Electoralism vs. Social Movements

October 25th, 2012

The ballot box is the coffin of class consciousness. Voting serves to legitimize the state - people think the state is okay because a handful of figureheads were elected. Voting acts as a safety valve that directs discontent away from direct action. Some people pay lip-service to combining direct action with elections, but many people who might otherwise be inclined to revolt settle for voting the bums out of office instead. Direct action tends to undercut the viability of your election campaigns because if you are seen engaging in direct action, or are otherwise associated with it, you will alienate moderates who might otherwise have voted for you.

We have finite resources, and resources put into elections are resources not put into direct action. Every dollar put into elections is a dollar not put into organizing. Every hour someone spends campaigning for a candidate is an hour not spent organizing.

Elections also help coopt mass movements, thereby undercutting direct action. If someone from your movement, or even just someone you think of as being the "lesser of two evils," gets in office you are more likely to give that person the benefit of the doubt. When he tries to implement fucked up policies it will be easier for him to persuade people to go along with it because he's thought of as being on "our side." People who would otherwise oppose those policies will be more likely to support them than if someone from the other side had done the same thing. And even if they still oppose it, most probably won't oppose it with the same vigor as if the other side had done the same thing. The collapse of the anti-war movement as soon as Obama came into office, despite Obama's extensive warmongering, is an example of this. Bill Clinton was able to gut aid for dependent children ("welfare") while Reagan was unable to do so because, as a Democrat, he was able to get people who usually oppose that sort of thing to go along with it. Elections are a means by which the state controls the population, not vice versa.

Not voting has been the standard anarchist position since at least Bakunin’s days. There are no anarchist organizations that encourage people to vote in government elections, and quite a few that encourage people not to vote by organizing election boycott campaigns. There a handful of people who call themselves anarchists yet vote regularly. Most of them are not members of anarchist organizations, and often have either a poor grasp of anarchist theory or only a half-hearted commitment to it. There are also people who call themselves anarchists and openly defend capitalism, or engage in sexist behavior, or who do other things that contradict their purported anarchism, too. In all three cases, its hypocritical and contradicts the philosophy they claim to espouse. They are "anarchists" not anarchists, or anarcho-hypocrites. One might point to Noam Chomsky as an exception, but he’s stated repeatedly he’s more of an anarchist sympathizer than a real anarchist.