Elections

Were you to preach, in most parts of the world, that political connections are founded altogether on voluntary consent or a mutual promise, the magistrate would soon imprison you, as seditious, for loosening the ties of obedience...

Ours is supposed to be a country ruled by the majority, yet every policeman who is not vested with power by the majority can break up a meeting, drag the lecturer off the platform and club the audience out of the hall in true Russian fashion. The Postmaster General, who is not an elective officer, has the power to suppress publications and confiscate mail.

There are only two types of people in politics: the idiot and the rascal.

Democracy is an illusion when procedural mechanisms intended to reach and implement decisive judgments in accordance with a rule of political equality fail to do so.

Democracy was then still a revolutionary slogan, today it is a reactionary shackle on the movement, and this is brought to the consciousness of the working class through the mass experience of the general strike. Then Socialism was a far distant ideal, today it is a question of life or death...

Totalitarianism and parlimentarian democracy are merely two different ways to administer the state under capitalism. From the point of view of capital, both ways have their good and bad sides. Parliamentarian democracy is indeed more able to regulate conflicts between interest groups in society. But usually everyone ends up content only after having their piece of cake, which means increasing wages and public expenses, which requires further economic growth, which in turn requires more intensive exploitation of workers, natural resources, animals and 'less developed' countries. But at times, this intensification reaches its limits, and economic crisis begins.

...it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting.

As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall.... By reason of idleness and money, they end by having soldiers to enthralled their country and representatives to sell it.

...for workers and especially peasants, the republic existed as a broken promise.

When the people lose their liberty through deceit they are not so often betrayed by others as misled by themselves.

When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favor and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say 'Guns before butter', while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.

To suggest that democracy exists when it is mere illusion is the cruelest form of authoritarian manipulation.

Without this demonstration that we can build Libertarian Socialism, the future will continue to belong to the sort of politics that came out of the French Revolution -- with many political parties to begin with, and just one at the end.

If self-government be the rule, every self must be its subject. If a person govern, not only himself but others, that is despotic government, and it matters not if that control be over one or over a thousand individuals, or over a nation; in each case it would be the same principle of power exerted outside of self and over others, and this is despotism, whether it is exercised by one person over his subjects, or by twenty persons over a nation, or by one-half the people of a nation over the other half thereof.

...it is the people who direct the process, rather than those caught up in it, who are to blame...

And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests... everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.

British so-called democracy is only for domestic use. In the colonies, it is as Fascist as Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin. I will grant him that.

...where, unless the election were unanimous, would be the obligation on the minority to submit to the choice of the majority? How have a hundred men who wish for a master the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not?

You complain that our decrees are not carried out. Well, citizens, are you not yourselves somewhat accessory to this fault?

...the divine right of majorities is a dogma as little possessed of absolute truth as any other.

We are firmly convinced that the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy. In a republic, there are at least brief periods when the people, while continually exploited, is not oppressed; in the monarchies, oppression is constant. The democratic regime also lifts the masses up gradually to participation in public life -- something the monarchy never does. Nevertheless, while we prefer the republic, we must recognize and proclaim that whatever the form of government may be, so long as human society continues to be divided into different classes as a result of the hereditary inequality of occupations, of wealth, of education, and of rights, there will always be a class-restricted government and the inevitable exploitation of the majorities by the minorities.

...that act ceases to be an act of stupidity or an entitlement and becomes an act of theft when, having recourse to the brutal numbers game, the voter foists his sovereignty upon the sovereignty of the minorities.

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.

Every individual who, in the current state of affairs, drops a paper into the ballot box to choose a legislative authority or an executive authority is — perhaps not wittingly but at least out of ignorance, maybe not directly, but at least indirectly — a bad citizen.

If we are to maintain the fiction of the free state issuing from a social contract, we must assume that the majority of its citizens must have had the prudence, the discernment, and the sense of justice necessary to elect the worthiest and the most capable men and to place them at the head of their government. But if a people had exhibited these qualities, not just once and by mere chance but at all times throughout its existence, in all the elections it had to make, would it not mean that the people itself, as a mass, had reached so high a degree of morality and of culture that it no longer had need of either government or state? Such a people would not drag out a meaningless existence, giving free rein for all its instincts; out of its life, justice and public order would rise spontaneously and naturally. The State, in it, would cease to be the providence, the guardian, the educator, the regulator of society.

It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born.

It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politics. A statesman who rears up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call 'great'...

Elections, concerning which the sophists of the last revolution could prate so much and with such gravity; elections, if afforded priority over freedom, are like the fruit before the flower, like the consequence before the principle, the right before the act; the most po-faced stupidity that could ever have been devised in any age or place. Those who have ventured, those who have dared to summon the people to the ballot box before allowing them to consolidate their freedom have not only grossly abused the people’s inexperience and the frightful docility inculcated into its character through protracted dependency; they have also, by issuing orders and by that very act declaring themselves its betters, ignored the fundamental rules of logic — which ignorance must lead them on to falling victim to their hellish claptrap, leading to their sad meanderings in exile under the lash of the outcome of universal suffrage.

...as long as the present system can keep the working class petition-minded, the masters need have no fear of an uprising, and the social and industrial revolution will be far away.

As to parliamentary rule, and representative government altogether... It is becoming evident that it is merely stupid to elect a few men, and to entrust them with the task of making laws on all possible subjects, of which subject most of them are utterly ignorant.

...in a republic, the candidates for office must look downward, to gain the suffrages of the people; in a monarchy, they must turn their attention upwards, to court the good graces and favor of the great.

So, by going along to vote and by the very act of voting, the voter acknowledges that he is not free and awards the person for whom he is voting the power to set him free; he is admitting that he is oppressed and agreeing that the authorities have power to raise him up again; he makes a declaration of his desire to see justice instituted and surrenders to his delegates all authority to judge in the matter.

Perfect democracy and despotism appear to be the opposite extremes...

...changes in government are above all formal and not substantive.

Inequality of rights is created by a combination in one part of the community to exclude another part from its rights. Whenever it be made an article of a constitution, or a law, that the right of voting, or of electing and being elected, shall appertain exclusively to persons possessing a certain quantity of property, be it little or much, it is a combination of the persons possessing that quantity to exclude those who do not possess the same quantity. It is investing themselves with powers as a self-created part of society, to the exclusion of the rest.

The republicans have confirmed what we have so often said of them, namely that they have neither the men to carry out a revolution nor even the desire to do so.

As for representative government, it remains absolutely incomprehensible to us how intelligent men (and they are not wanting among the Collectivists) can continue to be the partizans of national and municipal parliaments, after all the lessons on this subject bestowed on us by history, whether in England or in France, in Germany, Switzerland or the United States. Whilst parliamentary rule is seen to be everywhere falling to pieces; whilst its principles in themselves--and no longer merely their applications--are being criticized in every direction, how can intelligent men calling themselves Revolutionary Socialists, seek to maintain a system already condemned to death?

Parliamentary action, for our post-World War generation, is something old and useless, like Christianity was for the children of the French Revolution.

...the revolution brings such an enormous mass of people upon the stage that any computation or regulation of the cost of the movement such as can be effected in a civil process, appears to be an altogether hopeless undertaking.

...a Constituent Assembly [parliament] is the means used by the privileged classes, when a dictatorship is not possible, either to prevent a revolution, or, when a revolution has already broken out, to stop its progress with the excuse of legalizing it, and to take back as much as possible of the gains that the people had made during the insurrectional period.

A free Republic! How a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a little over thirty years a small band of parasites have successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, who are tramping the country from east to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work.

...different forms of government, from different hands.... arrive at the same end by different ways.

...were one to choose a period of time, when the people's consent was the least regarded in public transactions, it would be precisely on the establishment of a new government.

Only beg right along for this permission: you may wait forever for it, for there is no one in the world who could give it to you.

The Masses: "...if you hold some public post and want to do a little pilfering, we will give you the sharp claws of a hawk."

I shall not speak of the glaring contradiction, both in conception and in fact, ... that of the cause of Democracy and Freedom being promoted, or even maintained, by crime and conquest.

...[America's] abandonment of its early principles it has become the servile imitator of the worst despotisms that have disgraced the ages.

But, one might say, could the State, the democratic State, based upon the free suffrage of all its citizens, be the negation of their liberty? And why not? That would depend entirely on the mission and the power that the citizens surrendered to the State. A republican State, based upon universal suffrage, could be very despotic, more despotic even than the monarchical State, if, under the pretext of representing everybody's will, it were to bring down the weight of its collective power upon the will and the free movement of each of its members.

Every state is a despotism, be the despot one or many, or (as one is likely to imagine about a republic) if all be lords, that is, despotize one over another.

...both Soviet and Western-type states could call themselves democratic.