Okay, I was asked to speak today in defense of the claim that “voting only makes things worse”. In truth, that’s not exactly my position. To be honest, I don’t care if anyone or everyone in this room today votes in November, or in local elections next spring. What I care about is making sure that people don’t walk out of here with any illusions about the value of voting. Simply put, I don’t care because it doesn’t matter.
It’s important to know that I think voting makes good sense in many cases, and in principle voting is the most appropriate way to resolve disputes among large numbers of people. The benefits of consensus in small groups are well known, but when the occasion arises to make decisions with hundreds or thousands of other people, then from my perspective voting is the most sensible approach. My anarchism is an anarchism of radical, direct, and participatory democracy. Voting is one of the best tools of democracy in this sense, both now and in the free society we hope to create.
Of course, as many people have pointed out, voting is merely a procedure, much the same whether it is utilized in the free society, or in a revolutionary organization, or in every city and town in the US this coming November. My problem is not with the procedure, it is with the capitalist, statist, and white supremacist context in which, for instance, the November elections will take place. In such a context, voting is never a procedure to expand freedom, and even in the best of all possible scenarios, elections are never a procedure to win even basic demands.
Apart from ideologues who think voting is the essence of all that is good in “this great nation”, there are two main arguments I’m used to encountering when I engage with people who want me to vote. The first is the lesser of two evils. “Anybody but Bush” is the current manifestation of this thinking. This sort of argument usually degenerates quickly into speculations on alternate histories that never happened (“what would Gore have done after 9/11?” etc.).
Such speculation can be fun in a way, but much more instructive right now, it seems to me, is the fact that enormous sections of the ruling class in North America, and pretty much all sections of the ruling class in the rest of the world, want Bush to lose. What does it say about our own political analysis that we find ourselves on the same side as Lee Iacocca, not to mention dozens of former movers and shakers in the armed forces, the intelligence community, diplomatic envoys, and so forth? Frankly stated, I think it means we are naïve if we believe that Bush is better for global capitalism, and we are foolish to think that Kerry will somehow be better for global anti-capitalism.
The second argument for voting is perhaps best represented by a long essay written by long-time anarchist Chris Crass, explaining his current enthusiasm for voting on both a local and a national level. His argument is that voting and even campaigning is really just an extension of the sorts of pressure politics many of us regularly engage in: demos and such demanding a new trial for Mumia, or community struggles that pressure local politicians to change anti-homeless ordinances, etc.
The key link in the chain for Chris and others, especially those who live in California, is the ballot initiative concept. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this, in California and a number of other states (mostly in the rockies and west), any piece of proposed legislation can be approved either by the legislature and the governor, or by one single popular vote, conducted on election day on the same ballot as all elective offices. Probably the most famous such ballot initiative was Proposition 187, a viciously anti-immigrant proposal which passed in California in 1994.
From here, Chris and others make the leap to actively campaigning for local candidates for office as a way to increase popular pressure on those same candidates and on all other local politicians. There are so many flaws in this logic it’s hard to know where to start. I’ll limit myself here to only a handful.
First, there is a fundamental difference between plebiscites and electoral campaigns: ballot initiatives directly make policy, and are therefore at least marginally democratic, where elections are about determining which particular member of the elite gets to make decisions for you. No policy changes are even remotely implied by elections.
Second, this logic depends on a fundamental misunderstanding of pressure politics and basic questions of how power works. When most of us engage in pressure politics, the threat that we hold over the heads of judges and politicians is not that we will vote them out of office; it’s that we will make their existance uncomfortable until they accommodate us.
Similarly, voting someone into office does not begin to produce results in most cases: the quid pro quo starts with active campaigning and runs through the inevitable compromises on issues that are less central to the group engaging in the pressure politics. You begin by thinking the politicians are working for you, but before long you are working for them.
This is the nature of power in an electoral context. The history of Chicago, through both Daley’s and even the revered Harold Washington, is the history of the quid pro quo and the eventual complicity of even radical community groups with the machine power structure. Look at any or all of the Saul Alinsky founded or inspired organizations in town and you will see what I mean. While not all locales are as extreme in this regard as Chicago (my anarchist brother, for instance, has been known to vote occasionally in local referenda and at least one election in Madison Wisconsin), the same principle is at work everywhere.
I want to conclude by confronting one of the strongest parts of what I keep calling the Chris Crass position (even though he shares it with thousands of anarchists across North America): one particularly stinging argument made by Chris and others is that not voting hurts poor people and people of color, while most of us making the anti-voting argument are privilged enough not to care about voting because we are white and not poor. I’m white and I’m not poor, I admit. I take these issues very seriously because it is certainly true that an electoral system that disenfranchises convicted felons has a disproportionate effect on poor people and people of color.
But my analysis of the relationship between poverty and voting doesn’t begin with “what should I do to help the poor?” It begins with “how do the poor intervene in politics?” When you ask that question, you can’t help but notice that most poor people don’t vote. They engage in politics in all sorts of other ways, through churches and community groups and street gangs and spontaneous resistance and so forth, but even among people who haven’t been formally disenfranchised, voting is not exactly common. While I certainly don’t mean to idealize the political attitudes of “the poor” (much less do I think of poor people or people of color as some sort of unified bloc), I also refuse to patronize those same attitudes by assuming that poor people are just too dumb to know that they really ought to vote, or by deciding that I must vote because they won’t do it themselves.
One more local example, however, is in order. Chicago still retains vestiges of what was once one of the most decentralized and community controlled public school systems in the country. The Local School Council or LSC still remains, although in most cases stripped of the majority of its original powers. Perhaps the most interesting thing about LSC’s is that the only requirements to vote in an LSC election are minimum age (18, I think) and residency in the area of the school. No restrictions prohibit voting by felons or by undocumented immigrants. If elections are ever to be meaningful, they need to look much more like LSC elections and much less like mayoral or Senate or presidential elections.
In this context, an interesting exception to my rejection of voting can be found, although this is one of those exceptions that proves the rule. A few years back, there was a particulary heated LSC election that pitted a Latino community group against a yuppie invasion in the eastern edge of Wicker Park. The community group was on good terms with a number of anarchists who were known as non-voters. The group coordinated a small scale vote-swap, in which anarchists who otherwise would not have voted instead voted the ticket of particular community members so old or infirm that they could not get to the polling place.
Does my endorsement of this vote swap constitute a form of bactracking on my previously articulated position? I don’t think so. My opposition to voting has never been moral, it has always been strategic. In this case, three factors make voting reasonable: first, the election is open to all; second, the LSC had (even if it mostly no longer has) true grassroots power as a local decision-making body that controlled an individual school on behalf of the community; and third, the vote swap itself recognized the ability of even the oldest and most infirm members of a poor and marginalized community to make their own decisions about participation in electoral politics. These three criteria make the vote swap look far more like voting in a free society than any other electoral circumstances that I’m familiar with.
Again, my opposition to voting is strategic: electoral politics in this country (with rare exceptions) is structurally incapable of producing the sorts of positive results touted by those who advocate voting from either a liberal or a radical perspective. While you can spend your ten minutes in the voting booth this November 2 if you want, what is far more important is what you do with the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes that day.
