One of the most distinctive aspects of anarchism is its anti-electoralism. When the doctrine was first coming together in the 19th century, our hostility to parliaments and electoral socialism was one of our key defining traits. Against both revolutionary and reformist social-democrats, anarchists argued for direct action and class organisation from below, believing that socialist participation in electoral politics would nullify the working class’ ability to fight capitalism, and turn working class organisations (like unions) into tools of the capitalist class.
While much has changed in politics since, there has been nothing that would cause us to abandon this particular view. In fact, we’ve had over a hundred and fifty years of practical evidence proving the validity of exactly these points. The left-wing of the establishment in most developed countries is made up of people who call, or called, themselves socialists: Labour in the UK, the Socialist Party in France, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and of course Labor in Australia. All of these organisations, at one time, advocated for the working-class to run society, but all of them made their peace and instead focused on running capitalism – even when it cost them their own working-class base.
We’ve also seen movements to the left of these parties emerge, and then undergo their own process of moderation. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece drew much attention when they began and promised a new kind of anti-capitalism, connected to social movements, but the result after all these years has been a failure – even by their own standards. Syriza completely capitulated to the EU’s austerity programme, the very thing it set out to oppose. In 2023 it elected a former Goldman-Sachs banker as leader, and then threw itself into another internal crisis that almost destroyed it. Podemos joined the centre-left PSOE in a disastrous neoliberal coalition that caused its once-considerable popularity to plummet, while achieving none of its key goals.
We’ve even been able to see the practical effects of anarchists abandoning our anti-parliamentary commitment. The Spanish CNT union helped nullify the revolution its own members made by joining the Spanish Popular Front government. In a lower-stakes environment, the nucleus around Georges Fontenis helped destroy France’s then-significant Anarchist Federation by pushing it down the path of a stunt electoral venture.
More recently, we have seen a good number of anarchists dissolve themselves into the social-democratic movements around the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the USA, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, and Jean-Luc Melenchon in France; we have even seen many advocate for supporting Democrats in the US electorally, in the name of fighting “Trump-fascism”.
Fortunately, it appears that this wave is receding, but have the right lessons been learnt? There is still an underlying supposition that we need to support electoral politics on some level, either to support the “lesser-evil” against the “greater-evil”, or simply to try and connect with everyday left-wing people. Those who dissent are regularly accused of being indifferent to the results of elections, or of being dogmatists obsessed with theoretical purity. Their arguments become increasingly indistinguishable from those of the “lesser-evils” themselves.
Against this, it becomes more and more important to assert the independence of the working class, and the necessity to fight against the influence of electoralism on social movements. The effect of all electoral politics is the subordination of our class to the capitalist system. Breaking out of this ideology is an essential step to overcoming capitalism altogether.
Where working-class politics goes to die
In a real sense, parliamentary politics depends on masking class divisions. At the voting booth, we do not vote as members of the working class or members of the capitalist class, but as individual citizens, all with a nominally equal right to decide who leads us. The fact that state power fulfils the same basic functions regardless of who is in government proves that this is bullshit, but democratic ideology nevertheless reinforces it as if it were true.
The power of the working class doesn’t come in our numbers – especially not expressed through vote-tallies. Our power comes from our position in the economy, from the fact that society is built on our labour. Rather than building class power from this fact, electoral politics instead focus on building an electorate: a mass of voters cobbled together by political promises, quid-pro-quo patronage and demographic wrangling.
Electoral politics force socialist organisations to become more conservative. They do so by tying the public commitments of socialist organisations to their “electability”: whether these policies might win or lose you votes. In order to succeed in the polls, you are forced to be realistic and leave unpopular demands to the side, no matter how important they might actually be; the alternative is to stand on an unpopular platform and get an embarrassing vote total.
It is indicative then that even revolutionary socialist electoral projects put forward demands that are little different to those of left-wing social democrats. The desire of electoral socialists to use parliaments to spread the socialist doctrine is then diminished by the fact that their success is dependent on misrepresenting what socialism actually means.
Any party that wants to win at elections is a party that seeks to govern, and any party that seeks to govern is a party that seeks to make peace with capitalism. Any socialist goals they start out with will end up meaning nothing when confronted with the reality of running the state.
Not only does the ruling government become the chief employer of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, it also becomes the institution responsible for the maintenance of capitalism. It oversees the imprisonment of the working class, directs the war machines that obliterate the workers of other countries and it shapes the economy “in the national interest”. Its primary, overriding purpose, is the defence of private property. This is what the state was developed to do, and it is what it will always do.
By coming to power, nominally working class parties shed their previous class identity and transform themselves into the left wing of the capitalist class. There are countless examples of this “bourgeoisification” occurring, even with moderate reformist outfits. The aforementioned examples of Labor, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Party are relevant here, as are the examples of Syriza and Podemos.
A challenge from the left
Nowadays, most revolutionary electoralists will admit that they have little chance of winning altogether; they do not seriously think that they will ever secure a parliamentary majority. In some sense they hope to never do so, knowing that it will put them unambiguously in the position of capitalists-in-chief. Their real goal is to elect a small number of people that will use their parliamentary seats to make propaganda, promote extra-parliamentary causes, and help legitimise socialism in the eyes of the general public. On paper, socialism is still going to come about through a revolution and the smashing of the state.
This is broadly the position of the most serious far-left electoral projects in Australia – Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative’s Victorian Socialists. The most successful examples of this internationally are the Workers’ Left Front in Argentina and People Before Profit in Ireland, both of which are essentially coalitions of Trotskyist organisations. To varying degrees this is also the position of Marxists operating within the DSA, as well as of more traditional parliamentary communist parties, like those in Greece and Britain.
The problem is that the pressures of parliament apply to those outside of government, too. Being a minority in parliament comes with its own set of pressures. This would intensify in a hung parliament scenario, where the votes of these socialists could be crucial to the formation of a government. The pressure to moderate even further would be immense, particularly if their refusal to back the left might result in the right coming to power.
Supporters of Socialist Alliance, Victorian Socialists and other socialist electoral ventures become excited at the prospect of using potential crossbench power to vote down bad legislation and squeeze positive commitments out of whoever is in government. However, it’s exactly this position that would pressure them to support a government. In all likelihood, this pressure would also come from the socialists’ own voter base, knowing that they’ve been mobilised on broadly reformist grounds to begin with.
The election of even one or two politicians can start a process of bureaucratisation that moderates parties in their own way. The fact that these politicians might take some arbitrarily lower salary is besides the point. The election of a politician entails the employment of a number of staffers, who will then become dependent on the re-election of the politician for their own livelihood. The politician’s party will struggle to keep their elected officials to account, knowing that in the case of any severe disagreement, the politician can simply split and keep their seat while the original party suddenly becomes unrepresented.
The American DSA is a particularly good example of this – none of the politicians it has elected have ever been even remotely accountable to the policy platforms of their own organisation. For some time, a key fight in the party between the left and right has been about the feasibility of enforcing this kind of discipline altogether.
The purpose of democratic parliaments is to keep political disagreements within narrow bounds, with the aim of managing capitalism; the system protects itself from dangerous ideas by integrating them into itself. Even politicians that are not in government contribute to the process of governing, through participation in debates over legislation, membership in parliamentary committees, and representations made on behalf of constituents. Their very presence in parliament as opponents of capitalism helps solidify the impression that parliament can be meaningfully used to oppose capitalism at all.
All of this would be inconsequential if the failures of electoral socialists only affected themselves, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The failures of electoral socialism damage the prospects of revolutionary socialism generally. They don’t simply discredit our ideas by associating them with blowhard politicians and opportunists looking for a bit of popularity; they also promote passivity among workers and drag working class organisations into their mess. They activate layers of potentially good militants and then burn them out during the inevitable process of betrayal and failure.
Regardless of what they might say about social movements and resistance outside of parliament, all successful electoral projects depend on promising reforms in exchange for votes. The vast majority of people vote for these parties in the expectation that they would be able to deliver serious improvements in their lives. Victorian Socialists’ last electoral slogan, “For real change – vote for us!”, says it all. “Real change” cannot be brought about by voting for someone to enact it on your behalf. Electoral socialists think that parliaments can be used to help workers break out of this passivity, but it has the opposite effect, swapping out one set of leaders for another.
A working class person that still thinks in terms of reformism is not going to have their opinion changed by bringing in a better type of reformist. The only thing that tangibly breaks the class away from such a mentality is direct action, carried out by the working class’ own institutions. One of the major problems facing working class organisations at present is precisely the fact that they are in thrall to politicians; most union officials prioritise the election of the Labor Party over the interests of their own members. The most important task for revolutionaries is therefore not to present themselves as alternative politicians, but to clear politicians out of the unions altogether.
Reforms, not reformism
Our opposition to electoral politics does not entail an opposition to the idea of seeking improvements under capitalism. Not at all! We argue that working class people should fight hard for improvements in their wages and conditions, as well as for more general social goals, like an end to racism against migrants, for free access to reproductive healthcare, for trans liberation, and so on.
In fact, the main point of our argument is that by placing your faith in a politician to deliver on what you want, you are diminishing your own power as a worker. That’s why we instead argue for direct action. To paraphrase the French anarchist Émile Pouget, it means the working class creating its own conditions of struggle, looking only to itself for the means to fight capitalists. By securing improvements and defending against attacks through our own organisations, through our own efforts, we develop a sense of strength and cohesion that we wouldn’t otherwise achieve.
When the class fights through its unions, for instance, it undercuts the democratic ideology mentioned earlier in the article. Class interests come to the fore over party loyalties. The inevitable clash between the interests of workers and the interests of their employers becomes obvious. It becomes clearer that the entire apparatus of government, from parliament to the Fair Work Commission, is there to keep workers where they are. The very act of striking demonstrates practically that your employer is dependent on your labour for their income, and that we can instead cooperate for our own benefit.
When union disputes are taken out of the hands of officials, workers also begin to learn how to develop their own sense of power and use it against their employers. The employers’ weaknesses are identified and targeted. Workers cohere themselves in order to succeed as a fighting force. Even things as mundane as drawing up strike rosters and identifying places to picket help develop the self-reliance and independence of the people involved. Anyone who has ever witnessed a real class fight up close and personal would know how it can transform people, as individuals and as a collective.
Imagine a situation where a government secures a wage rise for low-income workers by passing legislation raising the minimum wage by $5 an hour. Now, imagine a situation where a union of those same workers secures the exact same wage rise by taking strike action. While the direct outcome in terms of wages is the same, the qualitative effect is completely different, and it should be clear why the latter lays the groundwork for socialism in a way that the former subverts.
Our aim isn’t to build a nicer capitalism for society as a whole. We explicitly try to fight against that belief. We fight for a better life, but we do so knowing that all struggles will only ever be partial until we abolish capitalism altogether. We cannot do that without asserting our independence from capitalist politics. We instead have to look to the strength of workers’ own associations – unions, tenant organisations, organising projects, all the means by which workers fight back using their own strength.
Their success depends on our failure
People who argue for socialist participation in elections have real concerns that can’t be dismissed out of hand. The left is marginal, disconnected from the mass of the working class, and tactically lost. Countless extra-parliamentary left initiatives have come and gone. Street rallies take place every weekend without any actual effect. There is a real need for the revolutionary left to develop a serious strategy for class power, and to put it into practice.
Indeed, it’s important to note that reformist politicians often emerge as extra-parliamentary struggles fail. Podemos arose out of the huge anti-austerity “Indignados” movement. Sanders and Corbyn emerged not long after the extra-parliamentary movement around Occupy petered out. A feeling of despondency and helplessness overtook the far-left, and the sudden emergence of an enormous mass of people interested in social democracy led many to drop their previous commitments, in order to better engage with these people. In a very real sense, electoral socialists succeed when anarchists fail. Libertarians have to face up to that fact, and take on the challenge that it entails.
Isolation is stifling. This is exacerbated when people live in areas without an established far-left to work inside of. Some of the most avid supporters of electoral politics are people who live in regional areas or in suburbs without much of a visible left. In this atmosphere, even soft-left projects have an appeal – leafleting strangers for an anarchist reading group feels like a much tougher ask than door-knocking for a left candidate come election time.
Anything feels better than nothing. Even in less isolating settings like large workplaces, a mutual interest in a popular left politician might be something that allows you to bond with a potential union member and activist.
While acknowledging all of these sentiments – and sharing them ourselves – our belief is that electoral politics offers no solution to this malaise. Instead, it reinforces all of the problems that came before, while generating new ones that future generations will have to deal with.
Our commitment instead is to long-term work in the organisations of our class, and in the broad struggles our class fights. This patient activity can only consistently be done by a well-organised and committed anarchist group, willing to break out of the left bubble and start the essential process of implanting ourselves in working class life. A young worker angry at their boss shouldn’t have to turn to a charismatic politician and their illusory promises for hope; they should be able to join their union and find a militant branch that will fight their employers and encourage the young worker themselves to get involved. They should be able to see radicals in their neighbourhood, mobilising around this or that issue that affects them. This is not an impossible dream – it can be a reality, if we take it seriously. That means abandoning electoralism, but it also means getting organised.
