A-Infos (en) Canada, Anarchist journal Linchpin #6 - Elections: all we can hope for? By Scott Neigh

Election season. It's a sad time. ---- Elections are neither nothing nor 
everything. Within narrow bounds, we get to choose -- criminally narrow bounds 
that mean they cannot touch the things that mean life or death, more suffering 
or less suffering, for many, but can make small but real changes that mean life 
or death, more suffering or less suffering, for others. It would be politically 
foolish and morally dubious to ignore that. ---- In the U.S., the choice is 
between a neoliberal and a complete maniac -- not good and evil, but not quite 
tweedledum and tweedledee. It may not matter in exactly the way the hype machine 
claims that Obama is the first African American nominee for a major party – 
perhaps the first African American president, a single generation after the fall 
of Jim Crow – but it definitely matters.

In terms of policy impacts, a modest drop in people who lack health care; 
management of empire that might result in a small decrease in body count; small 
efforts to safeguard the ability some women in the U.S. currently have to get an 
abortion when they need one; small but non-trivial efforts to reduce some kinds 
of poverty for some people; a few of the intrusions by the national security 
state (but only a few) rolled back; maybe even small reductions in the barriers 
workers' face in organizing: I doubt all of these things will happen, but I 
suspect a few will if Obama is elected. Small in comparison to the scale of the 
problems? Sure. Real impacts on real lives despite that? Yup. And because of 
that, it matters. At the same time, empire will roll on undisturbed, the bodies 
of poor and working-class people of colour in the so-called third world will 
continue to be sacrificed on the alter of capitalism, rising poverty will 
increase suffering and early death in the global north as well, workers and 
communities will still have little control over our work and the economy, sexual 
violence will remain endemic, and white supremacy and patriarchy will continue 
to be fundamental organizing principles of our lives even if Obama wins. And 
that matters too. A lot.

As for Canada, the election will score a bit less on the drama-o-meter. Minority 
government status has kept Harper from excessive rampage, memories of the 
dubious charms of straight-up neoliberalism are still quite fresh so the coat of 
greenish paint slathered on by Dion cannot disguise what is on offer, and Layton 
-- well, I'm not someone who has ever harboured illusions about the NDP, but 
even within my modest expectations I am not impressed. Though that's probably 
how I'll vote. But the same logic applies. Just to take one example, the 
difference between having and not having national, socialized daycare makes a 
real difference to people's lives. But even trading Harper's band of buffoons 
for a Liberal minority supported by the NDP -- generally the most progressive 
combination you can find in Canadian electoral politics, even if it never lasts 
long -- will never in a million years root out the fundamental injustices of our 
society if that's the only source of change.

So I'm not saying don't vote. I'm not saying don't care about who wins. I'm not 
even saying don't intervene in the election somehow. What I am saying is that we 
all need to take a good, long, critical look at our words and our actions and 
figure out what external cues they respond to. We need to ask, "What organizes 
my political life?"

Does your political imagination, your sense of the necessary, the target of your 
desire for a better world, and the process by which you make decisions for 
acting politically on a daily basis begin from the totality of the problems that 
face us, the experiences of those hit hardest by them, and a desire to figure 
out how to address them in their entirety? Or do they begin from the framing of 
the problems in the mainstream media, the narrow window of change that is 
imaginable in electoral politics, and/or the changes that can be made through 
paid work at social services funded by state or para-state sources? The question 
is one of imagination, of what shapes the horizon of your vision, the reference 
points that guide your actions.

For instance, if you are considering poverty, you could have an important debate 
about how critical allies within social services and the agency sector can be 
part of political projects aimed at ending poverty -- by sharing information, 
gaining access to resources, finding ways to un-erase the voices of people 
living in poverty, and so on -- and whatever the limits of such alliance might 
be. But if your entire political imagination on the subject is organized around 
using and winning more funding for social services and the agency sector, your 
politics are not being organized by starting from the problems (and you are 
ignoring how intrusive, controlling, and oppressive many people living in 
poverty experience even the more sympathetic agencies to be), they are being 
organized by relations of ruling.

Because that's what they are at least partly about: ruling. The dominant media, 
electoral politics, and the agency sector -- the three things that are most 
likely to bound the imaginations of self-styled 'progressives' -- are integrated 
into relations which rule us in practical, material, demonstrable ways. 
Elections and social service agencies especially take our energy for change, our 
desire for a better world, and they channel them in particular ways. I know good 
people who do good, important work in those areas, but work within those 
contexts is all the more effective if it is done with a critical consciousness 
that is not purely defined by them. At best these are terrains for struggle. But 
so many people seem to think that the channels of activity that were granted by 
elites in response to past struggles, in part as hard-won concessions and in 
part as attempts to co-opt, are all we need or even all that are reasonably 
possible.

It is in lowering our expectations, closing off our sense of possibility, making 
us believe that "this is it," that so much of our potential to make the world 
better is stolen from us. Or, as I tend to see it in my more depressive moments, 
how so much of that potential is simply surrendered by so many of us.
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