Negativity will get us nowhere; George Galloway

[luke]

Negativity will get us nowhere; George Galloway
Some have already written off Barack Obama's presidency. GEORGE GALLOWAY begs to differ.

IT WAS indeed a watershed - and the best is yet to come. Even the most jaded of leftists must have appreciated what the election of Barack Obama represents when they saw those pictures from Chicago, New York and across the United States.

Then there was the victory speech, which managed to segue from Lincoln through Sam Cooke to Martin Luther King. Expectations are running high. The higher the better as far as I'm concerned.

For there are two mistaken reactions to the political earthquake that has struck the US.

The first, not one that most people on the left in Britain are likely to make, would be to shut up shop and place all our hopes in the new administration.

There's certainly pressure from the Democratic Party mainstream in the US for progressives there to do that.

But listening to some on the left here, you'd think that this had already happened or was inevitable. For the second mistaken reaction is a kind of defeatist, pessimistic cynicism masquerading as hyperradicalism.

Nothing will change, say the sages, just you wait, it'll be business as usual. Despite appearances, there's nothing radical about this message at all. What it says is that the Wall Street interests, the Pentagon and the US elite are not merely powerful - anyone with any sense would recognise that - but are all-powerful, capable of corralling any opposition.

Not only is that a counsel of despair, it also leads to its own form of elitism. The masses who voted for Obama, whose vote was higher among the working class than the middle class, are treated as dupes who, unlike the savants of the left, were unable to see the true futility and impotence of their actions.

No movement has ever achieved anything with an attitude like that. And it's striking that it is the most out of touch and esoteric parts of the organised left that have adopted that kind of tone.

By contrast, there is a much healthier and more widespread response among what you might call the social left, those people who are not in any organised relationship with socialists or left-wing politicos, but whose values and sentiments are on the left.

Large numbers of such people are not oblivious to the central meaning, the truly radical message, of Obama's victory - things can change.

Things can change so radically that you can have a black president of a country founded on slavery, its version of capitalism sustained through the deepest racism, one-third of which was an apartheid state when I was a teenager, in which 10,000 black people were lynched between the 1880s and the 1960s and where there are more black men in prison than in college.

Nor, in my experience, are most of them ignorant of pressures that are already coming to bear on Obama to curtail the desire for radical change. As the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it, "Without struggle, there is no progress. Those who want progress without struggle want the ocean without the mighty roar of its waters."

But the whole point is that there is going to be a struggle. Indeed, it is already taking place in circumstances in which the neoliberal nostrums of the last 30 years stand cruelly exposed.

It's not just that Obama begins his presidency in the wake of a popular rejection of Bush and the Reaganite Republicanism. It's also that the bankers and the CEOs are all at sea, tossed about on Douglass's mighty waters.

What policies they settle on to try to deal with the economic maelstrom are not yet certain. Crucially, they do not have a free hand to come up with them. They are pressured by the scale of the global economic mess on the one hand and the expectations attending the election of Obama on the other.

In such circumstances, the worst thing that the left can do is to retreat into knowing smugness. Instead, we should be seeking to make our ideas, including justified warnings about the limitations of an Obama presidency, much more mainstream than they have been for all too long.

That's true in the US but also in Britain, where politics is showing a remarkable volatility.

It was only a few months ago that various pundits were telling us that there was an inexorable shift to the right and to the Tories. I was almost alone when I predicted that Labour would hold the Glenrothes by-election.

Since then, we've seen not so much the rejuvenation of Labour but the harsh spotlight being shone on David Cameron, George Osborne and the old Etonians.

Their lack of substance has cast Gordon Brown in a flattering light. But all this is before the reality of the recession really hits people.

For most people, it has so far been a spectacle - mind-boggling numbers on stock markets and exchange dealings. Now, as job losses mount and homes become insecure, the bitter reality is beginning to bite.

It would be very foolish for Labour to ignore the consequences, but it will pay little more than lip service to them if it feels that it can take the support of working people for granted.

That will change only when those who see themselves as firmly on the left create a political force that can connect with the far wider numbers who share our values and much of our policies.

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from the morning star