It might be said that one of the key questions facing the Left -- the section that takes electoral politics as an arena of struggle -- regarding the 2008 elections is how to assess the relative importance of defeating McCain versus using the elections to create of a base for progressive politics.

The upsurge in activity behind Obama comes from a thorough disgust with the Bush presidency on several fronts, from the war on Iraq to the economy, plus a desire for change on some more long-standing issues such as health care.  This is different from either a massive turn towards a progressive political program or a social movement for change.

It is correct but not necessarily helpful, in my opinion, to call for a politics for uniting with masses' positive sentiments while criticizing the tendency to see Obama as the key vehicle for meaningful change.  Better to start with an analysis of our main political goals, map out our forces, figure out which organizations and sectors have what kind of potential.

Here the discussion on the Left gets interesting.  You have, on one end, the CPUSA that calls on leftists to go all out in defeating the ultra-right and promoting a land-slide victory for the Democrats.

While such a conclusion may strike many leftists as short-sighted or crude, there is a definite logic to the CP's thinking, compelling in its own right, and it's one trend that I think is crucial to understand and engage.  I would go so far as to argue that the CP has the best assessment of the left's current capacity, although they are evidently on the sidelines of some of the major developments on the left from the USSF to today.

You also have Freedom Road, which is mostly pushing for a "critical support" politics such as that embodied in Progressives for Obama; while the CP argues that a landslide victory by the Dems will make it much harder to contain mass pressure for change, Freedom Road argues that without more vibrant social movements, the openings created by a Dem electoral victory will be lost.

James Tracy and Steve Williams have also written a piece on the elections in Left Turn without taking a definite position on what to do.

This is all very abstract, but I think much of it comes down to what organizations folks will do their electoral work in.  Should we become a force within the Obama committees so that our criticism of Obama's positions will carry more weight inside the campaign?  Should we do voter education through our politically independent non-profits with the hopes that this will shift both Obama and voters to the left?   Try to develop local electoral coalitions across different sectors?  Something else?

Another ten-minute post.

Recently, I attended an anti-war rally in San Jose and brought along more than 20 members of my union, the majority of whom are immigrant women.  These union members make up a good chunk of our rank-and-file leadership, and all were excited to attend their first anti-war event.  One of our members, a housekeeper from El Salvador, talked about her son who is serving a second tour in Iraq.

Another organizer who works out of the Tenderloin in San Francisco -- a low-income community -- has started doing something called "first steps", where his organization tries to get broad groups of folks to take their first step in publicly opposing the war.

Another organizer who works with API youth in Oakland has been putting on anti-war forums over the past three years; the number of youth attending these has held steady at about 75.  She says that the forums are not going because youth members don't feel as though continued protests will have an effect.  "Oh yeah, those marches -- we used to go to those."

So I think that the anti-war mvmt is in a position to, on the one hand, take advantage of the fact that large numbers of folks are opposed to the war and, especially among oppressed peoples, that opposition runs deep because they understand how they are impacted.  But we are in a position of not being able to offer even a medium-term strategic vision of how continued involvement in the movement will bring about change -- hence, decreasing numbers at our rallies as our traditional activist base no longer mobilizes.

What does this have to do with the elections?  Well, millions of individuals have chosen the electoral arena as one area where they think they can make a difference.  And whether or not we like that, we also need to recognize that there is a great deal of truth in the idea that our movements can make little or no progress under a Bush (or McCain) administration.  The problem, of course, is that the Democratic candidates both happen to be committed to U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East, and see a limited retreat in Iraq as the only way to salvage those interests.  And this means that attempts by the anti-war mvmt to get involved in the electoral arena with the message that "electing a Democrat = progress" run the risk of de-mobilizing the movement after November.

It seems like that is the dilemma -- setting up way to the left of the masses right now means that we are ensuring our own marginalization for the next period -- while getting involved means potentially losing the 'movement' character of the anti-war mvmt.

In case you were wondering where food riots have broken out in the past month or so, the Guardian has compiled a map.

I'm not yet clear on the reason for rising food prices.

another ten minutes-or-less post.

A group of little-known individuals, including Danny Glover, Tom Hayden, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Bill Fletcher, Jr. have founded "Progressives for Obama" as their particular intervention into the current electoral moment.  It is either an organization, or a blog; or a blog that claims to be an organization.  I can't tell.  Anyway, it is certainly an exciting development and timed to take advantage of the aftermath of Obama's speech on race.  My own sense is that the speech on race has pulled a skeptical-to-lukewarm-but-not-hostile sector of the left (which has recently split from the skeptical-to-tepid sector) closer to seeing Obama's candidacy as having potentially progressive results.

Here are the paragraphs that I think define the org and its outlook.

"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined."

"However, the fact that Barack Obama openly defines himself as a centrist invites the formation of this progressive force within his coalition. Anything less could allow his eventual drift towards the right as the general election approaches. It was the industrial strikes and radical organizers in the 1930s who pushed Roosevelt to support the New Deal. It was the civil rights and student movements that brought about voting rights legislation under Lyndon Johnson and propelled Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy’s anti-war campaigns. It was the original Earth Day that led Richard Nixon to sign environmental laws. And it will be the Obama movement that makes it necessary and possible to end the war in Iraq, renew our economy with a populist emphasis, and confront the challenge of global warming."

I think it's clear that thinking of the upsurge of activity around Obama as a social movement is somewhat helpful but lacks analytical clarity, and it's important to really understand the dynamics of what's happening without shorthanding it as a social movement.  Regardless, I think of this as an effort to build a relationship with the large numbers of folks that have chosen to express their political frustrations and hopes via Obama.  I think that's an important place to be, especially since after the election people will be all over the map and trying to get sectors oriented coherently and in a positive direction means you need to be in the mix.

 

quickly now -- I'm blogging this in ten minutes or less cause I can't sleep.

Much of the left that is not anti-electoral and completely hostile to the Democratic party is trying to figure out how to relate to the elections, since the Obama campaign has seemingly galvanized huge numbers of young folks in this country.   One common line of thought is - "We need to be in a position to take advantage of the mass disillusionment and disappointment that will follow in the wake of an Obama presidency; we need to be able to offer an alternative."  Probably until last night this was as far as my own thinking had gone;  I read a short piece by somebody reacting to the Left Forum that essentially put forward that line, and now, upon further thought, I don't think that is a realistic approach.  It now seems clear that Obama seems willing to move somewhat on what we may call "democratic struggles" -- struggles for justice that don't seem to challenge the system of capitalism.  He has mentioned criminal justice reform, investing in schools, and of course, there is the war in Iraq (which is a whole different discussion but suffice it to say that I think Obama would implement a large but ultimately unsatisfactory draw-down of forces); he has also stated that he will tackle immigration reform -- albeit, surely a reform tilted somewhat towards business -- in his first two years (while Congressional leaders have said "second term").

What this means I think is that developments in mass consciousness will not swing immediately to a rejection of the two-party system, either in its conservative (apathy, cynicism about all politics) or radical (searching for something beyond the Dems) guise.  Reactions will be hugely varied and we can expect that large sections of progressives will count Obama in the "ally" column, especially as they will begin to make headway on some issues that perhaps have been stonewalled for 16 years. 

My ten minutes is up so I'll go to bed, but suffice it to say for now that I think this poses some major challenges for the left.

Here's a link to the full text of Obama's speech.

Comment will be reserved for a later date.

Dollars and Sense has a good article on the recent subprime crisis.

D and S also has a good assessment of recent economic history here.

Jeff Chang has written a blog entry regarding the Latino and Asian American vote swinging to Clinton.

Robert Lovato has written that the Latino vote did not, in fact, swing hard to Clinton.

The usual suspects (The Nation, The American Prospect) are also alive with political punditry of this sort.

The elections give me cause to reflect on Jean Paul-Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason."  Specifically, his category of human action known as 'seriality':

Let’s take a familiar example: piece-work for farm workers, who are paid a certain amount per pound.  We all know why capitalists like piece-work – it “forces” workers to work as hard as possible, maximizing productivity.  But let’s consider things from a workers perspective.  Now, from experience we know workers are not naïve.  Workers know why capitalists want to employ piece-work.  They know that when somebody starts working harder, the piece-work rate will drop – the farmers are going to start paying less per pound.  And everybody will have to pick more tomatoes or whatever in order to make exactly the same amount of money as before.  But what can you do?  You know somebody else, some worker somewhere else, is going to start working harder, setting the bar higher, and it’s just a matter of time before the rate goes down.  So you might as well work harder to pick more tomatoes to make more money while you still can.  And, thus, you yourself turn out to be the worker that drives the piece-rate down.

The same structure is at work in a variety of other situations, from the person that fears inflation and then floods the market with money so he can purchase assets, to collective panics, to waiting in line for a bus, to the very mechanism through which supply and demand sets market values.  What’s happening here?  It is not just the one worker or capitalist that is imitating what the Other is doing.  It is all of them that are working harder or dumping money because each thinks that is what the Other is doing.  In this situation, “the Other is me in every Other and every Other in me and everyone as Other in all the Others” (267).  It’s a dizzying sentence, which reflects the situation – everybody trying to do what they think everybody else is doing, which is what everybody else thinks everybody else is doing.  It is this action, that Sartre calls seriality.

At this point, the connection between U.S. voting and seriality is clear.  For it is the very real sense that certain candidates are "viable" and others are not, that creates that very viability.  "Would you like a candidate that really represents your views?"  "Yes, but such a candidate of course could never win..." is the typical response.

I should add, before I go to sleep tonight, that I see elections as a kind of mixture between seriality and what Sartre calls "group-in-fusion", but which we may shorthand as collective action or social movement.

After the Preface we get... the Introduction, of course.  I guess I will have to look up exactly what the difference is between a preface and an intro.  Anyway, the introduction seems concerned with the methodology of Phenomenology of Spirit and the ideas associated with the methodology.   Crucial to this discussion is  the nature of thinking and cognition.  Partly, Hegel sees philosophy as stumbling upon its assumption that thought and cognition are instruments we use to apprehend the truth; for as soon as we take this approach, then thought and cognition are separate from reality and so must fail in being able to grasp it.  I'll start with a paragraph where Hegel explains this eloquently.

"Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust.  Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?  Indeed, this fear takes something -- a great deal in fact -- for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true.  To be specific, it takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.  Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of truth"

Hegel's path, instead, is to take cognition or consciousness as itself part of reality.  We have forms of consciousness, forms of thought, that we take up and examine:  "The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the deatiled history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science."
These forms of consciousness will indeed be untrue -- and we shall see what that means, exactly -- but this passage through untruth is what itself constitutes the progression of philosophical thought.  In Hegel's words, when we show a form of consciousness to be untrue, we negate it; and what results from this negation is not a mere nothingness but "the nothingness of that from which it results", a determinate negation.  So that when our sense-certainty of Here and Now are shown to be contrary to what we mean, we are thrown forward into the realm of perception.

Hegel writes his lengthy preface to Phenomenology of Spirit in order to emphasize that a preface, as is conventionally understood, is not possible.  One cannot simply state the aims and results of the philosophical investigation, and differentiate it from other contemporary and historical trends of thought; the way that, for instance, one may be able to write an abstract for a paper in theoretical physics that states the result and establishes the way in which it corrects other physical theories.  Why?  It turns out that Hegel's response to this takes us to the very core of his thought, and so we find the only way that he could actually  write a preface is by refusing to write one.