Voting in Capitalism
As we ramp up for yet another American voting cycle, in which ubiquitous and identical political ads argue for the “choice” between candidates from only two parties, and this particular cycle unfolds against the backdrop of sweeping and righteously-angry protest against racial inequality in America, we are already hearing the constant refrain that “the best thing you can do is vote.”
But this is clearly not true. Voting within an unfair system, which already works to disenfranchise minority groups, the lesser-educated (read: less-affluent), and the disillusioned does not ensure democracy or even promote it. Instead it works to reinforce power structures which are in place to protect capital at all costs.
Take American policing, which exists at complete odds with its stated mission of protecting and serving the people (who pay for the salaries of police). Following the logic of voting as the answer to issues, voting for politicians who claim to believe in racial justice and an end to inequality should then lead to policing strategies being modified to promote those goals. This has not happened, as the police have remained simply an arm of the same organism that modern American two-party politics is also part of. That organism is a destructive beast, a fire-breathing dragon with one goal: to maximize profit and get it into the hands of as few people as possible. Voting in this case is not the answer.
So what is? We have just seen it in the streets. The only way that policing policies have been modified is through the unrelenting pressure of direct, mass action, as demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter movement. This is the same kind of movement seen in the 20th Century, the Civil Rights Movement, where voting had no impact but mass protest did. The only way that capitalist systems respond is by the threatening of capital, and that is what mass protest does better than anything as long as capitalism remains in place. The withholding of spending, the public shaming of capitalist structures such as the police, and the promise of continued market turmoil are proven means by which capitalists and their representatives (Congress, the Senate, et al) will allow for justice to be inched toward. This does not change the underlying issues with the structure of common society, but it does ameliorate some immediate suffering.
The police in America are a brutal enforcer of capitalist needs. Policing in a truly democratic society that cares for each and every citizen (we acknowledge that America is not this type of society and never has been) is not a militant, armed force. It is a community-based conflict resolver, comprised of trusted individuals who are known to the people they help, who do not carry force-multiplying weapons and the legally-sanctified right to use them. They are simply one piece of a large whole, a whole in which there is a minimum living standard ensured to every person so that concerns like education and health care are not commodified and therefore rendered scarce — a guiding principle of economics, that we see applied to things which should be basic to modern human life — and therefore crime is already an anomaly. In a caring society, the police would only need to broker peace over issues of mental health and personal well-being. Crime, the way Americans know it, is a function of poverty and inequality. Countries with greater equality have less crime — this is a known fact. Look to the police forces of Japan or Western European countries as examples of peace-brokering forces that spend far less time on the effects of crime and much more time on its causes. Police in America exist, in effect, to police the conducting of crime of which we already know the cause, and yet that cause is never dealt with.
Hence, voting in this system ensures that you are voting for people who have an interest in maintaining this policing culture. The only people to vote for would be those who espouse a genuine desire and plan to dismantle the very structure by which police exist. This line of thinking is similar when it comes to prison abolition. Voting for people who want to “reform” prison will do absolutely nothing to change the cause and effects of imprisonment. Only by removing prison as an option — the same as removing violent, potentially fatal policing as an option; the same as removing violent weaponry as an option, in the form of banning all guns — can we discuss a peaceful and free society. Open, democratic society does not mean the promotion of all options; rather, it promotes only those options that work toward humanizing, egalitarian ends. Until we as a society can recognize that reprimanding, caging, or killing other human beings who wish us no harm is never an option in line with those ends, we will not, in our individual minds, be free. Voting for anyone who maintains any of those options in any form is not an effective way of changing the world, and on this score it is clear in American politics that both the Democratic and Republican parties still embrace these options.
