and are these child slave quinoa vegans in the room with us right now

Essay quam videri

hey, so this election is the first time I’ve been old enough to vote. im not a Democrat; I was doing work for bernies campaign and was pretty heartbroken when he suspended his campaign cause I know that biden is a rapist piece of shit and kamala is a fucking cop. but when the time came to vote in the election I voted for biden anyway cause I was told it would do more to protect people who were harmed by trumps campaign I don’t expect any sort of real change with biden and I worry that electing him will pacify civil unrest and provide people with a false sense of security,, but I felt like I wouldn’t have any right to be upset about trump being re-elected if I didn’t vote but do you think that voting for biden was fundamentally wrong? I’m trying to figure out how to navigate living in an evil system and sometimes I don’t know if it’s better to opt out or to participate and support an evil that is nominally better than another evil just wanted your opinion cause most ppl I know are on that “vote blue no matter who” shit

Hey,

I do understand how you feel. It can be really confusing, and it is a difficult question to come to grips with, trying to navigate an evil system and to minimize the damage your participation in it brings. This isn't an indictment of you personally, but an indictment of the world in which we live. One of the most horrid aspects of Capitalism is the barbarity that it makes us all ineluctably complicit in. Most people participate in the evils of this system through no real desire of their own, but because Capitalism has developed over the centuries a number of means to coerce participation. You can't have slavery without slaves, and there were always slaves because they created the profits that shackled them. That doesn't make picking master's cotton a fundamentally wrong act. You're a captive, and the captive's first duty is to survive, and secondly, to escape.

This ubiquitous coercion naturally makes any mechanism which we are invited to participate in suspicious. This recent election is a prime example: do you vote for this senile, racist, war-mongering, pedophile rapist, or that senile, racist, war-mongering, pedophile rapist? Do you vote for the man who put the people into camps, or vote for the man that built the camps? Do we bear the ills we have, or fly to others we know not of? You're right to be wary of participation. Part of its purpose is to instill a feeling of complicity in the crimes that result, either in yourself, or cast over some other party. The Democrats took advantage of this over the last four years to berate Trump for doing everything that Obama and Biden also did. They did and said the same things during Bush II's presidency. Now they exchange gifts with him and have brunch. It's theater, and they're all in the same troupe.

Do you know what constitutes bourgeois moralism? That it is pointless, epitomized in the phrase "thoughts and prayers!" It's wishing for good rather than doing good, hoping to be passed over by evil instead of working to destroy evil. Why do the bourgeoisie love philanthropy? Because it does nothing to lessen human misery. That is the essence of bourgeois moralism: seeming rather than being. The proletarian has no use for something so impractical, and you should not let yourself be fettered in this way. It will do you no good, nor anyone else. You will merely appear to be doing good, which is far worse than being nakedly evil.

Whether you decide to vote or not, and who you cast it for is entirely your prerogative. Haranguing the voter for participating or not, in a system they do not control, have no voice in, nor any real method of shaping, for people they had no hand in choosing, is nothing but vapid bourgeois moralism. It's a sleight of hand, transferring the guilt for Trump's crimes from the people that perpetrated them—Trump himself, the bourgeois that supports him, the thugs that carry out his orders, and so on, the willful perpetrators—onto you, the individual that had no part in any of it. This tactic is used to assuage the guilt of those who are willfully either complicit in a real sense or complicit in spirit. The same charlatans that try to shame you into voting want you to ignore that they've spent the last four years casually participating in the society that Trump runs, and dutifully supporting his regime with their taxes and commerce, and facilitating it with their compliance. They have nothing to offer you for your vote, because they are bankrupt themselves, bereft of the moral fortitude they fault others for not having. All they want is absolution, and the onus does not lie on you to give it.

That not casting a vote gives you no right to be upset about the outcome of that vote is another facet of this, a fallacious tactic on the part of the bourgeoisie. Not casting a vote is a vote in itself. Your assent and support is something that should be earned, not demanded, or expected, or brow-beaten out of you. If there is no candidate that you believe deserves your vote, then the only responsible choice is to not cast it. To say otherwise is to disembowel the very meaning of democracy. The compulsion of assent renders it meaningless.

With that said, is it fundamentally wrong to vote for Biden?

I think that isn't as useful a question as, what do you hope to accomplish by it? Biden as an alternative to Trump is a false choice—we have Trump _because_ of Biden. He didn't spring from nothingness, after all. Biden, and the rest of the political class at the behest of their corporate donors, have for decades shaped policy, enacted legislation, and brick by brick built the road that brought us to Trump. That is in addition to the Democrats' faux opposition to Trump, and their total collaboration in acting with him and the rest of the Republican party. The danger you want to mitigate is as much the legacy of the Democrats as it is the Republicans. They work in tandem in order to hold the people you wish to shield hostage against you. To put it simply, there is no Trump without Biden.

Yet neither is one exactly like the other. While they are both bourgeois politicians representing bourgeois cliques, they represent different factions of the plutocracy and their interests. Does the US go to war with Iran, or with Russia? Does the US continue to spread fascism in South America or in Southeast Asia? You can choose not to choose, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that. You can choose the person that supports bombing country A or the one wanting to sanction country B, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that, either. In the grand scheme, your personal, individual vote amounts to very little. You'd might as well fret over which brand of soap you buy at the store, which brand of cereal, or your search engine. If there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, then it would seem to follow that the only ethical choice is to not consume—to commit suicide. Even if you make your own rope from your own home grown organic hemp, you are still injuring the working class by doing the work of the bourgeoisie for it. Capitalism robs us even of escape in death.

What is fundamentally wrong is casting a vote based on nothing but wishful thinking and delusion, of which "Blue No Matter Who" is a byword. The bourgeois voting for Biden at least has the virtue of voting for their own interest. "Blue No Matter Who" is an affirmation of nihilism, that not only can they do nothing, but they also expect nothing. It isn't a political strategy. It's naked resignation. The consumer society that Capitalism has shaped has induced people to believe that their desires can be bought. Buy this soap and 5% of the sale goes to preserving the rain forest. Donate 30 cents to end starvation in Africa. That is the mindset at work here. The removal of Trump is just another item to add to the cart. Vote, and all the discomfort and ugliness that Trump has made them aware of will go away. Things will go back "to normal." They are deluding themselves that think this is not normal.

Mao himself says that nothing is wholly good or wholly evil. Good may come from evil actions, and evil may result from good actions. Gavrilo Princip had no idea that when he killed two aristocrats that he was setting in motion events that would not only lead to the deaths of millions of people, but also the death of the empires he hated. Your vote is just another small piece of an ongoing, dialectical process of events and actions and decisions leading into and influencing one another, most of which is largely outside of your control. Years from now you might have reason to regret it, or to celebrate it, or maybe even both. Actively making that decision, however the outcome, at least means that you chose to be rather than to seem, and that’s the first step to doing good.