I hate that "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal" quote.

[robertoarchimboldi@kolektiva.social]

@afewbugs right, voting is easy but it is pointless. Of course collectively it isn't. But that means you need to be taking collective action. The very low level, low effort collective action is saying, 'vote x' or putting up a poster or defending a party's programme online or things of that ilk. Whether you actually go down to the polling station is irrelevant.

We do have to get over the idea that collective action is the sum of individual actions. I go vegan, you go vegan, eventually we all go vegan. That is not how it works. Often a very small number of people build a campaign and sometimes they bring about systemic change. You might support that campaign by sharing your favourite dhal recipe, but you becoming or being vegan is irrelevant. That change will involve lots of individual changes. Of course the campaign is not effective unless some people actually become vegan. That person may as well be you, but it doesn't have to be.

I would point out that, unlike with voting, there is no obvious connection between the number of vegans in the population and the level of animal suffering. It may be that by reducing demand for meat, the price of it goes down and so the level of animal welfare decreases to reduce cost. That is not an argument against being vegan. I think that you don't go vegan because it will reduce suffering, but because you cannot countenance eating animal products. In that sense it is disanalogous to voting

[afewbugs@social.coop]

@RobertoArchimboldi Taking veganism as an example, I can't speak for anyone else (my wife was a vegan-for-the-animals vegan first) but I went vegan first for the climate as an attempt to reduce my impact on the planet. We have both sort of converged on each other's issues over the years, but I don't think individual choices are meaningless because they're often the starting point for collective action. It's not just about what you as an individual do or don't choose to eat (buy/consume/spend your time on), sharing information on what you are doing and meeting other people doing the same is sort of what campaign networks arise out of and how people learn about issues from each other. In my experience people tend not to just wake up one morning, think "ooh I care about this" and take on an organising role cold, they start developing concerns about something and start meeting up with and learning from people who have the same concerns. And out of that campaigns like, say, plant based

[afewbugs@social.coop]

@RobertoArchimboldi Universities arise - my university has a plant based catering first policy, and that didn't just happen because people spontaneously decided to form a campaign

[afewbugs@social.coop]

Finally, in a strange convergence of my recent threads on here, just as it doesn't hurt to be gentler than maybe you need to be when moving snails, even if you believe voting won't do anything because your vote will be cancelled out who does it actually hurt to try? It literally takes 30 seconds if you have a postal vote, is every single moment of your day seriously so accounted by by doing good things for the world that 30 seconds would be wasted?

[vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de]

@afewbugs we are lucky in UK (and presumably rest of Europe) that voting is relatively easy, polling stations are within walking distance and during last election even with all the level of social tension / polarisation I only saw *one* Police car in the whole area (probably only there because folk might have been inclined to park in daft places)

[afewbugs@social.coop]

@vfrmedia thinking about it polling stations are one of the few bits of infrastructure that still works well aren't they? It's easier to get to vote than it is to get a GP appointment, find a dentist, get a bus on Sundays or get a Royal Mail parcel delivered in a rural area 😢

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@afewbugs I don't object to voting, but many times I've been in activist groups that were literally told to stand down by the Democratic Party in favor of concentrating on elections, and people would listen and do it.

[vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de]

@afewbugs they are still one of the things which by necessity remain in public ownership..

[robertoarchimboldi@kolektiva.social]

@afewbugs now I agree with what you say about how campaigns happen, but it is the collective action that changes things.

There is no correlation between your decision to eschew animal products in your diet and the emissions of the farming industry or between the number of animals slaughtered and your wife's dietary choices. The industry carries on regardless. Even if lots of people go vegan, and they have, the effect on the industry is to reduce the price of animal products and thus increase consumption elsewhere. The university going plant based does not have any effect either.

Of course, there will never be a vegan future without vegans in the present. The collective action has opened up that possibility. It is made much closer as your university goes vegan. It is clear that this is a way that we collectively could live. Your choices are part of that collective action, but it is at the level of collective possibility that change is occurring.

When Goldman says that voting changes nothing. She is not saying that you shouldn't vote. She is saying, rightly in my view, that the interests of the working class as a class are not furthered by any of the political parties available to them and that the system is such that they could never be.

She is warning against two illusions. 1. That the working class should align with any section of the bourgeoise to win concessions from them. I assume that she thinks that they will just be used and discarded. 2. That the class could pursue its interests through the formation of a working class political party, like the Populist Party (People's Party) of her day. I assume that she thinks that such a party will inevitably be subsumed into one or other of the bourgeois parties, as happened to the Populist Party. Instead she wants to see independent, international revolutionary organisation by the class.

That doesn't mean that you don't vote or even use the ballot as a means to extract concessions through campaigning. She is simply pointing out that it is collective action that brings change and that the class will never liberate itself through the bourgeois political process.

Of course, you might not share Goldman's class analysis. You might also share it but be on the side of the bourgeoise. In either case, you will think that electoral politics is productive. But then it is still the campaigning and not the individual voting that matters.

You might, like the DSA, think that Goldman is wrong about 2. They do think that they can wrest control of the Democratic party for the working class, but that is a question of organising. The equivalent strategy here would probably be to try to wrest control of the Greens from the petit bourgeois. Perhaps that is happening.

This has been very helpful and interesting. I think that I am beginning to repeat myself. So I will probably leave you the last word. Thank you

[nantucketlit@mastodon.social]

@afewbugs I often think of this photo, showing voting lines for the South African general election in 1994. People fought for many decades to get to this moment.