Pbrower sort of alludes to it, but if Obama's policies were Marxist, then he wouldn't be Marxist. Marx portrayed communism as a natural progression of society that occurs. First, you have feudal economy, then you grow in capitalism, then socialism at the hands of either revolution or appeasement of popular support, and then it falls into communist system, which really has no government.
Marx' interpretation of history is of course bunk, and anyone not a Marxist so recognizes if he has any sophistication at all. He may have gotten a few things right, but all in all, proletarian revolutions are most likely to occur where capitalism is a moral failure -- something that creates economic growth, but only for the few at the expense of the many. To be sure, there have been cases of such, but Marx underestimate the willingness of capitalists to survive by making compromises with the proletariat. Marx failed to recognize that capitalists would make an economic market out of the proletariat -- a market for cars, furniture, appliances, and non-slum housing -- and create the impression of upward mobility through merit on the job or by becoming capitalists while putting an end to the resentment that workers might have toward ownership and management. He is useful now only for discussing the final stage of human economic development -- that in which most human needs are easily met, whether a polity has 'successfully' achieved 'socialism' or has evaded it altogether.
Capitalism has one ultimate strength: that it believes in noting other than its own survival. It can adapt. It can survive strong unions, collective bargaining, technological change, cultural change, and ethnic or religious shifts. American capitalism could survive mass conversions of Americans to some vastly-different religious heritage. What it can't protect is bad business practices that themselves create failure.
'Obamacare' is offered as a reform of what may be the worst system of finanace of medical care in the industrialized world, a cost-loading system that makes American industrial production more costly than industrial production anywhere else on behalf of the medical-industrial complex. The medical system ensures that Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription medicine, pays the highest rates for medical treatment, and imposes a bad system of elder-care. We have to pay our physicians and nurses far more than the world average because they have the highest-cost educations that imply huge indebtendness to
lenders (supply and demand strikes again in a cost-loading system that decides that certain groups 'need' special breaks as privileged industries). No country has the built-in costs of our medical-care system that supposedly needs the high revenue to spur advances. We pay for a Mercedes-Benz and get a Chevrolet Impala. That's not to say that a Chevrolet Impala is a bad car -- it is just that you don't want to pay for it what you would pay for a Mercedes-Benz or even a Cadillac.
Speaking of the home country for Mercedes-Benz... German physicians earn much less than American physicians. But the German physician as a rule has gone through the educational system on heavily-subsidized schooling past the equivalent of the American high school and doesn't have the lenders to pay off. We see many foreign physicians and nurses in America -- but they aren't Germans. Maybe the Germans like their system, and maybe they don't like ours in which one has to negotiate with an insurance company before getting a procedure done. Physicians as a rule are lousy businessmen, and they shouldn't be expected to be effective negotiators or clerks.
The largest vendor to General Motors is... Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Medical costs are lower in Canada than in the US, which explains why much industrial work in the US has gone to Canada. That is no Third World country.
I can't say what Marx would say and neither can you. I'm more likely to consider that the survival instinct. If profits are to be derived from liberal efforts to reform capitalism, then some capitalists will jump in.
Recovery efforts can be very profitable; they must be for those capitalists who are to be the contractors or suppliers. Nobody says that any contemporary equivalent of a New Deal can succeed if it fails to create profits as well as jobs.
But this is worth noting -- what President has been in the White House during the greatest privatization of industry? Barack Obama. Selling off government investments in the auto industry and others has been the mark of someone loyal to capitalism. Sure, that undoes the effect of the financial coup of 2008. Results and image can diverge greatly; Dubya was the epitome of the 'pro-business' politician.
It is normal and necessary. But I look at the record of Rick Perry in Texas, and Texas-style Big Government is best described as crony capitalism. Sure, I despise crony capitalism; it implies massive corruption because those best connected to the Leadership get the choice of what to leave as table scraps for the rest of humanity after grabbing everything in sight and making all but themselves dependent and helpless.
...All in all, people can turn out in huge numbers to cast off unpopular politicians (Congress) as they can turn out in diluted numbers because the President hasn't achieved everything that he promised. 2012 stands to act as much a referendum on Tea Party politicians who won big in 2010 as on the President. People now know as they didn't recognize in 2010 that Congress is no less important than the President, especially when Congress is as polarized in ideology as it now is. I can imagine the vote going down in districts best described as R+10 or D+10 or more severe in partisan identity -- places where one Party has a lock on electing officials. But where the Republican is in a D+3 or even R+3 district but acts like the sort of Republican who would well fit an R+20 district... you might see local spikes in the vote. Any prediction of the vote in 2012 is now an excessively-precise effort in view of much that lies outside of realities that one usually can predict. We are in uncharted territory; the comforting realities of what we may have recently experienced may no longer be available.
