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The Greens candidates are just as bad as the conservatives, when you get down to it. They all want power, and they're all willing to make deals to get there.
Yes, the well-known Green-corporate axis and their damned shady totalitarian dealmaking; the Green agenda, with its consierable potential for rapid social change, is just another way of protecting the entrenched interests of commerce and inherited wealth from the equitable distribution of limited resources. Thank God you reminded me about those naked powerseekers in their snappy Hitlerite corduroys, I was nearly taken in...
What on earth are you talking about?
I don't think representative democracy works, and I don't feel that I'll ever be represented under that system.
Of course it doesn't work. It's shit. It's just slightly better than other models. I'm a big fan of direct democracy, myself, but then I think about whether that would mean Rule By Daily Express and I get less excited.
I think that the act of refusing to be represented has enormous political potential.
Before you unpack that a bit, I would like to point out that a rock situated for a million years at the top of a mountain, welded by ice or pressure or volcanic activity to the peak itself, has massive potential (kinetic) energy. It's just unlikely to be unleashed. Almost everything in the world has massive potential energy. In the movie industry, we say that a script we aren't interested in has potential. It means 'never gonna happen'.
People also have the right to be political in whatever way they need to be, or want to be: otherwise, what does politics mean, except coercion?
What does society mean except internalised power relations and microlevel coercions?
More prosaically, a society is a group of people sharing common cultural perceptions, behaviours, and rules. All these things are coercions, of a sort, penalised by exclusion or incarceration. Power and its exercise are inherent in human relations.
And coercion, finally, is at the heart of democracy: no democracy without the police, without force to 'make' people be represented, if need be.
Actually, I think the ownership of the means of violence - as you might say - is at the heart of government. Leviathan exists to prevent the state of Warre. I'm not a big fan of Warre. It's sucky. I don't believe humans are yet capable of functioning without government. I'd love to. But I don't. I think we have evolved government as a means of dealing with our own crappier urges. As a species strategy, I think it's not bad. (The problem is that it now seems to be getting interwoven with corporate cultures which owe allegiance to money rather than life, which is posing some serious problems. Another story.)
Given that in the US, many, many of the people who don't vote are members of minorities who are subject to far more discrimination than others (blacks, Latino/as, poor people), your argument doesn't hold up. Those people are not comfortable. Their problem is that no matter who they vote for, nobody actually changes the situation they're in. They know this, and so they don't participate.
Well, in the first place, W. has just shown that this isn't how it works. It may well be that the Democrats will not do much to make their situation better, but the Neo-Cons can sure as hell make it worse. So it's not so much that they 'know' that there's no point in their voting, as that they 'falsely believe' it.
In the second, I don't actually accept your premise. Affirmative actions, welfare schemes, medicare, and public schools do make a difference. They may not make a difference to everyone and they may not make a difference in this generation, but they do. And so does just plain not electing a party which includes a whole lotta overt racists.
Politics the career is just a game about different actors trying to gain more power and wealth.
Politics - not the career, the activity - is the gateway to influence. Many people seek to pass through it to achieve good ends. It is, sadly, impossible to be unaffected by the journey - but that does not mean everyone who engages in politics or comes into power through it is inherently bad or lost.
I see very little difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in the US, Labour or Conservative in the UK, or Liberal and Labor in Australia.
And in some ways you are correct. In the states in particular, you're talking for the most part about parties led by members of an educated, wealthy ruling elite. On the other hand, look a little closer and there are stark differences. David Cameron's front bench here in the UK is largely Etonian. For all their protests, the Tories are still drawing on the talent pool from one super-privileged school in the UK. They are a party of the aristocracy, for the aristocracy, for all that our upper class has blended in some ways with a corporate superrich elite. The Labour party is profoundly middle class at the top, with working class roots - although those definitions are becoming more problematic.
In the States, the Democrats are currently the party of 'not'. They are not unilateralist, not against abortion (which, by the way, is an issue with a major effect on the poorest portions of society) and not shackled to the Christian Right. Major differences.
I can't do Australian politics, so I'm not going to look like a putz trying.
maybe I'm not interested in a mass revolution, but more in what can be done here/now to make things better for people despite the electoral system.
And when you have a local issue which could be helped by a local politician, but the guy who would maybe go for your project needs more votes, will you explain to your local interest group that voting never changes anything? |
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