• nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    I understand why someone who did not go to college would not necessarily understand how tariffs will raise prices or how trickle down economics has never had empirical success

    And do you think it’s a good thing that this lack of understanding motivates them to go ‘pull that lever’, cancelling out your own vote?

    They haven’t [x, y, z, …]

    And do you feel like any of those things you want are more likely to happen with more people voting for the GOP? Is the fastest way to get there to vote for politicians that viciously oppose these measures? Do you think other countries magically got these things passed by voting against them?

    • simplymath@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      No. Other countries got there with protests and organizing the working class and building widespread solidarity. Those rights were earned with blood, not by electing the lesser of two evils.

      And, yes, I do think direct action and specific, localized outreach would be the way to build up that kind of movement. Showing up one day every 4 years while the Dems move further right every time is certainly not going to work anymore than voting for the republicans they’re trying to emulate.

      Unionize your workplace or set up a tenant’s union. Establish actual resistance and build up trust with these disaffected communities. Steal food from Walmart and give it to homeless people. Block an ICE detention vehicle or surround an eviction with people from the neighborhood. Power has never been given up willingly and no working class movement has ever succeeded without being a categorical threat to capital. The Democratic party is not that and will never be.

      Stop doubling down on polarized partisan poliltics and create instances for solidarity and mutual education. That might actually work.

      • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        Most other countries got there by voting people into power that wrote and voted these principles into law. Voted for people that improved their democratic processes.

        If you think it doesn’t matter that you voted for the most capitalist candidate as long as you do a little Robin Hood shit on the side, you’ve seen too many movies and not enough history imo

        • simplymath@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Nah. monarchies were largely ended by the Napoleonic wars and world war 1. It’s ahistorical to say Democracy was earned through electoralism. It also just makes no sense.

          The Spanish revolution was definitely a bloody conflict. So was the foundation of Yugoslavia and it’s NATO backed dissolution. So was Finnish independence from Russia. Or Ukrainian. Or Polish. Or Estonian or Latvian.

          Switzerland was founded by war too. Germany’s democracy was imposed by an occupying force-- as was Japan’s.

          France murdered their entire royal family. British India faced a decades long insurgency and worker strikes. The Magna Carta was signed after the king was fucking kidnapped.

          America’s founding myth is centered on a symbolic action to destroy private property (the Boston tea party).

          The only country (that I can think of) that voted for it’s democracy was Canada and that was only after a genocide of the indigenous population and centuries of colonial rule.

          • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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            10 days ago

            I’m not talking about becoming a democracy, I’m talking about *improving *and modernizing their democracies. As well as, well, voting for and enacting all the policy examples you listed

              • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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                10 days ago

                And do you think it was the bombers that wrote this into law, or elected politicians?

                edit: and why did other countries manage to get it into law a lot faster than the US?

                • simplymath@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  Also, I need a source about other countries enacting this before the US. In the 1880s, there wasn’t exactly a plethora of Democratic governments anywhere. Germany was a brand new idea and so was Italy. France encompassed parts of Spain and Sweden, which was itself an empire with a military dictator. The UK is still a monarchy with colonies that want to secede (namely Jamaica) and the Netherlands is too. Swedish people didn’t have surnames yet–they adopted the last name of their employer.

                  Eastern Europe had serfdom and antisemitic laws were the norm.

                  I would totally believe the UK got it first, but not without a mass mobilization of working class people.

                  Seriously, what are you talking about?

                  • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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                    10 days ago

                    Well, the US only enacted it in 1937

                    So I only have basically all of Europe off the top of my head

                • simplymath@lemmy.world
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                  10 days ago

                  I think the law is irrelevant without a mass movement. You simply won’t get the law without the mass movement.

                  You can’t get from where we are to working class liberation without passing through working class struggle.

                  • nonailsleft@lemm.ee
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                    10 days ago

                    Sure. Mass movement, politicians, pen, paper, law

                    Leave one of those out and it probably won’t work