The electoral system is so focused on the specific immediate task at hand, the election these people were hired to win (and working people to the bone doing it), that there’s never any room to step back and build something long-term. No one is planning for the Democratic party five or ten years from now (at least, not in a way that affects local organizing) because that’s ten or twenty times as long as the average staffer is expected to last. The feeling seems to be that every minute spent planning for something further out than the next election is a minute not spent working on winning the next election.

So, when I get on my anarchist high horse now and talk about how we need to spend our time, energy, and money on something other than electoral politics, it’s not the voting part that upsets me. It’s all this bullshit. Every election, we have to burn out all our most promising organizers in six months because there was no infrastructure for them to build on, and they have to make it all from scratch every time. It’s like we’re working extra hard to pay off our last payday loan, then taking out a new payday loan at the end, ensuring we’ll have to do the same thing over again next time.

I feel like this part bears emphasizing, given the arguments over it that I’ve seen recently. I’m aggressively neutral on the question of whether or not anarchists should vote. The hour or less per year that an individual anarchist may spend on voting just doesn’t matter. Almost all the waste of electoralism is in the time, energy, and money spent on campaigning, and having nothing to show for it afterwards if your candidate loses.

On the other side, if a fellow anarchist doesn’t want to vote, fighting with them about it isn’t worth the social cohesion cost. Even if you see value in voting as a rearguard action, we’re not a big enough bloc for their non-voting to really matter.