A View From The Left-Bye-Bye to the Mendacity of Hope

Workers Vanguard No. 1105	10 February 2017

Bye-Bye to the Mendacity of Hope

The following contribution, edited for publication, was submitted to Workers Vanguard by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander.

The charred remains of hopes for equality and freedom—especially among black people—are part of the real legacy of the Barack Obama presidency. Millions put their faith in this Wall Street Democrat. His skin color was supposed to translate into some relief after decade upon decade of assaults on working people and the poorest strata of society by both the Democrats and Republicans. Millions thought they would get some respite from the increasingly unbearable oppression.

But it is Obama’s ruling-class backers, such as the thieving bankers on Wall Street, that could truly say to him as he left office: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. You have been our faithful and able servant. You kept your promise of keeping the pitchforks away from our citadels of power.” And no, ex-president Obama wasn’t “held hostage by Republicans” when he forked out 16 trillion dollars to the parasitic bankers during the financial crisis. He did it because of his loyalty to capitalism.

Obama was a faithful and dependable servant of U.S. imperialism. He served the interests of his class—the bourgeoisie, the moneybags, the exploiters. He also totally screwed workers and the poor.

Obama faded from the picture with his farewell tour. After he recently spoke in Chicago, the city where he first seriously began climbing the greasy pole of bourgeois politics, some shared their thoughts with the press about what his presidency meant to them. The disappointment in American imperialism’s first black president was unmistakable.

For some, it was hard to muster much enthusiasm for his “legacy,” as evidenced by the remarks of a couple of black people interviewed. When asked about what Obama meant to them, one said: “I guess I feel sad,” and another: “He should be embarrassed that he came in as president and the problems have actually worsened.”

You can be sure that isn’t half of it.

The mendacity of hope—the sheer effrontery of having declared in 2007 that black people were 90 percent free (like being partially pregnant) and now boasting about how much progress has been made—is exposed by severe economic, racial and sexual oppression in the country. In his speech Obama cried out: “Yes we did!” But militant workers and youth, men and women, will say: No you didn’t!

A poignant example of the horrible social misery can be seen in the lack of affordable housing. Consider, for example, the devastation of poor people, largely black and female, in Washington, D.C. A recent New York Times article (1 January) noted that in Southeast Washington, “The city and its suburbs accumulate staggering wealth while its poorest residents grow poorer.” And, “In December, a devastating survey of 32 big cities prepared by the United States Conference of Mayors showed Washington with the highest rate of homelessness.”

Given the complete absence of militant leadership for workers and oppressed minorities, it’s no wonder that millions today feel a deep sense of hopelessness, powerlessness and invisibility. The “N” word is hurled at black people with increased brazenness. With the possible connivance of the judge and his lawyer, Dylann Roof, the fascist scum who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, used his court appearances as a platform to spew his racist filth while some of the victims’ relatives, friends and supporters looked on, their pain evident.

A class-struggle leadership of labor would have mobilized tens of thousands in Charleston and around the country and fought for labor action on the job to send a strong message to the race haters. Today, these fascists have black people, Jews, immigrants and women in their crosshairs. We of the Spartacist League have shown the way in the past: these vermin can be checked by powerful labor-centered mobilizations, relying on labor’s power and drawing behind it all the oppressed. It’s imperative that today’s anti-racist fighters study and assimilate this crucial history because it is a life-and-death matter.

Obama has had “amazing” success with the drone warfare program that he inherited from the Bush administration and the surveillance programs that he vastly expanded. Along with increased repression, his legacy is tied to maintaining Guantánamo.

Obama started using drone strikes the third day after he got into office. The carnage of his imperialist wars has been extensive. Obama mendaciously downplayed the number of civilians killed by his high-tech assassinations. The journalist John Pilger provided a useful summary (johnpilger.com, 17 January): “According to a Council on Foreign Relations Survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.” He added: “A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people.”

Several black supporters and critics of Obama’s “legacy”—from Michael Eric Dyson to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Van Jones and other petty-bourgeois, self-appointed Democratic Party spokesmen—will walk to the ends of the earth to hold the coat of their “brother.” The “radical” preacher and professor Cornel West, on the other hand, has attacked Obama with increasing vehemence, while aligning himself with the capitalist politician Bernie Sanders and his so-called “political revolution.”

Racist cop terror and the killing of black men, women and children have defined the Obama era. The heterogeneous Black Lives Matter movement clings to the petty-bourgeois perspective of seeking to pressure the Democrats and the capitalist state on a local level. Intelligent anti-racist liberals have gone off the deep end, with historian Eric Foner going so far as to draw a straight line from Reconstruction to the Obama presidency.

Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report (B.A.R.) group are more critical of the Democrats and Obama. But they explain the oppressed black masses’ fervent embrace of Obama by claiming that “Black America drank deeply from the intoxicating cup” of “ObamaL’aid” (blackagendareport.com, 18 January). This view is fundamentally false and blames black people for the oppression they endured under Obama. This grows out of B.A.R.’s rejection of a Marxist analysis and class-struggle program for black liberation. In not understanding the material basis of black oppression—a legacy of slavery that is rooted in the American capitalist profit system—Glen Ford embraces another bourgeois party, the Greens.

For the oppressed black masses, illusions in Obama’s presidency were bound up with a trans-class racial solidarity growing out of intensifying racial oppression and buttressed by a strong belief in American capitalist “democracy.” This is not the first time that this has happened.

A few decades ago, illusions that a “great” black (male) leader would lead the way out of this racist hell was shown in the support (still going strong) to the liberal, pro-Democratic Party pacifist Martin Luther King Jr. It’s now a well-known and documented fact that King collaborated with the Justice Department during the civil rights era, while the Feds were wiretapping and spreading false rumors about him.

The treachery of the ex-civil rights petty-bourgeois, liberal establishment runs right up to the present. Former civil rights activist John Lewis, an ex-SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) activist and longtime Democrat, was recently in the news calling for a boycott of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Trump basically told him to shut up (“all talk...no action”), and Lewis and his Democratic Party defenders were off and running to show that the now-deflated Democrats are on their game. Lewis’s call for a boycott was an empty stunt, truly a distilled expression of how the capitalist Democrats have nothing to offer the oppressed—never have and never will.

We Marxists remember and seek to instill in the consciousness of black people and anti-racist fighters the real history of why the civil rights movement was derailed. We tell the truth about the betrayals of such “luminaries” as Lewis. He contributed, in his own way, to politically disarming the masses at a critical time when he acquiesced to the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington and dropped from his speech any denunciation of the Democrats or the Republicans.

The struggle for workers revolution and black liberation requires fighting to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will smash bourgeois rule. Its task is to mobilize the working class independently from all parties and agencies of capital. The power of labor is in its unique role deriving from its relationship to the means of production. Such a party will arm class-conscious workers with a revolutionary program to fight on behalf of all of the oppressed and exploited and for socialist revolution. An internationally planned economy, effected through a series of socialist revolutions around the globe, will lay the material basis for world communism and the abolition of all classes.

A long history of betrayals and sellouts by the staunchly pro-capitalist union misleadership has led millions of white workers, hit hard by the severe economic depression, to embrace the reactionary demagogue Trump, whose rallies were orgies of racism and anti-immigrant chauvinism. These workers were tired of the lies of the hypocritical Democrats and their constant refrain about an unprecedented “recovery,” while their desperate plight was being ignored. The Democrats believed that their lies would always be swallowed. Their “socialist” helpmates in the reformist International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative helped spread illusions in the “people’s president,” Bernie Sanders, as well as the bourgeois Green Party.

Now the workers will be battered by a cabal of billionaire robbers whose government will be a plunderers’ paradise, an unconcealed dictatorship of the rich. We can expect even more brutal attacks on labor and oppressed minorities at home and death and destruction rained on dark-skinned peoples abroad, surpassing what even Obama “accomplished.”

The great Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin once remarked that the toiling masses must possess an experience of their own. This has been consciously distorted by the reformists to mean that Marxists must conciliate the illusions of working people and the poor. Far from it!

The irreconcilable interests of the ruling bourgeoisie and capitalism’s wage slaves will necessarily result in struggles against the “masters” of the planet—bloody U.S. imperialism. With the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party, there will come a time when many of these same workers will heed the call for sweeping away all of the exploiters. They will join with their black and Latino class brothers and sisters, with all the poor and oppressed, and see that their interests and future are bound up with fighting in common integrated class struggle for the eradication of the whole capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Or we will all go down separately.