Havana, Boston

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party, SWP) published two, backward-looking articles in its issue dated January 20. The first, by Sara Lobman, is a hopelessly sentimental account of the Cuban "Revolution." The lede paragraph sets the tone.

“Under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the Cuban people carried out a successful socialist revolution by uniting working people on the basis of a program that championed their own independent class interests,” Socialist Workers Party National Committee member Róger Calero told some 60 people at a special meeting here Jan. 5. The gathering was a celebration of the 66th anniversary of the Jan. 1, 1959, Cuban Revolution and to demand an immediate end to Washington’s decadeslong economic war aimed at crushing the Cuban people and overturning their revolution.

It stretches credulity to count the so-called "socialist revolution" as a success. Today's Cuba--which is fearlessly leading us into a post-electric future--is not only short on electric power, but now can no longer feed or house its population. There's even a water shortage, since without electricity the water pumps don't work. Presumably neither do the sewage treatment plants.

There is almost no transport on the island. Above is a satellite view of central Havana taken from Google Maps. It shows the four-lane Malecon merging into the seven-lane Tunel de la Habana. Amidst all those lanes, there are only three (3) vehicles in view! Clearly, Cuba does not have a traffic congestion problem.

The source of the problem--according to both the SWP and the Cuban government--is America's "decadeslong economic war aimed at crushing the Cuban people and overturning their revolution." Well, the Cuban people certainly are crushed--of that there is no doubt. But for what? Is the "Revolution" worth anything more than the silly propaganda posters displayed everywhere on the island? What has Cuba gained by earning the undying enmity of the USA? Nothing, so far as I can see. Indeed, the only people who perceived any benefit to the "Revolution" were the 60 people in attendance at the meeting upon which Ms. Lobman reports.

None of the other Trotskyist grouplets on my Beat even bother to talk about Cuba--likely because it's too embarrassing. They don't talk about Venezuela, either. They're not willing to tout the ox-cart as the latest in socialist transportation solutions.

Basically, socialism sucks. Forget about Cuba Libre. I'll settle for a Cuba with abundant food, clean running water, livable housing, and a bustling marketplace in the city center. If that means cozying up to the USA, then so be it.

The second article, by Susan Lamont, is a peon to the good ol' days, entitled ‘Battle of Boston’ 50 years ago helped change US class struggle. I remember it well, for this was my swansong as I was well on my way out of the Movement by that then.

The event surrounded a rather bitter fight to desegregate Boston's public schools. The premise was that Black children would learn more if they sat next to white children. That was always implausible because the white children--or at least their parents--were adamantly against any Black kids in their schools. There were more or less violent protests as the occasionally racist, white parents objected to the destruction of what had hitherto been their neighborhood school.

The upshot relevant to me was an effort to form a national movement in favor of school bussing--called the National Student Coalition Against Racism, or NSCAR. The premise was ludicrous: 

1) Pretty much everybody is against racism, which made it unclear who are opponents were to be. Indeed, the only opposition we confronted were working class parents in a white neighborhood who wanted to preserve their neighborhood school.

2) The Black kids weren't keen on being bussed long distances to schools where they obviously weren't welcome.

3) The issue was mostly about Boston geography, and didn't catch on as a national crusade.

So NSCAR had exactly one meeting, and somehow I got shanghaied into driving my car with a load of comrades to attend the meeting. And I did do that--on the first day. It was extraordinarily, excruciatingly, unendingly boring. They'd rented an auditorium seating about 500 people, of which perhaps 150 seats were taken. Most attendees were comrades, but there were a few ultraleft sectarians mixed in (I think Workers' League). The only interesting moments were the rare instances when one of the sectarians got to speak--at least that wasn't completely predictable. I doubt there were more than 20 "independents" in the whole crowd.

Needless to say, it was the first, last, and only NSCAR meeting ever held--long forgotten until Ms. Lamont chose to resurrect it in this article.

Fortunately for me, I met a fellow comrade from another city who was as bored with the proceedings as I was. And since we were more interested in exploring Boston than sitting thru another day of BS, we arranged for digs as far from the conference site as we dared go, and then spent the next morning and into the afternoon exploring Boston. It's a glorious city and I'm so glad we did that!

So around 3pm we sheepishly showed up at the conference site, hoping to escape unnoticed. Didn't happen, because as soon as we walked in a prominent comrade--no longer in the Movement, but a man of some accomplishment--confronted us and asked what happened. We confessed, but didn't apologize. We got the side eye expression of disapproval--but then nothing. We didn't get reported to any higher-ups or subjected to any further discipline.

It was my first time as a comrade where I behaved "irresponsibly." I learned my lesson--and vowed never to be "responsible" again. I spent another year as a nominal, inactive member, and then dropped out completely. My fellow comrade behaved similarly.

Bussing has long since died. The effort was very disruptive and seriously damaged the public schools. It was also completely unnecessary. I asked ChatGPT:

How do the demographics of Boston Public Schools compare with the school age population of Boston as a whole?

It answered (excerpt only):

The racial composition of Boston Public Schools (BPS) differs notably from that of Boston's overall school-age population.

Boston Public Schools (BPS) Demographics (2023):

Hispanic/Latino: 44% 

Black or African American: 28%

Asian: 9%

White: 15%

Other/Multi-Racial: 4%

Boston's School-Age Population Demographics (2018-2019):

Black: 45%

White: 24%

Hispanic: 19%

Asian: 3%

Other: 9% 

I disagree with ChatGPT. Apart from a significant discrepancy among Hispanics, it doesn't seem like BPS demographics are way out of whack. Please tell me what problem here will be solved by bussing?

Further Reading:

• The End of Cuban Civilization
• Chicago: Ilona Gersh Runs for Mayor
• Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist

Malik Miah Defends Harvard

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_Gay

Malik Miah--a longtime and honorable socialist, formerly a comrade of mine in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and now a leader in the Solidarity movement--astonishingly rises to the defense of elite education in an article entitled Targeting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Higher Education. The piece is a rousing defense of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and by extension all who supported her: students, faculty and the Harvard Corporation Board.

Harvard (along with a couple dozen other institutions) are tasked with educating elite students. For example, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both attended Harvard, admitted on the basis of their near perfect SAT scores. Educating elite students is, of course, precisely the opposite of championing equity. Equity and Harvard are like oil and water--and that is what makes Mr. Miah's defense of Harvard so mysterious.

It is a conceit among my Trotskyist friends--perhaps not often openly stated--that anybody could excel at Harvard if only they were given a chance. William F. Buckley famously said “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” My former comrades--I think including Malik Miah--will likely agree with that, and insist that there is no intelligence or aptitude difference between Harvard faculty and students, and a random collection of people chosen from the phone book. Further, the latter are more likely to represent the working class.

Of course it's not true, and if Harvard genuinely thought it was, then they would have to go out of business. Nevertheless, in deference to the American public's egalitarian impulse, they pretend it's true, and so they go to great lengths to admit a few lower class students and to hire a Black woman as president.

It's all a virtue-signaling scam. I wish Harvard would stick to educating the elite as measured, eg, by test scores.

Apparently Mr. Miah buys the charade. He truly believes that Claudine Gay represents progress in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in some meaningful way. And this despite Ms. Gay being woefully unqualified to be a college president at all, especially at Harvard. Let me count the ways.

The main job of a college president--especially at a private school--is to raise money. This can be done by soliciting donations, recruiting tuition-paying students, scamming the federal Student Loan program, recruiting students from petrostates who pay full, unsubsidized rates, etc. A president who can't meet fundraising expectations will not be long employed. Ms. Gay has 1) deeply alienated a large group of donors, who have vowed to never give Harvard another penny as long as she's in office, and 2) presided over a 17% drop in applications for early admission.

Any president of any skin color would be gone if they'd failed so miserably. (At my former campus, when the admissions' office failed to recruit enough students for the Fall semester, the president was unceremoniously fired.)

Then she got caught plagiarizing. Personally, I don't think this is such a big deal, and if one fires all college faculty who ever plagiarized anything, you probably wouldn't have many faculty left. Beyond which, with so much written on the web, it's hard to distinguish between purposeful plagiarism and coincidence.

But Harvard, in particular, makes a big, huge deal about plagiarism, and having its president caught in the act is embarrassing. Though I think this is more an excuse to fire her than an actual cause.

Finally, Ms. Gay is not much of a scholar. She has published only 11 papers and not a single book. No white male would get a job at Harvard even as janitor with such a weak publication record. She is not qualified to serve on the Harvard faculty.

Mr. Miah will claim this is just a plot against Black women, or an exercise in "white supremacy." Of course he's wrong. There are plenty of Black college presidents, and many of them successful on the measures I've just outlined. Let me mention Shirley Ann Jackson, first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT, who served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1999 to 2022. "Jackson has helped raise over $1 billion in donations for philanthropic causes." Ms. Jackson was frequently criticized, mostly for being the highest paid college president in the country. But nobody ever accused her of being a diversity hire.

Beyond issues posed by President Gay, there are some issues in higher education generally. In Mr. Miah's telling, these are all the result of perfidious attacks by a certain Christopher Rufo. He writes (quoting Mr. Rufo),

The far right is open about its objectives. Christopher F. Rufo, the leader of the racist mob that chased after Gay, said:

“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right,” he stated on X — formerly Twitter — on Dec. 19. “The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”

This is a replication of his earlier campaigns to turn “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs (DEI) into dog whistles for the reactionary Republican voting bloc.

Mr. Miah is generous with the insults. In particular, I wonder why everybody who disagrees with him is automatically a "racist?" Surely there are other, more important, issues facing higher ed than "racism," eg, money and mission. I don't know what a "dog whistle" is. Whatever it is, Mr. Miah's ears are much more finely attuned than mine--or any dog's.

Then it's not just Harvard that has a problem with “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The purpose of higher ed is to give its students a leg up on life--to make them better qualified for employment and to earn them more money and a higher status. Thus higher ed is all about maximizing inequity, that is separating their graduates from the hoi polloi. This seems built into the very nature of the enterprise, and not because of anything Mr. Rufo does.

Higher ed is as much or more about status transfer as wealth transfer. Wealth is easy--everybody can get rich at the same time. If Mr. Miah learns how to build a better mousetrap, then not only will he make more money, but I, a consumer, will benefit from having better mousetraps.

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. My status can't go up without Mr. Miah's status going down, and vice versa. It's ultimately a pecking order. When universities try to transfer status from one group to another, they're definitely gonna get pushback from those whose status is going down. For whatever reason--Mr. Miah probably knows why better than I do--higher ed today is all-in on raising the status of Black and gay people, and then to a much lesser extent, women. People who are not included (blue-collar folks, Asians, Jews) needless to say feel dissed. It's finally reached a boiling point; Blacks and gays have way higher status in higher ed than any other group.

This isn't the fault of Christopher Rufo.

So I don't know why Mr. Miah champions higher ed. It is probably the most reactionary institution in America today. Diversity, equity and inclusion are precisely not on higher education's agenda--and they never can be. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Intifada
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

The SWIP Flips to SWOP

Totally relevant picture about abortion (Source)

Insert any vowel into the acronym SWP (Socialist Workers Party, which publishes The Militant) and you end up with nonsense.

Random vowel insertion is the effect of this article, by Jacquie Henderson, entitled Ohio abortion referendum was blow to women, working class. I understand that the Party doesn't consider itself Trotskyist anymore (though they still frequently quote Trotsky), but this leaves that heritage so far in the dust that it's a real head-scratcher.

The lede paragraph:

After a national campaign organized by the Democratic Party, drawing in tens of millions of dollars, an amendment to enshrine the right to abortion in Ohio’s state constitution passed Nov. 7. The campaign had nothing to do with the fight for women’s rights — including the decriminalization of abortion — nor defending working-class interests.

Some background is important. The Party supported the Dobbs decision--in which the Supreme Court overturned abortion rights as a Constitutional issue, and instead referred the question back to the states and the people. This has been a political godsend for the Democrats, who have campaigned heavily on the so-called MAGA effort to ban abortion. The Dobbs decision led to no such outcome, and in fact abortion rights will soon be enshrined in law in all 50 states--it's that popular.

I can sort of see the Trotskyist logic in supporting Dobbs. They have long supported democratic rights, and therefore the Constitutional and civil rights of citizens. Abortion isn't even mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore neither the Court nor the Congress have any authority to legislate on the subject at all. Decisions about abortion should be left to the states and the people.

The Party, in their recent Political Report, which I reviewed here, in language I described as "mealy-mouthed," argued that abortion should be "decriminalized (whatever that means). "Mealy-mouthed" turns out to be an understatement. The offending paragraph in the Political Report quoted in my review is

...our communist program has nothing in common with bourgeois and middle-class forces--whether feminists, or campaigners for population control--who in fact advocate abortion as a means of contraception. We reject the pseudoscientific views of those who deny that the issue of human life, a profound moral question for all working people, is always involved in abortion decisions and procedures.

I don't think I understood what that paragraph meant. It's clarified in Ms. Henderson's article here:

The yes campaign was openly tied to getting President Joseph Biden reelected in 2024. After the vote, Biden declared, “Ohioans and voters across the country rejected attempts by MAGA Republican elected officials to impose extreme abortion bans.” He added, “The only reason abortion is banned in America is because of Donald Trump!”

In other words, the Party's position has nothing to do with abortion at all. They are simply against anything the Democrats are for--full stop. If the Dems were against abortion, they'd be for it. The problem with the Ohio referendum was not that it expanded abortion rights, but rather that it was supported by a bunch of evil, petty bourgeois Democrats--in an effort to get Biden reelected.

I agree with their assessment of the Democrat party. But setting oneself up as the "anti-Democrat" party seems to me just as illogical as Jeff "Vanguard Man" Mackler setting himself up as the anti-Trump party. It let's your opponent--be it Trump or Democrats--determine your entire political program.

I think the Party should have ignored the Ohio referendum altogether. The effect is ultimately inconsequential. As I recall, the Republicans had settled on a 15 week deadline for abortion. The referendum went for 22 weeks. According to the CDC, 93.5% of all abortions were performed by or before the 13th week. Fewer than 1% of abortions were performed at or after 21 weeks. I don't have numbers for 15 weeks, but it's likely over 95% of abortions occur before that deadline, and those that happen afterwards are almost certainly for compelling medical reasons, and not for the trivial excuses used earlier in the pregnancy. Abortion for compelling medical reasons will be allowed in any case.

The Party argues that enshrining the law as a state constitutional amendment will make it harder to overturn later, making it more difficult for "workers" to change their minds. This was the argument of the Pro-Life community. Though the Party takes this to unreasonable extremes. From Ms. Henderson's article:

The answer to inflation and growing pressures on families is not more abortions, as many Democrats argue. This is a woman’s medical decision. Workers should reject the push to use abortion as a means of contraception. At issue with abortion is a potential human being. Abortion should be a fallback, something that is needed when all else fails.

“This year workers have learned more about how to fight for better conditions, from striking autoworkers, casino workers, bakery and other unionists,” Hawkins said.

The SWP points to the powerful example set by the leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

Fidel Castro led working people to conquer power. Millions of women participated in the defense and advance of the revolution, breaking down barriers to full involvement in economic, social and political life. The revolutionary government organized child care, school and workplace lunch and after-school programs to help overcome the inequality women face. Along the way they decriminalized abortion.

In other words, because Americans are supposedly getting poorer (worse housing, worse food, worse medical care) we don't need more abortion--but instead we need to imitate Cuba. Cuba--where housing, food, and health care a vastly more available than in the USA. Really?

The SWOP is a FLOP. 

Allow me a personal reminiscence here.

When I was 18 years old I returned to my hometown after living 18 months in Germany. A girl I knew from high school before I left invited me over to her house for milk and cookies--and the complete recording of Jesus Christ Superstar on the stereo set. She had her whole life planned out--and wanted me to be a part of it. She wanted to get married and have five children. And Jesus Christ Superstar was by far the best piece of music ever written. I didn't mention that I was a sworn atheist, and that my stay in Germany (frequent trips to the old East Berlin notwithstanding) had turned me into a committed Communist. Besides, I was way too shy to make the requisite phone call necessary to cash in on her offer, so nothing ever came of it.

In recent years I've come to reconsider that road not taken. I certainly wouldn't have joined the Socialist Workers Party. I probably would never have attended college. There is no way I'd have spent a year with my family living in Uganda. I wouldn't have married my current wife--who gave me two children and now two grandchildren--who is from the Philippines. I have a whole country-in-law, which has added a richness to my life that I think I would miss.

But just suppose--if I'd had five children beginning at age 20. It would have been a hardscrabble, difficult life--supporting five children without a college degree. No fun at all. But by now I'd possibly have a dozen grandchildren. Not just two. And lots of kids would take care of me in my old age--not just my daughter. Of course this assumes the marriage endured for what now would be 52 years.

There's nothing wrong with that life. But it would have taken courage and commitment that I didn't have at age 18. After all, I couldn't even make the phone call.

The SWP is at least pro-natalist. Which, considering that the average, elderly Trotskyist has zero grandchildren, is amazing. Most people with no grandchildren are envious of folks like me--and it's that envy that drives the whole feminist/LGBTQIA+ movement. But the SWP has somehow risen above that--and for that they deserve praise and admiration.

Further Reading:

• Chicago: Ilona Gersh Runs For Mayor
• The American Right and Trans Rights
• The Philippines

 

 

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

Book Review: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us

Authored by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark, The low point of labor resistance is behind us is the political report adopted by the 49th Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), held on December 12th, 2022. The authors (whom I've dubbed the "Troika") are the long-time (going on five decades now) leaders of the Party. Comrades Barnes and Waters are over 80, while comrade Clark is about 70.

The premise is that the union movement has reached bottom, and because of economic misery workers are becoming more militant and more likely to organize and rebel. This, if true, will reverse a decades long trend that began in the 1970s.

Except I don't think it's true. Just today, in an editorial, the WSJ writes

Union members made up only 10.1% of the workforce last year, down from 10.3% in 2021, according to data released recently by the Labor Department. For a long time the prototypical union shop hasn’t been a private steel plant but a public school, yet the unionized share of government employees also fell.

Though the annual changes look small, they add up: The workforce in 2012 was 11.3% unionized, and in 2002 it was 13.3%. Organized labor hasn’t been able to stop the trend, despite frantic unionization drives, including many aimed at nontraditional members, such as the university graduate students who march under the United Auto Workers banner. Private workers are 6% unionized, down from 8.6% two decades ago. For public workers, it’s 33.1%, down from 37.3%.

Last week ZeroHedge reported similar statistics, along with this rather depressing gem:

The most unionized occupations are public safety (34.6%) and education (33.7%). The lowest are sales (3.0%) and computer and math jobs (3.3%). 

Bad news for Trotskyists, who don't consider cops to be part of the working class.

The Troika might concede that union membership hasn't yet recovered, but they'd insist that the trajectory has changed. Unions, they'd claim, are becoming more militant and better organized, which will be reflected in the overall statistics soon enough. They provide no data for that belief, but are concentrating their efforts in two unions: the bakery workers (BCTGM) and the rail workers. Among the bakery workers, 160 of them have gone on strike in recent months (120 at Ingredion, 40 at Corn Nuts). Both strikes have been settled. This does not auger a surge in labor activism.

The fact is that unions are increasingly irrelevant. There is a serious labor shortage for workers in blue collar professions, and those employees are getting raises. For example, Walmart recently raised starting salaries across the board from $12 to $14 per hour. That's a near 17% raise, for which no strike was required. They're doing this because they need the workers.

The Report consists of 27 sections, ranging in length from a paragraph to a page or two, organized within four chapters. The whole document (not counting prefatory material or illustrations) is about 60 pages long, or approximately 15,000 words. I read it in about three hours.

The first chapter is entitled Opposing US rulers' assaults on freedoms protected by the Constitution and their use of the political police. It describes in detail the unconstitutional persecution of Donald Trump and so-called "MAGA Republicans" by "the government's political police, first and foremost the FBI." It must be noted that the Party has had its own run-ins with the FBI before, notably the COINTELPRO lawsuit in which the Party won $264,000 in damages. Opposing the FBI is consistent with Party history, as the Report discusses at some length.

More, the Party notes that a majority of blue collar workers voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Trump earned the vote of record numbers of Hispanics and Blacks (though the latter was still a small percentage). Therefore supporting civil rights in this case is in solidarity with the people whom they hope to represent. They cast themselves as being on the side of the "deplorables" and the "bitter clingers."

In their defense, the Report cites Leon Trotsky himself:

"Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppressions of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements."

They are also very clear about who their opponents are.

Democrats, liberals, the "left," and "woke," so-called social justice warriors--not rightist or other reactionary forces--have led the assault against constitutional protections and freedoms in recent decades.

Trotskyists have always opposed the Democratic Party and all it stands for. The Report strongly reiterates that position.

While standing up for civil rights, the Report does not explicitly make clear their opposition to Trump and the Republican Party as agents of the bourgeoisie. Trump's name is mentioned in the Report only in passing, and the Republicans are not mentioned at all. This may lead to some confusion as to whether the Party still is part of the Left. I think they unambiguously are, but the Report would be better if they made that case explicitly.

The second chapter is entitled Capitalism's erosion of the family and the working-class road to women's emancipation. This includes some standard boilerplate:

Central to any communist program is a union-led fight for employment, with wage rates, work schedules, and job conditions necessary for families to live. ...

Jobs, not dependence on welfare programs, open a road forward. ...

Class-conscious workers call for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, with regular hours.

So they're in favor of full employment, but then, after all that, they come out in favor of a comprehensive welfare program: "What is needed is a floor for all families--an income that's sufficient for workers..." to pay for all the bennies. The standard label for such a policy is universal basic income, and was championed by Andrew Yang in 2020.

The weirdest part of the Report concerns abortion. They claim that (boldface mine)

...we fight for women's right to reproductive and maternal health care, sex education (not gender indoctrination), as well as access to the safest and most reliable contraceptive methods and safe and legal abortion.

There is then a long section on how they supported Roe v Wade back in the 1970s, but have now come to regret that choice. The argument isn't entirely convincing. Summarizing in my own words, Roe v Wade short-circuited a national debate on abortion, depriving the working class of an opportunity to come to a decision on their own.

What the current Supreme Court has done, in the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, is simply return decisions about abortion to people in the individual states. They didn't rule on abortion one way or the other. The Party supports this move, and assumes that abortion will eventually be legal everywhere.

But now comes the truly mysterious part (in section 15; boldface mine):

The Socialist Workers Party unconditionally supports the decriminalization of abortion and joins others in fighting for it.

Decriminalization? Why that instead of legalization, as suggested in the prior quote? There is a difference, I suppose, but we're never told what it is.

A hint might be this:

...our communist program has nothing in common with bourgeois and middle-class forces--whether feminists, or campaigners for population control--who in fact advocate abortion as a means of contraception. We reject the pseudoscientific views of those who deny that the issue of human life, a profound moral question for all working people, is always involved in abortion decisions and procedures.

That second sentence is a bit hard to follow because of the double negative (...reject...deny...). It could be more simply written, but I think the mealy-mouthedness is on purpose.

I interpret the Party's position as pro-natalist, i.e., they want workers to have more babies. I think they're right--I describe myself using that word (and not just for workers). It's hard to square pro-natalism with unequivocal support for birth control and abortion. Therefore they equivocate.

The third chapter is entitled The Cuban socialist revolution and our communist continuity. It's much shorter than the first two, and in my opinion is completely wrong. Indeed, I think the Party's whole international analysis is wrong--I'll refer readers to books by Peter Zeihan for a clearer understanding. I'm going to skip over that here.

The fourth chapter--shortest of all--is Forging a proletarian party and educating its cadre. They claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that

The SWP is forging a proletarian party in the United States--a revolutionary political instrument of the working class, whose purpose, as our constitution asserts...is "to educate and organize the working class in order to establish a workers and farmers government, which will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism."

That's a tall order for a Party of about a hundred souls, with an average age in the 60s. The majority of comrades are at or nearing retirement age. Their current leading spokeswoman is Ilona Gersh, who is in her mid-seventies. The leaders are a pair of octogenarians.

What I am most disappointed with is that the Party has not brought in new, younger leadership. While I don't support the Party's goal of revolution and socialism, I have no fear of that ever happening even in my grandchildren's lifetime. But I'm sentimentally attached to my former comrades, and I want the Party to continue to exist. Having the same leadership for 50 years is not healthy. Presuming that the organization will have a meaningful voice when lead by octogenarians is fanciful.

I don't think Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, or Steve Clark are serious about the World Revolution. They're just concerned for their own sinecures--and what happens after that let the devil take the hindmost.

I enjoyed reading the Report. It's well written, entertaining, and not too long. The illustrations are silly--they're mostly pictures of people standing around holding placards, such as shown on the front cover. But the book is professionally produced. I didn't find any typos--if there are some in what I've quoted here, they are mine. Apologies in advance.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2017 (about the 48th Convention)
• Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks
• Has the SWP Moved Right? Or the Republicans Left?

 

The Harm Reduction Team

Physician Mike Pappas works for a "harm reduction facility" in New York City, and writes a piece for Left Voice entitled Eric Adams Prescribes More Cops and Prisons for New York’s Poor and Oppressed. Who can be against harm reduction? And whose harm are they reducing?

Dr. Pappas' lede (link in original):

Last week, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced his new directive allowing cops to forcibly remove people from public areas and involuntarily detain them for transport to hospitals. The mayor’s guidance expands previous definitions which allowed cops and qualified professionals to involuntarily detain someone if the individual is deemed to be a threat. Now, the new recommendations allow cops to detain people if they deem they are “unable to meet their basic needs.”

My wife and I spent two days in Singapore last month, sightseeing. The most striking feature is that there are no beggars or homeless people on the streets or in the subway. It's the only city in the world that I've been to with that feature. This makes the city much more pleasant for the tourist. It is safe to walk around late at night. One doesn't need to fear pickpockets or muggers. One certainly doesn't have to worry about aggressive panhandlers on the subway.

It's much easier to be a tourist in Singapore than in New York. The no-beggars policy is obviously successful--this site claims that the "city of Singapore is very popular with international travellers. In 2019, it reached the 4th place of the world's most popular cities with 19.76 million tourists." For a city with less than 5.5 million people, this is pretty impressive (and even more impressive if you consider there isn't really very much to see there!).

Of course tourists aren't the only beneficiaries. The city hosts lots of hotels--we stayed in a big one--employing thousands of people. A key draw is the food--there are hundreds of restaurants at competitive prices. (For a delicious cheap-eat, go to the Chinatown Market.) The shopping centers are to die for. A rule of thumb is for every two tourists you need one employee. There are nearly 70,000 hotel rooms in Singapore, which at double occupancy results in 140,000 tourists every day. That means 70,000 people are employed taking care of them.

No wonder Singapore is such a rich country! When it comes to harm reduction, getting the beggars off the streets earns city residents some serious cash!

But Dr. Pappas will undoubtedly ask What happens to the mentally ill? the indigent? the addicted? Fair questions, those. Given the city-state's draconian drug laws, the addicted are probably in jail. The mentally ill are housed in hospitals--or at least some place that pretends to be a hospital. And the indigent are likely provided with subsidized housing--and told to stay there.

Singapore is not a free country. Civil liberties don't carry much weight. A harm reduction method that works there will not work anyplace else in the world--certainly not in messy, rambunctious, lively New York City.

At the same time, what Dr. Pappas calls "harm reduction" doesn't really cut the mustard. His horizon of "harm" extends only as far as the homeless--he wants to make their lives more comfortable. He ignores the welfare of an urban neighborhood when a few dozen homeless people camp out in their park, depriving them of its use. He doesn't see the effects on city life when homeless people shelter in subway stations or on trains. He pretends that mentally ill people pushing people on to subway tracks is not a real problem (only isolated incidences, he'd claim). He forgets that for every shooting in Times Square, there are thousands of potential tourists who decide they'd rather not spend their money on Broadway.

A New York Times article from this past March says that there are about 50,000 homeless people living in shelters. Nevertheless,

While it is difficult to accurately count the number of people living unsheltered, the city’s most recent estimate, conducted in January 2021, tallied about 1,300 people sleeping in subways and about 1,100 on the streets. Many advocates consider the estimate to be an undercount.

Those 2400+ people living rough are doing great harm to the remaining 8.465 million New Yorkers who don't sleep in subway cars or commandeer park benches. They scare tourists, commuters, restaurant patrons, pedestrians, and anybody else who wants to live in a civilized world. Mr. Adams' proposal is a perfectly reasonable effort to get people who for whatever reason can't follow rules of common decency and courtesy off the streets. This looks to be a police function--harm reduction for that small group of people can happen at the facility where the cops drop them off.

I also strongly urge the mayor to arrest turnstile jumpers and panhandlers. These are a small group of uncivilized people who hijack public conveyances for their own selfish purposes. Securing the right of 8.465 million New Yorkers to enjoy public spaces that they pay for constitutes a much greater degree of "harm reduction" than anything Dr. Pappas proposes.

In his headline, Dr. Pappas claims the homeless are "oppressed." This is not true--not even by Marxist standards. "Oppression" happens when surplus value is taken from workers in the form of profit. Homeless people are not workers, and they contribute nothing of value, much less surplus value. Instead they are thieves, stealing public spaces from workers who pay to ride the subway to work every day, and who deserve the quiet enjoyment of their ride.

The homeless, the turnstile jumpers, the squeegee guys--they're not oppressed. Instead, they are the oppressors. One can certainly feel sorry for them at some level, but they have absolutely no right to take over the subway or other public spaces.

Unfortunately, the harm reduction crew, which includes Dr. Pappas, isn't entirely innocent. Here is what it seems they're really interested in.

Workers at OnPoint NYC [a city-funded harm reduction outfit--ed] officially submitted their demand for voluntary union recognition on Thursday, December 8. The workers, who are demanding union recognition with the New England Joint Board of UNITE HERE, are calling their union OnPoint United. They are fighting for a wall-to-wall union, greater job security for employees, better healthcare, and a democratization of the workplace.

The truth will out! The harm reduction folks are more interested in their own bennies than in any serious harm reduction. Indeed, their incentives look to be entirely in the wrong place. The more homeless people there are, the more their services will supposedly be needed, and the more money they'll get. Rather than "harm reduction," their goal appears to be the exact opposite. They benefit most when the homeless population expands.

The vast majority of New Yorkers are civilized people. They deserve to live in a civilized city.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
• Unionizing Hotels?

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

Althusser in America

I'm proud of the zoo that Trotsky's Children has accumulated over the years. Of course there are the Trotskyists of various denominations that play the lead role on this blog. But many other grouplets and individuals make cameo appearances. I'm pleased to have dubbed Jeff Mackler (who owns Socialist Action) as a Brezhnevist. Solidarity might best be described as eco-feminist, a term that also fits the Freedom Socialist Party. Then there is the last gasp of the DeLeon movement, represented by the now defunct Socialist Labor Party. Don't forget the late Louis Proyect, a longstanding staple of this blog who was a free thinker. For bizarre species, let's include the Bob Avakian Fan Club--they're self-proclaimed Stalinists.

But surely the rarest bird of all--the very capstone of my collection--is a genuine Althusserist (or is that Althusserite? I'm not sure.), named after the French, Marxist philosopher of modest renown, Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990). While I have heard of Mr. Althusser, I confess that I have neither read anything by him nor about him, so an informed criticism of Althusserian dogma will not be found here.

Anyway, America's resident Althusser aficionado is a fellow by the name of Warren Montag. I think the German form of address describes him best: Herr Doktor Professor Montag--anything less is an injustice. For this guy's nose is so far up in the air that he can no longer smell the roses. The good Herr Doktor is the Louis M. Brown Family Professor in Literature in English at Occidental College, and he contributes to an article that during the past week headlined the Left Voice website, entitled ‘A United Labor Movement Can Stop the Far Right’: An Interview with Warren Montag.

Left Voice, as readers may recall, is a quality blog run by a claque of NYC college professors and their groupies. It makes sense that they'd choose the good Professor to inform us about the labor movement and the "far right"--despite the fact that he knows next to nothing about either topic. A more on-the-nose self parody of the petty bourgeois Left is hard to imagine.

For what it's worth, Occidental College is one of those fancy-pants places in L.A. catering to the spoiled youth of the upper middle class--and ripping them off for a pretty penny. The annual sticker price tuition & fees exceeds $60K. For that money they get to subsidize Professor Montag's continuing efforts to elucidate Althusserian thought and practice.

Professor Montag states:

Even if Trump 2020 was a lost cause, there was a clear pathway to the institutionalization of the rule of the Far Right. The GOP’s alliance with the organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers had awakened its primal instincts and showed the party what tens of millions shared with it: racism, misogyny, Christian nationalism, imperialism, the abandonment of the subaltern classes to the gospel of personal responsibility and the sanctity of private property.

There's so much to unpack in this paragraph. First he claims that the GOP is being taken over by the "far right," in which he includes groups such as the Proud Boys. Wikipedia notes that "[t]he total number of Proud Boys members is unknown. Reports estimate membership between several hundred up to 6,000." Let's flatter Professor Montag and accept the high estimate. Recall that 77 million people voted for Trump in 2020--that means the Proud Boys are 0.0078% of all people who voted Republican. This hardly seems like a takeover to me.

Then Professor Montag refers to the Proud Boys as "far right." I'd go further and call them fascist. My shorthand definition of fascism is people who believe we're poor because the foreigners stole all the money. The goal of a fascist group is to restore their chosen race/ethnicity to pride of place. For the Proud Boys, the foreigners are Jews, Black people, and immigrants.

Of course, by my definition BLM is also fascist. The only difference between BLM and Proud Boys is who they class as foreigners. For BLM it's Jews, White people, and immigrants. Reverse the colors and these two groups have an identical ideology. Some people will classify BLM as "far left." I can go along with that, too. But whatever term you apply to BLM, to be consistent you must use the same term for Proud Boys. You can't say one is far right while the other is far left. Pick one.

In reality, the Proud Boys and BLM both live on the dark side of the moon where Left and Right come together. Neither of them believes in civil rights, the rule of law, free markets, constitutional governance--or any of the other principles of a liberal society upon which both Democrats and Republicans largely agree.

Then--to those 77 million Trump voters--Professor Montag attributes a list of sins. It appears that Herr Doktor Montag has never in his entire life met or talked to even one of those voters. Almost all Trump voters will deny being racist. Trump himself denies being a racist, and there is little to suggest that he's wrong. (Trump has never opposed affirmative action; he does not advocate segregation; and unlike BLM, he adamantly defended the right of Black people to use the 911 emergency system.) Professor Montag claims to know what's in the heart of the average Trump voter better than they know themselves--despite never having ever talked to one. I can't take Professor Montag's opinion on this seriously.

Trump voters are no more misogynist than they are racist.

"Christian nationalism" is a pejorative term invented by non-Christians to justify their irrational bias against Christians. Christianity is a lifestyle choice that imposes no cost on anybody who is not a Christian. There is no reason to denigrate it.

"Imperialism" is a completely meaningless term anyway, but how an individual person can commit the sin of "imperialism" is beyond me.

Does Professor Montag really believe that personal responsibility is irrelevant? Surely it is up to the individual to take care of one's health, to tend to one's children, and to maximize one's income as much as possible. Conversely, nobody--certainly not Trump supporters--believes that everything results from individual effort.

Professor Montag paints with a very broad brush. According to Vox, 63% of the white working class (defined as non-college educated whites) voted for Trump. As did 37% of Latino voters and 10% of Black voters. Does our Herr Doktor Professor friend really think all these people are racist, misogynist scoundrels? If so, how does he ever expect there to be a working-class led revolution?

In reality, it's Professor Montag who is ripping off 19 year-olds for the purpose of feeding his Althusser ego-trip. The student loan crisis is at least partly his fault. I hope he'll be contributing his share toward paying off those debts.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler Channels Michael Roberts
• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Good Trump, Bad Trump

Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist

Does Louis Proyect deny being a white supremacist?

Not explicitly, of course, because if you say you're not a white supremacist, then you probably are a white supremacist. That's all because of white fragility and systemic racism--the very people who deny being subject to it are, in fact, the leading carriers of the disease.

Yet we do have good cause to suspect Mr. Proyect of being a white supremacist. For starters he's white. There's no getting around that--he doesn't even try to deny it. And if white supremacy is indeed a condition that afflicts white people--a problematic population--then there's no reason to exclude Mr. Proyect from the category.

Beyond that, he's Jewish. We all know that Jews profited immensely from the slave trade. Indeed, Mr. Proyect used to work for Goldman-Sachs, a Jewish-led institution if there ever was one, and one that supposedly acquired its riches mostly if not exclusively from slave dealing. Besides, Jews wrote the Hebrew Bible (and the New Testament), admitting that they owned slaves almost from the very beginning, starting with Exodus. (I have an edge on Mr. Proyect here. I'm only half Jewish, so by that genetic quantum I'm less of a white supremacist than he is.)

Mr. Proyect tries mightily to atone for this original sin by allying himself with the most antisemitic organizations possible--notably Hamas (that explicitly wants to kill all the Jews) and BDS (which cancels people for the crime of being Jewish). Sadly, the stain of white supremacy is not so easily discarded.

So he kowtows to the BIPOCs in most humiliating ways. BIPOC is how we're supposed to refer to Black people these days--at least according to the Fac-Staff email list on my campus. It stands for Black & Indigenous People of Color. Though weirdly, the loudest representatives of BIPOCs on my campus aren't much differently colored from me. He's keen on using dehumanizing terms like Latinx (I think it rhymes with minx)--a degendered dysphemism for Hispanic, a people so reduced that they have no purpose in life other than to be oppressed by white supremacists. 

He insists on using the phrase Native American instead of Indian, despite the fact that the people themselves prefer the latter term. Like other white supremacists, Mr. Proyect wants to eliminate all traces of Indian culture from American life. Not just by renaming all the sports teams, but likely by eventually replacing evocative place names like Chattanooga and Kalamazoo. Those represent the evil legacy of white supremacist cultural appropriation.

Unfortunately, in my 50 years following American Trotskyism and 40 years as an academic, I have yet to encounter a succinct definition of "white supremacy." Mr. Proyect is no help here, but he does offer an example of a white supremacist--an archetype if you will.

The poor fellow's name is Matthew Karp, a professor of history at Princeton. Mr. Proyect's account of Professor Karp's sins is an article entitled How Harper’s Magazine Undermines the Struggle Against White Supremacy, which appeared in Counterpunch. The teaser to the article on Mr. Proyect's blog sports a picture of John "Rick" MacArthur, the editor of Harpers who has been "orchestrating this shift to the right." It's probably more accurate to say that he's been orchestrating a shift to common sense.

Mr. Karp's error is that he had the unforgivable temerity to criticize Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 project. Mr. Proyect writes,

[Mr. Karp's] article argues that it is futile to dwell on the racist history of the USA and to instead look forward to breakthroughs like the Civil War, the civil rights movement, etc. Essentially, Karp aligns himself with the cadre of historians that complained bitterly about all the falsehoods they supposedly saw in the 1619 Project. Among them, his Princeton colleague Sean Wilentz barked the loudest at Hannah-Jones. Mostly, the complaints were about her introductory article that stated that the colonists fought for independence in order to maintain slavery and that racism was in America’s DNA.

Now Mr. Proyect is an ace historian--a really good one--and he surely knows more about history than I do. And to his credit, he refuses to say that Mr. Karp's criticism is actually wrong. But in his desperate attempt to suck up to Ms. Hannah-Jones, he can only argue by association--i.e., that Mr. Karp keeps bad company. Here is the rest of the above-quoted paragraph:

Except for Wilentz, the historians took their case to the World Socialist Website (WSWS), an outlet distinguished by its hysterical Henny-Penny warnings that WWIII was always about to break out and that Socialist Workers Party leader Joe Hansen was a GPU agent.

That is, because Mr. Karp agrees with somebody who at some other time said something stupid on a completely unrelated topic, therefore Mr. Karp's criticism is wrong. OK, so it isn't wrong--Mr. Proyect never says it's wrong--but apparently one shouldn't utter it in public.

The fact is--as surely Mr. Proyect knows--that maintaining slavery was important to some American revolutionaries, especially in Georgia and the Carolinas. They were afraid that Britain was going to ban the institution--as indeed Britain did in 1833. But the bulk of the Continental Army--led by George Washington--came from Yankee states: New England and Upstate New York. Those Yankees were abolitionists more likely than not, and in any case were not fighting for "white supremacy."

Obviously the relationship between race and the American Revolution is vastly more complicated than Ms. Hannah-Jones would have us believe. Mr. Proyect is so in hock to bullies like her, who claim the power to exonerate one from being a white supremacist, that he can't even call a simple spade a spade. This is humiliating.

He makes other statements for which he really ought to know better. He channels his inner Democrat, claiming "Republican state governments were working overtime to pass Jim Crow type voting laws." I always thought Mr. Proyect hated the Democratic Party, but here he is echoing a completely over-the-top talking point. The voting laws in states such as Georgia are nothing even close to being like Jim Crow. There will likely be no racially disparate impact at all from that legislation. Like Democrats, Mr. Proyect apparently believes that Black people are too stupid to get a driver's license. I told you he was a white supremacist.

Mr. Proyect writes

This rather obscure observation is supposed to remind us, according to Karp, that history is neither all good or all bad. I am not sure it is necessary to cite Foucault to understand what most children learn in the 8th grade. What they are not learning, however, is how White households ended up with 6.9 times as much wealth as Blacks’.

I think it's obvious that school children are learning about white/Black wealth discrepancies (that may be all they're learning). Mr. Proyect will attribute the problem to "white supremacy." This fails for two reasons:

• Neither he nor anybody else can define "white supremacy" with sufficient precision to make it measurable.
• He attributes all social ills to that one meaningless phrase. Surely Mr. Proyect is smart enough to know that history and sociology are much more complicated than that.

Finally, referring to the fact that Ms. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the Board of Trustees at U of North Carolina, he writes "Somehow, he [Mr. Karp] had not noticed the UNC’s egregious attack on Hannah-Jones’s right to tenure."

Nobody has a "right" to tenure, which is guaranteed by neither the Constitution nor by any reasonable definition of academic freedom. Tenure is an employment contract promising the holder a lifetime job. In this case, tenure meant that Ms. Hannah-Jones would receive a paycheck from the U. of North Carolina for decades to come. Obviously taxpayers in that state have a right to deny her that privilege, and it is the obligation of the Board of Trustees to represent the taxpayers. Which they did until they wimped out, but fortunately for North Carolinians the lady went elsewhere.

I think Ms. Hannah-Jones is a propagandist faking it as a scholar. She's a fraud who should never have been hired in the first place.

I'll admit to being facetious in this post. I don't really think that Mr. Proyect is a white supremacist. Indeed, I don't think he's any more a white supremacist than I am, and I am definitely not a white supremacist.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Teachers Can't Teach
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

 

The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

Let's get the silly stuff out of the way up front. In a Militant article (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) entitled What is the political road forward for workers in 2020, Seth Galinsky writes

The party’s candidates call for the unions to fight for a government-funded public works program to create millions of jobs at union scale, building schools, hospitals and other things workers need. They say we need to organize to cut the workweek with no cut in pay, to prevent further layoffs.

To accomplish this, they advocate a united front with the Tooth Fairy and her reserve army of Magic Unicorns who can build schools, hospitals, and other things workers supposedly need (but don't really) at no cost whatsoever. Because otherwise their proposal is such a misallocation of economic resources that it will drive us all into dire poverty.

Being socialists, they have to make demands like this, which puts them in common league with the entire far Left along with much of the Democratic Party, all of whom live in the Land of Wishful Thinking.

But once you get past the pro-forma BS, Mr. Galinsky's article, along with a more substantive piece by Naomi Craine (Violent course of antifa, Black Lives Matter threat to working class) begin to make a whole lot of sense. I write here not so much to disagree with them, but rather to expand on the ideas.

Ms. Craine has actually been to Kenosha. She writes

On Aug. 29, I attended a rally in Kenosha protesting the cop shooting of Jacob Blake Jr. on Aug. 23. It had been called by Blake’s family to oppose police brutality and to urge a halt to arson and violence carried out by anarcho-radical forces earlier in the week. At an Aug. 25 protest, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse had shot three Black Lives Matter supporters, killing two.

Although the Aug. 29 rally was called a “Peace March,” one of the speakers, who was not identified by name, declared, “If you kill one of us, it’s time for us to kill one of yours.” He went on to bait Caucasians at the action and closed his speech with the slogan, “Race first.” Several black-clad individuals, some openly carrying weapons, participated as a group in the rally.

Ms. Craine is more diplomatic than I will be, but she correctly hints that BLM (at least the core group) is a fascist gang. I use the word advisedly--not as an epithet--because they subscribe to the fascist meme: We're poor because the foreigners stole all the money. Here "foreigners" is a stand-in for some other racial or ethnic group--often Jews. In France today it's Muslims. For BLM it's "white people", who used to get called "honkies." (BLM doesn't like Jews much, either, though I think dedicated antisemitism is more the specialty of Antifa--another fascist gang, as Ms. Craine points out.)

BLM is not a civil rights organization. They don't believe in civil rights at all--certainly not freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, or even freedom of thought. Their creed is what's mine is mine--and what's yours is mine, too.

I do not believe BLM is a mass organization. Ignore the supposed widespread support it seems to enjoy--most of that is just feel-good virtue signaling by suburban liberals on college campuses, aka useful idiots. The actual organization is only a few thousands, perhaps ten thousand, people. A competent government committed to civil order could put them down in a jiffy.

I don't believe BLM speaks for Black people. Even Al Sharpton is separating himself from them. Their goal is a race war--which Blacks will lose big time simply because they're only 12% of the population. There are some suckers in the white community who are falling for the race war shtick--fortunately they're an even smaller minority. But the longer government stays on the sidelines, the closer we get to an actual race war.

Ms. Craine writes

It is in the course of these fights and broader struggles in the years ahead working people will learn how to defend ourselves in disciplined ways from assaults by the bosses and cops who protect their rule. And we will see more clearly the middle-class character and dangerous anti-working-class course of antifa and the Black Lives Matter leadership.

The first sentence is tooth-fairy Trotsky-talk. But the second sentence is more true than Ms. Craine realizes, blinded as she is by Marxist language. Redefining terms will clarify much.

Who she calls "working people," I will refer to as folks with a positive net worth. It doesn't have to be much: some equity in a house; a small 401K account; or even just a marketable skill that can earn a living. Maybe it's a small fishing boat. Whatever it is, these folks are Trump's base--the blue-collar worker who lives in the bungalow in a working class part of town.  Think Archie Bunker if you must.

And the folks she calls "middle class" I'll refer to as the lumpen proletariat--people who don't own anything, not even a marketable skill. Of course that includes the homeless bums and the welfare queens--among many other people who are simply incapable of taking care of themselves. We can all feel sorry for those folks, but they're not the problem.

The worrisome lumpens appear on the surface to be middle class--think Meathead. They include those who've buried themselves in student loans with no chance of ever paying them back. Or others who can't live within their means and are now hopelessly in hock to credit card companies. Or the many who have fallen off the academic ladder--college dropouts--who despite all that "education", know nothing that can earn them a living. Or ladies age 30 who are still in grad school working on that post-modern Jane Austen monograph. Or those who have finished grad school--PhD in hand--and are now competing in the impossible academic job market. Or the guys majoring in "Black Studies," who have learned nothing more than to see themselves as victims.

These lumpens--these are the dangerous folks. They're the true Meatheads of our age, having no chance of ever earning an honest living. And of course they're bitter, and angry, and above all, envious. Compare them with my wife's immigrant relatives--Uber drivers, orderlies, food service workers--all of whom own their own homes and cars and have a little money in the bank. And they have children and grandchildren. Naturally the lumpens are green with envy! That's why they take it out on restaurant patrons, as Ms. Craine mentions.

Or the spoiled off-spring of the upper-middle class who have only menial jobs to look forward to, and now riot with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (don't you just love that transgressive "k"!). Because at bottom they're stupid and they feel entitled. They never went through the school of hard knocks. They've never had to earn a living.

Those are the people who join Antifa and BLM, for just as Marx predicted, it's the lumpen proletariat who are the soldiers for fascist gangs.

Further Reading:

• Is Jeff Mackler a Racist?
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• A Nation of Shopkeepers

Is Jeff Mackler a Racist?

Jeff Mackler writes a long article (3000+ words) published in the July print edition of Socialist Action, entitled U.S. Fight Against Racism and Repression Reaches New Heights (pdf). Despite Mr. Mackler being a talented writer, it's one of those that I've read so that you don't have to. Frankly, it's boring.

Setting the tone, in the lead paragraph he writes,

Unprecedented, multi-racial, daily mobilizations against the ingrained institutional racism that permeates every aspect U.S. society have exploded in scope and intensity. Recent surveys estimate that 15 million to 26 million Americans have taken part in the widespread demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd. They continue to this day.

The exaggerations are stunning. Taking the obvious first--that 15 to 26 million people have participated in the protests--my back-of-the envelope calculation comes to about 600,000 demonstrators. Perhaps that's a low estimate--multiply by two or three if you want--but Mr. Mackler's is 25 times bigger--in other words, just way out of line.

Then he says the demonstrations were over the murder of George Floyd. That's rather like protesting child abuse--everybody is against it. Everybody from across the political spectrum--from Steve Bannon to Jeff Mackler--agrees that Mr. Floyd was murdered, and that his killer should be brought to justice. Even the police unions--who almost always stand up for cops no matter what they do--agree that he was murdered! So I don't know who the demonstrators are protesting against.

Even Mr. Mackler indirectly admits that the fuss was not about George Floyd's murder, which by all accounts was a once-off crime committed by a rogue cop. But in his view it is symptomatic of "ingrained institutional racism that permeates every aspect [of] US society." He offers some statistics revealing the depth of the problem.

About 63 percent of those shot and killed by police in Minneapolis between 2000 and 2017 – 19 people – were Black, while only 17 percent – 5 people – were white.

So--to fill in the missing data--over a 17 year period 30 people were shot and killed by police in Minneapolis. That's less than two per year--police shootings are not a major cause of death in Minneapolis or the country. Most of those shootings were justified in the sense that the police's mandate to protect public safety sometimes requires them to use force.

On the basis of this small, statistically meaningless dataset, Mr. Mackler infers a giant racist conspiracy. He offers no other evidence.

Though it is true that Blacks are stopped, arrested and prosecuted at a rate exceeding their fraction of the population. Mr. Mackler will attribute that to "racism." Like most Republicans, I think it's because of higher crime in Black communities, as illustrated here.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Though the reasons for higher crime might in part be racism, surely the actual causes are far more complicated than that. Racism is likely only a minor contributor.

Which is not to say there aren't any problems with the police. The police department in Ferguson, MO, for example, was running an extortion racket. The Black residents of that city had every right to be upset--though burning down stores in your own neighborhood is not an especially helpful tactic. Likewise, a Black woman from Minneapolis interviewed on Fox News was all in favor of the police, but she wished they better represented the neighborhood. According to her most cops didn't even live in Minneapolis, and no matter how good their intentions they didn't really understand what was going on.

While there is certainly room for improvement, polls show that Black people do not support defunding the police. This recent Gallup poll  reports that 81% of Black citizens want the police present in their community. This makes sense--like the rest of us, Black people are civilized and want to live in a civilized world.

Here is what Mr. Mackler proposes instead of the police:

The right of Black, Brown and Native American people to control and govern their own lives and communities, free from white racist police brutality and corporate exploitation, can only begin with a fundamental change in relations of power. The struggle to disarm, defund, and disband the racist institutions of police power begins with the emergence of new organs of democratic control of the communities of the oppressed themselves.

Civil order requires a "well-regulated militia" (as the 2nd Amendment puts it). Today we call that the police department, and it has a monopoly on violence in civil settings. Well-regulated means subject to civilian and ultimately democratic authority, for otherwise it becomes just another street gang (which is always a threat, see, e.g., Ferguson).

Absent the police, chaos ensues. Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of a well-regulated police department, one gets only street gangs. We can call this the Mogadishu solution, in honor of the city which, for the past several decades, has been unable to field a well-regulated militia.

Mr. Mackler definitely has "Trump" on the brain. Indeed, I think The Donald has built a golf course inside his head. The president is mentioned 19 times in the article. Some examples:

"...the posturing, chin up egomaniac President Trump..."
"...the racist bigot President Trump..."
"...fearful, bragging bigot Trump and his family..."

One concludes that Mr. Mackler doesn't like Trump very much, but aside from name-calling he presents no evidence that the man is especially racist. By comparison, George Floyd only earns four mentions.

Nevertheless, let's take Mr. Mackler seriously and take an example of what he would call "racism." Let's consider Chicago--a city I know well, and where my son currently lives. Chicago is really two cities in one--on the North Side it is a wealthy, global, cosmopolitan place--a slightly smaller version of Manhattan or San Francisco. On the South and West Sides it's a mostly Black, very poor, third world city.

My son is part of the global city. He earns six figures working in IT for a major financial institution. His salary is so high because people with his skill set are scarce as hen's teeth and there's a bidding war for his services. The man is entirely self-taught--he never got any formal education in IT--in fact he never attended college at all. Instead he worked toward certifications demonstrating the necessary technical skills. Anybody can do that--there are no admission's criteria, no interviews, nobody cares what race you are, nobody cares where you live or how old you are. Indeed, the certifying companies are often not located in the US.

Get one of these certificates and you will almost certainly get a job--the market is that tight. You'll have to start at the bottom, earning only $80K annually, but after a couple years experience you too will be in the top 10%.

Of course easier said than done. My son worked hard studying for the exams, and then often didn't pass the first time he took them (or even the second time).

So why can't people on the South Side of Chicago do the same? I admit--this is a variant of Hillary's advice to coal miners--that they should all learn to code. And certainly only a minority of South Siders could do what my son did, who is himself only among a small minority of his high school classmates. That said, the number of South Siders working in high-skilled IT professions for major financial institutions borders on zero. Why?

It certainly isn't Trump's fault. Even if the man were a racist, the problem is long-standing and predates him by decades. It's also not the banks' fault--they'd love to hire skilled African-Americans. I actually don't think it's any individual's fault, but if I were to blame one person, that would be Jeff Mackler.

Because my son had the advantage of an at least decent public high school education (nothing fancy--he grew up in small-town Indiana). The Chicago Public Schools, meanwhile, are execrable--basically glorified babysitting clubs. This is substantially the fault of the teachers' unions--who run the schools primarily for the convenience of the teachers and not for the students.

Jeff Mackler is a retired teachers' union hack. So if you gotta blame somebody, he's as good a fall guy as anybody--much better than Trump.

The unions blame parents and the community for their pupils' poor performance. They perennially claim they don't have enough money, despite the fact that Illinois spends $14,000 per student per year. Effectively, the unions believe that South Side children are ineducable. In other words, the unions--including Mr. Mackler--are racist.

You can't get any IT certifications if you're illiterate and innumerate, thus excluding most graduates of the Chicago Public School system.

The looters--who Mr. Mackler claims were only a "small percentage" of the protesters--destroyed Walmart stores, including those at 83rd St. just off the Dan Ryan Expressway, and in Austin on the West Side. Walmart--as an act of charity--promises to reopen the unprofitable stores. People do, after all, need to get their groceries and medicines. The city committed to help.

Ensuring competent police protection seems like the least they could do.

Further Reading:

• Who Are The Police?
• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade and China
• Unionizing Hotels