this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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You can choose your own moral logic, but for me I don't think this argument holds much value.
For one, it takes it as a given that some of that suffering will happen regardless and we are powerless to do anything about it. We're not. There is another choice, you're just not willing to accept it as valid.
By supporting the system which causes this suffering, you are enabling the suffering. Period. You are saying "We will not oppose you doing these things as long as you're not doing some other things." Except of course even those other things are on the table because you've already backed yourselves into a position where any amount of evil is acceptable if there is a greater one out there somewhere.
How can you assign and weigh the moral value of the suffering of any given group against any other? Do LGBTQ rights for the imperial core help the people getting bombed in various countries around the world? Does the legal right to an abortion help the people who don't have financial access to get one for lack of healthcare? (Remember, in America, a right is only a right if you can afford to exercise it.) How do you even begin to compare the value of any given policy (or lack of policy) to the harm done by living in a surveillance state?
To me, the harm reduction argument is one that says "We are ok with trading the rights of some people for other people and we believe we have the right to make that decision for those groups." It's horrifyingly easy to hand wave away the suffering of people you don't know. But if you were living in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba... actually it'll be faster if I just link this: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/us-westward-expansion/26024-us-interventions.html
If you were one of the people impacted by US imperialism... would you still make the same choice? Would you still support the US government because a different US government might hurt some US people you don't know?
Because genocide is bad, but genocide plus other human rights violations is worse. Seems like simple logic, to me. Sucks that those are the choices.
So for me, it's "choose Joe Biden," who will be complicit in Gazan genocide, or it's "choose Trump," who will be complicit in Gazan genocide and hurt me, people like me, and people I know. If I vote for "third party person" who has zero chance of winning and Trump wins, I will bear the blame for failing to act in my best interest, and my moral purity won't save anyone. If I vote third party and Biden wins, it will be in spite of me, and I will get to enjoy the benefits of people who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty while also being indebted to them.
And that is not a position in which I wish to find myself.
I'm not saying to vote for a 3rd party. I'm saying that the solution does not involve voting and that the act of participating in such a vote is an active choice to support cruelty.
Voting, to the extent that it does anything, communicates 2 things:
So by voting within such a system, you provide your support for it. You say that you will not otherwise oppose it's actions. Your choice isn't harm some people or harm more people. Your choice is whether or not you will make it easier for the government to harm whoever they're harming. Not only does that government harm people, but it actively works to crush opposition to it. You are supporting the efforts to do that to. You are actively opposing everyone who fights against the system.
More people will suffer every year that the government stays in the hands of capitalists and imperialists. Those people wouldn't be hurt in the world where we actually did something about that. You can't just take them for granted as having already been hurt by something other than your decision to continue participating in the system.
Okay, but what alternative do you propose? I'm not an anarchist, so "just tear it down" isn't an option I'd agree with.
I’m not an anarchist either. (At least I think. Admittedly my understanding of anarchism is a little lacking, but from the gist of it it doesn’t seem very practical.) I’m a communist. The path forward is simple even if it’s very difficult. You band together with people, build power through your capacity to withhold your labor, and be ready to fight back when the capitalists inevitably attack.
Power is about the ability to make people do what you want even when they don’t want it. It’s inevitable derived through the means to reproduce society and force to back it up. Right now capitalists have that means and force and thus can impose their will on others. In that context, voting lacks any basis for power to enforce the will of the voters on the ruling class because the capitalists own things and the workers don’t successfully use their collective productive power to oppose them. It can ONLY turn out this way if your only political action is voting in a capitalist “democracy.” The system isn’t set up to respond to anyone who doesn’t already hold power because if it did, they wouldn’t be in power anymore.
It’s important to have an understanding of the how things work structurally, because if your analysis only begins and ends with the actions and professed ideologies of specific people, you can’t possibly hope to ever break out of the cycle of meager progress followed by regression.
You should read up on anarchism, it's cool. Our tactics largely the same as you ascribe to the communists, but we aim for only bottom up orgs and not top down.
I'm with you on collective action, like unions, but I don't really see how that applies to government. The system works whether one person votes or 1mil, and if zero of the regular non-politicians voted, the politicians still get a vote. If you're talking about collective action to vote for someone different, there's two main problems with that:
We can't all agree on what issues are most important, which is part of why third parties never win.
There's too many bad actors who would use that opportunity as an authoritarian power grab.
I think your idea could work if we had federal ranked choice, but we average people don't "produce" anything that the government can't produce itself. If someone wanted a communist government, they'd have to get communists elected, and to do that, they'd have to sell the idea of Communism to regular people who don't know anything other than late-stage capitalism.
It would have to emerge organically from the ground up, not the top down. I think we're on our way (I'm more of a socialist), but I don't think it will happen in our lifetime, and rushing it will only scare the ignorant.
Either way, I think we've beaten this horse enough. You've been at least respectful, which is more than I can say for a lot of comments. Have a nice day.