Is that the electoral register in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?

The first rule of electoral politics is that it’s easy to make trite statements against the whole thing (see below). It’s easy because the main political parties have made it easy for us to do that. In all the emphasis on the marginal seats, the floating voters, the attempts to appease the other side’s voters, it seems like none of our leaders is that bothered that the biggest demographic is now the non-voter.

Now on the one hand, this does induce weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth for liberals. They feel bad (not much new there). They feel really bad when it turns out that the worse off are statistically more likely to be non-voters. Their solution to this is quite simple. Working class people should be made, by law, to “attend polling stations”.

On the other hand, some (but by no means all) anarchists will smugly claim all this as a great victory for their brand of politics. “Don’t vote – it only encourages them.” And quite right too. However this means some (but not all) anarchists are able to sit back and slag everything off or make symbolic protests like going up mob-handed to say hello to the G8 summit from behind a far-from-thin blue line.

That, or play samba badly in supermarkets.

The problem with all of this is that people don’t vote for all sorts of reasons. Because they don’t give a fuck. Because they DO give a fuck. But the simple (non)act of not voting doesn’t actually do anything to move things forwards. It might make some liberals feel uneasy. It might even make Blair feel uneasy to know that his brand of politics has put record numbers of people off. But this unease doesn’t actually change the fundamental power relations at the heart of societeeeeeee.

Self-defined anarchists represent a tiny minority of people who do not vote. Most people who refuse to participate in the electoral process do not have a citizens’ militia tucked away in their spare room. They don’t feel like a revolution is imminent, possible, or even desireable. They might have more immediate problems to sort out before even getting to that.

They might even vote (on a local level) for someone who dealt with those problems, or at least recognised that they existed. They might welcome the prospect of people engaged in politics who didn’t just come round to their estates every 4 years and asking them to put a cross in a box. They might even get involved with something like that. It might, slowly but surely, lead to greater things – not in a glamorous, sexy or adrenalised way, but something that could be monitored, measured, reflected on, and improved…

It might be the case that large scale revolutionary upheavals require large volumes of people who are engaged in some way, and not a tiny minority of punks, politicos and students who can talk the hind legs of a donkey about working class autonomy, but shy away from actually running these ideas past anyone not in their own little counter-cultural ghetto.

It may be that the best way to get people to engage is to try and achieve small things that make a difference to them and their neighbours or workmates, rather than calling for a revolution, or spending lots of time talking AT people about the problems of other people thousands of miles away.

It may be that you could produce a brilliantly-worded pamphlet denouncing ideas like that as being reformist and distracting the working class from their historic mission of achieving global communism (whose continued absence is causing a bit of disquiet, it has to be said).

You might find that knocking on doors and asking people about their problems is more rewarding, for all concerned, than presenting people with brilliant manifestos which really nail down the global condition and have great new buzzwords in them.

You might find it knackering, all this. It might do your head in. You may find yourself having to deal with all sorts of grey areas which you don’t have a smart-arse answer to already. But it really doesn’t look like anyone will do it for you, so…