> BHO is a run-of-the-mill neolib politician.
>
> And yet, over the past few weeks he has been described - by list
> members, not just the heavy breathers of the NYT and other official
> lib organs we've snarkily quoted - as measurably more progressive than
> HRC, as a latter day Jackie Robinson, as, due to his directly mixed
> parentage and message of "hope", a uniter of White and Black and the
> architect of the inherently 'radical' act of voting for a Black guy
> for prez, as a booster of beleaguered self esteem, as Nietzsche's
> superman and the archives know what other astounding things
That's not my argument.
The objective outcomes of our individual actions tend to escape our control. We set in motion forces that we not necessarily control. Nothing in nature or social life requires that the consequences of our actions match our initial designs or that they be contained neatly within the bounds of our ideological preconceptions. The chain of social events that we as individuals unleash overflow our personal traits, virtues, vices, or expectations.
So, no, I don't attribute to Obama any magical power as a person. But, tied to his attempt on the presidency, there is an emerging political force that -- in my humble opinion -- represents a potentially progressive force in U.S. politics. That said, I don't idealize mass movements either. They are just bunches of people, as good as the individuals who make them up, people like you or I. The interesting attribute of bunches of people taking joint action is that their interactions entail the possibility of collective self-transformation -- hopefully (although not necessarily) for the better.
The emerging political phenomenon around Obama's campaign is hooked on a massive sentiment. That matters to me. It is involving highly oppressed, impoverished segments of the working class that otherwise would not be very inclined to participate in political life. That matters to me. The standards that I use to judge the potential progressiveness of this emerging movement is not how close the ideological self-image of the movement matches my own personal beliefs. My own beliefs about where politics *should* go are irrelevant here. To me, it is about the motion of real working people, driven by their needs and aspirations.
Moreover, I don't look at all this in a vacuum, abstractly, but in the context of alternative, concrete possibilities. That is, I don't compare the phenomenon to what may happen under ideal circumstances. Rather, I contrast it with the alternative political processes we can observe -- e.g. those underpinning the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Things are never entirely clear. But at some point one needs to make a decision.
Among Marxists, there's a historical anecdote that makes the point. The series of worker protests in St. Petersburg that led to the Russian revolution of 1905, the "general dress rehearsal" of the 1917 Russian revolution (as Lenin later called it). For the standards of this list, those protests were meek. Basically, people met for group praying and mass processions where they publicly begged the Tsar to please please end the war with Japan, reduce the workday, and dictate laws improving working conditions in the factories. The figure of the Tsar was respected. They didn't use youtube rock videos, but the equivalent back then -- religious icons, tsarist emblems, etc. prominently displayed in the marches. If government policies were fucked up, it was the ministers' fault. The protests were led by a priest (George Gapon) who turned out to be, as some radicals suspected at the time, a paid agent of the tsarist Okhrana (the political police).
Since the protests had not been inspired or organized directly by the socialdemocrats (Lenin's comrades), many seasoned radicals view them with suspicion. They were in favor of, you know, more militant forms of protest. They were open about the goal of immediate overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and its replacement with a democracy, which the protesters didn't adopt. But at this stage, the workers followed Gapon, not the socialdemocrats.
Whatever one's view of Lenin as a historical figure, the guy supported the protests as they were, wholeheartedly. No explicit reservations whatever. In his radical newspaper, he launched a blistering attack on the Tsar for refusing to even accept the workers' petition (at some point, the tsar met with Gapon and received the petition). Not a criticism of the religious cloak enveloping the protests or of the personal limitations of Gapon, of which Lenin was well aware. Lenin thought it entirely possible for the dynamics of the protests, driven ultimately by the workers' pressing needs, to end up prevailing over the timidity of Gapon, overflowing the initial ideological strictures of the movement. The immediate criminal overreaction of the Tsar against the protests and the subsequent eruption of workers' revolutionary activity confirmed Lenin's views. The rest is history.
(Please do not interpret this analogy as my predicting a revolution in the U.S. The point of the analogy is spelled out in the second paragraph above.)
So, I don't think I'm "using extraordinarily flattering words" to depict Obama as an individual. You won't be able to find one instance in which I call him "progressive" or anything like that. (The comparison with Jackie Robinson is limited to this: Given that racism is ingrained in the social conditions, at one point or another, Black individuals in the U.S. may feel that they need to compromise and come across as non-aggressive in their response to racial abuse in order to advance their goals, individual or collective.) In fact, I entirely agree that Obama is a "corporate funded black candidate" (as Glen Gord puts it). Not only corporate funded, but also corporate funded. I agree that the Democratic Party is a highly corrupt, political formation of the capitalists, by the capitalists, and for the capitalists. But that's only part of the story.
And, to me, the fact that "committed, life long activists like Charles Barron" are awed by the phenomenon is indicative -- not of betrayal, foolishness, or moral weakness -- but of awareness of and sensitivity to the kind of forces that are being set in motion. Because, again, this is not mainly about Obama as an individual or about the Democratic Party as a political apparatus. It's mainly about the political forces in motion. Obama -- for the most part and as far as I'm concerned -- is like given data, like the weather. Ultimately, the key factor is us.
> For years, Carrol Cox has warned us about the folly of centering our
> hopes (or any hope, really) on the Democratic party. Every four years
> we argue over which Dem candidate is marginally closer to our point of
> view and which candidate is more likely to pursue an agenda which
> somewhat resembles progressive politics - or at least, hold Republican
> excesses at bay.
Carrol misses the point entirely. He does make it all about people's "hopes" and about the adequacy of the Democratic Party (as is, viewed statically) as an instrument of working-class liberation. It's trivially true that U.S. workers won't be able to liberate themselves through the Democratic Party as is. It is like looking at a kid and ponderously declaring that he can't do things that adults routinely do. In Carrol's mind, the DP is a political formation given once and for all in history. And people cannot take meaningful collective action, grow, learn. They can only "hope."
And this will also be my last posting on this thread.