Abolish Election Day!
27:02 Monday | 17 Brumaire CCXXXI | November 7 2022 | Waxing Gibbous Blood Moon 🌔🔴🌕🌖 | Election Day | 18 Hours 51 Minutes to polls close
Its Election Day here in the Apartheid States of UhhhmerCIA (is that clever? i’m not sure but that’s a a fun creative writing, at a very monadular? strata? ecological niche?, letters and syllables and acronyms ) and we all know what that means, which is why I will announce it to you all as if upon learning it for the first time, as is the custom of such things: the time has arrived for a sort of meta? or at least recursive? resetting of the national political calendar, a gawky 2, 4, and 10 year thing with its almost Romanesque commitment to frequent elections, who of course elected the vast majority of magistrates and tribunes for a single year max., (I so want foldable text, uggh squarespace give me footnotes ) to be fed its thematic data, (just listening to discusion of hard and negri’s empire, postmodernism, dataism, transparency as paramount epistmeic-ethic virtue value, in politics, … interesting to drive that idea to the end of its road and off the cliff, an ai company which promises to +5666666666
lol thx fox heart emoji
transparentize the conciosus and unconcious motives of all politicians
political imaginary, surveillance of the masses through statistical dream analyissi (SDA, Stattistical Analysis of Dreams and …)
president remains, as does the chief justice of the supreme court, speaker , pres pro tem, vice pres
but new offices rise to the positions of significance
)
and to give us our new Narative .
My prediction for tht narative will be that the dems lose any votes, seats, chambers, offices, powers, prestige, real or imagined (probably a lot real but hey whose counting the point isn’t to count everytime a democrat looses an office, its to take a drink) will be blamed on !. Biden being too COMUINISTIC by reluctantly signing off on a modest debt jubilee (see Deuteronomy 15:1, also the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, a book name I always a ssoci a te cia ica ica aic ai cai CI AI If Angels were to Govern) and entering into the poison snare of AOC COA CO2 CO YOU C U C SEE YOU SEE YOU TOO 2. nancy pelosi will be reminded of a pledge to only serve a certain number of terms as Speaker by a freshman congressman hawt on the heels of an overfunded military contractor insurance lible agent turned CANDIDATE For AMERICA blue dog victory and then nancy will begin to melt like a violently sped up and deepfried IndianA Jones Temple of Doom wax figure, expanding impossibly to fill corridores and committee chambers, satanic altars and Backstage Cooridores of the Real, a star imploading just to the ulterior side of Reality As We Know it, before snapping back into place as if reverting after only a brief relapsing ripple against the edges of the coveneant which binds her, into her standard vampiric grinning form, the latest addition to her war-laundering flock muffled and gagged and dragged into a dark room deep below the Capitol, to emerge less than a news cycle later, fresh rough surgical scars on the crown and lower left hemisphere peeking cheekily from thick slabs of day time TV makeup to mumble platitiudes out of sync with his lips and inflexions of his throat, meaningless to the point of coming back round to being over-full of meaning and then lapping its own oversaturated i-logos-ian sense 3. a raucous mumbling of bipartisanship and errotically veiled screams for cross-party violence will emerge from the Old and Famous Camps of the American Far Right and the American Very Very Far Right respectively, embodying as they do two mutually dependent, mutually opposing maladaptive coping mechanisms for the rampant Paranoia which is nothing more nor less than the rather intuitive product of the Ongoing And Eternal End Of The Wolrd.
anyway, these periodic, oversimplistic, temporally rickity, causually (intentionally) obscurful, ((as Matt Christman puts it a series of “baffles” and baricades to change, yes, but in the way that plumbing is designed to stop wateer and also allow water to flow at the same time, just opposite directions, i.e. change which administers, facilitates, mediates, meditates, the extraction of value from and the delivery of control upon the working class by the ruling class, then the system will permit and even require with impossible speed and ease relative to the modest, oh so painfuly, dreadfully, vaincharitioiusly moddest goals of the billionaire patriarchial-liberal AMericcan left, would never even dream daring to ask permision to imagine using on their own pet projects, gun control for example, or the distribution of abortion-related goods and services, et cetera. )) Moments, Events (if we are to believe the poli-stat junckies of the Nate Silver ilk)) wherein alll the prediction models must now be tested and the prettiest bell of the ball crowned princess of the masked prophets (scandal from a couple elections cycles back) and see which one came closes to (and thereby deserves its fortunes to be continue to be read ) the version of the Real events you decide you will understand yourself to have observed come the Big Night.
we ought to Abolish the whole thing.
Abolish Elections? well, some of you would certainly like me to go down that pipeline and i certainly truck with advocates of sortition and fluid democracy and direct democracy itself i find the arguements adjacent to The Tyranny of Structurelessness (which is, as I understand it, Precisely the Tyranny of the Structure which of Course Exists You think you just get rid of structures by out-lawing them? did you outlaw the law too? will you outlaw the ghosts next—ohhh they’d love that—which state that you' have the option of getting rid of something only to the extent that you’re willing and able to declare it having gotten rid of, which is to say, before or during or after you and different people, in paralele and cross hatch to the process of getting rid of it, will set specific metrics and genreal principles defining what it means for a certain amount of it to be gotten gone. and once you declare it gone, new opportunities are given to it as well, opportutnities to haunt and remember and incite memory and incite you to haunt yourself back. Mark Fisher took a Rousseaun line by declaring the goal not to be to capture the state, but to subordinate it to the general will, which in the terms he’s arranged i find myself sympathetnic for, ie maintaining certain formal mechanisms of leadership not just for their own utility (often enough they aren’t nearly as useful as they are by default of our hierarchy worshiping systems of thinking and doing give them credit for) so much as the fact that if you decline to put power in a box ex leui affecting Power’s Absence, it may be more likely instead to run about without the benefits of prior construction, palpitation, reading, contextualization. But for me, I’d rather unleash the creative powers of abolition towards an entierely new reimagining of communal, industrial, cultural, artistic, mechanisms of political choice, viz. election, choosing.
One Such Creative Abolotion—Get rid of election day in the sense of elections being specificly temporally bound, or at least so mainly bound. 1 day in 2 years for the House, or 1 day in 4 years for the presidency, is 1 in 730 and 1461 respectively. A Senator is analyzed but once in all of 2191.5 days. horrifying. and yes yes you have little nibbles around the edges—early voting, or (critical to my adhd) advance mail in balloting—but they all add up to just one day, just with a longer then a day long landing track. No, what I’m saying will be radically, i.e. quantity to quality transforming: let every day be election day, without any day being afforded the je ne sais quoi powers and pressures of a Day of Choosing (god sounds like the title of a very by the book dystopian horor short story).
Imagine: everyone in the community, lets for simplicity of comparison say the US, has an account in a voting system, the same as they do now, but instead of their string being strumed once every couple of years, a ballot sent out, and sent back in or not sent in, you have a continiously updating ledger wherein you affixed your affirmation and/or opposition for any number of particular candidates, party, or coalition of parties in government. on any day, you can walk to the post office and update your preferences. at any point in the day, you can access them by computer terminal, by smart phone or public infrastructure interface, and signal your displeasure by withdrawing your ballot from your patron or entering into a new alliance. Every Hour, perhaps, the radio might rattle off any changes in seats that a given party has seen that day or week, and of course if a scandal breaks and sudden shift in power occurs, then in the very middle of a speech the composition of the legislature could change such that an official is removed from office and new commissioners invested with powers which themselves could fluctuate at great sensitivity.
constitutionally, i subscribe to a skeptical, i suppose even conservative view of Executive Power, especially where it seeks to set itself up as an independent prevailing node rather then a discharge, a port, a manifestation. certain execuative rights may be necessary or expidient, but among them a strong right to prevail upon an office by refernce to an old and discredited mandate, even or the sake of continutity of office, does not rank high on my priorities. such instant recall is of course one of the constitional political principles Marx specifically observed and prescribed in light of the Paris Commune, but i am suggesting that not only should the possible time for elections be expanded, but the actual, practical everyday incorporation of election be instantiated. this in comination with its application not merely to individual politicians but to delegations, conferences, federations and coalitions, according to the philosophies of proportional representation, upon a foundational stratigical-ethical orientation to solidarity and the building of institutions as bridges, gates, and bells, as well as our own labrynths, tunnels, spires, temples, altars, shrines and monasteries infused in their dedication and function with the rhythms of democratic revolutionary life.
of course, the lack of guarantees to designate a clear executive means that execuative power, in absence of a box for the demon to perch in but also in absence of reform and reoriginization which wards the demon off, may just as well set up shop all around and amongst the idle boxes, and to this we must solve the riddle of the vanishing act—the coincidence of absence and nonexistence which phenomologically threatens to turn into identity and thereby make a fatal assault on that squemish taboo: Object Permanence. so where to put that execuative power?
in the absence of prevailing elected officials, i think the randomly chosen parts of the legislature—being still subject to mechanisms of account, but different, perhaps cross-entangled manners—might serve as the steadying office, perhaps we can make the Head of the Republic a Committee or Prythanes composed of a rotating mix of industrial, regional, social delegations, to whom executive power is returned in a limited, “caretaker” capacity, but at the advantage of being the default point. they could have the ability to appoint co-commisars from among their own ranks and from the political factions in the congress, and by extention the political factions dominant in and manifest as industrial unions, communes, traditional indigeneous social networks, etc etc. the co-commisars would still oversee the functioning and administiring of departments, commission, programs, mediations, and other infrastructure of a socialist political infrastructure, but the fact that their appointers were themselves only given power as the result of a temporary prevailing coalition or default rotation would mean that local conditions as well as broad consensus among the socio-economically interdependent structures within the jurisdiction of the Congress would tend to prevail in terms of which commissioners, whose assignments could perhaps for added decentralization be partially randomized, be authorized and reauthorized to act in the name of the Congress.