https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/boots-riley-why-i-am-voting-bernie-sanders
He deactivated his twitter account but he had a bunch of tweets responding to people asking “If Bernie loses the primary are you still voting?” and he was like “Fuck no don’t you understand anything I wrote?”
People are mad at John Mulaney for saying this, starting at 4:19:
Or… maybe peeps want to chat a little about apartheid era South Africa…
Your vote counts! And the South African capitalists were true believers. So much so that they established legally autonomous democratic ‘homelands’ for their black workers.
And how did those black working folk repay the kindness and generosity of the white capitalists? Well… we all know that some think black folk are lazy and apathetic, and this ungrateful buncha of slackers were just that. They refused to vote! Then they doubled down on their lazy apathetic ungrateful folly and… gulp… complained about apartheid. They broke the rule. They didn’t vote, so they had no damn thing to complain about, period.
They had farcical “national” elections, which were boycotted, of course. But what was really hilarious is they had farcical local elections too. The google gods have abandoned me, and this might be before the cusp of everything being online, so I’ll tell the story as I miss-remember reading it from tree-roms back in the day…
They had elections for mayors and such. One election, for a constituency like 500,000, was boycotted, and the final vote was like 8-5. Almost all the voters were family members of the candidates, and the luser pulled a Homer, and forgot to vote for himself.
Not reading the whole thread. But just wondering if anyone has filled in Step 2 of the Underpants Gnomes exercise.
Step 1: Don’t Vote
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
I take Sabo’s point to be that the same sequence follows from “Step 1: Vote”, and that the ??? is the whole ball game no matter what.
My one thought worth contributing is that it’s hard to see how any non electoral political change in the US would occur without outside backing. And these days the prevailing ‘approved’ method to get that is to claim that an election has been stolen. And that that is hard to do if you boycott them. So even non electoral regime change might rely to some extent on voting.
I’ve addressed that above, see my response to @-Formula72. The question is a misunderstanding of what strategy & tactics are. It’s like this…
If you are interested in learning, you’ll get a lot more bang-for-the-buck by reading the linkeed articles instead. The thread is mostly fools trolling the thread… because that’s what we mainly do here as UnStuckers.
And oh yeah… just in case it isn’t clear, this is why I’ve been posting all these historical examples. The US Abolitionists “won”. Black South African working folk “beat” apartheid. Somehow they overcame “Step 2: ???” in real life. Imagine that… if you can.
Again, if you are actually interesting in learning… look into the history. You don’t need this thread to do that.
That’s a fair enough point.
So people organized around an idea or set of ideas and did things through direct action? Great.
What does intentionally not voting have to do with that?
Again, it’s a strategy not an end. Sometimes it might make sense to use it, sometimes it might not. Sometimes other strategies might make more sense. Often a blend of different concurrent strategies seem better still.
The senatorial donkeys staged an IRL vote boycott stunt last month. They don’t do direct action. Still… for some reason they chose a strategy of boycotting voting.
Do you know why?
Every anti voting argument is going to fail with me until someone shows me how Prohibition first became a constitutional amendment and then got repealed in a way that isn’t a huge pro voting story (and from both sides).
I’m not discounting the role of street action. I’m well aware of how workers managed to get virtually every right they have while being thwarted very effectively at the ballot box and that’s just one example.
It’s just not an either/or thing. It’s both. If you want the bottom 60% of this countries income distribution to have real power in this country the fastest way there is to both get them to the polls en masse AND disrupt the comfortable lives of the top ~3% with huge protests. I’m for voting tomorrow, and I switched my political budget from donating to politicians to donating to bail funds when the George Floyd protests broke out. I’m very happy with that investment decision.
EDIT: My mom is a 100% purebred hillbilly whose parents escaped Pike county KY in the 50’s in the most hillbilly way you can escape Appalachia… going to Berea College. My great grandfather was a deeply unpopular man because he was a gun thug for a coal mine who escorted scabs across the picket lines. He was a mean drunk and my grandfather hated him.
I was lazy with my first reply, but sadly for you I’m now at a loose end.
I think you have to establish their illegitimacy. You’re right that there are ways to do that that don’t involve participation, and certainly correct that the US’s own regime change operations don’t always use participation. However you’re dealing with a case where pretty much everyone thinks the US system is as fair as we can make them. Even now. Yeah, I know. My instinct is that the more legitimate the election process is seen as then the more necessary the attempted participation is.
At a local level it’s also different. As you yourself posted about recently then the more local the power then the easier it is to persuade, force and even subvert the people in power via direct action. That’s clearly more worthwhile than voting if you can do it. I don’t think any of that really holds at the level of the Presidential election, though. Whatever the action taken then it’s all really in the realms of PR until you get support from existing powers who can apply the pressure it takes, and my point was basically that a stolen election is the simplest PR story to tell at the moment.
Because the Barrett nomination process was a farce. The votes were predetermined.
This is not at all analogous to this election, unless you believe that Trump and Biden are the same, in which case we’re never going to agree.
You didn’t read the OP.
Sure, but that doesn’t answer your Q. What does intentionally not voting have to do with that?
The OP has a picture and no real content. If you have something that you think I should read, link it. I’m not wading through dozens of posts of memes and arguing to find some nugget of wisdom.
To show that it’s a farce? I really have no idea. The result with regard to ACB was going to be the same no matter what they did.
You need to read post #2 too. But I’ll belabor the point here, so don’t bother. I trying to facilitate a chat (post #2) about political abstentionism (post #1). Part of facilitating is not taking sides. I’m not doing that “This is what I think, prove me wrong” crap.
Again, in case it isn’t obvious, the first two orders of business are (a) seeing that the thread doesn’t get overrun by the trolls, and (b) driving a stake through this “Step 1: gibberish; Step 2: ???; Step 3: profit” nonsense. Note: those two hurdles need to be overcome before we can to even begin to engage in productive and respectful chat,
As to what to read, the most popular article ITT so far is http://www.indigenousaction.org/voting-is-not-harm-reduction-an-indigenous-perspective/ with six click throughs.
But you believe they indeed have a reason, correct? Aren’t you curious what it might be? If not, this thread really isn’t the droid you are looking for.
Back in the day, I spent some time in the dive bars of Knoxville TN. A reg came down to the city from what he called a “hollar” up in the Smokie Mountains. Hooper was a really big old boy and cool as shit. The only time he got mad, was when some fool called him a hillbilly. He was indignant and said: “I ain’t no hillbilly, I got my teeth”.
Unstuckers might not be familiar with KY’s Berea College…
Berea College isn’t like most other colleges. It was founded in 1855 by a Presbyterian minister who was an abolitionist. It was the first integrated, co-educational college in the South. And it has not charged students tuition since 1892. Every student on campus works, and its labor program is like work-study on steroids."
Anyways, back to chatting about the Quantum Butterfly Effect. It’s turns out Fansville has the exact same discussion ongoing.
Is it too late to point out that “abstentionism” within a political context is most commonly used to refer standing for election then refusing to participate in government if you win, a practice associated primarily with Ireland and Sinn Fein.
Also, everyone should read this. “Threaten but Participate: Why Election Boycotts Are a Bad Idea” by Matthew Frankel, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Of the 171 cases examined for this study, a small minority (roughly four percent) resulted in positive outcomes for the boycotting parties. These cases fell into two very different categories: cases where the opposition party had considerable popular support and the boycott was merely one piece of a larger opposition campaign that could mobilize street protests, strikes and other forms of civil unrest, and cases where electoral laws required quorums to proceed. There have been successes in both categories, but the former cases bring the risk of military intervention while the latter cases risk blowback to the boycotting party for being obstructionist.
