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Voting and rioting aren’t mutually exclusive. I would go far as to say they are the peanut butter and jelly of domestic politics. The hammer and anvil go together. Two wings of the same bird. Ect.
I’ve come to say this but the mealy mouthed neoliberals think that the Democrats will magic away all the fascism and we’ll all be safe.
Voting is the olive branch the owning class extended when the rioting got too close to them. You take that twig, let it ease your conscience however you see fit, then head back out into another riot with a clear mind. It is possible to vote, and also understand that voting is an ultimately meaningless gesture used to guage discontentment of the commoners.
Voting gives credence to the rioting. If you can’t be bothered enough to vote, it pulls legitimacy from the riots.
VOTE MOTHERFUCKERS
Once again *clears throat*:
“Nonviolence is fine, as long as it works.” — Malcolm X
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.” — Stokely Carmichael
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Any sane person would do both.
Even if they think it would do nothing, they would still vote in the off chance that it would.
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I dislike this line of thinking because often what this sort of violence does is delegitimize these claims at the same time. For the few times it has worked, it hasn’t worked a lot.
On top of that, slavery ended because the government made laws against it. Interment ended because the government changed. How many awful things never came about BECAUSE of voting? Imagine if Trump didn’t win. Imagine if Roger Stone never got Bush elected? What if FDR wasn’t elected? What if Lincoln didn’t win?
It’s just a poor way of thinking.
I lost my longer post, but will summarize.
Slaves were freeing themselves before Lincoln got involved, Japanese internment ended six months after Japan surrendered and Trump, Bush, FDR and Lincoln all took horrific actions.
I went on to talk about violence like Bleeding Kansas, the Haitian Revolution from France, Nat Turner’s Rebellion and John Brown. I then bastardized Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, “Vote softly, and punch your leaders in the dick, maybe steal a car?”. Also something about eight hour days and the Haymarket Affair.
Violence is an important part of history and politics. I’m sure you will say, “progress in when big strong men get voted for and take action” or something. I do feel sorry for you. May we get through these turbulent times using violence when that is the only language that will be heard.
Violence is how we assure our votes are heard. But voting is still important. Even if it’s only used for movement building.
“progress in when big strong men get voted for and take action” or something. I do feel sorry for you
What the fuck? Weirdest shit to say while advocating violence.
Slaves were not freeing themselves, they were on the run. They were not safe. They did not get a fair shot in the world and most often did not get to live successful lives. And even after passing those amendments that stuff still didn’t get better but they had the law on their side and that changed history. Slaves had been fighting and running for centuries before countries started passing laws to change that, the only reason why slavery isn’t as big of a thing today is because laws were codified to stop it. And the only reason why that happened was because stories were shared, insight was offered and empathy, understanding and knowledge won. You’ll probably say something super disrespectful acting like Americans working today with their AC, Internet, eating more food than anyone back then could imagine is slavery but that is absolutely absurd. It isn’t fair today, we can do better but my god the calls for violence are pathetic when solutions are right in front of your face.
Japanese internment ended six months after Japan surrendered
So it ended because of policy, not because of violence? What are you pointing out here I don’t understand? The internment of Japanese citizens was wrong but it wasn’t because of some violent episode it ended?
Trump, Bush, FDR and Lincoln all took horrific actions.
Great explanation? Lincoln has two main problems from what I remember - he changed the law to arrest people who opposed the war, protested, editors of newspapers, Confederate sympathizers which you can definitely say wasn’t cool but on the other side, these were people basically supporting slavery or at least being Ed Sheeran about the enslavement of people, so feel how you want about that I dunno. He also continued the abuse of Indigenous Americans which is super fucked up, but you’re starting to fall into the leftist problem where suddenly nobody is perfect, everyone is bad and now you’ve set such impossible ridiculous standards nothing will get done it’s called a circular firing squad, and it’s really fucking dumb especially when looking back in history and applying modern lens on these people’s entire actions. Lincoln ended slavery, that is what happened and it was for the best.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Have you heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? Tons of people here on Lemmy will tell you actions like that helped acquire worker’s rights but they actually didn’t. Historians look back and recognize it likely delayed worker’s rights because the response was suppression as a form of retribution/punishment. This same thing happened with Nat Turner’s Rebellion. You did not get the weekend because people died for it, you got the weekend because people worked together to get it. They spoke, they voted, they educated.
Violence is an important part of history and politics.
Yes it is but looking at history violence almost always just makes things way fucking worse. Cherry picking instances of violence you support isn’t the look you think it is. When you have an option to actually JUST FUCKING VOTE. And make change without killing innocent people, many of them poor and unable to escape violence, YOU’RE the asshole here. Don’t you understand that? You’re basically demanding people throw their bodies into a meat grinder to get what you believe is right.
The Haitian Rebellion was the only successful slave rebellion and that was because a multitude of reasons that had nothing to do with their choice to be violent. Their adversaries were weakened, slavery was already being seen as a cruel and evil thing, smart people used their words to get everyone to work together. It wasn’t violence that achieved independence for them. Nat Turner did his best as did John Brown, so did Lincoln, so did FDR, and so did Obama, regardless of how you choose to view these people they did want to make a change that was positive just like you do. Left-leaning people want so badly for the best candidate possible, they literally want a messiah to be every option they have and they want every scenario to have a pretty little solution with no bloodshed or cruelty, but then they also want to engage with violence and cheer on slaughtering of the bad guys. It doesn’t make sense. Crucify and kill anyone who isn’t perfect and all you’re left with is more violent people?
My point isn’t violence is bad and you’re dumb for saying it or something, my point is calling for violence is bad when you have such an easy fucking lay up of a solution. Which is to just fucking vote, get the right people in and let time march forward. If you try to engage in violence you will enact the suffering of so many people who don’t choose that for themselves. Slavery wasn’t defeated with a sword, kings weren’t defeated by the guillotine. It was by the word and the pen and knowledge that we were able to push past these awful things in history. I find it absolutely absurd how many people want to leap to violence and can’t understand they are literally the monsters they hate, history literally teaches us this time and time again. A revolutionary force engages in violence to make change, then that violence becomes the norm and they continue the violence because they believe they were correct to be violent in the first place.
This post is fucking stupid because it completely ignores times in history where collective action, voting and education made the most drastic changes - voting rights for women/POC/the young/the poor/the disabled, apartheid ended because of sanctions, the Great Salt March, the Singing Revolution, it goes on and on where non-violence got better results than violence ever could’ve. It is through collective action and taking back your government system. If voting did not matter they wouldn’t put so much god damn effort to get people to not vote. Murdering Caesar did not make Rome better.
The people that decided they were too busy to vote last time could quite literally band together and elect anyone they want in any party.
I know, fuck me, right?
Slavery never ended. It just got rebranded. You can access it via the “For Profit Prison System” option.
it’s even in the constitution that slavery is illegal… except for prisoners. crazy shit.
Electoralism aside, the camps stayed open. The Supreme Court of USA ruled at the end of 1944 that loyal citizens couldn’t be detained and FDR rescinded the Executive Order. The camps wound down in 1945 and were all closed by 1946 after the wars conclusion.
Another thing that doesn’t work against fascism - posting as political action. “Rick Glass” has made a career out of being an online “radical” influencer, but in real life every project they touch is plagued by disorganization, leftist infighting, and directionless-ness. I know because I’ve experienced it first hand. I think leftists need to come to terms with the fact that all leftist influencers are harmful to left movements the same way other influencers distort every other field they touch - they are hopelessly shaped by the dynamics of social media companies and the needs of the attention capital.
Its disturbing to me, bringing Holocaust as example here, but not Boston Tea, no French, Haitian, russian or Chinese revolutions, Mexico, Iran or Cuba also are great examples. Yet, not all of them went for good.
For why Holocaust is bad example., there’s other comments, but even slavery is bad - slavery ended in many local places by riots, since very first slavery, thousands year ago, such riots happened. But it still lasted as law, new ownerships were made, next peoples were enslaved. Until some law on ups were changed, mostly by… votes.
Wanna change something, change the ups, govs.
Holocaust might have ended through war, but it could have been prevented through ballot box in 1933
Hitler wasn’t voted in. His party got a small minority of votes. He was appointed chancellor by the liberals and conservatives.
He was fought in the streets by the KPD, but the SPD and the aforementioned groups worked against them, choosing to make Hitler Chancellor in order to give him the power he needed to crack down on the KPD.The holocaust wouldnt have happened if the spartacists hadn’t been so naive.
Luxemburg and the Spartacists had criticized the SPD in 1914 for having become a bourgeois party. Its like, they knew what was happening, they just didn’t do anything about it until 1917. Naive in that they continued to trust the SPD despite identifying its actual class character, when they should have been organizing, educating, and building for the split, so that when the split happens the mass of workers are prepared.
Its a really interesting point to make in this thread, since “rioting” was
ultimatelypart of what defeated the German working class. Police would infiltrate the movement, incite putschism or convince people to switch the target of an action. Over and over, defeat after defeat, still the power of the bourgeois in Germany was crushed by the revolutionary workers. Except, there was nobody on the left who could lead and organize a transitional government, they’d all been killed in riots or exiled.I feel like saying it was “rioting” that defeated the working class is a bit reductive. If the spartacists had been less naive in their uprising (not trusting the SPD, not giving money back to banks, so much other stuff) then “rioting” would have put the working class in a different situation. In the following decades what did them in was the systematic attack on them + their continued faith in their fellow person (despite ideological differences) that seems, very broadly, to have been the big issue.
I mean fair – just to say, you can riot and still lose, even when the conditions are ripe. The actual condition is organization and revolutionary program in practice, not just “riots.” Like sometimes you gotta take over the streets. To the point of the meme, you can organize people to vote which won’t get you there either. But it isn’t really riots or voting, both are subordinate to the revolutionary program. To me, the crisis of the working class is 1. Crisis of organization 2. Crisis of education/consciousness 3. Crisis of leadership.
We don’t really need a working class that riots or a working class that votes. We need a working class that knows when to vote, when/where/how to “riot”, but the need doesn’t really have to do with rioting or voting. Both are tactics, but tactics in the absence of strategy is a loser
The only naivete I can muster is that they should have been more prepared for how the Kaiser wasn’t going to allow Prussian Germany to lose Bavaria AND the monarchy. The SPD was a party that existed within the monarchy, and german states being independent of that was a far greater sin to the military aristocracy.
The holocaust is a crazy bad example for this argument.
As far as I understand, there weren’t significant riots or uprisings within Germany that led to the Nazi’s downfall.
…Ironically considering the voting claim, the Holocaust was stopped because of the choices of voters in faraway places. (okay, that and invading Russia rarely ends well for anyone, including the Russians.)
You should pull every lever you have. Riot. Vote. Be loud as fuck. Throw a brick at a cop. Do it all. Fuck 'em.
Nobody will do that alone and not if it jeopardizes their comfortable lives. Whatever rebels there are must make it safe enough for people to act their conscience if it is to happen before those people act from enough discomfort.
Voting isn’t really a lever at all 😕
It is if ppl were active on each level and in the mechanisms that decide candidates. Is there anyone you know personally who you would want to see in power?
Is there anyone you know personally who you would want to see in power?
God no 🤢
It really was a genius move to prevent uprisings, fix the candidates but everyone will blame eachother when whichever one wins inevitably perpetuates the orphan killing machine
Might not help. Doesn’t hurt.
It could very well hurt you individually, especially if
makes good on their threats to have ICE at the polls. And collectively, most people see voting as a tacit endorsement of the system. In my view, any possible benefit we could get by voting is drowned out by that tacit endorsement. And in my personal view, the benefits we can get from voting are not even near-zero; they are precisely zero, because liberal democracy is structurally designed to be uncontrollable with respect to proletarian political wills.You can take direct action and also use every lever you have to try and bring about a better world. We can’t vote our way out of fascism but we can at least vote against accelerationists and buy ourselves some time.
You can take direct action and also use every lever you have to try and bring about a better world.
Right, but my argument is that voting is not a lever. Yeah, use every lever you have, but voting is not a lever; it’s something else, like a button that does nothing.
we can at least vote against accelerationists and buy ourselves some time.
No we can’t. Both wings of capital are accelerationists in their own unique ways. Both wings of capital are pedocapitalist, fascist, settler-colonial, genocidal, racist, transphobic, homophobic, imperialist, and statist wastes of flesh and air. The only difference is their marketing. Our only hope is ourselves and the projects we build in opposition to capitalism and the State.
I vote for leftist candidates on my local level and I vote for whichever option is more interested in preventing ecocide federally. It isn’t going to fix anything, but we’re at a very sensitive moment for climate change and it really matters what we’re doing about it. I don’t understand how that’s not a lever at all. I would like it if the next generations have a world to inherit, and there is a tangible difference between the two major parties federally. I’ll vote for the neoliberal that kills the planet slower, because the revolution isn’t happening this election cycle, or likely for a long time. I take direct action in my community, and I use my vote in hopes of not killing the planet for shareholder value.
I vote for leftist candidates on my local level and I vote for whichever option is more interested in preventing ecocide federally.
IMO there are certain special cases where one can accurately judge that voting in a local election will prevent or guarantee a specific event, e.g. voting in a politician who promises not to do a specific thing (but even then, no guarantees because politicians are lying scum…). The logic here is that the social network is small enough that you personally know or are not very far separated from all parties in the situation.
I would like it if the next generations have a world to inherit, and there is a tangible difference between the two major parties federally. I’ll vote for the neoliberal that kills the planet slower, because the revolution isn’t happening this election cycle, or likely for a long time.
My argument is that neither of these is possible through voting. There is no tangible difference between the two parties from an anti-capitalist perspective other than their marketing. And the neoliberals are united in all the ways that count.
I take direct action in my community
Excellent!
and I use my vote in hopes of not killing the planet for shareholder value.
Personally, I think the miniscule time spent voting would be better used for rest and enjoying your life.
In general, I’m willing to agree to disagree with comrades on the voting issue…but emphasis on disagree.
Its not even a button that does nothing, its a button that further entrenches the current governmental structure and empowers the right.
How about a third party? Most people wouldn’t vote for one in the US because they’re worried about wasting their vote, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern for you and you can freely vote for one.
What third party? The abusers at PSL? The hypercapitalists at the Libertarian Party? The sixty-nine bajillion centrist vanity parties started by failed politicians who are such vapid losers that they couldn’t even hack it in the centrist caucuses of the big tent parties?
Again, even if there was a third party nominally worth voting for, voting is a small waste of time, and electoralism is a tremendous waste of time, for the simple reason that States, in particular liberal democratic ones, are structurally incapable of bringing about anarchy or even approximating anarchist ends. Even if voting was somehow capable of imposing positive change upon us, it violates the principle of means-ends unity.
Their position is ideological, not practical.
Throw bricks at ICE at polls then.
Hell yeah 🤘
tacit endorsement
What does that even mean?
In America, 65% of the population votes. In Australia, 83% of the population votes. I’m sure Americans trust the election system less than Australians do, but does that mean anything? Or is it just useless posturing?
You all already know your system is corrupt, but you haven’t revolted. You haven’t stopped Trump. We stopped Dutton. So I think a little misplaced faith might actually be good for society. And if it’s stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid.
Wouldn’t that be how an inciting incident for riots could happen?
