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Last Updated: Jan 9th, 2009 - 12:43:59 |
The stage of society to which we are moving toward would be some kind of Peoples Democracy.
Fundamentally, this is the social base of Obama’s victory, the so-called post-racial coalition. We understand that there is yet no such reality existing concretely in the institutions and relations of U.S. society, except that is the oncoming force that won this Fourth Revolution (Obama’s victory), and it is this force that must harnessed as a living material entity in transforming U.S. society.
This Peoples Democracy would place us near the most advanced stage of bourgeois Democracy. We can see monopoly capitalism crashing down around their and our heads! We have agreed to give the rulers a trillion dollars so they can continue to be rich and the rulers. But for the would-be Leftists to tell us that Obama’s only or “primary” function is to “save capitalism by building a united front to rescue capitalism NOT to bring about a more egalitarian, antiracist anti sexist pro environment society.” Why would anyone who was actually struggling for Democracy say that? It sounds like the sour grapes of the people who wanted us to waste our votes , but even though they tailed 98 percent of the Afro American and half of the rest of the American people, they still want to give us advice and instructions. Actually, it is they who need advice and instructions.
To make such a one-sided infantile Leftist or Trot-like analysis of the election would only turn that overwhelming majority whom you tail anyway, even more sharply and outspokenly against you. There is neither balance nor real analysis in that statement—just an attempt to be again, more revolutionary than the people. But the task of the revolutionary is to lead the people by taking what they already know and giving it back to them with the focus of the present the past and the future.
Plus to see Obama’s victory as simply a victory for monopoly capitalism is so thoroughly anarchist that it rejects the most important essence of the entire Obama drama, i.e. it was the highest stroke of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements yet. We bled to integrate lunch counters, buses, public toilets, water fountains, was that struggle just to create a united front to save monopoly capitalism? Do you think Obama’s victory less than those? It was a concrete victory for Democracy. Don’t you understand that you could say the victory of the North in the civil war was just to preserve capitalism? Yes, at a higher level. But don’t you think the concomitant advance of the Afro American people worth noting?
So to say Obama’s only function is to save monopoly capitalism, we say, “I’m glad you can dig it, but that's not all...”To claim merely an anarchist or infantile position and not deepen the analysis so we can understand that monopoly capitalism cannot survive unless it adopts some aspects of social Democracy. Obama’s election is the first aspect of that social Democracy. In the same way that FDR’s “New Deal” could not survive, even as a method of maintaining monopoly capitalism unless it adopted important features of socialism, social Democracy, i.e., Social Security and unemployment insurance, the WPA public works projects to put people back to work—even the artists.
I said before that what Obama must bring us is “A New New Deal”! That is why it is so important that he hit the ground running, in much the same way that Roosevelt did in his first 100 Days. (See ….) I was glad to hear that he was reading accounts of the emergency bills Roosevelt passed before the reactionary Congress could block him. Obama faces the same exigency. We need a “fast break” strategy with a few”alley oop” dunks perhaps. Before the opposition can resolidify itself.
We have a great unity among the people now with Obama’s victory and we and the people must move forward with that catalyst. We must unite principally against still existing racism and White supremacy. We must also unite against the domination of monopoly capitalism over the people’s needs. The theft of a trillion dollars has infuriated the people, certainly we can unite them, build a united front around the need to destroy surviving racism and White supremacy and for creating greater regulations on monopoly capitalism. If we give the investment banks a trillion dollars we should own those investment banks. If we give another two hundred fifty billion to the auto industry, we should own that auto industry.
We cannot wipe away monopoly capitalism with one election but our minimum program must include regulation of it, Public ownership reversing the trend of outsourcing, and sending factories out of the country, usually out of working class and minority neighborhoods. Certainly we can build a united front around these things.
We should be listing those things we can do, those things that Obama’s election has enabled us to do rather than spending time telling people that what they and he did was nothing!
In attacking monopoly capitalism we should support small capitalism and minority capitalism and fight that those businesses and institutions in working class and minority communities get the dollars that we are giving the investment banks and auto industry.
The development of small capitalism in those communities and state ownership of these financial institutions would be steps forward in terms of the development of a Peoples Democracy. Is this socialism? No, but we must first regulate and weaken monopoly capitalism, in tune with the Peoples newly awakened appetite for expanded Democracy and their hard times which we know and can make them better understand is caused by the domination of monopoly capitalism and imperialism, including the Iraq war.
It is up to us, the Left, to build on the powerful Democratic Coalition that Obama’s campaign and election have already built. We must strive to make such a Democratic coalition more than just an temporary election campaign call and fight to turn such ideas and momentary commitment into a powerful new base on which to focus Obama’s first term, but also to build this into a permanent aspect of US society. The anti-war forces are another key aspect of this coalition and a means to call for a refocusing of the $10 billion a month now spent on the Iraq war.
We should try to build a broad united front out of the consensus coming out of the 63 percent of the electorate that voted for Obama! One wonders how people in the Black Left who were at the North Carolina meeting and some others, can really call for an smaller united front than the hundred or so people who were there. What we need is a unity based on real struggle over actual objectives and motives, i.e. being “open and above board” without “conspiracy and intrigue.”
There are forces who dropped out of the Black Radical Congress because they were angry about alleged CPUSA “domination,” domination of what, and to what end? Just as a somewhat earlier canard that they couldn’t be in any group where there were White people. We wonder is this some fear of not being able to struggle for the correct line in these forces presence?
Too often it seems that some of the Black Left are really nationalists straining for a new identity by claiming to be Left but never Marxist Leninists. Some are Black Nationalists who claim “Left” by being influenced by Trotskyist or Anarchist stands.
At any rate we need an even broader United Front guided by genuine revolutionaries, communists not Trot influenced Black Leftists.
There are questions about Obama’s appointments even before he is inaugurated. Just as there were questions about him refusing public funding. On the second issue, it should be obvious by now that Obama saw the public funding, as it is now constructed, to be a ruse to cripple his fund raising, while the Republicans would run ragtime and out raise him, just as Hillary would have done.
On the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, we should try to understand that this was a very smart choice. The constant calumny against Obama that he is a Muslim. The Right kept screaming his middle name, Hussein, in hopes that would stop the Obamacoaster that enveloped the country. The constant questions about his support for Israel or from the other side about his relationship to the “Zionist entity” were a constant negation Obama faced. Even now, after the election, the fool, al Qaeda’s Zawahari, hurls insults about Obama. Just as some ignorant American anarchists threaten to disrupt the inauguration because of “Obama’s Zionism & Militarism.”
Rahm Emanuel’s selection is due to confound those who are not thoughtful about just what challenges Obama faces. The ever lurking actual Zionists will always make trouble until they can have what they really want, not peace, but the entire Middle East as a fiefdom ruled by Israel.
The Emanuel appointment stops Zionist mischief at the door. Karl Rove’s television appearance blasting Emanuel as “combative, ill tempered and foul mouthed” and that he was Obama’s worst appointment , were very encouraging to me. Let the rumor mongers and mischief makers and other nattering nabobs try to cause havoc at the gates. I trust Emanuel to handle that as chief of staff, both the constant undermining questions of the Zionists as well as the others who want to make Obama a Zionist. To be a friend of the Israeli people is no crime, to foster a Zionist dictatorship over the Middle East would be a crime. We cannot see Obama doing the latter.
The first necessity of the Obama precedent is to put out a call for a nationwide Democratic Coalition, to heighten even further the attack on White supremacy and racism. Even to fight to get these made illegal, unlawful. This would be the essence of the post-racial coalition, which has already shown its potential power with the election of the President. The Kennedy years could have set something of a precedent, but his assassination along with the assassinations of Malcolm X, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, and then peaking with the election of Nixon and the takeover at the end of the 70’s by the Reagan steamroller, has been with us, in essence, until today.
Those assassinations were a Right-wing coup, an oil-smelling coup that at its denouement was the invasion of the Middle East and the outright takeover of the oil fields, plus the move of the financial markets to Dubai, as alternate to London and Wall St. Monsters covered with and bathing in oil . The crash of the financial markets in the U.S. and to some extent worldwide can mark the end of this domination if we will move on the new precedent of Obama’s election.
Not only must this new Democratic Coalition take on White supremacy and Racism but to oppose and struggle to end the domination of monopoly capitalism over the people of the US, end the war in Iraq and in essence its domination of the world. State ownership, nationalization, new funding for non monopoly and small business. This Democratic coalition must be built into a permanent electoral presence as well to combat the still powerful and ruthless forces of white supremacy and the domination of society by monopoly capitalism.
The public works' new New Deal would see Katrina-damaged New Orleans as a top priority and seek to reconstruct the entire gulf ravaged area from Louisiana to Texas. The sagging infrastructure of bridges and tunnels and urban structures must be repaired. This is one solution to chronic unemployment. Certainly these inner cities are in need of public dollars for employment and reconstruction. Just as during the Depression, Roosevelt’s new deal even supported the arts, we must see that our new Democratic Coalition demands the same kind of support after years of the Republicans attacks on public support of the arts.
We want to build a new Democratic Coalition as an engine for the bringing of a People’s Democracy. Any narrowing of the “Post-racial coalition” that elected Obama is a mistake. We must fight to make it real. Those who think that tailing “labor,” mostly the labor bureaucrats, or pushing economism as a substitute for political organizing and fielding candidates for every position we are able to, are merely continuing the marginalization and irrelevance of the Left. The call for an anti-racist, anti-monopoly Democratic Coalition is correct and necessary and the only move that will give the genuine revolutionaries leadership of the progressive political struggle in the U.S.
Amiri Baraka
11/29/08
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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