Re: [Marxism] The Left and the Elections

["Mark Lause" <markalause@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 9:36 AM, Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  Obama's "universal health care" is a crock of shit and I am
>  singularly depressed to hear Joaquin give it any kind of credibility.
>

I agree with most of the general points Joaquin made on this, but
think that he puts them together into a structure that seems to goes
nowhere positive.

If the labor movement is disorganized, what about the African-American
community...which doesn't even reflect any coherent organization
structure or social movement but is really whatever the corporate
media tells us it is from time to time and place to place?  What is
Obama's real organic connection to that?  As opposed to his organic
connection to the white power structure?

Or are we just dealing with a typically middle class American
consumerism?  Is Obama simply a beneficiary of kind of focus group
identity of the sort that benefited O.J. or any prominent blacks that
have been successful in the white structure?  (That this is a major
source of Clinton's popularity among women of specific age groups is
simply transparen and her strategy seems to consist of nothing else
most of the time...well that coupled to attacks on Obama.)

Conversely, is it not circular logic to ascribe all the shortcomings
of black political sentiment to the failure of independent political
action...and then to be dismissive of calls for independent political
action (because we don't have mass independent anticapitalist politics
in the US)?

Where do we start?  How do we something in this election to build
something for the next one?

ML

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