I’m just as frustrated as you and that is where your emotions are misplaced.
The point of this post was “people who don’t vote because they object to all candidates are silly and short-sighted”. It sounds like you agree with that. Nobody said “only vote” just the same as you didn’t say “only do local”. That was kind of my point, in a roundabout way.
We need to vote local. We need to work with our communities to find and elevate good candidates. That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe but that doesn’t justify not voting.
To quote Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, “Decisions are made by people who show up.” If you don’t show up to the table where the decisions are happening, no matter what else you do, you’re giving your choice to someone else, because he decisions still get made, except now it is by people you had literally, voluntarily no say in choosing.
I will never support the idea of “we shouldn’t vote for the better candidate because they’re not good enough”. We’re not going to overthrow the government next month. So we should exert whatever influence we can wherever and whenever we can.
Nobody says only vote, but by design people do only vote. It’s made to disguise inaction as action, to make you feel like you have done something when all you have done is wash your hands of the responsibility.
That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe
Hard disagree on this one, there is a qualitative difference in acting to empower yourselves and acting to empower somebody above you, anyone who has done more than a little of both is conscious of this.
One of my ‘favourite’ experiences along these lines was during the lockdowns, local anarchists set up mutual aid groups and helped people do so across the city I was living in at the time (not a small one). After a point local politicians recognised that there was political capital to be made by involving themselves, so in many cases they barged in and took over, pushing everything through their own networks, and both the quality and quantity of assistance consistently declined in the places that they were successful. Their actions killed people, and not only will they never be held accountable, they got celebrated for it.
Absolutely everything here still runs foul of my original concern, when you have systemic forces pushing towards the concentration of power, anything you do (whilst of course still varying in severity) whilst not addressing this is both temporary and superficial* as more and more things get redirected to serve and feed these concentrations. This necessarily leads to conflict and potential collapse, as these concentrations run out of sources of power that aren’t held by other concentrations, they begin to come into conflict. You see an example in the economy at large, first they eat all of the little fish, then the big players start targeting each other with leveraged buyouts and the like. Their power lies in money, so their violence is felt and expressed in financial terms, state power lies in the threat of physical violence.
We can’t just ignore the more passive (in our direct experiences) violence. As I said before, if the conditions for it exist then it will grow, and there are systemic pressures maintaining these conditions that need to be addressed before this gets any more out of hand, no matter what brief respite the next election brings.
Edit: * Superficial in that it doesn’t address the problem, not that it doesn’t necessarily have tangible positives for people, hence why I say “voting is not enough” and not “don’t vote” (not to accuse you of suggesting otherwise, you have been clear there).
And my entire point is that you came into a thread about people who say “don’t vote”, tried to tell everyone “voting isn’t enough”, and justifiably got told “hey, stfu, nobody is saying voting alone is enough, but you still have to fucking vote”.
Like, I understand everything you’re saying and I don’t even disagree but you picked the wrong time and place to get annoyed with people who were venting their frustrations over a specific type of person that says “don’t vote, it’s ethically unjustifiable”.
I brought it here because I feel that the discussion misses the point and redirects anger away from the systems and structures that actually cause it onto other people in the same position as them. It is important that people understand what is happening or this and similar lines of divide and conquer (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it) are going to keep recurring. You might all be good eggs in every other regard, I have no reason to doubt that you are, but if you see how it can happen to you, you start to understand how it happens to others in worse ways. Understanding something is the first step in remedying it.
I definitely can see how it might just seem irrelevant from your perspective though, so that’s absolutely fair enough.
And I’m trying to tell you that most of us understand it already, and are still frustrated with the people trying to convince everyone not to vote as some kind of valid form of protest.
Your approach antagonizes your allies. Accelerationists who want people not to vote are not your allies and they’re not mine. They are overwhelmingly people in positions of privilege who can afford to watch everything burn down because they aren’t the ones who will be hurt by it. That’s not “people like you and me”. That’s selfish people with an axe to grind
I’m just as frustrated as you and that is where your emotions are misplaced.
The point of this post was “people who don’t vote because they object to all candidates are silly and short-sighted”. It sounds like you agree with that. Nobody said “only vote” just the same as you didn’t say “only do local”. That was kind of my point, in a roundabout way.
We need to vote local. We need to work with our communities to find and elevate good candidates. That involves exactly the kinds of grass-roots activities your describe but that doesn’t justify not voting.
To quote Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing, “Decisions are made by people who show up.” If you don’t show up to the table where the decisions are happening, no matter what else you do, you’re giving your choice to someone else, because he decisions still get made, except now it is by people you had literally, voluntarily no say in choosing.
I will never support the idea of “we shouldn’t vote for the better candidate because they’re not good enough”. We’re not going to overthrow the government next month. So we should exert whatever influence we can wherever and whenever we can.
Nobody says only vote, but by design people do only vote. It’s made to disguise inaction as action, to make you feel like you have done something when all you have done is wash your hands of the responsibility.
Hard disagree on this one, there is a qualitative difference in acting to empower yourselves and acting to empower somebody above you, anyone who has done more than a little of both is conscious of this.
One of my ‘favourite’ experiences along these lines was during the lockdowns, local anarchists set up mutual aid groups and helped people do so across the city I was living in at the time (not a small one). After a point local politicians recognised that there was political capital to be made by involving themselves, so in many cases they barged in and took over, pushing everything through their own networks, and both the quality and quantity of assistance consistently declined in the places that they were successful. Their actions killed people, and not only will they never be held accountable, they got celebrated for it.
Absolutely everything here still runs foul of my original concern, when you have systemic forces pushing towards the concentration of power, anything you do (whilst of course still varying in severity) whilst not addressing this is both temporary and superficial* as more and more things get redirected to serve and feed these concentrations. This necessarily leads to conflict and potential collapse, as these concentrations run out of sources of power that aren’t held by other concentrations, they begin to come into conflict. You see an example in the economy at large, first they eat all of the little fish, then the big players start targeting each other with leveraged buyouts and the like. Their power lies in money, so their violence is felt and expressed in financial terms, state power lies in the threat of physical violence.
We can’t just ignore the more passive (in our direct experiences) violence. As I said before, if the conditions for it exist then it will grow, and there are systemic pressures maintaining these conditions that need to be addressed before this gets any more out of hand, no matter what brief respite the next election brings.
Edit: * Superficial in that it doesn’t address the problem, not that it doesn’t necessarily have tangible positives for people, hence why I say “voting is not enough” and not “don’t vote” (not to accuse you of suggesting otherwise, you have been clear there).
And my entire point is that you came into a thread about people who say “don’t vote”, tried to tell everyone “voting isn’t enough”, and justifiably got told “hey, stfu, nobody is saying voting alone is enough, but you still have to fucking vote”.
Like, I understand everything you’re saying and I don’t even disagree but you picked the wrong time and place to get annoyed with people who were venting their frustrations over a specific type of person that says “don’t vote, it’s ethically unjustifiable”.
I brought it here because I feel that the discussion misses the point and redirects anger away from the systems and structures that actually cause it onto other people in the same position as them. It is important that people understand what is happening or this and similar lines of divide and conquer (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it) are going to keep recurring. You might all be good eggs in every other regard, I have no reason to doubt that you are, but if you see how it can happen to you, you start to understand how it happens to others in worse ways. Understanding something is the first step in remedying it.
I definitely can see how it might just seem irrelevant from your perspective though, so that’s absolutely fair enough.
And I’m trying to tell you that most of us understand it already, and are still frustrated with the people trying to convince everyone not to vote as some kind of valid form of protest.
Your approach antagonizes your allies. Accelerationists who want people not to vote are not your allies and they’re not mine. They are overwhelmingly people in positions of privilege who can afford to watch everything burn down because they aren’t the ones who will be hurt by it. That’s not “people like you and me”. That’s selfish people with an axe to grind
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