He got me to read the Manifesto and would have hours’ long debates with our social-democratic roommate and now this. It’s really shaking me up a bit.
He is on the whole defeatist ‘nothing will fundamentally shake the imperial machine so might as well pick the wardog with better domestic policies’ tip. I want to get through to him but I am getting stuck.
For example:
i also refuse to not vote my conscience but i figured this time its not like doing this abstract process to pick if id prefer -100 points vs -200 points is gonna matter that much if i genuinely believe itll even be slightly better under kamala i might as well
The person who first told me to read Mao, which got me into Marxism-Leninism in general, has become totally incoherent during the pandemic. The difference between us is that I have experience participating in organizations and seeing them fail the marginalized up close, and I experienced some of the same relief Hồ Chí Minh described as I took in Marxism Leninism, but my friend’s individualist tendencies have not exposed them enough to the fatal downsides of meandering eclecticism. They are now an antivaxxer who sees all public health as draconian, no AES are good enough for them, just sort of stuck at the Chomsky and Foucault despair dead end.
the whole “everyone who is doing lesser evilism is basically a hitler follower” thing is starting to genuinely piss me off. no these people specifically, like in OP, are not saying “might as well” because they’re trying to justify their preference for domestic vs foreign lives. they’re saying it because they are still used to a US with absolutely no organized left or worker’s power. they don’t see themselves as sacrificing anything because they think the left is completely incapable of doing anything in the US and that there is no leftist cause to sacrifice. this isn’t the position of a hitlerite, it’s the position of a leftist who genuinely thinks no positive systemic change is or is currently possible. i understand getting annoyed at online proselytizing blue MAGA types but implicitly lumping actual comrades who still have misplaced faith in lesser evilism in with them is not a salient analysis of material reality, the leftists voting for KKKopmala because they think collective bargaining is entirely out of reach and every person they know keeps yelling at them to do so are not at all comparable to Blueman Bloodmouth salivating over palestinian death counts
edit: of course it’s still extremely bad to be defeatist to the point of being complicit with a genocidal regime, but i do genuinely think the animating force in this case is defeatism rather than pure seflishness, so they’re far more redeemable than most types. Of course it’s up to OP whether it’s worth the time for them to do that
I agree in this point, but I wanna point out that it isn’t “everyone who is doing lesser evilism is basically a hitler follower”
It’s “everyone who is doing lesser evilism, while being aware a genocide is going on and being fine with it continuing, is basically a hitler follower”ofc if someone has been animated into believing such change is possible before this point despite the odds they’re perceiving, they are either extremely malleable due to social currents or otherwise just fascists hiding behind a mask
Try talking to liberals using this logic and you will find they don’t really care about the genocide. They are detached from the reality and are trying to normalize their electoral logic. Lesser evilism is their usual way of justifying why they dismiss their empathy and vote for a Dem.
Having a left would be valuable but they’ve been because it would necessarily mean these libs were on the left instead. Those who remained could be radicalized as well but many would retain this logic and this character.
voting is not politics, reading is not politics, make fun of him. If your state loses by 1 vote, tell him he should have gone with a better argument (like 10k donation to rcs)
P.s. (in the realm of absurdist arguments) there is a higher chance that some hot palestinian lady or mma fighter will make trumpo bomb tel aviv, than that kamala will not listen to some bloodless mormon sicko. That’s ignoring euros wouldn’t go that far along with trumpo. Domestically she would do jack shit cause of the senate anyway
Americans are all spineless imperial dogs
there is a suspicious lack of animation among lesser evil types to start creating any sort of militant organization to help those in Palestine. you’d assume if the average bluehitlerite cared as much as they say they do we would see a huge anti imperialist party be born over the last couple months.
100%
Heh, that’s nothing. My mentor, one of the best Marxist theorists in the country I grew up in, is now a reactionary who spouts right wing conspiracy theories lol. He got me into Marxism some 25 years ago and was one of the most progressive activists back in the days. Also we’re not from a Western country.
I honestly think that failures after failures of left wing movements globally since the 1990s have broken the brains of many who used to be at the forefront of left wing activism. It also coincided with the period of neoliberalism being spread to the Global South in the form of overseas educated professionals returning and joining social democratic/democratic socialist parties en masse and brought Western liberal ideologies into traditional workers parties.
I sense that many here are probably quite new to the whole socialism/communism thing. It’s sometimes discouraging to think that in another 10-20 years, probably half of your comrades would be fighting you on the other side of the struggle.
im beginning to think there’s something sinister in the concept of practicality
pragmatism for sure has a strong association with fascism.
?
I don’t think it’s practicality itself, because practicality dictates, to summarize by a lot, communism. No, I think they’re doing the same thing they do with “logic” and “reason”: kill them, and taxidermy them into little rhetorical totems they can wave around to give their mad pronunciations the illusion of weight. How many times have we all seen fascists say some ridiculous, out of pocket psychosexual shit and then just say the words Logic and Reason to try and justify it? Now Practicality has joined the pantheon of flayed concepts, not the real practicality of rational empathy and cooperation but the nihilistic, insectoid zero-sum Practicality™️ of genocide.
Explain?
We must do what is practical, what is “practical” happens to be compromising with Nazis, that type of logic etc…
I sense that many here are probably quite new to the whole socialism/communism thing. It’s sometimes discouraging to think that in another 10-20 years, probably half of your comrades would be fighting you on the other side of the struggle.
This was true for every single revolution (the most tragic example being the Irish Revolution), but as they say: the struggle continues.
the Irish Revolution
assume you mean the easter rising?
i get sad about the civil war most days but i would say in terms of historical knock-on effects / timelines diverging the german revolution is the most tragic.
It’s sometimes discouraging to think that in another 10-20 years, probably half of your comrades would be fighting you on the other side of the struggle.
After watching the survivors of the failure of Amerika’s civil rights movement and who they align with, I’ve come to accept that this will be the case until the heat death of the universe. No one is immune to minstrel-ing out for the crackers.
Sounds like your friend is enraptured by cpusa
I want to get through to him but I am getting stuck.
Why do you care about how they vote? It literally doesn’t matter.
Find it pretty funny how electoralist brainworms have infected even socialist Americans to the point that they’d think convincing someone not to vote is a useful course of action.
Just laugh and ignore him honestly. Or go vote to better maintain a friendship. Or lie about it. Again it simply doesn’t matter.
Why do you care about how they vote? It literally doesn’t matter.
I agree that voting doesn’t matter in terms of making a material difference in the social hierarchy because the US is not a democracy. However, who a person votes for (or whether they vote) is an indication of their values, which are in turn an indication of their future behavior, and anyone who votes for the regime that is currently conducting a fucking genocide demonstrates either their ignorance (which it seems OP’s friend cannot claim as a so-called socialist) or a fundamental lack of solidarity with those who are being dehumanized, tortured, and murdered, the victims of that genocide. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of solidarity with all oppressed peoples of the world. Just because voting doesn’t matter with respect to who wins the election, it sure as hell matters on an interpersonal level.
Find it pretty funny how electoralist brainworms have infected even socialist Americans to the point that they’d think convincing someone not to vote is a useful course of action.
It has next to nothing to do with electoralism as it is only tangentially related to the election itself. Again, it is about a person’s position relative to class struggle. If a member of the ruling class were murdering your family and your friend decided to throw in their support to that murderer with the rationalization that that murderer might benefit your friend more than some other murderer, it doesn’t matter how inconsequential their support is - it still tells you a great deal about your friend’s priorities and interests which don’t actually include your dying family or other oppressed people, only themselves.
Or go vote to better maintain a friendship. Or lie about it. Again it simply doesn’t matter.
Everything else aside, this is still terrible advice. Lie to your friend about your principles regarding genocide to “better maintain a friendship”? Gross.
Again it simply doesn’t matter.
Socialism is not nihilism.
The issue I have with this argument is that i feel like it is confusing voting for someone with endorsing them publicly. An argument I’ve heard from socialists online that has really resonated with me is that yes, voting for president in a liberal democray is a way that you can influence politics but it is literally the least powerful and least effective way to do so. Therefore if we, as people who call ourselves socialists and who want to change society for the better, if we spend a large percentage of our time online arguing with people about voting, we are being tricked into believing in this lie that voting between two bourgeoisie candidates is meaningful. The clearest way this manifests is in so-called socialists who demand that other socialists vote for Democrats. These people are obviously betraying their values and have become party hacks for the libs.
But another way that I think this manifests, and that ties back to this thread, is when we go out of our way to spend time and effort demanding that people write in a third party candidate or abstain instead of voting tactically. Initially this was really counterintuitive for me because I hate Kamala and the Democrats so much for enabling genocide that I couldn’t stomach the idea of anyone I cared about actually voting for them. But upon reflection, what I was really disgusted by was the idea of someone endorsing or supporting them. Because that is what makes a material difference. If someone is spending time and energy getting people to vote for Kamala, or any other liberal war criminal, then they are knowingly or not working to preserve the current system of oppression. But if all someone does is bubble in her name instead of trumps, they are not materially supporting genocide. While I personally don’t buy into the idea of voting as harm-reduction on a presidential level, if someone else wants to I’m not going to argue with them about it. What matters so much more to me is what we do with the rest of our time. If we can make material differences in our communities during the other 364 days of the year, that makes 10,000x the difference than a harm-reduction vote. (Again this only applies to the vote itself, if someone is going around advocating for others to vote blue then that’s a different story)
For context on where I’m coming from, I voted for De La Cruz but I don’t live in a swing state so my vote is purely symbolic anyway.
Anyway for OP don’t lie to your friend, that’s kinda shitty. I’d say if he wants to vote kamala as a token 0.1% harm reduction then by all means, but maybe point out that all of this energy he is spending convicing others to vote blue could be better spent doing literally anything else.
It’s not that I really disagree with this, I just think it’s mostly moot. Overall, it’s splitting hairs in a somewhat odd way, and especially considering the context of OP, where their friend is pressuring OP to vote Democrat, it just doesn’t apply. It’s almost obvious that what we are talking about here is not some secret schroedinger’s voting booth vote that no one else knows about, but a vote that is announced and therefore is a form of, as you put it, public endorsement. If someone secretly votes Kamala without telling a soul, especially if they’re doing real community work that benefits people in material ways, then sure, none are the wiser and the actual work that person is doing supercedes whatever asymptotically minuscule effect a single vote has. But then we’re almost getting into “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” territory.
Though that’s not really what we’re talking about here. Going back to my analogy above about a friend supporting the murder of your family (and to be clear, I know you’re not the same person I was responding to with that analogy). If you are completely and forever ignorant of your friend’s support for that person murdering your family, and their support of that murderer doesn’t actually change the ability of that murderer to do any more harm, then of course, you would have zero reason to think or feel negatively about your friend and no material difference is made. I would still contend that your friend is a shitty friend and a shitty person, but again, “if a tree falls in the forest…”
But that also does bring up another aspect of this. The person who voted blue (or in the analogy the friend who secretly gave their insignificant support to your family’s murderer) still themselves know what they did. So it matters to them. And while it may make zero difference to the outside world in that very moment or by that specific act, it still “matters” in the broad sense depending on their reasoning. If a person votes blue, or red for that matter, so long as they’re voting for fascists, is it because they do feel that the benefit to themselves outweighs the genocidal harm that candidate has done and will do? Is it because they laughingly did it in a cynical fit knowing that their vote doesn’t mean shit, though they actually despise the person they voted for and recognize they won’t benefit from that vote? If it’s the former, then that person is still someone who can’t be trusted to do the right thing, even if no one is aware of it. If it’s the latter, then sure, but I think their jokerification is approaching worrisome levels even if no one else knows. To put it one last way, if someone is secretly a racist, but never expresses it and only does things that positively effect the people they hate, then “no harm, no foul” but I still think that in the real world, a person who is racist will always tend to behave in ways that have negative effects in the world. And so too with secret Harris voter. No one might hear that one tree, but there is a near certainty other trees are going to fall when people are around to hear it.
Edit to add:
In short, I’m with @[email protected] on this one.
I’m not going to pick arguments over votes in the presidential election
I am. I want to know exactly who decided that in their personal calculus, that they could accept the genocide of another sovereign group of people if it meant the security of their own rights-- because when it’s my turn on the sacrificial altar, it’ll be those same coons, crackers, and assorted miscellaneous misleaders holding the knives.
I want to know who I can’t trust turning my back to.
when people show you they don’t care about genocide, believe them
Elections don’t matter, but who you vote for if you do does matter. It is an indicator of personal values.
If you are aware a candidate is committing a genocide and you are still voting for them… Then that does very much matter.removed by mod
You don’t have to explain to me that electorialism is a fuck. I know that. We all know that. Give your comrades the bare decency of assuming they understand basic concepts, even if you disagree with them.If you vote for Kamala while knowing she is committing a genocide, you are supporting someone committing a genocide. Electorialism is a fuck, but if you vote it is because you give it some value. If you vote for someone committing a genocide, you are supporting genocide. You are validating genocide. You are legitimising someone committing a genocide.
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Electorialism is a fuck, but if you vote it is because you give it some value.
Literally the next sentence.
Stop doing this debatebro bullshit.Edit: If you need more words to ignore then go and have your eyes glaze over @[email protected]s comment
It’s not about whether voting matters or not, it’s about watching a supposed comrade fail such an obvious litmus test
If some “leftist” started bragging about voting for Trump or pressuring people to do the same, we’d rightly dogpile that dipshit, it’s not the act of voting that’s causing the beef, it’s who you’re voting FOR that leads to these rifts
^^^
Sometimes it is useful to talk in electoral terms because someone is a liberal and cannot understand politics (yet) without it. And going all the way through the logic of how it doesn’t matter takes a very long time
But this person is apparently not a super lib so I dunno
even socialist Americans
“Socialist” Americans are borderline useless to the actual liberation of humanity. 99% of them just want a bigger share of imperial plunder. All the good non-white ones got killed decades ago. The amount of truly principled socialists in the USA is so low as to be a completely irrelevant political force.
Voting doesnt matter, you can vote if itll save your friendship but its not going to do anything else and they should know that
Yeah agree
Oh sorry I misunderstood you then
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Here we go again. The fact that you’re all just saying the exact same idiotic stupidities is honestly baffling. In a sense it’s nice since I don’t have to type out something unique for each and every one of you, but how can you live like that? Totally unexamined? Just… An empty vessel for whatever is on the front page of reddit to be broadcast into your skull this day.
And here’s an extra special treat, just for you because I imagine you’re gonna say something about not voting being a vote for Trump
- Kamala Harris has made it clear she will do nothing to protect LGBTQ people, stating “The law is the law”.
- Roe v. Wade was overturned while she was VP and it’s not like they didn’t get a fair warning beforehand. The dems didn’t do anything about Roe v. Wade because it’s a way to get rubes like you to clap for them like trained seals.
- I think it’d be good if we stopped the pointless meatgrinder in Ukraine - Something ukrainians agree with, since they have to be forcibly conscripted. If you believe the war is so important, then go volunteer.
- Tim Walz sicced the national guard on BLM protesters. Kamala Harris arrested black parents for having truant children and laughed about it. They are running on being tough on crime. As VP Harris has been in an administration that deported more than Trump. They have increased funding to cops. This is your idea of a person who won’t straight up murder BLM?
- See my other comment for an in-depth explanation of why you’re a fucking ghoul who I hope will hang for your collaborationist crimes some day. In brief: It is a genocide, the end point is extermination and they are being put in camps right now. It does not get worse.
Of course you did already know all this, at the very least on a subconscious level. You just don’t care or, more likely, you actively support a lot of it. But just say that instead, I’m tired of having you people pretending. At least the republicans are honest about being hateful bigots.
This is great because it accurately depicts you as actively participating in a genocide.
Thanks for sharing the complex convolutions of your mind
Why not blow up the trolley?
Yoinked
Niemöller wrote his poem about cowards like you.
Radicalize them
Met a kid online when I was a teenager who was the first communist I ever knew.
Then he went to college and was literally brainwashed by liberal propaganda.This reminds me of when I read a post somewhere about someone who met up with the person who convinced them to go vegan at a cafe after not seeing them for years. The person who convinced them to go vegan ordered a latte with dairy in it and revealed that they’re an ex-vegan now. OP was so confused and disappointed.
I may be butchering some of the details, but it was something like that.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain. It’s like old communists like Angela Davis stepping back from overt struggle and letting themselves become fangless ‘critics’ because they need to retire. Except in this friend’s case we are still young and he was never concretely politically active.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
I normally hate that quote because it was Nolan capeshit
in its origins of common usage, but then I think of what happened to Noam Chomsky. 
Voting in American elections is just signaling your fealty to the regime.
Of course I’m still voting so whatever. I like filling bubbles okay.
Jonesing for a multiple choice test lol
No matter what answer you select you lose
Just lie about who or if you voted dawg
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How do you mean zen fascism?
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My step dad is like that. Got a survival of the fittest kind of mindset and is like yea americas doing fucked up shit but might as well sit back and enjoy it bc we’re lucky to be able to
it’d be tempting to have some respect for this stance if they didn’t whine and complain when the tables turn, but they always do
I guess it’s more honest than what democrats give us at the very least lol
this might be the Matt rant you were referring to
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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