FAQ
Q: why not organize and stop treating the bus as a legitimate entity? why aren’t you working to stop the bus?
A: do both. cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank. but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive. “harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
I’m talking about the ones who are so proud of their principled take of not voting and telling others how that doesn’t change the system and how the actual change happens through other means. And then the other means they are doing are maybe some complaints on social media, which is just lol.
I mean, who are these people, though? I’ll take your word for it, but I haven’t really seen anyone IRL actually advocating for this as a strategy, and I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for it in a meaningful way, like, in a way that actually matters. The most I’ve seen to that effect is like, protest votes from people in california, which, sure, whatever, doesn’t really end up mattering because their district is still going to overwhelmingly be blue. I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for just like “nah I don’t wanna vote” as a legitimate strategy. The most solid stance I’ve seen people take is “I dunno if it matters, I would rather talk about local outreach” or whatever whatever.
I also don’t understand why the consistent instinct against voter apathy is just like. This, always, it’s always like, “oh you need to vote or else we’ll all get annihilated by freiza’s death ball” or like “you have to vote because not voting is for bitches” type stuff. I have very rarely seen the discussion go from like, this abstract talk to more concrete oh what has joe biden done positively, what might trump do very poorly, type of stuff, much less have I ever seen talk of actual interesting electoral politics about how people should vote, or who’s vote matters where, or whatever.
I dunno. It’s just annoying, I’ve seen this argument play in the abstract probably hundreds of time at this point, straight up, no joke, and also in real life. That’s only me counting this election season, too, and not the last 3-4 elections where basically the same set of conversations occurred.
I don’t know how you are on Lemmy without seeing the sort of people who advocate not voting and instead of doing something else to change the system. They’re everywhere. I’m betting even in this comment section.
You seem to be confusing those who genuinely don’t care to vote and those who aren’t voting because they’re totally changing the system some other way (lol). Two different groups. And I’m only talking about the second
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think the two groups are that dissimilar. I think both groups are also probably also fine with voting. I just haven’t seen anyone who actually thinks that voting is bad, I think at most I’ve seen people who think it’s a waste of time, or useless, maybe, but it’s kind of hard to make a convincing argument, generally, that taking say the, you know, at most like 7-8 hours to vote is a completely unjustifiable waste of time. That’d be a pretty extreme example and I don’t expect someone voting in that circumstance would realistically change anything, though, it’s more probable that someone could probably vote in like, just around an hour.
My point is more just that these people aren’t like, illogical ingrates, I guess. I dunno. I see both sides of this issue, I think people are mostly talking past each other and taking out mutual aggression because they don’t really have any other way to feel like they’re doing anything politically productive. Like in this thread the most disagreement I’ve seen is people who are like “Joe Biden isn’t ice cream!”. That’s not really a real disagreement with the core point being made, it’s like, a disagreement with the framing of the issue.
My other point, I guess, is that talking about these things in the abstract is a pretty quick way to get everyone pissed off. It sort of, “gets to the heart of the disagreement”, right, in terms of, oh, here’s where our worldviews diverge, but it doesn’t really do any of the work of convincing someone. I think in this case it’s a pretty narrow gap, to convince someone, it doesn’t seem like there’s that big of a divide. Anyone given to like, “Oh joe biden sucks I wish I could vote for someone more left wing” is probably going to mostly agree with everything else you might say.
Instead of like this argument in the abstract, it would probably have a higher success rate to argue about like, the NLRB not sucking right now, or the infrastructure bill and the amtrack stuff, or the student loan forgiveness, stuff like that, actual policies, and then I’d imagine people arguing the opposite would be like “oh well none of that stuff is really extreme at all or as extreme as we wanted”, or basically “too little too late”, and then, you know, I mean I’ve never seen anyone do this, but I think at that point you’d just have to like, give them the point of voting to maintain from a backslide, vs revolutionary action which helps actually make progress. Both are somewhat important and also somewhat contextual.
Like this whole thing is just a “dual power” problem, I guess. I dunno, I just find it really grating to like read through thread after thread of this same exact discourse happening when nobody’s goals are actually mutually exclusive, you know? It’s like neoliberal identity politics taken to the extreme, where everyone identifies as a revolutionary or as a reformist and everyone assumes and argues their own position instead of like just acknowledging their similarities and doing something about their common goals. It gives me serious COINTELPRO handbook vibes.
