Know Your Enemy - Voting: What Is it Good For? (w/ Astra Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, & Malcolm Harris) [TEASER]

Sam is joined by Astra Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, & Malcolm Harris to discuss the moral and strategic meaning — for the left — of voting in the 2024 election.

Duration: 3m
Broadcast on: 29 Oct 2024
Audio Format: other

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If you're on the left and you've spent time on the internet in the past few weeks, you've probably observe or participated in debates about the strategic value and moral status of voting in the 2024 election: Is it okay to vote for Kamala Harris even though her administration is complicit in a genocide? Is voting an exercise in signaling one's moral convincetions and identity? Or merely a tactical decision calculated to create better or worse terrain on which to organize in the future? Or is it something else altogether?

Perhaps these debates have stimulated you; perhaps they've filled you with despair; or perhaps (like Sam) they've driven you nuts. The intention of this conversation — with three of my favorite writers and thinkers — is to help us see further: past the stale categories and tendentious arguments that leave us, on the left, feeling frustrated and mistrustful, rather than mobilized and oriented toward a future beyond November 5th.

Our guests include: Astra Taylor, filmmaker, writer, organizer, and cofounder of The Debt Collective; author and organizer Malcolm Harris; and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, author, political philosopher, and co-editor of Hammer & Hope — a new magazine of black politics and culture.

Further Reading/Viewing/Listening:

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, (2023)

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), (2022)

Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, (2023)

— "What is Democracy?" (Zeitgeist Films, 2019)

Josie Ensor, "They voted Democrat for years — but the war in Lebanon changes everything," The Times, Oct 25, 2024.

"Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive Democrats and Community Leaders Statement on Presidential Election," Oct 24, 2024.

KYE, The Uncommitted Movement (w/ Waleed Shahid & Abbas Alawieh), Sept 4, 2024.

We've been told over and over again, I think very clearly, that we're not going to have any purchase on this administration. Rather than make concessions to the left, they have pointedly refused to make any concessions to the left. And I think that should clarify what our position is going to be under our perspective, Harris administration. - Unfortunately, it's not unreasonable to conclude that because they ran on, we're not gonna listen to you, we hate you, that that will be their position. It's not unreasonable to include that. It's not unreasonable. But I am gonna say, I am gonna say, the amount of support for an arms embargo, just as a democratic matter, you know, is extremely high, I don't actually think it would be good if everybody who's involved in organizing for policy change on Israel, Palestine, stopped doing that instead sabotaged factories. - I think you're insane. I think that's an insane thing to say. (all laughing) - I don't think just because the Harris administration is basically saying, fuck you to the left, to the left should be like, okay, well goodbye, we won't engage you, right? Like I do think we have a duty to be annoying and to be relentless in targeting them. - I mean, sure, I guess I just can't model in my head the person who's deciding either I'm gonna be a lobbyist or I'm going to blow up a truck shipment or whatever. Maybe that person's out there, but I just don't feel like either Harris or Trump winning will be clarifying to that segment of organizers. - Well, there's no magic button like Astra is saying, but if we look at what tactics in the Palestine movement have been effective, I cannot believe that the Biden administration has been moved in inch because there's just no distance from where they are from like the worst possible place. There's a genocide going on and no one has been able to stop it. I don't think lobbying the Biden administration, maybe even not protesting the Biden administration, certainly not like lobbying them with good faith from within the party as like uncommitted had tried to do. I think we know that that hasn't accomplished anything, right?

Transcription truncated.

Sam is joined by Astra Taylor, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, & Malcolm Harris to discuss the moral and strategic meaning — for the left — of voting in the 2024 election.