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Title: Why do anarchists abstain from elections?
Author: Tommy Lawson
Date: 10 April 2022
Language: en
Topics: electoralism;elections;reformism;abstension;anarchism
Source: Retrieved on 20 April 2022 from https://www.redblacknotes.com/2022/04/10/why-do-anarchists-abstain-from-elections/
Notes: “The following is a slightly edited version of a talk given to a panel hosted by Socialist Unity and Geelong Anarchist Communists in March, 2022. The topic of the panel was ‘should socialists participate in elections,’ however the idea was first posited as to discuss why anarchists do not run in elections. As such the article attempts to cover both bases.”

Tommy Lawson

Why do anarchists abstain from elections?

Debating a vision of socialism

When addressing a particular debate in politics, I think it’s important

to understand how an issue and the common positions around it developed.

As such, I want to demonstrate the rationale of why anarchists refuse to

participate in bourgeois elections.

Before I do, I should make a very basic statement about anarchism.

Anarchism is a branch of socialism. It aims for the revolutionary

overthrow of bourgeois society and its defining features are direct

action, federalism, internationalism and parliamentary abstention.

Anarchist strategy has been overwhelmingly focused on mass self-directed

working class activity. Usually this means building fighting unions, but

in different contexts has employed various forms as the means by which

workers can make revolution.

Throughout anarchist history, mass organisation has often been coupled

with a specific political organisation committed to anarchism, but it

has not been seen as the role of the specific organisation itself to

make nor to dictate the forms of the revolution.

So to address how and why anarchists hold the abstentionist position; As

comrades may know, anarchism developed out of the revolutionary

collectivist and federalist wing of the first International. At the

Basle Congress in 1869 the so-called ‘revolutionary collectivists’ first

began to articulate a programme for achieving and managing the future

society. Labour councils were to manage working class affairs, directing

strikes and generalising struggle against the bosses and the state until

such a point that workers could seize control of society. These labour

councils, based on both industry and community, would form ‘dual bodies

of production and consumption’, replacing the bourgeois state.

It’s important to note this vision was developed in opposition to

certain aspects of the ideas of Marx and the so-called ‘State

socialists.’ The Communist Manifesto was fairly well circulated

everywhere in Europe[1] except France by this time, and many

revolutionaries took serious issue with the lines in it about the

concentration of production into the hands of the state. The state of

course, being an institution of class domination. The other line the

collectivists took issue with was the idea of ‘winning the battle of

democracy’, which was interpreted to mean conquering the capitalist

state by electoral means.

While few people today maintain the illusion that socialism can be

achieved peacefully, it was not so obvious at the birth of the movement.

These early revolutionaries thought following the advice of Marx and

Engels would lead to putting the revolution on hold indefinitely. Or to

the complete state domination of all social life. Essentially, state

capitalism. If this was a fair interpretation of the ideas of Marx and

Engels is up for debate, but nonetheless, the debates around these ideas

helped shape the split in the First International.

In contrast to the slow electoral capture of the state, the collectivist

current, which eventually became the anarchists, believed the most

important task was the building of independent proletarian institutions.

As mentioned before, these autonomous working class organisations were

to form the basis of the new society. They were not intended to be

institutions which would piecemeal take over capitalism by turning

companies into co-ops or establishing mutual aid organisations. Rather,

by developing the autonomy of the working class through a process of

consistent conflict with capitalists and the state, the working class

would realise the nature of its opposition to capitalism and then

overthrow the system. The thesis was also that these institutions may

serve as the grounds not only for the current struggle, but also for

organisational basis of the new society. This of course was not a given

conclusion. It is, after all, immensely difficult to maintain the

combative nature of a proletarian organisation without it either being

smashed or integrated into managing capitalism. Autonomy from the

institutions of the state was therefore a key aspect of maintaining

revolutionary intent.

Over time, the fears of the anarchists were confirmed. Many early

socialist parties slowly jettisoned their vision of a new society as

they grew in popularity, won more votes and seats in parliaments, and

were slowly integrated into running bourgeois states.

As Rudolf Rocker put it, ‘Participation in the politics of the bourgeois

states has not brought the labour movement a hairs’ breadth closer to

Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been

completely crushed and condemned to insignificance.’

Why abstention?

The short detour through history presented here was to illustrate there

debates from which the anarchists’ abstentionist position developed. But

there is more to the analysis than a vision of labour councils running

society. Sometimes people assume that it comes from an abstract,

individualist moralism regarding not telling other people what to do, or

some politics of purity. These are misconceptions.

Sometimes people also think that anarchists’ rejection of electoral

politics translates into such absurd positions as refusing to vote

within their own collectives, in unions or other working class bodies,

and are against having any kind of representative organisation. Again

this is untrue, but instead of granting executive power to select

individuals, anarchists believe that at least as far as working class

organisations go, representation should be strictly mandated and

delegates immediately recallable. For the record, historically, the vast

majority of anarchist organisations have operated by majority vote.

The point I want to make ultimately, is that anarchists abstention from

electoral politics is not based on abstractions, but instead is based on

a very concrete assessment about the type of world we want, and what it

takes to get there.

One key idea is what anarchists define as transformative practice (or

praxis). That is, the building of the subjective, revolutionary

consciousness that, along, with objective conditions, is required to

make a revolution. In a society divided into classes, for workers

consciousness of their position emerges from the contradictions of the

social relations of production. That is, because the economic structures

of society mean that workers and capitalists ultimately have opposite

interests, struggles between classes are inevitable. The process of

fighting in their own interests shapes the consciousness of workers,

hopefully coming to realise the values of solidarity and collectivity

that are required to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism.

Therefore, to anarchists, the type of action workers undertake in the

class struggle plays a fundamental role in shaping the type of ideology

that emerges in the fight for socialism. Which is why the connection

between ends and means is vital, and why we can speak of anarchism as a

methodology that links both the form, direct action and direct

democracy, with the content, revolutionary socialist politics.

In parliamentary politics, workers are alienated from decision making

processes. A representative in parliament has a number of years where

they can make autonomous decisions, unaccountable to their electorate.

They are more accountable to the bureaucracy of the state and to

business pressures than their electorate. Their accountability to their

party can of course, depend upon the structures of said party, but the

party slowly becomes accountable to the state by its prolonged

participation.

The need to maintain a position in parliament comes to define the role

of even socialist parties. Increasing resources are dedicated to

maintaining seats, and members in parliament slowly build relationships

with bourgeois politicians, parties and even capitalists. Essentially,

electoralism conditions people and their organisations to a certain way

of doing politics, where parliamentary needs detract from collective

decision making and direct action.

So while participating in parliament means socialists give validation to

government in general, this is of less concern than the problem of

socialists in a position where they have to administer the bourgeois

state. Even if socialist politicians try to make laws more tailored to

the interests of the workers, the very functioning of the bourgeois

state is never really in the interests of the working class. It is not

suited to the revolutionary rupture that is required by revolution.

Sometimes socialist politicians even find themselves coming into

conflict with workers’ interests. Socialists might win a majority in a

local council or even a state, becoming responsible for the workers

engaged in various public utilities. Say an Enterprise Bargaining

Agreement comes up for negotiation, then the socialists face the

contradiction of supporting the workers against themselves as employer,

while simultaneously being responsible to the capitalist state for its

budgetary expenses! Also as we know, the positive programmes socialists

can enact through the bourgeois state are vetoed by capital. These

contradictions mean the revolutionary politics of socialists in

parliament are hardly sustainable.

But these problems affect more than just the workers’ parties. Consider

how embedded the Australian union movement is with the Australia Labor

Party, how much is sacrificed by union leaders attempting to utilise the

Party in an inside/outside strategy. The game with the “political” and

“industrial” arms has ultimately meant sacrificing the ‘industrial’ to

the ‘political.’ Todays ALP is dominated by the interests of certain

sections of Australian capital and administered by a layer of

middle-class professionals, union and state bureaucrats and professional

politicians straight from university.

The exceeding ‘political’ focus today’s union movement to address the

needs of the Australian workers is a tribute to the disorganisation of

the class. Union leadership consistently sells us the line that what is

needed is to get progressives elected, who will change the law and then

we can take industrial action. This logic is at essence, the real

problem.

The working class needs the capacity to act independently and

militantly. When half of your strategy relies on ‘boxing smart’ with the

capitalist state you are limited to working within a framework of legal

reforms, on the need to have a soapbox in parliament. This is why,

instead of building campaigns to ‘break the rules’, forcing the laws to

change to our needs, we have only seen the Australian Council of Trade

Unions seriously mobilise to ‘Change the Rules’, effectively a sly ALP

election campaign.

Cancelling workplace action because it runs the risk of upsetting the

political balance, or channeling action into parliamentary ends is a

deadly problem in the workers movement. Accepting limitations to our

demands and what we can fight to win is a defeatist logic. This is a

strong part of why anarchists refuse to legitimise the bourgeois state.

The way we fight as a class should never be limited by the ballot box.

Going even further than the limitation of strikes, we see that as

parliament is utilised by socialists, their everyday practice becomes

more and more based upon the impossibility of an insurrection, on

‘correcting’ the nature of bourgeois democracy rather than seeking to

abolish it. Proletarian politics becomes more and more bourgeois,

catering to the interests of the multi-class ‘citizen’ rather than the

proletarian producer.

Effectively, socialists in parliament are not a clever ‘foothold in

parliament for workers’ but a foothold of the capitalist state in the

workers’ movement. Tools that workers can use to struggle; protests,

boycotts, strikes and insurrections are valid. Participating in

parliament is not comparable to these forms of struggle, we do not want

to live in bourgeois society, we intend to destroy it.

Making parliamentary seats, even temporarily, a core part of socialist

strategy, conditions the struggle in a manner that ensures it is always

a constant priority. Once a seat is won, it must be defended, even at

the expense of the party’s politics. Socialist politics should remain

focused on the class at the place we know has the potential to remake

society; workers at the point of production.

Comrades may protest that not participating in parliament leaves the

field open for reactionary, bourgeois politicians. That anarchists are

suggesting we ignore ‘politics’ altogether. But this is wrong. To

anarchists, political rights must be fought for, or defended, by means

of mass direct action. Paraphrasing Malatesta “the way in which reforms

are achieved is as important as the fact they are achieved at all.”

Again, that is the forms that workers employ in their struggle are

dialectically linked to the content of those struggles, contributing to

the development of revolutionary consciousness.

How do we fight instead?

Anarchism suggests we should always aim to force a crisis in capitalist

production and the functioning of its institutions, exacerbating the

contradictions towards a revolutionary break.

We achieve reforms by our struggle outside of parliament because the

working class has the power to enact them. Because workers are also able

to defend it in everyday life, or else legal reforms remain a dead

letter. All the progressive laws in the world mean nothing if they are

not an active, enforced part of working class life and culture. As the

saying goes “you can’t win in court (or parliament) what you can’t hold

on the shop floor.”

This is why the focal point for struggle remains the economic fighting

bodies of workers. After all, although it is where workers are

exploited, it is also where they are most powerful, where workers

combine and overcome various sectional interests and prejudices, and

where we can most profoundly disrupt the functionality of capital. In

Australia today, the union movement is really very weak. But organised

labour remains the basis of our strength, and it should be our priority

to rebuild class autonomy and strength. But not through distractions

with bourgeois campaigns. Parliament is after all, where the bourgeoisie

settle their disputes, not workers.

The history of the working class proves that struggle outside of

parliament is the most effective way to organise. The 8 hour day, the

weekend, universal suffrage, the laundry list of achievements made by

the Builders Labourers Federation. Even gay marriage was legalised by

the Liberal Party, after decades of campaigns that refused to accept the

logic of waiting to get the right progressives elected. No major reforms

are ever won by getting people elected, they were won by combinations of

independent social movements and direct action by workers. So we do not

ignore the need for political reforms, we fight for them in a

proletarian manner.

Unfortunately, the reality is that electoral campaigns are a

distraction. Sometimes there are social movements which are building,

fighting, and even winning. Then an election comes along, and

politicians try to convince people the next step is to get them elected.

Socialists are even sometimes won over to building campaigns for parties

who don’t even share their politics[2]. It’s absurd people would waste

their time building organisations that advocate politics they don’t

believe in.

The advocates of electoral parties try to convince us that this is how

we can really make change. But it never comes, comrades instead become

convinced to abandon direct struggle for canvassing, because sometimes

that feels like you’re really making a difference. But if you look at

the big picture, the long term strategy is not guaranteed. Eventually,

the means, elections, have become the ends.

In fact, given the power that capital holds over bourgeois electoral

politics, the successes that parliamentary socialists manage to achieve

are usually ways of channeling discontent into safe avenues. It’s more

useful for the bosses to include socialists in managing their state than

have them outside, organising a strong opposition. Not only does

building parliamentary politics not help the workers movement, it

actively harms it.

Obviously, a common contention from other socialists is that the

abstentionist position should be seen only as a tactic employed

depending on material conditions, rather than it becoming a principle.

So while abstention may be a defining feature of what actually makes an

organisation or someone anarchist, this is only so because anarchists

have determined abstention to be a strategy appropriate to capitalist

relations in total!

Of course material conditions change, and other elements of our

strategies and tactics, such as forms of political organisation,

involvement in various social movements and unions, plans for

insurrection etc shift accordingly. But the overall strategy of

abstention, because it is so tied to the revolutionary end, does not

change.

After all, communism exists as a potential based on the contradictions

of capitalism. It does not slowly emerge from the institutions and forms

of social organisation in bourgeois society. Capitalism must be smashed,

our task is to lay the grounds for that radical break.

Victorian Socialists? Not for us.

Our left is dominated by bureaucratic unions, the ALP and the Greens.

There is extremely marginal space for Socialist electoral activity. What

success there has been for generations has been incredibly negligible.

Year after year of such results, tens of thousands of dollars and hours

have been invested in achieving very little.

At its height, even the vastly larger Communist Party only managed to

have a few people elected, and yet the only major changes they

influenced were won through building a direct action labour movement.

Look at what happened to the Democratic Socialist Perspective when it

dissolved into Socialist Alliance. An unmitigated disaster. From the

largest socialist group on the left to a small party of vaguely defined

anti-capitalism. Even the politics of Socialist Alternative have shifted

since embarking upon the Victorian Socialists project. They dropped

their union conference, the messaging around elections is contradictory.

The saving grace for the revolutionary politics of our Trotskyist

cousins is the lack of success of Victorian Socialists.

Victorian Socialists are not an appropriate body for revolutionary

anti-capitalist politics. As Jerome Small recently wrote in Red Flag

“you don’t have to be a revolutionary in order to support Victorian

Socialists.” Which is fair enough, but one wonders why revolutionaries

are building a non-revolutionary party.

Victorian Socialists Federal Election manifesto only mentions capitalism

three times, and none of these are paired with the suggestion of

overthrowing the system, only with reforming its contradictions. There

is no mention of revolution. Surely this should be the minimum task of a

revolutionary socialist organisation in parliament, but it falls even at

this first hurdle.

What the VS programme calls for is increased taxes on the rich and the

nationalisation of essential services. This is typical of social

democratic parties the world over. It is barely more radical than the

Greens, and certainly less relevant. If socialists are serious about

overthrowing capitalism, this is what they should be actively arguing

for, rather than covering it up with palatable reformist projects.

As such many excellent activists are spending their time extolling the

virtues of a party and a reformist programme that cannot be won. They

are building an electoral project rather than building social and labour

movements or revolutionary organisations. Many socialist comrades will

not accept the limitations and contradictions of participating in the

union bureaucracy, yet they compete for a role in the bourgeois state.

We are less interested in arguments for donkey votes and individual

abstention than what is required to build class power and what breaks

the limiting logic of parliamentary socialism. All socialists know that

politically sharp revolutionary organisations are a requirement of the

class struggle. This is what our anarchist-communist groups are

attempting to build, this is what we encourage other socialist comrades

to continue with. Without the distraction of electoralism.

Political organisation outside parliament, an independent and fighting

rank and file labour movement. These are the things we need to be

building in the here and now, preparing the way for a revolutionary

workers movement. Opportunities to build class power exist, from Library

strikes in Geelong to the Nurses and Teachers strikes in NSW, to the

campaigns of South Queensland Union of Renters. Campaigns to rebuild May

Day and the Climate Strikes similarly break the logic of parliamentary

action.

All the things socialists may expect to achieve from elections; a

soapbox for their politics, the ability to make small legal reforms, can

be achieved through means that do not require we sacrifice workers’

politics in the bourgeois halls of power.

I will be indulgent and finish with a quote from the famous

anarcho-syndicalist revolutionary Bueneventura Durruti; “the working

class has no parliament but the street, the factory, and the workplace.

They have no other path than social revolution.”

[1] Including in Russia, where it was translated by Bakunin.

[2] Think of all the ‘socialists’ involved in the Greens over the years.