A Marxist Pope?

I don't know any more about Jorge Bergoglio--now Pope Francis I--than you do. The name hadn't crossed my radar screen until today. The Church believes it is guided and protected by the Holy Spirit. I sure hope they're right because in purely human terms the selection is a disaster.

A few days ago, I told my wife that I thought the pope would be from Latin America. I was correct, but he's as close to an Italian as you can get without being from Italy. Further, he is 76 years old. So he's too old and too Italian to be a significant change agent in the Church. This is a very conservative (in the bad sense of the word) choice that will not serve the Church well.

He's conservative in the theological sense as well. He's opposed to abortion and birth control, and also opposed to gay marriage (and even gay sex). This affirms longstanding Catholic dogma, totally consistent with their world view. For Catholics, life and personhood are sacred, and anything that compromises an individual's integrity is morally wrong.  To complain about the pope's opinions on those subjects is to argue that the pope shouldn't be Catholic. It's silly.

You can call me a fake Catholic if you want. I accompany my wife to Mass on most Sundays--she's the one who's devout--and I don't mind doing so. I even take communion. But I don't really believe it. I can't buy the life-after-death stuff, which renders the rest of the story rather irrelevant. For all that, I am not anti-Catholic.  I think the Church is mostly a force for good in the world, and I really do wish it well.

Which is why I'm disappointed they've made such a poor choice for pope.

While there is no arguing with his stands on faith and morals, one can dispute his economics. Though he's a Jesuit, he has chosen the name of Francis, after St. Francis of Assisi, the 13th Century founder of the eponymous order. For those of you who are unchurched, St. Francis was heir to a very wealthy family. He took his inheritance and gave it all away to the poor. The Franciscan rule is no friar can possess anything more than what they need to survive for that day. Anything in excess must be given away. Franciscan priests take strict vows of poverty to this very day.

The church I attend is run by Franciscan priests--they dress in the trademark brown robes and sandals, and live simply and modestly in the church rectory. I doubt their cash income exceeds $10K annually. But they're not poor, at least not in the sense that St. Francis was poor. Unlike St. Francis, they don't have to beg for their daily meal. They get medical care, and they can count on support in retirement (the oldest priest is well into his 80s). The rectory has electricity, hot and cold running water, along with flush toilets. Collectively they own a car. They are all very well educated. I even occasionally see our parish priest at Starbucks buying a cup of coffee.

Now I'm not accusing them of hypocrisy--if anybody is a hypocrite it's me. Far from it--few people will voluntarily give up family, marriage, and career to earn $10K per year in a job that offers few or no opportunities for advancement. There's a reason why so few people go into the priesthood. I simply point out that in 21st Century America it is completely impossible to live like a 13th Century monk. In our society, nobody--I mean nobody--not even the most derelict homeless bum, is as poor as St. Francis.

So we read about Father Bergoglio, who moved out of the archbishop's mansion into a small apartment. And instead of being driven to work, rode the bus. Despite being a Jesuit, he voluntarily followed the Franciscan path of poverty. One reads that he was a voice for the poor, or a supporter of the poor, or endorsed the cause of the poor.

Between the lines, I read that he's pro-poverty. And that is precisely the problem.

I think St. Francis was the ur-Marxist. He believed that the cure for poverty is simply for rich people to give all their money away. That may have made a little bit of sense in 13th Century Italy, but it makes absolutely no sense today. In modern capitalism, rich people and poor people are simply not in competition with each other. Rich people (at least those outside of government, and excepting crony capitalists like Solyndra or Goldman-Sachs) get rich because they produce goods and services that improve the standard of living for everybody. Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many more, all made stuff the improved our lives. It is simply ridiculous to think they got wealthy at the expense of the poor. Quite the contrary, they got wealthy because they made the poor richer.

So I fear Pope Francis' economic views will perpetuate the same, evil fiction that Marxists propagate--that rich people are rich because they stole the money. It is just nonsense on stilts. And it is destructive nonsense--it enables the whole pro-poverty crowd, from the relatively benign Cristina Kirchner, to the masterful crook Fidel Castro, to the truly psychopathic Che Guevara, to the evil demagogue Hugo Chavez. These are people who dedicated their lives to impoverishing their nations and peoples, and the Church should have nothing to do with them.

Of course proto-Marxists exist on other continents besides Latin America, but Latin America seems especially prone to the disease. This is why I am disappointed that the Church chose a pope from that continent. It is a Really Bad Idea. 

I sure hope the Holy Spirit is paying attention.

Trouble in the Faculty Lounge

This post is in response to an article in Socialist Action (SA) entitled SF City College threatened by privatization. The article isn't really very informative. For a better account of the troubles at SF City College (CCSF) see this piece at InsideHigherEd (IHE).

Academia has long subscribed to a principle known as shared governance. The idea is that the faculty and the administration share the task of managing the university. The faculty make their contribution through a series of committees collectively known as faculty governance. While the details of faculty governance vary from institution to institution, the practice is nearly universal in American higher ed, and certainly has existed at all institutions to which I have been affiliated.

Lest those of you outside the ivory tower think this is just another undeserved perk awarded to spoiled professors, please think again. As both a faculty member and as a one-time college administrator, I have strongly supported shared governance, and for very practical reasons. One hires the faculty because of their expertise--e.g., math professors are hired because they know something about mathematics. The math faculty have to design and implement the curriculum, along with the degree requirements, the prerequisite chain, and so forth. No administrator can do that for them. Thus all things curricular ultimately start with the faculty, percolate up through the faculty governance bureaucracy, and finally land on the desk of the administration. This is the very reasonable premise for shared governance.

However reasonable, shared governance presents problems. Let me point out two big ones (among several others). First, even acknowledging that most faculty are hard-working, conscientious, and honest, there is a small, persistent, built-in bias in their judgement. They tend to confuse what they want to teach with what is important to teach. I had a math colleague who joked about having a PhD in "abstract nonsense." Now his expertise wasn't really in "nonsense," but instead in a specialized, esoteric field of mathematics. He realized how inappropriate it was for the undergraduate curriculum, and changed his teaching mission accordingly. Unfortunately, most other math faculty lack that wisdom--inspired as they are by "abstract nonsense," they orient their teaching around precisely the esoterica to which they've dedicated their scholarly lives. And so the curriculum goes off the rails.

The second problem is financing. Faculty do not have enough distance to make the cost/benefit choices that budgeting requires. Professors always think they're understaffed. Their solution to student performance issues is frequently to insert another class into the curriculum--at additional expense--rather than modifying the existing classes. The result is a proliferation of new classes--if you leave it up to faculty, the ideal class size is about three. Similarly, they will tend to hire people like themselves, i.e., a department that specializes in "abstract nonsense" will hire more people with the same expertise.

So the reason governance is shared is precisely to counterbalance these persistent biases. Ideally, students would be the ones to push back, but by definition they don't know enough about the discipline to be able to represent their own interests. Likewise, taxpayers are in no position to argue with the faculty. Thus the administration is left with the thankless task of keeping the faculty on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, administrators are rarely up to the challenge, especially since many are themselves promoted from the faculty ranks. The result is a large amount of waste, bloat, and inefficiency on college campuses.

So now we come to CCSF, a community college with about 85,000 students, down from 90,000. It is about to lose its accreditation from the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which would force the college to close.

The problems at CCSF are a perfect storm of dysfunction, resulting from the confluence of three separate problems. First and perhaps most egregiously, the shared governance model completely broke down. While you'll get somewhat different answers depending on who you talk to, my sense from the IHE article is that the faculty essentially had veto power over any administrative action. Curricular authority had morphed into budgetary and staffing decisions, leading to gross overstaffing and a huge budget deficit. These are the complaints of the ACCJC. 

Second, whatever the problems of unshared governance, the administration clearly didn't act competently. IHE remarks that a former chancellor was indicted, and another resigned because of health difficulties. They report that the small number of administrators on a campus so large was bound to lead to oversight problems (though I think ineffective administrators are a worse problem). In short, the administration largely abdicated its responsibility.

The third culprit was California's legendary budget deficits, leading to a $26 million deficit. Neither of the articles says what the total budget for the institution is, but given that many students it likely approaches $300 million--so this represents a 10% cut.

The SA article is wrong on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin. As you might expect with Trotskyist newspapers, much of the content is produced by volunteers, and is thus all over the map in terms of quality (I've read some excellent articles in The Militant). This article comes in near the bottom--it is poorly written and uninformative. If you knew nothing about the CCSF situation before, you won't be much the wiser after reading this article.

They're against any private efforts to improve education. They object to $500 billion in private investment. Their view is that all efforts must be mediated through some government bureaucracy. I guess you'd expect that from a socialist newspaper--but it still isn't very sensible.

They uncritically support the unionized faculty, and equate the interests of faculty with students. Of course this isn't true--faculty and student interests overlap, but are quite distinct and often opposed.

After pro forma slander against Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and the Lumina Foundation, etc., their primary ire is directed at the accrediting agency! This is bizarre--accreditors are voluntary associations of colleges and universities designed to prevent competition from "unaccredited" institutions. As such, accrediting agencies preserve the rights of faculty. Indeed, they are strong supporters of shared governance, and have frequently come down hard on administrators who violate the principle in the other direction. The fact that the ACCJC now criticizes the faculty shows just how untenable the situation has become.

SA argues that the faculty are supporters of "democratic procedures" to administer the campus. Indeed, they blame the accreditor of being "privately run and undemocratic." But this is a very strange form of democracy, where only unionized faculty have any vote. Certainly students are disenfranchised--they're just supposed to pay tuition and shut-up. Indeed, anybody who pays any bills is not part of the conversation. In SA's model, the faculty are allowed to commandeer resources from anybody in society to pay for whatever they deem necessary for "education." How far this is from the original conception of democracy, which includes the idea no taxation without representation.

If this is what higher education has become, then really, it does deserve to be shut down.

Women's Work

In my recent post, Marxism & EvoPsych, I took issue with Louis Proyect's comments about evolutionary psychology (EvoPsych). In particular, I dinged him for this:

Though academics are trained to explain away practically anything, I was shocked to see this article described by Chagnon supporters as having nothing to do with the racist theories so in vogue in early 20^thcentury America and Nazi Germany.

I argued that the facile association of EvoPsych with Social Darwinism is wildly off the mark
--to the point of slander. Still, it was unfair to discount Mr. Proyect's comments out of hand. He represents an opinion shared by Marxists of all denominations (including Trotskyists), by many mainstream social scientists, and of course by feminists. So let's inquire further.

Imagine the kindly country doctor of a century ago. This good man, if asked about a role for women in medicine, might have said "women simply don't have the constitution to be doctors. They are too emotional and too frail.They lack the intelligence of men." He certainly would not have meant any ill by his comments--they reflected mainstream thinking. It is unfair of feminists to accuse him of male chauvinism--that wasn't his intention at all.

Still, one hundred years on we can say categorically that he was wrong. Not only are there many women doctors, perhaps even the majority of current medical students are women.

Now let's put our doctor of yore on steroids and equip him with the language of EvoPsych. "Women lack the instinct to be doctors. They have different goals and aspirations, and so probably don't want to be doctors anyway. There may be a few women who will want to do it, but most simply won't. The male brain and the female brain have evolved for different purposes."

It is still all wrong. Unfortunately it is wrong in a way that is the real slander against EvoPsych--namely taking the terminology and spitting it out as pseudo-scientific garbage. So Mr. Proyect's paranoia is not unjustified. The language of EvoPsych is frequently misused, with people making all kinds of completely specious claims.

EvoPsych does maintain that male and female brains have evolved for different purposes, and therefore differ significantly. Further, a Norwegian man differs genetically more from his sister than he does from his Zimbabwean comrade. Accordingly, evolutionists regard sexual differences as more likely to be evolved than racial differences, for the latter are very small.

Another premise of EvoPsych is that evolution takes a long time, and that most human behaviors date from our stone age existence. The period is occasionally referred to as the Era of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), denoting the time period when the modern human mind was formed. There were no neurosurgeons in stone age times, or for that matter even during most of civilization. So on it's face it seems unlikely that there is any significant evolutionary advantage for men becoming neurosurgeons. Now some argue that men have evolved superior mathematical and spatial abilities because they were hunters during the EEA, but this is speculation. It is also at best a second or third order effect.

So most modern professions are probably equally available to men and women, at least as far as evolution is concerned. But there are some significant exceptions. The most obvious is warrior. A male warrior who survives has many more chances at copulation than a non-warrior or a dead warrior. At significant risk, he greatly enhances his chances at reproduction. A woman warrior takes the same risk but gets none of the benefit--her reproductive advantages are unchanged. Predictably enough, almost all the world's warriors are men, and very few are women. (The modern military is a bit different. EvoPsych can't really predict a gender difference in an ability to push a button firing a cruise missile, or to fly a drone. Thus allowing women into "combat" roles may not be that much of a stretch. On the other hand, house to house combat in Fallujah remains a man's job.)

Another example is rich man. After all, how much money do you need, any way? If you're a woman you need enough to support yourself and your children--$75,000 annually will serve quite well in today's America. The incentive for women to earn more than that diminishes rapidly--why bother? For a man, on the other hand, wealth is a great aphrodisiac. How much does a trophy wife cost? There is no such thing as too much money for a man--every dollar enhances his status just that much more. Accordingly, self-made billionaires are almost entirely male (female billionaires are usually heiresses).

These fairly obvious facts about human nature are the sorts of things that EvoPsych can explain very well. Our good doctor, on the other hand, is extending EvoPsych to where it doesn't belong, or at least to where it has no evidence. It is indeed human nature (dare I say instinct) to conflate what one wants to be true with what is true. That's what our imaginary doctor is doing, and frankly, I think that's what most critics of EvoPsych are doing. They're wedded to a cultural cause for everything, and that impedes their vision.

So now I'll do a bit of speculation myself. As stated, I don't believe there is much to differentiate men from women regards most career choices. But there is this: in almost all human societies there is a gender division of labor. The very words hunter-gatherer illustrate that this goes way back to the EEA. Men were hunters, and women were gatherers--at least mostly. No man wants to do woman's work, and conversely (latter day feminists notwithstanding) most women don't want to be perceived as masculine. I suggest this is instinct, i.e., part of human nature.

Thus professions will automatically segregate themselves into women's jobs or men's jobs, with few being gender neutral. Which job is which is historical and cultural accident, but the division will always be there. I see this every day as a college professor. I teach a general education science class to art students, and 80% are female. Indeed, at liberal arts colleges such as where I teach, about 2/3rds of the entire student body is female. Sixty years ago the ratio was reversed. There is nothing about college that is intrinsically male or female. But when it was a man's world, men went to college. Now that it's become a woman's world, men increasingly won't go near the place.

The feminist/Trotskyist/academic dream of a 50% gender distribution in all professions is just that--a dream. It is a dream that violates human nature and will never happen.

Blogging has been a bit light lately. It's midterms and I've been busy. Sorry.

Prison Health Care

Lynne Stewart, the "political prisoner" described in an earlier post, is ill. She has metastatic breast cancer, and while I'm not much of a doctor, I don't think the prognosis for that is very good. This really is too bad, because while I don't support her legal case, I respect her as a human being and don't wish that on anybody.

Socialist Action (SA) has an article on her case here, accompanied by a letter from Ms. Stewart herself. The facts, as I understand them from the article (it's a bit unclear), is that Ms. Stewart was operated on for breast cancer in New York (Sloan-Kettering) prior to going to prison. She was given a clean bill of health at that time. However, last October it was discovered (in prison) that the cancer has returned, and has now spread to both lungs, and possibly elsewhere.

Jeff Mackler, author of the SA article, argues that health care in prison is generally unsatisfactory. Further, Carswell prison (where Ms. Stewart is incarcerated) has a compassionate release policy that in principle would allow her to return to Sloan-Kettering for continued treatment. According to Mackler, "...officials insist that Lynne’s status as a well-known personality insures that she will receive adequate treatment, if not 'preferential treatment,' in prison."

Mackler condemns the prison for hypocrisy for giving Ms. Stewart special treatment because she is well known, but at the same time insists on special treatment for her by way of release to Sloan-Kettering. This argument doesn't make much sense--either she's due special treatment or not. The hypocrisy charge, if any, should be leveled against her defense committee--how many other prisoners have a defense committee?

Now I suspect that Mr. Mackler is correct in thinking that healthcare in prison is unsatisfactory. And I'm rather on his side there. Prisoners are wards of the state, and taxpayers have a moral obligation to tend to them properly. I'm much more sympathetic to the health needs of prisoners than I am to, say, the working poor. The latter are free people who can and should be expected to take major responsibility for themselves.

Indeed, on criminal justice issues I'm probably a Liberal. Some years ago heard a Bloggingheads dialogue with Mark Kleiman (I can't find the episode) that changed my thinking on these issues. Mr. Kleiman proposes a criminal justice system that seems to protect society, save money, and be compassionate all at the same time. On everything else I disagree with him--he's a Left-wing Democrat and I'm a Tea Party Republican--but here we're of one mind.

Ms. Stewart, in her letter, acquits herself well. She praises her "young woman oncologist." She is happy that a treatment plan is finally in the works, though she gently complains that it has taken a very long time. While she is tired of being escorted to doctor's visits in leg irons and chains, she is grateful for her guards' kindness. In a word, Ms. Stewart is much more generous in spirit than Mr. Mackler is. Not only is this the honorable thing to do, but it will earn her better treatment in the long run than if she is loudly critical of everything (as, e.g., Mumia abu-Jamal). Her defense committee may actually not be serving her very well.

While I do not support Ms. Stewart's legal case, and I do not consider her a "political prisoner," I do think everybody would be better served if she could be held in a less restrictive environment. It would save money and it would be gentler on her.

Marxism and EvoPsych

The ever-energetic Louis Proyect has three- recent- posts on Napoleon Chagnon's newest book Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists. Now he's way ahead of me--I haven't even read that book yet, much less all the reviews that Mr. Proyect covers. Nevertheless, I think Mr. Proyect's condemnation of evolutionary psychology (EvoPsych) is just wrong.

Mr. Proyect cites three major arguments. The first is his claim that EvoPsych is descendant from Social Darwinism in the 19th Century, and thus represents the reappearance of Nazi ideology in modern science. He says, for example,

Though academics are trained to explain away practically anything, I was shocked to see this article described by Chagnon supporters as having nothing to do with the racist theories so in vogue in early 20^thcentury America and Nazi Germany.

Mr. Proyect asserts a syllogism:

Social Darwinism is bad.
All bad things are false.
EvoPsych is like Social Darwinism.
Therefore EvoPsych is false.

Only the first premise of the argument is true. Unfortunately, not all bad things are false, and the facile association of EvoPsych to Social Darwinism is also wrong.

EvoPsych and Social Darwinism agree on only one thing--namely that our brains are a product of our evolutionary heritage just as any other body organ is. Unless you're a religious fanatic this seems obviously true. But Social Darwinism went much further and said that Englishmen (to pick an example) were more "evolved" than, say, the Inuit. EvoPsych rejects that categorically. Given that we are all alive today and we have all had equal time to "evolve," there is no case to be made that  "primitive" people are less evolved than anybody else.

Indeed, EvoPsych makes precisely the opposite case--not only are we all equally evolved, but under the hood we are all very much the same. EvoPsych frequently talks about our "stone-age brains," i.e., despite our civilizational veneer we're human animals underneath.. Unlike Social Darwinism, EvoPsych does not study primitive tribes to learn about how we are different, but rather to learn about how we are all the same.

Mr. Proyect's comparison between Social Darwinism and EvoPsych is, I think, a slander, and can only be made by willfully ignoring the big differences.

Second, Mr. Proyect mocks Napoleon Chagnon's apparent fixation on sex. "I am surprised that Chagnon did not report that the shaman told him, “Broads! Broads! Broads! Broads! Broads!”. His impact on the tribes was, after all, quite broad." Not having yet read Chagnon's book, I can't judge whether or not he overstates the role of sex in their warfare, but one doesn't need to rely on Mr. Chagnon to see that sex is an important motivator for battle. Here are just a few salient examples:

• Combatants are overwhelmingly male, and only rarely female. This appears to be human instinct, and strongly suggests a sexual motivation for fighting.
• War and rape are inextricably linked. Go back and read Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul for some excellent examples. Or, failing that, consider the Yugoslav "rape camps," the horrific rapes in the Congo, the "rape of Nanking," or the 72 virgins promised to Jihadi martyrs, along with the occasional command from their officers to take Christian and Jewish women captive and turn them into concubines. Only for the most disciplined, modern armed forces (e.g., the US Marine Corps) is rape not a significant battle reward, but even there it happens.
• Women are attracted to brave warriors. They are also attracted to athletes, who engage in a simulacrum of battle.
• Military and political leaders, from Julius Caesar through Genghis Khan and Mao Tse-Tung have had hundreds or even thousands of concubines. Indeed, it is likely that everybody alive today is descended from Julius Caesar.

So is Mr. Proyect really going to insist that sex and warfare are unrelated phenomena? Mr. Chagnon's goal was to establish this link in our evolutionary past--not because the Yanomamo were "unevolved," but because they were relatively untainted. In other words, insofar as they were like us, they represent our common genetic heritage.

Finally, Mr. Proyect doesn't like Napoleon Chagnon. He thinks he's a bad guy. And here I tend to agree with him--Mr. Chagnon isn't a person I’d want to lend money to. (Tyler Cowen suggests that part of Mr. Chagnon's problem is his name: Napoleon. Nobody nice could have that name.) But again, this is arguing by flawed syllogism:

Bad people are always wrong. 
Napoleon Chagnon is a bad man. 
Therefore Napoleon is wrong.

I think EvoPsych is indisputably true on some level. Surely the brain is an evolved organ, and as such our behavior is also evolved. Like all other animals, we have instincts. Behaviors that all or most human cultures have in common are likely instinctive. So the goal is to discover what is common to the human animal, and what depends on culture or the environment. This is the motivation behind Chagnon's research--it was an attempt to uncover our common humanity. I don't know how successful Mr. Chagnon's project was, but Mr. Proyect's argument by slander is not convincing or helpful.

I'll end with some thoughts about the Marxist alternative to EvoPsych. First, like Social Darwinism, but unlike EvoPsych, Marxism is a political point of view. It aspires not just to interpret the world, but to change it. EvoPsych has no such ambition--it merely tries to understand the human animal better. Thus evolutionists are all over the map politically. Steven Pinker and Robert Wright are very much on the Left side of the aisle. I don't know Richard Dawkins' politics, but his radical atheism allies him with the Left. On the other hand, there are many Rightists who will categorically reject EvoPsych. Obviously some religious fundamentalists fall into that category, but so will well-known scholars such as Harvey Mansfield or Paul Johnson.

A key factor in scientific thinking is to separate scientific results from moral conclusions. Social Darwinism wasn't science because it made moral claims. EvoPsych makes no moral claims--it simply tries to describe who we are and how we got that way. Marxism has a long history of mixing moral outcomes with scientific results, egregiously with Lysenkoism. In his rejection of EvoPsych, this is precisely the error that Mr. Proyect has fallen into.

Marxism will have us believe that human evolution somehow stopped when human society separated into classes, and has played an unimportant role since then. This statement is clearly not true--human evolution has continued unto the present day--and likely even accelerated. This is an indisputable empirical fact. Similarly, that our brain is an evolved, biological organ is simply a fact--it cannot be wished away by saying that culture or economic class consciousness trumps all.

At best, Napoleon Chagnon's life's work contributes a rich source of data toward our understanding of human nature. I tend toward that view, but not having yet read his book I really don't have a strong opinion. But the laws of evolution predate Mr. Chagnon by at least a century, and the evidence in favor of EvoPsych in some form is overwhelming, even if Mr. Chagnon turns out to be a complete fraud.

63rd & Halsted

When I was in the Socialist Workers Party, back in the early 70s, we used to go on Saturday morning Militant sales to the neighborhood shopping center at 63rd & Halsted, the heart of the Englewood neighborhood. Some of you may remember Pearl Chertoff--she accompanied me on many of those outings. We did this year round, but I remember it being very cold and windy, as if it were always January.

Many 20-year-olds have done stupider things than sell Militants at 63rd & Halsted, but few have done anything sillier. Folks must've thought I just stepped out of a Monty Python skit. I cringe at the memory, and have not told my wife or children about it. I was a lousy newspaper salesman. I think in two hours I'd sell three or four papers at 25 cents each--hardly enough to cover gas or car fare, even in those days.

In my old age I'm a bit more tolerant of my former self. However silly the reason, and unlike my children, I at least have spent some time in a poor, Black neighborhood. I know more than they do about poor places. So in that spirit, let me tell you briefly about what happened to me in Englewood.

• Nobody called me "honky," or any other nasty name.
• Nobody called me a "dirty Commie," even though I was both.
• Nobody robbed me, or tried to rob me.
• Nobody hassled me or threatened me.
• Nobody slashed my tires.
• Nobody tried to sell me drugs.
• Nobody joined the Stupid Socialist Workers Party.

In short, my time at 63rd and Halsted was boring. The people were invariably polite and friendly. I think the few who actually bought a paper did so more out of charity than anything else. For they were a big-hearted people with friendly smiles, who were much more generous toward me than I was toward them.

I drove by the corner a few years later--must have been mid-80s--and found that all the stores were abandoned and boarded up. I haven't been back since, but I doubt it's gotten better. Englewood has earned a new status as the murder capital of America. This is really sad.

What brings this to mind is the Paul McKinley for Congress campaign. In his intro video, Mr. McKinley says "I believe in prosperity." Well, I can just hear his critics scoff. Doesn't everybody believe in prosperity? they ask. How trite can you get.

No, everybody does not believe in prosperity. In fact, among the political class ("The Machine" in Mr. McKinley's Chicago-style formulation) few people believe in prosperity.

• Those numskulls who fought for a 9% sales tax certainly don't believe in prosperity. No wonder all those stores closed.
• The folks who think schools exist for the benefit of their patronage employees instead of for children don't believe in prosperity.
• The people who spent 30 years fighting Walmart definitely don't believe in prosperity. I hear Walmart finally opened up at 87th & the Dan Ryan. I certainly hope that's true. They certainly got no help from the patronage-driven, anti-prosperity crowd.
• The Sinaloa drug gangs, who decided they'd rather fight it out in the streets of Chicago than in Juarez. Where ever they fight, they don't believe in prosperity.
• Mayor Emanuel, who at very least is too much of a coward to take on the gangster/patronage interests who don't believe in prosperity. I guess they don't call him "The Godfather" for nothing.

So Mr. McKinley is unique among Chicago pols, which is why this webpage endorses him enthusiastically. Still, Mr. McKinley, you need to show us you believe in prosperity. I'll give you a couple of years after you take office, but then I'm going back to 63rd & Halsted, and I'm bringing my family with me. This is what I want to find:

•  A grocery store.
• A discount store, like the Dollar General that's in my neighborhood.
• A good place for lunch. And if they serve good fried chicken I'll be back in Englewood every chance I get.
• A local gift shop. For my immigrant wife, and even for my kids, a neighborhood like Englewood will be exotic. My wife will want to buy some souvenirs and local handcrafts, talk to some locals, and learn something.
• Kids on the street. I don't mean gangster kids. I mean little kids playing, or walking home from school.
• A cop on the corner.
• If you really want to put on the Ritz for us, put in a store like TJMaxx or something. There used to be a Goldblatt's there, so this isn't really impossible.

As I say, I'm bringing my wife and kids. I'm a big tipper, and my wife loves to shop. We'll spend money. But here's one better. The primary election is Tuesday a week from today. If you contribute to the McKinley for Congress campaign right now, then lunch is on me. Just take the Englewood train to the end of the line and I'll meet you at the station.

We believe in prosperity.

New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend

This is Part 2 of a series on Trotskyism and the New Media. Part 1 is here.

I have some up-close and personal experience with Socialist Action's web page. Some years back--don't recall quite when--I noticed they allowed comments on their site. What a wonderful opportunity, I thought. I can communicate with my old colleagues, engage in political conversation, and who knows, maybe even enlighten a comrade or two.

So I started commenting on the site, and worked hard to be a good citizen. It is from this experience that the rules for Trotsky's Children have evolved: be polite and respectful, take my interlocutors seriously, avoid ad hominem attacks, and stay away from meaningless, fighting words such as fascist or racist. I aspired--then and now--to be a friendly critic.

Did I always follow my rules? No--I confess I didn't. There was one post in particular--a comment on a report of their convention--that was so full of sarcastic snark that one couldn't have seen it as friendly. (Really--Marxists can so easily descend into self-parody that it's impossible to resist.) Still, by and large I stuck with the program.

My very first comment--on North Korea--garnered precisely the response I'd hoped for. One comrade simply wrote "F*** North Korea," which are my sentiments precisely. But after that initial success, I never received any feedback. Not that I'm surprised--the Party asked comrades not to honor me with a response, and they complied. The Socialist Workers Party in my day would have done exactly the same thing.

They let me comment more or less freely for the first couple of years, deleting only a few remarks. But then I guess I pushed one hot button too many and more of my posts got deleted. Eventually they instituted comment moderation and most of my remarks were never published. Accordingly, I stopped writing them and started this blog instead.

The latest incarnation of their website--now a few months old--doesn't allow comments at all. This, in my view, is a big mistake.

Indeed, when I first started posting and discovered that my comments weren't immediately deleted, I foolishly assumed that they welcomed my attention. I guess I'd been out of the Movement for too long and have read too much about how controversy drives web traffic. But Socialist Action has not gotten that message. I think this is symptomatic of a fatal flaw in the Leninist concept of a Vanguard Party.

The web devalues Grand Poobahs. In the old days you needed access to a printing press in order to be read. The New York Times editorial board, for example, had great power--they were the gatekeepers to an expensive resource. In the old days, when I was in the Party, we used to say we were unknown because we didn't have the resources of the bourgeois media. There was some truth to that then, but none at all now.

Now the problem a budding Vanguard Party has is, while it is not now a Grand Poobah, it aspires to become one. That is, Socialist Action (along with The Militant) doesn't just want to abolish the New York Times, but rather to replace it. Thus as the Internet corrodes the New York Times, it also destroys the ambitions of a Vanguard Party.

As we showed in Part 1, The Militant has essentially abandoned any such ambition. It has put its head in the sand and is just a weekly newspaper, a copy of which can also be found on the web. The Militant makes no effort to go web-native.

Not so with Socialist Action. They are trying very hard to use the Internet effectively. I can't recall when Socialist Action last had a print subscription drive. Indeed, the print edition looks more like a fund raiser than a way to get the word out. The real action takes place on the web. Here are some of the creditable things they are doing:

• The web page is regularly updated--at least every couple of days. The fact that the print edition only comes out monthly no longer determines the schedule.
• The site looks like a political site. It has headers that include "Donate," "Join," and "Contact Us." Perhaps revealingly, it lacks a "Get Involved" tab.
• The page has icons for Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and Youtube. In other words, they want to be part of the conversation.
• They advertise events. They really do want their readers involved with what they do.

So why don't they allow comments? Surely, if you want to be a center for political discourse, such as the Daily Kos, or RedState, or the Huffington Post, you have to give comments a big slice of the pie. Those sites are political organizing tools because they get their readers involved and talking to each other. By forbidding comments altogether, Socialist Action undoes everything it is trying to accomplish elsewhere on its site.

Of course, despite my best efforts at a friendly tone, Socialist Action will never regard me as a friend--we're on opposite sides of the political spectrum. I understand that--and deep down, they're not my friend, either. But they still should have been very happy when I started commenting on their website. And there is nothing wrong if comrades answer me back. After all, if they can't deal with me, how do they plan to lead a world revolution?

I am, in fact, their second-best friend. I read what they write, I take it seriously, and I spend time engaging them in conversation. That cannot hurt their cause. It doesn't hurt my cause either--I will be more widely read if comrades argue back. Controversy drives traffic. Traffic is what makes a web page important. Comments distinguish a successful web page from a dead-tree newspaper.

It's a little harder for them now that I have my own blog. I've attracted my own readers from the Right side of the aisle, along with Leftists from outside Socialist Action. Still, when somebody (anybody) reads your paper, takes it seriously, and drives traffic to your site, simply ignoring him is just dumb. They can't let their entire organization be turned into an anti-Dan King blog, but an occasional comment or article from them will do both of us good.

It used to be that a group of people--say in a Vanguard Party--could multiply their effectiveness by banding together and speaking with one voice. That's just not true anymore. Now, one voice is just one voice--regardless of how many people it represents. The web encourages multiple voices, even if they coalesce around certain ideas, such as socialism. By rigidly forbidding comrades from commenting on my site, or from having their own blogs that express their individual opinions (perhaps not always the Party Line), Socialist Action hugely reduces its effectiveness.

A blog roll is one important thing that's missing from the Socialist Action web page (the short list of links notwithstanding). Not only do they not like their second-best friends, they don't even like their first friends. They can't read anybody's opinion besides their own. In true Vanguard Party style, they act just like a Grand Poohbah wannabe.