From Felipe Gonzalez to Barack Obama: for change you have to rely on mobilization

From Felipe Gonzalez to Barack Obama: for change you have to rely on mobilization

Luis Martin-Cabrera
November 12, 2008
Translated by Scott Campbell
Spanish original: http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=75766

The images of Obama with his family on the gigantic Grant Park stage in Chicago mixed with Jesse Jackson's tear-covered face, the emotion of Oprah Winfrey - a kind of African-American Maria Teresa Campos - or the happiness of thousands and thousands of progressive volunteers or of people simply tired of four years of despotism, wars, inequality, institutionalized racism and corporate pillaging. Many of the people who I was watching the election results with began to speak of a new era, of the beginnings of a new life. That an African-American could make it to the White House meant that change could really happen. In the street, the honking of horns and the widespread happiness completed the historic moment: on the night of November 4 it was almost impossible to remove oneself from the collective unbridled emotion of Obama's victory.

The moment reminded me, save the distances that allow any kind of historical analogy, of the campaign and victory of another candidate whose slogan also centered on the popular call for change: Felipe Gonzalez. In 1982, I was only 10, but I remember well going to vote with my mother, convinced, as was nearly my entire family, that the victory of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the general elections was something like the victory of Allende in Chile in 1970: not just the end of the dictatorship but the peaceful route to socialism. It's worth remembering that just one year earlier Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero had entered the Congress of Deputies, pistol in hand, to remind us all that we could still return to the ominous years of the dictatorship. The charisma of Gonzalez, the rumpled style of Alfonso Guerra, the 800,000 jobs and the promise to not enter NATO, brought to power a party of leftists for the first time since the victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections. As happened on November 4, it was very difficult to remove oneself from the explosion of collective happiness; I still remember clearly the tears on my mother's face, who thought that her children would have more freedom and a better future.

As Felipe Gonzalez had to betray the Socialist Party in exile and renounce Marxism-Leninism to win, Obama has had to distance himself from his African-American pastor, because he, among other things, openly criticizes U.S. imperialism and its primal manifestation, the perpetuation of racism and classism. Obama has also had to join in the public lynching of professor William Ayers, who to this date we have not seen in any of the public or private television stations explaining why he participated in the Weather Underground, an organization that arose to fight against the war in Vietnam and police brutality against people of color. You can question the organization's methods, but it's suspicious that you can't even begin to discuss the historical conditions of oppression that led to its formation. Likewise, it's a shame that the academic community, save for a few exceptions, have remained with their arms crossed, watching as they lynch a professor of renowned academic prestige and an impeccable record of community work.

However, it's too soon to judge Obama's promises, but, what were Socialist Party's promises of change? What happened to the 800,000 jobs and the "No entry into NATO"? To judge the distance between our illusions at the time and the political reality of the PSOE, it's necessary to recall that not only did we join NATO and not only did they not create 800,000, but that on top of it came the industrial restructuring, the privatizations, the labor reform, the freedom to layoff workers for nearly no reason, Juan Guerra, Filesa, the GAL, Polanco shouting that "no one has the balls to deny him a private television station" [1] and, as the icing on the cake, the legalization of temp agencies, as evidence that capital in Spain camped out quite comfortably, although the party in power had the word socialist in its name. Today we know that there was no contradiction because, as Joan Garces documented in her excellent Soberanos e intervenidos (Rulers and take-overs), the PSOE was financed by the German Social Democratic Party with the acquiescence, and likely the contributions of, the CIA, the owners of the money.

We should not now try to be fortunetellers regarding Obama, but it doesn't serve to allow ourselves to be dragged along, eyes closed, by nebulous promises, just because we're exhausted after eight years of a Republican government. We also can't simply declare, as did an article in the newspaper Publico, that Obama "is a great product", it can't be dismissed that a black president has entered the White House in a country founded on slavery, segregation and the assassination of political leaders such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. It may be difficult (or perhaps now not so difficult) for those in Spain to imagine what it means for people of color in the United States to see a black president in a country where white privilege is still commonly used as a bargaining chip. On the other hand, the election of Obama cannot be understood, as many commentators in the media are claiming, as definitive proof that we live in a post-racial society. Obama is a beginning, not an end, an African-American president can't change two centuries of racial violence and oppression. To give an idea of the reality of this country, suffice to say in my own university - the University of California, San Diego - only 2% of the students are black and 9% of the students are Chicanos. There is almost the same percent of white students as there are black prisoners in jail, the majority of them there for minor offenses, such as possession of marijuana. As my colleague Dennis Childs has demonstrated, the privatization of the prison system and the jailing of the black population is the continuation through other means of slavery (the prisoners work for miserable wages in prison). Angola prison in Louisiana, for example, is built on the ruins of a slave plantation; the prisoners have the same skin color as the slaves in the past.

Because of this, to end racism we have to win more that symbolic battles. Racial oppression is not only an economic problem, but you can't eliminate racial oppression without changing the economic conditions that created and sustain it. What economic problems is Obama facing? What does this mean in the context of change? The global economic crisis of capital has made visible the collapse of the neoliberal consensus. Now it is not just us Marxists who say that markets don't self-regulate and that the invisible hand of the market is not so invisible, now Alan Greenspan is saying it, too. Since the crisis has stopped being invisible, it's stylish to accuse Milton Friedman in the New York Times and the prophets of neo-liberalism of all our ills, though the policies of Clinton were exactly the same as the fundamentalists with their free-market virtues. It is clear that we've reached the end of a cycle of accumulation and, in the United States at least, Keynesian and post-Keynesian economists have become fashionable, from the flamboyant Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman to James K. Galbraith, passing through the renewed thinking of the now-dead Minsky. All of them favor greater state intervention in the regulation of markets and public investment in infrastructure as the solution to the cyclical crisis of capital.

Up to now, it appears that Obama's agrees with the economic thinking of these neo-Keynesians, so much so that his economic adviser during the campaign, Robert Rubin, was one of the architects of NAFTA during the Clinton government, and his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, has received more money from Wall Street than any other U.S. politician. In whichever case, the hegemonic logic of the discussion has focused on the reconstruction of capitalism, even Harper's magazine, traditionally to the left of liberals, dedicated an edition to "saving capitalism". Why save, reconstruct, resurrect capitalism and not destroy it to substitute it with something better? Why not abandon the cyclical crises and systems of capitalism with their quotas of destruction, inequality, war and misery? These questions don't enter the vocabulary of the Obamites, more concerned, as was Gonzalez in '82, with giving off a centrist image of themselves, but we now know that the only truth in the struggle is that you can't govern for capital and the people at the same time, that you can't find any moral in profit nor in making capitalism a "civilized" entity, respectful of our rights, because the only thing it understands is the logic of profits.

But it shouldn't be all be pessimism, Obama is not only the result of the spectacular logic and support of large U.S. companies, he is also the product of the contributions of grassroots citizens and a robust mass movement that rallied him into power. I counted a friend among the thousands of volunteers for Obama, there are many unemployed due to this new crisis, thousands of college students fed up with a system that has stacked them with debt and left them an unhopeful future. If Obama's campaign proved anything, it is that popular mobilization works and it isn't - as Baudrillard wrote - a simply simulacrum of masses that are unable to affect anything politically significant. The only guarantee of change is to not dissolve this movement but to broaden it, unite it, for example, with the demands of the gay rights movement in California that has bravely gone into the streets to protest against the Mormon Church which financed the campaign against gay marriage.

Not all of our aspirations are the same, but our enemy is, and because of this we should unite in the same collective spirit that made it possible for Evo Morales to nationalize Bolivia's hydrocarbons in the face of threats from the oligarchy, the same that made it possible for Kirchner to nationalize the pension system in Argentina, the same that gave Hugo Chavez the legitimacy to govern for the people and with the people. A president without a mass movement behind him can only be a puppet in the hands of capital. If there is something to learn from Latin America it is precisely this, that from Buenos Aires to Caracas, it is the people in the streets who are saying no to global capitalism in the name of a more just society. Obama is not the anti-Christ as many Christian fundamentalists believe, nor is he the Messiah, he is only a charismatic and talented politician, it means that we should not march home and conform as happened in '82. In this sense, Obama's campaign, which appropriated one of the United Farm Workers slogans - "Yes, we can" - yet so that for Cesar Chavez and the Mexican migrants could have a more dignified live they had to march from Delano to Sacramento, to go on strike and change things from below. Today, as yesterday, we have to tell Obama from the streets, yes we can, and yes we can transform reality, yes we can, as Belen Gopegui stated, change and not just reform the hard nucleus of the real world so that the only possible morality is not profit and systems of crisis. If we have learned something from the long and disenchanting experience of social democracy in Spain is that we can't let ourselves be enchanted by the songs of sirens and then march ourselves home.

Luis Martin-Cabrera is professor of Literature at UC, San Diego.

Translator's notes:

[1] Juan Guerra is the brother of former Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Guerra, who got rich using his influence with his brother. Filesa was an organization formed to illegally raise funds for the PSOE. The GAL were the Antiterrorist Liberation Groups, death squads formed under Gonzalez to fight the ETA. Jesus de Polanco was a media mogul with close ties to the PSOE.

Scott Campbell is the editor of the blog http://angrywhitekid.blogs.com/ and a member of Tlaxcala (http://www.tlaxcala.es), the network of translators for linguistic diversity. This translation may be reprinted as long as the content remains unaltered, and the source, author, translator and reviser are cited.