Every election we are told the same story. Democracy is
under threat. The stakes have never been higher. This
election is the most important of our lifetime. We are urged
to enrol, urged to participate, urged to have our say.
Politicians, journalists, lobby groups and activists all
repeat the message until it becomes background noise. Yet
despite this relentless campaign, huge numbers of people
continue to stay away from the ballot box.
According
to figures drawn from the 2023 General Election, around 1.19
million eligible New Zealanders did not vote. Roughly
829,000 enrolled voters stayed home, while hundreds of
thousands of eligible people were not enrolled at all.
Together they amounted to one of the largest political
groupings in the country. If non-voters were a political
party, they would dwarf every party currently represented in
Parliament.
Predictably, politicians interpret this as
a problem to be solved. They see a vast reservoir of
untapped support waiting to be mobilised. Every party
imagines that if only the disengaged could be persuaded to
participate, they would vote the “right” way. The left
imagines that non-voters are frustrated workers waiting to
be radicalised into electoral politics. The right imagines
that they are ordinary people alienated by political
correctness and bureaucracy. Both sides believe the solution
is greater participation in the existing system.
What
if they are wrong? What if the refusal to vote is not a
failure of democracy but a judgement upon it? The political
class treats abstention as evidence of apathy. This
explanation is convenient because it absolves politicians of
responsibility. If people do not vote because they are lazy,
ignorant or indifferent, then there is nothing fundamentally
wrong with the institutions themselves. The fault lies with
the public. Yet the evidence points in another direction.
Many people who do not vote are far from disengaged. They
complain about housing, wages, healthcare, rents, policing,
war, environmental destruction and inequality. They have
strong opinions. They simply do not believe that casting a
ballot every three years will meaningfully alter any of
these conditions. It is difficult to argue with their
conclusion.
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Election campaigns create the illusion of
choice while narrowing the range of possible outcomes.
Voters are invited to choose which group of professional
politicians will administer capitalism. They are not invited
to decide whether capitalism itself should continue. They
may choose between competing managers of the state, but they
cannot vote away the state’s monopoly on power. They may
vote for different tax rates, different spending priorities
or different personalities, but they cannot vote to abolish
wage labour, landlords, prisons, borders or the structures
that generate exploitation in the first place. The ballot
paper offers options. It does not offer freedom.
This
becomes clearer when we look at the history of political
promises. Governments campaign as agents of change and
govern as custodians of the existing order. Labour promised
transformation and delivered record house prices. National
promised prosperity and delivered austerity. Coalition
governments are assembled, broken apart and reassembled
while the fundamentals remain untouched. Wealth continues to
accumulate at the top. Rent continues to rise. Work consumes
more of our lives. The machinery of government continues
regardless of who occupies the ministerial
offices.
Many people recognise this. They may not
describe it in anarchist terms, but they understand it
instinctively. They have watched governments come and go
while their own circumstances remain largely unchanged. They
have learned that election rhetoric bears little
relationship to political reality. When they refuse to vote,
they are often expressing not indifference but
disbelief.
The defenders of electoral politics respond
that non-participation only strengthens the powerful. If you
do not vote, they say, someone else will decide for you.
This argument assumes that voting constitutes genuine power.
It confuses the ability to choose rulers with the ability to
rule ourselves. Anarchists reject this confusion. The
question has never been who governs. The question is why
anyone should govern at all.
Representative democracy
rests on a strange proposition. Millions of people are told
that they possess political power, yet that power can only
be exercised by transferring it to somebody else. Every few
years citizens are invited to surrender their authority to
professional politicians, who then act in their name until
the next election. This arrangement is presented as
self-government. In reality it is government by others. The
act of voting does not challenge hierarchy. It legitimises
it.
This is why abstention has a long history within
revolutionary movements. From the anarchists of
nineteenth-century Europe to contemporary anti-authoritarian
movements around the world, many radicals have viewed
elections not as vehicles of liberation but as mechanisms of
incorporation. Voting channels discontent into institutions
designed to contain it. Instead of organising workplaces,
building communities of resistance or creating alternatives
to state authority, people are encouraged to place their
hopes in politicians. The result is passivity. Political
action becomes something performed on our behalf rather than
something we undertake ourselves.
None of this means
that all non-voters are conscious anarchists. Far from it.
The million-plus New Zealanders who did not vote in 2023
hold a wide variety of beliefs. Some will be socialists.
Some will be conservatives. Some will be politically
confused. Some will be simply busy. Yet taken together they
reveal an important truth. A growing section of society has
withdrawn its consent from the electoral spectacle. That
withdrawal deserves closer examination.
Political
commentators frequently describe low turnout as a crisis of
democracy. From an anarchist perspective, it may be a crisis
of legitimacy. The state requires more than police, courts
and prisons. It requires belief. People must accept that the
system represents them. They must believe that participation
grants them influence. They must trust that governments
derive authority from popular consent. When increasing
numbers refuse to participate, that story becomes harder to
sustain.
A parliament elected by a shrinking
proportion of the population remains legally valid, but its
moral authority begins to look questionable. The problem for
the political class is not merely that people are staying
home. The problem is that people are losing faith in the
institutions themselves. This is why governments and
political organisations devote enormous resources to
increasing voter participation. They need people to believe.
They need citizens to see elections as meaningful acts of
empowerment. The moment large numbers begin to question that
assumption, the ideological foundations of representative
government start to crack.
The answer, however, is not
cynicism. There is a difference between passive
disengagement and active abstention. Passive disengagement
says, “Nothing can be done.” Active abstention says,
“Something can be done, but not through this.”
Anarchists advocate the second position. Refusing to vote is
not enough. Staying home on election day while leaving
existing power structures untouched achieves little.
Abstention only becomes politically significant when
connected to collective action outside parliamentary
channels. The real question is not whether we vote. The real
question is how we organise.
History provides plenty
of answers. Workers have won gains through strikes rather
than elections. Communities have defended themselves through
mutual aid rather than legislation. Social movements have
forced change through direct action rather than lobbying.
Every meaningful improvement in ordinary people’s lives
has depended on pressure from below. Politicians may
eventually sign documents and pass laws, but they generally
do so after being compelled by organised
movements.
Power concedes nothing voluntarily. The
obsession with elections obscures this reality. Every three
years political energy is funnelled into campaigns,
candidates and polling. People are encouraged to view
politics as a spectator sport. They become audiences rather
than participants. The election cycle consumes attention
that could otherwise be devoted to building enduring forms
of collective power.
Imagine if even a fraction of the
energy spent on electoral campaigning were redirected
elsewhere. Imagine neighbourhood assemblies capable of
solving local problems without waiting for councils. Imagine
tenant unions capable of confronting landlords directly.
Imagine workplaces organised enough to challenge employers
through collective action. Imagine networks of mutual aid
that reduce dependence on state bureaucracy. These are not
fantasies. They exist already, albeit on a limited scale.
The challenge is expanding them.
This points toward a
different understanding of democracy. Not democracy as
periodic voting. Not democracy as parliamentary
representation. Democracy as direct participation in the
decisions that affect our lives. Democracy as collective
self-management. Democracy without politicians. The tragedy
of modern electoral politics is that it has narrowed our
political imagination. We are encouraged to believe that
democracy begins and ends at the ballot box. The result is a
population that feels powerless because it has been taught
to locate power in institutions beyond its
control.
The million-plus New Zealanders who did not
vote in 2023 should not be viewed as a problem requiring
correction. They are evidence that many people already sense
something is wrong. The task is not to shepherd them back
into the voting booth. The task is to transform scepticism
into organisation.
Abstention is often portrayed as
silence. In reality it can be a statement. It can express
the belief that liberation will not arrive through
Parliament, that politicians cannot solve problems rooted in
the structures they administer, and that genuine social
change requires ordinary people to act for themselves. The
largest political force in New Zealand may not be National,
Labour, ACT, the Greens or New Zealand First. It may be the
millions who no longer believe that any of them speak on
their behalf. The political establishment sees this as a
reservoir of votes waiting to be captured. Anarchists should
see it as something else – a sign that faith in
representative politics is weakening.
The question is
what comes next. If non-voting remains an individual act of
withdrawal, it will change little. If it becomes part of a
broader project of self-organisation, mutual aid, workplace
struggle and direct action, it points beyond the limits of
parliamentary politics altogether. The goal is not a better
set of rulers. The goal is a society in which rulers are
unnecessary. For those who seek such a society, the choice
is clear. Do not vote. Do not place your hopes in parties,
candidates or parliamentary majorities. Organise where you
live. Organise where you work. Build relationships of
solidarity. Create forms of power that do not depend upon
the state.
The future will not be delivered through a
ballot box. It will be built by our own hands.
Wyatt E Jones
AOTEAROA WORKERS SOLIDARITY
MOVEMENT
https://awsm.nz/the-largest-party-in-aotearoa-are-the-abstentionists/
aotearoa_anarchism@riseup.net
AWSM.NZ
14.6.26
