Who Should Trotskyists Vote For in 2020?

In a post by the Solidarity Green Party Working Group entitled Solidarity and the 2020 presidential election, they write

As reported in Solidarity’s Election Poll, a Solidarity internal poll found that 47% of respondents supported voting for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker running as Greens in the 2020 presidential election, 27% supported voting for Hawkins and Walker where the Democrats are assured of winning and for Joe Biden in “swing states,” 21% supported voting for Biden everywhere (motivated as “Dump Trump, fight Biden”), and 5% provided comments but selected none of the three options. ...

How did Solidarity, a revolutionary socialist organization founded on the principle of working-class political independence, get to this point? And not just Solidarity. How did the revolutionary socialist movement get to this point? We ask the question not to recriminate but to discern a way forward.

For any Trotskyist--current or former--the problem is self-evident. As a core principle Trotskyists refuse to cross the class line and will not support a "bourgeois" party. The Democrats are the very essence of a bourgeois party, and accordingly no self-respecting Trotskyist of whatever denomination will support them. My former comrades adamantly reject lesser-evilism, i.e., voting for a Democrat just because he seems more progressive than the Republican. The dogma is that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same--both representing the bourgeoisie.

The principle distinguishes Trotskyism from the Stalinist tradition which has long supported progressive Democrats, this year championing Bernie Sanders, and now Joe Biden. The Bob Avakian Fan Club, self-avowed Stalinists, write "It is crucial that there be a massive vote against Trump—which means voting for Biden."

Aversion to Democrats is often taken to extreme lengths. This year both the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Socialist Action (SA) are running their own candidates. In the SWP's case this extends a long tradition, and at least the completely useless effort is competently executed. SA, meanwhile, has put forth the laughably ridiculous Jeff Mackler as their candidate--they're not serious.

My friends at Solidarity rightly regard these old-fashioned Trotskyist campaigns as farcical, and accordingly they're looking beyond sectarian Trotskyism for solutions. Their current best choice looks to be Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker. There is precedent: in the 2016 cycle they supported Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. Prior to that SWP alum Peter Camejo was the Green Party candidate for Governor of California for three elections, beginning in 2002.

The SWP and SA accuse the Green Party of being middle class, which somehow puts them beyond the pale. The SWP is at least consistent, regarding the entire environmentalist movement as middle class, and therefore not worthy of support. SA supports radical environmentalism, but without supporting the Green Party.

The original leaders of Solidarity are all former members of the SWP, and for them the class line is a solid barrier--thou shalt not cross it! Which is why they're so astonished and disappointed that so many of their new colleagues (never part of the SWP) even countenance voting for Democrats.

The opposite, non-Trotskyist position is held by Bob Avakian, who writes (italics in original)

To approach this election from the standpoint of which candidate is “better” means failing to understand the truly profound stakes and potential consequences of what is involved. The fact is that there can be one—and only one—“good” that can come out of this election: delivering a decisive defeat to Trump and the whole fascist regime. Doing this would create far better conditions for continuing to wage the struggle against everything represented by the Trump/Pence regime and all the oppression and injustices of this system, and would be a great gift to the people of the world.

His claim is that Trump is qualitatively different from Biden because he's a fascist. Therefore, however bad Biden may be, he must be supported.

In contrast, the old majority within Solidarity argue this way:

Left advocates of voting for Biden generally give Trump as the reason. Trump is indeed a menace. His views may be no worse than those of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. But he is self-indulgent, chaotic and demagogic far beyond what they allowed themselves. His appeals to white chauvinism are effective with segments of the population, especially older white men. They bamboozle some white workers, who have real grievances but misdirect their anger.

If the U.S. were on the brink of fascism or military dictatorship and a vote for Biden were the last line of defense, perhaps advocating it could be justified. Although it wouldn’t achieve much. It would be like throwing a handkerchief at a charging bear. But the U.S. isn’t on the brink of fascism or military dictatorship. We’re at a highly polarized moment in the alternating administrations of the two-party system.

An article by John B. Cannon makes the case that one should strategically vote for Biden in states where the election is close, while casting a protest vote elsewhere. He writes

On the flip side, of course, Trump is a relatively weak authoritarian. It seems unlikely that he could consolidate a fascistic or authoritarian regime without vestiges of democratic checks, since neither the military nor most of the bourgeoisie support him. ... However, under Trump’s leadership, part of the Republican Party is blurring the line between fascism and right-wing nationalist, authoritarian aspirations, and Republican elected leaders are increasingly unable to operate independently of Trump’s personalistic command. In sum, the politics of fascism are very much at hand, even if the immediate possibility of a fascist consolidation ... is not.

He asks, "What’s a brink, and how do you know you are on it?" Mr. Cannon suggests we're not yet on the brink of fascism, but nevertheless this is a "crisis," perhaps like Germany in 1929 (not 1933). While Trump himself may not lead the way, a future, more competent fascist could really lead us over the brink. Therefore now is the time to stand up against fascism and vote for Biden where it actually makes some electoral difference, i.e., in swing states. Thus, in extremis, lesser-evilism is justified.

A full-fledged turn into the Democratic Party is advocated by Bill Resnick, a personality from Portland, OR. In an article weirdly entitled Dump Trump, Fight and Force Biden: An Electoral Strategy for the Left, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. That is, to vote for Biden while opposing him every step of the way.

He writes,

But just to be clear: everything said about Biden by those who argue against voting for him is true. These truths however, in this moment, don’t carry the day, if you believe, as I do, that Trump has to be stopped in his tracks, repudiated, to decisively interrupt the downward spiral toward a white supremacist autocracy. And a strategic vote for Biden makes sense since his administration will be forced to bargain with “progressive” Democrats in the Congress, and it should be possible to win significant programs, call them non-reformist or revolutionary reforms.

He explains what those reforms are:

We don’t have to wait until after the election to fight for a package of “non-reformist” reforms. By non-reformist reforms I mean programs and policies that:

• Demonstrate the virtues of radically democratic organizations and social relations which prove that “Every Cook Can Govern” – for example, worker-owned and controlled co-ops, democratically-run teams to treat chronic diseases, participatory budgeting in local government.
• Honor and reward the skills and contributions of those in non-elite, professional, college diploma- requiring work.
• Significantly shift political power downward and outward and Increase social organization and power at the base of our society.
• Provide a solid social safety net that increases the confidence and fighting power of the working class.
• Challenge all hierarchy including based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, and spiritual practice.

This, to my mind, is straight-out utopianism, and is not possible even under perfect communism, much less from Sleepy Joe Biden. These hippie-like reforms are a far cry from a Trotskyist transitional program. In my day we would have called it a popular front, i.e., forming a coalition with the bourgeoisie. It seems the old guard in Solidarity agrees with that assessment.

Trotskyism has always struggled between sectarian purity, on the one hand, and big-tent alliances on the other. The solution (insofar as one exists) is a united front consisting of only working class organizations. The antiwar movement as represented by the Student Mobilization Committee was the obvious (and perhaps only) successful example. Though it's not clear how that success has furthered the American Revolution.

Popular fronts work better. Martin Luther King's demands--all won through Republican and a few Democrat politicians--have resulted in enduring gains for civil rights in America. American democracy is strong enough, and capitalism successful enough, that wealth and privileges can be extended across society.

I disagree with my Trotskyist friends: I do not think Trump is a fascist--quite the contrary. Instead of growing government, he is trying to shrink it. Unlike BLM and Antifa, he does not have gangs of thugs on the streets. He is no threat to our democracy, having never once disobeyed a court order. He's neither racist nor white supremacist--he simply rejects ridiculous political correctness.

So this blog enthusiastically endorses Donald J. Trump for president--and not as a lesser evil, either.

Further Reading:

• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Book Review: Bronze Age Mindset

"A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"

My friends over at Left Voice are very modest. 

No final solutions do they propose; instead they put forth a supposedly tentative document entitled Fight Racism, Imperialism, and the Current Crisis: A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed.

The programmatic issues raised in this statement are not intended to be a complete or finished program. They are a first proposal — to the Left, to the activists of the BLM movement, and to workers’ and community organizations — to discuss the tasks we face now to defend ourselves and prepare for future struggle.

It doesn't seem all that tentative to me: at over 5,000 words it contains 51 programmatic bullet points! How incomplete or unfinished can that be? Far from uniting the Left, this is as sectarian as any document issued by the Spartacist League. 

Independent of substance, my friends need to learn a few tricks from the Trump campaign. People are persuaded by short, catchy, somewhat ambiguous slogans--Make America Great Again is a good example. While one can argue about what it actually means (I, for one, categorically reject the idea that it's racist), there is no doubt that it means something--enough to inspire millions to go out and vote for Trump. America First and Drain the Swamp are two other marvelous bullet points from the Trump doctrine. The Biden campaign chimes in with Build Back Better, and that's not bad. Much better than Hillary's I'm with her (which is literally meaningless).

The 51 bullets, meanwhile, will only generate argument and disagreement. All you'll get from them is a faculty-meeting talk-shop.

There are better examples closer to home. While Left Voice apparently aspires to become a vanguard party, it could take some advice from an already-existing vanguard party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Their Updated 2020 Campaign Platform (pdf) only has 13 bullets, which is still probably twelve too many--but at least they're snappy, e.g., Millions need jobs today!

Left Voice will agree with most of the SWP's bullets, so it's not clear to me why they're trying to reinvent the wheel here. I'll suggest that this whole I wanna be the vanguard business is inherently sectarian.

I can't possibly go through all 51 points, but a few of them are likely civilization-ending--on the order of an asteroid hitting the earth.

They demand, for example, that

we must nationalize the banking system with the expropriation of private banks (while protecting the savings of working people) and form a single public bank that is controlled by workers and the people who keep their money there.

Bankrupting all the world's banks will completely freeze up the economy. All trade, finance, and savings will instantly disappear. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe will die of famine within a few months, and the death toll will likely reach billions within a few years. This deeply unserious proposal reflects the class composition of Left Voice--they're typically failed academics and artists from New York City who know nothing about money, finance, savings, economics, or anything else. 

Similarly (boldface in original),

Establish total conversion to renewable energy, which can be accomplished only by taking U.S. industry out of capitalist control and centralizing production for a rapid economic transition.

Again, our friendly English professors know nothing about how the electrical grid works. None of them have any background in electrical engineering. If they did, they would know that this is completely gonzo and will reduce the planet to a medieval lifestyle. As the lights are turned off and transport is reduced to horseback, billions of people will die of starvation and disease in short order.

They write:

Further, we reject the U.S. Constitution and the deeply undemocratic and oppressive system it upholds. A document written by slave owners more than 200 years ago should not stand as the highest law of the land. The reactionary institutions enshrined in this document, from the presidency to the Senate, were designed to keep power concentrated in the hands of the ruling-class minority, excluding the vast majority from society’s most important decisions.

On it's face, this merely destroys the United States rather than the entire world. But given the importance of the USA in food and energy production, not to mention our financial wherewithal, it's likely that this demand will have the same effect as the previous two--namely mass starvation on a global scale. 

Left Voice's opinion is held by extremists on both the Right and the Left. Not only do BLM and Antifa reject the Constitution, but so also do the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. For a description of the modern alt-right, I suggest they read my review of Bronze Age Mindset, whose author shares Left Voice's distaste for Constitutional government.

The alternative to the Constitution is not some better world, but instead rule by warlords and street gangs. Our silly academics look down into the abyss and somehow they see utopia down there. What have they been smoking?

That's a sample of the truly stupid, destructive demands. There are some others that, while less catastrophic, are ridiculous. For example,

Free and unrestricted access that makes voting easy, by making Election Day a federal holiday, instituting easy vote-by-mail nationwide, opening more polling places, abolishing all discriminatory voter ID laws, and ensuring free public transport to and from polling places.

Why bother with all the folderol?  Why not just have internet voting, accessible to anybody around the world. After all, if voting in US elections in a human right, then surely people in China should have as much a right to vote as I do--and without having to sneak across the border first. We can save money too--we won't need polling stations, holidays, or transport. If it's mob rule that you want, then surely this is the best way to get it.

Finally, there is this:

Demand a democratic, secular, single Palestine state in all the historic Palestinian territory, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and an immediate halt to any further annexation of the West Bank. The only way to realize this demand of the Palestinian people is to fight for the dismantling of the Israeli state as a pro-imperialist and colonial enclave in the perspective for a workers’ and socialist Palestine where Arabs and Jews can live in peace.

Why do they restrict their demand to Israel? How about civil rights the Rohingya in Burma, or the Uighurs in China, or the Catalans in Spain, or the Serbs in Bosnia, or...? There are hundreds of other examples of ethnic conflict for which a "democratic, secular, single" state could be a solution. Yet they pick out Palestine. Why?

First, there's the very incongruity of it--a secular state with its capital in Jerusalem? Jerusalem, where the al Aqsa mosque is built upon the foundations of the Jewish Temple, surrounded by the streets where Jesus walked--and this is supposed to be a secular capital? If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that none of the disputants want a secular solution. It's impossible.

Second, just as there are valid political arguments to be made for all the other listed ethnic conflicts, there is also a good political case to be made against Zionism. Perhaps some of our Left Voice friends are honest about their political motivations. But some are probably not--some are not merely anti-Zionist, but instead they're antisemitic.  For however honest the merely political anti-Zionists are, antisemites will also flock to the banner. And there are a lot more antisemites than there are anti-Rohingya, anti-Uighur, or anti-Serb.

It's antisemitism that drives the passion behind the Israel/Palestine conflict--and that's why it finds a unique place amongst the 51 bullet points.

Anyway, as befits a group of English professors, Left Voice's document is well and engagingly written. If you want an adventure in kooky, topsy-turvy land, it's worth the read.

Further Reading:

• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Left Voice on Trump's Tulsa Rally
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

The Declining Rate of Profit

I keep dinging my Trotskyist friends about the declining rate of profit--magic words they invoke to account for any economic problem at all. It is clear that they generally have no clue as to what that means. But honestly I, too, had no clue what that means, so I thought I'd best go educate myself.

The best source I've found is a conference paper by Michael Roberts, presented in 2011, entitled Measuring the rate of profit; profit cycles and the next recession (pdf). I also looked at two blog posts by Mr. Roberts, here and here. Predictably, there is a huge literature on this topic, and my brief perusal does not qualify me as an expert. So think of this as questions from a novice--for which there are perhaps simple answers--rather than a critique.

The question I always ask my Trotskyist friends is whether by profit they mean operating profit or return on investment--these, of course, are two different things. By Mr. Roberts' account it is some variant of operating profit, i.e., income minus expenses.

Marx's original equation for Rate of Profit (P) is

where s is the surplus value (i.e., what most people would call "profit), c is the total capital stock, and v is the total cost of labor. This is intended to be measured for the entire economy--not just for any individual company.

Mr. Roberts goes through many ways of calculating this equation, but eventually concludes "In my view, the simplest is the best." He measures surplus value as

Or, in words, surplus value is everything left over after depreciation on capital equipment and total wages paid to employees, i.e., something like profit. 

This looks a whole lot like EBITDA, or Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, which is the gold standard measure for operating margins. It's not clear to me why Mr. Roberts didn't use EBITDA, but I'll speculate because it's only calculated for individual companies rather than for the economy as a whole. He discusses why he doesn't subtract taxes, but he never mentions interest or amortization. 

That last seems to me to be a very important omission. He does write "But these shorter-length profit cycles are really the product of the running down the stock of working capital (called the Kitchin cycle, named after that economist) and not a decisive ‘turning-point’ in profitability," which sounds like amortization in disguise. He seems to believe that all companies amortize all their equipment at the same rates, i.e., over 16 year cycles, and then replace their equipment at the same time. I find this hard to believe. Why not subtract amortization from the measure of surplus value?

On the other hand, perhaps amortization is better included in the calculation of c--the total capital stock. Mr. Roberts chooses what seems to me to be a very strange measure, namely the cost of plant and equipment at the time of original purchase. Alternatively, other authors calculate c as the current replacement cost, which given inflation will be a larger number. Mr. Roberts argues that latter method misrepresents Marx's original purpose, and from his explanation I agree with him. But either way, to include the cost of capital without including amortization is misleading. Amortized equipment no longer counts as an asset beyond its resale value.

I might disagree with Mr. Roberts on some more general, philosophical principles. This sentence bothers: 

The cause of a crisis like the Great Recession must lie with the key laws of motion of capitalism.

Marx, who lived during an exciting time in physics when both thermodynamics and electromagnetism were completely elucidated, may be forgiven for thinking that economics follows physics-like behavior--some "laws of motion." In fact, economics is more a branch of psychology than physics, for it depends ultimately on what consumers want to purchase. Who would've guessed that the most used part of a mobile phone is not the phone but instead the camera?--a fact that put traditional camera makers out of business. Consumer choices like that have a vastly bigger impact on economics than hypothetical measures such as the "global rate of profit."

Likewise, Trump's biggest impact on the economy was likely not the tax cuts, but rather his bully pulpit--his constant championing about how great things are. It gets the animal spirits flowing. Economists call this "expectations," which is a strange word that understates the effect. Judging from Mr. Roberts' essay, Marxist economists discount expectations and/or psychology altogether, which to my mind means they don't understand economics.

Perhaps as a corollary, if there are no "laws of motion" in economics, then I don't understand the purpose in aggregating the rate of profit across the entire economy. Apple has a very high rate of profit; by contrast Walmart fixes its operating margin at 3%--lowering prices when it goes above that, and closing stores if it falls irremediably below that. What is the point of averaging those two companies together? What do you learn from that statistic? I will argue, nothing.

Finally, Marxists make some very weird definitions. They distinguish between productive employees and unproductive employees. The former are workers who actually sit on the assembly line and make, mine, or grow stuff to sell. The latter are all the others, such as managers, marketers, accountants, professors and real estate agents. Perhaps that made sense in Marx's day when the economy consisted only of commodities. But today 80% of all workers are in services. Are they all unproductive employees?

Walmart is ultimately in the marketing business. Yes, I know they have some trucks and warehouses, but at the end of the day it's all about marketing to consumers. Are all those shelf stockers and cashiers unproductive? I certainly don't think so. People like me would starve to death without the efforts of Walmart workers! (And I depend on their managers, too.)

I think the distinction between productive and unproductive doesn't make sense anymore--at least not in the way Marx understood it.

Marxists consider stock market investments to be fictitious capital, to be distinguished from the real money actually invested in plant and equipment as computed by Mr. Roberts, which they call organic capital. If you're stuck with a just-like-physics view of economics, perhaps this makes sense, but economics is not like physics--it's about psychology. Here is the relevant question: Is company X using its resources--capital and labor--in a way that maximizes benefits for their customers? If the answer is yes, then the stock will go up. If the answer is no, the stock will go down. The problem is that customers are fickle--they may decide they prefer telephones to cameras, or sushi to french fries, or whatever. As consumer sentiments change, then so do investor sentiments, and the stock price varies accordingly, even by the hour.

Unlike what Marxists claim, it is precisely so-called fictitious capital that determines business viability. The total market capitalization depends on the stock price--not the sunk cost of plant and equipment. The relevant measure of profit is return on investment, not some bizarre measure of operating income.

Further Reading:

• Robots and AI
• Let Them Eat Little Bits of Green Paper
• Kim Moody on "Persistent Inequalities"