this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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I’m not an anarchist either. (At least I think. Admittedly my understanding of anarchism is a little lacking, but from the gist of it it doesn’t seem very practical.) I’m a communist. The path forward is simple even if it’s very difficult. You band together with people, build power through your capacity to withhold your labor, and be ready to fight back when the capitalists inevitably attack.
Power is about the ability to make people do what you want even when they don’t want it. It’s inevitable derived through the means to reproduce society and force to back it up. Right now capitalists have that means and force and thus can impose their will on others. In that context, voting lacks any basis for power to enforce the will of the voters on the ruling class because the capitalists own things and the workers don’t successfully use their collective productive power to oppose them. It can ONLY turn out this way if your only political action is voting in a capitalist “democracy.” The system isn’t set up to respond to anyone who doesn’t already hold power because if it did, they wouldn’t be in power anymore.
It’s important to have an understanding of the how things work structurally, because if your analysis only begins and ends with the actions and professed ideologies of specific people, you can’t possibly hope to ever break out of the cycle of meager progress followed by regression.
You should read up on anarchism, it's cool. Our tactics largely the same as you ascribe to the communists, but we aim for only bottom up orgs and not top down.
I'm with you on collective action, like unions, but I don't really see how that applies to government. The system works whether one person votes or 1mil, and if zero of the regular non-politicians voted, the politicians still get a vote. If you're talking about collective action to vote for someone different, there's two main problems with that:
We can't all agree on what issues are most important, which is part of why third parties never win.
There's too many bad actors who would use that opportunity as an authoritarian power grab.
I think your idea could work if we had federal ranked choice, but we average people don't "produce" anything that the government can't produce itself. If someone wanted a communist government, they'd have to get communists elected, and to do that, they'd have to sell the idea of Communism to regular people who don't know anything other than late-stage capitalism.
It would have to emerge organically from the ground up, not the top down. I think we're on our way (I'm more of a socialist), but I don't think it will happen in our lifetime, and rushing it will only scare the ignorant.
Either way, I think we've beaten this horse enough. You've been at least respectful, which is more than I can say for a lot of comments. Have a nice day.