{"id":278,"date":"2008-12-06T00:00:58","date_gmt":"2008-12-06T05:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=278"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:58","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:58","slug":"obama-and-the-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":"Obama and the “Left”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Progress or regress?<\/h2>\n

Considering the future of Leftist politics under Obama<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented at the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum on “Progress or regress? Considering the future of Leftist politics under Obama,” with panelists Stephen Duncombe (New York University), Pat Korte (new Students for a Democratic Society), Charles Post (Solidarity), and Paul Street, New York University, December 6, 2008. <\/em>An edited transcript<\/a> of the forum was published in The Platypus Review #12 (<\/em>May 2009).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am Chris Cutrone, and I am speaking for Platypus, which organized this forum.<\/p>\n

First, I would like to clarify: I don\u2019t think that the topic should be what the Left can or should do under an Obama administration. Rather, we need to admit that there is no Left today. And we need to consider and explore the conditions of possibility for a Left coming into existence some time in the foreseeable future, perhaps under Obama.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s election is a good occasion for the clarification of several issues that block the reconstitution of a Left adequate to the present and future.<\/p>\n

For it is Platypus\u2019s contention that \u201cthe Left is dead!\u201d We say this so that one day there might be a living Left, a force in the world for social emancipation that is lacking today. We regard the present absence of a Left to be a matter of consciousness, a lack of recognition of the actual progressive-emancipatory possibilities in the world as presently constituted. We consider the \u201cLeft\u201d today to be a mere relic of past forms of consciousness that are either no longer adequate to the present or were inadequate even in their original historical moments.<\/p>\n

So we in Platypus consider the \u201cLeft\u201d as it exists today to be actually a pseudo-\u201cLeft,\u201d an agglomeration of perspectives and notions \u2014 a set of more or less coherent but mostly incoherent ideologies \u2014 but not an authentic, coherent and powerful consciousness or set of recognitions and ideas, and certainly not a social force.<\/p>\n

The confusion with which today\u2019s pseudo-\u201cLeft\u201d is faced around Obama has multiple registers, and several layers of historical roots, some of which I wish to lay out and discuss, now in my opening remarks, as well as later in the Q&A.<\/p>\n

Before that, however, I wish to use myself as an example. From the moment Obama announced his candidacy, I felt strongly he would be the next President. This is because I \u2014 unlike those on the \u201cLeft\u201d \u2014 recognized that a historical shift \u2014 a generational passing \u2014 had taken place, which had made most of the reasons one might suppose Obama to fail superceded and obsolete. \u2014 Obama, by contrast, was a shrewd enough politician to recognize in himself an instrument adequate to the historical moment, one that he has played to great effect.<\/p>\n

Generationally, Obama is free in certain key respects from the symbolism of the 1960s that has subsumed politics for more than 40 years. In the process of the election, and as a result of the financial crisis, the hitherto predominant symbolism, for instance, Iraq for Vietnam, has passed in favor of the 1930s Great Depression and FDR. But already earlier in the campaign, Obama had represented an unwinding of the 1960s era and a return to the imagery of either Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Kennedys. History had already begun to unwind from 1968 to the 1963 March on Washington or more precisely to 1960 and JFK\u2019s election. We have evidently gotten beyond the endless repetition of 1972 and Nixon vs. McGovern only to arrive back at Camelot! The 1960s New Left and its aftermath have become historically bracketed, and after 40 years, this was none too soon!<\/p>\n

Such regression, the degree to which it has freed the social imagination from the trap of the late \u201960s, has been, if not \u201cprogressive,\u201d then at least salutary.<\/p>\n

For instance, on the issue of \u201crace\u201d in America, Obama has been neither a traditional \u201cblack\u201d politician nor has his victory been \u201cpost-racial.\u201d Rather, Obama has expressed a transformation in the way \u201crace\u201d and racism function, a definite end to the period of post-Jim Crow, post-Civil Rights and post-Black Power forms of social consciousness and politics.<\/p>\n

The \u201cLeft\u201d has responded to this shift Obama has represented with as much fear as desire. There has been a great deal of anxiety generated about the nature and character of this change. For the most part, there has been anxiety and regret on the \u201cLeft\u201d about the end of \u201cblack politics\u201d as it has functioned since the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Worse still, virtually everyone on the \u201cLeft\u201d seemed to harbor either an explicit or secret skepticism or disbelief at Obama\u2019s chances. This incredulity was rooted in the \u201cLeft\u2019s\u201d mistaken understanding and imagination of the ways anti-black racism actually function in America today, and how they have functioned historically leading to the present.<\/p>\n

The U.S. is no longer racist in the ways it has been, either in the Jim Crow era nor in the \u201960s period or its aftermath. Unfortunately, this does not mean a change beneficial for the majority of black people, but it does mean the need for a new social imagination and politics. Obama\u2019s election didn\u2019t change anything, nor will it, but it did reveal a change that had been long underway. As Bayard Rustin pointed out in the 1960s, black people don\u2019t suffer from bad attitudes<\/em> but from bad social conditions<\/em>. Attitudes may have changed but social conditions have not improved \u2014 in fact, in many respects they have worsened, and the ways social conditions work against black people for instance have changed: poverty and other forms of disempowerment of the working class function differently today than in the 1950s\u201360s Civil Rights era, and to the detriment of politics.<\/p>\n

But the \u201cLeft\u2019s\u201d incredulity about this change means only one thing: that the \u201cLeft\u201d is more racist than the general population \u2014 without this meaning that the greater populace is more \u201cprogressive.\u201d This is because the \u201cLeft\u201d is more ideological and more conservative-reactionary in its outlook, trapped in a set of historical blinders that the greater society has long since overcome.<\/p>\n

The fact that such changes have not been unambiguously \u2014 or indeed at all \u2014 \u201cprogressive,\u201d in the sense of social emancipation and empowerment, does not mean that the changes have not taken place or that a Left perspective could afford to ignore them.<\/p>\n

The fear with which this significance of Obama\u2019s victory has been met by the \u201cLeft\u201d is rooted in an attempt to avoid or ward off recognition of the obvious: that an earlier form of politics, specifically \u201cblack politics,\u201d of the post-Civil Rights and post-Black Power period, from the 1970s through the 1980s and \u201990s, was defunct \u2014 if indeed it had ever had any viability at all.<\/p>\n

The question is how to respond to the evident depoliticization that Obama represents. \u2014 For Obama in no way stood at the head of a \u201cmovement\u201d but only of an effective electoral strategy. Obama\u2019s electoral organization cannot be put to other ends, or transformed into a social movement. It cannot be force for change, let alone transformation.<\/p>\n

If this inherently conservative<\/em> character of Obama\u2019s victory is faced, what will it mean for conceiving a \u201cLeftist\u201d politics that can and must reckon with the changed conditions of social politics Obama\u2019s success has revealed?<\/p>\n

This is the question that the \u201cLeft\u201d tries to avoid.<\/p>\n

Instead, the Left has become enthralled by the court politics of Obama\u2019s Cabinet appointments and other such clues into which they can try to read his intentions.<\/p>\n

Obama himself has acknowledged how he functions as a \u201cprojection screen\u201d for others\u2019 desires and hopes (and also perhaps their anxieties and fears). Obama\u2019s soft authoritarianism is significant, for it reveals that the \u201cLeft\u201d is hardly free of this inherently conservative and depoliticizing aspect of American \u201cpolitics.\u201d<\/p>\n

For it is Platypus\u2019s contention that we not only live today in the absence of a \u201cLeft,\u201d but also in the absence of effective politics<\/em>. Obama is, no less than Bush and Clinton were, the effect of politics in the absence of politics.<\/p>\n

Changing this will be a very difficult and manifold task, involving the reinvigoration of organized labor as well as the deep interrogation and transformation of consciousness of present social realities on the \u201cLeft.\u201d It will require a radical rebirth of the Left.<\/p>\n

But Obama\u2019s victory might at least help sweep away some of the obstacles in social consciousness and imagination that have held back the \u201cLeft\u201d for more than a generation. But only if we recognize the opportunity of the present moment for what it is, without either positive or negative illusions. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Progress or regress? Considering the future of Leftist politics under Obama Chris Cutrone Presented at the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum on “Progress or regress? Considering the future of Leftist politics under Obama,” with panelists Stephen Duncombe (New York University), Pat Korte (new Students for a Democratic Society), Charles Post (Solidarity), and Paul Street, New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[12,24,22,23,15,5,6],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-12","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-neoconservatism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-obama-era","tag-public-fora","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3241,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/3241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}