Revolutions stand or fall with public support. Voting is the most visible way to establish public sentiment. People like to quote that only a third of the US actually elected Trump, but do we have a clear idea of just how many oppose him, if so many voters apparently never expressed their opinion in any measurable way?
Doing nothing and complaining on the internet is useless. Doing something is scary. If you knew you had your community at your back, wouldn’t you feel more confident to step up?
You’re right that people need to know that voting won’t be enough, but it’s still important in order to communicate the public opinion that separates a revolution from a coup.
That is indeed a good argument for voting, but voting third party
Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all.
There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn’t as big of a risk, it’s a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want.
In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it’s a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory.
FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you’re in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.
Even along with public support, revolutions need their violent wing. MLK wouldn’t have been as nearly successful without the Black Panthers visibly totin’ guns on the 5 O’Clock news. It made MLK look very reasonable to deal with.
Gandhi, the modern Icon of peaceful protest winning the day, had armed rebellions popping up behind him. The Indian’s had nearly a 100 year history of violence against the British. And an exhausted Great Britain just wanting to get out of the colonial business didn’t hurt either.
When facing despots and fascists, there needs to be people willing to kill and die for the cause of freedom. We have not reached that point yet.
Agreed on all points. It’s kinda like a robbery – you probably won’t arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different.
Though in this case, it’s the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.
This is absolutely the correct answer. Successful revolutions are always multilateral in their approach.
so voting AND revolution are both good
The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across.
As others point out, the elites won’t go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they’ll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions.
So while I don’t think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.
what about peaceful revolutions (as long as they DON’T even escalate)?
If, for whatever reason, the police collectively decides to no longer enforce the commands of those in power and no other group steps up to violently defend the status quo, a peaceful revolution in the form of civil disobedience would be conceivable.
Getting to that point without some measure of violence is what I believe to be unlikely – not impossible, mind you, and I very much hope for it, but it’s quite likely that an attempt to create such a consensus would (at least initially) be violently suppressed just as violent resistance would.
Even if it is achieved, the new society will need to guard itself against opportunistic egoists seeking to exploit the new power vacuum. Here too there may be at least an initial period of violence until that new dynamic is clear.
As long as there are people willing to hurt others for their own benefit, they will have to be fought.
But we should try to fight as little as possible.
I know of no revolutions that didnt use force or the credible threat of force, because the ruling class would always rather escalate than voluntarily give up their power.
thejre’s the people power revolution in the phillippines back in 1986
Here’s the thing:
I didn’t believe for a second that a Kamala victory would have crushed fascism forever.
In fact, I’m positive the GOP would place Trump’s cold corpse as their nominee in all future elections if they had to.
The problem is simple:
Fascists are in power right now.
They wouldn’t be in nearly as much power if Kamala had won
Because the fascists are in power, its exceedingly unlikely we’ll ever have a fair election again with this government
That wouldn’t be nearly as likely to be the case if Kamala had won.
Furthermore, I’m tired of white leftists screaming for revolution while they themselves know damn good and well they’d never fight in one themselves, and they wouldn’t suffer even close to as much as racial, sexual and gender minorities will in resisting fascism.
The white leftists who refused to vote for Kamala suffer nowhere near as much as any minority living under Trump, and they knew that and still relax with their arms behind their heads today.
Were the “Uncommitted” Palestinians white leftists?
The white leftists who refused to vote for Kamala suffer nowhere near as much as any minority loving under Trump, and they knew that and still relax with their arms behind their heads today
The smug liberals who refused to have a backbone or humanity in the face of their party’s genocide suffer nowhere near as much as Palestinans suffered under Biden and Harris, and they knew that and still relax with their fingers in their ears today
So you’re not at all refuting that minorities are suffering g far more than white people under Trump?
And here’s the issue with using the genocide of the Palestinians as an excuse to abandon all other minorities:
Resistance against the genocide in Palestine exists almost entirely within the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
Democracy would still almost certainly continue to exist in some capacity if Kamala had won.
But now that Trump won, Israel is not only entirely free, with zero guard rails whatsoever, to complete their genocide and attack all of their neighbors, but now the US is further involved than ever, outright bombing Iran in the process.
And genocide is your concern, huh?
What about the 4k (minimum) missing minorities that were kidnapped by ICE?
The mass building of concentration camps on US soil?
The massacre of Venezuelan civilians as prelude to an outright war and enslavement of Venezuela?
The campaign of the GOP’s to destroy the 14th amendment and Voting Rights Act? You know, eliminating birthright citizenship and voter rights, the same shit the Nazis did to Jews leading to the start of the Holocaust.
Oh, and the total betrayal of Ukraine in Russia’s genocidal war on them?
Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
In my mind palace.
Russia’s genocidal war
Words have meaning, and war is not genocide. You people support the Ukrainian coup government, who were doing actual ethnic cleansing before the Russian Federation finally stopped them. Anyone in the Donbas region would throw you in a hole for this equivocation, and you would deserve it. It makes me sick when liberals just mindlessly project the crimes of America’s vassals and allies on America’s enemies. Israel and Ukraine are allies. Israel trains both the Ukranian military and ICE. You are supporting, either tacitly or overtly, two different sets of nazis. You are a nazi supporter.
Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.
This is genocide-justifying horseshit to soothe your guilty conscience. Gaza was levelled under the Democrats. I’m not reading the rest of your fascist apologia because frankly, you people all spew the same delusional arguments. Anyone in Palestine would throw you into the sea for this inhumanity, and you would deserve it. Your cowardice and servility in the face of unimaginable cruelty has doomed you to live the rest of your life as a Good German. I would say good luck, but I don’t wish good luck for you. I wish you a sudden moment of terrible clarity.
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There is no adequate evidence whatsoever that any ethnic cleansing was taking place in Ukraine before Russia’s invasion, let alone one carried out by the Ukrainian government.
The genocide denier
Kamala was the less genocidal candidate.
The genocide denier
I don’t think you’re gonna be able to get a well trusted perception of events from most people in the area.
The colonialist dehumanizer
Germans are generally progressive people
The hitlerite imperialist
That’s a fact.
Source: I made it up
Russia is committing genocide in its war against Ukraine
Usa projection
Russia is the aggressor in the war against Ukraine
Usa projection
You’re just **** and regurgitating Kremlin propaganda.
This will get you banned, ableist nazi scum
I ain’t reading all that nazi shit, free Palestine
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these liberal mfs unironically
Do tell me what the roadmap for establishing progressive policies is like under Trump vs Kamala
Seems we’re objectively further away from a progressive government than ever. Am I wrong?
Damn thats true, seems like all your voting shit doesn’t fuckin work at all🤷♂️
Not a rebuttle to my point at all.
I’ll take it that you have absolutely no reasonable counter argument and are just shitposting images of minorities being attacked with no real goal in mind.
How typical
y’all go to a ballot box and think “i’m gonna vote less genocide today” ???
As opposed to…?
You understand the US has a binary party system, right? You have 2 choices.
Since the GOP primaries for Trump, and Biden totally fucked over the Dem party by dropping too late for anyone other than Kamala to take the ticket, that was the choice.
This is not an argument for cowardice and “lesser evil” fascism, this is an argument for revolution.
A revolution that you mfers will never fight in.
Time and time again we see terminally online leftists scream for revolution, and absolutely no indication one will ever happen, let alone that they’ll participate.
This is you coping by reflexively projecting your cowardice and complacency onto others to justify your uselessness, with an (un)healthy dose of “it can’t happen here” american exceptionalism. Keep wallowing, your overlords love it.
Every dictator came to power through elections. Every dictator then manipulates or abolishes the next election so as not to lose power. No dictator has ever lost an election. There are “honest” exceptions but they were soft dictators. Fascism is just a special kind of dictatorship.
Race baiting to distract from the class war?
Why is this type of privileged exclusionary 1 dimension opinion even upvoted?
There are multiple problems that matter at any given time.
Saying that racism is a distraction ignores the very real people who are being harmed right now because they aren’t you, and thus you don’t care about them. “I got mine” but about other issues.
Some take for a socialist to have really…
Some take for a socialist to have really…
I wouldn’t assume they are one.
I mean their post history seems to match, as does their presence here and comment.
I just think some people only believe in ideas insofar as they are in the groups that benefit from said policies.
what about classbaiting?
Moron
Tfw when you vote for the lesser evil and they proceed to appoint Hitler as cancellor.
Voting is one of many tools at our disposal - and right now we need all the tools we can get.
So, don’t shit on voting - do vote!
Do the other things too, but don’t skip the vote.
Widespread violence and voting? That’s the answer.
Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you’ll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
Even if you’re stuck in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south like me, where your vote will almost certainly be washed out by a horde of Nazis: still do it. Especially in smaller elections - school boards, city level stuff, whatever you can get in on. Those are the ones where you can really start to turn the tide. All it takes is for the usual rednecks to start feeling apathetic, and a handful of us bleeding-heart-commie-socialist-hippie-libruls to step up, and BAM, we’ve got a progressive oasis elected in our desert of red. Which still isn’t much, but it’s a foothold.
But it does require us to do the bare-assed minimum amount of effort in support of change, which is to vote.
Ugh. I agree with this. But I don’t, at the same time. I’m of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn’t exist. Some people just can’t be reasoned with.
Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral
No I’m with you there - but it’s hard to discuss that stuff without getting banned; and you can do that stuff while still casting a vote every now and then. I’ve stirred up a lot of drama here by encouraging the use of that tool - this thread is stuffed with mouth-foaming Trump progandists, so proceed with caution. And grab some popcorn - it’s a shitshow, but it’s a show!
You’re right that voting is a tool; you’re wrong about whose tool it is and what it’s used for.
It can be used for either liberation or oppression. Ceding it to the oppressors does not help you. Promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation helps the oppressors.
What is your goal here?
You are fundamentally confused such that you think there’s any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That’s what you do on forums.
You are spreading misinformation and promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation. You are an ally to our oppressors.
Bruh
No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.
Which of those are mutually exclusive to voting?
I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.
There it is. If you’re not a liberal you’re personally getting checks written by Putin or whomever’s the villain of the month.
You’re projecting.
You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you’re playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You’re the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
It’s honestly fucking frightening how you’re capable of that kind of doublethink.
And you’re not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
You voted not just for genocide, but to crank the genocide up to the max. “No genocide” wasn’t an option, because our system is shit, so why not at least try for damage control instead of taking the absolute most evil path you could?
You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
Which of those actions are mutually exclusive to voting?
BlueMAGA continues to insist that, because they denied the extent of the genocide when it was their team doing it, the genocide actually wasn’t that bad when it was their team doing it.
Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
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You people really are hell bent on reducing the word “genocide” to meaninglessness
but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse
This line is smoking gun proof that everyone in this thread trying to engage with you is talking exclusively over your head.
So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?
Ukranian genocide
You’re talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn’t possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you’re not that programmed.
Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.
You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”
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Nice try FBI
People not voting is why we’re in the situation we are in right now
Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, “people not voting” is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
Yes but they don’t want to admit that, since it makes their feelings hurt, so they pretend voting is useless.
You should definitely vote but it shouldn’t be the only thing you do.
No
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn’t work. Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It’s like all change must be meaningful, and if it’s not then it’s not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin’s position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard’s task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
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I don’t know why you think you own the place when this is their Lemmy instance, while you’re a guest here.
I dont own the place. But neither does anyone in this comment thread, no one here is a mod on memes.ml, not that I should be expto know who owns what on a public forum
Badjacketing is bad. Don’t do that.
You’re right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of ‘voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist’ that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.
It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like ‘dont vote’ to continue in our spaces.
Voting doesn’t do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it’s very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can’t magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.
If you want to argue against that, then do so, don’t badjacket.
Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.
- I don’t care what fascists hope.
- If fascists say the sky is blue, does that make it a “fascist talking point,” and therefore isn’t blue? That’s just not how it works.
Fascists don’t care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.
bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it’ll fix democracy bro
The total lack of show-up from the majority of the left to primaries and the general election is precisely why fascists are in power today.
You speak just like a privileged white psuedo-leftist who lives in relative peace while minorities have the largest crackdown on them since the start of the War on Drugs.
Now’s not the time for that we can’t afford four years of Vance. We need to hold our noses and vote for Skeletor so we can stop the spread, then focus on progressive issues
Can’t wait for the next biggest elections of our lifetime between JD Vance and Gavin newsome 😂 yikes
Skeletor, we want to vote for you so Vance doesn’t win, but stop supporting Hordak destroying Eternia
Skeletor: Hordak has a right to defend himself
Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin
you know what hitler? i tried to reason with you but you have left me no choice. i will be voting for somebody else. good luck earning my vote back fuckstick, you’re gonna need it.
This but the election is between Himmler and Eichmann
how white liberals think fascism works
Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza
you’re finished
Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu
no, pls
Is this not also true for liberals who aren’t white?
yes. i did not create this image
Or bearded. You can be a clean shaven, tan, even a woman and the meme still works.
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn’t explicitly cater to your identity as the default.
Lemmy libs next year: “VOTE FOR BLUEMAGA EVERYONE”
Chile actually voted out their dictator.
They’re only allowed to be voted out after they establish the rules of the game lmao. Military dictators are just puppets of capital used to organize society with force and when capital is happy with it they just move on from them. It’s absurd to think they were voted out lmao. Every single liberal democracy that evolved from a military dictatorship still uses the constitution written by the dictators, i.e. Spain.
Same as most Eastern Block countries. Except Romania, they chose other ways.
So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.
No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn’t have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that’s why voting worked.
I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.
then what happened
Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing
Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted
My mom said that you gotta vote if you want to complain and I do like to complain.
Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
And yet, we’re seeing GOP reps resigning in critical and contested seats that have been demonstrated to lean far more towards the Dems, especially when Dem-Socs are on the ticket.
We shouldn’t just vote, but not voting will ensure we never get out of this mess.
The MAGAts wouldn’t be trying every voter suppression trick in the book if voting wasn’t currently still a colossal threat to their power
@falseWhite what’s crazy is that hitler wasn’t even voted in- he was appointed, which means that fascists don’t even PRETEND to play by the rules of democracy
He was appointed by the elected government
We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?
We forgetting that the person who replaced him was also a fascist and then Trump got reelected anyway now?
Because people like you stayed home.
You’re the reason for Trump, it’s your fault.
Damn, I didn’t realize I - a non-eligible voter not living in a swing state - was that powerful. That makes it even more egregious that the Democrats didn’t try to win my vote. I personally chose who would win and they wouldn’t even not do genocide to convince me
From another commenter: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop
Trump wasn’t full fascist yet in his first term. He was just getting the taste of that power.
You could also believe the rumours that he only won the second time due to rigging and voter fraud. Something he constantly kept accusing the dems of. And we know how much he projects.
I get it but do you actually think we won’t have elections in 2028 and that a democrat can’t win the presidency again?
We just had some elections and democrats absolutely destroyed in almost all of them
I know it’s mostly doom out there but this is absolutely not a full fascist takeover
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Orange rapist loving .ml mods removed all my comments LOL 🤣🤣🤣🖕
Ah yes, the “definitely not mad” emoji
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My bet is that this is all a propaganda campaign.
Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?
Which just resulted in a different fascist being elected, and then Trump got reelected anyway?
The government wasn’t anywhere near as fascist then as it is now.
So you’re saying “No TRUE fascist”, huh?
Maybe people would vote more if the counter offer wasn’t also fascism
Americans: “Our FPTP two-party electoral college system doesn’t work. Clearly democracy doesn’t work.”
Meanwhile in Canada we just voted for dental care. Europeans just voted to take on big tech corporations.
I think the problem is years of “it’s not my job to educate you, sweetie”. Turns out it is our job to educate them. Because they vote.
Don’t you have SS veterans to be giving standing ovations too right now?
Remember when Canada voted to replace First-past-the-post voting?
The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.
Those guys are senators. There are no voting districts for Senate elections. They are state-wide popular votes.
Voting districts are relevant at the federal level for presidential and House of Representatives races.
