What the global Left can learn from Obama's victory

On the Friday after the historic Tuesday, Kenyans were still ululating and gyrating to the beat of the Obama presidential landslide. There was a public holiday decreed by our doddering head of state (forgetting for a moment that Kibaki himself stole an equally fiercely contested election just a few months ago), while a market-savvy brewer promoted one of its labels from senator to president (albeit in a limited edition). In the same spirit, a backstreet smarts guerrilla music producer unleashed a breaking news Benga-tinged praise song awash with brand new footage from the Grant Park site of the acceptance speech by Illinois's most famous politician, and in the classifieds at the very back of the daily newspapers, an innovative ‘Obama Sale’ to entice and pamper politically primed penny pinchers appeared, while in the maternity wards of Kenya we saw the appearance of instant Baracks and Barakas, including a fresh pair of fraternal Kisumu twins with the monikers Michelle and Barack. And on the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation's Kiswahili Service, an Obama campaign ditty by Trinidad's legendary calypso griot Mighty Sparrow continues the spirit of elation…

But in our excitement, some of us have propelled Obama to near messianic, almost mythical heights, even though the man himself (and his very down to earth spouse) frequently reminded his huge audiences that he is a very fallible human being with more than a couple of foibles just like the rest of us. In once in a life time global moments like this, we must pause and revisit the phenomenon of outstanding leaders and the historical circumstances which propel them to the national and world stages. It is my argument that if Barack Obama had never been born 47 years ago, history would still have invented him. Now, I know that I have just uttered what to some is a confusing and cryptic remark. What I am saying is that the concrete historical and material circumstances in the United States provided the fertiliser that allowed a neophyte first-time African-American senator like Barack Obama to knock on the doors of destiny in the early 21st century.

After eight years of the fascist, neoconservative and neoliberal Bush administration it was almost imperative that a leader would arise as an antidote to all those years of jingoistic and militaristic insanity, those delusions of prosperity spurred by oodles of snake oil from the crass neoliberal salesmen of global monopoly capitalism and the gross xenophobia of the bloodthirsty racists who denigrated Arabs and other people of colour using the canards of the Bush Doctrine. The specific set of socio-economic and political circumstances created the pre-conditions that allowed the talents, the vim, the fervour, the vigour, the inspiration, the charisma of a biracial Illinois constitutional professor turned senator to galvanise a grass roots movement and drive the pilots of the MV Project for a New American Century out of town and straight into the dustbins of political rejection. Remember, Obama has been living on this planet for almost half a century now. Eight years ago he failed miserably in his bid to be a member of the US Congress. Today he is on the brink of making history.

What is the difference? The time. Or rather the timing of his remarkable rise. It was important for Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and co. to rise to power to enable Obama to make history.

He is a leader who is needed in the United States at this time. In the future there will be other Obamas who may or may not even make it past their local counties and state legislatures. That is what I meant when I said a moment ago that if Obama had never been born, the disaster known as the Bush reign of terror would have created him anyway. Philosophically, I am very much influenced by Marxist thought and I agree wholeheartedly with the excerpt I have included at length below:

‘The role of great men [and women – Oloo] in history can be understood only by examining their activity in relation to the class struggle, to the activity of large social groups and to the struggle between these groups. Outstanding public men [and women - Oloo] are not the creators of events and movements but the leaders of the masses, of social classes. The support they receive from large social groups is, in fact, the source of their strength. No matter how gifted and intelligent these leaders may be in themselves, without such support they are powerless and incapable of exercising any significant influence on the course of events... Whether people with exceptional abilities come to the fore or not is inseparably connected with the operation of historical law.

‘There are always talented, gifted people in society. But only the appearance of a social need for people possessing certain capabilities, certain qualities of mind and character, can bring such people to the fore and create the necessary conditions for this. This is seen particularly strikingly in an epoch of revolutions, when hundreds of thousands of people come to direct public affairs, people who shortly before were quite unknown and who under the conditions of the old system could find no application of their talents and abilities. In exactly the same way the social demand in time of war creates conditions for the promotion of people possessing qualities of generalship. Who it is who comes to the fore under certain social conditions remains, of course, a matter of chance, the actual fact of the promotion of people whose qualities correspond to the needs of the age has the character of a natural law... Whether a particular outstanding public figure arises or not is a matter of chance, but this does not mean that anybody could occupy his (or her) place and carry out (their) historical mission. To perform that task appropriate qualities and abilities are needed. It is usually therefore people possessing such qualities to a greater or lesser degree who come to the fore as leaders...’(1)

In other words, what I am also saying is that students of Obama-mania must also examine the role that US progressive forces, particularly anti-war activists, radical democrats, anti-racists, feminists, LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bi-Sexual-Transsexual) foot soldiers, youth advocates, environmentalists and other militant groups have played in confronting the excesses of Bush and his big business supporters. We must factor in democratic and anti-imperialist forces around the world, from Latin America, to Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, North America and Europe who have mobilised and organised against the neoliberal global agenda. It is not an accident that there were 200,000 people in Berlin to drink in Barack Obama's every word a few months ago. In today's globalised world, we are all Americans to the extent that US imperialist policies impact on every one of our countries and therefore we all had a life and death stake in helping decide whom the next occupant of the White House will be.

Lest we forget, Obama's triumph is not an isolated incident in the Americas. It follows the consolidation of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, the success of the Movement Towards Socialism in Bolivia under Evo Morales – himself of indigenous stock, the ascendancy to the presidency in Paraguay of a left-wing outsider and pro-poor priest, a strike against the IMF and the World Bank in Ecuador and Argentina by progressive regimes, and the repeated success of Lula da Silva, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), and popular forces in Brazil (even with its centrist drift lately).

It is sweet but stale news by now that the world's candidate for the US presidency has prevailed, like Muhammad Ali in an unforgettable gruelling bout against a McCain-Sonny Liston from the yesteryears of the American political establishment.

Yes, let us savour that epic victory that is set to define an aspect of this epoch.
But will Obama deliver on all our dreams, aspirations and desires? Will he end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and stop the imperialist forays into Pakistan? Will he stop the meltdown of the global casino capitalist economy? Will he liberate Africa and the Third World from the peony, penury and pillory of the evil Bretton Woods twins? And end the Washington consensus against the Global South?

Will he restore the tens of thousands of foreclosed homes across the United States and guarantee full employment to his fellow Americans? Will he thwart the nuclear threat to human survival, sign the Kyoto Protocol, release Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier and the Cuban Five? Will he shut down the Guantánamo Bay torture centre and take Bush and Rumsfeld to the International Criminal Court (ICC)?

This is where we all have to come crashing back to planet earth.

Yes, it is true that Obama has exceptional leadership qualities that allowed him to trounce the Clintons and all those Democratic Party big wigs in the race for his party's nomination. Yes, it is true that John McCain is running against eight years of failed Republican policies. Yes, it is true that progressive global humanity gave the much-needed impetus for Obama to rise to the top.

But, and this is an important caveat, Barack Obama would not have secured the Democratic ticket to run for president if the monopoly bourgeoisie in the United States felt that he posed a grave danger to their class interests in the United States and around the world. International finance capital vetted Obama and saw in him a pair of very steady hands at the helm of the US Empire.

I have not been surprised to see the evolution of Barack Obama Jr. from a left-of-centre progressive Democrat to a centre right mainstream politician who promises to bomb Pakistan, kill Osama bin Laden and support the apartheid regime in Israel to the hilt.

We are thus confronted with the surreal contradiction:
Obama, the antidote to Bush, has all but guaranteed that he will pursue policies that will ‘stabilise’ the rule of international finance capital. Is Obama therefore a political charlatan that we should guard against? Or did he move deliberately to the right in order not to antagonise the Zionist and big business lobbies who would have blocked his election as the 44th President of the United States?

Many leftwing voices, like the prominent American commentator James Petras, think that Barack Obama is no friend of anti-imperialist and radical forces around the world. In a recent piece, Petras gave 12 reasons why he was rejecting Obama and voting for either Cynthia McKinney (former US Congresswoman and now the flag bearer for the US Greens) or Ralph Nader, the perennial radical loser/spoiler. Ralph Nader himself unleashed an Open Letter to Obama on 3 November in which he had less than complimentary things to say to the new US president.

Given all this leftist disquiet around the world, why is Onyango Oloo, a dyed-in-the wool Kenyan Marxist-Leninist, rooting for Obama? Is it because he shares part of my Luo and Kenyan heritage?

Hardly.

I think it is because the Obama presidency represents a very significant democratic breakthrough in contemporary world politics. The symbolism of an African-American president goes beyond the shallowness of skin colour and the superficialities of ethnic identity or national origin. We have seen African-Americans at the citadels of US power before – Condoleeza Rice is arguably the most powerful woman in the world. But like her boss Bush, she is universally reviled, not withstanding the fact that she is African-American and a woman as well. And much as he later cut a suave, sober urbane figure, we could never forget the fact that General Colin Powell helped supervise the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

Obama, on the other hand, is at the apex of a progressive national and international coalition against neoliberalism despite his overt ties to a section of the US big business interests. For me, I think the best analogy is to compare Obama to Mandela.

Now strictly speaking, Obama is not comparable to the great Nelson Mandela, the most widely respected world statesman still living. What I am referring to is the fact that Nelson Mandela towered above other global leaders despite the fact that strictly speaking his politics were really not that radical or revolutionary.

As a matter of historical record, Thabo Mbeki's discredited neoliberal policies known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) in South Africa were first initiated in 1996 when Nelson Mandela was still president. The South African Communist Party refers to these policies as the 1996 Class Project.

We still revere Mandela for pioneering the historic democratic breakthrough that triggered the collapse of the main pillars of the apartheid edifice in South Africa. Were we to examine his socio-economic policies under a harsh ideological lens, we would find that our beloved Madiba is completely culpable in the current spate of high unemployment, xenophobia and growing class contradictions gripping post-apartheid South Africa.

But we know that the Nelson Mandela that history will remember is not the co-architect of GEAR but rather the iconic ANC leader who endured 27 years in the dungeons and penitentiaries of the former apartheid state at the southern tip of our mother continent. Likewise, whatever else Barack Obama does with the 44th Presidency of the United States, posterity will remember the history he made on 4 November 2008.

Abraham Lincoln is credited with the legal emancipation of slaves in the United States. Who remembers his many, many significant flaws and drawbacks? Who remembers that George Washington was a slave owner?

Of course, Obama's complete legacy will not be determined nor can it be examined until after he leaves political office, whether it be after four years or two terms from now. Since that task is not only premature but impossible to carry out today, in early November, even before he has been sworn in, let us restrict ourselves to lifting our glasses in a toast to his famous victory for now at least.

But that is not all I have to say on the subject. For progressive, leftwing forces around the world I have the following observations to share:

As Vladimir Lenin and other Marxists said time and time again, the most direct path to socialism and revolution is through democracy. In other words, we must be swimming in the midst of the mass democratic tumult, participating in all the contemporary struggles in order not only to remain relevant, but keep the people vigilant about the long term tasks of progressive humanity. It is only by being part of these major struggles involving millions upon millions of fighting people that we can champion, in a credible way, our more radical and more sustainable agendas for social, economic, and political transformation.

If you were a German or a European in the 1930s and 1940s and did not take up against Hitler and Nazism, you forfeited any claims to be progressive. Likewise, you could not call yourself a ‘revolutionary’ in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s if you did not act in solidarity with South Africans in their struggle against apartheid or the Palestinians in their quest for national liberation. In the 2000s you were a bogus radical if you did not understand the importance of dislodging George Bush and his fascist Republican cabal from their perch and stranglehold of state power in the United States. To that extent supporting an Obama presidency was a democratic and even dare I say a revolutionary imperative for anyone – be they African, Asian, Caribbean, European, Latin or North American – who considered themselves even remotely ‘leftist’ (notwithstanding the ideological limitations of Barack Obama the individual). As he himself said, the election campaign was never really about him as a person, or even black people as a race.

The broad democratic movement in the United States which put together the grand coalition that voted out Bush's acolytes from office has important lessons to those of us in the Left who spend too much time navel-gazing and hair-splitting and far less time mobilising and organising ordinary people to fight for peace, democracy, and social transformation. I once read a quip (this was way back, perhaps in 1987) in the World Marxist Review from a Mexican communist decrying the fact that if only took two Leftists to come up with five political parties and ‘movements’ between them. Our challenge as communists, socialists, leftists, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, revolutionaries – whatever label we choose to pin on our lapels – is to combine our profound transformational visions with the hungry and urgent aspirations of millions of ordinary world citizens who have never heard of or read from Mao, Marx, Regis Debray, Che Guevara, Castro, Cabral, Chris Hani, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Angela Davis, Thomas Sankara, Maurice Bishop, Louis Althusser, György Lukács, Aijaz Ahmed, Terry Eagleton, CLR James, Kwame Nkrumah, Emmanuel ‘Blade’ Nzimande, Mahmood Mamdani, Yash Tandon, or Issa Shivji. We cannot afford the luxury of cynicism or the delusional complacency of insisting that our fractious little sects are the ones that will save global humanity from the perfidy of the capitalist monster.

This does not mean capitulating however to the wishy-washy liberal democrats or the flip-flopping rightward-drifting social democrats the world over. It does not mean, as it did for a whole bunch of communist and leftist parties in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, liquidating our revolutionary formations, abdicating our ideological principles, and stampeding to amorphous alliances.

Obama's historic triumph is therefore both a welcome democratic breakthrough as well as a challenge to all progressive humanity to keep their eyes on the ultimate democratic and revolutionary prize. This puts the accent on learning from and building on the massive, efficient machine that created the American popular movement for democracy, a machine that has now placed the son of a Kenyan foreign student and the daughter of American working-class parents in the most powerful office in the world.

* Onyango Oloo is a Kenyan political activist and former political prisoner.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

(1) Otto Kuusinen, Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp.222-7.