Steve Reads

I’m in the middle of a debate with a friend, who responded to one of my points rather harshly. The point was this: that it’s possible to cause a lot of social change without voting. To me, this is nearly axiomatic: if Rush Limbaugh manages to convince millions of people that feminists are all a bunch of “feminazis,” then that’s an enormous change in the way that people interact with one another. That’s on the level of social mores. Or look at the presence of TV shows like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and Will & Grace, each featuring prominent gay characters; the widespread — though by no means universal — acceptance of gay people is a profound political change, which happened without a single shot being fired or a single vote being cast.

Or to take another example: the Internet allowed news of JetBlue’s malfeasance to spread quickly and incite a boycott, then cause a lawsuit. All of this happened without a single vote changing. This is political change caused by technology influencing the market. Much of our political power is economic, because I doubt there’s any coherent way to partition economic power from political power.

Or take it down one level: the ability to bring a major corporation like JetBlue to its knees is remarkably empowering. This sense of empowerment is a political change on its own, and is of course likely to spread into all sorts of other areas.

The area where I think my friend was most upset with me was in my claim that downloading MP3s can be an expression of political power, regardless of whether the downloaders mean it to be. If — as is the case — everyone who wants MP3s can get them, and if — as I suspect — MP3s are essentially uncontrollable, then the recording industry will have to change. Even more, from my perspective: the recording industry is shooting itself in the foot in a lot of ways, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It’s galvanizing a huge opposition, and for one thing turning formerly apolitical MP3 downloaders into empowered political downloaders. The MP3 issue is becoming political, even if it wasn’t to begin with.

And in my view, all issues are political. I’m obviously not the first person to make this claim. I believe it was Howard Zinn who first said that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”: you’re moving whether or not you think you’re being impartial. That’s why the government, for instance, could never choose to remain neutral on a labor issue: by not taking sides between labor and capital, it’s implicitly throwing its weight against the weaker party. If the government refuses to step in and protect striking workers, Henry Ford has a free hand to club them. Neutrality is impossible.

Viewed this way, my big point when debating against my friend was that voting in local elections is only one of many ways to get power, and might not even be the most important one. To me, voting is one of the least empowering political acts, in terms of its psychological effect on the people. Voting is a way of funneling all political change into a quadrennial event. Sure, in the meantime you can send letters to your Congressfolks, but that’s just another way of saying that “your power only comes at the behest of the elected.” Our power is much greater than that. We have more power than we know; by convincing us that political power is the same as the power to pass bills through Congress, we ignore all the places where we can cause change. I don’t know whether this is deliberate, but it’s a natural consequence of our political system.

Why not instead view every little choice we make as a political one? I mentioned to my friend: buying free-range chicken is a political act — or at least has political consequences. (I’d probably say that an act is political if we intend the consequences that come out of it, but that’s just semantics with no pragmatic difference.) Buying fairly traded coffee can be a political act. I use Linux for political reasons, and doing so has political consequences (a more general adoption of democracy in product procurement, a shift in how people view their relationship to their products, a general feeling of empowerment). I write this weblog in the hope that — quite apart from any votes that I might sway — others will agree with me and the gospel will cascade; this is a political blog, in other words, both in content and in intent. If possible, I buy albums from non-RIAA artists. Living a life in accordance with deeply-held principles is hard, and I confess that my actions aren’t 100% (or probably even 75%) in accordance with my ethics, but the goal is to move in that direction.

Adam Kessel made some points about this years ago, in the context of the Critical Mass bike movement. Power doesn’t come from writing letters and sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone to do something for us. Power comes from doing it. To assume that voting is the only way — or even the best way — to get power is profoundly disrespectful to the true strength of humanity. It is a slave mentality.