turning off voters is the biggest reason why we don't vote imo in this environment and there's nothing you can do about shitty choices that the democrats will give us; but there's things you can do to overcome the other institutional part of it; aka gerrymandering:
setup free voting ride shares with free filling snacks in gerrymandered states that will pick each person up from home; drop them off at their polling station; pick them up from there; and then drop them off at home w/o having to wait for everyone to finish voting. the lines are VERY long and take hours in heavily gerrymandered places like houston texas and people hate voting already; so making them wait or skip dinner to vote is a non-starter.
setup free voting phone number and/or website that will help register you to vote (not just tell you what you need to do) on your behalf and include the option to mail you a pre-filled envelope and stamp if paper registration is required. advertise it HEAVILY on all forms of media everywhere and make it clear it's not from the government.
then, assign a case worker to every client to ensure that the registration was completed and followup on the problems that gerrymandered places usually create to suppress votes. also get lawyers or people familiar with election laws to file inquiries on each voter's behalf each time a gerrymandered place manages to find a reason to disqualify a voter or an employer refuses to let them off to vote and use that case worker to manage it.
expect it to fail the first few times because people hate talking about politics so they won't listen for the first few cycles.
It's good to see that the propaganda accounts have learned the Fox News trick of having one person innocently ask a question so a bunch of other people can rush in and provide the answer (which is turning out to be, big shocker, that Biden is bad and we shouldn't vote for him.) As Fox discovered, it seems a lot more organic that way instead of just having someone stand in front of the camera and say over and over "DON'T VOTE FOR BIDEN."
I am still waiting for them to learn to make accounts that are supporting Biden but doing a terrible job of it -- sort of a Lemmy version of Alan Colmes -- like "I'm glad the stock market and GDP are going up so much under Biden, as a rich person I think he's doing great with the economy and also he's sticking it to the Palestinians which I obviously support."
I've seen a little sporadic trickle of accounts with very bad semiconservative opinions and then also supporting certain Democrats, but they seem pretty chaotic and probably like authentic homegrown trolls. I think the real fake-Biden-supporting propaganda potential has yet to be unlocked. I do support this new development in innocent questions, though; it seems like it's got some potential.
You know what? I actually think the answers are almost all pretty solidly productive stuff. Like taking at face value the question and saying "hey here's how to help the Democrats win since you asked."
That was not what I expected. I am -- for real -- pretty surprised. I think I have well founded reasons for being suspicious of why you would have posted the actual "just asking questions" original post, but the answers (even the discussion from people being real critical of Biden) is fine. Has the Lemmy consensus, even on lemmy.ml, shifted that far away from "let's not vote for Biden what's the worst that could happen"?
I didn’t say everyone; I certainly don’t think that. When you’re backing Cornel West and saying you’re super concerned that the Democrats might lose the election and then making up false things about the Democrats and uninterested when you get called out on the false things and keep repeating them, though, I don’t think it takes some kind of crazy X-Files type of leap of logic to say hey everybody I think this guy’s not 100% on the level.
Convince Biden to drop out of the race about a week before the Democratic National Convention, citing health reasons, and name a millennial candidate who grew up on a farm with wind turbines and solar panels, before enlisting for 2+ terms, and moving to a middle-class area of a blue state after separating. Turn the convention into a media frenzy, energizing the Democratic base.
Undercuts Trump among rural Americans and veterans. Reverses all of Trump's old and senile attacks against Biden, as he suddenly becomes the geriatric candidate. Keeps all of Biden's supporters, while stepping away from the "genocide" criticism.
Basically, if Biden backs out a week before the convention and names someone in their 40's, they can run on a platform of "Ok, boomer" and reach 270.
Call your democratic politicians (if you have any) Governor/Senators/House Rep and advocate for pressure for Biden to step down gracefully from the ticket... then prepare to vote for Biden in November because that's a hell of a longshot.
If you're talking to people on the fence about voting or not focus more on Biden's policy achievements instead of Trump being a boogie man. Anyone liberal who is considering sitting out this election has already internally decided that Trump is an acceptable outcome for trying to change the two party system or to avoid dirtying their hands voting for Biden to continue genocide - pushing against people's fervently held beliefs is a waste of energy... the media really hasn't put much attention on things that Biden has accomplished so talking those things up won't make people defensive - you never want to directly challenge someone's fervently held beliefs because it is extremely difficult to shift those.
All I'm saying is capital-H History will know who collaborated by whose names are on the ballots. And goddess willing, if I get to survive this? I will sell y'all asses out to the historians if I'm asked.
"Yessir, those anglos were perfectly fine with letting their personally-armed and trained proxy force massacre as many brown foreigners as possible if it meant they got to keep their comfort"; I'm already practicing my Yeonmi Park routine. And I won't even have to lie; imagine that.
I'm reading this and having flashbacks to me campaigning for Hillary in 2016 and agreeing with people on doorsteps: yeah she's not great but she's much better than the alternative.
Roughly speaking. Supposing we see ourselves as a democracy, it comes off as weird anyone would "plot" a candidate's loss. In such a system, the only thing we can do is gain popular opinion. Unless we're implying we don't actually see things that way.
I know I've been asking myself if I want to stick around to see what happens, but I dunno if I have the courage to turn the gun on myself. I'd drink myself to death, if I had any booze around.
Don't have a genocidal sundowning segregationist nominated without a rank-and-file voting process with multiple candidates. Or accept that you are not really in charge of any of this when it comes to The Democratic Party and therefore you should place your political focus on ways to build and wield power that do not depend on it.
As has consistently been the case for people in our position, our power comes from our ability to organize and take collective action and to develop the question you asked even further and for the conditions in our own countries. This in contrast to what our rulers tell us gives us power (in reality, they give us instructions on how to maintain their power), which is usually some kind of institutional cooption, like joining an NGO or nagging people to vote for their oppressors or doing some slight participation in a milquetoast political party.
Increasing our organization and choosing good actions to take is not an easy process, though it is often surprisingly simple to describe. To be more organized we have to meet with one another, we must gain the skills to convince others to join up with us, to compile the information needed to contact interested parties, to strategically work in coalition with other organizations, to train each other regularly in the core tasks or running any organization. To choose the right actions to take, we must read political theory and history, teach this to each other, and understand how it applies (or does not) to our current situations. The political theory that is the most useful is that which is usually not taught, not even to criticize, but is glossed over or told stories about - it's the political theory of the left and a fearless critical reading of history.
Because our institutions educationally neglect us so severely, particularly when it comes to the tools for our own liberation, it can take a while before you might feel like you are confident or ready to go. That is okay and normal. There's nothing wrong with taking some time to read or to simply try things out a little first.
So I would recommend two things.
The first is to begin reading the political theory of the left and history. There may already be great authors and movements where you live, or there may have been some in the past. They can help you get an idea for who our enemy is (the ruling class) and what different movements have attempted (successfully and not) in the past. Try just one book at first. I often recommend that people start with Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti, as it is a good primer in what we all need to unlearn, or at least take a skeptical lens to, when it comes to the mass media telling of history and politics vs. what actually happened. The value of reading is that it will help you and everyone you talk to choose good actions to take collectively. Those who do not understand the nature of the system we must fight will choose the wrong actions and may even hurt our interests. So education is not just a good thing in itself, it is a tool of political organization.
The second is to get involved with an organization that does mass left politics. There are certain kinds of organizations I would recommend avoiding and I'll explain more if you ask about it. But most organizations that take a proper ground-up approach and are not an NGO will probably be a useful experience for you and your ability to politically organize. It will likely be useful even if you eventually leave that group for another!
Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.
I've been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don't have the foundation and context(didn't understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.
Are there any books that you'd recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?
Could I ask a related question:
In my place I'm seeing communal polarisation increasing. Or it is becoming more evident. How would one oppose that in a populace where religion and caste hold good sway, without the opposition giving it more power accidently?
I've seen leftist n leftish organisations being affected by this.
Mostly in the recommended reading order, but he listed some notes on their importance or when they can be skipped, etc. with many of the sources, particularly at the start of the list.
This should take you up through where you were at State and Revolution and where to go next. I have to say that the recommendation others have given for Black Shirts and Reds is also a very good place to start for the reasons they gave.
Almost all of these can be found on the internet archive, Anna's Archive, or you can ask around on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml for free digital copies. While some people prefer physical books, there shouldn't be any need to pay for these unless you want to.
Thank you for being interested and wanting to learn more! We can only liberate ourselves with more people like yourself.
Which books other than the one that you mentioned(thanks for that), would you recommend? Introductory ones that are modern/contemporary, if possible.
There are too many options, is the main challenge. I would usually want to suggest something that builds on your interests or addresses some topic you're really interested in, in particular.
I think one good angle to begin with is media criticism. It builds a very useful ongoing skill and also teaches many important facts and lessons about who controls us and how. It's simultaneously fascinating, upsetting, horrific, and banal. Blackshirts & Reds touches on it. Parenti also wrote Inventing Reality, which in my opinion is a book that is similar to but slightly better than Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky (which I also recommend). There is also FAIR.org, a website which focuses almost exclusively on media criticism, and the podcast Citations Needed that has a number of episodes dedicated to media criticism and current events.
There are two modern texts by the same author that I think are also very useful, though they are also (recent) historical critiques. I would recommend them if you are interested in some valuable but possibly upsetting historical explorations of what does not work, but is close to working. The books are The Jakarta Method and If We Burn by Vincent Bevins. The first will give a strong sense for just how far our oppressors will go and what we must think about if we want to win. The second is about challenges to organize, mostly but not always in rich Western countries.
Critiquing geopolitics can also be useful. There are too many books that come to mind on this topic. A perennial favorite is Michael Hudson's Super imperialism, which gives a nice argument for the coercive power of the US dollar and global debt structures. This is a useful topic to get a handle on because it's the very first and best tool chosen to crush any fights for the common person. Not even radical fights. Just simple things like winning an election and then nationalizing an industry so that you can feed your people rather than let foreign companies of your former colonizers extract and own all your stuff. Any fight to improve conditions in a country that has been targeted for extraction will have to fight these same groups and their complex of actors, including financial instruments, NGOs, propaganda blitzes, etc.
If you prefer to build from foundations there is really no substitute for reading seminal theories, though they won't be modern. Unfortunately, we are fighting the same fundamental system that people were fighting 150 years ago, though we are now the beneficiaries of seeing those experiments and learning from them. As foundational works I would recommend reading Marx and reading Emma Goldman, which will help lay foundations for understanding critiques of capitalism from both a Marxist and anarchist perspective. Marx's main work, Capital, is very difficult to read due to the way in which he methodologically laid out concepts, so I usually recommend that people read Heinrich's summary and then Michael Roberts' commentaries. Those two disagree with each other about a few things so you'll get a nice balance. For Goldman I recommend reading Anarchism and Other Essays. Once you have a foundation in Marxism I recommend reading Lenin, as his theoretical and organizational developments were key to the very first sustained anti-capitalist revolution on the planet. In addition, his theories on imperialism are incredibly relevant even today, as imperialism remains the primary tool of our oppressors.
I've been recommended State & rev and I have read it, but it seems that eventhough I get the idea, I don't have the foundation and context(didn't understand who all the people mentioned in it are) to fully understand it. Maybe I need to reread it.
That book will be very hard to understand without having some contextual knowledge of Marxism and of some of the arguments that lefties were having at the time. It's a theoretical work by Lenin where he lays out his conception of how socialists should treat the state (before, during, and after a hypothetical revolution) as well as how to specifically position a national anti-capitalist movement against cooption into reformism via liberal democratic institutions, particularly in the context of Tsarist Russia (while commenting on Germany as well, where most people that weren't like-minded with Lenin thought revolution would first occur). It's a very interesting book with many great quotes and theses but I would not start with it if the references aren't making a lot of sense.
Are there any books that you'd recommend about organising and the associated skills/strategy needed for it?
For the skills I personally don't think there are any particularly good books about it that are both modern and in English (there may be non-English books that are good but I haven't read!). The core skills are best acquired through practice and in finding opportunities to learn from experienced organizers. They will have books that they like, but imo it's a good idea to be skeptical of them. This is because most books on organizing are by people who are not particularly successful or who have succeeded in contexts that are actually fairly different from our own most of the time. For example, there are many skills in union organizing that are valuable for left organizing in general (many of them came from lefties in the first place). Those are great to learn. But if you go to the books about union organizing they tend to be pretty crap, in my experience, as they teach a formulaic approach and the authors are often just... not actually very good at it. Or they teach an approach that works great for organizing a factory when anti-capitalist sentiment is already high and it's the 1920s. When you go to apply their approaches to lefty organizing you'll end up in jail or something.
Anyways I recommend learning this from an organization. Find one that takes the skills of organizing seriously and has strategy and planning meetings rather than debate clubs. They will be the ones to learn in.
In my place I'm seeing communal polarisation increasing. Or it is becoming more evident. How would one oppose that in a populace where religion and caste hold good sway, without the opposition giving it more power accidently?
That is a very difficult question to answer! You may already know better than I do, being embedded in your local context. But I can suggest some things to consider.
The first is that religion is not a simple good or bad thing when it comes to organizing. It is another consciousness that can compete with or work with a liberation project. It will depend on its structure, how it exerts powers and who it antagonizes vs. helps. There are two big negative forms of political religiosity that are dangerous to liberation. The first is the obvious reactionary conflation of religion with tradition and factionalization, where it is used as a way to create a societal rift and oppression on the basis of religion. This is largely a distraction from the material basis of oppression, but is it very effective and harmful. The second is when religion is used to "check out" of struggle. For example, I know a local religious leader that tells people that it's okay that so many children are killed by Israelis in Palestine because they are martyred in heaven, the only thing that really matters. While this soothes some of the pain, it can also lead to a form of material apathy and turning away from action. With that said, there are also things like liberation theology and working with religious groups towards liberatory ends. It's something that has to be navigated on a case-by-case basis. It is not wrong to, for example, adopt the position that X group is copptonf Y religion and that this should be rejected, even if you do not personally subscribe to religion Y in the first place. You will be more powerful if you (as in, any organization you may be in) find a group that focuses on religion Y from an angle that is compatible with yours and for you to keep each other safe and strong.
Regarding caste, does this mean you are in South Asia or otherwise interacting with th concept of caste as derived from it? This is also a very challenging thing to consider and there are very good points to be made for addressing caste first vs. class first and how they overlap and are different. If you are in India, I would focus on how you might oppose Hindutva from an angle that is caste-critical and whether there are people in your area that are interested in opposing both. People who have been assigned a lower caste will be more likely to see the injustice and be able to act in their own favor and build momentum, though you can also find and make good use of "caste traitors".
Anyways your question is really about communal polarization. This is not something you can simply prevent as its own quantity. What you can do is build towards the better factions within that community and push your own projects. Our enemies create this polarization, they create and maintain fascists and the false consciousnesses that divide us against ourselves. We can't create unity that centers those false consciousness, is what I'll suggest. Class consciousness is at least a correct consciousness that opposes this division and if you include the additional valid liberation struggles you'll be able to build from firm ground.
I should say that this is not the kind of thing anyone can do alone. All of this would only be realistic to discuss as part of an organization to which you would be contributing your efforts and knowledge. So my real advice is to see if you can identify an anti-capitalist group in your community that seems at least 70% good and see if you can join it. And please do so as safely and securely as possible (in-person communication is best, do not use Whatsapp or Facebook etc).
I've seen leftist n leftish organisations being affected by this.
Lefty orgs are basically always in some form of drama or crisis, so this isn't necessarily an odd thing, haha. I can't give a useful opinion without knowing more about how they've been affected, though.
To add to the extensive information you've already been given, I would highly recommend the Anarchist FAQ, which is all good, but specifically section J breaks down the "what can we do about it" part.
This is the only correct answer. The settler empire cannot and will never do right, neither by the subjects-of-empire they still subject to fascism, to tenement housing because anglo realty companies bought up everything else to stranglehold rent prices, to carceral slavery in moldering prisons with food that'd give you COVID before it nourished you, to murder in our beds at the hands of SWAT teams; nor by the rest of the world that they routinely violate, pillage, and commit genocide upon. Death to the empire, worse to those who bear its water.
"I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done." -- John Brown, December 2, 1859