We know voting in bourgeois USian democracy is only affected by people in swing states (and even that is “which ghoul do you want to administer the dictatorship of capital”) but hear me out.
A comrade recently posted about ironically or unironically (I didn’t read enough into the thread) voting for AfD in Germany and it reminded me of a WaPo article that read:
“Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.”
So it got me thinking, by continuing to overextend the military, as empires do, are we actually seeing “two, three, many Vietnams”? Is the way to exhaust the empire’s military into submission to vote for Trump? On one hand we have the King of Hubris (hubris being the guarantor of empire decline) and on the other hand things might have played out this way while wearing a Democrat mask, too, as we know the real driving force is capital accumulation and Epstein island retreats. The down side is the harm that comes to marginalized and oppressed people, which again also happens under Dems when it’s their turn to protect capital accumulation and Epstein island retreats. I know in Germany it’s different because there are several parties but in the US we’re a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, we have two of them (shout out to Julius Nyerere). So would voting for Republicans be a net positive for the world and the demise of capitalism? Should we just abstain from voting? Vote blue for harm reduction?
A big piece of evidence for this theory comes from my personal experience- how many people I know afk that are now (recently) radicalized. People I wouldn’t expect in a million years to actually be down with changing the system are now fervent revolutionaries. Comrade Trump is the greatest left wing organizer since Lenin. That’s right I said it.
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Accelerationism is bullshit. If you want to do something stupid, do adventurism instead.
Hexbear users only know two things: electoralism and drive bits into the ground.
Once in a while I see a picture I dont understand, and I wish there was alt text for it so I could learn more about it.
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Thanks.
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“Bruce Willis and company demonstrate the most technologically sophisticated example of driving a bit into the ground”
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Thank you for this clear and direct answer
Just because the meat grinder meant to grind up the marginalized and 3rd world gets damaged when they shove people into it doesn’t mean we should shove even more people in to break it quicker.
Thank you for explaining this so concisely.
OP probably got their idea from Zapp Brannigan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
👏
You do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to Trump”
What if I’m handing him a really stinky bag of dog poop
Of course, the best way to beat fascists is to empower them /s
No.
go to the nearest concentration camp and ask the people inside what they think
There have been several threads about the topic of voting for Trump specifically before, and threads about the topic of accelerationism in general before, and the answer now is still the same as it was in 2024, in 2020, and really since the dawn of politics: accelerationism is not an effective strategy. There is nothing particular about the present day situation that makes it any different from the historical precedent which countless people have already written about. To put it simply, a successful revolution requires a large-scale, organized revolutionary movement with the support of the masses, capable of resisting the status quo. Accelerationism is making things worse without the means to make things better, which is historically how you get fascism. What we must remember is that things will always get worse of their own accord, but slowing down that worsening is how we get the necessary time and means to build a successful revolutionary movement.
You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.Yes, Marx tells us that the sharpening contradictions of capitalism will take us to socialism and then communism, so is your idea of slowing down that worsening voting for Democrats, 3rd party, or not voting at all?
From your point of view, do we create two, three, many Vietnams by simply letting capitalism’s decay take its course, or do we have to do something? This is, of course, unrelated to building people power, which should go on (and is going on more intensely than before where I live) regardless of what the ruling class does.
My own strategy in 2024 was voting for the PSL, but I knew other leftists who abstained or voted Democrat. The idea with voting third party is that it “puts proletarian politics on the agenda”: for non-leftists it creates more visibility for these ideas and shows that they have a base of support, for leftists it can be a morale boost to know how many people already stand behind our ideas, that sort of thing. This being said, I don’t think it’s worth people’s energy to scold others for either abstaining or voting Democrat, since the amount of things we can achieve through electoralism are limited to begin with.
As for the second point, let capitalism’s decay take its course in a sense. Your focus should be on agitating and helping others, that’s the way to both slow the worsening and build people’s power.
You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.
Very cis take.
A bit more than just a cis take, frankly, more of a broadly privileged take. My initial reply to this thread is trying to be firm but not hostile, but I think my frustration still shows a bit, because this accelerationist idea really feels “some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make / this is the first time in my adult life that an issue has impacted me personally”. A recurring thought I’ve had for a while now is whether I’m outgrowing this site, whether this site is just culturally getting worse, or perhaps both, because I think the first time when I criticized what I called “kulture” (or “socialism as a subculture”, or “Marxism-Leninism-Gobshitism”) on our site was in August of 2025, but I feel like the issue has really come to a head this year. Emphasis on “feel like” — this isn’t an empirical statistic — and I should specify that this applies to both Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and the broader Lemmy left. In essence, Marxism and leftism are turned into memes to be quoted ad nauseam, and people “read” not to learn how to best act to improve the world, but to prove that they belong in an online community. Even dialectical materialism becomes a “do as I say and not as I do”, where people can quote its basic meaning and claim to follow the philosophy, yet never actually apply the dialectical method in their analyses or daily lives as anything more than lip service. People failing to consider more than one aspect of an issue at a time leads to a lot of reactionary nonsense passing for “leftism”, and while the worst cases usually get removed and corrected, this reactionism still seems to fester far too often, leaving online leftist spaces increasingly muddied with correct stances gradually pushed out by the incorrect stances of those who can “talk the talk but not walk the walk”. I’m reminded of this quote from Philip Short’s 2004 biography of Pol Pot that a friend shared with me:
Most of them, moreover, had only the vaguest notions of Marxist theory. Thiounn Mumm, Khieu Samphân and, a generation later, radical students like Suong Sikoeun and In Sopheap waded through Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and State and Revolution, Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism and other ponderous tomes, but they were the exceptions who proved the rule. Sâr confessed later that when he read ‘the big, thick works of Marx . . . I didn’t really understand them at all.’ Ping Sây, too, thought that ‘Marx was too deep for us’.
OP doesn’t speak for Hexbear. The fact that the comments here pretty much unanimously say that accelerationism is wrong shows that. And yet, people never say things unless they feel they can in some sense “get away with it”, right? So there is some underlying current in our site’s culture that not only led OP to develop this idea, but to also not think to reflect any deeper on the idea or look up any previous threads about it before posting. I do not want to judge OP for still being in the process of learning, and in that process having a bad take and doing something without thinking; I’ve been there, and OP has allowed self to be corrected, and that is what’s most important. But things like this should always get us thinking about what we can do about our site culture to make cases like this less frequent.
You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.This all seems very reasonable and well considered to me. I probably should have come in with something more productive. I feel like I’ve just been seeing a lot more of this type of thing lately, most of the news I’ve seen (including but of course not limited to trans stuff) lately has got me feeling extra doomed, and also I have some shit going on IRL that’s got me more on edge than usual anyway, and I let the “this is rad, actually” of it all get to me more than I ought to have.
Come in with what you have the energy for: it’s important to let yourself feel your feelings, you really don’t have to blunt yourself in these sorts of situations just because being a little more polite or a little more verbose maybe has a slightly better chance of getting your point across. I think trans women are often deathly afraid of “taking up space” and end up becoming prone to being overly self-critical or self-flagellating, almost as if we’re looking for reasons to say we’re wrong or undeserving. I’m certainly not immune to that, either, but I try to be cognizant of it. In this case, just saying “very cis take” is a laconism that doesn’t necessarily spell out the issue, but that sort of laconism is only unproductive if it doesn’t inspire reflection on the part of OP — and whether OP responds to upset by thinking “damn, maybe this was a bad take” depends on how sage OP is, which is OP’s responsibility, not yours. You have a right to be mad, and not volunteer your mental health for another’s sake, “each according to ability”.
I find that it’s pretty rare that I get mad at people who are mad at me. There are some times when differences really are irreconcilable, yes, but in most cases, I will either listen and pretty quickly understand that I was wrong, or if I know to begin with that the anger is coming from a misunderstanding, then I don’t actually feel like the anger is directed at me, and I can deescalate. Especially on a site like this where everyone is already going to be on edge. Never will I say that people don’t have a right to be mad. If people insist upon you being polite at all times, that you must never show your upset, then that just creates a culture where the only people who can speak are those who can treat politics like a game, the privileged who don’t have much to lose.
Another important idea: just culture. This is another point that a lot of Hexbears struggle with: you shouldn’t be saying “who’s to blame” but rather “what caused the problem”, because “mistakes are generally a product of faulty organizational cultures, rather than solely brought about by the person or persons directly involved.” I first started to think about this because I used to watch a lot of Mentour Pilot and just culture is the basis of plane crash reports, and I really do think that a lot of people’s lives would be a lot better if they started thinking in those terms instead of blaming others or blaming themselves. A lot of the posts I see on !selfcrit@hexbear.net really feel like they boil down to “I did a bad thing and I’m sorry” instead of actually reflecting on what happened and what can be done going forward. You’re saying that you “let it get to you more than you ought to have”, but what does that actually mean? Setting aside that I think you’re in your right to be laconically mad to begin with, but you didn’t exactly print a permission slip and hand it to this post and say “OK, you can cause me to be mad now” and then the post said “very good, I will cause you to be mad now” and then you were mad. No, you saw something that made you feel despair about the world, and you responded as if you were feeling despair about the world, because you were.
Somewhat tangential, but I often find myself thinking about the whole Daoist parable of the river, where the water bends around the stone, and yet the stone is still eroded by the water, “action without action” or wu wei — that idea that by spontaneity and non-interference all things will be done in due time, to do things without forcing them. I dunno. The concept has been interpreted and misinterpreted in so many ways over the millennia, yet I still try to consider the idea in my daily life, and I have to wonder what the wu wei response to someone’s accelerationism would’ve been for you. I’m pretty certain the response you actually had — a response that said all it really needed to without any extra effort — is closer than the response you think you should’ve made in hindsight.
You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.I’m going to have to take some time and read through this a bit, but for a quick response, the main problem that I have with my response is that I shot the second arrow, so to speak. I also think that while it encapsulated what I was feeling fairly well, this is (or at least should be) a place where we help each other to be better, and taking some more time to explain why I felt that way may have been more helpful. So, it’s not so much that I feel wrong to have had that response as it is that I feel like I would like to have been more productive and less reactive, maybe. Which may not be required, but is how I’d like to be, at least in the face of naïveté. Outright, intentional malice is obviously a different situation, but I suspect that’s not what we have here.
Also, I appreciate your thoughtful responses. :)
I just assumed OP was joking. @happybaby@hexbear.net were you not joking?
No lol but I bet now you can see why I have to run my best ideas by my people before I act on them.
Nah, let’s not encourage self-censorship or in-group/out-group mentality. I think that if any comrade has a question they should feel free to come to askchapo and discuss. Like you pointed out, we are all at different stages of learning and the only wrong place to be is the place where one feels they don’t need to learn anymore. Hexbear is a place imo with tons of knowledge and experience so there is tremendous value here.
I know my question was “controversial” but I consider Hexbear my home and if I can’t ask here then I would have to keep it to myself and let it fester, which is not good. Plus, who knows who else was thinking something similar and got to explore the idea and get closer to the correct understanding.
It’s sad if my post made you feel like leaving Hexbear. I hope you stay, we need unity above all else, even if your highness has to deal with a dumbass like me from time to time ;)
Yeah, you’re right. I guess I’m on edge, too.
You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. Cēterum cēnseō iūs auctōris esse dēlendum.Sorry to hear that, and I can’t blame you for being on edge. You weren’t even wrong to be mad tbh, I unwittingly fell into “but it might work for us” and didn’t even realize my idea was simple accelerationism. I thought “this time it’s different” because the current regime is so talented at alienating allies, kneecapping the economy, and losing wars that if the Democrats came back into power the mass of centrists would just go back to brunch, but you comrades slapped me back onto the right track.
I live in a red state and my belly is nervous about the midterms, although my brain interprets that (and my surroundings afk) in it’s own fucked up way lol.
Dont play 5D chess
What’s your tactic when it comes to voting? Harm reduction (D), no voting, 3rd party?
I’m not American
A big piece of evidence for this theory comes from my personal experience- how many people I know afk that are now (recently) radicalized. People I wouldn’t expect in a million years to actually be down with changing the system are now fervent revolutionaries.
It’s cool if you’ve had this experience, but looking at the general reaction of going from first term Trump to Biden, how many libs just happily went back to brunch? The electoralism comm header image even had a joke about it. Also I think this website has discussed accelerationism before…
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how many libs just happily went back to brunch?
Do not be fooled that anti-trumpism is a radical position on the same footing as anti-capitalism. Just look at how many countries support America and Israel attacking Iran, the only problem is how it’s being done. The UK and other euros are still providing support to them, fucking kkklanada is condemning Iran even in the middle of Trump threatening annexation! Western countries for all their bluster are still in lockstep behind america following every order. It’s never a problem with the reality of America’s actions, the issue is always the optics.
the canadian shit especially is a joke. Carney is such a neoliberal doofus, the idea of a genuinely anti-US canada is comical I’m afraid.
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Seriously, like people are talking a big game about American threats of annexation and how we all hate America now (I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, it’s nice to be able to say “fuck america” and have people agree with me for once even though I know they heard “fuck trump”) but the second there’s a choice between supporting america or one of their victims Carney couldn’t move to condemn the Iranian “regime” fast enough. It’s fucking pathetic, literally zero sense of solidarity (unsurprising coming from a white settler state) even when IRANIANS ARE ACTUALLY BEING FUCKING MURDERED. But noooo trump tweeting some stupid ai map showing Canada as part of America that’s a bridge too far
Canada also hasn’t stopped sending funding and weapons to Israel, to my memory. That anyone wants to unironically welcome canada to “the resistance” blows me away lol
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Also I think this website has discussed accelerationism before…
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
first term Trump to Biden, how many libs just happily went back to brunch?
Yes, totally agree, but from Biden to Trump 2 I have noticed an intense shift to local organization. A lot of people were on the fence during Biden when the anti-genocide protests were getting violently shut down (still repeating but not really believing the bourgeois media’s talking points) but then when the 2 white people were killed in Minneapolis that’s when it really took off. Was it similar where you are or did they all just go back to brunch again?
but then when the 2 white people were killed in Minneapolis
Too depressing seeing once again that americans only spring into action when it affects white people. I’m not surprised anymore but it’s still rage inducing to see.
I live in the world’s sleepiest
retirement town and it feels like very little happens here, very insulated from world events. A bookstore here started prominently featuring 1984 by Saint George Orwell the week the trade war with the US started, so that’s the state of it up here. There is a May Day event in my town that I missed this year, which is the most substantial thing I’ve personally seen.
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No
It’s not based to vote for Trump because voting will never be based.
first post in almost a month
“fellas is it hecking based to vote for trump?”
