Do Anarchists Dream of Electoral Sheep?

So, given that this blog is meant to be about all politics and that, it seems appropriate to write - erm - something - about, you know, voting. This is not something on which my thoughts have settled, as of yet. On the one hand, I have no truck with the notion that if a citizen forfeits their right to vote, they also forfeit their right to comment on their own political situation. I've got every right to comment on any political situation I damn well like, whether that be the regularity of the bin collection in Meersbrook, Sheffield, or the fraught relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe with regards to immigration control and, erm, well, mainly the fact that the Zimbabwean people don't have any food to eat right now, yeah? Provided, of course, that I've bothered to inform myself to any degree about it. Which, actually, I haven't, and this is why I'm refraining from commenting about either bin collection in Meersbrook (it seems to happen) or the situation in Harare (pretty fucking terrible, I'd have thought.) But I *have* thought a bit about the ethics of voting vs abstention, and you, dear readers, are going to get the benefit of it.

As far as I understand it, if you don't have much truck with the political elite as represented by Westminster - by which I mean that if you don't find the goings on in the corridors of power entertaining in the same way that you find a soap opera entertaining - then the reasons for votiing are as follows:

1) You think that a vote for the party that you want to win/find least objectionable will make an appreciable difference to your own life and to the lives of people you care about.

2) You think that voting for a specific party upholds or extends a part of your own identity.

3) You have a genuine respect for one of the candidates put forward to represent your own area.

4) You think that if you use your vote to support a minority party, this will somehow contribute to a critical mass of opinion-formation that may in time change the whole tenor of the political establishment.

5) You don't think 4) at all, but you're going to use your vote to protest against the fact that you don't see any of the current viable options as, well, viable.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the most significant ones for my purposes. As it happens, I'm not of the opinion that voting for a minority party - whether this party finds some representation in parliament or no - will significantly change the character of mainstream politics in this country. I simply don't believe that this is the case. Even if by some miraculous, miraculous occurence the Green party romped home (home? No.) to power by a comfortable margin, I don't believe that they could effect a genuine change in the way that people in this country organise themselves. It wouldn't change the way that we think, because, you know, we're the ones that need to do that. And besides, they won't win. They probably won't win a single seat. The BNP is obviously a far more frightening proposition, and in fact offer the most compelling reason that I can think of for voting so far. If I felt that they were genuinely within reach of becoming a serious force to be reckoned with in British politics, I would turn out and vote Labour without a shadow of a doubt.

I suppose there is an argument to say that even if far right parties like the BNP aren't currently a serious cause for concern, refusing to vote allows them an opportunity to gain ground that should be denied to them. That's a relatively compelling argument, as is the idea that you should vote in the forthcoming election because, say, a Labour victory would probably mean a slightly more clement set of cutbacks in the public sector and therefore maybe a few more nursery schools and dialysis machines staying open. I'll ignore for now the fact that I live in an extremely safe Labour seat so essentially whatever I choose to do will be meaningless because I think that's a copout of an argument. So yeah, two relatively convincing arguments there. Essentially, then, the question of whether to vote or not hinges - like the last post - on a question of compromise. Do I believe that it's better to knuckle down and vote for a party that I find comtemptible - for its deceptions in the war in Iraq, for its continuing commitment to the introduction of prviate finance into the public sector (did you know that in some Sheffield primary schools kids are now being sent home adverts for private companies selling school equiptment along with their dinner order forms?) for the ugliness of its private smear campaigns, for the Hutton enquiry, for the cash for questions, for their sheer, petty, incompetent, humiliating lack of imagination - which as far as I can understand it rests either on a total inability to appreciate what it's like to be alive and a human being, or else a wilful ignorance of this state of affairs - in order to secure a slightly less shaky future for certain public services that I genuinely believe are useful and worthwhile.

I dunno, basically. Maybe I'm just a bit too proud to put my name to that shit. Maybe I feel that the whole sordid business debases what I think politics should be about - trying to work out what's right and fair and to balance that with what's possible - because I've never believed that it's right to demand the impossible. Seems like a waste of energy. But I do believe that it's important to think about what you're signing up to before you put your name to something, and I believe that voting is probably amongst the most important forms of signature that you'll ever make (birth certificates and rent-books notwithstanding) and if you don't think that there's an option there which represents you enough - which isn't too much of a compromise - then there's no shame in withholding it. So to be brutally honest, it looks like the option that I've plumped for is on the surface of it the most superficial one at all. I don't want to vote because to do so would damage my sense of who I am, of my integrity as a person.

Yeah, sure. I know, I know, big drama, right? Get over yourself and all that. But the thing is that my sense of identity gets bashed about on a bi-hourly basis anyway. Most people's do, I think. I'm in no hurry to make it worse, and certainly not for the sake of a myth of intelligent participation invented principally to legitimate the power that has been held in the same hands for generations and generations. Fuck 'em. They can do without me, to be honest. Not that they'll care much anyway, and not that my staying at home on May 5th - in my strong Labour seat - will make a ha'porth of difference anyway.

Next week: voting, part 2. So, I'm not voting in this election. But is it wrong to vote per se?

The Manifesto

Right, this is the idea: I am 24 years old. A brief sixth-form flirtation with socialism aside, I have always been apolitical. Resolutely so, in fact. To illustrate - a brief resumé:

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TORIES:
At university I spent most of my time hanging out with other-worldly would be academics who sported tweed jackets sans irony and were conservative without having to think about it. Thinking about it, 'hanging out' might be too strong a phrase. During this period in my life, I was known as 'the ill-informed but well meaning Guardian reading one'. This appelation is still more or less accurate...


WHEN GEO MOVED TO SHEFFIELD:
...but has been attenuated by the fact that I now live in Sheffield, where it is mandatory that you want Thatcher dead and were arrested during the miner's strike. This even holds for people who are undergraduates here. Generally speaking, the character of the city is slightly to the left of Trotsky.

WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TROTS:
When I first moved, I shared a house with two members of a Marxist organisation called the Allianc for Worker's Liberty. I went to their meetings occasionally until one of their members told me that he'd advised the organiser of the branch against attempting to recruit me because he had 'met more left-wing policemen.' Also, I accidentally slept with this guy's mate, and then I felt a bit embarrassed. Anyway, after that:

WHEN GEO WENT GREEN AND BASICALLY SLEPT IN A PLANT:
I kind of fell in with this crowd of unbelievably beautiful eco-hipsters who ate paté out of bins a lot and introduced me to the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones and allotments. About this time, I started to neurote about turning the heating on and eating sea-food. I still did it, though. In fact, my only concessions to the political convictions of my social circle that I've made thus far are a) that I now feel self-conscious consuming diet-coke in company and b) I bought a bike. So anyway, that pretty much brings me up to around last October...

WHEN GEO STARTED SLEEPING WITH AN ANARCHIST:
Does what it says on the tin, really. I started seeing this guy who's an anarchist. Only it wasn't just that I started seeing the guy: I actually started listening to him. And now I'm going to reading groups and can make cracks about doctrinaire Marxists without having to surreptitiously check the terminology that I've written on the back of my hand first. I'm not going to vote in the coming election, and I've even worked out why.

EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
Essentially, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING. And I'm not entirely sure I like it. Sure, I was a wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal before, but at least I was my wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal. So this is what this blog is here to do, really: a sort of ebb and flow chart of my thoughts about what I've heard, said and read over the past six months, and what I will be reading, hearing, saying and thinking in the future. This will almost certainly be sloppy, ill-thought out and badly researched half of the time, if not more - I'm only a beginner at this game, remember. But it represents my attempt - long delayed but I guess necessary - to work out what I think is wrong with the Way that Things Are Currently Organised - and to try and decide what, realistically, I can do about it. I'm not on here to proselytise or even particularly to justify my apathy - because I am apathetic a great deal of the time, I know - but because I find those blank white MS Word documents desperately daunting and I think that putting my thoughts into a public forum might help me to keep thinking them. I'd like to hear about the conclusions that other people have come to: whether you're an embittered old bastard with a gin problem and only a handful of rusty red star badges and a divorce to show for twenty year's devotion to the cause, or a fully-fledged eco-anarchist with twenty-six partners who's recently given birth to a tree. Tell me what you've been reading, and what you thought about it. Tell me how many fights you've been in recently. Tell me about this really great forgotten post-punk outfit who've developed the knack of neatly constructing damning critiques of 20th century consumer capitalism in two and a half minutes, complete with glitteringly jangling guitars. Fuck it, man. I'm ready. Bring it on.

And, on that note: I might go and read about anarchy for a little while. Laters.