Obama and the Left

Obama's election victory last week was generally greeted with warmth and a healthy degree of scepticism by those on, or leaning towards, the left. Of course, almost everybody felt a degree of Schadenfreude at the defeat of the McCain-Palin ticket. The extent of the ‘Change' that can reasonably be expected from an Obama presidency, however, remains open for debate.

The positions taken so far generally fall into one of three categories, all of which contain moments of truth. For some, Obama has been viewed as a bit of a distraction. Social change, so the argument goes, does not so much happen on the level of representational politics, and certainly not via the Office of the President of the United States. Rather, it occurs through social movements and struggles from below. The role that the movement against economic globalisation played in ending the end of history, breaking the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, is often cited as an example. To be sure, electoral victories have often been won on an anti-neoliberal ticket, but the ‘real' processes of change in both sensibility and policy were seen as set in motion from below - in the jungles of Chiapas and the streets of Seattle, rather than the Palácio do Planalto.

For others, however, Obama's election was both a real and symbolic victory in and of itself. There are generally two factors taken into consideration here. First of all, Obama's policy pledges and the courses of action he is likely to pursue are more ‘progressive' than those of McCain. His health care plan, for instance, promises coverage to millions, and almost every foreign policy expert the world over thought US military action against Iran was more likely under McCain than Obama. There is, of course, concern about some of Obama's policy proposals, such as his commitment to increased troop numbers in Afghanistan. Others doubt his ability to see through his most ambitious reforms in the current economic climate. Nevertheless, seen within the existing framework which, it is argued, is all we have to work with, the good guy is regarded as having won. Obama is and always was preferable to a President McCain. Likewise, the not unlikely prospect of a President Palin, should the ticket on which she was running have been successful, would have made possible the seemingly impossible: a turn for the worse in both domestic and foreign policy terms after Bush.

The second factor at play here is the recognition that, despite the supposedly ‘post-racial' nature of his candidacy, President-Elect Obama is without doubt the product of anti-racist social struggles. If an African-American woman in Alabama had not once refused to give up her seat on a bus for a White man, if hundreds of thousands had not, decades ago, marched on Washington DC or taken part in civil disobedience, Obama would not be where he is today. Of course, the election does not represent the end of racism in America, by any stretch of the imagination. But it is an indicator of how far the struggle against it has come. The fact that, barely 40 years after the end of legalised segregation, the label POTUS will soon refer to a man whose father was from Kenya is real change.

The third approach, on the left, to thinking about the meaning of the Obama presidency is to identify it as neither relatively meaningless (as in the first approach), nor an end in itself (as in the second), but as a potentially favourable transformation in the conditions in which we have to struggle for a better world. This is the approach for which I have the most sympathy. It also draws, of course, on the first two lines of argumentation. Certainly, the fact that an Obama presidency is possible reveals something about the success of anti-racist struggles and movements over the last half a century in the United States. Likewise, the strength of anti-war sentiment established during the Bush administration (as well as the failure of the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq) mean Obama will likely be far less inclined towards the mimicry of European imperialist projects than the current president and, to a lesser extent, his erstwhile rival. In a more limited way, the important role that less well off voters played in his election means that even if Obama cannot be expected to ‘spread the wealth around' in the way the left might like, he will at least likely refrain from spreading it further upwards through new regressive taxation.

However, the less pressure built by both the grassroots as well as the institutional left in the US and beyond over the next few months, the greater the disappointment likely to be felt of an Obama administration. Large sections of both the antiwar and labour movements in the US threw their support behind Obama early on in the primaries and continued to support ‘their' candidate throughout the campaign, largely deferring criticism until after Clinton and then McCain had been defeated. Setting aside for a moment discussion of whether this strategy made sense at the time, the current period of transition is without doubt a crucial moment.

It is between now and the end of January that the Obama administration will be finalising policy programmes, assembling their advisory team, and appointing key positions. The naming of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff (the least of whose flaws is being ‘too partisan'!) and the team of economic advisors assembled behind the President-Elect at his first press conference (none of whom were from organised labour) should be enough to illustrate the urgency of pressure from the left. The anti-war movement need to be on the streets demanding the promised speedy withdrawal from Iraq and increasing it's public opposition to the planned increased deployment to Afghanistan. Labour leaders need to insist on a place at the table in devising a response to the economic crisis. Meanwhile, the unions' rank and file should be preparing to mobilise against their leaderships' tendencies towards easy compromise and begin developing forms of collective bargaining power to secure their interests as the current crisis deepens.

Obama's election, then, signifies an as yet to be determined change in the conditions of struggle, and certainly not an end. As a trade union organiser friend who worked on his election campaign said to me this morning, ‘Now comes the hard part.'