This is why I think Doug is wrong in the claim that it was plain to see what Obama was going to do once elected. What black and other youth got was not a crystal ball but one of those mini biosphere ball with a lot of organic stuff floating around from which, it was promised, life would emerge. And they bought it and we can’t blame them.
However, I don’t see Doug blaming them (despite your quoted section above) based on the full context of what he has said here: he is blaming some dudes called Younge and Schmitty (or something like that) - I presume well-informed elders of revolution and punditry - for their stumping/energy-waste/bloviation about Obama (and his greatness).
> So far as I'm concerned, all who vote and work for social change are my comrades, whether they are inside or outside the Democratic party, and while criticism is necessary and healthy, it should be comradely and tempered by a certain humility.
Sure, I agree. But really, have terribly nasty things been said?
> There's no one individual or tendency on the left who can claim success; we've all in retrospect been plagued by "illusions" of one sort or another. With rare, transient exceptions, capitalism has survived repeated attempts by generations of Marxists, anarchists, and left-wing social democrats, each with their own prescriptions, to overthrow or to fundamentally alter it. The reasons for these failures are historical and material rather than ideological, though you wouldn't know it by the factional recriminations and proclamations of "told you so" which have regularly followed each defeat.
The criticism of “Obamania” on the part of movement seniors is not that they have latched on to the wrong ideology but that they have been misled. While yes, none of us can claim to have the right formula for success, I think we can fairly conclude - with historical and material support - that deluding ourselves is surely the wrong formula?
> It's too bad your feelings about Obama have expressed themselves in a certain contempt towards his multi-hued working class base and the left-wing activists who engaged with it, but I suppose it's indicative of the bitterness and despair …
No, mate, you are missing it. There can’t be bitterness or despair when this is what was expected all along (by Carrol, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Doug). It is the multi-hued working class base that is bitter and desperate (see our young newcomer’s last post - sorry I forget his name, or the youth turnout in 2010).
You are - no doubt unintentionally - I feel, playing word games here. Most left-wing activists have always been engaged with the multi-hued working class. It’s the engagement of such activists, especially those who should know better, with the Obama rocket - and the nature of that engagement - that is being criticised.
Woj, responded to me, with a friendly _Duh, what do you expect from politic[ian]s?_, but it’s not what I expect, but what this multi-hued working class expects, especially the youth, and unless a politics with some demand/expectation of honesty/ethics can be envisioned, I don’t see a way out. Perhaps those who think Marxism is a science think that it’s a matter of scientific twiddling of knobs - in the structure, without agency (to borrow from Julio’s recent post)… but it’s not, is it? (and that’s why I think Carrol is wrong on perceptions and their importance; it is critical, IMHO, to talk to the base about Obama and what he has wrought, in the terms of the political innocence of their righteous demands/expectations - but seriously, I am just a geek at a keyboard, I admit, and I could be speaking a lot of rot here).
—ravi