The current moment is like the recent wildfires. All this trash built up over the years and it sort of has to have its time to burn out. Everything just has to find a way to survive it until it runs out of fuel. When the pendulum swings back the other direction, just be ready to rebuild from the natural disaster.
Suggestions?
Read and learn from successful revolutions, and the Marxist tradition in general, which correctly identifies both the root problem, and has a wealth of historical experiences for how to defeat it, the correct and incorrect roads taken, and what worked/didn’t. Join working-class parties, and organize for our own interests, so that sociopaths who would be happy sacrificing all of us for the sake of profits, don’t control society.
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml keeps an excellent study guide here, and I have one here.
🫡 thanks comrade!
I dunno, do something. Anything really. You have a handful of the richest people on earth trying to turn your country into a tech monarchy that wants to have the ability to put its people in vr prisons or kill then outright if it becomes uneconomic to keep them alive. Your entire people should be in a fight or flight response. Literally attacking the government and trying to kill the billionaires. It’s that bad of a situation for you. This is the worst possible timeline. In 10 years I don’t think the us will be a democracy. I think it will be a dictatorship kept in power by some type of artificial intelligence run surveillance system. The average man will have less and less economic importance to the oligarchy meaning less and less power to stand up to them until eventually you have to value to them at all at which time they start killing you. This is a nightmare timeline you are in.
Laws mean nothing if the Dictator in chief can break them without consequence.
I honestly don’t think these one off protests will force any change personally. They are a start to network and I think we should shift protests to be places to centralize people to a method of communication.
But the only thing that would force the hand of change is a general strike for weeks/months like Georgia is doing.
One decentralized protest organizer is starting a method of collecting sign ups to organize such a protest. Im not sure who the original organizer is but id rather give trust that something will come of it.
Personally, I think I will see if I can be more involved in my local state politics and volunteering. Might see if I can run for local office or if that is feasible.
A few days of not buying anything might spark some action. I for one will not be buying anything on Feb. 28. Perhaps these buy nothing days can be repeated and extended?
Yeah that’s a great point. Soon as I saw the companies at the Inauguration I deleted social media platforms owned by them and switched to DuckDuckGo/Firefox. Ive been on Linux Mint for some time.
Protesting with our wallets and going against the whole consumerism culture of these oligarchs is definitely the way to go. :)
Better than not voting and doing nothing.
The best would be voting and being an activist.
Worse would be discouraging voting and activism. Instead try to tell people that nothing they do matters and just bend over and take it up the ass
The US is not a democracy, it’s a capitalist dictatorship.
Some Background: History conditions much of our thinking about our political systems and most Western democracies resemble Rome’s in 60 BC when, as Robin Daverman humorously says, three aristocrats–politician Julius Caesar, military hero Pompey and billionaire Crassus–formed a backroom alliance that dominated the elected senate. The oligarchs ensured that proletarii votes changed nothing and that the masses remained invisible unless they rioted or died in one of the elites’ endless civil wars. Two thousand years later, in Britain’s general election of 1784, the son of the First Earl of Chatham and Hester Grenville, sister of the previous Prime Minister George Grenville, and the son of the First Baron Holland and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of Second Duke of Richmond, offered voters offered a choice of dukes. Today, in many European countries (even egalitarian Sweden) ‘democracy’ is a mere veneer over powerful feudal aristocracies that still control their economies. American voters recently watched a former president’s wife competing with a former president’s brother being defeated by a billionaire who installed his daughter and son-in-law in important government positions and ensured that, as John Dewey said, “U.S. politics will remain the shadow cast on society by big business as long as power resides in business for private profit through private control of banking, land and industry, reinforced by command of the press and other means of propaganda”. Most Western politicians are related by marriage or wealth and have, like all hereditary classes, lost sympathy with the broad mass of their fellow citizens to the extent that, as American political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found, ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’
Even if one accepts the argument that voting is not productive, that doesn’t inherently justify not participating. There’s plenty of things people do daily that are not productive or useful uses of their time.
Please demonstrate the harm caused by voting in the presidential elections.
Even if it’s not productive, it takes at absolute worst case living in a hellscape without properly staffed polling places, one day out of your time every four years. I was able to do it and get back to my shit in 30 minutes this time, from the time I left home to the time I got back.
So even if it’s useless, for me it was the same as sitting on my ass and watching a TV show. Explain why that is such a horrendous waste of my time that I should have instead not done it at all.
The harm is simple, people get the illusion they’re making a difference and that it’s enough, it also legitimizes voting as the way to change things despite ample evidence it doesn’t.
This leads to Dems hating protestors, or telling protestors to protest quietly and no in the road. This leads to liberals hating the working class when they go in strike, because why didn’t they just vote for better conditions. It leads to liberals hating anything useful, because they already did the only ‘useful’ thing and voted.
This leads to lesser evilism and accepting institutions as the foundation of society, instead of any ideology that will positively change things.
Okay, and? How does voting harm us? Not voting does a lot more harm.
If your democracy is staged like reality TV, then it does nothing.
Does voting in a capitalist dictatorship work? It got the US to where it is now. Doing the same strategy over and over again, when proven that historically things keep getting worse, should tell you that not only is it a pointless strategy, it’s actively harmful because it draws energy into an electoral contest that does nothing to improve people’s lives.
Bourgeois democracy is an elaborate theatre piece used to keep people distracted, and give them the illusion of choice.
I’m not going to say the same thing twice, take a look at https://gregtech.eu/comment/3527169
That doesn’t address anything. Saying vote over and over doesn’t make it a viable strategy, especially in bourgeois “democracy”'s staged elections, where the vote choices are stacked between various capitalist puppets.
Essentially you’re asking us to play a rigged game, and insisting both that it’s not rigged, and that it’s super important to play it. Also that anyone who refuses to play it deserves ridicule. This is the level of zealotry people have in their fake political system.
I never said it wasn’t rigged. Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder. Democrats are, of course, the party of the rich, but so are Republicans. Republicans, however, are way more against the redistribution of wealth.
Not voting is not going to help you achieve the goal of stopping this madness. It will only make it harder.
You can only make statements like this, by ignoring history. People in the US have voted for 150+ years. This is the result.
Again, if voting is working so well, why do things keep getting worse? Are they just not voting hard enough? No, it’s the system that’s broken, it’s theatre, a catch-22, a rigged game. Those of us who’ve studied US history and it’s class history learned this a long time ago. The liberals coming and telling us to vote to fix things, aren’t bringing any new arguments, and appear to us like fanatical zealots, who think that if they repeat mantras over and over, it cancels history.
Both voting and not voting have the same effect. Nothing. It is not a democracy and pretending you are in one does fuck all.
Throw bricks at fascists, punch nazis, but also vote, ffs
- votes Kamala
- at least 51% of others do the same
- Kamala wins
Explain again how voting and not voting does the same? I know the first past the post system is horrible, but saying that voting does nothing is disingenuous.
This is false, multiple presidents won more than 51% of the vote and lost. Your elections are decided by election riggers during redistricting. It is called gerrymandering. You live in a corrupt society that uses voting and a circus every few years to mollify you. Even if Kamala won, which was basically impossible based on how the districts were drawn, you’d still live in a capitalist dictatorship that would be every bit as bad as it is now. You would still be causing wars around the world, you would still have homeless people everywhere, and most people would still be living pay check to paycheck while she did absolutely nothing. Kamala Harris is a manager of capitalism, not leader in any sense. You have absolutely no vote or say in the people who run your country, the board members of Goldman Sachs, Chase, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and the rest.
The sad thing is, trump won even the popular vote. And, even with gerrymandering, voting still makes a change, if even a small one.
Also, are you saying trump and kamala are the same lmfao
It’s clear that you are completely unaware of the history of the US democratic party as controlled opposition, and how thoroughly evil they are.
Here’s what the Biden administration did to Palestine:
Some more on your party:
You are free to participate in any kind of meaningless gestures and genuflection to make yourself feel better, but the US is a controlled authoritarian oligarchy with democratic window dressing and not a democracy in any meaningful way.
Look, if you aren’t going to do anything else, you might as well vote. It’s the best you can do. And even if you are active, you should still vote.
Right, I said you are free to do any meaningless gestures you want
You’re right, if you alone can’t fix everything, there’s really no point to trying.
My guy, life is filled with meaningless gestures we all have to regularly do.
I frequently know the only viable solution for companywide issues at my workplace. Do I just run off on my own and shove it through because I know I’m right? No.
Even when the change is so buried in the back end that they’d never know, I participate in the meaningless gesture of informing the business folks, taking questions that they don’t have the knowledge base to understand my answers, etc. It’s a regular process established in my workplace, and despite it not changing anything, it must be followed.
For the price of a few hours every four years, I get to bite back at people who argue that you don’t have any say if you didn’t vote. And if by some miracle voting ends up effecting some change (companies drawing conclusions from the popular vote maybe?), I’m already doing the bare minimum.
Wow, a lot of words to say nothing. You don’t have to do anything meaningless, it is by definition meaningless.
It’s so dense and stupid to generalise everybody. It’s not like the US has more than 2 parties to vote on and the country is already having an us vs then mentality which cause people of the “other side” to disprove of anything the “other side” does. Does comprise even exist in US dictionaries?
So what are you doing? Just curious.
Why are you defending the people with power to do something by attacking people who don’t have a fraction of that power and opportunity?
Like seriously. Why are you defending them.
Do you usually react like this when someone asks a simple question?
What are you doing?
oh okay. you don’t want to defend your premises you want to deflect and attack
I have been calling my representatives and senators every week thanks to reminders I set up using an app I found called 5 Calls. I would recommend that everyone do the same. Become a thorn in the side of every single Democrat and Republican that represents you. Make them remember who they work for.
So an intern can spend all day clearing out a voicemail inbox? Unfortunately I think we are past peaceful phone canvassing. Nothing will meaningfully change until the owner class have fear in their heart.
Protest outside their offices would be the next step then. Not exactly viable for everyone in a country this big though.
It’s really the keyboard activists. You would be surprised.
It’s all of you.
Not me, I’m on a whole other continent, watching the blaze, hoping it doesn’t spread too far.
Not me. I want the zealots all beheaded. Yea, what they’re doing is illegal and I also* voted. But now it’s chop chop time. I should start a website to get 15% of the population to agree with me on a specific day. Kind of like The General Strike. But with more axe.
OK. But what are you actually doing right now? What are any of us doing right now?
I’m talking to like minded people overseas about preparing resources to help at-risk people evacuate the United States. I’m also accumulating an emergency fund and arming myself. I will continue to masquerade as a cis white dude so I can move mostly unimpeded. I plan to help people get to New England as a staging point–it will remain RELATIVELY less dangerous than most other parts of the country here–where they might have a chance of SURVIVING LONG ENOUGH to cobble their shit together enough that they can legally get overseas from here without violating a visa and getting deported back to this shithole.
I will also continue attempting to practice the art of not tipping off the enemy by giving them any warning that I might be a threat to them. I must swaddle myself in the flayed skin of civility. I must smile politely and patiently to their faces. I must lull them into feeling safe around me. I must wait until their back is turned. And then I can personally drag them to hell by the neck. Hopefully when nobody else will witness it.
There needs to be fewer fascists in America. One way or another. I’d rather see them convinced rationally to peacefully change their minds and stop being fascists. If they remove that option, well, they get lie in the beds they’ve shat.
Just try to tell them the parties are the same. I’ve been pilloried three times, they cut my balls off, and I’m set to be hung tomorrow at dusk.
The issue isn’t that the parties are the same. It is that neither should be in power. And you’re all too fucking brainwashed to realize the only way out of this mess without violent revolution is a third party gaining power. And even with, probably.
Amen brothersister
3rd party can’t really gain power with first past the post. We have to implement ranked choice or approval voting before meaningful 3rd party choices are viable.
They aren’t the same. But they don’t need to be the same for them to both suck and not deserve to be in power. But harm reduction is real.
No it isn’t. Harm reduction caused a genocide.
Harm reduction would have saved trans people like me from being erased by the government.
Saying a simplistic, basic-ass statement such like “both parties are the same” is just annoying and not correct
Not recognizing that one party isn’t better than the other is the stake in the heart of democracy, nothing will change until you realize this
Counting negatives on my fingers…
huh?
Ok, but no one here said that. Thats a strawman liberals put up to avoid a few topics.
Those topics you’d rather not talk about:
Is all of gaza destroyed right now or not? Were tens of thousands of innocent civilians massacred there with our help on Bidens watch?
If you admit the above then he’s a war criminal isnt he.
Bidens response to the defund and reallocate movement for justice was to ignore the plees and increase police funding, correct?
Did abortion go down on Bidens watch? Did his previous work as head of the senate judiciary committee contribute to that?
Didnt Biden carry through with his promise to the rich donors that “nothing would fundamentally change”?
Biden and Harris were not for gun control were they. Are guns just not a problem anymore in our schools? School shootings stopped?
Did the Dems talk about the issues important to the poor and middle class? They sure needed their votes.
Did Biden have the polling numbers to win at any time in the 2 years leading up to the election? And did Harris do anything to differentiate herself from what was clearly a candidate who was about to lose in a big way?
Did Biden/Harris even bother to craft and talk about a Dem party platform? All we heard was “I’m not trump”.
Do you think if Harris had differentiated herself from Biden, talked about the poor and working class’s struggles and afirmed that the gaza war had to change, she would have still lost? I dont think so. But she chose not to do those things right.
And now Biden/Harris lost but its everyone elses “fault”? come on man. Stop lying to yourself and holding a pointless grudge and leveling these “both sides are the same” playground name calling distractions from these truths. Biden and Harris made the choices that led to the loss. They are not victim here, they are the perpetrators. We all got effed by their incomptence and hubris. Every demographic of voter was angry at Biden/Harris. Do you deny that?
You shouldnt be blaming the desperate voters who have been ignored and abused by their party, while excluding Biden/Harris from any blame. Some of you lot keep saying he’s one of the best presidents ever-- when all of the above topics argue pretty strongly otherwise, if you;d just acknowledge that the topics even exist.
But you wont. You wont reply, you’ll downvote, and thats the end of it for you.
Ok, but no one here said that.
They literally did though, in those exact words.
They literally did though, in those exact words.
I said you’d use that as a distraction and not engage on any of the topics I listed and lo and behold, thats exacly what you did. Frustrating.
Has is occurred to you that the reason no one is arguing that Biden and Harris aren’t pieces of shit is because they are actually pieces of shit, and no one in this reply chain said otherwise? That’s why “no one said that” was so funny to me.
All of these shortcomings are true, yet none one of them are a valid excuse for not voting for the lesser of two evils, I don t understand how this is so hard to grasp for some people. Accusing the abstentionists for what they have caused doesn’t imply absolving Biden of anything.
Directing the attention towards the voters instead of the democratic party is a deliberate tactic to create division among the working class. The democratic party has way more power than your neighbour who didn’t vote. Getting angry at your neighbour will only alienate them further. It’s a waste of energy.
Accusing the abstentionists for what they have caused.
Oh my God, get over yourself
You’re ignorant or lazy if you cannot see the difference- even if it is a nuance . . .they are different. For easy reference just check the Internet for voting disparity between the parties. Give me your top 5 most important values and then see which party aligns with them. Most likely you will not be able to say - they are both the same when voting for or against the 5 values I hold in highest regard.
My most important values are:
- no genocide, like under a whole Dem can we do that first?
- basic income for everyone regardless of status
- universal healthcare for anyone who ever should need it
- the legal system shouldnt discriminate based on who a person is
- you can fite me to to death on this, Trump is a shit piece and if i lived in Idaho I would have voted Harris but ya know what “oops” with regard to the electoral college I guess you are on the same team as me in Cali.
See?! See?!
Yeah, there is a reason my instance doesn’t have downvotes or federates with the lemmy.world idiots
Glad I finally got off world and can see your comments again. Missed you. Not trying to be weird, I just like your style.
Yeah, I feel you. Every time I say that the earth is flat I get ridiculed left and right
EDIT: Apparently I need a /s
Why should you say that out loud?
