No single thing alone will fix the world. Voting alone won’t fix it. Throwing a molotov alone won’t fix it.
Voting (in many places, for many people) takes almost no effort. Go do it. But don’t call it a day and think you’ve done everything you can do. Refusing to vote just yields one of the many fronts in this conflict without a fight.
Voting (in many places, for many people) takes almost no effort
The voting apparatus takes immense effort in fact. It takes so much effort that it’s almost all consuming for most nations during the election period and wastes thousands of human-workhours.
I meant the amount of effort it takes for the end user.
If we’re going to talk about higher order levels of effort, then everything gets very expensive very quickly.
No, The point is that all that “higher order level” of effort is wasted on electoralism. It’s not wasted in direct action.
I’m not sure I follow. I was talking about what individuals should do: direct action and also voting. Voting is often just a few minutes for the end user.
I’m not talking about what the state should spend resources on.
Voting is largely volunteer run. All that effort is wasted. Taking part in elections legitimizes that effort
Most people follow election results and those people’s actions have real, discernable, effects. If you yield on this front, even if you think elections are flawed, you’re letting your opponents have this power uncontested. That’s a terrible strategy.
No, it’s a terrible strategy to waste any effort on elections. If that effort was put in direct action for prefiguration instead, it would not matter what your opponents did.
Exactly, voting exists to the detriment of any state that implements it. It costs the government billions of dollars. Once we create a socialist paradise, the first thing we should do is abolish elections to save money.
I don’t give a fuck about the money
Money, work-hours, whatever. The only efficient and responsible way to run a socialist economy is with the firm grasp of a centralised authority. Voting doesn’t stop fascism, heroic dictators stop fascism.
ye ye fuck off
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Yes throwing a Molotov won’t fix it. Throwing 30 million on the other hand…
the changes we need to fix things can’t be made by elected officials. if voting would do anything, it would have done something 20 years ago.
direct action works regardless of who is elected. why do i even have to argue this, i thought this was an anarchist comm?
How bout voting for throwing a Molotov cocktails?
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The courts can’t help you, even if they wanted (they don’t)
Can’t they still slam Trump? /s
They’re gonna drag him
You think the 90M people that couldn’t be bothered to vote against fascism are going to take to the streets and fight?
Electoral voting is useless and built to disenfranchise and demotivate people participating from politics. Doing direct action immediately improves your life and builds mutual aid networks. So yes.
It’s useless, yet it’s exactly why we have a fascist dictator? That’s tautological.
You would get a fascist dictator regardless. That has always been the inevitable path of liberal electoral politics under capitalism.
Ah, defeatism. It’s going to happen anyway, so why bother doing anything about it. Great outlook.
Don’t put words in my mouth. I suggest the opposite of “doing nothing”. Voting is doing nothing every 4 years and expecting things to improve in the face of 100 years of evidence to the contrary.
I insist that you’re incorrect, based on the simple fact that 77M people voted for a fascist dictator and now we have a fascist dictator. Clearly voting does something, or we wouldn’t have a fascist dictator for president.
Yes, electoral politics inevitably and eventually “does” fascism.
Kinda ignores the reality that the past 3 election cycles have been fascist vs. a party that positions itself as progressive “not fascists.” You’d think that, you know. The “not fascists” would’ve done something to prevent the fascists from gaining power.
Instead, they endorsed international colonialism and genocide and spent 4 years fighting back against workers’ rights.
Electoral liberalism trends towards the right over time. As a rule. Because capitalist interests are always further to the right, and electoral liberalism is based on capitalism and the existence of a capitalist ruling class. Any ideology that permits the existence of capitalism must include very strong limits on capitalist enterprise and absolute bans on capital political power and influence. Or, by default, it becomes more fascist over time. Anti-capitalism is the only ideology congruent with antifascism.
They aren’t saying do nothing, they’re saying do something more useful than voting.
And I’m saying not voting is how we got fascism. There were 13M more people that did nothing, than all 77M people who voted for Trump. I don’t expect them to fight unless personally attacked.
That leaves the ~78M people that collectively voted against Trump. Then remove the sick, disabled, elderly, government, military, and police. We’re not getting anywhere with force unless we can engage the 90M people who couldn’t be inconvenienced to put pen to paper to stop fascism.
Oh, are you under the impression that there’s a group of liberals (as in liberalism in general) out there that doesn’t coddle and appease and enable fascism that I could vote for? Because Democrats are putting up the most token of resistance at best, and meanwhile voting in support of the right’s shenanigans in congress. Schumer voted for the budget, 4 others voted just the other day for a bill that would effectively disenfranchise millions of women, etc.
If you walk into a voting booth and find someone holding a bomb who insists that your only choice for how to deal with it is to choose between a long fuse or a short one, the only sane thing to do is to say ‘Good luck with that’ and leave before you get caught in the blast radius. I voted blue for 30 years and it didn’t get me less fascism, why do you imagine it would suddenly start working today? The fascism is coming from inside the house.
They stated a fact, that not defeatism. WTF is with people getting mad at the messenger all the time
The message that voting would’ve done nothing to stop Trump from being elected is nonsensical.
Not what they said at all
It doesn’t take 90M people to blow up a pipeline.
Can you point to a single US election where the half the country that never votes magically showed up to vote?
If not maybe don’t rely on a group of people that will never participate.
Everyone agitating for an overthrow of the system through memes is going to get out there and start doing it any day now just you wait…
Aaaaaaaany day now…
True. What works best is being a smug “nothing ever happens” lib online and doing one political action every 4 years.
I mean, that’s what this amounts to. So yeah, I agree.
Edit: sorry, that’s to say I agree with sarcasm dripping from your reply.
TBF thats exactly what happened with Trump.
QAnon, dude. Wtf.
I’m very disappointed with Biden’s administration for not charging more people in Trump’s first term for the crimes they committed. They didn’t face any consequences the last time and will now be completely off the rails. Now we have a second Trump administration with most of the same people that now know they can get away with anything.
The problem is that US democracy consists of voting for either a conservative party (Democrats) or a fascist party (Republicans).
When the conservatives are in power they care most about preserving the appearance of legitimacy of institutions and they don’t do anything like arresting politicians or stuffing the supreme court even though it would strengthen democracy.
Then the fascists get in and destroy everything anyway.
Oh, I see the psyop is hard at work already. “No, don’t vote, it’s useless, don’t even bother, leave it to those suckers who are doing this stupid ineffective voting thing. Oh, they have all the power all of the sudden? Who knew, no idea how that happened”
Don’t badjacket. Just because we don’t believe in the electoral farce doesn’t make us a paid actor.
That’s true, some people repeat the same points for free. This is also bad, it leads to bad outcomes.
100+ years of electoralism and you ended up in fascism anyway. Talk about bad outcomes.
Fascism, the ultimate form of antielectoralism, is winning, yes. And instead of fighting it, the most passionate groups of left-leaning people are obsessed with not doing the bare minimum to stop it.
Electoralism doesn’t stop fascism whatsoever.
Democracy works for whoever uses it. If you don’t use it, if you only let the worst parts of your country to use it, you get your electoralism.
There is an alternative explanation to all of it, progressives being a small minority will also explain the situation.
I let you to decide which is worse.The degree to which liberal democracy ‘works’ is dependent on the health of capital
The more capital fails, the greater chance democracy slips into populism because capital can no longer address the needs of the people and sustain its infinite growth. Populism either leans left (redistribution of capital towards labor) or it leans right (consolidation of capital toward an ‘in’ group to the exclusion of the out groups), but once capital has failed there’s really no returning to liberal democracy*.
*edit - until capital re-balances, but will trend toward collapse again
in particular, it seems to work for whomever can get their districts more successfully gerrymandered.
Pretty much. The left can’t be bothered by pragmatism and is blinded by perfectionism. It boggles my mind how the political side who should be the go to for most of the population can’t make politics.
“the left”- you have no idea what is left or right. The left maybe have two proponents in the entirety of government.
Edit: or->is
Maybe not voting hurts the chances of not having more proponents in government. Think we found the problem.
But we did vote our way into it, didn’t we?
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Only sorta. The only election the nazis won outright was after they had basically already seized power. Prior to that there was an alliance between the moderate right/business elites and the nazis where the moderate right wanted to use the far right to win and thought they could control Hitler but then he just used the little power they gave him to take more and…ok it’s exactly like right now.
Yes. You voted for voting to not work anymore.
I sure as fuck didn’t. And I’m not going to sit idly by while we slip into fascism, either.
Yes, but that was kinda like forgetting your keys inside on a windy day and you are currently hearing the front door slamming shut.
Apathy is what got us here
Avarice and individualism got here.
To the point many still consider both to be strengths and not the weaknesses they are.
You are not getting out of this by voting ALONE,
#but you still must also vote, at EVERY CHANCE
Soap box
Ballot box
Ammo box
If they deny the midterms, overturn the results or refuse to acknowledge their loss, that is the natural next step. People still believe in the power of popular sovereignty
Not now you’re not.
You had the chance to but didn’t protest-non-voters.
Good thing they’ve got guns to stop terrorist organizations such as ICE. I’m curious when we’ll hear about them being shot at, or worse, though.
Perfectly true.
But anarchism hasn’t exactly been very productive over the last century when it comes to providing alternatives, has it?
Anarchism has been very productive in improving the lives of those who practice it. Bringing about things like the 40-hour week. Anarchism doesn’t have to become the sociopolitical system to be beneficial. Look into prefiguration and also look at the comm rules.
Bringing about things like the 40-hour week.
Can you show me anywhere in the world where anarchism is as strongly represented in labor movements as it was in Spain during the 1930s?
Looking at the past does not make the present any better.
Anarchism doesn’t have to become the sociopolitical system to be beneficial.
So what should it be then? A vanguard in everything but name?
Look into prefiguration
I’d love to… but where is it? Every time I ask anarchists this, they point me to social projects such as that happening in northern Syria and Chiappas in Mexico - social projects that reject the anarchist label. And I don’t exactly blame them for rejecting it, either - trying to “preconfigure” something when your theory is too damn orthodox to even allow you to understand what “preconfiguring” should actually look like is a pretty obvious sociopolitical dead-end.
Can you show me anywhere in the world where anarchism is as strongly represented in labor movements as it was in Spain during the 1930s?
Can you show me anywhere in the world where Liberal Capitalist Democracy was strongly represented in 1400s? See how absurd this statement is?
So what should it be then? A vanguard in everything but name?
The opposite. Improving the lives of people practicing it in the here and now through anarchist praxis. People can practice direct action for mutual aid right now.
I’d love to… but where is it?
Prefiguration is a theory of praxis
See how absurd this statement is?
Liberalism is literally the ideology of the status quo now.
Is it absurd to point that out, too?
Prefiguration is a theory of praxis
Soooo… the failure of anarchism to actually preconfigure anything since the end of WW2 in the face of massive liberal counter-insurgency is perhaps tied to anarchist’s theories about preconfiguration not being remotely good enough - if they even exist at all?
Liberalism is literally the ideology of the status quo now.
Is it absurd to point that out, too?
What’s absurd is to claim that a radical socioeconomic reconfiguration can’t happen because it hasn’t happened yet.
Soooo… the failure of anarchism to actually preconfigure anything since the end of WW2 in the face of massive liberal counter-insurgency is perhaps tied to anarchist’s theories about preconfiguration not being remotely good enough - if they even exist at all?
Anarchist prefigure things all the time. Mutual Banks, Cooperatives, Anarcho-syndicalist unions, food banks, soup kitchens and so much more. Don’t know what the fuck you’re on about.
Anarchists saved and improved countless lives in the last few years by doing direct action. They rescue(d) and support(ed) refugees, fed people all over the world, setup bail funds and so much more.
Actually impacting other peoples lives (and your oen) directly is a pretty appealing alternative imo.
They rescue(d) and support(ed) refugees, fed people all over the world, setup bail funds and so much more.
This is all great - but lots of organizations and movements are doing direct action of all kinds. Can you seriously tell me that this represents a functional political movement that would be capable of surviving and thriving if a convulsive revolution were to kick off tomorrow?
what a shitty and irrelevant argument
Who said anything about anarchism? I’d be happy to just get democracy back.
I’d be happy to just get democracy back.
When did we have democracy?
Depends on you threshold but we have had it for a while. No need to spend money on elections or news media if we didn’t have a democracy.
Depends on you threshold but we have had it for a while
Getting to “choose” which pack of political racketeers gets to be the public face of capitalist looting and pillaging falls outside my threshold… which means that we’ve never had anything that can be called “democracy” with a straight face.
If we accept the liberals’ definition of democracy we might just as well accept the tankie’s definition of socialism, too - both are equally warped and vile.
Ok then, using your metrics we never had democracy. Using my metrics we had democracy, and I would prefer that to fascism.
But I also like stronger democracy. So if we can make improvements I’m all for it.
If I were (as a thought exercise) to consider your metrics for democracy valid, I’d have to enquire as to what the point of democracy even is if it comes with fascism as a built-in feature - which, of course, is perfectly acceptable if we were to use your metrics.
And that’s before we even get into the nitty gritty of how your metrics of democracy solves the fundamentally violent and fundamentally irreconcilable incompatibility between democratic values and the capitalist mode of production.
Why are you mad at me? All I am saying is what we have right now is worse than what we had last year and I would like that back at the very least. I never said that what we had a year ago would solve all the problems or was the ideal government or the best form of democracy.
When they start closing embassies is when you start pouring gasoline into whiskey bottles.
