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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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The true detriment is a two party system. You are like a dog being thrown scraps by whichever party you vote for, and things are only getting worse while people continue to pick one side or the other and don't overthrow the entire system they keep supporting.
No, the true detriment is civic illiteracy and widespread apathy. If people voted in droves and stayed engaged in the decisions that affect their lives, the institutional power of political parties would be nullified. The parties are powerful specifically because most people don't give a shit. There's a vacuum, and the party apparatus fills it.
Perhaps it's different in other places, but in my experience people do give a lot of shits. The system is just built against us in such a way that it's almost impossible to either have any hope of changing anything or see any changes that do happen. A huge cause of that disparity is the party system with it's incessant bickering and corrupt propaganda.
Fifty-four percent of eligible voters sat out the 2022 midterms where Republicans took control of the House. Thirty-four percent sat out in 2020. Half of the country either doesn't give a shit about the problems that could be fixed through active political engagement, or they don't give a shit about active political engagement. Both forms of apathy lead to the same conclusion.
A significant portion of that apathy is driven by people who look at these numbers and somehow still come away with "it's rigged@!!" as a conclusion. And that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. If the other 80 million people showed up to participate both during elections and afterwards while local, state, and federal decisions are being made (like, for example, at city council meetings), then the shockwaves that would send through the system would register on the Richter scale
People who think like you are part of the reason 80 million people sit on the sidelines and complain when shit doesn't go their way. You know how Republicans completely changed the course of history in 2010? By showing up in numbers. You know how women changed the course of history in the early 20th century? By showing up in numbers. You know how black Americans changed the course of history in the 1960s? By showing up in numbers.
Nobody is going to do a damn thing for you if you sit on your ass and complain that change is impossible.
Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter are pretty recent examples of where "showing up in numbers" just wasn't enough. The system is rigged and blaming victims isn't getting us anywhere. Anecdotally throughout my life, I have seen uncountable numbers of people come to work/school/etc. with an "I voted" sticker, and my conspiracy theory is that the numbers are meaningless and the people who rigged the system already decide who is winning before the first vote is cast, unless they abandon the plan because their polling shows an absolute landslide that would reveal their fuckery.
Occupy Wall Street lasted 59 days, and BLM lasted 1 year in total, while most of the protests lasted little more than 5 months. Women's suffrage groups started their organized resistance in the 1840s, roughly eighty years before they earned the right to vote, with significant violence erupting at their events in the 1850s and organizations forming at a rapid clip in the decades after the Civil War. Many women's suffrage activists died of old age before they saw significant progress.
Civil Rights era activists campaigned in the streets for fourteen years. Hundreds were killed, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands were imprisoned. Cops sprayed peaceful protesters with fire hoses and had police dogs rip the flesh from their bodies. But still they showed up, they marched, and they fought as a group.
What you're describing are part time slacktivists who showed up until it got uncomfortable and they got bored, at which time they let their apathy take back over and buried their noses in their cell phones. What you're talking about is a bunch of virtue signaling, and it amounted to nothing precisely because there was no class solidarity or significant grassroots organization.
And fuck off with your "it's rigged and votes are counted by the lizard people Illuminati" nonsense. You sound like a Proud Boy wannabe, and you're eroding the faith people have in their own nation. Shame on you.
No true Scotsman and Godwin's law, nice. Anyways, BLM is an obvious continuation of the civil rights movement, and calling them "slacktivists" is derisive and reductionist.
Protesting until you die of old age is not what it used to be. The surveillance of the modern world makes protestors into easy targets if they ever become a true threat. The powers that be have learned plenty from the civil rights era.
Nobody should have faith in any nation to erode in the first place. Every single one has fucked over their neighbors and their own populations to further the ambitions of the rich and powerful. Look to the erosion of antitrust and privacy laws to see where we are headed. Look at how SOPA and other protests have gone. You seriously think nobody knows how to protest anymore, and it's just a generational failing? Despite the obvious ways the oppressors have adapted to the modern world?
1 year. They organized for one year and then went home. The rest of the country completely fucking forgot about whatever it was they were asking for about 5 months in. If they're the new generation of the Civil Rights Movement, then they're inept crybabies who don't actually know anything about what Civil Rights leaders went through, were imprisoned for, and died for, before they came along.
Excuses. Either you give a shit enough to put up a fight, or you don't for [insert reason here].
Or....they've succumbed to outrage du jour and voted to put representatives in office who only care about what keeps the outrage going. If the average citizen is dumb enough to turn politics off in favor of the Real Housewives of [insert stupid place] then they deserve the elected representatives they keep sending to office over and over and over again.
I absolutely do think our generation has lost its grip on what it means to a) have nothing to lose, and b) put up a fight. People are comfortable, fat, and lazy, and they find more solace in their smartphones than they do in talking to their neighbors and organizing groups of powerful citizens. Know why Moms for Liberty gets so much awful shit done? Because they're organized and motivated. It's crazy how lunatic conservatives somehow find a way to stay plugged in and show up at every local school board meeting even when it's just to cause drama, and the rest of the community who has a sincere stake in the outcomes of its decisions can't do more than complain that they have to pick the kids up at soccer practice or can't miss their yoga class. MLK Jr. wrote "Letters from a Birmingham Jail"....from a jail cell.
You want something? GO FUCKING GET IT AND STOP COMPLAINING. Nobody is going to give you what you don't take.
I'm not really interested in arguing this kind of stuff and I don't disagree with you that a lack of voter engagement is a problem. But, I would encourage you to try and understand exactly why it seems like people don't give a shit about the state of politics.
I'd be willing to bet that it's not actually a lack of giving a shit, just a feeling that our time is better spent on other things in life. Those 80 million people "sitting on the sidelines" aren't complaining for the fun of it, they are busy trying to live their lives and deal with their own problems. People feel like the system is rigged, not because of some ambiguous statistics, but because every time they try to work with the system they get shit on and forgotten. How can it not feel rigged when the majority of the country votes for one president and gets a different one instead? Or how about when states, without ever asking its citizens, take away a persons right to choose what happens to their own body? How is a system with an archaic electoral college, gerrymandering, corrupt politicians, and a parties that only represents the top 1% not a rigged system?
It's not that we don't know that showing up in numbers is a good way to enact change, nor are we just sitting on our collective asses complaining and expecting things will just magically change. We just aren't holding out hope that enough numbers will show up to make a dent in our lifetimes, or that the changes will even be ones that benefit us.
The majority party in this country is the party that doesn't vote.
The second major party is the party that complains endlessly about "both sides".
The third major party is the party that votes one way because that's what they've been told to do their whole life.
The fourth major party is the one that actually does research and engages that's being driven mad by the other three.
All revolutions have hurt poor people the most.
Lol sure. So why try and improve things? You'll only make it worse. Enjoy the scraps.
Please show me where I said to do nothing. Why don't you try imagining new ways of improving things rather than repeating the mistakes of the past? Of the revolutions in the 18th-20th centuries, I think only the American revolution accomplished anything close to what it was intending. And that's because it didn't destroy all the existing institutions while in the process of implementing new ones.
(Not that I agree with what the American revolution was intending, but we did get mostly what they set out to do without thousands of poor civilians starving to death in the process.)
The american revolution upheld slavery in America so yeah you're not wrong.
Our current institutions are the problem. Why should we keep them?
Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but a dramatic overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.
It's not the reform that I'm skeptical of. It's the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I'm skeptical of. It's emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the short nor the long run.
I'm proposing a revolution entirely led by the people, as that is the only true kind of revolution. The people who would then rule themselves with no intermediaries. Real grassroots organisation.
Well, it better have some kind of mechanism in place to keep the grocery stores full or it's going to fail on its face.
Couple things for you to look up:
These two things would likely do it.
Do what? Just saying "we'll have farming and transport" is not a plan.
I'm not saying there isn't any other way to accomplish food production and distribution. I'm saying that just overthrowing our current systems without an explicit plan to keep food on the shelves is going to result in regular working class people starving. That has happened in every revolution except the American, and that's because the American revolutionaries already had the Continental Congress in place making plans about how to administrate the country, if they managed to win the war.
But most revolutions were just pure chaos with no plan that resulted in regular people starving to death. I 100% agree we need new systems. But I'm not terribly interested in living through a violent revolution.
Is the people's assembly in session right now? No? Then save the details for when it matters. These decisions are made by people on the ground in response to material conditions.
I'm not in charge, so don't burden me with the responsibility of making the decisions all by myself.
But, simply put, make food according to estimations of what's needed, decided at regular meetings. Decide amongst assemblies from population centers which towns need how much.
Does that make the picture clearer?
And I'm just saying be careful of who and what you support and make sure they're planning to have these things covered.
There is no one promising this, and I wouldn't trust anyone saying they did. I would only trust a movement that started from the people.
Then the people have to be organized enough to keep the food going! It's not magic, the world doesn't just run without any planning or direction.
Of course they have to be organised. Who expects things to be done with no effort?
I'm just explaining that there isn't some politician or pundit who said this to me verbatim for me to nod along like a thoughtless chicken. I heard bits and pieces here, read others there, and over years formed an opinion through research and conversations. This isn't a campaign promise of some party asking for votes.
They didn't have farming and transport in Bolshevik Russia?
Yes, but they also had a dogmatic and limited view of the theories they adapted. This inevitably led to corruption and revisionism.
Ah, so they weren't true Scotsmen?
That fallacy only holds when it's a retroactive and also incorrect claim of category error. This is neither retroactive nor incorrect. The USSR is not communist by any definition, not now, or before it existed, either. Marx himself wouldn't have been a fan.
To oversimplify, there are three criteria for communism:
The state must be abolished. That means no government, no class of rulers, no individual or group with a monopoly claim on force to achieve their ends. People self-manage and organise their affairs and business by common agreement and consent based on mutual aid and co-operation.
Classes must be abolished. There can be no class distinctions remaining; specifically, no owners who can exploit workers. All are workers, and all commonly own all materially productive components of society. Nothing is privately owned by individuals (meaning nothing is gatekept for the purposes of gaining materially from doing so), but is democratically organised on the basis of need.
Money itself must be abolished. Once democracy has prevailed over the economy, the common ownership of the means of production has been achieved, and thus everyone has reached the stage where they can freely consume what they need and want without worry of whether they can "afford" it, money will be seen as the arbitrary constraint that it is, and cease to be useful, and disappear completely.
None of these things happened under the USSR. If Marx were a teacher and the USSR his student, they would get a failing grade.
No true "no true Scotsman fallacy" fallacy?
We have to go deeper!
Well? You not gonna acknowledge that definitions exist?
Dude... definitions exist. Sometimes things don't meet them. Are you gonna deny that? Does "no true scotsman" just mean "any claim that a thing is not a true example of some category" to you? Is a bicycle a true example of a sandwich? Is a Frenchman living in Paris a true Scotsman?
Did the USSR meet even one of those standards? Answer this if you only answer one.
Much like the kleptocratic-fascist China and North Korea is a republic by name only. Read up on your fallacies
It also helped them the most.
By starving millions of them? Because that's exactly what transpired during most of those revolutions. And the long term outcomes have not turned out to be better for poor people than the American revolution was. Show me the ideal communist state that resulted.
Revolutions often happen because of starvation. Not the other way around.
And I can tell you this... Billionaires and their conservative minions are making many of us extremely hungry.
Well they solved starvation by dramatically increasing it and then replaced old systems with new ones that have all those same old problems. So consider me unconvinced. I think we need to find a new way to change these systems that's more resilient for the future