The Vote Fallacy: Strategically Advancing Radical Politics in the 2004 Elections -Ben Grosscup

While election seasons are widely seen as times when the polity practices politics, this is an illusion; electoralism that accepts the premises of representative democracy is conceptually distinct and incompatible with practicing true politics. Politics involves public debate on the issues of a self-manging political community that leads to social policy. Voting is no political act in that it has nothing to do with this. Rather, it is a highly personal act, which indicates the isolated location of the citizen in representative democracy. The class of bureaucrats who legislate social policy systematically exclude the majority of the population from substantive political participation through varied means: 1) making politics a professional endeavor 2) carefully choosing what kinds of people can occupy such professions through the the two-party-system and the mass media and 3) directly disenfranchising targeted groups who are expected to vote the wrong way. Insofar as citizens choose to vote in the national election, they are making a private and politically ineffectual choice between the bewildering threat of Bush and no positive alternative. Such vote-centric politics have mystified and colonized the progressive political imagination, oftentimes making its advocates actively complicit in their own political isolation by allying themselves with forces that uphold the status-quo. Continue reading "The Vote Fallacy: Strategically Advancing Radical Politics in the 2004 Elections -Ben Grosscup"

Reclaim the Cities: From Protest to Popular Power -By Cindy Milstein

"Direct action gets the goods," proclaimed the Industrial Workers of the World nearly a century ago. And in the short time since Seattle, this has certainly proven to be the case. Indeed, "the goods" reaped by the new direct action movement here in North America have included creating doubt as to the scope and nature of globalization, shedding light on the nearly unknown workings of international trade and finance bodies, and making anarchism and anticapitalism almost household words. As if that weren't enough, we find ourselves on the streets of twenty-first-century metropolises demonstrating our power to resist in a way that models the good society we envision: a truly democratic one.

Democracy is Direct -By Cindy Milstein

These days, words seem to be thrown around like so much loose change. Democracy is no exception.

We hear demands to "democraticize" the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Some contend that "democracy" is the standard for good government. Others allege that "more," "better," or even "participatory democracy" is the needed antidote to our woes. At the heart of these well-intentioned but misguided sentiments beats a genuine desire: to gain control over our lives.