[Marxism] Why I'd vote for Obama -- if it counted

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Dave Walters writes: 

"I appreciate Fred's comments, most of which, I think, I agree with. 
 
"There are several parts to this discussion. Assuming HERE we are discussing
this among people who do not call for a vote for Obama (I state this because
I haven't read all the threads on this), then the most important aspect of
this discussion is how to approach Obama *supporters* among the Black
community."

*  *  * 

I was struck by Dave Walters's PREcondition, "Assuming HERE we are
discussing this among people who do not call for a vote for Obama" and even
more by what he posits as "the" most important aspect of this discussion:
"how to approach Obama *supporters* among the Black community."

So let me try this argument:  I do not call for a vote for Obama quite
simply because I can't vote for Obama and I don't know anyone who can. Those
who can literally vote "for" Obama are the 4000 delegates to the Democrat
convention and, should he win there, the 500+ members of the electoral
college when they meet in their respective state capitals in December. 

OK, it may seem like nit-picking but from time to time it is useful to
remember that we DO NOT LIVE in what most Marxists would consider a normal
bourgeois democracy. Our choices are channeled and constrained, and even
more than by the written constitutional structures, the less formal
unwritten constitution, the one that says two and only two parties are
allowed to exist and so on.

In the sovereign state of Georgia, as a practical matter, the choices in
November will be limited to the slate of electors pledged to McCain and
either Obama or Clinton. Yes, you can write someone in, but that is casting
a blank or spoiled ballot unless the write-in has registered with the
secretary of state, and even if they have, what is the point? McCain will
carry Georgia unless there is a political tsunami building in this country
that's going to reach all the way to the top of the Rocky Mountains, in
which case we have a lot more to discuss than electoral cretinism.

So, IN GEORGIA, it's easy enough to call on people to vote for sister
Cynthia. "It's like the message you would be trying to send by voting for
Obama, only on steroids," I'd say. "With lead powder filling in your boxing
gloves for extra oomph."

And an argument like that will work probably in forty states, give or take. 

And, yes, it's an argument for a "tactical" or "useful" vote rather than a
"principled" vote. But that was precisely the point of my little homily
about the undemocracy of the United States. You're not voting in a
presidential election. You're voting in one of 50 simultaneous but distinct
winning-slate-takes-all (except for one or two states) statewide elections
for presidential electors. 

In other words, we take part in a game whose rules are set up to lead to
pre-determined outcomes. 

Now, it turns out that one of the unwritten rules is that you can be Black
and run for President, but you can't be Black and win.

Now here comes Black America and says they want to change the rules, just
like they changed the rules on who could vote, on who could be in a city
council, on who could be Mayor, on who could be in Congress, on who could be
in the Senate, on who could be in the Supreme Court. They propose that a
Black person has just as much right to be the bourgeois-imperialist
president of the United States as the white man.

And comrades here imagine the issue is "how to approach Obama *supporters*
among the Black community"? Well, what about answering the question the
Black community is posing FIRST: "Should the unwritten constitution of this
country be changed so that a Black person can be occupy the position of
bourgeois-imperialist president, just like the white man?"

You say, "but I don't want a bourgeois-imperialist president. Of any color."
And if you could figure out how to translate the concept of "bourgeois
imperialist president" into words accessible to most Black people, probably
the majority would agree with you. And they'll say, "Y'all get that labor
party or green party or red party ready for 2012, and I'm with you all the
way. You can even nominate a sister or a brother because we're going to end
Jim Crow in the White House in 2008."

That is the problem we face. We are for working-class, not bourgeois
politics. Except this country doesn't happen to HAVE working class politics.
None whatsoever. Because this country doesn't HAVE a cohered working class.
Not in the political field, not in its electoral reflection. 

But we DO HAVE a highly cohered Black community. A community whose members
have fought for and died for the right to register, the right to vote, the
right to run for and hold public office. And they've decided THIS year is
the year they're going to bust the color line at the White House.

And, it is true, that is due to sentiment in ruling class circles that they
could really USE someone ... different in the White House to get the rest of
the world to forget about George Bush. But what of it? It was ALSO the
ruling class that decided that, for the sake of America's domestic
tranquility and international image, they had to let Black folks vote. They
decided they had to let them into the Democratic Party, yes, even in the
state of Mississippi. They decided they had to let them into city councils,
to let them be mayors, to let them be in Congress. They even had to colorize
the Supreme Court.

To begin with, that "someone different" this year wasn't going to be Obama.
It was going to be Mrs. Clinton. But circumstances conspired so that there
was this extraordinarily talented --or just accidentally well-suited for the
moment-- politician named Barack Obama, and some folks in ruling class
circles went with him. By and large the Black community was going to go with
Clinton. But when they saw Obama could get more white folks to vote for him
than Clinton in Iowa, they said, it's nation time, let's go desegregate the
White House. 

Black folks have had to do this --everything they've accomplished in terms
of political participation and representation-- within the constraints of
essentially a one-party system, because the Republicans only have use for
the anti-Black vote. It wasn't a choice. It wasn't like Meany or Reuther or
Kirkland or Hoffa or Raynor came to the Black community begging it to get in
with their labor party and the community told them to fuck off, Black people
would only support racist imperialist parties. It's the working class that
failed to provide the Black community with any other viable choices than the
Democrats.

And I've never heard a more heart-felt and convincing explanation of the
problem with this than from Sister Cynthia McKinney speaking to a Latino
group here in town, back in 1994, when she was about to win or had just won
re-election to Congress as a Democrat. And her message was don't do in the
Latino community what we did in the Black. Don't give yourselves to the
Democrats. They will take you for granted and give you just a few crumbs,
because they know you have nowhere else to go. Of course, in the few years
since then the Republicans have taken care of this with their anti-immigrant
jihad. They are PUSHING the Latino community into the Democratic party just
as they did the Blacks with the Republican party's support for segregation
decades ago.

OK, so now here come we, the Marxist movement, the expression in the sphere
of conscious ideology of the workers movement. And we say ... what? 

That the desegregation of the White House past the kitchen staff,
secretarial pool and secret service has to wait until the working class is
ready? 

And if the community says, "well, okay, why don't y'all go talk to the class
and see how long its going to take them to get their shit together," will we
have the courage to answer truly? Will we admit "we can't 'talk to the
class.' Because the working class doesn't even EXIST as a political subject
in this country. The rest of the workers are all in the Democrat party like
you guys, or worse, in the Republicans." Will we?

Now, I'm not saying the color line trumps the class line every time, but I
AM saying the color line is real, and the class line is, in the U.S.
political field, strictly an ideological construct. Unlike the color line,
it is not a demarcation of the front where living social forces in motion
are meeting and clashing.

"But," you object, "that color line is ENTIRELY in enemy class territory."
Yes it is. So it goes. But that's really the same statement as saying the
working class is totally MIA in the United States in the political field.
And it's not even that it hasn't yet succeeded in conquering much political
space, it has NO political space because it hasn't even TRIED. And it hasn't
tried because it doesn't EXIST.

This means each and every significant clash of social forces in the
electoral arena is going to take place on the terrain of bourgeois party
electoral politics BECAUSE THERE IS NO OTHER TERRAIN. Not for MASS social
forces. 

And that brings me back to my "tactical" or "useful" vote for Cynthia in
November. That might work well enough for an individual, but it isn't really
a serious position one could advocate in the name of the workers movement or
a political group or the revolutionary movement or anything else like that,
because it dodges the real question: which side are you on?

Will you help Obama win or not? 

If your vote was the last vote in the last state that Obama needed to get an
electoral college majority, and if you knew your vote counted double, so
that if you voted for Obama, he would win by one, but if you voted any other
way, or not voted, he'd lose by one vote in the state, and with it the
state's electoral college votes and the presidency, what would you do?

See, I'd have no problem saying I'd take my decisive, make-or-break vote in
2000 and give it to Nader and let Gore lose, if he hadn't succeeded in
suckering a couple of more working people into voting for him (or if he
didn't have the stomach to mount a real fight against the republican cabal
that stole the election), well fuck him. Not my problem.  

And I'd have no problem in the 2004 election either. Kerry began his
convention acceptance speech with the patriotic salute he learned as a war
criminal in Vietnam and the phrase "reporting for duty." So let some
patriotic American bail him out. It ain't me, babe.

And --sorry-- I don't think I'd have a problem sticking it to Mrs. Clinton
were she the nominee in 2008. Or hubby Bill in the 1990's.

But I would have a problem --Colbert style, in my gut-- letting McCain win
instead of Obama. And I'd still have a problem if I had a crystal ball to
see into parallel future universes that showed Obama and McCain were
completely interchangeable, they both did exactly the same things and led to
exactly the same outcomes: in terms of what the president did, it made
absolutely ZERO difference on that level. I think I'd still choose to have
Obama win. SIMPLY and SOLELY on the basis that a Black person has as much
right to be president as a white one, and a Black person has never been
president, never been ALLOWED to be president, indeed, a Black person's
candidacy has never been taken seriously before now.

Joaquín