Comments Elsewhere

scott: ‘Good point, Rad Geek. I should’ve put “world governments” instead of “the world.” Admittedly, this entry wasn’t written from a very anarchist perspective.’

Well, fair enough, but I’m still not sure why. I mean, maybe “respect” for elections from other world governments will end up with better results for freedom and justice, and maybe it won’t. Part of it probably has to do with what “respect” means in this context. (If it means, e.g., not going to war over it, sure. If it means taking seriously the idea that the election makes the resulting coalition a proper collective bargaining agent with which to dicker about the rights of all Palestinians, probably not.)

I think the important thing here is that government elections don’t place any legitimate demands on anyone, and so aren’t “respectable” on their own account — at the very most they may be strategically useful for getting other people who buy into majoritarian popular sovereignty to hold back on doing nasty things that they might otherwise do. But I think that one of the most important insights in anarchism is the observation that at its very best, that’s just a means to exchange a more obnoxious band of pirates for a less obnoxious band of pirates. And thus that these kind of appeals need to be taken with a heaping helping of salt, when they are taken at all.