Vote Early, Vote Often

There are “elections,” and there are elections. There’s “democracy,” and then there’s democracy. Anarchists, as you will no doubt be aware, tend to have a particularly jaundiced view of these things, hence their readiness to apply quotation marks to the majority of processes meant to legitimize government. And with good cause. Anyone who’s had experience of democratic centralism or the “proletarian democracy” of the Leninist microsects understands that it resembles genuine democracy about as much as “proletarian justice” resembles actual justice. At the same time, when we hear liberals talking about democracy, civil liberties, and human rights, we want to take them at their word and hold them to it: For them, representative democracy is the motherlode, whereas for anarchists it’s about as close as you can come to democracy without democracy, the perfect hegemonic deception.

The problem with democracy as anarchists see it is that there simply isn’t enough voting done. If liberals are serious about democracy, we ask that it should be direct democracy, not representative; that it mean not just political democracy, but also economic and industrial democracy, meaning democracy in the workplace; and also that it mean social democracy, that is, that the decisions made affecting all of us in our everyday lives be subject to direct democracy and accountability, so that we can be meaningfully involved in and have control over local schools, retirement homes, sports clubs, residents and tenants associations, and so on.

That this should require a social transformation, we accept; that it necessarily requires a violent overthrow of those in power, we do not. What it does require is the support of the mass of people who make up society, and when anarchists advance the “Marxist” view that the liberation of the workers will be task of the workers themselves, we mean precisely that: Anarchists will support the workers where their aims are congruent, but they won’t try to “lead” a workers’ movement or pose as its vanguard or even seize power in their name.

Legitimate, violent revolutions do take place, of course, but they occur usually because there is no meaningful alternative for the expression of protest or opinion. Orlando Figes’s analysis of the Russian revolution made it clear that the revolution was bound to happen given the lack of accountability of the Tsar and his circle, but it was also necessary that a major crisis, the war, accompany the lack of formal social structures of accountability. There was no other outlet for protest at the futility and atrocity of war, and the court’s attitude to the populace had been clearly demonstrated over the preceding decade.

We’ve taken an approach of studied quietude over events in Iraq since last March, mostly from a sense of discomfort at the bloviating witnessed elsewhere and a realization that blogs lend themselves readily to self-importance, and one thing we are not, at Counago & Spaves, is important. So no ponderous pontificating. We have also suspended judgement on an ongoing basis because experience has taught us, if nothing else, the law of unintended consequences. Since the 1960s, the anti-imperialist left has royally fucked up on the job by supporting national liberation movements that could in no sense be called progressive against an American imperialist power that was intent on denying basic human rights. Genuinely well-meaning and good people regularly managed to advance the causes of butchers and murderers by assuming that they had to take sides; that we live in a Manichean world in which the opposite of Evil had to be Good, as opposed to another Evil. By assuming that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the left has time and again allied itself with reactionary forces.

It’s an apocryphal tale that Chou en-Lai was once asked by a reporter to comment on what he thought were the most important consequences of the French revolution, to which he said that “it’s too early to tell.” The fact that it wasn’t Chou who spoke these words but an adviser who was giving an off-the-cuff response to what he thought were contemporary events occurring on the other side of the world doesn’t matter. There’s much to be said for his circumspection. We’re not the sort here to trawl the Net looking for news items that only confirm our pre-selected interpretation of events, as though history isn’t happening, only the unfolding of some master dialectic. It is, indeed, too early to tell.

Does that make this anarchist’s eye any less jaundiced? Shouldn’t he be rejoicing?

It’s too early to tell.