[lbo-talk] Low voter turnout

[Marvin Gandall]

There is a rather long but interesting essay in the latest Spiked Online by
Jennie Bristow on the general trend towards low voter turnout in all of the
advanced capitalist countries. Some leftists, particularly in the US, have
argued that political abstention is somehow an an advance over political
participation because it represents the masses' inuitive rejection of sham
electoralism and the illusions fostered by purportedly reformist parties -
the Democratic Party, in particular.

Bristow shows that low voter turnout is not unique to the US, nor is it
primarily atributable to the programmatic "betrayals" of these parties.
Rather, it's a symptom of the current weakness of the working class, which
explains why the Democrats and labour and social democratic parties have
increasingly separated themselves from their traditional trade union and
social movement base and further adapted to the parties on their right. For
US leftists prone to "American exceptionalism", it would suggest that the
best way to understand the Democratic Party and the relationship of the
American working class to it is to examine the parallel weakness and
corresponding relations of workers in other countries to their own reformist
parties, and to draw such distinctions as there are between the Democrats
and the social democratic parties within that broader international
framework.

Bristow's thesis is:

"General Elections, in Western society since 1945, were fought out over a
clear political divide: the politics of left and right. How a person voted
was intimately tied up with who they were - where they lived, what job they
had, their friends and their family. It was not an act to be carried out in
isolation from the rest of one's life: voting, and how you voted, was as
much a part of everyday life as was politics.

What changed was not the advent of the fanciful 'post-industrial society'
but the defeat of the working class and the end of the politics of left and
right. The defeat of the official labour movement in the 1980s, symbolised
in Britain by the failure of the miners' strike, alongside the end of the
Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, indicated the end of the road
for the left and brought to an end the historic battle between alternative
visions of society."

Nothwithstanding Bristow's echo of Fukiyama that the historic battle between
left and right has been "brought to an end" rather than suspended, her
attention to the material underpinnings of voter abstentionism is worth
examining by those who centrally blame the failure of the left to attain its
historic objectives on a "crisis of leadership" at the political level.

Full: http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/0000000CA9A1.htm

Marv Gandall