Vacation

 

This blog is on vacation until after Christmas. Enjoy the holidays!

Trump Won! Professor Hoff Says So

Trump divides the working class: four on his left, three on his right.
(Photo source: Doug Mills-Pool)

It seems like every Left Voice author wants to weigh in on Trump's electoral victory. See, eg, here, here and here. But by far the best of the genre is this piece by Professor James Dennis Hoff (associate professor, CUNY English Department) entitled Trump Wants to Divide the Working Class — We Must Fight to Unite It. It's good because--professorial status notwithstanding--Dr. Hoff is a good writer and a clear thinker.

Indeed, the professor's piece is as clear a summary of the returns as you will find anywhere, and if only for that reason I suggest you read it. He writes (links omitted)

In contrast to Kamala Harris, who looks set to receive about six million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, Trump is actually on target to win close to four million more votes than last time — when he and Joe Biden each received the largest number of votes ever in a presidential election. In fact, Trump may win almost as many additional votes this election as there were additional eligible voters. In 2020, there were more than 240 million eligible voters, compared to 244 million in 2024, which is shaping up to be the second largest turnout of eligible voters in history. At the same time, exit polls show that 71 percent of voters said they were voting “for their candidate” rather than against their opponent in 2024, compared to 62 percent in 2020.

And then follows a detailed description of the results, which I condense into bullet points (links omitted):

• "...Harris likely won a smaller percentage (about two points) of votes from women than Biden did in 2022."
• "Meanwhile, Latino voters, particularly Latino men, turned out in record-breaking numbers for Trump. 46 percent of Latino voters chose Trump this election, ..."
• "Trump won 16 percent of the Black vote this election compared to 8 percent in 2020 and just 6 percent in 2016. Harris, on the other hand, lost about ten percent of the Black vote compared to Biden. Most astounding perhaps is that this increase in Black votes for Trump seems to have happened across the entire country: in blue states as well as red states, and in cities as well as suburbs."
• "Even in New York City, where he took more than 30 percent of the vote, Trump performed well in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods."

In other words, Kamala lost by a landslide--she lost ground compared to Biden and other Democrats in almost every demographic constituency you can think of.

Which, of course, begs the question: 

Why has this happened, and how should the Left respond?

His argument begins this way:

While many working people no doubt voted for Trump because they are deeply worried about their own and their family’s economic well-being, many unfortunately also did so with the full understanding that he plans to increase attacks on the rights of women and trans people, that he will likely further weaken already weak labor laws, and that he plans to deport a million so-called illegal immigrants. 

It's not clear to me how Professor Hoff thinks Trump will attack the rights of women. If he's referring to abortion, that's pretty much a non-issue as far as Trump is concerned. It is now a matter for state legislatures (which is where the issue legitimately belongs).

Regarding the rights of trans people, I think our professor friend is on pretty thin ice here as well. Nobody denies the rights of trans people guaranteed under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Those are rights that we all have--you, me, Professor Hoff, and every last trans person. What Professor Hoff claims is that trans people should have rights beyond those that the rest of us have, eg, the right to use women's restrooms. Neither Dr. Hoff nor I have the right to use women's restrooms--and there's nothing in the Constitution that would guarantee that right to trans people.

Standards of public decency are established at state and municipal levels. There is no reason why trans people should be exempt from those standards. Indeed, the existing rules for bathroom use are very sensible and are designed to protect women and girls from male (ie, anybody with a penis) predators.

Trump's most effective ad campaign (arguably the most effective ad campaign of all time) ended with the tag line Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you. It's an effective pun: they/them can refer to the minuscule portion of the population that is legitimately trans, or it can refer to any special interest (eg, pharmaceutical firms) that tries to take advantage of voters--trans people being among the loudest special interests.

The prohibition of trans people on women's sports teams is equally rooted in biology and common sense. There is no Constitutional right to play on a girl's soccer team. Sorry.

Regards immigration, Professor Hoff writes,

On the question of immigration, in particular, the Right has relentlessly and successfully argued that what they call “illegal immigrants” are not only draining the national coffers, but negatively contributing to everything from unemployment, to low wages and higher rents, and many people — many of them immigrants themselves — are increasingly open to those explanations.

Along with the Professor, I will also take issue with the idea that immigrants are draining the national coffers. Indeed, to the extent they pay sales, property and payroll taxes they are contributing to the national coffers--not least helping to pay for my considerable medical bills covered by Medicare. I'm very grateful for that.

But on the other issues Professor Hoff is just wrong. Immigrants (illegal or otherwise) do compete for jobs and housing. That competition has the market effect of lowering wages and raising rents. Native born and immigrant citizens are right to raise that concern. As the professor points out, "Many Latino voters in those counties [along the Rio Grande] said they voted for Trump because they think stricter regulations on immigration will protect their jobs and livelihoods." Plus the large and sudden influx of immigrants is socially destructive and ruins communities.

Working people are responding to obvious threats to their way of life. They are not irrational victims of Trumpian misinformation and Democratic Party perfidy. Professor Hoff does not give the American working class credit for having an intelligent opinion (which, given that he's a professor, isn't surprising).

Then, in the professor's opinion, Trump is not a friend of the working man. He will, for example, sponsor a bunch of anti-union regulations that will make it much harder for organized labor. He does ding the unions for not being very good at their jobs, writing

Indeed, as Sou Mi explains, while organized labor has made gains for higher paid manufacturing workers, it has largely failed to address the problems of some of its most precarious workers, particularly those in the logistics sector, including Amazon and UPS, who are predominantly Black and Latino ..."

The economics of Amazon and UPS (along with Walmart, Starbucks, and many other companies) preclude a successful union movement--the profit margins are too small. I described that in detail here in an article explaining why Amazon has not yet signed a contract with the new union.

The fact is that today's modern union movement is oriented to the professor types, like Dr. Hoff. Unlike workers in the real world, Dr. Hoff gets his salary from the government--he's on the public dole. Since the government never needs to earn a profit it can be very generous with the largesse. The teachers' unions are especially effective at extorting taxpayers--including new immigrant taxpayers.

I think most workers in the private sector see through the scam and are becoming less interested in unionization--especially since the efforts at Amazon and Starbucks have not led to an improvement in their working conditions.

Professor Hoff tells us

Most working people, after all, know that Trump is also no solution, even many who voted for him. In this sense there are plenty of reasons why the working class shift toward Trump’s ideas this election may be short lived, especially if he actually follows through with his plans for the economy and immigration reform.

My main beef with this paragraph is there are no solutions--there are only trade-offs. Professor Hoff foolishly thinks his silly Marxism is going to solve all problems--he's just wrong. And most people know he's wrong, which is why Left Voice only has about 50 members.

I don't know how durable Trumpism will be, but I think he'll do a better job representing the working class than that cloud of academic pinheads that are at the core of the Democrat Party--including Professor Hoff. 

Further Reading:

• Sam Karlin Makes a Mess of the Middle East
• A Woman's Place is ...
• Unions and Work From Home

Election 2024, Trotskyists' Unanimous Opinion

(Source)

They're unanimous--all the Trotskyist grouplets which I follow believe that a mass, independent working class party is the solution to all America's problems. 

Jimena Vergara, writing in Left Voice states it clearly in her closing sentence.

For this, we need not only a united front against the Right, but also a political party of the working class and oppressed with a socialist program that unites our struggles and gives us the foundation with which to fight for a better world. 

In an article posted in Socialist Action, guest authors Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard proclaim that

Fundamental change only occurs through class struggle. Mass action is the only road toward rebuilding the union movement, independent organizations of Blacks, women and all the oppressed, the revolutionary socialist movement and a mass workers party championing all the oppressed and exploited, and ultimately a socialist revolution.

Meanwhile, The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) in an article by Terry Evans, opines that

The SWP candidates are unionists, joining strike picket lines and building solidarity wherever they go. They’ve explained why workers need to break from the bosses’ political parties and build a party of our own, a party of labor, that can fight to take political power.

A working class party has never existed in the United States. It has existed in other countries (UK, Germany, Canada, etc.), but in every case it has evolved into a "reformist" party that resembles the American Democrats. Many of those parties, like the German Social Democrats led by the formidable Karl Kautsky, are direct heirs of Marx and Engels. It is both ironic and instructive that Marxist parties should end up as bourgeois, reformist institutions.

Our Trotskyist friends never ask why there has never been a successful workers' party anywhere in the western world. (They'll claim the Russian Revolution was a success--though it certainly didn't turn out that way.) The reason for that perennial failure is because Marxism is just wrong.

The basic tenet of Marxism is that the driver of history is the intractable, insoluble, existential conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Only one class can win, and that class must be the proletariat, according to our Trotskyist friends. But this is wrong--workers and capitalists are on the same side in most things: both of them need to maximize sales revenue in order to succeed. For the workers (who often claim more than 90% of revenue) it means more jobs and higher wages. For the capitalist it's the source of profit. Without revenue, both of them will starve.

Consumers are on the other side of the equation. They want better quality at lower prices and with improved service. They usually get what they want--which is why our standard of living has steadily improved since the dawn of the industrial revolution. The customer is always right.

That fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics is why Trotskyists never make any progress with their pipedream. All real workers need to cooperate with their capitalist bosses. Workers definitely do not want to overthrow the whole damn system.

This explains why Donald Trump is a tribune of the working class. He realizes that corporate taxes don't just take money away from the bosses--they take even more money away from the workers. He understands that over-the-top environmental regulations won't just put Exxon-Mobil out of business, but also put all the people who work in fossil-fuel related industries out of a job. Trump realizes that exaggerated Wokery adds a cost to doing business that will reduce revenue and hurt both the capitalists and the workers.

Our Trotskyist friends delude themselves in thinking they own the Truth: that because of their leadership as the Vanguard Party, the scales of false-consciousness shall fall from proletarian eyes, and they shall see the light and flock to the revolutionary banner. In fact, the people most afflicted with false consciousness are the Trotskyist grouplets, which is why they remain grouplets.

The villain of the piece--the organization most responsible for false consciousness--is the Democratic Party. All our Trotskyist friends claim to hate the Democrats. But here the movement divides into two factions: one, led by the SWP, better understands why Trump is popular among real workers, and thus support many of the things Trump does. In other words, they think Trump is the chief agent of false consciousness.

Accordingly, the SWP defend Trump when his positions are defensible. They strongly protested the relentless lawfare as an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans. They object to the expensive, petty bourgeois climate agenda championed by other Trotskyists and their Democrat friends. They oppose the Woke silliness espoused by Democrats and other Trotskyists.

At the same time, they oppose Trump. Terry Evans writes,

Trump seeks to refurbish the image of the Republican Party as a party for workers. But he’s a real-estate-dealing capitalist in search of the highest profits. And his campaign seeks to demonize a section of the working class — immigrant workers with and without papers — in an effort to convince workers this is the cause of their worsening situation, not capitalism. This divides and weakens the working class and labor movement.

They accuse Trump of the same crime for which our other friends condemn the Democrats--namely trafficking in false consciousness. But they realize that the majority of the working class does, indeed, support Trump, and often for good reasons.

The other faction--represented by all other grouplets, but most prominently by Left Voice, subscribe to the Democratic Party's position (at least that of its Progressive faction) 100% of the time. They accuse the Democrats of not really believing what they say they want, but rather of cynically promoting false consciousness.

A classic response from that second faction comes from Left Voice author Tatiana Cozzarelli.  Apparently completely detached from proletarian sensibilities, she writes,

I teach on Wednesday mornings and on November 6, I was met with students who were in a shocked silence. They were in the 6th grade when Trump won the last election and again, this racist, misogynist authoritarian would take the White House. Some of them cried, thinking of friends and family who might get deported.  

For many, it was grief, fear and disbelief. When they hear “mass deportations,” it means their uncle, their mother, themselves. 

What to say to these 19 year olds? I wish I could just tell them it would be okay. That they won’t get deported. That they are safe. 

I can’t promise they will be safe. 

I can’t say to them that in two years voting Democrat will fix it– that would be a lie.

So she teaches at a CUNY school in New York City, where she is also a PhD student in "Urban Education" (whatever the hell that is). She obviously doesn't get around much, and obviously isn't a member of the working class. Trump won a majority of "working class" votes, defined as voters without a college degree. That certainly doesn't apply to Ms. Cozzarelli, who is wasting her time and our money getting a useless PhD.  

Trump won the election--in today's context by a landslide. Trotskyists have no clue why. Trump tells the truth when he claims to be a tribune of the working class. Our Trotskyist friends don't understand reality.

Further Reading:

• Kamala vs. Trump: The Decline of America?
• Whiners & Complainers
• SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign

Mary-Alice on Cosmetics & Fashion

Advertisement from around 1950. Cubans today wish they had a refrigerators filled with food.
(Picture Source: The Militant)

The octogenarian comrade Mary-Alice Waters opines on the status of women using a book first published in 1986 as a guide: Cosmetics, Fashion and the Exploitation of Women. She celebrates the new edition, which occasions this series of three articles from and about the book. The original book contains articles by old Party stalwarts, Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed. ("Party" refers to the Socialist Workers Party, SWP, publishers of The Militant.)

The first article is the new preface authored by Ms. Waters. The second article is the first chapter, also authored by Ms. Waters. Finally are some short reflections on the book by a Cuban woman, Isabel Moya, given as a speech in Havana in 2011 (back when Cuba still had electricity).

The first sentences of Ms. Waters' preface were for me a disappointment:

Title notwithstanding, Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women is not a book about cosmetics.

It is about capitalism.

Geez, I'm more interested in cosmetics and fashion. In The Militant every article is about "capitalism." The paper gets interesting only when they talk about something else. Besides which, Ms. Waters knows nothing about how capitalism actually works. 

Fortunately the excerpts cover other topics as well, notably economics, biology, anthropology, psychology and politics. Wow! It's a pastiche of factoids from beginning to end.

Unfortunately, Ms. Waters seems to think all progress in the social sciences ended in 1881, when the "materialist" anthropologist Lewis Morgan died. Or perhaps in 1895 when Friedrich Engels passed. Or maybe into the early 20th Century with Morgan's disciple, Robert Briffault. But nothing since the dawn of jet aircraft, or computers, or the internet, or mobile telephony, or the dramatic progress science has made studying human genomics. None of this crosses her radar screen--because if it did it would readily disprove her thesis. She can win the argument only by plugging her ears and pretending progress doesn't exist.

Her thesis is that humans are distinctive because we "labor." She quotes Evelyn Reed (italics in original):

Beauty has no identity with fashion. But it has an identity with labor. Apart from

the realm of nature, all that is beautiful has been produced in labor and by laborers.

Well? Maybe. Though it seems to me the fundamental human characteristic is not that we labor (beavers also labor), but that we trade. No other species on the planet engages in trade. Indeed, in an era when Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens shared the space, Neanderthal products are always found near where they were made. Human products, on the other hand, are often found hundreds of miles from where they were made. Perhaps labor can be defined as the act of making something for purposes of trade? In other words, labor exists to make the customer happy.

I'm not sure how Ms. Reed defines labor, but I think I disagree with her quote. People often produce beautiful things without any expectation of financial reward. And it is true--they "labor." But if made for personal use, then they don't trade, just like a beaver doesn't trade. Women (and some men) apply cosmetics to make themselves beautiful--and it is not done for any financial reward.

Regards cosmetics, Ms. Waters proposes some serious conspiracy theory.

More than three centuries later, the resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the creation of markets — that is, creating “needs” where none yet exist — are still expanding astronomically. Under the profit system, instead of advances in the productivity of social labor breaking down this mystical animation of objects that working people ourselves have made, the working class and lower middle classes are pushed into “needing” more and more things. Everything from each new cell phone release, to the latest model automobile, $500 torn blue jeans, and an exploding array of “cosmetic” surgeries, skin bleaches or tanning salons, designer handbags, and cosmetics-designed-to-make-you-look-like-you’re-not-using-cosmetics.

That is, women buy cosmetics only because they are foisted on them by a rapacious, scheming capitalist class. This is ridiculous! Women buy cosmetics because they want to, not because they've been bamboozled by the bourgeoisie. Working class women are way smarter than our comrade gives them credit for.

As a test, Ms. Waters should go to the dollar store and buy a bunch of cheap cosmetics that she can take with her next time she goes to Cuba (if she ever goes to Cuba again). She can pass them out to local women, whom I hazard will be overjoyed to receive them, without any encouragement from the bourgeoisie. Just a little bit of beauty to brighten their otherwise dark, dreary, boring days.

I'm not going to detail Ms. Waters' description of capitalism, but a few things need clarification. First, the declining rate of profit refers only to commodities, ie, products that compete only on price, such as gasoline. All other products, like most branded products, will compete on factors other than price. A commodity smart phone costs about $50; the latest iPhone will set you back more than $800! The iPhone, which competes on style and functionality, is not a commodity, and the profit margin on that product is huge.

The bottom line is that consumers determine the price for all non-commodity products. Apple will charge whatever consumers are willing to pay. The cosmetics you buy at the dollar store are commodities. The cosmetics you get from L'Oréal are definitely not commodities. 

The second and most important point is that Comrade Mary-Alice is a Luddite. She doesn't think there should be any pleasure in the world. Buying something that makes one more beautiful or more stylish is, in her opinion, just the bourgeoisie messing with your mind. She's wrong. America is a rich country because you can buy refrigerators full of food, shelves full of cosmetics, closets full of clothes, garages with two cars, and vacations to some of the finest beaches in the world. Compare that to consumers in that socialist heaven-state, Cuba, who can't even buy food or fresh water.

The measure of any society is the level of consumption--and Americans are by far the best consumers in the world. That's why everybody on the planet wants to move here. You can't eliminate poverty without increasing consumption--neither the Cubans nor the Chinese have learned that lesson yet.

Ms. Waters, in her preface, lists a whole bunch of bad things that happen to women, eg, "the stoning of women for adultery," and "government dictates that a woman must cover her hair, or face, or entire body, and that even her voice should never be heard in public." Most of the examples are from pre-modern societies (eg, Afghanistan) and do not represent the lives of women in the capitalist world. Nevertheless, our friendly comrade induces from her examples that women are systematically oppressed and are second class citizens.

This is not generally true, partly because she omits the list of bad things that happen to men, eg, dying by the thousands of the trenches in WW1. Or, quoting Robert Gordon, describing life prior to 1870, "men's work was dirty and dangerous, while women's toil was unremitting drudgery." It's hard to say one sex was more oppressed than the other. Life was hard all the way round.

Women are sometimes subordinated and oppressed. More generally they're not--instead they're protected and cherished. The fundamental error that Marxists (including Ms. Waters) make is that they believe evolution stopped the minute human beings came along. They claim that culture has supplanted biology. But this is false--it's more accurate to say that culture has augmented biology. Indeed, culture is itself a product of evolution, and conversely, culture dramatically influences the reproductive success of various human ethnicities. Thus culture drives evolution. The modern term for this is gene-culture co-evolution.

Men and women are biologically different. We evolved separately for different roles in reproduction. All cultures distinguish between men and women--there is no culture on earth where they are regarded interchangeably. Most of the differences between men and women in today's modern capitalist society stem, directly or indirectly, from those fundamental, biological differences. 

Mary-Alice is wrong to consider all differences to be examples of oppression.

Let me close with a poem (that only a woman could write) by Dulce María Loynaz, quoted by Isabel Loya. I include it here just because I like it.

If you love me, love me whole,
       not by zones of light or shadow …
If you love me, love me black
       and white, and gray and green,
       and blonde and dark …
Love me by day,
       love me by night …
And by morning in the open window!
If you love me, don’t break me
       in pieces:
Love me whole … or don’t
       love me at all!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Human Diversity 
• Down the Cuba Rabbit Hole With Mary-Alice Waters
• Mary-Alice Waters' Religious View of History