For anyone talking with trans friends or loved ones, here’s a good resource @marcie@lemmy.ml prepared.

1. The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.

2. Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.

3. You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.

4. Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.

5. No, I’m not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.

6. How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?

7. When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s regime and issues with Kamala’s election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala’s platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.

8. When entering into negotiations with someone, it’s a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.

9. You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself “How did I end up all the way over here?” I’m not following you into that marsh but you’re welcome to go into it yourself, just don’t get upset at me when I point out what you’re heading into and don’t get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.

10. Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠

11. Kamala Harris said she would “follow the law” regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like “leadership” but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it’s laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.

12. Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.

13. You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump’s regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to “stop fascism”. What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?

14. When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I’m not doing anything:

• I’m not about to dox myself

• I’m not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you’ve already told me that I haven’t done anything

• It’s a huge self-report and it’s obvious that you’re projecting

• You alienate others by telling them “I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation”

15. You aren’t entitled to others’ votes. Stop pretending that you are.

16. We aren’t splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.

17. You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.

18. Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I’m stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it’s low-key ableist became you’re arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn’t that right?

19. You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that’s it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.

20. Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the “it will stop Trump” argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. “You can push them right”, “By voting we will get a seat at the table”, “Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote”, “We have to vote this way to protect the country”, “Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate”, and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?

21. Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren’t going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.

22. You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump’s presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.

23. I don’t care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn’t have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you’ve been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I’ve been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won’t listen to a word of what I’ve said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.

24. A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that’s a win for my political objectives. However I can’t control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that’s a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?

I have none except that:

1. This country is going to get worse and worse. Neither party offers any way out (because they are beholden to capital) and the unviability of a third party means people will constantly bounce between the two, blaming the current signs of decline om the incumbent party. Incumbent disadvantage will be a thing. In the end, Harris lost because she was a member of Biden’s administration and Biden himself only won because he wasn’t a member of Trump’s administration or a member of Trump’s party.

2. The majority of people already recognize the sham election for what it is and opt out to not waste their time. Imagine wasting an entire workday standing in line with nothing to show for it in the end. And as the country further declines and third parties continue to be unviable, more people will check out. These people are fertile soil for radicalization. They are disillusioned with the status quo but don’t know exactly why and are just begging for somebody to show them the way forward.

3. The people who still believe in the electoral process will be and ought to be treated like Jehovah’s Witnesses: a bunch of evangelizing and obnoxious freaks. Believing in the electoral process should be treated like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Copying over a comment I made in another thread:

I think this article I shared earlier in the week on /c/history is a pretty good piece to send to people, especially those at least sympathetic towards socialism. It outlines how the abolitionists actually managed to achieve lasting change in the United States, despite its 2 party system and powerful slave-owning aristocracy.

Basically it lays out what was done by the abolitionists to achieve a better world. That could help us start a serious discussion on what is to be done in our time.

The Abolitionist Dirty Break by Ben Grove

From the introduction of the piece:

How can a small movement challenge the Leviathan? How can it find strength in its independence? How can it topple a power that seems omnipotent and achieve a revolution?

In 2024, these tasks may seem hopelessly difficult to socialists in the United States. But defying the powerful has never been easy, and we will always have lessons to learn from our predecessors. One of the most important, yet also misunderstood, is the American abolitionist movement.

It’s easy enough to celebrate abolitionists for their righteous principles: activists of every stripe invoke their legacy. Yet abolitionists and their Radical Republican allies were more than just moral idealists. They were also cunning revolutionary strategists. Using principled independent politics, they successfully attacked America’s slaveholding oligarchy and the two-party system that protected it. Their insights and debates have tremendous relevance for modern socialists, because abolitionism helped to ignite the most important revolutionary rupture in U.S. history: the Civil War and the downfall of chattel slavery.

And these were the conditions that their movement built itself in:

By the 1820s, a two-party system of Whigs and Democrats was developing, nurtured by the brilliant New York politician Martin Van Buren. Van Buren’s explicit goal was to use the excitement of party politics to distract the masses from more dangerous conflicts over slavery. Whigs and Democrats would have fiery conflict and genuine power struggles—but both sides suppressed opposition to America’s true ruling class: the planters of the South, the Slave Power.

Here’s a little “intro to Marxism-Leninism” list I threw together, modified a bit. It’s critically missing Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, and National Liberation theory, so any additions on that matter would be excellent. I am working through intersectional theory right now, which is why it is missing from this present list, the goal is to be as straight to the point as possible.

A good intro for someone with no familiarity is Engels’ Principles of Communism and if you are anti-AES but willing to read I recommend Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

From there, it becomes more important to understand that Marxism-Leninism is broken into 3 major components:

1. Dialectical and Historical Materialism

2. Critique of Capitalism along the lines of Marx’s Law of Value

3. Advocacy for Revolutionary Socialism

And as such, I recommend, in order:

1. Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy

By far my favorite primer on Dialectical and Historical Materialism. By understanding DiaMat first, you make it easier to understand the rest of Marxism.

2. Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Further reading on DiaMat, but crucially introduces the why of Scientific Socialism, essentially explaining how Capitalism itself preps the conditions for public ownership and planning by centralizing itself into monopolist syndicates.

3. Marx’s Wage Labor and Capital as well as Wages, Price and Profit

Best taken as a pair, these essays simplify the most important parts of the Law of Value.

4. Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Absolutely crucial and the most important work for understanding the modern era and its primary contradictions.

5. Lenin’s The State and Revolution

Excellent refutation of revisionists and Social Democrats who think the State can be reformed, and not replaced. Also a good call to action to cap off the intro.

After reading all of this, whoever has completed these works should have a good grasp of the basics of Marxism-Leninism and be equipped to do their own Marxist-Leninist analysis, though tons of excellent and fairly critical works were dropped for the sake of limiting the scope to an intro reading list.