Edit: Read this first please
I've been every leftist tendency from anarchist to marxist-leninist(-maoist) I've read all the theory books about imperialism and economics and free association and shit I've written papers on the Zapatistas and I've been in leadership positions in left wing organizations. I've been arrested for doing activism and I've done union organizing. I've been banned from Israel for involvement in anti-zionist organizations (supposedly, I've never actually tested it.). I've done organizing that got me behind the scenes looking at local the functioning of local governments, and I've done organizing completely outside of the realm of government. Mutual Aid, Base Building, you name it, I've done it. I was decrying climate change outside my statehouse as a teenager and marching against police brutality before the phrase Black Lives Matter was even coined for the movement.
And I am going to say that is is my personal opinion that if you are an American with voting rights and you live in a state that isn't 110% guaranteed to be blue, then you really do need to vote in November and you need to vote for the Democrats. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio: you all especially need to vote for the Democrats in November.
You absolutely do not have to like it. In fact, you probably should be feeling mixed feelings about it. The Democrats are hardly our friends and you should never trust them. They are a class of nobles playing political games and nothing they say is earnest nor honest.
But what the Democrats are is, generally, capable of keeping the government functioning to the minimum extent necessary for us all to take the government for granted. When it comes to international policy, the Democrats will not be doing what's best for the international working class, but they are substantially less likely to trigger a world war or a global famine. You do not want those things to happen. The United States is disproportionately powerful in affecting the lives of everyone on this planet and if you are going to be stuck with an evil empire, it is best to have an evil empire that wants to avoid brand new all-out multinational wars when possible.
What I have come to understand is that a government is a massive organization that does a fuck ton of shit and a lot of it is good and a lot of it is bad but you do want to have one, you really do. The more I have learned about how civic infrastructure works, how government works, what governments do, the more I have come to understand that it has not been possible for any healthy human society to function without some sort of government since like, the eleventh century. You can call it whatever you want, but it ends up becoming a government at a certain point, and if you're going to have a government, you want it to be a functional one that adequately provides decent public services.
A government consists of:
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Politicians/Nobles/Whoever who squabble and play complex games with each other in order to determine what the government should do. Fuck these guys, but for what it's worth, it's actually extraordinarily difficult to get everyone to agree on doing something, and it has always been the case in human history that politicians play complex games to decide what will happen.
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Ministers/Political Appointees/Administrators/Secretaries/Whoever who the politicians assign to manage major divisions of the government according to the wishes of our rulers. Fuck these guys too, most of the time at least.
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Civil Servants who are the vast majority of people comprising "the government" and they are, ideally and most of the time even in the worst governments, highly qualified politically neutral professionals who are just trying to carry out some sort of public service or project for the civic good.
Civil servants are making sure you have clean drinking water, that you know what the weather will be and if a hurricane is coming, that the basic transportation infrastructure is in decent condition, that the trash is being collected and responsibly processed and disposed of, that your fucking food at the grocery store doesn't contain horrible diseases. Adam Conover has this great documentary miniseries called "The G Word" going over a lot of the things we take for granted that are done by civil servants and I highly recommend it to everyone.
Because of my particular labor organizing that I was doing before the TBI last year, I got to know a lot of different kinds of civil servants in a lot of very difficult departments and everything they do is really important even departments that sound dry and boring like Licensing and Inspection or Streets or Project Planning. It all works together in a complex interconnected system that keeps life running. Civil Servants, whatever their political beliefs (generally but certainly not at all always left leaning), are often quite passionate about what they do. They are often experts. They want to do their jobs. They want to alert us to hurricanes. They want to reduce disease. They want to good education to children. They want to help people. Most of these professions are not jobs you go into in order to make money. They usually pay a middling salary, require years of expensive education, and can be hard to find openings for. The people who dedicate their lives to this shit take it seriously and they want to do their jobs.
A dysfunctional administration and politicians can fuck up this work very badly for a very long time. The decision that fucked up the drinking water in Flint Michigan was very quick and easy for a shitty Republican-led government to make to save money, but the impact fucked up the pipes in every single building such that even after the Democrats fixed the source of the problem (they did do that, by the way), it is now necessary to replace the pipes in every single building one by one in order to make the water drinkable again. That is a very very slow project even with a lot of funding, and that's just one town. The Republican administration in Massachusetts put off deferred maintenance of the MBTA for so long they had to shut down entire train lines for repairs for long stretches of time and fixing the problem is going to take a very very long time. In Philadelphia, at the start of the pandemic, a Democratic mayor laid off every non-union part-time and seasonal employee from most departments, because the city literally couldn't afford to pay them all without going bankrupt. It's easy with the stroke of a pen to lay off 450 people from a department, but it takes many years to hire 450 people back to fill those vacancies, to train them, for them to figure out how the job works without much continuity, and to reboot those government functions and get them back to where they were pre-pandemic. Even when the money is allocated, doing the work to fix systemic failures and the destruction of existing systems takes a lot of time and political willpower even when everyone is on the same page about trying to get shit working again.
Donald Trump fucked up the CDC during his administration in a way that is going to take a very very long time to restore. What Trump fucks up in one day, it could take 8 years to fix, for some of these problems, given the way that government works. Civil servants are human beings who can only work so fast even when money is being thrown at them. It takes time and effort and labor just to spend the money, and the political games make it all the more complicated.
The Biden-Harris administration has not brought us radical change and liberation, but they've been hacking away trying to fix shit and putting in a real effort, and I sympathize with the federal, state, and county level civil servants and ministers who are trying to implement these bills and put shit back together. The election cycle in this country is honestly just a year too short imho when it comes to getting shit done.
The Democrats are not our liberators but they are trying to put a functioning government back together that can do shit like predict hurricanes and deploy disaster relief, or ensure the public water supply is drinkable, or make some effort towards combating climate change (which somehow doesn't have the political will to do the radical things that are needed.) They are trying to do so in a way that is stable and winnable. They are afraid pushing too hard will get backlash, which sucks as, and is a bad strategy, but that's the game of politics.
Republican-appointed judges are doing shit like stripping our federal agencies of their ability to enforce regulations. Democrats are not communists, but they sure as fuck aren't doing that. Keynesian economics is still better than that.
- The Military/Pigs/Cops/Violent Horrible State Apparatus/Foreign Affairs
Obviously I left out another group of people who are a part of the government. Civil Servants are civilians. Cops, soldiers, spies, etc. are not civilians. They do the violent awful shit we hate. I do not believe in a necessity for police or prisons. These departments of government are horrible and immoral and need to be abolished.... but there is no political will in this country to make that happen any time soon and there is no government on the planet modeling the proper alternative. The best we have to look at is the "nordic model" or things done in small indigenous communities like the Zapatistas or some native Hawai'ian communities. Nothing large scale.
I don't think the Democrats are going to make any progress at all on improving this part of the empire. This is an evil part of this evil evil empire and it is why I often have felt conflicted about voting Democrat or sometimes abstained entirely. This arm imposes the problems of the US on everybody else.
But the Democrats are not going to start a fucking nuclear war, or horrible international trade wars, or destroy the supply chain, or a major multinational war. We have lived in a state of constant war for the past 23 years so we take for granted that these "small wars" are things that are just "always happening." But none of these wars are to the scale of a World War. WWI and WWII were really fucking bad for every single fucking person on this planet. They were called World Wars for a reason. If the US, China, Iran, and Russia go to direct war with each other, nobody is going to have a good time. There is a damn good reason that since WWII every major power has been fighting through these proxy battles in other countries instead of direct armed conflict. I truly do not think that Trump and his Republican Party understand this.
The supply chain is fundamentally international and interconnected. Remember when we just regularly couldn't get basic shit from the store? In 2020 there were breakdowns in the functioning of the supply chain at every level and it sucked for in the imperial core but it really sucked for everyone else. A world war would cause that kind of disruption 100x worse. Homesteading is impossible. You are not going to hide from an international conflict through cottagecore LARPing. That's just not how shit works. Trade has always been international. This isn't fucking minecraft. Nobody has access to every resource they need all in one place.
Biden's support for the State of Israel is inhumane and awful.... Trump is only going to make that worse.
You don't have to like Biden, but Agenda47/Project 2025 is fucking bad!!
It seems really likely that we could get another 4 years of Trump. Do you remember how bad that was? It'll only be worse. They're openly calling for mass deportations. They're openly calling for total illegalization of LGBT communities at the federal level. They're not going to make shit better for fucking anybody and I'm sorry but I burned myself down to the last of my damn wick from 2016 to 2023 trying to fight Trump and his policies every way I could like he was Adolf Hitler preparing to do another holocaust and it didn't fucking work. I didn't skimp of tactics. I truly didn't. Never post shit online you shouldn't say online but truly, truly, I was doing the real shit, and it didn't fucking work. I tried tactics from every tendency, I organized leftist groups to collaborate across tendency, I worked inside and outside of systems, we saw some of the largest revolts in American history, and nothing fucking happened. The end result of it all was we got Juneteenth declared a holiday and Joe Biden narrowly elected.
Maybe this is just me being burnt out but if you are not secretly a member of the genuine clandestine People's Militia ready to enact a genuine civil war (which would also really suck to live through by the way) then shut the fuck up about any kind of leftist organizing being able to compensate for living under a Trump administration. Whatever fervor it gives us, however much it might pull in liberals, however much it might "accelerate" movements, it cannot possibly compensate for the impacts of a Trump administration. Abolishing the NOAA will kill millions in the long term. The dysfunction of public services will kill millions. Aggressive international relations could kill tens of millions. We saw how his dismantling of the CDC killed millions and is disabling even more people.
Mutual aid networks are great but they cannot compensate for genuine government-run public services. Mutual aid cannot replace the NOAA, it cannot replace NASA, it cannot replace the CDC, it cannot replace the water department, it cannot replace the public library (and if you think it can you don't understand libraries a smidge), it cannot replace garbage collection and waste disposal, it cannot maintain public transportation infrastructure, it cannot inspect meat for diseases, it cannot protect the environment in the meticulous and detailed way that the FWA does it, it cannot prevent wars with other countries, it cannot unfuck the supply chain, it can't maintain the sewers, it cannot even fix the fucking electric grid and that's not even a publicly-owned service in much of the country somehow. Mutual aid is not going to replace the functions of a government. Like it or hate it you live in a massive macro-level managed system meticulously maintained by millions of invisible hands from people who dedicate their entire lives to maintaining one small piece of it so small you can barely tell where it fits in and the government administration coordinates all of that and the Republicans actively dismantle it and sell it off for short-term profit.
Voting for the Democrats cannot and should not be seen as the full extent of anyone's political efforts towards liberation but to be quite honest right now I'm done being the main character and thinking I'm going to achieve anyone's liberation. The world is so much bigger and more complicated than you think it is from the seat of a liberal arts classroom or on your fucking toilet scrolling through social media LARPing as revolutionaries and insisting that somehow ideological purity is the pathway to liberation.
You'd rather have the Democrats as your opponent, you really do
The Democrats never give you 100% of your demands but they do give you like, 50%. I've been an activist and organizer during two Democratic presidencies and one republican. Obama never gave us everything we demanded but we did get some big fucking improvements. Young people don't even know how fucking bad it was with healthcare before the ACA. Biden is hardly divesting from Israel but he has been putting pressure on Likud to stop massacring people and it's very obvious that the change in tone was in response to public protests of his support for Likud.
You know what's super different between when I was marching for justice for Trayvon Martin and now? When cops kill unarmed innocent people now, they get fired and tried for it as a crime. This is not the systemic change we need to stop it from happening over and over again but in 2012 it was fucking unheard of for a cop to be indicted for shooting a Black person let alone found guilty of the crime and fired for it. This is hardly police abolition or prison abolition. One person dying this way is too many. But when I was protesting police brutality, the demand back then was simply to indict the motherfucker who did it. The Democrats do cave to political pressure.
The Trump administration kidnapped one of my comrades who I was organizing with in 2017, locked him in solitary in a concentration camp, tortured him for six months physically and psychologically, then deported him to a country he'd never lived in with no money to make ends meet. He has not been able to recover from this situation since and went from an up-and-coming professional to someone who e-begs online for people to wire money to him. I went to college with this guy, he was a DREAMer, and he was targeted for his legal non-violent protesting and had his life destroyed. I was arrested too, but merely kept in jail for one (1) day and then released. Fucking talk about privilege. The contrast in how we were treated is pretty fucking stark. It's "easy" for a white citizen to talk about "be gay do crimes" when the repercussions are so diminished aren't they.
In response to our anti-deportation organizing under Trump, we not only were unable to prevent a single person from being deported after all, but deep long-term violence was inflicted on organizers.
The Democrats are hardly left wing. But they are not Trump. Preventing Trump from becoming president is worth re-electing fucking Joe Biden.
Everyone who hasn't been to jail shut the fuck up about illegalism
Like idfk jail was bad. I was put in a solitary high observation cell for one (1) day, with no food or water, a guard watched me piss, there was no toilet paper, I couldn't even wash my hands, they gave me these little slippers made of paper towels and I was so stir crazy I tore them up and turned them into paper cranes I played with like dolls. When they took me for my mugshot I was like, earnestly genuinely happy to get to walk a bit and interact with someone. It had only been 7 hours at that point. When I returned to my cell, the cranes were gone and they did not replace my slippers, so my feet got cold and I had even less to interact with. The "bed" is a hard concrete slab extending by the wall and it's not wide so you always feel like you're going to fall off. There is no pillow. There was no way for me to be given any daily medications I needed. The idea that I could exercise in there like you see in the movies is laughable.
I was only there for one (1) day before a lawyer got me released. It was a very bad experience. I really don't know how to describe how rough it was. All I could remember was being so incredibly grateful to have been released, and to have it weighing on me so deeply that there are hundreds of thousands of people experiencing that day every single day of their lives and often even worse. All I could think about how grateful I was that it had been one day and not one week. My DREAMer comrade later went through worse conditions for six months. We made the news after our arrest. We were protesting the detention and deportation of one single father in our town. His case was not even reviewed. He was deported anyway.
This was with a liberal-presenting non-violent protest group by the way. We didn't even do anything genuinely disruptive to ICE operations. It was purely symbolic protest.
If you've never had an experience close to this from your leftist organizing, then shut etc fuck up about ideological purity. If what you think we need is an armed revolution?! Yeah you better fucking have a massive clandestine modern army hidden up your ass. If you're talking about "decentralized cells of illegal activity and mutual aid" great please show me your plans on how to keep the water department running. On how to keep the supply chain connected to hospitals.
Stop fucking LARPing on social media about being the most noble ideologically pure leftist who's too cool to vote. If you live in New Jersey or Vermont then sure I don't give a shit your state is going to vote blue no matter who, but if there's even an inkling of your state's delegates going to Trump, please just fucking swallow your damn pride and make a plan to go vote for the Democrats in November. You do not have to like the Democrats. I sure fucking don't. And you should still be actively involved in some form of political organizing that will force the hands of those in power to concede to the demands of the left. (You are actually involved in some form of organizing to back up your political speech online, right?) But if you're just some nerd on the computer, then please stop posting about "be gay do crimes" (the 'crime' is online piracy and sticker-oriented vandalism) and LARPing as some radical punk and just concede yourself to the necessity of voting for the Democratic candidates at the federal level in November's general election.
The harm a second Trump term could do to the entire fucking world is too steep to weigh against your moral and ideological purity. If you want to do some calculus on the positive impact your actions can have on the world, it might even be most effective to involve yourself on....... dear lord must I say it..... getting out the vote. The negative you off-set by getting people to vote in your swing state could be the best thing you ever do and you can transfer those organizing skills to trying to work on real radical change after the election!!
Anyway, yeah, wow, big fucking change in my political opinion here compared to five years ago but that's how I'm feeling right now. We absolutely cannot allow another Trump term. I'll vote for Pete fucking Buttigieg if I have to.
If we had the privilege of the US having a multi-party situation
If we had the privilege of republicans being just corrupt
If we had the privilege of the US having a reasonable seperation of powers and the judicial wasn't very recently very captured
If we had the privilege of millions in the US not depending on the government
If we had the privilege of millions outside the US not depending on them keeping up aid, agreements, commitments etc.
Then we could have a conversation about alternative options. And you know what sucks the most for me personally? I'm on the other side of the world. I can't vote. I can't go doorknocking. I can't write to "my representative". And yet the outcomes of the election can have massive effects on my life.