Left Voice Antisemites Speak Out

 

(Source: Hunger Strike for Palestine Launched at CUNY)

Professor James Dennis Hoff, on the English faculty at CUNY and a prominent contributor to Left Voice, champions the slogan Free Palestine. Hamas, the murderous death cult responsible for the current war in Gaza, also proclaims Free Palestine. Elias Rodriguez--the person arrested for murdering a recently engaged, young Israeli couple while attending an event in DC--outdid them both, yelling Free Free Palestine upon completing the deed.

Free Palestine is a very thinly disguised exhortation to kill all the Jews living in Israel. Another of Hamas' favorite slogans is Globalize the Intifada, which can only be read as demanding the extermination of all Jews worldwide. Mr. Rodriguez took the slogans literally and got a head start on said extermination--he murdered two Jews in cold blood.

Professor Hoff obviously agrees with both Hamas and Mr. Rodriguez--the only good Jew is a dead Jew. In his article entitled Don’t Blame the Palestine Movement or the Left for the Jewish Museum Shooting, he justifies Mr. Rodriguez's act in two ways:

Professor Hoff calls this "genocide"
(https://www.anera.org/how-big-is-gaza/)

First, he claims that because "more than 60,000 people were murdered by Israel in Gaza," Mr. Rodriguez had some cause for exacting revenge. The only people murdered in the Gaza war were the 1200 Israelis slaughtered during the surprise attack on October 7th. All other victims are war casualties--the number of which Hamas certainly exaggerates. Israel is not trying to kill civilians, but it is working hard (and successfully) to wipe out Hamas.

War is terrible and all deaths are tragic. But there is a world of difference between war casualties and gratuitous murder. There is also a big difference between war casualties and genocide. There is no genocide taking place in Gaza--Professor Hoff and his comrades are just lying about that.

Second, he claims any sympathy for the DC victims is just hypocrisy, exaggerated by media outlets such as the New York Times. The goal of the media is "to actively propagate the lie that the movement for Palestine is a violent and antisemitic threat to domestic peace."

Really!? Is Professor Hoff claiming that Hamas is nonviolent, and that Oct. 7th was just a peaceful walk in the park? He apparently also believes that purposely killing Jews isn't antisemitic! His justification is silly (links omitted).

The New York Times, for instance, has repeatedly stated, without evidence, that the shooting was an act of antisemitism, despite the fact that both of the victims were employed by the Israeli state, and that reports suggest Rodriguez chose his targets deliberately. Furthermore, as his manifesto makes plain, his actions were clearly driven by his outrage at the ongoing genocide in Gaza and had nothing to do with hatred of any ethnic or racial group. Such knee-jerk conflations of anti-zionism and antisemitism have by now become standard practice for most of the U.S. media.

Cruelly murdering two Jews only because they're Israeli seems obviously antisemitic--what other evidence do you need? Mr. Hoff says the murderer wasn't really killing Jews, but rather only "Zionists." Among Israelis this is a distinction without a difference. For Hamas (and for anybody else who uses Hamas slogans) there is no daylight between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Does our professor really believe that Zionists in the United States should just be gunned down for no other reason? Apparently Yes, he does.

Because the murderer is connected to the communist Party for Socialism and Liberation grouplet, his act is seen as a black mark against all socialists. Professor Hoff complains

Such obvious red-baiting clearly has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people or stopping real antisemitism of the kind promoted by people like Elon Musk and the Far Right. Instead it is designed to encourage more repression and violence against those who support the movement for Palestine and the entire Left.

Except demanding the extermination of all Jews in Palestine (and worldwide) as Hamas and its followers do--is definitionally antisemitic! I don't know what comments Elon Musk has made that cause the professor to think he's an antisemite, but unlike Hamas and Professor Hoff, Mr. Musk has never, ever called for the murder of all Jews (whether or not they're Zionists).

Professor Hoff is a raving antisemite, and American antisemitism is today a disease of the Left-- including many in the Democratic Party. The professor has a right to free speech, despite the fact that what he says is vile. But nobody who advocates for and defends the slaughter of Jews should be employed as a professor at a public university.

While Professor Hoff's piece reveals the deeply illiberal and murderous intentions of Left Voice, the other article we consider today better belongs as an SNL skit. These antisemites (depicted above) are nothing if not a self-parody.

The lede paragraph reporting on their hijinks reads,

As the Israeli genocide of Gaza intensifies and a famine is declared, a group of eight faculty, students, and staff from across the City University of New York (CUNY) have launched an indefinite hunger strike outside the Graduate Center in Manhattan. They will be at this location from 12 to 6 pm every day and are demanding that, “Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees immediately divest from the zionist state and from all weapons and technology manufacturers equipping the israeli-US genocide in Palestine.” The hunger strikers are launching a fundraiser to support families in Gaza and hosting political education, art, and mutual aid events for the local community in New York.

I'm not sure what the point of a hunger strike is. Are they trying to prove how stupid they are? Do they want us to feel sorry for them? Is it an act of virtue-signaling directed at fellow antisemites? I suspect the latter--you and me are not part of their intended audience.

Though one has to wonder how serious this is. They're in public from noon to 6pm--and for all I know afterwards they go to McDonalds for a good dinner.

Their demands are as kooky as the project itself. They want 1) CUNY to divest from Israel, and 2) to divest from all "weapons and technology manufacturers" equipping the "genocide." These are impossible.

Israel is fully integrated into the global economy, and "divesting" from Israel means sticking all your money under a mattress. This won't happen. Similarly divesting from specific industries is equally impossible--Israel produces much of the software that is built into Silicon Valley technology.

Our antisemitic comrades are all pro-poverty. Their best solution for Palestinians between the River & the Sea is to completely destroy the Israeli economy, driving all residents of whatever nationality into dire poverty. It's worse than absurd. These people are just a joke.

Further Reading:

• Professor Hoff & Harvard
• Iranian-American Demands Death to Israel
• Whiners & Complainers

Marxist Economics

 

Source

Michael Roberts, a formidable Marxist economist, is interviewed by Left Voice's Jason Koslowski in a post entitled Is a Major Slump on the Way? He is asked some basic questions about the tenets of Marxist economics, which makes for a useful read.

The first question asks about the labor theory of value, and why it is important today. Mr. Roberts responds:

Mainstream theories deny that the value/price of commodities is due to human labour.  Instead, some argue that the value or price of a commodity depends on the individual demand for it, its degree of utility. You might pay $1 for an ice cream but somebody else might pay $2, depending on the ‘marginal utility’ of an ice cream to each person. So the price is dependent on the desire of each individual, averaged in some way.  

This is nonsense; first, because how can you add up each individual’s desire for an ice cream to reach its average value?  Second, the question that is not answered is: why does an ice cream cost only $1-2 while a motor vehicle is priced at $30,000?  What decides that is the cost of producing each in terms of the labour time involved, not the individual demand for cars over ice creams.

You can count me among the "mainstream economists" here, who believe that it's consumers who assign values to products. A consumer will spend $30,000 on a car only if a car is worth that much money to her--and preferable to spending the same money on a fancy vacation or for the down payment on a house. Her calculation of value has nothing to do with what the workers think their time is worth.

Mr. Roberts asks how the capitalist can determine that "average value" for an ice cream cone? He can't, of course, but what he can do is find the revenue maximizing price. If the price is higher than that, then too few people will buy ice cream. If the price is lower, then he's just leaving money sitting on the table. There is a price--known as the market price--that maximizes revenue. In theory that happens to be where the red and green curves in the above diagram intersect. Prices convey information about how much consumers want a given product. It is consumers who set prices--not the capitalist or the workers.

Though Mr. Roberts isn't entirely wrong--he asks why a car can't be sold of one or two dollars, like an ice cream cone. This is, of course, because the cost of production--including labor--is much higher to produce a car than it is to produce an ice cream cone. So the price of a car must be higher than the cost of production, including labor. If consumers aren't willing to pay at least that much, then no cars will be produced. Neither capitalists nor workers will be willing to manufacture cars that can only fetch a couple bucks in the marketplace. Or, put another way, the price has to clear the market.

Of course some consumers are willing to pay much more than the market price. Only cheap cars will sell for $30K--these days one can easily find cars that are priced well over $100K! It seems that enough people are willing to spend that kind of money on a car. The production costs to make expensive cars are not that much higher than for the cheap, commodity cars, and so the luxury brands are very profitable for the capitalist. Not because the workers are exploited, but only because some consumers value brand, fashion, fancy electronics and leather seats more than most. In other words, automakers discriminate and they find customers who are willing to pay well above the market price for their cars.

It's the same with airline tickets. Basic economy tickets are a commodity product and are sold as cheaply as the cost of production allows. I use the word commodity here in the narrow sense, meaning products that compete primarily on price. But business class and first class seats sell for a lot more, and substantially add to the airline's profit margin. Unlike what Mr. Roberts implicitly claims, branded and/or luxury products are not commodities and are sold at (often substantially) higher prices. This is only because consumers are willing to pay for them, even if the additional labor cost is negligible.

Quoting again from Mr. Roberts:

Value in things and services produced as commodities for sale by capitalists has a dual basis: 1) it must be useful to somebody so that it will be bought, i.e. it has a “use-value”; but 2) it must be sold for money, i.e. it has exchange value. The great discovery by Marx was to show that the value or wages paid to workers for their labour time is less than the value of the goods or services sold by the capitalist.  The worker works eight hours in a day but gets paid the equivalent of just four hours labour time.  The capitalist appropriates the remaining four hours on the sale of the product. This is “surplus value” free to the capitalist.

What he calls "use-value" is, in fact, the value that the consumer puts on the product. Some consumers are willing to pay more and others less. Capitalists try to get consumers to pay more by upselling them to, say, business class. Consumers try to pay less by shopping around for sales and/or discounts. At the end of the day, the so-called "exchange value," aka price, is the result of bargaining between the consumer and the capitalist. This negotiation has nothing to do with the cost of labor.

Mr. Roberts posits yet a third value--determined by neither what the consumer wants nor by what the negotiated price eventually is. It is instead a spiritual quantity that Mr. Roberts calls "surplus value." I call it spiritual because there is no way this quantity can be measured--Mr. Roberts' offers the imaginary approximation that it accounts for 50% of the "exchange value" price. It is this spiritual, "surplus value" that is supposedly being stolen from the worker and pocketed by the capitalist as profit.

Wages are also the result of market competition. The capitalist needs to pay enough to convince the employee to come to work--and also not to work for another firm. The worker wants not only more money, but also benefits and leisure time. None of this has anything to do with what consumers are willing to pay.

Finally, Mr. Roberts completely misunderstands the role of "profit." There are two ways to measure profit: one as a fraction of all operating expenses, ie, operating profit. This is the measure that Marxists use (though they have a very weird and completely impractical way of estimating it). They posit a "law of economics" that global operating profits are declining. There is no empirical way to test this result.

While it is true that the operating profit has to be positive in order for there to be any profit of any kind, it doesn't have to be big. Walmart, for example, sets its operating profit to be 3%--if it's higher they lower prices; if it's lower, they eventually close the store. While low operating profits may be bad for the capitalist, the trend is excellent for consumers, since it means lower prices overall. Thus what Marxists interpret as being bad for the economy is actually good--assuming the trend of declining profits exists at all.

The way capitalists calculate "profit" is completely different: they calculate it as earnings per share, usually expressed in reciprocal form as the price/earnings ratio (PE ratio). Thus the relevant measure doesn't depend on operating profit at all (as long as it's positive), but instead as a percent of the total market capitalization of the company. By this measure there can never be any systematic decline in profits, since if operating profits go down, then share prices will go down in proportion.

The successful capitalist combines various resources--labor, capital, natural resources, expertise--into a company that creates something new that is of greater value to consumers than the constituent parts. Creating value for consumers is known as creating social utility, ie, making us all richer. Modern America is vastly richer than 18th Century Britain because capitalists, by imaginative recombinations of resources have been able to generate huge amounts of social utility.

The Marxists have economics all wrong--but if you want a concise and clear exposition of Marxist economics, then Michael Roberts is a good place to start.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
• Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes

The Fading Fumes of Trotskyism

 

Jack Barnes

Jeff Mackler

Jack Barnes' biography has yet to be written, and I am certainly not the one to write it. I've never met the man apart from being in the audience at a few of his Oberlin presentations. All I know is what I've heard through the grapevine (and from Wikipedia). Along with his life-long companion, Mary-Alice Waters, he attended Carleton College, and in 1960 joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That brought him and Ms. Waters into contact with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)--in those days an avowedly Trotskyist Party in fraternal solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International. In 1972 he became National Secretary (top leader) of the Party, a post he has held ever since. Comrade Mary-Alice followed him on to the Political Committee, a status she continues to hold.

So support for the Cuban "Revolution" is in the core DNA of the Party, even today. Almost every issue of The Militant contains articles about Cuba, this week's being no exception. This is noteworthy because the Party has evolved its opinions on many other topics, eg,

• They no longer refer to themselves as "Trotskyist," and have broken ties with the Fourth International.
• They have distanced themselves from Wokeism, and no longer associate with the petty-bourgeois, identity movements so common elsewhere on the Left.
• They support Israel against Hamas, which they regard (correctly) as a fascist death cult.

Today the Party consists of about 100 comrades (with perhaps 200 sympathizers), down from around 2000 in the early 70s. It's an aging crowd--the median age is likely over 70 by now. They'll survive Jack Barnes (who turns 85 this year), but I doubt they'll make it too much longer than that.

I think the end of the SWP and the end of the Cuban "Revolution" are likely to occur simultaneously. When Cuba is no longer "revolutionary," then the Party's very raison d'etre is gone. Without their allegiance to the Cuban Commies the SWP simply becomes a rather weird group of Trump supporters.

So people have been predicting the imminent demise of the "Revolution" for many decades now--and such predictions have so far come to naught. I think that's because the soothsayers have misunderstood the fate of Cuba: the "Revolution" isn't going out with a bang, but instead with a whimper. Rather than a cataclysmic end to the regime, it will instead just gradually and literally die away and fade into the dustbin of history.

In this, the "Revolution" is like the SWP. The Party won't end by Jack Barnes turning off the lights at the National Office. Instead there will be a gradual aging and shrinking until there is effectively nothing left. The historical analogy is the Socialist Labor Party, a once vital movement that faded into a website that ended when the last keeper of the flame passed away. It's gonna take another 20 years, but this is also how the Socialist Workers Party will end.

And so it is with Cuba. There will likely never be a counter-revolution in Cuba, but instead the country will cease to be a civilized, cohesive society. It's already close to that--most of the island is without electricity for most or all of the day, and transport is today mostly by oxcart and donkey.

The country is in steep demographic decline. You can't trust the Cuban government numbers (echoed by the United Nations)--those are certified fake. The government still counts as residents people who left the island less than two years ago--which obviously inflates the population numbers. According to official numbers, in 2024 the population of the island was 9,748,532. As mentioned, this ignores the large out-migration that began in 2020. According to the Universidad de Navarra in an article by Agustina Rodríguez Granja (emphasis mine)

The Cuban government refuses to give concrete figures on the recent massive outflow of citizens, claiming that until they have been out of the country for two years, they are still considered residents. This forces researchers to collect data from the receiving countries and to draw their own models. The conclusion of Cuban demographer and economist Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos is that in reality only 8.62 million people reside on the island, pointing to an 18% decrease in population between 2022 and 2023. Thus, more than one million people would have left Cuba since 2021, a Issue that is in line with the number of Cubans registered in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in other countries.

She goes on to write,

Based on the number of Cubans who entered the United States and the count that on other occasions this direct migration to the U.S. has represented in the overall Cuban migration, Albizu-Campos extrapolates that the total number of Cubans who left the island between 2021 and 2024 is close to an estimated 1.79 million.

The people who are leaving are typically working age, and disproportionately female of childbearing age. The government is letting them leave likely because they don't want rebellion at home. But eventually the "Revolution" will be reduced to a bunch of old people without electricity, subsisting by growing food on whatever land they can get ahold of.

It's not just the fading fumes of Cuba. It's also the fading fumes of the Socialist Workers Party. 

Speaking of fading fast, I haven't read a biography of Jeff Mackler, either. I also have never met him, but I think his bio might actually be very short--perhaps only one word: pathetic.

Mr. Mackler is the "national secretary" of the nearly defunct Socialist Action organization. That grouplet, which fancies itself as the "vanguard party," likely consists of a couple dozen comrades. It's gotten so small and so devoid of talent that I've taken to referring to Mr. Mackler as Vanguard Man, ie, the very last, living leader of the coming American revolution. 

The last formal edition of their newspaper was published in June, 2022, and since then their webpage has struggled with content. As I predicted back in January, it appears that Mr. Mackler (who is in his 80s) is no longer capable of leadership. So Vanguard Man is fading out, and it's not clear whose gonna lead us into the next revolutionary era.

The most recent post in Socialist Action, dated April 30th, is entitled Socialist Action General Membership Meeting for Comrades and Friends. It reads in full (except for details of Zoom meeting that was held on May 4th),

Comrades and Friends,

Join us this coming Sunday, May 4 at 5 pm PST [7 PM Midwest and 8 pm EST] for our Socialist Action ZOOM general membership meeting.

Reply to David.huseth@tutanota.com, John Pottinger <jpottinger@earthlink.net>, Jeff Mackler <jmackler@lmi.net>

Proposed agenda:

Analysis of Democrat’s “Hands Off” and “50 50 1,” • Defense of Palestine • May May/Immigrant Rights • New SA Members •  Fourth International World Congress Assessment and SA’s termination of fraternal membership. • Other business.

Comradely.

David and John

I don't know David Huseth, but John Pottinger was a comrade of mine in Chicago back in the day. He's a perfectly fine, upstanding gentleman against whom I bear no grudge--but frankly, he is woefully unqualified to assume the role of Vanguard Man. At very least he lacks the editorial talent. Note that prior to this April 30th announcement, the last post to their webpage was on March 20th.

No word yet on the outcome of the general membership meeting. But honestly, along with Mr. Mackler, it appears that Socialist Action is passing from this mortal coil. Which is a bit surprising--I expected the SWP to go first. 

There's more, of course. One shouldn't forget Left Voice, a claque of petty bourgeois academics that suffer from an overdose of Wokeism, a hatred of Jews, and of all the ills that beset the modern academy (eg, among other things, the advent of AI). These people aren't serious.

There is the nearly forgotten Socialist Viewpoint, a bi-monthly magazine edited by an aging group of spinsters formerly associated with Nat Weinstein's grouplet. And I can't forget Workers' Voice, which is in part a split-off from Socialist Action, and which now claims to be a vanguard party all its own.

The most significant remnant of Trotskyism is Solidarity, which isn't really Trotskyist anymore (not that anybody else is), but has instead become an addendum to the Democratic Party.

Anyway, I find all of this increasingly meaningless and boring, which is why I'm uninspired to write. There's no point. I won't end this blog--something will come along that inspires--but it's probably gonna be less frequent than it has been.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us
• American Brezhnevism Today
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

 

Professor Hoff & Harvard

 

Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.

It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.

But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)

The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.

Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.

Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.

I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.

So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.

Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.

Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.

So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.

What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.

The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.

In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.

I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.

Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.

Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.

And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.

The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.

Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.

Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.

Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes, 

Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.

Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.

In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Economic Crisis
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• The Professors Congress: The International Situation

Tariffs!

AI generated cartoon representing tariffs

The article is by Jason Koslowski, and it appears in Left Voice under the title Notes from a Wall Street Sewer: Tariff Edition. Mr. Koslowski identifies himself as "a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia." In other words, he works for peanuts, having to share his salary with the zillion other PhDs out there seeking a career in academia.

I assume he teaches English given the quality of writing, which is good. 

He gets the most important fact correct: Tariffs are "a tax on imported things." The reason for tariffs is supposedly to make foreign goods more expensive for American consumers, and thereby encouraging us to buy domestically. Or, alternatively, to incentivize the producer to manufacture their products in the US. In principle, tariffs should lower the trade deficit.

He remarks, correctly, that this usually doesn't work, writing "...this plan did not work in 2016. Also, pretty much every expert everywhere says it’s not going to work this time."

I don't blame Mr. Koslowski for taking Trump's justification for tariffs at face value. But in this case I think he's mistaken. I think Trump understands that tariffs won't likely reduce the trade deficit. What he really wants to do is raise taxes. And tariffs, especially disguised as repatriating factories to the US, is a politically acceptable way to raise taxes.

In other words, tariffs are--first and foremost--a tax increase. That's entirely the point. The uncertainty arises when one asks Who is gonna pay the taxes? This turns out not to be an easy question to answer.

The obvious answer, which both our contingent college teacher and "experts" suggest isn't likely, is that American consumers will pay the taxes. But here's the rub: when confronted with a tax increase, people adjust their behavior to avoid paying the taxes. American consumers are no exception: they can substitute the foreign products with American products, or they can decide they don't need as much of the tariffed goods after all. Eg, if Mexican avocados are tariffed, then perhaps our affection for guacamole will be lessened. This option, if it happens, would reduce the trade deficit.

Or it could happen that the foreign producers desperately need the revenue, and so they reduce their prices sufficiently to maintain market share. I think Chinese manufacturers may fall into this category--the Chinese need the US dollar reserve currency in order to buy food and oil from abroad, regardless of whether they end up taking a loss in Yuan terms. This is called mercantilism. In this case it is Chinese producers (both workers & capitalists) who pay the tax. There will be no net decrease in the trade deficit.

A third option is that--because, eg, Americans by fewer Canadian products--that Canadians just simply don't have enough money to buy American products. The result is that the Canadian dollar will decline in value compared to the US dollar. This is good for the Canadian manufacturer because of the favorable exchange rate their products sold in the US are no more expensive than they were before the tariffs were imposed. But Canadian consumers are still worse off--they still won't be able to afford that vacation in Florida. In this case there might be an increase in the trade deficit (Canadians sell just as much, but buy less), and it is the Canadian consumer who ends up paying the tax.

Finally, it's possible that Walmart generates sufficiently high margin on, eg, Mexican avocados that they can just pay the tariff as extra overhead. In this case the Walmart shareholder (and eventually, employees) are paying the tariff tax. This will also have no effect on the trade deficit.

None of these options are mutually exclusive, and it's likely that they will all apply to some degree. Of this we can be certain: every option reduces trade and therefore reduces wealth. As such tariffs are bad for the economy. But that's true for any tax increase--all taxes are bad for the economy. The only advantage of tariffs is that they're politically more palatable.

Of course it gets even more complicated. Mr. Koslowski mentions that other countries will levy retaliatory tariffs, ie, raising taxes even more! And it spirals down from there. But I think this problem is somewhat limited because: 1) the US runs a large trade deficit with the rest of the world, so other countries need to sell to the US a lot more than the US needs to buy from them. So the US will win this kind of war. And 2) the US depends less on foreign trade than almost any country on earth, so it's relatively immune from retaliatory tariffs.

In short, apart from being a tax increase, the effects of tariffs are near impossible to forecast. There are just too many options, followed by options in response to prior options, to know how this is gonna proceed. Anybody who predicts a supply shortage/inflation/higher price for Americans/a recession, or any other disaster may be right, but they're most likely wrong. I predict that Trump's tariffs won't have a huge effect on the American economy. People will respond by minimizing their tax bill, and eventually not much tax will actually be collected.

Mr. Koslowski damages his credibility with his cartoon-like description of the US economy. He writes

I think we should see the tariffs as part of a magic trick Trump is trying to pull off. That trick is to hold together an unstable — that’s the key word — class alliance. To get elected, he had to win over very different sections of the different classes in society. 

First sector of this support: large chunks of the ruling class, the “big bourgeoisie,” the very rich, majority shareholders and big CEOs of big companies. ...

He won a lot of them over. Trump’s selling his party as the most pro-business of the two parties. (Elections are lovers’ quarrels between segments of our masters.) He’s offering massive tax breaks for the rich, again. He’s deregulating the economy, he’s slashing protections on the environment — all this is great for profits.

One part of his appeal to the ruling rich: break the backs of the workers. 

His premise is that there is a fight-to-the-death between bosses and workers. I've discussed this in many previous blog posts, and it's not true. While they have some things to fight over, for the most part bosses and workers have a common purpose: sell as much to consumers as possible.

He asserts that the "big bourgeoisie" have a common interest--namely they're for tariffs. Many of them (in industries like agriculture, auto manufacturing, retailers, etc.) are very much against tariffs. Others (such as tech firms) don't care because they don't export material goods. I don't think there are many big businesses who actually think tariffs work in their favor.

The biggest supporters of tariffs are in fact the unions. Many union members were present at Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement. UAW head Shawn Fain is a strong supporter. And no wonder--tariffs allow unionized workers to collect a rent on top of the market wage--eg, a salary increase roughly equal to the tariff.

Mr. Koslowski's only evidence that Trump is anti-worker is "...he's attacking the National Labor Relations Board." This is small potatoes--the NLRB plays a bit role in the American economy. Indeed, the whole idea of collective bargaining is so last century--supply chains and consumer choices are too diffuse for a strike against any one company to have much significance. Much more impactful are unions as lobbying and political organizations, and it is in precisely that role that Trump is trying to reach out to them. A new tariff will strengthen the union far more than any collective bargaining agreement.

Personally, I'm on the side of Mr. Koslowski's cartoonish bourgeoisie: I think tariffs are on net a bad thing for the economy. They're a tax increase. But politically they make a lot of sense, and for Donald Trump they look to be a winning issue.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Tradable vs. Non-Tradable Goods

Cosmetics, Cuba & Mary-Alice Waters

From left, Esther Pérez, Mary-Alice Waters and Martín Koppel at the podium in Havana
(Source: Militant/Jonathan Silberman)

Contrary to my prediction, octogenarian Mary-Alice Waters really did make another trip to Cuba in February--and took a whole bevy of comrades with her (as best as I can determine, including Martín Koppel, Jonathan Silberman, Rachele Fruit and Philippe Tessier). Ms. Waters is second in command of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and longtime consort to chief honcho and similarly aged Jack Barnes. 

The occasion was the Havana Book Fair, and the topic of Mary-Alice's speech was a new edition (2024) of Cosmetics, Fashion and the Exploitation of Women, recently translated into Spanish by a Cuban, Esther Pérez.  The original authors were Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed, while the new edition includes contributions by Ms. Waters.  Her speech is reprinted in The Militant under the title ‘Fight for women’s equality is part of battle on world scale to settle which class will rule’. A companion article, by Rachele Fruit and Philippe Tessier, is headed Lively exchange at Havana book launch.

There are at least two things weird about the above photo. First are the microphones on the table. Authors Fruit and Tessier tell us that about 30 people attended the session. It hardly seems necessary to have a sound system, especially since Cuba is busy liberating itself from electricity use. After last Saturday's additional power failure, a reasonable estimate is that only 10% of demand is satisfied. It seems unlikely that the microphones even work. Why are they even there?

The second weird thing--recall this is a talk nominally about cosmetics and how evil capitalists have bamboozled women into buying them--is that octogenarian Mary-Alice has obviously dyed her hair! Compare her hair color with that of Esther Pérez--a woman likely younger than Ms. Waters, but who, living in Cuba, doesn't even have access to cheap hair dye.

In my prior article (Mary-Alice on Cosmetics & Fashion) I challenged Ms. Waters:

As a test, Ms. Waters should go to the dollar store and buy a bunch of cheap cosmetics that she can take with her next time she goes to Cuba (if she ever goes to Cuba again). She can pass them out to local women, whom I hazard will be overjoyed to receive them, without any encouragement from the bourgeoisie. Just a little bit of beauty to brighten their otherwise dark, dreary, boring days.

At very least she could've brought along some hair dye to share with her loyal translator. It would seem like the right thing to do.

The gist of Mary-Alice's speech was that women are oppressed, not just by men, but mostly by "capitalism" (whatever that is--Mary-Alice has no clue). The depths of their oppression is illustrated by the fact that they are hoodwinked into buying cosmetics that (according to Mary-Alice) they 1) don't need, 2) are dangerous, and 3) are similar to addictive drugs, such as fentanyl.

To which my responses are: 1) maybe women don't need cosmetics (who is Ms. Waters to tell women what they need?), but surely they enjoy having them. Cuban women probably have bigger problems than a lack of cosmetics (eg, adjusting to no electricity), but I still think had Mary-Alice taken my advice, she would've brightened the day of a few Cuban ladies. Cheapskate!

2) Ms. Waters mentions a few edge cases where cosmetics--broadly understood--might be dangerous. Her examples are mostly around cosmetic surgery, which I agree is perhaps taking the passion too far. But L'Oreal is the biggest cosmetics company in the world, and I don't think she can reasonably claim that any of their products are dangerous. 

3) They're addicting--which is true, but so is everything else that's pleasurable. I take great joy in being able to turn on electric lights in the evening. Does that mean that I'm addicted to electricity? Are her Cuban comrades better off being free of such an addiction?

Ms. Waters summarizes her talk at the end by asking and answering two questions.

The first question is: Are the issues addressed in a debate about cosmetics and fashion many decades ago still relevant? Haven’t “we” moved beyond that?

Second: Hasn’t knowledge of the earliest human societies moved far beyond what was known in the early 1950s? Isn’t Evelyn Reed’s article on “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” outdated for that reason?

This is her answer to question one:

More than three centuries after the birth of industrial capitalism, we can say that the resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the creation of markets — that is, creating “needs” that don’t naturally exist — have expanded astronomically, and continue to expand. 

Which demonstrates that she knows nothing about capitalism. To me, the most succinct definition of capitalism is an economic order designed to maximize consumption. Capitalists want you to shop till you drop.

Contrast that with socialism, where consumer wants are to be rationed by the government. Under socialism you can buy cosmetics only if the State approves the sale of cosmetics. Mary-Alice is convinced that nobody (except her) needs cosmetics, and therefore you should be prohibited from buying them. Apparently in Cuba they've decided that nobody needs electricity, either.

Sure--you can complain about overconsumption or even wasteful spending. But I think those are minor problems compared with the problem that afflicts most of the world, namely under-consumption, aka poverty. The problem in Cuba has nothing to do with who owns the means of production or who gets to distribute the proceeds. The problem is poverty. That's all it is. Cubans aren't allowed to buy what they want to buy.

Ms, Waters responds to the second question merely by asking another: Who needs any stinkin' research anyway? Some 60+ years ago she read a book entitled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Friedrich Engels, first published in 1884. That book is the absolute truth when it comes to anthropology. Why? Because it's "materialist," whatever that means.

In the intervening six decades Mary-Alice has refused to read anything new in the human sciences. Whenever confronted by novelty she sticks her fingers in her ears and sings loudly "LA LA LA LA..." to drown out any contrary information.

She's never heard of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it appears she denies the theory of evolution altogether. She doesn't know what the human genome is, much less the astounding discoveries made over the past couple of decades. She's unfamiliar with radiocarbon dating. She's resoundingly ignorant of basic economics. Amazingly, she denies that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Hell, she probably hasn't even read Sigmund Freud (who is, at very least, a pleasurable read).

She's a complete ignoramus, and we can safely ignore her opinions. Whether in English or Spanish, Cosmetics... is not a serious book.

Further Reading:

• The End of Cuban Civilization
• Steve Clark's Bizarre Book Bazaar
• Book Review: Human Diversity

The March 17th Militant: A Review

 

Volunteers at community project in Atabey, Havana. Recycling trash, they produce compost and grow vegetables. Ana Morales, speaking, talks to group and visitors. Jover Araújo, project director, center. Longtime revolutionary combatant Víctor Dreke, right, member of the group.
(Picture & caption source: The Militant/Martin Koppel)

It usually doesn't take me very long to skim through the pages of The Militant, the weekly publication of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The articles are so boilerplate and uninteresting as to not deserve a closer look. But the most recent issue dated March 17, 2025, is different. There are a number of articles that invite a response--indeed, for which I could have devoted an entire post. Instead I'm taking the opportunity to review the paper as a whole, with comments on some of the contents.

The paper began publication 1928, concurrently with the events leading to the founding of the international Trotskyist movement generally. As such, it is the oldest Trotskyist paper in the United States, and likely among the oldest in the world. Through various splits and copycat grouplets, there exists today a whole bevy of so-called "Trotskyist" newspapers, of which this blog covers only a few.

Newspaper is the operative word here: for most of its existence The Militant was published only in print form, distributed weekly both by mail and by comrades hawking copies on the street. That DNA is still baked into the modern paper: it is print first, after which a web-friendly version is posted on the internet. You can read the print version in pdf format, but the web format is far more convenient for me.

So yes, even though the web page is nicely designed and easy to navigate, it's still just a copy of the print version. It is updated weekly (not daily) except on weeks when the print paper isn't published. The print copies are mailed out on Thursday, and the issues are post-dated 11 days later. For example, the current issue was mailed on March 6th and is dated March 17th. The web version is posted on Saturday--this week on March 8th.

This, of course, makes perfect sense when you consider the fact that the SWP's comrades are typically in their 70s, and if they're at all like me they spent much of their youth selling Militants on street corners. Old habits die hard.

Compare with the latest incarnation of Trotskyism over at Left Voice, which is clearly web-native, and if they even have a print version I've never seen it. The Left Voice comrades belong to the Millennial generation, and it shows. Though it's not like they are any more relevant to American political conversation.

For the past several weeks The Militant has covered the successes Cuba is having in liberating humanity from electricity. Comrades Jonathan Silberman and Martin Koppel traveled to the island and now report back in an article entitled In face of US economic war, Havana neighbors organize to grow food, clean up the area. 

The the accompanying photo (above) suggests that the morose-looking, shabbily-dressed gentlemen have "volunteered" to plant a vegetable garden and to clean up a garbage dump.

“We’re just in the initial stages, but over the past few months we’ve gotten good results growing vegetables — cucumber, lettuce, broccoli, garlic and parsley,” said Araújo, the director of the project. “We deliver the vegetables without charge to schools, elderly people and economically vulnerable households.”

Of course the reason the veggies are "free" is only because the labor is free, ie, the workers are paid nothing. I doubt they're actually volunteers, especially since the article reports that "[José Jerónimo] Estevez is an elected representative of one of the local Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), a nationwide organization that involves people on a neighborhood level." CDR is a euphemism for Cuba's ubiquitous secret police, analogous to the Stasi in East Germany.

So this is forced labor, aka slave labor. No wonder those guys look so morose!

It gets worse. The state capacity of the Cuban government is so diminished that they can no longer provide basic municipal services, such as garbage pickup. Indeed, lack of trash collection 

...has afflicted residential neighborhoods across the city. The majority of Havana’s garbage trucks have been paralyzed by the lack of imported fuel and spare parts caused by Washington’s economic war on Cuba. Despite these shortages, the Cuban government has marshaled resources to improve trash collection, and in parts of Havana such as Vedado and Miramar, some of the unofficial refuse dumps that had mushroomed on residential blocks have been eliminated.

If you believe The Militant, the US has sanctioned Cuba because our bourgeoisie are so envious of the Cuban lifestyle that they're afraid Americans will want to imitate them. Just think how marvelous life in America could be if we spent our free time sorting garbage by hand like they do in Cuba!

The reason that the US sanctions Cuba is because it's not a team player in the political or economic order, and can't be trusted to repay its debts. Besides which, there's plenty of oil for sale on the open market, and if Cuba had any money they could buy what they need.

A second article that caught my attention is by my old friend Brian Williams. Mr. Williams is The Militant's generally competent economics reporter--usually much better than others on my beat. But he falls down on the job here, retelling false narratives commonly recited in the progressive Left. His article is entitled Wall Street: ‘Life’s good for the rich, that’s good for you’. There are two whoppers that caught my eye.

First, he conflates stock with flow.

Last year the top 1% of U.S. households held $49.2 trillion in wealth, or about 30% of the country’s total wealth. To put this in perspective, this is more than the 2024 gross national product of the four largest capitalist economies — U.S., $25.43 trillion; China, $14.72 trillion; Japan, $4.25 trillion; and Germany, $3.85 trillion. 

The $49.2 trillion represents the (very hypothetical and mostly fictional) total wealth held by the bourgeoisie, accumulated over a lifetime of hard work and savvy investment. That is a stock of money, the same as net worth. Meanwhile, the gross national product numbers represent the total income of their respective countries over the course of a single year. That is a flow of money. It's an apples & oranges comparison, analogous to comparing a pound of butter with the speed of a car. Mr. Williams should know better.

Then he complains about good news.

Households that rake in $250,000 a year or more — those in the top 10% of income levels — account for nearly 50% of all spending, especially on luxury items. And this spending is what propels big-business media like the Journal to claim classless “consumers” are doing fine.

Would he rather the wealthier households just took their money and stuffed it into mattresses? Would that be better for the economy? Of course not! You can't have an economy without consumption. Think of all the waitresses, groundskeepers, Uber drivers, yoga instructors, jewelry salesladies, car dealers and home construction workers who would be out of a job of richer people didn't spend their money.

Who is gonna buy those expensive SUVs that UAW workers manufacture if not for people who have some money?

Marxists think that an economy is driven by production. They're wrong--an economy thrives or fails because of consumption. Cuba is so poor because the people there have no money and can't buy anything. They have to import tourists to purchase what little the country can produce.

There is more. The Book of the Month section reprints an excerpt from Evelyn Reed explaining her cartoonish version of anthropology. It's not worth reading.

The lede article is entitled ‘We run to build a party for workers to take power’, and is written by Terry Evans. The headline makes it sound really boring (like similarly-titled pieces in every issue of the paper), but this one reports on the Party's New Jersey gubernatorial candidate (Joanne Kuniansky) and is slightly more worthwhile.

Quoting Ms. Kuniansky, it contains this gem:

“Growing numbers of workers are repelled by the Democrats and Republicans. But without a complete break from these bosses’ parties, workers can make no progress..."

Really? A record turnout for Donald Trump does not suggest that "workers are repelled by the Democrats and Republicans." 

And in its 97 years of existence the Socialist Workers Party has made no progress.

Further Reading:

• Mary-Alice on Cosmetics & Fashion
• Book Review: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us 
• Left Voice and the SWP