Instead of voting, let’s organise to change something! These Political Parties are the definition of our manipulation and exclusion from any change.

from thefreeonline on 1st June 2024 by AnarCom Network↗

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Why vote?  Look at the person you are thinking of voting for, what makes them not look sound, or feel like any politician you’ve ever seen strutting and lying on our TV screens?

What makes them so excel in virtues you don’t have that you should hand your power and autonomy over to them?

Would you hand the contents of your home so easily over to a burglar, or your family without a murmur to a kidnapper?  Of course not! That would be ridiculous, yet it’s the same principle they don’t want us to see in the carnival of election time.

The idea that we willingly handover all agency over our neighbourhoods, our welfare and our futures to professionals who excel in some of the worst human arts of manipulation, deceit, lies and corruption is the stuff of nightmares and dark graphic novels. That they want to have power in the first place should be clue enough.

For all the lies that pervade election times, perhaps the biggest is that the ballot box makes us equal, that Rishi with his million-pound swimming pool and the shop worker with a paddling pool have the same rights and responsibilities as each other.   Except that what we give Starmer or Rishi is theirs to loot for the duration, while we wait for our right to place an X in five years-time on another piece of paper.  

And how precious that X is made to feel given that you probably only have 10 of them to use in your lifetime. 10 moments of feeling equal is your lifetime ration of influence or participation.

In the process, its dull familiarity creates the attitude in most of us summed up as “I don’t believe in politics” or “what has politics got to do with me?”  And that is exactly what they want us to feel.   Distanced and docile.

However, always pushing back against this is our innate humanity and our struggle for a dignified existence. Our own lives are social, economic, and emotional all of which combine to make our existence deeply political. 

We care massively about our friends, our loved ones, our neighbourhoods and environment, our welfare, and our futures.

On a day-to-day level we demonstrate this actively with our colleagues, communities, and the kinds of social family we consciously choose to construct. 

We come together all the time in free, and yes, political association. 

To combat litter, to look after our vulnerable neighbours, to volunteer, to assist and to commune with others like us in football teams, choirs, for feeding people, hospital transports or knitting circles.  And to strike against them!

It’s often said that we must vote because people fought and gave their lives for that right. 

How odd then that we vote in elections only put in power those who want us to continue fighting and dying to protect their power!  Nice try, but even the most dedicated voter can recognise the army of ‘mini me’s’ starting to climb the greasy pole.

Political parties, election campaigns whether national or local are not the community in action! They are the definition of our blindsided manipulation and exclusion from anything meaningful that looks like change.

They want our participation in this staged event – it looks good for them.  It encourages them and allows them to claim their greed is in our name.  Look at the last time you used your X, what did it change?  We feel sure if they thought it could really change anything they would make it illegal.

Wouldn’t it be great if these elections receive the contempt they deserve.  Let’s have an election strike!

Voting leaves them feeling empowered and subjects us to passivity at best, state sanctioned brutality at worst.  Refusing to vote in favour of community mobilisation is not apathy, on the contrary, if you vote you may feel you’ve no right to complain.

Vote labour and still die horribly!

If we live long enough to complain that is!  What makes this election different is that it is happening in a time war!  We are rearming towards a generalised war as Ukraine/Russia; Gaza/Israel, Britain, Yemen, Iran, China, and the US all coalesce along front lines of capitalist rivalry.

In fact Great Britain is proudly posing as the US attack dog to promote open war with Russia – despite the fact that Russia will be forced to use its Nuclear Weapons.

Whoever you vote for will not end the war but pursue its escalation in the ‘national interest’.  That is in fact the interests of the capitalists, their local state operatives and the imperialist blocks whose boots on the ground they are. 

Both parties promise to maintain war austerity and increase military spending, one is openly committed to conscription, and we have seen where the Tories go Labour goes. 

What can we do instead? 

Taking us beyond these points, the question arises what can we do instead?  Practically, individually, and collectively.  Locally and nationally, at home and abroad?

On the most basic level, as individuals, thinking globally but acting locally, refuse the imposed consensus and say what we see. 

Call out the hypocrisy and advocate for ourselves and our class across frontiers.  Collectively, refuse to subsume our needs to any so called ‘national interest’.

Link our needs and demands to the austerity of war profiteering and profiteering wars.  Everything we do at home, here for ourselves and our class, hinders the operation of the warfare state.

Talk, communicate, share our own struggles and insights – individual, community, workplace, environmental – in solidarity across locality and trade.  A victory on the home front is a victory and example abroad.

Make demands opposed the charades of their violent ‘social peace’, linked to opposition to their wars.  Workers in the field of arms manufacture or supply, energy, shipping, chemicals, iron and steel, ports, aviation, and docks can all be instrumental in slowing or blocking the supply lines of war.  Include these as centres of propagating our own demands and against militarisation.

In direct action choose targets that challenge power and build solidarity. Activists everywhere should target the centres of power, production and decision making instead of paint bombing musicals or obstructing other workers battling to meet our daily needs.

Build hubs of coordination, discussion, communication bringing community and labour together.  Develop our own methods of accountable and actionable decision making.

Own these decisions and actions, publicise and promote them.  Disseminate in multimedia formats and let others see that resistance is possible.  The longest journey, a single step.

We may always ask when and where should I start?  Two nuclear armed powers are warring in a capitalist power block crisis on our frontiers.  Our state is involved in both!  The danger is real, the danger is now.. 

Instead of voting, let’s organise to change something!

Article by Dreyfus

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