Louis Proyect on "Radical Professors"

Louis Proyect pens a piece entitled Radical professors and the hazards of social media that cites four examples of leftist academics who have gotten themselves in trouble by intemperate tweeting: Steven Salaita, George Cicciarello-Maher, Johnny Eric Williams, and James Livingston.

The most egregious case is that of George C-M, a former professor at Drexel University, who was somehow inspired to tweet "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." Mr. Proyect offers some background. The tweet was

...prompted by the racist backlash against State Farm Insurance for purportedly advancing “white genocide” through a commercial featuring an interracial couple. This trope of “white genocide” is ubiquitous to the alt-right, including the business about white farmers in South Africa being killed off. After the fuckwit Tucker Carlson claimed that this was taking place, Trump followed up with a tweet even though it had no factual basis. Unlike the University of Illinois, Drexel University defended his free speech rights but George resigned eventually because the death threats and other forms of harassment became intolerable. Like Salaita, he was guilty of nothing except using Swiftian satire that might have been acceptable among leftists but not to Fox News’s audience.

Mr. Proyect claims some context of which I was unaware, e.g., that State Farm Insurance somehow advocated "white genocide" in a commercial. I find this hard to believe. He further maintains that we rightists are somehow fixated on said supposed genocide--I, for one, live in no fear of such an event, however disturbing recent events in South Africa might be.

The upshot of this is that we're supposed to excuse George's tweet as "Swiftian satire," i.e., just harmless fun that only a dedicated right-winger could take out of context.

Of course tweets come without context--almost by definition--and if George is foolish enough to proclaim his ardent desire for "white genocide" via that medium, then who am I to disbelieve him? Even after reading Mr. Proyect's explanation, I can't understand the tweet in any way besides literally.

I don't fear "white genocide," but at the same time I don't believe anybody who advocates it deserves to work as a professor. George has, whether purposely or foolishly, disqualified himself from the academic profession.

As an aside, if some right-wing professor (there are a few) had posted a similar tweet about African-Americans or LGBTQ people, the "Swiftian satire" excuse wouldn't have passed the laugh test. Such a person would have been fired before sundown--and rightly so.

As a second aside, the tweet can possibly be interpreted as a threat, in which case it is not protected speech. Of the four cases Mr. Proyect cites, this is the only one where I'm not sure First Amendment rights apply.

Now lets turn to the sorry case of Mr. Salaita, who opined that "At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?" among many other things. Mr. Salaita had been offered a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois, but because of antisemitic tweeting the offer was withdrawn before he could start work. Mr. Proyect writes "It should have been obvious that this was Swiftian satire but the board preferred to placate wealthy Jewish donors rather than uphold academic freedom."

For the life of me I can't see anything satirical in Mr. Salaita's tweets, Swiftian or otherwise. I have no trouble calling him an anti-Semite. That said, he does not directly threaten or libel anybody, so despite being hate speech it is clearly protected under the First Amendment. But he does not have a right to work at the University of Illinois as a professor, and the school was right to rescind the offer.

Mr. Proyect blames "wealthy Jewish donors" for the outcome. I don't know if that's true, but let's suppose it is. The University of Illinois--faculty and students alike--are dependent on donations, especially in Illinois where state funding has been cut to the bone. Mr. Proyect will put that all at risk just so that some clueless little twerp can run off at the mouth with his vile hate speech. Hiring Mr. Salaita would have severely damaged the institution, and the Board had no choice but to let him go.

So why do these people post such career-ending tweets? Are they really that stupid? Well, yes they are, but there is also a larger story to tell. They are all academics and as such they live in an echo chamber. Status in academia is achieved by loudly touting one's anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-misogynist, anti-Israel (Jewish) credentials. It's an arms race--the more and better your virtue-signalling, the higher your status within the community (and the more likely you are to get published, funding, tenure, etc.).

We recently endured such an episode on my campus. A long-time political science professor--often interviewed by The Economist and the New York Times--made the rather obvious observation that the Republican John Faso will likely win the congressional seat over the Democrat Antonio Delgado. He also had the temerity to criticize hip-hop music, leading to a faculty piling-on that lasted for several weeks, ended only by the offending professor's abject apology, though he had said nothing he needed to apologize for.

It's nothing but virtue-signalling all the way down. And sometimes this internecine, academic competition escapes its bounds, leading to tweets that, to people in the real world, are correctly interpreted as hate speech.

That brings us to the sad case of James Livingston, who tweeted

OK, officially, I now hate white people. I am a white people, for God’s sake, but can we keep them — us — us out of my neighborhood? I just went to Harlem Shake on 124 and Lenox for a Classic burger to go, that would my dinner, and the place is overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around on the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.

I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know it's about access to my dinner. Fuck you too. 

As Mr. Proyect points out, this isn't even political. It definitely is protected, and further, it's not hate speech, even though it sounds that way. There is no way that Mr. Livingston should lose his job at Rutgers University because of it.

But it is pathetic. This guy is so insecure about his own moral virtue that he has to condemn other restaurant patrons for their lack of "woke-ness." Most people visit restaurants for the food--not to demonstrate their political bonafides. Harlem Shake gets pretty good reviews on Yelp. How would the management and employees feel if all of a sudden white customers stayed away because they weren't "woke" enough?

He's definitely got a chip on his shoulder. Maybe he needs to visit a psychiatrist?

I'll take issue with Mr. Proyect's description of these professors as "radical." A radical implies somebody of independent thought. These people, far from being radical, simply can't control themselves, be it from some psychological defect or too much academic peer pressure. Instead, they are the slaves of a virtue-signalling mob.

Further Reading:

• If Everybody is a Racist, Then Nobody is a Racist
• Sex and the Alpha Male
• Louis "Lyndon LaRouche" Proyect

Three From The Militant

I'm failing at my job.

My job is to criticize the Trotskyist movement from the Right. I'm tasked with keeping my remarks civil, serious and friendly, but critical it still should be.

Unfortunately the recent issue of The Militant makes that very difficult. It contains three articles that I mostly agree with--it's hard to criticize something agreeable. Still, I'll try.

The first, by Bob Carter, is entitled Protests hit Quebec festival move to shut musical revue. It concerns a theater production about slavery that was shut down by critics who accused it of "cultural appropriation."

On June 26, about 100 protesters organized by the self-named SLAV Resistance Collective protested in front of the theater doors on opening night. The protesters, both Black and Caucasian, shouted, chanted and waved placards accusing internationally renowned Quebecois producer Robert Lepage and lead singer Betty Bonifassi of being “racists” and of appropriating Black history because they are “white” and the show didn’t have a majority Black cast. 

On July 4, Montreal Jazz Festival officials cancelled the production after only two of the scheduled 16 shows. More than 8,000 tickets had already been sold. Officials apologized to anyone who they said might have been offended by the performance.

The Militant quotes producer Robert Lepage:

“Everything that led to this cancellation is a direct blow to artistic freedom,” Lepage said in a widely circulated statement. “When we are no longer allowed to step into someone else’s shoes, when it is forbidden to identify with someone else, theatre is denied its very nature … and is thus rendered meaningless.”

Of course this is absolutely correct. Unfortunately many of my other Trotskyist friends (along with the entire academic Left) will side with the censors. The Militant is right to call them to task.

The second, by Terry Evans, is headlined US, EU rulers clash over trade, spending for NATO. It centers attention on President Trump's recent meeting EU president Jean-Claude Juncker. I actually disagree with much of this article, but Mr. Evans gets one thing very right.

Much of what is reported in the liberal media about the clashes between Washington and Berlin aims to hide this reality. It seeks to reinforce the notion that Trump’s actions are endangering Washington’s interests by threatening to tear up the decades-long “world order” through which the U.S. rulers have collaborated with their “traditional allies” that make up the EU.

While it is likely true that Mr. Trump is needlessly undiplomatic in his dealings with the Europeans, The Militant is quite right when they suggest the media and critics are hyperventilating a bit. The fact is that the world has changed since 1991, and even more so since 2010, after which fracking came fully on line. Americans simply don't need that old alliance anymore.

But many people--not just in government but also in the media, academia, the military-industrial complex, and think tanks--have built their careers around those old verities. They've learned to negotiate the halls of NATO, the catacombs of the EU, the byzantine rules of the WTO, along with the elaborate protocols of the United Nations. Seventy years of collective expertise are now threatened with irrelevance--whole PhD programs are about to go out of business.

Call it the Deep State if you will, but it's actually something much more mundane than that. It's a heartfelt plea for job security--a plea that will ultimately fail. As individuals I feel sorry for them, but for the rest of us the demise of this world is probably all for the best.

Mr. Evans appears to agree with me.

Workers face a world today where a series of historic shifts are unfolding in the “order” the U.S. rulers imposed after the second imperialist world war — in Korea, the Mideast, Asia and in Europe. Trump is working within these developments to put together alliances and arrangements that favor the U.S. rulers. Many of those involve steps that can tamp down wars and conflicts that have existed for decades. These are good for working people. They open political space for us to act and learn how to fight for our class interests.

As the above paragraph indicates, the article occasionally devolves into boilerplate Trotsky-talk. Ignore that, however, and most of what it says is very agreeable.

The third article is by Roger Calero--Venezuela: Workers, farmers face effects of capitalist crisis. The Militant never bought into the whole Chavez charade, for reasons explained by Mr. Calero.

The leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution never mobilized working people to take control of production and the land and replace the bourgeois government with a workers and farmers government on the road to expropriating the capitalist class. They rejected the revolutionary example set by workers and farmers in Cuba. That is the only road that offers working people the chance to confront the problems they face.

 I think this is pretty lame--especially since Mr. Calero admits elsewhere that Venezuela did expropriate foreign owners (boldface mine).

A U.S. federal court judge ruled Aug. 9 in favor of Canadian gold mining company Crystallex, saying it can collect $1.4 billion it claims to have lost when late President Hugo Chávez nationalized the gold-mining firm in 2009. This could result in the company taking control and selling U.S.-based oil refineries owned by Citgo, which is part of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA.

Still, The Militant thinks it's off the hook and can now criticize the Venezuelan regime with "I told you so" impunity. And its criticisms are right on the money, e.g.,

“I am better off selling empanadas than working as a nurse,” said Ana Rosario Contreras, president of Caracas College of Nurses, during a July 6 protest demanding higher wages. “An empanada costs 500,000 bolivars and I get paid 600,000 every two weeks.”

The problem with Venezuela is not that they didn't utter the correct magic words, nor that they failed to completely implement the exact policy prescribed Jack Barnes from his Manhattan penthouse. No--the problem with Venezuela is socialism.

Socialism has failed always and everywhere. And however much I agree with The Militant on any individual point--for that reason alone my job still needs to be done.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2018
• Summary Statement of US Strategic Goals for the Coming Period
• Viva Poverty!

Solidarity on Trump & Trade

I'm way behind on following Solidarity, which a month ago published an article by Luke Pretz and Bill Resnick (P&R), entitled Trump's Trade Folly and the Virtues of Organizing for a Radical "Fair Trade". It's a good piece, worth analyzing in detail.

They get off on the wrong foot--at least by my lights--by completely misunderstanding Donald Trump. The lede:

While Trump has been careening between policy positions on near everything (China, the Koreas, Syria, NATO, DACA, and health care policy among others), he has in his public statements and tweets remained dedicated to the economic nationalism that was a central plank in his campaign platform. In recent weeks he has kept himself in the headlines announcing aggressive tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico, the European Union, also his blunderbuss tariffs on Chinese manufacture perhaps igniting a mini-trade war, his obsession with combating the US trade deficit, and his tantrum at the G-7 conference snubbing his European counterparts and especially attacking Canada.

          ...the media accepted Trump’s economic nationalist theatrics as the real Trump, ...

They view Mr. Trump as an ignorant bozo, not conscious of his own policy and incapable of forming a coherent strategy. I think this is precisely wrong--Mr. Trump knows exactly what he is doing, and why.

But if you don't understand the president's method, then you can interpret his supposed madness any number of ways. P&R suggest that Trump's rhetoric notwithstanding, his underlings are sticking with the "neoliberal" agenda of free trade, for which the failed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty is a proxy. P&R infer this conspiracy because they can't imagine that the "ruling class" can be against free trade, and therefore it's Trump who doesn't know what he's doing.

At some level they're right. The business community--from the Chamber of Commerce to Main Street to Wall Street have all come out vociferously against tariffs. Even Whirlpool (the appliance manufacturer), which had long demanded protection from South Korean competitors, is now complaining loudly that the steel and aluminum tariffs raise their costs far beyond any benefit from tariffs against LG and Samsung. So even they are now suggesting all tariffs be abandoned.

How different this is from 1930, when the business class broadly supported the Smoot-Hawley duties. Supply chains today are so complex and so global that nobody profits from tariffs anymore. The near universal opinion is that tariffs are bad and will lower everybody's standard of living. Even the very language--"trade war"--suggests as much. No war ever made people better off.

Only a few people proclaim protectionism as a solution to our economic woes. The lead voice is Pat Buchanan, who claims that tariffs are what made this country rich to begin with. Despite being a Buchanan fan, I disagree with every word of this piece, including most of his cited "facts."

Mr. Buchanan is a voice in the wilderness.

I don't believe Trump is against free trade. Like P&R, he claims to only want "fair" trade, though the interpretations of "fair" do not correspond. And the president does have point: the days when the US can afford to run persistent trade deficits--year after year, decade after decade--are over. There were reasons we did that during the Cold War, but the world has changed. The US is no longer willing to subsidize global commerce.

I've written about these topics elsewhere, including at some of the links below.

Getting back to P&R--they claim to have discovered a third way that's neither protectionism nor free trade. They call it "fair trade", which they think is somehow radically different from Trump's version of "fair trade." I think they're wrong--no matter how you slice or dice it, "fair" trade is just a form of protectionism. The only (very slight) difference between P&R and Trump is who gets protected.

In P&R's scheme, Americans should be allowed to buy products from Mexico only if Mexican workers are paid on an American scale and receive American-quality benefits (including things like environmental protections). Let's count the ways this won't work.

1. Workers in Mexico are less skilled than American workers. That shows up today as only low-end vehicles are manufactured in Mexico, e.g., the Chevy Cruze. The important, high-end cars, e.g., F-150 pickup trucks, are all assembled in the USA. This is partly a function of skill level.
2. Infrastructure in Mexico is way below the American standard. Electricity and water are much more expensive. Transportation costs way more--the country has a poor highway system and nearly no rail network. (One can blame geography for that deficit.)
3. The infrastructure to provide workers with American-style benefits does not exist. The medical facilities do not exist because the population is too poor to afford them. The financial markets necessary to provide reliable pension plans also don't exist.
4. The reason Mexico is poor is because there are too few rich people in Mexico. The number of Mexicans who can afford an F-150 pickup is negligible compared to, say, New Jersey. Ciudad Juarez is a thousand miles further from New Jersey than Michigan or Tennessee. Manufacturing of large, heavy objects (cars) is always cheaper near the marketplace.

Mexicans can compete with American labor only by reducing their prices, which is what they do. P&R want to prohibit them from doing that, which will put Mexican manufacturing completely out of business. P&R's solution is the same as a very huge tariff.

Beyond this, P&R miss some important distinctions. First is the difference between tradable and non-tradable goods. Tradable goods can easily cross borders--things like cars, textiles, airplanes. Non-tradable goods are not easily exported, e.g., food service, plumbing repair, medical care, education. By far the bulk of the US economy is in the non-tradable sector--workers there do NOT benefit from tariffs at all.

But they are hurt. As tariffs (or P&R's substitute) raise the cost of imports, non-tradable workers will be forced to pay higher prices and their standard of living will suffer. So P&R's proposal will (very hypothetically) aid Mexican workers (assuming they still have a job) at the expense of Americans employed in the non-tradable sector--i.e., the majority of workers.

One last point. It turns out that open borders and free trade are approximately the same thing (at least in the tradable sector). With open borders (which I assume P&R support), jobs are kept in the USA and workers are imported to fill them. With free trade, the workers stay in their home countries, but the jobs are exported so they have work. Either way there is labor arbitrage.

So P&R are proposing something completely ridiculous. They want to prevent Mexican workers from having jobs in Mexico, but at the same time welcome them to the US to take the same jobs here. I don't understand the justification for this weird and politically unpopular procedure. Indeed, I don't think P&R have thought their proposal through very carefully.

I appreciate P&R's good intentions. They want to improve the lives of Mexican workers at what they believe will be no cost to American workers. But they believe in a free lunch--and it will end in catastrophe. Good intentions notwithstanding, our two friends need to think through how it would all come down in practice.

Note: Mrs. Trotsky and I will be celebrating our anniversary by spending next week in Mexico City. Who knows--I might even visit the Old Man's fortress? Sadly, I don't read or speak Spanish, so I doubt I'll learn very much about politics. Though if I do you'll be the first to hear about it. However, I won't be getting anything posted next week--I'm leaving my laptop at home.

Further Reading:

• Trade Wars
• China & the United States
• Tradable vs. Non-Tradable Goods