Votes are earned.
He makes a great point, endorsing Biden isn’t going to do anything to win their contract battles. The liberal DC blob has gotten so used to union leadership being adjuncts to the Democrat machine that when they steadfastly put union members first, the libs go ballistic.
That’s basically the argument I make to normies when I explain why I don’t vote for the Dems. They take the left (I mean the broader “left”) for granted, so just handing over our votes and demanding nothing return means you get nothing. And we’re at the point now that the Dems aren’t even throwing the most basic of bones to the left.
Breaking up the railroad strike has been my go-to example. Demanding that Dems support unions other than when it’s convenient for them (and unobtrusive to capital) is the most basic demand the left can make, and it’s one that I’ve found that regular ass libs I know irl have a hard time arguing against.
Everytime I bring it up the drms insist that Biden personally worked to get the union member everything they asked for and then why I ask them why didn’t he just support them originally they say it would have hurt the economy.
They have an excuse for everything even if it contradicts their last excuse.
They’ll bend over backwards to compromise with republicans but they won’t bend a finger to compromise with us. Why should I care if their political project fails?
Why should I care if their political project fails?
Because people get hurt.
Democrats might suck as far their desire, willingness, and ability to implement actual leftist reforms, but they are not as purposefully cruel. Suffering is real, more suffering is worse than less suffering, and one party is openly sadist.
Also, one party will make your goal of making the world a better place (which I assume is your ultimate goal) much more risky than the other. Why would you make your goal more difficult to achieve out of spite?
(This is your cue to bring up black vans at BLM and say that Democrats are no better).
I realize that the Democrats are not going to bring about communist utopia, but as a trans person, one party winning power makes me scared of going about daily life, makes me wonder if my medication will be banned, whether I’ll be prohibited from public areas because of my identity – the other doesn’t. But I guess you don’t care about any of that.
If you think voting Democrat will make your revolution less likely or take longer, and you are willing to let harm happen to make it happen faster than you are an accelerationist - a morally tenuous position at best.
Democrats might suck as far their desire, willingness, and ability to implement actual leftist reforms, but they are not as purposefully cruel. Suffering is real, more suffering is worse than less suffering, and one party is openly sadist.
Cop City is a complete counter to this argument. It’s in Atlanta, a Democrat stronghold. It’s obvious Cop City is a response to the George Floyd uprising, which the Democrats alongside the Republicans suppressed through counterinsurgency. Your fundamental error is believing the two parties aren’t part of a domestic counterinsurgency apparatus. An effective COIN apparatus employs the carrot and the stick. Of course the carrot is less immediately painful than the stick. That’s the function of the carrot. But do you think the good cop is somehow better than the bad cop, especially when they’re working together as a team?
Also, one party will make your goal of making the world a better place (which I assume is your ultimate goal) much more risky than the other. Why would you make your goal more difficult to achieve out of spite?
This is not really substantiated. You could easily make the argument that the Republicans are so openly reprehensible that people are far more likely to rise up like we saw with how the George Floyd uprising was partially fueled by Trump being an open fascist. Both this argument and your argument make the error that the Republicans and Democrats aren’t working together. Just because they have different roles doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the same team.
I realize that the Democrats are not going to bring about communist utopia, but as a trans person, one party winning power makes me scared of going about daily life, makes me wonder if my medication will be banned, whether I’ll be prohibited from public areas because of my identity – the other doesn’t. But I guess you don’t care about any of that.
Democrats don’t enshrine anything into law, meaning whatever fascist bullshit the Republicans come up with will be put up without a fight. Plus, federalism means those bullshit laws get passed anyways regardless who’s president. We saw this with Roe vs Wade where Democrats didn’t do shit after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of reproductive rights. They don’t do shit when they’re in power, and they aren’t an opposition party when not in power.
If you think voting Democrat will make your revolution less likely or take longer, and you are willing to let harm happen to make it happen faster than you are an accelerationist - a morally tenuous position at best.
Voting Democrat is at best a stalling tactic until Republicans drive the car off the cliff. If it’s in the context of you and your loved ones fleeing the US to a more progressive country, then yes, voting Democrat makes perfect sense since you would be out of the car when the car goes overboard. But if you have no real plans of immigrating to another country, voting Democrat means nothing since the car is going overboard anyways. Or it would be going overboard unless we wrestle control of the car from both the Democrats and Republicans.
You could easily make the argument that the Republicans are so openly reprehensible that people are far more likely to rise up
This is accelerationism, it harms people and the outcome is very uncertain so it’s not worth it, I am not for it.
Democrats don’t enshrine anything into law, meaning whatever fascist bullshit the Republicans come up with will be put up without a fight
So Democrats are not your ideal communists so you’re just gonna let fascists in power?
Voting Democrat is at best a stalling tactic
YES!!! FUCK!!! You get it! Vote Democrat and stall the fucking shit hitting the fan and build dual power, build community. Dunking on people ain’t the way to make progress.
You completely miss my point about the Democrats and Republicans being part of domestic counterinsurgency. And as for your point about stalling, stalling itself isn’t a real political strategy. The problem is that you’re elevating what is at best a mediocre political tactic into a political strategy. It’s not “you should vote,” but “you should vote for this particular referendum because the local community is politically engaged and actually wants this referendum to pass.” But as a tactic, there will be plenty of cases where the pursuing this tactic is a complete waste of time and energy. Presidential elections are a complete waste of time for people outside of battleground states. I live in a state, county, and city where the presidential results have been the same since Reagan. Literally everyone here knows which presidential candidate will win in 2024 and 2028 and 2032 and so on, so there’s really no point in voting for who gets to be president. The time spend canvasing or donating money or even trying to convince strangers to vote is better off just feeding homeless people.
hehe… HAHAH… HAW HAW… GUFFAAW!
Okay… So… there were some headlines at the beginning of the year talking about how many anti-trans bills the Republican party had been flooding the various states’ Congresses’ with. The number was in the hundreds across the USA.
You know what I never read a headline about? How many pro-trans bills the Democratic party were flooding those same Congresses’ with in response. So like, no only would they be vocal and voting against the anti-trans stuff but being vocal and pushing for pro-trans stuff. But that didn’t seem to happen. One party not only said what they believed, they actually tried to legislate in accordance with their stated beliefs. The other party will talk about believing something but get really waffley when it comes time to actually do the thing.
Also, if you live in a red state, the “harm reduction” argument doesn’t apply. Unless you vote for team red, your vote is wasted on a candidate.
The other party will talk about believing something but get really waffley when it comes time to actually do the thing.
I transitioned just over 20 years ago, at the time in California I had no right to housing or employment (i.e. it was perfectly legal for a landord to say “we don’t rent to your type”). Guess who changed that?
Also, if you live in a red state, the “harm reduction” argument doesn’t apply.
So you’re saying it matters?
Lol tough timing for that argument Newsom literally just vetoed a bill defending Trans people.
Was what they did to Libya not purposefully cruel? are mandatory minimums and three strike laws not purposefully cruel? is mass deportation not purposefully cruel? Are sanctions on Venezuela not purposefully cruel?
Was what they did to Libya not purposefully cruel?
Not sure what this is about
Are mandatory minimums and three strike laws not purposefully cruel?
Yes, and I’d imagine there’s much more support for this type of law amongst Republicans then Democrats. I’d imagine you’re going to point out the '94 crime bill or something and Democratic support. Well, understand I’m not a Democrat apologist, I don’t think they are without blame or do no wrong, they are just not as bad as Republicans.
is mass deportation not purposefully cruel? Are sanctions on Venezuela not purposefully cruel?
Yes, do you think Republicans would not do these things? And much worse? I’m not saying Democrats are good.
Not sure what this is about
Google how Gaddafi died and then what Hillary had to say about it, for one.
But what happened to the country was that it was bombed back to the stone age and what was once one of the better countries in Africa for the poor became one that has open air slave markets.
I disagree with this post being removed. First of all, I think trans people who are afraid of the GOP’s genocidal actions against trans people should have room to express that fear. I’ve always said that still clinging to the idea that there is hope to save trans people in voting for Democrats is an understandable if wrong position. I empathize with it.
Second, I think there should be room in leftist circles to discuss whether lesser evilism and harm reduction are acceptable positions. I don’t think it should be dismissed as liberalism. I was a comunist who still believed in lesser evilism for a looooooong time and to this day I would vote Democrat in presidential elections if I lived in a state where my vote mattered. Honestly, with lesser evilism its more that I’ve accepted the party line without really understanding it rather than really truly getting why its wrong, so Ilike discussions about it to happen because I learn best through discussion.
Obviously I disagree with them that there is any hope in the Democratic party. I’m past that point. But I don’t think they said anything removable. Nothing that makes this space unsafe for Hexbears.
What got removed? Did I get removed? Is Hexbear scared of me? lol
Y’all define liberalism as anyone not 100% pro Xi Jinping Thought. A liberal is a proponent of capitalism right? I am not.
I’d like to point out in a binary system, i.e. “lesser evilism” vs “more evilism”, the choice should be clear. Voting Democrat is not about thinking the “lesser evil” will fix things, it’s about not making things unnecessarily worse.
You are still riddled with liberalism as a philosophy, regardless of your stated desires to end capitalism. It’s a framework within which you’ve learned literally everything up until you read works from feudal peoples or Marxists. But even pre-maexist/pre-liberalism works have been absorbed by liberal context and reinterpreted through that lens. You are still here.
Stalin wrote about anarchism as an idea which exists in every socio-economic system. It’s what happens when someone is part of that system but wanting to be independent of it. We don’t just want independence from capitalism, but the overthrow of it, and that’s why we are Marxists. I think there are anarchists (mostly only ever seen here on hexbear) that are real comrades which Stalin’s analysis missed, those that see the crushing of the state needing to happen and be pushed for faster. I fully agree but think patience is a better tactic unfortunately.
You are not that though, you are just the kind Stalin talked about
Democrats might suck as far their desire, willingness, and ability to implement actual leftist reforms, but they are not as purposefully cruel. Suffering is real, more suffering is worse than less suffering, and one party is openly sadist.
Republicans are obviously more cruel than Democrats and I’ll even throw in that they’re generally dumber as well. But I do think you’re underselling just how dog shit and cruel Democrats are. We have somewhere between 50-90k people dying each year due to lacking healthcare in this country and Democrats have absolutely no desire to stop it. Nada, zilch, none, 200-360k people will have died in the US under Biden presidency that didn’t have to.
Republicans are dumb antivaxers who don’t understand science, but Democrats claim to, which makes their COVID response a cruel and disgusting genocide on those with disabilities.
whether I’ll be prohibited from public areas because of my identity – the other doesn’t. But I guess you don’t care about any of that.
I can’t speak for the person you responded to, but I would assume that they care about trans rights and existence.
I do think two things are worth noting:
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Your and my votes generally do not matter because a single vote usually is not going to make a difference we could have every Hexbear user vote, even the non-American ones, and it would not move the needle.
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The attack on trans people is happening while Democrats are in power and rather than confronting it in any meaningful way they’ve equivocated about the complexity of childs sports.
If you think voting Democrat will make your revolution less likely or take longer, and you are willing to let harm happen to make it happen faster than you are an accelerationist - a morally tenuous position at best.
Capitalism is going to do what it does regardless of which party we vote for. This is because the contradictions are very apparent and neither party is capable of addressing them. Republicans will continue to scapegoat trans people and probably immigrants and Democrats will continue to be cowards while hogs shoot up schools and gay bars. And that’s it. Nothing will be done about it.
I agree with everything but I think this is a weak line to use:
a single vote is not going to make a difference
it’s true that leftists are too small in number to sway an election, but with that line you’re just gonna get “what if everyone thought that way.” You can see how the lib you were talking to latched onto that one line and ignored everything else.
more importantly, the whole purpose of denigrating voting is to get people to organize. As long as people organize, whether or not they also vote in national elections is of little consequence imo, as long as they have realistic expectations. If they think there’s some marginal harm reduction, that’s fine, as long as they don’t pin all their hopes on some crisp, bloodless Democrat who’ll let Citibank pick their cabinet like Obama did in 2008.
People need to understand that, even when the majority votes blue, their votes do not actually result in policy. We have to break the false sense of political agency that voting gives people. But the purpose is ultimately not to stop people from voting, but to make them start organizing.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
[…]
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
I really like your point about voting not resulting in policy, I’d completely forgotten about that study and will be using it. But I’d like to clarify something:
a single vote is not going to make a difference
it’s true that leftists are too small in number to sway an election
It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative or a leftist any single vote doesn’t matter because single votes do not typically determine elections. Like you can be a liberal in a conservative area you’ll be out voted or a liberal in a liberal area will likely have their candidate win by a significant margin meaning their vote didn’t really matter either.
Capitalism is going to do what it does regardless of which party we vote for. This is because the contradictions are very apparent and neither party is capable of addressing them. Republicans will continue to scapegoat trans people and probably immigrants and Democrats will continue to be cowards while hogs shoot up schools and gay bars. And that’s it. Nothing will be done about it.
So then why not look for realistic solutions to ending capitalism rather than entertain the idea that a few thousand people (who spent lots of energy in the meantime pissing people off online for fun) are going to persuade enough people to join them in a successful communist revolution?
I’m an anarcho-communist, so I’m not saying the solutions to the world’s problems can be solved within the system, but I also think there is value in being realistic and reducing harm with available tools and not making my enemy more powerful out of spite.
So then why not look for realistic solutions to ending capitalism rather than entertain the idea that a few thousand people (who spent lots of energy in the meantime pissing people off online for fun) are going to persuade enough people to join them in a successful communist revolution?
No one here is pretending that having fun online is really advancing a revolutionary agenda. That’s pure projection. You think you’re doing something by voting and by telling us to vote. Its an empty sacrement that absolves you by participating in it. And like all hollow religions, its adherents need others to believe.
You might want to consider looking for realistic solutions rather than entertaining the idea that one person will convience a few thousand people (who spend free time pissing people off by being openly communist while online for fun) of the importance of ing in a fake democracy
Voting for a piece of legislation, cool. Which is why all the cool things that people want don’t get put up for public votes, we might actually get good stuff.
Voting for a person, who then gets to whatever they want carte blanche style for their entire term, meh.
I’ll reply to both of your comments just to be coherent:
(which seems to me to imply (in this case) don’t bother voting, revolution is the only way to make things better)
I did not say this. Voting can make things better it just often doesn’t. My mentality on voting is that if it’s easy to do then do it but there are counties where I live where people will have to wait for up to 3 hours to vote and often have to get to work. Is it worth it to browbeat these people who would rather do anything else? I would say not.
A single person being a vegan or driving an SUV does not matter in aggregate for the climate because there are systematic problems that pollute significantly more than any single person will in infinite lifetimes.
So then why not look for realistic solutions to ending capitalism rather than entertain the idea that a few thousand people (who spent lots of energy in the meantime pissing people off online for fun) are going to persuade enough people to join them in a successful communist revolution?
My brother/sister/nb in Christ are you really saying that it is more “realistic” to vote out capitalism than it is to have a revolution? There have been numerous revolutions and zero elections that have overthrown capitalism.
If you want to vote to improve things Godspeed and I’ll even join you, but the notion that you’ll achieve your goals of Socialism through voting is absurd. Direct action gets the goods and is infinitely more important than voting.
Your and my votes generally do not matter because a single vote usually is not going to make a difference… (which seems to me to imply (in this case) don’t bother voting, revolution is the only way to make things better)
I see this attitude a lot in the auth-left. Is this a general thing or only counts when talking about voting?
What about driving SUVs? I’m just one person, doesn’t matter if I drive an SUV right? It’s only one automobile. And promoting the concept that people shouldn’t drive SUVs would be silly right?
What about consuming animal products? It wouldn’t matter if people become vegan or not right?, the cow is already dead, the carbon emissions already emitted, and one person eating a hamburger won’t make any difference, no sense in eating less meat or trying to promote eating less meat, it’d be no more useful than voting/promoting voting. The only solution would be to outlaw being non-vegan, and anyone who wants a burger deserves the wall right?
auth-left
Polcomp is a stupid meme that it is below you to believe in even as a liberal
Bad examples.
The idea of voting is for collective action (maybe). If 51 % vote for something, the we all are supposed to do the thing.
It would be like, “If 51% of people went vegan, then 100% of the population would be required to be vegan. But since vegans are not 51% of the people, no concessions should be made towards their beliefs.”
Honestly, the Republicans and conserva-Dems are doing that right now with an transphobic arguments along the line of, “Hey, trans people are such small portion of the population, wouldn’t it be easier for them all to just, you know, not be trans?”
You do not have a morally superior position because you personally feel scared by one of the two sides of the increasingly fascistic coin of american politics. I’d argue that dismissing the immense suffering of huge swathes of the world let alone the USA in exchange for personal security is an immensely selfish (at minimum amoral) stance. Especially when that security is built on a house of cards that can be taken away at any moment when the Democrats find it “politically inconvenient” to support trans people.
Also, yes, lots of dems are intentionally cruel, so socialists support and organize with socialist/left parties. Wild that. The binary of Republican-Democrat is such an obviously bullshit creation; it’s incredible that in the year 2023 people are still browbeating people for not caring about presidential elections. It might be worthwhile to interrogate why you think that the mass amounts of violence that the Democrats support (often, in conjunction with the Republicans or as continuation of Republican policy) can be so readily dismissed.
If you think that voting in US Presidential Elections will make your country any better, and you are willing to ignore harm happening to the already hyper-exploited and oppressed populations of the world, then you are a misguided electoralist - a morally tenuous position at best.
You do not have a morally superior position because you personally feel scared by one of the two sides
I have a morally superior position because I’m trying to reduce harm while you’re trying to get your party into power.
while you’re trying to get your party into power.
Said the individual campaigning for votes for dems.
If you and the people you are organizing with (I’m sure you organize irl) decide to engage in entryism. Good for you, hope it goes well. I’ll tell you, historically, it typically doesn’t go great.
Newsom literally just vetoed a bill to protect trans kids in california despite overwhelming democrat representation and approval, that’s the most recent ratfuckery the democrats have pulled in a long line of them. You’re telling people to run for office? Tell me what happened to Bernie, an extremely milquetoast left option but still too disruptive to DNC corporate interest.
I agree with you people should vote, they should vote for third parties. they should communicate to political institutions that what we have is not working. But too many Americans have latched onto their dumb sports team red-blue politics game rather than trying to actually understand what political power is materially, theoretically, and historically. If we do engage in entryism (we shouldn’t) it should be organized so as not to get subsumed and crushed. If you are personally compelled to vote for the democrats out of personal interest, I will not stop you. But I am not interested in crumbs dusted from the table.
Republicans are the drunken father that comes home and beats you with his belt and Democrats are the mother that cries about it but keeps buying him beer. I get why you might like her better but the cycle of abuse doesn’t stop until you grow the fuck up and start hitting back
Reducing harm by voting for the dixiecrat who stood by and let Roe v Wade get shredded, and then dismantled the railroad strike, which coincidentally led to a 38-car train derailment and massive chemical spill in Ohio just a few weeks later
We’ve reduced so much harm!
