Elections are useful when used as an agitational tool to activate more of the population. The problem is when electoralism is the end goal.
It is ok for us to push for reforms on the way to revolution. To cohere a larger movement we need to not only prove ourselves as socialists who can improve your life materially, but also we need to uplift those who are worst off so they are able to join our movement in the first place.
I believe in using everything at our disposal to do the necessary organizing, agitating, and educating on the path to fomenting revolutionary sentiment, but will fight subordinating the movement to milquetoast reformists who’s end goal is nicer capitalism, not the wholesale dissolution of it the world over.
Our movement is still frustratingly in its infancy. The material conditions for revolution are building but are still not here. We need to keep agitating this line - people are waking up. They hear what we have to say and they agree. Organizing works but it takes time and a strategy of patience. If we do not meet people where they are at and engage in the structures they trust, even when we do not, we are simply ceding ground to those who would poison them against us.
We aren’t gonna vote our way out of facism but we sure as hell can use those votes to agitate for why voting will never be enough.
Edit: one other thing to add here is we should not be striving to build a movement predicated around voting. Voting is the least impactful way to be involved in politics. What we should be building is a movement of average people, the workers who make this country run, who have an active say and care about how the country operates top to bottom. We want people to care about how things work and get done. We want them get involved in areas they care about and making their voices heard with suggestions and concerns. We want a truly involved population of people engaging in democracy - not just by voting but by having a hand on the wheel that steers not only their country but by extension their lives. We are building a movement not of better voters but of leaders who can champion the world we all deserve.
The oligarchic pseudo democracy we have does yes. The whole system is captured and only gives the illusion of choice.
True democracy has people working collectively to make decisions with robust systems of accountability to those who are elected to carry out those decisions. Democracy is truly having your hand on the wheel of your destiny by having a real voice in the world you live in.
Is it ok if we riot and burn down cop cars before while and after elections, if you want to find out you’ll end up in fascism or not you just have to consider if you’re ok with violence as a higher priority solution against it, if the riots get in the way of the election you have to realize they’re more effective against fascism and resisting, stopping sometimes even joining the criticism on them is paramount to stripping and handcuffing yourself to prove to your kidnapper you’re not deserving of punishment
Organizing mass protests or strikes like you are describing is downstream of the strategic agitation and education i am advocating for. You can’t just manifest these forms of direct action - you have to do the work to build the material conditions for them to happen.
I don’t know how to take this, where i live bringing topic of anti government or protesting or complaining about living standards does not take building material conditions for
What are these material conditions, suffering? Do you guys riot and protest out of choice instead of out of need?
I’m not trying to be dishonest here, where i live if you signal someone to pick you up and you just say the word police to them i don’t know who they are they’ll pick you up and take you right to your home free of charge, i genuinely do not comprehend the need for some conditions or setup to resist, living is the conditions for it
I am going to assume you don’t live in the US based on your comment. I can only speak from a US centric perspective. I will try to explain what I am saying.
Living in the US is interesting because of how thoroughly propagandized the population is. Large swaths of the working class have been convinced their best bet is on the rich, not on building power for themselves. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Living in the heart of the evil empire ruining the world does something to you that you have to work hard over time to deprogram.
As conditions in the country deteriorate many people become disabused of these ideas but it takes time and a direct confrontation with their beliefs for it to happen often times. On top of this the capitalist class has many pressure valves that allow people to wash their hands of feeling like they need to do anything - they went to stomp around at a protest sanctioned by the police and went home, they donated to an LGBTQ advocacy NGO, etc etc etc.
Moreso effective protests and strikes especially take massive amounts of coordination and planning to pull off in a safe way. To organize those you need people who have apparatuses to make them happen and we are largely still building those structures. Big strikes don’t just happen out of nowhere they take years to make happen. It takes time to build the organizations that can even organize these efforts too.
And lastly people who are struggling to feed their kids and afford to go to the doctor simply do not have the ability to go to protests when it risks their only livelihood allowing them and their family to survive. We need to work as socialists to identify the material needs these people are lacking so they CAN join us.
I wrote this up hastily but would love to keep talking on this more. Broadly I think these ideas touch on my concerns about the material conditions even if it could probably be fleshed out and revised some more.
I see, yeah i don’t live in US i live in north africa and the first difference i spotted is the propaganda aspect, here there’s of course nationalist propaganda and corruption and indoctrination but there’s a hard line drawn on government, it’s like we’re us, we suck, we’re horrible and we’re mind controlled, but it’s all ours, even the mind control, meanwhile the government all of it is “them”, no one ever mixes the government with the identity of the people not even the flag is theirs, they’re just our bosses
So struggle and resistance is natural, riots or protests is something you’d bring your friends over to or tell your family about not something to avoid or hide
I actually got told once that a riot was taking place over death of someone(it wasn’t even caused by the government they just used it as an excuse to bring old wage cuts as an issue) and they told me if i wanted to come and i did! I picked them up and some snacks and we went over to just record from a distance and cheer, you don’t get to see this very often, the police also are brutal and they sometimes attack people with vehicles but when the the riots become public they generally stop escalating, maybe they also don’t get paid enough for this or are just told to stop, normally they’re pretty awful and don’t even follow laws as is, they also avoid killing people directly while controlling the riots because someone from us dying is bad enough to start riots, someone dying while rioting is when many public workers just leave on coincidentally timed vacations, i genuinely don’t think they organize it either they just know they’ll get away with free days because chaos is guaranteed to take place, the government also knows that it’s best to have riots last days than to crack down and have a complete shut down of the country because they know we absolutely hate them
Also when people generally tell others about how bad the riots are or protestors get treated it’s always in a sympathetic way and are always told to remember the original cause rather than focusing on the damage unless there was theft from small businesses everyone looks down on that because they’re us
I didn’t understand the idea that you could love governments at all until you brought up propaganda for it, it’s so normalized here to have a clear separation of pro country and pro government even when every radio station, TVs and media outlet is blasting pro government agenda and most buildings having pro government pictures or banners, people just look at you weird if you take any of it seriously or remind you how to think properly when it’s a 1 one 1, you only take it seriously infront of “them”, and they’re not us
We also struggle to eat here, sometimes water or electricity just go out due to strain, most meals are more like snacks, but because we’re so poor it’s actually unprofitable for the large fast food manufacturers to set up shop here so the small businesses like street stalls or stands still give you meals for cheap, i’m not sure how this works in the US since you said people struggle to feed kids, also not to be rude but i think feed is exaggerated sometimes, i only really need loaf of bread and tuna can twice a day and some water/juice and i usually call it being fed for the day
But yeah! We don’t actually coordinate anything here people are just extremely angry and that shared anger and the us vs them is what coordinates us, everyone makes sure to turn the country into an ungoverned zone if anything more is taken
Elections are useful when used as an agitational tool to activate more of the population. The problem is when electoralism is the end goal.
It is ok for us to push for reforms on the way to revolution. To cohere a larger movement we need to not only prove ourselves as socialists who can improve your life materially, but also we need to uplift those who are worst off so they are able to join our movement in the first place.
I believe in using everything at our disposal to do the necessary organizing, agitating, and educating on the path to fomenting revolutionary sentiment, but will fight subordinating the movement to milquetoast reformists who’s end goal is nicer capitalism, not the wholesale dissolution of it the world over.
Our movement is still frustratingly in its infancy. The material conditions for revolution are building but are still not here. We need to keep agitating this line - people are waking up. They hear what we have to say and they agree. Organizing works but it takes time and a strategy of patience. If we do not meet people where they are at and engage in the structures they trust, even when we do not, we are simply ceding ground to those who would poison them against us.
We aren’t gonna vote our way out of facism but we sure as hell can use those votes to agitate for why voting will never be enough.
Edit: one other thing to add here is we should not be striving to build a movement predicated around voting. Voting is the least impactful way to be involved in politics. What we should be building is a movement of average people, the workers who make this country run, who have an active say and care about how the country operates top to bottom. We want people to care about how things work and get done. We want them get involved in areas they care about and making their voices heard with suggestions and concerns. We want a truly involved population of people engaging in democracy - not just by voting but by having a hand on the wheel that steers not only their country but by extension their lives. We are building a movement not of better voters but of leaders who can champion the world we all deserve.
democracy as a whole is merely a farce to make worker class feel like they are doing something
The oligarchic pseudo democracy we have does yes. The whole system is captured and only gives the illusion of choice.
True democracy has people working collectively to make decisions with robust systems of accountability to those who are elected to carry out those decisions. Democracy is truly having your hand on the wheel of your destiny by having a real voice in the world you live in.
Is it ok if we riot and burn down cop cars before while and after elections, if you want to find out you’ll end up in fascism or not you just have to consider if you’re ok with violence as a higher priority solution against it, if the riots get in the way of the election you have to realize they’re more effective against fascism and resisting, stopping sometimes even joining the criticism on them is paramount to stripping and handcuffing yourself to prove to your kidnapper you’re not deserving of punishment
Organizing mass protests or strikes like you are describing is downstream of the strategic agitation and education i am advocating for. You can’t just manifest these forms of direct action - you have to do the work to build the material conditions for them to happen.
I don’t know how to take this, where i live bringing topic of anti government or protesting or complaining about living standards does not take building material conditions for
What are these material conditions, suffering? Do you guys riot and protest out of choice instead of out of need?
I’m not trying to be dishonest here, where i live if you signal someone to pick you up and you just say the word police to them i don’t know who they are they’ll pick you up and take you right to your home free of charge, i genuinely do not comprehend the need for some conditions or setup to resist, living is the conditions for it
I am going to assume you don’t live in the US based on your comment. I can only speak from a US centric perspective. I will try to explain what I am saying.
Living in the US is interesting because of how thoroughly propagandized the population is. Large swaths of the working class have been convinced their best bet is on the rich, not on building power for themselves. We are all “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Living in the heart of the evil empire ruining the world does something to you that you have to work hard over time to deprogram.
As conditions in the country deteriorate many people become disabused of these ideas but it takes time and a direct confrontation with their beliefs for it to happen often times. On top of this the capitalist class has many pressure valves that allow people to wash their hands of feeling like they need to do anything - they went to stomp around at a protest sanctioned by the police and went home, they donated to an LGBTQ advocacy NGO, etc etc etc.
Moreso effective protests and strikes especially take massive amounts of coordination and planning to pull off in a safe way. To organize those you need people who have apparatuses to make them happen and we are largely still building those structures. Big strikes don’t just happen out of nowhere they take years to make happen. It takes time to build the organizations that can even organize these efforts too.
And lastly people who are struggling to feed their kids and afford to go to the doctor simply do not have the ability to go to protests when it risks their only livelihood allowing them and their family to survive. We need to work as socialists to identify the material needs these people are lacking so they CAN join us.
I wrote this up hastily but would love to keep talking on this more. Broadly I think these ideas touch on my concerns about the material conditions even if it could probably be fleshed out and revised some more.
I see, yeah i don’t live in US i live in north africa and the first difference i spotted is the propaganda aspect, here there’s of course nationalist propaganda and corruption and indoctrination but there’s a hard line drawn on government, it’s like we’re us, we suck, we’re horrible and we’re mind controlled, but it’s all ours, even the mind control, meanwhile the government all of it is “them”, no one ever mixes the government with the identity of the people not even the flag is theirs, they’re just our bosses
So struggle and resistance is natural, riots or protests is something you’d bring your friends over to or tell your family about not something to avoid or hide
I actually got told once that a riot was taking place over death of someone(it wasn’t even caused by the government they just used it as an excuse to bring old wage cuts as an issue) and they told me if i wanted to come and i did! I picked them up and some snacks and we went over to just record from a distance and cheer, you don’t get to see this very often, the police also are brutal and they sometimes attack people with vehicles but when the the riots become public they generally stop escalating, maybe they also don’t get paid enough for this or are just told to stop, normally they’re pretty awful and don’t even follow laws as is, they also avoid killing people directly while controlling the riots because someone from us dying is bad enough to start riots, someone dying while rioting is when many public workers just leave on coincidentally timed vacations, i genuinely don’t think they organize it either they just know they’ll get away with free days because chaos is guaranteed to take place, the government also knows that it’s best to have riots last days than to crack down and have a complete shut down of the country because they know we absolutely hate them
Also when people generally tell others about how bad the riots are or protestors get treated it’s always in a sympathetic way and are always told to remember the original cause rather than focusing on the damage unless there was theft from small businesses everyone looks down on that because they’re us
I didn’t understand the idea that you could love governments at all until you brought up propaganda for it, it’s so normalized here to have a clear separation of pro country and pro government even when every radio station, TVs and media outlet is blasting pro government agenda and most buildings having pro government pictures or banners, people just look at you weird if you take any of it seriously or remind you how to think properly when it’s a 1 one 1, you only take it seriously infront of “them”, and they’re not us
We also struggle to eat here, sometimes water or electricity just go out due to strain, most meals are more like snacks, but because we’re so poor it’s actually unprofitable for the large fast food manufacturers to set up shop here so the small businesses like street stalls or stands still give you meals for cheap, i’m not sure how this works in the US since you said people struggle to feed kids, also not to be rude but i think feed is exaggerated sometimes, i only really need loaf of bread and tuna can twice a day and some water/juice and i usually call it being fed for the day
But yeah! We don’t actually coordinate anything here people are just extremely angry and that shared anger and the us vs them is what coordinates us, everyone makes sure to turn the country into an ungoverned zone if anything more is taken
mexico proved this is true and now they have shienbaum, while our criticism gave us harris and trump