Why We Refuse to Vote: An Anarchist Response to Critics

From back cover:

“Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives…We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.”
-Voting is Not Harm Reduction: An Indigenous Perspective

“To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing one’s own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey.”
– On Voting

“Anarchists distinguish themselves by asserting a direct and unobstructed link between thought and action, between desires and their free fulfillment. We reject all societal processes that break that link—such as private property, exchange relations, division of labor, and democracy. We call that broken link alienation….anarchists are anti-political. We are not interested in a different claim to alienated power, in a different leadership, in another form of representation, in a regime change, or in anything that merely shuffles around the makeup of alienated power. Any time someone claims to represent you or to be your liberatory force, that should be a definite red flag. We are anti-political because we are interested in the self-organization of the power of individuals. This tension towards self-organization is completely orthogonal to democracy in any of its various forms.”
An Anarchist Critique of Democracy

Why We Refuse to Vote pdf

Against Community Building, Towards Friendship

From back cover:

“The idea of community is held in such high regard by anarchists that it’s eerily reminiscent of USA liberals paying fealty to the “sacred ground” of their nation’s capitol. Community is something consecrated and unassailable to anarchists. It’s the bond that binds us to our fellow true Against Community Building believers. It gives us belonging, direction, purpose, safety, all those good things.

But does it really?…”

“Community always seems to be the spark that ignites an inferno of hierarchy and domination. So much horrific oppression and death has been justified in the age of Leviathan by attaching it to “the good of the community”. I’ve seen so many people, including anarchists, sweep all manner of abuses under the rug in a desperate attempt to “protect the integrity of the community”. Somehow the community is always put before the people who inhabit it, as if a precarious eidolon drawn from thin air and held together by nothing but collective resolve is more sacred than life itself.”

Against Community Building_Toward Friendships pdf

Identity and Power

From back cover:

“We are against identity because we think it holds this oppressive reality together. Our identities as marginalized people are our inheritances that separate us as inferior. For centuries, distinctions of inferiority have been used as the building blocks for exploitation and control. Identity is the infrastructure of our suffering and would need to be shattered if we wish to see oppression demolished.

Presently, identity pits us against each other instead of against the system’s infrastructures. Scrambling to tally distinctions of how oppressed we are in comparison to others and what we deserve to be compensated doesn’t end our exploitation and only keeps us distracted from making the necessary calculations to sabotage the infrastructure holding domination in place.”

Identity and Power pdf