• slugbones@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        “Go Vote!” Rings more and more hollow every day we have watch the country crumble. I am begging you to think outside the box of electoral politics because it is where dreams go to die.

        Nobody voted to put kids to work at meatpacking plants and we will almost assuredly not be allowed to vote on a solution but there are children suffering dangerous jobs right now. The capitalists that run the country do not care about your votes they care about profits and they have so many more resources than us to tip things in their favor.

        Voting has not and never will be enough. It is literally the bare minimum you can do and you should not pat yourself on the back for it.

        • 🔻Sleepless One🔻@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.

          –Lenin

        • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I am begging you to think outside the box of electoral politics because it is where dreams go to die.

          I assure you I’ve thought long and hard about this.

          Nobody voted to put kids to work at meatpacking plants

          Ah, but they did. Politicians talk about doing that and people still vote for them. That’s the whole problem.

          Voting has not and never will be enough. It is literally the bare minimum you can do and you should not pat yourself on the back for it.

          The alternative is violent revolution. If you’ll study history, you’ll observe that most violent revolutions result in either failure (in which case the revolutionaries are all executed) or a brutal dictatorship that no one can meaningfully challenge (see Mao, Stalin, etc). Very rarely does violent revolution have a result that could be reasonably called positive. The 1776 revolution in what would become the United States is a historical anomaly, and there is no good reason to believe that doing it again would have the same positive result.

          • slugbones@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            If you think I was trying to tell you to pick up a weapon and charge at the govt you truly haven’t thought about anything beyond the box.

              • slugbones@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Form a labor union, join a leftist org, start a mutual aid network for your community. Literally ANYHING beyond just mindlessly yelling about voting.

                • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s pretty hard to form a labor union as long as it remains legal to just fire the entire workplace’s staff and replace them all, and that will remain legal as long as people keep voting for anti-union politicians.

                  Leftist organizations and mutual aid networks already exist in good number, and that’s great, but it doesn’t put good politicians in office. The one and only thing that decides who’s in office is voting.

                  I would like to remind you that if voting didn’t do anything, no one would be trying to stop people from voting.

                  • slugbones@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    You are literally just making excuses for doing nothing… exactly as I thought. If voting changed anything they would make it illegal.

          • bigbox@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            How can voters show demand for non-corrupt candidates if their only options to vote on are corrupt candidates? How can we change this?

            • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              There was a non-corrupt option in 2016: Bernie Sanders. Almost no one voted for him.

              How can we change this? Somehow convince all of America to consistently vote for the least-corrupt candidates in both the Democratic primary election and the general election. This will shift the Overton window back to where it should be.

              I cannot fathom why people aren’t already doing this, so I couldn’t tell you how to convince them to start, but that’s what has to happen. Somehow.