If by “not falling in line” you mean “actively sabotaging the working class for selfish reasons” then I suppose you have a point, but I would argue that in class war those organizations which do not support the working class are fair targets.

the will of the proletariat during the 1917 and 1918 elections

By the time the Bolsheviks were disregarding the results of elections, the People’s Soviets were the state power in the former Russian Empire, and they were a hundred times more democratic than the Duma ever was.

amassing personal power and wealth

I’m sorry comrade but the Soviets simply never did this. The benefits enjoyed by even top Party officials paled in comparison to the lavish lifestyles of the former Russian Empire’s aristocracy or those of the ruling class of any of their contemporary capitalist rivals - even fucking Stalin lived in a shared apartment!

Objectively speaking the Soviet Union was one of the most democratic and equal societies on this Earth during the time of its existence, and you can very clearly see in the data how their system equalized wealth (not “perfectly”, just “better than everyone else has ever done it”), and how the destruction of their system undid all of their progress.

Palestinians

Claudia De la Cruz it is.

I won’t deny that people can do multiple things at once, I just don’t agree with the premise that voting matters in the current paradigm.

If you had enough people to do the thing, then you would be able to protect members of the group at a local level while national orgs realign and/or get replaced.

But nobody has a large enough group of people to do the thing. In the absence of a large enough group of people to do the thing, voting is a purely personal decision that will not effect the outcome.

As I’ve said elsewhere, to fix it from within the system itself you would need a bloc of people willing to punish one of the parties for moving right by withholding their votes and their donations. To fix it from without the system is also possible, but would require some “authoritarianism” in the form of people with guns. Anything else is just people flailing around ineffectually and getting mad at others who aren’t flailing in the ineffectual way that they prefer.

Either way you’ve got the same problem: getting a large enough group of people together who are willing to do the thing. Socialists of all stripes have been trying to crack that egg for over a hundred years and the only ones who had any success were the ones that managed to get the peasants on their side because peasants have a certain amount of class consciousness that proles don’t.

If choosing red or blue doesn’t work, and choosing another option also doesn’t work, then what good does feeling self righteous about your decision to pick one over the other do? Unless you’re suggesting that the shitty reality of our situation is that we’re fucked and nothing will work at all no matter what - which is a level of defeatism that I don’t think is very helpful either.

You could put the Sega CD or 32X into this meme and it would still work, the Dreamcast was just the last in a series of flops.

The fact that nobody has done “screen in a controller” since Nintendo toyed around with a handful of Gamecube-GBA games is a crime. It was a cool ass idea that got displaced by internet lobbies before it got off the ground.

edit: yeah I know Wii U too but that’s not what I mean, that’s something else.

If the Dreamcast hadn’t had the misfortune of coming out during the objectively best console generation, it would have done fine - but also, if it hadn’t been the latest in a series of flops (Sega CD, 32x, Saturn), then maybe the Dreamcast’s failure wouldn’t have driven Sega out of the console market. Sega struck gold with the Genesis and they just couldn’t replicate it, RIP to a real one,

Perhaps if both sides were not so awful, people wouldn’t feel compelled to meme about them.

Lemmitors: You don’t understand! I’m not voting for Slightly More Rotting Corpse, I’m voting for the Slightly More Rotting Corpse administration. Yes it’s true that both of them support nuclear warfare along the Mexican border, but Rotting Corpse would be dropping more nukes with higher frequency on the climate refugees so we have to vote for the lesser evil.

To push the Dems left you can either a) reward them for moving left or b) punish them for moving right. Continuing to vote for them year after year as they continually move to the right accomplishes neither of these things.

If every single incentive structure rewards the Democrats for shifting to the right, please tell me how on earth they are under any pressure at all to shift back to the left. The answer is that they’re not, and the people who believe that they’re engaging in the system and pushing it in the right direction are simply fooling themselves as they take part in the system’s unstoppable rightward movement.

We have class war waged against us by the bourgeoisie, and thousands of people are casualties of that war every single day. Expecting to turn the tide against them without getting our hands dirty in turn is useless idealism.

So you wouldn’t accept any system that’s not a direct democracy? Where every single person is involved in every single vote? It’s a coherent position I suppose, but IMO totally impractical and idealistic.

As I said in another comment, this mode of thought is completely defeatist. If you rule out the possibility of a violent uprising and look at how to change our system from within the system itself, the ONLY way to push the country left is for a dedicated bloc of people to refuse to vote for centrist Democrats for multiple elections in a row until the party center aligns with that bloc. That’s the reason why every one of the last few elections has been “the most important election in history” and all the other crap.

but I don’t believe authoritarianism is the best way to go about it.

Humor me for a moment, which of the following do you consider authoritarian?

• asking your boss for better wages
• using the power of a union to force your boss to give your coworkers better wages
• using the power of the state to force all bosses to pay all workers better wages

Our election is going to work like Russia’s does

We already have sham elections, ours just pretends to have two democratic parties instead of one.

Tankies are hypocrites who didn’t understand their self-proclaimed ideologies.

Tankies are very frequently the only people in the room who’ve done the reading. If you believe that so called “authoritarian methods” are antithetical to leftism, then I recommend you read the following pamphlet by Engels.

we can’t fix our current situation in one election.

We can never fix the current situation in one election. Fixing the American system, within the parameters set forth by that system, requires a dedicated voting bloc that lasts multiple elections refusing to vote for the Dems until they shift far enough left to appease that bloc. As long as you are focused on the next election, your prescription for fixing American politics is just as unrealistic as a random Twitter tankie declaring a general strike.