For those of you who don't follow the ins and outs of Trotskyist grouplets, Socialist Resurgence (SR) arose from a split in Socialist Action (SA), as I described here. Nominally, the split was over some abstruse (and irrelevant) issue concerning Syria. In reality, I think the break-up was over leadership. Specifically, SA's chief honcho (and failed presidential candidate) is the incompetent, 80 year old Jeff Mackler. He has been national secretary since SA was founded in 1983.
The problem extends way beyond SA. Gus Hall was national secretary of the CPUSA from 1959 until just before his death in 2000. James P. Cannon, founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led the organization from 1938 to 1953--though he retired long before he died in 1974. The SWP is now helmed by 81 year old Jack Barnes, who has served since 1972.
So Trotskyism has a problem--their leaders seem to think they own a birthright. There is no bench, no term limits, no succession planning. It's a conceptual flaw in the democratic centralism framework, and it's why the organizations always split after they grow beyond a certain size. I see no indication that SR has addressed--much less solved--this issue.
In commemoration of James Cannon's birthday, SR comrades Ernie Gotta and Erwin Freed pen companion articles about the relevance of his legacy for today. Mr. Gotta writes,
Cannon would likely conclude (I think this is obvious) that the revolutionary leadership of the working class in our present moment is in poor condition. He might suggest that our historic role in 2021 must be in reforging a revolutionary leadership in the U.S. with a deeply internationalist perspective. As we begin resolving the problems of revolutionary socialist leadership in the U.S. through fusions and regroupments, we’ll have to do the same internationally as well.
This is mostly Trotskyist gobbledygook, but a little meaning can be extracted. By "revolutionary leadership," he means the existence of a vanguard party. This is a disciplined organization that is possessed with the precisely correct political line so that it can steer the benighted working class around the dangerous shoals of reformism and ultraleftism until a workers' state beachhead can be established on the other side.
SR possesses at least a tinge of self-awareness in the realization that their organization--perhaps 50 comrades--is too small to qualify as a vanguard that's gonna overthrow the capitalist system. So they have connected with an umbrella group--the Revolutionary Socialist Network--consisting of leftover grouplets from the now defunct International Socialists (along with something derived from the Workers' League). It's a hodge-podge of sectarian grouplets that all believe in almost the same thing but for theological differences. And they can't agree on who their leaders should be--so I think unity is likely a lost cause.
Mr. Freed opines on the importance of the "revolutionary press."
The press is a central component of all Bolshevik organizations. As Cannon said, the purpose of the vanguard party “is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.” Cannon took seriously the paper’s role in realizing these actualities, which Lenin defined as “not merely a collective propagandist and collective agitator, [but also] collective organizer.”
The concept was likely unworkable even in Mr. Cannon's day, but today it is completely ridiculous. The idea is that a single publication (edited by Socialist Resurgence) will have so much credibility among the working class that they won't bother to read anything else. Perhaps that was vaguely realistic dream when each city had only one daily paper and two TV stations--a Revolutionary Press could conceivably gain status in that environment. But today--with 500 channels on TV, millions of channels on YouTube, along with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., etc.--the notion that the publication of some tiny grouplet like SR is gonna get heard above the noise is utterly absurd. Not gonna happen. Even the New York Times struggles in this environment, and nobody else has a chance.
Still, they're trying, and unlike their former comrades in SA, they're competent. Their webpage is as good as any of the grouplets--but you can see by the number comments (mostly zero) that their reach is not very far. SR consists predominately (as best I can tell) of graduate students--people whom Lenin would've called the intelligentsia, but whom I refer to as the lumpen proletariat. But they're educated, they write well, and they can organize things like a podcast.
I just listened to a podcast on Socialist Resurgence Radio, an interview between host Alex Coy and SR's resident economist, Osman Keshawarz (a grad student at UMass). I do not have a transcript, so apologies if I misremember something.
- It's professionally done. The sound quality is excellent, the host is fluent and entertaining, and the guest is smart and well-informed. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. How very unlike the endlessly boring podcasts by Jeff Mackler, hacking his way through a monotone exposition of whatever (I never managed to sit through an entire episode).
- Mr. Keshawarz, while competent, is still wrong. He thinks wealth accrues in a zero-sum competition between capitalists and workers, where the system is rigged so that workers inevitably lose. In truth, it's not zero-sum--the standard of living of everybody in capitalist societies has steadily increased since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This is because entrepreneurs, via a process of trial and error, try to find the most efficient uses possible for resources (labor, capital, raw materials). Accordingly, there is a continuous ratcheting up of productivity, leading to more wealth across the entire society.
- Mr. Keshawarz is narrowly correct about the division of the producer surplus. That is, at any given time the producers (workers and capitalists) have to figure out how to divvy up the proceeds between them. But he completely ignores the consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to consumers by reducing the costs of production as much as possible. It is the growth in the consumer surplus that drives the persistent increase in our standard of living across the centuries.
(Source) - As mentioned, entrepreneurs seek to maximize social utility by a process of trial and error. The purpose of financial markets--in all their complexity--is to reallocate capital from inefficient enterprises to efficient, highly productive enterprises. Of course there is a lot more error than there are successes--most new ventures either fail, or end up as small businesses. Mr. Keshawarz apparently wants the 14,000 people employed by GameStop to keep their jobs forever, despite the fact that the company no longer makes any sense--the world has changed. Even he admits that those employees are today "ripping off their customers." It will be much better if that labor force is reemployed doing something else that is of greater value to consumers.
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