some left views of obama - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 11-06-2008, 04:14 PM

this link

Three left views on Obama: Howard Zinn, Mike Davis, Todd Chretien. Links

will take you to 3 articles/interviews pasted into a row at samir amin's world forum for alternatives website.
of them, i think the davis piece most closely resembles my own view of what's happening around us, what the causes are and what obama appears to represent (and not represent) in this context.

since positions like these are largely shut out of the american corporate media, i thought it might be interesting to see what you make of them.

there is a spectrum of folk to the left of obama, to the left of the democrats.
there is a need for a serious political opposition from the left--zinn is right about that, and i think he's right about the reasons for it.

but what do you think?

Charlatan · 11-06-2008, 05:12 PM

I think Obama will be under immense pressure to go back on many of the promises he made. Given the current economic "crisis" I suspect the corporations will look to say, we need tax breaks and handouts... more of the what we've been getting.

It happened to Clinton. He campaigned on many of the same sorts of promises that Obama has made and by the time he was inaugurated he changed his position radically.

smooth · 11-06-2008, 05:25 PM

damn it Roachboy. I actually read the entire fucking article and then had to respond to willravel and forgot a lot

it's pretty complex!

anyway, I disagree with the fact that there needs to be a huge labor movement in order to spurn obama to action simply because we have the benefit of retrospection. similarly, I don't agree with some points about how our intellectual shelves are barren and that everyone is operating within the paradigm of global capitalism (I know it wasn't worded so crassly, but I'm using shorthand and hoping you know which parts of the article Im referencing).

It's almost as if that argument is being made on the basis that the authors are making the inverse errors....fuck this is sloppy.
what I mean is that the criticism that our politics are mired in the paradigm of the right seemed based upon the critique being buried under the heavy load of marxism. I just can't see how an avowed marxist would argue or be surprised that the next logical step is hypercapitalism. and it's odd to hear someone excited about the fall of our banking system without seeming to understand that we don't have labor as labor anymore. the best I can see is that we have worker-owners. we can't ruin capitalism without ruining the livlihood of the workers.

and it's got to be from a class consciousness, not a leader making systems changes.
unless I'm totally distorting shit, it's almost like he's advocating skipping a few beats in what marx argued were necessary changes along an evolutionary process...and herein lies the rub. the fact that marx is based on the idea of political evolution...cough...now let's go back to the critique of our entire political spectrum mired in a particular worldview? you see where I'm going with this? what about marxism itself mired in a particular paradigm which either never was entirely correct or is very likely to not fit what we're facing?

damn it, my friend just showed up and she's loading the pipe. I really got to go and I hope I didn't fuck my thoughts too much.
but I read the entire article and I thought about it. and I wanted to give you a piece of what started rattling around in my head cuz I figured we'd enjoy discussing this over time.

guyy · 11-06-2008, 10:39 PM

I agree with Zinn, but i'm somewhat optimistic about the chances for an opening for workers in the next 4 years. But maybe that optimism comes from the mistaken belief that people see things in the way i do. In any case, i've thought that inequality has been a contributing factor to the current crisis, and that to get to the root of the problem, we have to address inequality in some fashion. That is to say that there are reasons to support greater equality from a purely technocratic perspective. The problem is that without the mass movements, you have only technocratic reason to offer as rationales. There isn't an angry horde ready to storm Washington if a few bones aren't thrown its way.

I agree with Davis that the lack of ideas about the economy could be crippling. On the other hand, i don't like his analogy of pulling things off the shelf. The conceptual tools don't spring full formed out of someone's head. They develop with application, and with reflection on that application. In other words, the requisite conceptual apparatus may not be as obvious as a commodity sitting on the shelf saying "choose me". Whether or not Obama & crew can pull the US out of the current slump may depend more on attitudes toward theory. I guess that puts me more in tune with his friend than Davis himself.

The difference between now and the 1960s or 1930s is that there is no civil rights movement, no pressure from the left, no Soviet Union, only a tiny anti-war movement, no student movement. At the same time, the right opposition doesn't seem terribly coherent either. A left opposition could develop, but it would have to develop first. It's not out there right now. For better or worse, we're in a time of flux.

roachboy · 11-08-2008, 07:19 AM

partly, i liked the davis piece for the grand canyon thing at the start--the inability to process it, the difficulties with getting a sense of dimension to something that is, in a sense, right in front of you. at one level, the story is about the kantian sublime, that sense of falling when confronted with the really fucking big. but at the other, wedged into the piece, it's about the outstripping of a conceptual apparatus by the emergence of the new. that's more or less how i have been thinking about the mutation that's underway in the ideological and material organizations of contemporary capitalism--that we're in a strange period of a kind of collective cognitive dissonance--not so much that the mutation in the ordering regimes is like the grand canyon relative to the sensibilities of the first people who saw it, but more that the mutation is as much a frame of reference problem as it is a material/organizational one and that frame of reference problem is what is primarily being performed. like across the board.

it includes the observer.

so don't think any off the shelf approach is going to be coherent, but at the same time it's difficult to imagine what the alternatives really are---elements taken from what has worked in the past will probably be cobbled together and that cobbling together will produce an assemblage that will bit by bit produce the constraints that will enable the fabrication of slightly different assemblages that will sooner or later begin to work out a different logic for thinking the overarching organizations of what exists. another way of saying this---one of the many assumptions that's been eaten away of late is that there is a Leader who surfaces with an Alternative Way of Seeing fully developed inside that Special Skull which is connected to some God and which will "save us"---so the modality of staging the political process particular to, say, television (which is the central ideological relay system in the states) has been outstripped, but it persists nonetheless--and you see it unfolding--the 2 year obsession with the sporting-event/election has in a sense an extended exercise in adapting patterns of legitimation by staging them as now located in the transition out of the bush administration. the consequence of that is the euphoria surrounding obama's election--not because he necessarily has a better idea of how to proceed than anyone else, but rather because he now embodies a legitimacy that had been transferred into the movement-out-from-under the bush period---which is also why i think a mc-cain victory would have been a Problem, and a Big Problem. an unintended consequence of this is the opening of a space in the context of which mutation and the reassertion of the same are coterminous. in that way, the development of ideological assemblages as a mode of collective coping can happen within the existing system, but with consequences for the ways in which the world is staged that i think are being ignored up to this point.

i think this makes sense....

in this context, i think the social movements that zinn dreams of would function mostly as the left traditionally functioned within capitalism, as an external feedback loop. a counter-discourse or discourses stretches the boundaries of the dominant discourses, provides them with space to not only be relativized (and with that opens the possibility of being overthrown) but to operate with sets of co-ordinates outside itself that can be adopted as an aspect of system adjustment. this function is what i think the american hysterical fear of the left has always missed about it---and it is a function that i don't think many social movements, particularly not more revolutionary movements (once they exist)--find a rewarding element in imagining what they are about and what they do.

but they're necessary, it seems to me, as laboratories almost.

so i think this stuff points toward a scenario that can at least be thought about as the american ideological monocropping system falls in on itself at the level of cognitive framing devices...

i think obama and the new administration is in a far better position to act constructively within this situation than a republican administration would have been.

i think also that the politics of spectatorship need to end.

i gotta go.

11-06-2008, 04:14 PM	#1 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	some left views of obama this link Three left views on Obama: Howard Zinn, Mike Davis, Todd Chretien. Links will take you to 3 articles/interviews pasted into a row at samir amin's world forum for alternatives website. of them, i think the davis piece most closely resembles my own view of what's happening around us, what the causes are and what obama appears to represent (and not represent) in this context. since positions like these are largely shut out of the american corporate media, i thought it might be interesting to see what you make of them. there is a spectrum of folk to the left of obama, to the left of the democrats. there is a need for a serious political opposition from the left--zinn is right about that, and i think he's right about the reasons for it. but what do you think? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

11-06-2008, 05:12 PM	#2 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	I think Obama will be under immense pressure to go back on many of the promises he made. Given the current economic "crisis" I suspect the corporations will look to say, we need tax breaks and handouts... more of the what we've been getting. It happened to Clinton. He campaigned on many of the same sorts of promises that Obama has made and by the time he was inaugurated he changed his position radically. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

11-06-2008, 05:25 PM	#3 (permalink)
smooth Junkie Location: Right here	damn it Roachboy. I actually read the entire fucking article and then had to respond to willravel and forgot a lot it's pretty complex! anyway, I disagree with the fact that there needs to be a huge labor movement in order to spurn obama to action simply because we have the benefit of retrospection. similarly, I don't agree with some points about how our intellectual shelves are barren and that everyone is operating within the paradigm of global capitalism (I know it wasn't worded so crassly, but I'm using shorthand and hoping you know which parts of the article Im referencing). It's almost as if that argument is being made on the basis that the authors are making the inverse errors....fuck this is sloppy. what I mean is that the criticism that our politics are mired in the paradigm of the right seemed based upon the critique being buried under the heavy load of marxism. I just can't see how an avowed marxist would argue or be surprised that the next logical step is hypercapitalism. and it's odd to hear someone excited about the fall of our banking system without seeming to understand that we don't have labor as labor anymore. the best I can see is that we have worker-owners. we can't ruin capitalism without ruining the livlihood of the workers. and it's got to be from a class consciousness, not a leader making systems changes. unless I'm totally distorting shit, it's almost like he's advocating skipping a few beats in what marx argued were necessary changes along an evolutionary process...and herein lies the rub. the fact that marx is based on the idea of political evolution...cough...now let's go back to the critique of our entire political spectrum mired in a particular worldview? you see where I'm going with this? what about marxism itself mired in a particular paradigm which either never was entirely correct or is very likely to not fit what we're facing? damn it, my friend just showed up and she's loading the pipe. I really got to go and I hope I didn't fuck my thoughts too much. but I read the entire article and I thought about it. and I wanted to give you a piece of what started rattling around in my head cuz I figured we'd enjoy discussing this over time. __________________ "The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann "You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

11-08-2008, 07:19 AM	#5 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	partly, i liked the davis piece for the grand canyon thing at the start--the inability to process it, the difficulties with getting a sense of dimension to something that is, in a sense, right in front of you. at one level, the story is about the kantian sublime, that sense of falling when confronted with the really fucking big. but at the other, wedged into the piece, it's about the outstripping of a conceptual apparatus by the emergence of the new. that's more or less how i have been thinking about the mutation that's underway in the ideological and material organizations of contemporary capitalism--that we're in a strange period of a kind of collective cognitive dissonance--not so much that the mutation in the ordering regimes is like the grand canyon relative to the sensibilities of the first people who saw it, but more that the mutation is as much a frame of reference problem as it is a material/organizational one and that frame of reference problem is what is primarily being performed. like across the board. it includes the observer. so don't think any off the shelf approach is going to be coherent, but at the same time it's difficult to imagine what the alternatives really are---elements taken from what has worked in the past will probably be cobbled together and that cobbling together will produce an assemblage that will bit by bit produce the constraints that will enable the fabrication of slightly different assemblages that will sooner or later begin to work out a different logic for thinking the overarching organizations of what exists. another way of saying this---one of the many assumptions that's been eaten away of late is that there is a Leader who surfaces with an Alternative Way of Seeing fully developed inside that Special Skull which is connected to some God and which will "save us"---so the modality of staging the political process particular to, say, television (which is the central ideological relay system in the states) has been outstripped, but it persists nonetheless--and you see it unfolding--the 2 year obsession with the sporting-event/election has in a sense an extended exercise in adapting patterns of legitimation by staging them as now located in the transition out of the bush administration. the consequence of that is the euphoria surrounding obama's election--not because he necessarily has a better idea of how to proceed than anyone else, but rather because he now embodies a legitimacy that had been transferred into the movement-out-from-under the bush period---which is also why i think a mc-cain victory would have been a Problem, and a Big Problem. an unintended consequence of this is the opening of a space in the context of which mutation and the reassertion of the same are coterminous. in that way, the development of ideological assemblages as a mode of collective coping can happen within the existing system, but with consequences for the ways in which the world is staged that i think are being ignored up to this point. i think this makes sense.... in this context, i think the social movements that zinn dreams of would function mostly as the left traditionally functioned within capitalism, as an external feedback loop. a counter-discourse or discourses stretches the boundaries of the dominant discourses, provides them with space to not only be relativized (and with that opens the possibility of being overthrown) but to operate with sets of co-ordinates outside itself that can be adopted as an aspect of system adjustment. this function is what i think the american hysterical fear of the left has always missed about it---and it is a function that i don't think many social movements, particularly not more revolutionary movements (once they exist)--find a rewarding element in imagining what they are about and what they do. but they're necessary, it seems to me, as laboratories almost. so i think this stuff points toward a scenario that can at least be thought about as the american ideological monocropping system falls in on itself at the level of cognitive framing devices... i think obama and the new administration is in a far better position to act constructively within this situation than a republican administration would have been. i think also that the politics of spectatorship need to end. i gotta go. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

11-06-2008, 10:39 PM	#4 (permalink)
guyy Addict Location: Cottage Grove, Wisconsin	I agree with Zinn, but i'm somewhat optimistic about the chances for an opening for workers in the next 4 years. But maybe that optimism comes from the mistaken belief that people see things in the way i do. In any case, i've thought that inequality has been a contributing factor to the current crisis, and that to get to the root of the problem, we have to address inequality in some fashion. That is to say that there are reasons to support greater equality from a purely technocratic perspective. The problem is that without the mass movements, you have only technocratic reason to offer as rationales. There isn't an angry horde ready to storm Washington if a few bones aren't thrown its way. I agree with Davis that the lack of ideas about the economy could be crippling. On the other hand, i don't like his analogy of pulling things off the shelf. The conceptual tools don't spring full formed out of someone's head. They develop with application, and with reflection on that application. In other words, the requisite conceptual apparatus may not be as obvious as a commodity sitting on the shelf saying "choose me". Whether or not Obama & crew can pull the US out of the current slump may depend more on attitudes toward theory. I guess that puts me more in tune with his friend than Davis himself. The difference between now and the 1960s or 1930s is that there is no civil rights movement, no pressure from the left, no Soviet Union, only a tiny anti-war movement, no student movement. At the same time, the right opposition doesn't seem terribly coherent either. A left opposition could develop, but it would have to develop first. It's not out there right now. For better or worse, we're in a time of flux.