Amiri Baraka said Thursday night that "the most obvious infantile left anarchist error" would be not supporting Barack Obama this election. Since the revolution is not coming (and I am inclined to take his word over George Katsiaficas', even though my UMass students seemed sort of revolutionary this week: they made a smiley face on the board next to the Malcolm X quote, "Let the dying be reciprocal"), we should work for Obama so we can pressure him to get the means of production under control, abolish the electoral college and the senate ("all the senate does is keep its foot on the neck of the house of representatives"), and form a united front government of international unions, the petit bourgeoisie, farmers, and I think there might've been another group that I didn't write down. (This sounds a lot like Lauren Berlant's description of the precariat, a concept/organizing principle that is really big in Europe right now.) So what we need is direct democracy and compulsory voting ("if they can tax you, they can make you vote"). And if we work for Obama and then demand accountability from him, maybe he will stop listening to corporations and start listening to the people.
Contrast this with Noam Chomsky's recent evaluation of Obama: "Yeah, Ronald Reagan made change alright. He changed a lot of people from alive to dead." But Amiri Baraka seems to believe in Obama's capacity to inspire--he was talking about students in Texas marching to get a polling place on campus, and he also attributed to Obamania the fact that Newark had gone 43 days without a murder ("the mood is different"). So part of this is Obama's power as a Kennedyesque cipher who can inspire challenges to capitalism and white supremacy (patriarchy, not so much) even if he is not challenging those things so overtly. Or at all. But I think Amiri Baraka really believes Obama might be amenable to substantively changing our political system.
He continued to emphasize this point in the Q & A, when a reunion with an old comrade from the Socialist Workers Party quickly devolved into a shouting match. Amiri Baraka said, "You're from the SWP? You people can't get elected to the school board!" And also, "So tell me, where's the revolution? Do you see any revolution around here?" At which point the guy turned around and left the hall. I guess he didn't want to waste his time if the conditions weren't right.
Anyway, I still think we should protest at the DNC. There's a new movie about the 1968 protests and ensuing trial that looks really exciting. I think it's one of those cartoon-hybrid movies, like that one where Keanu Reeves discovers that the government is getting people addicted to drugs and then engineering the war on drugs so they can arrest people and force them to work on the farms where they're growing the drugs in the first place. Speaking of which, Amiri Baraka's 9/11 conspiracy theory seemed kind of convincing to me: he was an Air Force pilot before he was dishonorably discharged for reading Marx, and he explained that the second a plane goes off course the government knows about it and radios the pilots and if they don't hear from the plane, they shoot it down. And this was hours that the planes were flying completely off course. I don't know, doesn't that seem sort of plausible, given how diabolical this administration has been in so many other ways?
