USA has sent 26.7 billion dollars to Israel to carry out genocide
USA has sent 26.7 billion dollars to Israel to carry out genocide
We are constantly told that solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing poor and working class people in the U.S. do not exist. Meanwhile, billions taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the genocide of Palestinians.
That very money could have ended homelessness in the United States.
Money for our needs, not the U.S.-Israeli war machine!
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By all means, vote independent in state and local elections. We need more choices than a two-party system offers. If the candidate seem qualified, then help new parties establish themselves. Once they build enough followers to make a difference, we can start electing senators. Then the presidency becomes a serious option.
Unfortunately, there aren’t currently any third party candidates with a realistic chance of winning. The only responsible thing we can do for now is choose the lesser of two evils.
Fuck off omg how undecent can you be? You come under post about a genocide to tell people to still vote the guy who paid for this genocide? Do you have no fucking shame you scum? Seriously. Do you look at yourself in the mirror sometime? How trashy can you be.
Maybe as an american you could shut the fuck up for once. Read the fucking room.
This is not about winning. Putting votes on third parties is a long term investment. It directly shows both evil parties they are missing out on votes.
Votes they would have had if they changed their agenda.
Rewarding a "lesser evil" for not appealing to left wing voters will teach them they need to keep doing evil because that is what makes them win.
Unfortunately, there aren’t currently any third party candidates with a realistic chance of winning. The only responsible thing we can do for now is choose the lesser of two evils.
I don’t know anyone who thinks this is about winning. Everyone knows their third party vote isn’t going to result in a win for their candidate, and their candidate also knows this, and they know their candidate knows. When you lecture someone on what they already know, all you do is annoy them. You’re not going to get far with them if you don’t understand what their reasons really are. I can’t tell you; you’ll have to ask them.
One reason for some, that I think you can easily understand, is that unless you live in a swing state, it costs nothing to vote left of genocide. There is no downside, and it may make the Democratic party sweat enough to move slightly left. The party isn’t going to move left if they know you’ll always vote blue no matter who: all that does is make you a reliable and politically irrelevant punching bag.
I wonder if Claudia should rebrand their logo (that they have in the bottom right hand corner of OP) to say something like “*swing state? Vote Harris”
There’s no way she wants 45 to become 47. So she must have some guilt about marketing herself and Karina where a swing state voter might accidentally help get a bad man elected.
(I don’t know anything about her but I’m trusting she has her heart in the right place and is alarmed at all the same things the average Lemming is)
PSL is a Marxist Party. They believe revolution is necessary, and despise the Democrats and Republicans alike. They want their voters to vote in swing states to advertise their party platform and delegitimize the failure of the electoral system in general. They aren't pulling punches because, like all Marxists, they believe the Democrats are unacceptable as well as the Republicans.
There’s a part of my brain that totally gets the logic behind needing a revolution to shake up the system, but then the other part of me is like, ‘Violence? Nah, hard pass.’ So I end up with this funny little cognitive dissonance. I’m all, ‘Yeah, REVOLUTION!’ and at the same time, ‘But let’s make sure no one gets hurt, okay?’ It’s like being stuck between a revolution and a group hug, if that even makes sense!
This is a good article on why pacifism has not helped us overturn injustice historically, and won't in the future.
Yikes, thanks for sharing that. I've not seen anything like this. I have seen him say other pretty asinine things in his past, but nothing like this.
I do understand this to some degree, and unfortunately, only through the lens of privilege, I'm sure. I will have to read this in full later, but my quick glance take-away is that, by being a pacifist you essentially will be ruled by those who don't care at all and will commit atrocities against you, and, the least anyone can do is to defend themselves? Please correct me, and as I said, still need to read the entire thing!
Marxists would pick reform 100% of the time. The reason Marxists are revolutionary is not because they desire violence, but because reform is about as likely as asking the owner-board of your local megacorp to hand over the regins. Impossible without force.
Trying to plead with corporatists to reform is wasting your breath as they will offer empty promises to do something after your support is required then inevitably do fuck all afterwards, saying either they need to get so many other things done or they'll look at your concerns at the next election cycle/when they need your support.
Also when corporatists realise their coercion has failed, they will immediately use violence to obtain your complicit obedience.
Yes, that's also why Marxists are revolutionary. Reform is impossible because there are more layers than a croissant required to work through, and each layer is made of iron.
Absolutely, it’s unfortunately a law of the status quo. My biggest concern is that once force is used to take the reins, you’re stuck defending them, which just brings us back to the same place. I’ll admit, I’m likely ignorant of many Marxist ideas. Maybe they have a solution for that, but knowing how humans tend to operate, things often fall short of ideals. Are there any proposals in Marxist thought that address how to avoid falling into the trap of constantly defending the new status quo? I’d love to understand more about that, because honestly, I don’t know what the solution would be. That’s way above my pay grade!
That's a complicated question. The short answer is that, until Socialism is established world-wide, states are necessary, along with millitaries to defend them. All AES states have had to defend themselves, the USSR was invaded by 14 Capitalist nations right after the October Revolution.
Additionally, Socialism is not "the same place as before." Establishing Socialism through revolution has fundamentally changed who has the reigns, the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat.
Have you read any Marxist theory? I can give some reading lists, either a "full course" or I can recommend specific works going over the Marxist theory of revolution and the state, but that may raise more questions than it answers.
Honestly, as an American, I’ve avoided diving into Marxist ideas because they tend to carry a lot of ‘baggage’ here and are seen as a touchy subject by many. That said, the more I learn, the more I realize that I probably align with some aspects of Marxist theory, having arrived at similar basic concepts on my own, though I’ve always been puzzled why we don’t embrace these ideas. I haven’t really read any Marxist theory directly, mostly because of the negative bias around it, but I’d love to start somewhere. If you could recommend some beginner-friendly resources to help me get my feet wet, I’d really appreciate it. I also assume that there are resources here on Lemmy? Thanks!
Really cool!
Maybe you'll find you disagree with most or all of what you read, that's fine, you don't have to agree. I don't think Litvinov^[foreign minister of the Soviet Union in the 30s] agreed with the nazis when he "[i]n 1928 [...] had read and re-read Mein Kampf until he almost memorized it"^[The Cold War and Its Origins, Denna F. Flemming, p.60]. But reading even the books of our enemies is necessary to learn and grow.
I'm the creator of comlib (see some of the links in Cowbees comment), I've been thinking of giving someone that did what you did, to ask and learn, a.. "coupon" for an EPUB. So if you use EPUBs and you have some book you'd like made into one, come tell me and I'll prioritize it.
Honestly, I'd start with Blackshirts and Reds, it's a history book that analyzes AES states critically and debunks modern anticommunism and anti-Marxism. Michael Parenti uses modern, non-Marxist language to appeal to liberals and leftists sympathetic to Marxism but unsure about it and AES. An alternative, or supplementary source, is the famous "Yellow Parenti" speech and/or Albert Einstein's Why Socialism?
The absolute best primer is Engels' The Principles of Communism, which I would follow with Politzer's Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and swing back to Engels for Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. By now, you should understand what Communism is, how Marxism diverges from older Utopian Socialism, and have a thorough understanding of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, the philosophical foundation of Marxism. DiaMat makes the rest of Marxist theory far easier to understand, as it is the basis of all that follows, including analysis of Capitalism and Imperialism, and why Socialism is what comes after Capitalism.
Now, you can read Wage Labor and Capital as well as Value, Price and Profit back to back for Marx to explain the Law of Value without yet delving all the way into Capital, and prep you for Lenin's works Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution, to bring you to the modern era of Imperialist Capitalism and explain the Marxist theory of the State.
If you read all of those works, you will be more well-read than the vast majority of Leftists. There are numerous other fantastic Marxist works, but this will get you by far the most bang for your buck when starting out.
As for Lemmy, the instances that care the most about Marxism are Hexbear.net, Lemmy.ml, and Lemmygrad.ml, both Hexbear and Grad have reading lists and offer help with theory.