You'd sooner build a movement with a breakfast program than an electoral campaign, but when the left does a breakfast program the cops kill the people behind it. When the left tries a federal electoral campaign, it fails because first past the post incentivizes strategic voting which chokes any third party in the crib.
The remaining paths to power are somewhere in-between, using labor organization and indigenous resistance against colonization as the main points to struggle over and build the movement; the degree to which national electoral politics factors into the left's strategy is pretty limited, but we've always been trying our best to contest local elections where it can actually make a difference. The influence of surveillance on these efforts means that they have to remain decentralized and have limits as to what they can do on the ground without kneecapping themselves. So, yea, there actually is a movement, there are just some important structural forces that preempt the separated pieces of the movement from coalescing beyond where they currently exist. Overcoming those forces requires us to reach more people with the existing movement, and I don't think selling them on voting for a losing candidate for symbolic reasons is particularly effective.
You'd sooner build a movement with a breakfast program than an electoral campaign, but when the left does a breakfast program the cops kill the people behind it. When the left tries a federal electoral campaign, it fails because first past the post incentivizes strategic voting which chokes any third party in the crib.
The remaining paths to power are somewhere in-between, using labor organization and indigenous resistance against colonization as the main points to struggle over and build the movement; the degree to which national electoral politics factors into the left's strategy is pretty limited, but we've always been trying our best to contest local elections where it can actually make a difference. The influence of surveillance on these efforts means that they have to remain decentralized and have limits as to what they can do on the ground without kneecapping themselves. So, yea, there actually is a movement, there are just some important structural forces that preempt the separated pieces of the movement from coalescing beyond where they currently exist. Overcoming those forces requires us to reach more people with the existing movement, and I don't think selling them on voting for a losing candidate for symbolic reasons is particularly effective.