The People Are Stupid

The people are stupid is the mantra of every Trotskyist's analysis of this (or any other) election campaign. The recently infamous Jonathan Gruber, a chief architect of Obamacare, has nothing on my Marxist friends when it comes to dissing the intelligence of Americans.

The leader of the effort for this cycle is Socialist Action's Jeff Mackler. Not only are voters all stupid, but so must be his readers. Mr. Mackler never misses a chance for utterly incredible exaggeration--completely unconvincing to anybody besides a complete idiot. Here are just a couple of examples (emphases mine).

The Democrats and Republicans spent an unprecedented mid-term, if not all-time, election total of $4 billion, roughly $2 billion each. The giant corporations that footed the bills for their chosen candidates undoubtedly will get trillions of dollars in return, as is always the case in capitalist elections.

Trillions? Recall that US GDP is about $18 trillion annually, and so for a paltry of $4 billion the ruling class will stuff their pockets with a major fraction of all the wealth in the country. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is worth about $80 billion. He's famously apolitical and probably donated peanuts to the election campaign, but by Mr. Mackler's account he'll surely at least double his net worth.

If you believe that, you're as dumb as Mr. Mackler thinks you are.

He gets more specific about the amount.

Obama gifted only $30 trillion or so to the corporate elite in bailouts of every sort. During 2012-13 he granted the great banks through the Federal Reserve’s “Quantitative Easing” or “economic stimuli to the rich” policy only $89 billion per month. The same crooked banks, the largest in the country, sold the government essentially worthless mortgages. They were eventually fined several billion, a mere “slap on the wrist” fraction of what they stole. No jail for anyone! In contrast, George Bush only granted the corporate elite a mere $1 trillion or two during his reign.

Again, it boggles the imagination to think anybody believes this. Mr. Mackler asserts that Obama stole 30 trillion dollars out of the economy and gave it to his cronies. Not even the folks at ZeroHedge will sign on to that--they who are unfailing critics of crony capitalism.

That's the funny part about Mr. Mackler's claim--he's the only person in the world who understands the depths of corruption in our society. Nobody else has a clue. We're all worried about theft on the order of millions, or maybe even hundreds of millions. But Mr. Mackler knows the truth--it's really trillions being swept under the table.

Where is all this money going? So far it's disappeared without a trace. Perhaps there's some Bat Cave somewhere where the Banksters hide their gold coins? (Oddly, there's been no shortage of gold coins recently.) Since Mr. Mackler is such an expert on the world economy, perhaps he can explain to us how this massive disappearance of money doesn't show up in any tabulation of global statistics.

No Trotskyist conspiracy theory would be complete without mentioning quantitative easing. In Mr. Mackler's theory, $89 billion per month were being shoveled into the pockets of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankenfein. (There is a whiff of antisemitism in ZeroHedge's account of the same vile plot.) Believing this requires that you ignore some important facts about banking. Banks accept deposits and make loans. The money in a bank is not the personal property of the CEO, and QE is not primarily a gift to the banks. It's mostly a guarantee for depositors.

Sure enough--there is plenty of room for fraud. They can cheat on the fees, or skim off the top. That might add up to millions or tens of millions. But the assertion that the banks made off wholesale with the entire QE effort, undetected by anybody except Jeff Mackler, is simply fantastic. Only your Trotskyist knows.

If Socialist Action's election account is stupid, then The Militant's is pathetic. Their summary article follows Dan Fein around on his quixotic campaign for governor of Illinois (won, I am happy to say, by the Republican, Bruce Rauner). Mr. Fein wasn't on the ballot, so no surprise he didn't win the election. He ran for governor of New York in 2010--if memory serves he was on the ballot for that election. Not that it made any difference.

For the first time in many decades the Socialist Workers Party candidates were not on the ballot in any state. The Party is shrinking off the radar screen.

Mr. Fein spent the campaign season walking picket lines across Chicagoland. He marched with the teachers' union in Waukegan (they settled the next day). He picketed with the Teamsters in Skokie, trying to organize a moving & storage company. And finally, he stood with the nine members of the Machinists' union in East Dundee, who have been standing outside a Chevrolet dealership since July!

So much for the turn to basic industry. How far they have fallen.

Mr. Fein, while more humble and honest than his comrades over at Socialist Action, nevertheless promulgates a fundamental myth of Trotskyism.

“... I’m for a labor party that mobilizes the working class to fight,” Fein said. “Change doesn’t come through elections, but in the course of class battles against the bosses and their government, through which we can transform our unions, ourselves and society.”

Also,

“Lesser-evil politics is a trap for working people,” Fein said. “We need to organize against the capitalist Democratic, Republican and Green parties. A fighting Labor Party is needed.”

In the Trotskyist imagination, there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. Sarah Palin and Al Sharpton both share bourgeois politics. They're identical under the skin. Again, only your Trotskyist knows.

Louis Proyect, in an article written before the election, illustrates this point well. It's an expletive-laden tirade against Bernie Sanders, whom he accuses of being a fake socialist. Maybe, though Mr. Sanders is enough of a socialist that I'll never vote for him. Mr. Proyect's beef is that Mr. Sanders has supported other Democrats--may the heavens forfend. Specifically, he supported Mark Begich, Kay Hagan, and Mary Landrieu.

Now I'm overjoyed that none of those worthies won reelection--they're all too socialist for my taste. But Mr. Proyect dings them for perfectly reasonable positions.

Mr. Begich gets knocked for supporting oil and gas drilling on the North Slope, and for supporting the Keystone pipeline.

Ms. Landrieu is slammed for supporting the oil and gas industry in Louisiana, and also for supporting the Keystone pipeline.

Ms. Hagan is vilified for supporting the tobacco industry.

All of these candidates are working to defend the livelihoods of citizens in their states. Oil and gas supports hundreds of thousands of people in this country. The growth of the business has kept gasoline prices low, despite turmoil in the Middle East. Yet Mr. Proyect (who lives in Manhattan) thinks all those people should be summarily thrown out of work. Further, Americans should be required to pay $5 or $10 or more per gallon, just so Mr. Proyect (who likely doesn't own a car) can be happy.

What a selfish jerk!

That's the problem with socialists of all stripes: they are pro-poverty. In their view, the only legitimate role for citizens is to be on the welfare dole. Nobody is allowed to earn an honest living. That's why they like places like Cuba and Venezuela and North Korea. In those countries poverty is progressing by leaps and bounds. That's why they're called progressive.

I say Down With Poverty.

That's why I'm a Republican.

Further Reading:

• The 47th SWP Convention
• The Ukraine and the Other Ukraine
• Grenada & The Art of Being a Comrade

Socialist Action's Convention 2014

Trotskyists, armed with the Marxist ideological arsenal, pride themselves on offering a unique and intelligent opinion of world affairs. So it is a disappointment to read excerpts from Michael Schreiber's World Political Situation Report only to discover warmed-over, cherry-picked conventional wisdom.

Socialist Action (SA) has apparently not inherited Jack Barnes' talent for storytelling. Mr. Barnes' convention reports are masterful exercises in persuasive, sentimental argument, aimed primarily at comrades, but readable by a larger public. Importantly, he gets his facts mostly right. By contrast, SA's documents are sloppy, full of over-the-top claims that seem unlikely to be true.

The piece in question is about Europe's economy. The lede sets the tone.

Capitalism’s offensive against the world’s working class—which gathered momentum as a consequence of the major economic recession that began in late 2007—continues unabated. Even in the major industrial nations, the ruling class has been waging an all-out struggle to make working people shoulder the debilitating effects of the economic crisis.

The premise is completely wrong. Capitalists make money by selling better products at lower prices to more people. How can that be interpreted as an "offensive against the world's working class?" Quite the contrary, capitalism enriches all of us. Perhaps Mr. Schreiber has purchased the new iPhone 6, or maybe he recently flew on the Boeing Dreamliner airplane, or perhaps like me he takes statins for high cholesterol. Maybe he just bought a car with intelligent cruise control. And he certainly posts articles on to the web. My family buys fresh blueberries in January, imported from Chile. They're no more expensive than the blueberries we buy in the summer imported from New Jersey.

Gas prices are down by 20%. My wife is flying half-way round the world for less money than it cost her three years ago. Even food prices are starting to go down.

How can this guy claim that we're all getting poorer and keep a straight face? There's no way.

Well, there is a way, and of course it involves Greece--a cherry-picked example if there ever was one. German capitalists (evil bastards) sold the Greeks a bunch of new Mercedes on credit--money that now needs to be paid back. Mr. Schreiber doesn't give German workers any credit for building fine motorcars for Greek drivers, but now complains when they want to get paid for it. The problem is the Greeks want a free lunch (or at least a free Mercedes).

So I'll grant Mr. Schreiber that bit of his argument--people in Greece are poorer now than they were ten years ago. But if this is argument by cherry-picking, then I can pick cherries better than he can. The country with the largest proven reserves of crude oil is--wait for it--Venezuela. By all rights it should be a wealthy place.

Yet Venezuela, once the darling of the American Left, has destroyed its oil industry. Today the oil fields have gone to rot, with infrastructure lying in ruins. Venezuelans are much poorer today than they use to be. There are shortages of toilet paper and milk, along with most other consumer products. Caracas has one of the highest crime rates in the world.

Mr. Schreiber's article contains some glaring contradictions. In one paragraph, he complains on behalf of European heating oil refiners that the market is completely glutted, in part by imports of American oil and gas. Accordingly, in Italy 3500 jobs are at risk.

The very next paragraph, however, claims that "imperialist powers" are falling all over themselves to invest in Ukraine, which "might have the fourth largest deposits of frackable shale gas in the world." Go figure. Why would they do that if there's a huge glut of oil and gas on the market? This is what happens when you cherry-pick factoids and have no understanding of underlying economic principles.

Mr. Schreiber goes further and claims that "[t]his explains, for example, the intense interest of Western capitalism in bringing Ukraine into the European Union and into NATO, while muscling Russian capitalism out of the picture." Since when? There isn't a single country willing to put any boots on the ground to make Ukraine part of NATO. And it boggles the mind that anybody wants it in the (disintegrating) European Union. Mr. Schreiber lives in a fantasy land.

The summary of "facts" concludes with this howler.

In summary, despite continued and heightened attacks on the working class by international capitalism—leading to a huge increase in poverty worldwide and a huge shift of wealth upward to the already wealthy— none of the efforts by the masses to thwart these attacks has yet resulted in lasting victories.

There is no huge increase in global poverty. For example, China has suffered a slowdown since 2007--today it's growing at only 7% annually. Given 1% annual population growth, it's hard to see how the Chinese are getting poorer. Likewise, the US has been growing at 2-3% annually since 2010, again significantly above population growth. While some aspects of the American lifestyle are worse than before (most notably, job security), there is little evidence that people are actually poorer. On a global scale, among nations participating in the global economy, that is clearly not true.

Mr. Schreiber points out that Germany's economy shrank by 0.2% last year, after increasing for the past five years. Germany's population isn't growing at all, so this represents at worst an extremely modest decline in the standard of living. But given persistent deflation in the Eurozone, it probably doesn't even mean that much. Like the rest of us, Germans have a higher standard of living than they have ever had before in history.

At the end of the article Mr. Schreiber recounts how the European working class is reacting to this supposedly dire state of affairs. He starts oddly, with the demonstrations in Hong Kong! Not sure what the relevance of that is.

Then he talks about the rise of far right parties in Europe, from the Sweden Democrats to France's National Front. He asserts that the "absence of effective working-class leadership has allowed ultra-right, ultra-nationalist, and fascist parties to grow in some areas, luring petty bourgeois and even working-class sectors into their ranks with rhetoric that blames social problems on immigrants or minority ethnic populations."

But the rise of the extreme right has nothing to do with "working-class leadership," or, for that matter, even economics. It is, instead, because of the democracy deficit intrinsic to the European Union. A bunch of technocrats in Brussels claim to know what's best for every country, and the people never really get a say in the matter. Of course they object to that.

There are crises in Europe--a democracy deficit, and a currency union that doesn't make social sense. The European Union has gotten too big and too powerful. It needs to be reduced to the free trade area it was originally.

But growing European-wide poverty is not the problem. Because there isn't any.

Further Reading:

• Left Labor's Lost Cause
• Socialist Action Jumps the Shark
• Jack Barnes' Next Book

Dorothy Day

I've been an admirer of the Catholic Worker (CW) movement for a long time, albeit from a distance and not uncritically. A comparison with Trotskyism is appropriate.

Founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980) and Peter Maurin (1877 - 1949), the Catholic Worker newspaper has been published ever since. Peter Maurin was the intellect behind the effort, but the legs (and most of the credit) go to the amazing Dorothy Day. By comparison, The Militant was first published in 1928, and apart from a brief, early interruption, is also still around.

The CW movement sponsors houses of hospitality, that today we might recognize as homeless shelters. In the 1930s, however, at the depths of the depression, many otherwise working class people needed assistance.

Dorothy was a Leftist before she was a Catholic. She had close friends in the Communist Party in her early years. She wrote for the Daily Worker, and also for The Masses. I don't believe she seriously encountered Trotskyism, and I think she would have seen it as equivalent to Stalinism.

So here is my understanding of what CW represents, in bullet points.

• They are principled pacifists. Dorothy distinguished herself from Communists saying that she was "a pacifist even in the class war." CW is long associated with people like A. J. Muste (a former SWP comrade), Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan.
• They accept the Marxist meme: We're poor because the rich people stole all the money. That led to Dorothy's sympathy for Stalin, Mao, and Castro, among others. But unlike the Communists, she never forgave them for their mass murder and persecution of religion.
• CW is resolutely Catholic. While they have disagreed with the Church on individual issues (just war theory, for example, as that conflicts with their pacifism), they subscribe to Catholic morality. They oppose abortion. I think many of them oppose birth control. Dorothy from her own personal experience deeply opposed the "free love" movement, and accordingly took issue with much of second-wave feminism. I recall some years ago reading the reminiscences of a long-time Leftist who spent his early years around CW. He eventually fell away, finally realizing that they were really serious about their Catholic faith, which he didn't share. The name wasn't (and isn't) just a historical artifact.
• They believe that physical labor is essential to humanity. They assert the dignity of the working man and woman. Dignity is a stronger reason for full employment than the wage (though that's important, too).
• Most important, they subscribe to personalism, i.e., the essential purpose of good works is made at the level of the individual. Not for them is the mass movement, nor are they concerned about changes in GDP. The Catholic Worker newspaper frequently features extended obituaries of homeless people, often mentally ill.

For CW, the most important words of Jesus are these:

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ 

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

I have just finished reading Ross Douthat's book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. One of the heresies he discusses is that of the social gospel, i.e., elevating the quoted Bible verses above all others. In America the social gospel as a heresy was founded by Walter Rauschenbusch in the early 20th Century, and rewritten for our own time by Harvard's Harvey Cox. Many Protestant denominations and Catholic orders fell for it, subsuming the entire Christian faith into those short verses, and gradually rendering themselves irrelevant in the process. Mr. Douthat offers the Jesuits as an example.

But by hewing closely to the rest of Catholicism, Dorothy Day and CW has managed to avoid that heresy. They have successfully combined the social gospel with a vibrant, durable Christian faith. She resolutely rejected the notion of founding a religious order, though as a movement it had a charism that emphasized care of the poor and physical labor. But charism and heresy are two different things. Dorothy never dispensed with the rest of Catholicism.

I first heard of the Catholic Worker (CW) movement from a comrade in Portland when I was a new member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Curiously, I don't recall a single mention of the Catholic Worker movement ever in The Militant, nor in any of its latter day offspring.
That oddity is the subject of this essay.

To my knowledge, no CW house was located in Portland in the early 70s, and so I never encountered CW directly until much later in life. In those days, CW appealed to the counterculture and attracted some hippies. Much to Dorothy's dismay, some houses tolerated pot and sex. Each house was independent--there was no overarching hierarchy, and accordingly wide variations in house rules. So the Catholic part of the mission was occasionally lost and the house degenerated into a hippie commune. Somehow Dorothy managed to keep enough of them on the straight and narrow to maintain the integrity of the movement.

The SWP regarded CW as irrelevant--we would have called them Jesus freaks. Given CWs aversion to mass movements (that they regarded, correctly, as incipiently totalitarian), we never encountered them at antiwar demonstrations. They preferred nonviolent terrorism, such as breaking into military bases and spilling red paint onto ICBMs. Still, in a larger sense, they would have been part of the antiwar coalition that the SWP led in the early 1970s.

The political role of CW was anarchism. In this they are very much like Marina Sitrin, recently described in a piece in Socialist Action (see here). Ms. Sitrin obviously does not share CW's Catholic faith, but in most other respects her political point of view is identical. They both subscribe to the Marxist meme, they both reject "state power," and they both believe in social change from the bottom up.

But CW is a more durable, truer face of anarchism. The only reason to care about the poor is for moral or spiritual reasons. From any standpoint of practical economics, the poor are irrelevant. The contribution of sub-Saharan Africa to the world economy is negligible. Fortunately, the moral and spiritual motivates lots of people (and not just Leftists), and so much effort is devoted to helping the poor. The difference between CW and Marina Sitrin--and, for that matter, the SWP and Socialist Action--is that CW explicitly recognizes the moral and spiritual dimensions of poverty. They quote a Bible verse to prove it.

By any reasonable measure Dorothy Day has been phenomenally successful. Arguably, Pope Francis is an adherent to the Catholic Worker movement, with his emphasis on voluntary poverty, help for the poor, and his devotion to the Franciscan tradition. Far from being a voice in the wilderness, CW now has the ear of the Vatican establishment. They're not exactly happy about that, and they are resisting the canonization of Dorothy Day.

I take issue with CW on two things.  Recognizing the spiritual and moral necessity of helping the poor is one thing, but it is not necessary to throw out everything we know about economics. Their adherence to the Marxist meme is destructive and does not help the poor. Capitalism helps the poor, partly because most capitalists want to get through the eye of that needle, but mostly because it makes everybody richer. As we've mentioned, today's homeless are not at all the same population as the poor people in Dorothy's depression era. In the way Dorothy understood it, there simply aren't any poor people in the United States today.

The second thing is faith. I'm a practicing Catholic (because of my wife), but not a believing one. I don't have faith. She put it this way.

I had a conversation with John Spivak, the Communist writer, a few years ago, and he said to me, "How can you believe? How can you believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Virgin birth, in the Resurrection?" I could only say that I believe in the Roman Catholic Church and all she teaches. I have accepted Her authority with my whole heart. At the same time I want to point out to you that we are taught to pray for final perseverance. We are taught that faith is a gift, and sometimes I wonder why some have it and some do not. I feel my own unworthiness and can never be grateful enough to God for His gift of faith.

 I, sadly, do not have that gift of faith. But I admire people who do. I admire Dorothy Day.

Further Reading:

• What Would Lenin Do?
• Book Review: Lord Of The World
• A Marxist Pope?

The Demise of the Academy

My Trotskyist friends are big on material conditions. By this they mean the underlying forces influencing any social change or social movement. For Marxists, such material causes are inevitably economic. Famously, they interpret everything through a class conflict lens, and will often refer to the historical relationship of forces, or the contradictions inherent in capitalism.

So a lot of this is gibberish, but the underlying idea is true. Important social phenomena are indeed caused by important changes in the material facts of life. These, of course, need not only be economic, but can also be biological and sexual. They can even be psychological--economists have long recognized the importance of expectations in causing economic events.

So what’s causing the demise of the academy? It’s not just that professors are a bunch of pointy-headed nitwits--though that is certainly true. And it’s not just the hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go agenda, though that definitely hasn’t helped any. No--the reasons ultimately are economic and sexual. The other phenomena are a symptom of the academy’s dysfunction, not a cause.

Three key causes of academic decline are ultimately technological in origin--automation, disintermediation, and democratization.

The first item refers to disruptive pedagogy. This includes on-line learning, such as MOOCs, computer-aided instruction, such as Rosetta Stone, and computerized instructional aids, such as automated grading. The net result of all these technologies is to make higher education cheaper. It partially overcomes Baumol’s disease by increasing the productivity of the faculty.

But unlike all the hype, none of these technologies threaten higher education at its core. At some level, education depends on person-to-person interactions. While new technologies will eliminate a lot of professors’ jobs, there’s no way they’ll become completely obsolete.

It will, however, change what professors teach. We may distinguish between articulated knowledge and tacit knowledge. Articulated knowledge is the stuff you can put in words. It shows up in textbooks, on Wikipedia, and in on-line courses. Mathematics is the ultimate in articulated knowledge--everything can be reduced to words, numbers and symbols. Some form of computerized instruction will soon replace almost all mathematics professors. To a lesser degree the same is true in many STEM disciplines.

Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is stuff that can’t be put into words. Pronouncing Chinese nouns is a good example--the only way you’ll learn that is by imitation. Descriptions such as put your tongue on the top of your mouth simply won’t get you very far. Learning Chinese fluently ultimately requires that you spend time in China imitating native speakers.

A lot of what you learn in college is tacit knowledge, especially in the arts and humanities. There will always be jobs for human professors in those fields. So the hype around pedagogical technologies is, in my opinion, somewhat exaggerated.

The second way technology threatens college life is through disintermediation. Disintermediation means that it will no longer be one-stop shopping anymore. The college as a single location where students buy everything from their calculus class to their gym memberships will disappear. Rather, each of those items will be purchased a la carte from whatever provider offers the best value. Calculus, for example, will be delivered on-line from The Calculus Company. (That’s a company I’d like to found--it would teach nothing but calculus in all it’s variations for students at all levels.) Housing and athletics will be run by similarly specialist companies. The college will be reduced to housing those classes that are best taught in person.

The third term--democratization--destroys the university’s monopoly on scholarship. The Internet makes information available to anybody. It allows people without credentials (horrors!) to do valuable work in whatever discipline they want. This blog comments on Louis Proyect’s blog--he is a good example. The man is a good historian, despite having neither the credential nor the academic rank. He can do this because he no longer needs access to a physical library. Most of the sources available to “professional” historians are now available to anybody at a very modest cost.

Much of the dispute about climate change isn’t really about the climate. It’s more about who has authority to speak on behalf of “science”. Blogs such as Skeptical Science stoutly defend the professoriate--if you don’t have a tenured position at an official university, you have no standing to say anything about science. On the other side, bloggers like Stephen McIntyre weigh in aggressively, even without credentials.

The credentialists will ultimately lose this argument, and with them so will the academy. With scholarship so easily dispersed to the four winds, both students and taxpayers are becoming increasingly reluctant to pay for it to happen on college campuses. Outside of the most elite institutions, the research mission of colleges and universities will disappear. Scholarship in fields such as literature, history, and philosophy will become avocations, curated by public intellectuals (such as Mr. Proyect) who establish themselves as experts.

The college will be hollowed out, teaching only courses that require capital investment, such as chemistry labs.

So I think most higher education institutions will disappear, though that process may take decades. (After all, the Post Office is still around.) The material conditions for its demise are in place, and nothing our academic friends do will change that fact.

Still, they’re doing a really good job of hastening the inevitable. Our professor friends are engaging in remarkably stupid activities.

The prime example is the crusade against sexual harassment. The claim is that female college students are sexually assaulted way in excess of the regular populations. (1 in 5 is the obviously bogus statistic floating around.) To remedy this “tragedy”, illiberal rules and laws are being implemented, all of which are almost certainly unconstitutional. The most egregious is the new law in California (summarized as “yes means yes”) which makes it impossible for men to defend themselves against a sexual assault charge, as even defenders of the law admit.

It all began with a Dear Colleague letter from the federal Department of Education, “suggesting” that campuses should use a preponderance of the evidence standard in adjudicating sexual disputes. This means that men are tried and convicted (in a civil sense) of heinous crimes without due process.

So I support these new sexual assault laws. I oppose the academy in all its nefarious forms, and anything that destroys its credibility is something to be celebrated. Men will be even less likely to attend college than before. (And when they leave, so will the women.) Those that do are more likely to be filing lawsuits against their campuses, assisting them in bankruptcy. My campus is spending a fortune in policing--we have more cops per square foot than any city in America. And all for the sake of defending us against (mostly) non-existent crimes.

The professoriate is trying to help the Democratic Party with its war against women meme. Instead, they’re simply hastening their own doom.

Down with the academy!

Further Reading:

• Sisters & Slackers
• College: Signal vs. Substance
• Why the Academy Sucks

Trotskyists Down on the Farm

I respond to an article appearing in Counterpunch, written by Carmello Ruiz-Marrero, entitled Toward the Agro-Police State. That title is over-the-top. The content is succinctly represented by the sub-heading: "You'll need an iPad if you want to be a farmer."

Horrors!

Mr. Ruiz-Marrero reports that Monsanto is buying some small technology companies, none for more than a billion dollars. (For comparison, Monsanto is capitalized at around $18 billion, and Apple Computer at over $500 billion.) The first company is The Climate Corporation. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero quotes from their mission statement:

The Climate Corporation aims to help farmers around the world protect and improve their farming operations with uniquely powerful software and insurance products. The company’s proprietary technology platform combines hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver climate.com, a solution that helps farmers improve their profits by making better informed operating and financing decisions, and Total Weather Insurance, an insurance offering that pays farmers automatically for bad weather that may impact their profits.

Farmers are more likely to earn money and less likely to lose it. Consumers will get cheaper prices. The environment benefits because fewer resources are wasted. It's hard to find fault with this. What's Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's problem?

It gets worse.

In 2012 Monsanto bought a similar company, Precision Planting, for $210 million. The biotech behemoth was after the company’s FieldView platform, a hardware/software package that monitors the performance of farm machinery and pretty much tells the farmer how to do everything, determining even the spacing between crop rows.

Yet another evil plot to make food cheaper and better, using fewer chemicals while wasting less land and water. These awful capitalists! What will they think of next?

Mr. Ruiz-Marrero lays out the benefits of this new technology rather clearly.

Welcome to the brave new world of precision farming, in which every farmer will need a wifi connection and an iPad. Precision ag, as it is often called, is the collective name of a series of new agricultural data and crop monitoring technologies. The alleged benefits of these new techno packages include increased yields, better information for decision making in the farm, reduction in the use and overuse of agrochemicals and fertilizer, and increased profits. It relies on cutting edge technologies like geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, wireless internet, portable computers, high-speed data processing, and global positioning (GPS).

Again, I still fail to see the problem. How can he possibly be against any of this?

I'll summarize his complaint in bullet points.

• It employs military technology, specifically drone aircraft. The connection is to Big Data in the cloud. The farmer will be cut out of the loop. Further, data will be readily available to adjudicate patent violations or lawsuits.
• Farmers will be deskilled. There will be a "loss of local farm knowledge and the erosion of farmer's rights." (Though probably with less erosion of the farmer's land.)
• On the other hand, many farmers in Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's native Puerto Rico are illiterate. Only 14% have college degrees. Deskilling notwithstanding, they won't be able to cope with the intellectual demands of wifi and robotic drones.
• Adopting this new technology, at the low end, costs  $1,000,000, $100,000, $20,000. Frankly, that's just not a lot of money--not even for a family farm. A farmer without that much capital has a title: subsistence farmer. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero's fears that farmers will be forced into debt seems unwarranted.

But the main problem is all this benefits the wealthy. Only rich people will be able to buy the wholesome, freshly-grown, organic vegetables at the local farmer's market. The rest of us shlubs will be stuck with cheap frankenfoods, plastics on a stalk. But Mr. Ruiz-Marrero surely exaggerates the difference. There are no nutritional differences between so-called "organic" foods and their GM analogs. In a few cases there may be a taste difference, notably with tomatoes. Personally, I think the "organic" label is just advertising hype and I refuse to buy the stuff.

Cheaper food is better than expensive food. Farming that uses fewer resources is better than farming that wastes resources. Mr. Ruiz-Marrero has got his priorities all wrong.

Louis Proyect contributed his two-cents with a post here. Revealingly, it's an ad hominem attack on a journalist rather than any kind of reasoned argument. On science issues (where Mr. Proyect is resoundingly ignorant) that appears to be the best he can do. The Pulitzer-winning reporter, Amy Harmon, apparently has the moral backbone of a dead rat, what defending GM foods as she does. Mr. Proyect delivers the laugh line:

Her sordid record is worth examining, as is the question of genetic modification itself that she practically likens to global warming denialism or creationism...

The irony is that Mr. Proyect is himself a quasi-creationist, denying as he does the overwhelming evidence of evolution on human behavior.

Of course it's not necessary to believe lock-step in everything that so-called "scientists" say. I myself take partial issue with the so-called "consensus" on global warming. There may be good non-scientific reasons to reject evolution. But Mr. Proyect can't have it both ways--that the "consensus" is always true except when he disagrees with it.

But, since he's in awe of science, here's the statement by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on GM foods.

The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe … The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.

I agree with this. If all the bad things that the anti-GM movement predicted were true, they would have happened by now. In the meantime, over two trillion GM meals have been served, with no evidence either of bad health or environmental destruction.

Misters Proyect and Ruiz-Marrero need to find themselves some new windmills to slay.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: A Troublesome Inheritance
• David Berlinski & Evolution
• Luddites Against Fracking

Red-Baiting the Climate

When I was a Trotskyist, the words "red-baiting" ended any argument. The term stems from the 1950s when Communists (the Stalinist ones in the CPUSA) were surreptitiously infiltrating themselves into government agencies where they then aided and abetted the Soviets.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union we now know for a fact that that happened, though probably neither to the extent nor with the consequences they desired.

But that term never applied very well to Trotskyists. We viewed the bourgeois state as the mortal enemy, and far from trying to infiltrate it we avoided it like the plague. Our criticism of the CPUSA was that they were class-collaborationists, i.e., they participated with bourgeois governments in oppressing the working class. We condemned them for their very infiltration.

But we did infiltrate, if not the bourgeois state, then various "working class" social movements and institutions. In the 1930s Trotskyists played a key role in the development of the Teamsters Union. From the 1950s through the 1980s we made continuous efforts to form "fractions" in the unions, i.e., groups of "worker-Bolsheviks" who could advance a revolutionary socialist agenda.

So when addressed to Trotskyists the term takes on a slightly different meaning. It implies that a given organization is a front-group, nominally independent but in reality controlled by the Party. Today new names have evolved to describe such organizations: "astroturf", or "sockpuppets." The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) certainly had its share of front groups. Almost all defense committees were such, most famously the one that pursued the COINTELPRO lawsuit. The Mark Curtis Defense Committee is another example. While these went around seeking endorsements, they never had much of a footprint outside of the Party.

The National Student Coalition Against Racism was another such front group. In this case the Party wanted it to become a mass organization, but failed.

On the other hand, there were a few organizations led by Trotskyists that really did have a mass following. The Student Mobilization Committee is the most important one--it organized the 800,000 strong antiwar marches on April 24th, 1971. Comrades were clearly in the leadership of this group, but with 800,000 adherents it's really hard to think of it as a front group. Instead, it's probably the closest the American communist movement has ever come to having an actual success.

So now we come to the Sept. 21st Climate March. The big demonstration--300,000 people--happened in New York. Reason TV has a perfectly good report here, and while the communists get a mention, most of the audience is goodhearted if fuzzy-thinking people. They're not Trotskyist wannabes. Indeed, I think this march was organized by legitimate climate activists--Bill McKibben gave a talk on my campus to build attendance. The Trotskyists are a sideshow.

So now comes the blogger Zombie, reporting on the climate march in Oakland, CA. This was much smaller (he doesn't give a number), perhaps only a thousand people or so. He red-baits the march as a commie event. And he certainly has some good evidence. All of this blog's friends make an appearance: Socialist Action gets top billing. Solidarity is present. Even Socialist Viewpoint makes a cameo appearance (holding a sign promoting "system change not climate change"). The SWP had a very large booth.

The CPUSA was there, as were the International Socialists, the Freedom Socialist Party, and Socialist Alternative. Bob Avakian's fan club made an appearance, with t-shirts advertising "BA Speaks." And Mr. Zombie makes a point to include the card table lit display from the (I kid you not) Committees of Correspondence for Democracy & Socialism.

Further, the keynote speaker was an avowed revolutionary socialist. I don't know who she was or what organization she represented. She advised the assembled to get involved by talking to any of the people in the booths, i.e., all the Trotskyists and commies.

But it can't be entirely true. For all their similarities, these grouplets are all at each other's throats. My former comrades in the SWP wouldn't give the Bob Avakian fan club the time of day (nor do I blame them). There is no love lost between Socialist Action and Socialist Viewpoint, however much you'd think they have in common.

Further, the SWP regards environmentalism as a petty-bourgeois phenomenon, and is not fully on board with the enterprise. The fact that they had a lit booth up says nothing about their support for the march, which at best would be tepid.

So the march was organized by the People's Climate Committee (PCC). Are they a front group for one of these Trotskyist sects? I doubt it, though perhaps Socialist Action played a disproportionate role. But like the SMC of yore, this effort really does tap into the fervent feeling of many people. The New York march was big enough to drown out the Trotskyists, but that wasn't true in Oakland. Rather than being a front group, instead the PCC's march was hijacked by assorted communists.

So what do all of these commie groups have in common?

• They are old. There are remarkably few people under 40 behind the lit tables. Most of them look to be nearing 60.
• They are ugly. We all get less attractive as we age. Most of us make some efforts to hide that fact, but apparently not the communists.
• They're angry. They all look like they've got a big chip on their shoulder. The picture of the two Socialist Viewpoint ladies makes the case.
• They're miserable. None of them are having any fun. Far from being a party atmosphere, this is a chore. These folks put the Puritans to shame--it's against the rules to smile.

At least that's how they come across in the photos. Maybe Mr. Zombie has selectively published unflattering photos. That's probably part of it. I doubt the event was quite as miserable as he's made it look. Still, his imagery conforms to my recollection of antiwar demonstrations. We were all young back then, but apart from the age difference I don't think much has changed. I never enjoyed attending those. I was tasked with selling The Militant, and the experience was both boring and stressful.

If this represents the flower of the revolutionary movement, then I am pleased to say that the bourgeoisie have nothing to fear.

PS: Mr. Zombie previously posted a very amusing account of a Slutwalks march, here.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Changing Face of US Politics
• Liberals!
• The Decline of American Trotskyism

Robots of the World, Unite!

In the previous issue of Socialist Viewpoint is a fascinating article by Danny Haiphong, entitled Capitalist Automation in the 21st Century. The interesting thing is that Mr. Haiphong gets the facts mostly right, but his interpretation of them is mistaken. It's worth trying to take it apart. The article is short and hard to excerpt, so you may want to read the whole thing.

Mr. Haiphong reports on a hero of the workers' cause with whom I was previously unacquainted. "James Boggs was a revolutionary Black autoworker in the Post World War II era, a period where technology boomed from the vast expansion of “war-time” industries. He broke from the racist leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW) to help organize the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in the early ’60s."

In 1968, Mr. Boggs pretty clearly laid out the rap sheet against automation that Marxists make to this very day. In Mr. Haiphong's words:

In The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, Boggs examines the impact of capitalist automation. During the industrial period of U.S. capitalism, advanced technology was implemented to speed-up, or automate productive factories. This development grinded away at traditional labor union structures, displacing “skilled” workers and pressuring labor unions to bargain for defensive protections of “bread and butter” gains instead of offensive campaigns for workplace power. Boggs asserted that the only effective counter offensive to automation’s assault on labor would be for workers to make “politics” instead of ”things.” Automation paved the way for deindustrialization and precipitated a decline in conditions for all workers that could not be remedied under the U.S. capitalist system.

That's pretty prescient! Only the last sentence seems wrong. There is no way that conditions for all workers are declining. By any measure our standard of living has gone up--and not just for rich people. Even poor people are vastly better off than they were fifty years ago.

Indeed, it is rather perverse to say that automation is an "assault" on labor. Is labor better off digging ditches with a pick and shovel rather than using a backhoe? Were women really happier working at the deadly tedious job of telephone operator, instead of relying on automatic switches? The over-the-road truck driver may be a romantic job, but it is a grindingly enervating occupation. Driverless trucks (coming soon) will render that job mostly obsolete. Surely, machines are better at boringly endless jobs than people are.

As if channeling Mr. Boggs, Seth Galinsky pens an article in this week's Militant about union efforts to organize fast workers. He quotes a Burger King employee:

“Conditions are bad,” Luz Meza, who works at Burger King, said at the Houston rally. “The equipment doesn’t work and the ventilation is no good. I got burned and the boss said to put mustard on it. One worker got cut and there were no Band-Aids. There’s no sick, vacation or holiday pay.”

Why would anybody want a job like that? Fortunately, such jobs may not exist much longer.

Momentum Machines of San Francisco has invented a fully-automated contraption that can grind meat, slice tomatoes, grill patties, wrap fully cooked burgers and do pretty much anything else human fast-food workers can do. The machine is capable of cranking out 360 burgers per hour, ...

So the Burger King of the (near) future will have three employees per shift--one to greet customers and hand them their food at the counter, another to do likewise at the drive-thru window, and a third responsible for cleaning and minor maintenance. (This assumes that ordering and payment are done by mobile phone and voice-recognition software.) That's ten or more people who won't be doing meaningless, smelly, dangerous jobs at Burger King. What's there not to like?

The unions won't like it. With only three employees there's nothing left to organize at fast food. (And in a pinch the store could function even without those three.) That looks to be Mr. Haiphong's objection to automation. It grinds away at "labor union structures," rendering them irrelevant. The SEIU is half-heartedly trying to organize fast food workers because they see photogenic victims of capitalist plunder. If they succeed (which they won't--and they know it) then automation comes down all that much faster. There's no way that any food service job earns $15/hour when up against the machine.

It's a Marxist truism that automation "hurts" the working class, but Mr. Haiphong goes beyond this analysis.

Automation has produced a decline in the total rate of profit alongside heightened insecurity for workers. Capitalist profit derives from the amount of labor time unpaid, or simply put, from capitalists paying workers less than their output produced over time. This is the basis of labor exploitation. Technology creates a decrease in the total rate of profit because it is a past product of labor exploitation. Thus, technology is a cost for capitalist enterprises. And under capitalism, costs to profits means consequences for workers.

This perceptive paragraph is unusual in the Marxist press, and it's not entirely untrue. But I'm going to quibble with Mr. Haiphong's phrase "decrease in the total rate of profit." In his usage the concept is undefined and meaningless. But if he means that prices go down as a result of automation, he's absolutely correct. The capitalist cannot charge for the labor of employees that don't work there anymore. And in the long run, once the capital expense has been amortized, the cost declines to the price of raw materials and electricity to run the machine. Mr. Haiphong is correct--this is bad for capitalists as it reduces everything to a commodity.

But he never gets to the next step. Prices go down, and therefore consumers get richer. And that explains the paradox that Mr. Haiphong apparently can't get his head around. How is it that workers can be so seriously mistreated, but at the same time society is getting richer and richer and richer? The answer is that even as wages decline, prices are going down even faster. Our standard of living goes up.

Or put another way, higher productivity is a good thing. 360 hamburgers per hour with no labor expense is vastly better than putting people through hell working in a Burger King joint. Mr. Haiphong calls it speed-up, but it is precisely not that. It is radically changing the way we work and making us infinitely richer in the process.

Further Reading:

• Left Labor's Lost Cause
• Your Future Job: Building a Career in the New Normal
• Getting Richer While Feeling Poorer