No subject

simply is no reason to support Obama. Even in terms of the things you
raise about various reforms, if you got a 10% vote in this election
for Nader and/or McKinney, you would see many more concessions than
Obama is offering, as the ruling class parties and specially the
Democrats try to re-establish their credibility and attractiveness to
people escaping from their control on their left. Think about it this
way: don't go chasing the Democrats, make the Democrats chase after
you.

I think Obama is the real response of the Democrats to the independent
campaigns of recent years and especially Nader's 2000 campaign. I
think 9/11 and how the Republicans and Democrats manipulated that
makes it harder to see,  but Obama has gotten extraordinary support,
yes from young people and Blacks and so on, but also from a ton of big
shots in the Democratic Party's top circles. That a junior Senator
from Illinois --and a Black man at that-- could defeat the Clinton
machine is astounding. He had, yes, thousands of enthusiastic
volunteers, something that especially in caucus states made a
difference. But those volunteers were organized and deployed by some
of the most experienced and effective Democrat operatives both on a
national AND a local level. The way he got those top operatives is
from networks within the Democratic party.

So the question arises, WHY did these Democrats do that? I think it
was, among other things, to neutralize a possible challenge to their
left. Even if this was not consciously thought through in these sorts
of terms by all these circles, and it was just a question of being
impressed by the energy and motion and enthusiasm his campaign
unleashed, there was something going on in the population in terms of
wanting change away from the traditional politics of the two-party
system that Obama tapped into. That's what it represents politically
in my view.

People don't realize but the independent campaigns of recent years
have been qualitatively larger and much more serious and much more
widely covered than those of decades past, even at the height of the
radicalization in the 60s and 70s. The 9/11 attacks and their
aftermath obscured it, but I think what was seen in the 2000 Nader
campaign was making a resurgence. And I think the Obama campaign has
largely headed it off into a "safe" direction, for the time being.

How and why was he able to do that? Obviously we're dealing with a
really gifted political figure and orator, but it's not just that. I
think a key factor, the key factor, perhaps, is that he is Black. I
think "Black" in some ways has become a very strong brand or identity
in U.S. politics, and one with a much clearer, cleaner profile than
the old time party labels. And Obama while consciously and skillfully
avoiding being labelled "just" a Black candidate, at the same time has
projected himself very strongly as coming FROM the Black tradition of
fighting for justice.

It may seem like I'm just making a straight-up case for denouncing
Obama, but actually I'm not. There is in the tradition of the Marxist
movement an understanding that people learn, not from being preached
at, but from their own experiences, and a tactic that Lenin called
"critical support," and which he characterized as "support like a rope
supports a hanging man." In Lenin's case, he proposed it to the
emerging young communist parties in their relations to much larger
social democratic parties. If two parties based in the working class
movement ran against each other, they might both lose to bourgeois
parties. So the Communists should generally support the larger social
democrats but at the same time criticize the leaders and politicians
of these parties, warning that they would not truly represent workers
interests.

And this isn't the only variant of the idea. In Cuba, when the
revolution first came to power, Fidel and his friends wanted to
demonstrate two things simultaneously: that they hadn't fought to get
rid of Batista to put themselves in his place, but that to make this a
real revolution, the real revolutionaries would have to lead it. So
they took a bunch of the traditional anti-Batista politicians and had
them take the top government offices, and then mobilized people to
demand this government carry out the revolutionary measures, like
cutting rent and the agrarian reform. The government went from crisis
to crisis as the traditional politicians resisted radical measures.
And one post after another fell to the revolutionaries. It took more
than half a year for the government to finally be firmly under the
control of the revolutionaries, but through that process they had
welded Cuba's working people into an independent political force, went
through the experience with masses of people of overcoming their
illusions in traditional politicians. Fidel was ultrapopular from day
one and he probably could have named the cabinet he wanted on January
1. But if he had done that, the political clarification and
differentiation among the masses that came from those fights would not
have taken place, at least not as quickly and radically.

It isn't an easy tactic to carry out because it requires a strong
political center with a mass audience and some mass influence, and we
haven't got that in this country, we have no instrument to carry out a
tactic of critical support to Obama were it to be decided that would
be useful.

But the point of this whole missive is that it's not just a question
of seeing what miserly --or even sweeping-- reforms some capitalist
politician might offer (and in this sense, the social democracy of
the 1920s that Lenin wrote about were also capitalist politicians,
because they defended continuing with this basic system, with whatever
patches or changes, rather than abolishing it), but of trying to
situate what you do tactically in a given election within a clear
strategic project to advance towards working people becoming such a
strong and coherent political force that they can take power into
their own hands.

That's why I believe Louis has been so short with you -- you don't
seem to have a political horizon that goes beyond November. The
outlook that you project, frankly, is that of the Sunday morning
political talk show hosts. That's fine and legitimate and all sorts of
other things, but it is not Marxism. socialism, radicalism, Maoism,
Trotskyism or anything else remotely connected to the idea of
fundamentally changing this society.

If we don't think things through strategically, we're not really
thinking as Marxists.

Joaquin