[Pen-l] Marxists for Obama: a bumpy road ahead

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The pro-Obama, self-described Marxist left has a tough job on its hands. 
Well before taking office, Obama has made it painfully obvious that his 
administration will be in effect Clinton’s third term. With Mrs. Clinton 
about to assume the office of Secretary of State, a perfect symbol of 
the kind of bellicose foreign policy that the dovish President-elect 
campaigned against, one wonders whether the primary was just some kind 
of elaborate deception foisted on a gullible public yearning for change.

Perhaps nobody with Marxist credentials after a fashion is better 
qualified to serve as a spin doctor for the incoming Obama 
administration than Carl Davidson, the 65 year old 1960s SDS leader and 
editor of the Guardian newspaper, a New Left weekly newspaper that 
morphed into a Maoist publication around the same time that the shards 
of SDS were launching the New Communist Movement. The New Communist 
Movement, embodied in sects like Bob Avakian’s RCP, styled itself after 
the CPUSA before it became “revisionist”. In keeping with their 
neo-Stalinist ambitions, such groups became past masters at lying 
through their teeth and opportunist politics, including a turn toward 
the Democratic Party. In realigning with the 150 year old party of 
racism and imperialist war, they came full circle. If SDS had resolved 
to “part of the way with LBJ”, many of its veterans who came to embrace 
the DP were now ready to go all the way with Obama.

In a prolix article titled “The Bumpy Road Ahead: New Tasks of the Left 
Following Obama’s Victory” that was posted to Portside, a mailing list 
that is moderated by the Eurocommunist Committees of Correspondence, 
Davidson uses every trick he learned in the neo-Stalinist milieu to 
shore up support for Obama and discredit his opponents on the left who 
are stigmatized as “ultraleft” for their opposition to the “war on 
terror”, Wall Street bailouts, Zionism and other disgusting policies 
about to be carried out by the Democrats.

After reminding us of what a breakthrough it was to have a Black 
president (an observation that will likely begin to wear thin after a 
year or so of DP misrule), Davidson attempts to explain Obama’s 
presidency in class terms:

"The Obama team at the top is comprised of global capital’s 
representatives in the U.S. as well as U.S. multinational capitalists, 
and these two overlap but are not the same. It is a faction of 
imperialism, and there is no need for us to prettify it, deny it or 
cover it up in any way. The important thing to see is that it is neither 
neoliberalism nor the old corporate liberalism. Obama is carving out a 
new niche for himself, a work in progress still within the bounds of 
capitalism, but a ‘high road’ industrial policy capitalism that is less 
state-centric and more market- based in its approach, more Green, more 
high tech, more third wave and participatory, less politics-as- 
consumerism and more ‘public citizen’ and education focused. In short, 
it’s capitalism for a multipolar world and the 21st century."

For those a bit puzzled by the reference to “third wave”, this is the 
very same buzzword coined by Alvin Toffler to describe a post-industrial 
society. The first wave was composed of small farms and the second is 
synonymous with the industrial revolution. Needless to say, this schema 
developed by a former editor of Fortune magazine has little to do with 
Marxism. Davidson, a computer consultant, became smitten with the idea a 
couple of decades ago and promoted it as part of a high-tech driven 
brand of market socialism called “cyRev”. I analyzed his theories in an 
article that can be read here. As an unrepentant Marxist, I felt quite 
put off by the kind of Silicon Valley boosterism that pervaded cyRev:

"In our view of socialism, we affirm the entrepreneurial spirit, the 
motivating energy of the market and the right of individuals to become 
wealthy through the private ownership of the capital they have helped to 
create. At the same time, we fundamentally reorder priorities in how 
both property and capital is defined. While both personal property and 
capital may still be owned by individuals, we no longer see ownership as 
an absolute power. Property, especially productive property in the form 
of capital, is to be seen primarily as a social power relation that can 
be guided and regulated, just as other power relations are regulated for 
the common good of society. Incomes are also subject to progressive 
taxation."

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/marxists-for-obama-a-bumpy-road-ahead/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l