Most anarchists refuse to participate in elections. Does this mean we are anti-democratic? No, far from it, but we oppose the electoral system because it is a fraud, and we oppose the thinking behind the system because it is false.
In Britain, we have a general election once every five years or so. If a person lives for 70 odd years and first votes at twenty, then they get to write ten crosses.
X X X X X X X X X X
That is all the say you have got under British 'democracy'. It's pathetic....
The democratic swindle starts with the idea of 'representation', one person standing for many others. You vote for somebody twice a decade, John Major or Tony Blair, perhaps, and this person represents your interests and thousands of other people in Parliament. Our experience through many years shows MP's only represent themselves and the interests of Big Business; the people who paid for the electoral ad campaign to put them there.
Already, the fault with this is obvious. One person stands for many - a whole swathe of disparate interests. All of these compete and there always will be some losers. The grosser the representation, the more losers there are, as a simple fact of electoral geometry. Before we start getting indignant about MP's, we can see similar tendencies is all political organizations, Parish Councils, even including radical groups using the method of representation. Outside mythology, there are no saints - just people. It is a simple fact of human nature that whenever you put one person in authority over others, that person will 'abuse' their position.
Indeed, there can be no such thing as 'right' use of power, for all power corrupts. Yet, the electoral system is the means by which political power is granted 'legitimacy' within mainstream society. We have to think long and hard before we go anywhere near elections. If, after placing that cross, the government declares war on some group of people ( eg the unemployed, travellers, ravers, etc) then all of those who voted, regardless of party, had something to do with the making of that situation and are to some extent implicated in it. Do you really want to grant it that legitimacy?
All power corrupts. This corruption spreads through all levels, wherever power is being exercised. Everybody who once had a job has walked off with pencils, taken stuff home from work. That's a trivial example but how much more so the politician? I'm not saying there is no such thing as altruism but everybody has their own hierarchy of concerns, starting with those closest to the individual and moving outwards; family, relatives, friends, people they were at school or college together with, colleagues, members of the same political party or boardroom - these will be more important than abstractions such as constituents or 'the people'.
The whole idea of political representation assumes 'the people' are not there to plead for their own interests. Representation depends on exclusion. We wouldn't need representatives if we all had the right to defend our own interests within the political system. In a debate, the MP, councillor, committee representative or whatever stands up to make his or her speech and is then faced with the choice 'do I represent the people, or do I defend my own interests?' - The point here is that it isn't rational for that 'representative' to adopt the first choice. Given the necessity of a decision between more hospital beds or my own company getting defence contracts to make Saddam's electric torture batons, which do you think will win out? Representation entails betrayal.
Power takes away another person's ability to decide something. Rightly, anarchists will have nothing to do with this. Loss of power is the logical and psychological consequence of representation; one result of the power grasping politician is the passive powerless despairing mass of people outside the halls of power. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to canvass during an election as part of their political education will have probably experienced this disheartening lack of political awareness in people. I remember talking to a woman who I knew had voted Tory in the 1987 General Election, saying 'Well, you'll get your bloody poll tax now!' She hadn't got a clue what I was talking about, didn't know what was in the Tory manifesto. This kind of story leads to the question: Should we trust the judgement of the 20 Million Sun readers?
Democracy is the right of the majority to oppress the majority. Just because some piss pot political party was voted into power doesn't mean we have to go along with it. Two wrongs don't make a right and 13 million seven hundred and sixty thousand, five hundred and twenty five wrong opinions are still wrong. part of the problem with electoralism is that it is an abdication of responsibility. After placing his/her cross, the voter walks away and participation goes no further. This is wrong, and attitude to be exposed and opposed.
The danger of discussing the passivity problem is that you are apt to sound elitist, arrogant, dismissive of people. If you have got this impression, I am sorry. Often businessmen say 'You'll never get poor under-estimating the intelligence of people, and the politicians' arrogance is something of the same attitude. Unfortunately, things like the post poll tax 1992 election and the National Lottery seem to bear this out. If anarchists really were elitist, arrogant etc, then we would jack the whole political thing in and think up some sort of rip-off to make ourselves rich, buy an island in the Caribbean, take up other activities more rewarding to our overblown egos...
Against the anarchist arrogance charge, I say it is not wrong to hope. The answer to it starts with the declaration that this corrupt and nepotistic system of representation is not the best form of society that people can hope for. Do the passive mass of people really want to stay like that? If so then there really is no hope, but we can't believe that. Surely they have a right to be told about the possibilities, to be shown that other ways of living are possible? They have a right to be made aware that they could be free of it; and again, we ourselves have every right to try to break free of this electoral tyranny - we don't need anyone else's permission to fight it.
Ten crosses a life time is all the say you've got. The problem is that by voting you lend credibility to the system, in putting your cross on the piece of paper you are taken as giving your consent to be governed. The supporters of the state take heart from the fact that 30 million people vote in a general election. On the other hand, what would happen if nobody voted? The whole illegitimacy of the state would be exposed. From this we see that voting only encourages them.
The voter entered into a one sided 'contract' with the state - a Mephistophelian pact. At best the X can only be a coarse, very coarse approximation, for nobody completely agrees with everything in the manifesto or with every policy decision taken in the next five years of rule. In exchange for that cross on that piece of paper, the aspirations of the individual are quenched. This is a natural result of that effect of electoral dilution implied by the process of representation. Even within a single party, debate becomes channelled inside set limits, subject to the hidden or not so hidden agenda. Remember the row when Claire Short tried to initiate a Labour party discussion about drugs? Yet another person who had their aspirations quenched. Party constitutions, party whips, the electoral system, the way constituencies are gerrymandered (change the boundaries and you change the result) all of these stem from that initial principle that representation entails betrayal. 'Democracy' is the means by which the wishes of the people are prevented.
The electoral contract is one-sided because on the one hand it offers the delusion that all count equally, on the other hand electoral arithmetic means the individual counts for nothing. 10 ticks a life time. Wow. Fair votes for all? It takes an average of 36,597 votes to elect one Tory MP, 43,799 votes to elect a Labour and a staggering 333,688 votes to elect one Liberal Democrat. The reality is that it is a completely bent system.
One argument (advanced even by anarchists) is that voting is a positive thing to do, a step towards liberation. We live in the real world, the electoral system exists and is there to be used. With hospital closures and the like, which party governs us is literally a matter of life and death. In this, Labour is assumed to be a better state of affairs than a Conservative government. Therefore we have a civic duty to cast our vote in the hope of bringing down the Tory. This argument is not claiming that Labour is any good, just that it is less worse. I used to think like this, but now the argument no longer works because Labour are no different from the Tories.
In the old days (the 1920's) people like my Grandfather wanted to vote Labour but there were no Labour candidates, so they used to write Socialist slogans on the ballot paper, or stick red stickers on them. This would be a positive alternative to simply staying at home and not voting. One thing is sure though - you never get 'NO GOVERNMENT' as an option on the ballot paper.
Other people suggest putting up anarchist candidates in elections, perhaps as serious contenders or maybe satirically and subversively along the lines of Screaming Lord Sutch. Often these would give a Sinn Fein style promise not to take up the seat if elected. Any gain from this would be miniscule, as against the waste of effort and resources. The way the system is set up, this would be seen as just another candidate.
UNDER ELECTORALISM ONCE EVERY FIVE YEARS YOU HAVE A MINUSCULE SAY JUST TEN TICKS A LIFE TIME WITH ANARCHISM YOU GET YOUR SAY EVERY DAY
Anarchists have even stood in elections and won! In Holland, July 1970, the Kabouters polled 11% of the vote and took 5 seats on the 45 member Amsterdam council. People in favour of this say it gives a chance to put anarchist ideas across to the wider public, exposes the anarchist movement to scrutiny and invites people to take us seriously as a political force. All of these are good reasons, of course, but it has to be said that we do not need to stand in elections to put our ideas across to people. The object of elections is for politicians to gain power and create the illusion that people have a say in what goes on when they do not. Were we to stand in elections, then our motives and objectives would be different, but how would they be interpreted? To participate also implies consent in the same way that voting does. Anarchist election candidates would not be part of the power game at all, but they would join themselves with the deception and lend whatever radical credibility they might have to a flawed process. Perhaps they would be drawn into the power structure itself and swallowed whole. Is that a risk worth taking?
The reasons the Kabouters did so well was Proportional Representation. (PR) If you get 3% of the vote you get 3% of the seats. With the British First Past The Post (FPP) system, even if you get 20% of the vote like the Liberals, you still only get 3% of the seats. This is a big reason why participating in elections involves so much effort for so little gain.
Something else which is often ignored is that radical candidates in elections compromise all their supporters. It would be an act of gross stupidity for anarchists to participate in elections. You see, the ballot is not secret at all. Elections provide the state with the perfect way of tracking dissidents. When you go to vote, your number on the electoral roll (therefore your name and address) is written on the stub in the book of ballot papers, and then the paper itself is torn out (rather like a cheque book) and stamped with an embossed code identifying the polling station, and so your electoral roll. Each paper is also numbered, as are the cheque stubs. After the election is over and the votes counted, the papers, electoral rolls and ballot stub books are sent off to the Home Office, supposedly for 'safe keeping'. Teams of men from MI5 will no doubt trawl through the whole lot, doubtless looking at all the interesting candidates first. Unless anything goes wrong, they've got five whole years to work out t
The idea of representation is the main problem with elections. Representational democracy is grounded in the principle of exclusion. Ordinary people don't get a look in, you don't get members of the public making speeches in the House of Commons, nor are we allowed to vote in those division lobbies. Because there is this representation principle, the whole thing is utterly disconnected from outside.
Not voting in elections is just one (small) thing. What we need to do instead is build up positive alternatives of empowerment. We need to initiate hundreds of small, inclusive, participatory democracies, where people are involved in all decisions. One fault with representation is that it makes people passive. Tick the box and be absolved of responsibility. To some extent it is all our own fault, because if people kept active the parliamentary, representational processes would be by-passed. The system is predicated on people staying passive, but the tendency of the last decade and more is for greater and greater activism and this is starting to pay off. Voting, however, is a kind of abdication - we are too lazy to take charge of our own lives, so we place that cross and walk away. This is how and why the sleazy politicians have wormed their way in there.
We need to break out of that passive mental attitude; as wide a selection of the population as possible needs to change their way of thinking. Participating, whether by standing or voting in elections, only enhances their power at our expense. We need to create small but active political structures, completely outside that representational political culture. It cannot be done fromn side. We can see how this process is already happening, effectively too, in the present. You never get a mainstream political party voluntarily disbanding itself - this clinging to power has much too hard a grip on them for that. Yet with the road protests or the CJA model - the sort of patterns to aim at, people come together to do a particular political task, and when it is over they disband the group, going on to other things. If we put our energy into this it would be a million times more productive and rewarding than wasting our time with electoral politics.
article sent in by Urban Paranoia