Karim,
I have not read all of Campbell's notes but I intend to with unadulterated
focus. It is the reserve of the great inertia that Barack Obama's campaign
means. Chock-full of actionable information to be properly synthesized.
Meanwhile I thank you for sharing it.
Haruna. I save it for later.
In a message dated 3/23/2008 10:39:35 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Obama at the crossroads of a revolution? Horace Cambell (2008-03-20) In a
nuanced article that borrows from various disciplines such as philosophy and
physics, Horace Campbell argues that Barrack Obama would only be trapped by a
conservative and anti-people social and economic system if those "who are
being drawn into the audacity of hope do not build their own political
movement and political organization." He argues that only "only a bottom up movement
can prevent Barack Obama from becoming a racial decoy for the Wall Street
forces."
INTRODUCTION
The new force of the youth has now made itself felt in US presidential
politics in 2008. This force is manifest in the tremendous outpouring of the
collectivities of different races, classes, genders, sexual orientation and ages
coming forward to support the candidacy of Barack Obama. Barack Obama was born
of an African father from Kenya and a mother of European extraction from
Kansas in the heartland of the United States. Obama is drawing on both heritages
and is campaigning to make a break with the binary categories that
perpetuates divisions and the politics of exclusion. This break is a fundamental
concept in fractal theory and opens up questions of the laws of unintended
consequences in politics. It is the combination of the new energy and light that
emerges from the Barrack Obama campaign that sparks questions on the need for a
new framework for analyzing politics. This is the framework based on truth,
justice, peace and a new mode of politics. In South Africa, the
term emerged to point to the ways that in which we share a common humanity.
This short statement will argue that after nearly thirty years of
traditional republican and democratic politics there is a desire for hope. It is hope
that goes beyond the audacity of the campaign of Obama or the kind of
balancing which is inscribed in his book, The Audacity of Hope.
This hope cannot be quantified and this absence of quantification bears
positive and negative possibilities. The positive possibilities can emerge from
the intentionality of those forces who can build on the new self organizing
tools for self emancipation and for moving the politics of this society to a
new level. Without the involvement of a new constituency in politics, the
Barack Obama campaign can only go so far to ignite the imagination of the youth
but this fire will burn out if there are no self similar processes being
developed in spaces of peace, spaces of hope and non racialized spaces.
Even if Obama were to be elected to be the President of the United States,
the conditions/realities for the overwhelming majority of the citizens
(especially blacks, browns, and First nation peoples) will not change overnight. The
economic recession, the joblessness of millions and the massive military
machine will expose whether this election discourse on change can be transformed
into setting in motion a new mobilization of popular forces to struggle for
a new mode of politics and economics. In the conclusion we will note that
though Obama is no revolutionary, he is caught in a revolutionary moment and his
message of hope has tapped into the desire for peace, reconstruction and
justice…
Barack Obama is campaigning on the basis of change. In this campaign, his
ideas may not be totally formed in relation to the fundamental questions facing
the society, but what is clear is that his movement has tapped into a force,
energy force that at this moment is unstoppable. The same youths who have
grown up in the era of the information revolution and the platforms such as
Face book/ My Space are using new social networking techniques that baffle the
political pundits reared in the universities that taught the physics of Isaac
Newton and the derivative mechanical concepts of Adam Smith and John Locke.
Polling and the laws of predictability that emanate from this mechanical era
has fallen short of grasping the new energy as thousands of new actors and
actresses surge on to the stage of politics to identify with the break from the
old politics of fear and so called War on Terror.
Millions are no longer deterred by the fear mongering of the Bush/Cheney
leadership or the imagery of Islamic peoples as terrorists. Decent Christians
are now seeking the gospel of peace and love instead of hate and religious
fundamentalism.
UBUNTU AND THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Barack Obama is opposed to the hierarchies of the whites over blacks and
browns and uses his own life as a metaphor for calling on citizens to come
together to save the planet earth. Obama has gone on record to register his
opposition to the structured existence that places humans as atomized individuals
without responsibility to family or society. Atomized individuals are open to
manipulation by the media and are open to the Hobbesian thinking that society
must be based on conflict and confrontation or ‘war of every man against
every man.’ This manipulation is one form of psychological warfare against the
citizens of the United States…
The idea of change that echoes from the Obama campaign has been calling for
citizens to place themselves at the center and to empower themselves, firstly
with their positive thinking, “Yes we can,” and more importantly by
organizing to intervene in the political process. In response to this call, a cross
section of the citizens of the United States from Iowa to Nebraska, from
Idaho to Georgia and from Washington to Louisiana have come forward to seek the
new ideas of twenty first century change. In the process there are new
constituencies that have found their voice. This has led to a level of spontaneity
that one could see in the muchwatched video- Yes we can.
Can the old media and the old ideas blunt the quantum leap in the
consciousness of the youth that is taking place at the moment? This is the question
that emerges from the discourse of the political talking heads on the same
television stations that were enthusiastic cheer leaders for the illegal war
against the peoples of Iraq.
These political commentators who were brought up to reproduce the
misinformation of the media that tormented young people and led them into depression
and isolation cannot fully understand the call of the Obama campaign to the
youth that the change must begin in the youth themselves and that that have to
believe in their capacity for change.
The political pundits of the mainstream media have been in the main brought
up within the context of the hierarchies of Newtonian physics have been
confounded by the bottom up, responsive, plural and holistic message of the Yes we
can campaign.
These hierarchies have been at the base of the faulty democratic traditions
of the United States that did not recognize native peoples as humans and
rendered African Americans as three fifths of a human being. The same democratic
tradition did not recognize women as citizens. Obama is not calling for this
deformed reference to be the basis for change, he is exhorting all classes
and all ages to be part of the solution, by drawing from a different tradition,
the progressive traditions that sought to enrich and enlarge the meaning of
democracy…
The unique experiences that Obama learnt when he was an organizer on the
South Side of Chicago taught him the humility to listen to the ordinary person
and it is this methodical organizing like the repetition of self similarity
that one can discern in the organizational skills of Obama. The political
victories in Idaho, Nebraska, the Virgin Islands and Missouri followed the scaling
pattern of Obama that built up a profile in every district and in every part
of the country so that he could not be pigeon-holed. After the land slide
victory in South Carolina, Bill Clinton sought to compare Obama to Jesse
Jackson and to limit his appeal to African Americans citizens. But the citizens of
Washington State, Missouri, Louisiana and Maine voted with their heads and
their hearts in response to new organizing thrust that is making the quantum
leap in US politics a possibility. This leap has been reinforced by the nested
loops of new social networks wired through the spaces of the
information revolution.
After these victories the momentum began to build and citizens in Virginia,
Maryland and the District of Columbia signaled that they were another link in
the chain of this momentous political intervention. Young people have
organized themselves into new formations and have been energized by the promise
that Obama would want to move in a new direction. In the past forty years the
established parties benefited from the demobilization of the youth and unlike
most liberal democratic states the numbers of citizens voting in the USA has
been consistently below the numbers of other western democracies. Apathy and
withdrawal from the system have been the outcome of the absence of realistic
alternatives for the majority of the poor in the United States. This absence
of participation by the youth has benefited the corporations and special
interests to the point where there had been no incentive for the two parties to
remove the restrictions that deter young people from participating
in politics. The advent of Barack Obama is generating the long sought after
alternative, hence the unprecedented turnout for the caucuses and primaries…
New experiences are being created in the midst of a new kind of political
campaign that builds on these networks. The traditional media (newspapers,
radio and Television stations) and the campaign of the Clintons have made clear
statements about the organizational experience of the team around Hilary
Clinton (Madeline Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton etc).
Yet, it is this same experience rooted in the mechanistic hierarchies of
Newtonian physics that is becoming the albatross of the political campaign of
Hilary Clinton. Her experiences are very similar to the leader of the Republican
Party, John McCain. John McCain is proud of his support for the wars against
the peoples of Iraq and the merchants of death. Hilary Clinton has sought to
demonstrate to the club of militarists that she would oil the war machinery
while millions are without basic jobs.
Without fresh ideas when US citizens wanted a clean break with the
militarism that brought the quagmire and fiasco in Iraq, Hilary Clinton could not
understand that she had to tell the people that she was wrong in supporting the
unjust war in Iraq. This is politics of truth that is now needed in the
society. But from the position of Hilary Clinton on a possible military strike
against Iran and more importantly, her base in the constituency of the financial
speculators of New York State exposed the fact that thought she is
campaigning to change conditions for women, she has not broken with the militarists of
the society. Decency would require that Hilary Clinton rewrite her texts on
her responses to war and genocide during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. In
this campaign her character has emerged especially in the case of the primary
in Florida. Hilary Clinton’s willingness to claim a victory in Florida when
she had said she would not brought out her true character to all
peoples, black and white, women and men…
The Obama campaign has been able to draw on the organizational capacities of
those who want to turn truth into a political force so that the society can
turn from war to peace. This is the basic force behind the momentum of
Barrack Obama and his experiences of Chicago has been able to translate this (peace
thrust) in order to build up the electoral profile, bringing new teams in
every part of the country and creating new training spaces for the energetic
to donate, participate and learn the possibilities for change. Yet, because of
the limitations of the electoral system that mitigates against direct
participation of the citizen beyond voting, it is urgent that those who have
understood the need for a new politics build new organizations at new sites of
politics.
This new urgency is especially the case in the peace movement that has been
unable to build on to the aspirations of the masses of the people for
justice. Five years after the illegal occupation of Iraq, the activists for peace
yearn for new forms of expression and hence there is a slow learning curve that
demonstrations without follow up will only frustrate those who want new
organizations. In 2003 at the start of the war against the peoples of Iraq there
were millions of peoples on the streets.
Yet the established leadership of the peace movement was not able to take
the question of the illegal war to the court of international opinion to that
the immorality of the war could be brought before the International Criminal
Court in The Hague…
Momentum means that when a person or object is moving, regardless of what it
is - the harder it is to stop that person or object. When one consider
"momentum" in terms of politics, this means that if a presidential candidate, such
as Obama, sees and/or experiences a gain and/or surge in his message of
peace, hope and change with millions singing, Yes we can, there could be nothing,
not even bullets that can intervene in this momentum. This is the basis for
a possible quantum leap in US politics to bring a new mode of politics for
the 21st Century.
Obama is not a revolutionary but he has been caught up in a revolutionary
moment in world history. The electoral campaign of Obama is riding on a wave of
peace and change desired by ordinary Americans. There are limitations to the
electoral project insofar as the task of restructuring US society is a
gigantic one that cannot be done overnight. Obama may not be the solution, but is
a small step in the direction of making the break with the old binary
conceptions that dominated enlightenment thinking. It is the laws of unintended
consequences that will emanate from this break that can lead to a new direction
with the new positive bottom up organizing for transformation to a democratic
society where all can live in peace.
A clear understanding of the nature of US politics and limitation of the
structures of the in-built conservativsim of the system means that Barrack Obama
would only be trapped by this social system if those who are being drawn
into the audacity of hope do not build their own political movement and
political organization. It is only a bottom up movement hat can prevent Barack Obama
from becoming a racial decoy for the Wall Street forces. Self mobilization,
self organization and emancipatory ideas will create new spaces so that the
political space will be expanded beyond the media, the lobbyists and the ritual
spaces of the White House, Congress and the Senate Chambers. Safe and clean
neighborhoods, children who are reared to respect all human beings and a
society that support repair of the planet earth awaits these new self organizing
forces.
The campaign of Barack Obama is the story of hundreds of thousands of
ordinary people. These are the people who are participating because they believe
that politics can mean something again. It is apt to conclude with the words of
Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary
spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to
poverty, racism and militarism.”
* Horace Campbell is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.
** Extracted by the author from "Barack Obama, Fractals And Momentum In
Politics” http://academic.udayton.edu/race/2008ElectionandRacism/Obama/Obama74.htm
*** Please send comments to [log in to unmask] or comment online at
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For those wishing to watch/listen to Obama's speech, you can do so at:
http://my.barackobama.com/ObamasOwnWords
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