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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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Late Stage Capitalism
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By electing the same people that got us into this mess?
You didn't answer the question. What's the no death camp option?
You have to create it, it wont be handed to you on a silver platter. You can start by not kissing the dems arses and yelling at them to do better or fold up shop. While showing the republicans the back of your hand too, obviously. They are playing you and using your vote like its a foregone conclusion, and you are letting them. Why not stand up for yourself? Or do you have any morals at all? American selfishness is another issue and it disguises itself as learned helplessness.
And how does not voting help that?
What is it with liberals when someone says you don't have to support the oligarchy they translate that to don't vote
Your post says not to vote for the lesser evil. Voting for the greater evil would be stupid. Are you advocating for voting third party then? What is your actual suggestion?
Obvious troll is obvious. Your whole post is about not voting.
Also you're probably more of liberal than me little guy.
'You are more liberal than me.'
You think a communist running a communist community is more liberal than you?
Do you even hear yourself?
I'm currently waiting to stand trial for breaking into an Israeli owned arms factory.
I lead a campaign to ban supermarkets from throwing away edible food instead of giving it the poor and hungry.
I volunteer and communist community soup kitchen for the homeless.
I organised the workers at my company into forming a union that has repeatedly won better deals for the workers across the industry.
I help maintain a free community vegetable garden and teach people how to be more self sufficient.
And yes, I help run my local communist community as part of all that, including teaching workshops on various subjects, maintaining the community library specialising in political theory books and teaching the best way to reduce harm in a capitalist society.
I advocate for people to be realistic and vote for what will lead to the best outcome, because I don't put my own self righteousness and moral superiority complex over the actual reality of people's lives.
You on the other hand will gladly give the actual fascists power if it means you get to act like your hands are clean. And you make arguments that are indistinguishable from those of radical free market capitalists.
Yes, you are much, much more of a liberal than me. You like to LARP as a communist because it makes you feel good, rather than working to advance the actual goals of communism. I know youre too full of yourself to accept that. But if you're even 1/10 the communist you like present yourself as, you would take this critism on board and actually evaluate if your actions serve the underlying purpose of making the world a better place to live for the exploited and impressed masses. But we both know you won't.
This is awesome. You're doing great work.
In your reading, what have you found Marxist political theorists posing as possible relationships with electorialism?
It's pretty split, plenty of authors are diehard revolutionists, others are reforms, but even among the reformists plenty think you should always vote for for socialist parties as a way to organise socialist groups.
But even among those authors, including Marx himself they acknowledge that it can be useful tool for achieving goals like universal sufferage and working class power. But with emphasis on it not being a replacement for actual organisation and struggle.
But personally I think it's worth considering the different political landscape at the time these authors were writing, with global communism on the rise, several countries becoming socialist and the fairly widespread popularity of socialist parties in the west. They were also pretty exclusively taking about implement socialism as the end all be all goal, and not considering the meantime.
So given that there is no real socialist party in the US and there is no real possibility of a revolution any time in the near future, it becomes better to try and lay the groundwork for the future, educate and organise. So it's better to use the power of your vote to vote against the party that is anti-educstion, anti-arts and that banned AntiFa as an organisation.
Come on, Tom. You know the answer. You're just not willing to say it.
What most of them said is to vote for the socialist parties over and over and over again, so long as there is a socialist party. But when there isn't? The only purpose of elections in a bourgeois democracy without a socialist movement is to produce the evidence required to convince people that voting doesn't work. The best socialist propaganda is getting a Democrat elected and then watch how they fuck everything up the same way the Republicans do and use propaganda to convince the masses that voting will not change anything. That's what they said about elections in bourgeois democracies and you know it.
And that's what's happening here. So many people have this false belief that the Democrats are better than the Republicans and that somehow voting for them will make things better. And it won't. And all the evidence is right there, bit the entire political apparatus is aligned to ensure people believe this lie. The job of the agitator is to break this lie down, shake up the beliefs of the masses, and demonstrate that voting in Biden, Harris, Obama, Clinton, and all the rest produced the exact same results and created the conditions for what is happening now.
Further, the Soviet theorists went after the he sheepdogs of the DemSocs in Western Europe and said that the DemSocs were actually collaborationists with the fascists and they shouldn't ever be voted for and should in fact be abandoned for their duplicitous position.
They are. 1.6 million people had healthcare stripped from them by Trump.
Several states now will arrest women for having a miscarriage because of Trumps corrupt supreme court and republican stage legislature.
Inflation has increased massively forcing even more poor Americans into poverty.
Thousands of Iraqis are dead because of Trumps war, and Lebanon is currently being invaded because of Trumps support for Netanyahu.
And you will probably view this as a good thing, but plenty of Ukrainians are dead because of Trumps cutting military aid and trying to force Ukraine to make concession to Russia.
Americans have had billions stolen from them by Trump giving tax breaks and charging them pointless tariffs.
Trump also denied disaster aid to blue states after fires and floods, negatively effecting many Americans.
And he has turned ICE into his private police force.
To claim there is no difference just show you are willfully ignoring reality to hold an obviously flawed position. And quite frankly is insulting to the people the republicans have harmed. But again you don't give a single shit about them, because they're not real to you. They are just hypotheticals you use as pieces to push your own self serving moral superiority complex.
Because the economy is dying and Obama setup a system with a switch that said "flip this to remove millions of people from healthcare"
Because RBG refused to retire and because the Democrats literally gave up, refused to remove the filibuster, then demonstrated that they were capable and willing to remove the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling, but not to "save America", clearly indicating that they could have stopped it but chose not to.
Because the American economic empire is in free fall and has been for over a decade.
Bush 2 planned 7 wars after Afghanistan. Obama engaged 4 of them, one of them, Libya, was a total romp. Biden engaged 3 of them. Trump's war is not Trump's war. They are the wars of the US empire, which have been part of US policy for 99% of its existence. Democrats have committed genocide. Republicans have committed genocide. Democrats have advanced civil rights. Republicans have advanced civil rights.
Trump was the first president to approve sending arms to Ukraine. Obama refused because he thought it would provoke Russia.
Corporate profits are always higher under Democrats.
Granted.
Obama restructured ICE, CBP, and BORTAC allowing them to be deployed in US cities. Obama appointed Tom Homan. Obama and Homan deported 3m people. Trump has only managed to deport 1.5m so far. Oh, and Tom Homan was Trump's deportation czar too. In both terms.
So, let's talk about this because I think I have a clearer picture of reality than you. I think Obama deporting 3m people is pretty bad. And I think that you pretending that the Democrats are better than Republicans on immigration is insulting to the 3m people Obama deported (5M if you count all the repatriations at the border). The Biden administration saw an uptick of the use of solitary confinement in border concentration camps. I think that's pretty bad and I think you pretending that the Ds are better than the Rs is insulting to the people who were tortured. I think the people the Rs harm are hypothetical to you, because you don't examine how the people that the Rs harm are the same people the Ds harm. It's like that AOC meme where she only cries in front of concentration camps when Trump is in office. You ignore the harm the Ds do, even when its greater, because it serves your moral superiority complex. You want to believe that voting for Ds and helping them get elected is a good thing and is harm reduction. It would pain you to think that what you actually did helped the Ds create more harm in the world while maintaining their narrative of legitimacy and morality. It sucks to realize that as racist as Trump is, Bill and Hillary lived in the Arkansas Governor's Mansion and had black house slaves and didn't think they should do anything about prison slavery or about racialized mass incarceration. In fact, they were part of the triangulation that the Ds did to target black people in order to get more votes in swing states.
I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here. I'm trying to demolish yours.
Insert Sure Jan meme here
That's one of the major problems, Democrats claim to support the no death camp issue, but they want someone else to do all the work so they can come in afterwards, jump on our bandwagon as if they supported it the whole time
It would be the option for expressing power outside of voting....
And how has that gone for you? How many concentration camps has it stopped?
I mean it's not going well, but I having trouble thinking of a time where a country voted its way out of having concentration camps either.
Britain ended slavery and the transatlantic slave trade through voting.
Is that really what happened though? Domestic political pressure from the electorate, rather than economic pressure from the merchant class, and geopolitical opportunism?
Yes, the abolition of slavery came about from ideological abolitionists like theAnti-Slavery society. And the PM that oversaw it, the Earl Grey was a diehard Abolitionist. He also famously championed the Reform act that enfranchised hundreds of thousands of Brits and removed the defacto ability for companies to openly buy seats in Parliament.
"Several factors led to the Act’s passage. Britain’s economy was in flux at the time, and, as a new system of international commerce emerged, its slaveholding Caribbean colonies—which were largely focused on sugar production—could no longer compete with larger plantation economies such as those of Cuba and Brazil. Merchants began to demand an end to the monopolies on the British market held by the Caribbean colonies and pushed instead for free trade. The persistent struggles of enslaved Africans and a growing fear of slave uprisings among plantation owners were another major factor."
Are you making the argument that decades of political pressure from multiple slavery Abolitionist groups as well as the prime minister being vehemently against slavery had nothing to do with it?
No, I'm making the argument that those factors were secondary to the real driving causes which were economic.
Well that's certainly a take
You know what stops pipelines? Physical altercations. You know what stops cop cities? Physical altercations. Voting has only ever increased the military, increased the police, and increased the prisons. Voting one way or the other literally has no impact. The only way to stop this stuff is to fight.
Like the Keystone XL pipeline that was delayed by Obama, then Trump tried to force it through and then was finally stopped when Biden signed an executive order revoking their permit?
Which cities are no longer "cop cities" (whatever that means) because of physical altercstions?
Voting passed civil rights, voting ended gay criminalisation, voting passed labour laws, healthcare reform and women's rights.
And when it goes the other way voting gets us war in Iran, gets criminalised abortions, legalised transphobia, qualified immunity for cops, "clean coal", legalised pedophilia, people executed by ice, and hundred of thousands of people deported.
There is literally no argument for fighting for your rights that excludes voting as well.
The Keystone XL pipeline was delayed by Obama in response to the physical altercations that were happening to prevent it. He didn't do that because we voted for him, he did it because we were willing to fight. More to the point, though, the Ds didn't actually come up with a way to stop it from happening. They delayed it using the office of the president, which immediately created the opportunity for Trump. Solving this with presidential action is exactly the sort of performative bullshit the Ds are great at. While Obama blocked the permit for the Keystone XL, he also drove the single largest expansion of fossil fuel production the US has ever seen under a single president.
Because it was never about voting him in to protect the environment. It was about putting your body on the line and fighting with riot police.
The fact that you don't know what a cop city is makes you woefully under equipped for this part of the conversation m. Go do some reading. Cop cities have strong bi-partisan support and the only thing stopping them is protestors physically disrupting construction sites.
Only because there were riots and radical disobedience. I mean, think about women's suffrage. The women couldn't vote their way to suffrage, definitionally. They got it by making it impossible to ignore them. When all they did was lobby, they got nowhere for decades. They had to shut things down and make life very hard for everyone else to get what they wanted. They literally couldn't fucking vote, how could this be an example of the power of voting?
The US has been at war for 99% of its existence. Truman, the Democrat, launched the genocidal war in Korea. Johnson, the Democrat, launched the genocidal war in Vietnam. Obama, the Democrat, launched the mass murdering war in Libya (which was planned under Bush 2). Biden sent millions of weapons to Israel and collaborated with them to continue the genocide in Palestine. The war in Iran is this administration's special war, but every single administration is bathed in blood and it goes back to the founding of the country.
Because the Democrats had multiple trifectas over the last 40 years and openly refused to codify Roe into law. And they did so by blaming their own party members as anti-abortion. So the Ds are telling you openly that the reason we don't have abortion protected in law is because the Ds literally can't do it because Ds oppose it. How much clearer do they need to be?
Bruh. The Supreme Court made transphobia illegal, not the Democrats. Transphobia has been a bipartisan legal structure across the US for well over a century.
Qualified immunity is a judicial doctrine, not a party position. Democrats aggressively supported qualified inmunity. It's only recently that Ds shifted their position and it's explicitly because of the riots in 2020, not because people voted for them.
Obama was a huge proponent of clean coal. Are you daft?
I mean, Biden explicitly didn't prosecute the Epstein case, he refused to let the DOJ release the files, he had all the knowledge as did his DOJ and they did nothing.
All the data I have looked at is that cops killing people is independent of party in office. As in, it literally doesn't matter who you vote in, cops will kill people at about the same rate. Yes, the R's use of ICE and DHS in the streets of major cities is absolutely shocking.
But Obama and Biden developed these departments into the tool they are. They expanded data collecting and sharing for these departments. They created the structure required to deploy ICE and BORTAC into American cities. Hell, Homan was Obama's pick to run ICE and was his top deportation official. It's not surprising Trump would continue to rely on him for the same purpose.
Obama still holds the current record for most people deported - 3 million, with an additional 2 million at the border.
I know that the narrative is that Democrats are the exact opposite of the things that are terrible about the Republicans, but it's a false narrative. They both advance the same agendas, and where they differ, the Ds make everything they do easily reversible or ignorable. But worse is that the Ds actively create the tools the Rs use.
So no. Voting doesn't create change. People in the streets creates change.
You're intentionally missing the point here. You say fighting closes pipelines, not voting, but if Trump won in 2020 the pipeline would have gone through, because no amount of fighting would have got him to change his mind, but it did for Biden. So voting does, undeniably, make a difference.
And there's that classic smugness you people live and breathe for.
And as usually instead of just explaining what you mean by this random obscure bit of terminology that no one else uses, you just use it as a chance to jerk yourself off. This is exactly what I mean I say you guys only care about your own moral superiority and not about actually advancing the causes you pretend to believe in.
Like I try and look up what you mean, but the only reference to cop cities is just a training campus for cops in Atlanta.
And because people voted. If the pro civil rights types just said "both sides are the same, so I'm not going to vote for segregation" and didn't vote, then republicans would have won and we wouldnt have got the civil rights act at all.
This is what you guys don't seem to understand. You need both political activism AND voting to make a difference, you can't just rely on one or the other. When you don't vote you effectively taking your hands off the reigns and letting everyone else steer where they want.
If you want politicians to make the changes you want, then you have to actually vote, because the pro Palestine people vote, the anti abortion types vote, the homophobes, transohobes and sexists vote. So politicians can either push policy for those people to win their votes or they can push policy for people like you who don't vote and gain nothing for it.
I'll ignore your self-victimization about your own ignorance and just go after the voting thing.
Again, women's suffrage is the example that shows you're wrong. They literally couldn't vote and still got what they needed because of what you call "activism". Except it was specifically radical activism. They spent decades lobbying politicians and letter writing and protesting acceptably and it go them nowhere. They broke the law, they ended up prison, they went on hunger strikes, they surrounded the white house. They got the ballot. Not by voting. By fighting.
So when we look at the civil rights movement, we see that Nixon was ALSO forced to concede policy positions and abandon his conservative positions. So clearly it's not the case that voting in Ds is the only way. Meanwhile, FDR the democrat refused any structural civil rights concessions and refused to entertain a federal anti-lynching bill and JFK the Democrat also avoided making any major concessions arguing that it would harm the Democrats in the South.
So as we see, the party in charge doesn't fucking matter, what matters is how forcefully you can make your case. This is known as "interest convergence". Until you can make meeting your demands less risky than ignoring your demands, nothing will happen. Republican and Democrat alike work this way. You have to force them.
Again your intentionally missing the point and pushing the false dichotomy that's it's either voting or protesting/fighting.
You can and should do both. And nothing you're arguing is a good point against voting.
It’s like trying to build muscle by studying math. Will studying math help you when you need to track your progress and understand angles and pulleys? Yes. But studying math isn’t going to build muscle. Nothing is stopping me from going to the gym and also studying math, but studying math isn’t actually the thing that will build muscle.
Voting isn’t solving any of our problems. Can it help a little bit with some of them? Maybe. But we need to be honest about what it will solve.
Keystone XL pipeline was canceled because of physical altercation, voting rights and civil rights were passed because of physical altercations. The gay community only won their rights because of physical altercations. What is it with liberals that are terrified of actual protest?
It was cancelled because Biden passed an executive order revoking their permit. If Trump won in 2020 they would have kept their permit and the pipeline would have been built.
You're trying to claim the giant souless billion dollar oil company would decide against making more profit simply because of some minor protests and confrontations with police. You're basically making the same argument free market capitalists do....
Biden canceling the permit was the final step, there was A LOT of activism and fighting well before that happened. And Biden only revoked the permit because SCOTUS killed the project August 2020
And would Trump, who made a big deal about supporting the pipeline in 2016, have cancelled the pipeline if he won in 2020?
He wouldn't have had a choice, SCOTUS killed it during his term. Regardless if he would have revoked the permit or not it couldn't move forward.
don't be petulant.
It isn't there. Vote for whoever you want, but acknowledging that you were not given choices at all is important.
But you are. The thing is systems of governance for hundreds of millions of people, all with different wants, morals and desires across very different circumstances and locales is going to be extremely complex. Mix into that the shitty power dynamics of capitalism and you system with a lot of political inertia that eventually boils down to 2 pretty similar positions at the highest level. And trying to move that political lever at the very furthers end is difficult.
If you want your position given more weight, then you have to act at every level of governance, not just the very top with the presidential election.
That's certainly a theory. But it doesn't really hold up. The reason we have 2 similar positions at the highest level is because they are one position, it's the position the dominant ruling class and it always has been. You think that somehow the desire of native Americans to be free mixed with the desire for black Americans for reparations mixed with poor immigrants to be safe mixed with poor white people to be healthy leads to Palestinian genocide?
Naw. Come on! You can't think that's how this works, can you?
If you only think in the broadest terms, sure, they are both capitalist neoliberal parties. But when you look at it more granularly and through the lense of long term change rather than the idea we could somehow have a communist USA by the next election, then they are very different.
Since we have no real socialist party and we are not anywhere near the critical mass required for a revolution, the best we can is lay groundwork for the future, educate and organise. And when one party is labelling AntiFa as terrorists, attacking education and the arts and disenfranchising left wing and minority voters, the best option is pretty clearly to use your vote to prevent that, rather than not voting or casting a token vote for 3rd parties. As it not only reduces harm in the short term, it makes it easier to achieve long term goals.
And primaries are a thing. Currently the Dems are similar on Palestine because most in the house are pro Israel, but we have already organised to get pro Palestine officials into office, so if we able to get even more, that would pressure the government to take action.
This has happened in other countries for example, Labour in the UK started as stuanchky pro Israel, with Starmer saying Israel had the right to cut off food and water. Then facing a rise in pro Palestine MP both in his own party and from the Greens, as well as activist pressure, he has steadily relented on that position to the point the UK now recognises Palestine as a country. And only hasn't gone further because there's is still a large Zionist contingent also putting their own pressure on government. But if pro Palestine people just didn't vote, they wouldn't have gotten any MPs and there would be no pressure on Labour and no reason for the government to attempt to court those voters.
Again it seems to me you are only viewing things through a very short sighted black and white lense.
Keep going please...Tell me how that would work in the US system of First Past The Post elections.
Or if First Past The Post elections is the problem, tell me how you would get rid of that system.
It would require not using elections to express power
Well first I want you to imagine having a sense of decency, an ability to feel shame, and identify what morality you have, if any. Let me know when you get to that point and we'll talk next steps. Whats worth you acting on? Not someone else, you.
edit: no reply, and theres your answer. You will only act when you are literally lit on fire, and until then you'll sit there and do nothing while flapping your mouth uselessly, same as you centrist lot always do. You are a walking liability to whatever political party will have you.
Sigh...
So you don't actually have a real solution for getting rid of the conservatives and neoliberals in office.
You just want everyone to know that you're too cool to be a Republican or a Democrat. 👍
You don't need to get rid of that system. All you do is need to vote for candidates that do not support the oligarchy. But liberals are not concerned about long-term success, their concern about the short-term win
I mean..yes. Exactly. That's what the primaries are for. Primary out the neoliberals.
The Republicans primary out anyone who isn't hard right enough for them. They vote, then they vote again, then they vote some more.
And now all branches of government are controlled by the hard right. Because they voted. A lot.
Incorrect.
In the 21st century alone, Democratic presidential candidates have accumulated tens of millions more raw votes than their Republican counterparts, heavily bolstered by high-population states like California and New York. For instance, in 2008 and 2020, Democratic candidates won the popular vote by margins of roughly 9.5 million and 7 million votes respectively.
Democratic primaries routinely draw higher raw voter turnout than Republican primaries.
When evaluating the "national house vote" (the cumulative number of votes cast nationwide for all members of the U.S. House of Representatives) the Democratic Party frequently captures a higher raw vote total. High-turnout midterm wave elections, such as the 2006 and 2018 midterms, saw immense raw vote advantages for Democrats.
Local election turnouts are heavily dominated by major metropolitan areas. America’s most populous cities (such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago) feature massive electorates that vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in local municipal races.
So your theory of is not supported by the evidence. Please try to explain why things are the way they are again, but this time include the fact that Democrats have consistently voted more at every single level than Republics for almost 30 years.