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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • None of that takes anything away from my original point that participating more can make things less bad. I never even said that violent action was distinct from participation, just that it’s not the easiest form of participation to convince people to do, and that attempting a revolution (which is a huge step up from bombing a few factories and assassinating a few CEOs) won’t go well if it’s not got broad popular support or police and military backing. I’ve had enough arguments with tankies who insisted that it was easy to overthrow a capitalist state with twelve guys who believed hard enough in communism to magically generate an army, and there was no point in any other form of participation, that the thread looked to me like it might be about to summon the never vote, just wait for a revolutionary communist army to form people.


  • I think you’ve misunderstood a lot of my comment.

    The US’ democracy is advertised as giving the population what they want, but it’s designed so that it doesn’t give the population what they want unless everyone votes and does so in their best interests, and it’s also designed so that lots of people don’t vote and if they do, they vote against their interests. That way, there’s the illusion of giving people what they want so they don’t revolt, but powerful people have their interests prioritised.

    Because the system has to have an illusion of working in normal people’s interests, it’s got a failure mode where it starts approximating working in people’s interests when more people vote and more people engage enough to know which options on the ballot are closest to being in their interests.

    I’m not saying that magically getting everyone to know who they should vote for and then show up to the polls is feasible, just that refusing to participate because the system’s ‘broken’ is what the system wants and how it makes sure it keeps doing the things it does.


  • When one of the flaws is that it’s designed to only function as advertised if there’s full participation, participating harder can make things less bad, and participating less can make things worse.

    Either way, it’s much easier to convince people to go out and vote than it is to convince them to take up arms in a revolution, kill their opponents, and risk being killed or imprisoned as a consequence. If your revolutionary faction can’t gather enough people to win an election, then it doesn’t have enough support to win a civil war without getting the police and military on its side, and that’s not going to happen in the US.