Horace Campbell’s latest book, http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/503/campbell_obama_cover.jpg [2]* [email protected] [3] or comment online at Pambazuka News [4].
NOTES:
[1] Campbell 2010: 3
[2] These acts enacted by the United States Congress represented enabling legislation which afforded the opportunity for people of color in the United States to begin the long march towards full equality.
[3] Note must be made that it was in the USA that concepts such as scientific racism and eugenics took root and were used as mechanisms to legally degrade the humanity of people of colour.
[4]Campbell 2010: xiii
[5]Campbell 2010: 2-11.
[6]Campbell 2010: 15
[7] Campbell 2010: 121.
[8]Ibid.
[9] ‘With a NAFTA agreement that has labor provisions and environmental provisions as side agreements, it strikes me, if those side agreements mean anything, then they might as well be incorporated into the main body of the agreements so that they can be effectively enforced. And I think it is important, whether we’re talking about our relationships with Canada or our relationships with Mexico that all countries concerned are thinking about how workers are being treated.’ See transcript of President Obama’s interview on his first trip to Canada (Democracy Now.org – February 20, 2009.) Also see President Obama’s letter of December 26, 2007 to the IOWA Fair Trade Campaign, ‘One of the first things I’ll do as President will be to call the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico and work with them to fix NAFTA. We’ll add binding obligations to protect the right to collective bargaining and other core labor standards recognised by the International Labor Organisation. And I will add enforceable measures to NAFTA, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), CAFTA [Central America Free Trade Agreement] and other Free Trade Agreements (FTA’s) currently in effect. Similarly, we should add binding environmental standards so that companies from one country cannot gain an economic advantage by destroying the environment. And we should amend NAFTA to make clear that fair laws and regulations written to protect citizens in any of the three countries cannot be overridden simply at the request of foreign investors.’
(http://www.citizen.org/documents/ObamaTradeCampaignStatementsFINAL.pdf [5]).
[10] Campbell 2010: 234 – Quote from Vandana Shiva.
[11] Campbell 2010: 238; Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities, 1991: 83-84.
[12] Campbell 2010: 269.
How are we to understand Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to power? What does the movement which propelled him to power represent? And why has he not fulfilled the promises of his election campaign? Wazir Mohamed reviews a new book by Horace Campbell that seeks to answer these questions.
Links
[1] https://www.pambazuka.org/taxonomy/term/3998
[2] http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330068&]Barack Obama and Twenty First Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA</a> tells the story of the political struggles that shaped the ascendance of the first non-white person to the Presidency. </p> <p>In Horace Campbell’s view, while Barack Obama is not a revolutionary, his ascendance to the Oval Office is reflective of the contemporary mood and everyday expectation of most Americans today that their elected leaders would bring about changed conditions of life and of living for: the poor of all ethnic backgrounds, African Americans, Hispanics and other new immigrants, young people, women, white workers, and workers in general. </p> <p>The election of Barack Obama is related to the message of change which took on a momentum and a life of its own in the election campaign. Campbell relates this momentum as a sign that we are in the midst of the beginning of a new revolutionary moment. A moment which is not centered strictly on electoral change, but is multi-faceted and involves many different manifestations, such as massive technological change, the sharpening of environmental justice issues, the implosion of the new liberal way, heightened anti-racist consciousness, the de-legitimisation of militarism and occupation, and opposition to all forms of religious persecution. </p> <p>Throughout the book the author expands on these questions, but this review concentrates on how people of all shades came together to decide on the need for change - not just for change in leader, but change in the historically divisive structure of top-down decision making. This, he argues, can ultimately lead to change in the old order. </p> <p>Horace Campbell’s conception of the revolutionary moment is related to two specific factors. Firstly, as the book argues, historically the revolutionary moment has been defined by the convergence of forces at that point ‘when the ideas supporting or propping up the old order had become unsustainable.’[1] His argument is that the signs that this moment is fast approaching can be gleaned from the bottom-up mobilisation and decision making processes which emerged in the campaign without which Obama may not have been propelled to the Presidency. Secondly, is the election of the first non-white President in the United States of America. Hence, while Obama is not a revolutionary in Campbell’s view, the mere fact that he was propelled to this office through the coalescing of the people’s consciousness for change through bottom-up mobilisation and decision making processes, the expectation is that he is required to answer the call of the people for structural change. </p> <p>The expectation in the USA and around the world, especially in the post-colonial world, is that being the first non-white person to reach the mountain top, Barack Obama will give leadership towards a new dispensation of rights not only for the most down pressed in his country of birth, but for peoples of colour everywhere. While the book does not say this, it is important at the outset to point out that Barack Obama is the first non-white person to be elected to the highest office in the so-called developed and imperial world. This in itself could represent a democratic opening. It must be remembered that not so long ago, at least up to the 14th amendment of the US constitution after the Civil War, a person of colour was lawfully designated ‘three fifths’ of a human.[2] For one of these children to emerge and become President is indeed a breakthrough - it is time for other parts of the developed world to follow and is high time for this kind of forward step in Western Europe. </p> <p>While this book holds this up as a revolutionary moment, the author makes no pretence that it by any stretch of imagination means that racism and racial inequality in every area of life in the USA came to an end with the election of Obama. </p> <p>The book is well researched. It gives the reader cause to pause, to reflect, to analyse, and when we do that we are enabled through the evolutionary path of Barack and Michelle Obama’s life history to be able to connect them to the history of the struggle for equality and social justice, and not just for ‘freedom’. Having established the connection through the life path of the Obamas, Horace Campbell enables the reader to desist from the temptation of plucking them, the Obamas out as a black couple disconnected from history and from community. </p> <p>This work traces and establishes the connection between Obama’s rise and the long struggle of non-white peoples in the USA for the freedoms enshrined in the rising of struggles of African slaves against slavery; in the rising against the British Imperial domination which culminated in the unfinished American Revolution of 1776 for full freedoms; in the values of ‘Equalite, Liberte, Fraternite’ espoused by the French Revolution of 1789; in the values of racial, economic, political and social justice demanded by the Jacobins in the still unfinished Haitian Revolution of 1804; in the rising of African Americans against Jim Crow and the Klu Klux Klan; in the unfinished task of deconstruction of structural racism and white privilege; and in the unfinished Civil Rights struggle to end segregation and restore common humanity to the American landscape. Although the book identifies all these struggles as having influenced the direction of Barack Obama, it nevertheless presents him as a ‘pragmatic’ liberal who continues to operate in a world view that expects the capitalist free market system to offer up solutions out of which will emerge equality. </p> <p>OBAMA CAMPAIGNED AS A HUMAN BEING RATHER THAN AS A BLACK PERSON </p> <p>This work traces the complexity of the history of the United States wherein every roadblock imaginable was created to prevent people of colour from achieving the full dignity for all human beings. We cannot forget that the foundation of this society has been built on the atrocities committed against Native Americans, and native peoples especially in the Americas. A history intertwined with the rise of racism as a concept and scientific racism as a methodology of labour control; that is the dehumanisation of blackness and anything non-white as inferior.[3] </p> <p>It is from this backdrop that Horace Campbell delineates the rise of Obama and the ideology of change as a signifier of a revolutionary moment. His usage of the terminology revolutionary is deliberate. He argues that although Obama in his view is not a revolutionary perse; Obama is caught up and is required by circumstance to respond to the demands for change in this moment, a moment Campbell identifies as a revolutionary moment in world history. ‘The revolutionary moment…in the US,’ he outlines ‘is underscored by the convergence of forces that brought the country’s politics to an inflection point at the wake of the election season of 2007-2008.’ An inflection point which in Campbell’s view represents cracks in the walls of the politics of hate which ‘Obama…a student of black liberation,’ took advantage of and successfully ‘tapped into the humanist philosophy of Ubuntu and the optimism embedded in the message of hope’ in order to help create and lead an election movement that enabled him and the ideology of change to force a pathway through the cracks in the walls of the politics of hate which has consumed the national psyche.[4] </p> <p>REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT – NEW MOMENT IN HISTORY </p> <p>Obama’s ascendancy through people centered political mobilisation (bottom-up), though not altering the balance of forces at the top echelons of the society represents a revolutionary moment. This is a new moment in the history of political mobilisation; a revolutionary moment created by the masses who organised and voted for change in the status quo; change that Obama so far has been unable to deliver because of his failure to take the organising principles of the change campaign of respect and bottom-up organisation and problem solving into the White House. </p> <p>Horace Campbell does not mince words in this book, he is clear and deliberate in his analysis that this work is not only a contribution to the exhaustive critique of capitalism, but more importantly seeks to identify paths to new modes of economic and social organisation. While his boldness is likely to open the space for unending criticism from those who are unwilling to engage the future critically, he carefully and through painstaking observation of the Obama Change campaign is able to identify the emergence of the germ of the new social organisation. The maturation of the ‘principles of self-emancipation and self- organisation’, that is the bottom-up principle of organisation that was used by the campaign to replace liberalist ideas of top down electoral democracy - which in the past have served to shut ordinary people out from the corridors of power.[5] </p> <p>The theme of the revolutionary moment is supported by the use of as he argues, ‘the self organisation and self mobilisation…in the 2008 election campaign’. This in his view ‘raised new directions for the understanding of revolutionary organisation’ for the future.[6] This book is thus a call for students, academics and activists alike who may be interested in changing the direction of politics wherever they are to examine the processes, the organisation and methodologies used in the campaign to defeat, derail, and silence the protagonists of the old politics: the vanguardist politics of the Democratic and Republican establishment.</p> <p>OLD POLITICS DEFEATED </p> <p>The defeat of the tested machinations of the old politics is captured in chapters four and five of the book, appropriately titled: ‘Grassroots Organising Confronts the Machine’ (chapter four), and ‘Fractal Wisdom and Optimism in the Primary Campaign of 2008’ (chapter five). In these chapters Horace Campbell gives readers a birdseye view of how Obama - a black person from Chicago, a little known community organiser and a political outsider - was propelled by the campaign for change to defeat the old Democratic Party machinery in the Primaries. The defeat of the Democratic Party machine was related to the transformation of the nature of the presentation of the candidate not as black, but as a human being. Because ‘Obama ran as a human being and not as a black candidate’, he was unlike his black predecessors whose candidacy historically was about creating ‘leverage’, a space for themselves ‘to bargain with the top officials of the party for positions and handouts’.[7] </p> <p>Horace Campbell argues that this resulted from patient and disciplined political organisation imbued with the philosophy of Ubuntu. ‘The new ideas of Ubuntu - shared humanity -inspired a transcendence of the hierarchical idea of whiteness and blackness, firing up the young in the process’.[8] It was the young of all colours who carried Obama over the finish line in the primaries and in the general election. As such, though as he argues Obama is himself not a revolutionary, his upbringing and exposure to the struggle against racism for equality places him at the conjuncture of history, what Campbell calls the inflection point. And it is this conjuncture, the moment at which the old liberalist ideas of rule became crisis ridden as demonstrated by the near collapse of Wall Street, which signaled the beginning of the end of US hegemony and the dollar as the currency of world trade. As we are now seeing from the foreclosure crisis, the crisis of liberalism is tied to the concept of private property. It is here where the link between whiteness and property compounds the ideological crisis for the international capitalist system. </p> <p>Barack Obama’s signal that he was willing to transcend ‘blackness’ and to run as a human being interested in change fired up the imagination of the country and this helped to propel him to victory. It also exposes leaders throughout the world who want to call themselves revolutionary but embrace principles of private property and capital accumulation. </p> <p>POLITICS OF CHANGE AND THE PRESIDENCY</p> <p>While the book calls on organisers and conscious people to continue to support the network of networks that made the election of Obama possible, it is very critical of the fact that he has surrounded himself with the very people from the status quo who are the authors, benefactors and supporters of unequal political, social and economic relations which has kept the mass of working people in subjection. This book reminds us of the forces that change confronts: the overpowering presence of the military and financial industrial complex which works to keep things stacked up against ordinary folk. It represents a grim reminder that though the mass of ordinary people require change in their daily lives, such change will not happen quickly. It is a reminder that change is a slow process. In arguing that the election represents a revolutionary moment, Campbell is outlining that this was a major step forward, that it represented a dent in the armour of the powers that be. </p> <p>The book is a call to action. For Campbell the revolutionary moment represents the possibility of opening up spaces for new engagements for change and transformation to stalk and change the discourse in the corridors of power. For Campbell the combination of a non-white President who emerged out of the inner recesses of the people’s struggle to be human, with the self organised and self emancipated bottom-up decision making processes that emerged in the campaign is a winning combination for the struggles against the machine politics of the past. It is a call to action from this backdrop: He is saying that progressive groups, community organisations, the women’s movements, the new social movements (gay and lesbian rights, civil rights, human rights, workers in defence of the minimum wage and benefits, etc) need to learn from the Ubuntu principles used in the campaign in order to change the debate on the national plane. </p> <p>NEW POLITICS OF CHANGE AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY </p> <p>The final three chapters of this book speak directly to the need for a new politics, a new style of activism, and indeed a new sense of humanity. The Democratic Party has lost the debate on the new direction for the society because the movement for change stopped at the margins of the corridors of power. Change as a concept for the new century is not reflected in the workings of the Democratic Party, the Congress, nor the White House. Since the end of the campaign, the behaviour of operatives in these places reflects the attitude that change was a political ploy. This has turned off a lot of people who want to work for structural change. In the 2008 electoral cycle it was a way of joining and energising a process that said ‘enough is enough’. Obama, the Congress, the Democratic Party, and the White House must be forced to demonstrate in a forthright manner that the change message of the campaign was not a political ploy.</p> <p>The validity of the change message was measured because it was pregnant with the practical things that needed to be done to change the role of government locally as well as globally. The message resonated at home and abroad because ordinary people and the youth believe in the gut that the US must change the way it deals with politics, economics, the environment, with peace and war, and more especially with the use of technology to reshape and close the inequality gap between the multitude at the bottom and the few at the top in all areas of human activity and life. </p> <p>One example of the change message which resonated with workers at home and abroad was the signal that if elected Obama would be willing to engage and possibly reshape the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to include a labour and environment clause. In the new economy, where jobs are outsourced to global satellites, a labour clause in free trade agreements such as NAFTA is important for workers in Ohio and other parts of the US; it is also important for workers in Mexico, China, India, Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, and in all other areas of the world. The change message of hope and renewal recognised that workers everywhere deserve and require a level playing field, where their trade union rights to form organisations and to engage in collective bargaining for decent wages and conditions of work, including long term benefits such as pensions and health care should be the hallmark and requirement for any company to do business in any part of the world.[9] </p> <p>This was an important signal that the new tenant in the White House was going to be willing to address the ways in which globalisation is threatening global survival on all fronts. It was a signal that if given the chance he was going to bring the message to the forefront that the current race to the bottom, ‘the madness must be stopped’. It was a signal that if elected, Obama - to quote Vandana Shiva’s words - was going to join the forces who believe that if we act together, ‘with our collective will and our courageous interventions we must cure not the symptoms of insecurity but the root causes’ of insecurity which today threatens to increase the perils faced by the most vulnerable.[10] He is yet to do this.</p> <p>The Obama administration is yet to address in a comprehensive and methodological manner the problems of the most vulnerable in US society and in the world. Rather than find new solutions to the structural problem of inequality, they have adopted old approaches which helped to construct such inequalities in the society. Chapter eight of the book titled ‘Networks for Peace and Transformation’ critiques the wrong headedness of the policies adopted by the Obama economic team, the half hearted Keynesian economic approach to solving the problems that came to a head in September 2008 in the collapse of Wall Street. This was indeed the collapse of neo-liberal politics and economics which Alan Greenspan describes as a ‘flaw’.</p> <p>The result of such wrong-headedness and half-heartedness is that after almost two years and the expenditure of almost one trillion dollars in stimulus packages, unemployment has increased. Rather than spend money to address the historical structural problem which has given the rich undue advantage over the most vulnerable, the middle classes and the poor, the Obama team decided to prop up the Wall Street tycoons who created the problems in the first place. The wrong-headedness of these policies has increased the economic woes for the middle classes, the bottom part of which has slipped into what sociologists are now calling ‘the new poor’. The wrong-headedness of these policies has also increased the impoverishment of the poor and those who were already living below the poverty line. </p> <p>When Obama went to the White House he surrounded himself with persons such as Tim Geithner, Cass Sunstein, Larry Summers, and Arne Duncan, persons who did not understand that it is better to spend money on public education rather than on prisons. The US continues to spend an average of US$22,000 per year on each inmate in prison, while the disparity in what it spends on public education per child ranges from US$5,500 (New York City) to US$15,000 (Manhasset and Great Neck, high spending suburbs of New York).[11] Rather than engage the structural issues which have made the public school system in most poor communities dysfunctional, they are engaged in the clamour to create new entities, ‘charter schools’. Having paid careful attention to the grassroots mobilisation which affected both the tone of the message and the decisions that arose from the Democratic Convention, Horace Campbell recognised the reasons why the people were fired up. He tries to capture the ‘fired up’ mood of different sections of ordinary people who are organised for bottom-up change. Thus in presenting the argument of a ‘revolutionary moment’ this chapter recognises the growth of new mobilisation points, such as the New Abolishment Movement which has arisen to fight against the excesses and to reform the mentality which guides the workings of the prison industrial complex (2,304,115 inmates were living in prison in the US in 2008, the largest jail population in the developed world); and the military industrial complex. </p> <p>Movements such as the New Abolishment, the New Environmental Justice Movements, the Peace Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Anti-Racist Movements and so forth represents in Campbell’s view the wave of the future. These new peoples and community organised and supported groups have a single aim, they aim to open up spaces for the repair of the human spirit. The idea of change won in the Primaries and at the Democratic Convention and will win so long as the people remain mobilised.</p> <p>Horace Campbell argues in this book that the human spirit cannot be repaired unless the people step into and take over the arena of politics. Political change has to move beyond the ballot box and the right to vote. He says that ‘the challenge for women and men is to ask how the open source campaign and the tools that were mobilised and harnessed can shape a new understanding of politics and political engagement’. He calls on humanity to ponder the question, how can the movement develop, independently of the political formations that were business enterprises? Questions like these have arisen in the light of the abandonment by Obama in the White House of the mobilised networks of the campaign which brought him to power. The book argues that Obama seems to be trapped as a President because he abandoned the mobilised networks of the campaign. He takes the position that Obama can be released from this stranglehold, if the networks remain mobilised and active. Mobilisation and activity is required to unlock the deadlock reflected in the beleaguered Presidency.[12]</p> <p>CONCLUSION</p> <p>As a means of closing the discourse on this book for the moment I restate some of the core points of this book. One of the main points of departure in this book is the contradiction between the messenger and the message. The message of change, which is in effect revolution or transformation sought by the mass of ordinary people, is on target, but because the messenger is not a ‘revolutionary’ transformation/revolution is yet to become a realisable goal. Two main examples of this contradiction at work are the failures of Barack Obama to firmly establish his support for a single payer system in health care, or to dismantle ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ in the military. Both of these were campaign promises which continue to attract popular support from a wide cross section of the population. </p> <p>A second point of departure in this book is the unease which has emerged between the message of change and the status quo; that is between the haves and have-nots in the society; and between those with privilege and those without. This tension was best expressed in the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Here the society was being forced to choose between a future of fossil fuels and the transformation to new and sustainable sources of energy production. The debate is no longer between Republicans and Democrats (none of these enjoyed popular support on any given day over the past year); it is now about the failure of the politics of these two branches of a similar political ideology which seeks to continuously transfer wealth from the poor to the rich (the only difference between them is how much); it is about methodologies of social transformation to bring about equal access to health care, to education, to economic rewards between men and women and between white and coloured and between straight and gay. This contradiction is being felt in the corridors of the Democratic Party. </p> <p>The third point of departure in this book is the growth and rise of new social movements which are arising to fill the political vacuum as the old politics recedes; movements whose organising principles are shaped in the spirit of Ubuntu - the need for a shared humanity; a shared humanity that begins to reject the divisions erected through patriarchy, racism, and individualism; a shared humanity based on the ideas of communalist use of resources; a shared humanity that recognises and respects the need to protect the environment; and a shared humanity that attempts to repair the damage the prison and military industrial complex have done to the human spirit - a shared humanity that in the final analysis will organise life and community to create peace and reject violence and war.</p> <p>BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS</p> <p><a href=
[3] http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745330068&]Barack Obama and Twenty First Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA</a> by Horace Campbell is published by Pluto Press, New York, 2010.<br /> * Wazir Mohamed is assistant professor of Sociology, Indiana University East.<br /> * Please send comments to <a href=
[4] http://www.pambazuka.org/
[5] http://www.citizen.org/documents/ObamaTradeCampaignStatementsFINAL.pdf
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[7] https://www.pambazuka.org/taxonomy/term/6865
[8] https://www.pambazuka.org/category/ict-media-security
[9] http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category.php/comment/68398