I know it sounds like I’m feeding into some Doomer vibe, or like I’m giving up. I’m not, I will absolutely continue going to food drives and joining the occasional protest if I can, but my serious question I’ve been kinda struggling with is whether registration for voting is even worth it? I mean in my area there aren’t really 3rd parties, just a bunch of Jackass Democrats and Greedy Republicans yelling about how they’re more American. I suppose there are some referendums, but nothing that really helps people especially. I remember in 2016(I was a lib) I had told a friend that not voting creates a more dangerous situation for POC and LGBTQIA people that we know personally. The fucked up thing about what I said is that it kinda ignores the sad reality that Democrats often toss aside these groups as sacrifices for a few more votes. So Idk how to proceed. My potential vote for a Dem governor will make me feel worse than when I voted for Biden bc I know better. I can tell myself that I genuinely didn’t know better when I voted for Biden, I was a Dem who was willing to do anything to beat the Far Right, and I got what I wanted, just not what I expected. Sorry for the long Body Text, but as a USA comrade in a strongly Blue State, is voting worth anything? Thank you.
This may get downvoted to hell but i’m cool with that. I think it’s worth taking an hour every couple years to get a mail-in ballot, vote for the least fashy people available, throw the thing in the mail and then completely ignoring bourguoise “democracy” for the next 2 years. Yeah, I voted for Biden. I spent less time on it in a year than I spent watching any given shitty Netflix series. It’s not revolutionary, but I think it’s worth the absolute minimum, as long as I put a lot more effort into actual revolution.
Put another way: you’re a grownup and you don’t need to justify your actions to other people if you’re focused on building a better world for everyone.
That’s what I think too mostly. No lie in my mind it’s a match of mental tennis going back and forth with “just vote for 20 min and you’re done for 2 yrs” and “those 20 minutes do nothing.” Ultimately I’m not a statesman, nobody is analyzing why I voted for X and if I did it for Y reason. I figure that as bad as the shitty person I vote for is, it’s like 20 minutes of filling out stuff related to politics(which I’m addicted to already) and if I can vote for a socialist leaning candidate then I most likely will just to show symbolic support and if the party receives enough support, they get more gov funding.But if it’s a Pelosi vs Republican scenario (I don’t live in CA so that’s not my case luckily) then I won’t vote.
The national clown show should take up a very small fraction of your legitimate consideration imo.
But feel free to gum up the local scene. And if your orgs allies have a certain way to vote then do that.
One interesting to note is that whenever a party ends up in overwhelming majorities, there’s always factionalism that splits it up. If Democrats won an overwhelming majority we’d likely also have a lot more critiques of establishment elites coming from the left. It weakens their ability to justify neoliberalism under the guise of appealing to “moderates”
That being said shit’s complicated. They tried to deport my family just months after Trump got elected and he overturned the entire immigration apparatus within a few weeks. At the same time, Biden has been much more imperialist than Trump could’ve ever dreamed of and nobody is as effective at giving away money to “defense” contractors as Democrats. Bernie was genuinely actually on track to win the nomination in 2020 and betting markets, historically the single most accurate predictor, had him winning right up until the Clyburn endorsement of Biden.
All of these are simultaneously true and they should all be considered.
I gave some good money to Bernie then when I was 17 didn’t know better.
I see what you say but I want to argue it’s not worth much of our individual activism time/energy.
Voting is somewhat useless if it’s not organized strategically in a group which is what I suggest.
And our ‘democracy’ is very secure from what it means to actually be democratic. The maximum payout from voting as a form of activism is small because of this. That is why it not worthy of a large consideration.
Yes, if you’re actually organizing so much that spending an hour filling out a ballot based on some local union’s voter guide is gonna detract from that then you have a point. Also if you live in a state where voter suppression is much stronger, sure.
But I feel like that’s not a very common situation. I think when you factor in the impact that local elections have—Republicans are very successfully banning books about critical race theory currently by electing school board officials; sheriffs have an incredible amount of power with very little oversight and very few people vote on those races; local government officials can just sell your green space to bougie developers to further gentrification—if you factor in all that, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an activist too busy to copy a voter guide.
voting can net local communities some gain. the corrupt nature of larger politics makes it hard to get substantial change tho. presidents don’t impact much change alone. chesa boudin, the recently ousted sanfran d.a. was making a lot of healthy changes and got booted by larger powers. jackson mississippi has had at least some success with overtaking corrupt politics, but only to be met with oversight bribes for the recent battle to fix their water supplies, amongst other attacks by larger governatorial forces. another example is chicago fighting to remove corrupt judges, only to be met with redistricting and redlining of community boundaries, and fraudulent voting practices with poor excuses from the state
average voters in this country have no say in foreign policy
it’s not an easy yes or no, what matters is that we’re collectively building up duel power as a part of a larger /for the people/ strategy that stops relying on corportaist leeches and their super pac funded elites. not an easy thing to do considering the extremely violent nature of politics and policing in this country. the forces against forwardness, and their strategies, at least make themselves evident in the struggle.
the name of the game right now is more militant organizing, and continue building up the new labor movement as much as possible. join political organizations, frso/psl. get involved locally first, where people can actually influence change
I know voting feels worthless, but it’s necessary to ensure that the system can represent us. Even “deep blue” places are often only like 65% blue - we’re really all a shade of purple. As for breaking out of this oppressive duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, you could start volunteering for https://starvoting.org/ and/or https://represent.us/…
I’ve studied alternative voting systems a lot (even made a website that lets you compare about 2 dozen of them at once). I’d love for us to switch to an Approval system. But if there’s one thing I’ve concluded from studying them it’s that you can’t fix a system of exploitation through “reform” without directly addressing the underlying power structures. I do believe these systems can help us break the duopoly, but, if anything, smaller parties can be even more susceptible to corporate takeover
What gives you the impression that the system has ever represented regular people?
Alternative voting systems do not fix the problem. Plenty of capitalist dictatorship countries like australia use ranked choice voting, and that has not stopped them from genociding aboriginal peoples. It can’t even get their cities decent internet speeds lol.
