Why We Should NEVER Vote For ANYONE

These days it can be a controversial thing to say that, by design, gets unpleasant, contentious and irrationally angry and absurd responses and reactions from some quarters. It’s a viewpoint that is deliberately marginalised because doing so benefits the status quo and those who rule society. But the fact is that it’s always a mistake to put any trust in any politician. We cannot vote our way out of this dystopian capitalist mess. Bourgeois politics is a counter-productive waste of time and that includes all political parties and politicians. The entire capitalist class and their system is the enemy and none of them deserve our support, and that includes our votes (no matter who they are). Representative so-called ‘democracy’ has completely failed and is not worth participating in at all and that includes social capitalist politics, which sometimes falsely claims to be ‘socialist’. In reality voting is a disgusting submissive act of self-abasement and should be completely rejected and scorned. Ultimately, in various ways, it is not something that is in the interests of working-class people to do in the society that we are currently lumbered with much to our detriment.

On the whole organising tends to come to a standstill every time there is an election, especially when a Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn type politician comes along promising so-called ‘socialism’. Yet history shows who’s side these people are really on and that they have a habit of breaking their promises to the working class or not being able to keep them.

And if we are to gain reforms, how we do so is crucial and we need to build working class power and autonomous alternatives from below and utilise direct action and that’s how we’ve won gains and improvements in the past. Collaborating with any faction of the capitalist class strengthens them and weakens us. Supporting politicians is essential for the continued domination of the working class by capital. And if electoralism actually worked we would actually be getting somewhere and would have achieved socialism – but that hasn’t happened at all.
 
In any case, the supposedly progressive (or less reactionary) government has always been a diversionary tool for the benefit of the ruling class and this results in the working class ending up demotivated, demoralised and lethargic – eroding any desire for real self-determination. This no doubt contributes to the rightward drift in politics – how ‘pragmatic.’ Simply calling for or enacting an all-out general strike and real, effective action would be a better use of our time and energy. Neither will voting for the ‘lesser evil’ (which remains evil) get rid of poverty and bigotry and at the end of the day representative ‘democracy’ and capitalism do not fight conservatism and ultra-nationalism etc to the death and actually they fuel such things.

We only have a ‘choice’ in voting between one corporate sponsored politician or another corporate sponsored politician. Flip a coin. It doesn’t matter if it comes up heads or tails if the bank owns the coin. So, vote for who you want, but corporations ‘donate’ to all politicians, which is in reality just legalized bribery, so no matter who wins office, the corporations always win. Any vote is a vote for the capitalist class and its capitalist system and this includes the social capitalists and state capitalists of the left.

In a sense it doesn’t even really matter, if voting rights are suppressed or if there is gerrymandering because voting and electoralism is counter-productive and anti-working class, as is representative democracy itself. It is the lie that we are a so-called ‘free society’ and can vote our problems away and that the politicians and their advisers and their corporate backers will save us and that we ourselves are incapable of doing so, or shouldn’t be allowed to do so. Representative ‘democracy’ is the deceptive, hypnotising illusion of a fake, non-existent ‘freedom’ that preserves the status quo, the class system etc and won’t stop disenfranchising us and holding us back. Putting us firmly in ‘our place’. Let’s stop being deceived that we live in a free society that is for our interests when we don’t.

Voting also does the capitalist class a huge favour by using electoralism as a diversion away from effective politics and action. Representative ‘democracy’ has failed.  We need to build autonomous alternatives from below and genuinely resist capitalism and the state with collective direct action and practice genuine solidarity with a view to creating our own decentralised structures of working class self-organisation and collective, shared power that also truly give us a voice and empower us as individuals, such as –  free federations of communes – popular assemblies and worker’s councils, that are truly fair and directly democratic for ourselves and our communities. And all of that is what voting and electoralism is a deliberate diversion away from and why it is harmful to our class and to society and the political situation in general. That is why they want you to vote. All political parties and politicians should be totally rejected and that, rather than our votes, support and consent, is what they deserve.

Article by Tom Hughes