----- Original Message ----- From: "Julio Huato" <juliohuato at gmail.com> To: "Lbo Talk Lbo Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 5:19 PM Subject: [lbo-talk] at least he's black!
> Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>> 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.
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