[Marxism] Sunday's driving practice

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Eli writes: "I suppose you think Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have done
great things for black people, too.

"The truth is that, while there's plenty of racism in the country without
any question, the country has reached the point where the ruling class is
perfectly capable of finding a black man (less so a woman, I should think,
and even less so a black woman) who can be the proper manager for their
affairs."

People need to stop thinking about what the ruling class is up to and try to
start understanding things FROM BELOW, from the point of view of "regular
people," and in this case the Black community and the youth that have been
swept up by Obama-mania.

The RULING class has been willing to accept Black and female representatives
and administrators pretty much forever. What has made it difficult is the
existence of and the need to maintain the system of white and male supremacy
in society as a whole.

Some people on this list seem to reason, well Obama is Black but so is
Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Condi Rice and Colin Powell, so big effing
deal. They think in analogies and categories and abstractions. And having
satisfied themselves that a bourgeois politician is always and only a
bourgeois politician, they decry the stupidity of the masses, and seek to
save them by PREACHING at them such self-evident truths as that a bourgeois
politician is a bourgeois politician, QED.

In moving collectively, the masses do not reason by analogies or categories,
and mostly they just ACT. And if you ask them WHY, they will be hard-pressed
to offer much in the way of an explanation or justification. Often, quite
accidental figures --even ridiculous ones-- find themselves at the focus of
motion by masses of people.

I think I can give a fairly cogent explanation of WHY Obama instead of
Keyes, or Powell, or Rice, or Thomas on one side, and even why Obama instead
of McKinney. But I don't think it would do any good. If you don't get it now
you're not going to get it on the basis of my arguments.

The more interesting question is why Obama. Not instead of the others, but
why Obama period. Full stop. But not from the point of view of the ruling
class, but from the point of view of the oppressed Black community and the
point of view of young people. What is this motion about? Where does it
spring from?

Our sectarians insist such questions are just *irrelevant,*  it is motion
within the confines and orbit of the capitalists' two-party system and
therefore unworthy, marked by original sin.

They underlying issue here is really dialectics as a method of analysis, a
way of understanding reality. There isn't much to be said to refute most of
the critiques of Barrack Obama in particular or bourgeois politicians in
general that abound in our circles, for by and large they are all true. It
is the refusal to look at and apprehend the contradictory element in Obama
--not the candidate or person, but the POLITICAL phenomenon, the MASS
phenomenon, that underlies the hostile and sectarian reaction.

Joaquín