Your and my votes generally do not matter because a single vote usually is not going to make a difference... (which seems to me to imply (in this case) don't bother voting, revolution is the only way to make things better)

I see this attitude a lot in the auth-left. Is this a general thing or only counts when talking about voting?

What about driving SUVs? I'm just one person, doesn't matter if I drive an SUV right? It's only one automobile. And promoting the concept that people shouldn't drive SUVs would be silly right?

What about consuming animal products? It wouldn't matter if people become vegan or not right?, the cow is already dead, the carbon emissions already emitted, and one person eating a hamburger won't make any difference, no sense in eating less meat or trying to promote eating less meat, it'd be no more useful than voting/promoting voting. The only solution would be to outlaw being non-vegan, and anyone who wants a burger deserves the wall right?

I agree with everything but I think this is a weak line to use:

a single vote is not going to make a difference

it's true that leftists are too small in number to sway an election, but with that line you're just gonna get "what if everyone thought that way." You can see how the lib you were talking to latched onto that one line and ignored everything else.

more importantly, the whole purpose of denigrating voting is to get people to organize. As long as people organize, whether or not they also vote in national elections is of little consequence imo, as long as they have realistic expectations. If they think there's some marginal harm reduction, that's fine, as long as they don't pin all their hopes on some crisp, bloodless Democrat who'll let Citibank pick their cabinet like Obama did in 2008.

People need to understand that, even when the majority votes blue, their votes do not actually result in policy. We have to break the false sense of political agency that voting gives people. But the purpose is ultimately not to stop people from voting, but to make them start organizing.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014)

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.