A-Infos (en) US, Journal of the anarchist Anti-Racist Action - Turning the Tide, November-December 2008 - Editorial by Michael Novick

Obama's Election: Lessons for Defeating White Supremacy and Rebuilding 
Revolutionary Resistance ---- The election of Barack Obama has been greeted in a 
variety of ways: elation and relief (tempered by fear of a racist backlash or 
assassination attempt) by supporters, particularly US Africans; predictions of 
enhanced recruitment opportunity by organized white supremacists; doomsday 
predictions by conservatives. On the left there have been "exposes" of Obama's 
Zionism, militarism and dismissal of the particular needs of Black people or the 
working class. A group of DC anarchists has called for a disruption of his 
inaugural. - But any analysis needs to start from this reality: masses of people 
in the US feel they have helped make and change history by electing Obama.

His victory is indeed historic in many ways. It required the
largest voter turnout ever, and the highest percentage of registered
voters to vote in decades. Obama gained a clear majority, the highest
percentage by a Democrat since FDR except for Johnson's landslide
after the JFK assassination. He ran the most expensive campaign in
history. He is the first "bi-racial" (called Black or
African-American) president-elect, and incidentally the first child of
an immigrant, the first Hawaiian-born, one of the youngest, and by far
the least "embedded," president. Moreover, his was the first victory
by a self-proclaimed 'anti-war' candidate in the midst of a war. But
Obama's victory hardly signals that we are a "post-racial" society, as
evidenced by the self-contradictory self-congratulation of those who
proclaim that "by electing the first Black president" we have shown
that we are "color-blind." Exit polls showed that about a fifth of
'white' voters acknowledged that "race" was a significant factor.
Interestingly, of those, 30% voted for Obama. One explanation of this
is the fact that Obama's race made his intellect acceptable. US voters
would never have elected a 'white' candidate as obviously intelligent
as Obama. Yet they accepted and understood that a 'Black' candidate
would have to be twice as smart, twice as cool, as any 'white' to have
a chance to succeed.

Paradoxically but perhaps most essentially, Obama's election is also a
manifestation of the extent of the radical left's weakness,
irrelevance and inability to communicate. Over the past eight years of
Bush misrule, what effective strategies or serious ability to develop
a countervailing force or consciousness has the left or the anarchist
movement manifested? In that vacuum, people made a judgment that Obama
represented the best hope for the kind of change that could be
achieved through electoral means. This was not merely because he was
'Black,' but because he was intelligent, calm, organized, and an
effective and reassuring campaigner. McCain's charges of
'inexperience' didn't stick because Obama was attractive as a relative
outsider not deeply corrupted by long tenure in Washington, DC or in
office. His mild centrist critique of the Iraq war made 'sense' in a
context in which the anti-war movement had proven incapable of making
a dent or marshaling an extra-parliamentary opposition and resistance
to the war. Within the Democratic Party spectrum -- and the anti-war
movement has been tailing the Democrats for years -- he was the
electable 'opponent' of the Iraq war.

To imagine that a proclamation of opposition to Obama's inauguration
as a capitalist and statist will do anything to overcome the left's
weakness, irrelevance and inability to communicate -- in fact, that it
will do anything other than deepen and intensify those failures -- is
the height of arrogance. I have a different take on what we have to do
or learn in response to Obama's victory. It starts with the
perspective that the greatest on-going weakness of the left
strategically and politically is a refusal to recognize the nature of
this society as an Empire based on white-supremacist settler
colonialism. Related to that is our greatest tactical flaw, an
inability to practice authentic self-criticism, through which we learn
from our errors and defeats in order to eventually overcome them and
win. Our failure to do that has engendered a deep defeatism in masses
of people -- manifest as accommodation to Empire and unwillingness to
struggle against or even make a sharp break with the system.

One thing this election has demonstrated is how far into the past the
revolutionary militance of the civil rights and Black power movements
and the mass anti-imperialist opposition to the Vietnam War and
domestic colonialism have receded. McCain's inability to make the Bill
Ayers smear stick to Obama was because not only Obama but most of the
electorate was no older than 8, or perhaps not yet born, when Ayers
was an armed-propaganda radical. That period of revolutionary
optimism, when the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army or
the WUO were the tip of the iceberg of a massive upwelling of
rebelliousness and armed resistance, is now ancient history. (Speaking
of white privilege and class, Obama never would have associated with
ex-BLA members, nor would any have been on the board of an Annenberg
charity.) No amount of posturing could "Recreate 68" (or even 2000) in
Denver for the DNC or in DC for the inaugural. 47% of high school
seniors in the US today were registered to vote in time for the
election, and I suspect an overwhelming majority of them cast their
first ballots. They were born while the first George Bush was
president! Who better to speak to them than Anti-Racist Action, which
has historically been an attractor of high schoolers? Yet ARA's
current ability to do outreach, education, agitation and organizing in
high schools (or prisons, factories, community colleges or the
military) is miniscule.

The DC call relates that anarchists opposed and disrupted the last two
inaugurations, and therefore should do the same again. This flawed
reasoning lacks a material analysis of the consciousness of masses of
people in relation to the electoral process and the presidency. Bush's
two stolen victories undermined the authenticity and legitimacy of the
electoral process and of the imperial presidency. For his first
inaugural, he was anointed president by the Supreme Court after having
lost the popular vote. For his second, he was plagued by an unpopular
war and evidence of vote flipping and vote suppression. Protesters and
disrupters were speaking for millions when we denounced the inaugurals
and the presidency, and our message fell on receptive ears.

The current situation is far different, and blaming it on the voters
is another example of the left's lack of self-criticism and ability to
grow. Obama's victory signals a new lease on life for the presidency,
electoral politics and the two-party system. Obama won by a clear
majority, in which voter suppression was a negligible factor and in
which all minor parties together barely hit 1% of the vote, including
McKinney, Nader, Barr and Baldwin combined. His inauguration, even
apart from the historicity of his "Blackness," is being welcomed by
the overwhelming majority of the US population as proof of the
"mystery and majesty" of electoral democracy. In that context, a
disruption wouldn't express the unease of the general population in a
radical and uncompromising way, but would be taken as an alienating
slap in the face. It wouldn't be seen as a call to a higher form of
direct democracy, but as a rejection of the popular will expressed
through a peaceful, honest and democratic election and transfer of
power.

Now is the time for a sober reassessment of how to grapple with these
new realities. Obama did not merely collect millions of dollars from
hundreds of thousands of people -- he established a relationship with
them. He organized effectively tens of thousands of volunteers, and
turned out tens of millions of people to vote. Why has the left or the
anarchist movement been incapable of inspiring, stimulating or
organizing anywhere near that level of support, involvement,
voluntarism or participation? How can we start to do so?

Obama accurately read the demographic, technological and ideological
changes that are taking place in the U.S. and effectively offered
himself and his campaign as a vehicle for implementing or realizing
some of the aspirations those changes have generated. Obama seized on
the opportunity of the latest and deepest capitalist economic crisis
to develop a compelling narrative of how a lack of regulation, a lack
of attention to the 'middle class,' and an arrogant unilateralism in
'foreign policy' weakened the economy, national security and the
fiscal stability of the state. Neither the statist left nor the
anarchists are anywhere close to having the intellectual, political or
organizational capacity to challenge that narrative or that definition
of "change."

Unless and until we engage in a thoroughgoing self-criticism and
re-orientation towards an anti-colonialist politics of decolonization
as the basis of an effective anti-capitalism, we will be playing with
ourselves on the sidelines of history.

We need to put forward and undertake effective organizing strategies,
not merely demands, for self-determined direct action against economic
and environmental devastation, mass incarceration, militarism,
occupation and anti-immigrant hysteria. We need to participate in
building self-reliant communities of resistance. It is only oppressed
and exploited people who can make revolution, and save the planet by
saving ourselves. Go to the 25% of 'homeowners' who owe more on their
mortgage than their home is worth and unite them with the homeless. Go
to 30% of "War on Terror" veterans who report no earned wage income,
and who have massive unemployment rates, and help unite them with GI
resisters, with teens resisting recruitment, or with millions of
prisoners and their families. Then we can begin to make some history
of our own.

The editorial above appears in the November-December 2008 issue of
"Turning the Tide: Journal of Anti-Racist Action, Research &
Education," Volume 21 Number 6. A free sample copy of the entire issue
is available by writing ARA-LA, PO Box 1055, Culver City CA 90232,
emailing antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com, or calling 310-495-0299.
Subscriptions are $18 a year in the US, $28
institutional/international, payable to Anti-Racist Action at the
above address. Comments and responses are most welcome.
_________________________________________
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