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Voting is Whack

A quote I saw by Alicia Garza read, "Voting is not the be all end all; when we vote what we're doing is picking our opponent."


Firstly, I would like to say that that quote is fire. It both advocates for electoral politics while in the same breath discrediting the outcomes of it in order to advance an agenda beyond voting. People can get behind this quote, irregardless of their stance on voting, because it speaks to both those who are electoral politics driven, by speaking to their need to continuously fight against elected officials through electing more, progressive elected officials, and to radicals, who can understand this quote to mean that since voting doesn't solve anything there is always more work to be done because there will always be opposition to their praxis. The quote engages multiple forces of activism and demonstrates potential to converge their different and diverging ideologies.


But it is interesting to discuss the dynamics of voting. On the one hand, voting must be embraced because our ancestors literally died for the right to vote. On the other hand, voting aligns you to consent with the elected official's policies, agendas and platform, even if there are particular points of debate that you do not agree with. On the other hand, we understand that voting is only one tactic to defeat oppression and must be utilized because organizing must take on various strategies. On the other, other hand, voting is a symbolic tool that signifies complacency with ineffective democratic engagement and that must be surpassed by radical action that presents tangible changes. However, on the other hand, there are many people whose only accessible tactic for activism that can be advocated for is voting because they are restricted by things such as immigration status, disability, voter discrimination, etc. Yet, on another hand, voting is ineffective because the grip of capitalism coerces electoral politics into alignment with the interests of the rich elite and dominant corporations; democracy will ensure the triumph of wh(o)atever the rich desire.


This octopus of voting discourse is complex. It is a dialectically empowering and demoralizing event. When I voted, I simultaneously felt useless and positively engaged. I felt hopeless for the placebo effect of voting yet hopeful for a progressive change. I felt cognitive dissonance when considering my positionality as an eligible voter who must uphold the system for those who do/did not have the privilege to do so and as someone who doesn't believe elected officials, and electoral politics in general, have the capacity to represent my voice and the voice of the working-class. These emotions are what I mean when I say that voting is whack; the feeling of whackness/extreme whackinism is overwhelming. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that despite the results of this upcoming election, the world in this late stage of capitalism is crumbling and the process of electoral politics is much too slow to combat the scary realities of climate change, white supremacism, and fascism. There needs to be an alternative, militant strategy. Voting outcomes only foreshadow how much slower or faster this climax arrives.


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