The End of the Beginning: Not Yet Beginning of the End

                Forces on the center-left, including some comrades are proclaiming “we won,” breathing a sigh of relief while the mass media, adjusting to Obama’s victory, are dissecting the many tactical and strategic failures of the Republicans and the deep fissures in their party.

                I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade.  As one comrade said to me, “the people {both the American people and, given the U.S. military power, the people of the world} have dodged a bullet, a very big bullet.”

 Looking at the election, I thought though of Winston Churchill’s comment on the British Eighth Army’s victory over Hitler’s Afrika Corps at Le Alamein in 1942, “this is the end of the beginning”(meaning the string of Axis victories in Europe and Asia).

 Actually, the Soviet victory at the battle of Moscow  monts earlier was the real end of the beginning, and the response of the Anglo American allies, the center of the center –left coalition was also to breathe a sigh of relief and postpone the second front in Western Europe that was necessary to win the war.  

They with Churchill playing the leading role in convincing a reluctant Roosevelt, then   feared socialist revolutions and the expansion of Soviet power through Europe that the rapid collapse of the Axis forces might mean. The real beginning of the end, as all serious students of WWII from all perspectives understand, was the Soviet victory at the battle of Stalingrad months later.

          Before everyone gets lost in this history, let me make some connections to the present.  Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was for the American people a  political victory comparable to the battle of Moscow(remembering that war is politics by other means and vice versa)

       After nearly thirty years of reaction—the attack of trade unions which reduced the percentage of organized workers by more than half; the “deregulation” of banking, Wall Street, energy corporations, which, along with the crippling of progressive taxation on the wealthy that had begun in the New Deal era, saw a spectacular  rise  income inequality, destitution poverty in the form of hunger and homelessness;and , when decreased social income for everything from public housing, transportation, education, housing, minimum wages and social security and unemployment insurance payments were factored in, “real” poverty in which real living standards either stagnated or declined and employment and income security for the overwhelming majority of the work force dropped. 

      The  Wall Street predatory real estate loan created Crash of 2008 which propelled Obama into the presidency was the logical outcome of the second wave of these policies, far more destructive than the Savings and Loan  crash of 1987, which was the logical result of the first wave.  Barack Obama said rightly that the crash was the result of a policy that had failed completely, which was true, and he repeated that the election of 2012 would decide whether that philosophy would regain power, which was also true.

                But what would replace that back to the future philosophy of “free market” worship and regulatory and social welfare policy phobia, that recycling of the old 1920s “trickle down” theory calling itself “supply-side” economics. 

         Just as after the battle of Stalingrad, the center forces within the coalition that elected Obama pulled back.  Obama didn’t mean single payer health care, and he hadn’t supported it.  But powerful Democratic Party leaders connected to pharmaceuticals and insurance companies eliminated the public option that was the progressive core of the original legislation in order to enact it against an all out Republican attack. 

        Keynesian “stimulus” aka compensatory fiscal policy aka pump priming were also in the first Obama administration  primarily subsidies to capital, thanks to the political maneuvering of the center within the Obama coalition, who in 2009-2010 saw themselves fending off the left of the coalition, those demanding “bailouts for the people” “Medicare for all,” the enactment of the employee free choice act and swift repeal of the Bush tax cuts and the “deregulation” that had led to disaster. 

       Rather like Winston Churchill’s British Empire government after early Soviet victories determined that a Nazi triumph that would threaten Britain with invasion had been postponed indefinitely, the political brokers and their academic servants, breathing a sigh of relief that the Bush crazies were gone and operating through “Commissions” went about the task of wheeling and dealing to save industrial and finance capital.  At best, they stood on the sidelines while labor and progressive Democrats fought for better health care legislation, fiscal policies that would produce sharply reduce rather than merely contain unemployment and raise real incomes and mass purchasing power. 

                The result of course was the right Republican gains in the 2010 elections,  and before that the “Citizens United” decision of a rightwing dominated Supreme Court in 2010 which eliminated all restraints on  spending in federal elections

         “Citizens United”  few remember, was Karl Rove’s financial political  holding

 company for the Republican Right and Karl Rove’s real political hero was Mark Hanna, the Cleveland capitalist and Republican national chair who increased spending in the 1896 presidential election by five times to make his Ohio associate William McKinley president, a campaign in which thousands of paid political salesmen or “drummers” went through the country to sell McKinley and other candidates of big business the way new consumer products like Campbell Soup and Ivory soap were being advertised and sold. In the Bush years, Karl Rove boasted of creating a long term right Republican majority and even though Obama had won the election.  Like Hanna, he and likeminded reactionaries now see in the power of political money the raod to creating that majority.

                So many feared a resurgent Republican right led by Romney with all the money in the world  marching forward to win this election  seize the presidency and use it strategically, to continue my historical analogy, the way many in  Britain and the U.S. feared General Erwin Rommel’s “invincible” Afrika Corps marching through Egypt to seize the strategically important Suez Canal.  But while that was going on,  the really decisive battle was already being fought on the Volga in the environs of Stalingrad and the really decisive battle is already under way in Washington.

        Without saying that Obama needs the equivalent of a General Zhukov, who Stalin needed in 1943, or General Grant, who Lincoln needed in 1863, to come forward with a consistent strategy for victory,(although if I knew of some very smart and very tough liberal-labor Democrat with the necessary organizational skills I would recommend him or her) what is needed is a mass strategy that rejects “fiscal compromises” that reduces defeats and protects capitalist profits at the expense of labor and the people; that looks strategically at the military and military spending, separating the working soldiers from the military industrial complex, protecting both their lives and their benefits from the uniformed version of the predatory capitalists who attack the civilian members of their class. 

What is needed in the second Obama term in mass pressure, steady and unremitting.  It is time for those who have launched “Occupy” movements through the country to begin to “occupy” the city halls, state legislatures and congressional offices of the Democratic Party, not as angry enemies but as citizen constituents demanding national legislation and policy in the interests of the 99%. 

     If the left has no practical political agenda, if policy becomes an afterthought to direct action, then what the left philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance” in which the ruling groups listen but never hear, nodding at symbolic protests and then doing exactly what they want, becomes a trap which leads only to cooptation or withdrawal.

                The practical and tactical questions which must be asked now are these.  Who are the Republicans in the House majority who can be split off from the rightwing leadership, convinced that their survival in their districts depends on their acceptance legislation and policy to strengthen labor and social welfare, at least at the level of not actively obstructing such legislation. 

       Hitting their offices their events, telling them over and over again that the can run but they can’t hide, that all of the Citizens United money in the world won’t keep them in office in they continue to spit in the face of a majority of the people of their districts, is one practical expression of the sort of mass action that makes sense today, right now, after the elections. 

 Promoting and cultivating  progressive Democrats, who made gains in these elections at all levels, hitting them at their offices and  events as friends and supporters, while treating the Democratic power brokers with the “tough love” that they so richly reserve, exposing their sell outs consistently  is another immediate at (power brokers who can’t work behind the scenes lose their clients and eventually their power).

If we look at Congress today, the political balance of forces is objectively worse then it was in 2009.  But Congress and for that matter the formal “inside” institutions of government are only one part of politics.  The outside forces are now much more important and it is they that must give flesh and life to a second Obama administration, an administration which needs their militancy against both the Republican right and sections of the Democratic party establishment if it is to achieve the goals that  it has enunciated since 2008 as much as it needed them to get elected and re-elected.