Brian Williams, Inflation and China

Thousands protest ruinous inflation in Prague, Czech Republic, Sept. 28, one of several actions around the world demanding relief from the crushing impact of unfolding capitalist crisis.
Source: Reuters/David W Cerny; Caption: The Militant

I typically commend my friend and former comrade Brian Williams for his economics coverage. He's among the very few on my Beat who actually knows something about the subject and who makes some effort to report it honestly. But I gotta say, his latest article, published in The Militant and entitled Soaring prices wreak havoc on working people worldwide, disappoints. It's not really about economics, and instead it's boilerplate propaganda that's not worth reading. That said, it's a slow week in Trotsky-Land and so here we are.

Trotskyists--and Mr. Williams is no exception--are against inflation. In this they agree with 99.5% of the global public, which makes them boringly mainstream. He writes,

Rising prices are wreaking havoc with the lives of working people and our families worldwide. Inflation reduces the value of our wages as we confront higher costs for food, fuel, housing and other essentials, and rising debts. ...

Sizable protests against these assaults have been held in many countries. In France thousands joined protests in dozens of cities Sept. 29 during a one-day walkout called by the CGT union federation. They denounced rising food prices and moves by French President Emmanuel Macron to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 or 65. “Increase our salaries, not the age of retirement,” Metro conductor Ludovic Le Ny, told the Wall Street Journal in Paris.

Demonstrating against inflation is rather like demonstrating against earthquakes--it's under no one's control. Inflation arises when the supply of money exceeds the demand for money, which means the value of money goes down (i.e., things cost more). The supply of money is imperfectly regulated by central banks (in the US the Federal Reserve Bank), but even they can't control it with any precision. The demand for money depends on no central authority, but rather on collective consumer behavior. Nobody can control that, not even the Marxist despots in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea or China.

So it's not clear to me what the protesters pictured above expect to accomplish. They're wasting their time.

What astonishes me is that Mr. Williams thinks our primary problem is inflation. Trotskyists--of all people--surely should be able to identify the root of our difficulty: our standard of living is declining. Inflation is not causing this, but does result in part from efforts by governments to make people feel richer by giving them extra money. In the US this has come in the form of "stimulus checks" and "student loan forgiveness." But extra money doesn't make people richer--it just raises prices.

Why is our standard of living going down?

There is one big reason and several smaller contributing reasons. Let's consider the small stuff first.

The Ukraine war and accompanying sanctions on Russia have taken a big chunk of global energy supply off the market. This has a dramatic effect on Europe--and will definitely lower their standard of living until the supply can somehow be replaced.

Likewise, the war has reduced global food production and distribution. Together, Russia and Ukraine were the world's leading wheat exporters. This hugely disrupts the food supply in the Middle East and will likely lead to famine. Egypt--which now grows cotton as a successful cash crop--will have to abandon that to grow its own food. Egyptians will be getting a lot poorer.

The US has a serious labor shortage, caused by the retirement of the baby boomers, sharply declining birth rates and declining immigration, and increased social dysfunction such as drug abuse. The result is increased wages and stronger unions (arguably good things), but also serious shortages of healthcare workers, airline personnel, and skilled trades. Many small businesses are being forced to close.

Mr. Williams obviously doesn't understand this. He writes

A large number of newly created jobs are at low pay, forcing an increasing number of workers to take on a second or even a third job to make ends meet. At the same time, bosses are hiring part-time workers with few if any benefits, and pushing speedup, as part of their drive to defend their profits and to weaken our unions.

This is not true. Starting wages for low-skilled labor is now over $20/hour in many parts of the country. Companies like Starbucks are belatedly realizing that they're going to have to treat their employees a whole lot better.

But the big problem--the one that Mr. Williams barely mentions--is the demise of China. George Friedman explains it very clearly. While I believe this video was recorded some years ago as a prediction, it is a prediction that is now coming true.

China is bankrupt. Twenty percent of the world's productive economy is now going out of business.

The ramifications are global--and huge.

• The US used to import lots of stuff from China. That's not happening any more--our manufacturing is being repatriated. (A huge new chip manufacturing facility is opening near Albany, NY). It will take some years for our supply chain to readjust, and there will be an additional strain on our labor supply, but within five years Americans won't even know that China is missing.
• While the US was China's biggest customer (by far), Germany was China's biggest supplier. To manufacture all that stuff, China needed machines and machine tools--most of which were imported from Germany. That market has disappeared--China ain't importing nothing. For the first time in decades Germany is running a trade deficit. The German standard of living is declining not just because of energy, but because there is no market for their products. Basically, Germany (and the EU) is screwed.
• Many Third World countries are in the same boat as Germany. Mr. Williams mentions South Africa. South Africa's leading exports are gold, platinum, cars, iron products, coal, manganese, diamonds. Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but a lot of those girls live in China--and they're not buying diamonds any more. Gold is also a luxury product for which the Chinese market no longer exists. I'll suggest that (apart from cars) the other items on the export list were headed to China. Indeed, China was South Africa's largest export market--and it's gone. South Africa is just as screwed as Germany--there is no ready substitute market for its exports.

So Mr. Williams tells us about irrelevant demonstrations against a mostly irrelevant problem--namely inflation. I don't know who those poor souls in Prague should be demonstrating against, but maybe Chairman Xi is the place to start. Not that it would do any good--China is still bankrupt.

Further Reading:

• Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks
• Keith Leslie's International Report
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"

The American Right and Trans Rights

We academic, petty bourgeois types enjoy writing think pieces, letting us expound on the issues of the day. It's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and the conceit will have it that they make a difference in the world of ideas. In reality, of course, it's a way for the leisure class to occupy its time, because--after all--we don't have to work too hard for a living. We thinkers rely on American capitalism to slough off enough wealth to assure us that life's necessities will take care of themselves.

Our thoughtful essayist for today does his cogitating over at Left Voice (LV)--a leading mouthpiece for the petty bourgeois far-Left. Ezra Brain pens a thinker entitled Polarization, Economic Crisis, and Class Struggle: The Contradictions of the Political Moment. His byline tells us that "Ezra is a NYC based theatre artist and teacher," which suggests that he's not all that worried about where his next meal is coming from. Like me, he relies on the folks who stack produce at the supermarket for his sustenance.

Anyway, Mr. Brain's thinks are as good as anybody's, and his article is worth reading. Obviously I disagree with him. I believe he misses on two counts. He mischaracterizes the American Right, and his opinions on LGBTQIA+... matters are far from the mainstream. I'll close with a note on pronouns.

He writes (links omitted):

One of those strongest tendencies in the national situation is the advance of the Far Right and the escalating attacks on democratic rights — most notably the right to bodily autonomy and the right to vote. This right wing advance has echoes of the “culture wars” of the 1990s and early aughts, but it has some differences. First, this round of right-wing attacks on civil rights is successfully rolling back rights that were already legally enshrined. In other words, rather than just preventing the oppressed from winning more concessions from the state, the Right is successfully taking back concessions already won — such as the right to an abortion.

There is a contradiction here. The words "Far Right" suggest some kind of fringe movement. On the other hand "successfully rolling back rights" supposes support from at least a plurality of the electorate. I think designating what is longstanding Republican opinion as "Far Right" is not accurate. Center Right would be a better term.

And then I think he's factually wrong. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision didn't rule on abortion at all. It merely clarified who in our system of government is supposed to make that decision. The Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision (1973), which ruled that abortion was a "right" under the "penumbras" of the Constitution. The Dobbs decision rejected that (admittedly weak) reasoning and said that, rather than the Court, it is the States that should determine abortion law.

Politically, the GOP is the loser from the Dobbs opinion. Advocating a (more or less) complete ban on abortion was great virtue signaling, and as long as the bans were hypothetical it was a vote getter. (After all, who doesn't want to be pro-life?) But after Dobbs it is no longer hypothetical, and it turns out that near total bans on abortion are very unpopular. See, e.g., Kansas, where abortion rights won a referendum in landslide.

The near total bans now common in red states will soon be overturned by an angry electorate. Mr. Brain's fears are not warranted. The "Far Right" isn't "Far," and it won't be successful in "rolling back" the right to abortion.

Regards trans rights, Mr. Brain opines that

...the Right’s attack is more radicalized than before, as reflected in its goals. For example, the last wave of anti-trans bills was focused on banning trans people — but, as is almost always the case, specifically transfeminine people — from using the public bathroom associated with their gender. This is, of course, a heinous and right-wing attack on basic rights, but it is primarily aimed to restrict trans people’s ability to integrate into public life. Put another way, the attacks sought to restrict which public spaces trans people have access to.

Mr. Brain is inventing "rights" out of whole cloth. Nobody has a Constitutional Right to use the women's toilet--not me, not Mr. Brain, and not anybody else. Standards of public decency are determined by majority rules--and since the majority are by a wide margin heterosexual men and women, it's they who get to write the rules. A reasonable standard (in my opinion) is that people without penises can use the women's toilet if they want to--because people without penises represent no sexual threat to women. Post-op trans women are easily accommodated by this rule. 

These new attacks, however, go further and attempt to attack trans people’s right to transition at all. From attempting to make gender-affirming health care for youth a felony, to designating gender transitions as child abuse, to removing trans health care from Medicaid coverage — the current wave of right-wing attacks on trans health care seek to forcibly detransition people or stop them from ever transitioning in the first place. In this sense, these attacks are aimed at restricting trans people not only in public spaces but also in private ones.

Mr. Brain and I are obviously starting from different places, as his personal webpage shows. He clearly exists somewhere along the LGBTQIA+... spectrum (I don't know enough about it to say where). I conclude he has no children and never will have children, and therefore he knows nothing about being a parent. If he did, he couldn't possibly have written the paragraph quoted above.

I, meanwhile, have children and now grandchildren. Like all parents, I want my children to grow up to be successful and fertile adults. That is, I want grandchildren. I definitely don't want my kids or my grandkids to decide, on their own and at a prepubescent age, to volunteer for irreversible infertility treatments. What Mr. Brain calls "gender-affirming care" really is a felony--as is castrating young boys against their or their parents' wishes.

Given his life history, I'll forgive Mr. Brain for not understanding that. But his opinion will never gain traction among people with children and grandchildren. It's a political lost cause, restricted to the remotest regions of the academic/petty bourgeois Left.

Finally, a comment on pronouns. Mr. Brain, in his CV (pdf), asks that I refer to him as "They" or "Them". I refuse to do that because it's ungrammatical, and Mr. Brain--for all his travails--has no authority to change the rules of English grammar. Like toilet usage, when it comes to grammar it's the majority who get to determine how language gets used.

More--and specific to this blog--one of my purposes here is civil discourse. For that reason I always address my interlocutors with an honorific--usually Mr. or Ms. It's a token of respect despite disagreements. There is no honorific (that I know of) for "they" intended as a singular pronoun. Since our friend has chosen "Ezra" as his given name--commonly associated with men--I have used the corresponding pronoun and honorific: Mr. Brain.

Further Reading:

• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Elections 2021--Race and Transgender
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education