The Dangerous Logic of Blocking Protests in the Name of Electing Obama

In May, Chicago anti-war activists brought
Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Kinzer, and Doug Cassel to speak
at a town hall style City Council meeting and everyone expected the
City Council to pass a resolution against an attack on Iran the next
day. But before this could happen, Mayor Daley objected, saying, “Passing
a resolution like that puts a lot of burden upon [Obama’s] candidacy
and injects something that should not be injected” into the presidential
campaign. Since then, the resolution has been sidelined by City Council
aldermen and some of the activists who claim to personally support the
bill but have accepted Daley’s logic.

And now, as the Democratic National Convention
approaches at the end of August in Denver, people like Leslie Cagan
of United for Peace and Justice are working to pour cold water on attempts
to bring forward meaningful political protest. Recently she suggested
that the anti-war movement just “drop the idea of a big march on Sunday,
August 24th” and has insisted that “while there is plenty to be
critical about in terms of the Democratic Party leadership we would
NOT want [people] to see this as an anti-Democratic Party protest.”

But is it true that toning down anti-war
criticism and protest in order to elect Democrats can lead to good results?

How the Logic Plays Out: 2006

It is worth it to recall how a similar
logic played out in 2006.

In October of 2006, just weeks before
the mid-term election, the Democrats joined Republicans in Congress
to pass Bush’s Military Commissions Act. Even though this bill shredded
habeas corpus and legalized torture, many “progressives” excused
the Democrats, arguing they had
to go along in order not to appear “weak on terror” and thereby
lose the elections. At the same time, there was a growing movement for
impeachment based on iron-clad evidence of the Bush regime’s illegal
wire-tapping and the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed
in Iraq. Still, when Nancy Pelosi-and not long after, John Conyers-insisted
that impeachment was “off the table” many anti-war leaders curbed
their criticisms. Again, the argument was made that such “compromises”
were necessary in order to get the Democrats elected.

Remember how jubilant people across the
country felt when the Democrats did win? Then, remember how, once they
had more “reasonable” people in Congress these “anti-war leaders”
pulled out all the stops-calling nation-wide walk-outs, street protests,
and major town hall meetings-to apply their much-touted “pressure”?
And how after that, how the Democrats immediately cut the funding for
the occupation of Iraq and started shipping the troops home, while at
the same time they opened investigations and tried for war crimes the
high-ranking officials who had LIED to launch that war?

Oh wait. That’s not how it went down.
As soon as the election results were in, Nancy Pelosi began reinterpreting
what people had voted for. Over and over she repeated the lie that,
“The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington 
D.C.”

And then the new Democratically-controlled
Congress, including Obama, approved every single Iraq war spending
bill. This “more willing to listen” Democratically-controlled Congress,
including Obama, legalized Bush’s warrantless wire-tapping. This
Democratically-controlled Congress secretly granted Bush approval to
conduct Special Operations-including the use of deadly force-within
Iran’s sovereign borders.

All along the way, these “anti-war
leaders” weren’t calling people into the streets to apply their
oh-so-promised “pressure.” Instead, they”ve been busy doing their
part to keep people’s energies focused on the longest-ever presidential
race. Outrage after outrage, they push building real opposition into
the never-never future, rendering people passive and accepting as torture
and war crimes are furthered.

Instead of “moving the Democrats to
the left” this strategy resulted in moving the anti-war movement to
increasingly accept the monstrous “politics of the possible” and-despite
a growing anti-war sentiment in the country-become less and less visible
and less and less effective. You couldn’t get a more vivid demonstration
of what Bob Avakian was cautioning against when he wrote, “If you
fall into the orientation of trying to make the Democrats be what they
are not, and never will be, you will end up becoming more like what
the Democrats actually are.”

Why The Democrats
 
Act the Way They Do

Why is this so? Most fundamentally it
is because the essence of this country is not democracy, but capitalist
dictatorship. Political power is monopolized by a ruling class of capitalists
that sits at the top of a whole global network of exploitation and plunder.
It is this class that controls the armies and sends them to carry out
wars for resources and geo-strategic advantage against rivals. It is
this class that controls the elections and it is this class that the
major political parties-both the Democrats and the Republicans-are
representatives of. When those parties differ, sometimes quite sharply,
it is over how to pursue the interests of their system in a high
stakes and increasingly volatile world.

This is the case with Obama’s criticisms
of the Iraq war, of the Bush presidency, and of his opponent, John McCain.
From his very first “anti-war” speech until today, Obama has made
clear that his objections to the Iraq war flow from his belief that
it has weakened the military, economic, and political strength of the
U.S. And he wants to withdraw some troops from Iraq in order to escalate
the war on Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he promises his willingness to
act forcefully-including potentially using nuclear weapons-against
Iran and that he is willing to launch military operations inside Pakistan.
None of these positions are crafted in order to reflect the interests
of the majority. They are part of his attempt to convince the ruling
class that he would be the bestcommander-in-chief for American imperialist
interests.

The ruling class uses elections not
as a means through which basic decisions are made, but primarily for
the purpose of legitimizing their system and their politics and their
decisions. Then, the elections allow whoever wins to claim a “popular
mandate.” But remember 2006, and note this lesson well: they
will tell you what your vote, and their supposed mandate, means.
And just as we saw in “06, and as we are seeing repeated now with
Obama, elections are a way this system and its representatives channel
and confine the political activity of the people into a meaningless
dead-end.

To bring about the kind of change humanity
needs, people have to step outside of-and in opposition to-the whole
framework of official politics in this country. Most fundamentally this
means making revolution-getting beyond a system that is rooted in
the most brutal and degrading forms of oppression, reactionary violence,
and exploitation here and all over the world and throughout its history,
and completely breaking free of the terms and elections that this system
uses as part of how it governs.

Movement “leaders” not only fall
into this election trap-cycle after cycle-they lead others into
it, and they try to silence those who do try to mount actual
protest. Whatever they may personally believe or understand, these forces
portray the Bush crimes as a betrayal of American ideals rather than
an extension-albeit an extreme, and in many ways unprecedented, extension-of
what this country has always been about, founded as it was in
slavery and genocide, and soaked in the blood of people from Latin America
to South Africa butchered by repressive regimes backed by the U.S. Flowing
from their desire to “perfect”-not overthrow or even disrupt-the
system of American democracy, they repeatedly act to cool out anything
that would step outside official channels.

Realism”and Revolution

But there are also others-who do see
something rotten at the core of the United States system, and yet still
insist that even revolutionaries must support Obama. In a recent email
exchange one such friend of mine insisted that he “agreed [that] Obama
is part of the system. And, I agree, we need revolution. But unless
that is around the corner-we have to be realistic and support Obama.”

This is also wrong.

No one can promise that a revolutionary
situation is around the corner. But what can be said with certainty
is that very often in history revolutionary openings have emerged all
of sudden and seemingly out of nowhere. Such openings mainly come about
owing fundamentally to the nature and working of the system itself-to
the ways in which the underlying social and political “faultlines”
can suddenly split open. But what revolutionaries do in the whole period
leading up to that has a lot to do how the situation does
present itself. And if revolutionaries are not working every day towards-and
measuring everything they do up against-hastening the emergence of
a revolutionary situation and bringing about a revolutionary people
. . . if they are not “preparing minds and organizing forces” for
just such a rare opening. . . then they won’t even be able to recognize,
let alone seize on, a revolutionary situation when it does arise.

Revolution is not just an idea to “believe
in” in the abstract and then put aside as we putter around in the
world as it is. It must be actively striven for through a whole ensemble
of revolutionary activity-fighting the power, and transforming the
people, for revolution. A key aspect of this is confronting-and telling
others the truth about, not covering over-the true nature of bourgeois
elections as a vehicle for exercising and obscuring bourgeois dictatorship
and that what humanity really needs is communist revolution and a whole
different system. And this also means building massive political resistance
to the main ways in which, at any given time, the exploitative and oppressive
nature of this system gets focused up in policies and actions of the
ruling class and its agencies. Right now this includes coming out at
the Democratic National Convention and demonstrating against the wars,
the repression, and the other key elements of the agenda that need to
be opposed, and defeated.

You see, it is NOT the case that short
of revolution-or that for those who don’t agree with the need for
or desirability of revolution-there is nothing we can do but accept
the “lesser of two evils.” The choice we face is not really between
Obama and McCain. Our choice is between accepting the ruling class spectrum
of Obama to McCain as the limits of what is possible-or-rejecting
this whole framework and instead waging meaningful mass political resistance
to the whole fascist direction they are dragging things in.

When people did break loose in massive
political protest in 2002 and 2003 in the run up to the Iraq war, it
mattered. It gave the whole world hope in the knowledge that the
people of this country opposed what their government was doing and were
acting to stop it. These protests, which were then joined by millions
of people across the globe, stripped Bush of legitimacy as he launched
that war anyway. Then, as the war began to go badly, the challenge that
had been put before people by those protests continued to influence
the thinking of people broadly as more and more turned against the war
and the President.

Who would even know, to the extent that
people do, about the war crimes and torture carried out in this war,
if it weren’t for acts of courage and defiance of the people? It was
not the Democrats, but the anti-war soldiers and veterans who stepped
forward to expose the war crimes in Iraq. It was not the elected officials
making compromises in order to get elected, but the officials who answered
their consciences and forfeited careers who blew the whistle on torture.
It was not by campaigning, but by sitting down and refusing to be moved,
that the parents who lost children in this illegal war captured the
hearts of and moved millions.

Since the time of those world record
size protests, the outrage and disgust at the Bush program and its wars
has only grown deeper and more widespread. But now, what will become
of this outrage? Allowing it, or helping it, to be channeled into supporting
Obama when he is busy telling you he wants to better prosecute America’s
wars is the most unrealistic
idea there is!

Yes, millions will vote for Obama believing,
or at least telling themselves, that he will bring the change they want
to see. But as the policies of a murderous empire advance, in one form
or another under the next administration (assuming the Bush cabal allows
the elections to go forward), will these people be demoralized and demobilized,
or will they become radicalized and energized?

The answer to that question has a LOT
to do with what the anti-war movement does now. Whether we tone the
message down so, as Leslie Cagan put it, it’s not seen “as an anti-Democratic
Party protest,” and we don’t offend the delegates-or plant a pole
of real opposition right up against the misplaced hopes that will be
projected onto the Democratic National Convention?

At a time when the tens of millions of
people who have the potential strength to stop this war are being pacified
and corralled into a dead-end, what meaning does it have to call oneself
“anti-war” if you are not protesting outside the convention? Anyone
serious about stopping this whole direction of unjust war, torture and
fascist repression should be in the streets.

This article originally appeared in
Revolution. Sunsara Taylor is a member of the Advisory Board of World
Can’t Wait.