Voting is not harm reduction – working towards other futures

Thinking Through Methods of Engagement, Resistance, and Refusal

The liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society.

— Manning Marable

​​Language is a minefield. It has significant influence on how we think and what we believe. So remember to be CRITICAL.

— Mohammed El-Kurd

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Before I began writing this, I wanted to simply say — with no footnotes or caveats — that voting is not harm reduction. This election cycle, I’ve been struck by the wave of voices, some well-meaning and some opportunistic, declaring the opposite. What’s most concerning isn’t just the statement itself, but how it co-opts the language of harm reduction — language rooted in struggle, mutual aid, and community care — and repackages it in service of a liberal electoral project.

Harm reduction is not metaphor (yes this is indeed a play and hommage to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s Decolonization is not a Metaphor (2012)). It is not a catchphrase to be hauled out every time there is an election to soothe collective disillusionment of voting as an act that creates change and is not part of reifying systems we should oppose. It is a radical practice that emerged from queer, Indigenous, Black, disabled, and poor communities — people navigating state neglect, carceral violence, and medical abandonment. It has always been about survival in spite of state systems, not thanks to them.

To invoke harm reduction as a reason to vote — particularly within the current settler colonial, carceral, capitalist context — is a disservice to the people who built harm reduction from the ground up. It rebrands electoral participation as a life-saving act, while leaving the state’s own role in manufacturing harm largely unexamined.

Election cynicism is okay, and election pessimism is a must. We have witnessed genocide, the mass eviction of encampments, unfulfilled promises to end boil water advisories, relentless violence against land defenders, and corporate partnerships with grocers, among countless other injustices.

In Canada, the invocation of harm reduction in electoral discourse often masks the state’s ongoing role in producing the very harms communities are supposed to vote against. From the Liberal government’s repeated funding of arms to settler colonial regimes, to its failures in addressing the opioid epidemic, to the empty promises of reconciliation while pipelines are forced through Indigenous territories — the gap between policy and practice is cavernous. Yet, each election cycle, we are told that voting for the “lesser evil” is a form of care. This logic flattens the violence of Canadian statecraft, and erases the work of those who build resistance outside of Parliament — Indigenous land defenders, disabled organizers, Black harm reduction workers, and migrant justice collectives. In Canada, like elsewhere, voting is not harm reduction. It is, at best, a delay. At worst, it is complicity repackaged as care.

Harm Reduction is Rooted in Refusal

Harm reduction originated from and was influenced by social movements and grassroots strategies that took shape in the 1960s to 1980s (Harm Reduction Coalition, n.d.). These strategies were not aligned with state systems — they were often in defiance of them. Syringe exchanges and safe consumption spaces didn’t arise from policy memos; they emerged from urgent survival needs, from communities that knew no one else was coming to save them.

To say voting is harm reduction is to imply that voting is an act of care and resistance on par with these grassroots interventions. It is not. It will never be one.

It might be a tactic, it might be a tool, and for some, it might feel necessary. But it is not a substitute for organizing, for community care, for mutual aid, for direct action. And it should never be marketed as such.

Audre Lorde warned us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This is a quote people love to use in social movements and for good reason yet the minute there is an election for some it dissipates. Voting, often framed as the most accessible tool of democracy, is one such tool — designed within and for the architecture of the same systems many of us seek to unmake, undo, and unravel. When we’re told that voting is the only way to create change, we’re being asked to build liberation with instruments crafted to sustain empire. Lorde reminds us that true transformation demands different methods, different dreams — ones rooted in radical imagination, not assimilation.

On Co-optation and Language

Marable's insight—"[t]he liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society"—remains crucial. Time and again, we have seen language evolve and distort as it moves through different contexts.

The liberal project has long relied on absorbing the aesthetics and rhetoric of resistance. It packages abolitionist demands as reform, feminist ethics as branding strategy, and now — harm reduction as voting strategy. In each case, the effect is the same: defanging the radical edge of community practices to reinforce the very systems they sought to dismantle.

As Mohammed El-Kurd reminds us, "[l]anguage is a minefield. It has significant influence on how we think and what we believe," urging us to approach every discourse with a critical lens.

There’s a responsibility that comes with language — especially language that holds historical, embodied weight. So here are a few questions I offer to those using activist and organizing language in the name of “getting out the vote”:

• Would those who fought for these words — through grief, resistance, and collective action — be okay with how you are using them now?
  
  

• What does it mean when language forged in syringe exchanges, underground clinics, mutual aid collectives, and occupied streets is used to justify supporting a settler-colonial, carceral state?
  
  

• How are you honouring the histories and communities that shaped these practices? Or are you flattening them to ease your own discomfort?

I look also to Edward Said here, personally I encourage people to look to Said’s other work and writings.

Particularly Said reminds us, theory travels—and often mutates when it travels. What begins as a radical, context-specific intervention can be diluted or co-opted as it moves across institutions and geographies. Harm reduction, once a radical, community-rooted response to criminalization and state abandonment, is now increasingly used as electoral branding—stripped of its political edge and repackaged into sanitized talking points.

Homonationalism, too, began as a sharp critique of how queer identities were folded into state power and militarism, but has since become flattened in some circles into a marker of being “acceptably gay” in Western terms. Even Orientalism, originally a critique of imperialist knowledge systems, has traveled in strange ways—sometimes invoked to defend nation-states built on slavery, oil, and displacement. Language, like theory, shifts meaning as it moves—especially during elections, when radical terms are softened, emptied, or wielded in the service of maintaining power. As Suren Pillay writes, “the challenge is to hold on to the specificity of [a theory's] initial interventions… while we simultaneously put it to work in other places, at other times, for different uses.” The task now is not just to track these shifts, but to ask who benefits when theory is emptied of its teeth. How do we ensure organizing language does not stray too far?

What Futures Do We Imagine?

To insist that voting is not harm reduction is not apathy. It is an insistence on clarity. It is insistence on precision. It is a refusal to romanticize the mechanisms of empire and settler governance. It is a call to think beyond survival tactics that reinforce the status quo. It is a yearning for a politics that does not start and end at the ballot box. It is a desire to name precisely what voting is and is not.

The future we need will not be voted in — it will be built, slowly, deliberately, together.

I fear a future where, like DEI and other attempted interventions, harm reduction and other collective language and offerings travel to spaces that are electoral and corporate. Where our language of care is sanitized and weaponized, used to uphold the very systems we sought to dismantle.

We are not interested in symbolic gestures or performative politics. We are invested in reimagining and rebuilding — not branding — our liberation. The futures we imagine are rooted in refusal, in relation, and in responsibility to one another. They do not live in ballot boxes or campaign slogans. They live in our mutual aid, our joy, our land back, our abolitionist dreaming, our disruptions of extractive logic, our everyday acts of interdependence.

We close with no finality, only a beginning: a commitment to keep imagining futures that do not ask us to trade in our values for temporary safety. Futures that are ungovernable by colonial desire. Futures that are truly ours.

Reading List: Voting Is Not Harm Reduction – Critical Indigenous and Left Perspectives

1. Voting is Not Harm Reduction: An Indigenous Perspective (Zine)
   A radical zine by Indigenous Action dissecting the limits of electoral politics and the narrative of voting as harm reduction. It explores how settler colonial structures persist regardless of who's in office and calls for direct action and self-determination.
   
   

2. Audio Zine: Voting is Not Harm Reduction (Podcast)
   A narrated version of the above zine — great for folks who prefer listening. Offers the same sharp critique in audio.
   
   

3. Voting is Not Harm Reduction: A Student’s Viewpoint – The Carletonian
   Alé Cota writes on the disillusionment of youth and BIPOC voters within a U.S. university context.
   
   

4. Is Voting Really Harm Reduction? – Briarpatch Magazine
   A thoughtful counterpoint from Canadian publication Briarpatch, questioning but not entirely rejecting the harm reduction framing of voting. This piece invites readers to have nuance and broader strategy discussion.