Returning to Industry?

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) is launching a drive to sell a "new" book entitled Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party. It's mostly reprint of an older book first published in 1981 under the title The Changing Face of US Politics, which I reviewed here.

Along with three older pieces from The Militant, the only new content is an introduction by Jack Barnes, which you can read in The Militant here. Since I've read and reviewed the original book (albeit six years ago), this post is only about the new introduction.

The opening paragraphs include this:

The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party is about the working-class program, composition, and course of conduct of the only kind of party worthy of the name “revolutionary” in the imperialist epoch.  ...

This book is about building such a party in the United States and in other capitalist countries around the world. It is about the course the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessors have followed for one hundred years and counting.

The comrades have set a goal to sell over 1000 copies of this book, mostly by going door to door in working class neighborhoods. This seems truly bizarre to me. Perhaps the book is a useful read for comrades and ex-comrades, but it is certainly not a worthy propaganda tool. (Propaganda is the Trotskyist term of art for advertising.) A person loosely attracted to socialism is not even going to find the book readable, much less enlightening. It's all about an esoteric, internal squabble within the Party.

It looks like they are not trying to recruit the masses. They want to find those few individuals who actually read the book and are moved by it. There won't be many (likely none), but those people will join the SWP.

The book is horribly out of date. To begin, the proletariat doesn't even exist anymore--certainly not as Marx and Lenin imagined it. For them, "workers" were an amorphous blob of unskilled labor who had nothing to sell besides their time and muscle power. Today that hardly applies: muscle power is nearly irrelevant, and unskilled labor has a small and ever-shrinking purchase in the market place. Today's employees have skills, which means they have invested in human capital, and accordingly they have something big to lose in a revolution.

The proletariat doesn't even look the same as it did in 1981, as the pictures accompanying Mr. Barnes' introduction reveal. An example is this:

Above, miners hold national protest in Washington, D.C., March 1981, a few weeks before 160,000 began 10-week strike, turning back concession contract demanded by mine bosses.
(Picture & Caption credit: The Militant)

As of 2016 coal mining only employed 50,000 people, and with the advent of fracking that number is surely substantially smaller today. A national strike of coal miners is inconceivable today--much of the industry would just shut down for good.

It's the same story for other industrial unions: UAW, USWA, Teamsters, etc. Manufacturing only accounts for about 12% of US employment. That share is shrinking rapidly because of automation. Because of globalization, supply chains extend around the world. The ability of any American union to shut down production is negligible.

The recent GM strike is an example. The UAW was out for four weeks, and eventually settled for a very mediocre contract. Supposedly it hurt GM, but there was never any shortage of cars in American showrooms. Consumers didn't feel the strike at all. The only thing that might have happened is GM, along with its employees, lost market share to their competitors.

Unlike the days of Marx & Lenin, or even the 1980s, the industrial unions are a shadow of their former selves. The SWP acknowledges that: today they work at Walmart and for Uber (insofar as they're not retired).

Mr. Barnes will accuse me of denying the importance of the class struggle.

Denial of the class struggle is nothing new. There are more than enough grandparents to current “theories” about “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” and so on noisily propagated by young professionals and other upper middle class layers today. In 1940 James P. Cannon polemicized against petty bourgeois currents on the eve of World War II who “rail at our stick-in-the-mud attitude toward the fundamental concepts of Marxism — the class theory of the state, the class criterion in the appraisal of all political questions, the conception of politics, including war, as the expression of class interests, and so forth and so on.

There is much to credit in this paragraph. The Party has firmly rejected "petty bourgeois" campus movements. They truly defend the "deplorables," and as much as they disagree with Trump, they argue rightly that the people who voted for him deserve to have their choice respected. They see impeachment for the sham that it is (only a slight exaggeration to call it a CIA plot). They've sided with Gibson's Bakery against the spoiled brats who attend Oberlin College, along with the kooky faculty who really should know better.

As important, they are sane on the issue of climate change. The rest of the "petty bourgeois" left has gone all in on catastrophism. The Militant, while acknowledging there might be a problem (which even I acknowledge), nevertheless rejects the total and immediate destruction of all civilization as a cure. A ludicrously extreme version of this can be found on the new Socialist Resurgence website. When so-called Marxists argue seriously for a return to subsistence farming and mass poverty, then you know something has gone horribly wrong. The Militant has not fallen into this trap.

But--even if you don't like the word intersectionality--the world really has gotten a lot more complicated. If nothing else, the global working class is much richer than they were 40 or 200 years ago. Rich people are not inclined to throw it all away on the unlikely chance Mr. Barnes is right about world history. Rich people can invest themselves in other ways besides their jobs: family, hobbies, church, sports, etc. They don't define themselves primarily as workers. As Paul Le Blanc puts it, organizing the working class today is very much like herding cats. Most workers just won't be interested in a class-conscious message.

Which brings us back to the propaganda campaign. Mr. Barnes writes (emphasis mine):

SWP members, supporters, and young socialists support picket lines, knock on doors, and stand on porches to talk with working people in cities, towns, and farm country, as we carry out such activity on the job and in the unions.

Standing on porches works for bourgeois politicians. All they want from you is that you go vote in November. It's an easy ask that can convincingly be made from the front porch.

But that's not what the SWP wants. They want to change your life. They ask that you stop whatever you're doing and become a revolutionary socialist worker-Bolshevik. Ain't gonna happen just by standing on somebody's porch. For that kind of ask you need to really get to know somebody: babysit their kids, marry their daughter, root for the same football team, etc.

And this is where the Party made a huge mistake. By forcing comrades to move around every couple of years, they actively prevented them from making those strong connections. And this is why the original Turn to Industry never worked, and why selling a few books that nobody is gonna read won't work either.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• George Novack: Then and Now
• Trotskyism & New Media

Comrade Keith L. Writes About China

Comrade Keith L., then part of Socialist Action (SA), contributed a monograph entitled China: A New Imperial Power (pdf) to the 2016 pre-convention discussion bulletin. It is now among the founding documents of the new Socialist Resurgence group.

It's 83 pages long! And I read all of it, not because I had to, but because it really is fascinating. It is chock full of facts and statistics about the Chinese economy, along with interesting figures and maps. Comrade Keith is a good writer, and--at least if you like statistics--it's an enjoyable read. It is exhaustively researched, and while I can't vouch for total accuracy, what data I did double-check survived the experience. Comrade Keith definitely knows his China!

Were he an academic, this is a monograph that could earn him tenure. It's a pity that he writes for such a small, insignificant audience. (Like I should talk--what with my obsession over small, Trotskyist grouplets!)

While the piece can and should be profitably read just to learn about China, Comrade Keith has a larger agenda. He wants to demonstrate to his comrades that China is an "imperialist" power. For me this raises two problems. First, I don't think the word "imperialism" actually means anything. And second, if it does mean what you might think it means, then it's obvious that China is "imperialist," and no 83 page argument is necessary.

To define imperialism, Keith goes back to the original source, namely Lenin's 1916 work, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It's a five-point test: 1) monopolies play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the creation of "finance capital" and a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of of capital, in addition to the export of commodities; 4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations; and 5) the territorial division of the world into capitalist spheres of influence.

By this definition not even the United States is imperialist, failing to one degree or another on all five counts, most notably on the formation of monopolies. There is no major industry in the US that is dominated by a monopolist.

Consider, for example, Amazon, which is certainly a big company (on some days the world's biggest company by market cap). But it isn't a monopoly in any of its businesses. The retail trade is so competitive that Amazon can barely break even--basically no profit at all. Its cloud computing service, AWS, is profitable, but has to compete aggressively against Microsoft, IBM, Google, and recently, Apple. Amazon Prime is in entertainment, competing against Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney, and now Apple wants to enter that market, too. Whatever else Amazon is, it's not a monopoly.

Comrade Keith conflates "monopoly" with "big." He writes,

One useful measurement for determining the presence of monopoly companies is the Fortune 500 Global list, which lists the 500 largest companies in the world by revenue. How then, do China and other leading imperial powers compare on this metric?

After which he presents data in Figure 3 (p. 19) showing that China had 109 companies in the global Fortune 500 in 2017. Which only proves that China has big companies (like Amazon), not that they're monopolies. "Big" and "monopoly" are not the same thing. (China may have monopolies. I don't know, and Keith never makes the case.)

Similarly, the US has no "financial oligarchy." I assume that means a group of people who could, for example, set interest rates above the market rate. But it's obvious that no US financial institution can set interest rates--probably not even the Federal Reserve. The fluidity of the system is surely one reason why interest rates remain near all time lows (much to the chagrin of any incipient "oligarchy").

If not even the US is "imperialist," then why does Comrade Keith spend 83 pages trying to convince us that "imperialist" is something more than an epithet? The reason lies deep in the DNA of Marxism--Trotskyists need to explain why successful revolutions in the USSR, China, and elsewhere backslid to restore capitalist social relations. And further, this happened gradually without any violent counter-revolution. Now--only 28 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union--Socialist Action and Socialist Resurgence have finally come to terms with this course of events that wasn't supposed to happen.

Per Lenin, an "imperialist" country has to export capital, and China has been doing that at scale. China has accumulated, as of 2016, nearly $1.4 trillion in foreign direct investment, i.e., direct investment by China into businesses in other countries, ranking the country fifth in the world. (See Figure 8 on p. 25.)

China has been investing heavily in African ports, railroads and mining ventures, which makes sense since China is a natural-resource-poor country. In return for importing raw materials, China exported high-end manufactured products. Accordingly, China had a $38 billion trade surplus with Sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 (Figure 12 on p. 38).

They don't treat their African workers well. Comrade Keith quotes one of his sources (p. 32) at length, including this excerpt.

Chinese employers tend to be amongst the lowest paying in Africa when compared with other companies in the same sector. In Zambia, for example, the Chinese copper mine paid its workers 30% less than other copper mines in the country. In general, Chinese companies do not grant African workers any meaningful benefits and in some instances ignore even those that are prescribed by law. Wages above the national average were only found at those Chinese companies with a strong trade union presence. Chinese staff members enjoy significantly higher wages and more benefits than their African counterparts.

So here is my question--and I don't know the answer. What fraction of Chinese loans to a country like Zambia are denominated in RMB (the Chinese currency)? Obviously a lot of it is: Chinese employees on African work sites are likely paid in RMB, as are the costs of materials imported from China. The cost of consumer products sent to Africa are also probably denominated in RMB. On the other hand, salaries, rents and bribes paid to African employees, landlords and politicians must be paid in a hard currency. Which is surely one reason why China is so chintzy on the wages and working conditions.

The point is that RMB debt is funny-money. There is no transparency: China can simply write off RMB debts, or print money to pay for them, or just shoot people who complain about not getting paid back. As a mercantilist economy they don't care about making a profit. They only care about earning hard currency (USD) from the export of manufactured products, net of hard currency expenses spent in Africa acquiring the raw materials. Spending funny-money for those resources is not a problem (though there is a cost in Chinese living standards).

So Tanzania and Zambia, etc., may not be getting such a raw deal. Their actual dollar debt is probably much smaller than what the headline number suggests. The funny-money default will only count against them with respect to China--the rest of the world will ignore it and their credit rating will be unaffected.

Comrade Keith devotes considerable attention to the size and state of the Chinese military, detailing technical advances in the land, air and sea forces. China's annual defense spending is approximately one fourth that of the US--still a hefty sum. The country built its first foreign military base in Djibouti, along with a chain of ports (in Burma, Pakistan and Tanzania, among others) that could easily become military bases. Collectively these are part of the One Belt, One Road system.

Keith suggests that military force could be used to enforce debt repayment from countries like Zambia. This is not likely--not even the US would try to use military force just to enforce debts. The problem with roads, power plants, and mining infrastructure is they can't be repossessed. If Zambia can't repay, then China is plum out of luck. Unlike the US, they have no control over the international banking system.

I think Keith exaggerates China's current military strength. Yes--they are a force to be reckoned with in the South China Sea. But they do not have a blue water navy, and are nowhere close to acquiring one. Their geography--a continental country separated from the larger ocean by island archipelagos, mitigates against it. In the Indian Ocean they are no match for the Indian navy, and they have no power necessary to keep the Straits of Hormuz open should the US decide not to do that for them. I base my opinion on Peter Zeihan's books.

As mentioned, Comrade Keith describes at great length the miserable way that Chinese companies treat their African workforce. I have no cause to disbelieve him--and this alone is reason to read his article. China's foul behavior is attributed to "imperialism" (my emphasis).

The analysis of Tanzania, Namibia, and Ethiopia, as well as several integrated pieces of broader, continental-level analysis, attempt to show the broad trends, categories of interest, and serve as representative examples of Chinese imperialism in Africa. Broadly, it might be said that these primary interests fall into natural resource extraction, exporting of manufactured goods, capital export through infrastructure construction, offshoring of labor-intensive manufacturing, and utilizing Africa’s strategic position both in facilitating trade to and from Europe and in controlling the Indian Ocean. (p. 43)

I think the word "imperialism" adds nothing to this paragraph. The problem isn't "Chinese imperialism," but instead it's just China. China is a big country, humiliated in the 19th Century, that views itself as the Middle Kingdom, and as the world's leading and most important society. It's a very inward-looking, xenophobic culture, and no wonder they treat Africans with complete disrespect, if not contempt.

So the first couple of pages of Comrade Keith's opus are all about "imperialism." But after that you can just ignore the word. Then it's a rollicking good read, You will learn a whole lot about China. Highly recommended!

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade, and China
• China & the United States
• Sam King Defends Lenin's Imperialism

The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet

Last week I discussed the split in Socialist Action (SA) from the point of view of the Majority Faction (MF). This week I'll consider the corresponding documents from the minority Permanent Revolution Faction, now reconstituted as an independent group named Socialist Resurgence (SR).

I promise to read these documents so that you don't have to. But in this case I failed. SR's Founding Document (pdf) is so dense that I couldn't get through all of it. Not that it's poorly written--I see Michael Schreiber's fingerprints all over it, and he is a good writer. It's just that you had to have been there--if you weren't privy to all the preceding arguments then it makes no sense. It's like reading through transcripts of a marriage counseling session for a couple about to get divorced.

It's really boring! Though I've read enough to have some things to say.

The name of the new grouplet, Socialist Resurgence, is a bit of a misnomer. Socialist Recrudescence would be more apt. If Socialist Action, a grouplet of about 100 worker-Bolsheviks, has failed to lead us to the post-revolutionary promised land, then it's hard to be optimistic about SR, which numbers about 40 comrades (if commenter John B is to be believed).

The split is about US military engagements abroad, notably in Syria.

Both SA and SR believe that the essential problem in Syria is something called "US Imperialism," though neither knows with any precision what that is. Where they disagree is with the characterization of Bashar al-Assad.

• SA thinks he is an agent of resistance--a third world leader heroically defending his country from "US Imperialism." As such, he deserves to be defended and supported.
• SR thinks he is a cat's paw for "US Imperialism." That is, instead of being part of the solution, he is part of the problem. Al-Assad should be opposed by all good revolutionaries.

This is how SR describes SA's position:

The world is polarized between two great forces or camps. One is U.S. imperialism, which is trying to actively foment regime change almost everywhere in the world. The other great force is an “Axis of Resistance,” anchored by Russia, and maybe China, and this alliance includes the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and Syria, as well as organizations like ALBA. They implicitly and explicitly give political support to capitalist regimes.

They refer to this as campism.

I've addressed the issue myself, albeit in different terms, accusing SA of supporting any dictator--Putin, Assad, Maduro, Kim Jong Un--who for any reason opposes the United States. This puts them in bed with some really bad hombres, and renders them very unpopular among much of the American Left. For example, SA apparently believes that chemical weapons attacks blamed on al-Assad were really false flags. I'm not an expert on Syria, but I find false flag scenarios to be completely unconvincing. Too many people would have to be in on the conspiracy.

SR, by rejecting campism, gets away from the conspiracy theories, and is now able to pick and choose which dictators they want to support. That should make them more palatable to people they want to win over.

Of course they're both wrong. The Syrian conflict is only tangentially about "US Imperialism" (however poorly defined), as the US has no important strategic interest in the country. Obama's reluctance to enforce his humanitarian "red line" is proof enough, as is Trump's precipitous withdrawal of support for the Kurds.

The real problem in Syria is not "US Imperialism," but rather a sectarian/ethnic/religious conflict. The word "Alawite" is not mentioned in either SA's account of the split (discussed last week), nor in SR's Founding Document. This is truly bizarre. The Assad family are Alawites, a (heretical) Shi'ite sect comprising about 10% of the population, but which holds all important government and military posts.

Similar words--Christian, Druze, Kurd, and even Sunni--are not mentioned at all in SA's document. SR deigns to note the Syrian Sunni population only once.

And yet it is these ethnic distinctions that drive the whole conflict!

The reason SR gives for the massive destruction is ludicrous:

Following the Russian bombing of neighborhoods and hospitals in support of the murderous Assad regime, Russian companies were granted billions of dollars in contracts to rebuild Damascus, Aleppo, and other devastated cities. The reconstruction efforts were part of Assad’s larger gentrification plan to clear the cities of the working poor and open up areas to international financial institutions.

Ah yes! Russian bombing as an effort in urban renewal, as if Wall Street were eager to invest in Aleppo. Why not call it for what it is: ethnic cleansing. Neither of my Trotskyist friends have stumbled upon that term.

Recriminations within splitting groups are obviously personal and vicious (see aside below). This is no exception--they accuse each other of lying, acting in bad faith, being undemocratic, and not following the rules. In what might be called an Organizational Report (pdf), SR details their complaints against Comrade "Jeff M." (Jeff Mackler). I have no idea if what they say is true, but I will argue that it could be true, and for reasons that go beyond Mr. Mackler's turpitude.

Consider anti-Zionism. Narrowly interpreted this is a political opinion that can be held by honest people, e.g., the Szatmari Jews in Brooklyn. As I've said before, the Socialist Workers Party of my day was anti-Zionist is this sense.

But anti-Semites will also be anti-Zionist, albeit for disreputable reasons. So an anti-Zionist organization will attract not just honest, political anti-Zionists, but also true anti-Semites. Accordingly, SR accuses Mr. Mackler of collaborating with actual anti-Semites--which could be true. My opinion is, that by supporting Hamas, SA and SR have both crossed the Rubicon into true antisemitism. Mr. Mackler is just putting the icing on the cake.

The same problem holds for antiwar coalitions. The Trotskyist movement has long championed the united front, i.e, people who come together in support of a common cause, without necessarily agreeing on anything else. The classic, Trotskyist united front was the anti-Vietnam movement in the early 1970s, based on the simple slogan US Troops Out Now.

Similarly, the principal demand for today's United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) is Opposition to All US Wars and Interventions.

The problem with united fronts is they attract people with very different goals. Trotskyists, for example, opposed the US in Vietnam because we wanted the other side to win. Other people within the coalition were committed pacifists: they opposed any war and didn't want anybody to win. And yet others were classic liberals--the kind of folks who voted for Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern. They just opposed the war in Indochina. Yet the united front demonstrations brought all of them together into one big march.

The problem with today's UNAC is that the tent has gotten too big. SA still wants al-Assad to win, and the pacifists are still pacific. But also, there is now a crew dedicated isolationists--people like Alex Jones of  InfoWars, or even pundits like Pat Buchanan, who have opposed US involvement in every war since Korea. Then there are people who don't care about al-Assad, but really want Putin to win! SR, like Trump, just wants the US to withdraw--they don't seem to know who they want to actually win.

The dispute between SA and SR is about just how big the united front tent should be. SR accuses SA (and Jeff Mackler in particular) of collaborating with some truly unsavory people. Mr. Mackler's defense is that his people weren't initially aware of the unsavory types at the conference (in Russia), and never had anything to do with them.

A united front isn't stable. And Trotskyist organizations aren't stable, either. They tend to split apart.

An aside about splits:

The Dunbar Number is the maximum size of a human group based only on shared kinship or friendship--e.g., a group of hunter gatherers. Any group larger than that requires some institutional structure and bureaucracy in order to function. The size of the Dunbar number varies from 50 to 150, with the higher numbers only possible when there is an external threat--e.g., war with a neighboring group--that makes the big group advantageous. But the bigger the group, the more time they have to spend on "social grooming" in order to stay together.

It appears that Trotskyist grouplets rarely exceed the Dunbar number. Which means that, despite their elaborate constitutions and procedures, they only cohere because of personal friendships and reciprocity agreements. Once the group gets too big, or personal relations are in any way strained, the group splits into competing bands.

Dunbar groups are usually led by a chief who holds office by lifetime appointment, or until a younger man (they are always men) takes his place. Jack Barnes is boss of the Socialist Workers Party since 1972, while Jeff Mackler rules Socialist Action since 1983. This month we inaugurate the new leader of Socialist Resurgence, Michael Schreiber, who I predict will lead them for decades to come.

Anthropologists take note: Trotskyist grouplets are a good proxy for hunter-gather tribes, and probably a lot cheaper to study.

Further Reading:

• Our President is a Pacifist
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge
• Heather Bradford on Abortion