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Title: To the Electoral Cattle Author: Albert Libertad Date: February 1906 Language: en Topics: Elections, Left Electoralism, anti-voting Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1906/electoral-cattle.htm
Under the impetus of interested individuals the political committees are
opening the awaited era of electoral quarrels.
As usual, they will insult each other, slander each other, fight each
other. Blows will be exchanged for the benefit of third thieves, always
ready to profit from the stupidity of the crowd.
Why will you go for this?
You live with your kids in unhealthy lodgings. You eat â when you can â
food adulterated by the greed of traffickers. Exposed to the ravages of
alcoholism and tuberculosis, you wear yourself out from morning to night
at a job that is always imbecilic and useless and that you donât even
profit from. The next day you start over again, and so it goes till you
die.
Is it then a question of changing all this?
Are they going to give you the means of realizing a flourishing
existence, you and your comrades? Are you going to be able to come and
go, eat, drink, breathe without constraint, love with joy, rest, enjoy
scientific discoveries and their application, decreasing your efforts,
increasing your well-being. Are you finally going to live without
disgust or care the large life, the intense life?
No, say the politicians proposed for your suffrage. This is only a
distant ideal...You must be patient...You are many, but you should also
become conscious of your might so as to abandon it into the hands of
your âsaviorsâ once every four years.
But what will they do in their turn?
Laws! What is the law? The oppression of the greater number by a coterie
claiming to represent the majority.
In any event, error proclaimed by the majority doesnât become true, and
only the unthinking bow before a legal lie.
The truth cannot be determined by vote.
He who votes accepts to be beaten.
So why then are there laws? Because there is property.
So it is from the prejudice of property that all our miseries, all our
pain flow.
So those who suffer from it have an interest in destroying property, and
so the law.
The only logical means of suppressing laws is not to make them.
Who makes laws? Parliamentary arrivistes.
On closer analysis, it is thus not a handful of rulers who crush us, but
the thoughtlessness, the stupidity of the herd of those sheep of Panurge
who constitute the electoral cattle.
We will fight without cease for the conquest of âimmediate happinessâ by
remaining partisans of the only scientific method and by proclaiming
together with our abstentionist comrades:
The voter â that is the enemy!
And now, to the voting urns, cattle.