Marxist Critique of Electoral Democracy

In order for the left to win, it must apply Marx’s critique of liberalism, value, and alienation towards the conquest of power

The story in many electoral democracies rings a similar tone. In the United States, the last midterm election has a voter turnout of 49.6%, which was an impressive jump from the 36.7% experienced in the previous midterm election in 2014. In the United Kingdom, the turnout for the 2017 General Election was 68.7%, and in France, the last presidential election in France received a voter turnout of 48.7%. The question must be asked, why is it that voter turnout is so animically low in most democratic nations. While traditional left-critiques usually highlight voter suppression and the lack of candidates that represent the desires of the working class, these explanations lack the intellectual fire that came from Marx’s critique of liberalism as a whole.

Marx’s essay, On the Jewish Question, often criticized (and rightly so) as anti-semitic, contains one of Marx’s most passionate and systematic critiques of liberalism. In it, Marx elucidates how the core maxim of liberalism, that roughly reads as, “One is free to participate in any action to the extent that it does not infringe on the freedom of others,” is inherently isolating: “Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.”

Is it possible to connect this critique to the liberal ritual of voting, and in so doing relate not only voting to the maxim of liberal freedom, but how liberal freedom as an abstract institution is rooted within the material existence of property? At the heart of elections there lies a contradiction. On the one hand, society as a whole chooses its leaders, while on the other hand, the choice of candidate is a personal one. The personal nature of this ritual is exemplified in the fact that most voting is done in private stalls, a fixture that is usually only reserved for the public restroom. This contradiction lies at the heart of the maxim of liberalism. While on a macro scale, the election of a candidate usually develops into a situation in which one section of the population is privileged over the other, and therefore one segment of the population (usually the capitalists in modern democratic societies), gets to impinge of the effective liberty of another part of the population, on the micro scale, the individual vote is seen as the embodiment of the liberal maxim. One person exercising his right to vote has no impact on the right of any other person to vote (or his freedom more generally). In contrast to the changing of power in a revolution, the means by which power is expressed is bound up in the ability of one part of the population to deprive another part of the population of its right to act. This is usually carried out through the seizure of property, or through the arrest, exile, or execution of the opposing segment of the population.

What must also be addressed though is Marx’s connection between liberal freedoms (and therefore the right to vote) with the right to property, and the further implications of that in Marxian thought. The connection between the concept of the election, and the concept of the market is solidified in the analogies society uses to describe both processes. On the political side, discourse surrounding questions that are often of a political nature is called the, “marketplace of ideas”, while on the commercial side, shopping is often thought of as, “voting with your dollar”. If these metaphors are to be taken seriously, and if a Marxian perspective, usually reserved for economics, is applied to elections, then the rot in them both can be distilled.

In his discussion of commodities in Capital Volume I, Marx describes the commodity as having two constituent parts, a use value and an exchange value. In their simplest form, the use value of a commodity relates to the commodity’s ability to fulfill a human need or desire, while the exchange value relates to the commodities function as a thing that can be traded for other commodities. Simply put, the use value of a commodity is a qualitative assessment while the exchange value is a quantitative assessment: “While, therefore, with reference to use value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value [exchange value] it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple.”

Using the formulation, “You vote with your dollar”, it is possible to set up the following parallelisms: the consumer is the voter, the dollar is the vote, and the commodity is the candidate. And in fact, when the lenses of value and use value are applied, it holds true that the commodity and the candidate have similar composing parts. The use value of a candidate can be said to be the candidates qualifications and platform, his ability to serve the public, while the exchange value of a candidate can be regarded as the value assessed to the candidate via the marketplace of the election. This is expressed in the polling of the candidate, and finally, the vote total the candidate receives. In the logic of electoral politics, the vote and polling serve the same function as the exchange value does in the capitalist system, to allow things who have inherently uncomparable qualitative values to be comparable. Before the argument emerges that most things can have qualitative and quantitative assessments, and so that therefore looking at candidates using these two forms of assessment does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that elections are linked to the logic of capitalism, I point the reader to the election prediction service, Predictit. Instead of traditional polling, Predictit allows a market to determine the value of different candidates. Using the service, a user can literally make the assessment that, hypothetically, five Hillary Clintons are equal to one Donald Trump, as users are able to sell their stock in one candidate and buy stock in another candidate.

This parallelism between the candidate as a political commodity opens up an incredible web of implications, especially regarding the production of political candidates. In Marxian economics, it is homogeneous labor-time that gives commodities their exchange values: “All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are — Values.”

What is the labor that creates political candidates as vessels of exchange value, as objects that can be rendered down to a quantitative assessment that is put forward within the marketplace of the election? Who is the exploited subject that does not receive the full benefit of his work? In the case of the Marxian system, the consumer (voter), and the worker, are the same. It is not that the voter must toil in order to ascribe value to the political candidate of his choice, but simply seeing work as unneeded toil is a limited perspective on labor both in Marxian economics and even in mainstream economics. What work is the selling of one’s time in order to perform one activity. Fundamentally, wage-labor is a mechanism by which the scope of human activity is largely directed towards either the production of commodities, or the reproduction of the worker itself. This limiting of the scope of human action is so extreme, that actions that once were considered as apart from the system of capital creation, when put within the life of a worker, are converted almost automatically into activities that reproduce the worker. While a non-worker may read for his benefit as an individual human being, a worker (especially a worker in a white collar profession) reads, as that reading becomes a mechanism by which his mind is enriched in order that he may be a more productive worker, regardless of whether that was his actual intention.

Voting too, as a form of political work, is an action that by its very completion limits the possible scope of actions one can take, without having the burden of a good amount of cognitive dissonance. When one votes, and votes believing that his vote counts as not just a ritualistic action, but as a political action, one is essentially saying that 1) The election of the opposition is legitimate and therefore must be accepted, 2) The political system as a whole works and is good, and 3) The results of this election are important, but can be undone in the next election. If a street protest happens, a true voter would not participate. Why participate when the way of making political change that is accepted and most effective is by voting? The street protest is merely aesthetic, the election is substantive. If a general strike occurs, or if there is a mass expropriation of property, the true voter must retort that this is an unacceptable way of making political change, and that if the populace wants political change to happen, it should just wait for the next election. The election will tell the truth as to what society really wants.

Now of course, this “true voter” does not describe all voters, especially on the left. Most on the left view protests, strikes, occupations, boycotts, along with voting as ways of instilling political change. But for 76% of the voting population (according to the Washington Post), voting is their only means of political engagement. One cannot entirely blame this one apathy, because if these voters were completely apathetic, they would not vote at all. The lack of direct action coming from this sector of the population must be from the fact that the logic of voting creates it as a action that limits the use of other actions to instill political change.

I would like for a moment to address the voters who votes in addition to participating in other political activities. As 24% of the voting population, their presence does not destroy the argument. Going back to the analogy of the worker, the generally engaged voter is like the worker who, squeezed between his work and necessary recuperation time, is able to participate in some activity to advance himself as a human being. The factor-worker who comes home and reads Marx does not do so in order to advance himself as a worker. Similarly, the worker who exercises also does that in part for his own personal development, even when it may contribute to his productivity as a worker.

Carrying the worker/voter analogy to its ultimate conclusion, there is a synthesis between Marx’s sentiments in The Jewish Question, and Marx’s views on labor in the fact that elections, and the freedom to vote, posit man as an isolated individual. In Marx’s early writing Estranged Labor, Marx sees capitalism as alienating the the worker not only from the product of his labor, but also from his fellow workers: “Thus through estranged labor man not only creates his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to powers that are alien and hostile to him; he also creates the relationship in which other men stand to his production and to his product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men.”

In the fact that voting is an individual action, it takes the process of political change, which is supposed to be a collective processes, and makes the experience one of loneliness and isolation. Additionally, in the fact that the vote is a division of collective political power, the individual voter with his one vote is alienated from the political system as a whole, as he views his impact as so small, that in actuality, it has no impact. Lastly, the voter is alienated from the candidate he votes for. The candidate does not stand as the product of the voter, as someone who will always be accountable and connected to the voter. Rather, he is seen as an actor who is given power to do whatever he wants until the next election.

The left should not take this critique as a manifesto against electoral politics as a whole. Rather, the left should see the weakness of electoral politics to produce political change as something to exploit. In one of France 24 English’s youtube videos about the Yellow Vest movement, a temporary worker, Clement, is recorded as saying, “I came here for human contact. So many social links have been lost since small local bars, bakers, and shops shut down. They have all been replaced by big chains. Here [the yellow vest encampment] you can come and end up being friends with someone you met two hours ago.” Where capital and elections derive people of human contact with each other, the left should provide this, not only in the political dimensions of people’s lives, but in all dimensions. Far too often the left views people solely as political beings, but Marx knew well that the ultimate goal of the left should not be the creation of the “political being”, but the “specie being”, the human who in his life is best able to act as essentially human as he can.