Idea for a spoiled ballot campaign

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Myself and a comrade have had an idea relating to ballot spoiling for the upcoming UK General Election. The idea is based on the following contextual points:

There seems to be little zeal for any of the bourgeois parties amongst the populace - hence we may have more luck educating people about the problems of Capitalism.

It also seems that there has not been a full-on embrace of Socialist ideas as a result of the credit crunch and resultant recession. As such, it would surely make more sense to firstly focus on educating people on the problems of Capitalism, before going for the 'god squad' style tactic of persistent indoctrination.

As per the above, i'd be interested in knowing whether there was any fervour on this board for a co-ordinated spoiled ballot campaign, along the lines of the words 'NO TO CAPITALISM' (obviously, the words aren't important, the sentiment is, but one would like to have a similar theme on each ballot to get the message across more strongly)? It would surely only take for each of us to persuade a couple dozen constituents to raise awareness of popular dissatisfaction with the bourgeois establishment.

I urge your support on this question, comrades.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Any thoughts?

[Zanthorus]

What exactly would this achieve?

[Dimentio]

Myself and a comrade have had an idea relating to ballot spoiling for the upcoming UK General Election. The idea is based on the following contextual points:

There seems to be little zeal for any of the bourgeois parties amongst the populace - hence we may have more luck educating people about the problems of Capitalism.

It also seems that there has not been a full-on embrace of Socialist ideas as a result of the credit crunch and resultant recession. As such, it would surely make more sense to firstly focus on educating people on the problems of Capitalism, before going for the 'god squad' style tactic of persistent indoctrination.

As per the above, i'd be interested in knowing whether there was any fervour on this board for a co-ordinated spoiled ballot campaign, along the lines of the words 'NO TO CAPITALISM' (obviously, the words aren't important, the sentiment is, but one would like to have a similar theme on each ballot to get the message across more strongly)? It would surely only take for each of us to persuade a couple dozen constituents to raise awareness of popular dissatisfaction with the bourgeois establishment.

I urge your support on this question, comrades.

There was such a concerted campaign in the Swedish general elections of 1991. 10 000+ people voted with a blank note on which they had written "Kalle Anka" (Donald Duck, who is a cult figure in Sweden).

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

What exactly would this achieve?

It is a veritable way of rejecting all the major bourgeois parties.

Let us face it, we would be well served at this time to say to the working class 'look, Capitalism has failed you, look all around you' - and persuade them to make a fairly large show of dissatisfaction.

You can be sure that 10,000 co-ordinated spoiled ballots would achieve a lot more than 10,000 Socialist votes, diluted amongst dozens of parties/sects.

[eyedrop]

You can be sure that 10,000 co-ordinated spoiled ballots would achieve a lot more than 10,000 Socialist votes, diluted amongst dozens of parties/sects.
Not really, it's already a quite widespread opinion that politicians are crooks, but the spoiled ballots would easily just be ignored. When was the last time you saw any major news article about any ballot spoilage. (Not that I'm particularly favoring voting for the socialist parties instead.)

Organs of political and economic power outside the parliamentary systems is where it counts, those powers are after all where the boundaries for politicians are set.

A: A country with a strong, militant and confident population with a conservative government.

B: A country with a weak and passive population with a "socialist" government.

Consider which of the countries get's more progressive reforms.

[Bitter Ashes]

I'm putting "Direct Democracy" on mine.

Spoiling ballot papers does serve a purpose.

The validity of the election may be questioned if there is an unusually high proportion of spoilt votes. However, in countries such as the UK where spoilt ballots are counted, some voters will deliberately spoil their ballot paper to show disapproval of the candidates available whilst still taking part in the electoral process.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoilt_vote

And here's something from another site:

At each count in each constituency, the returning officer has to explain to all the candidates why a ballot paper has been counted as spoilt and usually this is in front of both candidates and their agents. Abstaining, or spoiling your ballot, therefore, gives you a voice at the count conferred to no-one else!
http://www.abstain05.co.uk/

[eyedrop]

Sure you can spoil your ballot, I usually do it myself, but I wouldn't invest any serious energy into spoilage. It doesn't matter much more than a census about people being disapproving of the government.

[Niccolò Rossi]

As a left communist I am of course an abstentionist, however, I don't buy the argument in favour of spoilage put forward by some leftists, anarchists and left communists.

Before we deal with the possibility of a large-scale spoilage campaign, we have to establish whether or not spoilage is preferable to abstention plain and simple (here I won't consider the question of electoral support for any party, on this question we are all ready in agreement).

Zanthoros asks the correct question when they ask "What exactly would this achieve?". To this El Granma replies:


It is a veritable way of rejecting all the major bourgeois parties.

Let us face it, we would be well served at this time to say to the working class 'look, Capitalism has failed you, look all around you' - and persuade them to make a fairly large show of dissatisfaction.

The question that follows here is: What is it's goal? i.e. Why make a show of dissatisfaction? What could it achieve?

I can not find a satisfactory answer to this question and I don't think one exists. I think the support for spoilage campaigns has it's roots firmly in activist protest culture and reformist mythology which believes in the possibility of making change through the democratic action of atomised citizens.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

To Niccolo Rossi:

I don't really accept the charge of 'reformist mythologyical' roots relating to spoiled ballot campaigns.

You ask, why make a show of dissatisfaction? The answer here is that one must take steps towards energising the masses and raising their class awareness. There is currently no serious medium for energising the majority of the working population. The news media is clearly on the side of the bourgeois, as they are part of the expoloiting class. However, it is clear that even if this is the case, they are forced to at least acknowledge (even if their reporting is still classist and steeped in bourgeois mentality) the existence of serious dissatisfaction by the public - for instance over the Iraq War, MPs expenses and over the over-exhuberance of the banks.

Thus, a spoiled ballot campaign will serve the purpose of highlighting public dissatisfaction with the political and economic system overall, rather than just over single issues such as the previous examples given. That is, in short, the issue here - organising, or at least highlighting, that the public is dissatisfied with the system itself, rather than some of the worst excesses that are consequent of Capitalism's existence - manifesting themselves in the shape of MPs excesses over expenses, ruling elites in the financial sector also paying themselves excessive salaries+ bonuses, and so on.

[Outinleftfield]

I think protest votes for actual candidates (registered candidates who will be counted) is better. In the end when the percentages and number of votes are tallied it will officially register that one more person did not vote for the main parties, meaning one more person is disgusted with the system.

Remember just because you cast a vote doesn't mean they will count it. Spoil your ballot and they just throw it out. If someone isn't officially running they won't even count it.

[Tatarin]

There was such a concerted campaign in the Swedish general elections of 1991. 10 000+ people voted with a blank note on which they had written "Kalle Anka" (Donald Duck, who is a cult figure in Sweden).

That campaign continued in a way to future elections, though the same name was registered as a new entity (so there would be "Kalle Anka" and "kalle Anka" for example, would be two different choices for some reason). I wonder if the same can be done in other countries, though I think that the exact same thing must be written by all the participants.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I can not find a satisfactory answer to this question and I don't think one exists. I think the support for spoilage campaigns has it's roots firmly in activist protest culture and reformist mythology which believes in the possibility of making change through the democratic action of atomised citizens.

The real problem with the left-com preference of abstention over spoilage is that organization of the latter tantamounts to yet another form of "voluntarism."

Better to have lots of stay-at-homes hoping eventually for spontaneous upheaval ("mass strikes")! :glare:

[Dermezel]

Focus on Marx's evidence for the centralization and accumulation of capital. That is the Natural Selection of Marxist theory. Without Marx's scientific analysis there is no way to elevate socialism over libertarianism or other utopian schemes.

Simply put, if you can prove capitalism naturally centralizes over time, and explain why, you leave them with two practical alternatives: private monopoly, or democratic control of the means of production.

Most people intuitively realize that private monopolies are harmful to society. And while they may not be thrilled about democratic ownership, they will desire that over private monopoly.

Again prove your case scientifically first. People are most likely to go by the data, actual facts, not just moralistic propaganda. That way you make the matter objective.

Second, you will have to be patient and use the best arguments over and over on a long-term basis. That is why I recommend the internet, as it is easy to bring the best evidence to bear, and you can engage in longer debates since it does not require a local presence.

To quote triple PH.d philosopher/biologist Massimo Pigliucci:



These sort of experiments have shown that the left hemisphere is in charge of our worldview, of the paradigms we currently hold about a variety of aspects of reality. In normal patients, these paradigms are constantly evaluated against external evidence, gathered by both hemispheres through a suite of sensorial inputs. The left interpreter has the all-important function of making sense of the world, and it does a reasonably good job at it. However, when the incoming data is insufficient, or when some piece of evidence contradicts the currently held view, the left hemisphere either rejects the unfit information or it distorts it so as to make sense of it. This process of "rationalizing" the world goes on, up to a certain point. If the degree of conflicting information is too high (i.e., there is too much dissonance between what one believes and what one perceives) then that most stupendous phenomenon suddenly occurs: we change our minds (literally)!

The problem that rational people face, then, is twofold. On the one hand, the brain has evolved a powerful mechanism to avoid changing its mind too often, which means that people will stubbornly continue to believe all sorts of nonsense because it is less painful than to radically alter their worldview. On the other hand, we know that the problem is all the more insurmountable when the data fed to the subject is poor, and unfortunately most of what modern human beings are exposed to by the media is pure garbage.

However, there is no need to despair just yet. Understanding the problem is a necessary (though by all means not sufficient) step to solve it. Realizing where people's stubbornness (and sometimes our own) comes from will help not getting unduly irritated or downright nasty when facing patent irrationality in our fellow human beings. And empathy is one important step toward connecting with anybody. The second message of modern neurobiological research is perhaps an old one, but which now comes with the weight of evidence: education is our (slow) way out. What we need to do is to keep educating people, to feed good information to the brain's interpreter. If neurobiologists are correct, most brains will come to understand reality if properly nurtured. It is ignorance which provides the necessity for just-so stories, with all the tragic consequences that follow when people defend a flawed worldview at all costs.

For the full article Google "Split Brains and Paradigm Shifts".

Simply put, do not expect your arguments to work like magic bullets. Even if your argument was 100% perfect it would take time and continual presentation of the data to change a person's mind.

[Dermezel]

Note: One third "option" is to de-industrialize and significantly reduce the size of the population. That option is genocidal.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I understand and accept that there is a certain elegance and validity to your point, Dermezel.

However, it is all too easy to sit back and say 'we will be proved right in the end'. Of course, I subscribe to the same Socialist ideals as you (i'm sure) do, and will for these to become praxis as soon as is possible. The problem is that the majority of the British population do not, and are not at a stage where they are going to embrace Socialism at face value, yet are most certainly at a stage where their class consciousness has been somewhat heightened, and there is certainly veritable unrest with the Capitalist system.

Just seems to me that there is no quick path to Socialism as of yet - you cannot run before you can walk. We should try walking first; mass spoiled ballots, on a common theme, would signify this 'walking' - a bona fide show of disquiet with the Capitalist system. From this, more sophisticated ways of undermining and indeed defeating Capitalism can be put into practice, but for now, we must get the ball rolling, so to speak.

[The Ungovernable Farce]

Ballot-spoiling is largely as useless as voting, but I do think campaigns to promote actual effective alternatives to voting (i.e. direct action) are a lot more worthwhile than standard lefty election campaigns.

[Dermezel]

I understand and accept that there is a certain elegance and validity to your point, Dermezel.

However, it is all too easy to sit back and say 'we will be proved right in the end'. Of course, I subscribe to the same Socialist ideals as you (i'm sure) do, and will for these to become praxis as soon as is possible. The problem is that the majority of the British population do not, and are not at a stage where they are going to embrace Socialism at face value, yet are most certainly at a stage where their class consciousness has been somewhat heightened, and there is certainly veritable unrest with the Capitalist system.

I'm not arguing that this will be some sort of magic bullet, but they accept Darwinism. They accept it because it is Scientific Fact, and has been proven so countless times despite being extremely unpopular and threatening to powerful authorities.

The problem is most socialists don't approach Marxism the same way. They do not understand that it is the Centralization of Capital, not the Labor Theory of Value (Marx didn't even prove this theory, Ricardo did) that is the Natural Selection of Marxism.

You prove that, you prove it scientifically, present the theory and the mountains of data to prove it, and you leave them with little choice in terms of social utility. Just show the evidence like this:

Marx claimed capital would centralize and accumulate (http://www.gaiaonline.com/gaia/redirect.php?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marxists.org%2Farc hive%2Fmarx%2Fworks%2F1867-c1%2Fch25.htm) over time, a claim which has been vindicated by several lines of empirical research and data:

http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html (http://www.gaiaonline.com/gaia/redirect.php?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.endgame.org%2Fprim er-wealth.html)

http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/Courses/so11/stratification/income&wealth.htm (http://www.gaiaonline.com/gaia/redirect.php?r=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.faculty.fairfield. edu%2Ffaculty%2Fhodgson%2FCourses%2Fso11%2Fstratif ication%2Fincome%26wealth.htm)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9503EFD8153EE033A25753C3A9679C94 6697D6CF (http://www.gaiaonline.com/gaia/redirect.php?r=http%3A%2F%2Fquery.nytimes.com%2Fgs t%2Fabstract.html%3Fres%3D9503EFD8153EE033A25753C3 A9679C946697D6CF)

Print that. Print a brief description of Marx's theory, print the mountains of statistical and factual evidence. Everyone knows corporations are dominating the market anyways. Everyone knows the economy is centralized. But what they really need is vindication by scientific evidence, not just intuition. They need it explained and proven for it to be truly convincing.

The only alternative economic theory is marginal utility, which is proven to be untestable:


The Austrian school of economics is very popular in libertarian and anarchist circles today. Part of that school is its methodology which favors building up theories based on axioms of human action. The Austrian school says that these axioms need no empirical verification. I believe any methodology that rejects empirical testing of theories is flawed. Once the scientific revolution reaches the social sciences, any school of thought that denies the empirical method will have to be abandoned just as happened in the physical and biological sciences. If libertarianism and anarchism are bundled together with Austrian economics, our politics will be disgraced along with Austrian economics and we'll receive the same respect as creationism or flat earth geography. Apparently there are economists who call themselves Austrians but are not orthodox in that they accept some empirical testing of their theories. I believe any economic theory must be tested however, not just some peripheral theories, and I will argue for this general rule.

When we study economics, we are dealing with observables. The prices of products, exchange rates of different national currencies, and the employment rate are all things we can observe. If we have a theory about how such things work, we can test that theory's predictions with what we observe and tell how good the theory is based on how close our predictions came to reality. A theory about economics will either make predictions about reality that can be observed or it will not. If it does not make any predictions that we can check, it is a useless theory and cannot tell us anything about our world. If this theory does make predictions, it is meaningful because its claims about the world can be found to be true or false. If this theory continuously succeeds at making correct predictions, we say this is a good theory, at least in the situations that we've tested it in. If there are parts of our theory that can be discarded while still retaining all of our theory's predictive power, those parts should be discarded.


Of course advocates of the Austrian school have objections to these arguments and insist that the empirical method is not a good one for economics. I emailed one of them following an article of his I saw at mises.org which rejected the empirical method. He replied to what I wrote with these things, which are pretty standard arguments from the Austrians.

He started by saying that some things, like the law of demand, are set in stone and that if it wasn't true, then we'd have to throw out all our textbooks because we wouldn't know if the law of demand would be true the next day. But this is bad reasoning because if all our textbooks are wrong, we are best off admitting it frankly and starting anew instead of lying to ourselves to make things easier. Also, if an economic law has passed numerous tests and made many true predictions it is very reasonable to believe it will continue to do so, the very reason we empirically test a theory is to find out how reliable it is.



He stated that one of the central tenets of Austrian economics is that the laws of human action are not falsifiable. But falsifiability is an absolute requirement of a scientific theory. If a theory makes predictions about reality, it can be falsified. All we'd have to do is find what predictions it makes, then test if those predictions are true. If a theory makes predictions that turn out to be false, we know our theory is wrong. Our Austrians seem to be saying that if we observe one thing and our theory tells us something else, we should ignore what we just saw and continue believing in our theory. Our theory won't be falsifiable only if it makes no predictions, and if it makes no predictions, it's useless for anything.



He later said that the premises for human action come from the long-term observations of human behavior and don't need to be continually tested to see if they're true. So he's saying here that situations have been observed where some law appears to hold, in fact numerous situations have backed up the validity of the law. What's odd then is that he seems to be saying that if some other situation comes up that contradicts this law, we should ignore this because the law has held up in so many situations before this happened. But of course this new situation isn't any less valid than any of the others, it happened and if we're interested in the truth, we can't ignore it. Part of scientific reasoning is that we try to prove our theories wrong instead of right. We put them to all sorts of tests to see if they always make correct predictions, and if they continuously pass our tests, we call them good theories and depend on them, though of course they're always up for more testing in other situations and to be tested more accurately. If we have a theory that passes all of our tests for a long time, but then we find a new situation where the theory fails, we don't throw out the theory altogether. Instead we say that the old theory is valid under the circumstances where it was successfully tested before and invalid under the new situations. We'd study these new situations and come up with new theories that explained economic behavior there. Finally, we would, if possible, find one theory that could give correct predictions under the new and old situations without any artificial separation between the two.
He also says that the laws of economics are true because of a certain understanding of how human beings act. The problem with this is that the theory that is built up is nothing more than an idealization of what human beings are. It is how a certain person believes that human beings act, but it's a fairly informal way of trying to figure things out and really isn't something we can depend on. So once we have this economic system built up from our understanding of how humans act, we have to scientifically test it to find if it is true.



These arguments are typical of the Austrians.http://anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=381

The problem is a lot of the Marxists and Socialists themselves do not realize this. They never studied the Law of Centralization, they do not know of the mountains of data that prove this is a fact not just an opinion. So all they do is promote socialist moralizing propaganda. And the general public looks around and sees different groups with different political and economic opinions. They do not see one group scientifically vindicated and one group as proposing poppy-cock pseudoscience.

This may not work entirely, plenty in the US still believe in creationism, plenty believe in psychics. But among the educated and open-minded these are non-issues. Marxism is different because nobody realizes it is just as well proven as Darwinism with respect to its central economic theory.

People will rebel against authority, and opinions, and political movements, even religious ideas. But only a fool rebels against something like math or gravity. Once a case is scientifically proven in a person's mind it has far more force then a moral argument or any belief based on propaganda or faith.

[ls]

As a left communist I am of course an abstentionist, however, I don't buy the argument in favour of spoilage put forward by some leftists, anarchists and left communists.

Before we deal with the possibility of a large-scale spoilage campaign, we have to establish whether or not spoilage is preferable to abstention plain and simple (here I won't consider the question of electoral support for any party, on this question we are all ready in agreement).

Zanthoros asks the correct question when they ask "What exactly would this achieve?". To this El Granma replies:



The question that follows here is: What is it's goal? i.e. Why make a show of dissatisfaction? What could it achieve?

I can not find a satisfactory answer to this question and I don't think one exists. I think the support for spoilage campaigns has it's roots firmly in activist protest culture and reformist mythology which believes in the possibility of making change through the democratic action of atomised citizens.

What would you say about protesting near the main voting spots (I'm not sure if this would be allowed for long tbh)? A valid tactic?

I know that National Front NS skinheads used to attempt to scare people away from the booths so they'd get councillors in, obviously the objective shouldn't be to intimidate people in any way here, but do you think it's a worthy way of reaching the working-class in general?

[Alf]

First, I agree with NR's post - the idea of 'spoiling the ballot' somehow seems to be tied up with the view that the atomised citizen in his booth is still able to express his 'democratic rights'. It's the very idea of the ballot booth we have to challenge - it's not just that the parties who stand in the elections are all bourgeois but that representative parliamentary democracy is a fraud. I can understand that in some countries you are forced by law to go into the ballot booth and in such cases spoiling your paper might make sense, but that doesn't apply very often.
In response to Is, I would not be against, say, handing out anti-election communist material outside polling booths; in situations of heightened class struggle, if elections were being used as a direct diversion from the struggle, then groups of workers in struggle might think it necessary to organise demonstrations outside polling booths (or, at a still higher stage, shut them down altogether).

[Die Neue Zeit]

in situations of heightened class struggle, if elections were being used as a direct diversion from the struggle, then groups of workers in struggle might think it necessary to organise demonstrations outside polling booths (or, at a still higher stage, shut them down altogether)

I have no problems with legal and illegal demonstrations (and a comrade suggested combining this with spoilage), but what you said at the end tantamounts to Bakuninist tactics.

[Niccolò Rossi]

I have no problems with demonstrations (and a comrade suggested combining this with spoilage), but what you said at the end tantamounts to Bakuninist tactics.

In what way?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Trying to shut down polling stations is a more civil version of bombing an empty embassy.

[Niccolò Rossi]

Trying to shut down polling stations is a more civil version of bombing an empty embassy.

Not at all. There is an essential difference. One is the act of a band of conspirators. The other is an expression of militant workers in struggle.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The other is still a conspiracy if those militant workers have not won over majority political support from the class as a whole.

[Niccolò Rossi]

The other is still a conspiracy if those military workers have not won over majority political support from the class as a whole.

Aside from the fact that this sort of fethism for the democratic principle ultimately only serves the ruling class, I think Alf's example is clearly not in contradiction with this.

[Die Neue Zeit]

As I said before, "majority political support" is not logically equal to "majority electoral support." Parts of the latter may be empty protest votes, "vote because my parents voted this way," "vote because it's the [Insert political brand or label] party," and so on.

"Majority political support" can come from strikes (and also spoiled votes and, yes, especially the very concept of party membership), but Luxemburg and Sorel before her were, like Kautsky after 1909, wrong in putting all the eggs into one basket.

[We can talk back and forth about "fetishism for the democratic principle" vs. "conning the working masses to power from a minoritarian standpoint," but given our firm positions on either side, I think it would be fruitless.]

The Bolsheviks obtained their majority political support from the working class before ousting the Provisional Government, retained it even as they didn't have "majority electoral support" in the Constituent Assembly, but then resorted to a series of shutdown coups in 1918 (the real Bolshevik coup d'etat) after losing majority political support (in at least some soviets).