Socialism, 2024

The Socialism Conference, apparently an annual event, was held this year in Chicago and attracted 2,000 participants. I was not present, but fortunately Left Voice's intrepid reporter, Ben Marenlensky, was there and covers all the details. The article is Socialism 2024 Conference: We Need to Address the Donkey in the Room. Which is a clever title given our author's concerns about the Democratic Party.

While there may be a donkey in the room, I can't help but notice the elephant in the room--namely the oversized Hamas flag decorating the dais. I don't know for sure how the conference participants interpret this flag, but it's unambiguous what Hamas means by it: that all Jews in Israel/Palestine should be killed and/or driven into exile. And if you take another of their slogans seriously--Globalize the Intifada--then all Jews around the world should be murdered.

Our conference participants--to avoid being accused of antisemitism--have watered this down slightly. For the word Jew, they substitute the term Zionist. The idea is that Jew is an ethnicity or religion, while Zionism is a political belief. Therefore--in their mind--the murder/exile of all Zionists in Palestine/Israel is A-OK. Go for it. No more ballots. Only bullets. Zionism is a capital offense.

Of course within Israel, 95% of all Jews are also Zionists, so this seems to be a distinction without much difference. In the US the populations don't overlap as exactly--while most Jews are Zionists, so are a large number of other Americans. But no matter--they all deserve to die.

But don't you dare accuse any of the participants of antisemitism. Quite the contrary--they love the Jews, and claim to have their best interests at heart. Bullshit.

Mr. Marenlensky opening paragraph reads, (links in original

The Socialism Conference is an annual event hosted by Haymarket Books in Chicago. This year, it brought together about 2,000 left-wing activists and academics of various tendencies, especially social democrats and Trotskyists, but also Stalinists, Maoists, anarchists, national liberationists, and social justice groups. This year’s conference took place in the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and a U.S. election in which both major parties repeatedly declare their unwavering support for Israel. Attendees of Socialism, in contrast, were united in support for Palestine, and there was a genuine desire for ideas about how to best combat Zionism and U.S. imperialism.

Fortunately, the dishonest term "genocide" appears only twice in Mr. Marenlensky's piece. Unfortunately, "genocide" was a major topic of discussion at the conference--practically every speech was about that. I've taken it on in many posts, eg, here, so I'm going to ignore it for now.

So enough about the elephant; let's get back to the donkeys, ie, the Democrats.

Mr. Marenlensky follows the standard Trotskyist position, namely there is a sharp class line running through society. There are bourgeois organizations, and then there are labor organizations--and never the twain should meet. The picture is muddied a bit (actually, a lot) by the existence of petty bourgeois groupings, that at bottom are really just stalking horses for the bourgeoisie. The Socialism Conference appears to be one of those.

A fundamental Trotskyist principle is to Never Cross the Class Line, ie, under no circumstances should one support bourgeois organizations or parties. Therefore it is fine to team up with unions--those are working class groups. But the Democratic Party is (in Trotskyist sociology) a bourgeois party and one should never support it no matter what.

Forming a coalition with working class organizations is called a united front. Forming a coalition with a bourgeois party is called a popular front. The Stalinist communist parties were big on popular fronts--and that is why (in the Trotskyist imagination) they lost so many battles (eg, the Spanish Civil War). So Mr. Marenlensky, being a Trotskyist, is adamantly opposed to any alliance with any part of the Democrat party. That's a popular front that crosses the class line, and is therefore doomed to failure.

The problem for Mr. Marenlensky is that the Socialism Conference is, inherently, a popular front. The comrades in that movement want to work with Progressive Democrats, including voting for Progressives Democrats in elections. That crosses the class line and is an absolute no-no.

So his first task is to criticize the way the conference is organized. He writes, referring to the Democratic party,

So much energy on the U.S. Left is wasted trying to galvanize support for a party that presents itself as the most responsible manager of capitalism. That energy could be spent campaigning for a workers’ party that fights for socialism. The Socialism Conference should have been an opportunity for both sides of this debate to confront the question in a constructive, comradely way. Unfortunately, this opportunity was largely squandered for a combination of political and structural reasons.

The "political and structural" reasons reduce to this: the Conference's participants want to have some impact on the real world. In the real world, Progressive Democrats have money and power and the ability to win elections. Trotskyists have none of that. Despite (or more likely, because of) their stand on high principles, Trotskyists never have any power or influence at all. All they do is kibbutz from the sidelines. So teaming up with Progressive Democrats just makes nothing but sense.

At least that's the way the conference organizers see it, and probably also a large majority of the participants. For these people the whole point of the conference is to tighten the alliance with segments of the Democratic Party, and to win over as many as they can to their ideas. What Trotskyists see as crossing the class line is seen by Conference attendees as practical politics.

And the attendees are not wrong. Progressive Democrats do occasionally win some real victories, notably in Blue States. All sorts of progressive policies are in place in California and New York, eg, rent control, prevailing wage laws, decriminalization of marijuana, social welfare efforts and social justice efforts. One can criticize them for only winning half a loaf--but the Trotskyists have never won any loaf--they've never succeeded in winning even a few crumbs.

As a political movement, Trotskyism is a proven failure. It's never been a success anywhere in the world, which is why the Socialism conferees don't have time for Trotskyists. For example, compare the Socialism Conference (2000 attendees) with Left Voice's recent convention (50 attendees; my review here). Would Left Voice--at their convention--allowed outsiders to discuss the virtues of forming popular fronts? Not likely--that conversation would not be allowed.

Likewise the Conference leaders and attendees are not interested in "forming an independent labor party," which is the rallying cry of all Trotskyists, including Left Voice. And for good reason: it's never happened, and it never will. There's no point in putting it on the agenda.

In his final paragraph, Mr. Maralensky puts it this way, claiming that Lenin (1870 - 1924) offered a useful guide to modern American politics.

In his seminal pamphlet, What Is To Be Done, Lenin describes a “marsh” of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and that our task is to “fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!” In other words, it’s not enough to struggle against collaboration with the class enemy, but also against those who want to turn toward, accommodate, or coddle the collaborators. The Socialism Conference needs to be organized in a way that facilitates this struggle, and Marxists need to be willing to wage it.

He is spitting into the wind. 

Further Reading:

• Is Trotskyism Dead?
• Nazis
• Unions and Work From Home

Tucker Carlson & Martha's Vineyard

iew YouTube video Tucker Carlson: Is an

Tucker Carlson is having a field day (actually, at least two of them) talking about Martha's Vineyard. This video is 21 minutes long, but I recommend watching it. He makes the Trumpian point very clearly, though please remember that he's an entertainer first (a very good one) and a political pundit only second. He points out the stunning hypocrisy of the Vineyarders (who sport signs saying "hate has no business here") as they arranged for the military to escort all 50 brown faces off their precious island within 24 hours. One resident said it was "like taking out the trash" (though he apparently intended his remarks to be attributed to DeSantis, but that was not clear from his context. The tweet was removed).

In a previous video Tucker suggests the Vineyarders should be joyful that 50 Venezuelans were sent to join them. After all, the island is 89% white, and since "diversity is our strength," welcoming 50 diverse Venezuelans should be a cause for celebration. But no joy--diversity was gone by military escort the following day.

So Mr. DeSantis has learned trolling from the master himself. And it's worked like a charm. It wiped Trump completely off the front pages for at least two days--important since the Dems want the election to be all about Trump. It makes the Dems left look ridiculous and hypocritical, reduced to phony accusations like "kidnapping" and "human trafficking, and asserting that everybody else is racist except for the enlightened denizens of Martha's Vineyard. Apparently Mr. DeSantis' trick forced the Biden administration to actually admit to a high-level meeting about immigration. Until now they've publicly ignored the issue. 

Though I've read enough commentary to realize that the Dem counterargument isn't entirely off-base, though it's clear Republicans won the news cycle by a country mile. The best Dem talking point was that the islanders' reception was not as hostile as Tucker will have you believe. (His "Froot Loops" segment is by far the weakest part of the video.) There were islanders who worked hard to make sure the Venezuelans got fed, showered, clothed and put up for the night. Yet it's odd that they couldn't persuade even 5 or 6 of them to stay on the island. Surely, with the nationwide labor shortage, there'd be more than enough work for them to do. And with the off-season island now full of empty hotel rooms, the purported lack of housing doesn't ring true either.

It was noted (I read this somewhere) that while the seasonal residents are the privileged, ultra-wealthy Obama-types, the year-round residents of the island are not like that at all. Instead, they're the servant class: the housemaids, groundskeepers, cops, chauffeurs, local officials, etc. Thus they responded as do similar workers in red states, i.e., with hostility to a large group of people who are coming to compete with them for jobs. (Not sure I believe that, though it could be part of the story.) As Tucker points out, red-staters in such circumstances are accused of being deplorable, bitter clinging racists. Obviously the Dems can't charge their own servants with such crimes--and hence the embarrassment. 

But both Tucker and the Dems miss the elephant in the room. They both conflate the Venezuelans with our American homeless population. And perhaps that's understandable, for they are, at least for the moment, homeless. They sleep on sidewalks, they haven't showered in weeks, they walked through the Darien Gap jungle, etc. The only thing missing are the hypodermic needles sticking out of their arms.

But the refugees are as different from our mentally-ill, addicted homeless people as night is from day. For the Venezuelans were, until a few years ago, solidly members of the middle class. Recall that their country used to be the richest in South America, until Hugo Chavez (enthusiastically cheered on by Progressives everywhere) put Venezuela on a path toward economic suicide. So these poor people have now spent the very last of their assets to come to the United States.

But, lack of money notwithstanding, these aren't really poor people. They're people with substance and middle class attitudes. They will do very well in America--like the Cubans before them.

• In three months they'll have a job and a place to live.
• In two years they'll speak English and own a car.
• In five years they'll have professional jobs and some of them will be buying houses.
• In fifteen years many of them will be citizens and they will vote.

None of these people will ever vote for anything that even remotely smells like socialism! That's why I call them the Future Republicans of America. Tucker sells them short--he thinks they're gonna be indigent indefinitely (as is likely true of many Salvadorans). He's afraid that they'll never assimilate into American culture and will change the country for the worse. He is just wrong!

The Dems are also wrong--though maybe deep down they realize what's happening. Inviting a whole bunch of incipient Republicans to NYC and DC (not to mention Martha's Vineyard) puts Democratic urban machine politics at risk. That's perhaps why they actually hate the immigrants so much that they have to get rid of them as fast as possible.

Tucker is wrong in another way as well. He shows a clip of Joe Biden saying that a country of 330 million can afford to bring in another two million immigrants. For once I'll side with Joe--he's right. Not only can we do it--we have to do it. American total fertility rates since the pandemic have dropped to about 1.7--well below replacement rate. We're not having enough babies. If red-staters really are worried about being "replaced," then part of the problem begins at home, specifically in the bedroom.

So we need a lot of new immigrants--but they shouldn't have to come this way. Why should a family have to traipse through the Darien Gap, and pay their very last coin to the Mexican Drug cartels in order to come the USA? There is absolutely no reason for that. We need the immigrants, and they want to come. We have to find a way to allow for legal immigration. There is more support for that than our media (left and right) are willing to admit.

But there are some conditions. The wall is a prerequisite. Before we can accept any large number of legal immigrants, we have to stop the illegal sort. We have to get control over our southern border. Second, we can't just accept low wage immigrants--that's unfair to our domestic workers. For every Honduran and Salvadoran, we need to also accept somebody with genuine skills, like nurses (e.g., more Filipinos). 

Biden, by irresponsibly and incompetently stopping the wall, has set back the cause for a higher rate of legal immigration by at least a decade. This, along with the disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, will mark his administration with shame.

Further Reading:

• A Leftist Criticizes the Left on Immigration
• Good Trump, Bad Trump
• Book Review: Nigel Farage

Althusser in America

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Montag states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump voters are no more misogynist than they are racist.

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist

Does Louis Proyect deny being a white supremacist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Proyect writes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

This is the book that Jack Barnes wishes he'd written. Mr. Barnes is the long-time leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who penned a tome entitled Are They Rich Because They're Smart? .

In today's book, The Cult of the Smart, author Frederik deBoer declares

This book is my prayer for the untalented, an attempt to show how badly our society and its people are hurt by the obsessive focus on schooling and smarts.

He does answer Mr. Barnes' question: they are rich because they're smart! This is unjust in two ways:

1. The emphasis on smart results in a meritocracy, namely a class of people that claim for themselves all the best jobs, and because they've done so well at school, they hold themselves morally superior to folks with low IQ scores. Mr. deBoer claims that most jobs don't require a high IQ, and sorting people by education is largely unjust.
2. "Smarts," aka intelligence (measured as IQ), is substantially genetically inherited--that is at least 50% of a person's IQ score can be attributed to genes. In this it is very much like musical talent, aptitude for basketball, or good vision, among many other traits. And while those attributes can contribute to a better life, smarts looms vastly larger in future outcomes. Intelligent people earn substantially more than the less intelligent. In Mr. deBoer's world, this is grossly unfair.

Mr. deBoer imagines himself a Marxist, and accordingly the real villains are the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the top 1%. But there not very many of them--only 1%--so while their economic importance is indisputable, their cultural influence is much weaker. For this they rely on the upper middle class--the top 20% of the population, and the best-educated people in the country. These are the folks who dominate academia, the media, politics, and the prestigious professions. They are, in a word, the meritocracy. This is also Mr. Barnes' point of view. 

The claim of the education establishment is that school is the great leveler--it gets everybody up to speed so they can compete in the modern economy. Mr. deBoer disagrees.

Because education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality. Far from making society more equal, our education system deepens inequality, sorting winners from losers and ensuring even greater financial rewards for the former. Nowhere is this dynamic more prevalent than in college.

He describes college as the "instrument of inequality." Students are tracked according to their IQ scores--those who are smart get ahead and eventually enroll at Harvard. The less gifted wind up at the local beauty school. It's deeply unfair.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do students perform badly because they attend bad schools? Or are the schools bad because they enroll poorly performing students? The received wisdom on the Left is the former answer--if we just equalized the schools, or the curriculum, or the funding, then all students would excel equally and educational inequality would disappear. This is termed the blank slate hypothesis--the contention that all children are equally endowed with intelligence, and all can learn calculus if they just try hard enough.

Mr. deBoer rejects the blank slate hypothesis. Summarizing current literature, he writes,

The relationship between genes and behavioral traits is neither perfect nor fixed; environment does matter, to a varying degree, and there are interventions that can ameliorate some of the impact of genes. The degree to which genes assert themselves varies over the course of life. Profoundly unequal environments for children can drown out genetic effects. There is also what behavioral geneticists call the "unshared environment," ...--the influence of unpredictable events, random chance, the flux of life. But none of that changes the fact that our genetic heritage deeply influences our behavioral selves, including our academic selves and that we should recognize that individual exceptions are less important than larger trends when we are dealing with broad populations. Like, say, when we're considering educational policy.

What Mr. deBoer writes about genes and behavioral traits corroborates the book Human Diversity, written by Charles Murray and which I regard as the leading textbook of the discipline. That Mr. deBoer and Mr. Murray mostly agree is something I find very reassuring.

Mr. deBoer urges his fellow Leftists to reject the Blank Slate dogma--the evidence for genetic influence on personality is too strong. By insisting on a manifestly false principle, the Left discredits itself.

In one important respect he disagrees with Mr. Murray--Mr. deBoer insists there are no racial or ethnic differences in IQ or other personality traits. He concedes that much is inherited--children tend to be as smart as their parents, who in turn take after their grandparents, and similarly are related to their cousins, nieces and nephews, and the whole clan. But to then claim that an ethnic group that practices endogamous marriage does not share on average a suite of personality traits is unreasonable. Of course they do--and in fact they must, as is amply and overwhelmingly demonstrated in Human Diversity.

Scott Alexander, in his lengthy review of The Cult of the Smart, argues that this opinion is not just a concession to political correctness, but rather a deeply held belief by Mr. deBoer--which Scott describes as vaguely irrational. But I think I have some insight here, because like Mr. deBoer, I have spent my career as a college professor. And I can tell you that thinking about IQ in racial categories is deeply, deeply destructive.

I used to teach general chemistry to a class of about 100 students--including a handful of Black students. It is horribly unfair to those students to walk into a classroom with the prejudice that Blacks aren't as smart as whites. For even if that is true on average, the students in my room are not average--they're not even close to average. For that matter, the white students aren't average, either--because anybody who enrolls in a general chemistry class is both smarter and more motivated than anything average. Conflating a half dozen individuals with an average over a large, and in this context irrelevant population is a huge category error. So big, in fact, that it's immoral. Anybody smart enough to read Charles Murray or Frederik deBoer should know better.

I think Mr. deBoer, with his otherwise irrational rejection of racial similarities, is responding to that immorality--and for that I give him props. But he's still wrong.

Mr. deBoer offers two lists of reforms--a list to be accomplished in the short-term, like under the Biden administration. And a more utopian list that might have to wait till after the revolution. Surprisingly, I agree with many items. I'll summarize in bullet points:

• "Provide Universal Childcare and Afterschool Care"-- He rejects the argument that either of these improve educational outcomes, but he supports it...

As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility for each of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.

Needless to say, I don't support this objective.

• "Lowering the Legal Dropout Age to 12"-- If the less-intelligent are forced to stay in school, then the obligation to graduate them requires the school to dramatically lower standards. Mr. deBoer documents this phenomenon at length. Among other things, it renders the high school diploma meaningless.
  
  I support this--our children spend waaaay too much time in school. An unmentioned corollary is that we need to let teenagers participate in the paid labor force--otherwise you have unsupervised kids out looking for trouble.
  
  
• "Eliminating Charter Schools"-- Why? I mostly accept Mr. deBoer's argument that charter schools yield no net positive educational benefit, but that misses the point for two reasons. First, while not changing the statistical average, charter schools may be of significant benefit to individuals. It's very much like the Black students in my gen-chem class--the average is irrelevant. All that matters are the individuals. Why not let students choose the school where they will be most successful?
  
  The second reason--even if there is no educational benefit--there are surely other benefits. There are, for example, advantages to children wearing uniforms--it likely saves the parents money. Scott mentions that kids can escape bullies by moving to a charter school. For many kids and parents, they're just more fun. Besides, they're cheaper than the public schools. I see no benefit in banning them.
  
  
• "Loosening Standards"-- I strongly agree with this one. We should abolish the absurd standards left over from the early 20th Century. My pet peeve--which Mr. deBoer also addresses--is the high school algebra requirement. Many kids will never pass it. Many more will pass it, but only at great cost in terms of time and misery. And to what end? If anything is less useful than high school algebra, I can't imagine what it is. Probably fewer than 1% of jobs in this country will require any facility in algebra, and computers can do it better than you can. The only people who should take algebra are people who are interested in mathematics for its own sake, or people who know they're headed for certain STEM careers.
  
  I feel the same way about long division. When was the last time any reader of this blog used long division? Likely not since the fourth grade. Waste of time.
  
  
• "College is Unnecessary for Living a Satisfying Life"-- Amen, brother! In college we have something called a general education program that's designed to turn you into an educated man or woman. In this day of unlimited bandwidth and instant access to any information you want, it's completely unnecessary. Anybody can go on YouTube and learn about anything from introductory electrical engineering to the Bible as literature, and everything else in between. The notion that you have to study all that at age 18 (when, frankly, most people are not interested) is almost as silly as learning algebra.
  
  If we canned the gen-ed programs, college could be shortened by a whole year, saving everybody a lot of time and money.
  
  I disagree with Mr. deBoer's claim that general education is mostly about racial bigotry.
  
  He spends most of the chapter discussing the salary benefits that accrue to college graduates. He rightly points out that it's mostly about native aptitude, not anything learned in school.
  
  My view is that college is useful for those people who enjoy school and are good at it. Everybody else should stay away. The worst thing you can do for your career is to go to college and then not graduate. That's a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your life. Better not to go to college at all.

The final chapter of the book lays out his idealistic perspective. It's complicated and I won't cover it here. Let me just pick out a snippet. 

The modern meritocracy doesn't judge itself by its material well-being, but instead ranks itself by status symbols: where you went to school, where and how intensively you've traveled, how Woke you are, how much you feign concern for the environment, etc. Mr. Barnes cites a similar list.

Mr. deBoer writes,

The old version of middle-class success--a two-car garage, a well-mowed lawn, and a big-ass television--seems simpler and more accessible, as it placed far less emphasis on success in a scarce number of fields ... But of course the heyday of this type of success was riven by racial and gender exclusion...

Like too many Leftists, Mr. deBoer grossly exaggerates the effects of racism. The problem was never racism as much as poverty--solve the poverty problem (which we've substantially done), and the "racism" mostly goes away.

And so those old middle-class ambitions have made a comeback--now expressed as Make America Great Again. The Left, of course, interprets it as "racism", but then they interpret everything that way. It's not racism. It is instead a plea to return to middle-class, bourgeois values that are much more democratic than those of our current meritocracy.

Mr. deBoer has written an excellent, very worthwhile book. Jack Barnes really needs to read it. 

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Are They Rich Because They're Smart?
• Book Review: Human Diversity
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education

 

Louis Proyect and "Degrowth"

I have often accused Louis Proyect of being pro-poverty (e.g., here, here, and here).

I did expect pushback at some point--how can a Marxist be in favor of poverty? Surely, I thought, Mr. Proyect would deny my charge and argue that he was indeed for human well-being.

What I didn't expect was a confession--Mr. Proyect explicitly admits to being pro-poverty! He concedes as much in an article entitled A reply to John Molyneux and Michael Lowy on degrowth. (Molyneux's paper is here; Lowy's can be found here.) "Degrowth" is a synonym for "we all need to take a big cut in our standard of living." He offers a succinct definition here:

Degrowth is completely focused on the question of how humanity can not only survive into the 22nd century but how can civilization continue until the planet dies due to astrophysical realities. It poses solutions based on the needs of a modest life-style that while giving up on SUV’s and all the other crap can allow the full development of the human being, who might have to work 10 hours a week while painting landscapes or growing orchids the rest of the time. That means addressing the population question that people like Molyneux recoils from.

The argument is that Joe, by not driving an SUV today, will measurably enhance the well-being of whatever civilization exists a billion years from now. This is ridiculous on its face!

At bottom, Mr. Proyect's philosophy is a death cult.

He makes two assumptions: first, he fails to discount the future--i.e., the comforts of his great-great-great grandchildren two hundred years from now are as, or even more important than our comforts today. This is ironic because I don't believe that Mr. Proyect even has any grandchildren, which renders the whole issue hypothetical. Since part of the proposed solution is reducing the birth rate, putative future generations won't exist at all. How's that for a wonderful life?

Second, he supposes he can predict the future. He knows with unseemly confidence that Joe's SUV is gonna ruin the climate--not just now, but literally for all time! I think he's almost certainly (99.999%) wrong about climate change--whatever that is, it isn't an existential threat, and future generations (much less distant civilizations) will not remember us for our carbon profligacy.

I can't possibly go through all the bullshit in his correspondents' two papers. Lowy's piece is so far detached from reality that it establishes him firmly among the 99% of academics that give the remaining 1% a bad name.

Our authors completely ignore capitalism's benefit to consumers. Capitalism produces the goods and services that we want to buy and which greatly prolong and enhance our lives. Claiming that capitalism's sole benefit is profit for the capitalist is simply not true.

They all maintain that democratic decision making will make for a better environment, arguing that somehow the majority will elevate the interests of future civilizations billions of years from now over those of their own children (or themselves) today. There is no evidence for that. Joe with his SUV gets to vote just as much as Mr. Proyect.

Their claim that capitalism wastes resources is not true. A capitalist wants to cut costs, which means using as few resources as possible. Now there are issues that arise from "the tragedy of the commons," i.e., people passing environmental costs on to their neighbors. This is where government has to step in and why we need an EPA (the purpose of which is not to preserve the environment for the next billion years). But for the most part, capitalism wastes as little as possible, and is therefore much cleaner than rival societies, such as socialist ones.

Most regrettably, our friends want to limit people to working 10 hours per week--they can spend the rest of their time "painting landscapes or growing orchids." But they're not allowed to earn any extra money! They can't start a business--not even a lemonade stand--because somebody a billion years from now might object.

Trading goods and services is a uniquely human trait--no other animal does that. Mr. Proyect calls it "working," and we're now supposed to be forbidden from doing it. This is like being in prison--where they sit around all day painting landscapes.

Somehow Mr. Proyect concocts a wood shortage--mysteriously there is now a dearth of trees. Capitalism is "[s]o efficient at reducing forests to toothpicks." He writes,

Molyneux proceeds to define some of the norms we can expect under world ecosocialism. This one stuck out for me: “The extensive retrofitting of homes”. I am not sure what this means exactly but it would point to the banning of any house or apartment over 3,000 square feet for a family of four. I’m definitely for that but within such an advanced new way of sheltering, how do we create the furniture that people need for a modicum of comfort? We certainly need chairs, tables, beds, desks, and bookshelves, don’t we? Can we have a socialist Ikea that supplies such basics?

In this new ecosocialist utopia, some bureaucrat is gonna tell you "you can't have that end table. We need to save the wood for the folks living a billion years from now."

Some people would prefer to have fine furniture to painting landscapes. Who are these ecosocialist creeps to tell them they can't do that?

One thing I really don't understand about ecosocialists is their fixation on "mass transit." Somehow they imagine that a technology from the early 1900s is the ultimate solution to problems faced by civilizations a billion years from now. I don't get it.

So how do people get to work? In 2019 (before the pandemic), 1.4% of American commuters took mass transit, while 5.3% worked from home. (These are median numbers from a list of 110 US metropolitan areas.) Since then transit's share has collapsed. Ridership in the New York metro is down as much as 90%, while the work from home share has skyrocketed. As of September, 2020, 33% of all employees worked exclusively from home, while another 25% worked from home for part of the week. Only 42% of American workers still go to the office or factory every day.

This trend may partially reverse post-pandemic, but it will never go back to where it was. The number of people working in Lower Manhattan or Chicago's Loop is now permanently reduced.

Please, Mr. Proyect--tell us why you think we need more buses and subways? (And let's forget about streetcars, which average speed is only 19 mph!)

The whole mass transit thing is an anachronism. And the whole ecosocialism thing is a vile religious movement that is very bad for children and other living men and women.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• George Novack Then and Now
• Book Review: The Fall of Rome

Who Should Trotskyists Vote For in 2020?

In a post by the Solidarity Green Party Working Group entitled Solidarity and the 2020 presidential election, they write

As reported in Solidarity’s Election Poll, a Solidarity internal poll found that 47% of respondents supported voting for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker running as Greens in the 2020 presidential election, 27% supported voting for Hawkins and Walker where the Democrats are assured of winning and for Joe Biden in “swing states,” 21% supported voting for Biden everywhere (motivated as “Dump Trump, fight Biden”), and 5% provided comments but selected none of the three options. ...

How did Solidarity, a revolutionary socialist organization founded on the principle of working-class political independence, get to this point? And not just Solidarity. How did the revolutionary socialist movement get to this point? We ask the question not to recriminate but to discern a way forward.

For any Trotskyist--current or former--the problem is self-evident. As a core principle Trotskyists refuse to cross the class line and will not support a "bourgeois" party. The Democrats are the very essence of a bourgeois party, and accordingly no self-respecting Trotskyist of whatever denomination will support them. My former comrades adamantly reject lesser-evilism, i.e., voting for a Democrat just because he seems more progressive than the Republican. The dogma is that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same--both representing the bourgeoisie.

The principle distinguishes Trotskyism from the Stalinist tradition which has long supported progressive Democrats, this year championing Bernie Sanders, and now Joe Biden. The Bob Avakian Fan Club, self-avowed Stalinists, write "It is crucial that there be a massive vote against Trump—which means voting for Biden."

Aversion to Democrats is often taken to extreme lengths. This year both the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Socialist Action (SA) are running their own candidates. In the SWP's case this extends a long tradition, and at least the completely useless effort is competently executed. SA, meanwhile, has put forth the laughably ridiculous Jeff Mackler as their candidate--they're not serious.

My friends at Solidarity rightly regard these old-fashioned Trotskyist campaigns as farcical, and accordingly they're looking beyond sectarian Trotskyism for solutions. Their current best choice looks to be Green Party candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker. There is precedent: in the 2016 cycle they supported Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. Prior to that SWP alum Peter Camejo was the Green Party candidate for Governor of California for three elections, beginning in 2002.

The SWP and SA accuse the Green Party of being middle class, which somehow puts them beyond the pale. The SWP is at least consistent, regarding the entire environmentalist movement as middle class, and therefore not worthy of support. SA supports radical environmentalism, but without supporting the Green Party.

The original leaders of Solidarity are all former members of the SWP, and for them the class line is a solid barrier--thou shalt not cross it! Which is why they're so astonished and disappointed that so many of their new colleagues (never part of the SWP) even countenance voting for Democrats.

The opposite, non-Trotskyist position is held by Bob Avakian, who writes (italics in original)

To approach this election from the standpoint of which candidate is “better” means failing to understand the truly profound stakes and potential consequences of what is involved. The fact is that there can be one—and only one—“good” that can come out of this election: delivering a decisive defeat to Trump and the whole fascist regime. Doing this would create far better conditions for continuing to wage the struggle against everything represented by the Trump/Pence regime and all the oppression and injustices of this system, and would be a great gift to the people of the world.

His claim is that Trump is qualitatively different from Biden because he's a fascist. Therefore, however bad Biden may be, he must be supported.

In contrast, the old majority within Solidarity argue this way:

Left advocates of voting for Biden generally give Trump as the reason. Trump is indeed a menace. His views may be no worse than those of Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. But he is self-indulgent, chaotic and demagogic far beyond what they allowed themselves. His appeals to white chauvinism are effective with segments of the population, especially older white men. They bamboozle some white workers, who have real grievances but misdirect their anger.

If the U.S. were on the brink of fascism or military dictatorship and a vote for Biden were the last line of defense, perhaps advocating it could be justified. Although it wouldn’t achieve much. It would be like throwing a handkerchief at a charging bear. But the U.S. isn’t on the brink of fascism or military dictatorship. We’re at a highly polarized moment in the alternating administrations of the two-party system.

An article by John B. Cannon makes the case that one should strategically vote for Biden in states where the election is close, while casting a protest vote elsewhere. He writes

On the flip side, of course, Trump is a relatively weak authoritarian. It seems unlikely that he could consolidate a fascistic or authoritarian regime without vestiges of democratic checks, since neither the military nor most of the bourgeoisie support him. ... However, under Trump’s leadership, part of the Republican Party is blurring the line between fascism and right-wing nationalist, authoritarian aspirations, and Republican elected leaders are increasingly unable to operate independently of Trump’s personalistic command. In sum, the politics of fascism are very much at hand, even if the immediate possibility of a fascist consolidation ... is not.

He asks, "What’s a brink, and how do you know you are on it?" Mr. Cannon suggests we're not yet on the brink of fascism, but nevertheless this is a "crisis," perhaps like Germany in 1929 (not 1933). While Trump himself may not lead the way, a future, more competent fascist could really lead us over the brink. Therefore now is the time to stand up against fascism and vote for Biden where it actually makes some electoral difference, i.e., in swing states. Thus, in extremis, lesser-evilism is justified.

A full-fledged turn into the Democratic Party is advocated by Bill Resnick, a personality from Portland, OR. In an article weirdly entitled Dump Trump, Fight and Force Biden: An Electoral Strategy for the Left, he wants to have his cake and eat it too. That is, to vote for Biden while opposing him every step of the way.

He writes,

But just to be clear: everything said about Biden by those who argue against voting for him is true. These truths however, in this moment, don’t carry the day, if you believe, as I do, that Trump has to be stopped in his tracks, repudiated, to decisively interrupt the downward spiral toward a white supremacist autocracy. And a strategic vote for Biden makes sense since his administration will be forced to bargain with “progressive” Democrats in the Congress, and it should be possible to win significant programs, call them non-reformist or revolutionary reforms.

He explains what those reforms are:

We don’t have to wait until after the election to fight for a package of “non-reformist” reforms. By non-reformist reforms I mean programs and policies that:

• Demonstrate the virtues of radically democratic organizations and social relations which prove that “Every Cook Can Govern” – for example, worker-owned and controlled co-ops, democratically-run teams to treat chronic diseases, participatory budgeting in local government.
• Honor and reward the skills and contributions of those in non-elite, professional, college diploma- requiring work.
• Significantly shift political power downward and outward and Increase social organization and power at the base of our society.
• Provide a solid social safety net that increases the confidence and fighting power of the working class.
• Challenge all hierarchy including based on race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, and spiritual practice.

This, to my mind, is straight-out utopianism, and is not possible even under perfect communism, much less from Sleepy Joe Biden. These hippie-like reforms are a far cry from a Trotskyist transitional program. In my day we would have called it a popular front, i.e., forming a coalition with the bourgeoisie. It seems the old guard in Solidarity agrees with that assessment.

Trotskyism has always struggled between sectarian purity, on the one hand, and big-tent alliances on the other. The solution (insofar as one exists) is a united front consisting of only working class organizations. The antiwar movement as represented by the Student Mobilization Committee was the obvious (and perhaps only) successful example. Though it's not clear how that success has furthered the American Revolution.

Popular fronts work better. Martin Luther King's demands--all won through Republican and a few Democrat politicians--have resulted in enduring gains for civil rights in America. American democracy is strong enough, and capitalism successful enough, that wealth and privileges can be extended across society.

I disagree with my Trotskyist friends: I do not think Trump is a fascist--quite the contrary. Instead of growing government, he is trying to shrink it. Unlike BLM and Antifa, he does not have gangs of thugs on the streets. He is no threat to our democracy, having never once disobeyed a court order. He's neither racist nor white supremacist--he simply rejects ridiculous political correctness.

So this blog enthusiastically endorses Donald J. Trump for president--and not as a lesser evil, either.

Further Reading:

• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Book Review: Bronze Age Mindset

Election 2020

Two days after I announced the End of Jeff Mackler's Campaign (posted 9/15), the candidate resurrected himself with a short piece entitled Socialist Action 2020 Presidential Candidate Jeff Mackler: No to Trump’s Coup Threat! (posted 9/17). He repeats every Democratic talking point in the book:

Socialist Action is in no way indifferent to Trump’s threat to cancel the 2020 election or to ignore its results on election day should he lose, or attempts to undermine the right to vote by defunding the Post Office to make the prompt counting of ballots difficult or using U.S. Supreme Court rulings to approve racist gerrymandering of districts and other undemocratic measures aimed at reducing the vote of Black and Latinx people. While we have always exposed the reactionary nature of bourgeois elections and all their anti-democratic aspects, we are far from the point of ceding this institution to would-be tyrants like Trump.

Mr. Mackler's supposed defense of free elections is hypocrisy on steroids. Trotskyists--including Socialist Action--put no faith in "bourgeois elections," and participate in them only until they can put together a big enough mob to overthrow the system illegally, after which all elections will be banned. Or if not, then after the Revolution Mr. Mackler will win with 99.9% of the vote. The remaining 0.1% will be put in front of a firing squad.

My original post elicited a comment from UNAC Blog (United National Antiwar Coalition), which looks like an ultraleft front group for Socialist Action. The comment reads in full,

It seems that during this time, as we go through COVID, have had a massive response to cop killings and racism, as jobs are lost, rents coming due and the capitalist parties moving to the right and showing no way forward, the example of an independent socialist campaign - even a small one- is better than none at all.

I have no complaint about a small, independent socialist campaign--I only insist that it be competently run, especially if it claims the Trotskyist banner. "Competent" means, among other things, choosing a candidate with some minimal level of charisma.

I'll suggest that the Socialist Workers Party campaign of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett fits the bill. They're small, socialist, and in the larger scheme of things completely inconsequential. But they're out on the campaign trail, they seek endorsements from outside their own movement, and I believe they'll be on the ballot in at least a few states. 

If you don't like them, then vote for the Green Party.

True to form, Mr. Mackler hasn't been heard from since Sept. 17th--so I'll stand by my claim that the campaign is moribund. (By the way, whatever happened to Heather Bradford, who was initially chosen as his running mate? Unfortunately she left in the Socialist Resurgence split (h/t commenter John B)and is now a designated non-person--likely one of those destined for the firing squad after the Revolution.)

But back to the Democratic talking points that Mr. Mackler so proudly regurgitates in his lede paragraph.

Mr. Trump has never vowed to remain in office illegally. He has promised to appeal close election results all the way to the Supreme Court, which is his right. This becomes "undemocratic" only if he disobeys a court order--which he's never done and almost certainly won't do. (If he does then everybody, including me, will oppose him.) The Democrat's fearmongering about Trump organizing a coup is just that--fearmongering. (Indeed, it looks more plausible that the Dems organized a coup against Trump beginning in 2016.)

Likewise, the post office is not being defunded. It's got plenty of money through the end of the fiscal year, i.e., through the election. The debate is over next year's funding.

For somebody who is trying to "reduc[e] the vote of Black and Latinx people", Mr. Trump is sure spending a lot of time and money to recruit them as voters. He's gone out of his way to blame only Antifa (the all-white fascist grouping) for the violence, only rarely mentioning Black Lives Matter (the half-white fascist grouping). He's made numerous promises to help the Black community economically--and unlike the Dems, Trump tries hard to keep his promises.

It's worth noting that both Blacks and Latinos are very much in support of the police--unlike the white fascist-types that want to "defund the police." Not even Al Sharpton supports BLM on this issue. Kamala Harris can't make up her mind, and Joe Biden has no mind to make up.

Just recently, Joe Biden compared Mr. Trump to Joseph Goebbels. In other words, the accusations against Trump have gotten so extreme and so far removed from reality that it looks likely to backfire on them.

The New York Times claims to have detailed information about Trump's tax returns, from which the bottom line is that there's nothing in there that we didn't know already. He has no big investments in Russia. He didn't launder money through Russia. He took a big loss on his casinos, which he has been able to deduct from his subsequent income meaning that he's paid no income tax in recent years. He's being audited because of a large refund he got ten years ago, which if he loses he'll be on the hook for $100 million.

He has done nothing illegal--or even unethical. He's simply followed the rules the way they were written, which is what taxpayers do everywhere.

I predict Mr. Trump will win reelection, perhaps by a large electoral vote margin. The reason is (as Conrad Black puts it) that the Biden-Harris ticket is unfeasible. Biden is clearly in mental decline. He can't speak extemporaneously to the media--not even friendly media. He's increasingly unable to even read from a teleprompter. He is simply incapable of being president, regardless of any ideology. He can't state any reason for his candidacy except that he hates Trump.

The Democratic strategy is to a) let Trump destroy himself with his supposedly outrageous comments, and b) to tar him with whatever scandal they can come up with. Meanwhile, Biden is supposed to sit in his basement and appeal to his image as being "a nice guy" who's "one of us." The problem with this is that Trump is a known quantity--the man is an open book. There is no new information to be had about the man, and the notion there's some smoking gun somewhere is an illusion.

This won't work. Trump-hatred will not win a majority of voters, and without a positive reason people won't vote for Mr. Biden. The basement campaign will fail.

What's more mysterious to me is why they're keeping Ms. Harris under wraps. After all, given Joe's age and obvious infirmities, Kamala is likely to be president within the first term. Nobody really knows who she is, and I think the public is too risk averse to take a chance on a complete unknown.

So here's Mr. Mackler's chance! As bad as he is as a candidate, he is better than Joe Biden. At least he had the courage to go up against Paul Duddridge, which is more than I can say for cowardly Joe. And even though his program is completely wacko, at least there is one. The man has something to say.

Mr. Mackler's meager virtues notwithstanding, this blog endorses Donald J. Trump for President.

Further Reading:

• The New Socialist Resurgence Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Craine has actually been to Kenosha. She writes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ms. Craine writes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Left Voice on Trump's Tulsa Rally

I made some changes to This Blog's Beat, i.e., the list of blogs in the right sidebar I promise to cover fairly regularly. I deleted Counterpunch and the Freedom Socialist Party--the former because apart from Louis Proyect's articles I almost never read it, and the latter because it's boring and useless.

Meanwhile, I've added Left Voice (h/t Louis Proyect) which proves to be an interesting rag full of great discussion topics. I previously described it as "published by a collective of New York City college professors virtue-signalling their revolutionary socialism." That was slightly unfair: they're not all professors, some of them are adjuncts, others teachers, then there are grad students, and at least one taxi driver who's probably fallen off the academic ladder somewhere. But they're all educated, intelligent people who have something to say.

The article for today is entitled The Great American Comeback? Trump Resumes His Re-Election Campaign With Bizarre Speech in Tulsa. The author is Ezra Brain, "a NYC based theatre artist and teacher."

Mr. Brain echoes the MSM that Trump is likely to lose in November. The polls are against him, and now even the betting markets are against him. I will point out that both MSM and the polls were wrong in 2016--but being wrong once doesn't mean they're always wrong. I find Biden to be a singularly unfeasible candidate--an incompetent, senile reincarnation of Hillary Clinton. MSM notwithstanding, I can't believe he'll win the election. So I'm still putting my money on Trump.

Mr. Brain mentions Covid:

The rally was controversial from its announcement. To begin with, experts almost universally agree that holding a rally with thousands of people during the current pandemic poses significant risk to all participants.

I agree with him that holding the rally was a risky proposition. I was shocked and disappointed that most attendees were not wearing masks--it makes them look stupid. I'll also note (as Mr. Brain does not) that the arena was only half full, and that the overflow crowd was mostly nonexistent. There are three theories for why:

1. People were afraid of the virus and therefore stayed away. I know I would not have attended.
2. AOC has a theory that a TikTok mob post went viral and inspired folks to reserve tickets without any intention of attending the rally.
3. Scott Adams goes along with the TikTok theory, but suggests it was a Chinese plot--TikTok is a Chinese company.

I dunno--I think virus fear is the most likely culprit. But some version of TikTok foul play may also be possible.

Mr. Brain is obsessed with "dog whistles." These are words and phrases that are presumably used to communicate "racism" to the intended audience, while leaving the rest of us ignorant. But Mr. Brain is on to the scheme, and so acutely sensitive is he to these dog whistles that he thinks he understands Mr. Trump's motivations even better than Trump himself.

For example, Mr. Brain thinks "thug" is a racial term--a connotation that even I, a retired academic and dedicated right-winger, never realized. Thug is defined as "a violent person, especially a criminal." Mr. Trump has almost exclusively blamed white thugs for the looting and violence--first and foremost Antifa, and more recently also white supremacists. He even blamed the white, elderly bozo from Buffalo who got himself knocked over by the cops. I can't recall Trump ever blaming Black street gangs for the problems, even though they were obviously also involved.

Mr. Brain accuses Trump of using "Juneteenth" as a racist dog whistle. By originally scheduling the rally for that day, and then a few days before rescheduling it, Trump has somehow revealed his inner racism. Huh? If he was so racist, why didn't he insist on holding rally on Juneteenth just out of principle?

Then Trump held the rally in Tulsa--site of a racist pogrom against Black people in March, 1921. The problem with Trump is not racism, but rather ignorance--he doesn't read. All his information comes from cable news, and until Juneteenth and the pogrom hit the news networks he knew nothing about them. This is not dog whistling.

It's not just Trump, but also Joe Biden.

The contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric on the uprisings built to a head when he launched a hypocritical full-on assault on Biden’s record on race. Making a series of shockingly salient points, he pointed out Biden’s personal affinity for segregationists, his terrible voting record, and how the economic policies that Biden has long-supported have impoverished Black Americans. The climax of the attack came with Trump declaring, seemingly unaware of the irony that the statement could just as easily apply to himself, that “racial justice begins when Joe Biden retires from public life.” That Donald Trump, with his decades-long history of racism, was able to mount such a valid attack against his opponent is as clear a sign as any that many of the differences between the two parties are cosmetic. Both Biden and Trump are racists ...

I don't see "Donald Trump's decades-long history of racism." Nowhere has Trump demanded a return to Jim Crow. He doesn't advocate the repeal of the voting rights act. He'd oppose any change in the public accommodations law. Unlike Biden, he's never hung out with avowed segregationists. I've never even heard him criticizing affirmative action! Apart from largely imaginary "dog whistles", Mr. Brain has no evidence of Trump's enduring racism.

I don't think Biden is a racist, either--he's just a Democrat. Democrats are fundamentally unprincipled and don't believe in anything except "higher taxes" and "bigger government." Mr. Biden will go whichever way the wind blows on race. He once hung out with segregationists; today he wants to "defund the police."

Neither Donald nor Joe are more racist than the average septuagenarian white guy.

Mr. Brain writes:

It was on statues that Trump most clearly stoked white nationalist sentiment. After first referencing the Confederate statue in DC that had been taken down and burned by protesters the night before, Trump began to make a series of statements about “our heritage.” These remarks directly played to the most radicalized sectors of his base ...He also said the radical left wants to “tear down our statues and punish and cancel anyone who does not conform to their demands.” 

Some statues should be torn down, and some shouldn't be. The distinction needs to be deliberate and sensitive, and the process legal. What is unacceptable is for a mob of Antifa thugs to tear down statues as an act of violence.

He also made the intentionally vague declaration that “We used to have things, we don’t anymore, because we want to be open.” What exactly these things that we can’t have anymore because we want to be open are, he never clarified.

We used to have football games and tailgate parties. We used to go to concerts and theaters. We used to eat in restaurants. Yet Mr. Brain puts this all into his "dog whistle" category. He really is dense--bordering on kookiness.

Of all people, Mr. Brain should hope that Trump's rally is successful. If only a few people get sick, then likely we can open up theaters sooner rather than later. As a theater person Mr. Brain should appreciate that.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on Reopening
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• Our President is a Pacifist