What Would Lenin Do?

Louis Proyect writes a wonderful article under the title Goodbye Lenin, appearing Counterpunch. He responds to friendly fire from our former comrade, Paul Le Blanc (not to be confused with the president of the University of Southern New Hampshire). Mr. Le Blanc was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (US SWP) when I joined, and has subsequently cycled his way through to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), his home since 2009.

Mr. Proyect's article is the latest volley in an on-going discussion from the consequences of the British SWP's collapse in a sex and rape scandal. I have not followed that at all, but apparently it has resulted in a serious leadership crisis. That larger issue was addressed by a prominent Marxist theorist, Alex Callinicos, in an article entitled Is Leninism Finished?. He maintains that whatever the specific fate of the British SWP, the truth remains that a Leninist vanguard Party is necessary to lead the working class in revolution.

Mr. Proyect responded with an answer to that question: Leninism is Finished, contending that the concept of democratic centralism is no longer helpful. He argues that the Leftist net must be cast wide, and that ideological purity is probably not the most important thing. Otherwise one ends up as a small, sectarian group, such as today's US SWP. His argument is similar to the one I make here.

Mr. Le Blanc picks up his cudgel in a piece entitled Leninism is Unfinished, where he tries to split the difference. Democratic centralism is still important, he maintains, but he thinks the modern grouplets purporting to be Leninist don't understand the concept. Lenin meant it in a much weaker sense, though how weak is a matter of dispute.

Here is how I summarize the three points of view:

Mr. Callinicos: Democratic centralism means vigorous, internal discussion of program and policy, followed by unity of speech and action presented to the outside world. That's the Trotskyism I grew up with.

Mr. Proyect: Democratic centralism means a united voice in parliament.

All discipline meant [according to Lenin--ed] was a deputy voting according to instructions from the party’s central committee, etc. For example, if Alex Callinicos was elected to Parliament and instructed to vote against funding the war in Iraq, and then voted for funding, the party would be entitled to expel him.

Outside of parliament, freedom of speech and action (within the "principles of the Party") are permitted.

Mr. Le Blanc defines democratic centralism succinctly: Freedom of discussion; Unity of action.

So let's consider an example. Back in the 1980s Nat Weinstein--then a member of Socialist Action (SA)--wanted to run his own newspaper. There were no important programmatic differences between SA and Weinstein and his friends, but nevertheless this perfectly simple and reasonable desire led to a split. And given the traditional conception of the "revolutionary press," it had to. The Party can't have two, independently edited newspapers.

Mr. Callinicos will agree with SA's decision to expel the Weinstein grouplet.

Mr. Proyect will probably agree with me and suggest that there's nothing wrong with Mr. Weinstein publishing his own newspaper under the SA umbrella. There is precedent for that, albeit not Trotskyist. The Daily Worker and People's World were both separately edited publications of the US Communist Party, with slightly different points of view. SA, of course, was too conservative to even consider the possibility.

I can't predict Mr. Le Blanc's opinion. Is publishing your own newspaper disunity of action, or freedom of discussion?

The last word, so far, belongs to Mr. Proyect in Goodbye Lenin. I can't do justice to his argument in the space here, nor indeed to any of the arguments. Rather than attempting any kind of summary, let me pick out some items that caught my fancy. I'll add that all three of my correspondents are very good writers, and if you're at all interested in debate on Marxist arcana, this is a good way to get there.

• Mr. Proyect repudiates the charge of "Zinovievism," supposedly leveled against him by Mr. Le Blanc. I'll let you figure out what that means for yourself--I did promise you Marxist arcana.
• Mr. Proyect indicates that the Internet changes everything, or at least a whole lot. Mr. Le Blanc appears not to like the Internet very much--witness the fact that his books are not available on Kindle. That means I'll never read them.
• Mr. Proyect touts the work of Lars Lih, an author whom Mr. Le Blanc seemingly does not think so highly of. The dispute may arise because Mr. Lih is an independent scholar, and not part of the academic priesthood to which Mr. Le Blanc belongs. Or it may be that Mr. Lih releases his books on Kindle. Indeed, I have downloaded his blessedly short Lenin biography, and am finding it quite enjoyable.

So I basically agree with Mr. Proyect--Leninism is dead. Misters Callinicos and Le Blanc are members of what some have called the Dead Russians Society. It's an apt name. As I read Mr. Lih, I am struck by how different Russia a century ago is from the modern world. Not only is there an Internet today (and therefore no "revolutionary press" worthy of the name), but there isn't even a proletariat. The working class of Lenin's day has long since been replaced by machines and robots. It's no longer sensible to speak of an intelligentsia--anybody who wants to read has access to all the information they could ever want.

Mr. Proyect is certainly correct that the Leninist grouplets of the sort I cover will remain completely irrelevant. That includes both versions of the SWP, along with Mr. Le Blanc's ISO, along with whatever variant of SA you care to imagine.

For all that, there is an air of unreality the pervades all the articles we've discussed. Mr. Callinicos spends most of his pixels on the evils of "neoliberalism." He demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how the modern economy works, nor the remotest comprehension of how to solve our serious problems. If this be the best Marxist theory can offer, then they've got worse problems than Leninism.

Mr. Proyect shares this view of the world, as demonstrated by his alternative to the Leninist project. He puts forward the Greek party SYRIZA as a role model. Now I think SYRIZA is mostly a group of government employees, and since the Greek government employs a very large proportion of the workforce, this is a sizable organization. The problem with these people is that they are totally unproductive. Every member of SYRIZA could go on strike and nobody would even notice. Rather than the proletariat, they represent the parasite, lumpen class.

SYRIZA believes that there is some huge stash of cash hidden somewhere, and if they just throw a big enough temper tantrum then the bank vaults will be opened an all problems will be solved. Of course it's delusional--nobody with any money remains in Greece. Worse, they conflate currency with money with wealth--all of which are completely different things. Currency is easily redistributed, but money less so. Wealth is almost impossible to redistribute since it is almost always intimately tied to the abilities of the wealth owner.

In Zimbabwe they liberated the white-owned farms that then subsequently fell into ruin. Because not only do you need land to run a farm, you also need expertise, access to capital, and access to markets. The Mugabe thieves had none of that--the wealth was impossible to capture. A similar story is playing out in Venezuela--by expropriating the oil industry the government is destroying it. Within the next decade (barring dramatic political change) Venezuela will not be an oil exporter, and for the same reason Zimbabwe isn't a food exporter.

Leninism won't get you to the socialist heaven of which Misters Callinicos, Le Blanc, and Proyect dream. But nothing else will either. Socialism is impossible.

Further Reading:

• Nat Weinstein's Project
• Trotskyism & New Media
• Jack Barnes' Next Book

Book Review: Work 2.0

Work 2.0: Nowhere to Hide,  by Sergiusz Prokurat, is a breathless account of the new world of work. He recounts in great detail how jobs have changed as a result of the digital revolution, specifically the web. His book contains a huge amount of data, lots of graphs (many of which are hard to see in the Kindle edition), and cites innumerable references. This is the work of a scholar, and as such it isn't an easy read.

I will find the book a very useful source for my own opus Your Future Job: How to Build a Career in the New Normal (draft excerpt here). Rather than scholars, my audience is different--I'm writing for 18-year-olds and their parents. That means a lot of the data and nuance has to disappear, to be replaced by the Big Idea, or at least the Simple Model. Or, the critic might argue, the Oversimplified Model.

And that's where I take issue with Mr. Prokurat's book. It's hard to see the big picture through all his data. It's information overload, and somehow the connecting links are missing. I'll give two examples.

First, he rightly considers globalization and outsourcing as a major driver of change. Lots of manufacturing jobs have been exported to China, with America's rust belt being hollowed out. "The 21st century will belong to Asia, as was the case always, except for the last 500 years. Asian workers are working very hard to make this happen while we consume as never before."

But this isn't true today. Automation is bringing manufacturing back to the United States in a big way, drawn by cheap electricity, good infrastructure, and proximity to markets. Wages are no longer a significant factor. It's China that is being hollowed out. A few pages later Mr. Prokurat admits as much. "The problem with this model [outsourcing for low labor costs] became evident with the opening of Asian labour markets--the model had simply been exhausted. We [countries like Poland and China] have reached a stage of development where we either enhance our economy's competitiveness, or we stop in our development tracks."

Later in the book he describes today's labor market for Generations Y and Z (i.e., my children and students). Today's workers, he claims, demand eight qualities from their employer: freedom; adjusting work to their needs; careful observation; credibility; cooperation; entertainment; a fast-paced environment; and innovativeness. Failure to offer these perks will cost the company its talented workforce. And then comes the bottom line: "What also matters is the possibility of rapid promotions and climbing the wage ladder."

Really? Maybe that's true for graduates from MIT or Stanford (though I doubt even for them), but it certainly isn't true for the students I talk to every day. I teach at a second-tier public university, and my students will be lucky to find any professional work. That they can lay eight conditions on their terms of employment is a pipe dream.

And sure enough, a few pages later Mr. Prokurat comes back down to earth. He admits to the shamefully high youth unemployment in Europe. And concedes that many if not most college graduates will struggle to find jobs. As to "rapid promotions and climbing the wage ladder," that simply won't happen for the majority of today's young people. That's one reason why I call them the screwed generation.

It's not that I disagree with Mr. Prokurat. Every one of his statements is true within some context. The problem is the book doesn't really explain that context--there is no story line. Thus we're presented with seeming contradictions within a few pages. He's missing the Big Idea.

There is one theme in the book that I do disagree with. Mr. Prokurat implies that the Web has somehow changed human nature. For example, he writes "Our physical presence will be supplemented by digital beings (e.g., our avatars developed in MMORGs, our presence in the world of Second Life, our interactions on our favourite forums) which represent us in cyberspace." Similarly, I think he exaggerates the effect of Facebook and Twitter.

This is the first I've heard of Second Life in several years. It used to be a big thing--indeed, my university hired a faculty member whose research was centered around that software. I thought that was silly then, and it's obviously nonsensical today. Second Life has fallen off the radar screen. Virtual reality is the domain of low-status males who retreat to that because they have so few opportunities in the real world. It is a sad place, not a happy one. I think that's true of Second Life, on-line porn, and probably most video games.

My knowledge of Facebook comes from seeing how my wife and daughter use it. For them it is a technology that allows them to keep up with friends and relatives. It replaces the telephone and the greeting card. It is precisely not a way to meet strangers or to expand one's social circle. Friends are still made the old-fashioned way--at school or work, at a church picnic, or in a bar. Human nature has not changed.

I'm distressed by Mr. Prokurat's account about how employers are searching employee's social media presence. This portends a 1984-like world, where political correctness is rigidly enforced. If any regulation of social media is warranted, it would be to limit this behavior. There has to be a realm where people can interact with their friends privately.

So Work 2.0 is a good book. I read the whole thing, and I will probably read it again as I write my own book. There's a lot of information there. And that Mr. Prokurat doesn't provide us with the Big Idea is probably a good thing--the reader can make their own interpretation.

All in all, it's a pretty depressing picture. I'm glad I'm nearing retirement.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Second Machine Age
• Book Review: Average is Over
• Why Trotskyists Don't Like Las Vegas

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Trillion?

This article is about Ta-Nehisi Coates' now infamous article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled The Case For Reparations.

Mr. Coates' article is better written and more thoroughly researched than a handwritten, beggar's plea, but the message is pretty much the same.

Homeless, tired and hungry. No family. Anything helps. God Bless you.

Like the sidewalk bum, Mr. Coates is coy about the amount he wants us to put in his tin cup. Estimates I've read range from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. He purports instead to be more interested in the come to Jesus moment when the scales finally fall from us white folks' eyes. We're supposed to have a conversation, a heart-to-heart where we finally recognize that we're all brothers under the skin. So here's my two-cents to the conversation, not that Mr. Coates will be listening.

Like the homeless beggar, no doubt Black people are poor, and no doubt they're an underclass, and no doubt they've been horribly mistreated. They've been an underclass ever since they arrived on these shores. Indeed (if you take Gregory Clark's thesis seriously) they were probably an underclass even before they left Africa. After all, the African slavers didn't pursue the social elite or the militarily capable. No--they targeted the poor and defenseless for sale to the Europeans. It's odd that Mr. Coates doesn't insist that some share of reparations come from today's West African elite--descendants of the slavers.

Mr. Coates wants us to take Congressman John Conyer's HR 40 bill seriously. From Mr. Conyers' website, the bill is supposed to accomplish four things:

1. It acknowledges the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery;
2. It establishes a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves;
3. It studies the impact of those forces on today's living African Americans; and
4. The commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.

Point 1 is stipulated. Slavery is fundamentally unjust and inhuman. If Mr. Conyers wants to pass a resolution in Congress saying that, it's fine by me.

Point 2 is silly. Why do we need a commission? Isn't the history of slavery being widely studied by academics and many others? What is a government commission supposed to accomplish that isn't already being done?

Point 3 is way too complicated. Shouldn't we also study the impact of history on white Americans? And what about Native Americans? Or Chinese Americans. Tyler Cowen argues (cogently in my opinion) that the large majority of white Americans were (slightly) harmed by the institution of slavery. And aren't today's African-Americans, dispossessed though they may be, better off than they would have been if their ancestors had been left in Africa? Compare North Lawndale with, e.g., Sierra Leone. How is some commission going to reconcile all of this?

Point 4 is impossible. History is history. You can't change it or undo it.

But OK--let's give Misters Coates and Conyers their way. And suppose that African-Americans are awarded some trillion dollars for successful beggary. The immediate beneficiaries will be Black folks, each of which will get some $30,000. Here is my prediction for the secondary beneficiaries.

State Lotteries--Poor people are almost by definition financially unsophisticated. They play the lottery as an investment--it's a get rich quick scheme. Accordingly, I predict that the teachers' unions will be avid supporters of this reparations scheme, given that most of the proceeds goes to education.

Drugs, Liquor and Tobacco--What better way to spend a windfall? Drugs, of course, represent another get rich scheme that young, poor males are likely to fall for. Besides, they get you laid. Accordingly, expect the Mexican cartels to support and lobby for reparations--a lot of the money is going to them.

Prisons--An enhanced drugs trade will lead to more crime and more arrests. The prison guards' union will be very happy with this. What a great deal!

Real Estate Scammers--Mr. Coates spends much of his essay describing how Blacks were ripped off by real estate salesmen in North Lawndale. Crooks prey on gullible people, and if you believe Mr. Coates then poor Blacks are among the most gullible around. Expect lots of the reparations money to be spent on fancy McMansions, sold for far more than they're worth. And in ten years, when the financial and social capital has expired, it will all degenerate into a new slum. Why does Mr. Coates think this will be any different than North Lawndale?

Colleges & Universities--Well meaning commentators are hoping that our gullible friends will spend their new found wealth on education instead of fake luxury. Nevermind that our nation is already over-invested in education, and for a lot of people more schooling makes little sense. And then colleges are often just as corrupt as real estate agents. Mr. Coates will probably finger places like the University of Phoenix, but ripoff joints like Chicago State University or the City College of San Francisco probably deserve more blame. Either way, the academics are going to make out like bandits, which is what they are.

Mr. Coates and Mr. Conyers miss a very important fact. Money is not the same thing as wealth. Especially in this case, many are suggesting that the Fed should just print up a trillion dollars and give it to Black people. But little bits of green paper are not going to substantially improve people's lives.

Money becomes wealth only when it is invested in capital that returns a revenue stream. That can be physical capital (e.g., rental property, or a restaurant) or human capital (e.g., education in something useful). Actually, it has to be both because there's no point in buying a restaurant if you don't know how to run it. But it can't be spent on fake luxury or phony degrees, much less on lottery tickets. Those aren't wealth.

Black people, like underclasses around the world, have not been able to accumulate wealth. In this they differ from the Jews, the Chinese, the Amish, the Mormons, and that fraction of white people we call the middle class. These are all people with bourgeois, or at least petty-bourgeois attitudes. These are people who hoard capital and pass it on to their children and grandchildren. That's why, unlike most Black people, they have a net worth greater than zero.

Until Black people can do that, not even $1,000,000,000,000 in reparations will make a dime's worth of difference.

Further Reading:

• Affirmative Action, IQ & Liberalism
• Food Network & The New Normal
• The Dream 50 Years On

Socialist Action Jumps The Shark

Admittedly, there is a difference between political opinions with intellectual rigor and those that appeal to sentiment. A political party ideally hits both those buttons, at least partially. For example, when I was a Trotskyist, the intellectual argument against the Vietnam war was opposition to imperialism, while sentiment was rooted in the horror of the war. The two matched up more or less, and the result was a growing Party.

Today, both Socialist Action and The Militant have lost their way. The former strives for intellectual rigor (such as it is), while the latter appeals to sentiment. Neither is successful.

A recent article by Jeff Mackler in Socialist Action touts the thesis of the aging muckraker, Seymour Hersh. He's the fellow who exposed the My Lai massacre some forty six years ago, and now he claims that the Syrian rebels are responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. That is the red line supposedly crossed by the Assad government that nearly led to US retaliation.

The consensus view is that crime was committed by the government, not by the rebels. I acknowledge there is some disagreement, and I certainly don't know enough about the mechanics of gas attacks to resolve the issue. But I find Mr. Hersh's claim, and by extension Socialist Action's position, untenable.

The Leftist expert on Syria is Louis Proyect, who has devoted a lengthy article on Seymour Hersh here. Mr. Proyect pretty convincingly debunks the Hersh thesis. Unfortunately, his argument is too ad hominem for my taste: Mr. Hersh is wrong because he agrees with right-wing news sites, such as World Net Daily. But of course there's no reason why Right and Left couldn't agree on a factual matter (were it factual). I'm a Right-winger and on this I agree with Mr. Proyect. Does that make Mr. Proyect wrong?

I think believing in a rebel sarin attack on their own position is a conspiracy theory. It requires that the rebels would use one of their few artillery shells to attack their own, very strategic position, and this apparently just to prod the US into retaliating against the government. Surely, if the rebels really did have access to artillery-deliverable sarin gas, they would have employed it against the enemy, rather than betting on the fanciest billiard ball bounce ever.

Socialist Action advances this theory in part to demonstrate that the rebels are really evil people. Therefore, just as a matter of basic human morality, you should support the government. This is an appeal to sentiment. The effort is belied somewhat by the caption to the photo: "Assad is guilty of many atrocities, as this photograph taken after a government airstrike on the town of Maarat al-Noaman shows. But did his regime use sarin gas?"

More, Socialist Action tries to show that the US is really siding with the rebels. In particular, they assert that we are trying to provide the rebels with shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADS), capable of shooting down civilian aircraft. For whatever reason we're trying to keep this effort a secret--to this day the mainstream media is completely bamboozled. It's not clear why we'd be trying to keep it a secret, nor could we were it true. The Israelis would have a conniption fit if they really believed we were trying to so arm the rebels, and would shout to the heavens.

The whole theory is just malarkey. As Mr. Proyect demonstrates, the US policy is to let the two sides fight it out and exhaust each other.

In a similarly perverse position, Socialist Action has come down on the side of the Russians in Ukraine.

The conflict in Ukraine has greatly escalated in recent days, as open revolt against the right-wing government in Kiev sweeps through the eastern and southern sections of the country. Protesters state that they are trying to protect the Russian-speaking population from discrimination and fascist attacks. Many call for autonomy for their region, while others say they are seeking to secede from Ukraine and to join Russia—as Crimea did following its March 16 referendum.

This thesis loosely agrees with Pat Buchanan's, who argues that Putin is defending Christendom. Buchanan's piece is better argued, and indeed, who one sides with here is a matter of taste. But Socialist Action is going against sentiment, which belongs to the freedom-fighting rebels in Kiev. Both The Militant and Mr. Proyect are on the side of the Maidan Square demonstrators.

So for both Syria and Ukraine Socialist Action goes against sentiment and instead argues for "principle." The principle is to oppose anything the American government supports. If the US supports the Maidan square crowd, then of course it's only because they're a bunch of fascists. If America opposes Assad, it can only be because the Baathist regime represents some residue of Marxism, and is in any event less vile than the evil Jihadis.

But since sentiment and principle have to sort-of align, it is necessary to come up with completely bogus crimes, such as the rebel's sarin gas attack. In the cause of sentiment, Socialist Action finds a fascist under every bed. It won't work--it's really hard to distinguish the Black Hats from the White Hats in either Syria or Ukraine. None of the hats are Red, either.

The Militant, in siding with sentiment on both Syria and Ukraine, has lost sight of principle. It's program has become increasingly incoherent, as I've documented elsewhere (most recently here). They're flailing around trying to find a thread on which to hang a position. To use the old Trotskyist lingo, The Militant is opportunist, while Socialist Action is sectarian. My 18-year-old self would still have joined with The Militant. I'd have nothing to do with Socialist Action.

Zoltan Grossman, writing in Socialist Viewpoint in one of the best articles about Ukraine I've read anywhere, puts it best: "The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend." Words to live by.

Further Reading:

• The Ukraine & The Other Ukraine
• Turkish Politics From Socialist Action
• Imperialism

Nat Weinstein's Project

I owe my friends at Socialist Viewpoint some attention. The last few issues have not caught my fancy, but the May/June edition contains much of interest. So I clicked over there to prepare this post, and discovered that the paper's founder, Nat Weinstein, has just passed away. He was 89 years old.

There is a well-written and remarkably generous obituary in Socialist Action, here, authored by Jeff Mackler. Louis Proyect also publishes some thoughts on Nat's passing.

I never met Mr. Weinstein, something I now regret. Among other things, he loved political discussion. I imagine that he and I could have spent a few enjoyable hours over coffee in conversation. I don't know if that would be true--it may be he'd never talk to a Republican--but I can hope. Now there's no way to ever know.

I don't agree with my Trotskyist friends, but I do respect them. Mr. Weinstein is very much worthy of respect. He was skilled as a painter. Mr. Mackler tells a funny story:

Highly skilled, Nat could paint a pine board to look like any kind of quality wood or stone. He was fond of telling the story of his experience in marbleizing several dozen giant wooden pillars in a huge downtown San Francisco commercial building. While high on a scaffold, Nat remembered, he had been denounced by a woman below, who was outraged that he appeared to be painting over the building’s beautiful “marble” pillars. He recalled that the woman was astonished to learn that the opposite was the case!

That passion extended to politics. Nat spent the WWII years in the Merchant Marine. Mr. Proyect quotes from Nat's wife, Sylvia Weinstein, who wrote

My husband had become a socialist while sailing on a ship to Venezuela. It was a three month trip, and he was a captive audience to a Trotskyist shipmate. I still have the letters he wrote me—three v-mail letters which started off with, “At last I have found the truth.” I thought he had become a Jehovah Witness.

The religious reference is revealing. I don't want to get into philosophical differences between Marxism and religion, but surely all passionate people have a religious-like impulse. Theirs is a moral cause, not just a pragmatic one. Nat's shipboard conversion led to a life-long passion that he carried to the day he died. I say that not with condescension, but rather with admiration. We who are without passion accomplish nothing.

In this spirit I now pay homage to Nat Weinstein by taking his newspaper seriously.

The May/June headliner is written by Gregg Shotwell.  The article is a deeply personal description of the Marxist theory of alienation. He started his career as a machine operator in Widdicomb’s furniture factory.

I loved the feel of wood in my hands. The smell of cherry, mahogany, and ash. Walnut was the most aromatic. It was intoxicating like roasting coffee. Sawdust is a fragrance that provokes memories as ancient and arousing as tools made by hands deep in the forest of our collective memory. Wood, even kiln-dried wood, feels and looks alive. I studied the grain of each piece before I cut, shaped, bored, or mitered it to fit. The work was satisfying and the job was integrated.

To support his growing family, he moved to the higher-paying but soul-deadening job at General Motors.

The first day I walked through the doors of GM, my body cringed. Every day for the next thirty years, my body cringed when I walked through the doors of GM. My senses felt assaulted by the noise and toxic vapors. A cloud of oil and coolant hung in the air. The concussion of mechanical clamor penetrated my body and hammered my eardrums. Everyone shouted. Curses were a natural response to the environment.  

At Widdicomb’s I considered eighty-eight pieces high volume. The production rate on my first job at GM was 88,000 pieces for eight hours of work.  

Eleven thousand pieces-per-hour is 183.33 parts-per-minute, more than three parts-per-second, and we had to accelerate the rate if we wanted to take any breaks. And we did.  

At Widdicomb’s there was only one shift. We never worked more than eight hours a day. If we had to work on Saturday, we only worked until noon. At GM ten hours was mandatory. All three shifts worked every Saturday. Sixty hours a week on top of a big hourly raise meant I was in the money. It also meant that I was paying for the money with my life. I was grinding 660,000 valve lifters a week.  

I didn’t like the job. I promised myself it was temporary, but I didn’t foresee what old timers called, “the golden handcuffs”—overtime, pension, benefits—or what pundits called, “the social contract.” Pundits didn’t understand that our work experience was dis-integrated and the so-called “social contract” bound us to a dehumanized system of labor. It was in effect an anti-social contract. 

Mr. Shotwell does us a service with his vivid description of a 20th Century automobile plant. He should then be doubly happy that such jobs first moved overseas, and are now rapidly disappearing altogether, replaced by robots. But I don't think he is. He wants future generations to enjoy the "benefits" of golden handcuffs. Unionism was founded to protect the interests of the proletariat, but when there is no proletariat, the benefits of a union disappear.

If it is any consolation, I believe the craft work that both Mr. Shotwell so enjoyed early in his career, and that Nat pursued for his entire working life, is making a comeback. Commodities like cars, houses, and furniture will be made by machine. But it is human nature to want something personalized and created--that luxury manufacture is where the jobs will be.

Zoltan Grossman writes a superb article about Ukraine, among the best I've read anywhere. The piece echos what I have written here, except that Mr. Grossman knows much more than I do. His essay has actual facts.

A regular feature of Socialist Viewpoint is Incarceration Nation. This features articles by and about prominent prisoners, including especially Mumia abu Jamal. An encounter with NYC's transit police is recited here. I think there's probably another side to the story, though I don't know what it is.

It is here where passion and reality don't mix very well. No doubt we have too many people in jail--approximately 1% of the male population. And no doubt some of them are innocent, more are mistreated, and most of them are miserable. It is a scandal. But also, a large fraction are psychopaths, including, I believe, Mumia. Perhaps not a majority, but a much higher fraction than in the general population. These people need to be in jail.

The Libertarian economist, David Henderson, writes about the Leftist author, Barbara Ehrenreich. He quotes her:

Stop all the ways that money is being taken from the poor. I mean, you can just spiral down so fast into poverty. You have a broken headlight, you get stopped. That fine is going to be greater than the cost of a new headlight. You don't have money to pay the fine, you're looking at an arrest warrant--and down you go.

Ms. Ehrenreich, Mr. Henderson, and I all agree that this is an injustice. So many piddly regulations benefit the middle class at the expense of the poor.

Nat Weinstein knew whereof we speak. His Trotskyist passion sometimes put him on the side of angels. May he rest in peace.

Further Reading:

• Labor's Final Step
• Socialist Viewpoint's Killer App
• Union Man

Quebec & The Militant's Incoherence

An article by Michael Prairie reporting on the provincial elections in Quebec is an essential read. First, the topic has been under-reported in the US, not featured on any of the webpages I routinely follow. Mr. Prairie gives a good, short and accurate account of the facts, which I definitely appreciate. And second, one can only marvel at the utter incoherence of the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP) position.

In very brief summary the facts are these: The separatist Parti Quebecois (PQ) won an election to form a minority government in 2010, headed by Pauline Marois. In what must be one of the greatest political blunders of all time, Ms. Marois called a snap election for April 7th, which the PQ lost in a landslide. Ms. Marois lost her own seat.

The proximate cause of this disaster was an intemperate remark by Quebec businessman and celebrity, Pierre Karl Peladeau, who some liken to Silvio Berlusconi. He announced that he "wanted to make Quebec a country." The PQ has always been for independence, but that cause has become increasingly unpopular in recent decades--it cost them the election.

In addition, the PQ government wanted to pass another illiberal law called the Charter of Quebec Values. (This is akin to the infamous Bill 101, passed in 1977, that regulated the use of language in private life.) The Charter would have banned government employees from wearing "conspicuous religious symbols" on the job, including the kippah (yarmulke), hijab (Muslim headscarf), and turban (Sikh religious headwear), among others. The effort was accompanied by sundry racist comments directed especially against Muslims and Jews:

Louise Mailloux, a prominent Quebec feminist and philosopher [and PQ member - ed], said this week she stands by her belief that circumcision and baptism are similar to rape and that kosher and halal certification is a tax that goes toward funding religious wars and lining the pockets of religious leaders.

I never found Quebecois nationalism to be a very attractive ideology. It is suffused with a deep-going antisemitism, leavened lately by an equally vicious hatred of Muslims. It's the stupid sister of France's National Front. I didn't like it very much even in 1970 when I was in the Party (more accurately, the Young Socialist Alliance). That was when Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to combat the terrorist FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front). Nearly my first political activity as a Trotskyist was supporting Quebec independence in the face of government repression.

So I'm sympathetic to and intrigued by Mr. Prairie's description of how the Party has disowned Quebec separatism and no longer supports the movement. He cites two developments over the past half century.

First, he claims the Quebecois have essentially won their fight against "national oppression." He cites figures such as relative earnings between Francophones and Anglophones in the province, with the former earning more than the latter. There is, in his view, little evidence of discrimination against the Quebecois.

I think this claim is correct. It's consistent with anecdotal evidence from my own recent trips to Montreal, from a Canadian friend who used to live there, and from my wife's Filipino relatives who are Montrealers. Bill 101 may be obnoxious, but it has worked to eliminate an enduring sense of grievance among French Canadians.

His second claim is also true: separatism fails because Quebec (and especially Montreal) is much more "multinational and heterogeneous" today. My wife's relatives are a good example. Grandma (my wife's cousin) speaks English and Tagalog, but no French. Her children--born in the Philippines but moved to Montreal as teenagers--speak English, Tagalog, and limited French as a foreign language. Her grandchildren speak English at home, French at school, and are fluently bilingual in Canada's languages. But they can't speak Tagalog. They are Canadian, but not Quebecois. Nobody in that clan would ever vote for the PQ.

So how does Mr. Prairie account for the Party's change of heart? Here the argument descends into incoherence:

The blows struck against the national oppression of Quebecois are one of many consequences of the weakening of U.S. and world imperialism since the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.

What? It gets worse:

The ground conquered against national oppression of Quebecois in Canada is one aspect of a world marked by the fact that U.S. imperialism — as well as the privileged ruling Soviet bureaucracies that were wiped out with the fall of the Stalinist regimes — failed to inflict demoralizing defeats on the working class in the former workers states of Eastern and Central Europe. ... As a consequence, toilers around the world, from Montreal to Kiev, are using the political space they've carved out to discuss, debate and organize against the bosses in face of the worldwide crisis of capitalist production and trade. 

World imperialism led by Washington lost the Cold War against the working class in the former Soviet Union. In similar fashion, Canadian imperialism has lost the Cold War against the working people of Quebec. 

This is something to celebrate.

I've been under the impression that the Party dropped the US lost the Cold War meme, but I guess not. It's resurrected here in the strangest possible context. Also reappearing is that odd phrase political space, a term which the Party has used in many contexts, from Syria to Turkey to Egypt. This is also opaque.

One might argue that the Party sympathizes more with Islamism than with Quebec nationalism. But I don't think that's true--elsewhere their condemnation of Jihadis has been nothing short of thundering. Their defense of Muslim rights in Quebec is a perfectly straightforward defense of religious freedom that I would also support.

So I'm clueless. Let me know if any of this makes sense to you. For all that, I agree with the Party's position on the Parti Quebecois.

I sure wish the Party would hold its much touted convention so that we'd get some clarity on these issues.

Further Reading:

• The Ukraine & The Other Ukraine
• Book Review: Nigel Farage
• Grenada & The Art Of Being A Comrade

Resurrecting the UAW

On January 29th radio host and economist Jack Rasmus interviewed the retired UAW activist Gregg Shotwell for the program Alternative Visions. The podcast is here. (I listened to it last night. I do not have a transcript, so any quotes below are recited from memory.) The topic concerns the state of the modern union movement, specifically the UAW, and its future prospects. I found it while searching for Mr. Shotwell's views on the UAW's Chattanooga defeat--this interview happened before that vote, but I think one can infer his opinion.

Neither of these gentlemen are stupid. I thoroughly enjoyed the podcast and learned much. But their Progressive (actually, Marxist) world view renders them blind to unassailable facts. It always astonishes me how ideological commitment can lead people so obviously astray. I'm certain I behave similarly in other contexts--it's human nature--but on this I can undoubtedly see more clearly than they can.

Mr. Rasmus introduces the topic by asking how unions have failed over the past three decades. And fail they have. As recently as 2002 the UAW had just under 640,000 members. By 2012 that had fallen to a bit over 380,000. Both of those are a steep decline from the 1.5 million members in the 1970s. The defeat in Chattanooga probably signals the end of the UAW as a significant player in American economic or political life.

So what have the unions done wrong?

The problem, according to Mr. Shotwell, is that unions have lost sight of their core mission to defend the interests of the workingman. Wages, working conditions, and benefits are what it is all about. The union should not be involved in plant management or profitability. In Mr. Shotwell's view the relationship between union and management is irreducibly adversarial and zero-sum. It's class conflict all the way down.

Unless unions can earn substantial benefits for their members, argues Mr. Shotwell, then unions serve no purpose. Concession contracts--which aim to increase the competitiveness of the company--are counterproductive. Likewise neutrality agreements (where the company agrees not to oppose the union) must come with some quid pro quo attached, which will ultimately screw the workingman. That, in his view, is what was happening in Chattanooga.

I think Mr. Shotwell's assessment is not far off. The UAW's decline is certainly partly because they can no longer win any benefits for their membership. The union earns $683 annually from each member--that's more than $50/month. For somebody earning $15/hour that's a significant sum, and it is not clear they're getting any value from it.

I believe the economic space for the union has disappeared--the union can no longer provide enough benefits to the workers to justify its cost. But Mr. Shotwell blames this entirely on the cupidity of the union leadership. The UAW boss, Bob King, is the son of a human resources manager at GM. In Mr. Shotwell's opinion this taints his entire attitude. He is more interested in managing the company than in protecting the workingman. Hence the concession contracts and the back-room deals with management.

So Mr. Shotwell would have a lot more credibility with me if the only bad guy were Mr. King. But he attributes vile motives to the entire union leadership, at whatever level. They've all been bought off or have lost touch with their constituents. Indeed, he is down on anybody who even competes for leadership positions. While he expresses sympathy for people in reform caucuses (those who try to replace the current, concessionary leaders with more militant sorts), he thinks they're ultimately doomed to fail. The new leaders will ultimately be bought off or rendered powerless. Mr. Shotwell provides examples.

To me this sounds like a conspiracy theory. That there are one or two bad apples is believable, but that people who have devoted their entire lives to unionism and its cause have all been bought off wholesale--this is incredible. Whatever the flaws of Bob King, or Andy Stern, or Richard Trumka, I have a hard time believing that they're principally interested in selling out their members. No way.

Instead, people who ascend to leadership positions are forced to confront reality. Facts are very stubborn things, unless all you want to do is kibbutz from the sidelines--which, despite his passion, is all that Mr. Shotwell does. A union leader realizes that there is not some bottomless pit of money that's just there for the taking. Management really is operating on very tight margins. Profit--condemned by Mr. Shotwell--is indeed an essential part of doing business, as the plant and equipment required to build cars costs money. Were that not true, then each individual autoworker could build and sell cars in his garage without any investment.

Instead, Mr. Shotwell urges unionists to take matters into their own hands. They shouldn't trust or even wait for the leadership. Rather, if the boss causes problems, they should organize right there on the shop floor to fight back. He calls it the "inside strike," and the tactic involves work-to-rule, work slow-downs, or even short sit-down strikes. Hit-em where it hurts, counsels Mr. Shotwell. Once you threaten profits then the boss will pay attention.

Yeah, right. Inside strikes will undoubtedly get attention, and if repeated probably result in closing the plant. There's a reason why that strategy hasn't caught on among workers.

There are two words that never cross Mr. Shotwell's lips: consumer and automation. Ultimately, cars are produced for consumers. Workers will get paid only if their product is both cheaper and better than the competition's. Mr. Shotwell is wrong about who most benefits from speed-up and strenuous working conditions: it's not primarily the bosses. It is, instead, the customer.

And if the customer benefits, then indirectly so do the shareholders and the employees. The workers keep their jobs, and the shareholders make a profit. It is precisely not a zero-sum game. The class-struggle description is not accurate. The UAW leadership understands this--the long term future of the workers depends on the viability of the company. Worrying about corporate profits is exactly what a union needs to do.

Automation is the principle reason why the UAW membership has been shrinking. Cars are assembled with far fewer people today than before. Indeed, the proletarian worker is increasingly an endangered species, displaced by the robot. Instead of relatively unskilled laborer, technical people are required--folks with computer skills. The world that Mr. Shotwell describes is fading away.

What bothers me most about both Misters Shotwell and Rasmus is their opposition to free trade. Mr. Shotwell still opposes NAFTA, despite the fact that it has substantially improved Americans' standard of living. Few people other than died-in-the-wool unionists are against it these days. Even Adam Smith understood that free trade made people richer--the bigger the market, the greater the degree of specialization, and the richer the society. By ignoring the consumer, our friends completely miss this phenomenon.

I admire and respect Mr. Shotwell. Much of what he says rings true. But he does not understand basic economics.

Further Reading:

• Post Office Blues
• What Are Unions Good For?
• Union Man