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Title: The Case Against Voting
Author: Colin Ward
Date: 1987
Language: en
Topics: anti-voting
Source: http://www.takver.com/history/elections/ward_on_voting.htm
Notes: Originally published in New Society 15 May 1987Reprinted in Freedom Vol 48 No 6 June 1987.

Colin Ward

The Case Against Voting

No politician of any colour likes a non-voter. Last week Labour MP Tony

Banks introduced a bill in an almost empty House of Commons seeking to

make voting compulsory .His fellow members had voted with their feet out

of the chamber, but he wanted to fine those of us who fail to vote,

unless, like absentees from school, we could produce ‘a legitimate

reason’.

Yet the non-voters are among the largest of the political groups. Tony

Banks reckons that they form 24 per cent of the electorate and he claims

that ‘those ten million or so who failed to vote in 1983 have a great

deal to answer for to those who did’. His assumption is that all those

non-voters would have made their cross for candidates of whom he

approves.

But the abstainers, like the other parties, are a broad church,

embracing the sick, the indifferent and the idle, those who have

something more pressing to do on a Thursday, as well as the hilarious

prohibited categories like peers, the insane and Anglican clergymen.

Among them, too, is the unknown quantity of conscientious non-voters. To

join this hidden party, as the South African elections reminded us, you

have to be eligible to vote.

Our own history has examples of the manipulations with which governments

ensure that citizens can’t win. Having abolished an Irish Parliament the

government made sure that the majority of the Irish were ineligible to

elect MPs to Westminster, and after the passing of the Roman Catholic

Relief Act, ensured that this majority still couldn’t vote by raising

the property qualification from ownership of land worth 40 shillings a

year to a figure of ten pounds a year . When the franchise was

eventually extended, was the best strategy for Home Rulers to boycott

the polling booth, or to vote for Nationalist candidates pledged not to

take their seats, since in any case they could not swear the oath of

allegiance to the British sovereign, or should they forget into

Westminster and there create I havoc?

The same tactical dilemmas divide Nationalist politicians in Northern

Ireland to this day, and in many other countries have beset every

movement for national autonomy. The issue for such movements in

considering whether to take part in or to boycott elections is not the

effectiveness of parliamentary government, but the usefulness of either

course in strategies for obtaining a parliament of one’s own.

One advocate of seeking the voters’ mandate for not taking one’s seat

was the late Guy Aldred who stood many times over 40 years as an

anti-parliamentary socialist candidate in Glasgow, believing that this

was useful propaganda. He convinced few of the conscientious non-voters

that this was true, and came bottom of the poll every time, except on

the occasion when he stood as a World Government candidate and came

second to bottom. Other believers in a protest vote argue that the right

tactic is to attend the poll and put slogans instead of crosses on the

ballot paper, so that it is registered as a spoilt rather than an uncast

vote.

But it is the anarchists who, for well over a century, have been the

most consistent advocates of conscientiously staying away from the poll.

Since anarchism implies an aspiration for a decentralised

non-governmental society, it makes no sense from an anarchist point of

view to elect representatives to form a central government. If you want

no government, what is the point of listening to the promises of a

better government? As Thoreau put it: ‘Cast your whole vote, not a strip

of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while

it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is

irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.’

The various streams of 19^(th) century anarchist thought were united

together in their opposition to participation in elections. Most of them

shared with the early Marxists the view that the State was simply the

executive committee of the ruling classes.

Political democracy, they declared, was just a facade concealing the

real effective power of the owners of capital and land. If the workers

withdrew their labour power the capitalist class would be impotent and

its State would fall to pieces. For the anarcho-syndicalists, every

industrial dispute was to be fought through to the bitter end with no

compromise. The culminating general strike would make the ruling class

powerless and the people would take over through their own forms of

industrial organisation, providing goods and services. under workers’

control. Parliamentary elections were not merely irrelevant, they were a

ruling-class conspiracy to divert workers’ attention from the real

struggle.

Anarchist-communists of the school of Kropotkin linked industrial

autonomy and local autonomy. The means of sustenance and livelihood

would be in the hands of the local commune on the principle ‘to each

according to his needs, from each according to his ability’. This

conception of the way society should organise itself through federations

of autonomous self-organising groups drew upon innumerable antecedents

older than the nation state: the medieval city with its guilds and

confraternities, the Russian mir and artel, the American town meeting of

the 18^(th) century. It exemplifies Kropotkin ‘s concept of mutual aid

as the mainspring of human society, and like Swiss federalism it implies

no parish pump isolation. From the anarchist., communist standpoint,

general elections to a central parliament are a form of social suicide

since they imply the surrender of local autonomy and local revenue-

gathering to central government which throughout history has shown

itself to be the destroyer, not the upholder, of communal

decision-making.

Finally, there is individualist anarchism. proclaiming that it is absurd

for individual people to surrender their right to run their own lives to

an outside body. Objectors see this as absurd selfishness and maintain

that government is necessary to restrain our anti-social natures.

Anarchists of all varieties respond with William Morris’s warning that

no man is good enough to be another man ‘s master .

Did anarchist abstentionism ever, in the slightest degree, affect the

course of events? There was one occasion when it was tested simply

because it was one of the rare times and places when anarchism really

influenced a mass movement. And the irony was that the effectiveness of

abstentionism was demonstrated only when it was abandoned.

In Spain, in the 1930s, there were two huge trade union federations. On

one side was the socialist UGT and on the other the syndicalist CNT,

strongly influenced by the anarchist federation FAI. The membership of

both these bodies was vast. (By the time they agreed on joint action

each could claim, according to whose estimates you read, between a

million and one and a half million members.) After the dictator Primo de

Rivera resigned in 1930, his supporter the King abdicated in 1931, but

the new socialist-republican government continued the repression of the

revolutionary left. In the elections of 1933 the CNT used the slogan

Frente a las urnas, la revolucion social (the alternative to the polling

booth is the social revolution). The triumph of the right was attributed

to the mass abstention of the workers, and the usual sporadic

confrontations followed.

Then came another chance to vote in the February elections of 1936. Very

quietly, the CNT leadership tacitly abandoned the position it had held

since 1911, that elections were a fraud and that “workers and peasants

should seize the factories and the land to produce for all. They and

their members voted for the Popular Front (a kind of joint Alliance and

Labour tactical voting). Our most revered chronicler of the events of

1936, Gerald Brenan in his Spanish Labyrinth, explained that the

electoral victory of the Popular Front ‘can to a great extent be put

down to the anarchist vote’. And certainly a deal behind the scenes

ensured that many thousands of political prisoners would be released.

Brenan says that ‘in many places the prisons had already been opened

without the local authorities daring to oppose it’.

But the triumph of electoral common sense over the convictions of a

lifetime had many consequences in Spain that no one had anticipated. The

Spanish workers were ready to take on the political right, but the

politicians of the left were not. The army was poised to seize power,

but the government was not willing to resist. In his book Lessons of the

Spanish Revolution, Vernon Richards raised a forbidden question: did the

CNT leadership take into account that by ensuring the electoral victory

of the left it was also ensuring that the generals of the right would

stage a military putsch which the respectable left politicians would not

restrain? ‘On the other hand a victory of the right, which was almost

certain if the CNT abstained, would mean the end of the military

conspiracy and the corning to power of a reactionary but ineffectual

government which, like its predecessors, would hold out for not more

than a year or two. There is no real evidence to show that there was any

significant development of a fascist movement in Spain along the lines

of the regimes in Italy and Germany.’

In fact, Spain had three different Popular Front governments on 18 and

19 July 1936, each of which was anxious to cave in to the insurgent

generals. It was only the popular rising ( on traditional anarchist

lines) and the seizure by workers and peasants, not just of arms and

military installations, but of land, factories and railways, that

ensured that there was any resistance at all to the generals. These are

ordinary facts, totally contrary to what Orwell used to call the News

Chronicle / New Statesman version of what happened in Spain. The Spanish

revolution of 1936 was forced upon the working class by the election of

the Popular Front and its capitulation to the insurgent generals. It was

subsequently eliminated in the name of national unity in combating the

right, which by then had won international backing. Having participated

in the elections the next step was participation in government by the

CNT/FAI leadership. This led to the permanent destruction of their own

movement and the suppression of the popular revolution, and was followed

by 40 years of fascist dictatorship.

And all this because of the decision to abandon the tradition of

non-voting. If history has any lessons for the conscientious

abstentionists it is that every time they get lured out of their

self-imposed political isolation into participation in the electoral

lottery, they make fools of themselves.

We might object that there is no parallel between Spain in 1936 and

Britain in 1987. But isn’t it interesting that the same politics-fixated

people who peddle horror tales about the power over government of

various non-elected bodies, whether it is the secret services, the

military chiefs of staff or the Association of Chief Police Officers

urge us to abandon any notion of principles or policies, and vote

strategically?

Form an effective Popular Front, they imply, and cast a tactical vote

for whoever the market researchers tell us is likeliest to unseat the

Conservative candidate. At the same time they revel in the allegations

that recent governments have been under suspicion from the State’s own

secret services because Harold Wilson was thought to be a Moscow agent,

and that the service chiefs were planning a takeover of power should

anyone to the left of Wilson take office.

Seasoned non-voters take a different and longer-term view of history.

They know that the similarities between the present government and both

its predecessors and successors far outweigh the differences. They

realise the truth of Kropotkin’s observation, 75 years ago, that ‘The

state organisation, having been the force to which the minorities

resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses,

cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges.’ In

urging the need for more popular, more decentralised, forms of social

administration, he stressed that we will be compelled to find new forms

of self-organisation for the social functions that the state fulfills

through the bureaucracy, and that ‘as long as this is not done, nothing

will be done.’

The non-voters will watch cynically as the politicians’ lies and

promises mount and the government good-news machine rolls into action,

quietly repeating the anarchist slogan :

‘If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.’

Colin Ward