Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end
In a message dated 2/28/2009 1:26:49 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, waistli...@aol.com writes: Obama as a uniter is an interesting Marxist approach. Perhaps if all of us was raised by a white parent and white grandparents, we too would be uniters. Why not just read his book - Dreams from my father? And then describe how being raised, during his formative years, where he was raised mirror the life of blacks in American Northern or Southern cities and country side. I do not write Obama is an immigrant. His story - meaning the story that he tells, and to a large degree the live he has lived, is that of the story of the immigrant and their first generation offspring. If you disagree with an interpretation why not simply state something to the effect that my interpretation is unless you are saying what Obama means is I was raised by one white parent and white grandparents and therefore I am a uniter, with the small physiological disposition of the descendants of Southern slavery. Without question he is African American, but that does not really tell much. Uniter! Trust me on the following: Obama is CEO for the capitalist class. WL. Barack Obama wonderful book, Dreams from My Father, is the immigrant story, a black immigrant, rather than the history of the Negro People, and his acute awareness of this living history accounts for his unique and individual ability to cross the color line. When Obama writes, My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there, what is meant is that my identity is not defined on the basis of the color factor in American history. The words of Obama reveals why no self respecting Marxist, born and reared as part of the baby boomers, can deploy the concept race, other than the petty bourgeois intellectuals unable to fully digest dialectics without opportunist sauce. ^ CB: Obama's words don't mean that. Unlike most Black people he was raised by White parents and grandparents. This gave him an unusual ability to understand both aspects of his Duboisian double consciousness. It allows him to be a uniter, not a divider. Obama is not an immigrant. He had little contact with his immigrant father. He was raised by US natives **Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filingnci d=emlcntusyelp0004) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis **Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filingncid=emlcntusyelp0004) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end
Trust me on the following: Obama is CEO for the capitalist class. WL. ^^ CB: So were Lincoln and FDR. From my observations, that's dogmatic ,formulaic thinking ,and in this situation, there keep arising more indications that something new is going on here. Need to try to think dialectically on this one. Again the first indicator is getting all those White people to vote for him. That's breaking a quantitative barrier. Then his first month as Pres is realistic , but making some changes that are possible in this context , despite all the left haters say. I could list the actions , but I'm not going to exert myself for the haters. Fuck em. The big crisis/problem is Afghanistan, and ,of course Palestine He's going to have to be Houdini on that. I can't see how he'll do it. Unless he just pretty soon , after this assessment he can get something like broker both a treaty with Hamas and a treaty with the Taliban et al not to facilitate, and to hinder any attack on the US by the bin Laden group. I don't know how he gets out of the obligation to capture bin Laden, *** Reply To begin a presentation - (the six part series for Black History Month, and the follow up dialogue) with class, class struggles and class antagonism, and then point out that Obama is the CEO of the capitalist class may very well be dogmatic ,formulaic thinking , or a refusal to try to think dialectically. But, there is no way to see how one thinks other than as it is expressed in exposition. For me this means class intersection and where the communist must push for the concessions made possible on the basis of temporary fields of relative unity. For instance health care has emerged as one of these fields and not because the workers need health care. This field emerges as a manifestation of intersection because private industry large and small, is being crushed by health care cost, along with insurance companies indirectly paying for the cost or medical plans. Further, the cost of Medicare can be more rationalized and driven downward by its reorganization around our new technological regime and the cost of prescription drugs can also be driven down through regulation. Class intersection of interest, rather than Obama as the uniter must inform our view of the art of the possible. Another such field exist in the agricultural sector, as the expansion of welfare and food stamps. Most certainly this business sector is screaming through its lobbyists that the people are hunger and need food; our food. Through this intersection of interest arising the demand to increase the consumption capacity of the masses, which also intersects with a huge area of the economy driven by consumer demand. Here is the basis upon which Obama emerges as uniter. This is not a bad thing, but a thing that must lend itself to a Marxist unraveling in its class dimensions. This is not to suggest being opposed to excursions into anthropology. This clamoring about white people is unsettling because 58 million, primarily whites voted in the historically fascist political block anchored in the Southern political establishment. We really need to find the means to propagandize class and popularize its meaning for America. I am of the opinion that the great polarity to be stuck and fought for in American society is between fascists and non fascist. There are material reasons for this opinion bound up with this stage of decay of capital. In the pre and post WWII era it was possible for a section of world politics to be anti-fascism and anti-communism because capitalism itself had not reached its historical barriers and the anti-communist/anti-fascists axis still had a task of sweeping the last institutions of feudalism from earth. Further, the era of the national colonial revolutions had not been completed and allowed for a unique class intersection of forces that emerged as the politics of the Third World movement. It mattered little that we communists screamed at the top of our lungs that there is no such thing as a Third Way, because the world still had to complete its historical process bound up with the destruction of direct colonialism and establishing the world hegemony of finance capital. Today, the world class alignment is such that the world bourgeoisie and world proletariat faces each other along lines spoken of in the Communist Manifesto. Further, a section of the world bourgeoisie and world proletariat has been effectively cast outside of bourgeois production and face each other in external collision. Without the connecting bond - tissue, that is the unity of productive forces and social relations of production there is no basis for unity with these extreme manifestation of the capital relations. If you do not have a job or the prospect of getting one, you exist in external collision with capital.
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end
Insofar as I understand what Waistline is saying here, I agree with all of it. -Original Message- From: waistli...@aol.com Sent: Mar 1, 2009 11:15 AM To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end Reply To begin a presentation - (the six part series for Black History Month, and the follow up dialogue) with class, class struggles and class antagonism, and then point out that Obama is the CEO of the capitalist class may very well be dogmatic ,formulaic thinking , or a refusal to try to think dialectically. But, there is no way to see how one thinks other than as it is expressed in exposition. For me this means class intersection and where the communist must push for the concessions made possible on the basis of temporary fields of relative unity. For instance health care has emerged as one of these fields and not because the workers need health care. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end
Waistline2 Obama as a uniter is an interesting Marxist approach. ^ CB: Marxist as in Workers of all nations and races , unite ! ^ Perhaps if all of us was raised by a white parent and white grandparents, we too would be uniters. ^ CB: Makes sense. It would engender need for unity on a personal level for peace of mind. His mother seems to have taught him Black history type respect for Black people. He seems to have somewhat consciously constructed a Black identity of high integrity. Going to the hood to live, like an anthropologist joining his own culture. Now he's an interesting character. To coin a phrase, he seems to be in the Presidential world , but not of it. Somehow he comes across as confident in the sense of not worried, in the face of an extraordinary mess but not arrogant and not aloof. Engaged with horrific crises, but not scared and not in the bliss of ignorance. I'm like more power to ya, Barry. So far, so good. ^^^ Why not just read his book - Dreams from my father? ^ CB: I did. ^ And then describe how being raised, during his formative years, where he was raised mirror the life of blacks in American Northern or Southern cities and country side. I do not write Obama is an immigrant. His story - meaning the story that he tells, and to a large degree the live he has lived, is that of the story of the immigrant and their first generation offspring. ^ CB: Maybe sort of half, but the other half is pretty American native. I will say that he's sort of like a brother from another planet. More like an immigrant from ancient Egypt or something, somekind of higher civilization than America. His mother was an anthropologist, and he lived in Indonesia for a while, which might give him some ability to view American culture objectively like an immigrant, but his grandfather was a traveling salesman and his grandmother worked in a bank, real regular Americans from Kansas He's _sui generis_, a phenomon, breaking through a new quantitative boundry in personality type. He's got a lot of character, and, well../\. intelligence social intelligence and abstract intelligence. If you disagree with an interpretation why not simply state something to the effect that my interpretation is unless you are saying what Obama means is I was raised by one white parent and white grandparents and therefore I am a uniter, with the small physiological disposition of the descendants of Southern slavery. Without question he is African American, but that does not really tell much. CB: See above Uniter! Trust me on the following: Obama is CEO for the capitalist class. WL. ^^ CB: So were Lincoln and FDR. From my observations, that's dogmatic ,formulaic thinking ,and in this situation, there keep arising more indications that something new is going on here. Need to try to think dialectically on this one. Again the first indicator is getting all those White people to vote for him. That's breaking a quantitative barrier. Then his first month as Pres is realistic , but making some changes that are possible in this context , despite all the left haters say. I could list the actions , but I'm not going to exert myself for the haters. Fuck em. The big crisis/problem is Afghanistan, and ,of course Palestine He's going to have to be Houdini on that. I can't see how he'll do it. Unless he just pretty soon , after this assessment he can get something like broker both a treaty with Hamas and a treaty with the Taliban et al not to facilitate, and to hinder any attack on the US by the bin Laden group. I don't know how he gets out of the obligation to capture bin Laden, Barack Obama wonderful book, Dreams from My Father, is the immigrant story, a black immigrant, rather than the history of the Negro People, and his acute awareness of this living history accounts for his unique and individual ability to cross the color line. When Obama writes, My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there, what is meant is that my identity is not defined on the basis of the color factor in American history. The words of Obama reveals why no self respecting Marxist, born and reared as part of the baby boomers, can deploy the concept race, other than the petty bourgeois intellectuals unable to fully digest dialectics without opportunist sauce. ^ CB: Obama's words don't mean that. Unlike most Black people he was raised by White parents and grandparents. This gave him an unusual ability to understand both aspects of his Duboisian double consciousness. It allows him to be a uniter, not a divider. Obama is not an immigrant. He had little contact with his immigrant father. He was raised by US natives ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity: 6/end
6. Cultural nuances/end Barack Obama is/as a black man, keenly aware of the color factor in American and world history and sensitive to the nuances of culture. I own and have read his autobiography Dreams From My Father, written in 1995 at the age of 33 at the same time of purchasing and reading Sidney Poitier Measure of A Man. Mr. Poitier introduced the #16 quotes of the 100 Years . . . .100 Movie Quotes in the movie In The Heat of The Night, where he plays the role of a Northern Black detective sent South to unravel a murder. His famous line was: They call me Mister Tibbs. Both of these men, proud, determined and elegant in their own right and individuality, manifest the story of the American melting pot, as America’s little discussed and little understood black underbelly. In 1963, Poitier became the first black man to win a USA Academy Award for Best Actor, and of course Obama is the first black man to become President. Neither are Negro, but most certainly black, in the same way that a second and third generation English man or German immigrant lives the metamorphosis in America, that is the American melting pot and emerges as Anglo American. The same can be said of say Minister Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey and even WEB Du Bois. Let’s isolate Minister Louis for a moment to examine how the American story has played itself out and unravel a quantifying of American history and individuals that seem to defies logic. Farrakhan was born in New York, Bronx, and raised as Eugene Walcott within the West Indian community in the Roxbury section of Boston Massachusetts. His mother, Sarah Mae Manning, had emigrated from Saint Kitts and Nevis in the 1920’s; his father, Percival Clarke, was a Jamaican cab driver from New York. As a child, he received training as a violinist. At the age of six, he was given his first violin and by the age of thirteen, he had played with the Boston College Orchestra and the Boston Civic Symphony. A year later, he went on to win national competitions, and was one of the first black performers to appear on Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour, where he also - naturally, won an award. A central focus of his youth was the Episcopal St. Cyprian's Church in Boston's Roxbury section, a part of Boston which also produced the great Leonard Bernstein. All of these men, noble and elegant in their own right and historical experience, manifest the striving and realization of the American Dream, to one degree or another, rather than the plight and circumstance of the Negro; meaning those people emerging from the melting pot of slavery and then formed under 90 years of structural Jim Crow. All these men are African American but that tell one virtually nothing, in the same way that whites as Anglo American informs one of next to nothing. Basically, Anglo American and African American means Americans with white and black skin, when in fact the individual has a real history. The experience of Jim Crow + white chauvinism, NOT Southern slavery + Jim Crow + white chauvinism, also shaped and impacted all of these men, but their experience mirrors, that of the European immigrant, to a vast degree, including Malcolm X. Malcolm’s mother Louise Little was born in Grenada, with Malcolm stating, she looked like a white woman, because of her Scottish father. Interesting yes? Barack Obama wonderful book, Dreams from My Father, is the immigrant story, a black immigrant, rather than the history of the Negro People, and his acute awareness of this living history accounts for his unique and individual ability to cross the color line. When Obama writes, My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there, what is meant is that my identity is not defined on the basis of the color factor in American history. The words of Obama reveals why no self respecting Marxist, born and reared as part of the baby boomers, can deploy the concept race, other than the petty bourgeois intellectuals unable to fully digest dialectics without opportunist sauce. The very concept of race is an ideological trap designed to obscure not just classes and class intersection, but prevents disclosing that, which is specific and critical to American society. Actually, lumping all blacks together under the rubric race is to lump all European ethnic together as a dominating race, rather than a historically oppressing peoples with classes amongst them; classes that began polarizing in a different manner the moment the barriers of Jim Crow began falling. It is accurate to insist that the election of Obama inaugurates the class struggle in America, with a section of the intelligentsia as black, fighting its last pitched battle to impose the concept of race on the emerging fighting section of our fighting proletariat. I have the most personal responsibility to
[Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity: 6/end
Barack Obama wonderful book, Dreams from My Father, is the immigrant story, a black immigrant, rather than the history of the Negro People, and his acute awareness of this living history accounts for his unique and individual ability to cross the color line. When Obama writes, My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there, what is meant is that my identity is not defined on the basis of the color factor in American history. The words of Obama reveals why no self respecting Marxist, born and reared as part of the baby boomers, can deploy the concept race, other than the petty bourgeois intellectuals unable to fully digest dialectics without opportunist sauce. ^ CB: Obama's words don't mean that. Unlike most Black people he was raised by White parents and grandparents. This gave him an unusual ability to understand both aspects of his Duboisian double consciousness. It allows him to be a uniter, not a divider. Obama is not an immigrant. He had little contact with his immigrant father. He was raised by US natives ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity 6/end
Obama as a uniter is an interesting Marxist approach. Perhaps if all of us was raised by a white parent and white grandparents, we too would be uniters. Why not just read his book - Dreams from my father? And then describe how being raised, during his formative years, where he was raised mirror the life of blacks in American Northern or Southern cities and country side. I do not write Obama is an immigrant. His story - meaning the story that he tells, and to a large degree the live he has lived, is that of the story of the immigrant and their first generation offspring. If you disagree with an interpretation why not simply state something to the effect that my interpretation is unless you are saying what Obama means is I was raised by one white parent and white grandparents and therefore I am a uniter, with the small physiological disposition of the descendants of Southern slavery. Without question he is African American, but that does not really tell much. Uniter! Trust me on the following: Obama is CEO for the capitalist class. WL. Barack Obama wonderful book, Dreams from My Father, is the immigrant story, a black immigrant, rather than the history of the Negro People, and his acute awareness of this living history accounts for his unique and individual ability to cross the color line. When Obama writes, My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there, what is meant is that my identity is not defined on the basis of the color factor in American history. The words of Obama reveals why no self respecting Marxist, born and reared as part of the baby boomers, can deploy the concept race, other than the petty bourgeois intellectuals unable to fully digest dialectics without opportunist sauce. ^ CB: Obama's words don't mean that. Unlike most Black people he was raised by White parents and grandparents. This gave him an unusual ability to understand both aspects of his Duboisian double consciousness. It allows him to be a uniter, not a divider. Obama is not an immigrant. He had little contact with his immigrant father. He was raised by US natives **Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filingncid=emlcntusyelp0004) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
