Re: [Marxism] The "turn to industry" of the 70s and 80s

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bhaskar:  "It's ridiculous to assert that a depoliticized population will
remain depoliticized forever."

It is easy to defeat straw men. I never said anything about "forever." 

So sure, it is ridiculous to talk in terms of forever. But it's just as
ridiculous to assert a depoliticized population will become politicized now
because we want it to, or that we must act as if it is becoming politicized
when reality has yet to demonstrate this tendency.

Bhaskar: "Presented between the alternative between the far-right economic
and social policies of John McCain and the center-right policies of Obama,
the working-class, students, communities of color enthusiastically chose the
latter.  Thousands of people organized to support Obama and hundreds of
thousands of unionists have campaigned for EFCA, universal health care and
other reforms.... is that not the working-class as it is attempting to
organize and fight the only way they can given the current circumstance?"

The election exit poll indicates that Obama's election was due first and
foremost to the extraordinary turnout among Black folks and his huge margin
of victory among them, and to a lesser but still significant degree, to
turnout among Latinos where he scored a substantial margin of victory.
However, the data do not support the claim that Obama's victory "is the
working-class as it is attempting to organize and fight the only way they
can given the current circumstance."

Using income as a proxy for class, Obama lost among whites with family
incomes under $50,000 a year with 47% to McCain's 51%. Using education as a
proxy, Obama lost among whites without a college degree with 40% of the vote
compared to McCain's 58%. Indeed, the sharpest differentiator among whites
was not class but generation. Whites under 30 backed Obama 54% to 44%. Older
whites backed McCain 57% to Obama's 41%, with little difference in the older
age groups.

Based on the actual data, I think that what happened is that actually Black
folks AS A PEOPLE acted with tremendous coherence among all age, education
and income groups giving Obama 90-some percent majorities across the board.

Latinos also acted with a great deal of coherence, favoring Obama between
than 2-1, and even higher when you set aside the Cuban vote which, for
reasons that are well known here, is atypical and not driven by the same
social and political issues. 

The working class vote was DIVIDED along racial/nationality lines, with
Blacks especially, but also other minorities voting very heavily for Obama
and with very high turnouts, whereas whites voted for McCain in a clear
majority.

If the election had been restricted to white workers only, Obama would have
been creamed. That's the truth.

Thus it makes no sense to assert that this was the class attempting to
organize and fight. There is no clear perceptible pattern of class action.
If you look at vote by income for the entire population, or vote by
education, it does seem like these class "proxies" do have some relation to
voting patterns. I believe these results are illusory, a product of the
demographic patterns prevalent especially in the Black and also Latino
communities. 

When you get 95% of Blacks and nearly 70% of Latinos voting Obama, it is
going to seem like the "entire" under $25K, under $50K and non-college
demographics went strongly for Obama, because Blacks and Latinos are so
heavily over-represented there. But in reality, the attribute associated
with Obama voting isn't income but race. Ditto for education.

The other side of this is that Obama was in no sense a working class
candidate. Like many other Democrat politicians before him, he went out of
his way to try to make himself relatively more attractive to various
segments of the working people than his rivals in the primary and the
general election. The fact that he is Black probably made some of this
marketing more credible than it might otherwise have been. It also
transformed the election into one that was, in the minds of many, partly a
referendum on white supremacy. 

Joaquin


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