Book O'Dead
29th July 2012, 08:21
In response and as an opener:
In response to your last intervention:
What does Obama's class origin have to do with his policies? He represents the interests of capital, and not workers. It doesn't matter if he grew up in a working class family. It matters where he is right now.
No offense, comrade, but seriously, why are there Obama supporters on RevLeft? I joined to get away from this shit.
I think you misunderstand the mythos of capitalist political democracy; I think Obama truly believes in it.
He and much of the Democratic party continue to believe that the role the political state is to act as an impartial arbiter of social disputes.
Perhaps you and I know that that is false but the majority of the American people--as indeed most people in Western Europe--believe in it as well.
Class conscious workers don't need to believe in that mythos in order to exploit it to our class advantage. We can use it to coerce liberal and reformist politicians to give enough ground for us to create our revolutionary space.
This is what has happened in most revolutions since 1776; in an attempt to forestall impending revolution the regimes gave in to certain demands until they could no longer do so and the revolutionaries continued to demand concessions until it became clear that no concession short of unconditional surrender by the elite would suffice. By then the revolutionaries had already gained sufficient confidence and space from which to launch their final assault on the regime.
If you look at the case studies of the buildup to previous revolutions you'll see that that pattern is repeated over and over.
You just need to be able to distinguish between reform and revolution.
In response to your last intervention:
What does Obama's class origin have to do with his policies? He represents the interests of capital, and not workers. It doesn't matter if he grew up in a working class family. It matters where he is right now.
No offense, comrade, but seriously, why are there Obama supporters on RevLeft? I joined to get away from this shit.
I think you misunderstand the mythos of capitalist political democracy; I think Obama truly believes in it.
He and much of the Democratic party continue to believe that the role the political state is to act as an impartial arbiter of social disputes.
Perhaps you and I know that that is false but the majority of the American people--as indeed most people in Western Europe--believe in it as well.
Class conscious workers don't need to believe in that mythos in order to exploit it to our class advantage. We can use it to coerce liberal and reformist politicians to give enough ground for us to create our revolutionary space.
This is what has happened in most revolutions since 1776; in an attempt to forestall impending revolution the regimes gave in to certain demands until they could no longer do so and the revolutionaries continued to demand concessions until it became clear that no concession short of unconditional surrender by the elite would suffice. By then the revolutionaries had already gained sufficient confidence and space from which to launch their final assault on the regime.
If you look at the case studies of the buildup to previous revolutions you'll see that that pattern is repeated over and over.
You just need to be able to distinguish between reform and revolution.