I disagree. You're assuming statism. There is a long and honorable history of principled abstentionism in the anarchist movement. The electoral process is often mistaken in this country for being the essence of democracy. It serves to legitimate the state. If you view the state as a fundamentally unjustifiable institution, voting (as an act of legitimation) becomes a moral issue.(1)Grace wrote:Lots of other great points have been made but just wanted to address this - it would NOT be revolutionary to not vote! What's revolutionary about that? What's truly revolutionary is to identify the characteristics that YOU think are key in a President and work towards getting someone like THAT in the White House. That's revolutionary. Or working to expand beyond a 2 party system.CPHigh wrote:Please read "The Limits of Power" by Andrew Bacevich.
This should be required reading before any election, specially this coming one.
The lesser or two evils!! This is the reason why we are voting this year?
We should really start a revolution by not voting!!!!
But not voting doesn't accomplish anything - it just gives the power to those who do show up to vote and those who are brave/stupid enough to run for office and win.
I myself have been a principled abstentionist for most of my life, as was my father. I'll be voting this time because McCain/Palin is just so godawful, but it's a negative vote, not a positive one. Obama does have many admirable qualities as a politician, however his and my views do not overlap. He is essentially offering the same solutions familiar in the last thirty years of the two party racket. His pick of Biden only reinforces my perceptions.
From an anarchist viewpoint, the state itself creates the problems for which it offers solutions. It's treating sores with a medicine that not only fails to address the underlying disease, but also aggravates those very sores. Some anarchists do believe in the possibility of making a difference through electoral politics, but they pointedly restrict it to the local level as part of a strategy called libertarian municipalism.(2)
However, there is no way to end the state through using the state. This is where every anarchist parts from Marx. Using statist means reinforces the state and weakens anarchy. It's simple behavioral patterning. The state's legitimacy rests first on violence and secondly on the psychological legitimation of that violence by the people. Reformism and trying to work within electoral politics reinforces the psychology of statism.
Anarchists have tried to cooperate or participate in the state (on a national level) before, in the Russian Revolution and in the Spanish Revolution. In both cases we were betrayed and slaughtered by the well-meaning statist socialists--and not just Bolshevists, but social-democrats looked on approvingly as well. The statists broke the back of both revolutions and concentrated power in the state. This is a sure and steady process that occurs as the result of the internal logic of the state.
States cannot tolerate free and voluntary association, which to me is a foundational principle of liberty. This for me is the crux of the problem--I am not allowed the choice to opt out of the state. The idea of someone living freely outside of the state is anathema to reactionaries and paternalistic socialists alike. To the former it's an affront to patriotism, to law and order. To the latter it's a rejection of the nanny state which is here to protect us all from the big bad corporations.(3) After all, an individual or a small cooperative/collective/commune in a state of liberty, producing only for subsistence and simple exchange belies the whole foundation of the state. Gotta bust them up, boys! Marxist legitimize such actions because a bourgeois economy is more "progressive" than a petty-bourgeois. And still more progressive is state capitalism, something they call socialism, only proving Bakunin right that the "red bureaucracy" would produce "the most vile and terrible lie" and "the worst of all despotic governments." Anyone who lived under Hoxha could tell you that.
Breaking the back of the two party racket could be revolutionary. Just getting someone in the White House is not revolutionary. Burning down the White House or turning it into a museum might be. None of these things are revolutionary enough to save us.
What is revolutionary? It's that old Wobbly motto: "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." Kevin Carson offers a program somewhat compatible with electoral politics. In all cases, we build counterinstitutions in which anarchist social relations can thrive. Even things as simple as lending without interest are an exercise in mutual aid. Work in every aspect of your life to foster free association, cooperation, solidarity, and mutual aid. As I said to a coworker, a society like ours that works in contradiction to the golden rule cannot help but eat itself, so apply the golden rule in your dealings with other people. Good behavior can be infectious. Agorists (a kind of left-libertarian) say we should work on creating a countereconomy by withdrawing from the legitimate economy as much as we can and only participating in grey and black markets. I don't know much about agorism, and that does sound slightly creepy, but I think it means exchanging, lending, gifting, working outside of the cash nexus. Start a community center. Everyone in your neighborhood could put up a list on the board. In one column are jobs they need done--fixing the waterheater, replacing a door--in the other column are jobs they can perform in return such as repairing siding, etc. Reciprocity and generosity are acts of rebellion against the cash nexus and the state. Here's something from "Riding Out the Credit Crisis" by Douglas Rushkoff in Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008:
There was a time when it was possible to have a traditional violent revolution. There was a time when anarchism was a true mass movement. That all died in Barcelona in May of 1937. But it's not the only way to make things better. Let's look to a world where our idea of politics is getting some people together to repair a road, not putting an X by the name of a lesser evil.Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn't necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.
If you're sourcing your garlic from your neighbor over the hill instead of the Big Ag conglomerate over the ocean, then shifts in the exchange rate won't matter much. If you're using a local currency to pay your mechanic to adjust your brakes, or your chiropractor to adjust your back, then a global liquidity crisis won't affect your ability to pay for either. If you move to a place because you're looking for smart people instead of a smart real estate investment, you're less likely to be suckered by high costs of a "hot" city or neighborhood, and more likely to find the kinds of people willing to serve as a social network, if for no other reason than they're less busy servicing their mortgages.
The more connected you are to the real world, and the more consciously you reject the lure of the speculative ladder, the less of a willing dupe you'll be in the pyramid scheme that's in the process of collapsing all around us at this moment.
Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition. And if you do have money to invest, put it into whatever lets you and your friends do those things.
Sorry for the long rant, but I thought I should put these ideas out there. I should say here, though, that if you do believe in the state, if you do support a party, I respect that! We are all individuals with individual convictions, and as an anarchist I cannot but respect your free will, heart, and mind. Do what seems the most moral, most efficacious. I think most state socialists are well-meaning people, as are most conservatives and all in between. Even the elites are not always evil--though they all may be short-sighted and selfish, every one of us is born into a struggle against the inevitable darkness of a yawning grave.
It is my conviction, however, that the ideas I've partially discussed here would result in the maximum balance of liberty and well-being for all. It's rational, commonsensical, and allows for our human folly. There is an alternative to our social cannibalism. If you think this is all idealism, look to history and anthropology. Societies like what I've described have existed, if not in toto at least in part. The opportunity we have is to realize an aggregation of all these good aspects, of these good things we have stumbled across in our primitive attempts to survive and persist. At no other time has a better way of living been simultaneously more possible and more impossible. This contradiction is at the heart of civilization right now: whither shall we go?
If anyone disagrees and thinks this all a load of nonsense, that's fine too! We may work at cross-purposes. None become my enemy until they harm my brother, my sister. I'm a firm believer in solidarity: an injury to one is an injury to all. Let's all just dance a while before we die. I doubt I'll live to see another 1936. But I might live to lay down the basis for it. I sure as hell would like to die trying!
All the best and more besides!
- Gene
Footnotes:
1. Paying taxes is also a moral issue, however in the case of taxes, nonadherence is criminal and so many anarchists still pay taxes in order to be left alone by the state. Of course, interference by the state is unavoidable. For a typical abstentionist piece, see the Case Against Voting by British anarchist Colin Ward.
2. Libertarian municipalism, however, concentrates on repurposing those institutions--a sort of democratic hijacking of the local state.
3. Yet these very corporations have pushed for such regulation and such policies. Every large corporation profits from the state. If we had free markets, it'd cease to be capitalism, and Walmart would no longer exist. See Chapter Six of Studies in Mutalist Political Economy by Kevin Carson for a historical survey and analysis of this, and see Chapter Five for why laissez-faire never existed, and finally Chapter Four for why capitalism has always been statist and exploitative.