Praxis

 I love the ideas of anarchism: mutual aid, the call for claims of pwoer to justify themselves, and community direct action. These ideas are winners.

Why then are so many anarchists that I've come across such dogmatic wankers?

I don't have years of frontline activism under my belt. I'm not what the right wing would call a 'professional protester'. Even before Covid activism was expensive and not something easy to engage in (not much call for it in the shires). I'm not a huge expert on the theory; in fact I find reading increasingly difficult in general. My eyesight is giong to shit and my concentration is shot. It it can be found audibly then I'm itneresrted. Hnudreds of pages of hudnreds of books of radical theory, political theory, economic theory, I'm going to struggle. Just keeping it real. There's no way in my life I'm ever going to read Das Kapital!

I just try to be a decent person. Not in some halo polishing way, but out of empathy. I don't like to see other people struggle. Maybe that's a personal weakness, as many these days seem to think.

But I can't abide the kind of dogma that says one ought not even vote. All year I've had this nonsense after calling on anarchists to vote for Labour. Why: because good praxis is primarily harm reduction. You don't vote because the system is good. You don't vote because Labour are great. Neither of those things are true. You vote because you can and because contributing to a voice that rejects the horrors of right wing politics, specifically Boris Johnson and the austerity-mongers reduces harm. Is this really so controversial?

To many anarchists, it seems (I'm sure there are many that think otherwise), the issue of not voting is an unbending principle. Don't vote, they say, it only encourages them. If voting achieved anything they'd ban it. This is utter bollocks. 

Certainly electoralism is a problem when it can distract from genuine grassroots causes, but the system isn't going anywhere. I wish it were; it's a horrible system. But if you don't vote you are still participating in it. There is no 'opt out' option. A spoiled ballot simply reinforces the status quo. In other words: either way, you vote! Your voice will be counted whether you like it or not, so you might as well use it.

It's not even about propaganda: I can't stand the imperialist flag waving "my daddy died for your vote". That's pure emotional manipulation solely intended to reinforce the status quo. But you do  have a vote, and it will get used so why not steer it as best you can. That's all I ask.

We're almost a year in of this government and we can see its failings laid bare, exposed in the light of Covid and its reaction to the virus. They have failed on all counts. Thousands dead. Failed care home policies, and now failed student policies off the back of a horrific destruction of kids' exam results and studies. The blatant corruption of contracts given to cronies, wasted. The bigotry and hatred resulting in mass working class divisions highlighted by the masked vs the unmasked. 

And we're still not done: Brexit is and always was driven by a hateful xenophobic ideology, pursued by utter fools. People as ignorant as they were self inflated.

If you think Corbyn would have been this bad, you're just wrong. He didn't need to be 100% better. 1% would have been enough to justify the aforementioned praxis.

We're divided as never before. Isolated and scared. Now you can add emotional exhaustion into that mix. We still don't have a vaccine or cure. Long covid hangs like a shadow as does the looking unemployment and economic aftershocks of this period. You can be sure of one thing: the Tories will use that as cover for more austerity. They will target, as they always have, us.

Praxis