Re: [Marxism] Fwd: URGENT! Obama's First Coup; meaning of Historical Opening

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/28/2009 11:51:40 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

So much for that Good Neighbor policy.  Anybody want to reconsider  the 
"historic opening" around Obama?
 
Reply
 
No, then is nothing to reconsider. However, I have no problem explaining  
what is meant by historical opening, in a way every worker in America can  
understand. 
 
What is a "historical opening?" 
 
What do these words mean? 
 
Opening means a breach or a period of political polarization, presenting an 
 opportunity that previously did not exist. Historic opening is political 
breach  of sufficient intensity to allow sections of the working class and of 
the  proletariat to move or behave different. 
 
The Obama administration is not the historical opening but expresses the  
historical opening. Obama emerged from the breach - the historic opening. The 
 historical opening occurred as byproduct of the economic crisis we are 
living as  previously stable section of the working class are driven into 
economic ruin and  spontaneous begin the fight for survival. This means losing 
our houses, jobs,  crumbling school systems and not being able to afford 
health care, pay high  energy bills and the cable bill. 
 
Specifically, a layer of the voting section of the economic middle - (a  
previously stable section of the industrial working class), swung to the Obama 
 campaign, while the proletariat - the lowest section of present day 
society,  continued its century old boycott of bourgeois elections. 
 
Letâs look at the historic opening as is slowly evolves in real time. 
 
President Barack Obama called on the American people to dream and to hope  
for change and a better life. The voting section of the working class 
responded.  His election signaled a major shift in what Americans want and 
expect 
from their  government. A previously conservative section of the working 
class shifted it  voting pattern and political loyalty from the Republican 
Party to the Democrats.  This shift of the voting section of the workers happen 
because we are confronted  with overwhelming problems, too big to solve on 
our own, and we heard a promise  to help us get through hard times. Plus, 
there does not exist in America a  nationwide political party representing 
labor. 
 
No matter how much Americans respect President Obama, no matter how long  we
âre willing to "wait and see", sooner or later we have to confront the 
reality  that no administration can bring about the change he promised. Little 
by little  every individual is going to be faced with the question, "why canâ
t any of the  administrations deliver on their promises?"  
 
Does this mean that we should give up our dreams? Absolutely not. What it  
does mean is that we cannot rely on the President or any other government 
leader  to bring about change; that a new society can only come through the 
struggle for  political power over control of the state. There are many stages 
to this  political struggle, and we are only at the beginning. We have to 
act as if  we are at the beginning phase and not in the middle or at the end. 
Our task now  is to understand what needs to be done at each stage. 
 
Revolutionaries go beyond appearances and perceptions to analyze underlying 
 causes and effects and actuality. Some Marxists agree that America is not 
Russia  and then proceed to apply Leninâs political conclusions to America. 
Russia had a  very different electoral system in 1909 that expressed a 
different class  relationship than in America. Russia was feudal with a system 
allocating the  workers candidates. Russiaâs Constitutional regime evolved to 
accommodate the  nobility or czar as the representatives of feudal classes; 
the bourgeoisie as a  rising class and the workers, with each allocated 
positions.  Under such  conditions workers candidates have a clear meaning. 
 
When Marx writes about workers candidates it is in the context of a society 
 transition from monarchy, with capitalist bonded to workers in conflict 
and  antagonism with the old dying feudal classes. Our electoral system is  
fundamentally different as is the form of our state and the underlying 
property  relations. 
 
Most people observe that Obama is not implementing policies of change they  
hoped for. Many criticize him for it, most certainly the ideological left 
and  sectarian Marxists, but this leads nowhere. Obama is bad. Here is a 
bourgeois  candidate and representative of capital. Telling a hungry man that 
his problem  is that he has no food doesnât do him any good. Proclaiming from 
the high top  that Obama is the problem does exactly what? Why is he the 
problem? 
 
Revolutionaries today cannot stand outside the process and simply proclaim  
that the problem is the problem - capitalism. Any newscaster or economist 
can  tell you the system is broken or how many people are losing their jobs, 
health  care, and ability to feed their families. 
 
The question before the movement is, what is to be done? Real questions  
call for real answers. This means politicizing every step of the way. It means 
 propagandizing from within the actual struggle â as scattered and 
disoriented as  it is â to push that struggle forward from within, through 
all its 
stages,  toward its actual conclusion. Pushing from within does not mean 
pushing the same  old ideological propositions, but explaining finance in 
simple 
terms, because a  historical form of struggle in America has always been 
connected to assault  against the banks and finance capital. This form of 
struggle goes back to the  old Populist Movement, all the way back to Thomas 
Jeffersonâs denunciations of  the private banking system. 
 
We have to explain in simply terms by government financing - issuing  
credit, does not create debt. Debt is created by government relying and  
borrowing from private lenders rather than simply printing credit/money. We 
have  to 
further explain why printing money does not create inflation when money is  
detached from specie. Money ainât gold or silver and is no more or less 
than a  credit instrument. We have to learn how to do our jobs better and not 
rest  content with pompous ideological statements. 
 
We can not avoid teaching and describing the system to the workers. We have 
 to show that we know what we are talking about. Lets state at the 
beginning and  why the historical opening is real and exist. . 
 
The historic opening appears within the government and how the people think 
 of government. It is important to remember the state is not the 
government. 
 
The state is much more powerful than the President - government. The state  
is an apparatus for the systematic application of force by which one class  
exercises control over another. Presidents come and go, but as long as the  
capitalist class controls the state, the state is the means to dominate the 
 workers in the interests of the capitalist class. The state of the United 
states  of America is and has always been an organization of violence in the 
hands of  our capitalists; and is and have always been the international 
hangmen of  revolutions and the enemy of the people of the world. 
 
The American state overthrows political regimes - governments, world wide.  
The government is not the state and subject to political shifts while the 
state  can only be overthrown. The state cannot shift as such. Nor can states 
be  reformed. Government can be reformed but the state as guardian of 
property can  only be overthrown and a new relationship of people to property - 
in the process  of production, can be established or abolished. 
 
Obama, like Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, all the  
way back to the first administration, is subordinate to the state whose 
primary  instruments of control are the military and police and intelligence 
agencies â  such as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. 
Immigration 
and Customs  Enforcement â by the many administrative agencies and all the 
Federal agencies,  each of which enforces a program and policies in favor of 
the ruling class. 
 
Even more so than other forms of government, the U.S. Constitution ties the 
 President more closely to the state than to the people who elected him by  
establishing the President as both the head of state and the head of 
government.  In countries, like England, Parliament can call for new elections 
through a vote  of no-confidence and bring in a new Prime Minister to 
reorganize the government,  while the Queen remains as head of the state. In 
our 
country, the electorate has  no means to change the government during the 
Presidentâs four year term. 
 
We saw this in Bushâs final years when, despite his dismal approval rating, 
 the American people were powerless to prevent him from carrying out the 
will of  the corporate state. Power rested, not in the electorate, but in 
powerful people  who have served as loyal servants of the corporate state for 
decades. Former  Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense 
Donald Rumsfeld,  architects of extreme violations of human rights â secret 
prisons, torture,  indefinite imprisonment without charges, and unrestricted 
surveillance â were  merely extending policies and practices they forged 
during the Ford  administration in the 1970âs. 
 
Obamaâs Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whose autobiography is entitled, 
 "From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How 
They  Won the Cold War," was also Secretary of Defense in the Bush 
administration.  Previously, he was Director of Intelligence for both Bush Jr. 
and 
Bush Sr. and  Deputy Director of Intelligence for Ronald Reagan. 
 
By more subtle, but equally effective means than FBI Director J. Edgar  
Hooverâs blackmail of leading politicians and government officials, such key  
figures and their numerous underlings in the state apparatus exercise control 
 over the elected administrations of today - the Constitutional regime. 
 
In the absence of a state wide Party of Laboring America, what we can hope  
for from the best of our elected leaders, such as a Cynthia McKinney, is 
that  they use their office as a bully pulpit to expose what is really 
happening and  to rouse the American people to a vision of a new society. It is 
not 
like one is  going to ever elect a bunch of communist to Senate and somehow 
change the  government and state. Use of the bully pulpit is important. 
This was Abraham  Lincolnâs strength. He changed the way the American people 
thought about  freedom, slavery and the American nation and thus was able to 
make history. 
 
Anyone that expects someone other than communists to do the job of  
communists have the wrong idea. 
 
The combination of the economic situation, American's aspirations for a  
better life, and the opportunity opened up by Obamaâs oratory are rousing the 
 
American people to embrace new ideas. A recent poll found that many 
Americans  are thinking favorably about socialism. This is proof of a 
historical 
political  and ideological opening. The battle over national health care is 
more than a  petty ideological quibble. The contempt most Americans hold 
towards pouring  trillions of dollars into the non-banking financial system is 
more than a  quibble. 
 
Once we grow up and stop playing at politics and admit we cannot set the  
national dialogue and national political agenda, then we can more fully carry 
 out our communist work. The capitalist set the agenda in its conflict with 
wage  labor. There is no other game in town. 
 
As the Obama administration continues to offer trillions of dollars in  
bailouts to banks and financial institutions, the American people are compelled 
 in desperation to call for bailouts for schools, for victims of predatory  
lenders, for housing and health care and this spontaneous striving is our  
working class pushing from within the "historical opening." As the 
government  moves toward considering nationalization in the interests of 
stabilizing  
corporations and financial institutions, the American people are beginning 
to  call for "nationalization" in the interests of the people not the 
corporations. 
 
The American people thinking (not demanding) favorably of socialism means  
"a new role for government" is desired. This is the ideological face of the  
historic opening. 
 
This is where we are at on Sunday June 28, 2009. Where we will be at on  
July 4, 2009 can be written about on July 5. 
 
The transition between the Bush and Obama administrations gives only the  
appearance of stability. A historical opening has appeared that marks 2009  
radically different from 2007. The events unfolding in Honduras should not be 
 cause to misunderstand the historical opening expressed in the election of 
Obama  and the wide shifts underway in government. Government polarization 
and shift  has not yet affected the state. 
 
The underlying reality of the capitalist system is one of great economic  
instability and intensifying polarization, which will inevitably lead to 
intense  political instability. The political reality of every administration 
is 
their  role in guiding the government - not the state, to conform to the 
changing  conditions and demands of the corporate state. The historical 
opening will  widen. If we do not learn how to act at the local level, what 
will 
happen is  that capital will achieve a certain stability, momentarily reform 
the  government, not the state or property relations, as a boundary in its 
fight for  survival and we will become trapped in this boundary until it 
exhausts itself. 
 
In their move toward fascism the ruling class is promoting and using the  
rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate groups to disarm and disorient 
the  growing popular struggles. When the state shifts to a fascist form, this 
does  not mean the state has shifted, rather the form of government has 
shifted. 
 
In the fight against fascism, revolutionaries must educate the American  
people to fight for a communal economic system with goods distributed 
according  to need. There are no reforms, no waiting for Obama, no half way 
measures. The  next step on the path to power for the people is to take up the 
fight 
for  nationalization in the interests of the people not the corporations. 
Not because  nationalization is a mysterious cure all, but because that is 
the practical form  of struggle that has emerged at this time. 
 
The art of politics and struggle means pushing to its limits whatever form  
and demands emerge in the political and ideological sphere. 
 
Historical opening? 
 
With out question. 
 

WL.
**************Make your summer sizzle with fast and easy recipes for the 
grill. (http://food.aol.com/grilling?ncid=emlcntusfood00000005)

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