Why I’m voting anarchist this Australian election
Speaking with Australia’s only Anarchist on the ballot
Our faith in our duly elected representatives is wearing thin, at best. People are apathetic about their one democratic duty of voting, and for good reason. According to the Lowy Institute just 60 per cent of Australian voters prefer democracy over other forms of government. And only 53 per cent would prefer a good democracy to a strong economy. This either means Australians are willing to accept a one-party communist state — or they hold the current system in low regard.
So aside from watching inane Friendyjordies videos on how good the Labor party is, why should we get excited about the upcoming Australian election? We are stuck between choosing the “least bad option” or a party to help ourselves feel smug amongst our peers. The political scene is a chicken rotisserie of political disappointments with some salmonella poisoning always on offer.
This is how your voting goes.
1. You choose the member who is not from the major parties and you vote, tell your friends and feel smug about it. But deep down you know that they won’t do shit to change anything
2. You hold your nose and vote for the party most likely to actually make some positive change, and they might, but they will probably fuck things up a little bit more also.
3. You vote for that guy who you think is nice and will make sure things keep going along as they are because you are not really sure why things keep going as they are, but damn, they work for you.
But how do we get ourselves out of this mess? It’s certainly not by just voting. Unfortunately it’s much harder than that. Voting for someone is putting us in the unenviable choice of choosing our next enemy. This is not to say that all the candidates are the same, but if you squint hard enough their political class entitlement looks pretty similar. The question is if we want the next years to be disastrous or just a long feeling of depression. Line up, choose your poison.
But, and there always is a but in throwaway thinkpieces, I have some options for you. As a roundabout philosophical anarchist I have found someone for you to vote for. Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Someone who doesn’t believe in the state choosing to legitimize it through participating in its sausage sizzle and cardboard box day of smoke and mirrors?
Yet the fact remains that voting is an easy tool at our disposal. And I have another reason, because I can vote for a man who is currently facing his 8th appearance in court on a charge of not voting in the previous election.
Dr Joe Toscano, a self prescribed anarchist, is standing in Dunkley with the not so radical platform of taxing the rich to pay for services. The man who looks like a cross between Santa Claus and Karl Marx tells me that “undermining the power of our real rulers, the corporate parliamentary puppet masters, is fundamental for radical change in Australia, in the 21st century.” And although put in a way that someone who has read much too much Emma Goldman, it sounds pretty reasonable, especially in the post Bernie Sanders epoch of “wow, there are some good guys in politics afterall”
Voting can make some difference, especially outside of the West. And although it will never lead to my utopia, holding out for a state free society is as stupid as believing that your vote is the most important democratic task.
As the good doctor Toscano said, “Abstaining from participation in parliamentary elections without doing anything meaningful in between elections, is a total waste of time.” He points to the favourite example of anarchists world wide: “The popular Front in Spain would not have been elected in 1936 without tens of thousands of anarchists ignoring their “leaders” and voting No Popular Front, no coup, no Spanish revolution.”
Anarchists have always voted, they voted for their leaders at the Front during the Spanish Civil War. Not voting in parliamentary elections is a strategy, not an article of anarchist “faith”.
As original nature boy Henry David 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.”
Toscano cites his chances of winning as worse than winning the lottery, but hopes to spark something other than the outright disgust which major party politicians are so expert in creating. He wants to mobilize people in the “pathetic amount of extra parliamentary activity in Australian politics.”
You see, dear reader, politics is much more than what goes on in the halls of parliament. In fact, most of it happens well outside of it. Dr Joe, who has also headed up Friends of the ABC alongside running his own medical practice said: “Ideas without accompanying action are just ideas. The central issue facing radical activists is why, despite widespread disillusionment with the parliamentary system, do people continue to vote? They continue to vote because there are no viable alternatives to parliamentary democracy in Australia today.”
And something needs to give. Why, I ask Dr. Toscano. Simple he says! Due to “the domination of all aspects of our existence by non-accountable corporations whose major responsibility is to create ever increasing profits for their major shareholders, irrespective of the human, social, cultural, environmental and national costs.”
But in the end, Joe doesn’t care so much about your vote. He has much bigger plans for you. “Whether you vote or not isn’t the issue, the issue is what are you doing in between elections? Are you reliving the failures of the past or are you involved in the struggle to create that new world in your heart?”
So if you want, eat your sausage at the sizzle, get your buzz out of dropping your piece of paper in the cardboard box but remove that smug look from your face when you vote the “right party” every three years because real politics exists outside the ballot box, and with people like Joe. So, like Joe, unless your make your commitment to other efforts in tandem with your voting, your vote is just for another master.
So take part in pressure groups, lobby, write, yell at someone, form a community group, whatever! Remember that democracy, as the scholar and activist Howard Zinn writes, “is not the counting up of votes, but the counting up of actions” It is the death of a thousand cuts.
