I think it’s still good to go vote to keep the worst from happening and to improve the circumstances for emancipatory struggle.
But I also think voting is one of the lesser important levers, compared to activism, organizing, unions and so on.
Both, giving up using levers and cosplaying trying by just voting for a shitty neoliberal mess and watch them making people frustrated enough to vote for trumpf and not doing anything else are irresponsible at the end of the day
Normally, I’d agree with you in regards to voting, but this endless cycle of always choosing the lesser evil while the obvious and truly necessary solutions are either underrepresented or not even represented at all (depending on country) is an exercise in futility and only ever serves to obfuscate the goalposts, like digging our own hole. Feels like the illusion of choice nowadays. Maybe this would’ve been effective given a lot of time, but with the accelerating degradation of socio-economics and the planet itself, I strongly believe we’re just wasting time dancing around the problem.
I always at least cancel my vote when there’s nothing to choose from so they can’t use my name for voter fraud (we’ve had thousands of dead people showing up in voting registries and skewing the numbers, this is how bad things are around here), but that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing in the past decade, with a few notable exceptions which didn’t affect things in the long run. What we now have on offer are: a combo of lukewarm buzzwords pertaining to climate protection (while changing as little as possible) with regressive social policies on the “Left”, a not-quite-Fascist, or a straight-up Fascist. Yes, here as well! Yay!
I agree with you that civic action is the most important element nowadays, can’t wait for the day when more people’ll pick up on that.
So, yeah. I don’t normally like to do this, but Plato may have been right, unfortunately. At least as far as the contemporary context is concerned.
I think it’s still good to go vote to keep the worst from happening and to improve the circumstances for emancipatory struggle.
But I also think voting is one of the lesser important levers, compared to activism, organizing, unions and so on.
Both, giving up using levers and cosplaying trying by just voting for a shitty neoliberal mess and watch them making people frustrated enough to vote for trumpf and not doing anything else are irresponsible at the end of the day
Normally, I’d agree with you in regards to voting, but this endless cycle of always choosing the lesser evil while the obvious and truly necessary solutions are either underrepresented or not even represented at all (depending on country) is an exercise in futility and only ever serves to obfuscate the goalposts, like digging our own hole. Feels like the illusion of choice nowadays. Maybe this would’ve been effective given a lot of time, but with the accelerating degradation of socio-economics and the planet itself, I strongly believe we’re just wasting time dancing around the problem.
I always at least cancel my vote when there’s nothing to choose from so they can’t use my name for voter fraud (we’ve had thousands of dead people showing up in voting registries and skewing the numbers, this is how bad things are around here), but that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing in the past decade, with a few notable exceptions which didn’t affect things in the long run. What we now have on offer are: a combo of lukewarm buzzwords pertaining to climate protection (while changing as little as possible) with regressive social policies on the “Left”, a not-quite-Fascist, or a straight-up Fascist. Yes, here as well! Yay!
I agree with you that civic action is the most important element nowadays, can’t wait for the day when more people’ll pick up on that.
So, yeah. I don’t normally like to do this, but Plato may have been right, unfortunately. At least as far as the contemporary context is concerned.