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Title: What’s Left? Author: Roy San Filippo Date: June 27, 2007 Language: en Topics: Elections, the spectacle, United States of America, Bring the Ruckus Source: Retrieved on March 14, 2019 from https://web.archive.org/web/20190314161019/[[http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/11 Notes: Roy San Filippo is the editor of A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writing from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (AK Press). He is a member of Bring the Ruckus in Los Angeles.
Elections are a political spectacle. They have a symbolic power but are
of little value to the population in affecting or directing public
policy. The mass political ritual of individuals anonymously pulling
levers in an election booth reinforces the collective myth of democracy
and cloaks the class and social antagonisms of society. Anarchists and
other revolutionary tendencies know that political power does not come
from voting booths, but by having real input into the decisions that
affect their lives. This requires re-imagining and reorganizing the
fundamental social relationship and political and economic structures of
capitalism, in short, a revolutionary transformation of society.
Every four years, in response to the American electoral cycle, liberal
and radical activists begin to push coalitions and activists into
electoral work for the Democratic Party and anarchists often
counter-organize against the charade of electoral “democracy.” Given
that voter turnout for major elections in the United States is often
less than 50%, this is one campaign that anarchists can actually claim
as a victory. In principle, there is nothing wrong with the anarchist
“Fuck the Vote” campaign, but it is not largely about organizing for
revolutionary change. Rather, the “Fuck the Vote” campaign serves a
broader purpose (much like the Liberal elections anarchists organize
against); it is a ritual of dissent that functions to reinforce the
collective identity of anarchists and cloaks anarchy’s own deep
political divisions. In this moment we abandon our anarcho-prefixes;
there is no more post-Leftist anarchist vs. Leftist anarchist vs.
primitivist anarchist. We are anarchists and we are Fucking the Vote.
As Marx noted, “The formulation of a question is its solution.” In other
words, the way you ask a question determines the possible answers to it.
We need to formulate a new question regarding elections. The question in
2004 is neither the electoralism of the liberals nor the
anti-electoralism of the anarchists, but how, as revolutionaries, we can
help to build movements that directly confront state power and prefigure
the type of society we want to live in. Anti-electoralism, like
electoralism, is an exercise in political impotence and an expression of
our powerlessness. Electoral politics is about legitimating capitalism
and the state. It is not about real power to the people. Rather than
attacking the state from our strengths, a strategy of anti-electoralism
takes as its beginning our weakest point—our political, institutional,
and strategic disadvantage in electoral politics. Such a campaign
reinforces our weakness by embracing our lack of a political voice and
political power in electoral politics, and by trying to utilize that
very weakness as the basis for organizing. Both electoral politics and
anti-electoralism are bad strategies if your goal is to radically
transform society.
Beyond the Spectacle
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life
presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything
that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
The anti-voting campaign suffers from same political problem as the
“anti-globalization” movement as practiced in the global North: long on
theatrics, symbolic acts, and spectacle, and short on posing any threat
to those who rule the world. The Left has become a pale shadow of
itself. The “New Left” is now over forty years old. That another Left
has failed to emerge during this time is telling. The Left lacks the
working-class base of the “old” Lefts of the late 19^(th) and early
20^(th) century and the intellectual base of the “New Left” of the
1960s. In addition, much of the white Left has long since abandoned the
Black and Brown liberation struggles. Rather than being the organized
expression of a movement “of the class, by the class, and for the
class,” the Left has become a series of political and symbolic
spectacles that are mere representations and mediations of resistance.
We now fill movie theaters with films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and The
Corporation, making the Left’s greatest contribution at the moment is in
the cultural production and consumption of resistance. Our puppet-making
skills are significantly better than our ability to challenge state
power. That isn’t a problem if our goal is make good street theater, but
our goal is to remake society. Certainly there is a place for puppets
and street theater and other symbolic acts. But these tactics are
largely disconnected from strategies for building concrete resistance to
the state and capitalism. What’s more, the state has adapted to these
tactics more quickly than the Left can counter. It didn’t take long
before the state began raiding convergence centers days and weeks before
our gatherings. The state doesn’t raid our convergence centers because
they respect our power; they raid our convergence centers because they
don’t. While the empire is busy in its attempt to remake the Middle
East, the Left continues to lose political and ideological ground to
neo-cons, neoliberals, and fundamentalists of every stripe. Can we stop
this slide and reestablish a viable, socialist, humanist, and radical
Left political pole? Or will we continue to prioritize pageantry over
power and relegate the Left to producers of political spectacle and
consumers of our own outrage?