We like to consider ourselves as free men and women, one and indivisible, whom cannot be cut in little pieces to be fit in the institutional drawers of the State or the tills of bosses and others owners. But it’s not difficult to realize that this is only one more illusion.
The fact is that we are not able to belong to ourselves. We are possessed by masters through money and time. Our time is divided up in little pieces at the will of politicians, advertisers, cops, judges, social “assistances”, bosses, of medicine, communities and family. All of them combine at a moment or another, consciously or not, to divide us, to set one against the other, to represent us by force, to rob us, to enlist us to go to the army, to analyze us, to threaten us, to buy and sell us, or, more basically, to club us.
The politicians are part of the ones who buy us at the best price to sell us at discount, they are part of the ones who make our eyes moist before they rape the amount of brain time available. They claim to represent our aspirations by dictating them to us, a social gun on the temple. In exchange of a ballot, they promise us oasis in the sandstorms of our existences, in the desert of pretenses and misery that fill our bored lives.
Soon, a new moment for voting, a free-for-all, the absolute hegemony of the ideological carpet salespeople. But who is still stupid enough to sincerely believe in it? Who is still stupid enough to go voting with a pounding heart like when we go to a first date?
Almost nobody; we go voting like others clock in, we go voting like we go to work, we go voting like when we fill out our tax return: in the most absolute boredom or looking down and hating oneself. Some are openly representatives of the bourgeoisie, others claim to represent the poor and the oppressed, but nothing looks more like a representative of the bourgeoisie than a representative of the poor.
No candidate will ever represent our lust for not being represented, none of them could ever represent faithfully two individuals at the same time. No election will ever make us free, will ever give us back our lives. The question is not to vote for whom or for what, the question is why vote?
At the next elections, as for all the others before, we will abstain from voting and we will invite everyone to do the same, not to participate at one’s own slavery. The point is not only to abstain and to desert the ballot boxes but to burn them all and to set fire to this world which debases and degrades us, to take back our lives, our bodies and our dignity, and if intelligence is not enough, force will do the trick.
Revolution.
Let’s attack everything that makes us weak and dispossesses us of our own lives.
Let’s liberate ourselves from politics.
Anarchists
4 thoughts on “[France] Never vote…”
you may also read “Why I don’t vote” – Vagabond Theorist [Oakland, USA]
“Let’s liberate ourselves from politics.”
I quite disagree with this. Politics is a very broad meaning, and it shouldn’t be confused with the institutionalized politics. What actually makes people be away (or liberated) from politics is VOTING. Because voting makes you give away your wishes and actions to some leadership, it sets you apart from deciding your own life. Not voting is what makes you into politics, because YOU decide your own life, not someone else.
I live in America, and I agree with this in regards to National elections. The politicians in Washington are clearly all the same, save for some very minor superficial differences (and those minor differences are blown up into as major focal points in campaigns). It sickens me to vote in those elections.
However, I still find voting in local elections gets results. After all, locally, we’re talking about schools, roads, safety, and even police protection in a more direct manner than the very abstract ways these things are presented in National elections. Locally, your vote actually still does matter (for the time being).