Vote With Your Feet (part 3)

"The inevitable result of the lack of ambitious thoughts is a mediocre politics and a devalued ethics."
-Alain Badiou (Theory of the Subject)

When self-proclaimed communists react with horror to the possibility of boycotting bourgeois parliamentarianism, we need to speculate on the gap between their theory and practice.  Anarchists, regardless of the problems I have with anarchism (and my anarchist past), are generally better in this area: when you suggest boycotting the elections to a group of anarchists, they wonder why it's even controversial.  Of course, a self-assured and comfortable communist will simply argue that of course anarchists are fine with boycotting the elections because anarchists, don't you know, are ultra-left children who do not understand politics to begin with.

My question, though, is whether this supposed communist position is itself entirely communist.  Whether this desire to mock an elections boycott as some form of petty-bourgeois "ultra-leftism" is actually an attempt to cloak unprincipled opportunism.  Whether the ire levelled at anarchists is nothing more than resignation in the face of the apparent "end of history."  I believe there are reasons to differentiate communist politics from anarchist politics, yes, but at the same time I also believe that some of the reasons given for this differentiation are wrong and unprincipled.

At the International Womens Day march on Saturday March 12th we circulated pamphlets about the March 19th event that would launch the federal elections boycott in Toronto.  We were careful to avoid handing these pamphlets to proud social democrats because we knew that the politics of social democracy were at odds with the politics we were promoting.  The hostility coming from communists who should know better, however, was telling: even though the event was promoted as a discussion and/or debate about the possibility of a boycott, we were pretty much told to screw off by members of some groups who did not want to even debate the possibility of building a movement based on a rejection of parliamentarianism.  Some decided that they were going to boycott the boycott.

When the majority of Canadian society does not participate in the elections process, however, a debate is necessary.  The point that needs to be emphasized, as I emphasized in my first post in this series, is that there already is an implicit boycott.  We need to understand that this is a democratic decision, where people are voting with their feet by not voting with ballots for one bourgeois party or another, rather than dismissing this situation as some general malaise of apathetic stupidity.

Apparently the debate must be avoided, a priori, as "ultra-left."  But in these days, where the traditional "left" is getting more and more opportunist and/or right (witness one "marxist" group's willingness to waste all of its time in entryism while attacking the arrested G20 activists for being too militant), what was once understood as basic leftism a century or half-a-century ago is now treated as ultra-left.  Building up an organization/party/whatever based on clear revolutionary politics is apparently an ultra-left strategy.  Rejecting parliamentarianism in practice is also ultra-leftism––we should only do that in theory, we are told, and practice calls for the subordination of our time and energy to reformist based coalitions.

What sort of communism is this?  How can we argue that bourgeois parliamentarianism will never end capitalism on the one hand, and yet waste our time advocating for this parliamentarianism, and building coalitions with social democrats and left liberals, on the other?

The communist imagination in North America is shrinking, stagnating within the limits of social democracy.  Numerous communist groups try to sell their opportunistic practice as properly "radical", convincing themselves that the only way forward is through reformist activities.  The height of this resignation, this banal way of seeing political possibilities, is codified in those groups like Fightback who advocate entryism and claim that this is the only true method of revolution, as evidenced in one book by Lenin––as if Lenin never wrote anything about the need for a party, how to build a party, and the problems with opportunistic parliamentarianism.

One Canadian communist actually argues that working for the NDP is the only viable socialist strategy in our context: "ultimately, given the Canadian political landscape as it exists today, I find myself unavoidably bound to the entryist strategy advocated by Fightback for the simple reason that there is currently no real alternative to the NDP as a Canadian labour party." (citation here)  But the "Canadian political landscape" of this supposed radical's imagination is one already determined by bourgeois parameters that cannot conceptualize an alternative beyond the boundaries drawn by capitalism.  Given the Canadian political landscape as it exists today?  What about a landscape where the majority of people living and working in Canada do not vote and do not see any of the parties as a viable option?  What about a landscape that exists at the centre of imperialism, a landscape that REQUIRES an alternative to the still imperialist/colonialist NDP?

Or what about this problem, and one that is immediately ignored by those who sneer at the possibility of building a boycott movement as a political strategy: the Canadian government is, due to its very existence as Canadian government, a settler-colonial government.  There was a time, decades back when the left as a whole cared about fostering real internationalism, when it was understood that part of anticolonial strategy was to boycott colonial governments.

No ambition, no imagination, no potential to approach the possibilities beyond things as they are: in this context, pursuing reformism as the telos of "revolutionary" practice makes complete sense––no wonder the Fightback position would see no real alternative to entryism, a Canadian landscape that is locked forever in the prison of capitalism where the only way to escape is to try and become prison guards.