None of the Above: The Anarchist Case Against Electoralism

by Wayne Price
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Most important of all is the idea of the general strike, where all the unions go out, in a city, region, or nationwide. A successful major strike or, even better, a general strike, would cause the workers to feel their power in a way in which no election could. It would lead to a breakthrough in consciousness for many workers.

Oppressed communities need to be democratically self-organized and to be able to use militant mass actions against repression, in coalition with each other and the labor movement. This applies to all oppressed groups with their own needs and issues, but who overlap with all others. They too need as much self-organization as possible and militant mass action, in coalition with all the overlapping groupings, especially labor.

Anarchists do not say, wait until the revolution. We advocate militant mass action right now to win even partial gains. We support the struggle for reforms, but do not think that this system can consistently and permanently provide a decent life for everyone. A revolution is needed (the complete transformation of capitalism into libertarian socialism).

Within anarchism, there have been exceptions to this view. The first self-labeled anarchist, Proudhon, was elected to the French parliament. Murray Bookchin, a well-known anarchist of today, advocates running in local elections and taking over city and town councils, as part of his Libertarian Municipalism strategy. The arguments against electoralism apply to this strategy too.
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In any case, most of the revolutionary wing of anarchism has historically opposed using elections (locally or nationally). From the beginning, the anarchist movement has rejected the possibility of an electoral road to socialism (meaning, not state socialism but libertarian socialism or anarcho-communism). They have opposed both revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, which aims to overthrow the existing state and replace it with a new state (the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, really a dictatorship of a bureaucratic party), and the social democracy (reformism), which advocates electing their bureaucratic party to run the existing state. Both programs require the people to chose a few leaders who will supposedly represent them in the national capital. These leaders will be political FOR the workers. The workers can go back to their jobs, doing what they are told by their bosses.

Instead, we as anarchists say that working people should organize themselves, should create institutions of direct, face-to-face democracy, such as factory councils or community committees, and federate these together. Stop relying on others and take your fate into your own hands!