Some Thoughts on the Occasion of My 42nd Birthday

As it happens, my 42nd birthday has fallen on a Friday - the same day we normally put Open Media Boston "to bed" at the end of our weekly news cycle. Thus it seems appropriate to sign this editorial, and hold forth a bit about the momentous events of the last week from my own personal perspective rather than the perspective of this publication overall.

So. Barack Obama is to be our next President. Like many others around the world, I am stunned that this has come to pass. As a lifelong student of American history, and as a left-wing political activist from my teenage years onwards, I fully appreciate what a profound change this fact represents. We have an African-American President. These United States. A nation founded on the institution of slavery as much as it was founded on liberty and justice for some. A nation that had one of the bloodiest wars in history on our own soil in large part over whether or not that institution would be ended. A nation that wasted a further hundred years in a morass of organized racism and the murder of thousands more black people before the Civil Rights Movement swept the worst of times past away. A nation that remains segregated in some important respects, and where racism still runs rampant in many forms - covert and overt.

This nation elected a black President. That's just amazing, and I don't want anyone to forget that fact as I proceed.

There's something that makes Obama's election even more astounding to me. He and I are in the same generation and were both active in the anti-apartheid movement on our campuses - he at Occidental, me at Boston University. This President-Elect has moved in similar progressive activist circles to mine, and is surrounded by many of our contemporaries as he takes control of the White House. People that fought hard to ensure that American universities, cities and corporations would not be able to profit off of investment in South Africa as long as it remained a racist state, and then went on to be active in the labor movement, the peace movement, the anti-racist movement, and many other social movements - these people are now going to be mid- and high-level functionaries in the new government.

This President comes from a background not so different from my own. He is not from wealth or privilege. He worked hard. Did well in school. Made some smart career moves. Entered politics at the right time and the right place. And a few years later won the highest elected office in the land. Very impressive.

All that said, I must say something else. I did not vote for this man. I could not. Because he is a representative of a political party I have profound disagreements with. And because two decades ago we made some different choices that took us in very different directions. He played it safe. I feel that I did not. He moved away from activist organizations and social movements that begat him. I did not. He became a centrist liberal. I remained on the political left. He accepted a great many compromises to get where he got. I did not, or at least hope I did not - inasmuch as there's any comparison to made between us now. Which there really isn't.

One of the biggest compromises was, as I just mentioned, to become a leader in one of the two U.S. corporate-backed political parties - the better of the two to be sure - but a capitalist party nonetheless. The Democrats of 2008 are not a labor party. They are certainly not, right-wing lunatic ravings notwithstanding, a socialist or communist or green party. We are not allowed to have strong parties outside the dominant duopoly at this juncture. The United States does not have a parliamentary political system. In fact, our political system works very hard to keep political challenges to the two main parties from ever raising their heads. Impossible election rules, and a lack of publicly-funded elections, among many other problems have seen to that.

But I am a man of the left. I am not a Democrat, even though circumstances often require me to work with Democrats in day-to-day politics - and even though I will vote for decent Democrats when it seems justifiable to do so. I am not a fan of capitalism. Certainly not as it's being practiced in this era. I believe working people need to rule the political roost in our own interest. I believe that most everything that meets people's basic needs must be socially produced and distributed if we are ever going to make this planet a pleasant place to live for every person on it. I also strongly believe in individual liberty - and the need to preserve it against authoritarian regimes of any kind. And I do not think these two views are at all incompatible. Quite the contrary.

As such, even though I admired one side of what Obama and his legions were trying to do in this election, I despised the other side of what they had to do to get him elected. He had to be a militarist, and an imperialist, in his calls to expand the war in Afghanistan and to invade Pakistan. He also had to betray the anti-war movement that delivered him quite a significant number of votes by not taking any firm stands on getting out of Iraq now. Plus he made noises about backing Georgian right-wingers in South Ossetia, and dissed Hugo Chavez and other leaders of the democratic left in Latin America. All of these positions have everything to do with continuing and expanding American control over oil and gas resources. And so, his taking these positions also represents his connection to the energy combines. Yet another President in the pocket of Big Oil.

Also, he raised more money than any other candidate in history in any country, driving the last nail into the coffin of campaign finance reform. Most of this money, contrary to the PR spin emanating from his campaign, came from corporations - including many of the very financial services industry titans responsible for the economic crisis now gripping the planet.

There's more I could say, but these reasons alone were enough not to vote for him. However, because the Green Party is in disarray, and I cannot stomach Ralph Nader's refusal to run a serious campaign and actually join a left party before running for office, I didn't vote for either him or McKinney.

I simply logged a protest vote. A vote saying, "I am not satisfied with the choices available to me in the existing political system." Certainly not when every other race I could vote on consisted of Democrats running unopposed, or virtually so. I did, however, vote on referendum questions. I voted no on Question 1, yes on Question 2, and (prepare yourselves animal rights activists) no on Question 3. So, a no on wiping out state government. A yes to decrminalizing marijuana (on the grounds that the War on Drugs has been a massive failed policy that has ruined countless lives). And a no on closing the dog tracks - which you can view as my vote on behalf of a dying local working class culture. The culture from which I spring as a working-class Bostonian. I also voted yes on the non-binding Question 4 in Cambridge because I do think the Palestinians continue to get a raw deal, and deserve better - although I didn't like the way the question was worded, and don't necessarily see the efficacy of putting lots of effort into non-binding referendum questions.

As regards the actual offices in play, I voted, in the final analysis, for a bunch of dead philosophers. People I like. Whose ideas I agree with. Whose words have made my mind fire on all cylinders. Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, and so on. People that have stood for human equality, democracy and freedom. People that weren't always popular in their time. People that have been forgotten by many, and never known by many more. I even voted for Socrates (for Senate against John Kerry) - despite the bad rap he gets as a conservative - because he was such a thorn in the side of complacency and easy thinking.

And that leads me to another issue I have with Obama and his campaign. I feel like his victory is the ultimate victory of a wing of the progressive movement my friends and I like to call the "organize, organize, organize faction." They are found throughout many social movements. And they are generally good people who want a better nation and a better world. But they don't think it's worth taking the time to hash out what precisely would make a better nation and a better world with everyone. They just want to sign people up to unions and civic organizations, and build a large political base, and a nice fat war chest ... and take power. Problem is, having not taken the time to debate things out with everyone, they tend to be kind of fuzzy on what they're really about. And their left politics tend to drop away the more powerful they get, and the higher up the political pyramid they go.

At the apex of this pyramid is now Barack Obama. And as I've already pointed out, he's a former progressive organizer who has made a whole lot of compromises to get where he is. And so have his lieutenants, a good number of whom are originally from the aforementioned "organize organize organize faction" of the left (the rest being corporate types from the Democratic Leadership Committee). So while I am glad to at least have some fairly rational technocrats taking power - people who don't try to organize our society in an manner most likely to bring about Armageddon and The Rapture, for example - I am very concerned that without any kind of solid theory behind them, and absent strong connections to a strong left, they are simply going to let the corporations that rule this country off the hook long before push ever gets to shove.

So what do I want? What do I think needs to be done? First, I am quite clear that history shows us that the left always does best outside of power during periods of rational governance - which generally means liberal capitalist governance of the type we are going to get now. So that's all for the good.

But the window that is opening for the growth of the left must be used. We must move through the window to a better political space. And that is the main point of my musings today. The anti-capitalist left, the peace movement, the feminist movement, the labor movement, the environmental movement and all related movements, need to become a political force strong enough to vie for power at all levels of government.

We also need to become a thinking left, and perhaps that is the first order of business. The Enlightenment project was never completed and has been precipitously abandoned by various strains of fashionable post-modernism in the left in the last couple of decades. People need to study and debate while they are building political movements. We need to be clear about why we act, when we act, how we act, and whom we act with to build a better society. We need to not simply elect people that cast off their left beliefs like some old set of clothes when the time is right for their career. We need to elect people that are accountable to the broad left movements that get them into positions of trust, and remove them from those positions when they violate that trust.

All of this is a tall order, and there's much much more I could say on the subject. But that's enough for now. You see where I stand, and what I'm driving at, I hope. Much work will be needed before the American left is to become a serious political force. Yet that work can and must be done. Here in Boston, as around the nation. Latin America and other parts of the world are clearly far ahead of us in this process, but I feel sure we can catch up.

I, for one, am up for the challenge. And I have but a single wish for my birthday present. I want to hear from people that are with me. That would be nice. (I also want to hear from people that are not with me, but not until the weekend is over.)

Then you can all get back to being thrilled and happy that all the theocrats and racists and reactionaries got their clocks cleaned for them. For a while. I enjoyed the show this week in many respects as much as pretty much everyone else around the world. When everyone's calmed down a bit we can get together and talk turkey - or maybe tofurky ... in respect to all the vegans incensed at my no vote on Question 3.

For now, I raise my glass to all of you. And I'll leave you with a nice Irish toast, even though I'm Greek: "May you have food and raiment, a soft pillow for your head. May you be forty years in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead."

Yassou, Boston!

Jason Pramas is the Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston.