Elections: A Trap for Fools. by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1973
First Published : Jean-Paul Sartre, «Élections, piège à cons», Les temps modernes , n° 318, janvier 1973; Source : Good Morning, Revolution HTML Markup : for marxists.org by Zdravko Saveski , 2021. In 1789 the vote was given to landowners. What this meant was that the vote had been given not to men but to their real estate, to bourgeois property, which could only vote for itself. Although the system was profoundly unfair, since it excluded the greater part of the French population, it was not absurd. The voters, of course, voted individually and in secret. This was in order to separate them from one another and allow only incidental connections between their votes. But all the voters were property owners and thus already isolated by their land, which closed around them and with its physical impenetrability kept out everything, including people. The ballots were discrete quantities that reflected only the separation of the voters. It was hoped that when the votes are counted, th
