Wittenberg, 2022

 

Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes addresses conference.
Source: MILITANT/HILDA CUZCO

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held its annual shindig this year at Wittenberg University, June 9 - 11. The Militant article reporting on the event is entitled Taking the Socialist Workers Party’s program to the toilers. As usual, the title doesn't really say much about the actual content.

It's a very strange article, from which I infer big changes are afoot within the SWP.

I'll begin with a nitpick. They write 

[Jack Barnes] was speaking to some 350 people at the SWP-sponsored International Active Workers Conference in Springfield, Ohio, June 11.

This year’s annual gathering, the largest since 2009, drew attendance from 10 countries... 

I went back and checked, going back as far as 2016. The 2018 Active Workers Conference hosted "nearly 400 participants." So somebody is fudging the numbers--not a good idea when they know I'm gonna call them out on that.

Back to the weird stuff: First, the article is very long. Few Militant articles are longer than a double-page spread, but this one includes an additional full page.

Second, they're calling a convention for December, 2022. Why not wrap up the convention during their stay at Wittenberg? I speculate that the pre-convention discussion will be more intense than usual and they want to give it some time. The political content of the current article is confusing, to say the least. It will take a convention to clear it all up--if indeed they intend to do that.

Finally, the authorship is different. The Militant reports from Active Workers Conferences in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 were all authored by Terry Evans and John Studer. (There was no conference in 2020, and 2016's report was authored by Naomi Craine.) This article is penned by Terry Evans and Steve Clark.

Mr. Clark is third in command at the SWP, following only Jack Barnes and his main squeeze, Mary-Alice Waters (though Wikipedia claims he's in a gay relationship). Mr. Clark writes for The Militant only when something serious is happening (e.g., here*). Meanwhile, commenter John B seems to suggest that "Terry Evans" (a pseudonym) is the Great Successor, i.e., next in line to succeed Mr. Barnes as National Secretary.

In other words, the Big Guns are writing this post, shoving the work-a-day reporter John Studer aside. This implies there is something more important than usual going on.

For more tea leaves we need to consider the article itself. I'll take on two topics. In both cases they start out with provocative rhetoric, only to retreat to Trotskyist boilerplate.

The first is Ukraine. They write,

The [National Committee] statement gives unconditional support to the fight for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty and demands an immediate end to Moscow’s military operations and occupation.

It demands a halt to all U.S. economic, banking, and trade sanctions against Russia, whose devastation falls overwhelmingly on working people in Russia, undercutting solidarity between workers and soldiers in the two countries. The statement also demands Washington withdraw all  its nuclear weapons and armed forces from Europe.

This is the standard Trotskyist position, held by almost everybody on my beat. They oppose "US imperialism" even if it helps a cause they support, i.e., an independent Ukraine. Like the others, they object to sanctions against Russia and US arms shipments to Ukraine. But...

During a lively question and answer session after Studer’s report, one participant asked whether an SWP candidate elected to Congress would support the U.S. government sending arms to Ukrainians.

“We have no quarrel with how Ukrainians get arms to defend themselves from Moscow’s assaults,” Studer said. “But the longstanding proletarian internationalist position of the communist movement is and remains, “Not one dime, not one soldier for the U.S. rulers and their war machine! No political confidence in the bosses’ government!”

The U.S. rulers do nothing other than advance their own capitalist interests in everything they do. If they extend military aid, it comes with unprincipled strings attached. ...

With the phrase "we have no quarrel...", Clark & Evans point out the obvious contradiction in their position, namely Ukraine's defense depends crucially on weapons from "imperialist" countries. So, unlike their competition, they are aware that what they say makes no sense. More, "lively Q&A" is not something I associate with SWP conclaves--which suggests that the position is under contentious debate. I'm led to expect something beyond boilerplate after the December convention.

The second red flag is the abortion ruling (which was only a leaked draft when Clark & Evans' article was written). Here is the shocker:

In 1973 the Militant  hailed as a victory the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision overturning laws in 46 states that restricted a woman’s access to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.

“Fifty years of experience in the class struggle have taught us that judgment was inaccurate,” said SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters in opening her conference report. “It soon became clear that the court edict set back the fight to repeal all laws criminalizing or restricting abortion.”

In other words, their support for Roe v Wade was a mistake. Who knew? But again, "lively discussion" ensued, yielding the following exchange:

In the question and answer session later that day, one participant disagreed with Waters’ assertion that an overturn of Roe v. Wade would be positive. She asked Waters what she meant when she said in her report that “the SWP is the party of life, not death.”

“Getting Roe out of the way will create an opportunity for working people to have the discussion we need,” Waters replied. “The job of the courts is not to impose legislation,” as it did in this case, “but to uphold rights and protections that have been wrested from the ruling class in struggles going back to the Bill of Rights.”

So it certainly sounds like they're gonna come out against abortion. But nope, they retreat back to Trotskyist boilerplate, as the next sentence in the quoted paragraph proves.

The 1973 ruling was an obstacle to fighting for access to safe and secure abortions, which is just one part of the broader working-class fight for both women and men today, she said.

I predict that the December convention will either reaffirm the Trotskyist boilerplate positions, or conversely double down on support for American policy in Ukraine and also for a consistent pro-life position.

I also suggest that the December convention may bring with it a change in leadership. Mr. Barnes is too old to be running a Party. Will the new leader be Steve Clark, Terry Evans, or somebody else?

A few other random comments:

The analysis of global politics (beginning with the sentence "But the so-called American Century abruptly came to an end before it had barely begun, ...") is not true. For a better and much clearer analysis, please read Peter Zeihan's latest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. 

Pathfinder Press' latest book is Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. It's a collection of essays by Frederick Engels, George Novack, Karl Marx and Mary-Alice Waters. Oddly, it's favorably reviewed (pdf) by Peter Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology (Boston University) and current president of the right-leaning think tank, the National Association of Scholars.

I'm skeptical the book is of much value. Any work of anthropology that doesn't include human genetic evolution is now hopelessly dated. Obviously Marx, Engels and Novack knew nothing about the subject, and I doubt Ms. Waters is any wiser. Mr. Wood should certainly know better--and maybe he does, but is too polite to say so.

 

* The link is to my article, which contains links to The Militant. These now yield a "page not found" error. For some reason the entire discussion has been deleted by the paper.

Further Reading:

• Wittenberg, 2021
• Down the Cuba Rabbit-Hole With Mary-Alice Waters
• Book Review: Human Diversity

Jeff Mackler Channels Michael Roberts

I intended to ignore Jeff Mackler, the octogenarian leader of a mini-grouplet called Socialist Action (SA). Mr. Mackler, readers of this blog may recall, ran the most incompetent campaign for president ever in history. Indeed, at least partly due to that ridiculous effort, SA is now reduced to a few dozen members.

SA is a "fraternal party" to the Fourth International (FI), an organization of Trotskyist parties around the world. Depending on how you define "membership," FI represents a few hundred to a few thousand people globally. In other words, it's of negligible political consequence. SA's mission is to set this organization on the true Trotskyist straight and narrow--that is, to return it to the concept of Leninist party building, which presumably has been abandoned by their international comrades.

It's a lost cause and a silly cause, and we may ignore it. Nevertheless, to that end three documents have been submitted to the FI, the most recent one entitled Debate in the Fourth International Part III: Capitalism’s World Economic, Political and Social Crises and the Coming Fightback. While authorship is not credited, the "politics in the report below were adopted by the National Committee of Socialist Action/USA..." However, it's obvious that Mr. Mackler is the actual author--he's a good writer and there is nobody else in that organization capable of the assignment--so I'll explicitly credit him here.

Because Mr. Mackler is a good writer, and because the topic is mostly economics, I break my vow to ignore him and will pay the man some attention.

The lede paragraph:

Today, world capitalism’s neo-liberal globalization is best characterized as a new form of organization where global value chains have become the dominant form of production, employing workers for one out of every five job on the planet. From low to high tech commodities, basic consumer goods to heavy capital equipment, food to services, goods for the world market are now produced across many countries, integrated through global value chains.

And this is true! Globalization has enriched people around the world. Bigger markets (and there is no bigger market than the globe) leads to more labor specialization (between countries and individuals), and as Adam Smith pointed out long ago, specialization is what increases productivity and makes people richer. There is a huge literature that makes this case, but I'll just cite three of my own posts, here, here and here.

But Mr. Mackler thinks globalization is evil, writing

This globalization was essentially driven by the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Ever declining average rates of profit, as repeatedly demonstrated by Marxist economist Michael Roberts, were countered worldwide by ever intensifying attacks on working people, ...

I don't think Mr. Roberts demonstrated any such thing. I wrote an (admittedly crappy) post on this some years ago. First, Mr. Roberts suggests a very weird definition of profit that nobody else uses and which has no effect on economic decision-making. Second, his definition only applies to the economy as a whole, and not to any individual company. So there is no way a CEO could make use of this information. Third, the quantities required to calculate "profit" are vague and not obviously tabulated anywhere. So all Mr. Roberts can do is estimate them.

And finally, he defines profit as something related to operating margins rather than return on investment. His ultimate claim is that operating margins have been shrinking over the past decades. I don't think that's true. Of course if it is true this is good--smaller operating margins are better for consumers, who get cheaper prices. Successful companies (e.g., Walmart) have capped their operating margins at 3%--if they go above that they reduce prices.

Profitability is usually and most meaningfully measured by return on investment, which is the quantity that's actually important to the capitalist. Accordingly, the price/earnings ratio is a lead indicator for how valuable a stock is.

Arguing for a falling rate of profit, Mr. Mackler cites Marx.

Simply put, as Marx explains in the first volume of Capital, the average value of any commodity is measured by the average amount of human labor power embodied in it in the course of its production.  Over time, competition compels capitalists to repeatedly renovate their productive facilities substituting machines for human labor power. This initially benefits the first on the market with the new technology and allows them to sell their product at a price above its real value. But as the competition heats up, weaker companies drop out while more serious competitors introduce even more advanced technological innovations and this initial advantage diminishes. 

In time the price and value of commodities tend to reach equilibrium and the corresponding average rate of profit declines in correspondence with the reduced quantity of human labor power embodied. 

And this is all true! I don't disagree with Marx at all. But Mr. Mackler leaves out two important points.

First, as already mentioned, declining profit rates (defined in terms of operating margins) are good for consumers, who get cheaper products. So I am in favor of shrinking profit margins--which as Mr. Mackler points out are often a result of new technology and increased productivity.  This increases our standard of living! If he is trying to convince me that capitalism is broken, this is not a very good argument.

Second, Mr. Mackler does not understand the meaning of "commodity." A commodity is a good which trades only on price. Gasoline is a commodity--people drive around searching for the lowest prices. They don't really care about anything else. So are basic economy airfares--you'll fly on the cheapest airline if all you want to do is save money. Obviously, things sold on commodity exchanges--e.g., copper, iron, wheat--all trade on price and not on any other quality.

Mr. Mackler cites an excellent example of something that is NOT a commodity.

The process [offshoring--ed] included such phenomena as major corporations like Apple employing some one million Chinese workers at near slave wages and hours and selling Apple I-phones for $1,000, only a few dollars of which went to Chinese and other Asian workers at the low end of the value chain.

I think the one million number is an exaggeration, as is the adjective "slave." But the point is mostly correct. In a post from 2013 I document that the assembly cost of an iPhone was only $8, while the sales price was closer to $300. The wages paid to the Chinese workers was 50 cents per hour. Add in the cost of components sourced from around the world, there is still no question that Apple made a healthy profit from the iPhone.

It's still true today, even with inflation doubling or tripling those numbers. The price of an iPhone is not determined by the production cost--and that's because an iPhone is NOT a commodity. Nobody buys it because it's cheap. Instead they appreciate the excellent engineering, the high-end components, the stellar design, and especially the cool factor in owning an iPhone. It's a fashion statement. An iPhone is expensive because Steve Jobs carefully and meticulously nurtured the brand. And for that reason it's very profitable with extremely high operating margins.

A commodity smart phone available on Amazon costs less than $40. That's the cost of production plus a small operating margin. An iPhone 13 sells for 20 times that much.

In Marx's time, almost everything sold was a commodity, and it is understandable that he expressed his economic theory in those terms. But that's not true today--most things Americans buy are not commodities. That is, the competition is not based solely or primarily on price, but rather on other qualities. The Marxist argument for declining profit margins does not apply.

Further Reading:

• Lost in the Amazon
• Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

James P. Cannon Was Spectacularly Wrong

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is introduced by Wikipedia this way:

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.

Among its earliest founders and also its most prominent leader was James P. Cannon, who wrote two books that are likely still required reading for any wannabe Trotskyist: The History of American Trotskyism, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. The former is still well worth reading; the latter is forgettable.

Mr. Cannon spent sixteen months (1944-1945) in jail for violating the Smith Act, later ruled unconstitutional. He wrote many Letters from Prison, now collected in a volume by that name. Among those letters (dated Dec, 1944) is a disquisition on the role of the Party's newspaper, The Militant. Excerpts from that letter are republished in this week's Militant under the headline From prison, Cannon proposed SWP expand reach of ‘Militant’. (I don't have access to the full letter; my comments here are based only on the excerpt.)

I'm not clear why The Militant republishes this. It is so out of date that it provides no guide as to what role the paper should play today. Rather than flattering the The Militant, it makes it look ridiculous. Mr. Cannon's lede paragraphs (ellipses and italics in original):

What kind of a paper will best serve the needs of the new party in the next period which lies immediately before us? We used to think, or rather take for granted, that as we broke out of the narrow propaganda circle and began to get a hearing from the workers, we should aim at changing the weekly into a daily. …

It was also assumed that, as the paper became a “mass” paper, it would be obliged to adapt itself to the political understanding of the average, if not to the lowest common denominator, among its new readers; leaving the more complicated political and theoretical explanations to the monthly magazine. …

By "next period" Mr. Cannon means the immediate future, i.e., the next few years after the war. He predicts that the paper will break out of the "narrow propaganda circle," and become widely read. Of course this turned out to be wrong. Apart from a sharp recession immediately following the war, the American economy entered into a long period of rapid growth that extended for twenty years through the 1960s. Living standards during that time more than tripled.

The reasons for this growth are detailed in Robert Gordon's marvelous book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth--and contrary to what my Trotskyist friends will claim, it has little to do with the wartime destruction of Europe. The fact is that the economy was growing at 6% annually, there was a decades-long labor shortage and so the unions were fat and sassy, and nobody wanted to turn the economy over to know-nothings like Jim Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. The political effect of all of this was an allergic reaction to all things "communist", culminating in the McCarthy senate hearings.

To reach this promised next period, Mr. Cannon details what the Party needed to do next.

But what we have to do next is to reach more and more new people, catch their attention at the moment when they are just awakening from political indifference, and try to reach them with our message regularly. A big national weekly is ideally suited to this task.

He then answers two questions about the role The Militant is supposed to play.

The first question is about the price--it definitely should not be free. (Italics in original; ellipses mine.)

The principle that readers must pay for the paper is a sound one; people are inclined to put a higher value on things they pay for, even if it is a very small amount, than on throwaway sheets which they get for nothing. ... [E]xperience has also shown that it is the principle of paying, not the amount paid, that is most important. The two should not be confused and lumped together.

Mr. Cannon asserts a very capitalist principle, namely that prices mean something. The price is a representation of value, and when people pay for something it means they value it more. How different this is from, say, Cuba, where the ration card is more important than money. Things like housing and medical care--which should have a high value--are given away for free. People don't take care of things they get for free, which is why the housing stock in Cuba is so miserable.

The second question is about the intended audience The Militant is supposed to reach. The paper should serve two audiences simultaneously. The majority of readers, in Mr. Cannon's imagination, will be the unwashed masses, who coming to Trotskyism for the first time will need a simple introduction to the dogma. At the other extreme are folks who have been around the movement for longer and are interested in more substantive and complex articles. Of course there is the spectrum in between--and The Militant will have to accommodate them as well.

As Mr. Cannon points out, the Party did not have the resources for two weekly newspapers--one will have to accomplish both tasks.

Of course it never happened. The Militant never became a mass market weekly and Mr. Cannon's market segmenting problem never arose.

What I found surprising is Mr. Cannon never discusses The Militant as an organizing tool. The model for this was Lenin's paper Iskra, which was used to share information among class conscious workers throughout Russia. Of course Lenin's organization was at that time illegal, which made such information transfer essential. The Militant was not illegal.

In any case, it's all gone awry. Every October the paper has to publish a Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation to comply with postal regulations. This includes circulation figures. From the issue dated October 25th, 2021 (pdf, p. 8), under the  "Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months" category, the "Total Paid Distribution" was 2,553 copies. This is a very far cry from being a mass market weekly.

I think 1972 might represent the high water mark for The Militant's circulation. Thus choosing the postal statement printed in the October 13, 1972 (pdf, p. 26) issue, we learn that "Total Paid Distribution" was 24,605 copies. This is ten-fold better than what they're doing today, but still a far cry from a mass market weekly.

Mr. Cannon served as National Secretary of the SWP from 1938 until his retirement in 1953. That latter year--when the political prospects for communist revolutionaries was at its nadir--must have been when Mr. Cannon recognized the futility of his efforts. The Militant was never going to achieve mass market status in his lifetime.

His successor, Farrell Dobbs, served as National Secretary until 1972, when he retired. And his successor, Jack Barnes--today an octogenarian--still holds the office! This, I think, is a scandal. The Party needs to pass term limits or a mandatory retirement age.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Book Review: Rise & Fall of American Growth
• Trotskyism & New Media