vote or don’t vote
You should really vote.
If you believe politicians are on your side, you’re picking your champion.
If you believe politicians are against you, you’re picking your opponent.
Either way, the person sitting in the chair matters.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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agreed. but also consider, which names appear on the ballot at all is largely the result of actions outside the election cycle (publicity events, fundraisers, grassroots door to door organizing, messaging, courting groups for endorsements).
in other words, voting is necessary but not sufficient.
not recognizing this is why so many movements lose momentum and fail to get their ideas in front of voters.
The way I like to put it is that voting is (one option for) the victory lap. It's necessary, but will mostly take care of itself if you were successful in your other, vastly more important work. The desperate get out the vote efforts we see today are only like that because they're the damage control leftists/progressives do after they fail in said vastly more important work (mostly by not showing up).
in other words, voting is necessary but not sufficient in changing things.
It’s funny, I was about to reply to another comment with “it’s insufficient, but it is not irrelevant.”
The opponent is not picked at the ballot box, but via the class structure. If you are a worker, your opponent is inherently the owning capitalist class who exploits your labor. Turns out, they are also the ones who unilaterally choose most "elected" officials and policy, which means politicians, at most, are middle managers for your opponent, the capitalist class. Choosing them is irrelevant because they have a continuity of agenda irregardless of who they are, they only get into the position because they are hired by the ruling class to do a particular job. Any of the outlier candidates who might sneak into a post here and there where they aren't directly controlled by capitalists, spend careers trying to fight small symptoms of the system and never make any ground.
This is also why the liberal focus on specific shitheels in politics (Trump, Vance, etc) is ultimately pointless: if your primary goal is to remove the individuals from power, they will simply be replaced by other ghouls with identical politics while your movement disintegrates because you accomplished your goal, achieving nothing.
You have to change the underlying material structure of your society in order to facilitate meaningful change.
Only the very dumbest calves choose their own butcher, especially if the only choices are neoliberal and or fascistic.
Direct action is one if not the most important ways to enact change. But I don't know where this idea that voting doesn't matter came from. Theres more than 1 way to skin a cat. Look around you. Look at this shit show of change happening in the US. That is the result of a bloc of voters who went to the polls in November. Voting does have consequences and can cause change... for better or worse.
I mean the problem with liberals is not that they focus on reforms, but that they don't follow through on those reforms; if they did they'd be some variant of social democrats. The real problem is how they, like conservatives, are worshippers of capital who think society should be subservient to the whims of the ultra-rich—just, you know, with a few gentlemen's agreements baked in.
The so-called "social democrats" in Germany have aa neoliberal program, just like the rest of the party landscape in Germany. I can't imagine it being any different in the rest of Europe.
That's true, but only because the German SDP relatively recently (in the 2000s if I understood the Wikipedia article right) adopted neoliberalism as opposed to its historical platform of Keynesian social democracy. For most of their history they were very much non-liberal social democrats.