We have more power to save ourselves than you've been led to believe
Voting is not harm reduction, direct action is
Take 10 deep breaths with me first.
This is a piece to ground us so we can refocus on the work we must commit to to get free. We need to focus on what can be, unburdened by what has been. Just kidding. Sometimes, we have to laugh at the colonial hellscape to survive.
On the real though- if you live in the west or even if you don’t, the last few days of American political theatre may have been all-consuming. I feel the exhaustion of people being distracted & engulfed by futile electoral politics all the way across oceans on the Malabar coast of South India. Hopefully, this piece does 2 things:
Give us some hope and unrelenting faith in our power as the people to liberate ourselves (as people across history always have)… without relinquishing our agency to useless, genocidal politicians that reign over the colonial empires oppressing us all.
Breakdown (in simple words) why voting is not harm reduction & why the “well we can vote for the lesser evil AND organize” both sides take is harmful
I’ll also make a case for why we should divest from settler colonial electoral politics using lots of inspo & quotes from this zine by Indigenous Action
Take 2 breaths with me again. Grab some tea, water, whatever soothes your being in this realm. Challo dost (let’s go friend).
The state is great at infusing a sense of impending doom & urgency in people when it wants to. After Trump’s Project 2025 theatrics, liberals in the so-called United States are drowning in panic, fumbling, seeking for quick solutions to a cesspool of problems rooted in centuries of ongoing bloody settler colonialism, turning to & hoping any non-trump president will help them, lacking foresight, and trapped in the same collective amnesia that comes with voting season every 4 years.
4 years ago many so-called leftists & liberals said that Biden was the “lesser of two evils”. For the last 10 months, we’ve witnessed over 500,000 Palestinians be massacred on livestream with weapons & unconditional financial support from the U.S. empire. Every politician’s hands drenched in blood. Clearly, Biden was not less harmful, neither was Harris who has always ecstatically supported the zionist regime. A few years ago, liberals said Obama was the lesser of two evils. The most vulnerable marginalized communities and the global south as a whole were wrecked during his presidency— he deported more people than any U.S. president, amped up the genocidal colonial wars that Bush started & outshined him on the body count by a mile, pioneered a drone strike programs that massacred entire communities (including the double tap protocol designed to deliver follow up strikes after the initial strike to kill first responders & eliminate any survivors) with 27,000 bombs dropped on Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia & Libya and that’s just the bloodshed we know off. Biden was his VP. The same Biden who spearheaded the 1994 crime bill that imposed tougher, deadlier prison sentences, criminalized & incarcerated more Black & Brown people, constructed more prisons, funded more cops & militarized police forces, expanded & codified the war on drugs and all around wrecked already decimated communities. Despite that, liberals promoted Biden & he became the next genocidal president, an unprecedented butcher-in-chief in his own regard but also more of the same as he amped up the imperial wars waged by Obama.
This cycle of settler colonial violence is almost poetic in a horrifying way— now Biden’s VP, Harris, the mass incarcerating top cop with an equally horrifying bloody record who is every bit as genocidal as Biden was, is being touted as the lesser evil.
“When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?…
At some point the left in the so-called U.S. realized that convincing people to rally behind a “lesser evil” was a losing strategy. The term “harm reduction” was appropriated to reframe efforts to justify their participation and coerce others to engage in the theater of what is called “democracy” in the U.S… A less harmful form of colonial occupation is fantasy. The process of colonial undoing will not occur by voting. You cannot decolonize the ballot.”
From the “Voting is Not Harm Reduction- An Indigenous Perspective” zine
Every U.S. president & administration has been just as bad as the ones that came before & after. Every 4 years, there’s also many of us cautioning people against relying on politicians to fix our problems. We sound like broken records. There is no “lesser” evil reigning over a genocidal colonial/ capitalist empire. All politicians are evil, some that are more crass & upfront about their fascism while others have better PR. But in practice, they are all the same. They operate in the same death machine that will chug alone with or without them.
Don’t worry, I’m not saying nothing we do matters. To the contrary, I’m saying everything we do matters. Each second, every breath, moment, joule of energy we expend… matters. It is our moral responsibility to focus our energy taking actions that will eventually free us all. We must learn from the past & move forward taking accountability for OUR role in the struggle for liberation. The more time we waste trying to force the master’s tools to work for us, the further away we are from being free.
“Do your work now for the next generation. When you work for your people, it is not what you receive, it’s what you give. And the best thing about working for the people is that what you give for the people sometimes nobody else knows except you. This is real struggle for the people…
The struggle that we’re involved in is an eternal struggle. We are not working for ourselves. We are working for generations to come… Generations later will come to thank us for the work we’ve done now.” — Kwame Ture
Voting is the master’s tool. The colonizer created it to give the disgruntled, slightly more privileged, soon-to-radicalize, almost-rebellious masses the illusion that their voice matters, that they can decide which direction the imperial beast turns next or have a say in who/ how/ how many it devours. No one benefits more from you believing this lie than the state.
We conflate familiarity with safety & it prevents our personal + political growth
Voting by definition is participation in settler colonialism. For example, voting for politicians that reign over the zionist settler colonial empire cannot & will not liberate Palestinians. The idea seems preposterous because of how “in your face” their oppressive conditions are. They cannot reform their colonizer. So what leads people to believe the same isn’t true of the so-called United States of America? An empire built on genocide, slavery, exploitation and ongoing, ever-expanding colonial conquests & violence against people and the land itself— cannot be made “less evil”.
I know it can be destabilizing, disorienting & incredibly confusing to imagine a way out of this violent cycle. I know it can be painful even to try to visualize the initial steps towards a better world. But, it is on us to free us. We may not have the collectivist infrastructure needed to threaten, weaken & dismantle these systems but the first step is to accept that is on us to build it. Relying on politicians in any capacity is perpetuating harm under the delusion that we’re reducing it.
There is an infinite expanse of evidence pointing to the fact that voting & participating in electoral politics has not benefited people. There is a mountain of evidence showing that the US is not a democracy but an oligarchy run by the wealthy where every decision made is made in the interests of the wealthy. The bar is so low that people perceive the crumbs thrown at them to be “wins” as massacres of millions of people around the world rage on. Every moment we fall for state propaganda, we are distracted & kept from focusing on building the foundation & community power we need to free ourselves. Letting go & divesting from settler colonial politics is a step towards liberation. One that should be followed by us seeking out people, building community as though our lives depend on it, finding & co-creating a political home, a collective to anchor into and figuring out how to militantly feed, clothe, shelter, defend & fight for each other on a day-to-day basis.
Think about how much time, resources & energy is spent on electoral politics. Even the time I feel compelled to expend saying the same thing over & over again hoping that a few people will snap out of it each time. Because I cannot do this alone, none of us can. We need more of us to “get” that the path to liberation is not voting or posting hot takes on social media, it is a total transformation of the self. It feels like ripping ourselves into shreds, a whole undoing of the self with gradual re-building, in community, piece by piece, each anchoring more into the “WE” than the “I”.
Why do we often feel powerless? How can we remind ourselves of our collective power?
Firstly, I alone cannot do much. I am powerless as an “individual” in isolation. There is no effective organizing I can do alone. The most I can do is unlearn, seek community, radicalize enough to know in my soul that it is on US to struggle together & be open to an never-ending uncomfortable but liberating evolution of my political beliefs & ideas. The rest of the answers will gradually come to us in the process of figuring out how to get free in community.
Often, I fall into pits of despair without seeing a way out. Entrapped in grief, sadness, fear & paranoia. I can’t see how we’ll “win”. This hopelessness is a logical symptom of us being born into & raised under capitalist/ colonial states that abuse & brainwash us into thinking that we have no power. They want us to think that we need them. The reality is to some extent we heavily depend on them & this conundrum of existing in the matrix that we’re trying to dismantle rightfully disorienting.
We are literally attempting to tear down the societal systems that we live under & still depend on for survival. However, if we gradually shift to depending more on each other, we start seeing the infinite capacity we, the people, have to resist, rebel & defiantly support our own survival as we fight. The more community we have, the more reciprocal relationships we’re in, the more capable we feel. Agency is not something that we can innately access, feel or act on in isolation or in a vacuum as an “individual”— it is a practice that is cultivated over time, in community.
These systems have brutalized & traumatized us… some more than others but at baseline being born into systems that deprive us of the right to life is traumatizing and the powerless you & I sometimes feel is a downstream outcome of that trauma. However, it is not an accurate reflection of our actual collective capacity, skill or ability to liberate ourselves.
Colonial, capitalist systems (like the state) oppress us in multiple ways. The first is the psychological abuse, manipulation, constant propaganda & brainwashing that we’re subject to in every facet of our lives. The colonial norms we’re forced to assimilate to, the capitalist values we’re force fed at school or told to aspire to by our uncritical nuclear families, the mainstream media/ entertainment/ knowledge systems we’re exposed to… all of it is meant to embed one primary message into your mind- “You need the empire, you cannot live without it, you must do what it says to maybe one day be happy”. We have all molded many parts of our personalities around values of the empire we internalized as our own.
The state’s abuse doesn’t stop at the psychological realm, it shapes our material, physical reality. The vast majority of us around the world are forced to spend our days toiling away at work generating wealth for the wealthy. As collectivist beings, we’re meant to spend majority of our time & energy doing things to support our communities survival. Instead, these systems create lonely, isolated beings, severed from the very things they need to thrive— community, culture & connection to land. It’s hard to break out of this default infrastructure. It’s another matrix paradox. How do we feed ourselves if we have never been allowed to figure out how to feed ourselves?
The first thing colonial empires do on conquests is violently sever the relationship the colonized people have with their land. Indigenous & all colonized people were/ are separated from their lands, forcefully displaced, dispossessed, barred from accessing any land, prevented from caring for land, giving to it, working it & using it as a direct source of sustenance. To control people, the empire must first control their access to basic survival resources. Once they cannot feed, shelter & clothe themselves, their obedience can be forced & labor can be extracted in exchange for crumbs that barely keep them alive… alive enough to be afraid, mindlessly conforming to the rules & norms of the colonizer but not so alive that they question the state of their existence or god forbid begin to collectively envision a way out of their oppression. That is why we are exhausted all the time— the systems designs the infrastructure of our daily lives to drain us of energy & direct our labor into the death machine, generating wealthy for the wealthy, leaving us with just enough energy to eat, shower, do what the state says, rinse & repeat.
So much of building & raising political consciousness is realizing & seeing our chains for what they are and becoming aware of the noose that keeps us tied to the matrix. However, there is a way out but it will require us to collective co-create amount the skills needed to be interdependent rather than dependent on the state. That is why mutual aid is so crucial, it increases our collective capacity to resist. But mutual aid on it’s own, without building mass political consciousness & without militant armed resistance, is just us facilitating the short-term bare bones survival of our people under deadly systems. It is prolonging their pain, it is having them hang onto dear life without giving them a real shot at liberation.
The sense of impending doom & urgency you may feel listening hearing about project 2025 is not a reflection of the situation getting worse, it is merely your nervous system being worked up by the state as was intended. Without critical thinking, people use this fleeting desire to “do something” to peddle more state propaganda, intentionally or unintentionally misdirecting even more people towards useless mainstream channels designed by colonizers to maintain & even strengthen the oppressive status quo. So building political consciousness all the time is critical. The goal is to NOT be reactive to the state but understand that these empires were built on centuries of bloodshed & these genocides are raging on… all the time. Your newfound urgency & awareness just means you’re finally starting to see things for what they are. Welcome to the struggle but it is critical that we enter it with humility, acknowledging the generations of foundations laid before us.
We can find solace in knowing that across history, rulers & politicians holding the reigns to an oppressive empire have never ever been involved in dismantling it. It has always been the people who have overthrown empires. Politicians are tools of the empire. They are our executioners, not our saviors. They serve the empire, not the people & their careers are built on selling you lies. But you & I, we have to give our whole being to the revolutionary struggle because it is on no one but us. Friend, no one is coming to save us— not in the sense that we are alone, but in the sense that our masters will not be our liberators. However, we can learn from past & present revolutions. We’re not going to have to reinvent the wheel.
Imagining & co-creating a better world outside the confines of existing systems
Political education is a critical part of mass revolutionary movement building. Across history, we’ve seen that revolutions require a critical momentum to be built first where people see that begging their rulers will never reduce the harm & violence unleashed on them. When enough people realize they must take matters into their own hands, we start having a real shot at taking down these empires.
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