The thing I still can’t understand is that the consensus of Lemmygrad and other leftist Lemmy instances is that both of these things are somehow true at the same time
electoralism can’t work, voting won’t fix this
voting for the democrats is bad
And I can’t understand this logic. Voting simultaneously doesn’t matter but also matters and is a full throated endorsement of genocide.
I also agree that we don’t have a real democracy, but if the choice is between “fake democracy with project 2025” and “fake democracy with milquetoast corpos” I’m not sure why I would do anything to help the openly fascist fascists take power.
It feels like trying to explain that the Divine Right of Kings is nonsense to a medieval peasant. They just flat out don’t seem to get it and worry that if they think about it too much, it’ll make God mad.
I’m sure it feels great up on that high horse to look down on the unwashed masses and tell them “you just don’t understand”
I’ve read Marx, I would love the system to be better. I’m not the vote blue demographic. I’m a human being living in America who understands how the current system of government works and the deep and inherent flaws in this system.
What does not-voting do to change anything? No one seems to be able to answer that simple question.
I get that voting doesn’t fix it. Does not-voting fix it? If not then why do you care if people vote or not? What actually fixes it and why does that thing give a shit whether or not people vote?
high horse to look down on the unwashed masses and tell them “you just don’t understand”
The “unwashed masses” don’t vote. Even in the 2020 election, if “didn’t vote” was a candidate, he would have won with an overwhelming landslide.
I’ve read Marx
Then why are you having so much trouble understanding that the American empire’s access to vast amounts of labor across the world breaks the American working class’s bargaining power? So long as you guys don’t fight against the expansion of the empire, things will continue to get worse for you at home. Yet still, you think that voting for this or that imperialist bastard is going to win you concessions.
Not only that, but your welfare state pretty much only exists because your ancestors fought for it (Literally, with violence), and the threat of the ussr scared your bourgeoise. The modern “left” america has nothing to stand on, or stand for. It has no real ability to bring about change because it cannot even discipline a genocider.
What does not-voting do to change anything?
As part of a coordinated campaign like the uncommitted movement? It could have forced the Democrats to alter their strategies. Voting third party would have also been great. As long as you liberals would actually be willing to follow through, which you never are.
“I’m sure it feels great to be up on that high-horse and think you’re looking down at the unwashed masses just because you won’t work with the flawed system that will have the supreme court nuke any milquetoast, limp-dick incremental change” That smugness? That right there? I’d rather not vote just to spite some of you ghouls. If you agree with us, cool; but there are plenty of campaigning “VOOTERS” here that love trying to shove that garbage down our throat while justifying the heinous
Non-voting doesn’t do anything on it’s own. Organizing does. But in order to organize you need to understand WHY you need to organize, which is why we offer theory and Marx does offer some insight into, if you have read his work.
We give a shit if people vote because slogging into electoralism instead of engaging with socialist or at the very least, alternative political parties it just does the same thing as non-voting except it gives a general sense of false security to the collective yt conscious that everything is just a-okay. Because they offer tiny, shitty changes for the world’s most destructive, blood-thirsty regime knowing that they are simply a stop-gap or a buffer to prevent a left-ward shift before the Supreme Court nukes it and are effective in neutralizing grassroots left movements.
Yea, so instead of embracing someone that is both doing the organizing and also voting, this community has been awful.
For a bunch of people so obsessed about organizing the people, maybe take a second to reflect on what a shit tier experience this has been for someone that would be your ally. I’m already doing a bunch of the organizing, and who simply believes that spending one minute to fill out a ballot for the least bad viable candidate is not a bad idea.
If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.
And I’ll still be your ally because I believe in this cause, but I also believe that throwing my vote away on some fringe third party candidate doesn’t help organize jack shit. And because of that one point you all have just been assholes.
If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.
Taking this personally and blaming a handful of people you briefly interacted with on the internet for the failures of communism in the US rather than taking into account the violent and pervasive worldwide campaign of anti-communism over decades makes you sound like a liberal who, however well-intentioned you may or may not be, has yet to make meaningful progress on unlearning the elitism that has been socialized into you from day one and has yet to begin internalizing the gravity of how violent these matters have been, historically, toward anyone who opposes imperialism, much less tries to organize a socialist state.
If you read this through that same socialized lens of people being ranked on a ladder of quality, you will probably think this is me “dunking on you” or “putting you down” or “trying to one up you”. But it’s not meant to be any of those things. I like to think of these things, as relating it to the framework of scientific socialism, as striving for “effective compassion.” The end goal is a decolonized world where the working class is empowered and free, the ultimate end goal is communism. But the steps to get there require a combination of theory and practice along the way, to understand what is required in context and develop toward change that is effective toward these compassionate goals that side with the colonized, the marginalized, the working class.
This also requires a certain amount of learning from each other. No one person has all of the answers and if you don’t already have the humility to consider what others are saying on the face of it without reaching for these sweeping proclamations about the entirety of an instance and the entirety of “leftist” efforts in the US, you need to develop some. We can’t afford people viewing contestment of theory and practice as a game of personal attacks and wholesale dismissal with only minimal consideration. Unfortunately, many of us online are accustomed to getting a heaping helping of disdain, if not accusations of being a foreign agent, simply for taking a patient and diplomatic anti-imperialist stance.
Ultimately, when it comes to things like “being an ally,” this isn’t a secret club that requires a secret handshake. It’s pretty transparent about what the ideological expectations are. Vague statements of organizing and caring about the same things make you, if honest in intention, a person who cares, but does not automatically mean you are ideologically aligned. This is something that I once had to learn when I was deep in liberal thinking still. Caring what happens to your fellow human beings is great. Doing something about it is even better. But populism alone is not marxist-leninist, nor anti-imperialist.
If you are already some of these things and I am misunderstanding, you are welcome to correct me on that. But if you are, it is all the more reason to take seriously the discussion of these things in the context of their mechanics, and try to look past whether people are nice to you in how they convey them.
I had lost my cool in this comment, but I edited now because I was inspired by your comment. Thank you. I should try to remain a compassionate and patient comrade.
“Take a second to reflect on what a shit-tier experience-”
Yeah, we’re shit to hostile actors and people who purposefully ignore and downplay what we say; going as so far to plug their ears even after we explained in as many different ranges as reactions as we can. I’ll admit, it’s msotly been negative; but you’ve had quite a few constructive replies to you.
You’re just an example of why we act so hostile. It’s because most of the time; they’re here to stir shit about things they don’t have any education on; even if you aren’t. Don’t believe me? Feel free to take a look around on some Ukraine threads and see for yourself. Nothing like excusing Nazis, right?
You have the ability to read theory, study and learn on why we act why we do.
“If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together…”
If you’d take two looks at most Americans; you’d see why most of us desire a cultural purge.
If you’d think about for two minutes why we are so hostile, maybe you’d get it. But no, you’re doubling down. Perhaps, that could be a tiny, tiny part of it. Really.
It’s much more a case of electoralism does nothing to help the working class people, only the rich and by voting for the parties and participating in their system, you’re accepting their false idea that voting for one of two genocidal parties is the only option.
So it’s an idea that electoralism will do nothing to stop the genocide, but will provide support for the very system that has lead to this “choice” between two actively genocidal parties. The US tries to frame itself as a democracy, but if the people actively opposed the system, recognising it as undemocratic, the ruling class would need to actively give concessions to the working class, or face revolt.
It’s like a worker’s strike. If your boss treats you like shit and doesn’t listen to anything you or the vast majority of their employees say, then you make your voices heard one way or another, if the “official channels” for making your voice heard don’t work, then you need to use a different method, the alternative of passive acceptance of the system does nothing but show the people in charge that they can continue on their current path and people will do nothing to stop them.
So since the democrats refuse to budge on this issue of genocide, we can surmise that “electoralism can’t work, voting won’t fix this.” as the powers that be will not change their minds on this issue. Voting for the democrats shows that despite them actively supporting a genocide, the voting public won’t “strike” and will meekly accept anything they do, regardless of how horrific it is. So this is why “voting for the democrats is bad.”
If a person apply the conspiray theories that the Pax Americana advocates made towards any citizens of the countries that they hate like Russia or China, then that person could say that electoralism always failed in the Western European diaspora because the voters who make voting decision that you do not like are “brainwashed”.
It’s always projection with westerners, same as when they say that the people from (insert enemy country here) are bloodthirsty and violent and therefore must be destroyed.
Maybe the first step is to understand how other nations could have systems more democratic than the West by letting go of the exceptionalism and bigotry that blinds one from this.
I agree, there are much better systems of democracy. I’m not blind to that and I don’t think America is exceptional, far from it.
How does “not voting” bring about this better system? What’s the plan? Do I just not vote and keep not voting and then someone comes by and says “hey, we are the people with all the power, we noticed you guys stopped voting so now we’ve decided that we should have a more fair proportional allotment of representatives and we will draw districts with the shortest split line algorithm to prevent gerrymandering”
Is that what happens? Does my awareness that better systems exist somehow make them appear here? Does it somehow wrestle control from those with power who made this system to perpetuate this power and will defend it with violence? Do they just give up because enough of us don’t vote?
I agree, there are much better systems of democracy.
Given your follow up queries - at this stage anyway - I am not sure you do know. For example, could you answer the following: why is China significantly more democratic than the US?
All liberal democracies are dictatorships of the bourgoisie no matter the technical processes of how they elect their political leaders and once you understand why and how then you will have at least the theoretical grounding to proceed further.
“Does my awareness that better systems exist somehow make them appear here? Does it somehow wrestle control from those with power who made this system to perpetuate this power and will defend it with violence?”
“Three keys to success: read, read, read.” - Lenin
“Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. … If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself…” ~ Mao, On Practice
Yes, it does, actually. The whole point we are making is that organizing and actually working to make an actual effort at educating more and moving people leftwards than electoralism is the result of seeing that electoralism itself is unsuccessful in applying meaningful change for the WILL of the working class, or the mandate, if you will; the ability to actually change the material conditions of our governance to serve the working class only.
That will/mandate is instead held by the ruling class, whom decides either or not to concede changes or to apply austerity and to never give up power. That will/mandate is held by the means of production; to which you have been largely removed from if you are a younger as they have been mostly offshored to other countries for profit extraction but still live, enjoy (greatly more benefits at the cost of the third world) and suffer under the relations of that production…which you’d know exactly why if you read Marx AND Lenin.
Every country has it’s own path to socialism.
“Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new” ~ Lenin, Three Sources, Three Components of Socialism
If someone thinks their only input is voting, fine go after them. I’ve unionized workplaces (both successfully and unsuccessfully), I’ve read the theory, and I’ve worked with my neighbors in building mutual aid and education about leftist ideas.
I’m still going to vote strategically for the party least likely to use the state sanctioned violence against my organizing efforts.
And if the reception I’ve received here as someone who would be sympathetic to your cause and who is actually working towards trying to achieve better results is any indication, this will never happen. I have been downvoted, belittled, and insulted.
That’s just one recent example. Do you want me to show you more of “that party’s” sanctioned violence?
We have members of our community here that saw first-hand repression of their communities under Walz’ governance during the Floyd riots. People who have already had state-sanctioned violence by that party.
I think right there is the core mistake you are making.
The first one is the case. In my opinion, some of our comrades could use a reminder that our focus doesn’t need to be on telling people who to vote for — that’s just more electoralism brainworms. (As comrade @darkernations@lemmygrad.ml pointed out, there are countries with functional democracies that don’t have this problem, but I’ll leave that part to other comrades and assume you’re US citizens who are eligible to vote in the state in which you reside.)
Vote for whoever you want. We’re just trying to explain that there’s a reason for the “most important election ever!!!1!!eleven” that keeps being pulled every election — the solution is not to be found in electoralism at all. It’s a tiny band-aid that will at best delay the rise of fascism, but will not actually solve the root problem.
You appear to be presenting some sort of dichotomy that is based on your interpretation of an amalgamation of positions you have read and does not relate to any specific take, so I’m not sure what to say on it.
There are people who are supporting PSL or other such efforts, for example. That is already one way it goes that contradicts your dichotomy, where it’s not as simple as “vote for nobody” or “vote blue no matter who”. Supporting an effort like PSL can be useful for educating and organizing, without having behind it the belief that a PSL candidate will win the presidency against all of the inertia, funding, celebrity, and third-party-blocking they are up against. Similar to how some of the energy behind Bernie’s campaigns had value for educating and organizing in spite of him not succeeding.
You don’t seem to be someone who thinks you’re using binary thinking. “Vote blue no matter who” folks often seem to be talking of strategy and compromises. But what kind of compromises? What kind of strategy? What are you gaining from going up to the democrat party and effectively saying, “Look, I’m going to vote for you no matter what, as long as you aren’t the other ones.” That tells them they don’t need to do anything differently, they don’t need to listen to you, they don’t need to care one lick what you have to say. They can continue doing their genocides and their billionaire-supporting acts and you’ll vote for them anyway because the wrong other one might get in if you don’t. What are you accomplishing? When has power ever listened more when you apply zero accountability to them and just say “you’re not as bad as the other one, so I guess you”?
To me, it ends up sounding like some of you have effectively given up. Like you don’t believe there’s ground to be gained here and you’re just trying to stave off collapse. Because if you truly believing the country is like a rolling bus headed for a cliff, are you thinking about how to do anything that will turn things around for the most marginalized, disenfranchised, colonized peoples? Or is the only thing you’ve got, “This bus driver will drive it off the cliff at 1mph rather than 2mph?”
What is your idea for turning this around? “Not total collapse right away vs. total collapse right away” isn’t a solution (if it were even a believable description of democrat vs republican and that’s a stretch to begin with).
If the bus is headed off the cliff and the thing I need to do is overhaul the system that dispatches buses off cliffs. That’s a hard thing to do, it won’t happen overnight, it would require a lot of working class individuals to stand up and demand a better system in the face of incredible state violence, and I am ALL FOR THAT.
I would love to see the proletariat rise up and destroy the parasitic oligarch class that rules over us, I really really really would. If you’ve got a plan to organize the fucking idiots I’ve been gifted as countrymen into giving a single solitary fuck about how hard the wealthiest 4 people in the country are ramming them in the ass, fucking great I would love to hear it.
In the meanwhile, this broken down shitbucket of a democracy does give me the opportunity to make the bus go 1 mph instead of 2 mph giving us all more time to fix this fucking thing, why wouldn’t I do that?
Is the plan just accelerationism? I should do nothing, let the bus fly over the cliff and then hope that I survive and can also do a better job putting it back together after the crash?
I have marched against war, I have organized protests, I have tried my damnedest to organize the workers I work with while they worry that they don’t want to rock the boat. If this is a fight why should I leave a weapon sitting on the table? If the oligarchs are going to let me choose the puppets, why would I choose the ones that want me dead over the one that don’t?
My position isn’t vote blue no matter who, it’s that the republicans are objectively worse, they wrote a giant plan out and unlike many of my countrymen I took the time to read it. I don’t want that shit to happen, that’s what I’m voting against.
And if a bunch of cranks want to say I’m complicit in genocide, great. Neither the people doing the killing or the people being killed are going to give one wet shit about how many Americans were complicit by voting for the republicans or complicit by voting for the democrats. There is no turnout low enough that stops the genocide.
You want to stop the genocide, you tell me fucking how. You tell me how not voting helps. You explain to me how making it cheaper and easier for the people doing the genocide to continue the farce of democracy helps anyone one fucking bit and I’ll listen.
All I hear here is “voting makes you complicit and won’t fix things, you have to do …. To fix it”. What goes in there? A revolution? The armed uprising of the people against our oppressors? Great, are they fucking massed on a hill somewhere waiting to see the turnout numbers for the election? Is that what’s holding back the glorious overthrow of capital, that too many Americans vote?
There’s nothing glorious about a revolution. We want a revolution because it’s necessary to give control of the government to the people. The road to revolution in the US is a long and challenging one and one that has very little to do with the current election.
Voting for a third party candidate, and better yet, working with a ML party like PSL helps spread class consciousness, even by a little. Worrying about elections when one of two oppressor parties are going to win anyway is a waste of energy and could have been better spent building a movement for the long-term. If we don’t build the ship by the time the material conditions in the future give opportunities for revolution, we will not succeed as the proletariat. Yes, it’s extremely difficult to organize people in the most propagandized country of the world. That’s why we need all of the help we can get. I believe delaying the collapse is the worse choice anyway as I don’t believe people are going to be radicalized until their material conditions worsen greatly and quickly. People are too comfortable with the current fascist rule, and Project 2025 is already mostly implemented here despite the fear-mongering.
I don’t understand why everyone here thinks this is binary. You either vote in the election or do these organizing efforts.
I’m doing both.
I’ve worked to unionize my workplaces, successfully and unsuccessfully. I’ve read the theory. I am part of a local mutual aid group that I helped found where we are doing our best to build the awareness and understanding amongst others.
I’m also going to vote for the only viable candidate that is least likely to use state sanctioned violence to kill the people I’m organizing with.
What waste of energy? The 1 fucking minute it takes to fill out my ballot that they mail me? That’s the thing you are upset about?
What waste of energy? The 1 fucking minute it takes to fill out my ballot that they mail me? That’s the thing you are upset about?
You’re also complaining on social media about people not wanting to vote for Kamala Hitleress. You’re advocating for people to “vote the lesser of two evils”, which is not really going to save us and conflicts with educating people about the illegitimacy of our obviously-not-democracy. Telling people to vote for the “lesser of two evils” while claiming to bring class consciousness by educating people on Marx is essentially expecting reformism to work, which it never has, and never will, especially in the belly of the beast, aka Amerikkka. This is why ML parties like the PSL are against telling their comrades to give up and vote for the DNC. It’s antithetical for communists to do this and achieves nothing.
First off, I didn’t advocate for anyone to do anything. I asked a question about how not voting helps.
I don’t expect voting for the Dems to fix the problems we face. I do expect either the Dems or the republicans to win. I think the Dems will give me a slightly more favorable environment to do my organizing work in.
Voting for the PSL or ML parties doesn’t educate anyone about anything. If I sit down at my kitchen table and mark in PSL or Dem no one knows but me.
And voting for those parties means I don’t get any say in the environment I will exist in for the next 4 years in which I will do the work of organizing and educating others.
This is why I’m saying the people here are obsessed with a phony binary choice and are strawmanning the shit out of my position.
If I came in here and said “everyone vote kamala to bring about communism in America” your points would be valid. Go read what I wrote, I never said that.
I don’t give one solitary shit who you vote for, I was trying to understand the strategy I’ve heard advocated for in these forums.
I don’t give one solitary shit who you vote for, I was trying to understand the strategy I’ve heard advocated for in these forums.
If you don’t give a shit, then why are you continuing to make a fuss about all of the answers people have given you in multiple different ways that explain our strategy? You obviously do give a shit, otherwise you wouldn’t continue arguing instead of learning from our side for once. We’re just going in circles. You say you read Marx, then I suggest you also read Lenin as well because I don’t think anyone here is going to change your mind except yourself.
Voting against the two party system gives statistics on the dissatisfaction of the population. It shows people that people are fed up and don’t want to continue participating in this fascist dictatorship. It’s also not about who voted for who and the results of the election. The point is to take advantage of the time when most people pay attention to politics and educate them while we still have their attention. Do you not want PSL to do this? Should we just sit back and wait for the conditions that spark potential revolution that we would fail at because we didn’t build the ship?
I met a bunch of people during petitioning and was able to help build awareness of our party as most people didn’t know about us at all. We were out in the streets protesting and marching for Palestine. We made a commitment to being persistent in supporting our communities during multiple struggles. We built class consciousness by supporting the Black communities when people were murdered by the cops. We give a voice to Palestinian Americans that the DNC treats as subhuman.
I personally witnessed events started by my pre-branch having an attendance of a few people to many hundreds this year alone. We stopped various bills from passing in our state, which surprised us, and we put our state on the map. Project 2025 doesn’t disappear by voting for Kopmala, it is stopped by us working together against the system and eventually overthrowing our bourgeois oppressors.
How the hell are we supposed to build a movement if we keep telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils? Do we not participate in elections? What are we gaining by so-called “buying time”? We’re fucked by either party. They both operate for capitalists. It literally makes no difference. There’s no time bought. The same policies are going to occur regardless of who’s in office.
If PSL, FRSO, etc. were to tell everyone to vote Kamala, don’t you think that will kill so much support for our movement? Then who is supposed to take the reigns of the new party? Wouldn’t that force us to start all over again? And why would we want such a massive blunder to kill the momentum that our party has built for the past 20 years? Why give up on our values and submit to the bourgeoisie? Being a communist means not being tailist.
Should this forum of comrades just say we need to vote for the other Hitler? Doesn’t that go against our values? What do you want from us?
I don’t give a shit who you vote for, I didn’t say I don’t give a shit about this conversation. I’m done with this community. You can all go fuck yourselves
Nope, makes no difference. Australia and Japan both use alternative voting systems, and both still very conservative countries, australia carrying out its ongoing indigenous eviction under that system.
Bourgeois parliamentarism has proven to be the safest shell for capitalist rule.
We can recommend some books on what makes socialist democracy different from capitalist dictatorships.
FPtP isn’t the half of it. The US was formed of a bourgeois revolution to overthrow a still semi-feudal monarchy, and we’ve been a bourgeois-run state ever since, just as the bourgeois land-owning, slave-owning Founding Fathers intended. Our government was never meant to represent the working class; it almost never has and seldomer will, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote…
Voting only leads to fascists being in office. Also, it works according to you. May be you just want fascists that are nice to you like Hitler was to Blondie and mean to Palestinians like Hitler was to Jews.
Because of the way the Electoral College works, this can only be true if you’re voting in a swing state, otherwise your vote is completely irrelevant, instead of almost completely irrelevant.
I’m not one to make moralist arguments on how to vote. I’m not going to say that a vote for Harris is a vote for genocide. Voting in bourgeois elections in general, and for bourgeois parties in particular, have limited but real tactical utility*, one of which is short-term harm reduction. If you live in a swing state and want to tactically vote for Harris as harm reduction, I think there’s an argument for that. But it’s important to appreciate the severe limitations of bourgeois electoralism.
*Marxists have written at length about their limited tactical uses since before the October Revolution over a century ago.
Tactical use of parliamentarianism is really only practical when you have a vanguard party that’s somewhat widely supported by the proletariat. We don’t have anything like that in the US so the focus should be on propaganda, building class consciousness among the proletariat, and making that vanguard party a reality. The election has zero bearing on this whatsoever besides providing opportunities to help people realize that their beloved democracy is in fact a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
I don’t really disagree with anything you wrote.
The thing I still can’t understand is that the consensus of Lemmygrad and other leftist Lemmy instances is that both of these things are somehow true at the same time
And I can’t understand this logic. Voting simultaneously doesn’t matter but also matters and is a full throated endorsement of genocide.
I also agree that we don’t have a real democracy, but if the choice is between “fake democracy with project 2025” and “fake democracy with milquetoast corpos” I’m not sure why I would do anything to help the openly fascist fascists take power.
What I don’t understand is how the vote blue demographic still doesn’t understand what the arguments of the non-voters actually even are.
It feels like trying to explain that the Divine Right of Kings is nonsense to a medieval peasant. They just flat out don’t seem to get it and worry that if they think about it too much, it’ll make God mad.
Omg, that analogy is perfect. I think I’ll start using it.
So explain it.
I’m sure it feels great up on that high horse to look down on the unwashed masses and tell them “you just don’t understand”
I’ve read Marx, I would love the system to be better. I’m not the vote blue demographic. I’m a human being living in America who understands how the current system of government works and the deep and inherent flaws in this system.
What does not-voting do to change anything? No one seems to be able to answer that simple question.
I get that voting doesn’t fix it. Does not-voting fix it? If not then why do you care if people vote or not? What actually fixes it and why does that thing give a shit whether or not people vote?
The “unwashed masses” don’t vote. Even in the 2020 election, if “didn’t vote” was a candidate, he would have won with an overwhelming landslide.
Then why are you having so much trouble understanding that the American empire’s access to vast amounts of labor across the world breaks the American working class’s bargaining power? So long as you guys don’t fight against the expansion of the empire, things will continue to get worse for you at home. Yet still, you think that voting for this or that imperialist bastard is going to win you concessions.
Not only that, but your welfare state pretty much only exists because your ancestors fought for it (Literally, with violence), and the threat of the ussr scared your bourgeoise. The modern “left” america has nothing to stand on, or stand for. It has no real ability to bring about change because it cannot even discipline a genocider.
As part of a coordinated campaign like the uncommitted movement? It could have forced the Democrats to alter their strategies. Voting third party would have also been great. As long as you liberals would actually be willing to follow through, which you never are.
ive read marx but i dont understand why you dont want to vote for kamala?!?!
Marx basically tells you to vote for kamala in Luke 1:16!
Oh hey, you just did it.
“I’m sure it feels great to be up on that high-horse and think you’re looking down at the unwashed masses just because you won’t work with the flawed system that will have the supreme court nuke any milquetoast, limp-dick incremental change” That smugness? That right there? I’d rather not vote just to spite some of you ghouls. If you agree with us, cool; but there are plenty of campaigning “VOOTERS” here that love trying to shove that garbage down our throat while justifying the heinous
Non-voting doesn’t do anything on it’s own. Organizing does. But in order to organize you need to understand WHY you need to organize, which is why we offer theory and Marx does offer some insight into, if you have read his work.
We give a shit if people vote because slogging into electoralism instead of engaging with socialist or at the very least, alternative political parties it just does the same thing as non-voting except it gives a general sense of false security to the collective yt conscious that everything is just a-okay. Because they offer tiny, shitty changes for the world’s most destructive, blood-thirsty regime knowing that they are simply a stop-gap or a buffer to prevent a left-ward shift before the Supreme Court nukes it and are effective in neutralizing grassroots left movements.
Yea, so instead of embracing someone that is both doing the organizing and also voting, this community has been awful.
For a bunch of people so obsessed about organizing the people, maybe take a second to reflect on what a shit tier experience this has been for someone that would be your ally. I’m already doing a bunch of the organizing, and who simply believes that spending one minute to fill out a ballot for the least bad viable candidate is not a bad idea.
If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.
And I’ll still be your ally because I believe in this cause, but I also believe that throwing my vote away on some fringe third party candidate doesn’t help organize jack shit. And because of that one point you all have just been assholes.
Taking this personally and blaming a handful of people you briefly interacted with on the internet for the failures of communism in the US rather than taking into account the violent and pervasive worldwide campaign of anti-communism over decades makes you sound like a liberal who, however well-intentioned you may or may not be, has yet to make meaningful progress on unlearning the elitism that has been socialized into you from day one and has yet to begin internalizing the gravity of how violent these matters have been, historically, toward anyone who opposes imperialism, much less tries to organize a socialist state.
If you read this through that same socialized lens of people being ranked on a ladder of quality, you will probably think this is me “dunking on you” or “putting you down” or “trying to one up you”. But it’s not meant to be any of those things. I like to think of these things, as relating it to the framework of scientific socialism, as striving for “effective compassion.” The end goal is a decolonized world where the working class is empowered and free, the ultimate end goal is communism. But the steps to get there require a combination of theory and practice along the way, to understand what is required in context and develop toward change that is effective toward these compassionate goals that side with the colonized, the marginalized, the working class.
This also requires a certain amount of learning from each other. No one person has all of the answers and if you don’t already have the humility to consider what others are saying on the face of it without reaching for these sweeping proclamations about the entirety of an instance and the entirety of “leftist” efforts in the US, you need to develop some. We can’t afford people viewing contestment of theory and practice as a game of personal attacks and wholesale dismissal with only minimal consideration. Unfortunately, many of us online are accustomed to getting a heaping helping of disdain, if not accusations of being a foreign agent, simply for taking a patient and diplomatic anti-imperialist stance.
Ultimately, when it comes to things like “being an ally,” this isn’t a secret club that requires a secret handshake. It’s pretty transparent about what the ideological expectations are. Vague statements of organizing and caring about the same things make you, if honest in intention, a person who cares, but does not automatically mean you are ideologically aligned. This is something that I once had to learn when I was deep in liberal thinking still. Caring what happens to your fellow human beings is great. Doing something about it is even better. But populism alone is not marxist-leninist, nor anti-imperialist.
If you are already some of these things and I am misunderstanding, you are welcome to correct me on that. But if you are, it is all the more reason to take seriously the discussion of these things in the context of their mechanics, and try to look past whether people are nice to you in how they convey them.
I had lost my cool in this comment, but I edited now because I was inspired by your comment. Thank you. I should try to remain a compassionate and patient comrade.
I’m glad to hear that, thank you for being thoughtful. 🙏
“Take a second to reflect on what a shit-tier experience-”
Yeah, we’re shit to hostile actors and people who purposefully ignore and downplay what we say; going as so far to plug their ears even after we explained in as many different ranges as reactions as we can. I’ll admit, it’s msotly been negative; but you’ve had quite a few constructive replies to you.
You’re just an example of why we act so hostile. It’s because most of the time; they’re here to stir shit about things they don’t have any education on; even if you aren’t. Don’t believe me? Feel free to take a look around on some Ukraine threads and see for yourself. Nothing like excusing Nazis, right?
You have the ability to read theory, study and learn on why we act why we do.
“If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together…”
If you’d take two looks at most Americans; you’d see why most of us desire a cultural purge.
If you’d think about for two minutes why we are so hostile, maybe you’d get it. But no, you’re doubling down. Perhaps, that could be a tiny, tiny part of it. Really.
It’s much more a case of electoralism does nothing to help the working class people, only the rich and by voting for the parties and participating in their system, you’re accepting their false idea that voting for one of two genocidal parties is the only option.
So it’s an idea that electoralism will do nothing to stop the genocide, but will provide support for the very system that has lead to this “choice” between two actively genocidal parties. The US tries to frame itself as a democracy, but if the people actively opposed the system, recognising it as undemocratic, the ruling class would need to actively give concessions to the working class, or face revolt.
It’s like a worker’s strike. If your boss treats you like shit and doesn’t listen to anything you or the vast majority of their employees say, then you make your voices heard one way or another, if the “official channels” for making your voice heard don’t work, then you need to use a different method, the alternative of passive acceptance of the system does nothing but show the people in charge that they can continue on their current path and people will do nothing to stop them.
So since the democrats refuse to budge on this issue of genocide, we can surmise that “electoralism can’t work, voting won’t fix this.” as the powers that be will not change their minds on this issue. Voting for the democrats shows that despite them actively supporting a genocide, the voting public won’t “strike” and will meekly accept anything they do, regardless of how horrific it is. So this is why “voting for the democrats is bad.”
If a person apply the conspiray theories that the Pax Americana advocates made towards any citizens of the countries that they hate like Russia or China, then that person could say that electoralism always failed in the Western European diaspora because the voters who make voting decision that you do not like are “brainwashed”.
It’s always projection with westerners, same as when they say that the people from (insert enemy country here) are bloodthirsty and violent and therefore must be destroyed.
Maybe the first step is to understand how other nations could have systems more democratic than the West by letting go of the exceptionalism and bigotry that blinds one from this.
I agree, there are much better systems of democracy. I’m not blind to that and I don’t think America is exceptional, far from it.
How does “not voting” bring about this better system? What’s the plan? Do I just not vote and keep not voting and then someone comes by and says “hey, we are the people with all the power, we noticed you guys stopped voting so now we’ve decided that we should have a more fair proportional allotment of representatives and we will draw districts with the shortest split line algorithm to prevent gerrymandering”
Is that what happens? Does my awareness that better systems exist somehow make them appear here? Does it somehow wrestle control from those with power who made this system to perpetuate this power and will defend it with violence? Do they just give up because enough of us don’t vote?
Given your follow up queries - at this stage anyway - I am not sure you do know. For example, could you answer the following: why is China significantly more democratic than the US?
All liberal democracies are dictatorships of the bourgoisie no matter the technical processes of how they elect their political leaders and once you understand why and how then you will have at least the theoretical grounding to proceed further.
“Does my awareness that better systems exist somehow make them appear here? Does it somehow wrestle control from those with power who made this system to perpetuate this power and will defend it with violence?”
“Three keys to success: read, read, read.” - Lenin
“Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. … If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself…” ~ Mao, On Practice
Yes, it does, actually. The whole point we are making is that organizing and actually working to make an actual effort at educating more and moving people leftwards than electoralism is the result of seeing that electoralism itself is unsuccessful in applying meaningful change for the WILL of the working class, or the mandate, if you will; the ability to actually change the material conditions of our governance to serve the working class only.
That will/mandate is instead held by the ruling class, whom decides either or not to concede changes or to apply austerity and to never give up power. That will/mandate is held by the means of production; to which you have been largely removed from if you are a younger as they have been mostly offshored to other countries for profit extraction but still live, enjoy (greatly more benefits at the cost of the third world) and suffer under the relations of that production…which you’d know exactly why if you read Marx AND Lenin.
Every country has it’s own path to socialism.
“Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new” ~ Lenin, Three Sources, Three Components of Socialism
I’ve found the core mistake you are all making.
I can do two things at once
I can both vote and do those things.
If someone thinks their only input is voting, fine go after them. I’ve unionized workplaces (both successfully and unsuccessfully), I’ve read the theory, and I’ve worked with my neighbors in building mutual aid and education about leftist ideas.
I’m still going to vote strategically for the party least likely to use the state sanctioned violence against my organizing efforts.
And if the reception I’ve received here as someone who would be sympathetic to your cause and who is actually working towards trying to achieve better results is any indication, this will never happen. I have been downvoted, belittled, and insulted.
Good fucking job on the solidarity everyone.
“for the party least likely to use the state sanctioned violence against my organizing efforts.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/74-arrested-at-democratic-national-convention-in-chicago/3311531
That’s just one recent example. Do you want me to show you more of “that party’s” sanctioned violence? We have members of our community here that saw first-hand repression of their communities under Walz’ governance during the Floyd riots. People who have already had state-sanctioned violence by that party.
I think right there is the core mistake you are making.
@Kalkaline@leminal.space @immutable@lemm.ee @Mountain_Mike_420@lemmy.ml
See the previous discussion on Hexbear just a week and a half ago: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5376884
The first one is the case. In my opinion, some of our comrades could use a reminder that our focus doesn’t need to be on telling people who to vote for — that’s just more electoralism brainworms. (As comrade @darkernations@lemmygrad.ml pointed out, there are countries with functional democracies that don’t have this problem, but I’ll leave that part to other comrades and assume you’re US citizens who are eligible to vote in the state in which you reside.)
Vote for whoever you want. We’re just trying to explain that there’s a reason for the “most important election ever!!!1!!eleven” that keeps being pulled every election — the solution is not to be found in electoralism at all. It’s a tiny band-aid that will at best delay the rise of fascism, but will not actually solve the root problem.
If you vote for usa, you are complicit in genocide.
Good thing there’s no part of the ballot that says:
[ ] USA [ ] Not USA
That’s not a good thing wtf
This might legitimately be the dumbest group of people ever assembled.
You said
What the fuck does “vote for usa” mean? I’m making a joke that there’s no place on the ballot to vote for or against USA.
Dems and Reps are usa
Not voting = against usa
You’re projecting.
You appear to be presenting some sort of dichotomy that is based on your interpretation of an amalgamation of positions you have read and does not relate to any specific take, so I’m not sure what to say on it.
There are people who are supporting PSL or other such efforts, for example. That is already one way it goes that contradicts your dichotomy, where it’s not as simple as “vote for nobody” or “vote blue no matter who”. Supporting an effort like PSL can be useful for educating and organizing, without having behind it the belief that a PSL candidate will win the presidency against all of the inertia, funding, celebrity, and third-party-blocking they are up against. Similar to how some of the energy behind Bernie’s campaigns had value for educating and organizing in spite of him not succeeding.
You don’t seem to be someone who thinks you’re using binary thinking. “Vote blue no matter who” folks often seem to be talking of strategy and compromises. But what kind of compromises? What kind of strategy? What are you gaining from going up to the democrat party and effectively saying, “Look, I’m going to vote for you no matter what, as long as you aren’t the other ones.” That tells them they don’t need to do anything differently, they don’t need to listen to you, they don’t need to care one lick what you have to say. They can continue doing their genocides and their billionaire-supporting acts and you’ll vote for them anyway because the wrong other one might get in if you don’t. What are you accomplishing? When has power ever listened more when you apply zero accountability to them and just say “you’re not as bad as the other one, so I guess you”?
To me, it ends up sounding like some of you have effectively given up. Like you don’t believe there’s ground to be gained here and you’re just trying to stave off collapse. Because if you truly believing the country is like a rolling bus headed for a cliff, are you thinking about how to do anything that will turn things around for the most marginalized, disenfranchised, colonized peoples? Or is the only thing you’ve got, “This bus driver will drive it off the cliff at 1mph rather than 2mph?”
What is your idea for turning this around? “Not total collapse right away vs. total collapse right away” isn’t a solution (if it were even a believable description of democrat vs republican and that’s a stretch to begin with).
Ok so to use your turning around the bus analogy.
If the bus is headed off the cliff and the thing I need to do is overhaul the system that dispatches buses off cliffs. That’s a hard thing to do, it won’t happen overnight, it would require a lot of working class individuals to stand up and demand a better system in the face of incredible state violence, and I am ALL FOR THAT.
I would love to see the proletariat rise up and destroy the parasitic oligarch class that rules over us, I really really really would. If you’ve got a plan to organize the fucking idiots I’ve been gifted as countrymen into giving a single solitary fuck about how hard the wealthiest 4 people in the country are ramming them in the ass, fucking great I would love to hear it.
In the meanwhile, this broken down shitbucket of a democracy does give me the opportunity to make the bus go 1 mph instead of 2 mph giving us all more time to fix this fucking thing, why wouldn’t I do that?
Is the plan just accelerationism? I should do nothing, let the bus fly over the cliff and then hope that I survive and can also do a better job putting it back together after the crash?
I have marched against war, I have organized protests, I have tried my damnedest to organize the workers I work with while they worry that they don’t want to rock the boat. If this is a fight why should I leave a weapon sitting on the table? If the oligarchs are going to let me choose the puppets, why would I choose the ones that want me dead over the one that don’t?
My position isn’t vote blue no matter who, it’s that the republicans are objectively worse, they wrote a giant plan out and unlike many of my countrymen I took the time to read it. I don’t want that shit to happen, that’s what I’m voting against.
And if a bunch of cranks want to say I’m complicit in genocide, great. Neither the people doing the killing or the people being killed are going to give one wet shit about how many Americans were complicit by voting for the republicans or complicit by voting for the democrats. There is no turnout low enough that stops the genocide.
You want to stop the genocide, you tell me fucking how. You tell me how not voting helps. You explain to me how making it cheaper and easier for the people doing the genocide to continue the farce of democracy helps anyone one fucking bit and I’ll listen.
All I hear here is “voting makes you complicit and won’t fix things, you have to do …. To fix it”. What goes in there? A revolution? The armed uprising of the people against our oppressors? Great, are they fucking massed on a hill somewhere waiting to see the turnout numbers for the election? Is that what’s holding back the glorious overthrow of capital, that too many Americans vote?
There’s nothing glorious about a revolution. We want a revolution because it’s necessary to give control of the government to the people. The road to revolution in the US is a long and challenging one and one that has very little to do with the current election.
Voting for a third party candidate, and better yet, working with a ML party like PSL helps spread class consciousness, even by a little. Worrying about elections when one of two oppressor parties are going to win anyway is a waste of energy and could have been better spent building a movement for the long-term. If we don’t build the ship by the time the material conditions in the future give opportunities for revolution, we will not succeed as the proletariat. Yes, it’s extremely difficult to organize people in the most propagandized country of the world. That’s why we need all of the help we can get. I believe delaying the collapse is the worse choice anyway as I don’t believe people are going to be radicalized until their material conditions worsen greatly and quickly. People are too comfortable with the current fascist rule, and Project 2025 is already mostly implemented here despite the fear-mongering.
I don’t understand why everyone here thinks this is binary. You either vote in the election or do these organizing efforts.
I’m doing both.
I’ve worked to unionize my workplaces, successfully and unsuccessfully. I’ve read the theory. I am part of a local mutual aid group that I helped found where we are doing our best to build the awareness and understanding amongst others.
I’m also going to vote for the only viable candidate that is least likely to use state sanctioned violence to kill the people I’m organizing with.
What waste of energy? The 1 fucking minute it takes to fill out my ballot that they mail me? That’s the thing you are upset about?
You’re also complaining on social media about people not wanting to vote for Kamala Hitleress. You’re advocating for people to “vote the lesser of two evils”, which is not really going to save us and conflicts with educating people about the illegitimacy of our obviously-not-democracy. Telling people to vote for the “lesser of two evils” while claiming to bring class consciousness by educating people on Marx is essentially expecting reformism to work, which it never has, and never will, especially in the belly of the beast, aka Amerikkka. This is why ML parties like the PSL are against telling their comrades to give up and vote for the DNC. It’s antithetical for communists to do this and achieves nothing.
First off, I didn’t advocate for anyone to do anything. I asked a question about how not voting helps.
I don’t expect voting for the Dems to fix the problems we face. I do expect either the Dems or the republicans to win. I think the Dems will give me a slightly more favorable environment to do my organizing work in.
Voting for the PSL or ML parties doesn’t educate anyone about anything. If I sit down at my kitchen table and mark in PSL or Dem no one knows but me.
And voting for those parties means I don’t get any say in the environment I will exist in for the next 4 years in which I will do the work of organizing and educating others.
This is why I’m saying the people here are obsessed with a phony binary choice and are strawmanning the shit out of my position.
If I came in here and said “everyone vote kamala to bring about communism in America” your points would be valid. Go read what I wrote, I never said that.
I don’t give one solitary shit who you vote for, I was trying to understand the strategy I’ve heard advocated for in these forums.
If you don’t give a shit, then why are you continuing to make a fuss about all of the answers people have given you in multiple different ways that explain our strategy? You obviously do give a shit, otherwise you wouldn’t continue arguing instead of learning from our side for once. We’re just going in circles. You say you read Marx, then I suggest you also read Lenin as well because I don’t think anyone here is going to change your mind except yourself.
Voting against the two party system gives statistics on the dissatisfaction of the population. It shows people that people are fed up and don’t want to continue participating in this fascist dictatorship. It’s also not about who voted for who and the results of the election. The point is to take advantage of the time when most people pay attention to politics and educate them while we still have their attention. Do you not want PSL to do this? Should we just sit back and wait for the conditions that spark potential revolution that we would fail at because we didn’t build the ship?
I met a bunch of people during petitioning and was able to help build awareness of our party as most people didn’t know about us at all. We were out in the streets protesting and marching for Palestine. We made a commitment to being persistent in supporting our communities during multiple struggles. We built class consciousness by supporting the Black communities when people were murdered by the cops. We give a voice to Palestinian Americans that the DNC treats as subhuman.
I personally witnessed events started by my pre-branch having an attendance of a few people to many hundreds this year alone. We stopped various bills from passing in our state, which surprised us, and we put our state on the map. Project 2025 doesn’t disappear by voting for Kopmala, it is stopped by us working together against the system and eventually overthrowing our bourgeois oppressors.
How the hell are we supposed to build a movement if we keep telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils? Do we not participate in elections? What are we gaining by so-called “buying time”? We’re fucked by either party. They both operate for capitalists. It literally makes no difference. There’s no time bought. The same policies are going to occur regardless of who’s in office.
If PSL, FRSO, etc. were to tell everyone to vote Kamala, don’t you think that will kill so much support for our movement? Then who is supposed to take the reigns of the new party? Wouldn’t that force us to start all over again? And why would we want such a massive blunder to kill the momentum that our party has built for the past 20 years? Why give up on our values and submit to the bourgeoisie? Being a communist means not being tailist.
Should this forum of comrades just say we need to vote for the other Hitler? Doesn’t that go against our values? What do you want from us?
I don’t give a shit who you vote for, I didn’t say I don’t give a shit about this conversation. I’m done with this community. You can all go fuck yourselves
Not voting puts one in the “enemies of the empire of evil” team. I’d say that’s pretty desireable.
You can just vote 3rd party i.e. Jill Stein.
Jill Stein is not a viable candidate, that leads to Trump being elected.
As you just proved, voting doesn’t work
First past the post voting doesn’t work
Nope, makes no difference. Australia and Japan both use alternative voting systems, and both still very conservative countries, australia carrying out its ongoing indigenous eviction under that system.
Bourgeois parliamentarism has proven to be the safest shell for capitalist rule.
We can recommend some books on what makes socialist democracy different from capitalist dictatorships.
FPtP isn’t the half of it. The US was formed of a bourgeois revolution to overthrow a still semi-feudal monarchy, and we’ve been a bourgeois-run state ever since, just as the bourgeois land-owning, slave-owning Founding Fathers intended. Our government was never meant to represent the working class; it almost never has and seldomer will, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (who aren’t disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote…
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Voting only leads to fascists being in office. Also, it works according to you. May be you just want fascists that are nice to you like Hitler was to Blondie and mean to Palestinians like Hitler was to Jews.
Vaush? Is that you?
Because of the way the Electoral College works, this can only be true if you’re voting in a swing state, otherwise your vote is completely irrelevant, instead of almost completely irrelevant.
I’m not one to make moralist arguments on how to vote. I’m not going to say that a vote for Harris is a vote for genocide. Voting in bourgeois elections in general, and for bourgeois parties in particular, have limited but real tactical utility*, one of which is short-term harm reduction. If you live in a swing state and want to tactically vote for Harris as harm reduction, I think there’s an argument for that. But it’s important to appreciate the severe limitations of bourgeois electoralism.
*Marxists have written at length about their limited tactical uses since before the October Revolution over a century ago.
Tactical use of parliamentarianism is really only practical when you have a vanguard party that’s somewhat widely supported by the proletariat. We don’t have anything like that in the US so the focus should be on propaganda, building class consciousness among the proletariat, and making that vanguard party a reality. The election has zero bearing on this whatsoever besides providing opportunities to help people realize that their beloved democracy is in fact a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.