Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 23:24:15 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: A Reply to Noam Chomsky
From: Thiago Oppermann <thiago_oppermann-AT-bigpond.com>


On 1/4/2004 8:33 PM, "steve again" <stopera-AT-operamail.com> wrote:

> Not as such, but certainly socialdemocratic politics says, "don't take illegal
> or hazardous action, wait till election time and get your representatives to
> sort it out for you." This ideology does not exist in a vacuum nor entirely
> seperate from all workers. Some people do go along with this, and will attempt
> to dissuade others from acting in their own interests.

The important point is that voting does not mean endorsement of
social-democratic politics. What social-democrats think is really not very
interesting.


> Yes, but people who argue for abstention also try to put it in some
> oppositional or radical context. So the isolated but mass disengagement that
> happens now is interpreted as something that is negative to the status quo.
> Abstensionism tries to ally this already existing disengagement with some
> other activity. Its not (always) just a championing of non-participation in
> elections, but also an attempt to relate to what some people are really doing,
> as well as to dispel illusions of others. That doesn't mean its not
> problematic, but I think you are caricaturing the arguments here.

It is first of all wrong to suppose that abstention is negative to the
status quo, it is in fact entirely functional within the status quo, both in
practical terms and in ideological terms - absentees tend to benefit the
Republican party, and abstinence is understood as consent.

I wonder if subsuming the  conspicuous fact of mass disengagement to another
political project - one of opposition and radicalism - would be any less
phoney than the conservative interpretation of absenteeism as consent. It
makes sense, of course, to make as big a fuss about not voting if you chose
to do that. The question is whether the great mass of people who do not vote
do so from anything resembling an oppositional or radical project. And here
I must say: we simply don't know. There is every likelihood that they do
not. But more important still is the matter that you have to assemble this
particular knowledge in order to link up your oppositional project and the
nonvoters. That constitutes a whole discourse - why people don't vote, the
reasons for their apathy, their sociological profile, criminology, questions
of education and enlightened self-interest, etc... That's the point I have
been rather rudely hammering. You cannot escape these questions, for you
cannot simply flatly deny that people are lazy or stupid or simply too busy
to get to a booth. So you are drawn into the orbit of this discourse that
structures the nonvoter, casts him as hero, villain or lamb - but this is
not, as far as we know, the nonvoters' discourse. It is an artificial
creation, it is a tacked-on reading of opposition and rebellion, which in
fact substitute for apathy and consent in an otherwise identical epistemic
situation. 

Thiago

  




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