Two Takes on Trump's Trials

Two posts opine on the indictments of Donald Trump, both written before the recent charges were leveled in Georgia. The first--by James Dennis Hoff (English prof, CUNY), dated Aug. 4th, entitled Trump Indictments Are About Capitalist Stability, Not Justice--appears in Left Voice. The second, by Terry Evans, appearing in the August 21st Militant (publication of the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) is headed Defend free speech for all! Drop charges against Trump. As the headlines suggest, these take quite different positions on Mr. Trump's travails.

Professor Hoff (in his lede paragraph) is convinced of Trump's guilt, and suggests that the recent indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith will

... focus exclusively on Trump’s attempts to stay in office by overturning the 2020 election results, thus, as prosecutors claim, defrauding and violating the civil rights of millions of U.S. voters. That Trump is guilty of these charges, and much worse, goes without saying. 

Contrary to Professor Hoff's prejudice, it is not at all obvious Trump is guilty of anything in this indictment. A subsequent sentence in Professor Hoff's paragraph also doesn't ring true. 

And after a political career of spewing hate, advocating violence, and promoting and helping to pass harmful laws against immigrants, women, and people of color, Trump deserves nothing less than to spend what’s left of his pathetic life in jail. 

I don't think Trump has ever advocated violence--quite the opposite--as I wrote back in 2019.

President Trump has turned down many opportunities to go to war. His retaliation against Syria (for chemical weapons violations) was destroying an empty "research facility" in the middle of the night. When Iran shot down a drone, it turned out that he didn't want to kill any Iranians. He rejected John Bolton's desperate pleas to invade Venezuela. He wants to pull our troops out of Afghanistan. He has studiously ignored all the provocations coming from Pyongyang.

...The man is a pacifist. It's that simple.

Indeed, later in his article our friend condemns Trump for wanting to pull out of NATO and refusing US involvement in the Ukraine war--i.e. precisely for his pacifism.

Professor Hoff admits that the 78 (now 91) charges against Trump are mostly an electoral ploy to prevent Trump from winning, though he believes there is a darker, more nefarious motive.

Indeed, this latest indictment has nothing to do with protecting the rule of law, and everything to do with protecting bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere. Trump’s supporters and conservative right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, have argued for months now that the indictments are politically motivated. ... While they are correct that these indictments are part of a broader attempt to keep Trump from winning a second election, ... behind the many damning charges against Trump lies a more fundamental attempt on behalf of a broad sector of capital to defend the stability and legitimacy of the U.S. regime in the midst of a series of ongoing military, economic, ecological, and political crises.

Elsewhere in the article, Professor Hoff uses "ruling class" as a synonym for "broad sector of capital." I believe this nomenclature is a source of confusion.

The "ruling class" is defined by economic status--the very richest in our society who control the most capital. By the most generous definition it includes the top 1%--which includes households earning more than $500K/year. The median salary for a doctor is $400K, so there are many, many doctors who earn enough to get them into the 1%. They may be rich, but they're not exactly members of the "ruling class." By contrast, the top 0.1% earned a minimum of $3.3 million in 2021, which seems like a more reasonable cutoff for membership in the "ruling class."

The problem with Professor Hoff's analysis is that--despite the power over the economy the ruling class possesses--they are much too small in number to determine our cultural and political lives. That kind of influence rests not with the economic elite, but rather with the status elite. The status elite caste includes government officials, academics, journalists, corporate HR departments, and--these days--social media influencers. Indeed, given his academic rank with tenure at a large university in New York City, Professor Hoff is a member of that elite.

No wonder he hates Trump. The status elite universally hate Trump because he represents a direct threat to their status. He wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy (may the heavens forfend!), defund the universities (God help us all), and trash the Woke/climate propaganda (just imagine what the deplorables will believe in then!).

Despite his radical pretensions, Professor Hoff is a loyal member of his caste. Indeed, he even seems to suck up to NATO and the Ukraine war because that's what his caste does. He is definitely against shrinking the federal government and defunding the universities.

If Professor Hoff misconstrues the ruling caste, then he certainly mischaracterizes working class! He writes,

For huge portions of the U.S population, particularly disaffected and downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites, Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric and strongman Bonapartism are the embodiment of a growing resentment of what Nancy Fraser called progressive neoliberalism, and a misguided desire to solve the capitalist crisis through a reactionary and frequently racist attempt to “Make America Great Again” at the expense of the further immiseration of Black and Brown working people.

Typically, Marxists refer to "huge portions of the U.S population" as the working class, not as "downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites." Indeed, that latter phrase refers much more to Professor Hoff himself than it does, say, to Walmart employees. Status notwithstanding, economically speaking the professor is a member of the lumpen intelligentsia, whose income (in light of declining enrollments and all) comes mostly in the form of what amounts to a welfare check.

Indeed, defining working class as non-college educated workers, Trump got the majority of those votes (a large majority of white voters, nearly 40% of Hispanic voters, and a still small but record portion of black voters).

Unlike Professor Hoff, who posits some vague conspiracy theory on the part of the "ruling class" to protect "...bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere," The Militant's Terry Evans, in his lede paragraph, is very clear about the threat the indictments pose.

Defending constitutionally protected free speech is at the heart of fighting the latest assault on political rights by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department. Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment of former President Donald Trump would gut the First Amendment in an attempt to drive Biden’s main rival for the presidency out of the 2024 race and put him in jail.

He buttresses his argument with a quote from Trotsky:

Under capitalism, all suppression of political rights — regardless of who is targeted — “bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history,” Leon Trotsky, who had been a leader of the Bolshevik-led 1917 Russian Revolution, said in 1939.

In other words, the indictments against Trump are a direct attack on Constitutional civil liberties, for which the working class are the chief beneficiaries.

Politicians lie all the time. Under the First Amendment they have a right to lie. Even if Trump had lied through his teeth about the 2020 election (a dubious proposition since Trump likely believed his own bullshit), he still has a First Amendment right to speak. Even if Trump is convicted it is likely that the Supreme Court will overturn the conviction as violating the Bill of Rights. As it should.

I'm proud to say that, in the 1970s when I was a member of the SWP, I stood for the defense of civil liberties in the Party's COINTELPRO lawsuit against the FBI. In those days the rightwing establishment was infringing on the civil liberties of its leftwing opponents.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: it is a leftwing establishment illegally attacking their rightwing opponents. I am proudly still defending civil liberties today. Meanwhile, Professor Hoff is an unabashed supporter of the establishment--and as such he opposes freedom of speech and is betraying his professed allegiance to the working class (which was always mostly fake to begin with).

Further Reading:

• Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY
• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

Three Militant Articles on the Economy

While energy prices have gone down, most items working people depend on are still rising today.
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Caption: The Militant)

All three articles are from the August 7th issue of The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party, SWP). and two of them are only indirectly about the economy. The first piece is entitled Why do liberals claim that US capitalism is on the upswing?  and is authored by The Militant's economics correspondent, Brian Williams. The second, by Seth Galinsky, is headlined Teamsters union says tentative agreement reached with UPS. Finally, there is an editorial under the banner Cuba’s socialist revolution points way forward for working people.

Mr. Williams gets it mostly right--but tells only one side of the story. He agrees with Republican partisans that the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, with this lede (links mine)

If you go by what the liberal big-business media are saying, the economy is on the verge of a boom, with prices dropping and fears of a wrenching recession fading away. Among a plethora of articles pushing this view include: “Everything’s coming up soft landing,” by New York Times economic whiz Paul Krugman, and “US economy shifts into disinflation mode,” by Reuters.

Not true, claims Mr. Williams, and he cites the above chart as evidence, saying 

But this doesn’t mean that prices of goods essential for working people don’t continue to bite us. Rents rose by 8.3% over the past year. Prices for grocery items workers need kept going up — cereals, up 16%; jelly and jam, up 17.5%; mayonnaise, 23%; applesauce, 22%, for example.

Some of the steepest rises were for the cost of insuring a vehicle, up 17% in June. And the cost of keeping your car running rose 12.7% from a year earlier.

He's right in holding Mr. Krugman to account, who claims that fuel, food and rent can be ignored in any meaningful measure of inflation.

There are plenty of voices in the media who, like Mr. Williams, argue that we're heading for a recession. Indeed, the whole Republican party makes that claim, for obvious electoral reasons. The popular website Zerohedge.com makes that case in spades. And they might be right.

On the other hand, it may be no recession is on the near horizon. A popular meme today is, instead of a "soft-landing", there will be "no-landing", that is the economy will continue to grow at a rate proportional to population growth and new technology, i.e., 1 - 2%. But the cost will be continued inflation at or above 3%. My opinion (today; I change my mind every week or so) is this is the most likely outcome, though I'll hazard inflation will be more like 5%.

Mr. Williams makes a huge error, for which we can fault Marxism to which he is beholden. He writes,

Bosses and government spokespeople claim that the biggest problem with inflation is it impels workers to fight for higher wages, leading to what they claim is a “wage-price spiral.” This just isn’t true. When workers organize and use unions to fight and win higher wages, it just means profits go down. Profits are what the bosses steal from the fruits of our labor.

Marxism claims that capital should cost nothing. This will never be true, no matter who owns it. The statement that higher wages always come out of profits is also usually wrong. Most often higher wages result in higher prices, just as the "bosses" claim.

He goes on to say that "...workers’ real wages are currently 3.2% lower than in December 2020." Perhaps this is true--there are uncertainties in measurement that make it debatable. But more important, there have been pandemic-driven changes in the economy that confound any simple comparison. For example, consumer preferences have changed from goods (which manufacture pays relatively high wages) to services (which pay relatively low wages). This will result in lower overall wages, but not because of inflation.

More, Mr. Galinsky, writing about the UPS settlement with the Teamsters Union, writes

According to the Teamsters’ press release, all current full- and part-time UPS workers will get a $7.50 per hour wage increase over the life of the contract, starting with $2.75 more this year. That comes to about an average of 6.5% a year.

Six and one half percent is well over the rate of inflation. Unions do best when there is a labor shortage, forcing all companies to pay more for labor, whether they're unionized or not. Walmart, Amazon and Starbucks have all raised their wages recently. No union is required to get a hefty raise.

I think The Militant fundamentally misunderstands the union movement. Unionists are not revolutionaries in the making. They're certainly not communists. Any union member will understand that a company has to make a profit in order to stay in business (see, e.g., here). The last thing they want is for the company to go bankrupt, as is happening with Yellow Freight, putting nearly 30,000 teamsters out of a job. At their core, unions are pro-company and pro-capitalist. They resent organizations like the SWP, who see unions merely as a tool to help the vanguard party take state power. See, e.g., the Labor Notes movement.

Finally, the editors reprint an excerpt from Castro's speech titled History will absolve me. This speech was delivered in 1953,  It is an agenda for the "revolution," which at that point was still in the future. It is entirely appropriate to compare Castro's promises with the outcome today. What follows are some quotes (taken from the excerpt of the speech published by the editors), with my comments in red (which are so obvious they're hardly necessary).

• When we talk about the people, in terms of struggle, we mean the 600,000 Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a job. Since the "revolution" millions of people have fled the island in search of jobs and a better life, with more arriving in the US every day. 1.2 million Cuban-Americans live in Miami alone.
• The 500,000 farmworkers who live in miserable huts, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their poverty with their children; who don’t have an inch of land to till and whose lives would move any heart not made of stone. Nothing has changed here. Farmworkers still live in miserable huts, still don't own any land, and still lack enough food to live well on.
• The 400,000 industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled; whose gains won in the past are being taken away; whose homes are hellish shacks that resemble the worst barracks; whose wages pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender; whose future is a cut in pay and loss of a job; whose life is endless toil; whose only rest is the grave. Today industrial workers and laborers have no retirement funds, and their salaries are less than $100/month. A UPS employee earns that much in under five hours.
• The 20,000 small merchants, crushed by debt, ruined by the crisis, and dealt the final blow by a plague of thieving, venal officials. Today small merchants are crushed by even more venal officials, and are not allowed to run even the smallest businesses without bureaucratic oversight and corruption.
• The 10,000 young professionals: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, journalists, painters, sculptors, and others who leave school with a degree, looking for a way to fight, full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end with all doors closed and deaf to their pleas and outrage. With all doors closed to them in Cuba, these are the people who have fled to Miami and have turned that city into the financial and cultural capital of Latin America.

Not only will history not absolve him, it will condemn him! It is obvious that by the standards of its own promises, the "revolution" has been an abject failure. The SWP and The Militant are strong supporters of the Cuban, so-called "revolution. By reprinting this, The Militant's editors show just how clueless they really are. This is just face-plant stupid.

Further Reading:

• Unions and Work From Home
• Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY
• Lost in the Amazon