The Arizona Shooting and Obama’s “Socialist” Choirboys

Most Americans saw the recent shooting in Arizona for what it was—a senseless act of violence perpetrated by a deranged, delusional individual. This was not the case for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and its Sunday socialist chorus, who used the event to counterattack the Republicans, who had just drubbed the Democrats in November’s Congressional elections, for hate and violence mongering. For the most part, the comments from chastened surviving Democratic officeholders were muted or anodyne appeals to get along and work nicely together. This was in the spirit of the opening of the new House of Representatives, when the Democrats read, along with the exultant Republican victors, sections of the expurgated Constitution, the nasty parts about slavery having been deleted from that holy text.

Obama’s speech at a memorial in Tucson, accurately described by many as a political rally, set the agenda, albeit with a tactful caution. He called for “talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds” and pled that “only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation.” This pious sermonizing was ludicrously hailed by Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books (13 January) as the modern-day equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speeches excoriating slavery, overlooking in his raptures for Obama—CEO of racist U.S. imperialism—that Lincoln led a bloody and just civil war to crush the slaveowners’ rebellion.

The Nation (13 January), organ of the Democratic Party left wing, intoned: “There is an opportunity now to show a different America. That doesn’t mean only rejecting gunsight ads or turning away from threatening campaign rhetoric; it means leaders from President Obama on down clearly articulating a social compact, which is the only real route to safety for politicians and citizens alike.” A half step to the left, the ersatz socialists of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Workers World Party (WWP) groove on the call to “fight the right,” particularly the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing of the Republican Party.

A reality check is warranted. The ongoing depression, the latest and by far the most massive of three economic crises in the past three decades, has further ravaged jobs and pensions while hacking to pieces the scant social services available in the U.S. that used to provide working and poor people with some basis for a livable future. Driven by the need to accumulate profits that is the raison d’être of their system, America’s capitalist rulers, the perpetrators of this disaster, still walk the streets or, more accurately, drive them in limos.

Such recovery as has occurred is for the very rich only. Not only have these not sacrificed, but their gargantuan share of the nation’s wealth remains unscathed. Indeed, the share of income going to the top 1 percent in this country has grown exponentially. From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase went to this layer. And while working people continue to lose their jobs, pensions and homes in the “Great Recession,” American businesses have in the same period raked in profits at an annual rate greater than at any time in the past 60 years.

The bourgeois parties, Democrat and Republican, who vie to administer the capitalist order are currently driven by the purpose of shielding the banking and industrial magnates from the consequences of the havoc wreaked by their rotting system. It is in the service of this purpose that Obama and the Democrats have acted to continue and escalate the attacks on democratic rights won in past struggles, rights that provide the oppressed and exploited masses with some defense against injustice as well as some ability to mobilize to redress the assaults on their ability to survive.

They hope that the population foregoes its guns (i.e., the right to self-defense) and accepts increasing constraints on what they say or print. Thus the government has recently gone after protesters of a war that almost all despise (see article, page 12) and those that expose the machinations and lies of U.S. imperialism, such as Julian Assange and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking classified documents and is currently in solitary confinement in Quantico, Virginia. These are deemed to be, at best, legally culpable for giving comfort to America’s enemies or, at worst, traitors who deserve incarceration.

Although now somewhat embarrassed by its cheerleading for Obama when he ran for the post of Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, the reformist left remains committed to the Sisyphean task of pressuring the president to the left. The ISO and WWP will occasionally condemn the evils of capitalism, without any reference to the need for a working-class socialist overturn of its decaying social order.

Thus, the ISO’s Socialist Worker (18 January) wrote: “Those who want to right the injustices of this society should protest the bigoted attacks of the right wing. But we can’t accept the calls by Obama to ‘transcend our differences.’... On the contrary, we welcome the conflict between left and right—in the form of struggle for a better society, and the louder the better.” Similar drivel can also be found in the pages of Workers World (12 January): “While this resurgence of reaction is pushed mostly by Republicans, it also feeds on the weakness of the Democratic leaders, who have compromised and retreated on every issue, from health care to Social Security to workers’ rights.” In short, things will get better if the weak-kneed Democrats are forced to man up.

But of course the Democrats have done such, for their class interest. Among the impediments to “national unity” are public sector unions that, as yet, have not sacrificed their pensions and health care or succumbed to the tsunami of wage-slashing that has accompanied the depression, obviously in violation of the spirit of “shared sacrifice.” With President Obama leading the attack on the unionization of teachers and such seniority rights as their existing unions have maintained, others, including not a few Democratic Party politicos, are thinking that maybe the right to collective bargaining for public sector workers has to go, let alone the right to strike to the extent it exists. In substance, this agenda differs little from that of the Republicans save for its emphasis on gun control and the Democrats’ flimsy pretensions to protect the common man from the ravages of the system of capitalist exploitation.

Most Americans are justly angered and enraged by their circumstances. That this redounded to the electoral victory of the Republicans, who largely banked on the support of the petty-bourgeois bigots and racists who are the core elements of the Tea Party, is hardly surprising given the absence of significant social/class struggle. This absence is, to no small extent, a product of the groveling sellout of unionized workers by the trade-union tops who constitute a power base within the Democratic Party.

But it needs to be noted that it wasn’t the Tea Party types who created the current catastrophe or who bailed out the bankers or who led the attacks on jobs, wages and pensions. Nor are they leading the attacks against democratic rights—in fact, they fancy themselves victims of these assaults. It is the objective of these yahoos—for the most part older and generally loudmouthed, self-satisfied white males—to protect “their” entitlements (Social Security and Medicare) while ensuring that no tax money is spent on programs for immigrants, black people, the poor and unemployed, women in need of abortions—i.e., on Medicaid, food stamps, scholarships and all other “handouts” for those they consider “undeserving.”

The Tea Party is reactionary, to be sure, but not a fascist movement. Sarah Palin, who recently invoked the anti-Semitic charge of “blood libel,” lacks the intellectual energy necessary to even try to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf. Nevertheless, it is critically necessary to mobilize to stop the attacks on such social benefits as remain. (Even the thoughtful bourgeois politician might want to pause before putting to torch the last vestiges of the public mental health system.) Those attacks, which have been in process for decades, will not cease if Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are barred from accessing the public media. In fact, attacks on free speech have always been and will be ultimately directed not at those who advocate injustice and oppression, but rather at those who protest and oppose these ongoing and integral components of capitalist class rule.

It is no accident that the ISO and WWP, whose rhetoric is emblematic of the entire reformist “left,” add fuel to the absurd notion that the capitalist system based on exploitation and oppression can be forced to throttle right-wing reaction. Yesterday they led protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with the demand that the imperialists’ guns be traded in for the butter of social programs at home. Today they hype the notion that there is a better society to be had if the rulers could be forced to lop off their right arms.

The current devastation is the product of the anarchy inherent to the capitalist system. Anger and rage are necessary ingredients of the class and other social struggles that are desperately needed to begin the fight to overturn that system. It is the multiracial working class that possesses the social power required to accomplish that end through socialist revolution. But in this country that power is held back by the chains binding the working class to the Democratic Party, chains that must be shattered through the building of a revolutionary proletarian party based on the understanding that the workers share no common cause with their imperialist masters.