A Lesson in Dialectics: Response to a Political Lightweight 

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The Dialectic of Obama

It was by chance today that I encountered an article written by Thomas Lifson on the website of his conservative news outlet “The American Thinker” entitled The Dialectic of Obama. To those familiar with Marxist theory this will immediately register as an allusion to Obama’s supposed “communist ties” and “socialist tendencies”.

Lifson opens the article with the claim that “America's left, and the party it dominates, faced a reckoning yesterday”, speaking of the recent midterm elections that saw many democratic politicians lose their seats to more conservative candidates. He continued that “[t]wo short years ago, exultant progressives believed America had shifted permanently to the left. Now that sweet taste of victory has turned to acrid ashes in their mouths.”

The question I raise to this portion of Lifson’s article is this: when referring to “America’s left”, do you refer to the slightly left of center if left at all democrats who only help to re-enforce the status quo for the right, such as the unified drones who praised Obama before he was even inaugurated, or the real left – the fringe radicals who hold to such absurd notions as workers’ rights and equality?

By Lifson’s allusion to Obama’s Marxism and his subsequent lack of knowledge of left ideology, the answer to the above question is axiomatic. To American democrats who truly align with their party, who upon proper analysis through a worldwide and historical perspective find themselves at the center of the political spectrum, this very well may have been a major blow. However, to the true American left, nearly diminished beyond their capacity to repair by a long history of violent right-wing repression, this is just another step in the direction of a continued right-wing dominance of American politics.

So Lifson, as is expected of most American conservatives, begins his article by portraying his disappointing but utterly expected lack of understanding of leftist politics. Hopefully his grasp of the concept of dialectics will prove to be superior to his understanding of the left. Indeed, he at least correctly attributes the modern dialectic to Hegel and not Marx, and even correctly explains the dialectical process, and so he shows hope straight out of the gate. However, after this he falls completely flat. He goes on to say that “[t]he wise dialectical thinker understands that by heightening contradictions (or not letting a crisis go to waste, in the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel), the final outcome -- the synthesis -- can be shaped in radical directions.” While it is true that Marx’s ideology was based on contradiction, conflict, and resolution, it is also important to note that he was employing his dialectic in order to observe history. To quote Marx, “the history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggle”. It was not Marx’s intent to incite class struggle through dialectical reasoning. Marx was merely observing an obvious fact – that class relations in society are marked by a long history of struggle. In feudal times this struggle was between multiple classes. Marx and Engels list these classes in the Communist Manifesto:

“In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.”

Today, according to Marx, this list has been narrowed to merely two classes – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx’s communism, through the dialectic, is meant to emerge as a stateless, classless society upon a final synthesis which he does not describe in great detail.

Lifson then states that “[a]mong those who took this lesson was Saul Alinsky, for example, who wanted to "rub raw the resentments of the people" in order to hasten revolution through peaceful means, inspiring young Barack Obama to become a community organizer.”

Lifson’s liberal application of the concept of dialectics to say that “[t]he wise dialectic thinker” makes it his goal to “heighten contradictions” in order to shape things in “radical directions” is completely off base, but his slippery slope leading from this misguided understanding of Marxist theory, through a quote by Saul Alinsky, to Barack Obama’s community organizing, borders on levels of paranoia equivalent to that of Joseph McCarthy.

And in similar fashion he alludes to Barack Obama’s ties with Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. While Davis was definitely a friend of Obama’s grandfather and undoubtedly played some sort of role in his life, this role, according to Obama himself in his memoirs, was restricted to that of a figure he saw as such:

“It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.”

It is apparent that Obama saw Frank merely as a misguided and hard-set political romantic whose ways would never change no matter how outlandish they were. But conservatives are not convinced. They continue to insist that Barack Obama is, indeed, a communist and they likely will not change their minds even in the face of proof to the contrary – “as incurable as [Barack’s] mother” in their convictions. In spite of this, at the possibility that there is, in fact, a voice of reason within the choir of the unreasonable that Lifson preaches to, here are some facts about Obama, communism, and Frank Marshall Davis that should leave no doubt that Obama is not a communist:

Barack Obama’s Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, for the most part, benefitted top financial officials and did little for the workforce as they were intended to operate in true trickle-down fashion which would have made Ronald Reagan proud.

Frank Marshall Davis stated in an interview late in his life, when asked about the ILWU, a union in Hawaii that he had strong ties with, that “it was the policy of management to divide and rule”, implying that he strongly opposed this feature of hierarchical business structure. This being a generic stance of all socialists, if Obama is indeed a socialist, it is peculiarly absent from his policies.

Socialism, by its real definition, means simply “workers’ control over the means of production”. In other words, socialists want to place control of the tools and raw materials required to labor into the hands of the workers.

Communism is but one of many forms of socialism which involves need based remuneration.

While these definitions seem contrary to our understanding of these terms due to a common conflation of communism with Soviet Russia under Stalin’s control, as well as other supposedly communist empires, it is in fact the case that there have been many other marginally successful social experiments based on communist principles that actually did beckon the true spirit of communism, both in its Marxian sense and in other senses. Some of these include the Paris Commune of 1871, the Ukrainian Free Territory that lasted from 1919 until 1921, and the Spanish Revolution that lasted from 1936 until 1939, of which all of these suffered the same violent fate at the hands of either right-wing extremists or supposedly left-wing dictators. Some smaller scale communist projects have been a bit more successful in the long term including the Israeli kibbutzim which were founded around 1904 on communist principles that remained virtually unabated until the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, and Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen which was established in 1971 and still stands firm in its communist principles, though it has had to make some compromises and its existence is today in jeopardy due to state interference.

If Obama was actually a socialist, there would have been no bailouts. He would have instead turned control over to the workers of failed businesses and allowed them to run as worker cooperatives. Had Obama truly been influenced by Davis, who was actually a communist, by Davis’ words it is apparent that Obama would never have bailed out any of these businesses to begin with.

Lifson continues that “[t]he dialectical game plan of the Obama presidency was obvious: use the ongoing financial crisis sparked by subprime mortgage lending to generate momentum for fundamental restructuring of the economy”, stating that Obama had planned to “[b]lame Bush and big business for the problems”. Was this really the case? With all the blame that was dealt to big business, it sure did benefit from Obama’s actual policies. If there was a dialectical struggle at all in this case, Obama was playing the lead role for the fat cats.

But what I find most perplexing about Lifson’s article is his admonishing description of “[t]he Tea Party phenomenon” as “a self-organizing, spontaneous rebellion aimed at overthrowing the brand-new progressive dominance of government” which he claims “was fatally misunderstood by just about everyone on the left.”

It was hardly misunderstood by the left. After all, their method of operation through protest and other forms of peaceful civil disobedience is borrowed directly from the left with its long history of labor unionism. He then claims that “[t]he only model they had for understanding it was their own experience of mass mobilization: top-down, centralized, and funded by wealthy special interests”, completely neglecting the fact that the bottom-up structure is a purely libertarian socialist (yes, the term exists, and actually predates the right-wing usage of the term) phenomenon with its roots in early anarchism and the collectivist movement. On the contrary, to trace the origins of the top-down structure, we may look no further than rank-and-file capitalist industrial structures championed by right-wing heroes such as Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and our conservative good ol’ boy ex-president George W. Bush. Ironically, Tea Party mobilization is, in essence, proving the long held contentions of the true left to be correct.

I also find it peculiar that Lifson, as all other conservatives do, wishes to canonize the US Constitution as if it were some impervious doctrine sent by God himself to govern his constituents. It is, according to the conservatives, not a living document. Is this true? If so, at what moment was it no longer acceptable to amend or re-interpret it? Was it before or after the ratification of the fourteenth amendment? Should we set the constitution back to the state that it was in during the prohibition when the eighteenth amendment ruled the land, or should we accept the twenty-first amendment that basically repealed it? And if the nation’s Constitution is so sacred, then why was the same standard not held by conservatives when it came to California’s State Constitution in 2008 when they passed Proposition 8? Such inconsistency is rampant in conservative circles. The Tea Party is no exception to this rule.

However, the American “left” is no more consistent. It is true, indeed, that Obama demonized big business prior to lining their pockets. He fooled the public into thinking that his administration would hold big business accountable then went behind their backs and dumped their tax money into the very big businesses he was demonizing. While I disagree on a great many things with Ron Paul, he was absolutely correct when he said that Obama is not a socialist but that rather he is a corporatist. While Frank Marshall Davis may have a negative track record, especially as a Stalinist, Barack Obama could have only gained if he had actually been influence even in the slightest by old Fred. And so while the dialectic seems to be taking its turn towards an antithesis against Obama, I do not see the synthesis being much of an improvement, for the near future at least. Luckily we can hope for a better world someday. Until the dialectic actually includes the influence of the people, however, I am afraid that day will not come.

Added by: Watcher, 28/Mar/24 | Comments: 0
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