Oberlin, 2026: History & Sentiment

Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents political report to June international party conference. With Barnes, from left are SWP leaders Paul Mailhot, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. (Photo credit: MILITANT/LAURA ANDERSON; Caption: The Militant)

This week's Militant* publishes the first part of two reporting on the Party's 2026 International Conference held last June in Oberlin, Ohio. The title is SWP conference: Building a working-class party on Marxist foundations in the fight for workers power amid today’s capitalist crises and wars, and reports on the speech by Jack Barnes. Speeches by Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark will presumably be discussed next week. Comrades Jack, Mary-Alice and Steve constitute the central leadership of the Party, which I have dubbed the Troika.

Back in 2013 I proposed a framework for analyzing Comrade Jack's speeches, and it goes something like this:

• The speeches put great weight on history. Every event is deeply meaningful and subject to dialectical, Marxist interpretation. This makes them important.
• They are very sentimental, invariably referring to something that happened back when comrades were young (e.g., Malcolm X). So the speeches are inspiring.
• They make some odd-ball claim that sets the Party apart. For example, nobody else on the Left (or even the world) believes that the US lost the cold war. This inspires group solidarity.

Mr. Barnes makes an important historical claim that a Marxist, revolutionary-socialist Party in the Leninist-Bolshevik tradition already exists in the USA. It does not need to be reinvented or refounded. The hard work, according to Comrade Jack, has already been done. The article makes several points that I'll summarize in bullets.

• "Vanguard workers parties can grow with stunning speed amid deep going revolutionary events."
•  “We keep on building the party through our involvement in the class struggle and mass work of all kinds.”
• The Party's size is not important--that can change very quickly when the time is right.
• The Party "is proletarian in our program, our class composition and our norms and habits of political conduct. 'Our communist program is stronger than ever,' he said."

The SWP, with perhaps 100 members, is the vanguard remnant, the seed from which a future revolution will be brought forth. Their cadre, he claims, is proletarian to it's core.

I'll take issue with that last claim: their cadre was proletarian. Today they're increasingly retired. I think the average age is over 70. Comrades Jack and Mary-Alice are both about 85, and Steve is perhaps pushing 80. I wrote a post entitled Abandoning the Working Class about a revolutionary's retirement. What is the class nature of Bolshevik retirees? I suggested they might be declassed, like students.

The word "death" does not occur at all in the document--yet comrades are dying--obviously dying faster than new comrades can be recruited. Two comrades passed recently for whom obituaries appeared in The Militant.

The first was John Benson, who passed on March 6th at age 85. He met Jack and Mary-Alice when they were all students together at Carleton College. His leading accomplishments:

After joining the SWP in 1962, Benson helped build and lead 10 different party branches and organizing committees, served on the party’s National Committee for 15 years, carried out responsibilities helping build the international communist movement and worked at numerous industrial jobs, where he worked to strengthen the union.

Along with party members, supporters and others interested in learning more about the party, members of Benson’s family attended the meeting. This included his brothers Ken and Steve, with whom John shared a lifetime love of golf, a sport he mastered growing up in Crete, Illinois, some 30 miles south of Chicago.

I think all that organizing has been washed away with time--most of those branches don't exist anymore.

The second decedent was Dave Prince, a handsome man who frequently sat on the dais at Oberlin conferences alongside the Troika.

Prince, who joined the SWP in Cleveland in 1965, died on Jan. 25 at age 82, after a long battle against cancer. A member of the party’s National Committee since 1977, he shouldered a wide variety of central leadership responsibilities for the SWP’s party-building activity and international work. He helped organize and lead the financing of the party nationally, as well as the editorial preparation, printing, and circulation of books on working-class politics and program.

Mr. Prince is survived by a brother and sister, along with his longtime companion, Vivian Sahner.

No children and no grandchildren for either of these gentlemen.

For contrast, check out the obituary column for any small town America. I randomly picked Burns, Oregon, where a fellow died earlier this month at age 78. His very long obituary includes:

He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Andrea; his children, Matt, Luke (Missy), Megan (Tyler), and Trey (Jamie); his grandchildren, Chad (Serina), Tara (Jake), Colton, Jaxon, Taylen, Cali, and Tell; his great grandchildren, Cannon, Carter, Tell, Tilly, Tabor, His brother, Lou (Mary Jo) and numerous nieces, nephews, extended family members, and friends.

Folks with children and grandchildren, not to mention great grandchildren, are the people who will determine the future. This man is an example of a life well lived.

So I'll give great credit to my former comrades who made heroic sacrifices on behalf of the movement. They moved hither and yon across the country, dropping career, friends, and everything to respond to the momentary needs of the revolution. They never married or had children. If success had followed sacrifice, then it would be easy to admire them. As it is, they're to be pitied.

For they have not been able to reproduce themselves. Certainly not in the biological sense, but also not politically. They have not been able to recruit a younger generation of comrades to keep the flame going after they die. The biological and political are linked: red diaper babies are comrades who were the children of comrades. Our crop of aging, one-time proletarians are leaving no red diaper babies to follow in their footsteps.

May I suggest a fanciful solution? Our mutual friends over at Left Voice are all Millennials, many of whom aspire to be Trotskyists. Indeed, some of them are part of the Trotskyist Faction of the Fourth International--hard to get more Trotskyist than that! But they need an education: like our comrades 50 years ago, they're green behind their petty-bourgeois ears. They also need to disabuse themselves of their alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. But if--and it is a very big IF--then this is a Young Socialist Alliance in waiting. As Comrade Jack puts it, the Revolutionary Party already exists. No need for these young whippersnappers to reinvent it.

The second bullet in the analysis of Mr. Barnes' speeches is something sentimental that brings back fond memories of youth. Comrade Jack delivers hugely!

The SWP was founded as a Trotskyist party, in close collaboration with Leon (the Old Man) Trotsky himself, during his exile in Coyoacan, Mexico. While prohibited by law from being a member of the Fourth International, the Party stood "in fraternal solidarity" with the International, engaging in rousing sectarian disputes with people like Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. Then, for reasons that now escape me, the Party "abandoned Trotskyism," not completely, but certainly downplaying the connection.

Well, Trotsky is back! The group-read for the conference (200 copies were sold!) was In Defense of Marxism, now available in a 2026 edition published by Pathfinder Press, with a new introduction by Steve Clark. The book is a collection of correspondence to and from the Old Man during a faction fight and eventual split within the Party over World War II.

Nothing gets more sentimental than the resurrection of old Leon himself! My second bullet is more than satisfied.

The third bullet is a position that is so outlandish that it serves as a marker for group solidarity. I'll claim that is the Party's current position on Iran. But that looks to be a topic from Part 2 of The Militant's coverage of their conference, due to appear next week.

So stay tuned. 

*The Militant is the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), often referred to as the "Party." Jack Barnes is the National Secretary (CEO), a position he's held since 1972.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the SWP
• The March 17th Militant: A Review
• Trotskyist Ephemera

Jew Lady Betrays Both Country and Kin

(Source)

Frankie Levine flew all the way to Berlin, Germany, to deliver a speech of which she should be deeply ashamed. It's reprinted in Left Voice under the title “We Know the Way Out of this Violent System”: Speech from a Socialist Summer Camp in Germany, from which the above photo is taken. I assume it's a picture of the author.

She introduces herself:

Good evening, bonsoir, buonasera, buenas noches, guten abend. My name is Frankie and I am honored to join you as a representative from the declining, crisis-ridden empire that is the United States.

Her diagnosis is entirely wrong. The US is not declining, it's not crisis-ridden, and it isn't an empire. And she's not a representative of our country: we're a hardworking, quietly patriotic folk who cherish our constitutionally-endowed freedoms, along with our world-beating standard of living. Frankie is herself a beneficiary of our success: she flew to Berlin on an incredibly safe airplane, traveling without difficulty on a US Passport, and upon arrival was able to freely convert US dollars into euros, along with using a credit or debit card to pay for essentials. Nevertheless, she wants to destroy the United States.

She tells us a lot about herself: that she's a fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew who "been anti-Zionist since I was fourteen." She credits her 95 year-old grandmother for some crazy shit, eg, “Israel is an apartheid state that is committing genocide,” and who "mourns Palestinian children." Nothing wrong with mourning Palestinian children--the death of any child is a tragedy. But can she spare a thought or two for the Israeli children tortured to death on October 7th, 2023? Apparently not.

Hamas started the Gaza war and is responsible for most of the casualties on both sides. They put up their own children as human shields. The "genocide" slur is just a rehash of the old antisemitic slander that Jews suck the blood of Arab and Christian babies as part of their secret Kabbalistic rituals. There has been no genocide in Gaza--even by inflated Hamas figures less than 3% of Gaza's population died in the war. 

Anyway--no point in going over this again. Grandma is likely senile, and Frankie isn't gonna listen to me anyway. Beyond which Frankie has a solution to the world's woes, and it's this:

Today, we are here because we know the way out of this violent system. We need an independent, working class party that fights for revolutionary international socialism.

This, of course, is what my former comrades in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have been demanding since 1928, when their newspaper, The Militant, was founded. For example, The Militant from March 26th, 1951, proclaimed

The burning need is the formation of an independent labor party, which can mobilize the potentially gigantic political strength of the working people. 

That was before I was born and certainly before Frankie was born. You'd think that if Trotskyists have been trying for nearly a century to "build an independent labor party," and have never succeeded in the US nor durably succeeded anywhere in the world, it might be time to rethink priorities? Besides which, how this solves the problems between Israelis and Palestinians is beyond me.

But Frankie wants to "transform society." I, along with tens of millions of my fellow Americans, depend on a monthly social security check. Somehow this "transformation" is gonna have to happen without any interruption in social security checks. Silly little Frankie imagines that she's smart enough to pull that off. And not just her--the assorted failed academics around Left Voice hardly inspire confidence that they know how to finance social security. Their most illustrious comrade, James Dennis Hoff, is an English professor at a community college. While creditable in today's tough academic job market, the guy doesn't know squat about how the social security system works. Should flaky Frankie succeed in her "transformation," I predict the collapse of the social security system.

And not just that, but also water, gas and electric utilities, supply chains across the globe, public order, and all food distribution will fail. Indeed, Frankie's "transformation" will result in mass starvation and death to most of the world's population. I'll give her credit for good intentions, but at some point some minimal intelligence is required. She ain't got it. 

No wonder the American proletariat strongly prefers Trump to pie-in-the-sky socialists (aka communists).

Frankie proudly asserts her "anti-Zionist" credentials, claiming she's been so since age 14. She waves "anti-Zionism" around like an amulet, as though it will magically protect her from the gas chambers. It won't. Her problem is that many (most?) of her allies are not mere anti-Zionists, but genuine antisemites. Her comrades Otto Fors and Maryam Alaniz are demonstrably antisemitic--at best they see foolish Frankie as a useful tool. When the day comes to globalize the intifada, Frankie will be exterminated along with the rest of them.

While she doesn't support the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates for irrelevant Trotskyist-sectarian reasons, she somehow doesn't object to their blatant Jew-hatred. Future congresswoman Darializa Chevalier celebrated Hamas' slaughter on October 8th. The success of Abdul El Sayed in Michigan is further cause for worry, as is that of Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York. Both those gentlemen are smiley-faced exponents of the Muslim Brotherhood. Frankie is fighting for socialism. What she'll get is an Islamic State.

During her visit to Berlin perhaps she learned a useful word Judenrein? Literally it means cleansed of Jews, and it's the word the Nazis used to describe their Holocaust efforts. Hamas has cleaned this up a little bit--in English they demand Free Palestine. But what does that word free mean? It means free of Jews. After all, Jews are walking all over Palestine, occupying it with their filthy feet and causing all the world's problems. A fair, multilingual translation of free Palestine is judenrein Palestine. The Jews need to be exterminated. 

I don't know what psychic itch Frankie scratches by hanging out with these people. Whatever it is, she needs to get over it. They want to kill her, her family, her people--everybody in her neighborhood. It's OK to care about Palestinian children. Somebody needs to do that. But allying with a bunch of murderous thugs like Hamas does not benefit anybody's children--certainly not Palestine's!

The socialist Left, specifically the DSA, Left Voice, and all the Trotskyist grouplets apart from the SWP, have formed an unholy alliance with Islamic fascism. Fortunately Trotskyism can be ignored--and ultimately I think that fate awaits the DSA.  I don't think the majority of Americans are antisemitic. I don't even think a majority of Democrats are antisemitic. So this too shall pass.

Frankie needs to find a better home for her good heart.

Further Reading:

• Envy Is Why They Hate The Jews
• The Fading Fumes of Trotskyism
• Left Voice and the SWP

Cuba Fading Fast

An example for working people? Not even the plumber has a truck! (Source)

Roy Landerson publishes a piece in The Militant misleadingly entitled Why the Cuban Revolution is an example for all working people. That doesn't describe the article at all. Instead it's a sentimental post about how a dictator was overthrown by a bunch of ragtag "revolutionaries." This isn't an example for working people so much as a sentimental journey for those who were inspired by the so-called "revolution" at the time.

How many people in the US will recall Fidel Castro's supposedly inspirational speech History Will Absolve Me? It's two hours long! All but the most brainwashed Castro fans will fall asleep before it's over. It asserts that Castro partisans are unfailingly honest, innocent, peaceful (despite launching an insurrection) citizens, while the government officials are all and always liars, crooks and thieves. I confess I didn't read the whole thing--it was too boring and too incredible.

Yet Mr. Landerson will have us believe that History Will Absolve Me is the greatest document since the Declaration of Independence.

Usually, if a country is "an example for working people" it's because it has a higher standard of living, offers more freedom in terms of career, where to live, and how to spend your money and your free time. Cuba provides none of that: housing is hopelessly dilapidated, food is nearly non-existent, you can't choose a career, and--it seems to me worst of all--one has to spend one's free time listening to boring speeches and "volunteering" to contribute free labor.

Whatever the good life is, Cuba's is the complete opposite. When possible Cubans flee to the USA--or Mexico or Colombia, or Panama or any place besides Cuba. Mr. Landerson's headline is 180 degrees wrong.

The dictator that so offended Mr. Castro was a politician cum gangster named Fulgencio Batista, president of Cuba from 1952 to 1959. The Castroites had much to complain about (links & footnotes omitted).

Throughout the 1950s, Havana served as "a hedonistic playground for the world's elite", producing sizable gambling, prostitution and drug profits for the American mafia, corrupt law-enforcement officials, and their politically elected cronies. In the assessment of the Cuban-American historian Louis Perez, "Havana was then what Las Vegas has become." Relatedly, it is estimated that by the end of the 1950s the city of Havana had 270 brothels. In addition, drugs, be it marijuana or cocaine, were so plentiful at the time that one American magazine in 1950 proclaimed "Narcotics are hardly more difficult to obtain in Cuba than a shot of rum. And only slightly more expensive." As a result, the playwright Arthur Miller described Batista's Cuba in The Nation as "hopelessly corrupt, a Mafia playground, (and) a bordello for Americans and other foreigners."

While the prostitution part is as much a draw today as it was back then, the Castro regime has curtailed the drug trade. They've tried to keep the tourist industry alive, but instead of attracting the rich or famous (eg, Ernest Hemingway), Cuba instead appeals to low-budget package tourists. Much less lucrative.

In 1960 (according to Google AI) Cuba produced between 5.6 and 6.0 million tons of sugar. After 66 years of Castro rule production is down to 200,000 tons.

Perhaps the country most like Cuba is the Dominican Republic--same ethnicity and former Spanish colony. In 1960 it was ruled by a dictator way more vicious than Mr. Batista, namely Rafael Trujillo ("Generalissimo" from 1934 until his death in 1961). He is credibly charged with murdering between 25,000 and 50,000 people. If Mr. Castro had been Dominican he would have been summarily shot and never put on trial.

I asked ChatGPT what fraction of Dominican households had access to electricity in 1960, and also today. Her answer, excerpted:

In 1960: the best estimate is roughly 15–25% of households had reliable electricity.

Today (2025–2026): about 95–99% of Dominican households have reasonably reliable electricity, although reliability still varies substantially by neighborhood.

I put the same question to her about Cuba:

By the late 1950s Cuba was one of the more electrified countries in Latin America:

• Havana and other cities had extensive electric service.
• Cuba was considerably more urbanized than the Dominican Republic.
• Many towns had electricity, although rural electrification remained incomplete.
• Large rural areas still lacked service entirely.

Historical studies of Latin American electrification suggest Cuba's household electrification rate around 1958–1960 was approximately 55–70%, much higher than most neighboring countries.

Moreover, where electricity existed, it was generally dependable.

Clearly, Mr. Batista was way more successful in getting electricity to his population than his Dominican counterpart. He also killed far fewer people. Corruption was, of course a problem, but comparatively a minor one..

Regards today, Ms. GPT points out that 100% of Cuban households are connected to the electrical grid. But the grid is not reliable, and in recent years it's failed more or less completely. Apparently Cuba had another nationwide blackout in early June. She writes:

Access to the grid has improved from roughly 60% to essentially 100%. But reliability has deteriorated dramatically in recent years because of the collapse of the generating system and fuel shortages. A household that technically has electricity today may still experience many hours each day without power.

She goes on to estimate that despite 100% access, only between 30%- 50% of households have power at any given time. Ms. GPT does not have access to the most recent internet pages, so I think today's figure is no more than 30%.

In other words, since Trujillo died, the Dominican Republic has brought its electrical grid almost to first world standards. Meanwhile, Cuba has gone the opposite direction--from a dependable, nationwide grid under Batista, to complete collapse under the Castro brothers. This is NOT an example for working people--at least not a positive one.

Mr. Landerson's retort will be Cuba's problems are entirely due to the perfidy of the United States. Of course that's small comfort to the average Cuban--why did the Castro brothers go so far out of their way to anger the US? Seems in retrospect to be totally unnecessary--what has Cuba gained from that? As Marco Rubio puts it, the only thing worse than a communist is a stupid communist.

 
But Mr. Landerson is wrong: Cuba is in significant part the author of her own problems, for when it comes to corruption, the Castros have been far worse than anything Batista did. The Castro regime has stolen 90% of people's paychecks--it's hard to get more corrupt than that.

A useful counterpoint to Mr. Landerson's piece appears in Left Voice in an article by Adrien Masson entitled Cuba’s Market Reforms Are a Huge Retreat for Socialism. He takes the regime to task for taking some obvious steps to rejuvenate its economy, to wit:

The main measures include the adoption of private banking, lifting the cap on how many companies private individuals can own, giving private companies control over how many workers they hire and at what wages, eliminating the government’s monopoly on foreign trade, repaying external debt by selling national assets, and expanding the private sector’s reach. State-owned properties and real estate can now be sold to both domestic and foreign companies and individuals, while subsidies for important goods will be taken away from most Cubans and means-tested for the most vulnerable.

In other words, he accuses Cuba of going down the capitalist road and betraying the working class along with socialist ideals. He is right, of course, and the government's new policy is a straightforward admission that the idiotic, "revolutionary" fantasies held over the past 67 years are worthless. How many lives have been wasted sacrificing everything in a heroic effort that has done nothing but enrich the Castro clan?

The nonsense spouted by Mr. Masson deserves its own post. I won't go into detail here. His article is a very clear illustration of how Marxists completely misunderstand capitalism. The bottom line is Mr. Masson wants a do-over--his solution is to subject another three generations of Cubans to ever more poverty and misery. 

Further Reading:

• Cosmetics, Cuba & Mary-Alice Waters
• The End of Cuban Civilization
• The Trotskyist Faction on Haiti

Envy Is Why They Hate The Jews

Source

An old Russian joke tells about a poor peasant whose better-off neighbor has just gotten a cow. In his anguish, the peasant cries out to God for relief from his distress. When God replies and asks him what he wants him to do, the peasant replies, “Kill the cow.” (Charles Colson)

Otto Fors is a Left Voice columnist who can barely conceal his antisemitism. He apparently believes that if he only substitutes the word "Jew" with "Zionist," then he is somehow rendered innocent of being antisemitic. Demanding "kill all the Jews" is too blatant, but executing all Zionists is perfectly A-OK. The conceit is while "Jew" is a racial/ethnic/religious category, "Zionist" is a political opinion--one that is punishable by death.  Any fair-minded person can see through the charade.

Mr. Fors contributes a piece in Left Voice with the sub-heading Establishment Democratic candidates are being defeated by anti-Zionist challengers. The movement for Palestine has made support for Israel toxic — let’s keep it up! There are at least two things wrong with this:

1. "Anti-Zionist challengers" should be replaced with "anti-Jewish challengers."
2. "Movement for Palestine" should be replaced with "movement for Hamas."

Since when did Hamas do anything for the Palestinians? They certainly did them no favors on October 7th, 2023 when Hamas murdered nearly 1200 people in an unprovoked attack on Israel. The entirely predictable Israeli response has not in any way benefited the Palestinians in Gaza. 

Hamas is loudly, proudly and unambiguously antisemitic. Their key demand is Free Palestine, which means a Palestine that is cleansed of Jews. The Jews should be expelled, or better yet, exterminated. Anybody who supports Hamas--as Mr. Fors does--supports the extermination of the Jews.

Mr. Fors quotes former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who claims his opinion is "grounded in a sincere commitment to Israel’s future security and prosperity." In our comrade's opinion this convicts him of "Zionism." But why can't Mr. Fors champion Israeli prosperity? For any prosperity is better than none at all. The Arab populations in Israel and the West Bank are definitely richer than their counterparts in other countries because Israel is prosperous. Does Mr. Fors really think they'd be better off poorer?

And that's what reminds me of the Russian joke. Like the Russian peasant, Mr. Fors doesn't care at all if Arabs are impoverished. He just wants to kill the Israeli "cow," ie, the economy. He is not motivated by justice or well-being--his passion is purely envy. He doesn't hate the Jews because they're evil, but instead because they're successful.

Mr. Fors identifies himself as "...a college professor in the New York area." I googled his name and discovered no mention of him on any college faculty list. Sometimes adjunct faculty aren't listed by name, or perhaps he's an unemployed professor. Either way, the man is not successful in his chosen career. Presumably he has a Ph.D. degree, which means he's invested a huge amount of time in academia, and likely has no other skill that qualifies him for any other job.

Higher education is a shrinking or possibly dying industry, beset with all kinds of problems: demographics, artificial intelligence, and political polarization to name just a few. Getting a job in higher ed is really, really hard these days, so it's no surprise that Mr. Fors is a failure. Though he should've known better--all those years spent in a useless Ph.D. program should have been enough to teach him a thing or two.

Anyway, Mr. Fors looks up, and what he sees are a whole bunch of aging tenured professors in whose footsteps he wishes to follow. A lot (perhaps 30%) of those old folks are Jewish, who entered the profession (like me) a long time ago when the odds were much better. And our comrade is just green with envy! That is why he hates the Jews.

He's not alone. The two Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) ladies who upset longstanding Democratic incumbents in the recent New York congressional primaries are both rabidly antisemitic.

According to the NY Post

Scandal-plagued far-left congressional hopeful Darializa Avila Chevalier attended an anti-Israeli rally in the Big Apple one day after Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, according to reports.

The 32-year-old radical with a twisted history of bashing Israel joined a hateful Times Square mob on Oct. 8, 2023, that torched the Israeli flag and flashed swastikas after hundreds of Jews were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in a surprise attack on the Jewish state.

Chevalier, who is gunning for Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat’s seat in New York’s 13th House District, justified her attendance by declaring she is simply a lifelong advocate of Palestine.

Her colleague, Claire Valdez, is equally against the Jews, demanding an "end to the genocide." Odd because there is no genocide (only a small fraction of Gaza's 2.3 million inhabitants have died in the war), and the suggestion evokes the medieval blood libel against the Jews--that Jews suck the blood of gentile babies as part of their secret rites.

Anyway, will it surprise us that both of these ladies are frustrated academicians? From Wikipedia (footnotes omitted):

Avila Chevalier began a PhD program in sociology at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, becoming a doctoral candidate by 2025. Her research has focused on immigration law and policy and incarceration in the United States, especially on the ways Black immigrants from Latin America have been affected by the US criminal justice system and deportation.

 and

Valdez received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studying painting and art history. She worked a series of service jobs, including at Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Trader Joe's, before moving to New York City to pursue a career in art.

Neither these ladies nor Mr. Fors are members of the oppressed working class. Instead they're overeducated, no-longer-young adults who have discovered that all their book-learning has not delivered on the promise of upper middle class jobs in the professoriate. They take it out on the Jews.

Some months ago I read a terrifying article in Left Voice authored by Otto Fors. It described pro-Hamas demonstrations in the New York suburb of West Orange, NJ, which Mr. Fors described as "heavily Zionist." As mentioned, Zionist is his synonym for Jewish, and he is correct--West Orange is approximately 30% Jewish, including a large Orthodox community. According to Mr. Fors, the "Zionists" objected to pro-Hamas demonstrations in their public parks.

And they're right to be upset! Hamas' demand is the extermination of Israel's Jews, and if you take their slogan Globalize the Intifada literally, they demand the extermination of all Jews around the world, including those in W. Orange. In Mr. Fors' telling, the Jews were unreasonably objecting to the such antisemites rallying in public parks. The circumstance reminds one of Skokie, IL, where back in 1978 a group of Neo-Nazi protesters wanted to march through the Jewish suburb.

I made a mental note of the article, intending to comment on it, only to discover that it had been scrubbed from the web. Perhaps my memory deceives me--maybe there was no such article? Maybe Mr. Fors didn't write it? If somebody knows better, please message me in the comments. But I think the mask slipped too far--the piece was just too obviously an embarrassing expression of rank antisemitism.

Because the claque of failed academics who write for Left Voice hate the Jews--Otto Fors first among them. It's a passion born of envy.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice Antisemites Speak Out
• Iranian-American Demands Death to Israel
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain

Iran & Hamas

Pro Hamas demonstration in Berlin
(Source)

Two Left Voice posts about the recently concluded Iran War:

Author Juan Chingo writes a reasonable summary of the US/Iran/Israel conflict as of about 24 hours ago. Of course it is already out of date. The piece is entitled Trump’s Attack on Iran Resonates Beyond the Middle East.

While generally fair-minded, his post has an antisemitic, pro-Islamist slant. Not least, he insists on the Islamist framing of the Gaza war as "genocide"--a lie that reveals his true sympathies.

Mr. Chingo's lede paragraph (links in original):

Donald Trump has taken the riskiest and most potentially devastating step of his second term: a full-scale air strike against Iran’s major nuclear facilities, described by his advisors as “limited and contained.” The White House is seeking to sell the operation as a surgical strike aimed at neutralizing a growing threat, not launching an all-out war in the Middle East.

The attack — which hit the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan sites — constitutes a high-stakes gamble on Trump’s part.

He's right about the risk! The TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) moniker never fit the man--in both business and politics he was never afraid of risks. Usually he wins; sometimes he loses.

As has become apparent over the past 24 hours, Trump has likely won the gamble with his Iran bombing. As Mr. Chingo puts it,

Tehran is perhaps most likely to go a third way: a calibrated, symbolic but noisy retaliation that allows it to save face without crossing Washington’s red lines.

The other two possibilities Mr. Chingo lists are a literal surrender, or a reprisal intended to draw the US into an all-out war. As Mr. Chingo predicted, the purely performative "attack" on a US base in Qatar was, in fact, this third way. So all the panicking about the US being drawn into another endless conflict as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan seems moot.

A prolonged war is not very likely, no matter what happens. There is no chance the US will launch a ground invasion of Iran, and for one very good reason--we'd lose! Iran, a country with 90 million people, sits on a high plateau surrounded by mountains. Any invasion will require hundreds of thousands of troops and be fought on terrain that heavily favors the defenders. Unlike Iraq, Iran is a coherent polity that has existed for centuries, and unlike Afghanistan, it has a strong central government. In short, Iran could and would put up a fight.

It's with Mr. Chingo's further analysis that some problems emerge. He writes

It’s further proof that Tel Aviv is no longer acting simply as an ally of Washington, but as an actor seeking to manipulate its protector. This represents a dangerous reversal of the traditional division of roles between the imperialist center and its client states, with unpredictable consequences in the various global geopolitical scenarios, where the United States intended to delegate its former role as global policeman.

This is correct--Israel is not (and never was) a mere puppet of the US. Disagreements began in 1956 with the Suez Crisis when Israel, allied with France & the UK, invaded Egypt upon Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower strongly objected, and eventually forced the invaders to withdraw. There have been other incidents since, eg here.

Mr. Chingo's weasel word is "imperialist," perhaps the most meaningless word in the English language. "Imperialist" suggests that there is some spiritual authority above both the US and Israeli governments that mysteriously guides the policies of the two nations. Such a mythical enterprise does not exist. For a guide to policy it's best to take Trump and Netanyahu at their words.

For example, Trump clearly is not interested in regime change: "I don’t want it. I’d like to see everything calm down as quickly as possible... Regime change takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos, so we’ll see how it does.” Conversely, Netanyahu was all-in on assassinating Ayatollah Khamenei: "It's not going to escalate the conflict, it's going to end the conflict."

This represents a fundamental disagreement between the two allies--and not even the all-powerful "imperialists" can remove it. The security interests of the US and Israel diverge on this point. By strength of arms, the US won the argument.

Mr. Chingo says something funny.

The bombing of Iran not only marks a turning point for Trump’s presidency, but could redefine the global security architecture for decades to come. The message it leaves is brutal in its clarity: deterrence is no longer based on treaties or negotiations, but on the ability to strike first and strike hard.

Deterrence was never based on treaties or negotiations. Those peaceful processes were never more than the velvet glove covering the fist. At the end of the day, global politics is about force--it has always been thus and always will be so. I'm surprised that Mr. Chingo--a so-called materialist--doesn't see this.

The second article that offends, by Left Voice author Nathaniel Flakin, is entitled Berlin’s Biggest-Ever March for Palestine. He claims that "50,000 people protested against the genocide in Gaza."

First, he claims that a "genocide" is happening in Gaza, which is obviously false--and reflects a hidden agenda.

Second, he conflates "pro-Palestinian" with "pro-Hamas." I have no problem with somebody being pro-Palestinian--Palestinians are human beings too, and deserve all the human rights the rest of us have. But Hamas is definitely not pro-Palestinian! What have they ever done that's benefitted the Palestinians? Indeed, Hamas needlessly started a war that has reduced their compatriots to abject poverty.

No. Hamas isn't "pro-Palestinian." Instead it's pro-Iranian. The Ayatollahs have been chanting Death to Israel for over 50 years now--and they mean it quite literally. It's that agenda, the whole Death to Israel thing, that Hamas has signed up for. It's not at all about the Palestinians--it's about exterminating all the Jews. That's all it's about. Free Palestine means nothing less than a Judenrein Palestine.

It is surely obscene that a demonstration should be held in Berlin demanding a final solution to the Jewish question. Have the Germans learned nothing? Though I take some comfort in hoping that there weren't too many Germans in the crowd. Instead it was likely populated by recent immigrants from the Middle East who have brought their age-old hatreds with them to Germany.

Germany has laws (which I oppose on free speech grounds) that prohibit dissemination of Nazi propaganda. Yet for some reason the Germans are now tolerating a fascist sect that openly advocates for the extermination of all Jews.

Though I guess we can be thankful for one thing. It's Hamas' attack on October 7th that set in motion the chain of events that led to the collapse of Iran as a regional power. Hamas' sugar daddy isn't gonna be helping them anymore--and perhaps the war in Gaza will end sooner than anyone thinks.

Further Reading:

• Sam Karlin Makes a Mess of the Middle East
• Left Voice and the Intifada
• Nazis

Left Voice Antisemites Speak Out

 

(Source: Hunger Strike for Palestine Launched at CUNY)

Professor James Dennis Hoff, on the English faculty at CUNY and a prominent contributor to Left Voice, champions the slogan Free Palestine. Hamas, the murderous death cult responsible for the current war in Gaza, also proclaims Free Palestine. Elias Rodriguez--the person arrested for murdering a recently engaged, young Israeli couple while attending an event in DC--outdid them both, yelling Free Free Palestine upon completing the deed.

Free Palestine is a very thinly disguised exhortation to kill all the Jews living in Israel. Another of Hamas' favorite slogans is Globalize the Intifada, which can only be read as demanding the extermination of all Jews worldwide. Mr. Rodriguez took the slogans literally and got a head start on said extermination--he murdered two Jews in cold blood.

Professor Hoff obviously agrees with both Hamas and Mr. Rodriguez--the only good Jew is a dead Jew. In his article entitled Don’t Blame the Palestine Movement or the Left for the Jewish Museum Shooting, he justifies Mr. Rodriguez's act in two ways:

Professor Hoff calls this "genocide"
(https://www.anera.org/how-big-is-gaza/)

First, he claims that because "more than 60,000 people were murdered by Israel in Gaza," Mr. Rodriguez had some cause for exacting revenge. The only people murdered in the Gaza war were the 1200 Israelis slaughtered during the surprise attack on October 7th. All other victims are war casualties--the number of which Hamas certainly exaggerates. Israel is not trying to kill civilians, but it is working hard (and successfully) to wipe out Hamas.

War is terrible and all deaths are tragic. But there is a world of difference between war casualties and gratuitous murder. There is also a big difference between war casualties and genocide. There is no genocide taking place in Gaza--Professor Hoff and his comrades are just lying about that.

Second, he claims any sympathy for the DC victims is just hypocrisy, exaggerated by media outlets such as the New York Times. The goal of the media is "to actively propagate the lie that the movement for Palestine is a violent and antisemitic threat to domestic peace."

Really!? Is Professor Hoff claiming that Hamas is nonviolent, and that Oct. 7th was just a peaceful walk in the park? He apparently also believes that purposely killing Jews isn't antisemitic! His justification is silly (links omitted).

The New York Times, for instance, has repeatedly stated, without evidence, that the shooting was an act of antisemitism, despite the fact that both of the victims were employed by the Israeli state, and that reports suggest Rodriguez chose his targets deliberately. Furthermore, as his manifesto makes plain, his actions were clearly driven by his outrage at the ongoing genocide in Gaza and had nothing to do with hatred of any ethnic or racial group. Such knee-jerk conflations of anti-zionism and antisemitism have by now become standard practice for most of the U.S. media.

Cruelly murdering two Jews only because they're Israeli seems obviously antisemitic--what other evidence do you need? Mr. Hoff says the murderer wasn't really killing Jews, but rather only "Zionists." Among Israelis this is a distinction without a difference. For Hamas (and for anybody else who uses Hamas slogans) there is no daylight between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Does our professor really believe that Zionists in the United States should just be gunned down for no other reason? Apparently Yes, he does.

Because the murderer is connected to the communist Party for Socialism and Liberation grouplet, his act is seen as a black mark against all socialists. Professor Hoff complains

Such obvious red-baiting clearly has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people or stopping real antisemitism of the kind promoted by people like Elon Musk and the Far Right. Instead it is designed to encourage more repression and violence against those who support the movement for Palestine and the entire Left.

Except demanding the extermination of all Jews in Palestine (and worldwide) as Hamas and its followers do--is definitionally antisemitic! I don't know what comments Elon Musk has made that cause the professor to think he's an antisemite, but unlike Hamas and Professor Hoff, Mr. Musk has never, ever called for the murder of all Jews (whether or not they're Zionists).

Professor Hoff is a raving antisemite, and American antisemitism is today a disease of the Left-- including many in the Democratic Party. The professor has a right to free speech, despite the fact that what he says is vile. But nobody who advocates for and defends the slaughter of Jews should be employed as a professor at a public university.

While Professor Hoff's piece reveals the deeply illiberal and murderous intentions of Left Voice, the other article we consider today better belongs as an SNL skit. These antisemites (depicted above) are nothing if not a self-parody.

The lede paragraph reporting on their hijinks reads,

As the Israeli genocide of Gaza intensifies and a famine is declared, a group of eight faculty, students, and staff from across the City University of New York (CUNY) have launched an indefinite hunger strike outside the Graduate Center in Manhattan. They will be at this location from 12 to 6 pm every day and are demanding that, “Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and the CUNY Board of Trustees immediately divest from the zionist state and from all weapons and technology manufacturers equipping the israeli-US genocide in Palestine.” The hunger strikers are launching a fundraiser to support families in Gaza and hosting political education, art, and mutual aid events for the local community in New York.

I'm not sure what the point of a hunger strike is. Are they trying to prove how stupid they are? Do they want us to feel sorry for them? Is it an act of virtue-signaling directed at fellow antisemites? I suspect the latter--you and me are not part of their intended audience.

Though one has to wonder how serious this is. They're in public from noon to 6pm--and for all I know afterwards they go to McDonalds for a good dinner.

Their demands are as kooky as the project itself. They want 1) CUNY to divest from Israel, and 2) to divest from all "weapons and technology manufacturers" equipping the "genocide." These are impossible.

Israel is fully integrated into the global economy, and "divesting" from Israel means sticking all your money under a mattress. This won't happen. Similarly divesting from specific industries is equally impossible--Israel produces much of the software that is built into Silicon Valley technology.

Our antisemitic comrades are all pro-poverty. Their best solution for Palestinians between the River & the Sea is to completely destroy the Israeli economy, driving all residents of whatever nationality into dire poverty. It's worse than absurd. These people are just a joke.

Further Reading:

• Professor Hoff & Harvard
• Iranian-American Demands Death to Israel
• Whiners & Complainers

Marxist Economics

 

Source

Michael Roberts, a formidable Marxist economist, is interviewed by Left Voice's Jason Koslowski in a post entitled Is a Major Slump on the Way? He is asked some basic questions about the tenets of Marxist economics, which makes for a useful read.

The first question asks about the labor theory of value, and why it is important today. Mr. Roberts responds:

Mainstream theories deny that the value/price of commodities is due to human labour.  Instead, some argue that the value or price of a commodity depends on the individual demand for it, its degree of utility. You might pay $1 for an ice cream but somebody else might pay $2, depending on the ‘marginal utility’ of an ice cream to each person. So the price is dependent on the desire of each individual, averaged in some way.  

This is nonsense; first, because how can you add up each individual’s desire for an ice cream to reach its average value?  Second, the question that is not answered is: why does an ice cream cost only $1-2 while a motor vehicle is priced at $30,000?  What decides that is the cost of producing each in terms of the labour time involved, not the individual demand for cars over ice creams.

You can count me among the "mainstream economists" here, who believe that it's consumers who assign values to products. A consumer will spend $30,000 on a car only if a car is worth that much money to her--and preferable to spending the same money on a fancy vacation or for the down payment on a house. Her calculation of value has nothing to do with what the workers think their time is worth.

Mr. Roberts asks how the capitalist can determine that "average value" for an ice cream cone? He can't, of course, but what he can do is find the revenue maximizing price. If the price is higher than that, then too few people will buy ice cream. If the price is lower, then he's just leaving money sitting on the table. There is a price--known as the market price--that maximizes revenue. In theory that happens to be where the red and green curves in the above diagram intersect. Prices convey information about how much consumers want a given product. It is consumers who set prices--not the capitalist or the workers.

Though Mr. Roberts isn't entirely wrong--he asks why a car can't be sold of one or two dollars, like an ice cream cone. This is, of course, because the cost of production--including labor--is much higher to produce a car than it is to produce an ice cream cone. So the price of a car must be higher than the cost of production, including labor. If consumers aren't willing to pay at least that much, then no cars will be produced. Neither capitalists nor workers will be willing to manufacture cars that can only fetch a couple bucks in the marketplace. Or, put another way, the price has to clear the market.

Of course some consumers are willing to pay much more than the market price. Only cheap cars will sell for $30K--these days one can easily find cars that are priced well over $100K! It seems that enough people are willing to spend that kind of money on a car. The production costs to make expensive cars are not that much higher than for the cheap, commodity cars, and so the luxury brands are very profitable for the capitalist. Not because the workers are exploited, but only because some consumers value brand, fashion, fancy electronics and leather seats more than most. In other words, automakers discriminate and they find customers who are willing to pay well above the market price for their cars.

It's the same with airline tickets. Basic economy tickets are a commodity product and are sold as cheaply as the cost of production allows. I use the word commodity here in the narrow sense, meaning products that compete primarily on price. But business class and first class seats sell for a lot more, and substantially add to the airline's profit margin. Unlike what Mr. Roberts implicitly claims, branded and/or luxury products are not commodities and are sold at (often substantially) higher prices. This is only because consumers are willing to pay for them, even if the additional labor cost is negligible.

Quoting again from Mr. Roberts:

Value in things and services produced as commodities for sale by capitalists has a dual basis: 1) it must be useful to somebody so that it will be bought, i.e. it has a “use-value”; but 2) it must be sold for money, i.e. it has exchange value. The great discovery by Marx was to show that the value or wages paid to workers for their labour time is less than the value of the goods or services sold by the capitalist.  The worker works eight hours in a day but gets paid the equivalent of just four hours labour time.  The capitalist appropriates the remaining four hours on the sale of the product. This is “surplus value” free to the capitalist.

What he calls "use-value" is, in fact, the value that the consumer puts on the product. Some consumers are willing to pay more and others less. Capitalists try to get consumers to pay more by upselling them to, say, business class. Consumers try to pay less by shopping around for sales and/or discounts. At the end of the day, the so-called "exchange value," aka price, is the result of bargaining between the consumer and the capitalist. This negotiation has nothing to do with the cost of labor.

Mr. Roberts posits yet a third value--determined by neither what the consumer wants nor by what the negotiated price eventually is. It is instead a spiritual quantity that Mr. Roberts calls "surplus value." I call it spiritual because there is no way this quantity can be measured--Mr. Roberts' offers the imaginary approximation that it accounts for 50% of the "exchange value" price. It is this spiritual, "surplus value" that is supposedly being stolen from the worker and pocketed by the capitalist as profit.

Wages are also the result of market competition. The capitalist needs to pay enough to convince the employee to come to work--and also not to work for another firm. The worker wants not only more money, but also benefits and leisure time. None of this has anything to do with what consumers are willing to pay.

Finally, Mr. Roberts completely misunderstands the role of "profit." There are two ways to measure profit: one as a fraction of all operating expenses, ie, operating profit. This is the measure that Marxists use (though they have a very weird and completely impractical way of estimating it). They posit a "law of economics" that global operating profits are declining. There is no empirical way to test this result.

While it is true that the operating profit has to be positive in order for there to be any profit of any kind, it doesn't have to be big. Walmart, for example, sets its operating profit to be 3%--if it's higher they lower prices; if it's lower, they eventually close the store. While low operating profits may be bad for the capitalist, the trend is excellent for consumers, since it means lower prices overall. Thus what Marxists interpret as being bad for the economy is actually good--assuming the trend of declining profits exists at all.

The way capitalists calculate "profit" is completely different: they calculate it as earnings per share, usually expressed in reciprocal form as the price/earnings ratio (PE ratio). Thus the relevant measure doesn't depend on operating profit at all (as long as it's positive), but instead as a percent of the total market capitalization of the company. By this measure there can never be any systematic decline in profits, since if operating profits go down, then share prices will go down in proportion.

The successful capitalist combines various resources--labor, capital, natural resources, expertise--into a company that creates something new that is of greater value to consumers than the constituent parts. Creating value for consumers is known as creating social utility, ie, making us all richer. Modern America is vastly richer than 18th Century Britain because capitalists, by imaginative recombinations of resources have been able to generate huge amounts of social utility.

The Marxists have economics all wrong--but if you want a concise and clear exposition of Marxist economics, then Michael Roberts is a good place to start.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
• Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes

Professor Hoff & Harvard

 

Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.

It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.

But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)

The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.

Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.

Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.

I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.

So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.

Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.

Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.

So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.

What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.

The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.

In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.

I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.

Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.

Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.

And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.

The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.

Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.

Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.

Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes, 

Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.

Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.

In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Economic Crisis
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• The Professors Congress: The International Situation

Tariffs!

AI generated cartoon representing tariffs

The article is by Jason Koslowski, and it appears in Left Voice under the title Notes from a Wall Street Sewer: Tariff Edition. Mr. Koslowski identifies himself as "a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia." In other words, he works for peanuts, having to share his salary with the zillion other PhDs out there seeking a career in academia.

I assume he teaches English given the quality of writing, which is good. 

He gets the most important fact correct: Tariffs are "a tax on imported things." The reason for tariffs is supposedly to make foreign goods more expensive for American consumers, and thereby encouraging us to buy domestically. Or, alternatively, to incentivize the producer to manufacture their products in the US. In principle, tariffs should lower the trade deficit.

He remarks, correctly, that this usually doesn't work, writing "...this plan did not work in 2016. Also, pretty much every expert everywhere says it’s not going to work this time."

I don't blame Mr. Koslowski for taking Trump's justification for tariffs at face value. But in this case I think he's mistaken. I think Trump understands that tariffs won't likely reduce the trade deficit. What he really wants to do is raise taxes. And tariffs, especially disguised as repatriating factories to the US, is a politically acceptable way to raise taxes.

In other words, tariffs are--first and foremost--a tax increase. That's entirely the point. The uncertainty arises when one asks Who is gonna pay the taxes? This turns out not to be an easy question to answer.

The obvious answer, which both our contingent college teacher and "experts" suggest isn't likely, is that American consumers will pay the taxes. But here's the rub: when confronted with a tax increase, people adjust their behavior to avoid paying the taxes. American consumers are no exception: they can substitute the foreign products with American products, or they can decide they don't need as much of the tariffed goods after all. Eg, if Mexican avocados are tariffed, then perhaps our affection for guacamole will be lessened. This option, if it happens, would reduce the trade deficit.

Or it could happen that the foreign producers desperately need the revenue, and so they reduce their prices sufficiently to maintain market share. I think Chinese manufacturers may fall into this category--the Chinese need the US dollar reserve currency in order to buy food and oil from abroad, regardless of whether they end up taking a loss in Yuan terms. This is called mercantilism. In this case it is Chinese producers (both workers & capitalists) who pay the tax. There will be no net decrease in the trade deficit.

A third option is that--because, eg, Americans by fewer Canadian products--that Canadians just simply don't have enough money to buy American products. The result is that the Canadian dollar will decline in value compared to the US dollar. This is good for the Canadian manufacturer because of the favorable exchange rate their products sold in the US are no more expensive than they were before the tariffs were imposed. But Canadian consumers are still worse off--they still won't be able to afford that vacation in Florida. In this case there might be an increase in the trade deficit (Canadians sell just as much, but buy less), and it is the Canadian consumer who ends up paying the tax.

Finally, it's possible that Walmart generates sufficiently high margin on, eg, Mexican avocados that they can just pay the tariff as extra overhead. In this case the Walmart shareholder (and eventually, employees) are paying the tariff tax. This will also have no effect on the trade deficit.

None of these options are mutually exclusive, and it's likely that they will all apply to some degree. Of this we can be certain: every option reduces trade and therefore reduces wealth. As such tariffs are bad for the economy. But that's true for any tax increase--all taxes are bad for the economy. The only advantage of tariffs is that they're politically more palatable.

Of course it gets even more complicated. Mr. Koslowski mentions that other countries will levy retaliatory tariffs, ie, raising taxes even more! And it spirals down from there. But I think this problem is somewhat limited because: 1) the US runs a large trade deficit with the rest of the world, so other countries need to sell to the US a lot more than the US needs to buy from them. So the US will win this kind of war. And 2) the US depends less on foreign trade than almost any country on earth, so it's relatively immune from retaliatory tariffs.

In short, apart from being a tax increase, the effects of tariffs are near impossible to forecast. There are just too many options, followed by options in response to prior options, to know how this is gonna proceed. Anybody who predicts a supply shortage/inflation/higher price for Americans/a recession, or any other disaster may be right, but they're most likely wrong. I predict that Trump's tariffs won't have a huge effect on the American economy. People will respond by minimizing their tax bill, and eventually not much tax will actually be collected.

Mr. Koslowski damages his credibility with his cartoon-like description of the US economy. He writes

I think we should see the tariffs as part of a magic trick Trump is trying to pull off. That trick is to hold together an unstable — that’s the key word — class alliance. To get elected, he had to win over very different sections of the different classes in society. 

First sector of this support: large chunks of the ruling class, the “big bourgeoisie,” the very rich, majority shareholders and big CEOs of big companies. ...

He won a lot of them over. Trump’s selling his party as the most pro-business of the two parties. (Elections are lovers’ quarrels between segments of our masters.) He’s offering massive tax breaks for the rich, again. He’s deregulating the economy, he’s slashing protections on the environment — all this is great for profits.

One part of his appeal to the ruling rich: break the backs of the workers. 

His premise is that there is a fight-to-the-death between bosses and workers. I've discussed this in many previous blog posts, and it's not true. While they have some things to fight over, for the most part bosses and workers have a common purpose: sell as much to consumers as possible.

He asserts that the "big bourgeoisie" have a common interest--namely they're for tariffs. Many of them (in industries like agriculture, auto manufacturing, retailers, etc.) are very much against tariffs. Others (such as tech firms) don't care because they don't export material goods. I don't think there are many big businesses who actually think tariffs work in their favor.

The biggest supporters of tariffs are in fact the unions. Many union members were present at Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement. UAW head Shawn Fain is a strong supporter. And no wonder--tariffs allow unionized workers to collect a rent on top of the market wage--eg, a salary increase roughly equal to the tariff.

Mr. Koslowski's only evidence that Trump is anti-worker is "...he's attacking the National Labor Relations Board." This is small potatoes--the NLRB plays a bit role in the American economy. Indeed, the whole idea of collective bargaining is so last century--supply chains and consumer choices are too diffuse for a strike against any one company to have much significance. Much more impactful are unions as lobbying and political organizations, and it is in precisely that role that Trump is trying to reach out to them. A new tariff will strengthen the union far more than any collective bargaining agreement.

Personally, I'm on the side of Mr. Koslowski's cartoonish bourgeoisie: I think tariffs are on net a bad thing for the economy. They're a tax increase. But politically they make a lot of sense, and for Donald Trump they look to be a winning issue.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Tradable vs. Non-Tradable Goods

Hamas Lost The War!

 

By Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=138775619

Left Voice journalist and leading antisemite, Maryam Alaniz, pens an article entitled Ceasefire on the Brink: Trump and Netanyahu Push for Renewed War in Gaza. She is right that the "ceasefire is on the brink." Otherwise almost everything else in the article is just wrong.

She seems to think that Hamas still has some bargaining power. She writes,

The situation has opened up a diplomatic crisis and jeopardizes the second stage of the deal — scheduled for March — which calls for the release of all remaining hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and a permanent ceasefire. Netanyahu, under pressure from his far-right allies, has vowed to continue military operations until Hamas is eliminated, calling the second phase into question.

The "situation" refers to the aftermath of Trump's remark describing Gaza as a "demolition zone" unfit for human habitation, and that the population needs to be removed into better housing. This seems on its face to be undeniably true--as the picture above (and also the one accompanying Ms. Alaniz's article) illustrates. Does she really think 2.3 million people can happily live amidst the rubble?

The quoted paragraph suggests she believes Israel and Hamas are embarking on a lengthy negotiation process which will end (ideally) with Hamas remaining in control of the Strip. She claims that 

Despite Israel’s overwhelming military advantage, Netanyahu’s government has failed to achieve its stated goal of eradicating Hamas — much like previous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan failed to eliminate their political adversaries. This failure is not just a military embarrassment but a political disaster for both Israel and its imperial patrons. Even with U.S. backing, Israel has proven incapable of achieving decisive victory, further exposing the bankruptcy of its apartheid policies.

Ms. Alaniz is just wrong: Israel has categorically, unambiguously won the war in Gaza. Hamas has been wiped out as a military organization. It has no infrastructure left, no access to food, water, electricity or armaments, and no place to hide. The only remaining military asset are a few teenagers marching around with AK-47s pretending to be an army.

And the hostages? Yes, Hamas still has hostages, and that's all that stays Israel's hand. But not for long, because, as Trump says, on Saturday "all hell" is gonna break loose. The only negotiation left open for Hamas is when and how the hostages will be released. That's it. That's their last bargaining chip, and now it comes with an expiration date.

There will be no negotiation. Israel will dictate the terms of the peace. As Trump's comments make clear, Gaza as it existed on October 6, 2023, will NOT be rebuilt, and most of its existing residents will have to find a new place to live. The where, how and when of such resettlement remains to be determined, but it will happen--and for humanitarian reasons it must happen soon.

Ms. Alaniz complains about "ethnic cleansing." Yes--but that's what happens when you lose a war. Had Hamas won, would they have behaved any differently? Of course not! Their explicit agenda was the murder/exile of all of Israel's Jews. Their goal has always been a Judenrein Palestine. It is a crusade that Ms. Alaniz has ardently supported.

Moral of that story: if you start a war, you'd better make sure you win it. Hamas started the war on October 7th, and Israel's actions since then have been entirely predictable. Why Hamas thought they could defy the laws of military gravity is beyond me. Their actions on that date seem in retrospect to be inexcusably stupid. They will now suffer the consequences.

So the question becomes where the Palestinians will be resettled, and who will pay for the facilities to house them at their new address. Neither Egypt nor Jordan want to host them, and for good reason. Egypt correctly views Hamas as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood--a sworn enemy of its current government. Housing a million Palestinians would be seriously disruptive. The Egyptians have adamantly refused to accept refugees from the war--their Rafah crossing has been hermitically sealed shut. They're not of a mind to open it now.

Jordan already houses a huge refugee population, including Palestinians (most of whom are now Jordanian citizens), Syrians, Lebanese and Iraqis. They don't need any more Palestinian refugees--and certainly not the sort that come from Gaza! Again, such an influx would be hugely destabilizing.

So I don't know what the solution will be. Probably Egypt--in exchange for large dollops of aid from both Israel and the US.

Ms. Alaniz does accurately lay out the motives of the neighboring states. None of them want Gazan refugees. Meanwhile, they're happy to see the end of Hamas, which they regard as a proxy for their archenemy: Iran.

So what explains Ms. Alaniz's completely unreasonable hatred of Israel? This paragraph may offer a clue (links omitted).

At the same time, the so-called “two-state solution,” the proposed liberal alternative to the total subjugation of the Palestinians, remains a mirage. For decades, this “solution” has been used to delay and deflect from the reality that Israel has always been a capitalist settler-colonial state created to defend the interests of imperialism.

She is right about the two-state solution. It is now impossible. But she is wrong that it represents the "total subjugation of the Palestinians." No, it was an effort to find a way for the two peoples to live together. Obviously failed, thanks to Oct. 7th.

The last sentence is a clue to her antisemitism. She describes Israel as "a capitalist settler-colonial state created to defend the interests of imperialism." Let's take these terms one at a time.

"Imperialism" is a meaningless weasel-word. There is no conscious body on the globe that expresses the "interests of imperialism." "Imperialism" has no interests and they don't need defending. "Imperialism" doesn't even exist. How the "interests of imperialism" map on to the Israel-Gaza conflict is an unknowable mystery.

But Israel is "capitalist." All this means is that it has a viable economy and can engage in global trade. It produces exports from which proceeds it can buy imports. Indeed, the country boasts a small trade surplus. Israel generally permits free trade within its borders, which is why it has a high standard of living. Contrast this with any of its Arab neighbors.

Then she describes Israel as a "colony." Of whom? Who is the colonial master (besides non-existent "imperialism")?

More precisely, she describes it as a "colonial-settler" state. She is right about the settlers--Jewish settlers began arriving from Eastern Europe (mostly from Russia/Ukraine) in the late 19th Century, fleeing from pogroms. By the 1880s there were 80,000 Jews in Palestine. By 1948 the Jewish population had grown to 630,000, despite the British Mandate's efforts to keep Jewish immigration to a minimum. In the four years after independence, 687,624 Jews moved to Israel--mostly survivors and refugees from the Holocaust, who had no place else to go. Over the next two decades, 630,000 Mizrahi Jews moved to Israel from the Middle East and North Africa.

So yes--they were settlers. Of that there is no question. But which colonial power did they represent? Russia? Iraq? Yemen? Morocco? Or any number of other countries from which Jews fled under varying degrees of duress? Today about 70% of Israel's Jewish population were born in Israel. They are no longer settlers, but instead natives--with as much right to live there as any Palestinian.

Israelis, being human, are not more (or less) moral than any other group of people. But they are more civilized than any of their Arab neighbors, and certainly more than Gazans. By "civilized" I mean a richer, more prosperous economy, a bigger, more powerful military, and a more stable and democratic form of government.

Israel won the war and owns the peace. Gazans, in their majority, are likely to be rehoused somewhere else.

Further Reading:

• Sam Karlin Makes a Mess of the Middle East
• Left Voice and the Intifada
• Nazis