Reality Check

I appreciate the perspective of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) as it often provides me with what I consider a “reality check” on current political events.

Take for instance the writings of WSWS contributor Patrick Martin on the recent clinching of the Democratic presidential nomination by Barack Obama. In all the hoopla that took place just four days ago when Obama claimed victory here in St. Paul, I guess I chose to ignore an obvious reality, one that Martin unapologetically articulates: Obama (like Clinton) is a “political representatives of the American ruling elite, the small financial aristocracy which controls all the economic and political levers within US society, including the two officially recognized ‘major’ parties and the mass media. . . . The purpose of [his] campaign is to refurbish American capitalist politics without touching its rotten foundations.”

Still, I find myself going back and forth. Yes, Martin raises some fundamental truths. Yet given the flawed US political system, and the unlikelihood of a socialist (eco-socialist, preferably) evolution occurring within the US anytime soon, what are the alternatives? There comes a point, surely, when one must be pragmatic and go with the best that is offered – even if this “best” is far from what’s truly needed or desired. Is not awareness of the need for such pro-activism in less-than-favorable circumstances, also a type of “reality check”?

Anyway, following are excerpts from Martin’s commentary on Obama. I welcome any feedback that readers of this weblog may care to offer.

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Excerpts from
Obama Clinches Democratic Presidential Nomination
By Patrick Martin
World Socialist Web Site
June 5, 2008

. . . Obama’s campaign was not in any genuine sense an “antiwar” campaign, although he appealed to popular hostility to the war in Iraq and constantly linked Clinton and Bush with his refrain that Iraq was “a war that should never have been authorized and never been waged.”

The Illinois senator represents a section of the American ruling elite that has concluded that the invasion and conquest of Iraq was a strategic debacle and that a significant change in posture and personnel is required to salvage the interests of American imperialism in the Middle East and internationally. These layers do not oppose military action as such, but regard the Bush administration’s single-minded focus on winning a military victory in Iraq as unwise and ultimately disastrous.

Long before Obama became a household name, filling stadiums and attracting small contributions by the millions over the Internet, his candidacy had attracted the support of a significant section of the Democratic foreign policy establishment, including figures like former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Clinton national security adviser Anthony Lake.

They were drawn to Obama not so much by his critique of the Bush administration—which was not particularly vigorous, even by the toothless standards of the congressional Democrats—as by the symbolic effect that the election of the first African-American president would have in terms of reviving illusions, both internationally and within the United States, in the democratic pretensions of American capitalism.

With Obama’s nomination effectively secured, the American media has now gone into overdrive to peddle such illusions. The television networks have devoted endless hours to glorifying the great achievement of American democracy in nominating an African-American to lead the presidential ticket of one of the two major bourgeois parties for the first time in US history.

. . . [Yet] despite the incessant claims of the media and of their Democratic Party supporters and apologists, Obama no more represents the interests of black and minority people than Hillary Clinton represents the interests of all women.

Both Obama and Clinton are political representatives of the American ruling elite, the small financial aristocracy which controls all the economic and political levers within US society, including the two officially recognized “major” parties and the mass media.

. . . The Obama nomination is not the product of a popular insurgency against the Democratic Party establishment or of a mass movement from below, as some of Obama’s more self-deluded supporters on the liberal left now proclaim. The role of the masses in the Obama campaign is best demonstrated by the rallies like that held Tuesday night in St. Paul, Minnesota—the people serve as extras in a well-developed, highly skillful marketing campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to refurbish American capitalist politics without touching its rotten foundations.

Obama attacked his presumptive Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, over his “stay-the-course” policy in Iraq, but he couched his critique of the war in nationalistic terms. The Bush-McCain policy, he said, “asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians,” as though it was Iraq exploiting the United States, and not the reverse. He cited the cost of the war for the American people, but not the far greater cost inflicted upon the Iraqi population by the American invasion and occupation, which has virtually destroyed Iraq as a functioning society.

At the same time, the Democratic candidate further parsed his supposed commitment to bring an end to the war, declaring—in implicit rejection of any rapid pullout of troops— “I won’t stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq.” He added, “We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in, but start leaving we must.” At some points in the campaign, Obama has suggested that all US combat troops would be pulled out in his first year in the White House. This has been whittled down to a vague pledge to “start leaving,” a formulation that opens the door to an occupation of essentially indefinite duration.

Obama continued this emphasis on revived and renewed American militarism in his speech Wednesday morning to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the principal pro-Israel lobby in Washington. He declared that he would never negotiate with Hamas and other Islamic and nationalist groups that refuse to recognize the state of Israel.

. . . As for Iran, the Toronto Globe & Mail correspondent at the AIPAC meeting commented, “Sen. Obama seemed almost as hawkish as Sen. McCain or current President George W. Bush.”

Obama told AIPAC, “The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat.” He added, in language that was vague but undeniably ominous, “I will do everything in my power—everything, everything—to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

An Obama presidency would not represent a fundamental break with the politics of American imperialism, but rather its continuation in a new form. The first black president will prove as determined to uphold the interests of the US ruling elite as the first black secretary of state, Colin Powell, and his successor Condoleezza Rice, who is also African-American.

It is not skin color, but class position, which is the decisive political criterion. It is necessary to reiterate this fundamental Marxist truth under conditions in which all manner of left liberals will seek to reinforce illusions in Obama and, through him, in the Democratic Party and the profit system as a whole.

. . . The truth is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both instruments of the American ruling elite, whose differences are tactical rather than fundamental.

Driving an Obama administration will be the ongoing and ever-deepening crisis of American and world capitalism, and the efforts of the US ruling elite to defend its world position and its dominance at home by every possible means — from the honeyed words of the Democratic presidential candidate to police-state spying and war.

To read Patrick Martin’s commentary in its entirety, click here.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
Historic (and Wild!)
R.I.P Neoclassical Economics
Capitalism on Trial
John le Carré’s Dark Suspicions
Richard Flanagan Wants a “Gentler, More Generous” Australia
Let’s Also Honor the “Expendables”
Amy Goodman and the “Sacred Responsibility of Listening”
John Pilger on Resisting Empire