Cosmetics, Cuba & Mary-Alice Waters

From left, Esther Pérez, Mary-Alice Waters and Martín Koppel at the podium in Havana
(Source: Militant/Jonathan Silberman)

Contrary to my prediction, octogenarian Mary-Alice Waters really did make another trip to Cuba in February--and took a whole bevy of comrades with her (as best as I can determine, including Martín Koppel, Jonathan Silberman, Rachele Fruit and Philippe Tessier). Ms. Waters is second in command of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and longtime consort to chief honcho and similarly aged Jack Barnes. 

The occasion was the Havana Book Fair, and the topic of Mary-Alice's speech was a new edition (2024) of Cosmetics, Fashion and the Exploitation of Women, recently translated into Spanish by a Cuban, Esther Pérez.  The original authors were Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed, while the new edition includes contributions by Ms. Waters.  Her speech is reprinted in The Militant under the title ‘Fight for women’s equality is part of battle on world scale to settle which class will rule’. A companion article, by Rachele Fruit and Philippe Tessier, is headed Lively exchange at Havana book launch.

There are at least two things weird about the above photo. First are the microphones on the table. Authors Fruit and Tessier tell us that about 30 people attended the session. It hardly seems necessary to have a sound system, especially since Cuba is busy liberating itself from electricity use. After last Saturday's additional power failure, a reasonable estimate is that only 10% of demand is satisfied. It seems unlikely that the microphones even work. Why are they even there?

The second weird thing--recall this is a talk nominally about cosmetics and how evil capitalists have bamboozled women into buying them--is that octogenarian Mary-Alice has obviously dyed her hair! Compare her hair color with that of Esther Pérez--a woman likely younger than Ms. Waters, but who, living in Cuba, doesn't even have access to cheap hair dye.

In my prior article (Mary-Alice on Cosmetics & Fashion) I challenged Ms. Waters:

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.

At very least she could've brought along some hair dye to share with her loyal translator. It would seem like the right thing to do.

The gist of Mary-Alice's speech was that women are oppressed, not just by men, but mostly by "capitalism" (whatever that is--Mary-Alice has no clue). The depths of their oppression is illustrated by the fact that they are hoodwinked into buying cosmetics that (according to Mary-Alice) they 1) don't need, 2) are dangerous, and 3) are similar to addictive drugs, such as fentanyl.

To which my responses are: 1) maybe women don't need cosmetics (who is Ms. Waters to tell women what they need?), but surely they enjoy having them. Cuban women probably have bigger problems than a lack of cosmetics (eg, adjusting to no electricity), but I still think had Mary-Alice taken my advice, she would've brightened the day of a few Cuban ladies. Cheapskate!

2) Ms. Waters mentions a few edge cases where cosmetics--broadly understood--might be dangerous. Her examples are mostly around cosmetic surgery, which I agree is perhaps taking the passion too far. But L'Oreal is the biggest cosmetics company in the world, and I don't think she can reasonably claim that any of their products are dangerous. 

3) They're addicting--which is true, but so is everything else that's pleasurable. I take great joy in being able to turn on electric lights in the evening. Does that mean that I'm addicted to electricity? Are her Cuban comrades better off being free of such an addiction?

Ms. Waters summarizes her talk at the end by asking and answering two questions.

The first question is: Are the issues addressed in a debate about cosmetics and fashion many decades ago still relevant? Haven’t “we” moved beyond that?

Second: Hasn’t knowledge of the earliest human societies moved far beyond what was known in the early 1950s? Isn’t Evelyn Reed’s article on “Anthropology: Marxist or Bourgeois?” outdated for that reason?

This is her answer to question one:

More than three centuries after the birth of industrial capitalism, we can say that the resources devoted by capitalist enterprises to advertising and the creation of markets — that is, creating “needs” that don’t naturally exist — have expanded astronomically, and continue to expand. 

Which demonstrates that she knows nothing about capitalism. To me, the most succinct definition of capitalism is an economic order designed to maximize consumption. Capitalists want you to shop till you drop.

Contrast that with socialism, where consumer wants are to be rationed by the government. Under socialism you can buy cosmetics only if the State approves the sale of cosmetics. Mary-Alice is convinced that nobody (except her) needs cosmetics, and therefore you should be prohibited from buying them. Apparently in Cuba they've decided that nobody needs electricity, either.

Sure--you can complain about overconsumption or even wasteful spending. But I think those are minor problems compared with the problem that afflicts most of the world, namely under-consumption, aka poverty. The problem in Cuba has nothing to do with who owns the means of production or who gets to distribute the proceeds. The problem is poverty. That's all it is. Cubans aren't allowed to buy what they want to buy.

Ms, Waters responds to the second question merely by asking another: Who needs any stinkin' research anyway? Some 60+ years ago she read a book entitled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Friedrich Engels, first published in 1884. That book is the absolute truth when it comes to anthropology. Why? Because it's "materialist," whatever that means.

In the intervening six decades Mary-Alice has refused to read anything new in the human sciences. Whenever confronted by novelty she sticks her fingers in her ears and sings loudly "LA LA LA LA..." to drown out any contrary information.

She's never heard of evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it appears she denies the theory of evolution altogether. She doesn't know what the human genome is, much less the astounding discoveries made over the past couple of decades. She's unfamiliar with radiocarbon dating. She's resoundingly ignorant of basic economics. Amazingly, she denies that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Hell, she probably hasn't even read Sigmund Freud (who is, at very least, a pleasurable read).

She's a complete ignoramus, and we can safely ignore her opinions. Whether in English or Spanish, Cosmetics... is not a serious book.

Further Reading:

• The End of Cuban Civilization
• Steve Clark's Bizarre Book Bazaar
• Book Review: Human Diversity

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

A Woman's Place Is....

(By janeyhenning - Flickr: stirring, CC BY 2.0)

Allegedly we Trump-supporting, MAGA-types will finish the title sentence with: A woman's place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The Trotskyist retort is that we want deny women their Constitutional rights--and even their humanity--by forcing her back in the kitchen. We're not gonna force her to do anything.

But now comes The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) with a feature article entitled Fight for women’s rights expanded when millions joined the workforce, authored by Maggie Trowe. I'm not clear how Ms. Trowe will complete the sentence. How about

A woman's place is on the construction site, wearing steel-toed boots and pregnant?

Or perhaps the boots should be replaced by steel-toed high heels? Either way our young lady needs to be pregnant. The working class depends on it. Ms. Trowe's lede paragraph:

The falling birth rate and rising obstacles workers face to being able to afford to raise children have become key issues in the 2024 presidential campaign. Decades of employer attacks on wages and working conditions have made starting a family much more difficult for workers and produced conditions that reinforce the second-class status of women under capitalism. 

And, later on, she writes

The U.S. birth rate in 2023 was 1.62 births per woman, down from 3.65 in 1960, and below the rate required to maintain the population.

Capitalist pundits who used to write articles warning of the dangers of “overpopulation,” now sound alarms about the “increasing burden of too many old people.” Their real concern is that with fewer young, healthy workers the capitalist class can’t count on a sufficient supply of labor to exploit.

There's a minor technical error here: Ms. Trowe's number is the fertility rate (the average number of children women bear over a lifetime), and not the birth rate (which was about 11 live births per 1000 women in 2021). But her larger point is absolutely correct. As a nation (and also as a working class) we don't have enough babies! More women need to get pregnant, like pronto!

Weirdly, in the same issue The Militant publishes an editorial praising Cuba, where the fertility rate has declined from just under 4.7 in 1963 to 1.57 today. It's been below 2.1 (the rate necessary to sustain the population) since 1978. So when it comes to having babies, the Cubans can't even keep up with the USA, where the fertility rate didn't drop below 2.1 until 2007. Unlike the US, Cuba can't accept immigrants. Indeed, folks are fleeing the island faster than they're being born, and Cuba's population is in absolute decline. Not exactly a role model for a baby boom.

Still, much credit to Ms. Trowe because she is the only Trotskyist on my beat that even mentions declining fertility rates. At least she acknowledges the problem.

She writes,

The average cost of childbirth today is $18,865. For those with insurance, the average off-the-top expense is $2,854. Feeding a hungry newborn can set you back $50 for a can of baby formula at Walmart. A box of Pampers is $35. When you add these to the persistently high cost of rent, food, transportation and child care, is it any wonder young workers have doubts about raising a family or that women are putting off decisions about whether to have children?

And she is right! It's very expensive to raise a child--and always has been. Though I'd argue that it's cheaper now than anytime in prior human history. When my daughter was born we toyed with buying cloth diapers and laundering them, presumably saving money. We quickly gave up on that and went for the disposable kind. Does anybody today still have to launder diapers?

So what's the SWP's solution to the not-as-sorry-state-of-affairs-as-it-used-to-be? For that Ms. Trowe turns to the SWP's presidential candidate, Rachele Fruit, who tells us exactly what we should do. Ms. Trowe describes her view this way,

Such a party [a hypothetical labor party --Ed] would fight for a massive, federally funded jobs program to put millions to work at union-scale pay, for wage and benefit adjustments so that every time prices rise our wages go up automatically...

Another name for this program is inflation. If you increase the money supply (needed to pay the additional wages) without proportionately increasing the quantity of goods sold, then everything just has to cost that much more.

How is this going to make raising a child cheaper?

Chief SWP honcho Jack Barnes describes the Party's economic plan this way:

At the same time, in face of capitalism’s accompanying curse of unemployment, the working class and unions must fight for a shorter workweek, with no cut in pay. And for a massive, government-funded program of public works to provide jobs at union-scale wages building housing, schools, hospitals, child care centers, rural development and other things working people need.

So the number of unemployed construction workers is probably around 1%. As a society we're maxxed out on construction--we can't possibly build all that extra stuff that Mr. Barnes (and also Ms. Fruit) thinks are needed without not building the stuff already under construction.

There's only one way around it--grow the labor force. As Ms. Trowe points out, non-pregnant women are already working, so now we need to get those pregnant ladies out of the kitchen and on the job as well. Girl, put on your hard hat and steel-toed high heels and get your tush busy building that new school that Her Brilliancy Rachele Fruit says we need. Even if you're pregnant. Especially if you're pregnant--who needs a new school if there won't be any children? 

Lay that cinderblock on the wall--from a scaffold 20 ft up in the air. High heels are really good for climbing ladders. Clean out that old asbestos. Girl, you gotta do your share--our socialist future depends on it. Set a role model for your sisters for appropriate choice of footwear. We need the babies and we need the construction workers. Remember, construction work (esp. asbestos removal) is safer for babies than smoking or using cocaine.

A few weeks ago I had a new roof installed on my house. About ten guys came over and did the job in a bit over six hours. No women--it was rampant discrimination. Surely a pregnant lady can climb ladders, not lose her balance on a sloped roof, haul 50 lb bags of shingles around, and handle a nail gun. It's never too early for a baby to start absorbing proletons and learning the benefits of a hard day's work. Pregnant women need to do their share!

Apparently being pregnant isn't hard enough. The SWP's economic plan says they also have to install roofs.

Nobody on my side of the aisle will require a pregnant woman to stay barefoot in the kitchen. But if you're pregnant, it does rather seem like a good idea. Much better than enduring 90 degree heat on a hot roof. The woman in the picture doesn't exactly look unhappy.

It's easy to poke fun at Ms. Trowe's article and the Party's nonsensical economic agenda. But I have to give Ms. Trowe a lot of credit--at least compared to other tendencies on the Trotskyist left. She at least understands that to have a socialist society--or any kind of society--there have to be children. She realizes that "freedom" doesn't reduce to the freedom to kill your baby. There are other more important things in life--like loving your child, and having a husband who can do the dirty, dangerous jobs that men often have to do, and who can earn you a living.

She understands that abortion has to be legal--it's an unfortunate corollary of modern medicine. But it's not a virtue. It's not something to be proud of.

Ms. Trowe is on the right side of a basic issue. And my poking fun at her kinda misses the point--which is to honor and cherish pregnant women. I think Ms. Trowe agrees with me.

Further Reading:

• Whiners & Complainers
• The SWIP Flips to SWOP
• The American Right and Trans Rights

 

It's Not Just About Abortion

I never understood why a "right to abortion" is a core programmatic plank of Trotskyism. I didn't get it even when I was a Trotskyist. It seems to me that the dispute is not primarily of economic importance, and therefore it cuts across class lines. Yet to this very day all Trotskyists regard abortion as a working class issue. The recent leak of the Alito draft brings the matter to the fore.

Two articles guide our inquiry. The first, entitled Mobilize in the streets to defeat the attacks on abortion rights! by Delores Underwood and published in Workers' Voice (WV), represents the Trotskyist view as I recall it from my youth. The second, entitled Supreme Court leak fuels debate on defense of families, women’s rights, by Terry Evans and appearing in The Militant, represents a slightly heretical point of view. (The Militant is published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP.)

Ms. Underwood states the Trotskyist case for "reproductive rights" relatively clearly (link and italics in original).

Gender oppression places the burden of domestic and wage labor overwhelmingly on those with reproductive capacity. In today’s capitalist society, the cost to reproduce laborers falls largely on the domestic sphere, and particularly on the shoulders of working-class women: health care, insurance, food, and increasingly, education is paid for not by the regime that requires wage laborers, but by the laborers themselves. As we explained: “The capitalist system wants to have it both ways: It wants women to have children to reproduce the labor force (so it heavily regulates reproductive rights) but it does not want to pay for the cost of social reproduction of labor power.” And in every new crisis of capitalism, women are tasked with new burdens in the realm of waged work and care work. 

To phrase it in my own words via bullet points:

• The capitalist class needs to reproduce workers to maintain production.
• To do this it makes demands on women to have and sustain children--tasks which are very costly and time-consuming.
• Women should get paid for this labor, but they don't. Thus the capitalist class is disproportionately "oppressing" women.
• The capitalist class makes excess profits because of women's unpaid labor.
• Therefore the capitalist class puts restrictions on abortion to maintain this added level of "oppression" and to capture the surplus value (aka, profit) from unpaid labor.

This seems like 90% hokum and 10% truth.

The truth is that total production (usually known as GDP) increases with the size and skill level of the labor force. So no doubt, without new babies there will be no new workers, and as the population dies out production will come to a complete halt. Ms. Underwood has got that right.

But almost everything else is wrong. The primary beneficiary of increased GDP is not the capitalist class, but rather consumers--most of whom are workers. We're the people who buy whatever it is that capitalists and workers produce. Our standard of living depends on GDP.

Parents are the people who benefit most from children. They often rely on their kids to take care of them in their old age, and also if they're lucky they'll have some grandchildren. A fundamental task of being human is parenting children and raising them to be successful and fertile adults.

So I can't take Ms. Underwood's economic rationale for abortion seriously. And frankly, I don't think she takes it seriously either. Her motivation is much more visceral. She writes,

It’s clear that the conservative-majority court is seeking to reinforce the capitalist regime of social reproduction and heteronormativity and setting the scene for further attacks on queer, gender non-conforming, and trans rights.

She apparently has a thing against "heteronormativity." But of course it's those "heteronormal" people who actually have children. I suggest she envies them for just that reason, and it's because of envy that she wants to knock us heteronormal folks down a peg. Envy is what drives her crusade.

She really doesn't like babies. She applauds Black people for not having them.

The [abortion] ban will disproportionately affect Black women, oppressed by class and race, who are already four to five times more likely to have an abortion and are more likely not to have access to contraception.

Of course the disproportionate abortion rate for Black people can be seen as part of a eugenicist conspiracy. I don't believe in the conspiracy theories, but a lot of people do. Indeed, an early campaigner for birth control, Margaret Sanger, championed eugenics as a reason for her cause. By contrast, Kathy Barnette, candidate for senate in Pennsylvania and certainly not a member of the bourgeoisie, is clearly shocked by abortions of Black children.

Just for the record, trans people (at least those who have undergone medical procedures) are completely infertile. This is why parents object so strongly to their grade school children being taught that infertility is a value-free choice for them. No parent wants to raise infertile children.

I read somewhere that the fertility rate for gay people is 0.5--far below the 2.1 reproduction rate. I have no idea how that's measured and I grant no credibility to that specific number. But no doubt the fertility rate for gay people is far below that of heteronormal folks. Parents, rightly, usually love their children  unconditionally regardless of whether they're gay or have downs syndrome. But given a choice, they'd rather have children who will give them grandchildren.

For that reason Downs syndrome babies are typically aborted these days. Likewise, if there ever is a cheap genetic test for homosexuality, then I predict most gay babies will be aborted as well. Will Ms. Underwood still support abortion in that circumstance? Is she ok with the disproportionate abortion of female babies in China? For that matter, does she really think it is good that abortion rates among Black women is four to five times higher than for whites?

Terry Evans--in his article in The Militant--buys into the same hokey economics that Ms. Underwood describes, essentially demanding that capitalists bear all costs related to childbearing.

For working people, access to abortion cannot be addressed separately from the growing pressures tearing at our families. ...

That crisis is accelerating after years of declining real wages; unaffordable housing and child care; longer hours, forced overtime and draining work schedules that cripple family life; and the intolerable weight of mounting household debts. All of this is exacerbated by the biggest price rises in 40 years.

I guess that shared economic theory is what makes them both Trotskyists. But unlike Ms. Underwood, Mr. Evans doesn't envy the fertile. His support for abortion is tepid.

These questions can’t be addressed without a fighting program to win broader access to affordable family health care, child care, housing, jobs, contraception, easily accessible adoption and more. This fight is the road to win an unchallengeable majority to include abortion in all public family planning programs.

The picture accompanying his article shows a mother of three, "forced" to quit her job so to educate her children at home because of the pandemic. The implication is that she made the right choice--that her children are far more important than any career or paid employment. People who have abortions usually don't have three children.

I don't agree with Mr. Evans' economic theory, which is just silly, boilerplate Trotskyism. But unlike most of the Left, he is not extolling infertility as a positive good.

I think abortion has to be legal to some degree. It is an evil necessity imposed on us by modern medicine, which requires humans to make more choices about who lives and who dies. A necessity it may sometimes be, but it is never a good thing. Nobody is ever happier because they had an abortion.

Most of the Left (Mr. Evans excluded) isn't just in favor of abortion. They're support infertility generally, which is why they champion "trans rights" that render people infertile, and also gay rights, that render people infertile. Many people are infertile because they have no choice--and they of course deserve full civil rights as citizens. But nobody should be actively encouraged to give up child-rearing.

I think people who support abortion are envious--they either don't or can't have kids. They want to deprive the rest of us of that joy. It is envy that powers their crusade. Accordingly they describe abortion in euphemisms, such as "reproductive rights,", as "health care," or as a "choice." They don't like babies.

Lots of people depend on that fetus in the womb--not just the mother, but the father, grandparents, siblings, cousins, the school district--and yes, several steps removed, the capitalist. All of them want that baby to be born. Babies are a good thing--gay babies, girl babies, Black babies, even white male babies. 

Babies make people happy.

Further Reading:

• The New Aristocrats
• The New Socialist Resurgence Grouplet
• The Philippines

Men are Men and Women are Women

Men are men and women are women. So claims The Militant. Sort of. Somehow.

A feature article in this week's paper written by the Editors, entitled A working-class road to expand rights for all the oppressed, leads with this paragraph (link and emphasis mine).

An article in last week’s issue of the Militant — under the headline “Supreme Court: Job Discrimination for Being Gay, Transgender Is Illegal. Ruling Includes ‘Poison Pill’ Against Women’s Rights Fight” — was wrong. It erroneously implied that the June 15 court decision, though flawed, should be welcomed by the working class and others fighting to eradicate prejudice, bigotry and discrimination in employment and other areas.

"Implied" really is a weasel word--apparently the offending article, by Emma Johnson, never actually said anything wrong. Indeed, after reading both articles, wrong seems much too strong a word. At worst it's slightly unclear. Surely no reason for Ms. Johnson to be rendered an unperson.

The articles concern the recent 6-3 Supreme Court ruling stating that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” The decision--authored by Justice Gorsuch--was based on an interpretation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The surprising ruling has drawn much conservative ire.

The Militant isn't precisely against the outcome, as the second paragraph of the Editors' article makes clear.

The stakes for the working class and our allies in opposing each of the three separate firings at issue in the court case are indisputable. The bosses themselves readily acknowledged they had fired the workers only upon learning they were gay or transsexual, without the pretense of any work-related reason. If employers get away with arbitrarily singling out a worker for firing or other penalties, then any fighting capacity of the workforce and unions for unity in protecting one another is set back, irreparably so if not combated and reversed.

The problem isn't the decision, but rather the way it was reached. Gay and transgender rights are to be won by working class activism following a debate within the working class itself. Instead the rights were awarded on a silver platter, offered up rather arbitrarily by the Supreme Court.

The analogy Ms. Johnson offers is Roe v. Wade, which preempted any discussion of abortion in this country. In her telling, American workers would have reached a consensus guaranteeing a woman's right to choose, and instead of it being hopelessly controversial, abortion would have been widely available. The result of Roe v. Wade is paradoxically not more abortion, but rather less as the working class can't speak with one voice on the issue.

The Editors, meanwhile, cite the 1979 Weber case, where a white worker sued on grounds that an affirmative action program resulted in "reverse discrimination." The Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Weber, which the Editors claim was "a victory for working people."

That is the kind of working-class action needed to defeat arbitrary and discriminatory hiring, firing or promotion practices of any kind by private or government employers. Changing attitudes about countless forms of discrimination and bigotry are not the product of either legislation or court rulings but of unity forged in struggle by working people, the oppressed, and our class organizations.

So let's try to figure this out.

• The Gorsuch decision, while nominally correct in guaranteeing gay rights, nevertheless preempted working class action. Both Ms. Johnson and the Editors agree with that.
• Roe v. Wade, mentioned by Ms. Johnson, and also nominally correct, has also preempted working class action, paradoxically making abortion less available.
• The Weber case, cited by the Editors, is still nominally correct, but in this case it is a reflection of working class sentiment rather than an arbitrary Court ruling.

Huh?

Honestly, I'm stumped. I can't make head or tail of this. Where did Ms. Johnson go wrong?

The problem isn't really anything that Ms. Johnson says. It's rather that she's succumbed to reactionary petty bourgeois thinking--nothing that a good dose of humiliation self-criticism won't solve.

Because--while the outcome of Gorsuch's ruling is correct--the reasoning is straight from the reactionary, petty bourgeois Left. The Editors write:

The court’s contorted ruling as to what constitutes discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” is a blow to working people and the oppressed. It lends credence to the utterly anti-scientific notion promoted by many who consider themselves enlightened, progressive, that human beings (unlike almost all other animal species) are not born as either female or male. ...

Those holding this unscientific view demand that “gender” — solely a grammatical term until only several decades ago — instead be left open at birth, to be “chosen” by the individual sometime later in life from literally dozens of possible options. Anyone can supposedly be a woman or a man, or virtually any variant in between, merely by declaring themselves so.

And true enough--men are men and women are women. Vive la différence! The Editors accurately mock the ridiculous opinion common in academic circles. It's easy to do--we conservatives do it all the time. That Ms. Johnson fell for the academic BS shows her lack of proletarian sensibilities.

But wait! Turns out she's just as sensible as the Editors, perhaps even more so. She writes,

But the fact is, the court’s way of handling the case assures that years of litigation will follow. Reactionary forces that advance a gender-over-sex agenda will weaken the fight for women’s emancipation. They will seek to use the ruling to demand admittance to women’s bathrooms, sports competitions, locker rooms and other sex-separate spaces, and to attack freedom of speech and health care.

So I count Ms. Johnson not guilty. Her article is actually a clearer statement of what I (sort of) understand to be The Militant's true position. She does not deserve her walk of shame.

So why does The Militant retract an article that doesn't need to be retracted? This is like Tweedledum retracting a piece written by Tweedledee. It makes no sense.

So I count three possible reasons:

1. Ms. Johnson is about to be expelled from the Party.
2. There is some very subtle point that I missed, but which nevertheless is of profound importance. In which case they need a third article to tell us what it is.
3. It's just clickbait. It did, after all, inspire me to write this post.

I vote for option three. I should probably retract this post--but I won't.

Further Reading:

• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Sex and the Alpha Male
• The SWP Defends Civilization

The Militant Visits Manila

For some reason my Trotskyist friends love International Book Fairs. The Militant reports on such events from diverse places like Havana, Tehran, Erbil, London, Sweden, and more. Recently they devoted two articles (dated Nov. 12 and Oct. 29) to a fair in Manila.

I don't know who the intended audience is at a book fair (bookstores? consumers? critics?) but Pathfinder Press was there. 

There was hardly an hour when the Pathfinder booth at the Sept. 12-16 Manila International Book Fair wasn’t packed with fairgoers of all ages browsing the shelves with growing enthusiasm for the books they saw. The crowds kept coming even after a powerful storm sideswiped the city Sept. 15.

The two titles championed that week were Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women (published 1993), and Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution (First edition published in 2006; recently reissued). The hosts at the booth included Ron Poulson from Australia, Janet Roth from New Zealand, and Mary-Alice Waters from New York. They were assisted by "[t]wo young Filipinos active in social and political struggles...". In addition, comrades Poulson and Waters participated in a panel discussion held at the University of the Philippines.

So I'm not interested in book fairs, which in this Amazon-era are a complete waste of time. And I'm not all that interested in the two books highlighted. I read Cosmetics... many years ago, along with author Evelyn Reed's regrettable magnum opus, Woman's Evolution (1975). I've never read Three Generals, and have no intention of doing so.

The fascinating topic for me is the city of Manila and the people who live there. My wife of 32 years was born in the Philippines and lived in Manila as a teenager and young adult. I spent about four weeks in the city, most recently in 1995. I'm due for another visit (perhaps next Spring), but I don't really like traveling there. As Mary-Alice can likely attest, the traffic is simply terrible--it's impossible to get around. And then I am required to spend most of my time listening to my wife talk Tagalog to her myriad friends and relations. It's dull.

Which doesn't mean I'm ignorant. I read a history of the city by Nick Joaquin, Manila, my Manila. It's a wonderful book, but sadly not readily available in the US. Among many other things, I recently read 1493 by Charles Mann--he devotes a long chapter to Manila. Finally, I love maps, and my wife brought me back an excellent one from a recent trip. So while I may not know Manila, I do know Manila geography.

Filipinos love nicknames, and the ones given to women baffle the Militant's authors. For example, the "coordinator of WomanHealth Philippines, convener of the Dignidad electoral coalition, and a leading member of the Philippines-Cuba Cultural and Friendship Association" goes by "Princess." That would shame an comparably well-placed, upper-middle class feminist in the United States.

That's hardly the worst of it. Common nicknames include "Baby," "Precious," "Queenie," and "Inday."  That latter is the Visayan word for "sexy young woman," or, perhaps, "bimbo." Nobody finds these names insulting--quite the contrary, they are proud of them, especially as they get older. (Men have nicknames, too--a common one, for a grown man, is "Boy.")

Two observations seem relevant. First, the Philippines is a remarkably religious country. Eighty percent are Catholic, with the remainder divided between Protestants and Muslims. Whatever their confession, they take religion extremely seriously--to the point of nailing themselves onto a cross on Good Friday. I've never met a Filipino atheist or agnostic.

Catholics (unlike Protestants or Muslims) venerate the Virgin Mary--she of the Immaculate Conception, assumed into heaven as our Blessed Mother. This whole shtick (which people take very seriously) effectively raises the status of women--especially mothers. While young women have difficult lives (as do young men), older women acquire the status of matriarch and head large extended families. The result is that marriage is especially valuable to Filipinas--one can't become a matriarch without a family. It also goes a long way to explaining the relatively high fertility rate.

Second, like women the world over, Filipinas are very fashion-conscious. Unlike what Cosmetics... claims, this is an intramural status competition among women--men are bit players. So this question from the floor is not surprising:

Fredda Ruth Rosete, a young Filipina, asked: “I want to be fashionable and to look attractive to the opposite sex. I’ve been told I’m contributing to my own oppression. Is that true?”

“The answer is no!” Waters replied. “But we have to be conscious of the pressures on us generated by the capitalist system and not let that determine our lives. ..."

Mary-Alice seems to have retreated from the hard-nosed, merciless feminism I recall from my youth. That unadulterated, radical version common in America will not appeal in the Philippines.

Re discrimination against Chinese, Mary-Alice makes the following ridiculous statement.

Waters said, “Cuba is the only country in the world where there is no discrimination against descendants of overseas Chinese. The only one! Before the Cuban Revolution, Chinese there were discriminated against as they are in all other countries where large numbers of Chinese settled.

How could she possibly know that? By what quantitative measure of discrimination against Chinese does Cuba come out identically zero?

Or put another way: Can Mary-Alice please tell us where the best Dim Sum restaurant in Havana is? I'll hazard there aren't any Dim Sum restaurants in Havana--good food is against the law there. In Manila, conversely, good Chinese food is everywhere. I had by a wide margin the best hot & sour soup ever in my entire life there.

Please don't tell me that Chinese aren't discriminated against in Havana.

Her co-panelist, Teresita Ang See (typical Chinese-Filipina name: Catholic given name, Chinese family name) understands the situation better. A little history is helpful.

The Spanish founded Manila, which prior was a swampy river delta, inhabited by fishermen who lived on the few islands. But Manila Bay is a world class harbor, and the Spanish filled in some of the swamp, founding a city at the mouth of the Pasig River. That original city exists now as Intramuros--still today a religious, cultural, and educational center of the country.

The reason for the Spanish settlement was to facilitate trade with China. In exchange for Mexican gold and silver, China sold silks, porcelain, spices, and other manufactures. Junks arrived from China carrying the goods, while galleons came from Acapulco carrying the gold. The ships traded cargoes in Manila and sailed back to where they came from.

Facilitating this trade were a group of Chinese merchants and bankers. The Spanish didn't like commerce and didn't trust the Chinese, so they were restricted to the Parian (today known as Binondo) on the other side of the Pasig. The Chinese got rich. The Spanish built their empire and aggressively practiced their religion. The local Tagalogs got nothing except Catholicism and jobs as stevedores. Or occasionally they were taken as slaves to help sail the boats in one direction or another.

For many centuries Binondo was the commercial center of the Philippines. It is still the heart of Chinatown (though that has expanded into Quiapo). Since Manila was completely leveled during WWII, postwar the commercial center was rebuilt in Makati, where there was more room. But the people who run it are still the same--Filipino-Chinese--who constitute the country's commercial class to this very day. They dominate business life.

Needless to say, all this breeds envy. Anti-Chinese pogroms are a constant throughout Philippine history--Parian itself was destroyed by rampaging mobs on numerous occasions. My wife recalls from her childhood how the Chinese were forcibly run out of her hometown--their stores and property confiscated, Idi Amin style.

Cubans are surely aware of how that works. They didn't just drive their commercial class out of a single town, but rather out of the entire country. Indeed, it's likely that the best Dim Sum restaurant in Havana is actually located in Miami.

Further Reading:

• China & the United States
• Women Are From Venus; Trotskyists Are From Pluto
• The Status of Marxists

Whose Free Speech?

A talk with that title was presented at SUNY New Paltz by Dana Cloud, a professor of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University (annual tuition: $47K). I did not attend, but the organizers kindly posted a video of the proceedings here, and I did watch that. It's a bit over an hour long and not really worth your time, but it's entertaining (and of high technical quality). If you do want to listen to it I recommend you do so soon as the link may disappear.

A caveat: I listened to the presentation last night. I do not have a transcript and I'm not going to listen to it again. So while I will make every effort to accurately recount the presenters' opinions (albeit in my own words), it may be that my memory deceives me. I apologize in advance.

The program consisted of three parts. First came an introduction from college president Don Christian, whose office funded the speaker series. (The president's office is in turn funded by students and taxpayers, whose contributions were not acknowledged.) Mr. Christian, to his credit, reiterated the College's commitment to the First Amendment, arguing that a state college has to follow the law of the land. He then hedged, pointing out that some people may be offended by other's speech, that this was problematic, and that the campus will be sensitive to people's feelings.

The second speaker (beginning at 5:59) was Jessica Pabon, an assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She served as the host and organizer for the event, and her introductory remarks are a summary of recent events on campus, where supposedly "marginalized groups" pushed back against "white males" basking in their privileged free speech. The current speaker series was initiated as a response, and with no sense of irony she mentions that it was generously funded and ostentatiously blessed by the (white male) president of the college.

Nobody on campus opposes Ms. Pabon's free speech, and indeed they're bending over backwards to provide her and her ilk with a forum. I think this is to their credit. Nevertheless, in Ms. Pabon's view, "white male" complaints about lack of free speech on campus, far from being an assertion of first amendment rights, are instead an act of bullying and harassment against "people of color", "women", and "LGBTQ" adherents. 

I think she opposes the first amendment, believes that speech should be regulated by some sort of racial/gender quota system, and that people like her should decide who gets to say what.

Then (at 13:30) Ms. Cloud takes the stage. Her credential for this talk is not some academic paper, but rather her experience (which she describes here) as the recipient of hateful and vile e-mail.

I myself was targeted in June after I tweeted for reinforcements at a demonstration against anti-Muslim activists, writing that if more people came out, we could “finish them off.” Of course, as a nonviolent and longtime activist, I did not intend to take or incite actual violence. The statement was taken out of context and circulated via social media across major right-wing outlets including the right-wing front Campus Reform and by Ann Coulter. [link to campus reform here--ed]

Certainly she has every right to be upset (though honestly, she should be more careful about her tweets), but nothing here is about the first amendment. Harassment and threats are not protected speech. Instead she was victimized by petty criminals--likely dysfunctional teenage boys trolling from their mothers' basements.

But the thrust of her talk didn't concern speech at all, but rather about a grand conspiracy theory to discredit "critical faculty" at America's universities. Such persecution (and here I have carefully checked the quote) "becomes part of a larger, globalist, neoliberal agenda. By attacking critical and activist faculty, the minions of the right are doing the work of global capitalism."

So who are these "critical faculty" who have been so relentlessly attacked? I didn't catch every name, but two stood out: George Ciccariello-Maher and Saida Grundy.

George, a former professor at Drexel University, out-did Ms. Cloud in intemperate tweeting by a mile. He wrote "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." After which he claimed he was taken out of context. Now maybe Mizzes Cloud and Pabon think that constitutes "critical thinking", but the rest of us see crackpot apeshit.

Drexel University, like any other organization in the world, is a brand. It can't allow completely kooky (and possibly dangerous) insults of its students and faculty to go unchecked. Of course they had to fire George. If nothing else he lost his job for pure stupidity.

The less egregious Saida Grundy (who I believe still has her job at Boston University) is similarly insulting of her employers' customers. According to CNN,

Her personal Twitter account has since been made private, but the Boston Globe reported some of the tweets: "why is white america so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" and "every MLK week i commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible."

That "problem population" is paying her salary (tuition: $52K), and even if there is a (slight) scholarly point behind what she says, some courteous discretion is in order. (For example, I live in a majority Black community. Out of respect for my neighbors--who treat me very kindly--I won't be putting a Trump yard sign in front of my house. It would be totally misunderstood, or "taken out of context" as Ms. Cloud puts it.)

Ms. Cloud is especially upset that funding of "critical programs" is being cut. She bemoans the lack of funding for graduate students. Of course she shouldn't be surprised--if you poke your biggest funders in the eye, surely their enthusiasm for giving money will decline. I understand that Mizzes Pabon and Cloud have every first amendment right to hate on me (a white male) as much as they want. But I don't understand why I have to pay them for the privilege of doing so.

No wonder Republicans no longer see higher education as a good investment.

Ms. Cloud sees university faculty as the cream of American society. As I interpret her remarks, they are the only people with the scholarly distance and critical point of view who can legitimately criticize our world. But not all faculty are created equal.

The STEM folks have sold out to the defense department, which discredits them (though to my knowledge nobody at New Paltz has any funding from DoD). The social scientists have sold out to big business by letting their research be used to manipulate the rest of us. So only the "critical" faculty remain--the vanguard party, if you will, who can lead us to the Next American Revolution.

Not really a Marxist perspective, but that notwithstanding Ms. Cloud is a comrade in the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The ISO split from the Socialist Workers Party before my time, over reasons that are no longer relevant to anything (state capitalism in the Soviet Union). Because I have no personal connections with them they are not on my Beat, though I end up covering them anyway. But rest assured, the ISO is as irrelevant a grouplet as any of the others, their academic pretensions notwithstanding.

It's hard to estimate from the video, but the audience for this talk looks to be about 50 people. They were enthusiastic, polite and engaged. There were no hecklers, and nobody tried to disrupt the meeting. During Q&A the questions weren't just softball--they were marshmallows, at least insofar as they were coherent. Apparently anybody with any critical thinking skills decided to stay home (pun intended).

The ISO is not representative of American opinion, and despite the campus-wide, aggressive advertising for this event it drew only a limited audience. Probably an audience comparable in size to what a neo-Nazi speaker would have gotten (leaving out all the counter-protesters). Neither of these groups believes in American democracy, individual liberty, or economic freedom. The best response is to just ignore them.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Gorbachev
• Freedom Socialist Party Reads Marx
• Why the Academy Sucks

Sex and the Alpha Male

What the mainstream media has to say about the slew of sexual harassment scandals is silly. In their telling women have finally had the "courage" to call out "unacceptable" behavior on the part of "men." We are now at a turning point, they claim, where the male psyche has been sufficiently tamed such that we stand on the precipice of a different world.

Hogwash! "Courage" is not a new attribute among women, but rather a function of new media. It's easy to be courageous in an era of Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone cameras. In an earlier day the best you could do is go to the New York Times and plead for coverage (which mostly didn't happen). Nor has the male psyche changed--it's just that any expectation of privacy is now non-existent. Whatever they do is likely to become public, much to the embarrassment of Alphas who preferred their failed efforts at conquest remained secret.

The world will adjust, and not by a decrease in sexual hijinks. Instead the constant scandals will wear on the public, they'll tire of them, and soon enough tune them out. This, too, shall pass.

The most perceptive post on the kerfuffle that I have read so far surprisingly comes from a music professor. Kristi Brown-Montesano (B-M) is on the faculty at Colburn Conservatory of Music, has authored a book entitled The Women of Mozart's Operas, and pens a piece entitled Holding Don Giovanni Accountable.* (h/t Tyler Cowen)

The opera revolves around three women, two aristocrats and a peasant girl. Donna Elvira is in love with Don Giovanni and feels betrayed by his infidelity. Donna Anna was either raped or seduced by him. Her father came to defend her honor and was murdered by Don Giovanni. Finally, Zerlina was also raped or seduced by the Don.

Professor B-M is convinced that rape is the appropriate descriptor in the latter two cases. Maybe. Though if I were Mr. Giovanni's defense attorney I could at least raise reasonable doubt.

For starters, rape isn't really an operatic subject, while seduction certainly is. If my client were intent on simply forcing himself on Zerlina, why did he sing her such a beautiful aria beforehand (Là ci darem la mano)? To which her reply was roughly I want to, but I shouldn't.

She eventually succumbs, after which she is deeply ashamed. She goes to her fiance begging forgiveness with what I think is the most beautiful aria in the whole opera (Batti, batti, o bel Masetto). Forgiveness is soon granted.

The professor has a stronger argument in the other case. According to Donna Anna (echoed by Lepporello), Giovanni sneaked into her bedroom and raped her, after which he murdered her father. We don't know for certain what happened--the events occurred off-stage before the opera even begins.

Donna Anna loudly proclaims her victimhood, and feels not ashamed but rather humiliated. Instead of seeking forgiveness, she goes to her hopelessly feckless boyfriend--Don Ottavio, a Beta male if there ever was one--and demands that he avenge the crime. He comically touts his pathetically unsuccessful efforts to redeem her honor.

And maybe a crime it was. But why? Giovanni is obviously very successful with the ladies and doesn't really need to force himself on anybody. She, meanwhile, has every reason to lie about it. That's my lawyerly response, and maybe it's true.

Were I producing Don Giovanni, I'd cast Anita Hill as Donna Elvira. She always struck me as the woman scorned, and had she become the Mrs. Clarence Thomas we'd never have heard another word from her.

Monica Lewinsky will get Zerlina's role, an innocent seduced by a charming man. She never claimed otherwise, and I don't recall her ever saying a bad word about Bill Clinton. Like Zerlina, all she sought from the public was forgiveness, which she never received. We were too mean-spirited.

Finally, I'd assign Juanita Broaddrick the role of Donna Anna. She claims she was raped by Bill Clinton, and perhaps that's true. Again, though, why? Rape is usually the last resort of low-status males who can't get it any other way. Bill certainly doesn't fall into that category--why would he force himself on somebody when there were any number of others eager for the privilege? So I don't believe her, just as I don't believe Donna Anna.

Mozart's opera is about a male predator and not a female manipulator (for that, listen to Bizet's Carmen). Women have a career option not open to most men--they can spread their legs in return for promotion. When men offer that bargain it is considered a fireable offense. But surely as often as not the offer comes from the woman. In the current environment the man is damned if he accepts her offer and damned if he doesn't. It's always his fault, no matter what the circumstances. That's what makes it an unfair witch-hunt.

So we need some rules about sex in the workplace. It's just that I don't know what they should be. Perhaps we should go by the Mike Pence standard: no man should ever be alone with a woman not his wife? That would end sexual harassment, albeit at the cost of putting the kibosh on most women's careers. Though we're headed toward a rule like that on college campuses.

Or perhaps it's a prohibition against sex in the workplace? My former campus recently instituted something very similar to that. I'm not opposed to it, but it has to be enforced against both genders--not just men.

I can tell you what the solution is not: the females in Congress want all men to behave like Don Ottavio--cowardly, weak, ineffectual. Alpha males are supposed to sacrifice their Alpha-ness and become wallpaper. It won't happen, and surely we don't want it to happen. What a boring world!

So I think (based only on what I know, which may not be enough) that Al Franken has done nothing to deserve losing his Senate seat. The Democratic women are stupid. John Conyers is on the bubble, but he's so old he should probably retire anyway. Donald Trump behaved in precisely the way you'd expect Donald to behave, and as far as I can tell has done nothing worse than Al Franken. He should not be impeached for sexual misconduct (or for any other reason).

Roy Moore's transgressions are much worse and if true are literally criminal. Though they happened a very long time ago. I surely wish that Luther Strange had won the primary. The fact that the allegations were made public only after the primary speaks to the dishonesty of Alabama Democrats, and also is a reason to doubt the whole story.

Still, I wish the guy would just disappear. Having said that (were I an Alabaman) I'd vote for him. He's a bastard, but he's our bastard.

The final scene in Don Giovanni is like the ending to a cheap, dance-hall rom-com. It's a we all lived happily ever after epilogue. The Human Comedy is indeed just that: a comedy. Complicated humans will rarely interact in straightforward, good/evil ways, especially when it comes to sex.

Shit happens. Get over it. Get a life. Enjoy the passing scene.

* Don Giovanni is an opera by Mozart about an aristocratic playboy (also known as Don Juan) whose mission in life is to f**k as many women as possible. A short synopsis of the plot is here.

Further Reading:

• Women are from Venus; Trotskyists are from Pluto
• Beware The Amazons
• Dorothy Day

Women Are From Venus; Trotskyists Are From Pluto

It's usually rude to comment on somebody's appearance. An unspoken rule among college professors is to never do that, especially to women and not even when it's complimentary. That's professional courtesy augmented by a dose of political correctness. The pretense is that appearances aren't important--it's what shows up in a person's soul that counts.

Of course the pretense is wrong. We are all physical beings, and our lives depend crucially on what we look like. My life's chances are significantly reduced because I'm not a 6'5" NFL football player. Similarly, most women aren't beautiful enough to be a movie star or a famous fashion model. Those are extreme examples, but tall, handsome men earn more money and have more beautiful wives and more successful children than us shorter, fatter fellows. Similarly, beautiful women are more likely to snag the tall, handsome, wealthy husband.

So when Trotskyists knock on doors politicking, they think it is only the issues that count: low wages, unemployment, evil cops, etc. But of course that's not true. Whenever two people meet, especially when they are of the same gender, there is a status competition. And who wins depends very much on appearance, whether Trotskyists realize that or not.

They obviously don't realize it, as illustrated by the cover article in this week's Militant. Entitled Socialist Workers Party: 'Defend Voter's Rights!', it's obviously intended to further working class politics. It tells the story of Comrade Ellen Brickley, who knocked on the door of Miss Renee,* identified as a hair stylist. They're shown in the picture, reproduced below. Zero points for guessing who Ms. Brickley is.



Of course it's risky to judge an interaction based on a still photo--that's a millisecond slice easily taken out of context. Yet The Militant's editors saw fit to publish this photo, so presumably it represents something they think is both typical and flattering.  

The obvious irony is Ms. Brickley--who has likely not visited a hair stylist in years, if ever--is now soliciting one. It's not clear what she expects to accomplish. The Trotskyist view (explained by Evelyn Reed) is that women doll themselves up only to entertain men and for no other reason. Miss Renee, by this account, is totally in hock to the patriarchy, completely hypnotized by us evil guys.

Of course that's not true. While men are certainly part of the picture, fashion is as much a status competition among women as anything else. Beautiful women have every reason to flaunt it, and even less attractive women do their best. Most people call it self esteem.

So Miss Renee wins this status competition hands down. Not only is she naturally more attractive, but she obviously takes care of herself and looks as good as she can. She emphasizes her femininity to the point of provocation. Ms. Brickley, meanwhile, has just thrown in the towel.

So now it's easy to write a caption for this picture. Miss Renee (who as a hair stylist is only rarely the high-status female in the room) is definitely the top dog in this encounter. That's why she's enjoying it so much, smiling broadly as she looks down, patronizingly, at her visitor. She's doing her best to extend the encounter for as long as possible, which is why she feigns interest in Trotskyist politics.

Ms. Brickley, meanwhile, looks very uncomfortable, even angry. At some level she knows she's being had.

It is inconceivable to me that somebody like Miss Renee would ever join the SWP. At very least she'd have to shave her head and give up her career as a hair stylist. She'd have to voluntarily renounce whatever status she has and become an ugly bitch. Of course she's not going to do that! Ms. Brickley, apart from humiliating herself, has also wasted her time.

You think I'm kidding about the haircut? Ms. Brickley's coiffure is similar to the Trotskyist comrades of my youth. Women comrades tended to be homely, and accordingly disavowed any interest in beauty, as less attractive women are wont to do.

It holds true even today. This picture dates from 2013, and shows Margaret Trowe campaigning for Des Moines city council, visiting Miss Essie* sitting on her porch. Miss Essie is a retired hotel cleaner.



The status gap between the two women is not quite so obvious. Still, at least Miss Essie is recognizably female, which is more than one can say for Ms. Trowe (at least from the picture). Further, Miss Essie was likely quite attractive in her younger years. I'll hazard that she has children and grandchildren, unlike Ms. Trowe. So I'll count Miss Essie as the more successful, higher status woman. Ms. Trowe's subservient posture suggests as much.

Ms. Trowe has the same Trotskyist-style haircut as Ms. Brickley. She's obviously a low-status woman, and it's not clear to me why higher-status folks would want to join her organization. People want to move up in the world--not down.

*The Militant cites full names for Miss Renee and Miss Essie. I choose not to include those to save them any further embarrassment.

Further Reading:

• Old White Man Runs For President
• Beware the Amazons!
• Sisters & Slackers

Beware the Amazons!

I have not read Adrienne Mayor's new book, entitled The Amazons: Lives & Legends of Women Warriors Across the Ancient World. It would never have crossed my radar screen but for an article in Socialist Action.

From the preview at amazon.com it looks to be charmingly written and beautifully researched. Appropriately, it's doing well in the sales rankings and has been widely reviewed elsewhere. I have read two "bourgeois" reviews from The Independent and the Wall Street Journal. There's nothing wrong with the book. It's just that I have lots of other stuff to read first that's more important to me.

Ms. Mayor's opus concerns female warriors from Scythia. That land was in Central Asia, and the warriors (both men and women, as the WSJ points out) were members of nomadic tribes who depended on finding new pastureland and/or booty for survival. Occasionally they attacked Greek communities (unsuccessfully, I gather), inspiring a voluminous and enduring series of myths about Amazon warriors. They caught the Greek imagination.

Ms. Mayor writes

After Heracles, Amazons were the single most popular subjects in Greek vase paintings. Amazons appeared in city murals and monumental civic sculptures in Athens and other Greek cities; tombs and places linked to Amazons were revered in the Greek and Anatolian landscape.

Ms. Mayor's effort is to separate fact from fiction--what was true about the Amazons, and what was myth. It's a book about art, culture, fashion, archaeology, and sex. I think it will be a bestseller.

So why am I writing about a book that I have no plan to read? It's because of the odd, idiosyncratic review provided by Socialist Action's resident feminist, Christine Marie, entitled A challenge to the myth of male dominance. Ms. Marie reads much more into the book than I think is there.

The title of Ms. Marie's review gives the game away. She reduces a complex, romantic tale to a cardboard cutout. Mayor's book is little more than an anecdote to justify some Marxist theory.

Her first claim is that the very existence of female warriors is in doubt. Of course that's not true--we have Amazons even today--the US military is almost completely gender-integrated. Ms. Marie thinks that we males are sent into paroxysms of psychological despair by the mere thought of female warriors. Then how does she explain the idolization of said Amazons in today's video games?

Second, she suggests that the acknowledgement of women soldiers has been the secret knowledge of Marxist anthropologists.

Collections of works by Marxist feminist anthropologists such as Eleanor Burke Leacock are kept in the public eye thanks only to small radical publishing houses. And so, when academic publishers commit to printing a new book that challenges the mainstream on these questions, it should be celebrated.

This ultimately reduces to a conspiracy theory--that well-known academics (almost all of whom are Leftists, and the majority are women) are somehow keeping important knowledge under wraps. How could this happen? And why?

Then comes the bizarre argument that because women died in battle, therefore there is a threat to male dominance. The logic escapes me. I do not see the connection between the title of Ms. Marie's piece and the substance of Ms. Mayor's book. Over 700,000 British soldiers died in World War I, many of them in futile attempts to move the front lines by a few hundred yards. Is that an argument for male dominance? And yet Ms. Marie will have us believe that the discovery of graves of a few hundred female battle victims implies that women were equals way back when.

And then there is the category error. She is taking a tale from history and turning it into a fact of anthropology. Ms. Mayor's book looks to be a rousing good tale, analogous perhaps to the myriad Civil War stories. These are at best anecdotes. And true enough--collect enough anecdotes and eventually you get data. But Ms. Marie has one anecdote and from there she argues for Marxist anthropology. The premise does not justify the conclusion.

Any effort to do anthropology has to take into account evolutionary psychology. From what I've read, there is nothing in Ms. Mayor's book that contradicts evoPsych. Nor as a work of history would one expect it to. But anthropology looks at a much bigger canvas over a much longer timeframe. Marx knew nothing about genes or genetics, nor did he have any ability to track their propagation through human populations. We have that toolkit today, at least in rudimentary form.

I don't expect Ms. Marie to change her mind. A person's political opinions are likely innate, or at least not changeable after age 30 or so. It all depends on what categories you put things in, and what values you consider important. To use Arnold Kling's language, Ms. Marie puts everything in terms of an Oppression/Liberation axis. Women are oppressed, and the political goal is to free them.

I prefer (in this context) the Civilization/Barbarism axis, i.e., that rules of civilized behavior are a crucial ingredient of our modern world. Civilization requires some limits on freedom. Men, for example, are not allowed to form street gangs with the purpose of going out to rape women, Genghis Khan style. Women, on the other hand, need to provide domestic life that keeps families and communities intact. When these institutions break down, we'll all be much worse off.

So Ms. Marie is from Mars and I'm from Venus, or whatever. I relinquish any effort to alter her world view. But I will suggest that she could become better at making her own case if she knew more. And that, of course, applies to me as well. So I'll make a deal with her. If she reads one book that I recommend, then I shall return the favor. The goal is not to change minds (impossible), but rather just to inform.

My recommendation for Ms. Marie is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. I don't agree with everything in that book. It's also somewhat dated. Nevertheless, I think it makes the strongest case against Marxist anthropology as historically understood. Now a reformulation of Marxism is possible, but that will require some understanding of evolutionary psychology.

I await Ms. Marie's instructions for what book I am to read. I promise to review it here.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• Stitched-Up Snit

Stitched Up Snit

This post is inspired by a review in Socialist Action (by Christine Marie) of a book by Tansy Hoskins entitled Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. Actually, that's a book I'd like to read. But the Kindle price is almost $19! And this for a book that is only 216 pages long.

I refuse to buy it.

The hypocrisy in this case is galling. Much of Ms. Hoskin's argument is about how the fashion industry destroys the environment, along with preventing people from reaching their true aspirations. And then they overprice environmentally-friendly e-books by a factor of three? What gives?

So I'm stuck with Ms. Marie's review (along with a better article in The Guardian). Her piece includes astonishingly meaningless sentences, for example:

Individual artists can create work that inspires dreams of a different kind of society, while, at the same time, the art system that abides that rebellion actually hides capitalism’s inherently destructive mode of functioning and its vulnerability to overthrow by the majority.

and

Liberation from our own alienation, retail therapy, credit card debt, and body image issues, Hoskins explains, can only be won collectively and in solidarity with garment workers acting in their interest worldwide.

 Judged from Ms. Marie's review, Ms. Hoskins' book makes the following claims.

The industry exploits workers.

This is certainly not true, at least not in China. Per capita GDP in China has increased by a factor of 14 since 1980. That means the average person in China is 14 times richer than they were 35 years ago. Never have so many people been pulled out of poverty ever before in human history--surely one of the greatest accomplishments of the human race. Even if it doesn't stick, i.e., if China goes into a prolonged depression, a decline of 50% (very unlikely short of war) still leaves them seven-fold better off than they were in 1980.

Similar statistics exist for Vietnam, India, and even Bangladesh--modest only by comparison to China.

Fashion is bad for the environment.

Ms. Marie points to the example of the Aral Sea, an inland sea destroyed by cotton farming in the--get this--Soviet Union. How that example discredits capitalism is not clear. But the larger point has at least a grain of truth, for there is no doubt that China, in particular, has serious environmental problems. Their environmental bureaucracy dates from Maoist times--again not much of a rap against capitalism.

The solution to environmental problems is to make people richer. Then they will have enough money to make the necessary capital investment in infrastructure to preserve the environment. Forcing textile workers to return to a life of subsistence farming--which is ultimately what Ms. Marie proposes--is not much of an alternative.

The consumer is a victim of "false need."

Leave it to socialists to determine what your needs are. You think you need new underwear? Well, forget it--you'll never get permission from the Underwear Needs Department. You can apply again in six months. 

Who the hell do these people think they are? Do they really think they have the right to disapprove of your wardrobe because they think you don't "need" it?

I've often wondered what happens to Dunkin Donuts after the revolution. Nobody needs a donut, so maybe they'd just close them all down. Or maybe all we need are plain donuts--none of the bourgeois, cop-attracting sprinkles. The only way I'll ever support socialism is if they appoint me as Commissar for Donuts for life.

Fashion designers are evil scoundrels.

Fashion designers are into waste, deception, exploitation, and profit. That's it. That consumers get cheap prices? Forget it--not important. That consumers enjoy having new things? Stupid consumers--they're consumed with false needs. That workers are able to earn a living? Nah! If only they realized how exploited they were, they'd be first in line to get back behind that old water buffalo. That there's a very sophisticated, home-grown dye and textile manufacturing industry in India? That's just awful. All of that should be regulated by Christine Marie--she absolutely knows what's best for Indian workers.

Socialism is for poverty. It will deprive you of your livelihood. It will deprive you of your ability to buy things you want. It will deprive you of your humanity. The only beneficiaries are the wannabe dictators like Christine Marie.

Further Reading:

• Sisters & Slackers
• Book Review: Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
• Viva Poverty!