- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Voting is not mutually exclusive with whatever your alternative is.
Electoralism does not really just mean indiviuals going to vote. Its a mindset or strategy that focuses mostly on elections and how to influence them or how to gain votes.
Again, I don’t see how developing an election based strategy diminishes one’s ability to develop simultaneous strategies.
The most obvious is that it uses resources that could be used elsewhere. The amount of resources spent in every election is massive. Groups / orgs that do electoralism often spend most of there resources this way, because they have to compete with way bigger and better founded parties.
Also doing electoralism often is something of an image and credibility thing. To have chances there groups / orgs often try to have a civil / good / appealing image and they often care about that image enough to not do radical / bad optics actions.
Also when you do electoralism you agree to certain conditions of the state to participate. In most states you have to have certain legal structures and processes in place which usually are pretty hierarchical and are really hard / impossible to work around in horizontal and antiauthoritarian ways. This way it makes it (nearly) impossible to implement anarchist concepts such as “unity of goal and practice” (sorry I dont know a better translation, maybe prefiguration fits). Agreeing to be a legal entity that the state recognizes and allows to participate in elections also reduces the field of activities you can do without impacting your ability to do electoralism.
Voting for people that will kill you instead of ever being convinced to inch towards equality is mutually exclusive with any alternative that might work.
But voting for people who might kill you because their opponents will kill you buys time while you develop better alternatives.
Voting for a genocidal party with a history of invading countries full of people that look like you because they decided to not be slaves to multicolor capitalists is not better, in any way, than voting for a genocidal party with a history of invading countries like you because they decided to not be slaves to white capitalists except they might also target you openly.
Only if you’re a single issue voter, which is dumb. If they’re equally bad on that one issue, but one is objectively better than the other on most other issues, it is in fact objectively better to vote for the one who is better on the other issues. One of the two will win, damage control is the rational choice.
The issue is genocide.
The rational choice would be throwing out every politician supporting genocide since genocide never limits its victims. If you vote for genocide you will always eventually become the victim if you do not physically start fighting your government.
Why didn’t you throw out every politician supporting genocide then? Perhaps because that’s not in your power to do as an individual?
I did my part in that, by not voting for any politician supporting genocide.
Did that once, just like a cartoon. And while stumbling around bleeding, I stepped on it again. Had to get stitches.
I appreciate the sentiment, so I upvoted. Voting is integral to a liberal democracy, just start at the local level.
My thinking, being from the US personally, is if you have a solid grass roots coalition who can provide support it’s a win. Getting someone elected at the top won’t help if you don’t have support underneath them.
“If voting worked they would make it illegal” is true, because they disenfranchise voters all the time. Unfortunately, a liberal democracy is the strongest path forward to a better system of government/economic redistribution.
Liberal democracy is antithetical to both democracy and freedom.
Not gonna engage with anything I said huh? Ok.
I did. Liberal democracy is not a popular democracy; the average person has no power or rights in it. It is a democracy of the ownership class.
What form of democracy can you see working in the real world today?
The one that is currently working in the most populous country, the one that has raised the standard of living for the most people in history.
You mean India?
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