Workers' Liberty

On 4 November Barack Obama was elected as the first black president of the USA. He got 60% of the votes of the relatively hard-up (household income less than $50,000 a year) and only 49% of the votes of the well-off (household income above $100,00 a year).

Kim Moody, an American socialist activist living in London who was formerly the director of the US rank-and-file labour movement publication Labor Notes (www.labornotes.org), spoke to Sacha Ismail

America will vote in the 'world's most powerful person' in November. George Bush has become a hate figure for the big money and world-conquering ambitions of the US.

The following article is by Malik Miah, one of the editors of the US socialist magazine Against the Current. We print it in the interests of debate and to relate to an issue that extends beyond the American left. We invite our readers to write contributions to this discussion.

The latest issue of Solidarity contains two articles about the American presidential elections, offering two different perspectives with the aim of stimulating debate. That’s certainly positive, except for one thing. I can’t tell the difference between the two points of view.

In 1961, the year of Barack Obama’s birth, it was still legal for the US government to discriminate against its citizens on grounds of race (the Civil Rights Act which formally banned such discrimin

The enthusiasm among the progressive wing of the Democratic Party for Barack Obama, a compelling writer, an inspiring speaker with a story that seems to define the American experience, is understandable. Indeed, the symbolic significance of an African-American so close to the presidency in a country whose politics is so fundamentally scarred by racism cannot be underestimated. This enthusiasm seems to have upturned the usual justification on the part of progressives and leftists for voting Democratic. No longer is the zeal for the DP based primarily on the abhorrence for the Republican administration; no longer is the justification offered defined largely in the negative, by the nature of the reactionary opposition.

Barack Obama's clinching of the Democratic presidential nomination raises a variety of issues for socialists.

The inconclusive outcome of the Democratic Party primaries to date suggests an increasing certainty that the nomination process may only resolve itself during the August convention. The so-called “super delegates,” the skeletal deposits of the party — its elected officials and functionaries — may have the decisive say.

By Barry Finger

In his reply to my article on the US elections (Solidarity 3/124), Eric Lee displays complete indifference to the principle of working-class political independence.

To write, as Sacha Ismail does, that U.S. "Republicans and Democrats are ... almost identical in policy terms" betrays either a startling ignorance of American politics or a form of ultra-leftism.

Arguments about Barack Obama, John Edwards, Ron Paul, etc. from Shiraz Socialist.

The 2006 election demonstrated a tentative move to the left by the American electorate. The discontent is not likely to abate any time soon. But a left that fails to force a break with the Democrats will find that this new aspiration for change will eventually dissolve into anti-political skepticism and despair.

In 1996, an independent Labor Party with over two million affiliated trade unionists was established, but it failed to break completely with the Democrats and eventually withered. Reviving such initiatives is the key task for socialists, and all those who want to see something more like real democracy in the US.