your oppressor won’t allow you to vote for your liberation
By shag carpet bomb • Feb 13th, 2008 • Category: Clinton, Election 2008, Obama, Politics[I, myself, plan on cashing in on this phenom. I’m making some buttons and bumper stickers: Don’t Blame Me, I didn’t vote for either of them. This occurred to me as I listened to Clinton and tried not to fall asleep. I had to entertain myself. Then I listened to Obama and tried not to be constantly amazed at how he says nothing and everything — especially that bit about how you can have a college education if you work hard and, damn, the damn damn damn hyper-patriotic nationalism.]
Over the weekend, I listened to an Uhuru Radio program. If you weren’t aware, that’s a group I was involved with back in the old ‘hood. It’s an important — indeed, THE — font of radical politics in the area. I was lucky to live there, as much as I hated it otherwise. And thank DOG for internet radio so I can keep up with WMNF, which features political Sunday programming with Uhuru Brothers and Sisters.
Anyway, on the radio, it was pointed out that “The Great Debaters, is to film what Barack Obama is to the electoral process!” Its function is, to paraphrase, “reel you back in, make you hope and believe, that getting white people to accept you, getting them to like you, believing that an election will make things better is the answer. And that’s what Barack Obama’s function is, to reel you back in to the democratic party as the solution. That’s what this film does, is make you think that assimilation into capitalism, into colonization as the answer to black liberation. Because the oppressor will never allow you to vote for your own liberation.”
There’s been an ongoing debate on the lbo discussion list in re: Obama, with Dwayne Monroe arguing that Obama is the safe black guy that salves the souls of white folks and Charles Brown arguing, essentially, that it’s too big a deal to elect a black man president to subject Obama to such stringent demands as we (of the Marxish left and heavy users of Marx left) typically make of Clinton, Edwards, Nader, etc.
Black Commentator (click here to support them. They need the moola! Click!) has an interesting essay up, addressing claims such as “Obama’s a community organizer!” and pointing out that this isn’t true. What caught my eye was the quote from a Nigerian newspaper editorial in The Daily Sun:
“Many Black Americans and our Brown and Red sisters and brothers will, I fear, come to be deeply disappointed in Barack Obama, once he demonstrates who he really is. There will be no peace or justice under an Obama Presidency, should such come to pass. Even the majority of white Americans, with the exception of the corporate liberals and conservatives, may yet come to realize that Obama’s interests are corporate interests; they are not the needs and interests of everyday people, who represent the overwhelming majority of this nation and the world. “
…
“Nevertheless, and despite all of the foregoing, there are those who insist, regarding Barack Obama: “At least he’s black!” Is he? What is Blackness and what does it really mean in America? And how is being bamboozled, pimped, and disenfranchised by a black person any better than being emaciated by a person of any other color? Think about it as if your very life depends on it, because, ultimately, it may.
The January 31, 2008, Daily Sun of Nigeria, in an article entitled, “Barack Obama May Win, But He’s No African American,” poignantly stated, in relevant part: “There are several fundamental issues that must be clarified to understand the importance of Obama’s candidacy. First of all, strictly speaking Barack Obama is not an African-American - but an African who is American. He’s not a descendant of the enslaved Africans who built America without reward or respect for their contributions… But there is a side to his character that well-illustrates the differences between himself and the average ‘Black American.’ For instance, when speaking of his heritage he points proudly to his living relatives [in Kenya]… He doesn’t have the burden or challenge of discussing how his ancestors overcame prejudice within the very society he’s striving to rule. He doesn’t have to refer to the disenfranchisement and dehumanization of his ancestors when he speaks of the legacy that he represents…” Nor does he have or relate to the collective suffering and ongoing struggle of a physically and emotionally brutalized Black America.”
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Why, why, why, is there so much sense being written over in that country of yours, and yet no substantial left challenge to those bozos, uh ? Sometimes, I just don’t know.
i don’t know ilestre. i don’t know. omali is awesome - though I sometimes don’t care for the simplification. lately, it’s all about bitching at people for getting so invested in the elections. Take this HOward Zinn essay, which I don’t substantially disagree with.
But I have ask: WHY fucking waste time wrting about it to admonish people. It just keeps the madness going!
Election Madness By Howard Zinn The Progressive March 2008 Issue
There’s a man in Florida who has been writing to me for years (ten pages, handwritten) though I’ve never met him. He tells me the kinds of jobs he has held-security guard, repairman, etc. He has worked all kinds of shifts, night and day, to barely keep his family going. His letters to me have always been angry, railing against our capitalist system for its failure to assure “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness” for working people.
Just today, a letter came. To my relief it was not handwritten because he is now using e-mail: “Well, I’m writing to you today because there is a wretched situation in this country that I cannot abide and must say something about. I am so enraged about this mortgage crisis. That the majority of Americans must live their lives in perpetual debt, and so many are sinking beneath the load, has me so steamed. Damn, that makes me so mad, I can’t tell you. . . . I did a security guard job today that involved watching over a house that had been foreclosed on and was up for auction. They held an open house, and I was there to watch over the place during this event. There were three of the guards doing the same thing in three other homes in this same community. I was sitting there during the quiet moments and wondering about who those people were who had been evicted and where they were now.”
On the same day I received this letter, there was a front-page story in the Boston Globe, with the headline “Thousands in Mass. Foreclosed on in ‘07.”
The subhead was “7,563 homes were seized, nearly 3 times the ‘06 rate.”
A few nights before, CBS television reported that 750,000 people with disabilities have been waiting for years for their Social Security benefits because the system is underfunded and there are not enough personnel to handle all the requests, even desperate ones.
Stories like these may be reported in the media, but they are gone in a flash. What’s not gone, what occupies the press day after day, impossible to ignore, is the election frenzy.
This seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.
And sad to say, the Presidential contest has mesmerized liberals and radicals alike. We are all vulnerable.
Is it possible to get together with friends these days and avoid the subject of the Presidential elections?
The very people who should know better, having criticized the hold of the media on the national mind, find themselves transfixed by the press, glued to the television set, as the candidates preen and smile and bring forth a shower of clichés with a solemnity appropriate for epic poetry.
Even in the so-called left periodicals, we must admit there is an exorbitant amount of attention given to minutely examining the major candidates. An occasional bone is thrown to the minor candidates, though everyone knows our marvelous democratic political system won’t allow them in.
No, I’m not taking some ultra-left position that elections are totally insignificant, and that we should refuse to vote to preserve our moral purity. Yes, there are candidates who are somewhat better than others, and at certain times of national crisis (the Thirties, for instance, or right now) where even a slight difference between the two parties may be a matter of life and death.
I’m talking about a sense of proportion that gets lost in the election madness. Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.
But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.
Let’s remember that even when there is a “better” candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore.
The unprecedented policies of the New Deal-Social Security, unemployment insurance, job creation, minimum wage, subsidized housing-were not simply the result of FDR’s progressivism. The Roosevelt Administration, coming into office, faced a nation in turmoil. The last year of the Hoover Administration had experienced the rebellion of the Bonus Army-thousands of veterans of the First World War descending on Washington to demand help from Congress as their families were going hungry. There were disturbances of the unemployed in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New York, Seattle.
In 1934, early in the Roosevelt Presidency, strikes broke out all over the country, including a general strike in Minneapolis, a general strike in San Francisco, hundreds of thousands on strike in the textile mills of the South. Unemployed councils formed all over the country. Desperate people were taking action on their own, defying the police to put back the furniture of evicted tenants, and creating self-help organizations with hundreds of thousands of members.
Without a national crisis-economic destitution and rebellion-it is not likely the Roosevelt Administration would have instituted the bold reforms that it did.
Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.
They offer no radical change from the status quo.
They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure.
They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.
None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties. We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism.
So we need to free ourselves from the election madness engulfing the entire society, including the left.
Yes, two minutes. Before that, and after that, we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
For instance, the mortgage foreclosures that are driving millions from their homes-they should remind us of a similar situation after the Revolutionary War, when small farmers, many of them war veterans (like so many of our homeless today), could not afford to pay their taxes and were threatened with the loss of the land, their homes. They gathered by the thousands around courthouses and refused to allow the auctions to take place.
The evictions today of people who cannot pay their rents should remind us of what people did in the Thirties when they organized and put the belongings of the evicted families back in their apartments, in defiance of the authorities.
Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.
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Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”
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