I wonder what the rapture equivalent is?

Revolutionaries don't say that anything less than revolution is worthless, we just point out how electoralism cannot solve the fundamental problems of capitalist society. We also don't say that revolution fixes everything overnight, it merely allows us to start building and developing socialism, with all of the difficulties and new problems we face when that happens. We also don't baselessly say revolution is coming any minute or anything, just that as capitalism decays it grows more and more likely, which is reflected in crisis and more violent reaction, like we are seeing with the Trump admin.

If anyone wants to develop a better understanding of Marxism-Leninism, I made an introductory reading list, feel free to check it out! Even the first 2 works listed will give you a much better understanding of our positions.

we don't "wait" for a revolution nor do we expect it to magically fix anything.

but i guess it's easier to be ignorant than to at least learn what leftism even is.

we don’t “wait” for a revolution nor do we expect it to magically fix anything.
We do wait for material conditions to align (our own or our community's). Movements needs a cataclyst. Not every moment is ripe for sweeping change.
And we absolutely expect revolutions to improve life dramatically - often simply by removing the corrupt oligarchs mismanaging the system.
But these are pragmatic approaches to economic management, not magical resolutions to human world events.
but i guess it’s easier to be ignorant than to at least learn what leftism even is.
It's easier to believe in the End of the World for some people than the End of Capitalism.
- you added some nuance.
  We do wait for material conditions to align
  we do, but we do need a critical mass of people, our interests aligned, and to be prepared to swiftly seize the opportunity. all of that's easier said, and needs a lot of work.
  we absolutely expect revolutions to improve life dramatically
  in the medium-long term though, right? I don't really expect my country to be rebuilt overnight, but i can see how we'd start having something reasonable in the decade post revolution, if all goes right. socialism often has to be born from the ashes of scorched-earth capitalism.
  easier to believe in the End of the World for some people than the End of Capitalism
  preach. i think it's one of our biggest obstacles tbh.
Nah I've studied political science at the graduate level and this is pretty much spot on.
- I studied psychology at a graduate level and have decided that you’re schizophrenic
- ... sarcasm, right?
you don't, and that's good, but that doesn't make it universal. as for the split between these 2 types, idk so I won't even guess
- true, but it's ok to take the needed time though. life gets in the way, people work long hours, and helping build a movement is a lot of work.
  i'm sure aspiring MLs always have this at the back of their minds, because practicing ones are always pretty insistent on telling people to organize and adjust expectations.
There definitely are those that do though I think
And tbh I think the more relevant thing that is pointed out here are those that call anyone doing any sort of electoralism/reformism liberals who are worthless. Which, yea, by itself isn't gonna fully fix society but I'd at least rather people suffer less in the meantime
- electoralism is disencouraged because the game is rigged. often when you really get into it, there is truly not much difference between the candidates policy-wise.
  and if the ruling class wants fascism, they will bend the rules until they get it. i mean, trump was supposed to be in prison, isn't he? didn't he even lose the popular vote in his first term?
  i've seen it play out in my country over and over again. genuine-sounding people like mamdani eventually gets de-winged, or removed if they flail too much.

The world is ~~sinful~~ anti-democratic backsliding but we just have to wait until the ~~Second Coming~~ the Election happens when everything will be magically fixed. Any attempt to make actual progress makes you a ~~lukewarm Christian~~ tankie anything less than ~~the Apocolypse~~ the Election (which is definitely fair and free and democratic full of extremely popular and nice politicians) is completely useless. Also consuming certian media or makin certain lifesytle choices is ~~sinful and unchristian~~ makes you a tankie or a rebellious ineffective anarchist or a secret conservative.

This is besides the point, but in what way is a "lukewarm Christian' someone who actually makes progress? I've only ever heard the term be used in the opposite way.

This is literally just almost every terminally online ML lol

that's why I posted this here lmao

I consider myself libertarian, but unlike others, I think my political ideal would be terrible to implement overnight. I see libertarianism more as a direction than an end goal, and we should evaluate how far down that path we want to go.

I'm also Christian and don't believe in Rapture. Instead, I think that if Christ's second coming is literal (don't want to get into a theological debate), any changes will be a process. People won't evaporate or whatever, instead they'll be spared in some form from the wider unrest that will end up destroying the "sinners" or whatever. Things just don't happen all at once like that.

I guess for my personal ideal, the closest would be everyone all of a sudden deciding that their rights are important and worth fighting for?

Those are very reasonable positions to hold.
Out of curiosity, since there aren't really any libertarians where I live, what makes you think that it's the best solution, and how do you intend to solve the two problems I percieve to be the big ones: Who else can properly manage public services and how do you prevent corporations eroding rule of law?
- what makes you think that it’s the best solution
  I believe the ends do not justify the means. The primary goal should be maximizing liberty, with some concessions for practicality.
  For example, I believe in UBI, but not because it's a human right, but because you can't realistically come back from mistakes or harm from others if there's no safety net. The options for a safety net are government services (healthcare, food assistance, housing assistance, etc) or cash handouts (UBI or NIT). Government services come with inequity in access (whether you're approved can be up to discretion), whereas cash is simple and equitable. Outcomes may be worse with cash for some people (maybe they'll buy drugs or gamble), but that's because people are free to choose how they use it, and freedom is the ideal here. Ideally we don't need a social safety net, but because we do, it should be as simple as possible.
  I happen to believe that freedom tends to create opportunity and improves outcomes, but that's not the primary goal.
  Who else can properly manage public services?
  I absolutely believe government should exist and will have a role to play in this. The goal should be minimal government involvement where competition can exist. Some things cannot be provided ethically by private, competitive companies, such as arrests, but many can.
  Some examples:
  electricity (and perhaps water) - generation is private, last mile is public; cities basically buy electricity from suppliers with the goal of reliability and price
  roads - should be funded based on use, meaning vehicle registration taxes, gas taxes, tolls, etc, not subsidized with income taxes; this allows other methods of transportation to compete, like rail
  police - split force into two parts, those that don't need extra authority (could be privatized) and those that do (cannot be privatized); the former can handle citations, trespass, etc, and can only detain, not arrest, search, taze, shoot, etc; the latter would be the current police system, but with higher pay and expectations
  Basically, how can we solve problems with less government/force?
  how do you prevent corporations eroding rule of law?
  Limit what the legislature can do and push regulations and whatnot to court precedence. I trust juries way more than legislators. The attorney general's main job should be to sue companies and set regulations by winning cases and setting precedent.
  Legislatures want reelection, so campaign donations have a lot of sway, and that may be more effective than actually doing what constituents want. There's a clear conflict of interest there, so no wonder wealthy companies get their way.
  An AG, on the other hand, could be compensated based on winning lawsuits. If they win a lot, they could make a ton of money, perhaps more than whatever the companies they're suing would be willing to pay. Individuals could also bring their own suit, so a bad AG would just push it onto the private sector, which is a check on the AG. And it's not just companies that could get sued, but the regulator bodies themselves, so it's a check on corruption there as well.
  The important thing is that regular people decide what's reasonable, not elected legislators. Legislators should set the big picture (pollution is bad), courts get into specifics (pollution value X is too much), and companies respond by making risk-adjusted decisions (test to make sure pollution is sufficiently under X to avoid lawsuits).

Especially over the past few years, this viewpoint seems to dominate over so many leftist spaces, and I believe it's part of what led to Trump winning the election. I don't particularly like the Democrats either, but so many refuse to vote for anything other than an impossible overnight jump to socialism.

yOu JuSt hATe tHe WoRkiNG cLaSs!1!
- Ivory tower leftists hate nothing more than the working man.

You forgot to mention both have accelerationists willing to make people's lives worse to hasten the ~~Rapture~~ Revolution.

Comrade, this time it’s really late stage capitalism comrade, trust me comrade. Revolution is imminent, the workers will rise up. / repeat for 150 years.
both have accelerationists
Accelerationism isn't a policy, it's a coping mechanism.
"Actually, I love that things aren't going my way, because it'll all work out in the end" is what you say when you're down bad with no clear hope of recovery.
And complaining about acceleratism is just scapegoating. You're not in this position because a secret cabal of extremists is sabotaging your milquetoast efforts because they think losing harder is good.

This may be the worst take I've ever heard tbh

Both sides same horseshoe isn't even a new take

Straw man level 1000

"and if you don't live by MY interpretation of some dead guy's beliefs, you are wrong and are worse than the enemy*

Great take. We must ask ourselves: what happens the day after the revolution?

Building socialism, as has happened everywhere else revolution has succeeded. It's a long and difficult process, but it's real and possible at the same time.
Well if we look at China, Cuba, the USSR, Vietnam, Laos, you get invaded/bombed by America.
But also continue to work really hard, but now your labor goes to bringing yourself and a billion others out of poverty instead of further expanding the power of the bourgeoisie.
- When was the USSR, China, and Cuba bombed by America directly after their revolution?
1rpd/1440=0.00069rpm
Nice.
To idle along nicely, we need to reach about 800 revolutions per minute. So we need to increase our number of revolutions by about x1,100,000
(And I realise now I've inadvertently worked out that if I left my car idling for 24 hours, the engine would go through over 1.1million revolutions. Cool!)
Really, if there is a sudden turning point, where Eat The Rich becomes common thought, how long does it last? Is it over in a few days? Is it a literal class war going on for years? If the bottom 50 decides to take out the top 5, how long can it go on for?
- Depends on the country. China was at war for decades, Russia had several revolutions before the final revolution, Cuba's took years, Vietnam's involved war against the US as well. There are no universal conditions for that.
- Check out the Russian revolution. The extremists will put the moderate revolutionaries in the gulag or shoot them.
- Hey, when you’re 22 you know everything but your brain still hasn’t fully matured and you don’t have time for that kind of stuff!
  Death to capitalist oppressors! Let’s fuck!

Downvote me father for I have committed bad praxis.

Hate to say it, but I'd argue that this particular leftist sub-group can be ever worse than Christians. At least on paper, Christians are supposed to want to convert sinners and non-believers, and are supposed to work to do outreach to help people explicitly undeserving. The Christian enemy of the devil is effectively an abstract. Yes, there's the anti-lgbt+ bigots, but in my experience they are a minority despite their incessant loudness and overwhelming presence in the public eye.

This particular revolution worshipping sub-group of leftists though? They appear to overwhelmingly just want death and suffering for their "enemies". They have no plans to attempt to convert people and many are actively against even trying.

I can't tell you how much heat I've taken for suggesting that (at best) ignoring all the fuckers that voted for Trump and not trying to find any way to build relationships so you can turn them is a losing strategy.

It makes me sick that so very many people see violent and complete revolution where somehow they never have to deal with opposition voices ever again afterwards (read: purges and re-education camps, ideas I've seen positive unironic support for from this group a shocking amount) as a more viable and desiriable outcome than trying to understand and care for their misguided neighbors and family so they can turn them.

Just because your plan isn't technically genocide due to it falling on lines of political ideology doesn't make it less completely fucked in the head and reprehensible.

If your wishes for the future include "We have to be baddies so we can completely erase the worse baddies from existence and make our utopia" then I strongly suggest you need to reevaluate just about fucking everything in your life and ideals.

This is just wrong from top to bottom. Revolutionary theory has always posited that revolution can only come from the large majority, even if we use methods like vanguard parties if the working class at large isn't behind it then it will fail. Every successful revolution has had working class education, organization, and agitation as its basis.
Revolution doesn't mean genocide. Historically, revolution has been less bloody than the systems that upheld pre-revolutionary society. Mark Twain has an excellent quote on this:
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Overall, I think you'd do well by actually listening to us. I wrote an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, feel free to give it a look!
I can’t tell you how much heat I’ve taken for suggesting that (at best) ignoring all the fuckers that voted for Trump and not trying to find any way to build relationships so you can turn them is a losing strategy.
Look I hate tankies, accelerationists, and purity testing among progressives, but generally speaking the great rural swaths of MAGA chuds are as much of a waste of time as tankies are. They're either completely deluded or sociopathically self-interested. There isn't any moral standing to demanding I go out and have a beer with my racist MAGA neighbor. Nor would that even be a tolerable course of action for me, he could literally die in a fire I'd feel nothing.
- So... do you find extermination of these people is a more tolerable course of action than getting to know them?
  This is a core point I'm trying to make here, and strive to make fairly often elsewhere. The "rural swathes of MAGA chuds" (keep drinking the 1%s rural vs urban division of the middle and lower classes why don't you) are a large enough group/voting bloc that they cannot simply be ignored.
  It doesn't have to be you, but someone has to do something about this group. And I'm not coyly endorsing mass murder or sterilization here. I'm also not sitting on my ass telling others to do work I'm not doing myself.
  You can resign yourself to try and just outlive them. You could just keep trying to outvote them every time, forever. Sad, but tolerable and entirely understandable, attitude.
  You can come up with a large number of other ways that effectively amount to "remove their ability to vote", most of which would be violations of human rights or elimination of human life. These are the attitudes I find reprehensible, and shockingly fucking common.
  Or we could all start making concentrated efforts to start treating people with god awful views as people where some amount of them might be able to be changed. Not as subhuman mosters (the term "chud" is pretty disgusting when you get down to it), as unredeemable fools, as non-entities (wouldn't care if they dropped dead), or at best as roadbumps to be driven over on the path towards the future.
  The fact that so many people look around at their neighbors and see so many of them as just useless wastes of space is one of the most effective ways that those in power maintain that power. Keeping those lower than them squabbling among each other so they can't effectively organize against the people on top.
  I'm not going to argue for some full overthrow of the concept of capitalism, but there is clearly a hell of a lot wrong. A lot of rot up at the top. Willingly and intentionally saying "but those people are so backwards that I could never work with them" is just a disgustingly elitist concept.
  Go and punch the actual nazis. Call out "nazi bar" situations. People who literally want you and yours dead? Fire at will.
  But those are levels of hatred that are far rarer than people pretend they are. Most people just want to get on with their day, and a lot of people against certain groups fold very quickly when someone they love turns out say, homosexual. That's not hypocrisy. It's an opportunity to help someone reflect on their biases. We all have them, stop putting yourself up on such a pedestal.
  I've rambled enough, but I'll throw this in as a bonus:
  The "rural flyover states" have been done so fucking bad by the federal government, by their local politicians, and by corporations for so fucking long that I can't help but see punching down every time someone starts in on the bullshit about "those stupid people out in rural areas". They deal with a lot of similar issues to poor urban areas, and the attitude of the entire fucking world in calling impovershed areas "the global south" should give us all pause, especially when these areas of the US are in no way limited to the former confederate states.
  I was born in one of those states. My wife is from one of those counties in a larger state. We're both happy as hell to be out, but seeing what goes on there on a regular basis is terrible.
  People talk about tent cities and rising amounts of homeless in major cities. No one talks about the towns that have had every industry pull out over the last 50 years and the homeless and drug abuse problems in them that are only exacerbated by there being literally no homeless shelters or clinics for 30 miles with almost entirely barren highway in between the few pockets of dying towns.
That's why they narrowed it to evangelical Christians. There is still your argument that they will try to convert you first, but boy if you don't, it's the same hate. I'd say the leftist hate is at least honest and doesn't try to camouflage it with "love the sinner" lies and cherrypicking from a guide book.
- Leftists cherry pick from holy scripture aka. theory ad nauseam to build arguments to support any inhumane action.
  The Christian „love the sinner“, „love your enemies“ is different. There you only need to profess your faith to be accepted in the community. Then afterwards the reeducation/indoctrination/conversion happens over time.
  With tankies you go to gulag/reeducation/indoctrination first, and if you survive that you can maybe become a comrade. You will never join the party though. You remain irredeemable and a suspect counterrevolutionary.

This leftist believes we are already dead and this is hell.

Yeah I'd much rather die in the fast track concentration camps our government is building today than the slow track one our government has us in now.

And not a single one is doing anything to actually revolt, just sitting online talking shit on people who are actively doing things because "incrementalism is useless, we need a revolution".

Sorry creating lemmy isn't starting the revolution, getting together a small amount of people online to talk about a parallel societal formation isn't starting a revolution, being civically inactive is not starting a revolution, buying a bunch of guns is not starting a revolution, talking about moving away from corporate tracking tools is not starting a revolution, switching from US to Chinese propaganda is not starting a revolution. As lame as all the gravy seal militias in the US are, they are numerous steps ahead on the starting of a revolution.

This is erasure of orgs like The Party for Socialism and Liberation and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. One of the number one things leftists try to encourage people to do online is to join an org, because sitting around and talking is useless beyond the entertainment of it and perhaps learning more theory. We do organize IRL, I've met some wonderful people doing so.
- Yeah and I am a member of the two that are in my area. They all subscribe to incrementalism as people on your .ml would put it, though. None of these are preparing a revolution, they would labeled terrorist organizations, and destroyed very quickly if they did anything, actually, radical, like the ALF/ELF, while being so visible.

Leftist rapture is The Singularity.

No, that’s libertarian tech bro rapture.
eh... so far the only ones I've seen really perked up about the singularity are techbro libertarians.

The Antichrist walks among us, wearing a spray tan and a toupee. We must use our second amendment rights to throw off our oppressors and create the kingdom of Elohim on earth.

What you've got there is a tankie

Hmm... Floating into the sky which is also where a magical land exists with an all knowing, benevolent supreme being or equality and fair treatment for all peoples... Yeah those are the same.

Well, Marx’ withering away of the state and the rise of Communism was basically the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Not really, all it means is that as an ecomomy collectivizes and class distinctions fade as ownership of production is equalized, the need for strong institutions to uphold one class and oppress others fades too, as there would be no class.
"A stateless utopia birthed from the continual consolidation of power in a proletariat dictatorship" gives the same vibes as trickle down economics.
- As production and distribution are collectivized, class fades, and along with it the institutions needed to uphold the working class as the ruling class over capitalists, as there would be no capitalists. It doesn't mean the total erasure of administration and management.

Could it be because extremist platforms (like filthy rich preachers, Fox News, or toxic, algorithmic apps) inevitably lead to this?

It's almost like clergy and retired Silicon Valley royalty and social sciences/social media researchers have been warning of this exact thing, over and over, for decades...

I've been saying this for a long time now. All the "moral" principles that people supposedly just have are actually derived from christian thoughts that have pervaded society for centuries. All the supposedly secular and "ethical" concepts are actually just christian concepts without the brand name "christian".

Dear God, the Tankies are fundies!

Workin' on the 0.0002% deep in the comments.

Hot bubble baths are pretty transcendent. That would be my vote for leftist rapture.

mmm, bubble bath