[Marxism] Last-minute stab by rightist Dobson against Obama

[Mark Lause]

Walter Lippmann <walterlx at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The McCain-Palin-Bush forces aren't only using James Dobson as their
> spearhead in attacking Obama. They widely use a multi-issue, not a
> single-issue approach. And mostly they don't spend too much time
> attacking one another as people on the political left do.
>

Really????  I'd suggest that what you're seeing as some kind of
unitary conspiracy to emphasize different things in different
circumstances is just a failure to read the evidence from the inside
out.  These "McCain-Palin-Bush" forces are all tugging their own
directions and creating a lot of acrimony in their own ranks.  In
fact, this dissintengration of the old Reaganite coalition is why a
number of prominent old reactionaries (now embraced by the
"progressives" supporting Obama) are calling for a Democratic vote.

Or maybe they're only calling for a Democratic vote in some states....

Fred Feldman <ffeldman at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>
> I have come to the conclusion that voting for a
> bourgeois party or a coalition involving bourgeois forces is not a
> PRINCIPLED question. Even aside from the many circumstances in the
> semicolonial world where this is just a sectarian dead end.
>
[snips]

> Does voting for Obama cross class lines? To me the answer to that is  YES. I
> think that is obvious.
>
> Does that mean it is wrong from a working class or social-revolutionary
> standpoint to do that in all questions. I don't think that is so. It is
> determined concretely. A great deal of class-collaboration takes place every
> day, and has to. Was the Soviet Union wrong to fight world war II in a
> military alliance with US imperialism? No, that was a necessity of survival
> -- and it was a necessary political act, not just a military one. How the
> Soviet bureaucracy used that alliance against revolutionary struggles is
> another question.
>

I agree entirely that some abstract set of religious principles isn't
the point.  This is the point of the earlier arguments about whether
candidates who call themselves "socialist" are preferable to those
that don't.  Broader questions have much greater importance.  For a
materialist, context defines everything.

As to drawing the class line at the ballot box, we are not in "the
semicolonial world where this is just a sectarian dead end."

Nor does this have much to do with the Soviet alliance with US
imperialism sixty or seventy years ago.  Neither McCain nor Palin are
Hitlerites.

The ballot is a mandate to rule from the governed to the governing.
As I tell my liberal friends, regardless of what progressive notions
you have in your mind or your heart when you cast your ballot, it is
objectively vote of confidence in his agenda.  That's how it's going
to be seen and understood socially, and the rest is a matter between
you and the Holy Ghost.

My approach doesn't even pretend to be rooted in Leninism (which is
open to all sorts of twistings and rationalizations), but by the
experience of radicals here in the U.S.   We don't give our mandate to
people who asking for that mandate because they want to slaughter
Indians or Mexicans.  We don't give our mandate to the people who want
to root economic prosperity in slavery.  We don't give that mandate to
people who believe they don't need to obtain that mandate from ALL of
us.  We don't give that mandate to people who believe it to be their
divinely ordained or social Darwinian destiny to deny us basic human
rights.  We don't give that mandate to people who deny us our civil
rights (which include our right to form parties, run candidates, etc.)

Solidarity!
Mark L.

PS: However deplorable it seems to rationalize voting for Obama on the
flimsiest of grounds, I find it doubly deplorable to use the McKinney
campaign as a means of doing so.  Indeed, it strikes me as much the
same as the CP use of the Browder campaign to support FDR.