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"

Our Dreams Will Never Fit In Their Ballot Boxes

Don't Just Vote, Get Political! -Free Society Collective

A few members of the Free Society Collective and friends have produced a pamphlet for the DNC/RNC malarky for 2004. You can download the complete pdf here. (304k) Here's an excerpt:

It’s election time again, and so-called politics has come to the forefront of public discourse. Liberals and radicals alike have squandered quite a bit of energy debating the old question of whether or not to vote; the answer, of course, is that it’s the wrong question. Liberals have been so fixated on elections as to ignore the issue of whether representation even equals democracy, and whether voting even equals politics. Anti-authoritarians, on the other hand, while claiming not to recognize the sovereignty of any officials, elected or not, have nonetheless developed their own mythology around voting, attributing to it the mystical power to “legitimize” authority figures thus elected. But voting is not what gives power to politicians, just as abstention cannot take it away from them; they have decisionmaking power because representative democracy intentionally places it in the hands of a few, and because we fail to take it away from them by deliberately applying it ourselves through horizontal forms of self-governance. Continue reading "Don't Just Vote, Get Political! -Free Society Collective"

In the Wake of Madrid, the U.S. Election Turns into a Global Referendum - By Cindy Milstein

The world gets smaller and scarier by the day. This simple fact is the context for my morning routine: a cup of coffee sipped to the latest news of terrorism. It is equally the backdrop for my other media scan: the U.S. presidential race. More and more these two intertwine. The ballot box, as 3/11 in Madrid cruelly announced, is now a front in a borderless war that puts everyone at risk. But as the Spanish people proved, it can also be turned into a referendum--albeit one with a certain degree of ambiguity.

Toward an Anarchist Politics -By Cindy Milstein

During last fall's televised presidential debates, a curious ad appeared. A semi-scruffy young musician is shown yelling at a boy on a bicycle, “You are all sheep for the capitalist wolves.” Next, flashing ominously across the screen, is the tag line: “This guy votes. Shouldn't you?”