ON VOTING

A Ritual of Justifying Biases

By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.

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The Democratic and Republican parties are the official political organizations of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC). They prosecute the interests of US capitalism’s ownership class by managing the dollar-area empire, both parties vying for each four-year contract to operate the national government. These two parties are called “the major parties” because they share a joint control of the political apparatus, extending to all three branches of government: executive, judicial and legislative. The relative proportions of managerial power allotted quadrennially to the major parties reflects the consensus of political opinion among the many constituencies making up the MICC (adjustments may occur through mid-term elections). It is important to remember that the domestic component of MICC capitalism is economic class warfare, capital’s unrelenting attack on the working class (“labor,” “wage earners,” or most accurately “wage slaves”), and the foreign component is imperialism by militarized dollar-area economics (see my previous article, “Oiling The War Machine” http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia07112008.html).

Voting for a major party candidate is an endorsement of MICC capitalism, both in its domestic assaults on popular democracy and the working class, and in its imperialistic aggression. Expressing a preference for a Democratic or Republican candidate is accepting MICC capitalism with an endorsement of one of its two proposed management styles. The major parties have been called collectively a “duopoly.”

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So, you have three choices: 1, vote for the empire led by John McCain with a lumbering regressive politics; 2, vote for the empire led by Barack Obama with sophisticated regressive politics; 3, vote against the empire.

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Objectively, I realize that Ralph Nader will not win the election. So, is my vote wasted? Since it is my vote and I prefer to apply it to the support of the people who carry on the platform of ideas I would wish this nation to adopt, no. I understand how presumptuous Democrats may wish to commandeer my vote, with the excuse that as a leftist I should be a captive of their party, and vote for O’Clinton to spite McBush. They will wail that my vote for Nader is a wasted vote, perhaps even contributing to a Republican victory. But, I repeat, I will never again vote for war, and I will never again endorse the empire. I don’t care if I’m the only person in the country who votes against the empire. That will never be a wasted vote. “I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don’t want and get lots of it.”

If I can do this, then so can you, and so could a majority of US voters, once they wake up.

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