Is Trotskyism Dead?

— ADL (@ADL) June 11, 2024

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2024

When you've lost AOC, you've pretty much lost the argument. It's all very depressing.

As much as I disagree with Trotskyism, as a former comrade and longtime student I've always wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have tried hard to credit them with good intentions. However wooly-minded, at least they honestly desired a better world.

But for the most part I can no longer believe this. Their pro-Hamas sympathies lead them to call for the obliteration of the world's Jews. After October 7th it is no longer possible to interpret slogans like From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free, or--even worse--Globalize the Intifada, as anything other than demanding the murder of all Jews. 

They will probably claim they don't really want that (I don't believe them), but then there needs at very least to be an asterisk on those slogans. They must clearly state what they do mean. Because--coming from Hamas and without the asterisk--a Free Palestine is just a Judenrein Palestine, and Globalize the Intifada implies nothing other than the murder of Jews worldwide.

They compound the obfuscation by calling Israel's war against Hamas genocide. Whatever else it is (and it's bad enough) it is nowhere near the level of genocide.

Left Voice author Sam Karlin reveals his true feelings in an article entitled Liberal Towns in New Jersey Are Increasing Attacks on Pro-Palestine Activists. His very first paragraph gives the game away (link in original).

Pro-Palestine activists in New Jersey are coming up against repression. Five months ago, a collection of neighbors in South Orange and Maplewood (SOMA) New Jersey came together to form SOMA Collective for Palestine. This group has been advocating for a ceasefire and denouncing Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza in a community that is heavily Zionist. In fact, SOMA is a highly wealthy community and part of the eighth wealthiest congressional district in the country. The fact that the movement for Palestine reached even this community is a testament to its support from large sectors of society.

In this case the word Zionist is just used as a synonym for Jewish. Indeed, the supposed wealth of the Zionists/Jews just shows how despicable they actually are. Needless to say, the "Zionists" are not happy to see people demonstrating in public parks loudly demanding their murder, and do not regard such demonstrations as "free speech." Of course they're upset--and this has nothing to do with "Islamophobia" or "anti-Arab racism," as Mr. Karlin argues later in his article.

Mr. Karlin is an out-and-out antisemite, along with all his comrades at Left Voice, Socialist Action, and Workers' Voice, among other Trotskyist grouplets. They've all bought the pro-Hamas propaganda to the hilt--whether you call them Jews or Zionists, they're evil people whose filthy feet "occupy" supposedly Palestinian land, and nothing less than their murder/exile will solve the problem.

My Trotskyist "friends" have gone from being misguided but good-hearted, to being outright evil. They support the admittedly-fascist Hamas, just like in my day when we supported the Khmer Rouge.

Would Trotsky have supported Hamas? I don't know, but I hope not. He wrote a book entitled "The Jewish Question," which I have not read, but I doubt it advocates the mass murder of all Jews. Left Voice's alliance with Hamas is a betrayal of Trotskyism. And the same is true for most other Trotskyist grouplets.

As I say, it's very depressing. But that's not the end of their problems.

I read somewhere (I believe it was in one of Barry Sheppard's books) that a small organization (such as the Socialist Workers Party--SWP back in the 1970s) will attract a disproportionate share of social misfits. I think that was true, and I'll include myself among that number. Speaking for myself, the Party gave me a ready-made circle of friends, a mission in life similar to joining a religious sect, along with a lifestyle (eg, the no-drugs rule) that I found very congenial. Some others had physical problems (eg, blindness), or were so socially mal-adept that they needed therapy. 

I think that's still true. All of the little grouplets I follow seem to have similar problems, and attract a ragtag list of maladjusted grad students, adjunct faculty, "journalists" (such as Mr. Karlin), theater wannabes, etc. Few if any have the slightest chance of success in larger society, and so it is no wonder that they set themselves up as a "Vanguard Party," thereby anointing themselves with the success that eludes them in real life. In a word, they're just like we were, except that we were more self-aware of our shortcomings than this later generation.

This current crop of Trotskyists are not merely in denial, but they extol their oddities as being somehow an improvement. A disproportionate (I think, a majority) of Left Voice comrades self-identify as queer. I don't precisely know what this means, but to me it's a rough synonym for mentally ill. Indeed, our Left Voice comrades appear to be in some measure mentally ill.

Not that there is any great shame in this--as said, I suffered similarly when I was their age. And such status does not deny one's right to a political opinion. But one should be self-aware enough to realize that most "normal" people will not see mental illness--or queerness--as a positive attribute. And that for a very good reason: queer people are almost by definition infertile. Few parents want to raise a child that proudly proclaims his/her infertility.

So whether they call themselves queer or trans, or even gay--and then raise that to the status of a virtue--that's a non-starter. It will never become a mass movement beyond the infertile queer community. Working class folks will not want to associate themselves with a weird group of losers. If Left Voice wants an impact on the wider world, then they need to keep their queerness to themselves.

Other Trotskyist groups seem to realize that. Both Socialist Action and Workers' Voice, while they still nominally support trans rights, no longer talk much about it. Indeed, the queerest people in Workers' Voice seem to have left the movement.

So the grouplets I've mentioned so far have left Trotskyism. They've descended into Hamas-style, antisemitic nihilism, which in this country--fortunately--will never win widespread support. And they've gotten so obsessed with their own queerness that they're no longer able to communicate with the larger world.

In a word, they've become progressive Democrats. Left Voice, Socialist Action and Workers' Voice all agree with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party 99%. They're more Democrat than most Democrats. Trotskyists are supposed to despise the Democrats, not join them. But these grouplets--while occasionally faking hatred--love the Democrat Party and all it stands for.

Trotskyism is dead...

With one big exception: the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP believes that workers are first of all proletarian. That means disciplined, loyal, trustworthy, and above all,  fertile. Infertility has no place in a Trotskyist program. The SWP despises the Democrat party and all it stands for--especially its progressive wing. It rightly sees progressives as being a petty-bourgeois, incipiently fascist movement.

They may go too far with this. Perhaps--in their hatred of the Democrats--they're all too cozy with the Trump team? Could be. But that's not their most serious problem.

The SWP's problem is captured by the 2024 presidential ticket: Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter for president and VP, respectively. As The Militant reported here (italics in original),

The Socialist Workers Party nominated Dennis Richter as its vice presidential candidate April 29. Due to health considerations that need attention over the next several months, Margaret Trowe, who had been the party’s candidate, will no longer be able to run.

Mr. Richter joined the Movement back in 1972, and is probably around 70 years old. Ms. Trowe, whom he replaces as a candidate, will likely turn 76 this year. An illness that requires several months to treat is possibly cancer--and from personal experience let me say that cancer is a very time-consuming disease to treat. I wish Ms. Trowe all the best.

In a word, my former comrades are too old--their leaders, Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters, are both in their 80s. The Party is gradually dying out! OK--it's not dead yet, and I do wish them a few more years. 

But the die is cast and the clock is ticking. Trotskyism--even in this pure form--will soon be dead.

Further Reading:

• SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign
  
• Left Voice and the Intifada
  
• Socialist Action's Political Report
  

Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes

Source: CATO Institute

Thanks to Jaime Monterojo over at Workers' Voice for writing a serious article about the debt ceiling. I'm a few weeks late in getting this up--that's because I've been traveling overseas for several weeks, and then also had some health issues.

Mr. Monterojo's good turn is an article entitled Democrats and GOP make a deal to avert debt crisis. It is a legitimate attempt to discuss the economics of the issue--and while I think his Marxism leads him hopelessly astray, as I'll detail below, I really do appreciate the effort.

Marxist theology comes through loud and clear in one of Mr. Monterojo's introductory paragraphs.

Today the debt is $31.4 trillion, or 133% of U.S. GDP, a 25% jump from 2016. This is the highest level of national debt in U.S. history.

The debt problem has at its root the crisis of capitalism’s profitability. The fall in this profitability, starting in the 1980s, prompted the rich to attack the conditions of the American working class through cuts in public services, anti-union attacks, and factory closures of companies that opted to move to other countries—mainly China—in search of better conditions to generate profits.

To begin, there is no problem with "capitalism's profitability"--this is a myth foisted on us by Marx. Mr. Monterojo cites no data for his assertion, but I assume he's referring to work by Michael Roberts (see here, here and here. See my review of these articles here, along with the bottom-line criticism here.) In bullet points, the reasons why the Marxist notion of the declining rate of profit are wrong are given below.

• Marx's measure of "profit" was a very weirdly defined measure of operating margin. The data required to tabulate it is not collected today. Even Mr. Roberts can't reliably calculate the Marxist figure without making lots of dubious assumptions. The results of that calculation are meaningless, and nobody outside the small, Marxist circle pays any attention to them.
• Marx assumed that all products were commodities--i.e., the only distinguishing feature is price. For example, gasoline is mostly a commodity--one buys gas from the cheapest gas station, and rarely does any other feature count for much. But most of what we buy today are not commodities--nobody chooses an iPhone because it's cheap, and folks don't pick a restaurant based primarily on price. These are not commodities, and the profit margins do not depend on operating margins or the cost of production.
• Even if Marxists could accurately calculate their "operating margin/"profit", they don't understand what their result means. In fact, a "declining rate of profit" is good for the economy because it saves consumers money. The whole purpose of an economy is to benefit consumers (what other purpose could it conceivably have?), and lower profit margins benefit consumers. This is why Walmart limits its operating margins to 3% or below.
• For some bizarre reason, Marx insisted that the "rate of profit" only be calculated for the global economy as a whole. This is impossible--the data don't exist. And it's hard to see how any individual capitalist could make sense of that number even if you could calculate it.
• In point of fact, capitalists don't measure their profit by operating margins, but instead by return on investment. The operating margin does have to be above zero, but beyond that "profit" in the meaningful sense depends on the capital invested, as expressed by the price/earnings ratio. Here "price" is the price of a share of the company, i.e., the cost of capital.

Even if you accept Mr. Monterojo's thesis that profitability is "declining," it's still hard to see how that causes the debt crisis or cuts in public services. On the other hand, anti-union attacks and factory closures may increase profit margins, but more likely (and in the long term, always) reduce costs for consumers, i.e., make society richer and more prosperous. 

Then Mr. Montejero complains about how Presidents Bush and Trump lowered tax rates, and how this supposedly impoverished the working class. He writes,

The state began to also lower taxes paid by the rich, one of the fundamental causes of the rise in debt. Successive presidents since Reagan have lowered taxes paid by the wealthy and undermining federal revenues. For example, Bush II lowered taxes on the wealthy in 2001 and 2003, in addition to encouraging the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, which required going over $2 trillion in debt, a sum that is growing. In 2017, Trump cut taxes for the country’s wealthiest people to a rate lower than that paid by the working class, the first time in the country’s history.

There are two parts to this argument. First he implies that tax receipts declined following the Trump tax cuts. The chart above shows that's not true. Total tax receipts are largely independent of tax rates.

Second, he says that marginal rates on wealthy people are lower than they are for us poorer folks. This is not strictly true. From this data, the top 1% paid 26.0% of their income in taxes. The top 50% paid 14.6% of  their income in taxes. The bottom 50% paid only 3.1% of their income in taxes.

Admittedly, this is only the federal income tax; it doesn't include payroll taxes, paid disproportionately by working people (who also receive a vastly disproportionate share of the benefits). Further, the very poorest people occasionally pay marginal rates in excess of 100%, e.g., when they exceed the maximum income to receive food stamps. So the story is more complicated, but since Mr. Montejero talks about tax rates, then he is obviously referring to the income tax.

Marginal tax rates aside, we have a remarkably progressive tax structure. The top 1% paid 42.3% of all federal income taxes. The next 49% paid 55.4% of all taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the population paid only 2.3%. The rich paid more, not because of minor changes to marginal tax rates, but simply because the rich have more money and can afford to pay more.

Mr. Montejero writes,

So the ruling class is in a complicated situation: On the one hand, they need to borrow and spend more money to avoid a crisis and, on the other hand, they need to keep an exorbitant inflation at bay, during which two American banks—the Silicon Valley Bank and Signature—have collapsed. The agreement signed by the Democrats and Republicans worsens national indebtedness, keeps inflation levels high, and ultimately is a postponement of an economic storm that has been growing and threatening the world capitalist economy, at the expense of workers’ living standards.

This paragraph is actually mostly true. I'd replace the words "ruling class" with "government," but perhaps that's a distinction without a difference. Either way, they need to spend more money to avoid a crisis--and they're borrowing it! The flaw in our author's argument is not in this paragraph, but in the preceding where he attributes all ills to the mythical declining rate of profit. That's not the problem.

The problem is political. For decades politicians have been promising their constituents more and more: bigger social security checks, more comprehensive healthcare benefits, exorbitant payments to the higher education cartel, not to mention greater defense expenditures. They got away with this because they never had to pay the bill--the government always borrowed money at low interest rates, and it was up to future generations to pay it all back. By which time said politicians will long since have been out of office.

Well, the future has arrived--and now the bill is due. What we've got is a big, stinking pile of debt--not just in the US, but worldwide. The politicians are increasingly unable to refinance it. Somehow this debt is gonna have to be liquidated--either by paying it back (raising taxes), cutting entitlements (good luck with that!), defaulting on it (ouch!), or inflating it away (happening right now). There are no other alternatives. And that's the crisis.

Debt necessarily lowers future GDP--and today will be no different now that the future has arrived.

It's got nothing to do with any mythical Marxist measure of profit.

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• The Harm Reduction Team
• It's Not Just About Abortion

Socialist Action's Political Report

Vanguard Man (source)

Socialist Action (SA) split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) back in 1983. It has been helmed by Jeff Mackler since its founding. He was SA's presidential candidate for both the 2016 and 2020 elections, running failed and unprofessional campaigns on both occasions. The man is 82 or 83 years old. It remains to be seen if he'll be the SA's candidate in 2024.

In 2019 SA underwent a split, with a large number (perhaps even a majority) of its members leaving. Notably, the very talented editor of their newspaper, Michael Schreiber, was among the leavers, as was Mr. Mackler's vice presidential running mate, Heather Bradford. How humiliating!

Some of the splitters went on to form the new and short-lived Socialist Resurgence movement. Other leaders of SA, e.g., Erwin Freed and Ernie Gotta (frequent coauthors), formed the core nucleus.

In 2022, Socialist Resurgence merged with a group called Workers' Voice with the new group assuming the latter name. This was hailed as an historic event, which I described as

The "two historic divisions" represent two versions of the Fourth International (FI): that of the United Secretariat, which purports to be the original FI, and the International Workers' League-Fourth International  (IWL-FI), which claims a mission to "reconstruct" the original FI. (A more useless mission is hard to imagine.)

So Mr. Mackler remains leader of SA's remnant husk, which I suggest is now down to about two dozen members. Since the first of the year their webpage has posted four (4!) articles--three of which are by Jeff Mackler, and one by that old Pol Pot supporter, Barry Sheppard. Apparently, apart from Mr. Mackler, nobody with any literary skills remains in the sect. Going back further in time, besides Mr. Mackler the website contains articles by others cribbed off the web. Only Marty Goodman, an SA comrade, occasionally contributes content.

Nevertheless, the "Party" held a convention last November. Insofar as it wasn't a Zoom meeting, it likely took place in Mr. Mackler's living room. The conclave issued a document: Fighting for the Socialist Future Today: Socialist Action Political Resolution. We're told that "[t]he following resolution was approved by Socialist Action’s 20th National Convention in November 2022." Approved it may have been, but the author is undoubtedly Mr. Mackler himself--so I'll give him credit here and not let him hide behind a Zoom meeting fig leaf.

I've taken to calling Mr. Mackler the "Vanguard Man." Normally, in Trotsky-talk, one speaks of the "Vanguard Party," which organization is the custodian of revolutionary tradition and which aspires to lead us toward a socialist utopia. But SA is so small and so depleted of talent that this awesome responsibility now rests on the shoulders of one octogenarian man: Jeff Mackler. Pity the poor proletariat, whose future hangs on such a thin reed.

Anyway, Mr. Mackler is a good writer, and that's the only reason I keep reading this stuff. But in this case he falls down on the job. There are too many typos, e.g., he writes "...right of return of all disposed Palestinians... ." Disposed is obviously the wrong word; perhaps he means dispossessed or dispersed? Not sure. Compare, e.g., with the SWP Political Report that I recently reviewed, in which I didn't find a single typo. It's not a big deal, but it indicates that the talent stack at SA is too small to support a proofreader.

The report is 15,000 words long, or the same length as the SWP's. I'll confess I skimmed through parts of it--much of it doesn't interest me, though perhaps that says more about me than Mr. Mackler.

The document discusses two big issues and several less important ones. The big issues concern "imperialism," especially the American variety, and then "[t]he global warming climate catastrophe."

Mr. Mackler subscribes to a theory known as campism, which I have dubbed American Brezhnevism. That post explains what that means in more detail, but briefly, campism maintains that the chief villain in the world is something called "American imperialism." We're never told what that is or how that operates, but it is apparently responsible for every war casualty anywhere in the world today. Mr. Mackler, for example, blames "American imperialism" for all the war deaths in Syria, and then also in Ukraine. Nobody else is responsible for anything. 

Because of "American imperialism," it is necessary for Vanguard Man to support any and all opponents of said imperialism, no matter how vile. Thus Mr. Mackler lends support to Assad in Syria,  Putin in Russia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is, of course, exactly the same argument that Barry Sheppard made in supporting Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia--no wonder Mr. Sheppard is an avid contributor to SA's webpage. However evil those regimes are, they're a lesser evil compared to "American imperialism."

To my mind, it's all a giant conspiracy theory. "American imperialism" does not exist in reality and is present only as a figment of Vanguard Man's overheated imagination.

Mr. Mackler is also a leader of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). Actually, it's not antiwar, but instead pro-war on the other side. They're rooting for Assad, Putin, the Taliban, Kim Jong-un, and China's Xi. Obviously this is not a popular position in the United States, especially since most sane people realize that "American imperialism" doesn't even exist.

Here is something funny. Vanguard Man admits that

With the exception of revolutionary Cuba, a healthy workers state with some inevitable bureaucratic distortions, there are no deformed or degenerated workers’ states in the world today.*

So, but for Cuba, we're all capitalist, imperialist running-dogs these days, the most evil of whom deserve support from those opposed to "American imperialism." But the humor comes from the asterisk, which footnote states,

*Tentative statement pending NC/PC discussion in the class nature of North Korea

As Shakespeare says, "uneasy is the head that wears a crown." Vanguard Man has a weighty decision to make: Is N. Korea a deformed workers' state, or instead only another imperialist, capitalist running-dog? The fate of the global proletariat depends on his answer.

Or not. Vanguard Man will support the Norks over the United States regardless of what their "class character" supposedly is.

I can't let Mr. Mackler's obvious antisemitism pass unremarked. He does say that "Anti-Zionism Is NOT Anti-Semitism." This is true--but the near-converse statement is also true: anti-Semites are always anti-Zionist. Thus anti-Zionism is an unprincipled coalition between those who support a constructive Palestinian nationalism, and those who simply hate the Jews. Vanguard Man is in that latter category because of his "...recognition of the illegitimacy of the racist, Zionist, colonial settler, apartheid state of Israel is today widespread, ..." Nobody but an antisemite could talk about Israel in such angry, vituperative terms. If he really were merely anti-Zionist, he'd use more conciliatory language.

The second big issue is climate change, where he opines:

Here, despite the uncontested facts, the world’s major powers press on to increase fossil fuel production in the face of ever-intensifying killer heat waves, deadly floods and hurricanes, inundation of low lying land masses, drying up and poisoning of major water supplies – all accompanied by unprecedented environmental destruction across the board. Forests are decimated, oceans and rivers are irreversibly polluted, air is poisoned, nature is torn asunder, with no end in sight. 2,000 people died in a single week from the recent heat wave in Spain and Portugal alone! All of the above are the undeniable reality everywhere.

This is just nonsense on stilts. He's cherry-picked random factoids that add up to nothing. He obviously knows nothing about science or scientists. Any legit climate scientist of whatever persuasion will be ashamed to be associated with our Vanguard Man.

I'm not a climate scientist, but I've spent my career as a professor of chemistry with a special interest in thermodynamics. So while I claim no expertise in climate science, I know a hell of a lot more than Vanguard Man. Which isn't hard, because he knows zilch.

The rest of the Report is about topics that are either irrelevant or unimportant: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, "Latinx" issues, etc. I don't have time or space, so see the links below if you're interested.

Further Reading:

• American Rights and Trans Rights
• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Cuba Needs More Communism!

It's Not Just About Abortion

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

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

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

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

To phrase it in my own words via bullet points:

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

This seems like 90% hokum and 10% truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Babies make people happy.

Further Reading:

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