Industrial Workers of the World

The following is from an interview with Glen Ford, editor of the online U.S. journal "Black Agenda".  Doug Henwood is the editor of the "Left Business Observer" out of New York City.  The interview was conducted on WBAI, a listener sponsored radio station in New York City.

Y

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Glen Ford -

What we've been talking about here of course is just...is he a fraud on basic Democratic Party terms?  And that's very, very clear. But that's not why we're getting so upset about him and slap him everytime he acts wrong. We at Blackagendareport.com see Barack Obama as a clear and present danger to the coherence of black politics and we see the evidence everyday.

Doug Henwood (after station ID) -

What does the popularity of Barack Obama tell you about the state of black politics in America now?

Glen Ford -

Well, Barack Obama plugs into an ancient current in black politics and it stems from Jim Crow segregation and of course, previous to that, slavery. Barack Obama seems to fulfill a dream, an ancient one in black America of having the ultimate black faces in high places.  And it's quite understandable.  Until the death of Jim Crow - which was - I was a young adult at that time - white society at large was arrayedagainst every black aspiration and therefore, any black person who rose to any kind of status through any means at all...that was seen as a victory for the whole, a collective victory for black folks.  Then,of course, Jim Crow died, folk got the vote and politics, in black communities, became politics between black folks.  But the mentality of Jim Crow - of seeking just black faces in high places and not evaluating them on their performance and accountability to blackpeople still remains 40 years later.  So that's a deep current and it's not Obama's fault that it's there but he benefits from it.

That's the general thing.

However, now, with the nation consumed and involved in a campaign with a black figure at the center of it those chickens are coming home to roost. And what we've discovered is the PARALYTIC...paralyzing effectof the Obama candidacy on black politics and I have a little anecdote that I'd like to tell you that I think sums it up entirely.

DH -

Please do.

GF -

About four weeks ago, I was teamed up on Ron Daniels' show on WBAI with Charles Barron - and I'm sure your listeners are familiar with him - he's a former Black Panther, city councilman, quite progressiveby any measurement and one of my favorite politicians because he's a black electoral official who is also a political activist so, to me he's the kind of model of what political folks should be if they seek office.  Councilman Barron was on the show with me to announce that he had just endorsed Barack Obama for president.  Ron Daniels knew our position on that.  So I proceeded to outline what we have just talkedabout on your show point by point to say, how could you [Daniels] support a person who obviously is on the other side of the politicial line from you?  And he couldn't answer...any of it.  There was nocoherent response.  And finally, after ten or fifteen minutes of this back and forth - which actually turned into a debate - he finally says "I just wanna give the brother a shot."   And that was it. And thatsums it up.

It was pitiful, it was inadequate but it really was accurate in terms of Barack Obama's knee jerk support among black folks in general and more critically, among activists, progressives - life long activistsand progressives who damn sure should know better.

DH -

White leftists like me depend upon the black portion of the population to provide a reliable base of social democratic and anti-imperialist policies...you guys are letting us down here.

GF -

Absolutely and that is why it is so important to understand that this not just an intra-black affair - that is very important to those of us who are black and care first and foremost about the health of theblack polity.  But if the black polity descends into incoherence - and this is already happening and Barack Obama has not yet won a primary [stated before Iowa: ] - but it is already underway.  If committed,life long activists like Charles Barron can be paralyzed, put into a kind of comatose stupor just by the presence of this corporate funded black candidate then we are in real trouble.  And if the black politybecomes fractured or just paralyzed then there really is no hope for anything resembling a progressive movement in the United States.

DH -I

t sounds in many ways like you're describing what is typical American ethnic politics.  Black Americans have been shaped by this country, they are Americans so maybe they're just following a long tradition ofthis kind of politics.

GF -I

f that were so then people like Charles Barron would not have to say "I just wanna give the brother a shot" when he's quite intelligent enough to know that that brother is not on his side.

[...]

full (MP3 audio)  -

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I don't support any particular Democratic candidate in the race for the U.S. Presidency.  I would hope that the candidate with the most potential to shift the wealth we workers create for the bosses back in our direction would win.  All bourgeois politicians are committed to the continuance of wage-slavery.  What I don't want to see in the USA is another Republican elected to the Presidency because Republicans are more likely to shift more of the wealth which workers create back into the hands of the ruling capitalist/landlord class coalition.  

"How?" you ask.

By saying, for instance, that Social Security (the U.S. government pension system for people over 62) is in a crisis, which it's not.  The latest Governemt Accounting Office report makes it plain that Social Security will be solvent for the next forty years, even if nothing is done to change its funding stream.  

How would a bourgeois politician of the Democratic Party approach the question of funding Social Security in the future, after the forty years or before?

To satisfy me (at minimum), that politician would put forward a plan to fund it by raising the threshold at which Social Security taxes are levied.  Right now, after some absurd amount of wealth is garnered by a person, there is no Social Security tax levied.  In other words, the rich, (mostly people in the employing and landlord classes) don't have most of their wealth exposed to taxation to pay IN to Social Security.

Obama and all Democratic Party candidates say that Social Security has a funding crisis.  Of course, the Republicans say this too.  They are all liars.  The Republicans are the worst of the bourgeois bunch.  So, what I'm saying here is that you have to have your critical thinking caps on to determine which Democrat to vote for, if you're going to vote.  Voting is voluntary in the USA and this usually accrues to the advantage of the conservatives, not the more left leaning potential voters.  None of the Democrats are going to go any further towards supporting programs which would funnel the wealth workers create back to themselves, unless workers seem aware that that is the way this wealth should be used.  That's the way left/right politics work in capitalist democracies.  The Republicans will have you believing that you'll be able to have more wealth in your pockets by axing social programs for the poorer sectors of the working class and letting the capitalist masters keep it, supposedly to create "jobs".  This is a lie too.  The Coalition polytricksters pull that one on their "battlers" every chance they get.  The simple fact is that the capitalist class never creates jobs in order to be nice to the "people of the United States" or any other nation State.  They employ wage-slaves to make goods and services for the capitalists to own and then to employ their hucksters to sell and make profits for them to keep.  True conservatives never want this wealth taxed in order to provide goods and services to the poorer sections of the working class, or in fact, ANY sector of the working class. 

But dig this, what's truly interesting about Obama's candidacy is that it is taken seriously.  This would never have happened back in the 50s or even the 60s or 70s.  In the 80s, you had Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition, but nobody thought Jesse had a chance to become President.  He was just thought of as an anti-racist influence.  But Barak Obama has a real chance to become President.  Can you imagine an Aboriginal PM?  That shows that the US population is a hell of lot less influenced by racist notions than it was back in the "good old days".  This is not to say that racism doesn't exist anymore in the USA; but Obama mania is a measure of how far we've come away from the days when people's minds were plagued with the 19th Century pseudo-scientific theories that there was more than one race amongst human beings and that the "whites" were at the top of the heap--sometimes even with the grace of God.

Wobbly greetings,

Y