[Marxism] --RE: Suddenly, a dangerous turn

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Gary McLennan writes: "I think this decrying of the attacks on Obama as
somehow destroying the hopes for progress is way off the mark.  I know I
write from thousands of miles away in Brisbane, but I think that somehow
this rhetoric or critical approach is linked to a residual feeling that in
some way the Democrats are better than Republicans.  How can anyone have
that position given the history of war-making Democratic presidents?

"Counterpunch too had a similar article that was posted here saying that the
Clintons' attack on Obama were guaranteeing the election of McCain etc." 

I think Gary is mistaken in writing this off. I do not think revolutionary
socialists can be neutral in this matter of the ATTACKS on Obama because he
is Black.

It grates, because what is involved is a defense of the right of a Black
person to be the CEO of Murder, Inc., and we are quite opposed to the very
existence of Murder, Inc. But until the masses of people in the United
States, and especially Black people, come to see the American state for what
it is, we are duty bound to insist that a Black has just as much right --or
more!-- to occupy ANY post in the U.S. government as whitey does (even if
whitey is a woman). Because if humanity has ANY hope of surviving the
historic crisis that now confronts it, a very large part of that hope rests
squarely on the Black nation within the United States. 

Revolutionists should be for anything that favors its cohesion, its
empowerment, and above all its political maturation.

In the United States today, and for a half century or more, the "color
line," and specifically the Black/white color line, has been and remains the
most acute expression WITHIN the imperialist heartland of the world-wide
battle between imperialism, on the one hand, and working and oppressed
peoples, on the other.

It is an extraordinary confirmation of the irreducible centrality of "race"
in U.S. politics that now it is even finding direct, explicit expression in
the field of American bourgeois pseudo-democracy ("bourgeois pseudo
democracy" because the American state does not even live up to the minimum
requirements for being considered a "bourgeois democracy," for example,
having the norm that the person that gets the most votes according to the
official count wins the contest).

Just as the Obama campaign has become --quite undeservedly, if you look at
the candidate's positions, that is undebatable, but I would argue quite
understandably, if you know U.S. history and politics-- the vehicle for the
coming together and expression of all sorts of inchoate but doubtlessly
progressive sentiments for peace, for equality and for social justice, the
Clinton campaign is becoming the vehicle for many who, unconsciously, and
now increasingly quite consciously, refuse to accept that a Black person can
be allowed to be president of the United States, no matter WHAT his
positions might be. 

It is, in a way, an ENTIRELY logical, defensible imperialist/white
supremacist, i.e., patriotic American, position: The "form" of a Black
person occupying the White House goes entirely AGAINST the content:
everything the White House has ever stood for, and even the name.

The Mississippi exit poll from March 4 tells an unmistakable story. A fourth
of Clinton's votes came from self-described Republicans. White, Mississippi
Republicans, the kind that keep white sheets next to their shotguns in the
closet. 

A Democrats-only primary would have given Obama a 37 percentage point lead,
half again as much as the 24 point lead he achieved. It would have given him
4-5 more delegates, rather than the 19-14 split that resulted from the
primary. The point is not that U.S. primaries are "unfair," because any
resemblance between U.S. "democracy" and even formal bourgeois
representative "democracy" is not so much accidental as completely illusory.
The point is that out of some 400,000 people who came out to vote in the
Democrat primary, 50,000 or more were, demonstrably so, white crackers who
crossed party lines to vote against what good, decent, God-fearing white
folks in Mississippi still call "the n****r." And that's not counting AT
LEAST tens of thousands of self-described "Democrat" and "Independent"
crackers who ALSO keep white sheets in their closet and also voted
--consciously-- against "the n****r." 

Giving Mrs. Clinton the benefit of every reasonable and even unreasonable
doubt, and should Obama win the nomination, extending to Senator McCain the
same courtesy, in other words, quite apart from the efforts of those running
AGAINST Obama to make this so, my *impression* is that it looks increasingly
likely that the REAL question on the ballot in Pennsylvania and other
states, and should Obama win the nomination, on the ballot in the fall, will
be not WHO should be president but WHETHER a Black can be allowed to be
president. Inevitably, the Clinton and eventually McCain candidacies become
the vehicle for those who just say no. 

And what makes it a Hobson's choice for us is that the "whether" is easy
enough to answer in principle, in general, in the abstract, but it isn't
going to be presented that way, it's going to be presented in the form of a
WHO. And as to the "WHO," to plagiarize a line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't
give a damn." Who cares which one of the bourgeois candidates is more
successful in getting more electoral college votes? But insofar as that
WHETHER is involved, even a little bit --and to me it looks like it's going
to be a LOT MORE than "a little bit"-- we do care, or SHOULD, passionately
so.

I have no tactical answer to propose to this dilemma. I am not a party, I am
not an organization, I am not even involved in a political organization that
might take a position on how to vote. I'm just an individual and on THAT
basis, for me, in the fall, in the state of Georgia which McCain WILL carry
and therefore any vote I cast will be meaningless, in terms of WHO the next
president should be, I can easily construct an explanation that will pass
muster on this list for doing a half dozen different things, including
nothing at all. What will count, if anything is what I say to people and how
that might influence their further political evolution. 

But, whether we like it or not, the left is a real, well, thing, movement,
current whatever. But it seems that, much as I've tried to raise the
question, at least in this one neighborhood of the left, no one is quite
ready to bite the bullet and say that a different approach should be taken
if Obama is the Democratic nominee. Well, I suppose there's still plenty of
time to discuss that, should it happen.

Joaquín