Guess what? Other forms of organizing and protest will also be opposed. And we should still do them.
If a movement is real and serious that organizing to vote in primaries is really not a big deal. Blue no matter who is really just a last resort and if you don’t want to then you should at least spoil your ballot.
PS anything you consider more effective than voting can still be done btw. Change is not an all or nothing (tho given the mindset around many here they should not be surprised when they really do keep getting nothing)
And you are not wrong, yet it is still where the DSA and the progressive movements live. At the end of your day you are discouraging people from helping them grow by being apathetic about voting. Like I said “Blue no matter who is really just a last resort and if you don’t want to then you should at least spoil your ballot.”
So… it will be opposed… I rest my case. Guess what the elite are going to work to make anything you try powerless. Should we stop trying all together? No we should do it anyway. Voting at is also low risk and low effort. If you cannot get your movement to do that there is no credibility you can do more.
Also if you read carefully you might notice i never said voting is the only thing we should be doing, but you won’t be doing that stuff either given how busy you are posting about how we should not vote. You should be proud of that btw; its the kind of leftist movement J. Edgar Hoover wanted to see. One apathetic about voting and without meaningful organization.
No. You’re still not hearing the criticism. Voting is impotent. It doesn’t have to be opposed because it’s structurally powerless. That’s why Princeton’s research showed that popular opinion, regardless of which power divisions between parties, has no measurable impact on legislation. Because doesn’t matter and never has. The parties do what they want and voting is the symbolic concession that makes people feel like the reason politicians are bad is because the voters failed.
No one is saying the voting will be resisted. We’re saying voting has never mattered in the history of the USA. It was designed that way by the founders. Mass movements are structurally incapable of changing the US via the ballot box by design.
It’s very important to understand how organizing works. Organizing for voting is wasted organizing. There are plenty of ways to organize that have nothing to do with voting and that organizing has far and away more impact because voting is impotent. And when more people become aware of the impotence of voting, alternative actions becomes the conversation. Voting is not a gateway drug to direct action. It’s a distraction from it.
Well don’t give them the concession they want.
DSA has NYC to show for their efforts. They still have a long way. You don’t have anyone to take to the streets or staying power.
Nope. You’re still not hearing the critique. Voting is a concession that the power elite give to the people. They really don’t care what people want but they know that if they didn’t allow voting they would have a rebellion to deal with. So voting is a concession they make to us. And they do it because it’s something they can control to ensure it doesn’t actually effect their class interests, even if the masses manage to organize and vote harder, because they know that if you can convince people voting is what matters they can reduce the chances of a rebellion.
Yeah, I mean. That’s how concessions work. Small victories that in a few locations that symbolically work to make people feel like progress is possible. We can see the history of how these things have worked both in the US and all across Latin America - social democracy emerges to absorb the anger of the masses, some concessions are made, and then a right-wing backlash inevitably reverses it all because the structure is still built by and for the power elite. The only way to address this is dismantling the structure entirely and rebuilding it. Mamdani getting elected is a nice symbolic victory and it will make some people’s lives better for a few years. Hell, he may even make a couple of long term beneficial changes. But the power stays the same.
Yeah, I mean, that’s what organizing is for and that’s why the US had two purges of leftists, outlawed communist organizing, huge propaganda campaigns, bipartisan media manipulation, and we are now entering into a third purge with both parties supporting it including putting people into prison with 70-year sentences for free speech.
Vote mongering groups have staying before because they don’t get disrupted violently by a bi-partisan coalition. Actually effective organizing has to put in a lot more effort to stay around long enough without being purged.
Let me guess… you are going to try anyway… even tho it is going to be opposed?
Cool, but your all or nothing still has nothing to show instead of having all. I am comfortable with the idea that I won’t be alive for the revolution. It can take a long time for society to change, but I do want to work toward it.
.mlis spinning its wheels pretending they are right. Really they are more worried about their perceived purity keeping their shirt clean than actually helping anyone. I don’t see people serious about a peaceful or violent overthrow, but I do see a group that just wants to shit on those trying to do something. In that way.mlis like that meme of the the dems and republicans being a saw and stopper, but the.mls are the stopper as they are discouraging people from joining those trying something.Wow. It’s like we’re successfully organizing and having an impact?
You can’t have it both ways friend. Either our path is impotent and we are small and unorganized or we actually have significant effects on the world and our strategies are working.
The people who believe in the ballot box have a legacy of 800k dead annually from bi-partisan sanctions, the largest criminal justice system by a factor of three, the most racially biased criminal justice system in the world, active maintenance of the domestic colonial genocide regime, active maintenance of the Israeli colonial genocide regime, domestic surveillance replete with sex pest cops stalking women, lynchings by cops and by white supremacists, 247 years of war, millions dead from wars of choice and aggression, and countless other atrocities and systems of unending oppression that both parties develop, maintain, advance, and protect.
Thank you for your effort in organizing the vote.
But what legacy do people who don’t believe in the ballot box have in preventing any of those things? Refusing to use the “concession” of voting hasn’t helped anyone.
This criticism only makes sense if abstaining from elections somehow did anything by itself, which it doesn’t. Organizing helps. Mutual aid helps. But these actions aren’t mutually exclusive with voting. It makes as much sense as saying "Don’t brush your teeth because it can’t eliminate your risk of cancer’. Not voting doesn’t stop any of the bipartisan evils, but voting alleviates the partisan ones, like women having access to healthcare or trans people being allowed to exist.
If an outcome doesn’t change based on a choice, that outcome isn’t a useful criteria in making the choice.
You really do not understand what a concession is, do you. Let me say it another way: if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. If voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it. The only reason they let us do it is because they have insulated their power from us. And again, this goes all the way back to founding. The founders were very clear that the masses cannot govern themselves and a democracy would be terrible for business, so they had to create elaborate systems like the electoral college and the bicameral legislature to create a buffer between their power and our will. Voting is conceded to us precisely because it costs them nothing to give it to us.
Exactly the same legacy as people who do. You are making a distinction that has no potency. What legacy do red-headed people have in preventing or causing these things? None. Red hair has no impact on these things. Same as voting. Again, the research over the last 30 years showed this. Popular opinion has literally no effect on federal policy. The government operates according to a logic that mostly ignores public opinion entirely (except rhetorically) and the only time it actually adapts to public opinion is when that public opinion is expressed in a way that threatens profits or operations.
That’s not true at all. That’s like saying criticizing rain dancing makes no sense because not dancing doesn’t do anything by itself. Do you see how silly that sounds? Criticizing voting as impotent doesn’t need not voting to somehow be potent for it to make sense.
Nor are they mutually exclusive with praying or animal sacrifice.
I hate to break it to you, but the Democrats are collaborators in creating these problems. They had trifecta control over the government 3 times and refused to codify abortion. Why? Because voting doesn’t matter. People are more upset about The Kennedy Center than about Hillary Clinton laughing at a video of a 70-year old man sodomized by a blade by partisans that her State Department managed under the Obama administration’s continuance of the destruction of African resistance to American empire as part of Bush and Powell’s program falling 9/11.
The Democrats can’t help you. They can’t save your friends. They can’t protect people. Because structurally, they have no incentive to and every time people think they can vote a couple of reps in, they prove time and again that they have been holding party discipline and allow another few Ds to support the agenda of the Rs. It always happens, it’s been happening. And the best you can come up with is blaming the voters.
That’s just not how power works. You are arguing from your steadfast belief in a myth, a fantasy that was handed to you by the very people who you think you are fighting against.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. This is literally the argument. You have arrived.
On the contrary, if voting didn’t change anything they wouldn’t suppress it so hard.
Then you’ve proved my point that voting doesn’t hurt. This is literally the argument, you have arrived.
Except for women, queer people, immigrants, people who rely on welfare, etc. Just because they aren’t the solution to most of the problems doesn’t mean that no one is affected differently based on the winner.
Feel free to elaborate.
I think you’re misunderstanding freagle’s point. The point isn’t that voting will be opposed, it’s that even if socialists won, they still cannot replace the system block by block into socialism. The state machinery itself is not neutral and system-indepentent, it’s developed and shaped specifically for the economic base that it reinforces. A socialist cannot use a capitalist state to create a socialist base and then a socialist state. That’s the critique.
Within that context, the solution is revolution. The point isn’t that refusing to vote will do anything, it’s that focusing so hard on elections within the context of a capitalist state redirects people’s attention from organizing efforts to the electoral process. It’s the actual worker organizing in parties, unions, and social organizations that unite the working classes and allow it to exert pressure. It’s how every major social reform has happened, and how every revolution has succeeded.
Basically, we should get organized, because that’s the actual only path forward. If someone decides to vote, but still dedicates their actual time for organizing, they are doing far more than someone who only votes.
And we should vote anyway. If your movement cannot be bothered to take an evening to do something that easy, even to spoil the ballot, it isn’t that serious or credible.
And I don’t disagree. Further elections don’t distract from this, but people who cannot be bothered to register to vote and act on it are also not going to have courage to strike which takes more effort and has the possibility to turn violent.
Voting is a form of being organized and a small proof of willingness to action. Just so you know.
Parties like PSL run candidates to advertise their platform and recruit. Considering the DNC and GOP are both pro-capitalist parties, it isn’t spoiling the ballot, it’s putting socialism on the ballot. The DSA, for all of my criticisms of them, are genuinely trying to decide whether or not to break from the democrats, and if they do they’d be far more effective. By tying workers to the DNC, or your party to the DNC, you deflate action.
Voting is not organizing. You do not have to do anything to vote other than cast the vote. Organizing is far more than that, it involves actually materially contributing to an organization, be it party building, education, unionizing, protesting, cop watching, free breakfast programs like the Black Panthers, the clinics PTB runs in Belgium, etc. Trying to tie voting to organizing is part of the deflationary effort I mentioned, because people confuse voting for organizing and see it as a “pass.”
Organizing takes a lot of effort, but is worthwhile.
True
Also true. And from my interactions with
.mltypes they won’t do either. How could they if they drag their feet at something so basic, yet expect me to believe they will grab a rifle when things get heated?Same thing when you have that attitude around voting.
The bulk of your comment is a character attack with no actual relevance to the points brought up (nor any way to prove or disprove). The actual division is your belief that if someone does not vote, they will not act. I think that’s a more interesting topic. The biggest bloc of voting-eligible citizens is the non-voter bloc in the US, and that’s because a huge chunk of people correctly recognize that voting won’t change much.
From the standpoint of organizing for socialism, what is to be done with this? Parties like the PSL do run candidates, but again, it’s explicitly to advertise their platform and to recruit. They don’t shame people for not voting, they appeal to the fact that many people are disaffected by capitalism and don’t see a way out.
The DSA is struggling between a clean or dirty break with the DNC. Their entire platform, at present, is reformist, and depends on elections. They therefore do try to get people to vote, but they have a sizable wing that is revolutionary, and de facto treats it as the same way PSL does, for advertising. The big difference therefore for these socialists is the belief that the bigger tent of DSA is better than the more correct and disciplined but smaller PSL.
The idea that there is a simplistic “voting is harm” take is a strawman. We don’t actually disagree on much, except that you seem to be intent on attacking a position that does not in reality exist. The actual position brought forward is that our efforts should be focused on organizing, not electoralism, and treating voting like it’s equal or greater in importance than organizing is a waste of effort. Not that we should waste effort in preventing people from voting, nobody does that.
And they are also not marching in the streets.
And its a good idea. Like I’ve said before, voting is still part of organizing.
Okay. And?
It seems to me that you are very narrow minded about organizing and being able to do more than one thing. Is your community garden going to demolish the system? No. Its too small. Still I would not say its a waste of time. It is still a form of organizing and people taking action. Not all of us have access to one btw. Access to a ballot is still more accessible and we should vote as left as we can. If you are really that hung up on the DNC you can spoil your ballot on the general election day. Also did you know the ballot has more than just the presidential race?
Correct, the people are not marching in the streets because the working class party has not yet educated, agitated, and organized at the scale necessary, and because we are not yet at a crisis point at which people naturally take to the streets, like the BLM protests were. Crisis points happen all the time, what is important is taking them from opposition to one part of the system to the system itself. That’s the job of the socialist party.
I’m aware that you can do more than one thing. As an organizer, I know that resources are extremely limited. The point isn’t to dissuade people from voting, but to persuade people to get organized and to correctly identify capitalism as the problem, not this or that politician. That’s why the idea that I am arguing against voting is flawed, I’m against treating voting like the primary means of political change, considering it cannot actually bring the necessary change about.
That’s my issue with this meme, the strawman it makes. You aren’t arguing against an actual position, but are framing it as though it’s the position the majority of revolutionary socialists have. We don’t actually disagree on much here.
Sure does not seem that way taking a stroll around
.ml.