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We must continue to understand that President Obama is an African-American and his victory flew in the face of nearly four centuries of institutional and ideological racism in North America, from the introduction of slavery in the 17th century.

The struggle against racism and the victories against it have always been a vital barometer of social progress in the U.S.  We as Communists have understood since the first years of our party’s birth more than any other integrated political group that a steady and continual struggle against racism could not be separated from all working class struggles and was necessary to the development of class consciousness and unity among the working class.

But there are still millions and millions of Americans, including working class people, influenced by racist ideology, “uncomfortable” with an African-American president, targets for rightwing politicians seeking to “surf” in what they hope will be a wave of racist backlash. And rightwing media appeals to them. 

 Yesterday a colleague of mine mentioned that she heard on a prominent rightwing talk radio station in New Jersey callers claiming that the Obama construction stimulus funds were being used for construction jobs for Blacks, a crackpot statement that can easily be shown to be factually false, but that is not the point–the prejudice is the point and such examples of the big lie are around and are being spread in subtle and not so subtle ways. 

We all knew and our leadership has acknowledged over and over again that The Obama administration is not a socialist or Communist administration and that its attempts to advance the progressive program that it ran on are handicapped by the last thirty years of “deregulation, detaxation, privatization,” which were advanced by righting Republicans and accepted by Democrats. We are not spreading any illusions about the Obama administration by not joining in the general left attacks on him and his administration

If we wish to strengthen the working class movement, ourselves as a party and influence the Obama administration to succeed in the way that the New Deal government succeeded, we should both make it clear that we reject and will fight in an unqualified way against the openly reactionary and less openly racist attacks against the administration, which are the main attacks that it faces, and also that we will criticize the legislation that comes from this congress and offer clear progressive alternatives, making it clear that the millions of new voters and new activists who elected Obama must carry forward the struggle to achieve the change that he campaigned on.

Let me end with a few practical policies which we might put forward:

First federal assumption of the state debts of those states which don’t have “right to work” laws and which have relatively advanced social and educational services, states like New Jersey, California, New York, Illinois, etc. Since repeal of Taft-Hartley is unlikely to say the least, giving states the option to repeal state right to work laws and upgrade education and social services to get their deficits absorbed would be a good policy. It would also produce many jobs by ending and to a considerable extent beginning to reverse the public sector cutbacks of the last three decades.

Another practical policy would be to reverse the wildly destructive policies of the last thirty years by enacting new national banking legislation and securities and exchange legislation would not only repeal the deregulation of the last three decades but establish a much higher level of regulation and public control over Wall Street and the Banking system (for example, making the chair of the Federal Reserve a Cabinet member serving at the pleasure of the President, not an appointed representative of private banks serving long terms which overlap administrations who have very limited controls over his policies.

A final practical policy would be to call for comprehensive tax reform, connecting a significant increase in progressive income and corporation taxes with decreases in regressive property taxes, sales taxes, and various other taxes and fees which have skyrocketed in recent decades.

These are policies that labor candidates progressive candidates, even the administration if it boldly moves in a progressive direction the way Roosevelt for example did in 1936, can go to the people with and win.

They are the sort of issues through which we can raise questions of the distribution of wealth and power in the society, turn working peoples attention to economic solutions that will strengthen them and make them more secure, which is what Communists in principle have struggled to do since the Manifesto, strengthening both them and ourselves by both learning from them and bringing our Marxist-Leninist understanding (whether we call it that or not) to them.

There are many other issues concerning international relations, the dangers of the administration’s escalation of the Afghan intervention, for it, for the working class in this country, and of course in the region and the world. 

Let me conclude with a reference from an article that Karl Marx wrote at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War which I think has relevance for our situation today. The article was in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and it took strong issue with the British press who were attacking the Union for not fighting the war as an anti-slavery war and with those who were suggesting that their was no difference between Lincoln and Buchanan. “It is one of its pet maneuvers”(Marx wrote of the English press, which was safely anti-slavery since slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1832) “to taunt the present Republican administration with the doings of its Pro-Slavery predecessors.”  Marx went on to say that from the papers which “tell us that they cannot sympathize was the North because its war is no Abolitionist war, we are informed that ‘the desperate expedient of proclaiming Negro emancipation and summoning the slaves to a general insurrection ‘ is a thing ‘repulsive and dreadful’ and that a ‘compromise’ would be “far preferable to success purchased at such a cost and stained by such a crime.’ “

I doubt that there are many on the left and among liberals and in our party for that matter who have any plans of a practical nature to advance a socialist revolution in the near future, which would be the equivalent of the great slave revolt that Marx saw British and American liberals fearing. But their positions, as Marx understood objectively aided the Confederacy by refusing to grasp that the victory of Lincoln and the Republicans to begin with represented a major change in the North from what had existed a few years before under Buchanan as we have contended that the victory of the Obama campaign has represented such a change. Lincoln was not an abolitionist, no more than Obama is a socialist, but for Marx, analyzing the larger political balance of forces and the necessity of ending slaveholder control over the U.S. economy, this was not so relevant.  What is relevant is that the Obama administration has opened space in which the left can present 

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