We're Still Proles: Their Elections Are Never Our Victories

We're Still Proles: Their Elections Are Never Our Victories
by crudo
Modesto Anarcho Blog

Last night I watched with several other anarchist friends as Obama became the next President of the United States Government. As someone who battled drug addiction and worked as a community organizer, counter poised to someone like McCain and Palin who own several houses and planes, (while claiming to be ’just like us’), it's easy to get excited about things changing in this country. After all, just the idea that a half African-American President will be in office is enough to make many people think that the fundamental nature of the power structure in this country will change in a significant way. Some even believe that the very essence of their lives will change in the country. After all, that's what Obama sold us on. Yes we can, change, hope...

But our lives have changed in the past year, even with Obama already in office. Let us not forget he has already served in the halls of power, as the government launched wars into other countries, increased repression against US citizens, deported migrants, and as the prison population within this country continues to grow and grow. Even Obama's platform for election offers threats against Pakistan and Iran, calls for more corporate mercenary groups like Blackwater to go into Iraq, the buildup of a ground war in Afghanistan, new 'clearer coal' and nuclear energy (ha!), and continued attacks against immigrants. While many were excited by the fact that a person of color would possibly be heading the government, many failed to look past Obama's color themselves and see that he still represented the interests of the rich and not the working class.

Here in the Central Valley of California, things have only been getting worse for us. We lead the state in poverty. We lead the nation in foreclosure. We face problems with drugs, pollution, air quality, jobs, police brutality, racism, and more. We have been hit hard by the California budget crisis and the economic recession. The Governor of this state repeatedly launches attacks on unions and workers. We are the front line of the attack by the rich against the rest of us. At the same time, 'our democracy' locally has been hard at work - against us! In the past year or so, as regular readers of Modesto Anarcho know very well, local governments in the Central Valley have managed to criminalize dumpster diving, shoot down needle exchange programs, further criminalizing squatting, shut down medical pot co-ops, beef up surveillance technology and police weaponry with grants from Homeland Security, round up and deport immigrants, launch attacks against the homeless, and so on. Of course, none of these things have been done with our say or even our vote. The landscape of our lives is not our own. Our terrain is decided upon largely by outside forces made up of people of a higher class than us. They make the laws, the put them in place, they own the police, courts, and prisons, and they own everything else. We work for them, we go to war for them, and we are killed by them. But every four years we seem to forget all that, and instead believe that we are somehow participating in a system that allows us to really change this society, albeit in a small, symbolic way.

But, on the tips of many people's tongues will come the cry, "but if we don't vote, we have no voice!" This is a confusing statement, because voting in it's essence takes away your voice, and give it first to the electoral college and then to the candidate that it puts in power. You have no voice, only a free pass to the rich person of your choosing. Besides, even if you voted for the leftist, most liberal candidate, you’d still be a wage slave. You can’t vote against being forced to sell your time, energy, and labor in order to survive. Under capitalism, a system where the rich control every aspect of our lives and livelihoods, elections only change some of the bosses on the top, not the system that is bellow them. After Obama is sworn into office, people will still rot in prison. The bombs and bullets in Iraq and everywhere else will keep exploding. The planet will keep getting hotter. Immigrants and the poor will still be targeted. People will still be harassed and attacked by pigs. People will still lose their homes. Capitalism needs poverty, destruction, and war to continue - but it also needs presidents and people willing to give them power. Isn't it time we stopped being the passive voters that they want us to be? Let's stop validating their system and believing in it. From the bailout to the horrors of everyday life - we know that their democracy is nothing by slavery to capitalism.

The alternative to electoral politics has always been direct action. We must organize as a class of people against the ruling class. We must break the divisions within ourselves such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. Our true power lies in our ability to suppress and destroy class society, to gain space and territory for ourselves. We have felt this power on the streets of Modesto and elsewhere during the May Day marches and walkouts that involved tens of thousands and brought the city to a standstill. We have seen it in the ongoing occupation at DQ-University, where poor people of color have lead a struggle to take back the land. We have experienced it in the community struggles to shut down the Tallow Plant, the Covanta Incinerator, and also stop racist groups like Save Our State. We have watched it in the rent strikes in Ceres, homeless tent cities in Fresno, riots against the police in Stockton, and the Copwatch programs against police brutality in Modesto.

Now, more than ever, the system of capitalism wants us to feel good about the election. That "we the people" have elected one of our own, we have brought change to America. We can forget about the past 8 years and go back to our lives as passive workers, consumers, debtors, and renters now. Our eyes, ears, and thoughts will be filled with a thousand empty slogans about how a great victory has been reached and obtained for us as a people. But it is not our victory, it is a victory for the elites and the rich. If we believe that it is a victory for ourselves, then we are living in a fantasy land. We have to understand that the system is trying to manufacture a belief in ourselves that we have something in common now with the power structure. Hopefully, we will see that this is bullshit. The rich want nothing more than to hold hands with us and gallop into the sunset, despite the fact that a economic and ecological disaster lies just on the horizon. Our victories will always be when we drive the police out of our neighborhoods and set fire to the prisons. When we take over the means of production and share the resources as a community. When we take back what has been stolen from us, day after day. These are our victories, we need only start to make them real.