Support for Barack Obama
Manning Marable claims that Barack Obama has read some of his books and "understands what socialism is."
Manning Marable, writing in the December 2008 issue of British Trotskyist journal Socialist Review[26], also claimed that Obama works with socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party.
Obama represents a generation of what might be called post-racial black politicians-by which I mean they espouse a politics that minimises matters of race. They do not like to talk about race and subsume it under the rubric of poverty and class. So they are generally left of centre, or liberal, on social and economic policy. Obama is a progressive liberal.
What makes Obama different is that he has also been a community organiser. He has read left literature, including my works, and he understands what socialism is. A lot of the people working with him are, indeed, socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party or as independent Marxists. There are a lot of people like that in Chicago who have worked with him for years...
When Dr Marable voted for Barack Obama, he voted for him not as a Democrat, but on the New York Working Families Party (WFP) line. Manning Marable is a member of the WFP which is a direct descendant of the now defunct New Party.
Why vote for Obama on a Working Families ticket? You are counted independently of the Democrats and it shows there is a left constituency in the state of New York. It gives us some leverage on decision-making and policy and we run our own candidates at local level.
Marable, as a Marxist tactician, went on to explain that to win elections and promote his policies Obama has to be subtle. He must bring his opponents on board and be careful not to scare centrist voters.
Obama regularly sends text messages to millions of people. He just sent a message saying, "Don't go away, now I need you to help govern." There is a debate right now within the Obama campaign about whether to move fast or go more slowly. The argument is that there have been 10 elections for president between 1968 and 2004 and Republicans have won seven of them. Obama is looking at the history and so are progressives who worked with him or critically endorsed him, like myself.
Dr Marable then defined the role of the left under an Obama administration-to push Obama in a "progressive" direction, just as the communists and socialists like A. Philip Randolph pressured Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s.
My argument is simple. The left must force him to carry out the agenda he promised, and that includes a national healthcare system...That is the number-three priority. The main priority is ending the war in Iraq. The second is the economic crisis. We need a robust Keynesian approach to employment and investment in infrastructure - a lot of the bridges built by the works projects administration of Franklin D Roosevelt 75 years ago need to be rebuilt and the roads are crumbling. Most of us on the left have taken a position of critical support toward Obama. We have to press him to carry out his own agenda.
The analogy of FDR is appropriate. But someone has to play the role of A Philip Randolph, the black socialist leader who attacked FDR from the left and in 1941 forced him to sign an executive order outlawing racial discrimination in factories producing for the war effort that refused to hire black people. Randolph threatened to bring 100,000 black workers to surround the White House. Roosevelt capitulated and signed an order that was the foundation of affirmative action. We need a network that can do it. That is the challenge for socialists in the US...
commie conspiracy?