To clarify the point of the post for outsiders:
Anti voting is the view that one must not be satisfied with voting, and must do more outside than voting, that is in contrast to the popular perception in which voting is seen as a way to bring about change when in reality it's anything but.
Voting will always work to concentrate power in the hands of the few because the powerful won't let it be anything other than a way to consolidate power, this would be directly against their interest.
Historically change was brought about by protest, struggle and sabotage.
Even in the social democracies in the nordics change was brought about because the struggle in Russia and Ukraine was seen as a threat to the capitalist system, this even fits with expectations as with the fall of the USSR and the veneer of a "socialist state", worker and human rights are being rolled back.
People voted for FDR instead of Herbert Hoover, and that ultimately resulted in some pretty sweet policies. It wasn't perfect, but that is a prime example of a presidential vote being worth casting, in addition to more anarchist methods of bringing change.
There was a lot of protests happening at that time which really helped motivate the new president to actually do something, but if all those protestors chose not to vote, Hoover could've been elected instead, which seems... Not ideal?
If i remember correctly, a lot of what FDR did was because the worker protests, led by communists, were extremely popular, as well as labor unions, so it is implied that this requires more than voting. Then again i read on that a few years ago and I'm not american so i might not remember the details so good 🤷♂️
Y'all are gonna be real unhappy with how things work out for the anarchists if Trump wins. Obama was a conservative Democrat and McCain was a center-right Republican; there was a ton of overlap. Between Biden and Trump there is a yawning chasm.
I agree with the protest, struggle and sabotage. Bringing not voting into the equation in this particular election is like refusing to put out your house on fire, because one of the firefighters voted for Ronald Reagan.
As for the Nordics. With the fall of the USSR you had a massive worker pool starting to compete with the Western workers for jobs. Especially China opening up allowed companies to not negotiate with unions and just offshore jobs. At the same time you had massive growth in the global work force, just from population growth. That gave capitalist the option to offshore jobs and that weakened the labor movement. That really hurt the left in the West a lot, as they obviously had the most expensive workers in the world.
The good news is that this is changing. China and the US are in a trade war. Russia is in a real war. Most of the world already has opened up to capitalism, so the number of locations to offshore to are limited. Population growth is slowing down, with the working age population growing much much slower.
We can already see some changes. Unions are getting stronger in the US. Same story in Europe, with some truely large strikes recently. That probably means better workers rights and so forth in the future. If not with the unions then some other way.
The idea is sound enough, but the rhetoric is deeply unpalatable. Focus on what you think people should be doing, not not doing.
protest, struggle and sabotage.
I've gone over it, albeit on a surface level to keep it relatively short, if you really want to know more then you ought to listen to people who go deeper than i am, not to go all "I'm not here to educate you" but you really do have better sources than a stranger's comment on the internet.
Still on your anti voting bullshit huh? Couldn't find a suitable meme relevant to this decade or even the last one though
You can block this sub you know.
Or just wander into it and highlight some weird messaging so that others can read the highlighting, since it definitely seems relevant.
Or just a single user.
None of them are up to election.
One of the two fascists is in the process of conducting the most acute genocide since the Holocaust. Not a hypothetical, predicted genocide, but a real one, unfolding in front of our very eyes in real time. There's not a chance in hell I'm not voting against him. If donkey fans really want to try to make me choose between the candidates on the two mainstream liberal mono-party ballot lines, they're not going to like the one I wind up voting for. I guess they should be happy I've got socialist candidates I can put my check mark next to instead.
Anyway, that's if I'm not in jail or stripped of my voting rights on election day in retaliation for direct action that opposes that genocide. Back into the streets!
