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NEWS & LETTERS, February 2008 - March 2008Black/Red ViewObama and Civil Rights?by John Alan Barack Obama has generated a lot of excitement over the possibility that racist U.S. capitalist society may elect its first Black president. He has appeal even among conservatives who say this will finally get us past the race question. Some on the Left are calling his campaign an extension of the Civil Rights Movement. Obama brings a youthful vigor to the campaign and is an articulate orator who speaks as a voice of change and unity for the whole nation. However, what can he do as President but represent the capitalist state and its interests? Aside from this vague notion of unity, his policy proposals, as in healthcare, are not even as good as Hillary Clinton's in achieving universal coverage. Indeed, until recently Clinton had more support in the Black community than Obama. KING V. LBJ Then Clinton speculated about the role of politics in the Civil Rights Movement during the South Carolina primary. "Dr. King's dream," she said, "began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964...the power of that dream became real in peoples' lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished." A debate ensued over what was more important: Dr. King's speeches or LBJ's political skills. Both points of view missed the perspective of Black masses. Middle-class Black leaders did try to narrow the Civil Rights Movement into the limited goal of gaining political power within capitalism. A few days after many of these leaders lined up behind President Johnson as he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Watts/Los Angeles exploded in a six-day revolt. As I put it in DIALECTICS OF BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLES (DBFS), "Watts was declaring: Here is the real reason for our movement and once again the government, as after the Civil War, is allegedly freeing us without permitting real freedom in a world where we can live and work like human beings." Though Dr. King didn't support the tactics of the ghetto rebellions, his dream was never limited to political participation. His speech pointed to the racism deep within U.S. capitalist society wherein most Blacks experienced the "chains of discrimination... living on a lonely island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity." DBFS addresses a needed new perspective on the unfolding of the idea of freedom: "If King's dream has not materialized after 40 years, to say nothing of centuries of Black opposition to racism, then racism needs to be recognized for what it is--a social manifestation of American capitalism. Racism has been modified by a century of mass movements, the enactment of civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions, but, like classism, it cannot be uprooted apart from its social origin and development in American capitalist society. STRUGGLES BY BLACK MASSES "The limits encountered by efforts at political emancipation do not prove the futility of the struggles by Black masses for freedom... The distinction between the two was integral to Karl Marx's entire new continent of thought and revolution. "Marx warned as early as his writings on 'The Jewish Question' in 1843 that... political emancipation by itself doesn't change the established order of an existing civil society. He insisted that social relations in our everyday lives have to change, not just political relations. For Marx that meant all social relations, beginning with new social relations at the point of production, as well as between men and women, and between the races. As he put it in 1843, 'All emancipation is a restoration of the human world and human relationships to humanity itself.'" Marx's view that a human revolution cannot stop at political emancipation but must declare itself to be permanent, speaks to the aspirations and hopes of the Black masses, which run much deeper than any politicians out to maintain American capitalism. |
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