Obama's Team -- 'Socialists with Communist Backgrounds'
Aaron Klein
Sept. 10, 2009
 Manning Marable |
"What makes Obama different is that he has also been a community organizer. He has read left literature, including my works, and he understands what socialism is," wrote Manning Marable, professor and founding director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.
"A lot of the people working with him are, indeed, socialists with backgrounds in the Communist Party or as independent Marxists," Marable wrote in a December 2008 piece published in the Socialist Review.
In the article, Marable contends "Obama is not a Marxist or a socialist – he is a progressive liberal."
"Obama represents a generation of what might be called post-racial black politicians – by which I mean they espouse a politics that minimizes matters of race. They do not like to talk about race and subsume it under the rubric of poverty and class."
Speaking to WND today, Marable refused to identify the individuals working with Obama he wrote were socialists with Communist Party backgrounds.
He said, however, those individuals strongly believe Obama would change the "tenor of politics within the Democratic party."
"I think the point I was making is that there are a number of people with left histories who were early participants in Obama's mobilization. They have a strong belief in Obama as a candidate with the possibility of changing the tenor of politics within the Democratic Party," he told WND.
Nine months after Marable's remarks on communists working with Obama, the president's controversial environmental adviser, Van Jones, resigned amid reports Jones was an admitted black nationalist and radical communist.
Marable has been teaching at Columbia since 1993, 10 years after Obama graduated from the college.
Marable was not commenting as an outside observer. The Columbia professor is intimately connected to many of Obama's radical associates and even was a founding member of the Socialist New Party. WND previously reported newspaper evidence showing Obama was a member of the party.
The New Party sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda – a history that might grant substance to Marable's comments to WND today about hopes Obama will change the "tenor" of the Democratic party.
WND last month interviewed a founder of the New Party, Marxist activist Carl Davidson, who recalled Obama's participation with his group.
In 2007, Marable was elected chair of Movement for a Democratic Society, or MDS, an arm of the radical Students for a Democratic Society from which the Weatherman terrorist organization later splintered.
Some Weathermen terrorists, including Ayers, participate in Marable's MDS. In November 2007, for example, WND found that Ayers participated in an MDS panel entitled, "Resisting endless war."
The New Zeal blog, meanwhile, found that Marable held leadership roles in the Communist Party offshoot, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
Also, Marable in 1998 helped found the Black Radical Congress, where he worked with controversial race scholar Cornel West, an Obama friend who introduced the politician at his first campaign stop in Harlem. WND disclosed that during that 2007 introduction, West first railed on stage against the "racist" U.S. criminal justice system of the "American empire."
West, currently a professor at Princeton University, served as an adviser on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March and is a personal friend of the Nation of Islam leader. West authored two books on race with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who was at the center of a recent controversy in which Obama remarked on Gates' being handcuffed by police outside his home after a report of a burglary.
Marable, in the mean time, has been a regular speaker at an annual socialist conference, the Socialist Scholars Conference, which is usually held at Cooper Union in New York. It has been reported that in the early 1980s, Obama attended socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.