Nothing is chosen in elections

Traducción hecha por los compañeros de League of Internationalist Communists

The Great Festival of Democracy

It has recently occurred to some cretin to call elections “the great festival of democracy”, being true in the sense that elections are the main argument of a great lie that capital celebrates every few years.

Nothing is chosen in the “elections”, beyond ratifying the political management of a catastrophic mode of production (capitalism) that drags us towards destruction.

No choice is made about rising prices, no choice about energy policy, no choice about the cost of housing. None of the questions which matter for our survival from one side to the other are outside the course of the political economy, that automatic mechanism whose component parts are exploitation, war, misery, which is consecrated to the accumulation of capital and the profit needs of a minority against the impoverishment of the immense majority.

Elections serve only to cover up this reality.

Not only do we elect nothing really consistent, but nothing is electable in the kingdom of the commodity. If we were really asked to “vote” on whether or not to raise food prices, the majority decision (logically to lower them) would have no practical application, the economic dynamics of capital would be imposed by its own dictatorial logic to any well-intentioned “voluntarism”.

The “democratic choice” actually occurs in two ways:

• Selecting a caterwaul (read, government of the day) of opportunists, cynics and scoundrels, who, placing themselves in supposedly antagonistic positions (left and right), will manage the criminal course of the capitalist economy, in an analogous way one and the other.
• To shore up, with an empty gesture, a system that cannot be “reformed”, which every “reform” makes stronger and which we can only battle through the world revolution, its organization and its historical program.

From Punishment to the Lesser Evil

Abstention is often the queen of the affair, beating the most voted party. We do not deceive ourselves. That is, we know that abstaining does not mean an increase of critical conscience towards the present state of things, although it does mean something else: the majority knows that by voting nothing changes, everything remains in its decay and continues its course. It is the evidence of a logical observation: the weariness of a circus without novelty or enjoyment.

But the system needs legitimacy, it needs to make itself believe and make us believe that we participate in it, that we believe in it. It needs us to say over and over again that, despite his obvious nakedness, “the king is dressed”, even if he is badly dressed, even if he looks tacky.

And he needs us to vote (even if only a few of us), he needs his statistics and that religious, solitary, act without real debate, without real conscience, which is to throw a piece of paper in a kind of fishbowl that we know is full of sharks. The way of “choosing” that capital imposes on us graphically represents its cruelest essence: atomized, neurotic, absurd—choosing among a handful of political commodities that are substantially the same and will undoubtedly serve the same masters.

Today, only two motivations lead us to vote:

• To punish the outgoing government, for doing as bad (maybe even worse) as planned and to contribute to make our survival more suffocating and mean.
• To choose between the bad and the worse, as if such blackmail could be called “choice”.

This second option is the main trump card that will be played again in the next elections to try to increase the number of voters. That is to say, to tell us that a party of certainly corrupt leftists and their corrupt partners of the ultra-right pose a greater threat than a leftist party that has implemented the most vicious policies of capital, passing it off (as if we were idiots) as a policy of progress and defense of the interests of the workers.

For this they will resort to the usual recourse: to implore us to form a great “anti-fascist” front.

It could be reproached, however, that the presence of the self-styled progressive forces offers a good part of the population an essential oxygen balloon to cope with the already hard life within the capital. But then we would be falling into their ideological mystification, believing that we have the power to decide our destiny within the narrow framework offered by the system. We would be granting to this whole bunch of politicians capacities that are not their own. Their speeches and promises, their campaigns and lies—these all offer nothing more than an overview of the trends already evident in the street. And in the same way that the most conservative groups do not have the capacity to provoke social regressions, but rather ratify the already existing racist, patriarchal, LGBTQphobic, etc., prejudices, the parties of the left of capital cannot reverse the devastating consequences of an ever more acute crisis of capital.

Behind all these social measures, both the apparently progressive and the more openly reactionary, nothing else is revealed but the impotence of a party system that is bound to operate within an increasingly narrower framework of action, and as good merchants they have no other option than to adorn themselves with a striking marketing that differentiates them from the rest of the competition.

But it is clear to us: for the proletariat, the only field of action is the class struggle.

Frontism as a Defense of Capitalism

Nothing is new under the sun. When the left of capital sees its capacity to recover the rejection of the really existing world exhausted and has made it amply clear that it is not here to change anything, but so that everything remains the same, then it must deploy the bogeyman of fascism and retrieve the myths of the Spanish civil war, the popular fronts and the anti-fascist struggle from the keepsake box of memories.

Although those myths were never such a thing and the smell of Stalinist mothballs is a bit of an ass-kicker, there is something that always works: fear mongering.

“When the bad guys win, you’re going to find out.” It is that threat that exalts fear and puts us in an uncertain and gloomy future where we will lose all our “rights” and will be subjugated by a furred beast. In that future we will not be able to maintain our house, the police will come to kick us out and if you protest, the full weight of an unjust and repressive law will fall upon you; the youth will not be able to leave home, because even if they have a job, housing prices will be higher than the moon; we will not make it to the end of the month, despite working like beasts at one, two or three shitty jobs; and that is in the hypothetical case of having a job, because the normal thing will be for you to spend more or less long periods of time unemployed; forget about leisure, that space between one day and another of exploitation; and do not try to cross the border, it will be guarded by armed police on both sides and you will be crushed against its fence, your death greeted by a “Nazi-fascist” minister of the interior; and endless more horrors that this black and gruesome future holds for us… and all this would a be terrible, if it were not for the fact that all this has been and is already the course towards which the most progressive government in Spain in a long time is quickly tiptoeing. As a logical consequence of capitalist politics, the future (whatever bastard governs) will follow that trend and no other. The worst is guaranteed by this system and its historical course, no matter who governs.

That they offer us to unite and fight all together and in revolt against a right that is nothing more than the other side of the coin of the left of capital, is perverse. That they offer us to become a complete “citizen” in defense of their democracy and paper rights that are the other side of the coin of exploitation and boredom is a shameful audacity. That they finally want to blame us if that right wing wins, which is its own reflection without any distortion, is a bad joke.

Some and others will continue to ask us to put an end to the stick with which capital hits us and replace it with another stick that continues to hit us. They will not stop shouting that the next criminals who manage their racket will cut off both of our hands, keeping silent that they have already cut off one of them (because they are the lesser evil) and waiting for the legislature to proceed to cut off the other.

There is no real choice between left and right. They are the different colors of the same capitalist management, increasingly catastrophic and perverse. There is no lesser evil. There is no real improvement of our conditions in this system. Our only option is to confront it, directly, in its entirety, from outside and against the State.

July 2023

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