Text:
It's wild how many people seem to think that winning a revolution would somehow be easier than winning an election.
This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"
And it's like. I'd be less annoyed about what are obviously people who are hurt and frustrated lashing out if they didn't act like I was a fucking fascist for saying "I don't think massive amounts of death and violence will help this situation, actually"
You also gotta build a parallel infrastructure.
Isn't that going back to the point from OP? It is way, way easier to convince a group of people to knock on doors and send text messages to their neighbors than it is to build a whole parallel government, especially in the most militarized area on Earth.
There's a ton of great small-scale work being done by Food Not Bombs, people growing community gardens, etc. It's just now going to replace the Capitalist society anytime soon.
I would argue that the point OP is missing is that the mechanisms they're advocating for don't actually result in the change we are looking for. You can get out the vote all you like, the levers of government were specifically designed from the ground up to be resistant to change. James Madison actually wrote about this in the federalist papers while advocating for the constitution.
Here's what he had to say when advocating for the Senate:
Representative democracy is designed, layer upon layer upon layer, to be resistant to change and to insulate the power of the wealthy. You're just not going to vote in socialism.
Agreed, which is why things will get much worse before they get better, unfortunately.
Thanks for these quotes.
It's just hard. Not to rehash old threads, but I am in the deep south and apathy is huge here. Most people aren't paying attention on purpose. I don't blame them!
There's a growing number of comrades too but we're so far away from anything like a revolution. If we can't even get the people most harmed by Capitalism to vote, how can I expect them to do anything spicy? I get that we don't have the best candidates so maybe that's what needs to change.
I also can't in good conscience abandon my trans friends and family over ideological differences. I care too much to refuse to vote and let the worst bigots run free through the local legislature. Dems also suck but 99.9% of the time they aren't trying to make it illegal to be trans in public!
I need to see some real material wins from this decade from the non-electoral crowd. From what I'm seeing we need more Mamdanis and ones who are willing to give the middle-finger to the Dem Party. Use the ballot line to get those free votes and sidestep all of the hurdles that makes parties like the Green Party irrelevant, push for actual Socialism, double down, and attack attack attack. It won't fix everything but again I'd rather have universal child care and landlords on defense than Cuomo spending his time glazing Israel...
I keep writing and deleting shit and I'm just gonna be honest. I think you need to read more. You're asking questions and giving answers that are to be blunt, rather naive. You wanna vote that's fine, I do it too, but it really feels like your expectations for how that's going to work out are still way above the bar of reality. People aren't here advocating for revolution because it's fun, they're advocating because electoralism has been tried over and over again and stopping up the cracks in the dam has never prevented the flood of fascism from coming and wiping out the marginalized. You can spend your entire life getting Mamdanis elected and as soon as they become a legitimate threat to capital they will just get killed along with anyone to close to them. That's a historical fact. Electoralism is playing a rigged game by the rules that your opponents aren't following.
Again, I would be open to switching off electoralism as a tool if I saw real gains made by non-electoral work. I can point to small-scale things like bus beaches being built that I helped with, but that pales in comparison to getting a million kids childcare and getting the attention of the entire mainstream media apparatus. The fact that Hasan Piker is on Fox News all the time is going to recruit more people to the left than the last 20 years of newspapers and independent parties' organizing combined. I'm seeing electoralism winning and improving people's lives and scaring the shit out of the people in power. No one's mutual aid project has done the same thing!
They will never give you any of that, and a Republican will just be elected in the next cycle to turn back the clock twice as much.
If you push for actual Socialism (which Mamdani is not doing btw), and have any level of real success, they will not hesitate to use the power of the state to harass, imprison, or kill you, and if things get really dire for them, they will not hesitate to kill your friends, your family, and anyone you have ever loved regardless of if they had any knowledge of your action. And I am talking about the Democrats here, who will just sit back and let the Republicans do this to you.
You can either take this shit actually seriously, and understand what the real stakes are, or you can just wander through naively and assume that they are just as non-committal as you are. That said, it is possible to take this shit seriously and choose to do nothing or only work when there is something that can actually be gained. These are all rational choices. Just be aware of what the stakes actually are, and what, if you are advocating for Socialism, you are actually asking for. The truth doesn't have to drive you mad.
Not that you shouldn't vote. By all means do. Just don't expect anything substantial to actually come of it.
People who weren't running for office got killed for organizing. We're dead either way, so I don't buy that argument.
And I do read! I tried getting through What Is To Be Done and it was a slog that wasn't helpful in anyway. I'll give State and Revolution a chance. But also I have reservations about telling people to "just read theory":
We need people to learn the skills of organizing, how to talk to people and run meetings, etc. Theory doesn't teach this.
Most people aren't going to read, and if they do, they're not reading at the grade level needed to understand this stuff.
Telling others to read instead of being able to explain ourselves quickly makes us look like a bunch of dorks. Dorks don't win.
Theory is great to learn context and history behind major left events, but is not relevant today. Material conditions are different and we need Theory that reflects this. Let's not become Bible thumpers unable to adapt because we keep pushing the same set of readings.
By pushing Theory you are self-selecting for a small number of nerdy, bookworm type people to organize with. And I'll be blunt, those people aren't leading anything much less a revolution. We need people of all stripes from across the working class. We need to be accessible to someone who just pulled a double at Wendy's and asking them to read super dense history lessons isn't reaching that person.
You are probably responding to the wrong person.
Correct. They will kill you anyways, so make sure what you are doing will actually do something, because their attention will be on you no matter your level of action.
I did not tell you to read anything. Reading historical theory really only matters if you are already committed to some sort of praxis. If you are not committed to praxis, all that reading theory does is become a series of philosophical what-ifs. Which is not Marxism.
Reading Lenin will help you understand the philosophy behind why we ought to commit ourselves to radical action, it is not an explainer on exactly how that radical action is to be organized. Indeed, Lenin himself believed this pamphlet to only be an introductory summary that he never got to finish. "What is to be Done" is primarily about how they ought to be get to start thinking about how to organize themselves (the politically radical Russian Social Democrats who have been continually denied chances to reform the system) with the working class. So there are some parallels to today.
I agree, learning about organizational methods is a great use of your time. How to run a meeting, deal with interpersonal conflict, look out for feds, manage a budget, manage an inventory, etc. All these things will only be a benefit for you. Btw, ALL OF THIS IS THEORY. Management theory, but theory nevertheless. You cannot escape theory.
This country is literally run by a bunch of fascist dorks. Being a dork has nothing to do with it.
Historical leftist theory and the history of leftist events are absolutely relevant today, and it is a completely anti-intellectual reactionary position to think otherwise. I'm not saying that everyone has to read theory, but it would be nice if some people did! We wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel every three to four years if people who were committed to political action spent time reading more on their theory and history.
If you keep committing yourself to these 1980's juvenile highschool stereotypes I am going to have an aneurysm. "Bookworms don't lead anything." Get over yourself. I'm not saying start a book club.
And, no shit, person who pulled a double at Wendy's is going to be far more interested in a drink and a conversation than reading anything. Which is fine! That is how the majority of socialist organizations throughout the years have organized, through bars, gyms, and social clubs.
Building a federal government based around subordinating people to the whole is hard.
Building a movement based around localities and organizations asserting their own self-determination, opposing corporate looting of their territory and people, and having some sort of collective self-defense, is a lot easier.
You don't need to change the minds of everyone on the ship to allow you to steer it around, you just need a hole in the hull, and a lifeboat.