Socialist Action's Convention, 2018

Socialist Action's (SA) 2018 convention was held in Minneapolis on Oct. 12 - 14, with the account on their webpage delayed until January 16th. It's mostly straight Trotskyist boilerplate--why it took them three months to put the article together is a mystery to me.

The relevant article (by The Editors) is entitled Socialist Action National Convention registers gains. Precisely what has been gained is left unsaid. Commenter John B estimates they have about 100 members--which seems consistent with the only statistic offered: there were 70 contributions to the pre-convention discussion bulletin.

The showstopping news is that the Party now declares China to be a capitalist country. Wow! They finally noticed. And Russia, too. But that's not all--they've gone all out on a capitalism-shaming kick. Even Venezuela and North Korea are now put into the capitalist camp.

As late as 2017 SA classed North Korea as a "deformed workers state," similar to the former Soviet Union. They don't explain how or when the counter-revolution and capitalist restoration has since occurred.

Likewise, Venezuela, once a beacon for leftists everywhere, has now become anathema, disowned by everybody. Apparently SA uses capitalist to describe any regime it doesn't like--the term is reduced to mere epithet.

For SA capitalism is an on/off switch--there are no gradations. A country is either capitalist (apparently all countries except Cuba), or a workers state (Cuba). Of course that's not true--some countries are more capitalist than others. A good proxy for degree of capitalist is the measure of economic freedom put together by the Heritage Foundation. Hong Kong tops the list, followed by Singapore and New Zealand. The US comes in at #17.

Ironically, super-socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), often accused of "going the full Venezuela", denies it, claiming her model for socialism is Sweden. Sweden ranks #15 in economic freedom--i.e. is more capitalist than even the USA!

The countries at the bottom of the list--i.e., most likely to be non-capitalist--are (in order) Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. The correlation between economic freedom and per capita GDP is pretty good, especially if you exclude rent-collecting petrostates and off-shore banking havens. Capitalism is good for children and other living things.

But back to China. SA claims that a poor China is good for our economy. This is certainly not true--how can we sell things to a bunch of poor people? And further, people who can cost-effectively manufacture goods for American consumers will not remain poor for very long--300 million Chinese have been brought into the global middle class. I have discussed this issue at length in my replies to Lynn Henderson, here and here.

The Editors add a wrinkle to the argument bringing in America's defense of intellectual property rights.  They write,

China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was conditioned on its respecting foreign corporations’ intellectual property rights—that is, agreeing not to compete by transforming its primitive factories via state-of-the-art technologies, which the U.S. today insists are protected by U.S. patents (“inviolable” intellectual property rights). As a result, for close to two decades and until recently, the level of Chinese labor productivity lagged far behind most capitalist nations.

The US (and the European Union) expected China to obey WTO intellectual property laws. This is a free market principle that the US wants to defend. It does not follow that the US wants China to be poor. No way. A poor China means a poorer United States.

But geopolitics gets in the way. Not only are we economically dependent on China, but China is a military competitor. For that reason we care very much if military technology falls into Chinese hands--and preventing that from happening is really important, even at the cost of more poverty.

Trump's trade policy is to lessen our dependence on China by moving as much "Made in China" over to "Made in Mexico." It is understood this will lower Americans' standard of living somewhat.

SA follows the Leftist lead in slandering President Trump. They write,

Yes, Trump is a billionaire businessman—an overtly racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, climate crisis denying, detention center/concentration camp crusading, homophobic, Islamophobic, warmongering, imperialist beast.

Trump may be racist (I don't think he is), but he certainly isn't "overtly racist." An overt racist would call for the restoration of Jim Crow, or claim that Blacks shouldn't be allowed to vote, or tout the superiority of white people. Trump has said nothing like that. An overt racist, eating a taco bowl, would have said "I hate Latinos" instead of (what he did say) "I love Latinos."

He's not even overtly racist against Mexicans. Here is what he actually said.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

He is not saying that all Mexicans are problematic, drug-pushing rapists. Only the ones that the government is sending over the border. Now I think that statement is completely false, but it's not "overtly racist." It is a criticism of the Mexican government.

Some on the Left are smarter than our Editors. They say that Trump talks in "dog-whistles" or secret code. In other words, he's not overt, but instead a disguised racist. That position is arguable, though I don't think it's true, either. Instead he just doesn't care about race--the issue is to him completely unimportant. He's race-ignorant.

Likewise, it is hard to call Trump a "warmonger," especially now that he's pulling troops out of Syria. He's said nothing to suggest he's "homophobic," and it stretches credulity to think he advocates "concentration camps." Only the "climate crisis denying" charge sticks--and I'm down with him on that one.

Socialist Action would have a lot more credibility if it could get its own house in order. This is what they say about the Fourth International (FI).

Our delegation at the FI’s February 2018 World Congress aimed at re-orienting the FI to its historic rejection of coalition capitalist (“popular front”) politics and imperialist wars, unconditional support to the right of oppressed nations and peoples to self-determination, and the construction of disciplined revolutionary parties on the Leninist model aimed at the construction of a world socialist order.

SA is defending a strategy that has never, ever worked in world history. Despite the rewriting of history after 1917, not even the Russian Revolution was caused by a Leninist Party. Neither were the (since failed) Chinese and Cuban revolutions. The concept of a Leninist vanguard party is a total dead letter.

Compare, for example, AOC. While it's obvious that she's a major ignoramus (a problem that will solve itself in time), at least she has charm and good looks. Indeed, in a recent Rasmussen poll AOC essentially tied Trump in a hypothetical presidential match-up. So the lady has some serious charisma, along with formidable social media skills.

Compare her with Jeff Mackler--Socialist Action's 2016 presidential candidate.

Socialist Action’s decision to run our own candidate for the presidency, even as an extremely modest propaganda effort, stood us in good stead with regard to the education of our ranks along with radicalizing layers who were beginning to learn the lessons of independent working-class politics in the electoral arena.

They're not kidding about the "extremely modest propaganda effort." All they did was a five-day campaign swing through southern New England. And contrary to AOC, Mr. Mackler has all the charisma of Leonid Brezhnev.

That despite the fact that he is the Vanguard of the Vanguard, uniquely possessed of The Precisely Correct Revolutionary Program. So perspicacious, in fact, that he can tell us that North Korea is now capitalist when it wasn't in 2017. Not even AOC can compete with that!

I think an American socialist revolution is hopelessly improbable. But if I were to bet on somebody leading it, that somebody would be Ms. Ocasio-Cortez instead of Mr. Mackler. I'll put million to one odds on that.

Further Reading:

• Schreiber on Bonn Climate Talks
• Charlottesville
• Lynn Henderson on Donald Trump

A Leftist Criticizes the Left on Immigration

I'm grateful to Socialist Action (SA) for turning me on to an intriguing article by Amanda Nagle, an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar. SA's critique by Ivan Dolphy is headlined Angela Nagle’s shoddy remedies for the ‘migrant crisis.’ Ms. Nagle's contribution, published in American Affairs, is titled The Left Case against Open Borders.

Mr. Dolphy's post suffers from the disease common to my Trotskyist friends, namely an inability to treat their interlocutors respectfully. Everything descends into ad hominem attacks, accusing others of moral turpitude or laziness. The word 'shoddy' in the title sets the tone. Ms. Nagle pens a 'diatribe', she fakes a 'leftist tinge', and she's accused of purposely taking Marx out of context (I think she's not guilty).

The closing line of Mr. Dolphy's piece sums up Ms. Nagle's supposed moral failings--pejorative terms and arguably untrue accusations included.

Given that Nagle is now officially on the payroll of a rag that changed its name from The Journal of American Greatness, it poses the question of who the useful idiot to big business might be.

It's not really a serious critique.

Ms. Nagle's key point is that open borders and free immigration are really a causes for the libertarian Right, and not the Left.

She writes,

The transformation of open borders into a “Left” position is a very new phenomenon and runs counter to the history of the organized Left in fundamental ways. Open borders has long been a rallying cry of the business and free market Right. Drawing from neoclassical economists, these groups have advocated for liberalizing migration on the grounds of market rationality and economic freedom. They oppose limits on migration for the same reasons that they oppose restrictions on the movement of capital.

She could have cited Michael Clemens' 2011 article entitled Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? The thesis is that, if the world's people could just move freely to the location where they'd earn the most money, it would immediately add trillions of dollars to global GDP.

Ms. Nagle suggests that the Leftist impulse to be kind to migrants is conflicting with what should be their loyalty to the indigenous labor movement. After all, it's hard to build a union when a whole lot of cheap, scab labor is being imported from Honduras.

In Ms. Nagle's view, the only true beneficiaries of unfettered immigration are the bosses, who get more labor at cheap prices. The fact that the migrants clearly earn more than they would in their home countries is apparently not important to her. The primary effect of immigration, claims Ms. Nagle, is to lower the wages of domestic workers. And domestic workers do suffer, no doubt.

Though Mr. Dolphy disputes her leftism, like a true Marxist Ms. Nagle sees everything as zero-sum, and ignores the primary beneficiaries of immigration--consumers. Joe Six-Pack can get his lawn mowed for $20 instead of $100, which definitely raises his standard of living. The libertarian view depends on precisely this point: a rise in GDP means that more goods and services are consumed, which is good for everybody. A trillion dollars is no small increase in consumption.

However good immigration is for the economy, completely open borders is politically impossible. The arguments against it are non-economic, and concern culture, history, demographics, and governance. For example, countries that are in serious demographic decline (e.g., Hungary, Sweden, Japan) are the least tolerant of migrants--they're afraid of being swamped. That is a factor in America's opposition to immigration as well.

Further, there is the trilemma--no less true for being old. Among the three goods--democracy, a functioning welfare state, and high rates of immigration--pick any two. Ethnic homogeneity is a precondition for democratic support for a welfare state. Lots of immigrants will be tolerated only as long as few social welfare benefits are extended to them. Or, as happens in the EU, high rates of immigration require undemocratic, dictatorial methods by the Brussels bureaucrats.

The libertarian choice is to accommodate immigration by zeroing out welfare benefits. Trump's alternative is to maintain the welfare state, but accordingly to minimize immigration. The progressive Left (including SA) defend both a generous welfare state and high immigration, but are happy to rule dictatorially (through the administrative state, or via much more totalitarian methods).

Ms. Nagle takes issue with her progressive comrades and seems to side more with Trump--at least in this context. I'm not sure she realizes that.

Ms. Nagle makes some arguments against immigration that I think are completely fallacious. For example,

According to Foreign Policy magazine, “There are more Ethiopian physicians practicing in Chicago today than in all of Ethiopia, a country of 80 million.” It is not difficult to see why the political and economic elites of the world’s richest countries would want the world to “send their best,” regardless of the consequences for the rest of the world. But why is the moralizing, pro–open borders Left providing a humanitarian face for this naked self-interest?

In other words, for the sake of Ethiopia we should prevent the immigration of Ethiopian doctors. But this makes no sense. There is no market for high-end medical care in Ethiopia, so the doctors earn a lot more money in Chicago.

Health problems in Ethiopia probably don't have much to do with doctors, but instead revolve much more about access to clean water, safe food, and appropriate sewage disposal. No doctors are required for that. What is necessary is money--and indeed, the Chicago doctors probably send more money back home than they could ever hope to earn in Addis Ababa. Also needed is good governance, which is in very short supply in Ethiopia, but has nothing to do with doctors.

Ms. Nagle asserts that NAFTA has been bad for Mexico.

Nafta forced Mexican farmers to compete with U.S. agriculture, with disastrous consequences for Mexico. Mexican imports doubled, and Mexico lost thousands of pig farms and corn growers to U.S. competition. ... By 2002, Mexican wages had dropped by 22 percent, even though worker productivity increased by 45 percent. In regions like Oaxaca, emigration devastated local economies and communities, as men emigrated to work in America’s farm labor force and slaughterhouses, leaving behind women, children, and the elderly.

She is correct that working in the US was much more lucrative for Mexican peasants than subsistence farming. I'm astonished that Leftists (including that true Luddite, Barry Sheppard) think unmechanized, backbreaking farm work represents a good future for Mexicans. In support of the "22 percent" statistic, she cites an article in People's World, a paper of the US Communist Party. That paper culls the number from a similarly dubious source.

It is certainly not true that Mexican living standards are declining. Since 2009 net migration between the US and Mexico has favored Mexico. And for good reason--the Mexican economy has been growing like gangbusters.

This past August my wife and I spent a vacation week in Mexico City. I was astonished at how rich the city was--at least as wealthy as any in Southern Europe. The notion that Mexico is being gutted by NAFTA is absurd.

The only substantive criticism that Mr. Dolphy levels against Ms. Nagle is her proposed solution to the immigration problem: a greatly strengthened e-verify. He writes,

Nagle goes on to implore the left to embrace E-verify, a policy that would place the onus on employers to verify the immigration status of all of their workers, and would punish businesses for noncompliance. Proponents of this policy claim that it’s a humane way to encourage the self-deportation of undocumented people. Basically, their reasoning is that by creating more barriers between undocumented immigrants and jobs or services it would softly encourage them to leave or not migrate in the first place.

I actually agree with him. Beyond serious privacy issues, E-verify imposes a hardship on legal workers, especially legal immigrants. Further, while illegals shouldn't be here in the first place, it's much better if they're employed than unemployed.

Here are my suggestions for an immigration policy:

1. A generous legal immigration system (the wide front door) that preferences skilled workers who can contribute to America's economy. We need to admit people "who love us."
2. Abolition of the H1-B visa that turns immigrants into indentured servants.
3. A strong border that allows our country to control who moves here. Illegal immigration has to be greatly reduced. Trump's policies, while not the answer, are at least addressing the right question.
4. We should not admit large numbers of semi-literate, unskilled people from countries like Honduras. They will not thrive in our economy and will almost inevitably end up on welfare.

Further Reading:

• The Militant Visits Manila
• Solidarity on Trump & Trade
• The "Bureau" on Immigration
• Immigration? Si!

Socialist Action's Fund Raising Appeal

Reproduced from Socialist Action, December 31, 2018

My friends over at Socialist Action (SA) are very coy about their membership, and so I grab at any opportunity to learn something about them. Fortunately for me a recently posted fund-raising appeal included this informative photo. It's not a random sample, but it will have to do.

The demographics are much younger than I expected. Surely a similar pic from the Socialist Workers Party would feature baby boomers. SA, at least, can collect enough millennials together in one place to make a group portrait. That is an achievement--though I suppose with rising socialist stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising.

The group's agenda is nothing if not ambitious: they want to cool the planet, free Mumia, liberate women, organize hotel workers, and tear down the walls at America's southern border.

Not to mention:

Simultaneously, we have deepened our participation in the campaign to build an international party along revolutionary Leninist lines, collaborating in the Platform for a Revolutionary International with our comrades abroad. Together with our European co-thinkers, Socialist Action delegates spoke on behalf of the Platform at the 17th World Congress of the Fourth International.

The banner tells us nothing about any of those efforts--instead it strikes me as ultraleft. Back in the day when I was a Trotskyist we avoided public slogans that made us seem out of touch with reality. Apparently these young comrades are not as familiar with the Transitional Program as we supposedly were. This is the kind of banner that the Workers League or the Progressive Labor Party might have unfurled.

But back to demographics--the picture includes six men and three women. All are white but for one of the women, who looks to me like she might be South Asian. This pretty much is the way I remember the old YSA--male by a ratio of 2 to 1. And white (disproportionately Jewish) with a few "people of color" mixed in.

Something else hasn't changed, either: these comrades are dressed just as shabbily as we were back in the 1970s. While I think our hair was longer, and perhaps there were more beads, I don't think there'd be much to distinguish us versus them in a photograph. I'm embarrassed to think about it now. I'd have been so much more successful in life if I'd paid just a little bit of attention to my appearance.

It appears that only the lady on the left has any self-esteem at all. The two gentlemen on the right look like losers. The remainder mostly hide behind the banner, but they don't seem any more fashionable than the others--though perhaps the man in the middle, with the careful coiffure, is an exception.

Poor grooming doesn't make you look proletarian. No--it just makes you look incompetent. Compare our comrades with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is nothing if not fashionable. Whose party would you rather join?

Socialist Action, like all socialists, expounds at great length about how badly off the working class is. We're under constant attack, our standard of living is going down, the ruling class is perpetually trying to find way to make us poorer, the environment is dirtier than ever, and we're beset with myriad capitalist ills such as racism, war, and transphobia.

So no wonder they chose a desolate bit of commercial landscape for the photo-op: cracked pavement in a parking lot, bare trees, and is that snow in the background? In the distance I spy what might be a church--that very symbol of false consciousness. The store behind them looks like a supermarket--a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables from around the world available to average people in a working-class neighborhood at cheap prices--which to socialists is nothing more than evidence of environmental destruction.

Sadly, the careful framing includes one little detail that betrays the constant litany of doom and gloom. You can see it clearly--it says "24 Hours." Why those conniving capitalists! In their efforts to impoverish us all, they can't help but keep their store open 24/7. Just so that comrades--after an arduous branch meeting--can drop by and pick up some snacks or a six-pack on their way home.

In Cuba and Venezuela they've done away with such extravagances--there stores are open for twelve hours per week, assuming they have anything to sell. And if they really do have something in stock the line outside goes around the block. Now that's the revolutionary spirit our comrades think is good for us all.

I think my friends have told us more about themselves than they intended.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect on "Radical Professors"
• Faction Fight!
• 63rd & Halsted