Black History Month 2009 Change and continuity: The election of Barack Obama By Waistline2 Obama: Change or continuity? (Part III) By Elíades Acosta Matos raises a question whose answer is "both!"
_http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Ite_ (http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=800&Ite) John Foster Dulles, leading Cold War warrior and America’s secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, summed up America’s foreign policy as, "no permanent friends, just permanent interest." This formula also applies to domestic policy. Barack Obama election as President, proves something has changed in American society, according to every political pole and tendency in American society itself. This "something" is bound up with American history; the historic crossing of the color line; political shifts and political realignments world wide and changes in the world wide mode of production demanding policy shift as US imperialism struggles to hold together the unity of productive forces and productive relations world wide. Obama the person and chief executive officer of capital - his symbolic gestures/jesters and rhetoric, are better understood placed in a historical and political context. Our society is breaking down. This break down is material and ideological. Barrack Obama was called forth as President Obama to "fix what is broken." All the Kings horses and all the Kings men can put our society back together again; at least on the old basis. Herein lays the rub. The context and content of the current financial and economic crisis, an intense cyclical crisis of capitalism, is shaped and impacted by the increasing revolution - crisis, in the productive machinery of American society. America is undergoing economic dislocation. This dislocation is a combination of revolution in the productive forces, the emergence of an antagonistic form of wealth and new antagonistic classes, combined with a classical crisis of capital reproduction. The new antagonistic form of wealth is capital as a notional (imaginary) value or wealth as valueless production. Society move in class antagonism. The dialectic of all social revolution is a combination of "contradiction" and "antagonism," with contradiction being replaced by antagonism. This process is slowly but inexorably underway in America, demanding disclosure and then President Obama‘s election place in that context. Contradiction and Antagonism. . The contradiction between the two basic classes holding society together, drives the system - mode of production, through all its quantitative boundaries. The introduction of new productive machinery creates new classes. With the emergence and quantitative expansion of new class(s), the new classes collide in external collision - antagonism, with the existing classes of the old society, founded on the old property relations. Then an epoch of social revolution emerges. The basic class contradiction of feudal society was between the serf and the nobility, with neither being able to overthrow the system of which they constituted. The serfs were not birthed in, or existed as an antagonistic class in in relationship to/with the nobility or the landed property relations, despite its history of repeated violent clashes. Why should not this very same dialectic apply to the two basic classes of capitalist society? At a certain stage of development of the productive forces, contradictions internal to feudal society, driving it through all its quantitative boundary’s were replaced, (not extinguished, but superseded) by an antagonism that appears as the new classes being generated on the basis of the revolution in the productive forces. These new classes were bourgeoisie and proletariat. Feudal society as the landed property relations, did not "just generate" the new classes, but rather a development in the productive machinery of feudal society is the material wherewithal for the emergence of the new classes. Hence, these classes emerging in the womb of the feudal order were birthed in antagonism - not contradiction, with landed property and all its social trappings and privileges. With the growth of industry - capital, segments of the serf as a class, undergoes transformation (metamorphosis), sheds its "serf form," and become modern proletarians. This change in the form of the working class, (from serf to modern proletariat) is the creation of an antagonistic class, or contradiction being replaced - superseded, by antagonism. Now that American society is undergoing a profound revolution in the society machinery the difference between class contradiction and class antagonism, rather than "antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions" is relevant. New classes in their infancy exist in America today in the form of a destitute proletariat, gravitating in and out of employment; merging one moment with a population permanently cast as temporary worker (30% of our working class and still growing); along side a mass of overaccumlated capital, whose over accumulation means it seek wealth expansion outside the boundary of investment in production or as it is understand and articulated at this moment; the brave new world of financialization, securitization or credit capitalism. Financialization is not a preferred policy of capital but the inexorable logic of the unheard of development of the productive forces and the scrabble to realize maximum profits at any cost, including institutional wealth creation outside the production of commodities. Some speak of the emergence of a new non-banking financial architecture - regime. What is clear is wealth creation detached from surplus value is a valueless form of wealth. This does not mean productive capital has mysterious vanished or no one works. Economic collapse in its revolutionary meanings implies the foundation of the old society faces collapse as society strains to reconstruct a new social/economic order based on the revolutionary new machinery of production and new forms of wealth. This new form of wealth creation has its infrastructure and political architects, who write the political agenda for American finance capital. The key to understanding Obama the person and his administration resides in American history itself and this moment of capitalist crisis. Barack Obama is most certainly the chief executive officer of imperial capital but that does not tell anyone very much. Dialectic of Revolution as history. Obama the person is the promise made flesh of our Second Revolutionary War - the Civil War. Written on the banner of our Second Revolutionary War is the p romise, "toward a more perfect union," and then the idea of a nation - not Union, conceived in liberty and justice. The living Obama as symbol, manifest this promise, and is the crossing of the color line in American history. Without understanding this tiny promise, and the crossing of the color line, the behavior of the American peoples and the class intersection that made his election possible makes no(n)-sense. The complexity as the moment, resides in the need for bourgeoisie and revolutionary alike, compelled by the logic of history, to appropriate the same history for diametrically opposed - antagonistic, purposes. Just as the living memory of Marti (José Julián Martí Pérez, January 28, 1853 –May 19, 1895) inspires masses to action and greatness, the peoples of America possess their inspiring ideas articulated in symbols. Some of those inspiring symbols expressed in the words freedom, emancipation, liberty and justice, have in our history worked at cross purpose and at loggerhead. During the entire period of the Civil Rights Movement, "freedom" and "emancipation" more often than not collided with notions of "liberty" and "justice." For reasons of our own history, our real culture, the Second and First American Revolutions continue to stir profound feelings in the peoples of America, precisely because they call forth noble ideas, promise activated, rooted in old Europe’s revolutionary wars against political feudalism, horrible defeats and partial realization in America. When Lincoln called America humanity last great bastion of hope, he was referring to the promise of the French Revolution - 1848, and the waves of reaction sweeping Europe. That American history is written on a parchment of genocide inked with Indian blood and chattel slavery, does not eclipse revolutionary logic and the dialectic of history as interlinked generations’ revolution. Successful revolutions achieve their cause, but the conditions are never quite ripe to achieve the scope of revolutionary vision, the mobilizing, social, subjective side of imagination that is human history as assertion. On the scale of history, the vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next. The spontaneous movement of people/classes/form of the laboring class and their enlightened elements keep demanding the same thing over and over, under changing conditions and each time the demands advance the revolutionary process. In this sense, there is chain of demands from one revolution to the next, weaving history together culminating in revolutionary warfare. "The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next." The fight to realize "the cause" by implementing social structures to ensure its stability, give rise to a new vision. On this basis the system itself is driven through all its quantitative boundaries. The cause in our Revolutionary War was independence. The vision was stated in the Declaration of Independence as competing forms of democracy. Jeffersonian democracy rest on the idea of a nation of independent small land owners. The vision of democracy espoused by slave holders, in the form of Jeffersonian democracy, contradicted itself. Since the vision was not fulfilled, another revolution was inevitable. Yet, "The Revolution of 1776" was a new thing in history. The French and British had revolutions to free themselves of feudalism. America was different, with no feudal classes and consequently no feudal relations. America was founded as a colony owned by England. Its purpose was to ship goods and resources back to the mother country. For the first time in history, a revolution for national liberation was bound up with "the revolution" in the mode of production itself, against feudalism. The Americans bourgeoisie wanted freedom from the restraints of feudal England for a complex of reasons, including the preservation of slavery. America was much different from Canada and one can see the remnants of Canada’s acceptance of a colonial regime, imprinted on her currency. As a result of feudalism, the culture of Canadians - the real culture, manifest a "noblesse oblige," - (noble obligation) of the Queen or ruling class to help her subjects. Not so in America. This in part accounts for a profound belief by the American workers in possessing a job and asking the government for nothing. America is perhaps the only country on earth never tainted by feudalism. When people cannot find work things polarize very quickly. Thus, a social and political shift, realignment is underway as the crisis deepens. What constituted the revolutionary kernel of 1776 was that it ushered in the historical epoch of national liberation, which would run its course for another 200 years, peaking between 1940 and the 1970s, and as a political epoch being closed out with the 1976 establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRVN). This does not mean that every inch of earth was wiped clean of feudal residue. What is meant is that a distinct period charactering history came to an end. What is of interest is that the paramount leader of the first Revolution was the country’s largest slave holder and richest man: George Washington. Jeffersonian democracy could not be realized because of slavery, Washington and Jefferson in the flesh. The seed was planted for the battle to be fought out again. The vision of one revolution becomes the cause of the next. Another revolution was inevitable. The clearest thinking revolutionaries of 1776 understood this, and knew without national liberation emancipating the slaves, the revolution would have to fight again. WL. end 1 of 6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- **************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+Filing&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000004) _______________________________________________ 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
