Voting & Electoralism: Steelman Debates Steelman

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Should we vote for the lesser evil? Should we engage in electoralism (do things beyond voting to influence who wins an election, e.g. canvassing, social media posts about a candidate)? Should we support politicians who identify as socialists? Are these things helping us? Could they be hurting us?

These questions and more are explored in a debate between two characters, both played by me, but don’t expect to see one side get destroyed. I aim to present strong arguments on both sides. (It takes a while for the anti-electoralism side to get warmed up, so be patient.)

Neither character perfectly represents my opinion.

My goal is not to convince anyone to stop/start voting. My goal is to show that whether or not you vote, we should focus on building a movement. I also hope to spread understanding for why people choose to vote or not vote, so we can stop judging each other and infighting about this and focus on working together on class struggle.

The issues in this video apply to any “democratic” country in any year. The 2020 U.S. election of Biden vs. Trump is only used as an example.

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00:00 Intro
01:09 Lesser Evil
05:29 Fascism
10:27 Luna’s surprise
12:06 Voting
13:41 Electoral politics
16:05 Social Democracy
19:41 Dream sequence
21:35 Electoral politics: Revisited
27:29 Lesser Evil: Revisited
31:07 You Don’t Know
33:04 Concluding Thoughts
35:25 Nyan Cat is Praxis
36:03 Outro

Check out my other videos:


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The idea to do a debate video on electoralism came from my friend, who even wrote a rough draft of a script. I ended up writing a new script from scratch but used a lot of their ideas. You can read their script here:

Another inspiration for this video is ContraPoints’ video Punching Natsees (which she deleted from her channel).
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LEARNING RESOURCES

• Script by my friend that inspired this video
• Anti-electoralism articles
• Interview with Noam Chomsky about why he supports voting for the lesser evil
• Video by Intelexual Media on why she supports voting for the lesser evil
• Video by revolutionnowhere arguing that leftists shouldn’t campaign for social democratic parties/politicians
• New Deal won by class struggle
and
• My video Power to End Capitalism: The Case for Workplace Organizing
• Various learning resources with advice on organizing and class-struggle, plus some theory

Music Credits
• Untitled song (Two Anonymous Comrades)
• Wu Tang Clan type beat (TW$)
• Smoove Weekend (TW$)
• O Fortuna (Carl Orff)
• Slaughter (Passion HiFi) thepassionhifi.com
• MydNyte (Noir Et Blanc Vie)
• Spanish Winter (Passion HiFi)
• A Las Barricadas ()
• Saxophone Beat 120bpm E minor (unknown musician, produced by jmoneybeats25)
• Born Barnstormers (Brian Boyko)
• You Don’t Know (Lucky Black Cat & Piano Playing Comrade)

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In this video I mention Bolivian President Evo Morales was overthrown in a coup. After filming this the coup was reversed in an election. But the point still stands, as there are other countries where social democratic governments were overthrown in a coup. We often focus on the imperialist aspect of this, which is important, but we can't ignore that these coups have domestic support (and often assistance) from capitalists. Perhaps the most infamous example is General Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile against President Allende. Chilean capitalists supported the coup and destabilized Allende’s government through a capital strike.

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