Trotsky's Children

Friday, September 1, 2023

Nazis

Image: dpa | Sebastian Willnow, reprinted by Left Voice

I have to take issue with the headline on Nathaniel Flakin's recent article in Left Voice, entitled How East Germany Got Overrun by Nazis.

The headline makes no sense. Presumably the last person to voluntarily join the National Socialist Workers (Nazi) Party would have done so by 1943. It's hard to imagine that anybody younger than, say, 25 would have had the political awareness and gumption to consort with what was by then an overwhelmingly unpopular movement. A 25-year-old in 1943 will have been born in 1918. Our new recruit would today be 105 years old.

Yet, according to Mr. Flakin's headline, East Germany is today overrun by 105 year old Nazis! Amazing! And it can't possibly be true.

Silly me! Of course Mr. Flakin doesn't mean literal "Nazis." Instead he's using the term metaphorically--but then it's very unclear precisely what he does mean. Probably the word just refers to anybody Mr. Flakin doesn't like, and since he doesn't like anybody outside of his own small sect, then of course East Germany is "overrun by Nazis."

In the essay itself he uses the term "fascist" as a synonym for "Nazi." But fascist is also a weasel-word, and as a substitute for Nazi it's rather a poor one. Fascism certainly has to include the founder of the tendency, Benito Mussolini, whose sins are well-known, but who did not commit mass murder. He wasn't even antisemitic.

Mussolini was not strongly antisemitic. He had close ties to Italian Jews, including several early founders and members of the Fascist movement. He was also strongly affected by two Jewish women: Angelica Balabanoff, from Russia, and Margherita Sarfatti, an Italian. After Mussolini rose to national power, he reassured Italian Jewry of their safety in an interview with the Chief Rabbi of Rome.

Mussolini considered himself a socialist, and about the only thing he agreed with the Nazis on was the word "Socialist" in their title: National Socialist Workers Party. His wartime alliance with Hitler was mostly one of necessity.

So while the Nazis were fascist, they were their own unique and especially horrible brand, rather analogous to how Stalinism and Maoism are akin to communism. Hitler was sui generis--the term fascism doesn't give him enough credit. Using Nazi as a synonym for fascist is remarkably imprecise and unjust.

My sister and I visited Berlin for a week last June for a family reunion. My father was born there, and I lived there as a teenager, attending high school (Gymnasium). The reunion was with a group of second cousins, all of whom had parents born in Berlin, and all are in some fraction Jewish (none sufficiently so to be recognized as such by an Orthodox rabbi). Some of us (like me) were born abroad, others were born in Berlin but left the city before the wall was built, and yet others were raised in the GDR. We are now all in our 70s, slightly older than Angela Merkel, who is only 69.

I also spent a day with a classmate from high school--a native Berliner who has lived in the City his entire life. Along with some time visiting my sister's friends.

Those Germans of my generation--my cousins, my classmates, my sister's friends, and millions of others--confronted a dauntingly difficult task. They're the people who had to clean up after the Nazis--I mean real Nazis, not the imaginary ones of Mr. Flakin's invention. And in this endeavor they've been remarkably successful. They have commemorated the Holocaust. They have honored their Jewish exiles (they literally begged my father to take up his German citizenship--he refused), they built museums, they hosted Nuremburg trials and hunted down Nazi war criminals, and they found a way to work with Israel. They made it illegal to be a Nazi, and frankly--at least among my generation--Nazism is as dead as a doornail.

Short of resurrecting seven million people, it's hard to see how they could have done any more to atone for the sins of the Nazis.

Most important, they built the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic). It's not perfect--not even close. They have something akin to a constitution (Grundgesetz) but it isn't really a constitution, and is in any case not the work of inspired genius that is the American Constitution. They're not as committed to free markets as I would prefer, they've been unreasonably (if understandably) pacifist, and their dedication to the Green agenda is as unreasonable as it is foolish. Still, compared to any plausible alternative, the Bundesrepublik has successfully provided peace and prosperity for Germany for the past 75 years, and by extension for all of Europe.

But Mr. Flakin is not impressed. He writes (GDR refers to former East Germany),

It wasn’t the 40 years of the GDR, but rather the 30 years since then, that saw the rise of fascist forces. After the Wende, when the capitalist West swallowed up its smaller neighbor, the planned economy was sold for scrap. That left millions of former GDR citizens poor, atomized, and open for authoritarian fantasies. ...
Along with an economic shock doctrine, the East also got a new state apparatus, with intelligence agencies that had been founded by Nazi war criminals. For a recent example, look at Hans-Georg Maaßen, a former head of the Verfassungsschutz who has since outed himself as an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, raving against “globalists” who secretly control the world. During the 1990s, that agency funneled lots of money to Nazi groups across the East — if you believe their version, they had to fund Nazis in order to know what Nazis were up to.

The first paragraph is arguably true. The East German economy largely was scrap--it's been widely reported that the infamous East German car, the Trabi, was worth less than the cost of raw materials required to make it.

The second paragraph is at best a gross exaggeration, if it is true at all. That one bureaucrat (Mr. Maaßen) out of thousands turns out to be a nutcase is not much of a surprise. And one has to ask if serious money was ever given to "Nazi" groups in E. Germany--though if "Nazi" is defined as anybody Mr. Flakin doesn't like, then it's likely true.

Does any of this diminish the serious and decades-long efforts of Germans of my generation to clean out the Nazis? No it does not, and I'm insulted by Mr. Flakin's cavalier dismissal of their efforts.

Mr. Flakin looks to be the age of my children--thirty-something. He is not responsible for the Nazis, the Holocaust, the World War, or any of the other sins perpetrated by his grandparents or great-grandparents. On these he is as innocent as my children.

But by the same token he's not responsible for the clean-up effort afterwards. This was done by his parents--and he should give them and their generation credit. He does his country a great disservice by not doing so.

Mr. Flakin picks on a poor fellow named Hannes Loth--apparently the second coming of Hitler himself--recently elected mayor of a small town in Eastern Germany. Mr. Loth represents the "far right" Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party--most popular in Eastern Germany.

The AfD supports some positions that I agree with. I do think Wokeism is a problem and needs to be dealt with. I also think that "climate change" is at best grossly exaggerated, for which the proposed cures are far worse than the disease. I disagree (but am sympathetic) with his views on immigration. These are all public policy issues on which reasonable people can disagree. No opinion on any of these topics will define you as either a communist or a fascist. Democratic institutions, such as exist in the Bundesrepublik, are the appropriate venues in which to have these debates.

But what to me is beyond the pale is when somebody objects to the Bundesrepublik altogether. Insofar as AfD really is "far right", it's because at least some of their members want to end the Republic and reestablish some sort of dictatorial rule.

And I object to Mr. Flakin for the same reason--he's against the very concept of a democratic Republic. I'd put him in the same category as the AfD.

The Bundesrepublik not only cleaned up the Nazi shit, but as Mr. Flakin notes, they also had to deal with the Stalinist-Commie shit when the wall came down. On this front they've been somewhat less successful, as the dichotomy between East and West Germany indicates. The old GDR was not as bad as Hitler--not by a long shot. They probably weren't even as bad as Stalin. I'd put them in a category like Mussolini--whether you want to call them fascist or communist doesn't really matter. The difference is only in fine points of Marxist theology.

That Mr. Flakin writes for Neues Deutschland, named after the former East German government mouthpiece, shows what he thinks of the Bundesrepublik. He opposes the hard fought, hard won efforts of my generation to remake Germany into a civilized country. He should be ashamed of himself.

Further Reading:

Thursday, August 17, 2023

Two Takes on Trump's Trials

Two posts opine on the indictments of Donald Trump, both written before the recent charges were leveled in Georgia. The first--by James Dennis Hoff (English prof, CUNY), dated Aug. 4th, entitled Trump Indictments Are About Capitalist Stability, Not Justice--appears in Left Voice. The second, by Terry Evans, appearing in the August 21st Militant (publication of the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) is headed Defend free speech for all! Drop charges against Trump. As the headlines suggest, these take quite different positions on Mr. Trump's travails.

Professor Hoff (in his lede paragraph) is convinced of Trump's guilt, and suggests that the recent indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith will

... focus exclusively on Trump’s attempts to stay in office by overturning the 2020 election results, thus, as prosecutors claim, defrauding and violating the civil rights of millions of U.S. voters. That Trump is guilty of these charges, and much worse, goes without saying.

Contrary to Professor Hoff's prejudice, it is not at all obvious Trump is guilty of anything in this indictment. A subsequent sentence in Professor Hoff's paragraph also doesn't ring true.

And after a political career of spewing hate, advocating violence, and promoting and helping to pass harmful laws against immigrants, women, and people of color, Trump deserves nothing less than to spend what’s left of his pathetic life in jail.

I don't think Trump has ever advocated violence--quite the opposite--as I wrote back in 2019.

President Trump has turned down many opportunities to go to war. His retaliation against Syria (for chemical weapons violations) was destroying an empty "research facility" in the middle of the night. When Iran shot down a drone, it turned out that he didn't want to kill any Iranians. He rejected John Bolton's desperate pleas to invade Venezuela. He wants to pull our troops out of Afghanistan. He has studiously ignored all the provocations coming from Pyongyang.

...The man is a pacifist. It's that simple.

Indeed, later in his article our friend condemns Trump for wanting to pull out of NATO and refusing US involvement in the Ukraine war--i.e. precisely for his pacifism.

Professor Hoff admits that the 78 (now 91) charges against Trump are mostly an electoral ploy to prevent Trump from winning, though he believes there is a darker, more nefarious motive.

Indeed, this latest indictment has nothing to do with protecting the rule of law, and everything to do with protecting bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere. Trump’s supporters and conservative right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, have argued for months now that the indictments are politically motivated. ... While they are correct that these indictments are part of a broader attempt to keep Trump from winning a second election, ... behind the many damning charges against Trump lies a more fundamental attempt on behalf of a broad sector of capital to defend the stability and legitimacy of the U.S. regime in the midst of a series of ongoing military, economic, ecological, and political crises.

Elsewhere in the article, Professor Hoff uses "ruling class" as a synonym for "broad sector of capital." I believe this nomenclature is a source of confusion.

The "ruling class" is defined by economic status--the very richest in our society who control the most capital. By the most generous definition it includes the top 1%--which includes households earning more than $500K/year. The median salary for a doctor is $400K, so there are many, many doctors who earn enough to get them into the 1%. They may be rich, but they're not exactly members of the "ruling class." By contrast, the top 0.1% earned a minimum of $3.3 million in 2021, which seems like a more reasonable cutoff for membership in the "ruling class."

The problem with Professor Hoff's analysis is that--despite the power over the economy the ruling class possesses--they are much too small in number to determine our cultural and political lives. That kind of influence rests not with the economic elite, but rather with the status elite. The status elite caste includes government officials, academics, journalists, corporate HR departments, and--these days--social media influencers. Indeed, given his academic rank with tenure at a large university in New York City, Professor Hoff is a member of that elite.

No wonder he hates Trump. The status elite universally hate Trump because he represents a direct threat to their status. He wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy (may the heavens forfend!), defund the universities (God help us all), and trash the Woke/climate propaganda (just imagine what the deplorables will believe in then!).

Despite his radical pretensions, Professor Hoff is a loyal member of his caste. Indeed, he even seems to suck up to NATO and the Ukraine war because that's what his caste does. He is definitely against shrinking the federal government and defunding the universities.

If Professor Hoff misconstrues the ruling caste, then he certainly mischaracterizes working class! He writes,

For huge portions of the U.S population, particularly disaffected and downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites, Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric and strongman Bonapartism are the embodiment of a growing resentment of what Nancy Fraser called progressive neoliberalism, and a misguided desire to solve the capitalist crisis through a reactionary and frequently racist attempt to “Make America Great Again” at the expense of the further immiseration of Black and Brown working people.

Typically, Marxists refer to "huge portions of the U.S population" as the working class, not as "downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites." Indeed, that latter phrase refers much more to Professor Hoff himself than it does, say, to Walmart employees. Status notwithstanding, economically speaking the professor is a member of the lumpen intelligentsia, whose income (in light of declining enrollments and all) comes mostly in the form of what amounts to a welfare check.

Indeed, defining working class as non-college educated workers, Trump got the majority of those votes (a large majority of white voters, nearly 40% of Hispanic voters, and a still small but record portion of black voters).

Unlike Professor Hoff, who posits some vague conspiracy theory on the part of the "ruling class" to protect "...bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere," The Militant's Terry Evans, in his lede paragraph, is very clear about the threat the indictments pose.

Defending constitutionally protected free speech is at the heart of fighting the latest assault on political rights by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department. Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment of former President Donald Trump would gut the First Amendment in an attempt to drive Biden’s main rival for the presidency out of the 2024 race and put him in jail.

He buttresses his argument with a quote from Trotsky:

Under capitalism, all suppression of political rights — regardless of who is targeted — “bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history,” Leon Trotsky, who had been a leader of the Bolshevik-led 1917 Russian Revolution, said in 1939.

In other words, the indictments against Trump are a direct attack on Constitutional civil liberties, for which the working class are the chief beneficiaries.

Politicians lie all the time. Under the First Amendment they have a right to lie. Even if Trump had lied through his teeth about the 2020 election (a dubious proposition since Trump likely believed his own bullshit), he still has a First Amendment right to speak. Even if Trump is convicted it is likely that the Supreme Court will overturn the conviction as violating the Bill of Rights. As it should.

I'm proud to say that, in the 1970s when I was a member of the SWP, I stood for the defense of civil liberties in the Party's COINTELPRO lawsuit against the FBI. In those days the rightwing establishment was infringing on the civil liberties of its leftwing opponents.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: it is a leftwing establishment illegally attacking their rightwing opponents. I am proudly still defending civil liberties today. Meanwhile, Professor Hoff is an unabashed supporter of the establishment--and as such he opposes freedom of speech and is betraying his professed allegiance to the working class (which was always mostly fake to begin with).

Further Reading:

Monday, August 7, 2023

Three Militant Articles on the Economy

While energy prices have gone down, most items working people depend on are still rising today.
(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Caption: The Militant)

All three articles are from the August 7th issue of The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party, SWP). and two of them are only indirectly about the economy. The first piece is entitled Why do liberals claim that US capitalism is on the upswing? and is authored by The Militant's economics correspondent, Brian Williams. The second, by Seth Galinsky, is headlined Teamsters union says tentative agreement reached with UPS. Finally, there is an editorial under the banner Cuba’s socialist revolution points way forward for working people.

Mr. Williams gets it mostly right--but tells only one side of the story. He agrees with Republican partisans that the economy is going to hell in a handbasket, with this lede (links mine)

If you go by what the liberal big-business media are saying, the economy is on the verge of a boom, with prices dropping and fears of a wrenching recession fading away. Among a plethora of articles pushing this view include: “Everything’s coming up soft landing,” by New York Times economic whiz Paul Krugman, and “US economy shifts into disinflation mode,” by Reuters.

Not true, claims Mr. Williams, and he cites the above chart as evidence, saying

But this doesn’t mean that prices of goods essential for working people don’t continue to bite us. Rents rose by 8.3% over the past year. Prices for grocery items workers need kept going up — cereals, up 16%; jelly and jam, up 17.5%; mayonnaise, 23%; applesauce, 22%, for example.
Some of the steepest rises were for the cost of insuring a vehicle, up 17% in June. And the cost of keeping your car running rose 12.7% from a year earlier.

He's right in holding Mr. Krugman to account, who claims that fuel, food and rent can be ignored in any meaningful measure of inflation.

There are plenty of voices in the media who, like Mr. Williams, argue that we're heading for a recession. Indeed, the whole Republican party makes that claim, for obvious electoral reasons. The popular website Zerohedge.com makes that case in spades. And they might be right.

On the other hand, it may be no recession is on the near horizon. A popular meme today is, instead of a "soft-landing", there will be "no-landing", that is the economy will continue to grow at a rate proportional to population growth and new technology, i.e., 1 - 2%. But the cost will be continued inflation at or above 3%. My opinion (today; I change my mind every week or so) is this is the most likely outcome, though I'll hazard inflation will be more like 5%.

Mr. Williams makes a huge error, for which we can fault Marxism to which he is beholden. He writes,

Bosses and government spokespeople claim that the biggest problem with inflation is it impels workers to fight for higher wages, leading to what they claim is a “wage-price spiral.” This just isn’t true. When workers organize and use unions to fight and win higher wages, it just means profits go down. Profits are what the bosses steal from the fruits of our labor.

Marxism claims that capital should cost nothing. This will never be true, no matter who owns it. The statement that higher wages always come out of profits is also usually wrong. Most often higher wages result in higher prices, just as the "bosses" claim.

He goes on to say that "...workers’ real wages are currently 3.2% lower than in December 2020." Perhaps this is true--there are uncertainties in measurement that make it debatable. But more important, there have been pandemic-driven changes in the economy that confound any simple comparison. For example, consumer preferences have changed from goods (which manufacture pays relatively high wages) to services (which pay relatively low wages). This will result in lower overall wages, but not because of inflation.

More, Mr. Galinsky, writing about the UPS settlement with the Teamsters Union, writes

According to the Teamsters’ press release, all current full- and part-time UPS workers will get a $7.50 per hour wage increase over the life of the contract, starting with $2.75 more this year. That comes to about an average of 6.5% a year.

Six and one half percent is well over the rate of inflation. Unions do best when there is a labor shortage, forcing all companies to pay more for labor, whether they're unionized or not. Walmart, Amazon and Starbucks have all raised their wages recently. No union is required to get a hefty raise.

I think The Militant fundamentally misunderstands the union movement. Unionists are not revolutionaries in the making. They're certainly not communists. Any union member will understand that a company has to make a profit in order to stay in business (see, e.g., here). The last thing they want is for the company to go bankrupt, as is happening with Yellow Freight, putting nearly 30,000 teamsters out of a job. At their core, unions are pro-company and pro-capitalist. They resent organizations like the SWP, who see unions merely as a tool to help the vanguard party take state power. See, e.g., the Labor Notes movement.

Finally, the editors reprint an excerpt from Castro's speech titled History will absolve me. This speech was delivered in 1953, It is an agenda for the "revolution," which at that point was still in the future. It is entirely appropriate to compare Castro's promises with the outcome today. What follows are some quotes (taken from the excerpt of the speech published by the editors), with my comments in red (which are so obvious they're hardly necessary).

When we talk about the people, in terms of struggle, we mean the 600,000 Cubans without work, who want to earn their daily bread honestly without having to emigrate from their homeland in search of a job. Since the "revolution" millions of people have fled the island in search of jobs and a better life, with more arriving in the US every day. 1.2 million Cuban-Americans live in Miami alone.
The 500,000 farmworkers who live in miserable huts, who work four months of the year and starve the rest, sharing their poverty with their children; who don’t have an inch of land to till and whose lives would move any heart not made of stone. Nothing has changed here. Farmworkers still live in miserable huts, still don't own any land, and still lack enough food to live well on.
The 400,000 industrial workers and laborers whose retirement funds have been embezzled; whose gains won in the past are being taken away; whose homes are hellish shacks that resemble the worst barracks; whose wages pass from the hands of the boss to those of the moneylender; whose future is a cut in pay and loss of a job; whose life is endless toil; whose only rest is the grave. Today industrial workers and laborers have no retirement funds, and their salaries are less than $100/month. A UPS employee earns that much in under five hours.
The 20,000 small merchants, crushed by debt, ruined by the crisis, and dealt the final blow by a plague of thieving, venal officials. Today small merchants are crushed by even more venal officials, and are not allowed to run even the smallest businesses without bureaucratic oversight and corruption.
The 10,000 young professionals: doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, school teachers, dentists, pharmacists, journalists, painters, sculptors, and others who leave school with a degree, looking for a way to fight, full of hope, only to find themselves at a dead end with all doors closed and deaf to their pleas and outrage. With all doors closed to them in Cuba, these are the people who have fled to Miami and have turned that city into the financial and cultural capital of Latin America.

Not only will history not absolve him, it will condemn him! It is obvious that by the standards of its own promises, the "revolution" has been an abject failure. The SWP and The Militant are strong supporters of the Cuban, so-called "revolution. By reprinting this, The Militant's editors show just how clueless they really are. This is just face-plant stupid.

Further Reading:

Saturday, July 29, 2023

Unions and Work From Home

Newly elected CWA President Claude Cummings, the union’s first African-American president.
(Picture & caption source)

I owe my friends at Solidarity some love--I've been ignoring them too long. And they deserve it by reposting a piece by Steve Early entitled Bosses, Union Officials, Rank-&-Filers Debate Work from Home. Mr. Early is a longtime activist in the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union, specifically its Newsguild affiliate which organizes newspaper employees. It's obvious that Mr. Early is a reporter: he writes well, and he definitely knows his facts! Mr. Early reports on a topic nobody else on my beat has mentioned: Work From Home (WFH).

According to demographer Wendell Cox, within all US metro areas with at least one million population, 21.9% of employees worked from home in 2021, while only 3.8% rode mass transit. At very least, the era of so-called "mass transit" appears to be over.

A recent WSJ article, dated July 11th, leads with this:

Office attendance is slumping again and bosses have a warning: We are a worse company when you stay home.
In buildings across 10 major U.S. cities, office occupancy has fallen back below 50% for the past three weeks, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks security swipes into offices. The drop comes despite new return-to-office mandates that affect more than 600,000 workers and counting.

The bosses cite multiple reasons for wanting their employees back in the office. First, they suspect they're slacking off. Then there is less room for creative conversations and serendipitous discoveries. And finally it's hard to on-board new employees or discover the likeliest candidates for promotion if you never meet them in person.

Also cited is the damage it does to downtowns:

“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” said Dean Porter of Houston. “Mayors and governors and too many managers want people back commuting.”
Workers who do a good portion of their job remotely contend they aren’t obligated to prop up the office, or an office-centric economy.
“It is not my responsibility to save downtown by going back to the office,” said Merrik Wright of Miami. “The average worker should not be in charge of something that just costs us time and money.”

Conversely, employees really like working from home, not only because it saves commuting time and expense. It permits a more flexible schedule, within which they can balance childcare and other responsibilities. They hate the "open-office" layout, which inhibits work. And they claim--with some data to back them up--that they're at least as productive at home as in the office.

On the downside, employees miss social contact with workmates, and they're also required to absorb the expense of setting up a home office.

If the bosses and their employees are struggling with WFH, then so too is the CWA. In a recent election for union president, the two candidates in the run-off disagreed on precisely that issue. The winner, newly elected president Claude Cummings, is a fan, arguing

... that CWA would not be well-positioned to help more white-collar workers win bargaining rights and contract language on WFH if top union officials opposed remote work options."

Mr. Cummings had support.

According to Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson, his fellow customer service reps in Minneapolis had discovered that remote work “was safer, saved them money on commuting and childcare, gave them more time for rest and with their families and more control of their work space.”
That’s why Knutson and leaders of other AT&T locals launched a grassroots campaign aimed at keeping Work from Home (WFH) as an option at AT&T, the most heavily unionized telecom company.

The response from the union leadership was lukewarm, at best. Indeed, Mr. Cummings' opponent was CWA Vice-President Ed Mooney. His stated reason for opposing WFH doesn't make too much sense.

... WFH has put “the companies in the driver’s seat because they are aware our members like it so much.”

But Mr. Early delves deeper, and Mr. Mooney's objection is more reasonable.

Mooney defended his role in negotiations with Verizon over WFH last year. During those talks, other CWA bargaining committee members like Local 1400 President Don Trementozzi had to overcome Mooney’s initial opposition—voiced during union caucuses — to extending remote work opportunities for Verizon customer service reps.
Then and now, Mooney’s questioning of WFH resonated not only with east coast Verizon locals, dominated by technicians, but also some rank-and-file radicals who belong to those locals. Echoing Mooney’s concerns, one long-time activist and fellow Labor Notes supporter told me that WFH “takes away our bargaining power, leaves people more atomized, and gives management too much control.”

And that's just it. The union depends on the office just as much as the bosses do. The bosses want to instill a company culture; the union wants to foster solidarity. Both of those are threatened by WFH, and hence the resistance from union officialdom despite the rank and file pressure.

Put in my own words: How do you organize a strike in a WFH shop? Holding a picket line in front of a largely abandoned office building doesn't look effective. Do you picket everybody's front porch? And how do you rat out the people who cross the picket line simply by logging in from their home office?

Mr. Early himself admits to being an early WFH skeptic.

Three decades ago, I was similarly ambivalent. As a national union rep between 1980 and 2007, I had much first-hand familiarity with the workplace culture of telephone company service reps and the different (and more blue-collar) world of inside and outside “plant technicians.” ... Most cable guys loved being able to take their trucks home at night and go directly to customers’ homes the next morning. Union-minded telephone techs wanted their co-workers to report to a central location every day, so they would have more regular contact with shop stewards.
After I helped a group of 1,500 customer service reps in New England get a first contract in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t long before the company now known as Verizon wanted to do a “trial” of work from home. One reason for our resistance to that proposal was the fear that collective action in newly organized call centers would be more difficult, if everyone was isolated at home and not working under the same roof.

But he's since come around--for which he credits new technology.

The availability of now well-tested new tools for communication, coordination, and membership participation — that were not available back then — has convinced me that greater union flexibility on this issue is absolutely essential. ...

According to [Don] Trementozzi, rank-and-file participation in his local actually increased during the pandemic. Because bargaining sessions, committee meetings and general membership gatherings were conducted via Zoom, they attracted people who would not have attended in person, after working all day or all week in their previous work locations.

The union argument against WFH is exactly the same as the bosses. And like the bosses' employees, Mr. Early is arguing that company culture/union solidarity is just as well transmitted during Zoom meetings. Count me just a little bit skeptical. But both the bosses and the union have to deal with huge employee resistance to being marched back into the office--and Mr. Early has given up the fight and chosen to side with the employees. I don't blame him, but I'm not sure how well that will serve the union.

The fact is that the interests of the union (in this case building solidarity) and the interests of the workers (who overwhelmingly like WFH) often diverge. There are many other examples, e.g., gig workers generally prefer their gig status to being full-time, unionized employees. I commented on how hotel workers have interests that don't correspond to their union here.

All that said, Steve Early is a good writer and an honest reporter who really knows something about his topic. He takes on a serious issue with important economic ramifications. His piece is well worth reading.

Further Reading:

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes

Source: CATO Institute

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

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

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

Today the debt is $31.4 trillion, or 133% of U.S. GDP, a 25% jump from 2016. This is the highest level of national debt in U.S. history.
The debt problem has at its root the crisis of capitalism’s profitability. The fall in this profitability, starting in the 1980s, prompted the rich to attack the conditions of the American working class through cuts in public services, anti-union attacks, and factory closures of companies that opted to move to other countries—mainly China—in search of better conditions to generate profits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Montejero writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

Sunday, July 2, 2023

Oberlin, 2023

Laura Garza leading comrades in prayer
(MILITANT/ARTHUR HUGHES)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), publishers of The Militant, report on their recent International Educational Conference held June 8 - 10 in Oberlin, Ohio. There are two articles describing the event, both written by Steve Clark and Terry Evans--members of the Party's core leadership. They're entitled Socialist Workers Party leadership sets course ahead and ‘A road forward to raise workers’ confidence in our own capacities’. One can think of these as being news and commentary, respectively, and for brevity I'll refer to them as such.

The news piece highlights the report given by Jack Barnes, the national secretary and Party's chief honcho. We're told that 333 people attended the conclave, including representatives from Canada, the UK and Australia, which seems around average for prior years. The article lists the agenda in a series of bullet points, which I quote here in shortened format.

In addition to defense of constitutional freedoms, the report by the party’s national secretary adopted by the June 12 leadership meeting focused on:

The centrality of organizing solidarity through the unions ...
Why advancing women’s emancipation cannot be reduced to the fight for the decriminalization of abortion. ...
The necessity of a proletarian internationalist course. ...
Why the unions must lead in forging an alliance of workers and exploited farmers ...
Why achieving any of these goals requires the working class and trade unions to break from the Democrats, Republicans ...
Advancing the revolutionary fight by the working class to remove state power, including the power to make war, from the ruling class and to establish a workers and farmers government that, as the SWP Constitution says, “will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism.”

The Party is justly proud of its defense of Constitutional rights, which has been a tradition since its founding. Indeed, I'm proud to say that I've been consistent on the subject as well, defending the SWP's right to free speech and to equal treatment under the law back when I was a comrade, and extending the same defense to Donald Trump and his followers today. Clark & Evans point out that

The same espionage statute wielded by Biden against Trump was used in 1918 to jail Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs for his support for the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution and opposition to U.S. imperialism’s predatory aims in World War I.

The SWP is the only organization on the Left that I'm aware of that is consistent in its support of Constitutional rights for ALL citizens, including both Trump and Debs (and James Cannon imprisoned under the Smith Act). For this it deserves considerable credit.

The Party's statement on women's rights is also more sensible than you'd expect. They write,

The starting point in the battle for women’s emancipation, Barnes said, is recognizing and addressing the growing social and economic crises that prevent working people starting families and providing for them. That means fighting for jobs with wage rates, work schedules and conditions that make family time possible — time for social activity together, sports, recreation, caring for children who are sick or need help with their homework, help for the aging. Time for family members to read, to take part in union, political and cultural activity.

Astonishingly, the Party is both pro-child and pro-family, which makes their decades-long championing of abortion rather embarrassing. The topic was debated during last year's convention, which resulted in the book The low point of labor resistance is behind us, which I reviewed here. Abortion, instead of being legalized should now only be decriminalized. I'm not sure what the difference is, but the latter makes it sound less important. Mr. Barnes goes on to say

The political course pursued by Democrats, the middle-class left and leaders of today’s bourgeois-minded women’s organizations, however, heads in the opposite direction, Barnes said. They reduce the fight for women’s rights to abortion access, campaigning for capitalist (almost always Democratic Party) politicians and “breaking the glass ceiling” to get more women into well-remunerated professional and managerial positions.

The Party is much more sensible than their nuttier comrades on the Left, who believe in 52 genders and that a man can transition into a woman simply by putting on a dress. The Party actually believes in fertility, which places them in the realm of sane political discourse.

But I won't go along with their communist project to socialize all childcare. This is a totalitarian project.

The commentary article tells us that a "proletarian internationalist course" actually consists of: solidarity with the Cuban "revolution."

The socialist conference opened with a political report by Mary-Alice Waters. Having led three political trips to Cuba this year by teams of cadres in the SWP and broader communist movement, Waters focused, among other topics, on political and leadership lessons of Cuba’s socialist revolution and Washington’s intensifying efforts to crush it.

The news yields a bit more information:

Barnes pointed to the global media blitz Washington has begun cranking up, alleging Chinese government spying operations in Cuba — charges Cuban leaders rebutted as “mendacious and unfounded” lies. Such false charges, the SWP leader said, are in line with the Biden administration’s course — building on that of the Trump White House and every Democratic and Republican administration for some 65 years — to overturn the socialist revolution in Cuba.

That's it--endless solidarity and uncritical acceptance of everything the Cuban government says is all there is to internationalism.

The Party's union work is so small scale and unimportant that it's barely worth mentioning. To wit:

Organizing solidarity is the backbone of work to strengthen the unions. Barnes pointed to the recent example of eight rail workers, all members of SMART-TD Local 1373, joining the picket line of striking Teamsters at Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages in Philadelphia last month. They brought several hundred dollars to donate to the strike fund.

Eight workers and a few hundred dollars adds up to a hill of beans. For what it's worth, the Party doesn't participate in what is probably the most viable union movement around: Labor Notes. I posted a piece on that, and in the comments I point out why I think the SWP abstains. I stand by that comment.

Similarly, getting the unions to break with Democrats is a lost cause--the Democrats have all the money and also power to change labor laws. More, unionists intrinsically understand economics better than my Trotskyist friends, blinded as they are by Marxist theology. The issue is about divvying up the producer surplus, not about who owns the means of production. The unions have got that right.

The last bullet point is simply a religious assertion--it has no practical consequence whatsoever. It is to Trotskyism what Judgement Day is to Christianity. But, beyond narrow pork barrel issues, it's a religious and moral impulse that motivates humans to engage in politics at all. And that's the role of the last bullet--it puts everything into moral perspective and justifies all the efforts (however futile) in trying to get from here to there.

The photo of Ms. Garza highlights the commentary article, and frankly "prayer" was the first word that came to my mind when I saw it. I doubt Ms. Garza experienced it that way, but if she's talking about that last bullet point--the ultimate purpose of the whole thing--then prayer is exactly what it was. And so, however unintentionally, The Militant's photographer and editor have accurately illustrated what the Socialist Workers Party is all about.

Amen, Amen!

Further Reading:

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY

The professor in question is James Dennis Hoff, associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY). His title suggests he has tenure, and from this webpage we conclude that his salary is in the $70K - $80K range. Especially if he lives in a dual-earner household, this is a solidly middle class income, even in New York City, where the median salary is about $60K.

Professor Hoff should consider himself very lucky to have a tenured job in an English department at such a high salary. From the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019,

The news was grim. Columbia University’s English department had failed to place a single current Ph.D. candidate into a tenure-track job this year. And 19 new doctoral students had accepted admission into the program, raising questions about why the cohort is so large when the job prospects aren’t plentiful.

Yet despite that, Professor Hoff is all in on making the problem even worse. In an article for Left Voice entitled Rekindling the Militant Spirit of CUNY’s Past, he writes (emphasis mine)

Mayor Eric Adams has announced an austerity budget that includes significant cuts to the City University of New York among other city agencies. In order to defeat these cuts, students, faculty, and other workers across the city must unite our struggles and be prepared to shut the university down.

CUNY employs over 40,000 people, and Professor Hoff's plan would put them all instantly out of work, potentially deprived of a paycheck and benefits for an indefinite period. This seems hopelessly counterproductive, rather like the child who threatens to hold his breath until his mother concedes on the candy bar.

The cause of our friend's temper tantrum is because (link in original)

This year, the university is once again facing a series of potentially devastating cuts that will only make the situation worse. While the latest New York State budget provided some additional funding to CUNY (still far less than is needed), New York City Mayor, Eric Adams has threatened to shrink the city’s contribution to the university’s budget by more than $68 million and is asking colleges to make plans to cut their spending by five or six percent next year.

The NYT article he links to presents data different than Mr. Hoff cites. I can't account for the discrepancy. From the NYT:

The message, delivered in a letter from the budget director, Jacques Jiha, directed the leaders of nearly every city agency, including the Police Department, to cut their budgets by 4 percent for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. Only the Department of Education and the City University of New York will be subject to smaller cuts of 3 percent.

What the professor doesn't mention is that CUNY enrollments declined overall by 20% since 2018, while the community college enrollments dropped by 30%. Obviously the institution has to downsize--even the otherwise irrational Professor Hoff needs to admit as much.

A second flaw in Mr. Hoff's argument is he never really tells us who he wants to strike against. He proposes multiple targets, none of which are very convincing. He writes,

Winning such a strike, however, will require more than just faculty and staff walking out of their classrooms and offices. CUNY labor is important for the social reproduction of the city’s workforce, but, unlike K-12 teachers, without whom huge portions of the entire workforce must stay home for lack of childcare, the immediate impacts of a strike at CUNY would likely be insufficient to force the hands of the CUNY administration or the state. In order to win such a struggle, the union will need allies.

Here he suggests that the strike is against "the administration" and/or "the state." Neither of these are strike-worthy. The administration suckles from the same teat as the faculty, and their incentives are exactly the same as the faculty. The difference is that, unlike Professor Hoff, they are precarious workers--none of them have tenure as administrators, and beyond top management they don't have tenure as faculty, either. For this reason they are much more sensitive about what their bosses think about them, and of necessity have both feet planted squarely in reality. The administration is not the enemy.

It's equally bizarre to think he's striking against "the state," where Democrats are totally in charge. The Dems see the teachers' unions in general, and the professors' union specifically, as tight allies, with money flowing generously in both directions. Mayor Adams himself promises a carve-out for CUNY, cutting their budget by only 3% instead of 4%. More, New York state is even raising CUNY's budget! Democratic politicians' self-interest is nearly perfectly aligned with the unions, so to cast them as a strike-worthy enemy is fanciful.

Here is what is going to happen. CUNY enrollment is down by 10% over the past year, and 20% since 2018. Therefore there needs to be a cut in personnel--which will happen over time. The CUNY budget is being cut by 3% (according to the Mayor), and even less than that if increases in state funding are included. If staffing over time has to shrink by 10%, and there is only a 3% cut in the budget, that leaves as much as 7% that can be redistributed to the remaining faculty in the form of raises. That's without raising taxes or calling for a special legislative session to completely rejigger the budget.

That's how it will play out, but it can be done the hard way or the easy way. The hard way is for the faculty to take Mr. Hoff's suggestion and go on strike, complete with the massive disruption and missed paychecks that would entail. Or one can just agree to it through some kind of (Kabuki) negotiation--little fuss and no muss. You'll end up with the same result either way.

Professor Hoff hints at a third solution, writing (link in original)

Like all of the reduced spending in Adams’ proposed budget (and there is a lot), he is blaming these cuts on the cost of helping integrate a wave of new immigrants; but in a city that is continually cited as the wealthiest in the world, there is more than enough money available for improved public services, increased wages for all public workers, and aid for new immigrants.

In other words, instead of striking against the administration or the state, CUNY faculty really need to stick it to those millionaires and billionaires--they are the strike-worthy targets. Of course one can't really strike against them. They depend on CUNY for almost nothing--and they already pay a hugely disproportionate share of the cost. The top 200,000 of the state's taxpayers pay 56.6% of all income taxes. In 2021 there were 84,366 filers who earned at least a million dollars--and they alone paid 48.5% of New York's income taxes. The richest 200 taxpayers alone pay 9.5% of all New York's income taxes! If they were to move out of state, CUNY and all public services would be royally screwed. They stay partly because they feel sorry for the likes of Professor Hoff--who shouldn't bite the hand that feeds him. (Source for above data)

What Professor Hoff and his Hoff-like friends in the city council and state legislature never remember is that those millionaires and billionaires earn their fortunes by providing useful goods and services to many millions of consumers across the country and around the world. Unlike Professor Hoff, who provides nothing of much value to anybody.

Further Reading: