This election will be my first as a confirmed anarchist. Since I live in Virginia, the campaign here has been so shrill - with 90% of that shrillness coming from one candidate - that I'm very tempted to vote soley to push Allen and the Republican's obnoxiousness out of office. Reading two essays, however, reaffirmed me of my beliefs.
The first is one my friend Brady (a fellow Richmond anarchist) sent me by the voluntaryist George H. Smith. It's a mock dialogue between an LPer and a anti-political libertarian (APL) on the subject of statist politics pursued for libertarian ends. APL discusses the contradiction in a party who promotes the idea of a free society participating in the mechanism that oppresses it.
LPer: But we both agree on the desirability of a free society. It seems to me that we just disagree on how best to achieve it. APL: Yes, we are in basic agreement concerning the goal to be achieved. But I am not merely asserting that the political method is inefficient in pursuit of this goal. Rather, I am arguing that the political means is inconsistent with libertarian principles, that it flies in the face of basic libertarian ideals. Consider an analogy. I state that a basic goal in my life is to acquire a good deal of money. You concede that this goal is, in itself, unobjectionable. Then I proceed to rob a bank. You are horrified and demand to know how I could do such a thing. I reply that we have a strategic difference of opinion. We both agree that my goal is laudable; we simply disagree concerning the means by which to attain it. We disagree on how to get from here to there. So I demand from you an alternative strategy for me to get rich. Sure, I say, my plan may not be perfect, but what can you purists offer in it place? Give me an alternate strategy, I demand, before taking pot shots at mine.
How would you reply to this? I suspect that you would accuse me of shifting ground. You would point out that the objection to robbing banks is not a simple issue of strategy, but involves profound moral questions. And you would say that your protest against my action was moral, rather than strategic, in nature. Therefore, unless I can surmount the moral objections to robbing banks, the strategy question is irrelevant. I cannot squirm past the moral issues, the matters of principle, in the guise of demanding alternate strategies. Now, returning to the subject of political action, I respond to your question the same way. Fine, let's get together and talk over the issue of strategy some day - we can talk about education, moral suasion, counter-economics, alternative institutions, civil disobedience, or what have you - but that's not the issue here. I submit that there is a profoundly anti-libertarian aspect of political action - i.e., of attempting to elect libertarians to public office - and this is the issue to which political libertarians must first address themselves. Show me that political action is consistent with libertarian principles, and then we can take up the issue of strategy. LPer: But you must address yourself to the issue of strategy at some point. You wish to disqualify the political means altogether, which seems to leave you precious little by which you can work for a free society. If your principles condemn you to inaction and certain defeat, then surely there must be something wrong with your principles. APL: This is quite curious. You equate activism with political action. Doing something, for you means, doing something political. You regard an anti-political libertarian as a non-activist, and this is surely one of the most pernicious myths circulating in the LP today.
This is a key point that I needed to hear: just because I'm not voting doesn't mean I don't care. I care passionately about what happens to this country, but I will not take part in its subjugation by granting the state my tacit permission to do so. There are other ways to effect change upon the world without resorting to the vote, such as counter-economics, direct action, engaging people in conversation, etc..
Wally Conger drives this point home with his Anti-Electorate manifesto, the introduction to which struck me (but the whole thing is short and right):
Of course, Big Media, political wonks, and Hollywood's get-out-the-vote "Left" insist that we members of the anti-Electorate are too lazy and/or apathetic to exercise the right to choose our own masters. Baloney. More and more, non-voting has become a conscious choice for Americans. And as Frank Chodorov wrote almost 60 years ago: "Remember that the proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution.… Unlike other revolutions, it calls for no organization, no violence, no war fund, no leader to sell it out. In the quiet of his conscience each citizen pledges himself, to himself, not to give moral support to an unmoral institution, and on election day he remains at home. That's all."
If the state is institutionalized violence, then what is the vote but a way to legitimize it by appeal to popularity? Remember that when you vote, you're not just agreeing to your own oppression - you're sanctioning your neighbor's. Not that you have the moral authority to grant that sanction anymore than the politicians have capacity to accept it.
Which underlines the total fraud that voting is - the socially coordinated rejection of authentic human moral agency. It's another example of the divesture of authority and responsibility onto some inanimate, abstract "institution" (in this way it is much like the corporate structure, and my critique is on similar grounds, but I'll elaborate in a future post). I hold that in order for humans to be moral, their responsibility to act morally is unalienable whatsoever - for the same reason their rights are.
This is why our rightful human liberty does not derive from state recognition, but rather from our own nature. All this talk about "rights" and "responsibilities" is just a way of identifying undelying aspects of individual sovereignty. If it's wrong for humans to, say, murder, then any aggregation of humans, no matter how constructed, cannot murder legitimately - nor can they grant the permission to do so! Therefore, elections are nothing more than a superstitious ritual by which everybody pretends to be something they're not.
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