Does rejecting electioneering mean that anarchists are apolitical?
No. Far from it. The “apolitical” nature of anarchism is Marxist nonsense. As it desires to fundamentally change society, anarchism can be nothing but political. However, anarchism does reject (as we have seen) “normal” political activity as ineffectual and corrupting. However, many (particularly Marxists) imply this reject of the con of capitalist politics means that anarchists concentration on purely “economic” issues like wages, working conditions and so forth. And, by so doing, Marxists claim that anarchists leave the political agenda to be dominated by capitalist ideology, with disastrous results for the working class. This view, however, is totally wrong. Indeed, Bakunin explicitly rejected the idea that working people could ignore politics and actually agreed with the Marxists that political indifference only led to capitalist control of the labour movement: “[some of] the workers in Germany . . .[were organized in] a kind of federation of small associations. . . ‘Self-help’. .
