omg, at the UTS student elections, an ANARCHIST was like supporting them or whatever. helping people with ballots and shit. /sorta relevant. and when i said, aren’t you an anarchist? he said, yeah that’s kind why i’m doing it b/c i have no interest!!
man, I help out with student union elections almost every year!! surely you know this about me. every damn year I wish I hadn’t let myself get sucked in but I just feel so terrible anytime I see all the young lefties’ little desperate faces
but yeah I am an anarchist and I not only vote, I’ve handed out how-to-vote cards at almost every state or national election since I was fourteen or so. it’s local government election time in Victoria right now and I’ve spent like three or four full days doorknocking and shit for a Trotskyist group, for Christ’s sake — I have my reasons
I’m anti-state and anti-electoral politics, I try not to get sucked into spending too much time on it or letting its existence foreshorten my perspective on what’s important, and I probably wouldn’t touch elections with a barge-pole if it wasn’t completely safe for me — but I have to acknowledge that the state exists, electoral politics exists, and they affect our lives
I’m against capitalism, but I still buy shit and, where possible, make decisions where I direct my money
I’m against violence but our lives are saturated with it, you know
I’m against a vision of social change that relies on access to state power or money, but I’m also against boycotts that are motivated by abstract ideas of purity and disengagement rather than specific strategic goals, because there is no position you can occupy that is outside society
but doing anything to do with electoral politics is really tedious and corrosive to the soul and this is why I’m so resentful of state socialists who don’t do it!! I feel like I have way less in common with university social theory New Communist bros who are into Marxism in an abstract way than with far more doctrinaire folk who are involved with their local Party. I hold my nose and put in an afternoon or two every couple of years for the less horrifying outcome, and if you’re actually a state socialist and you’re not doing that then I suspect you’re either super lazy or just some contrary dickhead who’s really into 20th century kitsch
I’m really mad about New Communism you guys
