Create a pledge to vote for a leftist candidate. If it surpasses ~85 million signatures, everyone who signed it will vote for the leftist candidate. Otherwise, they will all vote for Biden, since a minimum of 85 million votes are required to guarantee an election win.

I’d sign that shit, and I bet just about every leftist around here would, too. There’s literally no downside.

It is immensely difficult to get 85 people to agree to do something—never mind 85 million—but still not impossible. You almost definitely won’t be able to get 85 million signatures, but you’re more than welcome to try. If you don’t succeed, however, I encourage you to consider the realm of possibility when filling out your ballot. Voting for a third-party candidate and voting for Mickey Mouse—or a dead guy, or Vermin Supreme, or yourself—are equally irrelevant if the third-party candidate does not stand a chance of winning.

You gonna do better? Then go into politics. Otherwise take your pick.

I’d argue it’s not ultra-leftism if both options are reactionary. On the contrary, when going through such a turbulent period, to call yourself a socialist/Marxist and yet tail any anti-worker Democratic crisis cabinet is to compromise yourself just like the Mensheviks did for 8 months in 1917 when they happily took their warm seats and then didn’t do shit to improve the desperate position of the Russian workers and denounce the Russian imperialism.

So what to do instead of voting? Join the revolutionary communists to end the endless cycle of disappointment and picking lesser evil in the system that gives no real agency to 99% of the society.

Lol, I do far more for my community than joining some neutered gun club, but thank you for your concern.

in this day and age, there is no progressive wing of the bourgeoisie. Revolutionary communists fight for a workers’ government and do not give any support to any capitalist party or politician. (…) However, mass dissatisfaction with the Democrats does not mean a majority of Americans are right-wing reactionaries. On the contrary, most people merely want stability, good jobs and wages, and a safe and healthy place to raise a family. But this simply isn’t possible for everyone under capitalism. The exploitation of wage-labor by capital and the relentless drive for profits precludes this. As an arch-capitalist himself, Trump can’t square the circle either, and he is merely filling the political vacuum in a temporary and distorted way. If reelected, those workers attracted by his poisonous bravado will eventually realize that no American president can magically wave their problems away.

https://socialistrevolution.org/election-2024-why-genocide-joe-and-trumps-system-has-to-go/

Evil is evil and lesser evilism is a disgusting idea.

And when it comes to Trump, just as Hegel put it, historical necessity is often expressed through accident. Donald Trump is a giant, catastrophic accident for the capitalist class.

The people of USA succesfully beat two tyrannical systems in 18th and 19th century so why wouldn’t they now if the current state of things deteriorates in that direction. And so did the Russians who have lived under the tsarist tyranny. Or the people oppressed by the colonial regimes who have not attained their independence as a gesture of good will. Or Cubans overthrowing Batista. Or Chileans ousting Pinochet. Or South Africans overthrowing the apartheid.

All of that required militancy. Polite pleas are not a language tyrants understand. But, by extension, blind faith in electoralism has failed when the KPD failed to respond with proper militancy to the Reichstag fire decree in 1933. The militancy must be proactive. One should not be deluded that a “progressive” government will welcome with open arms any advanced, massive expression of social anger any more than a reactionary one would. See France where it is basic street knowledge to wear at least a solid fucking helmet with plexiglass visor to any protest if you don’t want to say, lose an eye under the oh-so-benevolvent rule of the liberal Macron.

Aaron Bushnell had a gun pointed at him as he died.

stagnant wages, no real influence on the politics because the Overton’s window is so narrow and all major parties filled with out of touch millionaires and also just because the political system does not really benefit a common person in a meaningful way, the cost of living and debt crisis, needing to join the military for basic public services, creeping corporate censorship and oligopolization creating a generation of dependent, depressed people with growing self-censorship instinct?

Also I hope the Russian government is overthrown by it’s people and that the right to the self determination of the myriad of ethnic groups of Russia is actually honored instead of them being used as a cannon fodder to oppress another nation.

but election rigging in post-Soviet Russia was actually started by the CIA to not let the communists get back to power in 1996 elections. Which is actually yet another proof that what is needed in any country really is a revolution and actual thorough democratization of every aspect of social and economic life possible, instead of neo-aristocratic electoralism. And that to that goal, a party able to lead a way towards it is needed (instead of trying to work within those that actually just prop up the system and will actively fight back when that is challenged (look up SJ Voralberg case in Austria as the most recent example, or even more glaringly, CPRF purging anti-war faction or the Blairite hostile takeover in Labour a couple years ago)), which was sadly lacking in Russia in the 90s as well as today.