Anarchism

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What is your voting red line? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This goes to all the peeps who support parliamentary voting as a valid political action.

If your society has been steadily progressing towards fascism for decades regardless of your voting (like the USA has been), is there any point, any action which will convince you that voting ultimately doesn't work?

Is so, what is it? What would your government have to do for you to acknowledge that voting doesn't matter? For many people, it was of course, supporting genocide (which is why so many states desperately try to deny a genocide is ongoing). But if genocide isn't, what is yours?

Eventually a society which has been slowly progressing towards fascism regardless of voting, will become fascist. And we all know what comes after that. There's always one thing where I think even the most hardcore parliamentarian will agree that voting ultimately didn't work: When they're personally being force-marched to the mass grave-sites.

Would that be your point? Or does it come earlier? If so, when?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Use all the tools at your disposal. Vote for the better of the candidates, and then also take direct action or whatever.

It’s stupid to “protest the system” by rejecting the method it does give you to steer it. If it’s ineffectual, you’ve lost nothing. If you happen to be one of 10,000 that markedly changes the outcome away from an outwardly evil candidate, then you have made a significant positive difference.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

If the system imposes two evil candidates or options to me, I reject the system. I'm just not deluded about my state in the machine like most liberals.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Right, just cocksure that nonparticipation changes anything, like most anarchists.

Like if you don't-vote hard enough, maybe nobody will be president. That moral high ground is totally better than slowing a descent into outright dictatorship. Organizing will be easier if you're all in one camp.

It's not as if your whole thing is realism, material conditions, and harm reduction, yeah? We'd be identically fucked if awful old neoliberal Hillary got three supreme court picks and believed diseases are real. Four years under The Idiot did a great job recruiting for your side... and not his.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Right, just cocksure that nonparticipation changes anything, like most anarchists.

No, just cocksure that participation changes nothing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

It changes who gets command of a global superpower.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

yeah, that’s basically giving up any power you do have.

let me know how the direct action works out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It's not power. It's an illusion. Direct action is what has given us anything from the 40 hour week to civil rights.