this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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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.