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bluemaga, bluemaga never changes.
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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It's ridiculous that you put voting third party and not voting in the same category. You clearly do not understand the effects of your actions.
No, I do. Not voting and voting third party both work towards eroding the Democratic Party, which is necessary in order for positive change in the us.
Voting third party is incredibly more effective at that because it signals a desire for change rather than just voter apathy
Sure. Not voting for democrats also signals apathy. Voting is miniscule, the real part lies elsewhere.
In what way does voting for a third party candidate signal apathy? It shows you would like a candidate that is not one of the two main parties. Is that not your intention?
What, do you plan on an armed revolution? Seriously?
Yes. So it signals apathy with the current system.
Because the only thing to do apart from voting once every two years is to bomb the local town hall... Why is it you assume it is either vote or immediate mass organised proletarian uprising?
Liberalism. Capitalist realism. Etc., etc. such ideas.
I must admit I still dont really understand what capitalist realism is
As the wikipedia page for Fishers book says:
Also I was reminded of these ReadFanon comments, thought I'm not sure they're directly related to this.
Thanks!
What about them?
That's not what "apathy" means. I hate to pull out the definition but I think you might actually benefit from it:
Voter apathy means you do not care about the subject of voting. If you are trying to achieve something by voting third party, you are by definition not being apathetic. If you care about changing the current system, as you have demonstrated elsewhere in this thread-- if you feel disgust, anger, or motivation of any kind to end the suffering it causes-- and choose to express that by voting third party, you are not apathetic.
On the other hand, if you choose not to vote, it is usually interpreted as apathy by the political apparatus-- you could have made your desire for the political future known and did not care to do so. Hope that makes sense.
Those are usually the two suggestions I hear being discussed. Don't vaguepost, if you have political suggestions you think would be useful, let's hear them!
No. Voter apathy means you are apathetic about the current system of voting, not the general concept of voting. It means that the current system does not appeal to you. Therefore both not voting and voting third party signals your apathy with the way things are.
Right, because when the political establishment talks about people who don't vote, they definitely dont talk about things like "voter outreach" or "appealing to non-voters" 🙄
That says a lot more about you than anything else. That you cant think of any political organising and you think "there is so much more to do" is somehow vague. Theres a wealth of resources of political organising available to you. Join PSL or something.
This is objectively stupid, I'm sorry. It is possible to be apathetic of the current voting system, but you aren't. You care about the outcome, you have an interest and motivation to vote (or not) a certain way. "Apathy with the way things are" would mean you don't care about the way things are, not that you dislike it and would like to change it as you have demonstrated many times. This argument doesn't even matter but it's pissing me off that you're using the word wrong.
Voter outreach is designed to appeal to people who don't care enough to vote, not people who are actively choosing not to vote. They believe nonvoters are apathetic, not protesting.
I am organized, I participate heavily in local political groups that do protests and (ironically) voter outreach. I've spent plenty of time volunteering and doing all that. Did you assume I didn't? What I am asking is whether you have a plan for how a revolution could actually be accomplished. One does not understand what one cannot explain, so go ahead.
You're not sorry, just stick to your insult instead of this affectation of snideness.
I'm not sorry, but it is a completely accurate use of the word and it is a fine descriptor for you, me, third party voters and non-voters.
I personally vote third party. I understand however that it will never bring change in itself, since any such party will be subsumed if it were ever to become a threat to capitalism. I am thus apathetic about voting. From the perspective of a democrat, they will also perceive non-voters and third party voters the same: People that are so apathetic about the current two-party system that they are willing to throw away their vote, one way or another.
I did not bother responding to the rest of your text trying to argue semantics.
Pretty obvious I assumed you didnt, and it was a pretty reasonable assumption given what you had written.
No, I dont have a plan for a revolution lol, why would I? What a disingenuous dumbass question.
Do you have the entire cabinet for the US government with your third party planned out? Do you have people in mind for every key position that needs to be staffed? Probably not either, because that's also not something you need to consider right this moment. The situation for either is so far off that any plan would be completely useless when it would be relevant, because conditions would have to change drastically for it to be relevant. Right now the point is to change conditions.
The current political apparatus in the U.S. is one of genocide and capitalism, it has been so since the founding and will not change by voting. It would not respond to my desire, and so I do not have such use of voting. The political future I wish to see can only come by taking power from the current system. It will not happen tomorrow, but nevertheless we should be prepared. And therefore, I, and BanMeFromPosting I assume, suggest organizing. Getting involved with politics day-to-day, building community, support networks, reading to better understand the world, etc.
Voting takes like 0 effort. You can work to supplant the current system AND vote once every few years. What possible downside would there be? It can help the idea of breaking the two-party system gain popular support too, which is symbiotic with the organizing you are suggesting.
Those are all good things to do. But once you have a group of like-minded supporters who believe in your cause-- then what? You don't want to vote or protest illegally apparently; economic protest maybe? Community assistance? Those are great, but you're leaving options on the table and seriously limiting your group's agency by not voting.
Voting. Does. Not. Work.
You people believe voting solves everything, that getting even a fascist democrat will be good as they can be pushed "left" somehow. This has been a thing for decades. Liberals are not to be trusted, they will side with fascism every time. Malcom X was right to call them foxes.
Is there a reason not to also vote? Also, why do .ml users never give any real suggestions for things to do to change the system? Do you have actual suggestions?
Join PSL. Join any volunteer organisation. Help out local outreach programmes. SALT for unions.
People generally don't give you specifics because they dont know what your specific situation is, so they dont know what is available to you nor what you are capable of. That you need every action served up to you on a silver platter is an indictment of you not of the people you talk to.
You don't change the system, it cannot be reformed. It's one that only serves the bourgeois.
Start by reading theory and not books like Harry Potter, to understand the material conditions of your country and its system.
So no? If your theory is applicable you could easily use it to suggest a course of action.
it's only a "no" from you because you don't want things to change for the better, only back to a time where you did not care about politics.
Again, if your beliefs were capable of changing the world for the better it should be trivial to suggest a course of action. Instead, you are sitting there doing nothing but insult or make wrong assumptions about anyone who disagrees with you, and complain about anything someone else does to improve the world. Sad.
I suggest reading theory to better understand, I suggested organizing with communists and preparing for a revolution in another reply to you.
Marxism-Leninism has changed the world for the better before. Like in USSR where life expectancy sharply rose from age 30~ to 70 in such a short time. Where famines were no longer had and everyone became better educated. China is another, where every year there's significant improvements, poverty being practically eliminated and are even reverting desertification.
You lot are NOT improving the world, are you fucking dense? Climate change is rabidly getting worse and Democrats and Republicans alike are still bound to capital, and capital profits from destroying the climate.
Reading theory and organizing are things you do in order to understand what goals to accomplish and to be more effective at accomplishing those goals. They create and support your plan, they are not the plan in and of itself. So the actual course of action you are suggesting here, as far as I can see, is to revolt.
That's still a pretty vague course of action tbh, and very difficult unless you have the serious support of the population. It's not impossible, but if the population agreed with you enough to revolt, they could also just not vote genocidal pedos into the white house and fix The System(TM) without the potential pitfalls of a revolt.
Edit: Forgot to respond to the last part. I meant making the choice that makes the world less bad. It's exhausting to specify "less bad" vs "good" every time, by this point my position should be clear.
Well yes, that's the point.
That's also the point, to organize and educate others, that includes agitprop.
Missing the point, Joe Biden was all the same, and the rabid acceleration of genocide started under him. Kamala Harris promised the same thing.
Unlike the actual present pitfalls of voting for genocide? There are countries that revolutionized and have developed very fast as a result with far better conditions, and they fought for it.
Are you suggesting that a motivated populace could successfully revolt but could not successfully vote in a third party?
How is it in any way worse to vote for the better option than to not vote? (Voting third party is acceptable).
if you get all that motivation and energy and then divert it into electoralism, you have successfully diverted away from revolution and back into the system that the bourgeois built.
Because voting under such a system does not do anything, at most, it's treats that can be taken away at any time.
How is it any different to remove a system and implement a new one than to overhaul an existing system? The result is identical and the methodology is not meaningfully different. I would say it would be a mistake to think revolution cannot take the form of an overhaul.
Voting also takes no effort. Do you believe so strongly that none of the differences within the unites states matter that you would sacrifice all of it in the hope that you could successfully organize a revolution? Why? Why not do both? At least vote third party.
You can NOT overhaul a system that is from the ground up, designed to serve the ruling class. An overhaul is just reformism, meant to maintain capitalism as a legitimate system.
I am not an Amerikan. Your country inflicts serious damage and misery everywhere it touches and its vassal states are there to extend its reach. Millions have died from your country, as imperialism is bipartisan. Even genocide is bipartisan. It has never fought in any battle for justified reasons, it has always been a genocidal settler country that managed to complete its genocide of the natives.
And revolution is just extreme reformism. Where is the line?
I figured that might be the case. So yes, for you it doesn't matter as much who gets elected because our foreign policy is similar (not identical-- Democrats still do better on this) regardless of leading party. And you are not as aware of the differences in interior policy. It is easy to accuse me of not caring about people's lives by not revolting-- but isn't it then true that you wouldn't care about our lives when you recommend against voting?
Voting improves our lives a lot and does actually improve foreign relations (eg. Trump had a direct hand in the Iran War, strikes on south american ships, tariffs causing rising prices for consumers in every country involved in us trade, etc.). It is counterproductive and harmful to recommend against voting, even if you believe that it could not lead to total reform that improves the way in which the system works, which it can.
No it isnt. Do the word-definition thing again. One seeks to replace a system the other seeks to "fix" the existing system.
Jesus fucking christ, read theory. All your very clever thoughts have already been talked through and deflated over a century ago. This is why people tell you to read, because all of this has already been answered.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/
Ok: "In political science, a revolution (Latin: revolutio, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic, or religious structures." - Wikipedia. The page actually spends quite a lot of time expanding on that definition, including several notes that it is often considered necessary to have an extrasystemic component, that is, that a reform from entirely within the system would not count as a revolution. My point was more that revolution is a type of reform, rather than that reform is a type of revolution. You can fix a system by replacing it. You can also fix it in place. There is no fundamental obstacle that appears in the latter case.
Interesting link. Will read.
As both the wiki and you just stated, it isn't. Youre welcome to make words mean whatever you want them to mean to you, but it will make conversation harder in a broader context and nigh impossible in an academic one. Instead of arguing with me about this, read Rosa Luxembourg.
Do you even FPTP?
Voting third party will not elect a third party candidate yet, but it will more clearly show your desire for change and has a better chance of meaningfully affecting the behavior of the dominant parties or other voters.
Agreed, but it's only under fairly specific circumstances that it's effective (i.e. worth it for the rational voter) in such a system. Post-war Britain managed to delete the Liberal party (or maybe just rename) but they ended up in the same boat after a while. If you can't respect ranked preferences you end up with two big parties that try to represent a bit more than half the country, with all the nuance that allows.
That's all true, yes. I just think it's rational to vote third party if you were planning on not voting at all because it has some positive benefits and no real downsides.
here's a longer comment (that links to another comment as well) i wrote about all this stuff
I read the comment, it's cogent but it's replying to things someone else said so it's a bit hard to apply it to what I've been saying in this thread in detail. TL;DR: Voting third party is valid for the reasons you outline.
Yes voting third party is completely valid. i vote third party. Not voting is also completely valid for the same reasons.