When Is A Change Really Gonna Come?

The latest round of the farce of the American “democratic process” is over. It was only fitting that my first and only time in an election booth (since I went to prison when I was 17 and have never had the opportunity to vote in a national election even if I had wanted to) was to cast my ballot for Stephen Colbert - a satirist for a joke of an electoral system. Not that I was under any illusions about this system going in, but I have to say it felt even more worthless and perfunctory to cast a ballot than I expected. I had to vote in a church, which didn’t make me too happy either - so much for that whole “separation of church and State” thing. In addition to voting for Stephen Colbert for President, I voted against all of the judges on the ballot and for a $30 million school project. Thus ends my one and only foray into the deadly distraction of electoral politics.

What I did do that was far more important than casting a ballot was to go out to the Obama victory rally in Grant Park and challenge people to take up a critical and revolutionary analysis of what this election means and what Obama represents - a “better” face on brutal imperialism. And not only to make that analysis, but to get involved in really changing society, in fundamentally eliminating the exploitation and oppression of capitalism. As Revolution newspaper posed the question, The Morning After the Elections… And the Change We Really Need… What Are You Gonna Do Now?.

I had quite a few conversations with people about the election, most rather brief but some of more substance. A lot of people really appreciated being posed such a serious question, with a number admitting that they didn’t even know or hadn’t even thought about what to do after the elections. Many people admitted that even though they voted for Obama, they didn’t really think that he was going to make the serious changes that are necessary in this society, and some just felt he was the “lesser of two evils.” Many, many people really loved the “Wanted For Mass Murder” t-shirts with the faces of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, etc. on the front. One gentleman really said he agreed that they needed to face prosecution for their war crimes, but when I asked him if he thought Obama would pursue that, he admitted that he wouldn’t.

It was definitely an important night, and being out there posing this challenge and question to people was great. It was definitely surreal to be surrounded by hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in the streets of Chicago and at the victory speech in Grant Park who were so openly and uncritically supportive of Obama and not only what he represents for American imperialism, but these vague, amorphous, content-free assertions of “change” and “hope” and “yes we can.”

Contrary to what Obama asserted in his victory speech, his election does not represent the “dreams” of America’s founders - in fact, Obama himself would literally be a piece of property and not even considered a human being by America’s founders. His worth to this “democracy” would be 3/5ths of an electoral vote in a “democratic” election that would have excluded every Black person in this country, all women, and even most white males who owned no property. The “two wars, a planet in peril, the worst finanial crisis in a century” are not some kind of random “accidents,” but based on fundamental choices of those in the ruling class. These so-called “brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan” are not there to “risk their lives for us” - they are there to enforce and expand American imperialist domination of the globe. America’s supposed “ideals” of “democracy, liberty, opportunity” are as far from the material reality of the lives of the people as they ever have been. And Barack Obama is not going to change that. The American Dream that Obama represents does not need to be “reclaimed,” the American nightmare of capitalism-imperialism needs to be uprooted and a new social and economic order established, one that is fundamentally determined to eliminate exploitation and oppression and liberate humanity from hundreds of years of outmoded social and economic relations.