The SWP by the Numbers

It's the data you've all been waiting for! 

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) has finally released the results of the Spring sub drive and fund drive in a chart labeled Campaign to expand reach of ‘Militant,’ books, fund March 12-May 17 (final chart).

Seriously, I keep dinging the paper for not providing any statistics about their membership--probably because the numbers are too depressing. But we can uncover a good deal of information by doing some analysis.

Here is a copy of my spreadsheet.

Branch	Subs quota	Subs sold	Sold/120	# comrades	Funds raised
Albany	35	38	3.5	4	$8,553
Atlanta	90	106	9.9	10	$11,839
Chicago	125	126	11.8	12	$14,291
Cincinnati	90	91	8.5	8	$5,944
Dallas-Ft.Worth	70	81	7.6	8	$4,980
Lincoln	15	18	1.7	2	$504
Los Angeles	130	145	13.5	14	$15,160
Miami	35	36	3.4	3	$5,250
Minneapolis	70	81	7.6	8	$5,640
N. New Jersey	90	92	8.6	9	$7,697
New York	125	126	11.8	12	$17,649
Oakland	100	100	9.3	9	$14,380
Philadelphia	40	41	3.8	4	$4,885
Pittsburgh	50	54	5.0	5	$5,016
Seattle	70	82	7.7	8	$13,681
Washington DC	65	68	6.4	6	$5,042
Totals	1200	1285	120.0	122	$140,511
Subs/comrade		10.71

The Branch column, the Subs Quota and the Subs Sold columns are copied directly from The Militant's chart. The Quota column is irrelevant to our analysis; we only consider the Sold column. Likewise, the Funds raised is transcribed from the chart.

The goal is to determine how many comrades are in each branch. The idea is that the number of subs sold should be proportional to the number of comrades. Accordingly, we are only interested in subs sales attributed to individual branches, so I have omitted the 40 subs sold at book fairs, and also the $1,300 raised directly through the National Office.

While it is still listed on the chart, it was reported last week that the Albany branch is closing down.

“The party is taking steps now to reinforce branches of the Socialist Workers Party in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Miami and Seattle,” Studer said. This is possible because party cadres in Albany have made themselves available to transfer to these cities, get jobs in union workplaces, and help to strengthen the forces the party already has in these cities, all important centers of working-class politics in the United States.

This suggests that were four comrades living in Albany who are moving to the listed cities. As you will see, those towns are in need of reinforcements.

Forum in Albany April 30 heard John Studer, speaking, SWP National Committee member and editor of Militant. From left, other speakers were Beverly Bernardo, Communist League in Canada; chair Jacob Perasso; and Alex Huinil, SWP Albany branch organizer.
(Source, Credit: Militant/Laura Anderson)

Note from the photo that Mr. Huinil is much younger than the typical SWP demographic--so the Party must have recruited somebody during their sojourn in New York's capital city.

Also note, as I reported here, the former Louisville branch moved to Cincinnati. Neither Albany nor Louisville now show up in The Militant's list of branches. This indicates that the Party has only a limited number of cadre--they can't grow the total number of branches. All they can do is rearrange their forces.

Here are some facts about branches. In my day, the minimum size of a branch was five comrades. Perhaps that number has shrunk a bit, but it can't shrink by very much. That's because the Party insists that each branch acquire a physical location--we called them "Halls," which typically include meeting space such as that depicted above. The rent for this real estate must be borne by the comrades in the branch, and splitting it less than five ways seems onerous. So I think the five-comrade-minimum, while perhaps not fixed in stone, is nevertheless a serious number. 

(The Party spends a huge fraction of its income on rent. Is this a good investment? I don't quite see the payoff, but I think it's a tradition since the Party was founded in the 1920s. No other organization on my Beat follows suit.)

In order to calculate the number of comrades per branch, I need to estimate the total size of the Party. Commenter John B. has suggested about 100 comrades. I have chosen a slightly higher number--120 comrades, for reasons I'll explain.

Given that, then the average number of subs sold per comrade is 10.71, as shown on the bottom row of my spreadsheet. That's simply 1285 divided by 120. Then of course it's easy to calculate the number of comrades per branch--just take the number of subs sold and divide it by 10.71. That data is given in the column labeled Sold/120. You will note that there are (were), e.g., 3.5 comrades in Albany and 11.8 in Chicago, etc. Obviously it's impossible for a branch to have a fraction of a comrade, so I have rounded those numbers to the nearest integer, shown in the column labeled # comrades--which answers our query.

So what could go wrong? Lots of things:

• It all depends on my estimate of the total number of comrades, which might be wrong.
• It assumes that the average subs sold per comrade for the Party as a whole also holds for each individual branch. That is, e.g., no branch has any super-salespersons who distort the average.
• It assumes that all comrades are true worker-Bolsheviks (i.e. voting members of the Party) and not sympathizers who also go on Militant sales. As a practical matter this distinction might not matter much.

So let's justify the number 120 as the total number of comrades. First, we know that Albany had four comrades since they're going to four different places. 120 is the smallest number I can put in that rounds up to four. Second, we know that all branches have to pay rent for a Hall--and I think this is impossible for three or fewer comrades. Again, 120 is the smallest number I can enter that gets us up to at least four comrades per branch. On the other hand, we know the Party has no extra comrades, so therefore 120 is likely the maximum size of the organization.

There are two exceptions. One is Lincoln, NE, which only has two comrades. But it's not a branch and doesn't have a Hall--they work out of a PO Box. There used to be a branch in Lincoln but it's long since been dissolved. I'll surmise that the comrades remaining there are retired and no longer available for worker-Bolshevik duty. Lincoln is a great retirement home for Trotskyists--one can live there on a social security check.

The second exception is Miami--and as just noted, Miami is one of the places where the Albany comrades are moving to. Note also that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are short on people as well.

So I will stick with my estimate of 120 total comrades.

Now let's briefly turn our attention to the fund raising effort. I commented on this a long time ago (2012) when the fund quota was $100K, and most of the money was used to pay salaries to Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters. This year they raised over $140K, and I don't know how the money is spent.

So if the total amount raised is proportional to the number of comrades, then it should also be proportional (by hypothesis) to the number of subs sold. The plot below shows a graph--and there is considerable scatter. What gives?

I'll argue that comrades living in cities with more billionaires earn more money than comrades living in cities with fewer billionaires. That's because richer people tend to pay higher salaries and can afford to be more generous. The data bears that out. The yellow data point below (above the trend line, and therefore paying disproportionately more) represents Seattle. The red point is for Oakland (the Bay Area) and the green point is data for New York. These are the three big billionaire cities. By contrast, the point furthest below the trendline comes from Cincinnati--91 subs and $5800.

On an unrelated note, the Party is holding its annual shindig this year again at Wittenberg University, June 9-11.

Further Reading:

• Wittenberg, 2021
• The June 21st Militant
• Elections 2020: Socialist Action and SWP

It's Not Just About Abortion

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

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

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

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

To phrase it in my own words via bullet points:

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

This seems like 90% hokum and 10% truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Babies make people happy.

Further Reading:

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

Lost in the Amazon

My friends over at Left Voice (a newspaper published by a Marxist group of NYC college professors, grad students, and assorted failed academics) have finally found some real workers to champion--Amazon warehouse employees. These workers actually earn an honest paycheck, unlike the teachers, professors, and grad students who just mooch off taxpayers and are the typical topics of Left Voice journalism. 

The article, entitled Grassroots Unionism: Lessons from the Victory at Amazon, written by Tatiana Cozzarelli (grad student, Urban Education) and James Dennis Hoff (English Prof, CUNY), is a comprehensive review of the successful unionization effort at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. The authors are competent reporters and good writers--the piece is worth your time.

What always astonishes me is how such intelligent, well-educated academics can be so hopelessly ignorant about basic economics. Here is a lede paragraph (links in original):

Amazon, the second-biggest employer in the United States and the third-largest corporation in the world, has made record profits off the backs of its more than 1.5 million employees, many of whom work in unsafe, sweatshop conditions in warehouses where they are treated like human machines. In 2021 Amazon raked in an astounding $33.6 billion in profits, yet it still pays its warehouse workers on average less than the living wage. Meanwhile, the company spent more than $4.3 million last year alone on anti-union lawyers in an attempt to kill organizing efforts at warehouses across the country, including Bessemer, Alabama, and Staten Island. After all, demands put forward by a union, including the end of forced overtime and a higher wage, would significantly hurt the profits made off hyperexploited workers.

Let's give credit to our authors for linking to sources--most other pages on my Beat don't do that. Accordingly their facts are largely correct--but incomplete because Amazon is really several, mostly independent, businesses. There is the retail business, which produces by far the largest revenue, but which is barely profitable. It competes directly against Walmart and Target, stores which have margins on the order of 3%--it's hard to imagine Amazon's margin is any bigger.

Then there is Amazon Prime, which is mostly in the entertainment business, competing against Netflix and Hulu, etc. I don't believe this is earning much money.

Finally is Amazon Web Services (AWS), competing against Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud, providing basic infrastructure software and hardware for large and small enterprises around the world. AWS is hugely profitable.

Take, for example, the 4th quarter of 2021. During that quarter Amazon had a net operating profit of $3.5 billion. Of that, AWS alone generated $5.3 billion in operating profits, meaning that all other Amazon businesses lost $1.8 billion. In the Q1, 2022, it seems the retail business is barely breaking even.

So unlike what Academicians Cozzarelli and Hoff claim, Mr. Bezos is doing a shit-lousy job of hyperexploiting those poor warehouse workers. Apparently they can't even cover their own salaries and need to be subsidized by the folks over at AWS. If that continues then obviously the retail business will gradually be shut down.

One way to return Amazon retail back to profitability would be to lower the salaries of their employees. If you take our Left Voice friends literally, then Amazon could do that quite arbitrarily--after all, the workers have absolutely no choice but to work at Amazon "where they are treated like human machines." So why doesn't the company do that? There is only one reason--the workers (who are not slaves) will quit. In order to have a work force large enough to get the job done, Amazon has to pay enough in wages and benefits to make it worthwhile for them to come to work. This is effectively the market rate.

The new union now established at a Staten Island warehouse is claiming that Amazon could without penalty raise wages to $30/hour. But naturally there is a penalty--Amazon would have to raise prices to consumers. It costs me $30 to have 24 rolls of toilet paper delivered to my door. I'm willing to pay a little more than Walmart since at my age the home delivery is a real advantage. But if the price were to go up to $45 or $60 then I'd buy toilet paper at Walmart instead (or Target or Aldi or wherever).

Amazon retail is in a very competitive business--they can't arbitrarily raise prices. Now inflation forces them to raise prices--but their competitors are under the same pressure and they all have to do it in together.

Here's the rub that Ms. Cozzarelli and Mr. Hoff don't understand. Jeff Bezos doesn't pay his employees anything--not one solitary dime. The people who pay the employees are the consumers--people like me. It's all fine and dandy when out of sympathy I think warehouse workers should get a raise, but when that cost is inevitably passed on to me I'm gonna jump ship and buy my toilet paper someplace else.

So what's wrong with a union? If all the union did was advertise the plight of warehouse workers and plead for me to pay more for my toilet paper, then there's nothing wrong with the union. But that's not what a union does. An example will illustrate.

There's a guy who mows my lawn for me, and every time he does that I pay him $40. He's running his own business and I pay him directly--there is no company and certainly no union involved.

Ideally I'd do that with the Amazon driver who delivers my package--she drops off the toilet paper and I give her $30. But of course it's not that simple. Probably half that money has to go to the manufacturer, and the other half is spread amongst a whole lot of people. Not only is there the delivery driver, but there are truck drivers, warehousemen, forklift operators, packing & shipping people, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if a couple hundred people touched my box of toilet paper en route from the factory to my house. All of them need to get paid for their services.

I have no way of knowing who any of those people are, and even if I did I have no way of apportioning my $30 between them. So I hire somebody to do that accounting for me--his name is Jeff Bezos. His job (insofar as he has a job beyond building his yacht and cavorting with his girlfriends) is to make sure everybody gets paid their share.

Or, put more generally, that's what management does. Obviously management has to be kept as small and efficient as possible--otherwise it costs me money, and/or the workers I want to pay won't get paid.

The problem with the union is that it inserts another layer of management that I have to pay for. They want control over how overtime is distributed, how long and how many breaks workers get, what the specific job descriptions are, etc. This is just inefficient, and the money will come from me, or more likely it will come out of the workers' hides. Or the AWS employees will have to pay for it, which is also unfair.

I think most Amazon workers understand this. The company's employees in Alabama voted down the union, as did workers at a second warehouse on Staten Island. It is only at the JFK8 warehouse that voted in the union. Ms. Cozzarelli and Mr. Hoff do a good job explaining why that happened--the union had a charismatic champion in the person of Chris Smalls, and management behaved rather stupidly. Without disputing their account, I think it's probably a bit one-sided--one would like to hear the company's side of the story, too.

But Cozzarelli and Hoff do appear to be substantially correct--Amazon has fired several managers from the JFK8 warehouse because they obviously blew it.

Further Reading:

• Amazon Defeats the Union
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• Book Review: The Everything Store

What's Happened Since I've Been Gone

I guess I need to explain my absence. My cancer came back and I've spent the last four months undergoing chemotherapy. The first few weeks were truly debilitating and I couldn't have blogged even if I wanted to. But after that--I just didn't want to. I was getting bored with my own posts. So with chemo as the excuse I took a break from blogging.

The good news is that the chemo worked--I am now in complete remission. In celebration my wife and I will be taking a vacation, including 12 days on a Caribbean cruise. I've never done that before--it's definitely an old man's holiday. So regular blogging won't resume until early May when we get home, but I'm chomping at the bit to get started again.

I've been gratified to see that even in the absence of new material, this blog has attracted 20 - 30 legit hits per day--pretty good for an amateur covering a very niche topic.

So if I've been sick, then my friends over at Socialist Action (SA) have been going stir-crazy. They managed to post exactly one (1) article during the month of March. I sure am glad I haven't paid for a subscription to the print newspaper--it must be mostly blank pages by now.

The reason for the silence is obvious. SA is unapologetically pro-Putin. To summarize their position in my own words, while they acknowledge that Russia is a capitalist/imperialist state, the country is nevertheless an objective force for progress because it necessarily must oppose the much stronger American imperialism. The real cause of the Ukraine war, in this view, is not anything that Putin or the Ukrainian people have done, but instead it's entirely the fault of "US imperialism"--that largely mythical boogeyman upon which all evil can be blamed.

On April 11th SA's chief honcho and failed presidential candidate Jeff Mackler finally posted a long article explaining at great length the position I've just described. The supposed sins of the USA are catalogued in detail. For example:

• Ukraine is dominated by US-funded fascists, such as the Azov Battalion.
• Fascist snipers shot 100 innocent civilian on Maidan Square in 2014.
• Fascists overthrew the duly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych--forcing him to flee to Russia.
• The US installed (somehow, mysteriously) the fascist prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. 

And so on. He cites no references for any of this--neither as links nor in a bibliography. His only source for the fascist snipers are unspecified remarks by Victoria Nuland--he provides neither the date nor venue for her speech. It's impossible to track this down. His only other source is a booklet authored by--Jeff Mackler--of all people.

In other words, Mr. Mackler just makes stuff up. You can't believe a word he says.

SA's call to action is to demonstrate against the US government for forcing Putin to invade Ukraine--as summarized by their key demand: US Out Now! Hands off Ukraine! Needless to say this is crazy-talk, and will attract no support from anybody on the American political spectrum.

One last thing: I can't let Mr. Mackler's antisemitism go unchecked. The fact that current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish apparently sticks in his craw. The only mention of the man's name is this: "We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recently-proclaimed affinity for Zionist Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed people."

If Mr. Mackler is nutty, then our comrades in Solidarity are perfectly sane. A long editorial, dated March 2nd, is posted by the "National Committee." The piece is well worth reading, and I recommend you do so. 

I think the article is mostly correct. They unambiguously condemn Russia for the invasion and are not making excuses for Putin. But at the same time they write:

NATO’s expansion into post-Soviet Eastern Europe, up to Russia’s borders, was all the more dangerous because it was not only a power grab, but also ideologically driven by the U.S. establishment’s assumption, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the crushing U.S. victory over Iraq in the 1990-91 Kuwait war, that its rule was uncontested. It violated assurances that U.S. diplomats at the highest level had made to Soviet leader Gorbachev, and was already called by George Kennan in the 1990s a “tragic mistake” that Russia ultimately would never accept.

This is absolutely correct. NATO should never have expanded east of the Oder/Neisse line (today Germany's eastern border). The extension into eastern Europe has to be seen by Russia as a threat. The Biden administration's biggest mistake was to insist that Ukraine have a hypothetical right to join NATO. Indeed, I think that was the proximate cause of the war to begin with.

Unlike Solidarity, I do not believe NATO should be abolished--I do think it needs to retreat from Russia's borders. The editorial also states that "...NATO and particularly U.S. imperialism are at least equally aggressive and as dangerous as Russian annexationism." I do not agree with the adjective equally here--Putin is by far most at fault.

Contra Jeff Mackler, they write:

It is painful to see how much of the U.S. peace movement swallowed the simplistic story that the events of 2014 in Ukraine, when a spectacularly corrupt pro-Russian government was deposed under pressure of a mass movement (over whether to join a European trade bloc or a Russian-led Eurasian one), were a “fascist coup” and a “genocide” of Russian-speaking regions.

In these claims, some kernels of reality are wrapped inside layers of twisted falsehoods that could (and do) come straight from the Kremlin – as if, for example, violent ultra-nationalist forces, which do exist in Ukraine, are more powerful there than they are in Russia!

I couldn't have put it better myself!

On a completely different topic, news comes that Socialist Resurgence (SR) will unite with a grouplet called Workers' Voice (WV), with the new group adopting that latter name. They write:

We are in agreement about the necessity for principled regroupment of revolutionary groups. The two groups carried out common discussions and practical work for two years and have come to a shared perspective on the fundamental situation facing the working class and oppressed today. On this basis, a congress was held on March 19-20, 2022, in which WV and SR voted to merge as Workers’ Voice. Our congress included observers from the International Workers League, Revolutionary Socialist Organizing Project, Tempest Collective, Corriente Obrera, and affiliates of the Revolutionary Socialist Network. 

As a fused organization, Workers’ Voice brings together two historic traditions of world Trotskyism into a common revolutionary party.

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

The Workers' League existed back in my day (1970s), then led by a fellow named Tim Wohlforth. In a play on his name, our derogatory name for them was the Woolies. I did not know them well--there weren't many Woolies in the cities where I lived. I say more about this in one of my earliest posts, here.

The IWL-FI writes a history of their movement--it reads like an endlessly tedious soap opera. I couldn't make much sense of it. Mr. Wohlforth is not mentioned at all--I think he was forced out in disgrace. More useful than the text itself are the footnotes. They're explanatory and can be read independently--and serve as a useful summary.

I've since googled around and discovered that Mr. Wohlforth died in 2019 at age 86. He spent the last decade of his life in Ashland, OR, where he was a member of the Society of Friends Meeting--a tradition he picked up from his childhood. He wrote mystery novels (with some success) and mentored others in that craft. Here is his obituary, and here is a reminiscence. Neither mentions his Workers' League years, but his Wikipedia page does. He is survived by a wife, a son, two grandchildren, and many friends. In other words, he was a successful and accomplished man.

I do wish the new Workers' Voice success. Certainly not in making a world revolution--heaven forbid--but in producing an interesting and useful web page from which I may learn something, and from which I can draw inspiration.

Further Reading:

• American Brezhnevism Today
• What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?
• 'Against the Current' Celebrates 200 Issues

Elections, 2021--Race & Transgender

Source: Andrew Harnik/AP, as published in Left Voice

Ezra Brain, a regular columnist for Left Voice, is a smart and interesting guy. His election night summary is excellent, and dated Nov. 3 is entitled  Election Night 2021: The Right Strikes Back. Another well written post from Left Voice author Tatiana Cozzarelli is dubbed Teachers Unions Must Fight the Attacks on Critical Race Theory and on Trans Kids. We'll also take a look at Terry Evans' piece from Nov. 22nd Militant headlined What do the 2021 election results mean for the US working class?

I don't have a big problem with Mr. Brain's Election night summary. The article is very well written and definitely informative--but there is nothing in it that is especially Marxist, much less Trotskyist. It is mostly a well-phrased rehash of Democratic Party talking points. The accompanying picture (shown above) is most revealing of Mr. Brain's biases: it shows a bunch of smiling white people, who have deceptively traded in a white hood for a red blazer, and who must all be racists because they're white, and you know they're white because they are so unWoke that there are no Black faces in the picture, and whenever white people get together for any reason, it's because they're racists. And did I mention that they are all white!

The problem for the progressive left is that one can't win people's votes by constantly accusing them of being racists. Surely reporters like Mr. Brain have to make some effort to understand what people are really thinking rather than just assuming they're all hopelessly obsessed with race and can't think about anything else. The best way to understand what people actually believe is to listen to what they say and to take them seriously--and then not assume you know more about their motives than they do themselves.

For example, Mr. Brain writes 

"Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican, also ran against critical race theory in schools. Ciattarelli essentially argued against the teaching of the terrible history of racism in the U.S."

I don't think CRT was the primary issue in New Jersey, and nobody is saying that racism and its history shouldn't be taught in schools. That's just a red herring. The real issue in New Jersey was exemplified by Governor Murphy's gaffe, when he said “If taxes are your issue, then New Jersey’s probably not your state.” A vote for Ciattarelli was a vote for lower taxes--not a vote for "racism."

Ms. Cozzarelli apparently imagines that on those rare occasions when us white folks aren't thinking about race, then we're thinking about sex. She writes.

Attacks on trans kids in schools take many forms, from the right to bathrooms to the right to play on sports teams. Eight anti-trans sports bans have passed in the past few months in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana, West Virginia, and Texas. These laws ban trans kids from playing sports on teams that correspond to their gender. Texas’s law  was publicly litigated, and trans kids came in to plead their case. 8 year old Sunny Bryant told the Texas State Legislature: “My first visit to the Capitol should have been on a school field trip, not defending my right to exist, but if I don’t show up, you won’t see the real stories. Kids like me whose futures will be crushed, opportunities taken away even before I’m given a chance to try.” Her powerful testimony didn’t stop the bill—it passed in Texas, and others like it passed in multiple states across the country.

I confess I find the problem trans people pose to be intractable. I do know a couple trans women quite well, and both have undergone a strenuous and debilitating medical procedure to make the transition. They are smart, honorable people who have overcome serious odds. I honestly wish them the very best, I hope others treat them courteously and respectfully, and I strongly oppose any infringement on their Constitutional rights. I have no problem with them using the women's washroom--and I can't see why anybody else should have an issue with that, either.

But...

I do have a problem when a junior high or high school boy wakes up one morning, puts on a dress, changes his pronoun, and then claims he's a girl--asserting for himself the right to use the girl's toilet and play on girl's sports teams. Perhaps he's legit--i.e., he really does think he was born in the wrong body and will eventually undergo the medical procedure. Or maybe he's just pwning us, or just trying to get on a varsity sports team, or something less honorable than that. Either way, he devalues the travails of real transgender people, such as the two women of my acquaintance.

My basic disagreement with the Woke left is that I don't believe gender roles are fluid. For almost all of us sex and gender are fixed at birth. For a very few (<1%), something goes wrong (or at least different) and they really are transgender. But the notion that some kid can switch genders at will--which seems to be the dogma of most Trotskyists these days--is simply wacko. I can't take that seriously, and therefore I can't take the Woke notion of "trans rights" seriously.

Men and women, boys and girls, are different--even from birth. Their bodies and brains are constructed differently. Boys are bigger and stronger; girls have a thicker corpus callosum that connects the two halves of the brain. Boys excel in visuo-spatial skills, i.e. they can throw a ball further and aim it more accurately. Conversely, girls excel in verbal skills. Etc. 

Letting boys play on girls' sports teams is just unfair, and therefore trans people are going to be left out. I'm sorry--as I said, the problem is intractable. But bathroom rules can be very simple: if you have a penis, you need to use the boys' bathroom. If you don't have a penis--either you weren't born with one or you've had surgery--then you may use the girls' bathroom.

I think a large majority of the world's population agrees with me, and the Woke effort to radically remake gender roles is doomed to failure.

If Mr. Brain and Ms. Cozzarelli articulately represent the Democratic Left, then the The Militant's Terry Evans is similarly adept at arguing for the Republican Right. It's odd that they both identify as "Trotskyists," at least in some loose sense of the term. They both agree on what the end outcome should be: we need a mass labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans, and the working class eventually needs to take state power.

Mr. Evans insists that blue collar white people are members of the working class. Our friends from Left Voice suggest that white folks can be workers only if they're grad students or somehow otherwise associated with the academic left. You need a graduate degree to not be a racist.

Mr. Evans' lede paragraph, in my opinion, represents an accurate description of Left Voice's authors.

The 2021 elections registered a sharp rejection of the anti-working-class politics of the liberal and middle-class socialist wing of the Democratic Party by workers and farmers across the country. From “defund the cops” referendums in Minneapolis and Seattle to the election results nationwide, candidates reflecting these views went down to defeat, taking other Democrats with them.

Regarding defunding the police, Mr. Evans quotes a fellow comrade this way: 

“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence within working-class communities. In addition to the immediate consequences for those affected, it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social solidarity,” Nelson said. “The rulers’ cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes fill the gap. ..."

I've expressed a similar point of view, and still assert that our Left Voice friends unwittingly want to deny Black citizens access to the 911 emergency system. This is a shameful position.

The true home for working class Americans of all races--as opposed to the top 10% and the lumpen intelligentsia--is the Republican Party.

Further Reading:

• The Fourth International--Trotskyist Faction Tried to Ruin my Breakfast
• Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"

Louisville, Cincinnati, Havana

Maggie Trowe, at podium, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, and Anthony Dutrow, right, member of the SWP National Committee, talk about political opportunities ahead as SWP members move to Cincinnati, at Oct. 2 Militant Labor Forum.
(Photo & caption source: Amy Husk/Militant)

The October 25th issue of The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) brings us tidings from Louisville, Kentucky. But not for long--because the whole branch is moving a hundred miles up the road to Cincinnati.

The announcement was made in the weirdest possible way. Maggie Trowe is running for mayor of Louisville, and has actually gotten a bit of media attention, including a nice write-up in the Courier-Journal. (See also here and here.) But it seems to no avail, for apparently the campaign is too hot for her, so she and her comrades are hightailing it to Cincinnati.

Eighteen people attended the forum "including four workers from two Walmart stores where members of the SWP had worked. A young woman, who met party members earlier that day at an action to defend a woman’s right to choose an abortion, brought a friend."

Leave it to the Party's mayoral candidate to invite special guests and possible new recruits only to announce that she's decided to cut and run. This rises to Macklerian levels of unseriousness.

The reason for the move is the usual grass is greener elsewhere boilerplate.

“We think in Cincinnati we’ll have greater opportunities to join in union battles and at the same time build a branch of the SWP in a city with a long tradition of class struggle, an industrial center in the Midwest,” Dutrow said. “And where there have been important struggles against racist oppression and police brutality, like those we’ve been part of in Louisville.”

Though timing and manner of the announcement notwithstanding, the move does make sense. The population of metro Cincinnati (2,256,884 from 2020 census), is the 30th largest city in the country, and the largest in Ohio. It's almost double the population of metro Louisville (1,285,439), the 45th biggest city in the nation. So Ohio's Queen City is a bigger sandbox.

I've been to both cities, but know Cincinnati better. My first visit there must have been in the late 80s, when I was living in Buffalo, NY. I went to visit a friend of mine from grad school, by then engaged at the Univ. of Cincinnati. He was a foreign student from Taiwan named Mr. Wong. I've sadly lost touch with him--and it's impossible to locate a Chinese guy named Wong, when a) he's almost certainly moved back to Taiwan, and b) the English spelling does not specify which Chinese character he uses for his name.

Anyway, my friend from Taiwan gave me the grand tour of Cincinnati. The first thing I did was learn how to spell the place. Then we had to eat some chili--I liked it. He drove me to Kentucky just so I could say I'd been there. Of course we spent time at his lab at the University, and then we walked around town. He knew nothing about baseball, but he did point out the P&G buildings downtown.

I wish Ms. Trowe luck in her campaign for mayor of Cincinnati--assuming she stays there long enough to make it happen.

Moving on to Havana: The Militant scored an interview with a foreign dignitary. The conversation is described in an article entitled ‘Cuban Revolution: a challenge to US imperialism’, by Martín Koppel, Mary-Alice Waters and Róger Calero. The lede paragraph:

Carlos Fernández de Cossío, head of the Cuban foreign ministry’s department for U.S. affairs, was in New York at the end of September for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. As part of his busy schedule, he made time to sit down and talk with the Militant. He spoke about the intensified assault the world’s strongest imperialist power is today mounting against the men and women who made and continue to defend Cuba’s socialist revolution.

(Source: Cuba Escena reprinted in The Militant)

The best way to parse this is by looking at the pictures included in the article, such as the one above. The Militant's caption reads

Artists bring theater and music to El Salvador, a rural town in Cuba’s Guantánamo province Jan. 28, 2019. Socialist revolution expanded access to culture and education to millions in countryside and city.

This reminds me of rural Uganda when I lived there in the 1990s: no electricity, no telephones, no internet, no television, mostly illiterate, and only limited radio. The performers have no stage, no microphones, no props, no makeup, and no lighting. Apparently that's also how rural Cubans still live--a world of deep and desperate poverty. 

Compare with the average American, who, when they tire of the 50 channels on TV, can stream almost any content they wish from anywhere. My wife and I have been watching a Chinese soap opera called Chef Hua on YouTube. Even poorer countries are better off than Cubans--rural Filipinos at least have access to the Internet and telephones.

The "socialist revolution," far from expanding "access to culture and education," has instead vastly reduced and impoverished said culture. It's very sad.

Or consider this image

(Source: GRANMA/MIGUEL FEBLES HERNÁNDEZ, reprinted in The Militant)

The Militant's caption reads

Havana, February 2021. Medical students go door to door, making sure anyone with COVID symptoms gets needed care. For more than 60 years black Cubans have been a leading force in the socialist revolution, fighting to consolidate social and political gains of working people of all skin colors while uprooting legacy of discrimination against Cubans who are black. 

These are very strange medical students--they carry no supplies, no thermometer or stethoscopes, or any other tools. All they've got are white shirts and clipboards. Perhaps they're not medical students (or not just medical students), but rather agents from the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution--the Stasi-like secret police that hires neighbors to snitch on neighbors. The lady at the door doesn't look too happy to see them--can't say I blame her.

In the past the SWP extended "critical support" to the Castro regime, offering an occasional criticism. For example, they once dinged the Cuban government for their homophobia. But there is nothing even remotely critical in The Militant's account of Fernández de Cossío's interview. Indeed, a more credulous audience our visiting diplomat has likely never had. Surely no audience in Cuba would grant him such authority.

Here's the deal: all government officials lie. Trump lied. Biden lies. Boris Johnson lies, etc. Mr. Fernández de Cossío represents the Cuban government, and there is no way he is telling the truth. Surely any journalist with half a brain will treat his comments with some skepticism.

But not Martín Koppel, Mary-Alice Waters and Róger Calero. Their obsequiousness is embarrassing, and it discredits The Militant as a serious newspaper.

Further Reading:

• Wittenberg, 2021
• Cuba Needs More Communism!
• Down the Cuba Rabbit-Hole with Mary-Alice Waters

The China Beat

This post is in response to three recent articles from the Trotskyist press--one by Jeff Mackler, another by Michael Roberts, and a short piece by Roy Landersen.

Mr. Mackler's piece is entitled The Myth of a New “Cold War” Between the U.S. and China/Russia. He's addicted to the word imperialism--the word fragment imperial- shows up 28 times in the article. This despite the fact that he has no clue what the word means. He's not alone--nobody else knows what it means either.

What I think he thinks it means is something like unequal exchange. That is, on the one hand US capitalists will exploit Chinese workers who manufacture cheap products for American consumers by paying them "near slave wages." On the other hand, the US will export expensive, overpriced products back to China. Thus the capitalist realizes excess profits on both legs of the round trip. The problem is it doesn't work that way. Why would China volunteer their citizens for slavery? And why would they agree to buy overpriced products when the same can be had for cheaper from other countries?

Mr. Mackler actually admits that the imperialism model doesn't fit. He writes,

In the 20 years since China was admitted to the WTO, China went from operating as one of the world’s lowest technology nations to today, when Chinese technology rivals or exceeds almost all other nations on earth. In the past 20-plus years China was transformed from providing “internal migrant” teenage girls from the countryside, producing garments in prison-like foreign-owned dormitory factories at six cents per hour and seven days a week, to a nation with some of the most modern Chinese-owned factories in the world, producing world-class industrial tools and machinery and state-of-the-art 5G (fifth generation) electronics and telecommunication products.

So--in a mere 20 years those migrant slave girls went from being ruthlessly exploited to becoming middle class citizens of an increasingly wealthy country. There is still a lot of poverty in China, but the collaboration between Walmart, on the one hand, and Chinese entrepreneurs on the other has lifted 400,000,000 people into the global middle class--an achievement unprecedented in human history. Mr. Mackler needs to explain how "imperialism" wrought such a change, and if so, then why is "imperialism" such a bad thing?

It's not like American consumers suffered. Walmart reduced prices across the board, sharply lowering the cost of living, especially in rural areas. More, Walmart kept its operating margins at 3%, thereby passing nearly all the benefits of the China trade on to American consumers. Sam Walton only got a small slice.

The problem with Mr. Mackler's version of Marxism is that he sees trade as being a zero-sum game. He thinks anybody who trades with the USA is getting ripped off. Other people postulate the reverse: the US is getting ripped off by foreigners selling cheap products to Americans (I put Barry Sheppard into this category here). Though Mr. Mackler is inconsistent: he also believes Cuba's suffering is due to the US trade embargo, i.e., Cuba can't trade with the US.

There are social and geopolitical reasons why the US needs to curtail its trade with China--but we will pay an economic price by doing so.

Michael Roberts' article, entitled China at a turning point?, is much better--not least because the word imperialism isn't mentioned even once. More, Mr. Roberts actually knows something and is careful about terminology--nothing he says can be dismissed out of hand.

The article is inspired by the collapse of the giant real estate developer, Evergrande. I think Mr. Roberts' analysis of the near-term consequences is accurate. It is not a financial collapse on the order of Lehman Brothers, nor will it bankrupt the entire Chinese economy. But it will lower the standard of living by a misallocation of resources. Mr. Roberts suggests that China is creating "zombie companies" such as exist in many capitalist countries. He writes,

The real problem is that in the last ten years (and even before) the Chinese leaders have allowed a massive expansion of unproductive and speculative investment by the capitalist sector of the economy.  In the drive to build enough houses and infrastructure for the sharply rising urban population, the central and local governments left the job to private developers.  Instead of building houses for rent, they opted for the ‘free market’ solution of private developers building for sale.  Evergrande-like development in China wasn’t just capitalism doing its thing. It was capitalism facilitated by government officials for their own purposes. Beijing wanted houses and local officials wanted revenue. The housing projects helped deliver both. The result was a huge rise in house prices in the major cities and a massive expansion of debt.  Indeed, the real estate sector has now reached over 20% of China’s GDP. 

I think this diagnosis is largely correct, except I wouldn't blame the free market, but instead government intervention in the market. "Beijing wanted houses and local officials wanted revenue" has nothing to do with free market capitalism.

The Chinese problem is in a sense the opposite of that of the USA. In our country we subsidize housing demand: Section 8 vouchers, eviction moratoria, generous tax benefits, subsidized mortgages, concerted government efforts to extend home sales to poor people, etc. At the same time, housing supply is sharply limited, mostly by local zoning and environmental regulations. Many Greenies want to ban single family housing altogether. The result, of course, is sharply higher housing costs as subsidized demand outstrips constrained supply.

In China it's the other way round. Both the local and national governments want more houses--and boy, have they built houses! Whole ghost cities full of them. Supply is hugely subsidized, leading to falling prices. But the government can't have falling prices since that would destroy middle class savings. The result is a bankrupt Evergrande that is building houses that nobody really wants to pay for anymore.

My take on this is government regulation--on either the demand side or the supply side--screws things up. It's not capitalism anymore, but rather government cronyism, which eventually morphs into fascism/socialism.

Mr. Roberts' solution is to prohibit consumers from buying what they want. In the US consumers by a large majority want to live in single family homes in the suburbs. Chinese consumers want to own their own apartment and drive a car. But Mr. Roberts and his fellow socialists are against that--they think they know what the people want more than the people themselves. His penultimate paragraph makes precisely that point.

What is needed is not a further expansion of consumer sectors by opening them up to ‘free markets’, but instead state-led investment into technology to boost productivity growth.  And that state sector investment can be directed towards environmental goals and away from uncontrolled expansion in carbon-emitting fossil fuel industries.  As Richard Smith has put it: “The Chinese don’t need a higher standard of living based on endless consumerism. They need a better mode of life: clean unpolluted air, water and soil, safe and nutritious food, comprehensive public health care, safe, quality housing, a public transportation system centred on urban bicycles and public transit instead of cars and ring roads.” Rising personal consumption and wage growth will follow such investment, as it always does.

Somehow I doubt Chinese consumers prefer to ride around on bicycles instead of owning a car.

Mr. Landersen, writing for The Militant, pens a piece entitled Embracing Mao, Chinese rulers continue assault on working people. The premise is much the same as Mr. Mackler's--Chinese workers were exploited and oppressed by their Stalinist masters (which makes me wonder why The Militant offered the Maoists critical support for all those years). That oppression continues near unabated to this very day--the dramatic rise in China's material well-being is barely mentioned.

China's travails are contrasted with Cuba's virtues:

This is the opposite of the working-class trajectory of the Marxist leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution. Under Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, workers and farmers were led to take political power into their own hands and to take on ever-greater control over all aspects of economic and social life, transforming themselves in the process. Working people became conscious actors in history, extending their hand to anti-imperialist struggles around the world.

Yet China has manifestly been more successful than Cuba! Cities like Shanghai and Beijing look a lot more like New York than Havana. There are good restaurants, excellent public transportation, and nice stores. As mentioned China has a sizeable middle class.

None of that exists in Cuba. Smart and ambitious Cubans have all been exiled. Those still living in Cuba are hungry, live in housing so dilapidated that they're functionally homeless, and survive without electricity for much of the day.

China has a lot of problems--but there is no way that Cuba compares favorably with China.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: Walmart