A Little Help for the Non Voter
from Surviving Leviathan by Peter Gelderloos
Election seasons tend to be stressful times for anarchists, especially if we’re not going to vote. There are very few common features that all anarchists share, but one of them might be that we care. We care about injustice, we care about oppression, we care that the wealthy and powerful are destroying life on the planet and trampling underfoot anyone who gets in the way of accumulation. We don’t look the other way. Granted, there are anarchists who get burned by caring without learning patience, without putting down roots. They tend to fall into deep depression, cynicism, addiction, or some form of Leftism (usually as single-issue progressives or smug Stalinist trolls), but that’s another topic.Also, people become anarchists not through declaration, but through action, by putting beliefs into practice. So when a Get-Out-the-Voter who turns to a little politics once every four years accuses us of being apathetic or inactive, it feels insulting, because it is insulting.Other times, we’re getting the lecture from dedicated progressives who actually do the work, in their way. In those cases what we deal with is not insult but extreme frustration: the patterns we name show up in our history time and time again. Voting—even though it is a normal, legal thing to do in well over a hundred countries around the world and has been that way for decades, if not centuries—has never delivered us to the Promised Land. In fact, things are getting worse.And to head off the ignorant quip that many a centrist or progressive will think themselves original for devising: no, the fact that we don’t currently have whole functional societies without any State is not a valid comparison, for two very simple reasons.
- While voting is encouraged and even rewarded, one of the few things the Right, Center, and Left can all agree on is that they will kill or imprison as many anarchists as they have to; they will evict, enslave, and genocide entire societies to make sure that there is no inhabited country in the world that is not ruled by a State.
- The entire world used to be stateless. Over the last three thousand years, we have won dozens of revolutions to overthrow the State and recreate self-organizing societies. In those free territories, society didn’t collapse. Often, the State was only able to take back control through military conquest, and plenty of times they tried and got their asses handed to them by our anti-state forebears. Five hundred years ago, just before European powers accelerated an unprecedented campaign of mass genocide and mass enslavement on every single inhabited continent, probably one-third to one-half of the world’s population was stateless, most of them intentionally so – meaning they were aware of neighboring states or past states, and possibly resisted state encroachments and reproduced a culture that celebrated its reciprocal aspects as well as its history of revolution, warfare against, or flight from state authority. They knew their lives were better without the State. As for the half of the human population that were state subjects? Most of them were slaves or servants. So… you can drop your masks now, apologists for the State.
People who put their trust in the State build their sense of history on embarrassing beliefs regarding human nature, unexamined assumptions about the inevitability of progress, or by simply accepting that “history is the history of the State” and erasing everything else. Just like the modern State is built on a foundation of violent erasure. Anarchists, on the other hand, have actually done the work to try and understand how and why states form, how and why they don’t form, how and why they get overthrown, and how and why societies resist state formation. You can find just a few examples here and here and here and here. (Going back to 1896, then the early 20th century, then the mid 20th century, then the 21st century, that’s Kropotkin, Reclus, Clastres, and finally my own imperfect contribution.)When we feel insulted or frustrated, we’re more likely to say hyperbolic things like, It doesn’t make a difference, which doesn’t help things, because clearly there is a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans; between Labor and the Tories; the AfD, the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens; the PP and the Socialists; the Liberal Party and the Workers’ Party… But as soon as we say they’re all the same, they spring on us, happy to have an easy route to missing the point entirely.So, though I’m sure it’s too little and too late, here is a little polemic you can share with that friend, co-worker, or family member who you just don’t want to talk with about the election one. more. time.Copy and paste what follows into an email, or—if you really want them to know how you feel—send along the whole newsletter. Hell, there might be a few others you’ll want them to read.Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloos is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.hoods, and planning for collective survival.
Why I’m Not Going to Vote
I’m not going to vote, because the difference between these parties is not enough to save life on this planet. Whether the Left, the Right, or the Center has been in the saddle, emissions have been rising, life-sustaining habitats and ecosystems are being destroyed, and false solutions get more free advertising. We are now crossing irreversible tipping points. Tens of millions of people are already dying every year because of this catastrophe. If we are not personally facing starvation, disease, and homelessness already because of so-called natural disasters, our children will, and it will get worse every generation after that. The forces that are causing this still have all the power and resources and what they are doing now will be felt most acutely fifty or a hundred or two hundred years from now. We need to dedicate all our imagination and all our energies to a deeply rooted social transformation, in order to urgently create a society of survival, a society of healing, and a society of mutual aid, rather than propping up the system responsible for this massive death and suffering. No single party is responsible. They all bear responsibility.
I’m not going to vote, because I refuse to support people or institutions that are complicit in genocide. Genocide is a red line for me. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are funding and arming the Israeli military, which in a year has killed over 100,000 people, destroyed the homes of two million people and forced a million more to flee their homes. Their military has been caught systematically carrying out torture, bombing hospitals, using children as human shields, summarily executing prisoners, again and again. I’m not the one who needs to justify not voting. You’re the one who needs to justify condoning this, or explain what you’re doing to offset the harm your chosen allies are causing.
I’m not going to vote, because the Democrats silenced any meaningful responses to police killings and police racism. As they lose support from Black and Muslim voters, rather than addressing the racism in our society they simply try to appeal to more suburban whites. In swing states, where Republican campaigns rest almost exclusively on race-baiting portrayals of immigrants and dehumanizing paranoia about trans people, directly encouraging more rightwing violence against these groups, the Democrats enable that violence by refusing to push back on the bigotry. Instead they claim they are also tough on immigration rather than building solidarity between people of any origin. They repeat Republican slurs like “trans biological men” or claim it was the Trump administration that was guilty of allowing healthcare for trans people in prison, rather than standing up for trans people and showing how false the rightwing sex panic is.
I’m not going to vote, because the Democrats systemically sabotage any progressive movement in this country, and if you don’t believe in revolution then some kind of ethical progress is the only vision you can offer for change. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got caught rigging the contest to clinch the party nomination and keep out the progressive wing, led at the time by Bernie Sanders, even though Sanders consistently polled as having a much better chance at beating Trump and other potential Republican nominees. Party elders and super delegates closed ranks around Clinton, who had her origins in the pro-segregation wing of the Party, because they were more afraid of the progressive politics of Sanders than the extreme bigotry and climate denialism of Trump. Likewise, during the Trump administration, rather than focusing on the reality of police racism or the frequent assassinations and mass killings carried out by white supremacist vigilantes, and again today with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, powerholders amongst the Democrats waste no opportunity to snipe or sabotage the new progressive wing that coalesced around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The last time in this country there was a truly progressive movement directly connected to either major party was during the FDR administration in the 1930s, and his brand of progressivism only arose as a strategy to co-opt and institutionalize the subversive organizing of the working class from Black sharecroppers to the multiracial and multiethnic workers in urban factories to the army of unemployed: it was to prevent an anticapitalist revolution. So even if your sincere goal is to create a progressive, pro-State movement, you’re contradicting yourself. Voting wouldn’t be the way to do it. Supporting revolutionary movements would.
Whether we are voting or not, we know that we keep us safe.
We know that the only way to guarantee access to abortions, hormones, and gender affirming care is to organize it ourselves, whether its legally or illegally.
We know that the only way to keep ourselves safe from white supremacists and transphobes, whether they’re wearing badges or hoods, is to arm ourselves, to train, to understand operational security, and to learn surveillance and countersurveillance.
We know that the most effective responses to so-called natural disasters come not from the government nor from humanitarian agencies but from our neighbors and from total strangers practicing mutual aid; that to become even more resilient for the next disaster, the best strategy isn’t some political party, it’s building up stashes of food, water, first aid, and tools, establishing relationships of solidarity globally and in our neighborhoods, and planning for collective survival.