SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign

Left, Rachele Fruit, SWP candidate for president. Right, Margaret Trowe, SWP candidate for vice president.
(Figure & Caption Source)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has announced their candidates for US President in 2024. The big reveal happened at a forum in Union City, NJ, and is described in two articles in this week's Militant here and here.

I have several immediate reactions:

• I'm glad they're running candidates. Despite the fact that their program is incoherent and I'm never gonna vote for them, I'm sentimentally attached to the effort. I put too much work into the Linda Jenness/Andrew Pulley campaign in 1972, and especially into the Peter Camejo/Willie Mae Reid campaign in 1976, for me not to care. I'm proud to say that Willie Mae was a good friend of mine back in the day. So Godspeed (or Lenin-speed) to the new candidates.
• Despite my not voting for them, I support them on several specific issues. First, they recognize Hamas for what it really is--namely a fascist thug gang that wants to murder all Jews. Unlike our other Trotskyist friends, the SWP understands that Hamas isn't even pro-Palestinian--all they are is pro-fascism and pro-murder.
  Second, they understand that Trump's legal problems are not because he's such a great criminal, but rather it's an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans. Indeed, they explain that better than I can. My response is to vote for Trump (which is what I intend to do), but I'm happy to have the support from my old friends in the SWP.
• There is nothing in either article about getting on the ballot anywhere, though they are working to get Joanne Kuniansky on the ballot for the New Jersey Senate seat.

OK--enough of a tease: the lucky candidates are Rachele Fruit for president, and Margaret Trowe for vice-president. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know either of them personally, despite the fact that we were comrades back in the day. Ms. Fruit apparently joined the Party back in 1970, which makes her roughly my age. As best as I can tell from her biography, she's a native of Philadelphia.

She has run for public office many times in the past. Indeed, she's currently running for the US Senate seat in Florida, open due to Rick Scott becoming governor. There is no explanation about who is going to take her place in that campaign. This seems unserious.

She ran for a Detroit Common Council seat in 1973, for governor of Georgia in 2018, and for governor of Florida in 2022. Most people will find it odd that one person runs for various offices in three states, but of course that's what SWP candidates do--they make no effort to go native and be from someplace specific.

We can infer that Ms. Trowe will turn 76 this year. It seems she grew up in Oakland, and she currently lives in the East Bay. From 1997-98 she worked as a meatpacker in Marshalltown, Iowa. If she's a typical comrade she has been posted in many places across the country. Her only run for public office was for vice-president in 2000, playing second fiddle in James Harris' campaign.

Both of our candidates are proud union members, and see that as a key selling point for their candidacy.

Fruit is a hotel worker and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355. Before that, she has been an active member of the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Ms. Trowe reports the following list:

Margaret Trowe is a unionist who has worked in the shipbuilding, garment, chemical and food production industries. Currently a member of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 125, Trowe is on a leave from her job as a production worker at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory in San Leandro, California, to campaign for vice president.

Apparently comrades change unions as often as the move across states, and only slightly less often than they change their clothes.

Which is sad. Ms. Fruit--who is at least 70--is still working in a hotel. Is she a maid? Had she stuck with just one of those union jobs for--let's say--30 years, she'd be collecting some kind of pension by now. Or at least she'd have a 401K. But as it is, she has to keep working into her 70s.

Ms. Trowe is just as poorly off--still working as a production worker on the chocolate line.

The Party did their comrades a grave disservice by moving them around so much--and for what looks like zero political gain. How do you earn trust or gain a reputation if you never live in a place for more than a few years? 

The list of unions our candidates were/are members of is praiseworthy. Apart from the Postal Workers, all of them are private sector unions. Put another way, they provided real goods and services for consumers who voluntarily paid for what was produced. Mss. Fruit & Trowe are actual, productive members of the working class. No mooching off the taxpayers for these two ladies, which puts them streets ahead of other Trotskyist grouplets who champion the causes of public sector workers (eg, Jeff Mackler--long time member of the teachers' union). By contrast, our friends over at Left Voice are grad students and college professors, clamoring for ever more generous welfare salaries for public college employees, at tax-payers expense.

It's weird that the campaign never mentions two unions that have been much in the news recently: Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union. These are serious--if not entirely successful--efforts to unionize workers who are hard to reach. I understand the SWP doesn't want to be in the same bed as the petty bourgeois fakers over at Left Voice, but in this case there is a confluence of interest and the Party is remiss in not getting on board.

Ms. Fruit summarized the campaign's program here:

“The capitalists’ profits come from exploiting wage labor. The wealthy minority holds state power by dividing the working majority,” Fruit said. “The SWP joins the fight for unity in the working class, for building and strengthening the trade union movement and labor solidarity, for opposing Washington’s wars, for a government-funded public-works program to provide jobs and put an end to divisions between employed and unemployed, and for demanding amnesty for immigrants living and working in the United States.”

My response in bullet points:

• The first sentence is just wrong. In a competitive free market (such as mostly exists in the USA), it is impossible for anybody to be oppressed in the Marxist sense. The second sentence is a gross exaggeration--the "wealthy minority" of whom she speaks is only 0.1% of the population, and despite their economic wherewithal, they're nowhere near numerous enough to "divide the working majority."
• Regards "Washington's wars," the Party seems to be supporting US foreign policy more than opposing it. They support the US arming Ukraine, and they back the US policy regards Hamas (though they appear to have more backbone than Mr. Biden). 
• About immigration, I point out here that the Party's position is somewhat more nuanced than what is said in the above quote.

Margaret Trowe said nothing but the truth, here:

“The Socialist Workers candidates urge workers to organize and act to prevent the Democratic Party’s assault on freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution,” Trowe said. “The Democrats’ witch hunt against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — the attempt to throw him off the ballot, ruin his family and send him to prison — is a blow to political rights workers sorely need. Whoever is targeted today, it is working people who will be targeted tomorrow.”

Enough said. Vote for Trump!

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
• The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform

Cheapskate Consumers in China

The Mall of America, suburban Minneapolis, sells a lot of stuff from China (source)

Roy Landersen, writing for The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP), contributes an article entitled China’s capitalist rulers’ deepening crises visit disaster on working people. Even though he gets China mostly right, he still misunderstands some basic economics. His lede paragraph is here (emphasis mine).

For decades China’s rulers have relied on expanding capitalist methods to grow their economy, and repression to keep working people in check. But their course today is producing falling exports, rising local government debt and a property market meltdown, exemplified by the collapse of Evergrande, once the world’s most profitable property developer.

What he describes here isn't really capitalism, but rather fascism. While under socialism all economic activity is run directly by the state, in fascism, it is run only indirectly by the state. The government allows private enterprise, but forcibly subordinates it to the political needs of the state. Mr. Landersen denotes this by the euphemism "capitalist methods," which is distinct from capitalism because economic profitability is not the primary concern. Instead enterprises must serve the state first and foremost.

Another name for this might be mercantilism. Either way, it is unfair to blame China's problems on capitalism. Instead, it's the fascist-like CCP that poisons the mix.

The last clause of the quoted paragraph is wrong. It seems that Evergrande was never profitable--the company has been accused of systematically inflating revenue. Apparently they've been running a big Ponzi scheme--with CCP connivance, of course. There were never any profits--only fraud.

In a transparent effort to blame mythical, foreign imperialists, Mr. Landersen writes,

A Hong Kong court ruled Jan. 29 that Evergrande, with its gigantic $300 billion debt, be liquidated, setting up a tug-of-war over its assets between Beijing and imperialist lenders who are owed billions. Bosses at the company stopped paying creditors two years ago.

Google AI (now called Gemini) reports that 

While Evergrande's total debt was massive at $340 billion, its reliance on foreign loans was relatively small. Here's a breakdown:

• Total debt: $340 billion
• Foreign debt: $25.4 billion
• Percentage of foreign debt: ~7.5%

The so-called "imperialist" lenders are only out $25 billion, which is small change. I don't know what an "imperialist" lender is--foreign lender is a better description. I'll suggest almost all of them are from Hong Kong. Is Hong Kong "imperialist"? The epithet is completely meaningless.

Mr. Landersen recites a litany of problems Chinese "workers" face, which I'll summarize in bullet points.

• Evergrande "took billions in down payments for houses that were never built, and its collapse left countless numbers of construction workers with unpaid wages." As said, it was all a big Ponzi scheme.
• "In industry, bosses’ profits fell 2.3% last year, after a 4% fall the year before." So it's not just workers who suffered.
• "High unemployment among Chinese university graduates — one in five without a job..."
• "Despite government inducements to have children, including tax breaks, cheap housing and cash payments, the birth rate fell in 2023 for the seventh straight year." China looks to be in an irrecoverable demographic downward spiral. There's probably no way of undoing that now.
• "Foreign capitalists are shifting manufacturing from China to countries like Vietnam where bosses pay workers less."
• "Chinese President Xi Jingping’s signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative, is losing steam. ... [G]overnments that have borrowed from Beijing are defaulting on loans."
• "For years, Beijing has detained millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, in 'reeducation camps' across Xinjiang province."
• "Demonstrations by workers have grown recently in China’s export-oriented manufacturing industries where demand has fallen. More than 1,700 strikes took place last year, double the number in 2022. They are protesting unpaid wages and benefits, as well as mass layoffs or forced relocations."

Mr. Landersen tells the truth--every statement in these bullet points is true. Intentionally or otherwise, he puts paid to the notion that China is some rising power about to displace the United States. There is no way that is gonna happen. Quite the contrary, China will increasingly have difficulty importing enough food and fuel to meet its needs.

It is, in the end, all a question of supply and demand. 

Marxists only talk about the supply--e.g., the governments in Cuba (sugar), North Korea (food) and the former Soviet Union (steel) all bragged about their levels of production. After all, in their view, the key to economic progress is to increase production because that's the only thing that adds value to an economy.

But it's not true. The real measure of economic progress is the rate of consumption, typically measured as sales volume. Because if consumers can't afford or find use for your product, its manufacture is a waste of resources. It's increased consumption that actually raises a country's standard of living.

This is why the plight of workers--how they're oppressed, deprived, etc.--is mostly irrelevant (as long as they're free and paid market rate wages). The real test of well-being is what those workers--acting as consumers--can buy. In Cuba they can't buy tiddlywinks. In China--even after all the progress of recent decades--most consumers are too poor to buy very much.

Americans, by contrast, are excellent consumers! Indeed, we're the best consumers on the planet. Almost every country on earth tries hard to sell into the American market--because that's where the consumers are. American consumers are the people who have made the world's economy go round.

In particular, modern China has never been able to consume its own production. It has always had to find consumers abroad--mostly by exporting to America.

Unfortunately, America is now tapped out. We're too far in debt to keep accepting new exports from other countries. Our ability to consume everything the world produces is no longer feasible. Other countries are going to have to develop their own consumer markets.

China has not done that. Not even close. A housing Ponzi scheme destroys consumption. A lack of babies results in a lack of consumers--the best consumers are families with children. Not having a good old-age pension system, or something like Medicare for old people, forces people to save more than they likely need for old age. And reduces consumption. China's "iron rice bowl" has rusted out.

So I think China is screwed. Mr. Landersen wants to blame capitalism, but he really should blame the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP, like most Marxists, has always emphasized production over consumption--and now they're in a pickle of their own making.

Mr. Landersen will, of course, champion the Cuban consumer, who earns something like $50/month. How much can you consume on that income? It's pathetic, and that's why Cuba is so poor.

Further Reading:

• Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes
• Brian Williams, Inflation and China
• The Eurodollar