Obama vs. the Revolution — What Changes Do People Really Need? (Part 1)
Posted by Mike E on October 6, 2008
In August, before the two presidential conventions, the Kasama Project in Chicago held a forum on the national elections. Mike Ely opened the discussions by presenting some initial thoughts. We will be post this talk as a series over the next few days.
by Mike Ely
Part 1: How to build a revolutionary movement in a time of Obama?
If you want radical change at this moment in history, you have to deal with the situation (in the U.S.) where large numbers of people are hoping (and sometimes believing) that supporting Obama can create “change you can believe in.”
And in keeping with the culture and politics of our Kasama project, a lot of what I am going to do is lay out questions, contradictions, facts and some proposals – so that we can have a discussion on a much higher level here between us.
And I’m hoping we have people here supporting Obama, and they feel fully comfortable to speak among friends – and engage views.
Let’s start here:
This is not your usual election for one simple reason: A Black man is within reach of the U.S. presidency. This is not politics as usual. And we can’t treat it that way. It is not merely a black face on literally the same old shit.
Black people (and others) believe that a Black president would mean something in this country – and we need to understand what they think (and whether Black and white people think it would represent the same things) and think through how true it is.
So here’s my plan. I’d like to talk about two clusters of questions, and put forward a specific analysis sharply to help frame our debates and our common actions:
(1) What’s actually our analysis of the Obama Phenomenon? What does he stand for? What’s the likely impact of this candidacy and even of his presidency? What really would it mean?
(2) How should our regrouping revolutionary movement relate to supporters of Obama? How do we talk to them, challenge them? What would the engagement be — and how will that change as Obama’s position changes and his politics become manifested? How do we build a revolutionary movement in the context of this election and beyond?
Let’s start by looking at the impact major events have on what the people think and do.
Events that Light the Sky
I often think about asking people: Where were you when the revolution met you?
What were you doing? What did you actually see and understand that made you think some profound change is needed? What kind of ideas were floating around? What macro events were hitting home — setting the terms, putting everyone through some changes.
Badiou talks about a major “event” defining (really redefining) everything — it is for him a central concept in a whole distinctive philosophy he has developed. And without getting into the idiosyncracies and insights of his discussion– many of us have seen events lighting the sky, and setting the terms and direction for political changes.
In the U.S. in the sixties really the killing of Martin Luther King was profound. Millions of Black people said “Okay, I get it now, they’re gonna kill him; he’s nonviolent; they’ll never give it up. So we have to go to another level.” For another generation 9/11 played a different role — re-rooting an aggressive American nationalism among some sections of the people… and so on.
There’s an individual process by which each of us come to our understandings, obviously, And then there’s the larger macro political process through which large numbers of people are being dragged into political life, or radicalized, or taugh specific lessons together. And, of course, different people (and different groups of people) respond differently to the same events. (the same 1960s that produces the previous wave of revolutionary movement also produced the religious right.)
And we have to understand that, because one of the things we want to break with is an increasingly religious model of political evangelization where we would end up just winning people in their ones and twos.
we need that kind of conversation, of course — that’s what we’re doing here today, talking to each other – face to face. But we also need to understand (and creatively anticipate) the macro processes by which significant numbers of people are opened to new political understandings — especially radical and revolutionary views and break loose from traditional politics.
If you look at the close Gore loss to Bush: it was that kind of event where millions of people learn the wrong lesson. They learned the lesson that if you have a third-party candidacy you’ll just help the right wing; your vote actually counts, that you get to pick the president. All of these were untrue on many levels. But, it is an example of a macro political event that people came out of with a summation. and it’s actually, to me, somewhat criminal that the revolutionary movement really didn’t actually engage that process in a way to resist and oppose that…and didn’t even speak about that in that way.
So, I do want to talk about that millions of people are going through this process; they’re being sucked into this undertow and that is beyond our control. That’s very objective to us. This relates to what I want to deal with first:
What is actually going on here — in this moment, in this election?
What does Obama represent? Why are they running a Black guy? What will it mean if he wins? What are his policies? And then how do we speak to people caught in that rip-tide? How would one develop a revolutionary movement in that context? That’s the two points I want to raise.
First off, I don’t really think this is an “election as usual.” and that’s sort of itself polemical.
It’s just not all the same just ‘bourgeois candidates, bourgeois election’. It is a heavy thing for a Black man to be within the reach of the U.S. presidency. And anyone who wants to go out among Black people and say ‘this isn’t a big deal,’ will quickly find out that they don’t agree and won’t agree. I think it’s important to break down how they view it, and you know and I don’t just mean Black people as a ‘they’, but how people are viewing it, and what it’s actual significance would be. And then sometimes the answer is given that the problem with it is it’s just a Black face being put on the same old system. And I’d like to get into that too because I think it’s more complicated than that.
Jose M said
You know, I am really glad that this was brought up. Mainly because it is in sharp contrast to the RCP’s method in saying that this is “politics as usual” and that Obama is just a prettier face on a rotting empire.
Now, I do think there is a lot of truth to that. That Obama is fundamentally a representative of american imperialism and he shall continue its horrors around the world – and here.
BUT, this view also underestimates, as Mike wants to highlight, that black people and those who believe in Obama’s candidacy disagree, and that he has come the closest a black person has to leading this white supremacist beast. We need to take that into account and shape how we can relate to these people. This is one of those times when Mike’s formulation of calling the RCP’s methods “hire your ideas, hire mine” comes into sharp view. It seems there is little mass line involved, little interest in seeing what the people really think, and more of an aggressive attitude to feed “the truth” to the people.
The reality is that ive used that example of “same old shit” with people before. And it is wrong. I acknowledge it. Ive used it as an easy way out to make a broader point: this system isnt for us.
I think Ive said this before elsewhere. Anyways, for the sake of this great discussion, Ill say it once more. It isnt genius, its actually a bit obvious, and please feel free to rip up this theory.
Anyway, i think that if Obama gets elected, it will serve as an important “event”. People will come to see that the change promised did not come, will not (and cannot – but thats up to us to explain). I think that it is similar to MLK’s death in that people will say “well, if obama, a man we vested so much trust in, has failed, us, what will it take for a better world”? If Mcain gets elected, things would be different imho. People will see the fucked up conditions, the wars in the middle east and say “see man, we shoulda voted for obama, shit woulda been different.” And these attitudes lead to radically diff directions. The former towards a possible more radical stance (provided we are a magnet) and the latter a still bourgeois democratic stance.
This is quite a crude example. I also need to take into consideration how the forces of revolution can come into play, regardless of the outcome.
Theres something else to take into consideration if Obama wins. I think it can lead to a new attitude towards the legitimacy of america’s “democracy.” Obama winning can give people the insight of “oh look, a black man is leading american, now we know why the US is the beacon of world freedom.” Know what I mean? It can also lead to that.
thats all for now.
Jose M said
correction:
when i say,
“I think Ive said this before elsewhere. Anyways, for the sake of this great discussion, Ill say it once more. It isnt genius, its actually a bit obvious, and please feel free to rip up this theory.”
i am talking about the paragraphs UNDER not ABOVE. I dont support the RCP’s “fire your ideas, hire mine” crap.
Nil said
Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about.
Mumia Abu Jamal’s essay that was posted here, I think, is on part of it. The very fact that the elites are willing to float a black man as president is not ‘business as usual’ right there–Abu Jamal suggested it meant that they knew the US was entering a period of decline, comparing to the rise of black mayors in American cities only when the American cities were really in trouble.
Obama’s candidacy is also further sort of a representation of capitalist globalization’s continued _retreat_ from white supremacy as an organizing principle. There will increasingly be elites in all nations (geographic and ethnic) and immiserated poor in all nations. Does one black guy as presidential candidate prove that? Of course not. But it is something that’s going on that we have other evidence of, and Obama is a symbol—and a message to the racist white working class from the white elite that racial solidarity is on the way out for ‘multicultural’ capitalism. (See _Night Vision_ by Butch Lee for analysis of some of the ways race is changing in contemporary capitalism; the book is 10 years old but still illuminating).
It also represents the understanding by (a major segment of) the coordinating elite that Bush neo-conservative unilaterial imperialism has failed. It decreased, not increased, American power—or perhaps rather, failed to stop the decline that has material causes beyond Bush’s “mistakes”, but Bush’s responses are not helping (American power). Time to try something new, or something old.
Carl Davidson said
Mike asks:
An interesting question that gets somewhere, I think, at least for some of us.
I know exactly where I was.
I was sitting in a small rural rickety Black church out near Highway 51 in the Mississippi in 1966. It was packed with African American sharecroppers in their denim work clothes. Another young kid from Nebraska and I were the only whites there.
Stokely Carmichael was speaking, explaining why Black was beautiful, how their young daughters with nappy hair were beautiful, that they suffered from the lack of political power at the hands of a ‘white power structures,’ and that they needed ‘Black power’, political power in their hands, the hands of the masses of Black workers and sharecroppers, to break the back of it, to change their lot fundamentally.
The air was electrified, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
People replied affirmatively in typical Black church ‘call and response,’ sharecroppers and their wives rose to ‘testify,’ and I learned things about class and national oppression, about Black consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, that I never forgot.
If the days ahead we were beaten and teargassed, ‘buked and scorned,’ to use the words of the Black church hymn, for trying to affirm the right to vote, the right of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Fannie Lou Hamer to the ballot, in the face of the Klan, the Highway Patrol and the wealthy Mississippians in power.
But we finished our 250-mile freedom march in Jackson, MS, at the Capitol, and I, along with many others, were never the same persons again.
There wasn’t that much special about me. I was a fairly bright grad student from a blue collar ‘greaser’ background in Western PA. There were thousands of bright, young idealist white students who did this–Tom Hayden, Jane Adams, Dan Swinney, Lyn Wells, dozens of close friends of mine, and many, many more. And I’m just mentioning the white kids from the North, who were just an adjunct to the hundreds of thousands of Black youth from the South and elsewhere.
But to this day, we all share a bond, and often acknowledge it when we talk to each other.
We, from this ‘Deep South Freedom Marcher’ group, or whatever you want to call it, look at the right to vote, the need to exercise it, and especially the rights of African-Africans in this regard, in a different light than too many of those who didn’t share this experience, and who take these things far more lightly, or are indifferent to them. It’s seared into our brains.
We know that a Black man thisclose to the Oval Office is a very big deal, far different than any ‘business as usual.’ White supremacy, even as it still stands, will have been dealt a body blow, and will never be quite the same again.
More strategically, we know personally the people’s blood that was spilled to gain the ballot, and we’ll never turn back, and never belittle it.
Mike E said
Carl writes:
I think that is a profoundly undialectical and misleading statement. It needs to be broken down (logically and factually).
People fought and died for legal equality (i.e. for an end to the formally enshrined Jim Crow system, as a step toward actual equality and liberation). this took many forms — demanding a right to use bathrooms in buss stations, demanding a right to vote and sit on juries, demanding a right to sit at lunch counters, and end to separate entrances for Black and white. and beyond that, it was a fight against a century of lynch law, ruthless murder, mutilation and torture that back the system of semi-feudal sharecropping.
Does that mean that every specific and individual aspect of that struggle is of inherent transcendent importance?
Just because people fought and died for the ballot must not be used (in a demagogic and rather illogical fashion) to argue that we must accept the ballot as powerful instrument of politics, or that we must never “belittle” it.
By carefully and accurately describing the sham of the ballot we are not belittling those who fought and died for equality — we are carrying on their struggle under new conditions.
Just on the point of demagogy: Imagine if someone said “people fought and even died for the right to use bathrooms in bus stations, and so we must never belittle the importance of bus station bathrooms.”
If someone said that, anyone with a brain could identify the illogical nature of the statement.
But those with continuing illusions about balloting may not see the illogic when “bathrooms” are replaced by “ballots.”
No, the argument for voting, voter registration, and electoral politics has to be fought out in its own right — with a clearsighted analysis of the ACTUAL power relations. Claiming, with misleading emotionalism, that we are not allowed to “belittle” voting because people died for that right — well it is just demagogy. and it won’t go uncriticized.
The fact of the matter is the opposite: Black people won a considerable degree of “legal equality” by the mid-1960s. but they are still not liberated. This means we can sum up from the last 40 years of bitter experience that the bourgeois democratic goals of that earlier civil rights movement (legal equality, right to vote etc.) were not sufficient for liberation. they were important. they were just struggles and demands. We stand on their shoulders in many ways.
But the world has moved on from the demands of the Black people against Jim Crow. Yes, it was an outrage that Black people could not sit on juries in the Deep South. But now that black people sit on juries — do black youth now get justice in the courts?
there is a great deal of experience to sum up about the illusory character of voting (and other legal rights): Voting doesn’t give you power, it draws you into legitimizing those who hold power.
Mike E said
Jose writes:
Yes, the RCP’s approach typically has a “tin ear” — and no sense of mass line.
But as you will see in the parts of this series that will follow, my thesis is not just that we need to develop a creative style for speaking with people caught up in illusions. It is also that there is being fought out here (and in other places in society) different approaches for how U.S. society should be organized: is it to be a Whiteman’s Christian Nation, or a Clinton-style Multicultural society. I will argue that both of these forms would embody oppression and capitalism — i.e. that they are wedded to empire, and rooted in the intense exploitation of a proletarian class inside and outside the U.S. — but they are not the same program, it is not just “the same old U.S. white supremacy” that is being prettified. The U.S. ruling class is struggling over how to handled some intense democgraphic changes, and their need for an exploitable proletariat.
More will come in the following parts of this series.
Keith said
Mike asks this question: “Why are they running a Black guy? ”
I think that the formulation explains a lot. It is the formulation of a conspiracy theorist. I am not trying to be disrespectful. But the formulation is the outcome of a kind of political analysis that assumes that there is some group, “they,” with omnipotent powers.
Once you pre-suppose a “they” who controls everything then you can’t make an analysis. This is why the RCP and to some degree the most vocal trends on Kasama believe that the revolution does not need to be organized. They think it will just **happen**. There will be some kind of crisis and everyone will come running looking for Avakian. To lead them. I will bet life that no one looks for Avakian in a crisis.
The revolution must be organized. If you have some better way of organizing outside of electoral politics then explain it. I can explain how working in electoral politics provides a path to revolution and as the crisis intensifies it is even clearer.
What is the non-electoral path to revolution?
Mike E said
Keith writes:
The problem with your obervation is that i don’t think there is some monolithic “they” that decides everything. (and neither does the RCP, by the way.)
The process by which a presidential candiate is chosen is a complex one, and the various institutions (funding committees, primaries, media vetting) have some relative independence in picking the victor.
there is no conspiracy.
However, we can still step back and say “why did powerful institutions and power centers of this system unite in choosing this particular senator as their candidate for president? Why did they think there was an advantage (to them, to their system, to the direction of U.S. society) to take this step? Why did they risk defying and even stirring the still-powerful forces of white racism in open combat? What are their political objectives here?”
Because there ARE real political objective behind the decision by powerful circles, funders, and king-makers of the Democratic Party.
The problem with Keith’s approach (which quickly emerges from his comment) is some people think Obama was chosen because “the people” (i.e. the voters) wanted him. And so (for many people) the emergence of an Obama is not a decision by key institutions and power centers of an oppressive system — it is the result of grass roots organizing. and that (in turn) is used to argue that obama’s candidacy is a victory of the people that should now be built on, and it should be used to argue that the electoral arena is a key arena for organizing people (and even where they can exercise some power).
No. People are organized in the course of the elections — but they are organized within the framework of this system, its choices and its ideological framework. In the U.S. there has been no way of organizing people for radical politics within the election (at least not since the death of Jim crow.) this may not be true in all countries, but it is certainly the case here in the U.S., unless the situation changes in some major ways.
I am glad Keith raises the question:
That is exactly the discussion and creative work that lies directly before us — we are looking for ways to dig into this, deeply, inside the Kasama Project (as an organization) and more publicly (on this site for example).
There are no quick easy answers “there for the taking” — but there is quite a bit to say to get the process started.
Carl Davidson said
To MikeE:
I don’t see anything at all demagogic about saying ‘never belittle’ the right to vote, especially for the oppressed and the working-class generally, whether under bourgeois democracy or any other system.
The fact that Black oppression and capitalism is still a fact of life is beside the point. Whatever gains we’ve made or defended since the 1960s, had both mass struggle AND the Black vote as critical instruments.
The fighters for each class and trend will view democracy in their own way, however its distorted or enhanced it will be or may be under any system. If you want to hear demagogy belittling it, just go to any anarchist meeting and you’ll get an earful.
But I’m not one to ever belittle it, and if that’s to be a line of demarcation between us, so be it.
But then, I’m one who thought the title of Avakians’s ‘Democracy, Can’t We Do Better Than This?’ was foolish and dangerous. Now that he’s into his cult, we see where he was coming from.
TellNoLies said
Mike,
I think that just as Keith’s framing ignores the critical role of various “powerful institutions and power centers of this system” in the selection of Obama, that your approach denies the role of actual popular mobilization in how elections work in the US. It is absolutely true that before a single vote is cast in the primaries, Obama was vetted by “powerful institutions and power centers of this system,” from the boards of major media conglomerates to the Council on Foreign Relations, and the electorate was then presented with a menu of several “serious contenders” and several more second-tier candidates who either served to pull certain constituencies into the electoral process or who were kept in reserve.
The outcome of the primaries, however, was not at all certain. It was an actual contest within a highly constrained framework, in which the voters actually decided. This is still a rigged game in the sense that all sorts of mechanisms are in place to prevent, say, a Dennis Kucinich or a Jesse Jackson from ever winning the nomination. But the point here is that there were also “powerful institutions and power centers of this system” that supported other candidates (and some big ones that still support McCain), and the question was finally PUT TO THE VOTERS. People voted and their votes decided that the Democratic candidate would be a Black man with experience as a community organizer who opposed the war in Iraq rather than a white woman closely tied to the DLC who supported that war.
The reality of this is critical to understand if we want to really understand how this rotten system legitimizes itself and how the ruling class episodically resorts to “the will of the people” to prevent its own internal conflicts from busting out into open warfare. I have no illusions that this process can be ultimately be wrested from the grip of the ruling class, but we need to look at the process in an all-sided way as the product first of jockeying within the ruling class to designate a cohort of acceptable candidates and then a real fight for public opinion between competing blocs within the ruling class.
Keith said
Just for the record, I have been asking what is the non-electoral path to revolution since the Spring. Not the slightest hint of an answer has emerged.
Maybe you could at least explain how you differ with this joke from the RCP: “Build public opinion, seize power.”
Eddy said
I beg to differ. If a political party is not a conspiracy, then there is no real definition to the word.
How is it that many, perhaps most, of the left have lost perspective about parliamentary bourgeois democracy, and especially the flavor practiced in the US?
Abstentionist slogans have evolved over the last several decades, but they are largely gloss; a view that describes the selection process as deceptive and comprehends the candidates fielded by the Republican and the Democratic parties as if they were NOT representing a specific political PARTY which itself represented a specific strata of the society.
The candidates are treated as free agents, and the socio-economic nature of the parties they represent is down-played or ignored; as if their agency was not inseparably linked to a specific program.
(c.f. Where is the class analysis of Ralph Nader’s party?)
Unlike some other imperialist countries, where the parliamentary landscape is populated with a range of distinct ‘class’ forces (albeit generally big capitalists and petit-bourgeois or other middle strata), in the US the monopoly capitalists have been able to largely confine parlimentarianism to the ‘two party system’.
I can imagine how Barack Obama rationalized his career path (in service to specific ruling strata), and can also imagine that he identifies with that class. McCain’s career path is even more obvious. But the fact remains that both of these agents are very real (not ‘virtual’ or ‘figurative’) representatives of two parties of the biggest bourgeoisie.
That the two parties can mount the stage and shut out nearly every other voice is very significant (they create public opinion in order to retain power). But their agents are not acting in some atomized manner.
Obama does provide a fresh face to imperialism, one that is more insinuating than any current alternates within his party or the other one. I suspect that the support for his candidacy (within his party and among the ruling class) has a lot to do with that perceived quality. It plays well ‘at home and abroad’ right now, for some fairly obvious reasons.
TellNoLies said
Why I Am (still) Going to Vote for Obama
First, I want to say how much I appreciate the discussion here of the Obama campaign. I think most of us, regardless of what we are going to do on election day, feel the theoretical poverty of the revolutionary left’s response to the Obama campaign. Kasama has been one of the only places where I have found serious attempts to grapple with the question even if it hasn’t produced the sort of breakthrough we might want. The debates here have forced me to clarify my own thinking, to move from an instinctive position to one that is more thought out. I have been forced to rethink and sometimes discard reasons for my initial support for Obama. At the end of the day, however, I think my initial instincts were correct.
Before I explain why I will be voting for Obama, I want to explain the reasosn I have rejected.
I am NOT voting for Obama because his campaign is “building a movement.” While this may be true in certain respects, it is also the case that the campaign is training millions of people in BAD politics, in a fawning adoration of unaccountable leadership, in the habits of regurgitating talking points in the service of immediate electoral expediency, and so on.
I am NOT voting for Obama because his inability to deliver on the hopes he has raised will inevitably radicalize his supporters. There is nothing inevitable in politics and there are just as many reasons to expect that huge numbers of people will be willing to give Obama enormous latitude, and that the gambit that his election will relegitimize this system in the eyes of many will, in fact, work.
I am NOT voting for Obama because people “fought and died for the right to vote” though this is, of course true.
I am NOT voting for Obama because I think there is a clear road to revolution through electoral politics.
There are other reasons I am no longer convinced by, but these are the most important ones in my view. So why am I voting for Obama?
I AM voting for Obama because this election is, among many other things, in fact a referendum on the current system of white supremacy in the United States. The fact not only of Obama’s blackness, but of his embrace by the Black community, and of the McCain-Palin campaign’s predictable resort to whipping up white racist anxieties has made this election a de facto referendum on the question of the full equality and capacities of Black people. That it is referendum framed largely in terms that we might reject does not make it any less a popular vote on the most central obstacle to the unity of oppressed people in the United States.
Mike has argued elsewhere that we should vigorously denounce the racism of the McCain campaign without falling into the trap of supporting Obama. But frankly I can not see any more effective repudiation of McCain’s racism (and that that has underpinned the electoral strategy of the Republican partyy for 40 years) than the biggest possible landslide in favor of Obama. No leaflets we write or conversations we have will deliver the sort of body blow to the psychic apparatus of white supremacy in the minds of white working people than an unambiguous Obama victory.
This is not to suggest that an Obama victory will mean an end to racism in the United States, only that it will decisively mark the formal end of an old racial order and the opening up of struggle over what the new order will look like. In many ways the recent naked appeals to racism by McCain and Palin should be seen not so much as the desperate last acts of an already defeated campaign, but as the opening salvos in the fight that will follow an Obama victory. As Fred Klonsky writes on his blog, PREA Prez (http://preaprez.wordpress.com/):
TellNoLies said
Ooops, I still don’t have the hand of this XTML stuff. The Klonsky quote is:
“These aren’t just desperate moves made by a campaign that is sinking fast in the polls. These are people who are preparing for life after an Obama victory and are beginning to organize now. Economic pain for working people is not going to end on November 4th or even in January. Organizing fear and anger and attempting to direct it at a black president and a potentially progressive dominated congress is their plan. History has seen stuff like it before.
That’s why winning isn’t enough. We have to beat them good.”
TellNoLies said
If you don’t get the high stakes involved in this, check out this:
ACORN Nevada Offices Raided
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/07/acorn_nevada_offices_raided.html
Jose M said
Thanks for the posts TNL.
Assuming that Barack Obama wins, then what? Ok, there is a clear delegitimization of white supremacy in the US because of his victory. I know you have also considered how his victory has the possibility of legitimizing the american political system in the eyes of many people.
What I want to get at is, where do we come in as revolutionaries? Where is our role in winning the people over to a systematic understanding of white supremacy?
Personally, I can see the reasons why you still support Obama, but I still do not, and will not. I wont support him even if it means a discredit to the long history of white supremacy in the US. I wont support him even if he promises free health care. It does not get to the root of the problem, and completely puts our responsibility as communists to the side.
Maz said
What about imperialist supremacy? Obama wants to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He values American lives above others around the world and believes he has a right to kill based on this. How could any internationalist vote for such a person?
irisbright said
TNL–
Thanks for putting your thought out position out there!
I have my own doubts about voting: I am very afraid of Palin–how she was basically picked for McCain in a high stakes election and the implications of that power if he is in office; and picking a supreme court judge. Which would mean losing Roe.
What about the other effect of an Obama win? People saying black people have no more obstacles now that a black man is president! But I suppose people already say that; it is a problem we have to deal with–exposing the systemic nature of racism, that it still exists.
Also, I thought Obama is intentionally, directly and strategically muting the reality of white supremacy in this country, and doing some serious harm in that.
irisbright said
I should say also: my comrades and I went to the State capitol for a pro-choice rally, which was basically an Obama rally. We had signs that said “Democrats capitulate to the christian right: abortion is not immoral or tragic!” and also “obama is not pro-choice enough” etc. A lot of young women agreed with the signs. But they see Obama as their only choice, and some of the reactions we got just showed that we just don’t make headway with a lot of people when we speak the truth about bourgeois elections. It is very frustrating. Who am I going to win over when I am talking to women who say: ‘Look–we can’t have another supreme court judge who is anti-choice in there.’ I mean, we are both saying ‘it is life and death!” This is the only remotely compelling argument I have heard to vote for Obama.
I mean, overall, Obama is the enemy–an imperialist, who wants to expand our wars in the Middle East. He said in the first debate: “America should never hesitate to use military force”.
I don’t know if I can support a referendum on white supremacy that is on the terms of the bourgeoisie.
N3wday said
The choice question is a hard one for me as well… It is the only fundamental thing that really distinguishes the two candidates from each other in my eyes. I can barely imagine the horror that would come with that right being revoked (having grown up when it has always been legal)…
Zack said
Isn’t it mostly true that the democrats have further and further capitulated on abortion over the years?
I’m young, so I’ll ask: wasn’t there a time when “abortion: legal and without apology” was not all that controversial amongst the dems? Today it’s “a sad choice” and something to “lessen.”
Jose M said
Assuming that Obama’s victory meant a defeat for white supremacy (or at least a statement against it), when one votes for Obama, you are not just putting in power what you want – you are also putting in power an imperialist politician who does downplay white supremacy in the country – and a man who will continue imperialism’s horrors.
n3wday said
Zack,
Not only did the stance on abortion change but the entire country has largely been conservatized since then. It’s not just a question of subjective opinion changing. I’m sure when those democrats were saying that they really meant it. The US went through massive upsurges where all kinds of things were coming into question, that was reflected in government. The opposite shift has occurred for some time now. It’s not only the opinion of the ruling class but also that of the ruled.
Keith said
perhaps you might consider the possibility that it is not the majority of people in the country, who currently support Obama, who are deluded, who have false consciousness, or who promote illusions. Maybe it is the ultra- (do nothing?) left, who are deluded, under illusions, and have a false consciousness. At the very least consider the arrogance of the explicit claim that the ultra-left has the answers (where these answers are we are never told, they are a secret like McCain’s plan to capture bin Landen). It is an arrogance that would even make the liberal elite blush.
TellNoLies said
Keith,
Can’t it be both? It seems to me that the majority of people in the US are plenty confused about a lot of fundamental truths about the nature of this system that most people on this site (including you I believe) understand more clearly. I remeber quite well when a moajority of Americans supported teh invasion of Iraq, for instance. Was it arrogant of me back then to oppose them? I don’t think most of the people here who are opposing Obama are claiming they “have the answers” as much as they are asserting that the Obama campaign doesn’t either. You are frustrated that people haven’t articulated a clear plan for an extra-electoral strategy for revolution in the US. But I think actually the spirit here is more humble than that. People feel a strong need for such a plan, but don’t pretend to have one. Your statements about the electoral road seem to imply that this strategy is simply “there for the taking” and if only the “ultra-left” would pull their heads from their asses they would be able to see it. This seems to me just as arrogant as the views that you (mistakenly IMHO) impute to the anti-Obama folks here. My sense is that people here are quite sincere in their search for a path to liberation in the context of the failure of previous projects and you might want to grant them a certain benefit of the doubt. I’m voting for Obama, but I think the perils of this course are very real and should not be dismissed casually.
n3wday said
Keith, I am going to assume that’s aimed at me. My own experience, and what I understand of the general sentiment of the democrat US pop (especially those in my area, the south) believe that ’safe, legal, and rare’ is in fact the best policy on abortion. I can’t escape the bumper stickers. Assuming what Zack brought up is factually accurate, there is nothing wrong with my statement. I actually believe objective conditions have some effect on the sentiment of the general population. There’s nothing arrogant about that (and slinging around insults really doesn’t help your case for that).
Um.. what answers am I claiming to have? Unfortunately the reason I hang around is because of the lack there of. I think many people, especially here, would agree.
You can present plenty of plans for action without them being any good.
And btw, most of the people here do a whole lot, ‘do nothing’ is really a baseless accusation. You say it because do nothing to you equals anything that you don’t agree with.
Carl Davidson said
It not too hard to figure out a revolutionary way to work in the election, but it’s a little late in the game. Do it anyway.
Here’s how we do it in Beaver County.
First, assess what the liberal-to-center Dems in office are doing, the local machine. They all went for Hillary, now they’re ignoring the ‘top of the ticket.’ They promote their own race, but tuck their tails between their legs. They won’t mention Obama on any of their lit or web sites. The most they do is show up at an Obama rally when they know they have a ’safe,’ ie, anti-racist, crowd.
So we pressure and expose them at every public meeting. We also press them on cutting off funds on the war and single payer, even if Obama isn’t fully on board. That’s aiming a blow at the regular Dems, as well as McCain. It’s also our independence and initiative vis-a-vis Obama.
Second, assess the local Obama campaign, which is NOT the same as the local Dems. It’s usually a few advanced Black workers, and a batch of young kids in their 20s, working their hearts out, 24/7, 16 hours a day.
We befriend them, teach them local conditions, teach them class struggle history, and they teach us a few things about today’s youth. We help them solve problems, like when local Blacks get into tension with them because there’s no money, or helping them get white union guys to meet and work together with young Blacks.
Third, assess the local trade unions. They run their own campaigns, separate from both the Obama kids and the incumbents. They go door-to-door talking directly to workers.
Join them on this. Help them sharpen the line on racism, and tie in the war. ‘Green Jobs, Not War Jobs’ came up in one of these. They all hate the war in Iraq, even if they’re divided on Afghanistan and other fronts. Talk about these, while you’re learning from them. Learn to practice the mass line when your team goes door-to-door. Identify the advanced workers, and distinguish progressive, middle and backward among the leaders. Keep lists and make friends for the future.
Fourth, and most important, do all of this in the frame of building your own independent mass democratic base organization. This is what you’ll building, not the local Dems.
It belongs to you and the working-class people and youth you bring into it. It’s line is more advanced, more strategic and stresses education around deep structural reform, Green industrial policy and economic democracy. It talks about Obama’s limitations, that while he’s our best shot in this election, he still a capitalist. In this context, you do revolutionary education with the most advanced on socialism as it makes sense. This mass organization is the group that you’re going to use to build wide alliances and wage class struggle and antiwar struggles with the White House no matter who is in it, and no matter whether there’s an election going on or not.
That’s the difference between how liberals and the left should go about this.
And yes indeed, it is a referendum on racism. And any referendum on racism will be done under this system, because as long as you need it, you aren’t going to get any better system.
Putting an Obama Yard sign in front of your house around here is an open declaration against white racism more than anything else, and the young white kids who wear Obama buttons and plaster Obama bumper stickers on the backs of their jacket do it exactly for that reason.
Forget wearing Orange; if you really want to wage some tough struggle, put ‘Vote Obama’ on you somewhere, go out among the masses of workers, and you’ll get all the struggle, along with just decent questions, that you can handle.
John Steele said
In news that relates to this thread, The New Yorker, has just endorsed Obama, its endorsement ending with these sentences:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/10/13/081013taco_talk_editors
The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.
TellNoLies said
John,
What, in your view, is the significance of this passage? I think its a tidy statement of the ruling claqss hopes placed in Obama. I guess my question is whether you think those hopes are actually likely to be realized under an Obama administration. I think an awful lot of weight is being placed on one mans biography as a counterweight to the structural crisis in US hegemony. This is not to say that Obama won’t give US hegemony a little juice at the outset, only that he isn’t magic.
There is a temptation in all this to see the continuation of the present course (represented by a McCain victory) as positive insofar as the empire seems to be going off the rails. I am deeply distrustful of this sort of “sharpen the contradictions” or “After Hitler, us” logic. My view is that as eager as we are to see a crisis that might turn into a revolutionary situation, our orientation should be towards the preparation of forces and defense of the conditions of legality that are most favorable to that task.
John Steele said
TellNoLies -
Sorry, I should have accompanied the quote with a little more explanation.
I thought the passage significant just in showing the hopes placed in the symbolic aspects of Obama as a figure of “mixed ethnicity” who might “be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them” – some of the aspects that Mike speaks to and analyzes in this and the succeeding posts in this series.
No, I don’t think the package of ruling-class hopes for what an Obama presidency could do to ‘reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home’ will be realized — not whatsoever, although as you say, it might give a little juice at the outset (certainly to a notable degree more than a McCain presidency).
On the other hand, I have no agreement at all with the idea of “sharpening the contradictions” through a McCain victory being any sort of goal for revolutionaries. That idea stems from an extremely superficial (and wrong) idea of how revolutionary situations (or situations favorable for revolutionary work, which is something different) come into being.
I really don’t think that revolutionary work in relation to this election consists in any degree in “taking a stance” with regard to the candidates, or urging people to vote for one, or not to vote at all. I think we should be doing what Kasama has been doing as well as it’s able, namely providing exposure and analysis as well as a forum for real discussion, while attempting to develop a real understanding of the dynamics of the world today, as well as a theoretical structure, that will be adequate to the revolutionary practice that’s so needed.
redflags said
TellNoLies: what makes you think people are free to discuss their work? On the Obama campaign or not?
We’re not all at such liberty, some of us who aren’t voting “get voted” anyway. That’s how the system works.
TellNoLies said
Redflags,
I understand that not everyone has the same liberty as Carl to talk about their mass work. I also understand that a few folks are compelled to participate in political activity they oppose. That said there is still a value in the sort of concrete examples Carl offers (for mass work, but not for revolutionary work), and I think the total absence of of such examples on the abstentionsist side IS a reflection of the real difficulty in turning that posture into a concrete program of action, both generally but especially in the particular situation of this campaign. Right now at least, abstentionism is cutting (some) revolutionaries off from the political life of the masses and that is reflected in the kinds of stories that can get told and used to illustrate arguments.
n3wday said
I have to agree with TellNoLies. As someone who mostly takes the absentionist side of things, I think there is a real difficulty in articulating mass work that’s significant, and doesn’t rely on just holding out until a revolutionary crisis that will rocket us up into the public sphere in a ‘telescoped’ way (to borrow the language of the letters).
I think, if we agree that elections aren’t the way to go, we need to start generating some innovative ideas, on this forum. That’s the type of discussion I was/am trying to open up on the “Living Species Disappearing… What Will We Do?” thread.
Mike E said
TNL writes:
well, that is not my view. What is currently cutting revolutoinaries off from the political life of the masses?
It is mainly the lack of a serious, creative, national revolutionary organization. If we had such an organized network we could act on our politics — including on our approach to bourgeois politics and elections.
Now it is true that the bourgeoisie offers everyone an immediate way to be ‘active” politically: they have countless, well-financed, highly promoted venues and forms for political involvement. But so what?
Since we don’t have an alternative, opposing, revolutionary aparatus — are we then forced (by a process of elimination) to join up with our oppressors and their representatives?
No. I think we should take this (relative, conjunctural) impotence as a spur to developing new revolutionary politics (”reconceive as we regroup” ) and not do the suicidal thing: take what few forces we have and convince them to join up with various left-liberal projects (under conditions where this can only be done fully under the banner of capitalist politics).
In fact these situations are not that unusual.
Just to pick one: Millions of working people were recruited for the trenches of world war 1. In those trenches, literally under the gun, there were often very few openings for conducting revolutoinary politics in an organized way. But what does one do in such situations? One finds the ways to build collective organization along revolutoinary lines, to identify and unite the advanced to influence the intermediate, and yes…. “hasten and await” larger crises that drag the people into ruptures with the dominant system.
I don’t think we should “rely on just holding out until a revolutionary crisis that will rocket us up into the public sphere in a ‘telescoped’ way.” Our approach is not “await a change” it is “hasten and await” — and HASTEN is the aspect that must be dominating our thoughts and actions.
And this is not just OUR analysis — every one in politics (without exception) is involved in some version of “hasten and await” — because political openings (for everyone) always involve both active preparation and the emergence of favorable conditions.
Here is the core of it: We can list a long spectrum of creative tactics that we could/should be carrying out around the elections — but virtually all of them requires (and envision) new revolutionary organization. and such organization will not emerge in the next month (i.e. before the election).
I don’t support an argument that says “since we don’t have any immediate means at hand for acting as revolutionaries, we should dive in as liberals.” What possible gain would that produce for the revolution or for the people?
I think one that needs to be grappled with is the fact that we don’t have a party. its not like we turn away from the RCP, and we can immediately act like we still have a party at hand (a core of cadre, a party press, fundraisers, databases of supporters, youth organization etc.) We don’t. and more significant, we have not gone through the necessary process of summing up what went wrong with our last revolutionary project — in a way that can help us (collectively) congeal around a new common program and strategy.
In the absense of a national revolutionary organization, the work of defining and building such a thing becomes important. And all the real urgency of politics (which in our world is always genuinely urgent) can’t be twisted into approaches that push us away from developing the much-needed new revolutionary current.
I think we need to develop a common practice as soon as possible — and there are a couple promising places where that should start. And I think we should be working hard to identify and attract revolutionary people who, like us, are eager for creative ways to act and speak as revolutionaries and communists.
There was a two-tier nature to the old RCP — where there were thinkers and doers. This emerged, in part, because of the culture of permanent crisis, where a hyped sense of urgency left many comrades with little time to think (and research and reflect) — producing (at times) into a movementism-on-autopilot.
I’m not eager to unintentionally reinvent that culture.
Keith said
Mike,
I think that you put the cart before the horse. The Russian Communist Party wasn’t organized until AFTER they made a revolution. The party initially was an amalgamation of circles of revolutionaries who organized locally and linked their activity through a newspaper. That linking up through the newspaper came after a long period of local organizing. We haven’t even gotten to this stage yet.
The last thing we need is a full blown revolutionary organization with a program (well it would be nice to have one, but it would not be real it would be another worthless sect, unless it was built on a foundation of practice). With have a pretty sharp disagreement around electoral work, but if we actually want to solve it we need to have is open discussion of what people are doing in different cites. And then we can compare practice and advance revolutionary organization based on practice. The critique of any reference as to practice as a the philosophical sin of pragmatism is just a cover for ineffectiveness or do-nothingness. Avakian would not be able to claim he is of Mao’s caliber if the question of practice and effectiveness was a serious measure of the or ideas.
We need a modern Iskra (a open website) that unites local revolutionary organizers through discussions of practice. Theory is a crystalized discussion of the real world.
Here is an essay I wrote in a different context about building a revolutionary organization
Newspaper Hawkers and Websites
One of the great curiosities of the revolutionary left is the newspaper hawker. At every protest, at every progressive and radical conference they appear. Trotskyites outside (they are never invited inside, — apparently they have no manners) with insufferable papers like The Workers Vanguard, or The Militant. Inside crusty old “new left” Maoists, and their unwitting youthful acolytes, push the latest edition of Revolution with insights from their maximum leader. To sell these papers you must be disciplined, you need guts, and a tolerance for abuse—most of the people who you try to sell the paper to refuse it. You must be prepared to hear “no.”
I was once one of those sad hawkers with my newspaper. I didn’t sell one the established papers like The Challenge, FightBack, or the People’s Weekly World. My secret communist cell published our own newspaper. That’s why I can explain this curiosity—the newspaper hawker and their newspaper—to you, dear reader, I was once a newspaper hawker myself.
The newspaper, that marvel of 19th century communication technology, which is today breathing its last gasps under the weight of new communications technology, somehow remains the preferred vehicle for the communication of revolutionary news and analysis by all manner of Marxian sects, why? Because in an important little essay entitled: “Where to Begin,” and in a follow up pamphlet called: What is to be done, V.I. Lenin said a newspaper was necessary to unite the revolutionaries and to organize the impending insurrection. Our modern revolutionaries read Lenin’s essay like a cookbook recipe—what is to be done? Just add water. Lenin’s plan was brilliant in 1901 and we have much to learn from it, but only if we update the plan for the twenty-first century.
First and foremost newspapers are no longer cutting edge communications technology. Secondly, the new technology, most notably the internet, can not be considered in isolation from new forms of social organization. The newspaper and the vanguard party built in the course of writing, editing, publishing, and distributing that newspaper are organizational, communicative, and cultural forms that correspond to one another, and the level of development of the productive forces. In other words, newspapers and top down vanguard parties go together, but they are completely out-dated forms. To use them today is like using a typewriter instead of word processing, or a television with rabbit ears instead of cable.
Although the newspaper is increasingly anachronistic many organizers, allies, and revolutionary groups still use newspapers and plenty of people still read them. We are in the middle of a transition from one era to another. How long that transition will take no one can predict. We must find ways to unite with progressives, revolutionaries, and workers still using newspapers. But newspapers can no longer play the role of collective organizer that Lenin envisioned.
Since Lenin’s essays there have been a number of revolutions in communications technology: telephone, radio, cinema, television, and the internet. Revolutionaries have missed nearly all of them.
But what is even worse, or sadder, is that all of these revolutionary groups with newspapers have retained the aspects of Lenin’s essays that are no longer relevant: the newspaper and top down organization, while they ignore entirely the most important elements of Lenin’s plan.
Lenin shows that political organization is built around communication technology. He insists that the newspaper is not just for news it is a “collective organizer” The newspaper, according to Lenin, is supposed to do much more than report the news—the paper is supposed to be a place for revolutionaries to communicate with one another, to explain their practice to one another, to share experiences, and resources, to debate and argue out ideas and analysis—and in this process revolutionary unity is built, revolutionary culture is developed, revolutionary practice begins to become coordinated, and revolutionary organization is expanded. Most of the sects use their newspaper as self-promotion, they rarely have open discussions and certainly never discuss their practice in a serious way so that it can be critiqued and improved upon. They are more interested in maintaining their little sects as small businesses that can fund the careers of a few so-called leaders.
How can we put Lenin’s plan into effect with modern communication technology and organizational forms? Lenin called for a single newspaper to unite all the small local groups. Today we have all sorts of small local groups and their websites and they are connected through links. But what we need is a radically open website where it is easy and simple to contribute and where the value of a contributions is weighed not be an editorial board or moderator but by our fellow revolutionary democrats. The technology is now available, some of it is used on websites like “DailyKos,” so that readers of a web page can “vote” on which articles and essays are most useful. Those with the most votes appear at the top of the web page and become the most read. In this way the site moderates itself. Posts that are disruptive will slide to the bottom of the page in the same way.
We need a website, that can unite all the local forces based on principle of revolutionary democracy that allows everyone full access. But openness and democracy are not just principles they are necessities. Openness and democracy are expedients. If we are to build the movement and transform this society we need the unrestrained and self-directed energy and creativity of the majority of people. Currently, no site on the left is this open, most retain the trappings of the 20th century: top down organization (moderators, and editors who determine content).
To get the project off the ground will require a commitment from organizers who are building dual power locally in numerous cities.
Bryan the Trot said
As much as I appreciate Keith’s condescending tone, I’ll reply as if it was a genuine contribution to dialogue and discussion.
Newspaper selling serves many functions that web interactions, conversations amongst activists, etc. cannot.
1. Along with petitions or (to a lesser extent) leafleting, it can open a conversation. A newspaper actually opens more of a conversation because you have to convince people that your group’s ideas are worth spending a dollar on.
2. These conversations at newspaper sales, if done correctly, can open a conversation that allows the socialist activist to learn more. To learn about the issues in the community, workplace, the mood, etc.
3. The newspaper seller is forced to publicly defend revolutionary ideas and to develop arguments to succeed in convincing people of those ideas.
4. The aim of the newspaper seller is not to get a dollar. The aim is to have such a good conversation that the person buying the paper is open to having more conversations over coffee, a beer, a lunch, etc.
5. The writers for the newspaper must develop ideas, program, etc. corresponding to concrete issues. If the writers are the sellers (which is the case in any healthy left group), then the dialogue from the sale can inform the writers.
6. The best paper sales are not at protests and left events. The best sales are at shopping centers, big workplaces, etc. This is to get out of the swamp of the activist left and actually interact with the unorganized.
Handing out leaflets or fliers or whatever cannot serve these functions because someone can take it and keep walking. You’re not asking for any sort of commitment from the person on the other end, so it doesn’t necessitate a dialogue.
There are many more reasons that revolutionaries sell newspapers, but I’ll leave it at that for now.