PRAGOTI

Younger generation of ‘mainstream’ America!! Thanks for the clarification. Right, the agency of white middle-class yuppiedom on facebook, myspace, digg and what have you! Cool! Marxists should celebrate that! And if they don’t, they are ‘messianic moralists’!

Prabhat Patnaik called the intellectual detractors of the Left ‘messianic moralists’ after Nandigram. To quote that masterpiece, ‘The crux of political praxis consists at any time in distinguishing between two camps: the camp of the "people" and camp hostile to the interests of "the people". You put your hopes on the camp hostile to people’s interest, the Left here refuses to that.

Who has denied the role of the ‘hard right’? Left groups here are concentrating their campaign to defeat Mccain. Many many activists have lost much more than jobs in fighting the system that was unleashed by Reagan, carried forward both by Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor and signed off with the Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’ and disastrous domestic policy. But they are ‘messianic moralists’ if they say Obama is a continuation of the parade of this imperialist establishment with one qualification – he has the most pleasant face.

Obama has not 'challenged the Republican and the Democratic Leadership Council's monopoly to the White House'; he is one of their own, or more charitably put, has become one with them. Obama tells us that waging war on Iraq in itself was not wrong; it was wrong in the ‘way’ it was done. On Obama and Cuba, here is Fidel Castro (The empire’s hypocritical politics).

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/mayo/lun26/Reflections-26may.html

Gunboat diplomacy and gung ho invasion are both part of the arsenal of imperialism. That is what differentiates Obama-Biden and Mccain-Palin in your articles. Your response defending Obama's promises of gunboat diplomacy only confirms this to be a read for the ‘smart’. Not for the Left.

It is fine to work up and steer working class racism towards China and all things Chinese including the Communist Party of China to be ahead in the race, but it hurts when that racism comes back as fear mongering in the final stage of the race! Right!

The Left in the US has no illusions either about a Mccain Presidency or an Obama Presidency. The opportunities lie not with the Obama Presidency, but in the questions that Americans are asking with financial crisis at home and the condemnation abroad. The possibilities lie in the structural interstices of class, race and gender that are gapingly in the open after decades of defeatism – be it questions on jobs, social security or on ‘faith and family values’. The hopes lie in the fact that most Americans are now opposed to the War on Iraq.

Whether the different sections of the Left can advance depends on a host of factors. But if the Left puts its eggs in Obama’s presidential basket of gunboat diplomacy, then all it will have is egg on its face. The struggle would be lost even before it has been waged.

This is no arm-chair anti-imperialism coming out of elite institutions, it is Marxist Leninist praxis built on years of trade-union work and anti-racist struggles. The source of ‘messianic moralism’ if any is tipped the other way by Prabhat Patnaik’s criterion!