Millions of people across the USA, and indeed around the planet are rejoicing at the historic victory of Barack Obama. First and foremost because he is the first black President in a country that was built on two centuries of slavery, a hundred years of ‘Jim Crow’, the systematic denial of democratic rights to the former slaves. A country that only forty years ago, and under pressure of a massive civil rights movement and uprisings in the inner cities, began to dismantle that machinery of racist oppression, a job far from complete to this day, despite the Obama win.
The opportunity for millions of usually disenfranchised African Americans to vote for someone that they felt represented them and their experiences was also a massive contributing factor to the historic turn out which saw the Republicans suffer their worst defeat in 60 years. The Democrats also made gains in the congress and increased their majorities, a sign that it was not just Obama’s charisma or race which people voted for, but for an end to the Republican parties domination of US politics over the last generation.
Many young people were also galvanised into voting, eagerly accepting the rhetoric about change and hope, two commodities that many US citizens have felt deprived of for the last eight years.Another major reason for the rejoicings is that Obama’s election marks the end of the hated Bush-Cheney era. This vote was a vote against everything that people hated about Bush from the pro-business policies, to the war on terror, to Guantanamo Bay, to the economic crisis. It represents a massive popular rejection of these policies.But if Obama’s election is welcomed by many in Africa, Asia and Latin America, in the hope that the war mongering typical of US policy under Bush and Cheney will abate, many more will take a lot of convincing that the USA’s abuses of its superpower status will end, that its domineering economic policies which have impoverished so many people will cease. They are right. Obama has made it plain his task is to restore United States prestige and leadership in the world. In short his task is to refurbish the image of US imperialism.
The United Sates is leading the world economy into recession, with potentially mass unemployment and greater poverty not just across the US but also the rest of the world. He will be the President as twenty years of globalisation and neoliberalism judders to an end. What will replace it cannot be predicted, beyond the fact that the US will face challenges from its “allies” as well as its enemies. The former are unlikely to concede it the unilateral leadership enjoyed By George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton or George W.At home despite the inevitable ‘honeymoon’ period after most elections, the problems of saving US capitalism and putting it back on the road to profits for the super rich will propel his administration into a conflict with the workers and lower middle class Americans who elected him.As the world celebrates the defeat of McCain and the George Bush party, millions will look in anticipation to Obama entering the White House in January. They expect major change, indeed a transformation of America. But perhaps few of them could specify exactly what these changes will be. Indeed there are many reasons to believe that, for all the sectors of Obama supporters, the change will be more symbolic than realAlready on the major issue of the day, the financial crisis and the proposed Paulson plan bank bail out, Obama and McCain had very similar positions, and both urged their parties to support it in congress. When it comes to the interests of US business Obama, as a leader of one of the only two significant capitalist parties in the USA, the man who received the majority of corporate- indeed Wall Street donations, will not be able to break from the logic of the market and the profit system which condemns so many to poverty and misery.But those progressive aspects of his policies that he has put forward, improving millions of US citizens access to healthcare, combating racism in the law and policing, combating inequality, increasing taxation on the rich these promises must be implemented, indeed extended. Those aspects of his policy that are backward looking and part of an ongoing Bush legacy; increasing troops in Afghanistan and threatening to expand the war into Pakistan, must be fought against and defeated.In the end no matter what people think of the scope of change that Obama represents, workers, youth and immigrants in the US must organise to fight, by mass mobilisations and protest movements, by strikes and demonstrations, like the day without immigrants in 2006.
The Democratic party in history has played the role of a safety valve. When things get too bad, when peoples hatred of the pro big business Republicans gets too much, the Democrats refurbish their radicalism a bit, promise change and a difference and scoop up the vote, before disappointing everyone again. Eight years later a Republican president is delivered back to the White House.Working class people don’t need the Democrats; they need their own party, a party of workers, the poor, immigrants and radical youth that fights for their interests, not just in the congress but also in the workplaces and on the streets. This party might seem light years away at the moment, but socialist minded people in the USA who want fairness and social justice could be won to such a project. We can do so by calling on all those young activists, all the black people and trade unionists that hope for real change from Obama to keep active- not to elect or re-elect him of the Democrats but to realise the health service, the trade union rights, the end of discrimination that he led them to believe they could achieve.If these forces mobilise for themselves; if they clarify and specify their demands, which will come more and more urgent as the recession bites; then when Obama lets them down, as he surely will, they will listen to the minority who said all along it was necessary to break from the Democrats and build an independent working class party, In such conditions it will become possible to end the trade unions’ support for the Democrats and win support for a new party, one with a clear socialist programme to destroy the bankrupt capitalist system in the USA.That means a socialist revolution against US capital and imperialism to break the power of the banks and the corporations, remove the racist cops and judges that still imprison and execute disproportionate numbers of Black Americans, and put ordinary workers in charge of society from top to bottom. Only such a struggle can end the cycle of boom and bust, only such a struggle can end imperialist wars, only such a struggle can truly end social inequality. The League and its co-thinkers in the USA are committed to that struggle over the coming years.