Obama is - expresses, this changed reality, and was called forth to do the impossible. Obama supersedes and leaps over the long night, that was the era of the rise and fall of the black political leader. A peculiar political phenomenon brought to life by Jim Crow segregation. 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) Part 4 Death of a Salesman. The election of Barack Obama closes out a period of American history and opens the door to the Third American Revolution: proletarian revolution, because of time, place and space outlined in part 1. Barack Obama has the demeanor, oratory and uses much of the language symbols of the black leader in American history. Or does he; or is it American history, with its persistent recycling of "Give me liberty or give me death?" Obama, rather than President Barack Obama, has a personal familiarity to it that can be quite discomforting, but is called forth due to his personal qualities and living link as momentary American history. Obama resurrected the dead undying Lincoln. "Towards a more perfect Union." Communists rooted in American history fail to appropriate this same history at their peril. Obama collected the dreams and realized dreams of an older generation that is our nation of immigrants. And former slaves. "Don’t matter what kind of ship carried you to America, we are all in the same boat." Who lacks the courage or manliness to apply this formula on a class basis and bias? Here is the real cultural war being waged against a certain infantile 1960ish counter culture amongst the left. Obama’s wielding of the "politics of change" is not reducible to demagogy, although electoral politics and much of all politics involves demagogy in the shape of the inspiring but unachievable driving vision. This includes communist politics and the demand for economic communism, whose emancipation of the proletariat is forever blocked, from full realization by an existing material configuration that is division of labor and productive force development; even after the criminal bourgeoisie has been swept from the furthers corner of earth. Even Jesus wept. . . . . Over the barriers. . Marx shifted his projection of world revolution as a doctrine of combat. Marx faced his very own quantifying dilemma. Engels explained why the programmatic demands of the Manifesto were obsolete. Lenin’s lament, built iron and steel socialism. Then the loop of logic carries us back to the future/present Marx; world revolution for this generations. It is precisely because Marx himself could not quantify the progression of the proletarian revolution the he and Engels wrote numerous prefaces to the Communists Manifesto, after the fact. These prefaces alone are worth their weight in good to the communist revolution. Voting America expressed its desire for real change, which it cannot yet define or articulate as a coherent vision because of its lack of class consciousness. At least this is how the American people understand their own actions expressed in Obama’s election, I would dare say. Therefore Obama is to be quantified, with instruments from the previous configuration of American history. To do such is to leave - liquidate (Lenin’s word) the last period, this time forever. Peering through the surface of the process dialectic of vision, cause and change; is the machinery of society; the outer expression of the underlying revolutionary process, felt and experienced as the fight in the political sphere. What Marxists generally call the superstructure, the ideological battle and what Americans once and generally call - with contempt, politics and "arguing religion." Politics in our country at all times express shifting political alliances and shifting structural relations or the living institutions that hold together the unity of the productive forces and the social relations - (if you will), of living economic and political America. This shifting always is bound up with the North/South political axis, due to slavery. Obama in the flesh completes a social and political process, which actually matured with the Clinton administration. This period actually begins with Bush 1, but he was quickly silenced after floating the concept of the "new world order." No political grouping or social movement in America can accomplish any of its goals without impacting and carrying with them 50 - 70 million people as a political and social base. Obama must be quantified. He will be quantified. The last period liquidates itself on the basis of itself. That Obama is an American left social democrat to the world outside and inside of America for some is beyond dispute. I use this term/concept. Until one looks at American history on its own basis. I am not sure if the political categories from a Europe being rocked and pregnant with bourgeois revolution and political strife between bourgeois and proletariat in combat - antagonism, with the classes of the feudal order are proper to America. Lenin marched along the same boulevard as the bourgeoisie, while preserving his independence as a distinct political trend and insurrectionary force. A section of the bourgeoisie and communism itself, were social democratic in relationship to Lenin. Lenin overthrow the bourgeoisie after both overthrew the feudal political establishment. That is to say, bourgeoisie and proletariat, as the new class fought against the Nobility as power holder, with the serf/[peasants loyalty being vied for. In a country with no feudal history where is the left bench of the bourgeoisie? Just asking this question is to leap beyond political Leninism. Perhaps, . . . maybe, this question, might be the first step in seeking a Marxist theoretical framework to place, "Obama's . . . "left lite" close to social-democracy," within. The left bench and Social democracy. Really? "Yes, I’m sitting on a bench, With my back up against the fence,. Wondering if I’ve got any sense. Sometime tells me I’m a fool, To let you treat me so cruel, Nevertheless you got me waiting. Sitin’ In the park. Waiting for you." (Billy Stewart: "Sitting in the Park") Daily thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals interact "on-line," struggle with catching up with an accurate vision of America as it exists, as it is becoming and, as it is understood by a new generation, to give full context to Obama’s electoral victory. What is being grappled with is a new form of social - class, struggle still out of everyone’s reach because it has not come of fruition. All statistical data suggests that a full 70% of the people of America do not trust large institutions, political institutions and government, with only roughly 35% taking part in electoral politics. America’s back is not against the fence. Rather America - a huge section of it, sits on the fence, tittering and teetering to the side of fascism and non-fascism. Nor is 2009 America akin to 1930 ’s Germany and its aftermath where one could be anti-fascism and anti-communism as a political equation. What has changed is the world. Today, the world proletariat faces the world bourgeoisie, without a feudal social and political backdrop or waves of anti-colonial revolutions. World wide the "political middle" and the small producer as a political force, has all but been eliminated. Slowly but inexorably the proletariat, with a huge and growing sector of it is being pushed out of social production and cast out of the civic society of the bourgeoisie. In this political equation a left social democracy, that is anti-communist cannot for long stand as being "left." Obama’s campaign momentarily created a gravitational pull strong enough to pull a large section of our working class spontaneously gravitating to the right, as their first political impulse. This is due precisely to the fact that labor is tied to capital by a thousand threads and the impulse to recapture economic security - a job, means spontaneously recreating the capital-labor bond. The spontaneous impulse to recapture a lost past and stability. Here is where we meet the fascist danger in the flesh. This does not mean pushing Obama to the "left," but rather establishing economic communism, devoid of its historic ideology as a form of Sovietism, as a political pole. Obama and no one else is to be "pushed to the left." Rather, establishing a communist polarity will compelled everything in the middle to seek refuge with this pole as a consistent fighter against fascism. Obama has to be quantified while knowing such quantification is bound to be wrong, outside stating he is the chief political representative/executive of imperial capital. This of course is no quantification but a qualification or quality. Obama is capital personified. Knowing this and a "dime" "won't even shine ones shoes, on Broadway." Obama also brings to an end the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader. A historical character that pushed himself unto history as the product result of open fascism in the Jim Crow South and his police state cousin in the North’s Negro conclaves. At the close of the Civil War the blacks began their spontaneous drift throughout American society. With the overthrow of Reconstruction and the institution of fascism and Jim Crow the structural relations within and between classes in America were recast. The black leader emerges as the "go between" - navigator, between the structures separating black society from white. Between 1865 and the 1890’s there were leaders and political leaders in government that were black. These leaders were not the peculiar phenomenon of the black leader. The counter revolution was the condition for the birth of the Black leader. Let’s be clear. Back to the Future III The South as the Confederate States of America, expressed desire was to complete it development as a nation with a state system to protect its economic and political interest. That is why it seceded from the Union in the first and last instance. What made the South culturally different from the North was slavery and "the antebellum culture" that emerged from the melting pot of slavery, with it’s seemingly feudal like attributes. The blacks of the South did not constitute a separate nation but were the primary labor force of a nation struggling to emerge into the light of day. The South lost the war sustaining a horrible and humiliating defeat. The Northern interests controlled the South by politically controlling the blacks. This control was the basis for breaking the political independence of the Southern elite. As that independence was broken, the Southern elite was forced to unite with their new economic masters. At that point, the goals of Reconstruction were accomplished and it could be dismantled as a political and military institution. But cotton still had to be picked. The unity of Northern and Southern political and economic interest was the foundation of the counterrevolution that drove the African Americans back into a near slave-like conditions, pulling the entire region down. First the blacks were given the vote, momentarily shattering the planters political power, then the vote was taken away once the planters were political subdued. The violence of the counterattack by the planters against the blacks was the condition for condemning more whites than blacks to the sharecropping system. By concentrating the attack against the blacks, the planters made it appear that the majority of poor whites were out of the line of fire. Centuries of white supremacy led most of the poor whites to believe that Not uniting on the basis of class interest, even that of sharecroppers and small dirt poor farmers, would give them privileged status over the blacks. The legalization of segregation and discrimination against the blacks guaranteed that the whites could not escape the slavery of sharecropping. After the disfranchisement of the African Americans, the laws supposedly passed against the blacks, were then applied to the white. From this complex of events arose a historical man, a black man, who could talk to a man, the white political and economic man, on behalf of and as spokespersons for the mass of blacks. Someone who could "talk to the man," on behalf of the prostrate black masses is different than one who spoke to power on behalf of the newly freed slaves and destitute masses of the South. The black leader. And indeed he was the man who talked to "the man." Who would have known that this historical man who talked to "The man" would become "The man" who now talks to the man or rather all men and women? Obama is not an "Uncle Tom." His social and political position within the superstructure, production relations and more importantly his moment in time as the post Jim Crow era, is not analogous to that of Uncle Tom in the fiction novel "Uncle Tom Cabin." Barack Obama is President of the United States of America, which as American history presuppose the destruction and eradication of structural and ideological Jim Crow. The man who did the talking to "The Man," broke into history as Booker T. Washington existing in symbiotic relations with Dr. Dubois, who when viewed through Chinese history and culture were dubbed the comprador and national bourgeoisie within the Deep South, as Negro. This man could not speak for the whites of the South due to structural Jim Crow and its accompanying ideology. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963), historically expressed the latter, joining the CPUSA in 1959. These concepts wielded by Chinese Communist/Marxists, leaves much to be desired, but seemed to capture the spirit of Mr. Washington forever changed with genuflecting toadyism. Genuflect = Chinese kowtow and toadyism is kowtowing to the 2nd power. end part 4 WL. 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