“Infusing his speech with the type of populist language that has emerged in the Occupy protests around the nation, Mr. Obama warned that growing income inequality meant that the United States was undermining its middle class” (NY Times, 12/6/11).
On December 6, the 101st anniversary of arch-imperialist president Teddy Roosevelt’s (TR) famous speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Barack Obama returned to the town in an attempt to steer the momentum of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to serve U.S. capitalists’ war needs.
TR supposedly had come to Osawatomie to commemorate John Brown’s heroic 1856 anti-slavery battle there (see box). But in reality, like Obama and other politicians now trying to mislead OWS, Roosevelt sought to channel workers’ demands for equality into all-class unity to support imperialist wars. With U.S. rulers seeking to expand beyond their 1898 conquests of former Spanish territories (including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines), he called for a “New Nationalism,” the patriotic ideology that would help push the U.S. into World War I five years later. At the same time, he created a template for Italy’s Fascists and Germany’s Nazis: a highly centralized and regulatory capitalist government that can control all classes, and the propaganda that service to such a state is for the greatest good.
TR aimed to reform capitalism. He ran for president on the so-called Progressive Party” ticket, and became known as a “trustbuster” for wanting to discipline the ruling class and save the system from its own excesses. Meanwhile, he popularized his case for imperialist aggression with a famous saying: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
A century later, Obama is working overtime to revive TR’s deadly pronouncements. Here are some Rooseveltian sound bites that Obama has embraced:
Equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest [read “military”—ed.] service of which he is capable.
I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us abroad that respect which is the surest guaranty of peace.
[I] ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what concerns our people as a whole.
By championing the “national interest,” Roosevelt was hiding the fact that the government’s job is to protect the interests of those who control society, namely the capitalist bosses, both in the U.S. and abroad. Throughout the world, local bosses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have used nationalism to spur workers to oust imperialist powers and “liberate” former colonial countries. Then the local capitalists take their turn in exploiting workers for profit, a common thread in this year’s “Arab Spring.”
The Patriotic ‘Middle Class’
Obama is straining to preserve the concept of a patriotic “middle class,” which serves to deaden class conflict and as a buffer between rulers and most workers. In imperialist economies thriving off colonial mega-profits, bosses can be forced to respond to class struggle by conceding a higher standard of living for the home country’s working class. The bosses then cite these workers as a new “middle” class (see box below).
But this phenomenon, described by Karl Marx 150 years ago, can last only as long as the imperialist nation’s ability to dominate less-developed countries and super-exploit their workers. In the U.S., huge sections of workers in auto, steel, railroads, manufacturing and mines have lost the jobs and living standards that they’d won through militant, communist-led class struggle. U.S. bosses, no longer in a position to afford these extra crumbs for a “middle class,” due to imperialist competition, have neutralized the unions and now pay a newly hired auto worker half of what the old contracts called for.
Racism is a big part of this ruling class offensive. After centuries of super-exploitation of black workers, from slavery through post-war Jim Crow, the rulers now offer middle-class benefits to some black bosses and professionals, while extorting super-profits from the overwhelming majority of black workers, along with Latinos and immigrants. At the same time, the capitalists have used the Great Recession to steal back benefits from black workers and others that were won through long struggle. The black workers themselves, whose ‘60s rebellions won those higher-paying jobs, began to be laid off in the recession of the early 1980s. As proof that racism hurts all workers, now white auto workers are suffering the same fate. (See page 4 on unemployment.)
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a distant cousin who greatly admired TR, held out the promise of potential prosperity — later supported by full employment in war plants — to mobilize workers for World War II. But the social contract over which FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presided, the so-called “American way of life,” has crashed..
Obama acknowledged as much in Kansas: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.” The president’s myth-spinning about an improving economy flies in the face of economists’ warnings that today’s mass joblessness will last for years — and that many of these unemployed may never get another job.
Populist Fascism
To deal with these domestic crises, Obama has pounced on the working class by sustaining many of Bush’s policies. Obama’s administration has detained and deported record numbers of undocumented immigrant workers, while pushing for a “Dream Act” that would send tens of thousands of immigrant youth into imperialist wars. The Obama Justice Department has endorsed military tribunals and enforces the most oppressive provisions of the Patriot Act, which Obama extended earlier this year. He bailed out the big banks with workers’ money while allowing millions of foreclosures. His federally backed bankruptcy plan forced workers at GM and Chrysler to accept a ban on strikes. And even as he spouted empty phrases about “democracy” and “freedom” for workers abroad, Obama imposed a wage freeze on hundreds of thousands of federal workers in the U.S.
We should make no mistake. Obama’s goal, like TR’s, is not to better the lot of workers, but to lead them to support an imperialist solution to a capitalist crisis. One such solution from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies involves “major U.S. attacks on military and civilian targets” in Iran, specifically up to 2,500 cruise missiles and strike sorties that “hit all suspect facilities for nuclear...targets including universities” (CSIS, 11/28/11).
For the U.S. rulers whom Obama serves, this aggression could lead to a mobilization for a larger invasion in the Middle East as the U.S. military expands its presence in the region, adding tens of thousands of troops in countries surrounding Iran. Another would be an intensifying conflict with Iran’s primary enabler: China, the U.S. capitalists’ main strategic foe.
For the international working class, the only real solution to the misery wrought by the profit system is to get rid of it altogether with communist revolution. This is PLP’s goal in immersing ourselves in workers’ class struggles. Our goal is to win our class to the communist ideas that will free us from the hell of capitalism.J
Myth of the ’Middle Class’
Obama, alongside his political buddies and the bosses’ media, constantly invoke the mythological “middle class” while never mentioning the working class. They are trying to convince workers who earn — or who aspire to earn — $50,000 or $75,000 a year that they are not workers. They want to hide the reality of a working class with its antagonistic relationship with an opposing, parasitic ruling class. The latter controls the means of production and reaps profits from exploiting worker’s labor power, the source of all value. Capitalists own; workers create.
Many workers’ struggles may have won incomes that enable them to afford a home, a car and a college education for their children, but they have no security under capitalism. Come the next crisis of overproduction and the next wave of mass unemployment, these higher-earning workers promptly get laid off and made homeless. Their “middle-class” life goes up in smoke. One’s class is not determined by income, but rather by the source of that income.
Opportunist-in-Chief ‘Forgets’ Anti-Racist Hero John Brown
Barack Obama spat on our class’s militant, anti-racist history by excluding John Brown from his December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. It was there, in 1856, that the great abolitionist led thirty-eight fighters, black and white, to counterattack 250 pro-slavery troops and kill twenty of them. Brown’s boldness at Osawatomie, Harpers Ferry and elsewhere helped encourage millions to take up arms against human bondage.
At Osawatomie, Brown wrote, “There will be no more peace in this land until slavery is done for.” But the United States’ first black president, whose own wife has slave ancestors, omitted John Brown because Obama understands that he’s on the other side. Far from fighting against oppression, the president wages war to heighten capitalist exploitation of workers around the globe.
Just before Virginia’s pro-slavery forces hanged him in 1859, after years of guerilla warfare, Brown acknowledged, “I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Brown was right. The main scourge attacking the working class today is imperialist war and its racist, fascist preparations. To rid ourselves of capitalism’s endless profit wars, we will need to transform the demonstrated anger of OWS into militant action and a long-term plan toward communist revolution.