People are asking me where we are now – how the hell do I know? I’ve heard from several people who really are losing their retirement savings. It’s terrible, and their lives are going to change very dramatically. But our perception should be this is a rare opening.

The old order is crumbling. Politics right now is the fight of the old order, represented not just by Wall Street but other interests, to cling to their diminishing power. And up to now, they have been assisted and supported in that by both political parties and most ‘responsibles’, so called. But that, too, is changing rapidly.

So you have to now put aside the reflexive despair that people on the left usually experience, even about the election outcome and our new president, and look at it as a dynamic process that we can influence. It breaks all ideological and practical political barriers, and is a serious crisis for the nation and also the world, but is also liberating.

This is the moment when we talk about the society we want to help create, in the most ambitious terms. And I’m not being a pie-eyed optimist, I understand all the reasons why that may well fail, but this is a moment of history people rarely, rarely get, and we should try to make the most of it.

William Greider is the national affairs correspondent at The Nation and author of Secrets of the Temple, a history of the Federal Reserve

Frances Fox Piven

Like Bill, I think that there are a lot of unknowns. We aren’t quite clear about whether the government bailouts simply mean more redistribution of American wealth upward and more scapegoating of the poor for the crisis along the way – as, for example, mortgage lending to poor people is blamed for the collapse in the markets.

But I want to talk rather about the long-standing belief on the left that economic crisis, although it causes terrible things to happen, also generates new political possibilities.

Whenever we say that, we’re really thinking about the Great Depression, because it generated a lot of economic insecurity and real hardship, but that was combined with virtually a total discrediting of the economic ruling class. When the economy failed, we finally got a candidate, FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt], who railed against the economic royalists in his speeches, and then we got a Congress that hauled these people before Congressional committees and machine-gunned them with questions, and this had a huge impact on the political culture of the country.

For a big moment, maybe 10, 20 years, people were not in the grip of the ideas of the economic ruling class. Maybe something like that will happen now. The press, and Congress, have already moved away from their former idiotic worship of the Delphic statements of Alan Greenspan [ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve]. Now people are really angry about the terms of the bailout. And there was a Chicago sheriff who said he wasn’t going to evict anybody who defaulted on their mortgages. That’s what happens in this kind of crisis because who’s right, who’s wrong, the way the world is – everything is up for grabs.

So when the reigning ideas are questioned like this, deep economic reform becomes possible. Obama has brought out lots of new voters. And his election has got to be only the beginning of the period of transformation, not the end. In the New Deal, if that’s our model, it wasn’t FDR winning in 1932 that led to significant economic social and political change in the country; it was that FDR and his rhetoric – rhetoric designed to win elections – gave people a sense that they mattered, that they had influence, that they had hope. He created a climate which helped to encourage the great social movements of the 1930s: the movements of the unemployed, the farmers, the aged, and especially, of course, the labour movement. Those movements created a lot of social disorder, but also a lot of instability in the electoral system. And because they did, FDR responded to their demands.

Bill Greider said we should talk big, we should think big, we should think about how to reorganise the economy, we should think about the end of empire perhaps. I agree, but I don’t think we should overlook the more homely reforms that people will respond to. We don’t want a national health system that gives everything to the providers; we want to reign in the providers in our national health care system. We want good income support systems, a decent retirement system, and we want to regulate the unregulated economy.

In other words, if we really are in the middle of a new period of possibility, we should also be willing, not only to think big, but to take it one step at a time, building the institutional arrangements that empower ordinary people, and stand as levees, restraining the next episode of market plunder if it comes.

Frances Fox Piven is the author of The Breaking of the American Social Compact and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote

Doug Henwood

People say the credit crunch is not their problem; but it is ours, too. Some people say ‘let it all fall down’. I say that’s not politics, that’s nihilism. There is a temptation to echo what Edmund Wilson said after the 1929 crash: ‘one couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden, unexpected collapse of that stupid, gigantic fraud’. But the unemployment rate hit 25 per cent in 1933, and I don’t think we want to see a re-run of that.

But we can make the situation better.

First of all, equity infusions: the government should buy stock in the banks rather than asset purchases. There is a study by some IMF [International Monetary Fund] economists that looked at scores of banking crises around the world and they found that equity infusions, recapitalising the banks, is a much more effective way of dealing with this than buying bad assets and trying to sell them.

Next, financing it. Yes, it’s a giveaway to the bankers, but there is plenty of money at the top of society. The top 10 per cent of the population has 45 per cent of the income, the top 1 per cent about 16 per cent. The top 1 per cent has about $2 trillion in income – and we don’t have to take it all at once, but we can take bits of it over the course of several years…

Debt relief. The IMF study also showed that debt relief is an important part of getting out of any kind of financial crisis, so this is an instance in which economic efficiency and social justice coincide. So that is an important demand to make.

Re-regulate the financial system. The financial system is so sprawling, and complicated, global, and interconnected that it is a project that is going to take a long time, but has to be done so we don’t have a rerun of this nonsense five or ten years down the road.

If we are going to nationalise the banks, why not control them as well, and not just give them a blank cheque to run things as they were? There is an ideological opening; with the state getting so explicitly involved in rescuing the mess that finance brought on itself and us, there is an opportunity to push things in a better direction. Out of the wreckage we could create all kinds of new economic development institutions – non-profit, co-operative, locally owned. We can create institutions that provide low-cost financial services for people who are being fleeced at the moment.

And finally, just a few words on the politics at the moment. People are talking about the end of neoliberalism. Maybe so, though I see a lot more continuity between neoliberalism and the 400 years of capitalism that went before it than some people do. But that aside, there is an idea, popular among the left, right, and centre, that neoliberalism means that the state got out of the economy. The state never got out of the economy; markets are not the state of nature, they need to be established and maintained by state power. The nature of that state and what it does is what matters.

Doug Henwood’s books include Wall Street and After the New Economy. He is working on a study of the current American ruling class

Arun Gupta

I’m going to start with my conclusions first. I agree with Doug on nearly everything, though I think governments have got out of the markets. Their role is now only a supporting role, funnelling wealth to corporations – the crony capitalism that has run rampant.

Now we are in a severe economic crisis that requires dramatic action. It’s gone from the US to global and from the financial sector to the rest of the economy. The only institutions that can do anything about it are governmental, and there has to be global concerted action. Our role is to make sure that whatever the policies enacted, they are democratic, transparent, and accountable.

This failure and the need for systemic government interventions mean that our work is largely done on an ideological level in terms of arguing for the necessity of, for example, something like a green New Deal, or single-payer national health care, which are two proposals you hear a lot. That’s because it’s hard to argue against it when you have this massive intervention in the economy. This crisis might also end up doing what the anti-war movement hasn’t been able to do – bring about an end to the Iraq war.

But without a mass-based dynamic opposition with a clear vision, agenda and strategy, the neoliberal model will just reassert itself. And it is already reasserting itself. We see the US reportedly turning to the IMF for consultation, and Iceland going hat in hand to the IMF for a loan, and what they’ll get in return is a severe austerity program.

What we need is a poly-culture economy. Without it we’ll be vulnerable to other global contagions, and without diverse economic structures, whatever regulatory frameworks are put in place will just be undermined and overturned down the road. There is a huge opening for the left and anti-capitalists. I don’t think it’s that hard to come up with detailed programmatic proposals. What is much more difficult – and this is something we must tackle because the left does not like to think about it – is organisation and ideology.

I’ve been in a lot of meetings and discussions in the last few weeks around organising against the Wall Street bailout plan, and it comes up time and again. People don’t want to confront the need for organisation and the need to have a clear ideology because once you do it leads to political battles. But without it we can’t say who the agent of change is, and we don’t have anything to organise around.

Arun Gupta is the editor of the Indypendent, the newspaper of New York City’s Indymedia centre, and is currently writing a book about the decline of the American empire

Naomi Klein

One thing Arun didn’t talk about is the fact that he was the person who sent the email that led to the great protest on Wall Street – the email that made news all over before the protest even happened. Some of the signs at that demonstration, I think, give us an indication of where we might take this. My favourite was one which said ‘No socialism for the rich until the rest of us get some!’

As Doug said, crises are not new, and we may be in uncharted territory but we have experienced these bursting bubbles before. I have a chapter in The Shock Doctrine about the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 called ‘Let it Burn’, because the very same banks that have been so anxious to get bailouts from US taxpayers now, at the time were saying, and this was a quote, that ‘what Asia needs is more pain’. Because, of course, Citibank, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, went into Asia after the crisis reached bottom and bought up the crown jewels of the Asian ‘tiger’ economies.

Anyway, what I wanted to quote to you from the book is something Alan Greenspan said at the time. He said that what he thought was being witnessed with the Asian financial crisis was ‘a very dramatic event towards a consensus of the type of market system which we have [in America]‘. In other words, Greenspan thought that the crisis was a lesson being taught to the Asian tigers for daring to protect their national industry. And, of course, the IMF imposed structural adjustment programmes which forced them to lower those barriers – which allowed the very Wall Street firms at the centre of this crisis to go in and engage in what the New York Times Magazine at the time called ‘the world’s biggest going out of business sale’.

Michel Camdessus, the head of the IMF at the time, agreed. He saw the crisis as Asia being reborn into American-style free markets. He said economic models are not eternal: very sanguine! There are times when they are useful and other times when they become outdated and must be abandoned. Once again, he saw it as a lesson.

And I think what’s interesting about that is that maybe it’s time for progressives to think of themselves as a sort of people’s IMF, though in more democratic terms, as we now really have evidence that this market model is broken. And clearly what is needed is some dramatic structural adjustment in the USA. So let’s play IMF.

Again in Argentina in 2001 the IMF tried to use the economic crisis to push through more structural adjustment, but the problem was that just a few months earlier they had been holding up Argentina as their model student – and they had already privatised everything. Also, the country itself had been very much indoctrinated in the idea that they were the model student, that they had followed the rules. And so it was much harder to sell the idea that you needed more neoliberal structural adjustment, and instead what you had was a popular revolt – and I think this is really important in this moment – against the entire expert class.

The slogan which was in the streets is a really good slogan for this moment: ‘Que se vayan todos’ – all of them must go. This was the period where they went through five presidents in three weeks, but it wasn’t just the politicians who went, it was the pundits, the economists, and because they had boasted so much about the miracle of Argentina, they found themselves bereft of the usual tools. Now, I think the United States in this moment is experiencing something a little bit similar in the sense that there is this consensus, and Obama has turned his election campaign into a kind of referendum on Friedmanite economic policies. Whether or not he is actually going to do it I think depends very much on the forces that we’re talking about in this room.

I want to talk about some short-term structural adjustment – the kind of pressure that can be placed on Obama right now.

Bob Rubin, Larry Summers – recently implicated in a fantastic piece in the New York Times, which I never thought I would read, questioning the Greenspan legacy, and pairing Rubin with Greenspan at every turn in creating the crisis we have now – have got to go, this is really crucial. I’m not just trying to make a popular point here, these guys are advising Obama on a day-to-day basis. When he wants to say that he has great people surrounding him, he talks about Bob Rubin.

And then, of course, we need to make the best of a bad situation: this terrible piece of legislation [the bank bailout]. But as Doug said, there is room to be arguing for equity instead of the buying of billions of dollars of this terrible debt. One of the things that’s incredible that’s happening now is they’re handing out no-bid contracts to the very companies that created this mess.

I’ve been writing about the expanding economy, going from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, just feeding off the next disaster – well, the next frontier of disaster capitalism is cleaning up after capitalism. It’s a $700 billion industry, and expanding.

We know that this crisis is being transferred from Wall Street to Washington, and that all of these bad debts that are now on the public books are going to be used by the right to argue that the next president can’t afford to keep their campaign promises. Think of this as Republican insurance against an Obama presidency.

Everything he’s saying ‘Yes, we can’ to, they say ‘No, you can’t’. You can’t because we just dumped this huge crisis on your lap, and Obama is already capitulating – huge surprise. He’s already said, well, maybe I can afford some things like green energy and so on, but we’ll have to phase them in.

Here’s a big idea: I’ve been calling for the nationalisation of Exxon. Because I think if nationalisation is on the table, let’s go big – let’s not just nationalise junk, let’s nationalise the biggest corporate criminals of them all, the people who have left us with the biggest crisis that we face, which is climate change. And now we’re going to hear that we can’t afford the investments to address this crisis, to change course, that addressing climate change is a luxury we can no longer afford. This is the fight we have to win.

And, actually, we can’t nationalise them, because how would you tell the difference between a nationalised oil company and what you have right now? So we need to internationalise them: there needs to be an international trust and these huge profits won by the oil and gas industry have to be the money that we use to transform to a sustainable economy.

Naomi Klein is the author of the international best seller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which discusses the harmful policies being asserted during moments of crisis

This is an edited transcript of ‘An Offer We Can’t Refuse? Progressives Respond to the Wall Street Crisis’, an emergency discussion at the Brecht Forum, New York, held by The Nation magazine on 10 October 2008 Transcription: Carole Ludwig and Mary Livingstone
Author photographs by Marlowe Mason (marlowenyc@yahoo.com)

It might seem odd to link the current financial crisis with the long-term polarization of incomes, but in fact the two are deeply connected. During the housing bubble, people borrowed heavily not only to buy houses (whose prices were rising out of reach of their incomes) but also to compensate for the weakest job and income growth of any expansion since the end of World War II. Between 2001 and 2007, homeowners withdrew almost $5 trillion in cash from their houses, either by borrowing against their equity or pocketing the proceeds of sales; such equity withdrawals, as they’re called, accounted for 30 percent of the growth in consumption over that six-year period. That extra lift disguised the labour market’s underlying weakness; without it, the 2001 recession might never have ended.

But that round of borrowing only extended one that had begun in the early 1980s. At first it was credit cards, but when the housing boom really got going around 2001, the mortgage market took the lead. Now households are up to their ears in debt, and the credit markets are broken.

Borrowing is only one side of the story. As incomes polarised, America’s rich and the financial institutions that serve them found their portfolios bulging with cash in need of a profitable investment outlet, and one of the outlets they found was lending to those below them on the income ladder. (That’s one of several places where all the cash that funded the credit card and mortgage borrowing came from.) They also poured their money into hedge funds, private equity funds and just plain old stocks and bonds.

That 25-year gusher of cash led to an enormous expansion in the financial markets. Total financial assets of all kinds (stocks, bonds, everything) averaged around 440 percent of GDP from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. They grew steadily, breaking 600 percent in 1990 and 1,000 percent by 2007. With a few notorious interruptions, it looked like Wall Street had entered a utopia: an eternal bull market. Regulators stopped regulating and auditors looked the other way as financial practices lost all traces of prudence. No figure embodies that negligence better than Alan Greenspan, who as chair of the Federal Reserve dropped the propensity to caution and worry characteristic of the central banking profession and instead cheered the markets onward. As he said many times in the 1990s and early 2000s, who was he, a mere mortal, to second-guess the collective wisdom of the markets? He seemed to have no sense that markets embody no collective wisdom and often act with all the careful consideration of a mob.

So while the proximate cause, as the lawyers say, of the current financial crisis is the bursting of the housing bubble and the souring of so much of the mortgage debt that financed it, that’s really only part of a much larger story. And while it’s inevitable that the government is going to have to spend hundreds of billions to repair the damage over the next few years, there’s a lot more that needs to be done over the longer term.

This is the point where it’s irresistibly tempting to call for a re-regulation of finance. And that is sorely needed. But we also need to remember why finance, like many other areas of economic life, was deregulated starting in the 1970s. From the point of view of the elite, corporate profits were too low, workers were too demanding and the hand of government was too heavy. Deregulation was part of a broad assault to make the economy more ‘flexible’, which translated into stagnant to declining wages and rising job insecurity for most Americans. And the medicine worked, from the elites’ point of view. Corporate profitability rose dramatically from the early 1980s until sometime last year. The polarization of incomes wasn’t an unwanted side effect of the medicine — it was part of the cure.

Although we’re hearing a lot now about how the Reagan era is over and the era of big government is back, an expanded government isn’t likely to do much more than rescue a failing financial system (in addition to the more familiar pursuits of waging war and jailing people). Nothing more humane will be pursued without a far more energised populace than we have. After this financial crisis and the likely bailout, it looks impossible to go back to the status quo ante — but we don’t seem ready to move on to something appealingly new yet, either.

This article appeared in the 24 September 2008 edition of The Nation

Furman is a Democrat Leadership Council (DLC)-style Democrat, someone out of the Clinton-Rubin summer school. [Rubin was Clinton's treasury secretary and the DLC is a corporate-funded association of Democrat moderates, closely associated with the Clintons.] He joins Austin Gouldstein as Obama’s chief economic advisor. Gouldstein is famous for eulogising Milton Friedman, and for having been the top DLC economist.

Among that collection of ghouls, Obama recently announced his appointment of foreign policy advisors. They include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously said that half a million dead Iraqi children killed by the sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration was a price worth paying. They also include Lee Hamilton and David Boren, two Congress people known for their protective attitude toward the CIA; Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor; and Susan Rice, another Clinton leftover and cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

I can’t say that I was surprised by any of these appointments, because I never doubted that Obama would be anything but a loyal servant of the empire, but it shouldn’t get past anyone that thought he represented a fresh start.

I think that there is no doubt that the lust for Obama, the mania that he has inspired, the departure from rationality and critical thinking, does represent some fantastic longing for a better world, more peaceful, egalitarian and humane. He is not going to deliver much on that, but there is some evidence of an admirable, popular desire behind the crush, and those desires will never leave disappointed. But, as I have argued for many years, there is great political potential in disillusionment with Democrats.

The working class are really, really pissed off at their standard of living, and the way that the rich have got more than the rest of us. I don’t think that Obama’s administration would do much to change that. But never did that possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That is not what Obama means when he uses that word, but I think history can be a great artist.

Gary Younge Doug Henwood’s analysis would work best if Obama was standing in Sweden, or some other place where there was a large left wing that could support him wanting to turn left. He isn’t, he is standing in America and, for the best part of eight years, it has seen of one of the most reactionary governments that we have had for some time. You have to deal with the reality that exists, rather than one that you would like.

I think that most of the criticisms Doug makes of Obama are fine. But then you have to say, okay, Obama goes to AIPEC [America Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group] and he genuflects, like John McCain and Hillary Clinton, so let’s go support the pro-Palestinian candidate. But there isn’t one.

So what I think many on the left are actually arguing for, and there is a case that one can make, is just don’t stand in elections. That the whole thing is corrupt and bankrupt, and that is it.

But if you are going to stand in elections and you are standing to win and be viable, then there is a context there that Obama inherits and didn’t create.
I think that it is very important to criticise Obama from the left. But if one leaves it there, then you don’t really get what I think is a crucial question for the left: how do we get from where we are now to this more progressive society? How do we get a better foreign policy?

Over the last eight years there has been a sense of despondency and frustration, and Obama’s candidacy is both the recipient of and a driver for the unleashing of that energy. There is a symbiotic relationship, I think, between Obama and his base.

The energy that you see in Obama’s base is among people who are desperate for something better, and that is what has enabled his candidacy to do so well. Which brings us to the question: are these people just deluded? Are we dealing with a massive, collective mania and false consciousness? Or do they see a possibility that they hadn’t seen in John Kerry or Al Gore?

The truth is that Obama has roused constituencies that had long been dormant, notably the black and the young. There is possibility in this – definitely the possibility of disappointment, but also the possibility of something better.

So we must ask ourselves two questions. First, are we going to abandon these people to disappointment, disillusionment and cynicism? Or are we going to engage them in a more progressive agenda that puts the pressure on Obama when he starts to flake? Do we provide him with critical support when he is starting to flake in certain areas already? Or do we decide cynical support or no support at all?

Second, who else? If you are on the left and you think that this is all delusional, all crazy, who else then brings 75,000 people out in Portland? Even for a half-way progressive programme, who else gets voter registration people working 12 hours a day in Louisiana? If not him at this moment, then who? Or what, or how?

Because in the five years that I have been here, and in the eight years since Bush came in, I haven’t seen as much possibility as I have now and if you don’t like this, you have to suggest something else. You have to go to Portland and say to those 75,000 people, you should be somewhere else. And they better go there, because otherwise all you are doing is sending them home.

Betsy Reed We are always looking at Democrat politics as both the more grass-roots and radical elements and the corporates, and these are very disparate elements. The former was in the forefront during the primaries in a very real way, in the form of the small donations that propelled Obama’s campaign, the sort of grass-roots, more progressive elements that have played a key role in bringing out those 75,000 people to those rallies, and really energising that black vote. This could completely revolutionise the electoral maths. There is discussion that a state like Georgia could actually be contested by Democrats.

That is nothing to shrug at, but the other thing that we have started to see more recently is that the corporate-Democratic hold on the party becomes painfully apparent when it shifts into general election mode. With the demise of the Hillary Clinton campaign, Obama has folded in that establishment element into his campaign, in particular with the hiring of Jason Furman as his campaign’s economic policy director.

If that is where we are beginning, it is pretty depressing. There have been some nods to the left. Obama’s people have mentioned the names of some progressive economists, but the people who are beginning to surround him now are similar to those who created the Clinton phenomenon.
The key question is ‘what role can the left play?’ We should have some leverage based on the grassroots energy that his campaign really depends on – he needs those volunteers.

The Obamamania thing was thrown around a lot by Clinton supporters, but there is something to it; there is a bit of hero-worship. It’s hard not to get a crush on the guy when you hear him because he is an amazing talker. And there is this desire to believe in him and not really think about what might be going on, and what might be wrong with him, and how we might try to push him in our direction.

Jo-ann Mort I want to start by picking up on something that Gary said: ‘We can have a discussion like this if we are in Sweden.’ But in Sweden the social democrats lost power and the conservatives are in power; it just shows how weak the left is globally. Even where there has been pretty much left-wing hegemony all of these years, there is a crisis of what defines the left and where the balance of power is.

I have been incredibly excited about Obama from the beginning. It is an amazing thing that America would nominate someone like him, and do it enthusiastically, and that he in fact may end up being the president. Now, as someone on the left, did I see him, and the excitement that I feel for him, as part of my left-wing agenda? No. I have never been one to think that the president of the US is the standard bearer for the left.

However, I think that now, in 2008, having lived through eight years of the Bush administration, an Obama presidency is a prerequisite for there to be any left at all in this country, and certainly for us to have the power in terms of the unions, working-class issues and opposition to corporatist economics.
The fact is that we, as the left collectively, are as weak as we have ever been. The only way that we are going to be able to build power is to have some breathing space in Washington, in the White House, that is going to make a difference.

I honestly don’t know if I can survive four years of John McCain. Just recently, I got an email to say that the US supreme court, Bush’s supreme court, made a decision that had struck down a California law that barred publicly-funded companies from speaking out against unions. We have a supreme court, a federal judiciary that is as anti-union as we could ever imagine, and then we have all of the regular Tory agencies against them. Bush has never had a meeting with the head of the AFL-CIO or the head of Change to Win, the two labour federations.

The current labour secretary thinks that her job is to investigate union leaders for corruption and block laws that would support workers’ rights on matters like health and safety in the workplace. So we need a good, elected Democrat in the White House, and I happen to think Obama is a centre-left candidate who will govern on the centre-left.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t do any of those things that Betsy and others have said in terms of keeping his feet to the fire. But we do have to look at the Jason Furman appointment in relation to how you get elected. This is still a very close election, but whereas McCain is moving to the right to sharpen his base – which to me shows that he is in trouble – Obama is moving to the centre, which is where you get the 50-plus-1 per cent of the votes you need to win.

The quick response to Furman’s appointment from trade unionists and others also made a big difference. Obama has pointed out that his economic team also includes Jared Burnstein from the Economic Policy Institute [a left-leaning think tank, which is close to the trade unions]. Robert Reich [Clinton's labour secretary] has also been quite outspoken about the Furman appointment.

Do I have any illusions that the pro-Wall Street, pro-free trade agenda is not going to be the agenda leading the day? No, but that is because the labour movement is so weak.

The only way we are going to be able to strengthen the labour movement is to be able to strengthen laws, to allow workers the right to organise and allow workers to take back the power that they need. And I feel very strongly that the only way that is going to happen is to get Obama into the White House.

Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m going to talk about the most obvious thing for me, which is Obama as a black president.

We have to face the fact that at the end of the primary this man was commanding a 98 per cent majority in the African American community. To get 90 per cent of black people doing anything, much less going to the polls and going to a voting booth, that doesn’t involve Densel Washington, Electric Sly etc is a tremendous thing.

I have many reservations too. Obama is a man who is expressing nothing explicit, nothing tangible – a great racial transcendent, in fact, and this may offer an excuse to those who don’t want to talk about race to completely get out of the discussion.

Despite this, we still have to stand back and ask: what sort of condition are we in now? What sort of world are we in that he is commanding 90 per cent? What you have to face up to is that African Americans have really paid the price of the last eight years – when you look at Katrina, or the Iraq war.

The possibility of the most famous African American in the world not being an entertainer or a ball player is really encouraging. As an African American, you come home and what you see on TV is always bad news with your face on it, about a black person defiling some child, or getting arrested, always really bad news.

The idea that you come home, you turn on the TV and find Barack Obama on there beating the crap out of John McCain – I don’t know what that is worth, I don’t know how that measures against economic policy, or anything like that, but that is a cause for some sort of optimism.

I live up in Harlem, and everywhere you go there are Barack Obama posters. I was at this great event called ‘Real Men Cook’ this Saturday, and all the people who came up to speak had this great excitement and optimism in the African American community that I have not seen in a long time. For all of my criticisms of Barack, it is very hard for me to dismiss that and say that it just isn’t worth anything.

Doug Henwood When it comes down to it, Obama is just another Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past, and the level of hope that people are mounting around him is just extraordinary to watch.

In terms of a president that can move us away from uncritical support of Israel – well, I’m afraid that a guy who’s middle name is Hussein is going to go out of his way to prove that he is not that guy, so I think that is another example of misplaced hopes.

Now people point to the degree of enthusiasm and support that he has drawn out, and that is interesting because the people who are so enthusiastic about supporting him are perhaps ahead of him, and perhaps ahead of what our judgment is of what the American population is willing to accept.

Maybe the working class really are pissed off, maybe they are ready for something more progressive than what we think they are, so that kind of mobilisation and enthusiasm is very encouraging in itself.

But I think that we need to prepare for the fact that these people are going to be very disappointed when they see what kind of government he runs. I think we have to be prepared for the disillusionment that comes, and be ready now, think about how we talk to people. It may take a year or two for people to realise how disillusioned they are but we have to be ready to talk to them when they are.

Gary Younge Well I think being on the left you are always prepared for disilluionment. That is the psychological nature of the left.

The challenge is really to be prepared for hope, and to be prepared for something that is actually better. It is really about the possibility – but not the certainty – that these huge numbers of people that you are seeing turning up aren’t deluded.

Maybe they have seen a vehicle for what they want. And the issue is, do we become a vehicle for him? Or does he become a vehicle for us? And those two things are not mutually exclusive, or assured.

That doesn’t mean we should be uncritical until Obama wins. In the UK, Labour tried the ‘just shut up and wait for the guy to get elected, everything will be fine’ line, and then we ended up with Blair, Brown and the most decimated left that we have had for years.

You shouldn’t give people a blank cheque. The left shouldn’t be taken for granted, and the idea that McCain moving to the right is a sign of weakness should be treated cautiously. Actually, Bush didn’t move to the centre. What Bush did was rally his base. And there is a way to win where you rally your base, and you get everybody out: that is actually how Bush won twice, not by moving to the middle.

Betsy Reed I think that there is some Obamamania out there. But I don’t think it is fair to say that he has run a content-less campaign. If you look at a lot of the speeches that he has given, he has a lot of ideas – although you might not agree with all of them. But in his challenge to trickle-down philosophy, he says there is something that government can do about the problems we face.

There is also his race speech about the legacy of racial pressures and what the responsibility of government is to respond to that. That is a different language from the one that we hear from Republicans, certainly, and it is a more progressive language than any we have heard from viable presidential candidates in my memory.

If you look back at Kerry, he didn’t even oppose the war. Sure, you can fault Obama for his war plan – I think that has been really under-scrutinised. In fact, Obama would preserve the green zone and the biggest embassy in world history. Basically, his plan would require anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 troops to remain in Iraq.

Despite this, Obama has a broadly anti-war agenda and a platform, an opening for the anti-war movement, if he is elected, to push him to end the war.

This is an edited transcript of ‘A People’s President? Barack Obama and the left’, a discussion at the Brecht Forum, New York, on 19 June 2008. Transcript: Jennifer Nelson and Lena de Casparis