Re: Once more on you know what...

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Once more on you know what...,
el 17 Dec 00, a las 2:49, Jose G. Perez dijo:

[Much interesting stuff snipped]

>
>     Philosophically, however, I disagree with you that citizens have an
> "obligation" to society to vote,

[sentence we agree on also snipped]

_Citizens_ have no obligation to society whatsoever. I don't care about
citizens at all. "Citoyen" is a bourgeois word, it is drenched with bourgeois
ideology and concreteness, that is, in the end, with admirable Meg Thatcher's
"there is no such a thing as a society".

I am not speaking of citizens, I simply find it very hard to think in those
terms. Now that you have put the word in black on white and I think over it, I
find the very word quite strange to my own dictionary. So that if you
understood that this was the line of my ideas, perhaps, I did not explain
myself well.

Let us put it this way: every person has an obligation to further her or his
class interests along the roads that she or he considers reasonable. That is,
we all have an unescapable right to class struggle (such a right is, in the
end, a _duty_!), and the concreteness of historic life makes class struggle run
along an assorted variety of avenues. From  _thermonuclear_ class war (as
chillingly stated once on Leninist International by that crude beast, Mark
Jones!) to the diplomatic conversations with clenched teeth in union
negotiations at business meeting rooms, there is a great range of situations
where this war takes actual shape and content.

In this sense, and ONLY in this sense, I will say nothing new if I explain that
we Marxists should not disparage electoral scenarios, and work to turn the
rules that control them (yes, our enemy's rule) as favorable to us as possible.
I believe that this is what has suggested that a common ground between your
ideas and mine could be found in a set of intelligent democratizing measures to
fight for (in the confidence that our enemy will not surrender any of those
positions easily, or even at all, thus allowing us to gain strength among those
who we are part of).

But I feel there is something more to be discussed.

Let us think of a group of Marxist unionists who are negotiating an agreement
with capital after a victorious strike. Please keep this in mind that even
during the fiercest strikes (1), the will of the workers is _to force the
bourgeois to arrive at some arrangement_, not to kill capitalism at that very
moment.

These unionists will, _at best_ carry on a negotiation under the rules of the
bourgeois state, that is the state of the class enemy. They will not do a
revolution by so acting, nor do they intend to do it. And if they did intend to
do it, then they would be putting the workers in a serious danger, among others
because the workers who back them do not want a revolution done by those means.

Workers, however, want a fair deal, some advantages, and in the end a reduction
in the rate of exploitation. One of the possible outcomes of the negotiation is
that none of these targets can be obtained. What to do, then? Well, precisely
that: begin with the _What to do_, not as a particular reading by some
organizer but as a deeply felt need of the mass of workers.

>  I can well imagine
> circumstances, and I'm sure you can too, where a revolutionary working class
> will boycott a bourgeois electoral farce; but of course, no silly law 
> imposing a
> $100 fine for NOT voting is going to stop us when the time comes.

Not  only I can imagine them. There has been historical record of such a case
in Argentina, not once but many times. Not a "revolutionary working class" but
two national democratic movements resorted to this tactics, and once during the
presidential elections which carried Arturo Illia to the Casa Rosada in 1963.
However, the possibility that the boycott could serve the political necessities
of the moment was made real because of our "mandatory" (I would stress that in
the way you pose the thing "mandatory" equates with "compulsory", which is far
from my ideas) system. Voters who could not vote for their candidates (that is,
for Peronism) massively voted blank. Blank ballots were the winners of that
election, and the Illia government began with a badge of illegitimacy (less
than 30% of the vote cast).

The 1994 Constitution, drafted by politicians as illegitimate as Illia, has
included a proviso that the proportional representation will be measured only
on the valid votes cast, that is discounting the blank votes. This is a
demonstration that under a mandatory voting system the ruling classes have to
EXPLICITLY elliminate rights (the right to "vote against all of you
motherfuckers") in order to rule. This should be a weapon in the hands of a
revolutionary who wants to show that most of the institutional arrangement of
what is known as "American democracy" has nothing of democratic. This is
basically what I meant when I timidly suggested that perhaps mandatory voting
would be an option for an electoral platform of the Left in the USA. All the
considerations you made at the beginning of your post are certainly on the line
that I expose here. But let us go back to philosophy.

>
>     Philosophically, I think the RIGHT to vote includes the right NOT to
> vote... I can always cast a blank or
> spoiled ballot, even if not voting is punishable by death.

This is exactly what I mean. Cast a blank vote, that is, actively, not
passively, show that you are against "all of 'em bastards". This is all I
meant. By the way, I believe that perhaps Lou Paulsen and others have pointed
out to a difficulty here, in that probably the energies you should have to put
to this task are out of any measure and better put elsewhere.


NOTES

(1) Yes, there is a major exception, that is a revolutionary strike. But I
guess we shall agree that this is not what we are talking about, are we?

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx