Im not going to pull punches on this rant. I am so exhausted by this rhetoric and unfortunately it is pervasive in my personal life and online. I spend most of my productive time reviewing literature on various global issues. Namely land grab discourse, genocide studies, conservation efforts, state development policy, IFI reports etc etc.
Let me tell you something about the lives of rural and Indigenous people in the global south. They get their homes burned down and murdered in their sleep. Their lands are stolen from them with techniques perfected by colonial powers, especially from US settler colonialism.
The state will steal their lands and “preserve it” for use of private capital, for white settlers, or to create a national park or preserves that wealthy foriegners can hunt game and so they can parade to the world how “modern” they are becoming.
If they cannot steal land outright they will use other more complicated manners to incentivise rural people to be tied into market relations, such as dependence on ecotourism or even biochar and other technologies presented as liberatory or as needed due to damages colonialism has done. “A bit of colonialism will help your colonialism problem,” if you will.
These relations will contradict and then corrode their lifeways and distracted from effective traditional methods because white tourists don’t want to see the cattle of pastoralists when on vacation. They are also shamed by the excess wealth of tourists, and the settlers that facilitate tourism, encouraging them to become more enfranchised into modernity so their lands will either become vulnerable to direct theft or the market relations will mold them into what settlers want them to do for the benifit of their estates.
These extreme minority settlers often own like half of an entire county, while the county next door is over half conservation area. This means fewer lands for grazing and fewer water sources available for rural people. It leads to starvation and death, especially during dry periods such as the current drought in east Africa, all while the state concern trolls about food security and executes the development dance to attract aid and FDI. It also means that lands are degraded by over use because these people are being choked out of their ancestral lands. The state and white settlers then blame the pastoralists and forest dwellers and weaponize Human Rights against them, saying the rural peoples are preventing the states quest for water security as they redirect all waters to metro areas and settler estates.
All of this is the genocidal process of primative accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. It is a privilege I am able to research these situations. It is a privilege that I am able to work with organizations that work with local Tribes on the issues they are concerned about. It is a privilege I am a grad student that is paid to do this, although our union has to fight the university for a fraction of a living wage.
I am not privileged to not vote Blue. It is more like a curse of understanding. Who do you think backs these violent efforts of dispossession? USAID is never far away. The EU is never far away. The IFI are always right there. Conservation as we know it was created in North America to conquer the continent and take the land from Indigenous peoples and it has exported these methods abroad. All of this is supported by institutions and policies that democrats and republicans alike believe in and enable globally. It is supported by finance capital which is the foundation of the present democratic party
Let me tell you what people who vote blue do about this. Kenya or some other post colonial state will massacre people and burn down their homes and create a national park. Netflix will then hire Obama to narrate a docuseriese on the glorious national parks of the world. Blue voters will then consume the erasure and genocide of rural people as feel-good, green™ content with satisfaction that the world is becoming a better place. That’s it. Then they go vote blue.
Anyone who says I am privileged to not vote blue has no clue or no care regarding how the world works and is a combination being hopelessly US centric, too focused on bourgeoisie partisanship and embarrassingly naive about the world. Voting blue is the opposite of solidarity. The people who say they are not privileged enough to not vote Blue fail to see their own privilege of living in the Disney land of the global north. What ever gains they think Democrats will give them will either never happen or will be cut from the flesh of people they are happy to sacrifice.
I will not be extorted by bourgeoisie partisans. My moral worth and political identify is mine to create, not theirs to demand. My concern is with the fundamental machinations of capital and the devestating impact it has on people while it reproduces itself, and it is most destructive in places far from the minds of democrats regardless of issues in the US. I’m not going to be tricked into supporting a party that enables the process of accumulation by dispossession, and that stands on a foundation of genocide. They only have moral arguments but they do not have moral standing.
Every time I ask how voting blue will prevent any material harm in any hood like mine, I’m greeted with deafening silences. The school to prison pipeline is maintained by voting blue. Carceral slavery is maintained by voting blue. Murderous pigs are paid by voting blue. The military-industrial complex gets fatter and fatter contracts by voting blue. Familial separations and concentration camps are upheld by voting blue. But these bourgeois partisans, which-- I love that phrase-- these bourgeois partisans will keep trumpeting ‘harm reduction’ until the cows come home.
By now, I’m convinced it’s only harm reduction for their coasts, for their suburbs, and for their gated communities. Harm reduction for the already-privileged, and fuck everybody else. ‘Well, fuck them too’ is what I say.
I couldn’t agree more. These tactics have been used to get people to support political figures that will not advance their goals for far too long. (not to mention how distracting electoralist positions really are from what could be more productive efforts)
Liberals oversimplify politics in a way that erases the dynamic political realities of everyone, especially colonised and working people. They obfuscate the imperialist function of mainstream political discourse. The colloquial left-right political spectrum that is enforced cannot explain the differences between interests of white settler workers, Black workers, or moderate middle income land owners, yet liberals live and die by it and demand coalitions be built with it’s logic.
Ultimately this is why the Democratic Party is a prison house of social movements and marginalized interests, just as the US is a prison house of nations.
Vote red then I guess? Republicans lock up their constituents and would love to actively harm you. But you… Proved a point, or something, right?
And there’s the invocation of the boogeyman. Seriously you lot are as predictable as a period-- you act like they don’t already. Every single killer cop thus far has been some psychotic right-winger, never mind the rank-and-file stochastic terrorist incels. Voting blue is not gonna stop them, was never going to stop them; y’all never stopped them before. Hell, in several cases, y’all straight up shut down movements to strip pigs of their power and military surplus arsenals.
"Just stop thinking and voot", that’s you. Maybe the shithole you seem to care so much about despite being one of the most malfeasant landmasses in existence deserves to fall if you can’t muster anything better than the geriatric settler kleptocrats you keep pinning up.
Here’s the thing. Voting isn’t the only thing you can do. Voting is binary (in the US) though. You can vote blue or red (or not vote). Voting in primaries is probably more useful than the final election for changing things though.
Outside of elections, there are a bunch of things that can be done to ensure they hear you. The difference is the Republicans will just call it rioting or whatever. Most democrats will just ignore it. There will be some who listen though, and on occasion they will be allowed to put something small into a larger bill.
The democratic party does have some more progressive representatives, but not many. It’s a big tent party. It’s got more conservatives than progressives, but it’s still more progressive than the other choice you have. Voting will do very little, but it does potentially have an effect. It’s one tool out of many and should not be relied upon alone, but it also shouldn’t just be ignored because it’s slower than we’d like.