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welp.
(self.trans)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2024
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Given the results of the election, it seems that the accelerationists might have had the right idea.
A burning building doesn't get put out by watching it burn. And the fire can in fact spread to the next building. Things can always get worse because there is no bottom. Things will only get better by making them better.
The accelerationists got what they wanted. And everyone, including them, are worse off for it. We've gone from not utilizing the limited time window, to avert the worst of climate change, to choosing to use that time to pollute as much as possible. We may in fact succeed in reaching 5°C before 2100.
And people are lazy and don't try, so things always get worse until things get bad enough that people get fed up with the things and do something about them.
For the last four years, people have been acting like they don't need to get off their asses and fundamentally change their way of life to address climate change because there was a Democrat in office. Now the Democrats aren't going to save them and they don't have a choice if they want a habitable planet for their grandkids.
Accelerationists suppressing the vote with their rhetoric is part of how we got here. They are the ones who intentionally went out of their way to fail and make other people fail as well. If laziness bothers you, then this should drive you up the wall.
It was not the Democrats who were going to save us. It was we the people who would save our democracy with our votes.
Accelerationists didn't depress the vote, the pro-fracking genocide apologist who tried to appeal to Republicans instead of her own base did.
The Democrats were never going to save us, only we can save us. The lazy people are those who thought voting alone would be sufficient and won't re-engage with politics until the next election.
We knew who the Democrats and Republicans are. The Democrats are neoliberals. The Republicans are fascists. We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves. We elected Biden last cycle. We could have elected Harris this cycle. We failed to do so.
The Democrats were never going to spontaneously become populist this cycle. Harris' campaign was at least progressive leaning before DNC consultants ran into the ground. Our job was to spread the word to vote for Harris and how it would be useful for advancing progressive and socialist causes over time.
Instead accelerations spread the propaganda that Harris and Trump were the same on Israel's genocide and that people needed to protest vote. Not enough people voted this election in part because of that. We failed to use our tool, the Democratic Party, to prevent fascism.
It's not lazy to think voting was sufficient. The only way to win was to get enough votes. That's how democracy works. People spread pro-democracy messages as best we could. We lost the election to fascism. Now we need to organize, because there isn't necessarily going to be a next election. Hopefully there will, but we may need mass protests if we even want a shot at another election.
Also, Trump threatened to arrest top Democrats. It seems like the Democratic Party could be dead by the next presidential election.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and America has never done Democracy. Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.
Electoralism is a trap. Voting won't save us. We have to save us, and we aren't all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.
The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed. Fascists leveraged the flaws in our democracy to take it away. That's why Republican voters had to actually vote to take our democracy away, but of course the capture of our democracy has been happening slowly before that. Hopefully fascist incompetence means this isn't the end for democracy, but we can't count on that.
Since Citizens United v. FEC corporations have had an outsized influence in our elections with unrestricted independent expenditures. But even before that, since Regan we've collectively adopted neoliberalism as a country. We've prioritized markets being free over people being free and all but the rich are worse off because of it. Late-stage capitalism has led us straight to an oligarchy of billionaires pledging fealty to a dictator.
It didn't have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism, changed to worker ownership of corporations, and levied wealth taxes on the rich. The issue was that we failed to get neoliberalism out of the minds of the population. People say something along of the lines of 'socialism doesn't work' and maybe even 'the soviet union collapsed' reflexively when they hear the word socialism.
Part of what we need to do is teach people that neoliberalism is scam and that socialism is the answer to their problems. In the coming years we are going to have a lot evidence that we can show people. But there is no sense in waiting. We can start on that now.
Democracy is the best system we have for inclusive political institutions. If you know a better one that is more inclusive please share it. We of course need to organize between elections, now more than ever. But if you never vote when you get the chance, and we will be lucky if we ever do, all that organization goes to waste.
You're not wrong, but it's irrelevant so long as we live under parties that benefit from this status quo. There's no way to get ranked choice voting without overthrowing the two-party system first. Things will have to get worse before they can get better.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. Are we a democracy or are we flawed? If the system is structured so badly that fascists can claim totalizing power, can you really call the system democratic?
"We" don't get to make that choice. The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.
There has been some progress in this regard. So it is possible to change systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States
These aren't mutually exclusive. Humans are imperfect. The systems we build are imperfect as a result. People have been measuring democracies on a scale from 0 to 10.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?time=2023
The US was made by wealthy land and slave owners. The compromises in the document reflect that. After WWII, McCarthyism did a lot to undermine communism, socialism, and the left in general in the US. It laid the ground work for the neoliberals who would come later to fill the minds of Americans with their ideology. The right in this country has been working to undermine the left for a long time. Blaming everything on democracy really misappropriates blame here. Especially when it's Republicans who have been working to undermine democracy.
Things only get better by making them better. What accelerationism misunderstands is that things haven't got better in the past because bad things happened to people. It's that things have gotten better because people learned from the bad things that happened to them and then used that knowledge to make things better. If we let things get bad and no one learns anything, it won't do any good. We have to educate people. And we can do that without things getting worse.
As it is now we might learn a lot of lessons from the rise of christo-fascism. But we may not be able to act on them. These election results have truly fucked us. Fascists might end up killing us all with fossil fuel emissions. But of course billionaires will survive in their apocalypse bunkers.
Accelerationists have never been right, their argument is self-defeating.
The heart of the accelerationist argument is equating red and blue, claiming the blues' inability to completely undo the damage of the reds is intentional and makes them no better -- that the purpose of a system is what it does.
But by that logic, the purpose of accelerationism is to enable fascist ascent, and that makes them indistinguishable from fascists.
If the purpose of a thing is what it does, then accelerationism isn't for anything. Recognizing that things will inevitably get worse before they can get better accomplishes nothing.
It's likely because of them that this was the outcome. 81M votes for Biden in 2020 and 10K less this year when it really mattered?
If it really mattered to the Democrats, they wouldn't be phoning it in on every issue from climate change to abortion to genocide. The party only has itself to blame for its failure to appeal to voters.