Every four years, as we come around to that carnage strewn and rotting battlefield known as “the presidential election cycle,” the question is raised as to whether this is a zone we’re obliged to enter. It’s a hot debate, hot as in ’emotional’ and, frequently, as in ‘full of much hot air.’ It’s also a debate which more and more of us are inclined to be done with.

Many, despite being haunted by a growing specter of doubt as to its efficacy, still throw down for an inflated ticket on the electoral ride to inevitable disappointment. Deeply committed to credos and traditions traceable to books or their parents, or more meaningfully invoking a morally righteous connection to an assortment of suffragist histories, they’ll rant that we absolutely must vote, that not to vote would be to violate the most precious, hard won right of every citizen! Or in a more partisan vein they’ll warn that to not vote is to endorse the enemy, the Republican or the Democrat depending on one’s viewpoint.

The other side then chimes in, “Vote? Why bother? What good does it do?” And to these, the voices of cynicism and frustration, we can add the voiceless who have nothing to say at all about participating or not. Generally tagged “apathetic,” their hopelessness or indifference has so totally removed them from the quadrennial melee and the broader social arena that they couldn’t care less about its outcomes or what they imply for them personally. Most of them, of course, are more beaten-down victims of a hopelessly venal and indifferent system than hopeless or indifferent at heart.

We, in rags of light, are much like them. We, too, place no hope in and are completely indifferent to election outcomes. We are beaten down. But we are also not like them, not like these faintly smouldering ashes, nor content to be the collateral damage of clashes of, by and for the powerful few. We are on fire.

We’ve all seen sham elections. We who aren’t in total denial know what happened in Florida in 2000. But the focus on such a massive fraud as this – and, to be sure, it was a fraud – inexcusably diverts us from the fact that elections which offer no choice for a better world, which critically don’t offer us a way to avoid irreversibly burgeoning poverty or to escape the ecocidal terror imposed by the ruling, profit-addicted class, are all sham elections.

We are neither overlooking nor insensitive to those historic battles for the right to vote which have been hard fought and bloody, lasting decades if not centuries. It took nearly 100 years for us to completely overcome the exclusionary participation of property owners in the electoral arena. From the Seneca Falls Convention, taken as the concerted beginning of the campaign for women’s suffrage, to the passage of the 19th Amendment, more than 70 years passed by. And while it was codified in the US Constitution that blacks could vote in 1866, it would be another century before the first wave of Jim Crow subsided with the Voting Rights Act. It is essential to note that none of these victories, partial or complete, were the consequence of a vote. They all came by way of mass, popular struggle if not outright war.

Today, the ongoing systemic disfranchisement of blacks is consequent upon what one author has called “the new Jim Crow”, and masses of people justifiably seething over this injustice have been hitting the streets in protest. While we understand the roots of rage against this reconfigured, prisons-for-profit institutionalization of centuries old racism, we also have to ask, ‘To what end can this new battle bring us?’

It seems to us that this rage has today been matched by the extent to which the fulfillment of the demand for voting rights would be a dubious victory at best, a right to affirm, along with the rest of us, the oppression of the entire multiracial working class. If only for the possible sake of the disfranchised coming to gain the realization that voting doesn’t change a thing, we support their struggle to vote. And we only hope that in victory they will reflect that it was a struggle, not a politician, which delivered their reward.

Beyond the electoral arena, beyond struggles like the one presently engaged by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition for felon refranchisement, for example, we must, however, engage the democratic struggle against institutionalized racism and for equity even in a reformist context if we ever hope to disengage the undeniable linchpin of American Capitalism which racism is. The maintenance of a black underclass which otherwise will forever hold in place working class division must be struggled against not simply as the basis for racial justice in our rhetorical “democracy” but as the foundation for the radical democracy we envision.

Struggle, not voting, is now more than ever the only way to avert degrees of devastation we must agonize to imagine lest we become the witting antagonists of posterity. To vote Republican, Democrat, third party or write-in your Aunt Sally is to legitimize a system which is bankrupting us not just domestically but maintaining systems of oppression globally, crushing democratic movements, creating environmental catastrophe and human neglect tantamount to genocide, and guaranteeing resource wars for profit to the last drop of viscous value. It is to guarantee the ongoing upward redistribution of wealth as fraudulent banks, with a judicial seal of approval, steal our homes by the thousand every day; as young people enter a world of shriveling possibilities because their labor isn’t profitable; as college debt becomes an insurmountable burden for an entire generation while it pumps capitalized air into next year’s bubble.

Not voting, on the other hand, while at worst a reflection of cynicism or frustration, of hopelessness or indifference, at best can be a positive act and politically conscious rejection of a system geared to the undoing and veritable enslavement of ourselves and more so of ensuing generations.

Voting or not voting – and can this be emphasized enough when what we’re facing is annihilation! – is not, however, the problematic crux of our present and future society, of our yearning for radical democracy (δημοκρατία). Vote or don’t vote, neither option has anything to do with engaging in a struggle we now see as critical, a struggle for democratic unity and, ultimately, a struggle to throw off an ages old oppression against which voting will never stand a chance.