Why did Barack Obama become a community organizer? Obama’s carefully crafted memoir, Dreams from My Father, offers several reasons for his choice of this career path in his senior year. When Obama’s college friends asked him what a community organizer does, he couldn’t answer in detail because he himself didn’t know. So “instead I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt… . Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”1 So one of Obama’s reasons for becoming a community organizer was to help push national politics to the left.
Although not presented as such, this is a sophisticated and somewhat surprising answer. Classically, after all, according to modern community organizing’s founder, Saul Alinsky, organizers are supposed to avoid entanglement in electoral politics. In the early eighties, however, the relationship between community organizing and national politics was changing. So perhaps Obama knew something about his newly chosen profession after all.
Obama’s second reason for taking up community organizing was more personal. Neither born nor raised in a black home, Obama urgently wanted to be part of an African-American community. Local organizing seemed to Obama a contemporary successor to the great civil rights struggle of the sixties—a movement that generated a deep sense of community among American blacks. So through the shared sacrifice of organizing—the poverty wages, political struggles, and acts of community building—Obama hoped to earn himself a place in an African-American world to which he had previously been a stranger.2
There is a hint in Dreams of a third and more ambitious reason for becoming an organizer—a synthesis of the other two. Obama hoped that the community he’d help build would reach beyond any single race, to transform America itself, “Because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white, and brown, could somehow redefine itself—I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.”3 So Obama took up organizing to secure his own racial identity, to push national politics to the left, and ultimately to provoke a deeper redefinition of America itself. An America thus re-defined would be a country Obama-the-outsider could at last fully belong to, because it would be an America that he himself had worked to create.
Obama’s account adds up to a quick but eloquent description of the vision of community organizing presented at the April 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference. Although Obama presents himself as naive, in fact, he was knowledgeable about socialist theories of community organizing from the start. No doubt community organizing’s day-to-day practice was at first a mystery to Obama. Yet he grasped the big picture quickly. Obama’s account is precise, believable, and beautifully wrought. His transgressions are sins of omission and misdirection. But, oh, what sins!
Impressive and informative though it is, Obama’s story doesn’t add up. Everything we know about Obama says that he is deliberate in decision, meticulous in preparation, and an avid reader. Whether we consider the organizer who over-scripted his early confrontations with Chicago authorities, the Project Vote leader bursting with plans and suggestions, or the president who relies on a teleprompter to control his message, Barack Obama does not jump into major decisions or high-risk situations lightly. He studies; he prepares; he deliberates.
Are we to believe that Obama committed himself to a career in community organizing without understanding what it was? “That’s what I’ll do,” exclaims Obama in Dreams, “I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”4 No doubt, Obama did say something like this to himself. But where was he when he said it, and who gave him the idea to begin with? Obama stayed true to his dream of becoming a community organizer through two years of failed job searches.5 No mere impulse can explain that. Organizing was the solution to Obama’s identity crisis, but he would never have realized this—or clung to his hopes so tenaciously—without first researching and exploring his professional goal with all of his characteristic thoroughness. That is precisely what happened.
When, exactly, did Obama decide to become a community organizer? Obama states very clearly in Dreams that it was 1983.6 Obama describes himself talking about organizing with his college classmates.7 He also sent out letters in search of an organizing job “in the months leading up to graduation.”8 So Obama must have decided to become a community organizer sometime between January and June of 1983—the latter half of his senior year at Columbia College. What was Obama doing at that time?
Obama’s Columbia years appear to be the least known period of his life.9 Yet we do know something of that time. In his senior year at Columbia, Obama was “majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.”10 We also know that Obama’s senior thesis advisor, Michael L. Baron, taught a year-long seminar on “international politics and American policy.”11 Obama was reportedly “a very, very active participant” in that seminar, displaying “a broad sense of international politics and international relations.”12 Although Obama did not graduate with honors,13 he got an A in Baron’s course, and years later Baron ended up recommending Obama for law school.14 We also know that Obama published a passionate and well-researched article on the student anti-war movement in the March 10, 1983, issue of the Columbia campus newsmagazine, Sundial.15
In short, Obama’s core efforts in his senior year were bent toward international issues. This makes perfect sense. Obama’s African heritage, his years in Indonesia, and his anthropologist mother would all have given him a special interest in international relations. His thesis, his best course work with his closest faculty connection, and his own extracurricular writing all confirm it. Moving back to Obama’s years at Occidental College, we know that, although he had many interests, disarmament was certainly among them. One of his Occidental roommates tells of facing a formidable Obama in a classroom debate on nuclear disarmament.16 Dreams, of course, presents Obama’s anti-apartheid activism at Occidental as a formative influence. Also, a 1990 Boston Globe piece says that Obama “specialized in international relations at Occidental College.”17 Moving forward, the post-Columbia job Obama took to save money toward his soon-to-be-impoverished organizing career involved helping companies with foreign operations “understand overseas markets.”18
For all these reasons, it seems probable that Obama was headed for a career in international relations. In any case, his attention was likely taken up with international issues right through the publication of his essay on the student anti-nuclear movement in early March of 1983. So what happened between March and June of 1983 that might have pushed Obama off of the international course he was so clearly on and gotten him exclaiming instead, “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change”? Since Obama was already searching for organizer jobs “in the months leading up to graduation,” the most likely moment for Obama’s organizing epiphany would have been sometime between early March and mid-April of 1983.
Once you know what went on there, it’s virtually impossible not to conclude that the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference of April 1 and 2, 1983, was Obama’s transformational moment. How do we know Obama was there? He tells us so himself, in Dreams, although if you blink you’ll miss it. Speaking of his New York days, Obama says:
Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers—a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-skating at Rockefeller Center.19
In the course of a sentence, Obama’s attendance at socialist conferences is transformed from something intense and consequential into just another urban diversion.
That Obama works to minimize his report is unsurprising. That Obama acknowledges attending socialist conferences at all is more interesting. Dreams from My Father was published in 1995, just as Obama was gearing up for his first political campaign. A passing revelation like this would appeal to Hyde Park’s influential and knowing socialist constituency, without unduly disturbing others. This may seem to attribute too much calculation to Obama, but his organizing colleagues in Chicago were hyper-conscious about revealing their socialism. Obama may also have worried that records of his attendance at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences would surface. Why not acknowledge the fact in such a way as to minimize attention and defuse the power of eventual revelation? The socialist conference issue may also help explain why Obama’s 2008 campaign consistently refused to name friends from the New York era.20
In fact, I have found Obama’s name on a DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) mailing list for one of the New York Socialist Scholars Conferences. Although the list is not labeled, analysis of its contents and associated material strongly suggests that Obama pre-registered for the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference. (For a review of the evidence, see Chapter Three.) This is significant because after the Marx Centennial in 1983, the DSA’s annual Socialist Scholars Conferences moved out of the Cooper Union and into the Boro of Manhattan Community College. So although Obama explicitly speaks only of Cooper Union as a conference locale, evidence indicates that he continued attending annual Socialist Scholars Conferences in 1984, and likely 1985 as well. Obama himself speaks of attending socialist “conferences,” in the plural, so at a minimum, he would have been present for at least two of the three annual Socialist Scholars Conferences held during his time in New York. And since Cooper Union is the only location Obama specifically mentions, he surely attended the 1983 Marx Centennial Conference. Could Obama have attended a socialist conference or conferences at New York’s Cooper Union, but not the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference of April 1983? That is exceedingly unlikely.
I’ve read through event notices in New York Democratic Socialist and Democratic Left (the local and national organs, respectively, of the Democratic Socialists of America) for the period when Obama was in New York. I found no notice of any DSA event at the Cooper Union other than the Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983. That event, on the other hand, was advertised widely, not only in New York Democratic Socialist21 and Democratic Left,22 but in the socialist periodical In These Times23 and in notices found as far afield as The Stony Brook Press,24 a student paper on Long Island’s North Shore. The 1984 New York Socialist Scholars Conference likewise had a large notice in In These Times,25 and the 1985 conference had a large ad in Democratic Left.26
It’s evident from the event notices in New York Democratic Socialist that by far the majority of New York DSA seminars, panel discussions, and classes on socialism were held at CUNY Graduate Center, where many prominent DSAers were on faculty. There were also events and demonstrations at Columbia University. DSA did sponsor other events— issue forums, awards dinners, and such at various locations in New York City—but I saw no notices for such events scheduled at Cooper Union.
It’s very likely that New York DSA held the Socialist Scholars Conference at Cooper Union in 1983, and again at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 1984 and 1985, because the usual DSA venue of CUNY Graduate Center lacked the space to host a substantial conference. The documentary evidence for Obama’s attendance at the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference (discussed in Chapter Three) certainly suggests that Obama had a particular interest in this conference series.
There was also the specific motivation of conference organizers in 1983 of commemorating Marx’s centennial at the Cooper Union, where he had been memorialized after his death. That, along with the shift of the Socialist Scholars Conferences in 1984 to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, points to Cooper Union as a likely one-shot locale, rather than a regular DSA conference venue. Borough of Manhattan Community College was part of the CUNY system, which made it more convenient than Cooper Union for use by an organization whose leading lights were concentrated at CUNY Graduate Center.
Conferences were major events, requiring extensive preparation and significant publicity. Reading through event notices in Democratic Left, we find a number of announcements of DSA conferences across the country. The 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference at Cooper Union is announced,27 but no other conference at Cooper Union is advertised. Had New York’s DSA moved out of its usual site for lectures, panel discussions, and public classes in socialism at CUNY Graduate Center for yet another conference at a large venue like Cooper Union, we would surely see publicity on a scale roughly comparable to that for the New York Socialist Scholars Conferences. Yet no such publicity is to be found.
A file of New York DSA internal planning documents for the Socialist Scholars Conference28 includes a document drawn up just after the successful Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference. That document (beginning “The success of the Scholars Conference demonstrates …”) indicates that the April 1983 Cooper Union Conference was filling a gap in intellectually oriented leftist political events created by the recent decline in an event series run by MARHO, the Mid- Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, out of John Jay College in Manhattan, near Lincoln Center. MARHO had put on leftist conferences and other similar events at John Jay for several years prior to 1983. According to the planning document: “Recently, though, they [MARHO] have lost energy and have ceased to put on frequent events … CUNY’s Democratic Socialist Clubs and IDS [Institute for Democratic Socialism] should move to fill this vacuum … Our events should be held at CUNY Graduate Center in an auditorium that could hold 100+ people.”
So the April 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference, held during the middle of the second of Obama’s two college school years at Columbia University, was filling a “socialist conference gap” that had spanned much of the time since Obama’s arrival in New York. Immediately after the April 1983 Cooper Union conference, socialist lectures and panels at CUNY Graduate Center and full-scale conferences at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, filled the gap left by the declining leftist event series at John Jay College on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In other words, evidence strongly indicates that Cooper Union was not a regular location for socialist conferences, but was, on the contrary, a onetime venue. It was chosen as a site to attempt to revive the lapsed tradition of Socialist Scholars Conferences because of the Marx centennial, and its success led to a series of smaller socialist speaking events at CUNY Graduate Center, and full-scale socialist conferences at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.
Given all this, Obama’s reference to “socialist conferences” at Cooper Union surely means that we can reliably place him at the April 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference. From this point on, I will treat Obama’s attendance at that conference as established.
Obama’s reference to “socialist conferences” at Cooper Union, in the plural, is most likely compressing the 1983 Cooper Unions Socialist Scholars Conference with his attendance at the 1984 (and possibly 1985) Socialist Scholars Conference at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. This sort of literary compression (which Obama owns up to in the introduction to Dreams from My Father) allows him to pass swiftly and lightly over an awkward topic.29
The topics of community organizing and minority participation in socialist politics were pervasive at the Cooper Union Conference. Some panels focused directly on these themes, yet many others would have touched on them as well. In my account, I’m going to concentrate on a couple of panels that addressed community organizing and minority politics in detail. These also happen to be panels I think Obama was likely to have attended. How, for example, could Obama have resisted a session on the links between race and class—a preoccupation of his? Yet I also plan to show that interest in community organizing and minority coalition-building was by no means confined to one or two Cooper Union panels. On the contrary, these issues were the talk of the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference. Wherever Obama was, he would have run into excited discussion about his soon-to-be chosen profession of community organizing, and its link to electoral politics. So while I’ll venture some educated guesses about Obama’s likely pattern of panel attendance, in the end, the details of his movements are less important than the overall thrust of the Marx Centennial Conference itself.
That 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference was more than a commemoration of Marx. According to the program, the Cooper Union conference was explicitly meant to be “a revival of the Socialist Scholars Conferences which did much to revive interest in socialism and Marxism in the academy during the sixties and early seventies.”30 Actually, the annual Socialist Scholars Conferences held in New York from 1965 through 1970 were far more than merely academic events. Those meetings of scholars and activists (with many individuals playing both roles) were clearly “movement” affairs. And although that first series of conferences eventually foundered on the gulf between scholars and activists—and on the conflicting militancies of the black movement, the women’s movement, and the lesbian and gay movement—the eighties revival featured a similar blending of scholarship and activism.31 In the tradition of Marx, whether overtly scholarly or not, the purpose of each panel was not merely to describe the world, but to change it.
Since I’m arguing that the impact of these conferences on Obama was immense, we need to understand them in some depth. At the very center of Obama’s secret world, these Socialist Scholars Conferences cannot be properly decoded without knowledge of the history, theory, and political environment that shaped them. Public ignorance of this socialist world is ultimately the most significant barrier to an appreciation of Obama’s background. So it’s worth considering the tradition that Cooper Union conference revived.
In September of 1967, Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly (very much a capitalist organ) carried an extended and critical report by Alice Widener on the Third Annual Socialist Scholars Conference.32 This was the high point of the sixties conference series, before the worst of the factional infighting set in. Widener’s 1967 conference report also serves as a revealing introduction to the revived conference series of the eighties. That’s because many of the key characters are the same—although in the sixties their cards were turned up and laid clearly on the table.
After taking some shots at the various Soviet and communist delegates in the house, Widener describes a particularly well-attended panel on “Poverty in America,” featuring Michael Harrington. In 1967, Harrington was well on his way to becoming the most influential socialist in America—a modern successor to socialist leaders Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. Later, in the eighties, Harrington would head the DSA, the sponsor of those revived Socialist Scholars Conferences. Harrington’s real claim to fame, however, was The Other America, the 1962 book that inspired the “War on Poverty.”33
After reading an extended review of Harrington’s book, and just three days before his own assassination, President Kennedy ordered the organization of a federal War on Poverty. President Johnson carried the plan forward, appointing Sargent Shriver to head the program. Harrington served as a prominent member of Shriver’s planning team, the goal of which was to abolish poverty in America.34 Yet by general consent, the War on Poverty failed, and Harrington spent much of the ensuing years disowning the fiasco.
For Reagan Republicans, Johnson’s War on Poverty was a textbook example of government gone wrong. In the conservative view, by generating ever more welfare dependency, government money merely aggravated the very conditions Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had hoped to abolish. For Harrington, on the other hand, the War on Poverty was a flop because it nickeled and dimed a problem that demanded far greater government spending. When Harrington said as much to Sargent Shriver at the time, Shriver shot back, “Well, I don’t know about you, Mr. Harrington, but I’ve never spent a billion dollars before.” (Obviously, “billion” was a scarier figure in the sixties.) Many will side with Shriver, but to the socialist Harrington, the real reason the War on Poverty failed was Shriver’s refusal to demand far greater government spending.35 At that 1967 Socialist Scholars panel, Harrington took pains to repudiate the Johnson administration’s half-measures, while still arguing for the viability and necessity of government-based solutions.36
Notice that Harrington’s brand of socialism did not prevent him from working within the system—even signing on with the Democratic Party. One reason the notion of a socialist president seems absurd is the image it generates of a disgruntled outsider pressing for violent revolution. There were plenty of embittered outsiders at the 1967 Socialist Scholars Conference. In fact, violent revolutionaries clearly outnumbered Harrington-style “democratic socialists.” Yet precisely because Harrington advocated a socialism that confined itself to strictly democratic and legal means, he had a level of visibility and influence—and panel attendance—few other socialists could match.
Another draw for the crowd at the poverty panel was the knowledge that Harrington was about to be slammed by his radical rivals. Speaking for these not-so-democratic radicals was labor organizer Stanley Aronowitz, who said he was with “a revolutionary action group.” Rejecting even an enlarged poverty program as mere “reformism,” Aronowitz offered a hard-edged Marxist analysis. “Racism is based on the profit system,” said Aronowitz. The police, he continued, are the arm of the ruling class in the ghettos. Speaking in the aftermath of a wave of urban riots, Aronowitz noted that blacks had already led the way by forming anti-police self-defense committees. It remained for Americans to follow their revolutionary example. As for the War on Poverty, Aronowitz continued, only one good thing has come of it: “At least it has given employment to the organizers.” At this, Widener reports, “the audience burst into laughter, applause, and cheers.” “That’s right man,” someone called out from the audience, “It gave our organizers some bread.”37 This being 1967, Widener has to explain to her readers that “bread” is slang for money. Unchanged from 1967 to today, however, radical organizers still look to cop some bread from a clueless Uncle Sam.
The extraordinary thing about this session is that, by the end, Harrington actually capitulated to Aronowitz and the rest of his critics. After heated discussion, Harrington said he’d be on board for a violent revolution: “OK,” he agreed, “if you think it will work.”38 Doctoral dissertations could be written around that long-forgotten concession. For it reveals that even the greatest modern proponent of purely democratic socialism saw democracy more as a tactic than a principle—merely the most practical route to socialism in the United States. Eventually, the collapse of “the sixties” brought revolutionaries like Aronowitz back to earth—and put Harrington in control of America’s socialist movement. Yet this forgotten moment exposes Harrington’s underlying radicalism, while also casting doubt on the radicals’ latter-day professions of democratic intent.
Fifteen years later, Stanley Aronowitz, now a sociologist, was a leader within Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America, and (according to DSA records) may well have planned the panels Obama attended at the 1983 Cooper Union Conference.39 In all that time, the differences between the factions represented by Harrington and Aronowitz had not disappeared. Yet they had moderated, in part because of the emergence of a third alternative between the two extremes—an alternative that had everything to do with community organizing.
The remainder of Widener’s riveting description of the 1967 Socialist Scholars Conference focuses on a “Black Power” panel session at which plans were made to lever the next summer’s season of urban riots into full-scale revolution. A scheme to burn down twenty American cities was floated, to be followed by “a military struggle in the streets.” Unlike Cuba and elsewhere, panelists patiently explained, revolution would actually be easier in modern cities, where a combination of “violence, sabotage, and traffic tie-ups can bring down the system.” Widener reports that one of the most militant planners was Ivanhoe Donaldson, campaign manager to Georgia State House member Julian Bond. (In the eighties, Bond became one of the most prominent politicians affiliated with Harrington’s DSA.) As campaign manager to one of the most successful black politicians in the South, Donaldson might be presumed to have been a strictly democratic socialist. To the contrary, Donaldson called on revolutionary forces to leave the ghettos and go downtown to torch the banks. Said Donaldson, “There’s a Chase Manhattan Bank at 125th Street in this town. We’re trying to get jobs in a bank we ought to destroy.”40
By 1983, the revolutionary impulse among ostensibly democratic socialists had by no means disappeared, although now it was buried out of sight. At the same time, the democratic tactic had triumphed. In Reagan’s America, socialists largely gave up on revolution (at least in the short and medium term) and settled instead on a program of local electoral resistance. A revived tradition of community organizing supplied the key to the new strategy. Now, instead of capitulating to the system by working at a bank—or overthrowing capitalism by burning banks down—socialist organizers developed more subtle techniques. Press banks with demonstrations from the outside to grab hold of the economy from within. Force the banks to work with you—even fund you—as you slowly turn financial institutions into instruments of social redistribution. Then harness the money and energy of these local battles to a new political movement. This still unknown chapter of American socialist history profoundly shaped Barack Obama.
With the sixties background in mind, let’s return to the 1983 Cooper Union Marx Centennial Conference. Following Frances Fox Piven’s opening remarks (see Chapter One), and two talks on the nuclear freeze movement by European guests, Michael Harrington was introduced to the Great Hall as America’s leading socialist.41 We can piece together the gist of Harrington’s address from a 1983 news report,42 from his broader writings, and from his article, “Standing Up For Marx,” published as a cover story in DSA’s newsletter, Democratic Left, in anticipation of the conference.43
In his Cooper Union remarks, Harrington repudiated the image of a totalitarian-friendly Marx and insisted instead that freedom and democracy are the essence of socialism. This is the claim of Harrington’s larger body of work, which interprets Marx as a misunderstood democrat—misunderstood especially by his own followers, including his close collaborator Friedrich Engels. Harrington goes so far as to claim that Marx himself misunderstood his own best impulses during an early and “immature” ultra-leftist phase.44 Certainly, this is a dubious reading of Marx. Even some of Harrington’s leading admirers reject it.45 In light of his willingness to shift tactics and embrace revolution in 1967, we can ask if Harrington himself honestly believed that Marx was a democrat.
In a sense, Harrington was sincere. As his thought developed from the sixties through the eighties, Harrington increasingly turned away from classic socialist plans for nationalization of the economy. Instead, he embraced a gradualist program in which workers and community groups would gain control of industries from within, redistributing wealth along the way.46 For Harrington, union ownership of a company, or reserved seats for community organizations on boards of directors or public utility commissions, was democracy and was socialism. So even in the event of a violent revolution (which with luck would never be necessary), Harrington believed that community-controlled wealth redistribution would effectively guarantee democracy in a post- revolutionary world. By the eighties, then, Harrington looked less to a socialist central government than to a consortium of unions and community organizations (for example, ACORN in its dealings with banks) to act as guardians of a genuine people’s democracy.
Of course, treating community groups like ACORN or its affiliated SEIU union locals as guardians of decentralized “democracy” in a socialized state will strike many as the very opposite of democracy as Americans understand that term. Yet by 1983, Harrington’s DSA was embracing this vision of a grassroots-based socialism. This is what Harrington was getting at when he told the assembly at Cooper Union: “We must reject collectivism imposed by elites of any sort upon the working people, but allow for people at the base to take over decisions that affect their lives—that is what Marxism is all about.”47
Harrington and his DSA colleagues had already moved to put this socialist vision into practice through work with community organizers (and future Obama colleagues) at Chicago’s Midwest Academy. But Obama wouldn’t have to wait for Chicago. Breakout panels on the second day of the Cooper Union conference would offer a detailed vision of a new, decentralized, community-based brand of socialism.
Not only did Harrington’s address to the all-conference plenary foreshadow this new socialist vision, so did a preceding plenary speech on European disarmament by Luciana Castellina, Italian Communist Party member and deputy in the European and Italian parliaments. Castellina argued that the nuclear freeze movement should be seen as something more than an effort to block deployment of a few American missiles. For her, the freeze movement portended a broader public effort to dismantle the entire Cold War system of competing American- and Soviet-led blocks. “Peace will not be granted by the bipolar leadership of the world,” said Castellina. The solution will come, not “through an agreement reached at the top, but by cutting through this process” via massive mobilization from below.48
Castellina’s well-received address must have delighted Obama, who only three weeks before had published a piece warning nuclear freeze proponents against targeting their efforts too narrowly. And paralleling Harrington’s efforts to shift the focus of socialism away from elites at the top, toward people at the base, Castellina repudiated both Soviet and Western leaders and called mass mobilization from below the real key to large-scale change. The echoes with Obama’s phrase, “Change won’t come from the top… . Change will come from a mobilized grass roots,” are clear.
As if to prove Castellina’s point, her plenary address was followed by a talk from Jean Pierre Cott, a member of the French Parliament and a former cabinet member. A nominally socialist leader, Cott shocked the crowd by calling for the dismantling of at least some of France’s welfare state and a correspondingly increased role for the free market. Cott then issued stinging criticisms of America’s nuclear freeze movement, rejecting its unilateral surrender to the Soviet military buildup.49 “Peace has often been the twin sister of aggression,” warned Cott. “If we want to deter the Soviets from doing anything foolish, this does mean the deployment of arms.” As Cott endorsed NATO’s planned deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles in Europe (the specific targets of the nuclear freeze movement), the crowd exploded into boos and hisses, nearly drowning him out. Cott was left shouting, “Comrades! Let us not kid ourselves!” and pleading for the right to free speech under socialism.50
In any case, between Reagan’s dominance at home and European leaders like Cott, American socialism was increasingly turning from centrally planned collectivism toward grassroots strategies—with a revitalized community organizing tradition at the center of the program. Crucial to this ambitious new socialist vision of community organizing was a novel connection between organizing and electoral politics. With Carter out and Reagan cutting into volunteer programs like VISTA, government-supplied “bread” for organizers was quickly disappearing.51 As livelihoods were put at risk, the traditional reluctance to enter electoral politics gave way. Socialist organizers made plans to harness grassroots power to a progressive political movement of national scope.
In the eighties, Harold Washington’s successful insurgent campaign for mayor of Chicago was the most important example of this new socialist strategy. That may seem surprising, since Harold Washington never described himself as a socialist. Yet the progressive coalition that defeated the Chicago machine and lifted Washington into office was the very model of socialist hopes for America’s political future. Washington was carried to victory by a popular movement of newly politicized black and Hispanic voters, supplemented by progressive whites. These groups were mobilized by activist Chicago churches (like Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ) and by Chicago’s many leftist community organizations.52 In significant part, this coalition was buttressed behind the scenes by Chicago’s powerful but discreet contingent of democratic socialists.
Harold Washington’s successful campaign to replace Chicago’s Democratic machine with an openly “progressive” governing coalition electrified the socialist world, and forever shaped the political ambitions of Barack Obama. Anyone who reads Obama’s Dreams from My Father will know how important Harold Washington’s example was to Obama during his years in Chicago. More interesting is the fact that the 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference took place virtually on the eve of Washington’s final victory. Events in Chicago loomed over the conference and almost surely helped inspire Obama to embrace community organizing. So before plunging into an account of Saturday’s panels, we need to look more closely at the Harold Washington phenomenon and what it meant to socialists in 1983.
Harold Washington’s close ties to Chicago’s socialists reached back to 1977, when he ran a failed campaign against the machine-backed candidate in a special election to replace the elder Mayor Daley (who had died in office). Although Washington did not call himself a socialist and did not completely reject capitalism, his campaign representatives approached several politically skilled and well-connected Chicago socialists for assistance.53 These socialist operatives were members of the New American Movement (NAM), a organization largely made up of ex-sixties radicals. When it was founded in 1970–71, NAM generally avoided electoral politics, working instead to create a mass-based movement for a socialist revolution. NAM is where anti-Harrington radicals like Stanley Aronowitz gathered after the collapse of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in 1969. But as America drifted rightward and hopes for revolution dimmed, a few NAM members began to experiment with left-insurgent politics within the Democratic Party.54
When Chicago NAMers entered Washington’s 1977 campaign, they learned to their delight that he was receptive to some of their most radical policy recommendations. In fact, Washington offered a number of socialist-friendly ideas on his own (the establishment of a publicly owned municipal bank, for example). NAM members contributed substantially to Washington’s position papers and made progress convincing Washington supporters that they could actively work with socialists.55 That first Washington campaign was a turning point in the decade-long process through which the most radical socialists of the sixties put off their revolutionary plans and adopted a Harrington-like gradualist electoral strategy instead.56
The result was the 1982 merger of NAM with Michael Harrington’s DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee) to form the new, Harrington-led Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Although tensions between the revolutionary radicals and Harrington’s followers continued, most DSAers were committed to electoral politics within the Democratic Party.
Harrington’s overall strategy was to force a two-party “realignment” by pulling the Democrats sharply to the left. Harrington expected that this would drive business interests away from the Democrats and into the Republican Party. In theory, however, a flood of newly energized minority and union voters would more than make up for the Democrats’ losses. Harrington hoped that once the two parties were polarized along class lines, the working-class-dominated Democrats would embrace socialism as their natural ideology.57
Harold Washington’s election thrilled America’s socialists because it appeared to portend just such a realignment. Washington himself was about as close to socialist as a major American politician could safely be. His victory was powered by a political awakening manifested in a massive voter-registration campaign in Chicago’s black community. Chicago’s blacks, rather than the city’s white middle-class “lakefront liberals,” were now spearheading a new progressive movement. Could minority voters be a sleeping giant that, once awakened, would vanquish Reagan and usher in a progressive future?58
Best of all, following the lead of his 1977 campaign, Washington openly courted and worked with Chicago’s socialists. In December of 1982, candidate Washington spoke before Chicago DSA’s regular membership meeting, receiving an enthusiastic reception from a crowd more than twice its usual size. DSA members played key roles in the upper echelons of Washington’s campaign, and DSAers involved with unions and community organizations helped bring those groups onto the Washington bandwagon. All told, Chicago DSA was probably the most important non-black group to back Washington. By helping to raise his share of white voters to 12 percent, the DSA arguably handed Harold Washington his victory.59
During the Washington campaign, Chicago Socialist, the newsletter of the Chicago chapter of the DSA, was giddy with excitement. With justice it could claim: “We have established ourselves as a small but important electoral force in the city.”60 This was an extraordinary coup for a group long used to marginality, and still operating only partially in the open. Chicago DSA was not a secret organization. On the other hand, it generally did not openly join in coalitions by, say, having its name printed on the letterhead of groups collectively backing a given candidate or cause. Chicago DSA members tended to influence campaigns as individuals, although in fact their participation was often coordinated by a DSA committee.61 Harold Washington’s willingness to address a regular DSA meeting promised a new world of open recognition and acceptance for Chicago’s socialists. What really made Chicago DSA “heads swirl,” however, was the prospect that the Washington victory might stand as a model for other cities, and even for a broader leftward realignment of the national Democratic Party.62
America’s socialists were certainly paying close attention. A simple picture of Harold Washington makes the point. Obama was a voracious reader, especially during his New York years, and almost surely spent plenty of time around the book and magazine display tables at the Cooper Union conference. If Obama had leafed through a copy of DSA’s then-current newsletter, he would have seen a full-page ad for the country’s most popular socialist magazine, In These Times. The ad features a large picture of “Representative Harold Washington,” just weeks away from victory in his race for mayor. Beneath the picture is an endorsement from Washington: “In These Times … provides valuable ammunition in the fight for civil rights and economic justice.”63
In These Times ran these large Harold Washington picture-ads in leftist publications for the next several months. The striking thing is that openly socialist congressman Ronald Dellums is reduced to a minor blurb at the bottom of the ad. And although Bernie Sanders, the openly socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, had won re-election just a month before, he received only a fraction of the news coverage that socialist publications devoted to Washington. Washington was featured in three In These Times weekly cover stories between February and April of 1983, with a great deal of coverage in between. The more hard-edged Marxist American Guardian, supposedly too radical to put much faith in electoral politics, was also plastered with Washington campaign news for months.
Obama likely saw much of this material. After all, the sort of person who attends socialist conferences is the sort who reads In These Times. The Cooper Union gathering featured an all-conference lunch session on socialist periodicals, so if Obama didn’t know about In These Times before the conference, he likely did after. And given the report that Obama was a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist in 1980 (see Chapters One and Three), it’s quite possible that he was also reading the Guardian.
The extraordinary thing is that, without actually declaring himself a socialist, Harold Washington beat out more openly radical politicians, literally turning himself into the poster boy for American socialism. It was enough that Washington was virtually socialist himself, willing to work closely with organized socialists, and a possible catalyst to a class-based realignment of the parties. Washington also symbolized the potential of an energized, minority-led progressive coalition to alter the balance of political power in the United States. In These Times saw the emotional support for Washington among Chicago’s blacks as a reincarnation of the sixties: “It was like Harold was Martin Luther King all over again.”64 Combine this with Washington’s willingness to push for tax increases and a redistributionist program, and it’s easy to see why In These Times and America’s socialists were swooning.
A celebratory editorial in the April 20–April 26 issue of In These Times captures the optimism—and strategy—of the moment:
The black community in every city is a natural left constituency. This is true not only for municipal politics but also nationally… . In other words, the left, including its socialist wing, can now begin to enter the mainstream of American life along with blacks. For while a fully mobilized black community can provide the solid core of victory, as it did in Chicago, in many places blacks can be successful only in coalition with Hispanics, labor and the left … the new reality is that the coalitions, if they come into being at all, will be based on mobilized black communities and, therefore will most likely be led by blacks.65
This line of thinking was already being bandied about at the Cooper Union Conference, held less than three weeks before that editorial was written. The buzz in the socialist world in April of 1983 was that blacks would be the leaders of a new socialist-friendly American political movement—a reincarnation of the sixties civil rights struggle, uniting all the races, but this time pushing beyond traditional civil rights toward egalitarian “economic rights.” Imagine the effect of this on an alienated and young left-leaning Obama, searching for an identity and career, and yearning to earn himself a bona fide place in America’s black community. Here was a path that could transform Obama from odd man out into the center of attention. In Obama’s own words, here was a way of “redefining the larger American community” by cobbling together a coalition of “black, white, and brown,” a coalition Obama’s unique background would fit him to lead. And at Saturday’s Cooper Union panels, he’d learn exactly how to go about it.
Although it’s impossible to know with certainty which panels Obama attended at this and subsequent Socialist Scholars Conferences, we can certainly make informed guesses. Given his interests, for example, it’s tough to imagine Obama passing up the early afternoon Cooper Union panel on “Race & Class in Marxism.” After all, Obama was in the midst of a painful personal struggle with his own racial identity, and we know from Dreams that he was preoccupied with the confluence of race and class. It’s easy enough to highlight a number of other panels at the 1983–85 Socialist Scholars Conferences that Obama was likely to have attended. The details of Obama’s movements, however, are not the central issue, since the gist of the themes treated in these panels would surely have gotten through to Obama in any case.
In the early- to mid-1980s, renewed interest in a grassroots electoral strategy linked to community organizing, voter registration, and minority mobilization was widespread in the DSA. Any number of panels Obama might have attended would have touched on this same strategy. The grassroots approach was highlighted in the 1983 all-conference plenary addresses. And as the American Marxist Guardian wrote of the 1984 conference, many of the best discussions at these events took place in the hallways, between sessions.66 No doubt Obama would have heard the buzz about community organizing there as well.
Then there are the books. Internal DSA files show conference organizers making concerted efforts to display panelists’ books at literature tables.67 We know that Obama was reading voraciously at just this time. A 2008 piece on Obama in the London Sunday Times quotes a friend and fellow organizer remarking on the large number of books lining Obama’s otherwise spare Chicago apartment in the mid-1980s. Along with philosophy, history, and black literature, there were also “some works on revolution.”68 No doubt a good number of Obama’s revolutionary books came from the New York Socialist Scholars Conferences. So Obama could easily have read the work of panelists he missed—or gone more deeply into the substance of talks that interested him. In short, while we cannot know Obama’s panel attendance with certainty, considering panels on his favorite topics, all-conference plenary sessions, hallway conversations, a general lunch meeting on socialist journals, and readily available books and other literature, it’s possible to piece together a picture of what Obama learned at these conferences.
A morning panel on “Social Movements” at the 1983 Cooper Union Conference could easily have introduced Obama to his new vocation.69 This panel was largely devoted to community organizing and its ties to the DSA’s electoral strategy. Featuring two “stars,” Frances Fox Piven and Barbara Ehrenreich, the Social Movements panel was probably the biggest draw of the morning. Certainly, in light of what we know of his interests, Obama would have been far less attracted to competing panels on sexuality, history, labor, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.
Peter Dreier is listed as the first speaker at the Social Movements panel. In the years leading up to the Cooper Union conference, Dreier had published a series of pieces on grassroots political strategies in the DSA newsletter, Democratic Left, and in Social Policy, the journal that serves as the intellectual home base of American community organizing.70 Like Piven, Dreier was an influential member of the DSA’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Dreier now writes frequently for The Nation, and has been a major influence on community organizing for decades. In his various writings, Dreier’s concern is to deepen the ties between community organizing and electoral politics, and also between community organizing and socialism.
“Socialist Incubators,” a 1980 piece in Social Policy, lays out the vision of community organizing that informed Dreier’s presentation at the Cooper Union Conference.71 Dreier’s strategic goal in that piece is to combine diverse community organizations into a national grassroots movement to “democratize control of major social, economic, and political institutions.” A drawing that illustrates the article shows a line of everyday folks walking into a board of directors meeting at a company called “U.S. Motors.” In other words, in this socialist utopia, members of unions and grassroots community organizations control America’s businesses. Dreier is seeking public control of America’s economy, yet means to accomplish it from below—through pressure from leftist community organizations. (Dreier would later serve as a key strategist in ACORN’s campaign to pressure banks into funding high-risk mortgages to low-credit customers.)
In Dreier’s vision, a grassroots movement for public control from below could gradually overcome American cultural resistance to state-run enterprises. With community organizations leading the way to a more collectively oriented national consciousness, changes like the importation of a Canadian-style government-run health-care system would eventually follow. So in Dreier’s view, community organizations are “socialist incubators,” slowly pushing their own members—and eventually America itself—toward socialist consciousness.
Ultimately, says Dreier, “socialist incubators must lead to the electoral arena.” If community organizations like ACORN, Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), and campus anti-apartheid activists could unite, with help from socialist advisors, they could catapult radicals in the mold of Berkeley congressman Ronald Dellums into public office. Politicians who thought of themselves as part of this grassroots socialist movement could “provide the legitimacy and staff resources to give national coherence to an otherwise fragmented movement.” In short, a synergy between grassroots community organizations and politicians that they themselves had put into office would slowly “incubate” an American rebirth of socialism.
Still bolder aspects of Dreier’s strategic vision are laid out in his February 1979 Social Policy essay, “The Case for Transitional Reform.”72 This piece, influential within organizing circles but virtually unknown outside, supplies a Marxist framework and a long-term strategy for community organizing. Here Dreier draws on French Marxist theorist Andre Gorz’s notion of “transitional reforms,” or “non-reformist reforms,” to suggest a way of transforming American capitalism into socialism. The central idea, borrowed from Gorz, is to create government programs that only seem to be “reforms” of the capitalist system. Rightly understood, these supposed reforms are so incompatible with capitalism that they gradually precipitate the system’s collapse.
Dreier’s strategy has two parts. On the one hand, quasi-socialist institutions need to be pre-established in the heart of capitalist society, so as to turn a coming moment of crisis in a socialist direction. These quasi-socialist institutions, of course, would be groups like ACORN, with a significant semi-governmental role via their insertion into the banking system, public utility commissions, business boards of directors, and so forth. The second part of the strategy involves “injecting unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis.”
Dreier has in mind a “revolution of rising entitlements” that “cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class.” “Proximately,” says Dreier, “the process leads to expansion of state activity and budgets, and … to fiscal crisis in the public sector. In the longer run, it may give socialist norms an opportunity for extension or at least visibility.” So Dreier’s plan is to gradually expand government spending until the country nears fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance. Dreier fears that this intentionally wrought crisis might actually backfire and produce fascism instead of socialism. That is why he believes it’s so important to have a left-wing grassroots movement already in place. Left-wing community organizers will turn the national fiscal crisis in a socialist direction. Dreier seems to think that some revolutionary violence may emerge at this point. Yet his stress is on conditions designed to achieve a gradual transition to socialism.
“The Case for Transitional Reform” appeared in 1979, just two years after Harold Washington’s first mayoral campaign began to convince some NAMers that left-insurgent politics within the Democratic Party might be a viable socialist option after all. Dreier’s piece marked a similar turning point in the world of community organizing, part of the process whereby radical socialists began to give up on immediate revolutionary hopes and accept “reformist” strategies instead. In the late seventies, and especially in the Reagan-dominated eighties, radical socialists began to turn in force to both electoral politics and community organizing. Dreier caught the spirit of the times by crafting a strategy combining gradualist tactics with a broader Marxist vision for radical social change.
A brief news report on the Social Movements panel makes it clear that Dreier’s Cooper Union talk developed themes initially laid out in his “Socialist Incubators” piece—the need to gather local community organizations into broader political coalitions in synergistic relationship with candidates (preferably grassroots organizers themselves) at the state and local levels.73 Ultimately, said Dreier, this is the way to combat Reaganomics. Dreier’s strategy certainly helps make sense of Obama’s original definition of community organizing as a response to Reagan’s “dirty deeds.” Obama’s message is Dreier’s message: “Change won’t come from the top… . Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” Dreier may or may not have broached his “crisis strategy” at the Cooper Union panel, but Obama surely learned about it eventually, since Gorz’s notion of “non-reformist reforms” is well known among community organizers. In fact, yet another Cooper Union panel could easily have discussed Gorz.
We can read what is probably a reworked version of Dreier’s Cooper Union talk in a cover piece he co-published with John Atlas and John Stephens (both also active in the DSA) in the July 23–30, 1983, issue of The Nation.74 This piece, “Progressive Politics in 1984,” came to embody the political strategy favored by those DSA members most committed to community organizing. It was reprinted in DSA’s internal “discussion bulletin,” Socialist Forum, and passed around at the 1983 national DSA convention. Obama likely saw the article when it came out in The Nation. (Interestingly, when you turn the page to get to the continuation, you’re confronted by a large picture of Harold Washington staring out from that omnipresent full-page ad for In These Times.)
The piece begins with the story of Doreen Del Banco, a community organizer who won election to the Connecticut State Legislature. Because of Del Banco’s connections to left-labor and community groups, “she was able to mobilize a small army of experienced and energetic campaign workers.” Del Banco worked with one of the “Citizens Action” groups, part of a loose national coalition of community organizations coordinated through Chicago’s Midwest Academy, the crypto-socialist organization that Obama himself would someday develop ties to. In their bylines, the authors of the Nation piece made no secret of their active association with the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s also of interest that, twenty-five years later, Peter Dreier would serve as an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.75
The Dreier, Atlas, and Stephens Nation piece touched on ACORN and the SEIU and emphasized the role of community organizations and voter registration drives in Harold Washington’s Chicago victory. In effect, this piece, which Obama may have heard a trial version of at Cooper Union, foreshadows his entire political career (as does Dreier’s “Socialist Incubators,” which mentions a number of groups with which Obama developed close ties). Dreier, Atlas, and Stephens call their approach the “party-within-a-party-plan”—a way to use the lever of community organizing to force the Democrats far to the left, thereby sparking a broader class-based realignment of the two parties. Here was a way of placing community organizing at the service of Michael Harrington’s ultimate strategic dream.
Harold Washington’s stunning upset victory in the Chicago Democratic mayoral primary came on February 22, 1983. The Democratic nomination is usually tantamount to election in Chicago, but with the city divided between black and white—machine and independent—the outcome of Washington’s general election battle with Republican Bernard Epton was anything but a foregone conclusion. The Cooper Union Conference, held just ten days before the April 12 general election, lay very much in the shadow of Chicago politics.
In the runup to Cooper Union, Peter Dreier used Harold Washington’s Chicago primary upset to tout a new voter registration plan designed by fellow community organizing strategist and DSA Executive Committee member Frances Fox Piven. In DSA’s internal “discussion bulletin,” Socialist Forum, Dreier highlighted the importance of a new article by Piven and her longtime collaborator Richard Cloward, “Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: A Movement Strategy.”76
Cloward and Piven wanted workers at various government agencies to start registering welfare recipients standing in line to collect their benefits. Pointing out that many DSA members already worked in welfare waiting rooms, legal service offices, and related agencies, Dreier urged full-scale socialist support for Piven’s plan. The key to success, said Dreier, would be to combine DSA’s electoral strategy with its heavy involvement in community organizing. If socialists could extend the reach of existing grassroots groups to still-unorganized poor and minority communities, and then tie these grassroots groups to registration campaigns on the model of Project Vote, the Harold Washington model might be replicated across the country. This strategy, of course, virtually describes Obama’s career path, and was a focus of much of the rest of the Social Movements panel. You can almost hear Obama saying to himself, “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change … And for socialism.”
Piven herself was on this panel, the thrust of which was optimism about a long-term strategy in which community organizing would combine voter registration and minority mobilization to turn the country left, thereby giving socialism a new lease on life.
As explained in the article Dreier was touting, Cloward and Piven’s strategy went well beyond mere voter registration. Their plan was to turbo-charge leftist politics by actively provoking conflict. Cloward and Piven expected that government workers doing effectively political registration work at welfare lines would get into trouble. Government employees registering welfare recipients on government property as a way of fighting Ronald Reagan’s budget cuts were sure to be “charged with exploiting their positions and coercing their clients for self-interested and partisan motives.” Cloward and Piven actually wanted to provoke this sort of attack. They believed that as soon as attempts were made to rein in politicized welfare workers, their clients would explode in protest, kicking off a massive movement reminiscent of the effort to register southern black voters in the sixties. “Until a registration campaign provokes just this level of conflict,” wrote Cloward and Piven, “all is prologue.”77
So according to Cloward and Piven, voter registration by itself would not be enough to “break the grip of the ruling groups.” Capitalists and their tame Democratic Party allies would continue to manipulate the consciousness of poor voters into supporting the current economic system. According to Cloward and Piven, only with the emergence of a massive protest movement on the model of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the sixties would the Democratic Party be “disrupted and transformed.”78 A Democratic Party flooded with poor and minority voters angry about attempts to keep them from the ballot box would kick out moderate politicians and usher in the long-awaited two-party realignment around competing capitalist and working-class poles. The path to an American socialism would then be open.
So when Obama compared his interest in grassroots organizing to the heady days of the civil rights movement, he was right. The socialist organizers at Cooper Union consciously thought of their strategies as attempts to reignite the driving emotions of the sixties.
Frank Reisman, another member of the Social Movements panel, would have delivered to his listeners a treasure house of strategic thinking about community organizing.79 Reisman edited Social Policy and helped to turn that (largely socialist) journal into the most important intellectual voice of community organizing in the country. Dreier’s “Socialist Incubators” piece, his article on “non-reformist reforms,” Cloward and Piven’s voter registration piece, and many other seminal articles on community organizing were published in Social Policy from the late seventies through the eighties and beyond. The editor of Social Policy could have provided Obama with the keys to the intellectual kingdom of community organizing.
Given the young Obama’s deep personal interest in issues of race, class, and the links between them, the early afternoon panel on “Race & Class in Marxism” would surely have caught his eye. The only truly serious competition with the Race & Class in Marxism panel would have been a session on “State and the Economy.” The draw here was less the topic than the fact that Detroit congressman John Conyers was the first speaker.80 We know that when Obama sent out letters seeking organizer jobs, he also contacted “any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda.”81 That would certainly have included Conyers, who had a well-established cooperative relationship with the DSA. Although it seems unlikely that Obama would have passed up the entire Race & Class in Marxism panel, it’s easy to imagine him dashing over to catch Conyers’s talk and then moving back to the session on race and class. (Obviously, we can’t know Obama’s movements in detail. The point is that the themes we’re discussing were conference-wide.)
Although a Conyers presentation on “State and the Economy” might seem far afield of community organizing, that is not necessarily the case. In February 1982 in Detroit, about a year before the Cooper Union Conference, Conyers addressed DSA’s first public event after its creation from the merger of DSOC and NAM. Here’s how Chicago DSA covered Conyers’s 1982 talk in its newsletter:
Representative Conyers … reminded DSA members that “liberal bullshit politics never worked and never will work, and that’s why we got Reagan.” Conyers urged the organization to emphasize local grassroots development, a strategy many DSA members agree the organization should adopt.82
So even if Obama had dashed over to catch Conyers’s talk, he might have gotten an earful about grassroots strategies and community organizing.
Back at the Race & Class in Marxism panel, Stanley Aronowitz was holding forth. I’m going to concentrate, however, on talks by Manning Marable and Cornel West.83 Although Cornel West is the bigger name today, in 1983, West was only beginning his ascent. At the time, Manning Marable was a vice chair of the DSA and “probably the best known black Marxist in the country.”84 That’s how West himself described Marable in his review of Marable’s 1983 book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Since this book appeared either just before or shortly after the Cooper Union Conference, and since it constitutes an in-depth discussion of race, class, and Marxism, it’s a safe bet that Marable’s panel presentation would have conveyed the core ideas of the book, his most ambitious work to date. It also seems likely that Obama would have made a point of eventually reading this book.
The first thing that strikes you about How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is Marable’s deep sense of alienation from the United States. “To be Black and socialist in America is to be a nonconformist,” he begins.85 In his preface, Marable quotes his wife’s half- joking comment that, after publication, they’d be forced to flee the country. Marable’s half-serious reply: “Our bags are always packed.”86 Marable opens the book by excerpting Frederick Douglass’s bitter 1852 rejection of American Fourth of July celebrations, as if nothing had changed in the United States since slavery.87
Marable’s bitterness flows from his central thesis. While many argue that black poverty is caused by a history of systematic minority exclusion from the American system, Marable claims that the system itself is designed to make blacks poor: “America’s ‘democratic’ government and ‘free enterprise’ system are structured deliberately and specifically to maximize Black oppression.”88 For Marable, racism doesn’t contradict the American way. Instead it reveals the oppressive truth of the entire capitalist system.
Although a vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, in his writing Marable is far more willing than Michael Harrington to openly repudiate American democratic norms. His model in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is the influential twentieth-century African-American author W. E. B. DuBois, whom Marable says was a life-long socialist, even when DuBois downplayed that socialism for strictly tactical reasons.89 For Marable, “no real democracy has ever existed in the United States.”90 Control of America by white capitalists, he says, renders the very notion of democracy absurd.91 While Marable concedes that Stalinism had its problems, he nonetheless sees the Soviet Union as closer to true democracy than a capitalist United States will ever be.92 Black crime is not the fault of the young men who commit it, Marable adds, but of the capitalist system itself.93 In short, says Marable, it is impossible to struggle against racism and still remain a proponent of capitalism.94 As for American democracy: “Without hesitation, we must explain that a basic social transformation within America’s social and economic structures would involve radical changes that would be viewed as clearly undemocratic by millions of people.”95 In particular, he says, the rights of any who discriminate against African-Americans, women, Chicanos, and gays would be restricted.96
If Obama did eventually read How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, he would surely have been struck by Marable’s choice of a poem by Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, to open the chapter on black capitalism.97 Davis’s poem is a bitter jab at efforts by middle-class blacks to distance themselves from their poverty-stricken roots. As for blacks who go into politics, says Marable: “The instant that the Black politician accepts the legitimacy of the State, the rules of the game, his/her critical faculties are destroyed permanently, and all that follows are absurdities.”98 Marable argues that between mass incarceration of young black men and Reagan’s budget cuts, America is moving toward subtle fascism and de facto genocide of American blacks.99 As Marable attacks America, excoriates the prison system, rejects “middle-classness,” and spins out theories of Reagan’s genocidal intent, it’s tough not to think of Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons touch on all these themes. Wright may or may not have read Marable, but the larger point is that both men were espousing a common hard-left view of the United States.
Given Marable’s bitter repudiation of America, you might think he rejects conventional politics altogether. Not so. The intriguing thing about Marable is the way he combines a sweeping and embittered opposition to the entire American system with a far more subtle and patient political strategy. Marable does have qualified praise for a few black politicians, particularly Congressmen Ronald Dellums and John Conyers, whom he describes as “open advocates of democratic socialism.”100 Marable has praise for Harold Washington as well.101 For Marable, properly calibrated leftist political gradualism in the present promises to undo the entire American system in the future: “The revolt for reforms within the capitalist state today transcends itself dia- lectically to become a revolution against the racist/capitalist system tomorrow.”102
Ultimately, then, for all his rejectionist rhetoric, Marable’s strategy and tactics bear a striking resemblance to those of Dreier and Piven: “Progressives can gain positions within the state, especially at municipal and state levels, which can help fund and support grass roots interests and indirectly assist in the development of a socialist majority.”103 Like Dreier, Marable even invokes Gorz’s notion of “non-reformist reforms,” with universal health care as one of his prime examples.104 In the end, Marable’s program echoes what Obama could have heard at the Social Movements panel: Penetrate the legislatures, expand entitlements, restrict capitalism through regulation, and place all of this in synergy with a proto-socialist grassroots movement.
Marable would likely have added something to his panel talk about the Harold Washington phenomenon. We know events in Chicago were on his mind, because Marable had a piece in the Guardian just two weeks before the Cooper Union Conference entitled “Many messages for Marxists from Chicago mayoral race.”105 There Marable says that Washington’s “social democratic” program places him “slightly to the left of almost every mayor of any U.S. city—with the exception of Berkeley’s [openly socialist] Gus Newport.” And in comments that could conceivably have been made at the Cooper Union conference itself, in an April 6 Guardian article, Marable argues for an electoral strategy for blacks built around “mass-based organizing” of “third world forces.”106 Once again, we can almost hear Obama saying to himself, “That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”
Cornel West’s talk, while it may have touched lightly on the need for multi-racial coalitions and grassroots organizing, was important for another reason. West’s panel presentation that day could easily have been Obama’s introduction to the world of black liberation theology. With multiple chances to hear from West at other Socialist Scholars Conferences, one or another talk by West likely helped lead Obama to Reverend Wright.
In 1983, West was a young assistant professor at Union Theological Seminary. Union was home to James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, and Jeremiah Wright’s theological mentor. West worked closely with Cone, serving as a bridge between the socialist world and the black theological community. West and Cone co-taught a seminar at Union Theological Seminary on “Black Theology and Marxist Thought.” Out of that seminar came a 1980 essay by Cone, “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?” That piece was issued as a pamphlet by DSA, with an added commentary by Michael Harrington.107 The same pamphlet was co-published by the “Black Theology Project,” a subdivision of a larger group called “Theology in the Americas.”108 Theology in the Americas (TIA) and its Black Theology Project (BTP) subdivision were organizations dedicated to propagating James Cone–style liberation theology.109 West was a powerful figure within both TIA and BTP, and so was Jeremiah Wright.
The DSA Records at New York’s Tamiment Library contain an April 13, 1982, letter from Cornel West to Michael Harrington.110 Harrington had just met with West and several other black theologians from Union Theological Seminary in an effort to recruit them to the newly formed DSA. Apparently Harrington got a cool reception from many of the Union people, suspicious that DSA would not have the best interest of the black community at heart. West, however, responded positively, enclosing membership dues and telling Harrington of his desire to “legitimate socialist alternatives” in public discourse, while also infusing the African-American church with socialist analysis and ideas. In the letter, West calls himself a “Council Communist,” a Marxist tradition flowing out of the work of Rosa Luxemburg, situated halfway between purely democratic socialism, on the one side, and authoritarian Bolshevism, on the other.
West expands on these themes in his first (and still, he says, favorite) book, Prophesy Deliverance!111 The book was published in the fall of 1982, just months before the Cooper Union Conference, so it’s a safe bet that West would have laid out the gist of Prophesy Deliverance! at the Race & Class in Marxism panel.
The interesting thing about Prophesy Deliverance! is that West puts his Marxist points across by way of an extended history of black liberation theology in America. So the doings of James Cone and his affiliated organizations, Theology in the Americas and the Black Theology Project, are a very important part of the book. All this may have been part of West’s talk at Cooper Union. In Prophesy Deliverance! West portrays black theology as passing through various stages. The current or fourth stage, according to West, is called, “Black Theology of Liberation as Critique of U.S. Capitalism.”112 West mentions Cone’s recent work as part of that stage, and also highlights an official 1977 statement by the Black Theology Project. Here’s a bit of that BTP manifesto: “Exploitative, profit-oriented capitalism is a way of ordering life fundamentally alien to human value in general, and to black humanity in particular.”113 Online biographies of Jeremiah Wright list him as a BTP board member from 1975 to 1995, so he may well have helped author that 1977 manifesto.114 Certainly Wright was deeply involved in BTP activities in the mid-1980s. In short, there is every possibility that as early as 1983, at the very moment he decided to become a community organizer, Obama was introduced to a socialist-friendly tradition of black theology whose most important representative in Chicago was Jeremiah Wright. And this would be far from the only opportunity Obama would have had to hear from Cornel West at a Socialist Scholars Conference. In fact, at the 1984 conference, Obama would have had an opportunity to hear from James Cone himself.
The place of community organizing and minority coalition-building in socialist electoral strategies were pervasive concerns of the DSA. Whichever panels Obama attended, whoever he met in the hallways, whatever journals and books he browsed at the literature tables—in one form or another, he would have run into talk about community organizing and the role of African-Americans in socialist politics. A late-afternoon session on “Urban Politics & Policy” would have been another venue in which Obama could have encountered these issues, as would a seemingly unrelated late-afternoon session on “Third World Socialisms,” featuring Paulette Pierce, a key member of DSA’s African-American Commission. Pierce had a special interest, not only in overseas issues, but also in minority coalition-building in American politics.
Another striking example of the breadth of DSA interest in these issues can be found in an article by Cooper Union conference organizer Bogdan Denitch in the spring 1983 issue of Social Policy, entitled “Confronting Coalition Contradictions.”115 Denitch was a close Harrington ally, whose interest was on the opposite end of the DSA spectrum from, say, Manning Marable or Cornel West. Denitch was a proponent of a predominantly “economic” socialism and tended to avoid various forms of identity politics. His special interest was Europe.
Yet in the issue of Social Policy that immediately followed the Cooper Union conference, Denitch published an essay on the significance of Harold Washington and minority-led coalitions for socialist politics in America. The point of Denitch’s brief Social Policy piece is that Harold Washington’s Chicago victory points the way to the most effective strategy for uniting a fractious left. The answer, says Denitch, is to build black-led coalitions around economic issues. Denitch could easily have taken up these points at his Cooper Union appearances. As conference organizer, Denitch delivered remarks at the all-conference closing plenary session and spoke at a panel on “Images of Socialism,” as well. Clearly, in the spring of 1983, Harold Washington’s use of grassroots organizing and black church activism had socialists of all stripes buzzing. So Denitch’s piece is yet more evidence that, whether through hallway banter, all-conference plenary sessions, or whatever set of panels he may have attended, Obama would have repeatedly run into the same set of strategic themes at Cooper Union.
Every aspect of Obama’s treatment of his career choice in Dreams from My Father was an active theme at the 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference. Want to fight the “dirty deeds” of Reagan and his minions? Become a community organizer. Do it well—and do it in a minority community—and you just might become the next Harold Washington, leading a coalition of blacks, whites, and Hispanics (“black, white, and brown”) for a socialist “redefinition” of America. Here, in community organizing and its associated proto-socialist political movement, was a rebirth of the sixties struggle for civil rights, yet focused now on economic equality. Through participation in this movement, Obama could earn himself a place in the African-American community, transforming America in the process. Obama says it all in Dreams. Only the socialism is omitted. Yet by suppressing the socialist context of his organizing, a deadly serious radical strategy to transform the United States goes missing, buried beneath a heart-rending tale of existential agony and personal redemption.
As for socialism itself, Obama’s conservative critics (along with Newsweek) seem to have a better handle on the term than anyone else. The idea that America might inadvertently and incrementally fall into socialism is a great deal closer to the strategies of “actual existing socialists” than textbook definitions of economies nationalized at a single revolutionary blow. The reason Americans don’t understand this is that the universe of post-sixties socialism has remained largely hidden from public view. Yet this is Obama’s world. It’s time we got to know it.