This is an expanded version of an article first published in The Socialist Standard and Star and Crescent

Perhaps I’m not the best person to be writing this article. Self-isolating at home for the last few weeks, my media consumption has mainly revolved around my three-year-old son’s favourite TV animations. But in between episodes of Paw Patrol and Peppa Pig, I’ve been watching the Covid-19 news narrative unfold. Media revenues have generally plummeted as advertisers withdraw their spends and even the big digital players like Facebook and Twitter have seen big falls in profits. But news is in demand as never before from a locked-down (or, in the case of Britain, semi-locked-down) public. The audience for television news, especially on BBC, has skyrocketed. And while their print circulations have been in long-term decline, the big newspapers have also strongly influenced public debate about the pandemic, providing many of the stories we access through social media.

Journalists have been using the word 'unprecedented' to describe the present situation. But this pandemic is not some 'black swan' event; there have been similar viral pandemics before and scientists had been warning that something like the present emergency was going to happen. What is new is the scale of the political and cultural reaction to the virus: in the modern era, there has never been a global lockdown of healthy populations and this has helped to make Covid-19 the biggest media story in history.

Much of the mainstream coverage of this emergency has been informative and I don’t agree with the view, popular in online alternative media, that journalists have simply been fuelling panic or fear about the coronavirus. In Britain, at least, politicians and media were blasé about its potential threat for far too long at the beginning at the year, although there is certainly some room for debate about how much 'overreaction' there might have been to Covid-19 since then. Experts are not unanimous on this question and there are obviously going to be fierce debates in future about the relevance of the pandemic measures that have been implemented; perhaps in a year's time we will have good enough data to judge whether the total number of excess deaths caused by this coronavirus really justified global lockdown.

But this is a genuine crisis, if only because the countries the virus is impacting have mostly been very badly prepared for it: having placed profits before people, they completely failed to invest in the scientific research and healthcare equipment needed to cope with a widely foreseen pandemic. In 2017, for example, the British government rejected a recommendation for all frontline NHS staff to be given protective equipment during a flu epidemic on the grounds that it would be too costly. For the most part, mainstream media have acknowledged the scale of the resulting problem. Yet there’s much to criticise in the media coverage of the emergency. After all, a media system owned and directed by the exploiting class is bound to discuss Covid-19 in ways that reflect capitalist interests and ideologies. Here are just a few of those ways.

Fighting Talk

Over recent weeks, the media have introduced us to several neologisms, such as 'social distancing' and 'contact-tracing' (which cynics might say is just a less alarming word for 'surveillance'). But the media have also used some more familiar discursive techniques. For example, many media and political discussions of this crisis have been wrapped in the language of patriotism and war. Trump called Covid-19 the “invisible enemy” and across the major media outlets, journalists have routinely talked of the ‘fight’ or ‘battle’ against the virus. “WAR ON CORONA” went the headline of Scotland’s Sunday Mail on 15th March. Other British papers have praised the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of the population. Of course, war metaphors are always popular among politicians and journalists seeking dramatic effect, especially when the state perceives a threat to its authority (British newspapers were full of them during the 2011 riots). Boris Johnson's talk about “beating” the enemy virus helped him to project his strength and ‘leadership’ skills at a time when even other members of his class were questioning his abilities.
 
For the rest of us, however, this war talk is quite unhelpful. For one thing, it might have distorted public perceptions of the crisis. In one of their online broadcasts in March, Novara media showed footage of an elderly Londoner (a woman clearly in the ‘high risk’ category) declaring that she would not stay at home to curb the spread of infection because that would be “giving in to the virus” – as though Covid-19 were a group of jihadists hell-bent on destroying ‘our way of life’! It has also been suggested by the chief executive of the organisation Suicide Crisis that describing the crisis as a war is potentially distressing to people with mental health conditions, who might feel ashamed that they're not tough enough to cope. And from a more macro-political angle, presenting this emergency as a ‘war’ conditions the public to accept the tougher new policing and digital surveillance measures being put in place by governments across the world and which many people fear will continue after the lockdown has ended. You don't have to be a 'conspiracy theorist' to have concerns about this - you only have to look at what is already happening in China.

Finally, militarist language tends to channel working-class dissatisfaction with capitalism into admiration for the nation state. Before the first ‘Clap for our Carers’ event which swept across Britain on 26th March (and which then became a weekly occurrence), Leo McKinstry of the right-wing Express came over all Churchillian, asking readers to “salute our NHS heroes in this their finest hour”. And after the event, the front page of the left-leaning Mirror newspaper was given over to photographs of smiling NHS workers being publicly applauded. “Your country LOVES you”, gushed the newspaper, along with “NATION SALUTES VIRUS HEROES”. Not to be outdone, the BBC’s Breakfast programme started a daily Hero Half Hour segment, in which viewers were invited to share praise for key workers “on the frontline”.

But there’s something fishy about this newfound love for often low-paid workers and as for NHS ‘heroism’, perhaps we should recall Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, whose central protagonist, a doctor called Bernard Rieux, states that his work “is not about heroism”, but about doing what’s necessary in an absurd situation. In fact, ‘Clap for our Carers’ has been a well-camouflaged propaganda campaign. It has certainly tapped into positive public feelings of solidarity with hard-pressed healthcare workers who are saving lives under difficult circumstances; however, those circumstances are due in no small measure to healthcare cuts imposed by successive governments, including the present one.

The media’s militarist and nationalist framing of the event has tended to obscure such facts, deflecting any criticism of the state with the feelgood patriotism of 'we’re all in this together' - indeed, the appeal of the campaign is libidinal as much as rhetorical. 'Clap for our Carers' works in a similar way to the insidious Help for Heroes campaign: if you criticise it, you'll quickly be accused of disrespecting 'our brave boys and girls'. It also works as a kind of anti-strike propaganda, allowing any future complaints, protests or industrial action taken by key workers (such as the Amazon strikes that have occurred in various countries) to be reframed as acts of intransigence against the national interest. How can you think of protesting when there's a war on?

China Crisis

Britain's tabloid newspapers have a global reputation for sensationalism and racism and they haven't disappointed during this emergency. Back in January, for example, the right-wing Daily Mail and other mainstream media sources published lurid images of a Chinese woman eating a bat in what some claimed was a Wuhan restaurant, although the pictures turned out to have been taken in 2016 in a restaurant in Palau and were therefore not connected with the recent outbreak. But that didn't matter. The ‘fake news’ story went viral, no doubt because it appealed to racist Western stereotypes of exotic orientals with bizarre habits.

It’s hard to prove that the media affects attitudes or behaviours in the real world, but it seems likely that the anti-Chinese messaging of the tabloids has contributed to the present climate of xenophobic hostility towards East Asian people. This has led to harassment and sometimes brutal physical assaults. On the 3rd March a Singaporean student was left needing facial reconstructive surgery after being attacked in London. And on 14th March an Asian-American family, including a two-year-old girl, were stabbed in a retail outlet in Texas by a man who apparently feared that the victims were infectious. Being the cynics that they are, politicians such as Johnson and Trump, who has referred to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus”, might be hoping to benefit from this popular anti-Chinese sentiment, as they try to sidestep responsibility for their failures in handling the outbreak by shifting the blame onto China – even to the point of asking for ‘reparations’. 'The Chinese' have become a useful scapegoat.

In parts of the left-leaning media, meanwhile, the China card has been played in a very different, but equally questionable way. During an interview on the Kremlin-supporting Russia Today television news channel, Stalin enthusiasts George Galloway and Ranjeet Brar heaped praise on the efficient and organised Chinese response to the outbreak. This is reasonable up to a point. After all, a case could be made that China marshalled its immense state apparatus to deal with the coronavirus outbreak more effectively than many other countries and it seems to have kept its death toll low.

Then again, we surely ought to be suspicious of health-related statistics reported by the Chinese state. And Galloway and Brar conveniently forgot that the Chinese government had initially tried to suppress the warnings of medical professionals about the spread of the virus. It should also be added that just as tabloid stories about the virus have generated widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the West, misinformation about the virus and its origins has also fuelled xenophobia and racism within China. This has been experienced particularly by black immigrants in China, who have been evicted by their landlords, barred from entering restaurants, and so on. One Chinese official, Zhao Lijian, has even tried to spread the rumour that the US army brought the virus to Wuhan last year.

None of this has stopped left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ publications from praising the glorious People’s Republic. The People's Dispatch even published an article with the title ‘How Chinese Socialism is Defeating the Coronavirus Outbreak’. I can only recommend that the authors of this piece actually visit China to witness its obscene wealth gap, rural poverty and hyper-exploited workers. China's rulers may pay lip service to Marx and communism, but they actively persecute and 'disappear' Marxist activists and university students. So no, China isn't socialist, it's a state-capitalist authoritarian nightmare and this left-wing cheering for China is as disturbing as the right-wing Sinophobia.

Corona Communism

Some very odd ideas about socialism have also been aired in more mainstream media. On 20th March, in the right-wing Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard urged that ‘Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market’. But this only shows the capitalist press's confusion about the meaning of socialism - or perhaps its ideological opportunism (as Paul Mattick once noted, Marxism is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie). For Evans-Pritchard, socialism means the state taking over control of the economy from private industry. Ironically, he shares this understanding of socialism as state control with much of the political left, not to mention parts of the Internet-based conspiracy community. For example, one of the more imaginative members of the conspiracy milieu, Max Igan, is currently arguing that the Covid lockdown is a socialist-communist plot organized by modern-day Bolsheviks to harvest the organs of the population! (Assuming we all come out of this with our kidneys in situ, it'll be interesting to see how Igan walks back his macabre predictions).

Of course, the state has indeed taken over aspects of private industry with dizzying speed in recent months, with the nationalisation of the hospitals in Ireland and the suspension of the rail franchise system in the UK, to give just two examples. Genuine socialism, however, means a world without classes, commodities, money and borders. What we have been seeing over recent weeks is not socialism, but the capitalist state putting in place measures to cover a proportion of workers' wages, bail out businesses and keep key services running. The state is simply doing what it must in order to head off any ‘social unrest’ that might arise during the epidemic and to ensure that the wheels of production can grind back into motion afterwards. To a limited extent, governments have been “putting their arms around workers” - but only so that they can get their hands back around our necks when normal business resumes.

Another, particularly daft media myth has been that the virus is a social leveller. This idea gained some traction in the major media when, on 25th March, the British public learned that the virus had pulled off its most audacious stunt so far, shamelessly infecting the first in line to the throne, Prince Charles. In the Express, Dr Hilary Jones was quoted as saying that the virus “is a great leveller” that will be “just as virulent for politicians and celebrities and the monarchy as it will the homeless and destitute”. A few days later, Clare Foges of The Times waxed lyrical on the theme, writing: “Coronavirus: the great leveller. Infecting princes and prime ministers, making hermits of most, hushing the concrete council estate and the millionaires' leafy square”.

Fortunately, not many people seem to have been fooled by this sort of twaddle. Sceptics on social media have argued that Prince Charles, who had shown only minor symptoms of C-19, had ‘jumped the queue’, having been given a coronavirus test despite NHS guidance that only hospitalised patients could receive one. The public has also given short shrift to celebrities claiming to be ‘just like us’ when faced with the threat of the virus. Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot’s attempt to prove that “we’re all in this together” by leading a star-studded singalong to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ was widely ridiculed on social media. And megastar Madonna, the world's wealthiest female musician, was mocked for an Instagram video in which she called Covid-19 “the great equaliser” while sitting in a petal-filled bathtub.
 
Far from thrusting us towards socialism or uniting the celebs with the plebs, the corona emergency has brought the savagely class divided nature of our world into sharp focus. It is true that anybody can catch the virus and this is surely one reason why the capitalist class is taking it very seriously. But this has been a tale of two pandemics. On the one side, the super-rich have headed for their disaster bunkers in private jets; on the other, workers on temporary or insecure contracts have faced destitution (by early April in Britain there had been one million new registrations for Universal Credit), while the most vulnerable groups in society, such as refugees, homeless people, those with pre-existing conditions, or the many low-paid key workers who cannot simply ‘stay at home’, are widely exposed to the virus.

Of course, the mainstream media cannot cover up these grotesque social inequalities completely. In April it was widely reported that the world's richest man - Amazon founder and boss Jeff Bezos - had added $24 billion to his wealth since the start of the year, owing to the growth in demand for online shopping. At the same time, workers in Amazon-owned Whole Foods Stores in the US were given a t-shirt emblazoned with the word 'Hero' on it, which I'm sure more than made up for being in a public-facing job without union protection or face masks. Perhaps they could wrap their t-shirts around their mouths.

Their Media and Ours
 
Despite all of these myths and mystifications, the mainstream media are not entirely bad and they cannot simply ignore the widespread public awareness of the government's incompetence. That's why tough questions have sometimes been asked of the government. For example, on 26th March the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, appeared on the BBC's Question Time discussion panel, condemning Britain's unreadiness for the pandemic as a “scandal”. Throughout April, much of the British media castigated the British government’s inability to guarantee adequate testing and protective equipment for NHS workers. A BBC Panorama investigation (27 April) has detailed the British government's failures and The Sunday Times (19 April) has also put the boot in, perhaps suggesting that Rupert Murdoch is distancing himself from the Tories.

But the general perspective of the mainstream media has been narrow and anti-working class. There have been plenty of stories about people flouting the social distancing rules, but none questioning how the profit system has hampered the medical response to the crisis. It has been primarily through the social media that working-class people have found solidarity via community information and support groups. And only socialist publications such as The Socialist Standard have been cutting through the nationalist claptrap and geopolitical blame games of the politicians and mainstream media to expose the underlying problem: the global capitalist system, which exists to protect profits rather than human life.

"His cupboard bare; his vision hardwired" - Wire, 'Internal Exile'

As some wag tweeted after the recent presidential election, orange is the new black: Trump the Terrible will soon replace Oleaginous Obama as the leader of the world's most powerful nation. Trump's white nationalist supporters and hangers-on are naturally ecstatic - and some of them may even find positions of power in the new administration.

Trump himself, of course, is a thoroughly rebarbative figure, a blundering clown in the freakshow of American democracy. Every element of his face betrays his nastiness and narcissism: the florid cheeks with their expression veering between phoney solemnity and leering frivolity; the puckered, hole-in-a-pie mouth, twisted at the corners into a rictus of sneering contempt; the cold, watchful eyes of a deep ocean predator. Groucho Marx once said, 'I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception'. But we will not be allowed to forget. For the next four years at least, Trump's fleshy fizog will be squinting and gurning from every television screen and social media feed, a demented icon of capitalist degeneracy.

Although the competition is fierce, Trump might just be the most dimwitted president in US history. This is, after all, the man who publicly said 7-Eleven when he meant 9/11. He is certainly highly dysfunctional, hailing from a traumatizing and traumatized family. Like his father (by all accounts), Trump is a bully, a psychologically damaged man who is now projecting his own malignancy onto a range of officially sanctioned Others: Mexicans, Muslims and women. From a psychoanalytical point of view, his tough-guy persona might be explained in terms of the 'traumatic bond' that often forms between victim and abuser, which in Trump's case was likely formed with his father in childhood. This 'identification with the aggressor', as Sándor Ferenczi famously called this kind of defence mechanism, might also explain the appeal of Trump for the many disgruntled left-behinds who voted for him: in a ruthless world, it's best to keep on side with the guy with the big stick.

While it is unlikely that Trump will go through with all, or even many of his pledges, we can expect the policies of Trump's administration broadly to match the reactionary rhetoric of his presidential campaign. Disaster certainly beckons - for workers, minorities and the environment. But some context and a sense of proportion is also needed.

Judging by mainstream journalism and social media commentary, most liberals reckon a Trump presidency to be a worse outcome than a Hillary Clinton one would have been. I am not so sure. While the Orange One is undoubtedly a monstrously vulgar reactionary capitalist, Clinton is a thoroughgoing neoliberal and a corrupt sadist. Who can forget her derisive quip following the butchering of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi in a drainage pipe: 'we came, we saw, he died'? And as Secretary of State under Obama, 'Killary' was responsible not just for cruel words, but for spreading real death and destruction across the globe. There is no reason to assume that she represented the lesser of two evils in the recent election.

Similar points could be made about the relationship of Trump to his predecessor, Barack Obama. Many liberal commentators see the passage from Obama to Trump in terms of what Carl Jung called enantiodromia - a radical transition from good to evil. Throughout the election campaign, they execrated Trump's every racist remark and lewd confession - and even seemed to derive a perverse enjoyment from doing so. And when Trump emerged victorious, some US liberals even expressed a desire to emigrate before the nasty stuff got underway (I'm a cosmopolitan individualist, get me out of here). But while liberals have revelled in the daily reports of Trump's bigotry, they have generally been silent on the crimes of the man who was US president for the past eight years. When these crimes are considered, Trump's succession appears less like a break with the past and more like business as usual.

So let's briefly consider Obama's track record. Obama implemented - and lied about - an unprecedented surveillance campaign against his own population, waged a veritable war on whistleblowers, normalized extrajudicial killing, lied about wanting to renegotiate NAFTA and stop job outsourcing, deported more immigrants than Clinton and Bush combined, and presided, with Hillary Clinton, over the destruction of Libya. Nor was Obama averse to expressions of Trump-style narcissism. In reference to his global drone murder programme - described by Noam Chomsky as 'the biggest terrorist campaign in history' - Obama is reported to have made a typically creepy joke to his aides: 'it turns out I’m really good at killing people' (an example, perhaps, of what psychoanalysts call 'defence through admission'). And who can forget his violent and patriarchal Correspondents Dinner 'joke' about using predator drones to take out potential suitors to his daughters. During the financial crisis, meanwhile, Obama showed himself to be the friend of the bankers and the hammer of the working class: the "black mascot of Wall Street", as Cornel West called him in 2011, bailed out the banks and opposed a moratorium on home foreclosures. Obama's rhetoric was slick and euphemistic - his administration re-branded the War on Terror an 'Overseas Contingency Operation', for example - but his actions bespoke his full commitment to capitalism and war.

Indeed, it should surprise nobody that the Obama years saw an unprecedented transfer of wealth in the United States from the poor to the rich. Trump, should he actually manage to survive as President, will surely bring misery to the working class at home and abroad; but Obama, the slick desk-bound assassin, has been doing precisely that for the last eight years, even if the US liberal-left, hopelessly lost in the labyrinths of identity politics, has largely proved unwilling to criticize his administration. Whatever else it stands for, then, Trump's triumph hardly represents a rolling back of eight years of enlightened governance. This is no Orange Thermidor.

Nevertheless, the shift from Obama to Trump is not just a changing of the guard, a transition from Tweedledum to Tweedledumber. Trump's victory, like the Brexit vote in the UK, does seem to signal a certain reconfiguration of forces in the post-crisis political landscape. The so-called 'neoliberal' political consensus of the past few decades is facing a challenge to its legitimacy and this, it seems, is giving rise to new strategies of ideological containment. This not a resurgence of fascism. Some ultra-right elements in the US have certainly been emboldened, even empowered in the wake of Trump's success. But this is not the 1930s and Trump is not a new Hitler, popular as such tropes are among many liberal activists. Rather, it is right-wing populism that is the order of the day and Trump's rise is mirrored in the ascendance of regressive strongmen all across the international stage: Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan and other xenophobic demagogues.

The precise meaning of this populist turn is not yet clear. Some radical analysts argue that the populist surge actually operates against the interests of dominant ruling class factions and thus represents a certain strategic impasse and even a loss of control among the bourgeoisie in the established democracies. According to this view, all is not well with the ruling order. Yet even if this analysis is correct, given the current absence of almost any serious working-class struggle (or even, let's be honest, basic organization) in most parts of the world, this destabilization of global politics is a potentially dangerous development.

As socialists, we can only reiterate that populism and charismatic leadership, whether in its right-wing or left-wing form, is not the answer to our problems. To those seeking a world without exploitation, war, xenophobia, racism and sexism, it matters little which butcher is currently wielding the cleaver over what Hegel called the 'slaughter bench of history'. As Marx insisted, the liberation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself. With this in mind, we should reject the idea that salvation lies in a nicer president or more enlightened prime minister. Whether black, white or tangerine, these politicians speak and act in the interests of the ruling class. In the immortal words of the punk group Crass, 'we've got to learn to reject all leaders, and the passive shit they feed us'. When Trump fails to make America - or anything else - great, we socialists will still be around, arguing that our future rests in our own hands.

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right"  -- H. L. Mencken

“Foxes and wolves usually are of the same breed. They belong to the same family – I think it’s called canine. And the difference is that the wolf when he shows you his teeth, you know that he’s your enemy; and the fox, when he shows you his teeth, he appears to be smiling. But no matter which of them you go with, you end up in the dog-house.” -- Malcolm X

Here's my nickel's worth as the US election race intensifies... As a recent International Communist Current article points out, Barack Obama was in 2008 (and remains in 2012) the US ruling class's 'preferred' candidate - Wall Street's man, as it were. Needless to say, Obama's presidency has not improved the lot of ordinary Americans and it has been a disaster for the people of the world and for the environment, as Matt Stoller makes clear in a recent article in Salon. Whatever claims may be made for Obama's supposed liberalism at home, there can be no doubt that if Obama is re-elected, the US will continue to spread death and destruction to every corner of the globe [edit: we haven't had to wait long to see evidence of this - one of the Nobel Peace Prize winner's first actions has been to give Israel the green light to launch a devastating assault on Gaza]. Indeed, the Obama administration has hitherto replaced the renditions and tortures of the Bush years with a policy of political murder, as last year's execution of Osama bin Laden and the ongoing drone attacks across the Middle East attest. This is not to say, of course, that a Romney win would be preferable. Although a Romney victory would likely pose some minor adjustment problems for the US ruling class, the Republican party offers no alternative to austerity and crisis for US workers and imperialist violence overseas. There is no lesser evil here: the US is essentially governed by a one party machine constituted by two virtually interchangeable factions, neither of which constitutes a 'progressive' option. As a Polish proverb has it: not my circus, not my monkeys.

Voter turn-out at the election is likely to be lower than it was 2008. Indeed, it is remarkable that despite the obscene media razzmatazz around election time (which this year is estimated to have cost an astonishing six billion dollars), US election turn-outs have not exceeded 60% since 1968. Modest election turn-outs are sometimes discussed by journalists in terms of 'voter apathy'; yet they may also be an indication that working class people are aware of the irrelevance of capitalist political parties to their lives and aspirations. Many workers understand perfectly well that a meaningful change in the way society is ordered - a change that could eradicate work, hunger and war and safeguard the natural environment - cannot be provided by either the left or the right. The worry, of course, is that this understandable insouciance towards democratic politics turns into a suspicion of all political action. Sheldon Wolin's understanding of Western democracies as 'inverted totalitarianisms' in which the public, far from being enthused and mobilised as in totalitarian states, become increasingly insecure and politically passive, is one to take seriously.

According to recent reports, the moral philosopher Cornel West, having supported Barack Obama's electoral campaign in 2008, has now been snubbed by his onetime hero. In response to this jilting and to what West sees as the Obama administration's betrayal of its political ideals, the academic's fawning has turned to fury. Thankfully, West has rediscovered his critical faculties, launching an ill-tempered attack on the Obama administration.

West's volte-face on Obama goes to show that it's never too late to learn. Indeed, amid the media feeding frenzy surrounding Barack and Michelle's British tour, now is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of what the Obama administration has really meant for the world and of just how completely left-wing 'progressives' were sucked in by the president's promises of political change.

Indeed, Cornel West is not alone. In 2008, many of the left-liberal academics who had reviled George W. Bush warmly welcomed Bush’s supposedly progressive Democratic successor. Their effusions were echoed in the liberal media. In a 2009 advertisement for the BBC News channel, a handsome young new father held a newborn baby in his arms and watched the election of the new president on the television as a tender smile spread across his face. Here was change that liberals could believe in. A leader article published in The Guardian (5 June 2008) before Obama’s election victory expressed the hope that Obama would ‘use US power more wisely and effectively than Mr Bush for the world’s urgent causes’.

Yet if ‘urgent causes’ have been pursued by the Obama regime, they have been those of the US ruling class. As communists argued all along, the election of Obama in 2008 represented political and ideological continuity with the Bush years, rather than change or a renewal of ‘hope’, the Obama campaign’s watery buzzword. As Vaneigem famously observed, hope is the leash of submission. The Obama administration proved to be an even more deadly enemy of the working class than its forerunner, driving through a so-called healthcare ‘reform’ that required tens of millions of working class Americans to take out private insurance while boosting profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; as even the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore has pointed out, the reform was a ‘victory for capitalism’. Overseas, meanwhile, the Obama administration intensified conflict in the Middle East by bombing Pakistan, enormously increased troop numbers in Afghanistan, invaded Haiti after a devastating earthquake in that country, and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on ending Israeli settlement expansion – to say nothing of the US involvement in the brutal suppression of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The Washington Post (5 June 2010) reported a dramatic increase in Special Operations under the Obama administration, while in his 2010 article ‘The Iranian threat’, Noam Chomsky noted that the Obama administration had accelerated its predecessors’ plans to acquire heavy ordnance, citing academic Dan Plesch’s view that the US is ‘gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran’. All of this lends a truly Orwellian quality to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. 

Like the election of the black president David Palmer in Fox’s television drama 24, the election of Obama appealed powerfully to the liberal political imaginary; no doubt the feminist left will hail the election of the first female US president – a scenario anticipated in the television drama Commander in Chief – as an equally ‘historic’ and politically progressive moment. Yet all of this is window dressing: neither the racial identity, nor the personal charisma, nor the gender of a president alters her institutional status or the capitalist nature of her political attachments. Despite the racial gloss, Obama is a capitalist politician whose administration presides over the oppression of workers at home and orchestrates deadly violence abroad in pursuit of imperialist objectives.

With regard to Obama, at least, the scales are finally falling from the eyes of many a leftist - just in time for the next US election, in which left intellectuals can be expected to play their customary role as capitalism's useful idiots, helping to renew the cycle of hype and disillusionment by building support for 'progressive' politicians and the system they serve.