Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 09:31:48 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: AUT: Re: voting ... A Reply to Noam Chomsky


>>> cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net 04/03/04 04:31AM >>>
In other
words, I support good conversation as against talking at people.

Chris, we had a very good example of this in someone who advocated NO CHOICE against voting, in other words that the power of the state should be legitimately used, as in Australia, to criminalise not voting. You, rather pusillanimously, declined to respond to that. Why? It was a reactionary position, and expressed in the most arrogant of terms, an arrogance that only increased when I questioned it in the hope that the writer had been joking. My own position is that I will not vote unless I have a particularly good reason for doing so (well ... who knows?). In South Africa we still have the democratic option of not going to the polls - anyone who wants to take that right away from me and suggest that I should be fined by the state or spend time in a SA jail (!) for those actions should be called to account in the most unequivocal of terms. Where do you stand on this?

On the question of 'revolutionary' as opposed to other kinds of abstention, I wonder if you would use the same logic as is sometimes evoked here in terms of such things as refusal of work. If the latter represents something that ordinary working people do as a form of class struggle then who are you to say that when they also decline to go to the polls to elect a capitalist politician that this is somehow a reactionary position (what "they do" as opposed to what  "we do" - your language - where do you get this information about "them" from regarding refusal to go to a polling booth?) Personally I think that the fact of 50% or more of a potential electorate not bothering to exercise the vote is an extremely significant political fact - it furthermore indicates to me a very healthy cynicism about the nature of politicians. Here in SA on 14th April we may or may not see the lowest poll in this country since 1994. There is obviously work to be done here in assessing the whole phenomenon - you haven't contributed to this at all. This language of what "they do" as opposed to what "we do" is simply retrogressive in this context.

Tahir



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