Black Skin, White Politics

Call me a pessimist if you want but I have been saying for over a year now that Obama won't change a fucking thing. But now at last the test can begin. I hate saying I told you so. I hate being right so often. I hated being right about the collapse of the Irish economy and the inevitable crisis in Global Capitalism. I hated being right about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you know what I am certainly not the only one who thinks the way I do. There are hundreds of millions, possibly even billions of people on the planet who react with cynicism to the bile churned out by the builders of consensus.

Change and Hope are nothing but words. In themselves they mean nothing. Obama is nothing but a political parrot constantly repeating what he knows people want to hear. Of course people want change! Of course people want to be able to live in hope rather than fear! That's why he says it! Not because he means it but because he knows it's what people want to hear. It is also why he won the election. The establishment had to let the black guy win because otherwise people would have lost faith in the system. After eight years of Bush if another Republican had won people would have realised what is called democracy is nothing more than a sham. So the establishment bought itself another couple of years by slipping on a new mask. Make it look as if the system can change from the inside. People won't feel obliged to organise in their communities and workplaces to agitate for real social change and by the time they see through Obama we'll have conjured up another illusion to trick the people into supporting a system which exists only to exploit them.

Speaking of masks I would suggest that now is an excellent time for people to read Frantz Fanon. His excellent Black Skin, White Masks like most great books has yet to have the impact it should on society. Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony. He was indoctrinated from an early age by the French colonisers to believe that he could gain acceptance by imitating their manner of doing things. As a result he eventually went on to become a psychoanalyst, a truly noble and middle class aspiration. However Fanon's experiences inside the French establishment and in France led him to a startling realisation. No matter how hard a black person tried to do the things in the way Whites wanted them to they would always be marginalised and discriminated against.

His activities in psychoanalysis now began to take a new form. He stated that colonised people take on the languages and culture of their colonisers in order to overcome an inferiority complex or a sense of alienation which has arisen as a direct result of being colonised. In essence they slip on a white mask as they see it as the only way to combat the malaise which has arisen out of their experiences as an oppressed people. Nations such as Britain and France always excelled in creating native elites. That is finding a section of the colonised people whom the favoured over others in order to educate and indoctrinate them into doing the bidding of their colonial masters. They create a native middle class, who are to relate more closely to their oppressors than their fellow oppressed. This system has led to the continuation of imperialism long after nations have attained their flag independence as the proteges of the erstwhile colonisers carry on in a business as usual manner and continue to implement the economic and social systems dictated to them by the coloniser. Fanon's experiences eventually led him to Algeria where he became involved with the FLN and their struggle for national liberation. It was in Algeria that he wrote his other great work The Wretched of the Earth.

So how does all this relate to Barak Obama? Well Obama's skin might be black but his politics aren't. It is exceedingly naïve to assume that a change in President will make any difference in the first place but the hype about Obama has reached an unprecedented level. Firstly because of his skin colour and secondly because of his rhetoric which rings hollower than the vaults of Anglo Irish Bank. So everybody else can feel free to wet themselves with excitement if they want but excuse me if I choose not to. I am a Marxist. But do you even know what I mean when I say that? I apply a class analysis to politics. The world is divided into lots of different groups but there is one group that dominates them all, the bourgeoisie. These are the elite businessmen who tell politicians what to do. They have crushed the ability of the people to resist by turning them against each other and brainwashing them. They have made the most effective tool for social change, the Unions their lapdogs and tell us that any time anybody struggles for social justice that it is bad for business and therefore bad for the country.

These are people who wouldn't even have let Obama be nominated if they thought he was actually going to change anything. We live in a world without democracy. We live in a world of smoke and mirrors and media sensationalism where a tiny elite have decided what is to be done before we even knew there was a decision to be made. Just look at the example of the Lisbon treaty here in Europe, living proof that politicians don't feel that people can be trusted to make their own decisions.

The lot of the millions of disadvantaged black people in America has not changed overnight because somebody of mixed race played by all the rules set down by the establishment and was awarded with high office. The primary form of discrimination suffered by African Americans is economic and social and has arisen as a direct result of the experiences which brought them to America in the first place, namely slavery. In the same way a colonised people can behave in the way the oppressor wishes them to and gain the upper hand over their countrymen so too an African American can become middle class or upper middle class, but he is not elevating the lot of his race. He is making a cynical bid for power and represents only self interest.

Obama is nothing more than a poster boy for the establishment, he is as much of a puppet as Bush because fundamentally nothing has changed with the election of Obama and nothing is going to. If we want to see change in the world then we are going to have look wider than the options presented to us by tweedle dum and tweedle dee political parties every few years. Feel free to disagree with me now but lets talk about it in six months or a year and see who was right.