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Ok, I’m sure I’ll make some people angry here, but this is why you should probably vote. I’m not going to tell you to vote for Biden specifically or whatever, but this is why you should participate in elections. It’s literally the bare minimum, but it’s still necessary praxis.
Like Biden blows, and the Harris vp pick is infuriating, but that shouldn’t make you not vote at all. Vote for La Riva or Hawkins if you can’t bring yourself to vote for Biden, but don’t just not vote at all.
I’m sure people will claim that “if it changes anything, they wouldn’t let you do it,” but they don’t let a ton of people do it. They suppress voters all the time. They gutted the voting rights act. There’s felony disenfranchisement. There’s voter ID laws. They don’t want you to.
It isn’t going to change anything major—especially not in a single election cycle. That doesn’t mean it’s useless. History is measured in decades. Change doesn’t come overnight. It’s a process that requires active participation at all levels of society.
So many people want to put the cart before the horse here. Last I checked, the left in America has virtually no institutional power to speak of, and it is indisputable fact that building power is going to be harder with Donald Trump in the White House.
It’s disconcerting how many people have given in to reactionary politics in, but we need to understand how that happened, and it happened, by and large, at the ballot box with the Tea Party movement. We can’t just ignore the reality in front of our faces.
You need to counter reactionary politics with revolutionary politics. Voting isn’t a revolutionary act, but not doing it is even less so. It’s admitting defeat on a front that needs to be contested. We can’t just let our enemies have the day here.
This is why I beg my comrades, for the love of all that is good, to read the theory on the subject so it can inform your praxis. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm
People who tell you not to vote are either unread or feds. It’s endlessly frustrating to me to see fellow leftists say that voting is pointless. Especially self-proclaimed MLs. Theory shouldn’t be treated dogma, but it’s necessary to at least consider here.
