We have more power to save ourselves than you've been led to believe. Voting is not harm reduction, direct action is

“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 have more power to save ourselves than you've been led to believe

Voting is Not Harm Reduction – An Indigenous Perspective – Indigenous Action Media
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?

Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives.

We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.

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.

Harm reduction was established in the 1980s as a public health strategy for people dealing with substance use issues who struggle with abstinence. According to the Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) the principles of harm reduction establish that the identified behavior is “part of life” so they “choose not to ignore or condemn but to minimize harmful effects” and work towards breaking social stigmas towards “safer use.” The HRC also states that, “there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction.” Overall, harm reduction focuses on reducing adverse impacts associated with harmful behaviors.

The proposition of “harm reduction” in the context of voting means something entirely different from those organizing to address substance use issues. The assertion is that “since this political system isn’t going away, we’ll support politicians and laws that may do less harm.”

The idea of a ballot being capable of reducing the harm in a system rooted in colonial domination and exploitation, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism is an extraordinary exaggeration. There is no person whose lives aren’t impacted everyday by these systems of oppression, but instead of coded reformism and coercive “get out the vote” campaigns towards a “safer” form of settler colonialism, we’re asking “what is the real and tragic harm and danger associated with perpetuating colonial power and what can be done to end it?”