"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Apr 17, 2010

On Wasting Votes

Recently, fwoan wrote an excellent take down of electoral lesser-evilism.

Starting right out of the gate, fwoan writes, "As our country gears up for the election cycle again, we will be subjected to the tired campaigns of status quo politicians explaining to us that this year’s election is “the most important in our history” as we’re told every election cycle to make sure true democracy is stifled by inhibiting actual choice – increasing their wealth while decreasing ours."

Immediately, he* tackles a core problem with the American electoral project. Every two, four or six years bundlers, fund raisers, PACs, interests groups and campaigns invite the electorate to pick from a narrow slate of candidates who will, almost invariably, use their positions to enact enforceable policy with results that hurt - in a very real way - the voters.

These candidates, with rare exceptions, belong to the capitalist class, either as owners or as managerial professionals. Because they can afford to run, or have access to the funding which the majority of citizens cannot obtain, they enter the lists ahead of the large number of filing candidates who do not gain media coverage.

They possess a sympathetic hearing from the press, known as "viability" in electoral parlance. Let's gain some clarity - a "viable" candidate comes in one flavor only: he or she has sponsors. He or she can win.

Let's muse on that. A viable candidate has the access, power, position, resources and sponsorship to beat other candidates who also have access, power, position, resources and sponsorship. Before we treat this as a corruption of the original intent, let's remember that Thom. Paine languished in a French prison (pondering the abolition of private property) and John Madison wrote the Constitution with an eye to the continued power of the landed and mercantile elite.

Fwoan soon continues with, "How are we to ever institute social justice if we can never move beyond those who would sacrifice their sisters and brothers in the name of capital? I propose that if you don’t already, please vote third party!"

And while I think the invitation to voting third party channels involvement towards a dead end, fwoan uses the next several paragraphs to outline the relationships between struggle and social perception, keeping always in mind the admirable project of toppling the political economy which rests on the capitalized one. He* unravels the mystical appeal to a lesser evil, with alacrity, here:

The fight to win a more just society is not a fight that can be won in the short-term but rather, has to be part of an organized effort. Those who would say that voting third party only empowers the Republicans (And you don’t want to see a President Palin do you?) are missing the point! While yes, the Democrats are less conservative than the Republicans – both parties are on a slow crawl to the right. In that crawl, eventually candidates like Palin will become the norm, and later still will be considered progressive when compared to candidates of the future. I already outlined how Obama has been doing everything he can to empower conservative talking points as if McCain had been the one that was actually elected in 2008. The point is to upset and destroy this rightward crawl, not empower it by choosing what you perceive to be the lesser of two evils! But let’s humor this argument. Let’s say a mass movement to vote third party only splinters the traditionally Democratic vote and allows Republicans an easy victory. This would mean that the Democrats would suffer overwhelming losses, and Democrats are in the business of winning elections just as the Republicans are too, so a loss like this would not be something they would enjoy, correct? As often as they like to make us think otherwise, the Democrats didn’t become one of the strongest parties in our country by being stupid so it seems reasonable that they would study the election results and find the reasons for such a splintering of their electorate. When faced with demands for a party that doesn’t support wars, enable theft by the rich, allow discrimination, etc, the Democrats could choose to continue to lose elections, shift to the right even faster hoping to take away Republican voters (which worked disastrously for them in the first half of the last decade), or shift back to the left to earn their electorate back and gain new voters."

And on this I must part ways with him,* however estimable the reasons provided.  Over the four or so decades of my life, I have never seen the Democratic Party lurch leftward after an electoral defeat. The ratchet only works to the benefit of the ownership class because their membership controls the means by which ideas disseminate, the banks through which investment passes and the organs through which politicians finance their campaigns.

An electoral defeat for the Democrats won't result in a reformist party (and fwoan rejects a reformist party as a goal, rightly). It won't result in leftist or liberal programs, because the Democratic Party does not represent the constituencies of "the left." It neuters them. The Democratic Party represents that faction of the powerful who prefer to use social spectacular means (see, the Spectacle) to maintain the status quo, in occasional opposition to the broadly militarist-nationalist (still spectacular, all the same) GOP.

Casting votes and campaigning for third party candidates won't undermine the power of those who've accumulated control of the American economy, and the protective government which shields it from revolt. It will rather, I believe, isolate insurrectionary population groups from each other, in piddling factions and sects, providing easy targets for political machination and domestic anxiety.

Instead of raising consciousness, especially in the context of the American system, it will create pockets of disaffected sectarians who will inevitably retreat into defense of their positions, even as the spectacular media consigns them to mocking irrelevance, or focuses on them as examples of the dangers of "extremism."

Instead of encouraging an uprising, or new models for cooperation, working towards third (or fourth, or fifth) party electoral efforts will waste labor on a project which cannot but isolate its proponents, because it simultaneously affirms the electioneering, whilst guaranteeing its members will only suffer defeat.



* - a generic grammatical assumption on my part

5 comments:

fwoan said...

Bravo! Thank you so much for your thoughts. On the issues that we disagree, let's assume that I am wrong (because I already wrote as if I was right). If this does indeed only succeed in splintering the left into bickering factions that focus instead on fighting one another instead of working together to achieve common goals - what exactly do you propose as a way of raising the consciousness of the wider electorate?

This is an issue I have thought on for some time and because media and money are two tools that the left will almost never have at their disposal, educating others that they can have what is not on the menu becomes an infinitely more difficult task.

You already know, but for other readers let me repeat myself that a reformist solution is not one I am seeking but rather a way of strengthening solidarity of the working classes and ultimately overturning the current system.

Again, thank you for your thoughts!

Jack Crow said...

Fwoan,

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. As radicalized as I am (more on that later), I guess it's worth noting that Diogenes of Sinope graces the top of this page.

I'm a cosmopolitan (citizen of the world) Cynic, in something like the original sense of the term.

That in mind, I'm not sure any project of "consciousness raising" will or can succeed, as a program with clear ends.

Subscribing somewhat to Koestler's theory (see, Darkness at Noon) that contemporaries do not automatically develop or evolve contemporaneous understanding of the material world, I think that there will always be people who "lag behind," perhaps this group being the majority.

I think that "consciousness raising" is itself a trap, since it seeks a uniform degree of understanding and commitment to a specific set of goals, without ever treating with how variation will (or ought to) be reduced, or conformity enforced.

Digging back over the last 150 years, I think we can outline a series of clear, irrevocable revolutionary failures precisely because of this seeking after comprehensive revolutionary consciousness, followed always with fragmentation and sectarianism, as factions develop over "correct interpretation" of events and theory, not unlike religious schismatic discord.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is the root mysticism of classic socialist thought - the attempt to fix forever a crystalline state of affairs where every person is utterly fulfilled and social relations are harmonious.

The search for "revolutionary consciousness" is precisely this teleologically conceived harmony of purpose, and it is an invitation to failure, on its own terms.

Barring collective consciousness as perhaps dreamed up in pulp space opera, persons do not develop or share a uniform awareness of events. Our perspectives cannot be the same, because our heads are not the same, and do not occupy the same places in space and time. The only way to approach symmetry and unity of perspective is to enforce a party identity as loathsome as Orwell imagined.

So that, I think, we ought to jettison the baggage of utopian socialism entirely.

It is a failed theology.

What I believe we need, instead, is a willingness to embrace the redundant diversity (even in its unstable and temporary manifestations, in society) of mutualism and demarchism, where identity with a program and a revolutionary position plays no part.

Relieved of the burden of "revolutionary consciousness," as classically conceived, I believe we would do better to attend to historically material pursuits, namely and in the first case food and shelter independence.

Instead of trying to educate every person towards ideological consensus (which smacks of "washing up to take a bath"), let's give our labor to creating liberating material and economic conditions, worrying not one bit whether some still worship Jesus or others don't fully understand Marxist readings of commodification.

fwoan said...

Jack, I loved your response and gave me a fun afternoon of learning about Diogenes! I'm assuming the image in your header shows him with his lamp he used while searching for an "honest man"?

There's the saying that if you have no destination in mind that all roads will take you there. Though I think the left has successfully proven that with no destination in mind no roads will lead you there. So while I think that things like demarchism are admirable objectives and ones I would work to see realized, I think that it has to be part of a broader strategy and hence I think is just a further definition of our difference of opinion.

I'd also like to discuss your assertion (although unimportant in both our opinions) that repeated losses for the Democratic party would not causes a leftward shift. I'm not talking of the predictable and ceremonial fashion in which the two parties normally trade power, but rather a sustained loss in which conclusive evidence showed a preference for left parties. Is not the Republican party experiencing something to this effect now? With it's Tea Parties and virtual lack of participation in congress it has gone further rightward than I can recall and this after two definitive elections showing that conservatives thought they had become too liberal.

Jack Crow said...

fwoan,

Great questions. I have a busy afternoon (children at dentists, run training, meeting with mayor to discuss his disastrous plan to combine schools into k-8 neighborhood school-houses) - but I will check back either late tonight, or tomorrow, with the sort of response worthy of those questions.

Respect,

~ Jack

Jack Crow said...

fwoan,

Sorry it took me longer to get back to this. I'd written out a long reply, but in re-reading it I realized I'd said less with more words than I really wanted.

So:

You wrote, "So while I think that things like demarchism are admirable objectives and ones I would work to see realized, I think that it has to be part of a broader strategy and hence I think is just a further definition of our difference of opinion."

I agree. I'm personally leery of party line efforts, which is why I lean away from centralized strategy. It's a matter of practice, I guess. What works in rural New England might not work in urban Florida, probably won't work in St. Louis, et cetera.

"I'd also like to discuss your assertion (although unimportant in both our opinions) that repeated losses for the Democratic party would not causes a leftward shift. I'm not talking of the predictable and ceremonial fashion in which the two parties normally trade power, but rather a sustained loss in which conclusive evidence showed a preference for left parties. Is not the Republican party experiencing something to this effect now? With it's Tea Parties and virtual lack of participation in congress it has gone further rightward than I can recall and this after two definitive elections showing that conservatives thought they had become too liberal."

I don't see a leftward shift for any political party vying for control of the corporate state, fwoan.

Because no party can run that state and being "leftist."