If your primary means of political engagement is through the electoral system, then yes, it’s a waste of valuable organizing energy. Socialist parties should run candidates to advertise their platform and recruit, not as an actual way of getting change.
I propose what Marxists have proposed since the beginning: revolutionary organizing. This is a constant process that doesn’t depend on the electoral cycle, it’s more that those that only really tune into politics around election season don’t notice it as much until election season. You can go back into my comment history, and I have been enormously consistent with what I have said, and when I have said it.
The actual revolutionary strategy is to educate the working classes on political theory and history, struggle alongside them in the realm of unionizing, indigenous sovereignty, strikes, and in so doing build up a worker party capable of leading revolution whenever capitalism hits crisis points.
Taking a few hours twice in an election cycle to cast a vote is not some intolerable wast of organizing energy.
It’s at least worth a try to influence the elections and candidates.
“It’s not possible to reform so don’t even try” is a stupidly bad take. It seems accelerationist, that you hope for a civilization wide disaster that would leave hundreds of millions desperate in hopes that it will at least open up the path to some non-democratic result which you somehow hope will be your desired result as opposed to a myriad of competing interests that is likely to institute any number of even worse results.
First, I don’t really give a shit if people vote or not. My issue isn’t with the few hours people spend on election day, it’s with the days, weeks, months, even years spent on electoral campaigns, canvassing, and overall redirecting the problems people are already identifying with capitalism into elections. This creates a pressure valve, where people sit complicit for a few years at a time, perhaps agitating here or there to vote blue. It’s an enormous waste of time at this scale for socialists to be doing this.
Second, that’s not accelerationism. Acceletationism is the belief that we should support the most stable and competent stewards of imperialism and capitalists, so that capital concentrates at a faster rate and collapses sooner. This means that the Democrats, as the party where profits and stock market growth are generally higher, are the actual accelerationist candidate. Accelerationism isn’t deliberately blowing up the system by voting for Republicans, nor is revolution accelerationism.
The fact is, capitalism systemically results in crisis about once a decade. This is built into capitalism, it’s how it functions, and each time the biggest capitalists come out with far more of the capital than they had before as the smaller capitalists die off or are acquired. To prepare for crisis is not to expedite it, we need to get organized in anticipation of something we already know happens. Here’s a handy chart:
We need to build up that organized revolutionary core, and educate and agitate amongst the masses to bring about revolution. Not redirect their attention towards the DNC as their sole means of political life.
If your primary means of political engagement is through the electoral system, then yes, it’s a waste of valuable organizing energy. Socialist parties should run candidates to advertise their platform and recruit, not as an actual way of getting change.
I propose what Marxists have proposed since the beginning: revolutionary organizing. This is a constant process that doesn’t depend on the electoral cycle, it’s more that those that only really tune into politics around election season don’t notice it as much until election season. You can go back into my comment history, and I have been enormously consistent with what I have said, and when I have said it.
The actual revolutionary strategy is to educate the working classes on political theory and history, struggle alongside them in the realm of unionizing, indigenous sovereignty, strikes, and in so doing build up a worker party capable of leading revolution whenever capitalism hits crisis points.
Taking a few hours twice in an election cycle to cast a vote is not some intolerable wast of organizing energy.
It’s at least worth a try to influence the elections and candidates.
“It’s not possible to reform so don’t even try” is a stupidly bad take. It seems accelerationist, that you hope for a civilization wide disaster that would leave hundreds of millions desperate in hopes that it will at least open up the path to some non-democratic result which you somehow hope will be your desired result as opposed to a myriad of competing interests that is likely to institute any number of even worse results.
There are several things wrong with this.
First, I don’t really give a shit if people vote or not. My issue isn’t with the few hours people spend on election day, it’s with the days, weeks, months, even years spent on electoral campaigns, canvassing, and overall redirecting the problems people are already identifying with capitalism into elections. This creates a pressure valve, where people sit complicit for a few years at a time, perhaps agitating here or there to vote blue. It’s an enormous waste of time at this scale for socialists to be doing this.
Second, that’s not accelerationism. Acceletationism is the belief that we should support the most stable and competent stewards of imperialism and capitalists, so that capital concentrates at a faster rate and collapses sooner. This means that the Democrats, as the party where profits and stock market growth are generally higher, are the actual accelerationist candidate. Accelerationism isn’t deliberately blowing up the system by voting for Republicans, nor is revolution accelerationism.
The fact is, capitalism systemically results in crisis about once a decade. This is built into capitalism, it’s how it functions, and each time the biggest capitalists come out with far more of the capital than they had before as the smaller capitalists die off or are acquired. To prepare for crisis is not to expedite it, we need to get organized in anticipation of something we already know happens. Here’s a handy chart:
We need to build up that organized revolutionary core, and educate and agitate amongst the masses to bring about revolution. Not redirect their attention towards the DNC as their sole means of political life.