People tell me that because I don’t vote I don’t have a right to complain. I think the opposite: those who vote play the game (legitimise the system) and shouldn’t be salty that their preferred candidate didn’t win; they should say ggwp and vote harder next time.
Just throwing that out there so people don’t feel pressured into becoming voters. “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal” said someone once.
If I could vote in a place where invalid votes were counted as invalid and if most votes came in as invalid it would invalidate the election I’d be crossing out the ballot in every election. Unfortunately in most places invalid votes don’t count (they’re simply a statistic) or they get counted as part of the winning party/candidate’s vote (fuck that).
That said, I like how the DPRK chooses candidates. (Ideally) they’re chosen through discussion and then a Yes/No vote is done to confirm there is an overwhelming consensus. Hence the Western propaganda against DPRK saying they have one candidate on the ballot and the candidate gets over 90% of the vote.
Remember, choice to keep the Soviet Union won the most votes and they dissolved it anyway.
No one asked me if I want to live in a capitalist system, until they do, I have no reason to go out and vote.
I think we should vote for communist candidates if possible as a way to raise class consciousness and protest against the establishment but obviously socialism won’t come through the ballot box.
There are no communist parties that are also revolutionary or who engage in all the activities a Party should. Communist “parties” engage in electoralism and then spout platitudes once they get any kind of media attention.
You seem to have rustled some feathers with your post.
Anyway, don’t let people guilt trip you into voting if you don’t see a worthy candidate. I kept voting on the ‘next best thing’ only to be fucked over again and again and again. I regained my faith in politics only when I joined a party that looked beyond voting and instead wanted to take direct action against things happening around me. There are a million things you could do that are more effective than voting. Maybe you should lok around you and join orgs that actually have an impact, if you haven’t already.
I actually have joined an international solidarity organisation, in addition to the individual activism/direct action I otherwise do.
Lesser evilism and voting against a political party cause they’re “evil” (according to another political party) never made much sense to me.
In the US, I had some hope in voting all of one time in my life. That was with Bernie’s campaign in 2020 and I was pretty lib then still (some beginnings of anti-imperialism, but kind of in that confused place where a lot of people call themselves “leftist”). I then saw one guy made a phone call, a bunch of people dropped out and threw their support behind one godawful candidate that wasn’t Bernie (who wasn’t even that extreme, just mildly reformist) and he folded so easily after that. All that effort so easily punctured for a guy (Bernie) who might be a relatively honest person up to that point, but nevertheless still had incredibly weak reformist politics.
Looking at it from the views I have now, he was compromise upon compromise representing, in an incredibly mild-mannered way, a reformist segment of the virtually invisible “left” in US electoral politics. And they acted like he was absolute doom extremist and undermined him with relative ease.
That made it apparent to me how embedded the capitalist control of the electoral system is. The only parties that are allowed to have any viability pretty much pick out some Rent-A-Politician corporate stooges from a lineup and then make you choose one. If you somehow manage to get a candidate in who is slightly outside of that, they will vilify them and if that fails and an outsider somehow actually gets into office, the stooges will form around them with enormous pressure and assimilate them into the machine of excuses, “the system is hard”, “change takes time”, “I have to make compromises to make progress.”
That whole Bernie debacle (Corbyn debacle for British) should have shown everyone that the bourgoisie and the “powers that be” are never going to allow the people to choose who they want.
Why do you guys spend like 10 years having fruitless conversations with Americans we can walk out. We can leave
I’ve voted for every election I was eligible for but for the upcoming EU elections I’ll probably not vote or vote blank since there’s no left wing Eurosceptic party running in my country
For some reason I still have to vote on a Dutch candidate instead of a Belgian one and I honestly don’t know which one. Maybe I won’t vote either.
Strange, thought you could vote for the country you’re living in if you’re an EU citizen. My mom doesn’t have Dutch nationality but she can still vote in the EU elections for Dutch parties. But maybe it’s a different case
Yes, if you’re an EU citizen who lives in another EU country, you vote for that country’s candidates in the EU election.
What’s the point of voting in EU parliamentary elections anyway?
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The EU parliament is powerless and doesn’t actually have the ability to pass or repeal any laws, that power rests with the EU council that is made up of prime ministers/presidents of EU countries.
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Doing so only legitimises the farce that is the EU. EU is not a country, nation-state or sovereign entity (or rather, shouldn’t be). It’s a colonial power that takes away sovereignty from countries and imposes rules and laws on others.
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