- voting is useless and ineffective
- voting was useful and effective for Trump getting into office
- most Americans hate trump
- most Americans voted for Trump (well ok no but we’re also counting the people who didn’t vote as voting for Trump)
- Americans should do something!
- The Americans doing something aren’t doing it right, they should do a violence!
- Americans are so violent omg
- Americans should do a general strike!
- does not talk about or signal boost the general strike
- All Americans deserve what’s happening to them!
- Oh no these poor Americans getting shot and kidnapped!
- other countries should do something!
- it’s America’s mess they should be the one who clean it up!
- the opposition should be united!
- fuck Democrats, liberals, and anyone who isn’t my specific level of left, no compromise for getting anyone into office!
- vote the Republicans out!
- but fuck Democrats don’t vote for them!
- but also fuck third party voting is useless anyway!
- This is Donald Trump’s fault!
- actually we’re going to blame Democrats though
Like, I get that it’s different people, but I never see anyone calling this out. I think the worst is people who say we should be united and then actively do things to divide people.
It’s this seriously the best we can do? It just feels like people can’t get their shit together. I’m tired of my own side being more willing to fight each other than the GOP.
Because we should simply refuse to participate in an inherently genocidal system. Reject the notion that it even remotely represents us.
Because capital has factions. The right wing of capital wants to make it harder for the left wing of capital to get their way. The leftist view is: reject capital in all its forms. Leftists are not literally right-contrarians, i.e. do what the right tells us they don’t want. This would make leftists manipulable. Rightists are notorious liars.
You’re conflating the opinions of two diametrically opposed camps of people.
The right wants us to fuck off and die. How that gets achieved is subject to debate within their circles. The right most certainly does not want us to give them the wall. The right most certainly does not want us to develop dual power, take direct action to right the wrongs of capitalism, do mutual aid and community defense, and generally live outside their imposed norms and morality. If the right wing of capital has to lose at all, they would rather lose to the left wing of capital, for a simple reason: they understand that losing to the left wing of capital is neither permanent nor substantiative.
You’re so far up the rhetoric you’re actively promoting a right wing capitalist objective to gain and maintain power, I’m genuinely impressed.
Refusing to vote literally just hands power over to capital. It’s handing over the reins of power to the people who want you to fuck off and die. It’s not an effective tactic and honestly what they would want you to do.
The system as it is now, with whomever getting the most votes wins, means that the less people voting, the more influential the remaining votes are. If only three people voted in an election, reach vote has 33% of the decision making power.
“Oh yeah but what if we get everyone to be super communist and refuse to vote” won’t ever happen because people will vote for themselves. It’s just going to make their votes stronger.
By refusing to try to make things better within the system as well as outside of it, you’re hamstringing your own movement.
The system sucks but the strategy of “just let the right wing take over everything and don’t even vote against it” doesn’t sound viable.
Yes, this is why we need to make things better outside the system! I’m not even remotely saying to do nothing or let the capitalists win. I’m saying, aim for more than simply trying to win at liberal democracy.
The State is an enemy of the people. You cannot reform a system that is inherently designed to oppress the people.
Again, that “democracy” is decoration over what the people who control the system actually want to do to us. As the proletariat, our class does not get to materially affect the trajectory of the bourgeois system. The whole thing is structured to impose this reality upon us. Liberal democracy is a pressure valve to make sure proletarian revolution never happens. It decreases our ability to affect the trajectory of the system by focusing all our anger and effort towards harmless, nonsensical political theater.
I guaran-fucking-tee you, if the system somehow managed to register a vote to democratically take the capitalists out of power, or even just make their lives harder enough, it would get couped in like three seconds and replaced with competent fascists.
Look. Imagine you’re on a bus. It’s falling apart and the driver is insane, but you and other passengers can at least lean to one side or the other to shift it so you’re not running into a tree. You need a lot of passengers to do this though, so you need as many people to do it as possible. You want to get off the bus, get onto a new bus, but right now, you’re still inside of this bus.
There are people inside the bus who love what the crazy driver is doing, gate other passengers, and want to crash the bus so that people on one side of it die, and they don’t.
You want to get off, and another bus is being built as you’re going along. You are throwing stuff out of the bus so that it can get built, while slowing down the bus you’re on. You and everyone else can hop off this crazy bus when it’s built, but it’s nowhere near done yet.
The most sensible thing to do, while getting that other bus built, is also to lean the bus out of danger. You have the ability to shift the bus so it does as little damage to people in the short term, while working towards a better bus.
Arguing that we shouldn’t even do that because of how much this bus sucks will only get people hurt in the short term.
If you’re not using all the tools you have to fight, you’re not fighting effectively.
So yeah, work on stuff outside the system. But also work on what you have in the system as well. It’s doesn’t take long to vote, it’s the least you could do to keep more crazy bus drivers from taking the wheel.
The right thing to do is take direct action: one person beats the tar out of the bus driver, other person pulls the handbrake or hits the brake pedal. The bus has far too much inertia for even all the passengers to materially affect where it’s going. Liberalism demands that you override your survival instincts to do meaningless performative bullshit so you can smash into a tree on their terms.
And I honestly cannot believe that anyone would think anything other than direct action is the right option in this scenario. I mean this in the nicest way possible…how could you possibly think that rearranging the passengers could even be a realistic way to avoid a tree, or anything at all, in any situation? It doesn’t comport with physics. It’s completely unintuitive, and it’s not one of those counterintuitive things that makes sense under closer scrutiny. It doesn’t even begin to fix the actual problem. And even if you could affect the trajectory for a moment, the bus driver can just countersteer a few degrees.
Like if you actually did this in real life, you would just end up with a bus full of bodies all crammed together on one side wrapped around a tree.
Like honestly, not trying to be mean but I literally cannot explain this in any other way: this is how it actually feels to talk to liberals about their views. It’s literally “you’re on a bus being driven by a madman into a tree, here’s why you’re a monster for saying ‘we should physically directly try to stop him’”. Liberal electoralism doesn’t even give sensible solutions in the best of times, it’s against all physical and empirical evidence, but liberalism still manages to bring people, who are rightfully desperate for collective action and a sense of belonging, into doing harmless nonsense, anything for a whiff of the hopium that the monsters in the DNC peddle to us.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize the communist revolution was literally about to happen tomorrow, and the whole government is going to shut down, and the army is all going to quit, exactly tomorrow at 3pm, so it’s so immediate that we don’t have to worry about voting.
Oh wait, it’s not. That sort of things takes time. So maybe, like how I’ve been saying, we should do direct action, and, you know, while the government is still around, do our best to not let psychopaths into office by not letting them get elected.
Sorry it’s not glorious, but, ya know, since that revolution isn’t going to be happening tomorrow, we may as well.
Or hey, preemptively try to elect people who would be more sympathetic to the cause and hand the power over. Or vote in people from the Communist party where you can, that would be cool.
But until that direct action is finished, the government is still around, so we should vote. I’m not saying we should only vote, obviously, I haven’t this whole conversation, because, you know, do both.