On 2011-12-31, at 11:54 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> ...there'd probably be no Occupy without him (Obama).
I'd say the Occupy movement had little to do with Obama except that he presided over the recession which was ultimately responsible for it. The movement was triggered by the public sector union protests in Wisconsin and Ohio and the Arab Spring. I question that there would be no Occupy or something like it without Obama - that is, if McCain had instead won the 2008 election and the Republicans had formed the government.
In fact, the movement might well have appeared earlier. A McCain-Palin administration would have likely exacerbated the recession by, among other things, declining to inject a fiscal stimulus on the order of the Democrats' $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act, fuelling the already widespread popular discontent which had been steadily gathering under Bush. Instead, this political momentum was stalled by Obama's victory and channeled into the DP, where it was reduced to angry grumbling against the administration for its refusal to do what was necessary to end the crisis, aggravated by its pathetic grovelling to the discredited Republicans and bankers. If the Republicans had won, the shoe would have been on the other foot. The Republican base would have been the one demoralized by the failure of its leadership to turn things around, and much of the populist protest engendered by the crisis which flowed to the right in 2010 would almost certainly have gone in the other direction.
This isn't to suggest the working class - especially that part of it which is black, hispanic, female, gay, and unionized - would have been better off in retrospect under McCain-Palin, and that it should now be looking forward to a Republican victory in November. It's naive to think a Ron Paul administration would pursue an "anti-imperialist" foreign policy, and in other respects left-wing proponents of "the worse, the better" have a lot to answer for historically.
For my part, I was wrong about the Democrats in 2008. I haven't harboured any illusions about the leadership of the DP or the social democratic parties since soon after I became political back in the 60's, but I was anticipating that Obama's victory would excite expectations (it did), that the administration would disappoint (it did), and that the contradiction between what the DP base wanted and what the administration was prepared to deliver would lead to the development of an organized left wing in the party - one which could potentially become the formidable nucleus of a new third party after learning, through its own experience in struggle against the leadership, that the DP could not be reformed. That didn't happen, of course, and I can't see why it would if Obama were to win a second term.
It's also unclear where the Occupy movement, which formed outside the DP, will go from here. It might continue to develop outside the two major parties, but, not being an anarchist, I believe that, like all mass movements, it will need to find or found a party to finally realize its demands. There's no other road to power. To date, there seems to be more evidence of hostility than support for this idea among activists. This suggests to me that much of the energy unleashed by the movement could find its way its back into Obama's re-election campaign, or dissipate as students, the jobless, and the casually unemployed become tired of cycling through protests and dispersals with no clear idea of how their needs can be met.
But it's probably too soon to draw any definitive conclusions. Capitalism is still in crisis, and deteriorating conditions sooner or later raise the political consciousness and combativity of the masses. If the crisis develops into a global depression on an even greater scale than in the 30's, as the bourgeoisie itself feels it might, there's no reason to suppose it wouldn't be reflected in the growth of left-wing opposition both inside and outside of the Democratic party.