Under this undemocratic system dominated by the two parties of Wall Street, alternative candidates like Claudia and Karina are unjustly excluded from the polls, debates, and most mainstream coverage. But thanks to the tireless work of thousands of volunteers, we’re breaking through the obstacles!
Isn’t voting entirely restricted to electoral delegates? What’s the point in agitating for voting?
Is this a joke?
Mostly.
Is the message not understanding how first-past-the-post voting works?
You think I’m engaging in electoralism under the false notion that anyone elected within it could implement fundamentally revolutionary change? I’d have to be real fucking stupid to believe that.
What I do believe is that the non voting public is not ideologically aligned. Their lack of participation signals nothing to the actors within that system. The media does nothing to cover the thinking of this group or why they exist, and ultimately come to zero material conclusions when they do. The two parties spend zero dollars trying to activate these voters. They mean nothing, they impact nothing, they are invisible.
So why should I cast myself in with this lot? It took me 20min to early vote for an explicitly socialist candidate. A socialist candidate who had Democratic lawyers remove them from ballots in battle ground states. If spending 20min once every 4 years encourages Democrats to waste their time and money, that’s good enough for me.
I don’t have time to contribute to PSL and I already donate when I can. Casting them a vote, is more then nothing.
Don’t assume my participation is coming from a place of idealism.
This is, for better or worse, a reductionist view.
Reductionist how?
Your vote outside of the two-party system is effectively the same as a non-vote. That is the disconnect.
No one is looking at third party votes and seeing anything of substance. It will always look like a misunderstanding of the system.
The reductionism is the belief that vote == vote. It does not, and that means there is an extra step between vote and change. If you want change, which you should, you should also understand the limits of the system in place. To not do so is to allow it to continue on its path.
Edit: purely true only for the US system. Most voting systems have moved beyond this limitation. But we cannot ignore the limitation for ideology.
This is itself a reductionist statement though. Who exactly is “no one”? Surely you are not saying every single person tapped into US politics has a monolithic view of third party voting.
I would argue, in fact, that you are circling around something like a learned helplessness point of view in this regard. First, it is important to acknowledge that we can expect with relative certainty that bourgeois electoralism is not going to change the system on its own because the state has a monopoly on violence and because it is capable of using that violence where necessary to crush opposition, if the opposition does not have a vanguard. With that out of the way, we are talking about something more analogous to an ocean than we are talking about a series of if/else statements in a computer program. It is not binary that third party vote is either meaningful change or utterly useless. It is not even binary that bourgeois elections are either useless to participate in or are going to bring about revolution as soon as you knock on enough doors. There are gradations of how these things are interpreted by the public and what impact they can have. And what I mean by learned helplessness is that there’s a certain self-fulfilling prophecy if you take the belief too far. “Third party voting has no impact, therefore we won’t do it; which means no one is voting third party, which of course means it has no impact.”
The imperialists are not omniscient with infinite resources and knocking on their doors with domestic efforts that, even if only the bare minimum impact, give them a bit of a headache, is still better than nothing. We can compare it to an individual if that makes it clearer. If I’m trying to focus on driver and I have a screaming child in one ear and music blasting in another, while rain is pouring down, the chances are much higher I’m going to get in an accident. I can only pay attention to so much.
Now if you can demonstrate that things such as this are actually having zero impact (hard to believe), that they are not helping raise consciousness at all, that they are not helping organize anyone, that they are not giving the imperialists and local capitalists a headache at all, then sure, it might actually be a waste of effort. But like it or not, electoralism seems to be one of the few consistent vehicles for rallying and organizing people in the US, perhaps because of how many people view it as a legitimate and essential part of the system. That doesn’t mean you have to stop at elections. It just means that using it as a vehicle might help. And third parties appear to be a means of reaching out to people who are disenfranchised with the status quo, who still believe enough in the current electoralism to follow the political spectacle, but are also burned enough by the two party system to listen to the message of an alternative and build ties with them. That’s an opportunity for an in, right there. Something that isn’t so easy with people who are democrat or republican loyalists.
The Democrats spend money slandering 3rd parties and attempting to remove them from ballots. That’s a material impact on the election, even if a small one, it proves that they are threatened by them.
Care to elaborate?
Did I say I vote for change? I said its about sending a message. Change doesn’t happen at a ballot box in the capitalist system. A Maoist will tell you change flows from the barrel of a gun. Marxist-Leninists will tell you change comes from rising class consciousness. Neither would tell you it comes from voting.
The media will have to ask, where did the votes go? They will want to mine that question for content. Jill Stine, she’s a known quantity. “Who is Claudia De La Cruz?”, “Who are the PSL?” are eventually questions they will have to ask. This contradiction only generates more attention to 3rd parties. The more attention they have, the more eyes see them. The more eyes see them, the more people are exposed to alternatives. Which only results in more than zero percent of those eyes pealing away from the two parties.
PSLs goal isn’t electoral victory. Its clear though they understand that the election process, as a whole process, is driven by spectacle, and it will pull you in front of media if you are becoming too much of a threat within that system. This only exposes people to PSL and their movement.
This is an incremental process, a small part of a longer strategy of engagement and activism.