Jerome Roos has a piece that won’t get any mainstream-y attention, and will upset Duopoly Forever! adherents (assuming they notice, which is unlikely), at Roar Magazine :
Beyond the vote: the crisis of representative democracy
Voting is meaningless when representatives are powerless in the face of greater forces. For democracy to work, we first of all need to wake up to reality.
There is something profoundly wrong with our political system. Humanity is arguably facing its greatest challenge to date — a simultaneous financial, economic, social, political, environmental and spiritual crisis — and yet nothing ever seems to change. Somehow, it’s like we’re stuck in Groundhog Day, in an endless repetition of the same old rituals, over and over again. Like some neurotic gambling addict, we just keep shuffling around the same deck of cards. …
Hope abounds when the US elects its most progressive President in decades — but even he ends up bailing out Wall Street at the expense of millions of families who lose their homes. Heck, he even keeps a personal kill list and forsakes his #1 election promise to close Guantanamo! …
Similarly, a sigh of relief resounds across Europe when France elects its first Socialist President in two decades. … ‘Lo and behold: only a few months later Hollande is suddenly Merkel’s closest ally … . In the end, everybody bows before the power of the market. …
Representative democracy has long since ceased to be about competing visions for the future of society. With the owners out of reach, we are relegated to electing managers. …
Despite this near-total discrediting of the political establishment, most people continue to fetishize the free vote as such. Those who prefer not to vote and instead look for other ways to contribute to social change are immediately branded as apathetic chavs or useless anarchists whose abstention only benefits the ruling party. …
The range of options considered for debate in representative democracy remains limited to policy — and a very narrow range of policies at that. No one even dares to discuss the flawed structure of capitalist democracy. …
Roos writes about the recent election in the Netherlands, where he lives, and his decision not to vote.
I decided not to give away my voice to some powerless career politician. Instead, I decided to keep my voice to myself and keep screaming from the top of my lungs. Not because I’m an anarchist, but simply because I consider my voice much too valuable to be given away to another person.
The bottomline is that representative democracy institutionally stifles political participation. As Howard Zinn put it, ‘Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.’ The liberation of new public spaces operating outside of the sphere of privately-owned capital; the co-creation of inclusive forms of collective decision-making; the development of new political subjectivities — these are our true democratic responsibilities as concerned citizens today.
My thoughts (please add yours in the Comments).
Thinking about the power of the Two Party Front For the Oligarchy’s serious pronouncement (to Right and Left): “You have nowhere else to go,” and about what is heard when that very serious pronouncement is challenged, this seems to be the argument:
Until somebody else does something about it, there’s nowhere else to go. And anyone who thinks they can do something about it is idealistic and doesn’t understand the way things are, which is the way they’ll stay, unless somebody else does something about it. And to think anyone could actually do anything about it only means they don’t understand the way things are.
(Vote For Nobody graphic via Roar Magazine)
One of the things that gets overlooked in this country are safe seats. Safe seats has for the most part eliminated democracy in large swaths of the country. Several states, including California, have changed the process by taking the control away from politicians and giving it to a committee. But I can forsee a time when even these committee’s will be corrupted if they are not watched continously. As you know of course, with two senators per state and the electoral college, this was never a democracy anyway. Computerized redistricting has also perverted the whole process, something Mr.Obama took great advantage of in his second run for the Senate.
I think the Declaration of Independence gives us the right to change government when it becomes so oppressive that it denies the citizens the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Maybe it’s time to say enough is enough.
I don’t think of my vote as being a way of “giving away my voice”. I consider it another means of expressing what I want. That’s how a democracy should work – when I vote for someone, it isn’t an endorsement of anything he does. It’s a choice between alternatives, and an expression of which way I want the jurisdiction in question to go. I voted for Barack Obama in the last election. I still get to criticize him, and I get to do it just as much as if I hadn’t made that mistake.
I’m afraid I don’t understand that sort of reasoning. Refusing to vote is like deliberately bringing a knife to a gunfight. If politicians don’t care about how you vote, they won’t care about what you have to say, either. The vote is the one thing they should care about, because enough of them going a different way means they’re not in power, which is what they need to do their jobs.