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I have never voted in my life and probably never will (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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People tell me that because I don't vote I don't have a right to complain. I think the opposite: those who vote play the game (legitimise the system) and shouldn't be salty that their preferred candidate didn't win; they should say ggwp and vote harder next time.

Just throwing that out there so people don't feel pressured into becoming voters. "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal" said someone once.

If I could vote in a place where invalid votes were counted as invalid and if most votes came in as invalid it would invalidate the election I'd be crossing out the ballot in every election. Unfortunately in most places invalid votes don't count (they're simply a statistic) or they get counted as part of the winning party/candidate's vote (fuck that).

That said, I like how the DPRK chooses candidates. (Ideally) they're chosen through discussion and then a Yes/No vote is done to confirm there is an overwhelming consensus. Hence the Western propaganda against DPRK saying they have one candidate on the ballot and the candidate gets over 90% of the vote.

Remember, choice to keep the Soviet Union won the most votes and they dissolved it anyway.

No one asked me if I want to live in a capitalist system, until they do, I have no reason to go out and vote.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In the US, I had some hope in voting all of one time in my life. That was with Bernie's campaign in 2020 and I was pretty lib then still (some beginnings of anti-imperialism, but kind of in that confused place where a lot of people call themselves "leftist"). I then saw one guy made a phone call, a bunch of people dropped out and threw their support behind one godawful candidate that wasn't Bernie (who wasn't even that extreme, just mildly reformist) and he folded so easily after that. All that effort so easily punctured for a guy (Bernie) who might be a relatively honest person up to that point, but nevertheless still had incredibly weak reformist politics.

Looking at it from the views I have now, he was compromise upon compromise representing, in an incredibly mild-mannered way, a reformist segment of the virtually invisible "left" in US electoral politics. And they acted like he was absolute doom extremist and undermined him with relative ease.

That made it apparent to me how embedded the capitalist control of the electoral system is. The only parties that are allowed to have any viability pretty much pick out some Rent-A-Politician corporate stooges from a lineup and then make you choose one. If you somehow manage to get a candidate in who is slightly outside of that, they will vilify them and if that fails and an outsider somehow actually gets into office, the stooges will form around them with enormous pressure and assimilate them into the machine of excuses, "the system is hard", "change takes time", "I have to make compromises to make progress."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

That whole Bernie debacle (Corbyn debacle for British) should have shown everyone that the bourgoisie and the "powers that be" are never going to allow the people to choose who they want.