>> Some of the good ways that the system of dominance
could be undermined: There may be democratic and socialist radical change in the
world that would lead to more and more regions withdrawing from the U.S. imperial
project. Or we in the United States can oppose our imperial institutions
and undermine them through mobilization against them. That means
mobilization against who-ever occupies the office of
president. <<
Jerry
________
I don't believe Obama is a sleeper agent on th side of the
proletariat. Or the image of the second coming of Christ.
That he is a historical marker is to obvious to ignore. Obama
is the first black President. That is what he has done that is the historical
marker. I voted for him and remained convinced I voted on
the progressive side of American history.
Obama became a lightening rod for change aspirations for a
complex of reasons, of which him being black is actually not the most important.
But then again, him being black is really important. It is not important in the
sense that Alan Keyes could not have won nomination in the Republican Party,
much less President. Al Sharption could have not won the Democratic nomination
much less President. Colin Powell could not have won President, or the
Republican Party nomination. Jesse Jackson Sr. or Jr., could have not won the
party's nomination for President, much less President.
I sensed late in the game that Obama could and would win. In
fact something was written on Pen-L about his speech in 2004. What was sensed
was the death of the black leader, as black leader. Some of us have been trying
to get our hands on this thing that is real American history. Obama is not a
black leader and this is not a bad thing. On the most basic level he is not
angry or suffer the wound of a thousand cuts from Jim Crow. A whole
generation in American knows nothing of Jim Crow. Racism has not vanished from
the landscape, but Jim Crow has. Mr. Crow is dead. Uncle Tom is dead. The black
Leader as black leader is dead. A new configuration of our history has opened up
and we can shape it in the flesh. This the stuff communist are born
for.
Communism. There, I said it again.
For me the issue was not "is Obama a representative of
capital?" Nor was I driven by a lesser of two evils fear.
Obama is a juncture in our history for very complex reasons.
One of them was pointed out as the reemergence of imperial rivalry. Another is
international considerations and realigning American imperial policy. I have
every intension of closing following his administrations actions in regard to
the "Palestinian Factor" in the Middle East and relations with the state of
Israel. A decisive shift away from support of the Israeli state would indicate
not a change of heart of American imperialism, but common sense. Perhaps this
will be the issue that brings Obama and Hillary to antagonism. Reforming our
relations with Cuba makes basic common sense. Our government historical approach
to continental African is in need of total over haul for common sense reasons.
Not a change in the heart of imperialism but realignment as great as the policy
change from direct colonialism to neo colonialism to financial entrapment
by finance capital, no matter who amongst the former colonials command the power
of the state.
Chavez, who I deeply respect, is no threat to American
imperialism on any level. He is used as an ideological
target. Domestic and international policy is in shift.
Exactly what will the Obama administration do? I don't know.
Victory to the workers in their current struggle, no matter
who is in office, is an approach and attitude bordering on the sacred. At
the end of the day, the power of capital has to be overthrown, dismantled and
the country reconstructed.
Today is not the end of the day and I do not advocate not
working toward the end of the day.
Today is the beginning hours of the 4th day
of Obama's administration and already I am not happy. I am happy we
crossed a historical juncture, but I still am not emancipated. Proletarians
cannot emancipate themselves until there is nothing left in the social struggle
except their self emancipation. It took a long time to understand this.
I want to see folks go to jail, who have been charged with and
convicted of war crimes, beginning with George W. I want people in jail
for stealing more than 200 million in so-called reconstruction funds earmarked
for Iraq. I want the people in jail that looted the libraries and museums of
Iraq, during the early hours of our armies military penetration of Baghdad. I
wanted all ancient artifacts and art returned to their country of origin. There
is a laundry list of wants, concessions, that are possible, because of the
alignment of social forces in this country and the need for a shift in state
policy.
Not a repeat of the so-called Roosevelt Coalition, but a
militant fight for the possible.
This matter over NSA spying on American journalists and the
outrage being generated means a Freedom of Information II is possible. The
initial Freedom of Information Act was the product of the death of the rat fink
Hoover. Many of my most personal friends and I were able to get our files. My
point is that I did not understand what made the first Freedom of Information
possible, until years later. There was a profound breach within the ranks of the
highest levels of the bourgeois political establishment. Senators and workers
within government bureaucracy was spied on by Hoover, and they wanted this
information out of the hands of the state.
Breaches, shifts in policy and what generates such shifts is a
little bit easier for me to see nowadays.
American imperialism needs to reform its relations with all
the major states and not so major states of the world, without changing the
property relations. This requires a political reordering domestically. Obama
understood this and slip in between a complex of breaches and shifts.
If only communists could master this art of the possible, and
tone down the thick ideology.
Americans will buy economic communism. They will not buy what
has been ideological communism.
The Obama campaign began transforming America and
introduced some powerful organizing technique. Yet, far to often many of us
argue over whether or not the campaign infrastructure was a real organization.
The basis of his campaign was working class deeply rooted in our middle class.
But that is how social processes evolve, or at least begin in America. The
Civil Rights movement was not very different in this regard. The period of the
late 1960s and 1970's found many middle class whites, driven my moral outrage,
to join and create the various grouping on the left. The problem back then was
that the Anglo middle class fighters (petty bourgeois, if you will) could not be
united with the black workers. This was a historical alignment that I only
vaguely understand back then.
My point is the striving to catch up with our history because
Obama caught most of the left and Marxists, with our brilliant dialectic,
flatfooted. Iowa did not ring the bell for us, or rather me. Why? My own narrow
mindedness.
I expect nothing from Obama's administration but more pain.
Different pain, but more. He has already done what he was drafted to do as a
living embodiment of our history. Now, he just so happened to announce that he
wanted the borders to Gaza opened so supplies could reach the people. Was this
not the very issue that ignited this latest wave of war? The Israeli state
interdiction of supplies and blocking borders? Who knows what can happen when
shift is in play. Not a shift to a communist America and dismantling of all
military basis. But shift.
No, I do not advocate the road to revolution as the electoral
path. 2 and 1/2 million showed up in Washington because the American
people were mildly angry and glad to rid themselves of Bush W. Imagine 60 - 70
million in motion, demanding anything. Such a movement is the meaning of a mass
uprising. Not a "riot" but a mass uprising American style.
Obama is a juncture.
WL.