1.
Most anarchists believe elections are useless and lead nowhere. This is false, elections capture demands and integrate it into statecraft. They divide on the political spectrum and construct another divide between good and bad citizens, produced along class and racial lines (excluding non-citizens, prisoners included).
2.
Electoralists believe elections are a strategic means to pass an agenda. They are opportunists. They might be right in the very short term, when benefiting from early leftist euphoria, but are missing the point of state function and production of subjects, citizens.
3.
More often than not, voting is for “activists” only a matter of political allegiance (the left votes left), and for others a matter of marketing, and/or sympathy for candidates. For them, stepping outside political allegiance is treason (racism, sexism, transphobia, you name it), it is incriminated of the evils of this world.
a. This rhetoric of treason has become all too common and kept on expanding in the past few years after Brexit, Trump, etc. It is the last moral tool for the Left to push, what it believes is its constituency, to vote (and not always for itself). The new US legislative attack on reproductive rights are a clear example that voting “for women and queers” and against Fascism doesn’t guaranty them safety.
b. It was also a rhetoric used by the mainstream feminist movement in Argentina to vote in 2019 for pro-abortion right and Peronist candidate Alberto Fernández. A support to Argentinian philofascism in order to maintain the hegemonic program of mainstream South American Feminism. Following neoliberal and medicalistic lingo, “abortion” became “Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy”, instrumentalising “the impoverished, indigenous, racialised”. The mainstream discourse was in fact largely imposed by NGOs and international institutions throughout the years. In it, “the impoverished, indigenous, racialised” folks are only objects. The moralist electoral rhetoric functions largely in a similar, objectifying, way. It is an experiment in mass political tokenisation, whether or not the “tokens” end up participating in it, adopting the rhetoric, or not.
4.
Stepping outside of allegiance should not be a call to support conservatives and/or fascists. It should come from an understanding of democracy as producing Fascism.
a. Tyranny is a regulatory form of democracy (even more so when the democracy is rooted in slavery and coloniality), and every attempt to “reinforce democracy”, to democratise governments, or any disciplinary institutions should take very seriously the tyranny, imperiality, and the categories of race and gender always structural in their desired political structures.
b. Dictatorship is a function of the Republic. Every Republican, even from the socialist traditions of a social Republic, would support a dictatorship as long as it fits their preferred model of Imperium (even more valid in older colonial empires).
c. Every attempt to stop Fascism by the means of tyranny (democracy) and dictatorship (populism, republicanism) would only delay its realization or shape-shift it, not dismantle it.
5.
Anarchists have historically opposed voting and voting rights alike (Malatesta, Goldman, Parson). These positions have been made obsolete by desires to participate in statecraft and by the subversion implied by demanding rights for sub-citizens and/or colonial/racialised subjects.
a. Voting rights should be supported for every subjects of every states, including in the so-called democratic and/or republican regimes. People can only recognise the scam of human rights when they have them, and they did not realise their promises.
b. Movements that end up demanding voting rights have very often two tendencies. One defending their demand in terms of “justice” and “equality” that subvert institutions. Another that already understands the limits of the demands. The first should be supported, the second amplified, both always should be articulated together.
6.
Abstention is a threat to some. Every supporter of democratic institutions, the humanist bourgeoisie, politicians and the Left on top, want to end it, no matter what dangers it might hide. But if abstention was revolutionary, they would make it illegal, and if it has been tried in (post)colonies, for now, they mainly make it immoral.
7.
For electoralists, every election is more important than the precedent, that is why no one should abstain. For anti-electoralists, they are all the same, that is why we should abstain. Both positions are wrong.
8.
The question is not “to vote or not to vote”, but to evaluate where and how classes and communities resist the state and capital, and opt for the means that best meet our ends.
a. That being said, for the lower classes the time has long been at the refusal to vote. In the West, most White abstentionists would never have second thoughts about voting fascism. Converting abstention into votes in polls can be a serious fascist threat.
b. In Chile in 2021 the Left, “libertarian socialists” included, worked to civilise the social movement and blend it into the so-called civil society. Even like that 40+% abstained in the presidential rounds, the lowest abstention in the past few years. However, some months earlier during the gubernatorial elections, Chile recorded the highest level of abstention since the end of the dictatorship, less than 20% turnout. That spoke for the anti-statist turn of the uprising. As a reaction, democrats of the Left opposition started drawing up a bill to make the vote mandatory because the privileged end up “over represented” when the vote is voluntary… And even though, the left got elected, prisoners are still jailed, the police/military still attacks insurgent Mapuches and urban student protests. From Chile, constitutionalism can be understood as a strategy to capture the rejection of statecraft, to divert mobilizations towards institutional battles of indefinite duration, towards the national reconstruction under the aegis of Justice, Army, Police, and national productivism.
c. Podemos and other Left populists in Spain worked hard to convert the 15M in an electoral success. All the attempts of localists, “municipalists” and barrio anarchists have been submerged by regional nationalisms that fed on repression, presenting themselves as the main autonomists (i.e. Catalunya). 10 years later there is nothing left of the movement apart from some local democraticising efforts (see 4.a.). Unidas Podemos is at an all time low even with the recent alliances, and has 6 points below the fascist party Vox. The alliances between the Partido Popular and Vox are not announcing an obvious electoral success for the PSOE and Unidas Podemos.
d. Fascist threat or not, a democratic Left feeding on social movements is an issue to take seriously. Most electoralists and anti-electoralists alike haven’t take this fact into good consideration.
9.
If we are strategists (that is maniacs concerned by understanding history as a totality that we want to direct linearly), voting is a strategy. For others, it can be a tactic.
10.
As a tactic, voting doesn’t necessitate to actually vote. It can be a lot more effective to withhold votes collectively than to vote against something or someone.
a. The most promising strategy of building a constituency to withhold votes has been Malcolm X’s OAAU’s voter registration campaign. Contrary to electoralist strategies, it was part of a community program and non-partisan.
b. The difficulty is to build a constituency that is ready for a destituent process. The power of the OAAU’s project resided in the problem of Black radicals organizing for Black interests against White supremacy. The black bourgeoisie was the only constituent element in the movement.
c. Electoralists on the other hand are ready to build “new hegemonies”, to educate non-voters on the benefits of democracy, extend the democratic process, not to organise multi-layered dual powers that could strongly bargain votes.
d. Another form of this strategy would be the model of Irish abstentionism, participating in elections but refusing to take any seats. Bluring the whole idea of representation and subverting colonial parliament.
11.
The state of the Left and social movements in the West does not allow space for bargain. That is why so-called revolutionaries are ready to campaign for the first social-democratic option that could get good scores.
a. This campaigning processes are dislocating the Left, that might be a good news and allow us to reject the Left in so far as it’s goal has always been to extend control and governmentality.
b. If the Right is paternalistic, the Left sees the state as a mother that should care for and maintain citizens inside of her family. If we are serious family abolitionists, we should have already been more than suspicious about the Left’s state/gender politics.
12.
Race is always a criteria in poll turnouts. Usually negative racialisation lowering participation. Often times white supremacy organizes itself to voluntarily make it harder to vote.
a. Not voting is also a proof of dignity. Even though it could have been a chance to achieve legal independance, Kanaks decided in December 2021 to not participate to the referendum in opposition both to the Loyalists (pro-settlers) and COVID policies that led to the death of hundreds of Kanaks, an illustration of the disrespect towards communitarian decisional forms. Communities that the disastrous governmental management of the pandemic continued to crush. Dignity can be felt as a more noble nationalist position than participating to the masters’ votes.
b. In 2001, before 9/11 and the War on Terror made it forgettable for the West, Algeria went through one of its more intense insurrectional moment since independance in 1962, the so-called Black Spring. Starting as a mostly Kabyle protest, the movement spreaded against Le Pouvoir did spread through out the country, leading to mass non-participation to the 2002 elections, time at which polling stations were even forced to close. If the movement didn’t achieve its larger destituent potential, Le Pouvoir was forced to give recognition to the Kabyle identity and organizations. Since, many villages have inherited from the radical events and reintegrated it in “traditional” communal practices. Abstention can be a revolutionary tool against state power even while it is killing and injuring physically thousands in the streets.
c. 2022 was France’s presidential election, yet again the fascist threat loomed on the results, leftists panicked, as they do, at the idea of loosing political representation. Meanwhile, French colonial territories (so-called Overseas) abstained. Contradicting the Leftist saying that a blank vote is a White vote, where colonialism survives abstention remains an anti-colonial withdrawl. It can hardly be said that a participation under 40% in Guadeloupe and Martinique is “apathy” after months of protests in 2021. Prefering to go to a family picnic instead of voting is not apolitical it is anti-political, a rejection of politics for community. Tavini Huiraatir the independantist party of occupied French Polynesia called to oppose the elections. Participation was also low in French Guiana, and not surprisingly in white Corsica that went through destructive unrest just weeks before the beginning of the elections. Ironically, the only position in the elections where the deathwish of the French decolonial movement to ally the hick (white prols) and the barbarians (prols of colour) was embodied, was not so much examplified by the Left vote than by abstention. This alliance was practical, not ideological.
13.
Vote centres debate around national interest, it is a national endeavour and any anti-assimilationnist (anti-)politics should see it as such, no matter how much it seems to validate progress of ones ideas and positions in the political sphere.
14.
Elections produce individual subjects and partisan national identities. Individualisation is also a tool used by electoralists to blame and shame non-voters, or push them to “take responsabilities”. Radicals that usually oppose individualisation are made one of its conveyor through electoralism. Militant Abstentionists also believe in an individual, independant of any community (be it “terrible”). In fact, it is the individual that abstains. On both sides of the divide, elections become a moral act, both sides believing to be on the “good” side.
15.
The only way to make elections (ir-)relevant is to further working class and decolonial autonomy. This can only be done by learning closely the practices that emanate from the daily oppositions to racial capitalism, recognizing the radical traditions of resistance behind perceived apathy to or integration in electoral processes.
16.
Autonomy is the struggle that follows and widens the cracks of racial capitalism, working against captures of any kind.
