Why Abandoning Elections Isn't Revolutionary, It's Just Demoralized Inaction

In response to those pushing for the abandonment of elections and voting, I give you my analysis of our current conditions, following that logic to its terminus.

When it comes to voting and non-electoral organizing of the workers, some argue that revolutionary organizing outside the electoral system offers communists better odds in the U.S. than pursuing elections, reasoning that the two-party structure, ballot access laws, and anti-communist stigma make elections a dead end while street-level organizing builds real power. The odds of major election success are low to nil, this is true. The problem is that this logic severs the two things Lenin explicitly held together: he didn't say avoid bourgeois institutions, he said use them, elections included, as a tool for raising class consciousness, recruiting cadre, and exposing the system's contradictions to the masses, while simultaneously building the organizational infrastructure for what comes next.

Non-electoral organizing without electoral engagement doesn't double your odds, it halves your reach, because you voluntarily abandon a platform that puts your program in front of working people who will never attend a meeting or join a march but will absolutely hear a communist candidate speak on housing, wages, and healthcare, and that exposure is how you build the mass base without which neither the electoral nor the revolutionary path goes anywhere. Furthermore, even if the left managed to achieve that unified front on a single issue long enough to matter, the irreconcilable differences between its factions, anarchists, identitarians, Trotskyists, and MLs, would immediately produce a civil war within the movement the moment the common enemy was removed, because tribal loyalty to incompatible programs was and will never be resolved, only temporarily suppressed, meaning the non-electoral route doesn't avoid the fragmentation problem, it just delays it until the worst possible moment.

If the people won't vote for a communist, even with many of the so-called communist platforms looking like a Bernie Sanders reform party, they're not going to organize with one in any meaningful way. And if the government's not going to let communists win positions, it's not going to let the people organize in ways that threaten it. Read the room. If you want to tell us not to believe in the slim chance of electoral politics, when we have even less faith in the non-electoral movement, then what you're saying is just give up. The parades and the volunteering at soup kitchens or neighborhood clean-ups are photo ops. It might help for a day but it's not inspiring; all it's doing is showing that offline organizing is meaningless, because it leaves us unable to do anything to real effect.

And that's not to include what feels like a book club of irrelevant history, economic lessons, and repetitive rhetoric. When you spend an hour reading something and walk away with three paragraphs worth of notes, if that, after the first dozen it starts to become redundant. The disillusionment and resignation are justified, making the political apathy and defeatism understandable.

Many people need to be led, and if there's no vanguard party, just some book clubs that protest, and small groups that get together to do some form of charity for the homeless or focus on some other group, then what's the point. People aren't going to waste time on what seems illogical to them if they cannot see a path to the society they want, the community they want, the world they want.

I'll keep reading when I can, but if you're going to tell me there's no point in voting, and I can clearly see the people in our society are too worried about self-preservation for a general strike to work, with the Palestinian genocide going on for what will be three years, with all these boycotts and those companies still standing proving they don't work, and with mutual aid only helping small portions of marginalized people instead of everyone, making it the equivalent of blowing on a cut, not even enough to be considered a band-aid, then there's no point to my activism.

My logic and reasoning is simple. Remove elections, observe that everything else demonstrably fails, arrive at justified inaction, and complete demoralization. People need a road map, they need role clarity, they need centralized structure of belonging to provide leadership and clarity.