Movement “leaders” not only fall into this election trap—cycle after cycle—they lead others into it, and they try to silence those who do try to mount actual protest. Whatever they may personally believe or understand, these forces portray the Bush crimes as a betrayal of American ideals rather than an extension—albeit an extreme, and in many ways unprecedented, extension—of what this country has always been about, founded as it was in slavery and genocide, and soaked in the blood of people from Latin America to South Africa butchered by repressive regimes backed by the U.S. Flowing from their desire to “perfect”—not overthrow or even disrupt—the system of American democracy, they repeatedly act to cool out anything that would step outside official channels.
Realism…and RevolutionBut there are also others—who do see something rotten at the core of the United States system, and yet still insist that even revolutionaries must support Obama. In a recent email exchange one such friend of mine insisted that he “agreed [that] Obama is part of the system. And, I agree, we need revolution. But unless that is around the corner—we have to be realistic and support Obama.”
This is also wrong.
No one can promise that a revolutionary situation is around the corner. But what can be said with certainty is that very often in history revolutionary openings have emerged all of sudden and seemingly out of nowhere. Such openings mainly come about owing fundamentally to the nature and working of the system itself—to the ways in which the underlying social and political “faultlines” can suddenly split open. But what revolutionaries do in the whole period leading up to that has a lot to do how the situation does present itself. And if revolutionaries are not working every day towards—and measuring everything they do up against—hastening the emergence of a revolutionary situation and bringing about a revolutionary people . . . if they are not “preparing minds and organizing forces” for just such a rare opening. . . then they won’t even be able to recognize, let alone seize on, a revolutionary situation when it does arise.
Revolution is not just an idea to “believe in” in the abstract and then put aside as we putter around in the world as it is. It must be actively striven for through a whole ensemble of revolutionary activity—fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution. A key aspect of this is confronting—and telling others the truth about, not covering over—the true nature of bourgeois elections as a vehicle for exercising and obscuring bourgeois dictatorship and that what humanity really needs is communist revolution and a whole different system. And this also means building massive political resistance to the main ways in which, at any given time, the exploitative and oppressive nature of this system gets focused up in policies and actions of the ruling class and its agencies. Right now this includes coming out at the Democratic National Convention and demonstrating against the wars, the repression, and the other key elements of the agenda that need to be opposed, and defeated.
You see, it is NOT the case that short of revolution—or that for those who don’t agree with the need for or desirability of revolution—there is nothing we can do but accept the “lesser of two evils.” The choice we face is not really between Obama and McCain. Our choice is between accepting the ruling class spectrum of Obama to McCain as the limits of what is possible—or—rejecting this whole framework and instead waging meaningful mass political resistance to the whole fascist direction they are dragging things in.
When people did break loose in massive political protest in 2002 and 2003 in the run up to the Iraq war, it mattered. It gave the whole world hope in the knowledge that the people of this country opposed what their government was doing and were acting to stop it. These protests, which were then joined by millions of people across the globe, stripped Bush of legitimacy as he launched that war anyway. Then, as the war began to go badly, the challenge that had been put before people by those protests continued to influence the thinking of people broadly as more and more turned against the war and the President.
Who would even know, to the extent that people do, about the war crimes and torture carried out in this war, if it weren’t for acts of courage and defiance of the people? It was not the Democrats, but the anti-war soldiers and veterans who stepped forward to expose the war crimes in Iraq. It was not the elected officials making compromises in order to get elected, but the officials who answered their consciences and forfeited careers who blew the whistle on torture. It was not by campaigning, but by sitting down and refusing to be moved, that the parents who lost children in this illegal war captured the hearts of and moved millions.
Since the time of those world record size protests, the outrage and disgust at the Bush program and its wars has only grown deeper and more widespread. But now, what will become of this outrage? Allowing it, or helping it, to be channeled into supporting Obama when he is busy telling you he wants to better prosecute America’s wars is the most unrealistic idea there is!
Yes, millions will vote for Obama believing, or at least telling themselves, that he will bring the change they want to see. But as the policies of a murderous empire advance, in one form or another under the next administration (assuming the Bush cabal allows the elections to go forward), will these people be demoralized and demobilized, or will they become radicalized and energized?
The answer to that question has a LOT to do with what the anti-war movement does now. Whether we tone the message down so, as Leslie Cagan put it, it’s not seen “as an anti-Democratic Party protest,” and we don’t offend the delegates—or plant a pole of real opposition right up against the misplaced hopes that will be projected onto the Democratic National Convention?
At a time when the tens of millions of people who have the potential strength to stop this war are being pacified and corralled into a dead-end, what meaning does it have to call oneself “anti-war” if you are not protesting outside the convention? Anyone serious about stopping this whole direction of unjust war, torture and fascist repression should be in the streets.
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