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thecommabandit
@thecommabandit

as an anarchist ive never understood why some anarchists are so vehemently against voting. like obviously were not going to vote our way into anarchy but most of them seem to think that participating in liberal electoralism somehow gives the incoming government a kind of mystical power over you, but isnt that just believing in the liberal myth of voting as conferring legitimacy on a government? like its just a vote, it doesnt matter beyond what it does. surely you just use it to try to make things less bad (if thats an option) and then go back to doing whatever anarchist stuff you were doing before?


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in reply to @thecommabandit's post:

Whenever this comes up I think about how many times in studying history I'd get to "the leftists boycotted the election" followed by fascists winning and doing away with elections. It's always surprising like, what did people expect to come from sitting on their hands like that,,,

What always gets me is the people going “wow being rude to people online is no way to get them to vote :( have you considered not doing that? I’m really looking for ways to make this about my feelings here”

it took me like 2 minutes to fill in my postal ballot, and like maybe 30 seconds to put it in a postbox while i was walking to get the bus to do other stuff i was already going to.

sure, the returns for voting are pretty miserable, but the investment is miniscule, so the RoI is fantastic.

Personally, I've always questioned the underlying premise that voting for the more liberal candidate (it goes without saying that the strategy is never to vote for the more conservative one) actually will make things less bad. Given two rather broad premises - that the electoral choice in many Western democracies is between liberalism and conservatism, and that liberalism has historically expressed greater animosity toward leftists of whatever stripe than toward conservatives - it's not even clear that voting for the lesser evil actually does all that much to stymie the greater evil. This is to say nothing of what we've seen under the Biden presidency.

I am attempting to navigate a path towards embracing anarchism and yet I can't see as how refusing to vote advances the cause at all. Voting may exert very little power but it's not zero, and surely that's the prime concern for any leftist right now: we inhabit a political environment that's extraordinarily hostile to all forms of leftism and therefore we must all use what few tools are available. Voting is one of them. There's value in voting only to limit damage and win a few years of breathing-room to marshal one's forces ~Chara

Historically during periods of intense leftist agitation existing political orders have used vote turnout as a proxy for a mandate to govern, which usually involves shutting down leftist orgs violently. Also historically counties with much higher voter turnouts will often use state violence to keep voter turnout high, again as a proxy for a mandate to govern. In both of these cases not voting as a block can be a part of a larger resistance to state power. However where I live in the US there are no syndicalist unions ready to take over the means of production and not voting is already the most popular option meaning that I believe different strategies are required to effectively resist the control of electoral politics.

I think the missing key to this question is identifying what discrete aspect-of-tendency is actually behind that anti-voting position. Because it's not just anarchists, and we all know these categorizations have ill-defined boundaries. Yes, it's clearly a question of authority and critique of representation (as opposed to delegation, etc.); these are very much in the domain of anarchist concern, and it does seem to be mostly anarchists voicing that position, but I have to wonder how much of the perception that it's an anarchist thing is just a bias toward fitting the subject to the stereotype. I have known / heard from a ton of people who describe themselves actually in opposition to anarchy having basically the exact same position (against participation in US elections), for the same reasons—framed as a rejection of tacitly supporting neocolonial empire, of distracting people from what could otherwise be an impetus to organize, and so on. Often these people are like vanguardist online revolutionaries with an urgency to match the direly moral seriousness of voting or not. It's the same vibe whatever you believe. You can probably find conservative constitutionalist weirdos who won't stoop to vote in this sham version of their country. [EDIT: It seems, then, to be more of a question of absolutism, of urgency of moral imperative. Or, you could frame it as a difference between of theory vs. practice in any given individual's choice of lifestyle/focus. And we need both those kinds of people.] To me, this says the that yes/no answer to the question is pretty superficial. But asking the question that you're asking is not, if we can use it to look deeper.

For me personally, I vote or don't vote depending on whether I feel it's practical or necessary, i.e. how useful my participation is, vs. how damaging it feels to the situation or to my sanity to take that compromise, or just based on how mad I am. I simply have a lot of resentment about the idea, from any quarter of the left, and not just in voting, that I am morally obligated to participate in something that I find pretty revolting. But like I'll do it, if it helps to prevent or slow a slide into fascism.