Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 14:17:11 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: voting ... A Reply to Noam Chomsky


I only want to respond to one point in this extremely pretentious post, not as a way of addressing the individual concerned, but as a follow-up to my previous reply to Chris (whose opinions I still value):

>>> thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com 04/03/04 04:42PM >>>
"2.1 It is untenable to argue that ignoring the charade does not determine
the non-voter as lazy, stupid, irresponsible or for that matter wizened, and
at the same time argue that the voter has been suckered into being a pawn in the replication of phoney or worse, real, social democracy."

Every one of these points can also be made against the refusal of work. 

As someone who may well be lazy, stupid, irresponsible and wizened (I am after all middle aged), I nevertheless find myself in the unusual position of being with the majority in the US and perhaps one day in S. Africa too - I hope so. I think, contra Chris, that that majority have remarkably similar motives to myself. Take laziness: I think that come April 14th, which being election day is a public holiday here, I will wake up thinking that all the politicians that I know of are a bunch of scumbags, liars and self-serving hypocrites, and that it is a lovely winter's day to turn over and go back to sleep rather than to get up and go stand in a tedious queue somewhere. Hence, yes, I will be acting out of laziness. I might differ from the majority though - after all I can't tell exactly what I will think in advance - in thinking that even if the politicians concerned are not personally as reprehensible as that, there is little in their personal power that they can do to change the course of capital, which they MUST serve as a condition of their profession. This will nevertheless still be a rationalisation of my personal laziness.

Now see how I explain my actions in terms of my own laziness, and impute the same motives to all those others who will be doing the same as me. Yet I am told that there is nothing that can be usefully said about the matter of agency here, so perhaps I am wrong in all this. Yet again, I note that there are many people on this list who regard absenteeism from work (that's right turning over and going back to sleep) as a form of class struggle. They would be horrified to hear someone accusing the worker of being lazy or irresponsible - in fact they would recoil from the accuser as being someone who is obviously an ideologue of the ruling class. 

It seems that we must choose between regarding all the workers as either lazy (the absentees) or suckers (the voters) in one matter, yet we must unfailingly regard them as heroes of the class struggle in the second matter. Yet I see the question of agency as being potentially similar in the two cases. But someone tells me that we can say nothing useful about agency in the one matter, yet we can specify exactly the nature of the agency in the other case. I know I am stupid and intellectually lazy (at least I can take comfort in sharing this with a great many other workers), but still I'm not such a halfwit as to believe any of this simplistic garbage.

In Australia, I am told, not to vote is a criminal act - I am also told that this is a good thing, precisely because not voting is a way oif benefitting the right. But then I notice that Australia has had some of the most rightwing governments anywhere, people who support imperialism unflinchingly, who have practised genocide against their own people, who have condoned the stealing of people's children from them and many other similar acts. Wow! Imagine what the governments of Australia would have been like if everyone had not been compelled to vote. They would have been seriously rightwing then, wouldn't they?

But as I say, I am just stupid, lazy and irresponsible, also very wizened, so I've probably got the whole thing wrong. Nevertheless form that limited viewpoint I still insist on posing the question of agency in absenteeism from both the polls and from the workplace. Unlike our dogmatists I think these are equally interesting questions and that they are related. So there.

Tahir





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