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  • Better than not voting and doing nothing.

    The best would be voting and being an activist.

    • The US is not a democracy, it's a capitalist dictatorship.

      Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’

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      • Even if one accepts the argument that voting is not productive, that doesn't inherently justify not participating. There's plenty of things people do daily that are not productive or useful uses of their time.

        Please demonstrate the harm caused by voting in the presidential elections.

        Even if it's not productive, it takes at absolute worst case living in a hellscape without properly staffed polling places, one day out of your time every four years. I was able to do it and get back to my shit in 30 minutes this time, from the time I left home to the time I got back.

        So even if it's useless, for me it was the same as sitting on my ass and watching a TV show. Explain why that is such a horrendous waste of my time that I should have instead not done it at all.

      • Okay, and? How does voting harm us? Not voting does a lot more harm.

        • If your democracy is staged like reality TV, then it does nothing.

          Does voting in a capitalist dictatorship work? It got the US to where it is now. Doing the same strategy over and over again, when proven that historically things keep getting worse, should tell you that not only is it a pointless strategy, it's actively harmful because it draws energy into an electoral contest that does nothing to improve people's lives.

          Bourgeois democracy is an elaborate theatre piece used to keep people distracted, and give them the illusion of choice.

          • I'm not going to say the same thing twice, take a look at https://gregtech.eu/comment/3527169

            • That doesn't address anything. Saying vote over and over doesn't make it a viable strategy, especially in bourgeois "democracy"'s staged elections, where the vote choices are stacked between various capitalist puppets.

              Essentially you're asking us to play a rigged game, and insisting both that it's not rigged, and that it's super important to play it. Also that anyone who refuses to play it deserves ridicule. This is the level of zealotry people have in their fake political system.

              • I never said it wasn't rigged. Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder. Democrats are, of course, the party of the rich, but so are Republicans. Republicans, however, are way more against the redistribution of wealth.

                • Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder.

                  You can only make statements like this, by ignoring history. People in the US have voted for 150+ years. This is the result.

                  Again, if voting is working so well, why do things keep getting worse? Are they just not voting hard enough? No, it's the system that's broken, it's theatre, a catch-22, a rigged game. Those of us who've studied US history and it's class history learned this a long time ago. The liberals coming and telling us to vote to fix things, aren't bringing any new arguments, and appear to us like fanatical zealots, who think that if they repeat mantras over and over, it cancels history.

                  • You are absolutely right! And there is so much more we should stop doing:

                    • We protested for more than 150+ years and see where we are now!
                    • The world did strikes and for over a century and what did it bring us? A dictatorship!
                    • We opened up communities and grassroot movements, and the only thing they done for us: Donald Trump! We need to stop all of this RIGHT NOW.
                      1. Protests do work, in fact that's how the US got all its amendments, and stopped the imperialist war on Vietnam. The important point, is that this takes place outside of electoralism / officially sanctioned actions within bourgeois democracy. Protests and activism also meet fierce resistance from US police, the domestic enforcers of capitalist rule, primarily because it's outside of their rigged "vote for capitalist puppet" game.

                      Nowadays liberals are doing their best to cripple the anti-war movement again by discouraging protests, and increasingly corral people into voting. They stood against the Iraq-war protests, just as they stand against pro-palestine protestors now.

                    • Brother you aren't thinking far enough!

                      • How many years have we allowed women to vote for them to just not stop this from happening?
                      • Why did we bother freeing the slaves when we just all ended up slaves to the corporate system man?
                      • What did we bother keeping that cold war cold for?

                      Seriously, thank you for the laugh. This is one weird ass twist on "ends justify the means" here. "Current situation retroactively invalidates any previous progress or the tools used to reach it" maybe? Quite a mouthful.

                    • Great point

                  • Hey Dessalines, have you considered that you can vote and do other things, like activism?

        • Both voting and not voting have the same effect. Nothing. It is not a democracy and pretending you are in one does fuck all.

            • votes Kamala
            • at least 51% of others do the same
            • Kamala wins

            Explain again how voting and not voting does the same? I know the first past the post system is horrible, but saying that voting does nothing is disingenuous.

            • This is false, multiple presidents won more than 51% of the vote and lost. Your elections are decided by election riggers during redistricting. It is called gerrymandering. You live in a corrupt society that uses voting and a circus every few years to mollify you. Even if Kamala won, which was basically impossible based on how the districts were drawn, you'd still live in a capitalist dictatorship that would be every bit as bad as it is now. You would still be causing wars around the world, you would still have homeless people everywhere, and most people would still be living pay check to paycheck while she did absolutely nothing. Kamala Harris is a manager of capitalism, not leader in any sense. You have absolutely no vote or say in the people who run your country, the board members of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and the rest.

          • Throw bricks at fascists, punch nazis, but also vote, ffs

    • Malcom X said,

      “ I don’t think that if I was cornered by any fox or a wolf, that I would have to take a choice between either one. I don’t see any choice between a fox or a wolf. A fox is a fox and a wolf is a wolf—to me. Neither one is the lesser of two evils. Both of them are evil. And Negroes, when they become politically mature, I think will realize that you don’t have to throw the bullets out of your gun just because you have a gun. Likewise you should wait until you have a target and bring that target down. I think when Negroes become really mature, they won’t vote just because they can vote. Sometimes they’ll abstain. Ofttimes in a position of abstaining is as effective in its results as an actual vote, as is proved in the UN. You have those who say “yes,” those who say “no,” and those who abstain. And those who abstain have just as much weight. And probably the most intelligent thing Negroes could do at this juncture would be to abstain and withhold their vote completely and make both the fox and the wolf fight it out among themselves.”

      This was true when he said and is true now. Malcom X knows far more about opposition to reactionary politics than you do and he what he said was in no outdated then nor now.

      (https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-at-columbia-university-november-20-1963)

    • You are free to participate in any kind of meaningless gestures and genuflection to make yourself feel better, but the US is a controlled authoritarian oligarchy with democratic window dressing and not a democracy in any meaningful way.

    • Worse would be discouraging voting and activism. Instead try to tell people that nothing they do matters and just bend over and take it up the ass

163 comments