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Here’s the thing. You can do both (vote and protest or revolt, etc.). Maybe voting won’t do anything but not voting definitely won’t.
The blue guy won and we still got genocide. Now we get to pick between the red guy who will continue to genocide Palestinians or the blue chick who will continue to genocide Palestinians. Really great system we've got here
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The whole point is most people don't do both, they likely do neither and maybe vote (which doesn't matter because it's largely just spectacle anyway).
The bourgeois electoral process is a mechanism for dissipating political momentum. It's the buffer between the masses and the elites. Picture a monarchist system on the verge of revolt, and the bankers funding the king come out and give a concession allowing the peasants to choose one of two new kings (both of whom have to go through an arbitrarily complicated selection process to ensure they aren't going to lessen the bankers' power and wealth). Some of the peasants might see through the ruse, but it only has to trick just enough of them to shift the balance of power back to the state apparatus.
The goal of leftists here isn't to get people not to vote, it's to help people see through the illusion, hoping to reach a critical mass that can affect material change. Historically, these critical masses are what forced puppet kings to give concessions. But history is rewritten to switch the causality, erasing activists and bestowing all credit on supposed great men.
I care more about your hair color or what you ate for breakfast than whether you vote and for whom. We need to see beyond the symbols and images and interact with the mechanisms they obscure.
Here's the thing. Anyone who thinks voting matters is also a civility fetishizing liberal who abhors violence to the 100000th power. Here in the real world, actual change that has benefited working people has only ever come through either explicit violence wrought on their behalf, or by the threat of it. People didn't get the 8 hour workday because they VOTED for it, they got it because enough pissed off, armed workers scared enough of the owning class that they felt compelled to pass it. 1850-1940s America was nearly a hundred fucking years of low-scale civil warfare and tbh if American workers didn't get so fat off post-war prosperity it'd still be going. But they did and because this shit isn't taught in our schools our country is filled with ignorant chuds who want to take us back to the stone ages and ignorant shit-libs who would gladly let them if the alternative meant violence.
So if you’re not going to vote then you’re going to go do violence? How much actual change have you produced from not voting? You see much benefit to working people from complaining online?
Those are the only two things in the world huh? Voting and violence? Oh and complaining online?
Have you thought about worker organization, work stoppages, boycotts, protests, economic shutdowns and other methods of applying pressure? Education programs, feeding the poor and training camps? Forming disciplined and militant groups to apply pressure?
Is all violence the same? Is a mass shooter killing random people the same as the working class beginning to defend itself against the ruling class? Even civility liberals admits self defense is fine but you want us to all be suffocated out by the capitalists quietly
but you want us to all be suffocated out by the capitalists quietly
Yes, they want us to
, shut the fuck up, and work our bones down to dust so they can have brunch in peace.
You see much benefit to working people from complaining online
About as much benefit as voting and giving legitimacy to our sham of a democracy
You are willfully ignoring the people giving you very good answers. People like you are the most insufferable people on the planet.
If you never withhold your vote than you have lost all leverage. Even in the logic of the stupid voting game always voting blue is a big fat L. If you are a reliable voting bloc, you will never get jack shit
You can also go climb a tree, it means the same as voting. Actually climbing a tree would objectively be better cuz at least you'll get exercise.
in houston or san antonio you can get a decent stamina workout by waiting in line for hours at the only polling place in your entire city.
You receive: all my votes
You give me: nothing
Economics 101
I'm not voting for Hitler, Hitler Jr, or any of his cousins.
A no-vote is a vote of no confidence in the system. I'll continue to vote in every presidential election, and it would be better if non-voters would instead vote for a third party like Green, PSL, or even whatever Cornell West is doing now. But i no longer blame anyone for not voting.