Not just USA, but all countries with “democracy”. Every candidates to vote came from same oligarch groups.
Democracy within socialism is good and works for the people, but democracy within capitalism is a sham.
America is the only society I know of that boasts of open elections but has no collective curiosity about who counts the votes or how it’s done.
I’m not saying fair elections would help; but I still get triggered easily by the subject.
I would like to think future historians will be as unkind to the vote pushers, as they will be to the fascists
We know every election up to and including JFK was rigged. I fail to see why it would be any different now.
As opposed to the Lemmy solution, “Don’t vote! That’ll do something!”
That isn’t really what people are saying. It’s more that voting cannot bring about socialism, while revolution can, and that therefore treating voting as the primary political outlet for people hampers the organizing efforts needed for revolution.
We’ve had this argument before and you haven’t convinced me this is true, especially with more immediate political concerns.
I’ve also talked with people who literally are against voting so your statement does not speak for everyone.
What “more immediate political concerns” are not fought better on the ground?
Why only fight on one front when you could fight on all fronts? You can vote and do other things, you know.
By voting for genociders you’re not fighting, you’re not even rolling over, you’re helping them.
I have never said that you aren’t allowed to vote, more that voting is far less important than organizing. You are disparaging organizing in favor of voting on the grounds of voting being better, my question is which issue is voting better for?
You are disparaging organizing in favor of voting on the grounds of voting being better
I have never, once, at all, ever held that position, nor have I said such a thing. I have always been a proponent of organizing and voting.
Don’t you dare put those words in my mouth.
We’ve had this argument before and you haven’t convinced me this is true, especially with more immediate political concerns.
Can you please explain what these “more immediate political concerns” are that voting is more important for than organizing?
People laughed, saying a vote for Kamala was pointless, and a vote for genocide, but everyone has suffered under this atrocity of an administration. I don’t know that Kamala would have called Marxists terrorists.
everyone has suffered under this atrocity of an administration.
Just like everyone suffered under the previous one.
I don’t know that Kamala would have called Marxists terrorists.
Her administration used “left wing ideals” as a signifier to find domestic terroists.
The DNC are complicit in the present state repression against left-wing groups, and the genocide in Palestine has continued.
You’re absolutely not wrong.
Who is telling you not to vote? What we’re telling you is: https://lemmy.ml/comment/22575324
It’s not wrong to say regulatory capture is a problem, it just doesn’t go far enough. The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The game is rigged. The election cycle’s pomp and circumstance is to divert your energy and attention from the fact that it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
Right, and if voting was useless, why do politicians want to take it away from demographics they hate? Why would people have to fight so hard for it?
If it really didn’t matter and it really was as you say it is, then they wouldn’t need to distract people.
If you really held onto this stance, then you can’t be mad at people who voted for Trump because it’s all smoke and mirrors anyway and he was picked with what, some shadow government?
Is organizing a revolution so easily distracted that spending like, a little part of a day casting a ballot something that’ll completely undermine everything? Is it that fragile?
Is organizing a revolution so easily distracted that spending like, a little part of a day casting a ballot something that’ll completely undermine everything?
Not at all. Again, who is saying not to vote?
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then they wouldn’t need to distract people.
The distraction is the voting system itself. Seems to work better on you than on most other people.
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Right, so voting is a pointless distraction that… The oligarchs still need to use for some reason.
We know the reasons, and we know the oligarchs will dispense with the pretense of elections when they hinder more than they help. Fascism isn’t a grassroots movement; it’s an astroturfed one funded by oligarchs. They fully unleash it when they become frustrated with bourgeois democracy.
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How will voting help?
It’s not really going to do anything, but it’s better than legitimising the system and entrenching genociders. Politicians use the amount of votes they receive as an argument for the legitimacy of their policies. The overarching oligarchy will exist wether you vote or not, the individuals in the structure have a much easier time of doing heinous shit if they are perceived as legitimate.
So voting for the people in power will, in a small way, make things worse.People are arguing voting does not work because if anyone actually leftist becomes popular, then they either get buried or subsumed by the structure - Bernie Sanders is an excellent example of both. In 2016 he got cheated out of the nomination, likewise in 2020. By 2020 he had already become a sheepdog for the left, channelling popular sentiment towards the establishment.
Another example is AOC who worked as a DC staffer for a long while, then took a 6 month gig as a bartender, and then received considerable promotion by the DNC by way of constantly being discussed negatively by the party elite, which then makes her appear as a political outsider - All the while she still supports the fundamental structure of the US as well as the DNC. She was a diehard supporter of Joe Biden as well as voting for Israel whenever it was needed, and running defence for things like the “Iron Dome”.
However, others would argue that voting can function as a tool to build momentum for leftist political organisations.Here’s some Lenin for you. The text is very specific to the situation his party found itself in in that specific historical moment, but it can still be used to exemplify some stuff:
The principal question for Social-Democrats who value the elections primarily as a means for the political enlightenment of the people, is, of course, the ideological and political content of all the propaganda and agitation to be carried on in Connection with them. That is what is meant by an election platform. To every party at all worthy of the name a platform is something that has existed long before the elections; it is not something specially devised “for the elections”, but an inevitable result of the whole work of the party, of the way the work is organised, and of its whole trend in the given historical period. And the R.S.D.L.P., too, already has a platform; its platform already exists and has been naturally and inevitably determined by the Party’s principles and by the tactics which the Party has already adopted, has already applied, and is still applying, during the entire period in the political life of the nation which in a certain respect is always “summed up” by elections. The platform of the R.S.D.L.P. is the sum total of the work which revolutionary Marxism and the sections of the advanced workers who remained faithful to it have accomplished in the 1908–11 period, the period of the orgy of counter revolution, the period of the June Third, Stolypin regime.
The three main items that make up this total are: (1) the programme of the Party; (2) its tactics; (3) its appraisal of the dominant-ideological and political trends of the given period, or the most widespread of them, or those which are most harmful for democracy and socialism. Without a programme a party cannot be an integral political organism capable of pursuing its line whatever turn events may take. Without a tactical line based on an appraisal of the current political situation and providing explicit answers to the “vexed problems” of our times, we might have a circle of theoreticians, but not a functioning political entity. Without an appraisal of the “active”, current or “fashionable” ideological and political trends, the programme and tactics may degenerate into dead “clauses” which can by no stretch of the imagination be put into effect or applied to the thousands of detailed, particular, and highly specific questions of practical activity with the necessary understanding of essentials, with an understanding of “what is what”.
(…)
Consider the question from, so to speak, the general historical standpoint. It is obvious (to all, except Larin and a handful of liquidators) that the bourgeois revolution in Russia has not been consummated. Russia is heading for a revolutionary crisis. We must prove that revolution is necessary and preach that it is legitimate and “beneficial”. This being the case, we must conduct our propaganda for political liberty so as to pose the question in all its aspects, formulate the goal for a movement that is bent on victory and not one that stops half-wayBasically: Elections can function as a platform for a well-organized, principled leftist party to agitate to the masses and legitimise itself in the popular culture. So in the current day if you vote, you should vote for a leftist third party to help them build momentum.
Here’s another snippet I think would be a good starting point for you, if you actually wish to understand the leftist position on elections, and not just argue against ridiculous strawmen. Really the whole book this second snippet is from is a good start. It’s not too heavy either.
But very tl;dr:
- Elections are controlled by capitalists and cannot be used to leave capitalism.
- If you have a principled leftist party, then elections can be used to build popular support and momentum, but change will still be wrought from outside the electoral system
- The democratic party is not a principled leftist party
- Capitalist parties cannot be changed from the inside
- If you vote, vote third party to help build alternatives
For reading:
- Lenin “The Election Campaign and the Election Platform” and a snippet from "Leftwing Communism - An infantile Disorder](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm) and here’s The book
- Luxembourg “Reform or Revolution”
when they vote against genocide you complains. What you want is a dictatorship where everybody should vote democrats
They often openly say they think “the masses” are too stupid to be allowed to rule a society. Liberals wear the mask of “democracy” but deep down think of themselves as benevolent plutocrats in waiting, with deep contempt for the average person in the imperial core and genocidal contempt for the average person in a Designated Enemy society.
*you complain
and why tf would I want a Democrat dictatorship? I’m literally encouraging people to vote, which is about what they want.
If there was a Democratic dictatorship you wouldn’t vote against it.
You encourage people to only vote for democrats , if they vote for a third party you claim they vote for trump meaning you support a one party
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Except you’re ignoring when I’ve said that we should change voting laws so third parties are viable.
Alright, you’re ignoring they think we should live in a socialist utopia. Neither part is right around the corner or feasible anytime soon. Voting laws will not be changed, and if they did it would not matter. Look at Alaska.
lol what has voting achieved??
Gotten people who can do better into positions of power? Kept people who can do harm out? Gotten rid of the feudal system where you only have power of you’re genetically born into it?
If voting didn’t matter, why would people fight and die for it? If voting didn’t matter, why do conservatives want you to not vote? If voting didn’t matter, why bother pretending and gave elections?
Why should you give up your agency over your government?
Or are you cool with the people who didn’t vote and kinda let Trump take over?
Gotten people who can do better into positions of power?
Since when? We’ve come to a point where genocide isn’t even a point of discussion, it’s just something that they all do. How are any of these people “people who can do better”? Trump won the popular vote. Bush won it in ´04 and now he’s being rehabilitated as some quirky old guy. We’ve come to a point where Bush isn’t Bush, but just some fucking grandpa, that’s your idea of “people who can do better”? Administrations that make people yearn for fucking Bush?? Not to mention people yearning for Obama, the guy who bailed out bankers, fucked over ACORN, did fuck all to get progressives into the supreme court, never codified Roe v Wade, bombed more people than Bush, expanded ICE dramatically, put kids in cages (something that never stopped), enshrined the PATRIOT act, and so much more.
We’re at a point where people pretend Bill Clinton wasn’t on the Epstein list. The guy who overturned Glass-Steagal, the guy who wrote NAFTA, the guy who bombed Yugoslavia so his wife would fuck him again, the guy who couped the first election in the Russian Republic (basically giving us Putin), the guy who oversaw the second half of Shock Doctrine in the broken up soviet bloc, the crime bill, deregulation that would give us the financial crisis, and again, so much more. That’s your idea of “people who can do better”? Better than what??? The people we now yearn for??? The people your “people who can do better” rehabilitate? Democrats idolise Reagan FFS, they’re doing reaganomics! This is “doing better”? It’s not even better than republicans.And again, Trump won. So that’s what your system gives you. Bush won, that’s what your system gets you.
Gotten people who can do better into positions of power? Kept people who can do harm out?
Trump won even by popular vote this last time. You sure you want to make the claim that it’s voting in particular that gets people who can “do better” in positions of power? How can a person be so dense as to think that voting is what keeps those who do harm out of powerful positions when every president, certainly at least within living memory, has wrought unmitigated harm upon the world?
Gotten rid of the feudal system where you only have power of you’re genetically born into it?
LOL. You honestly think voting is what ended feudalism?! And you think people in power now weren’t born into it?! Behold, the intellectual heights of liberal “thought.”
If voting didn’t matter, why would people fight and die for it?
Right, 'cause no one ever fought and died for something that wasn’t true or didn’t work the way they thought. (facepalm).
Also, if voting did work as you say, why do people still have to fight and die for their basic livelihoods and the well-being of their children, let alone the myriad other reasons people to this day are fighting and dying? There are just so many ways in which these questions reveal a deep and fundamental misunderstanding about how material reality works, I don’t know where to start. Oh and wait, didn’t you just say that voting ended feudalism? I guess all that fighting and dying was the sideshow, just done for emphasis apparently.If voting didn’t matter, why do conservatives want you to not vote?
Why do you, a liberal, not want conservatives to vote? Or maybe you do, in which case you should be content with Trump who was voted in. But to answer your question about conservatives: it’s rather obviously because they’re the part of the machine that generally has less popular support for the time being. This isn’t rocket science. Funny how despite that fact, conservatives still have as much and usually more power than the liberal “progressives,” I thought this voting thing (that ended feudalism! lol) was supposed to magically solve all of that.
If voting didn’t matter, why bother pretending and gave elections?
Because people like you believe the lie that it gives them some sort of power and control over the systems that rule them. Obviously. In other words, it clearly does work miracles to placate doofuses.
Why should you give up your agency over your government?
You shouldn’t, and that’s the point. Only a fool thinks voting within this system is exercising their agency.
In response to all of your “iF vOtInG dIiNt WoRk tHeN WHY” questions, how about this: If voting did work to give ordinary people power, why would your bourgeois overlords (who literally control more absolute wealth and exercise greater relative power and control than any rulers at any point in human history) let you do it? Answer: they wouldn’t.
Or are you cool with the people who didn’t vote and kinda let Trump take over?
Ooooh, so it’s all about people who realized they were only given shit options to vote for, they’re the real problem here, not the people who… umm… voted for Trump? According to you voting has all this amazing magical power to effect the world. But the people who actually used that supposed power for their choice of Trump aren’t actually what
put Trump in the presidencylet him “take over.” No, you think the problem is the people who can correctly identify a rigged system. Trump won the election via people doing exactly what you say they should do, by voting, but when it’s not the outcome you wanted, you say the man who literally won the popular vote “took over” and proceed to blame that “takeover” on the people who chose not to use that supposedly great power to endorse genocidaires. My god liberals are such a fucking joke it still gobsmacks me somehow.Yeah, you’re making a lot of assumptions and accusations about what I believe and that’s just full on strawmaning.
You go back and forth on how voting is useless than talk about how voting got Trump into power, and honestly, you haven’t made a single good argument for not voting. All that does as far as I’m concerned is get conservatives into office, and I’m not going to do that.
Have fun on the high road, the rest of us have to deal with consequences of people like you who don’t care if people like Trump get elected, because you took the “mOrAl HiGh GrOuNd” and wouldn’t do the minimal effort to keep a Nazi out of office.
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back door being a doormat.
assumptions and accusations about what I believe and that’s just full on strawmaning.
They’re drawing reasonable conclusions based on your given statements. That’s how reasoning works, you should try it sometime.
You go back and forth on how voting is useless than talk about how voting got Trump into power, and honestly, you haven’t made a single good argument for not voting. All that does as far as I’m concerned is get conservatives into office, and I’m not going to do that.
People have made plenty of arguments, and if all you’re focusing on domestic issues then you’re arrogant and selfish who is only concerned with having your treats threatened.
Have fun on the high road, the rest of us have to deal with consequences of people like you who don’t care if people like Trump get elected, because you took the “mOrAl HiGh GrOuNd” and wouldn’t do the minimal effort to keep a Nazi out of office.
Yeah man, the Orange Nazi is terrible, we need to have a BLUE Nazi instead! Just ignore how they both treated genocide as a bipartisan issue or where Biden ramped up the genocide significantly and Kamala promised she’d do the same.
You only dislike Trump because he’s mean about it, you’d sleep soundly if you had a president who enacted genocide, overthrew governments and killed millions of people but cared about “decorum” and “optics” as you liberals are obsessed with.
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back door being a doormat.
Says the doormat that says “WELCOME, BLUE NO MATTER WHO”
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Democrats are also throwing trans under the bus what do you mean?
And “nuance”? lmfao you are literally hyperfocusing on getting in a democrat above all else, to the point of “blue no matter who” while ignoring all points being made to you and you’re talking about nuance? LMFAO
both sides ism,
Pointing out the many similarities between the two parties’ policy positions is not the same as equating violent right wing militias with peaceful protesters, learn what the things you say mean.
Remember that most people on this website don’t live in your parallel universe where voting ended feudalism. They live in a world where voting didn’t end feudalism, so they won’t understand most of what you say.
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“Purity testing” is when you don’t think people should vote for genocide or more deportations or people who do fuck all to protect marginalised groups, while increasing the police state and furthering the climate apocalypse and warmongering. At this point, what’s left for you?
Yeah .ml has always been special with these hot takes.
almost every time I see .world there has been nothing but reactionary, bigoted and chauvinistic takes.
Its hard to see them as serious when they are more concerned with purity testing.
Yeah telling people off for voting for genocide sure is purity testing.
I guess its easy to wait for the right candidate when you are not under siege.
Like every conflict that Amerika has started where they lay siege upon them. Even now, Cuba is under siege and has been since they revolutionized many, many decades ago. And let me tell you, it’s not just Republicans that are doing this. After all, Obama sure loved droning weddings in Yemen, and he loves the open slave market he opened up in Libya after destroying it.
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This just shows that you do not care about Palestine, you have already written them off as doomed no matter what. So naturally, all that leaves is your desire for spoils of the plunder.
Don’t be fucking smug about genocide you fucking ass.
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That’s your response? Even not voting for genocide does more than one that actively participates and DEFENDS the system that allows for genocide to go on for as long as it has.
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- Doing nothing is better than further empowering those doing harm.
- You’re acting as if all one can do is vote. This seems more telling about you than anybody else.
- You’re acting as if the alternative to voting for genocide is to join houthis. Be serious.
It seems like you just want to argue, since the way you’re presenting yourself isn’t convincing for anyone reading, nor to the people you are engaging with, and you don’t actually engage with the arguments of those you disagree with, rather just saying nonsensical shit. Why even write at that point?
Yeah let me leave the door open for crusaders who extra want Gaza destroyed in office
You’re right, much better to leave the door open for neoliberals who want Gaza destroyed. I’m sure the people getting bombed will be able to feel the difference when the Secretary of War doesn’t have an Iron Cross tattoo
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To win an election, you have to hibernate for another 4 years.
“Fighting” and it’s voting for fascist genocidal geriatrics.
You aren’t fighting, you’re rolling over and yelling at people who say “hey how about we try something other than rolling over? Seems like it has only made things worse so far”
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone suggest, ever, that you only need to vote to solve problems.
I’m jealous of you then
