Cosmetics, Cuba & Mary-Alice Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is her answer to question one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Mary-Alice on Cosmetics & Fashion

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

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

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

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

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

It is about capitalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

A Woman's Place Is....

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, later on, she writes

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

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

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

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

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

She writes,

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

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

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

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

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

How is this going to make raising a child cheaper?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

The SWIP Flips to SWOP

Totally relevant picture about abortion (Source)

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

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

The lede paragraph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The SWOP is a FLOP. 

Allow me a personal reminiscence here.

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

 

Oberlin, 2023

 

Laura Garza leading comrades in prayer
(MILITANT/ARTHUR HUGHES)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), publishers of The Militant, report on their recent International Educational Conference held June 8 - 10 in Oberlin, Ohio. There are two articles describing the event, both written by Steve Clark and Terry Evans--members of the Party's core leadership. They're entitled Socialist Workers Party leadership sets course ahead and ‘A road forward to raise workers’ confidence in our own capacities’. One can think of these as being news and commentary, respectively, and for brevity I'll refer to them as such.

The news piece highlights the report given by Jack Barnes, the national secretary and Party's chief honcho. We're told that 333 people attended the conclave, including representatives from Canada, the UK and Australia, which seems around average for prior years. The article lists the agenda in a series of bullet points, which I quote here in shortened format.

In addition to defense of constitutional freedoms, the report by the party’s national secretary adopted by the June 12 leadership meeting focused on:

• The centrality of organizing solidarity through the unions ...
• Why advancing women’s emancipation cannot be reduced to the fight for the decriminalization of abortion. ...
• The necessity of a proletarian internationalist course. ...
• Why the unions must lead in forging an alliance of workers and exploited farmers ...
• Why achieving any of these goals requires the working class and trade unions to break from the Democrats, Republicans ...
• Advancing the revolutionary fight by the working class to remove state power, including the power to make war, from the ruling class and to establish a workers and farmers government that, as the SWP Constitution says, “will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism.”

The Party is justly proud of its defense of Constitutional rights, which has been a tradition since its founding. Indeed, I'm proud to say that I've been consistent on the subject as well, defending the SWP's right to free speech and to equal treatment under the law back when I was a comrade, and extending the same defense to Donald Trump and his followers today. Clark & Evans point out that

The same espionage statute wielded by Biden against Trump was used in 1918 to jail Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for his support for the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution and opposition to U.S. imperialism’s predatory aims in World War I.

The SWP is the only organization on the Left that I'm aware of that is consistent in its support of Constitutional rights for ALL citizens, including both Trump and Debs (and James Cannon imprisoned under the Smith Act). For this it deserves considerable credit.

The Party's statement on women's rights is also more sensible than you'd expect. They write,

The starting point in the battle for women’s emancipation, Barnes said, is recognizing and addressing the growing social and economic crises that prevent working people starting families and providing for them. That means fighting for jobs  with wage rates, work schedules and conditions that make family time possible — time for social activity together, sports, recreation, caring for children who are sick or need help with their homework, help for the aging. Time for family members to read, to take part in union, political and cultural activity.

Astonishingly, the Party is both pro-child and pro-family, which makes their decades-long championing of abortion rather embarrassing. The topic was debated during last year's convention, which resulted in the book The low point of labor resistance is behind us, which I reviewed here. Abortion, instead of being legalized should now only be decriminalized. I'm not sure what the difference is, but the latter makes it sound less important. Mr. Barnes goes on to say

The political course pursued by Democrats, the middle-class left and leaders of today’s bourgeois-minded women’s organizations, however, heads in the opposite direction, Barnes said. They reduce the fight for women’s rights to abortion access, campaigning for capitalist (almost always Democratic Party) politicians and “breaking the glass ceiling” to get more women into well-remunerated professional and managerial positions.

The Party is much more sensible than their nuttier comrades on the Left, who believe in 52 genders and that a man can transition into a woman simply by putting on a dress. The Party actually believes in fertility, which places them in the realm of sane political discourse.

But I won't go along with their communist project to socialize all childcare. This is a totalitarian project.

The commentary article tells us that a "proletarian internationalist course" actually consists of: solidarity with the Cuban "revolution."

The socialist conference opened with a political report by Mary-Alice Waters. Having led three political trips to Cuba this year by teams of cadres in the SWP and broader communist movement, Waters focused, among other topics, on political and leadership lessons of Cuba’s socialist revolution and Washington’s intensifying efforts to crush it.

The news yields a bit more information:

Barnes pointed to the global media blitz Washington has begun cranking up, alleging Chinese government spying operations in Cuba — charges Cuban leaders rebutted as “mendacious and unfounded” lies. Such false charges, the SWP leader said, are in line with the Biden administration’s course — building on that of the Trump White House and every Democratic and Republican administration for some 65 years — to overturn the socialist revolution in Cuba. 

That's it--endless solidarity and uncritical acceptance of everything the Cuban government says is all there is to internationalism. 

The Party's union work is so small scale and unimportant that it's barely worth mentioning. To wit:

Organizing solidarity is the backbone of work to strengthen the unions. Barnes pointed to the recent example of eight rail workers, all members of SMART-TD Local 1373, joining the picket line of striking Teamsters at Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages in Philadelphia last month. They brought several hundred dollars to donate to the strike fund.

Eight workers and a few hundred dollars adds up to a hill of beans. For what it's worth, the Party doesn't participate in what is probably the most viable union movement around: Labor Notes. I posted a piece on that, and in the comments I point out why I think the SWP abstains. I stand by that comment.

Similarly, getting the unions to break with Democrats is a lost cause--the Democrats have all the money and also power to change labor laws. More, unionists intrinsically understand economics better than my Trotskyist friends, blinded as they are by Marxist theology. The issue is about divvying up the producer surplus, not about who owns the means of production. The unions have got that right.

The last bullet point is simply a religious assertion--it has no practical consequence whatsoever. It is to Trotskyism what Judgement Day is to Christianity. But, beyond narrow pork barrel issues, it's a religious and moral impulse that motivates humans to engage in politics at all. And that's the role of the last bullet--it puts everything into moral perspective and justifies all the efforts (however futile) in trying to get from here to there.

The photo of Ms. Garza highlights the commentary article, and frankly "prayer" was the first word that came to my mind when I saw it. I doubt Ms. Garza experienced it that way, but if she's talking about that last bullet point--the ultimate purpose of the whole thing--then prayer is exactly what it was. And so, however unintentionally, The Militant's photographer and editor have accurately illustrated what the Socialist Workers Party is all about.

Amen, Amen!

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• Wittenberg, 2022
• Cuba Needs More Communism!

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In their defense, the Report cites Leon Trotsky himself:

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

They are also very clear about who their opponents are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hint might be this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

 

Elise Stefanik

Elise Stefanik is one of New York's own, and as such I'm partial to her. She represents my adopted state.

She grew up in suburban Albany, where her parents run a lumber supply business. She graduated from Harvard College, i.e., she's among the smartest people on the planet. Following graduation she went to work in the Bush White House doing foreign policy stuff. After Obama's election, she returned to Albany to help run her parents' business. When in 2014 Democrat Bill Owens decided not to run for re-election for Congress from New York's 21st district, she bought a house in Willsboro (Essex County) and ran for the seat. She won, and has won every re-election since by convincing margins. She was the youngest congressman (30) when first elected. She since got married and lives in Schuylerville (Saratoga County).

She's now running for House Republican Conference Chair to succeed the politically tarnished Liz Cheney. Her credentials are political backslapping, prodigious fund raising (I think she's among the dollar leaders), and, unlike Liz, her vocal and unwavering support for Trump during both his impeachment hearings. That has earned her strong support from DJT, and also from Steve Scalise, the House minority whip. Kevin McCarthy doesn't seem to like her very much, though he's decided not to oppose her.

But a lot of people (incl. the Club for Growth) have come out against, calling her too liberal. They do have a point:

• She is a squish on abortion. While she consistently opposes any taxpayer funding for the procedure, she's against making it illegal.
• She opposed Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Accords. She's trying to stake out middle ground in climate issues.
• She opposed Trump's troop withdrawal from Syria, and I assume she opposes our pending withdrawal from Afghanistan.
• Like the entire NY delegation, she opposed removing the SALT deduction.
• She opposed reallocating DoD funds to pay for the border wall (though I don't think this was because of opposition to the wall).
• She supported the LGBTQ rights bill.

In other words, say her detractors, she's no better than Liz Cheney.

Despite her support for the president, she clearly is not a Trump Republican. She isn't even a Reagan Republican. I think one has to go back to Calvin Coolidge to find a good analogue.

Calvin was born in Plymouth Center, Vermont, barely 75 miles from where Elise now lives. He attended college at Amherst in Northampton, MA. In those days Amherst was a legit good school for men, cultivating the rock-ribbed, Republican attitudes for which New Englanders were famous. Following college he apprenticed himself to a law firm (he was the last lawyer president not to have attended law school), and then lived in Northampton for the rest of his life, except for the time that he spent in the Governor's mansion in Boston or in the White House in DC. I'm informed by the excellent biography by Amity Shlaes.

Cal ran as vice-president under Warren Harding. The latter was a gregarious, happy, intelligent man whose campaign slogan was "Back to Normal." By that he meant undoing the near dictatorship of Woodrow Wilson, inspired by WWI. Wilson was as close to a fascist president as America has ever had, and surrounded himself by a coterie of like-minded people, e.g., Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. He curtailed both civil liberties and economic freedoms, and Harding's campaign promised to undo all of that. Harding won easily.

Unfortunately, Harding had one great flaw: he couldn't say NO. The result was people walked all over him and his administration became grossly corrupt, topped off by the Teapot Dome scandal. I think Harding would eventually have been impeached, but fortunately for the country he died first, and in 1923 the vastly more competent Silent Cal took over. Coolidge stuck to the same principles--shrinking government, counting every penny in the government fisc, and undoing all the civil liberties restrictions. The result was the roaring economy for which the '20s are famous.

So what is this Rock-Ribbed Republicanism so ably represented by Coolidge?

• Pragmatism. Rock-Ribbed Republicans do not go for Grand Eternal Schemes. Just solve today's problems as they come along.
• Moderation. No radical proposals. Put together viable coalitions.
• Thrift, bordering on asceticism, in both government and personal budgets.
• "City on a Hill." The USA is an exceptional country and therefore has exceptional responsibilities. We can't just abandon the rest of the world. We must live up to our high standards.
• High moral principles. For Coolidge that meant personal virtues; for modern politicians it's more likely to mean social justice virtues, such as LBGTQ rights,

Obviously, Elise isn't the same as Calvin Coolidge--we live in different times, and she's a different person, not least female. But if history doesn't repeat, it's easy to see the rhyme. She holds pragmatic, moderate positions--ones likely to piss off the extremes, such as Club for Growth. I'll bet she's a believer in balanced budgets--were she in charge we'd have no $2 trillion spending bills. She lives modestly, and there's no hint of corruption in her background.

Elise obviously has political ambitions beyond Congress. She aspires to statewide and/or national offices, and rumor has it she's considering a run for governor in 2022. I don't think the presidency is off her radar screen--she certainly has the smarts to pull it off. Let's consider her options.

• Her biggest hurdle for statewide office is not that she's a Republican, but rather that she is from Upstate. Her district is in the far northern reaches of New York, surrounding the Adirondack Park. Its population is nearly 60% rural. Her constituents are as far removed from the problems of New York City as it is possible to be. Needless to say, all postwar governors have built their political careers Downstate, in or near the City. The northernmost recent governor--George Pataki--hailed from Peekskill, in Westchester County. Beating a Downstate Democrat for statewide office will be a stretch, no matter how smart she is.
  
• On the other hand, her gender and pragmatic moderation make her the suburban woman's ideal candidate. Upstate notwithstanding, she's gonna poll well on Long Island and in Westchester County. Will that be enough to put her over the top? It will take a miracle, but it could happen.
• On the third hand, by his very brashness Trump was able to appeal to Black and (esp.) Hispanic voters. Elise's district, by contrast, is 90% white, and only 3% African-American. New England and Upstate New York is a part of the country uniquely inhospitable to Black folks. Cal never had to worry about that--but Elise does. Most New England politicians have the same problem, e.g., Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

I think the Republican Party needs to be a bigger tent than narrow Trumpism, and a champion for Rock-Ribbed Republicanism is a good thing. My biggest beef with her is the climate change shtick, which I think is mostly fake news. But I trust her enough to believe she's not gonna do anything really stupid, like ban airplanes or prohibit fracking. I admire her for standing up for Trump during the impeachment witch hunts--Coolidge-style loyalty counts for something.

To win a nationwide contest she'll have to expand her coalition beyond New York/New England. That's a big hurdle--Yankees aren't popular in much of the country. Just ask Liz Warren or Bernie about that.

So even though I'm more in the Trump camp, I still support her bid for Conference Chair. I will happily vote for her against any Democrat, though I won't promise to support her in a primary. You Go, Girl!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Book Review: Donald J. Trump
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

Louis Proyect vs. Steven Pinker

Louis Proyect is the master of ad hominem argument. In a post pretentiously titled Pecksniff and the Harper’s Open Letter, he'd refuse to sign the Harper's Open Letter because he wouldn't want to join the disreputable crowd of hypocritical, prominent signatories. He never claims to oppose the letter's actual content, which champions free speech, open inquiry, and some minimal respect for persons who disagree. These are bourgeois values which I believe Mr. Proyect holds in low esteem--he is, after all, a totalitarian Marxist.

Certainly respect for persons who disagree is low on Mr. Proyect's list. This is what he says about Mark Lilla.

Mark Lilla—Another Columbia professor. His claim to fame is writing a book urging the Democrats to dump “identity politics”. Katherine Franke, a Columbia law professor compared Lilla to David Duke and charged him with “underwriting the whitening of American nationalism, and the re-centering of white lives as the lives that matter most in the U.S.” Maybe he signed the letter because she “canceled” him.

So apparently any skepticism about "identity politics" is the same as David Duke, who, we may extrapolate further, is just one short step away from H*tl*r. And that's the problem--anybody who disagrees with Mr. Proyect is ultimately associated with the H-man. This is supposed to pass for discourse.

He saves his worst bile for Steven Pinker.

Steven Pinker—Pinker is arguably the worst person who signed the letter. My interest in him was focused on his reactionary sociobiological theories that I described as a mixture of Hobbes and Pangloss. I also recommend a new Jacobin article titled “It’s Official — Steven Pinker Is Full of Shit”. I guess Jacobin was guilty of cancel culture.

I've read both Mr Proyect's post (entitled Steven Pinker = Hobbes + Pangloss, posted in 2011, which in turn links to a post from 2009) and the Jacobin piece. It appears that Mr. Proyect has never actually read any of Pinker's books, so on this I have an edge. I read The Blank Slate shortly after it was published in 2003. I have never read The Better Angels of our Nature--the book that really gets Mr. Proyect's goat.

Sociobiology (aka evolutionary psychology) asserts two premises--the veracity of which are to be proven empirically.

1) That human evolution occurs much more rapidly than was believed in the 20th century.
2) That genetic evolution happens not just in response to changes in the natural environment, but also to changes in the social environment. This leads to the concept of gene-culture co-evolution. (For more about this, see Joseph Henrich.)

The first premise is now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt. Detectable evolution can happen in historical time--certainly within a few thousand years, and likely within one thousand years. Indeed, it can happen almost immediately, as when a small band of people separates from a much larger group, and by crossing a mountain range loses genetic contact with their ancestors. They will be genetically distinct almost from the git-go--even if they represented a random sample before they crossed the mountain range.

Analysis of the human genome (first sequenced in 2003) has become cheap and ubiquitous. Coupled with massive data processing power, it is now possible for commercial companies (e.g., 23&me) to distinguish ethnic groups by genomic analysis alone.

The second premise is harder to definitively establish, but it can be said with confidence that genes correlate with personality traits, which collectively contribute to culture. Correlation obviously does not prove causation, and because genetic influences are extremely complicated and subtle, proving causation will be difficult to impossible except in a few cases (e.g., lactose tolerance). But correlation certainly suggests causation, and in many cases it probably results from causation.

In the 2009 post Mr. Proyect attributes the following statements to Pinker.

• Males have a stronger tolerance for physical risk and a stronger drive for anonymous sex. 

• Women have stronger emotions and are better at reading emotions on the faces of others. 

• Pinker states “A variety of sexual motives, including taste in men, vary with the menstrual cycle.” 

• He also states that “in a sample of mathematically talented students, boys outnumbered girls by 13 to one” but that women maintain more eye-contact, and smile and laugh more often. 

• Humans are hard-wired to think in stereotypes and to prefer kin. 

• Some people, most of them men, are born with criminal tendencies. 

• Turning to the big questions of social transformation that have vexed Great Thinkers for the millennium, we learn from Pinker that “Biological facts are beginning to box in plausible political philosophies.” Communism may work for insects, but humans are programmed for economic exchange and “reciprocal altruism.” (Is that the reason I used to climb across the ceilings and consume a pound of sugar at a time when I was in the Trotskyist movement, I wonder?)

Apart from the last bullet, there is abundant empirical evidence--genetic, neurological, anatomical, behavioral, and anthropological--to support all these claims. The best, recent source for this is Charles Murray's 2019 book entitled Human Diversity (my review here). The author compiles huge datasets (sample sizes in the millions) to support the assertions listed above (and much more besides).

I know, I know. I genuinely wish that somebody else besides Mr. Murray had written the book, and failing that I wish he'd written it under a pseudonym. But it is really important here to separate the subject from the author. Mr. Murray has written a textbook instead of a monograph. He has not done the research himself, but has put together the data from the scientific literature compiled by other people. One common criticism of Mr. Murray's book is that he's published no peer reviewed papers. I don't know if that's true, but it's irrelevant--textbook authors are not typically researchers themselves.

The other common criticism is that he's "cherry-picked" the data. This is both cheap and irrefutable. Any author--even a textbook author--has to pick and choose what to include and what to leave out. So of course the contents are "cherry-picked" in that trivial sense. The implication, however, is that he's hiding some crucial bit of data that disproves his thesis--presumably because he's dishonest, racist, and his name is Charles Murray. I find this incredible. While the book can certainly be criticized, it won't be easily dismissed because of some magic, missing data point.

The Blank Slate, published in 2003, did not have access to the voluminous data at Murray's fingertips. It is necessarily more speculative, and has been criticized for telling just so stories. But Murray's subsequent data have largely confirmed Pinker's hypotheses.

In the 2009 post Mr. Proyect writes about Pinker:

For all of Pinker’s animosity to radicalism and Marxism in particular, there is very little evidence that he understands how historical materialism deals with the question of human nature. While it is beyond the scope of this article to trace its development through the years, suffice it to say that Marxism views the nature-nurture relationship dialectically.

It does not really challenge the existence of biologically determined traits, but simply places the whole question of equality, justice and freedom in a materialist context. In other words, revolutionary socialism strives to create the conditions in which all human beings can reach their full potential. Within the context of such a challenge, Pinker’s “Blank Slate,” with its discussions about the difference between the appearance of male and female brains (according to Pinker, they are “nearly as distinct as their bodies”) seems little more than “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” geared to readers of the New York Review of Books.

It turns out that the pop-culture Mars/Venus stories are not that far off the mark. Most people understand that men and women are different in the ways one expects. (Only woke people on college campuses have forgotten how to do that.) But Murray's data is much more rigorous: first, it's actual data with sample sizes in the millions rather than mere anecdotes; second, it can quantify the differences, and also the similarities between men and women; and finally, it can at very least correlate those differences with differences with genomic and neurological data. In some cases it can establish causation.

Opponents of sociobiology will not get very far by firing shots at Charles Murray. First, he's just the messenger, and second, his book is very thorough. What they need to do instead is write a competing textbook. If Marxist dialectics are indeed the key to the nature-nurture debate, then by all means write the textbook that makes that case. But it must take the data seriously--you can't just philosophize in the abstract about "equality, justice and freedom," along with empty words like "dialectically," and expect to get away with it.

Materialism, if it means anything at all, certainly means arguing from empirical data.

One last point: nobody is arguing for genetic determinism. The environment plays a large role--both for individual outcomes, and certainly for cultural outcomes. I hope there's even room for old curmudgeons like me who still believe free will has at least a small remit.

But what is now undeniably true is that genes play a significant role in explaining variation between individuals, and also between ethnic groups. While genetic determinism is wrong, it is equally impossible to ignore genetics when thinking about human health, psychology, and culture.

Mr. Murray makes that point. He argues that, within the next ten years, academic papers in the social sciences will all include genetic data as a matter of course, and will be unpublishable otherwise. This is already true in biology, medicine, and psychology, and will spread to sociology and economics--even in the face of political correctness.

So the window of opportunity for our Marxist friends to write their textbook is closing fast. Mr. Proyect needs to get busy.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Righteous Mind
• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• Marxism and EvoPsych

Men are Men and Women are Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's try to figure this out.

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

Huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I count three possible reasons:

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

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

Further Reading:

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