this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
1104 points (99.1% liked)
Work Reform
16253 readers
2157 users here now
A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If leftists didn't refuse to vote "on principle" we would be in a much better situation.
How many of the people who didn't vote were leftists not voting on principle?
Same for if neoliberals gave up the delusion that chasing conservative voters is going to get them a higher turnout. But I have no doubt they will continue to try the same thing and punch left when they fail.
I'm sure they will. We shouldn't vote for them. And if more leftists voted, they wouldn't win as often.
[edit: looks like I read too much into the comment I was replying to - I'll leave the below for the sake of honesty, but I was unfair, and I won't defend my hostility or uncharitable read (at least in this case lol)]
If only we got more of those DNC ghouls in office they could have slowed down some of this a bit!
Couldn't be that the "other party" just absorbs every complaint, atrocity, demand for real change and delivers none. It's probably those annoying leftists who are messing up progress!
FWIW I vote as often as I can. It's not hard for me to tell who is more evil and what levers are available to me at the moment (I also don't disparage others with thoughtful reasons to do otherwise).
Your take sucks and smells like a real Reddit-ass analysis of why things are going badly.
I never said anything about voting for Democrats. You made a lot of assumptions just to come here and argue with me.
And there are no thoughtful reasons not to vote. Just excuses that try to launder laziness into righteousness.
Okay, I've read through your other comments and you're right, I misunderstood and misrepresented your POV, I apologize.
For the record, just like there is a large contingent of online "leftists" who don't do much but whine, there's an accompanying group of folks who also habitually just whine, but they whine in the ways I attacked you for doing, some flavor of "if they'd only have voted (for Harris/Clinton/etc) then we'd all be at brunch!"
But that's not what you said, and given your other comments, you probably don't like those folks either. So yeah, I saw what looked like that and had an allergic reaction lol.
Anyway, my bad, cheers.
Ty!
And yeah, I understand how I could have been misconstrued as advocating "blue-no-matter-who". So to be absolutely clear: fuck Harris, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, and all the other neoliberal asshats who helped suppress actual progressives from having power within the Dem party and in The US more broadly.
Preach!
Shut up you bigot!
If they voted for Copmala Iranian schools and hospitals could've been bombed by trans people and immigrants.
You have denied them of equal opportunities!
It's amazing how easy it is to "win" an argument that exists only in your imagination
I'm so fucking glad that I don't live in 'Murica.
I don't know what argument you're responding to. Talk about projection.
Anyway, you probably just saw my username and assumed I'm "one of them". So let me say this real clear for all the bigots on Lemmy: we don't get to decide where we are born, and we are not inherently responsible for the actions of our governments. Get it through your thick dumb skulls.
what principal do you mean? asking harris to say genocide is bad? asking the dem party to cut the horseshit with primaries? asking biden to leave a year before he did?
anyone who voted third party is not why trump is in office, their numbers plus harris’ would still have lost to trump. sadly.
but cut the thick shit pushing horseshit rhetoric like your reply. grow up. stop supporting genocide too.
You made so many incorrect assumptions in your reply I don't even know where to start.
I never said to vote for corporate Dems, let alone stan for them.
I never said not to vote 3rd party. I do it all the time.
I never said that if leftists voted just in the 2024 presidential race that all would be fixed.
And you seem to have forgotten that we get to vote for more than just president.
If leftists voted en masse, my city would have a a very different local government from the one it has today - one that would create a base of power and solidarity to bring change to higher levels of government, and one that would actually take measure to protect us from federal goons.
So maybe engage with my actual point instead of the baseless image of me that you have in your head.
they weren’t assumptions but additional points and in addition you never answer my question.
Additional points that were irrelevant, because they didn't counter any of my actual beliefs.
And as to your question... what I usually hear from the leftists in my town is that any participation in the electoral process makes you a sellout liberal NPC genocide supporter. Or it's "validating the current system" or some other such nonsense.
The simple fact is that local elections in my city are usually won by a few hundred to few thousand votes. Voter turnout is extremely low, even by American standards, there is almost always an actual progressive (and often even socialists) on the ballot, and they almost always come in second place. If even half of the leftist nonvoters came out and voted, these people would win, and even the soulless corporate shills competing against them would have to shift to the left to stay relevant.
It wouldn't be THE fix to ALL our problems, but it would fucking help a lot of desperate people.
you went local when the larger convo is national.
as a leftist myself i push hard on local elections, and my usual comment to the folks running is, and i’ve actually said this, “local is most important because we know where you live”
national is horseshit and voting there does “legitimize” the exploitation and capitalist system we’ll never vote our way out of.
but locally, if i can get the town of 14k people to spend its money better and treat renters like they matter instead of the businesses on main st.. that’s a local win.
Larger convo was about voting generally, not about the federal elections.
And my point was that voting can make an impact. To expand on that point, the impact is cumulative. If this year a bunch of leftists who normally didn't vote decide to vote, we'll get better local governments across the country. In the next cycle, the Overton Window will have shifted left and more elections, perhaps at the state or even congressional level will result in candidates who aren't completely beholden to the bourgeoisie . The cycle after that, maybe we get a 3rd party candidate winning the electoral votes for a state. Or maybe enough states have shifted to the left that we get a critical mass on the National Popular Vote Pact and functionally do away with the electoral college.
It's clear I'm not talking about you, since you actually vote. But I know for a fact that among the American left the idea of voting at all is considered cringe. And I believe these people are at best misguided and at worst finding a righteous-sounding excuse for not wanting to bother.
Also, my city is more like half a million than 14 thousand. And it's got soooooooo many leftists. We would easily be the biggest voting block in the city if more of us actually bothered, because most of the rest of the population doesn't.
Finally, this:
is nonsense. Not voting doesn't register nationally as opposition or disapproval or dissatisfaction. It registers as apathy, and apathy legitimizes the status quo. If you want to make a statement in a national election, vote 3rd party. Write in a candidate. Do anything other than not vote.
I don’t disagree with a lot of what you say except that I have a novel feeling that the window only ever ratchets right and never returns left. but i don’t really know how to research that.
I don't have anything more than life experience and anecdote to base this on, but I think the reason it feels that way is sooooo many more leftists refuse to vote than reactionaries.
BTW, thank you for having a discussion with me and not just a pissing match. I appreciate that.
Yes Amazon didn't exist before Trump and they didn't pay the other side of your duopoly.
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/bezos-greases-way-into-dem-establishment-with-100-million-obama-donation/
If americans weren't such losers endlessly voting for one of those you would be in a much better situation.
But I see you're another one of those campist clowns.
You're all pathetic and a lost cause, so keep crying.
You deserve it