The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform

The Transitional Program is among the founding documents of modern Trotskyism. Written by Trotsky in 1938, it describes a method by which the revolutionary party can hasten the radicalization of the working class.

The original text is turgid prose--I don't recommend it. But in brief summary, the Party (in this case the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) should put forward seemingly reasonable demands that workers will all agree with, but which are impossible for the ruling class to accommodate. Out Now, referring to American troops in Vietnam, is a classic example. Workers thrilled to the call, demonstrating by the hundreds of thousands against the war, but it was impossible for the US government to precipitously end the war. (Though they came pretty close.)

Trotskyist presidential campaigns are supposedly designed around these so-called transitional demands. Impossible on the one hand; reasonable on the other. The thirteen demands that constitute the SWP's 2020 campaign platform (offered in support of the Alyson Kennedy/Malcolm Jarrett ticket) fail this test. They're completely unreasonable. No doubt the bourgeoisie will be flummoxed--but so will everybody else.

Here is the list:

UNIONS/FOR A LABOR PARTY Support workers’ struggles to organize to defend themselves, to use union power on behalf of ourselves and all working people. Workers need their own party, a labor party. One union for all drivers — taxi, Uber, Lyft, other app-based and car service drivers! Support farmworkers in their fight to organize unions and for safe working conditions.

This is a demand on the working class--not the bourgeoisie, and as such is not transitional. Every Trotskyist grouplet makes the same demand--even the laughable Jeff Mackler. The sentence about drivers is a non sequitur--they're effectively self-employed and can't meaningfully organize.

 AMNESTY FOR ALL UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS in the US, a life-and-death question for the unions to unite workers and cut across divisions the bosses use to drive down wages. For access to driver’s licenses for all.

Should people who arrive on tourist visas be granted the same amnesty? Or should they get amnesty only after they overstay their visas? Immigration laws don't drive down wages, but instead raise them because they lower competition for jobs. Not clear why they don't demand an end to all driver's licenses--what's the point of issuing them to all? Should 2-year olds be granted driver's licenses if they're undocumented?

JOBS Fight for a federal government-financed public works program to put millions to work at union-scale wages building roads, bridges, hospitals, child care centers, mass transportation and quality affordable housing workers need. Set the minimum wage to allow workers to have a home and support a family.

This paragraph reads like a timewarp from 1932. How is said public works program gonna put millions to work? Most construction projects require very few workers these days. They built a new building on my campus and there probably weren't more than 20 people on the construction site at any one time. And aren't new roads and bridges mostly just pork barrel projects used to siphon money into the pockets of corrupt officials (union and otherwise)? Can The Militant provide even one example of a new road or bridge that is so desperately needed as to warrant such an emergency effort? 

OPPOSE WASHINGTON’S WARS US hands off Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. US troops out of Afghanistan, Korea, the Middle East. End US colonial rule in Puerto Rico.

The US is pulling out of Afghanistan, the Middle East, and (eventually) Korea. We don't have troops in Venezuela or Cuba (apart from the Guantanamo sideshow). And if Puerto Rico wants independence, then please don't let the door hit them on the way out.

CUBA’S REVOLUTION — AN EXAMPLE End the US rulers’ economic war against Cuba; US out of Guantánamo. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 showed it is possible for workers and farmers to transform themselves in struggle, to take political power and uproot capitalist exploitation.

Nobody--not even my comrade-friends--will choose to voluntarily live in Cuba. Those heroic workers and farmers--all they've done is transform themselves into impoverished slaves of the Castro regime.

HEALTH CARE FOR ALL Fight for universal, government-guaranteed cradle-to-grave health care, and retirement income for all.

We already have health care for all. In the worst case it's Medicaid, which is a far sight better than what they get in Cuba. Most Americans have much better health care than that. And apparently my comrade-friends have never heard of social security.

ABORTION Defend women’s right to unrestricted access to family planning services, including the right to safe, secure abortions.

Not clear why the Party takes a position on abortion--how does it further the World Revolution? Do they also support infanticide? What about killing unwanted two-year olds?

ISRAEL & PALESTINE For the recognition of Israel and of a contiguous Palestinian state. For the right of Jews to return to Israel as a refuge in the face of capitalist crisis, Jew-hatred and murderous violence.

I agree with this demand. Whatever else the SWP is, it is not antisemitic. Thank you!

WORKERS CONTROL OVER PRODUCTION The bosses and their government lie to working people about their production costs and profits, while they insist they can’t afford to pay higher wages. Demand they open their books for inspection by workers and consumers. To prevent capitalist collusion and thievery — and their production of shoddy and dangerous goods like the Boeing 737 MAX — workers in their millions will need to fight for control of production, a step towards taking political power and a school for running the economy for ourselves in the interests of all.

The real demand here is for democratic control over business decisions. This will never work because the primary beneficiaries of business are neither workers nor capitalists, but instead consumers. Businesses respond to the marketplace because it is the market that makes consumers happy. It's consumers who demand safe airplanes--not Boeing employees or managers. If Boeing can't deliver then they should go out of business.

“JUSTICE” SYSTEM Fight against police brutality, racist discrimination and the entire capitalist injustice system with its frame-ups, “plea bargains,” onerous bail and outrageous prison sentences, all of which disproportionately hit workers who are Black. For the right to vote for ex-prisoners and all workers behind bars.

So I'm against police brutality, racist discrimination, onerous bail, etc. as much as the next guy. I'm also against high crime. Crime causes poverty, which is the reason some Black communities are poor. Eliminate the crime and everybody gets richer. My neighborhood is mostly Black. Black teenagers play basketball on the street. But there are very few cops around here and nobody is stopped or frisked. That's because there is no crime. My neighbors--whatever their color--are civilized people.

POLITICAL RIGHTS Defend democratic rights — the right to vote, to free speech and assembly and to bear arms, under attack from Democrats and Republicans alike. Stop FBI and other government spying, harassment and disruption.

I know there is a lot of whining and complaining on both sides of the aisle, but I still think that police interference in our democracy is a relatively minor problem.

PRISONER RIGHTS End solitary confinement. End suppression of the Militant, books and newspapers by prison authorities. Abolish the death penalty, an anti-working-class weapon in the hands of the rulers.

I'm sympathetic to this. Prisoners are wards of the state and it is our collective responsibility to take care of them. I think we have not always lived up to the responsibility. I think we should minimize the number of people in prison and in solitary confinement. But some people are just criminals and have to be locked up. I generally oppose the death penalty.

FARMERS — WORKERS ALLIES ON THE LAND To put a halt to farm foreclosures, bankruptcies and skyrocketing rural debt, we demand nationalization of the land. This puts the soil at the service of the farmers who till it, as opposed to control by the banks and landlords. We demand the government guarantee farmers their costs of production, including their living expenses.

Yet another paragraph from 1932. In what parallel universe is The Militant living in? If the government guaranteed costs of production we would end up with huge surpluses of products that consumers don't want to buy. Like everybody else, farmers have to work for the consumer.

Despite the fact that the Kennedy-Jarrett campaign is a professionally run operation (unlike Jeff Mackler's), these demands aren't transitional. They're not even logical. I'm not even clear what the programmatic differences are with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

This blog endorses the reelection of Donald J. Trump for president.

Further Reading:

• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers
• Our President is a Pacifist
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge

Note: Due to health issues, blogging may be light for the next few months.

The Las Vegas Democratic Debate

I don't know if you watched the Dem debate last night, but it was a jolly good show. Unlike the others, nothing boring about it.

I can't believe anybody who watched it will come away thinking that Bloomberg is a good candidate. He got completely eviscerated. Liz Warren, whatever else you may think about her, is very, very smart, and definitely deserves her title as Harvard Law professor. She took Bloomie apart limb from limb, leaving him speechless and flustered. Bernie & Biden got in some good shots as well--Charles Hurt remarks that "it was almost like Mr. Bloomberg joined the stage to give Mr. Biden a hand. I mean, next to Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Biden came off like a brain surgeon."

Bloomie--visibly embarrassed--slunk off the stage at the end with his tail between his legs, He got very little air-time, and apart from calling Bernie a "communist" (true), he scored no punches. If debates count for anything this should end his campaign. I guess there's another one next week--we'll see if he even shows up.

Money will buy you a seat at the table. But after that a successful candidate has to connect with voters in some personal way. TV ads can never do that. The only candidates this round who have that personal connection are Donald and Bernie. Trump routinely draws crowds of thousands at his rallies, and that is the key to his success. The man is an expert storyteller and entertainer. He also has a compelling political message, which (contrary to rumor) is not far-right, but is instead dead center in the American political spectrum.

Bernie can also draw a crowd--I read that his Las Vegas rally scored 10,000. I don't get the attraction, but it's obviously there. None of the others--not Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Warren, and certainly not Bloomberg--can pull an audience.

So I think the election comes down to two competing visions for America, represented by Bernie and Trump. The odds strongly favor Trump given that Bernie is too far Left. But Bernie is a wildcard--he could pull off a victory. Some of his more reluctant supporters are suggesting "we should take him seriously, but not literally." That is, don't believe the hyperbole about Medicare for All, because that will never happen. What will happen is a change in the environment in which the current medical system works (or doesn't). I think that will be much for the worse, but it's not the same thing as a revolution.

Compare this with Trump (about whom Salena Zito coined the famous seriously...literally phrase) and his early promise to deport all illegal aliens. He's made no serious effort to do that. Indeed, I think actual deportations were higher under Obama. I don't think Trump was ever serious about that promise.

But Bernie just might believe his own bullshit. In that case his election will destroy the country.

By the way, I don't dislike Bloomberg. In terms of actual policy he's not that bad (apart from wanting to spend a trillion dollars on a mostly imaginary climate problem). His stop & frisk strategy was an anti-crime measure, not something racist, and arguably it worked. For a staunch supporter of gun control it's hard to imagine him doing anything different.

The Democratic Party is disintegrating before our very eyes. I'm not sure what will take it's place, but something will. Old-fashioned social democracy such as existed from Teddy Roosevelt through Obama is dying out--not just in this country but around the world. I suggest that's because since 1975 global economic growth per capita has slowed down, and in that environment people are less willing to pay taxes to support other people's welfare benefits. It's a much less charitable, zero-sum world that we live in today. Until and unless per capita growth can resume its earlier course, the call for ever more generous government bennies will fall on deaf ears.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• Book Review: Donald J. Trump
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

Note: Due to health issues, blogging may be light for the next several months.

Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

Louis Proyect worries a lot.

There is climate change--a boogeyman that's supposed to destroy civilization within the next 12 years (I guess since the New Year it's now only 11 years). All this because of modest increases in CO2, which despite being only 0.04% of the atmosphere is nevertheless supposed to heat up the world's oceans lickety-split. Recall that the oceans represent 99.9% of global heat capacity--many orders of magnitude more than atmospheric CO2.

Rumors of our imminent demise from climate change are exaggerated way beyond any credible belief.

Then he frets over GMOs, or genetically modified plants that manufacture their own insecticide and thus don't need to be sprayed. While in principle just an improved method for breeding agricultural plants as has been done for millennia, the specific technique has been used since 1983. It saves farmers huge amounts of money in pesticides, along with greatly reducing the quantity of pesticide in the environment from any source. Despite trillions of GMO meals having been served, there is absolutely no evidence of any threat to human or ecological health as a result.

Mr. Proyect's aversion to GMOs is less rational than the fear some people have of measles vaccines. That is, completely irrational.

He worries about fracking. Here he is on more solid ground since the industry clearly has some environmental costs, though they are increasingly under control. But the benefits of fracking are huge, reducing fuel expenses across the entire society. Natural gas just fell below $2/Mbtu. The cost of gas to heat my 1800 sqft house was only $88 this past December, a nearly trivial expense. If you're against poverty and want poor people to be able to heat their homes, then this is really a good thing.

But Mr. Proyect probably agrees with President Obama: that we'd all be better off if all fuels cost three or four times more in the future. What a guy!

Mr. Proyect doesn't like nuclear power, either. He writes 

In his letter urging Bernie Sanders to embrace nuclear power, Phillips assured him that the human costs of Chernobyl were exaggerated. Even though there were likely 4,000 people who would die eventually because of exposure, it was a lot less than Greenpeace and other groups alleged.

The implication is that today's small, completely redesigned, Generation IV, nuclear power plants are just like Chernobyl. Which is like saying a modern Prius is the same as a Model T. With Gen IV, the residual radioactive waste decays in a few hundred years rather than a few billion. Unlike, say, coal ash waste, the volume of generated nuclear waste is very much smaller. It could all be stored in Yucca Mountain with plenty of room to spare. And it emits no CO2 (if that's important to you) or other atmospheric pollutants.

He worries about tourism--especially "mass tourism." He approvingly quotes Richard Smith: 

Take just one: Cruise ships are the fastest growing sector of mass tourism on the planet. But they are by far the most polluting tourist indulgence ever invented: Large ships can burn more than 150 tons of the filthiest diesel bunker fuel per day, spewing out more fumes—and far more toxic fumes—than 5 million cars, polluting entire regions, the whole of southern Europe – and all this to ferry a few thousand boozy passengers about bashing coral reefs. There is just no way this industry can be made sustainable.

This, presumably, is in addition to AOC's effort to ban airplanes--in Mr. Proyect's perfect world nobody will be allowed to travel at all. At least not unless you're exceptionally Woke. Only really Woke, pre-approved, certified people could get a passport. The rest of us will have to make do with three hots and a cot (aka free food and housing).

All for the sake of saving the planet.

Tens of millions (perhaps even hundreds of millions) of people depend on tourism, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood. Of those, some millions earn a living specifically from cruise ships. Mr. Proyect will throw all of these people into abject poverty.

Tourism is one of the most efficient ways of transferring money directly from rich people to poor people. And Mr. Proyect has, as a first order of business, a desire to stop it. What a guy!

Then, of course, he and Mr. Smith have their facts all wrong. Modern cruise ships don't run on oil at all, but instead on liquefied natural gas (cheaper, cleaner, and doesn't spill into the ocean). More, eco-cruises are growing faster than the industry as a whole--e.g., to the Galapagos and Antarctica. These ships, along with their customers, have a strong self-interest in protecting the resource they want tourists to see. If there was ever a lobby to protect the environment, the cruise industry is it.

Finally, Mr. Proyect writes off the people who live along Bangladesh's coast.

Huber certainly feels sorry for some Bangladeshi farmer or fisherman whose life will be destroyed by rising ocean levels but has to question how such struggles could ever have the social power capable of taking on a capitalist class that is responsible for the dispossession and pollution in the first place.  ... For a Yanomami or a Bangladesh farmer or fisherman, the stakes are very high. For a machinist working at Boeing or a Verizon lineman in suburban New Jersey, there are worries about climate change but it doesn’t have the same immediacy as living in a village near the Indian Ocean.

Rich people are able to take care of their environment--that's why America is much cleaner today than it was 50 or 100 years ago--and why the average New Jerseyan doesn't care. Poor people don't have that luxury. Mr. Proyect's solution is to make the rich people poor, which is truly perverse. The best solution is to make the poor people rich.

Perhaps Mr. Proyect has never heard of the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove swamp in the world, located in Bangladesh. Wouldn't part of a realistic solution be to attract more tourists to visit it? People who would buy fish from local fishermen, tours from local guides, handicrafts from local women, and food from local farmers. Plus they'd leave tips. Plus the travel company will have a strong vested interest in preserving the ecosystem.

Nah! That's much too practical. Mr. Proyect is against that. He thinks Bangladeshis should just remain poor forever so that some kooky folks on the Upper East Side can power-trip by banning air travel and cruise ships. What a guy!

I agree with Mr. Proyect that human civilization will come to an end some day--nothing lasts forever. We've been around (as a civilized species) for some 7000 years now, and perhaps we've got a few thousand more to go. I don't know how it ends, but I do know that we're not gonna run out of environment in the next eleven years. Not even in the next millennium. Mr. Proyect needs to get more sleep at night, and stop worrying about silly things.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• The Pro-Poverty Crowd
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

Note: Due to health issues, blogging may be light for the next few months.

Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Healthcare Workers

The ridiculously named grouplet Socialist Resurgence (SR) is publishing its founding documents, among which is a political report entitled U.S. faces political, social, and economic crisis (pdf). Numbering at most 50 members, the new organization is compelled to issue mighty proclamations on the state of modern politics. The resulting document is incoherent.

Of course our comrades are not explicitly demanding steep wage cuts for healthcare workers. They'd definitely deny it if you asked them. Indeed, they write

Healthcare workers are under siege by employers. Hospitals and clinics are cutting wages and benefits while nurses and doctors are forced to see more patients, despite evidence that doing so increases errors with disastrous effects. Experienced nurses and doctors are being fired and replaced by fresh out of school nurses and doctors-they're paid less. Experienced staff not fired are leaving the profession due to ever increasing on the job stress. Suicide rates of nurses and doctors are on the rise.

The solution to this sorry state of affairs is this (emphasis mine).

Health care is a human right. This must include dental, vision care, and humane, non-punitive, and non-stigmatizing approaches to mental health care. No one should have to go bankrupt because of medical costs or decide whether one eats or gets medicine. Get the insurance companies out of the equation. Free quality universal public health care now!

Even our Trotskyist friends are smart enough to know that nothing is "free"--everything has to be paid for somehow. Their conceit is that the disempowered bourgeoisie will foot the bill from all the huge profits they've stashed in some vault somewhere, accumulated over decades from the ruthless exploitation of the working class.

And that will work for a year, or maybe two, or at most ten. But eventually the 1% will be entirely dispossessed and no longer able to pay up. Then the cash has to come from someplace else. "Free" healthcare means that patients can't be charged, so the only other possible sources of money are either taxpayers or employees.

So it is instructive that the political report cites Cuba as a positive example for how healthcare should be funded. The bourgeoisie were eliminated 60 years ago, and any residual wealth they left behind has long since been squandered. So Cuba illustrates what happens when the piggy bank runs dry.

They write:

In Cuba, the healthcare system is publicly owned with several layers. There are community clinics, with doctor-nurse teams who live in the neighborhoods that they serve, local hospitals, and larger medical institutes. All healthcare is free, with some exceptions for some medicines and procedures for higher income people, and quality of life indices are impressive. Cuba enjoys one of the highest life expectancy rates in the hemisphere, with the average life expectancy at 78.05 years old, compared to the U.S. at 78.62 years. In 2005, Cuba had 627 doctors and 94 dentists per 100,000 population. That same year, there were 225 physicians and 54 dentists per 100,000 population in the U.S. All medical and nursing education in Cuba is free. Cuba has innovated in the realm of vaccines and cancer treatment. Unlike the U.S., which sends weapons around the world, Cuba sends doctors and nurses to disaster areas and semi-colonial countries.

One can certainly dispute the virtues of Cuban healthcare. Cubans have always had a long life expectancy since way back when--a trait that's likely more genetic than the result of good healthcare. Regards vaccines, all they've done (to their credit) is manufacture them--unhindered as they are by the liability faced by American firms. I'm unaware of any pathbreaking cancer research coming from Cuba. Medical research today is overwhelmingly done in the United States (which is one reason why drugs are more expensive here).

Those issues aside--the question is Who pays for healthcare for Cubans? The answer is obvious: the employees. According to Fox News, in 2014 Cuban doctors got a 150% pay raise--all the way to $67/month! Nurses also made out like bandits, with their monthly paycheck going from $13 to $25.

A homeless woman in any civilized country earns more than that just by panhandling. Our comrades will argue that Cubans are often compensated in kind rather than in cash, e.g., with "free" housing and a food ration card. Which is just like in the US: the bag lady gets to sleep for free in a shelter and is given a free meal (along with food stamps).

Life is much harder for US doctors, who have to pay their own rent and buy their own food. But they earn on average about $17,000/month, or a bit over 250 times what the Cuban medic makes. The median US salary for registered nurses in the US is about $6,000/month.

Healthcare is a labor-intensive business. While I have not been able to find a precise statistic, if it mirrors the economy as a whole 70% of costs are paid to labor. So obviously, if you want to reduce the cost of healthcare in America to be something close to "free", you will have to dramatically lower the wages of healthcare workers. The comrades never say that, but of course that's exactly what they mean. They think doctors and nurses, and phlebotomists and radiation technicians, and orderlies and laundry workers, should all take a whopping big pay cut--just so we can believe the fiction that healthcare is "free."

So I'll stand by my headline: a 100% accurate summary of Socialist Resurgence's true position. Socialist Resurgence demands steep wage cuts for healthcare workers.

The rest of the political report is not full of facts as much as factoids. The difference is context, and in every case our comrades leave that out. A few examples:

• They mention that despite low unemployment, labor participation has not budged. True, but it's due mostly to the on-going retirement of baby boomers, who are withdrawing from the labor force.
• They predict a new recession is looming. Of course they're right--eventually there will be a recession. The business cycle has not been repealed (except in places like Cuba which are in permanent recession). But it looks increasingly unlikely to happen in 2020.
• They write "the free speech rights of students and professors has come under attack. Critics of Israeli apartheid and advocates for BDS have been attacked as anti-Semitic by pro-Israel politicians and lobbying groups." Accusing somebody of antisemitism is not the same as denying their free speech rights. The campus Left's insistence on shouting down pro-Israel speakers is a much better example.
• "Living standards for U.S. workers are falling." This is manifestly not true.

But here is the biggest howler:

The wealthiest 1% possess 40% of the nation's wealth while the bottom 80% own 7%. Eight people, six from the U.S., own as much wealth as half of humanity. Only the top 20% fully recovered from the Great Recession.

Do eight people buy half the cars in the world? Do eight people eat half of the world's food? Do eight people own half of the world's houses? Do six Americans receive half of all social security payments? Of course not! It is only by the narrowest, cherry-picked definition of "wealth" that our comrades can make such ludicrous claims.

This is one of those documents I've read so that you don't have to. Not recommended.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Socialist Action Goes AWOL

Book Review: Capitalism Alone

Late Capitalism Sucks!

That's a not very accurate summary of Branko Milanovic's short, dense book Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World.

To begin, Mr. Milanovic will disagree with the adjective. There's nothing "late" about capitalism, for it is nowhere near extinction. Indeed, arguably it is just coming into its own. All its competitors have been vanquished. Socialism--whatever its theoretical and occasional popular appeal--simply cannot provide a quality standard of living for most people. The end of capitalism, should it ever come about, will not auger a brighter future, but instead the end of civilization. Think Venezuela.

Mr. Milanovic puts great stock on Gini coefficients--numbers that measure the degree of inequality in a society--with zero representing perfect equality of income and/or wealth, and one hundred (perfect inequality) implying that a single person has all the income/wealth, while everybody else has nothing. South Africa has the world's highest Gini value (63.0). The USA comes in at 41.5. The Nordic countries are at the low end, ranging from 26 to 29 (data from Wikipedia).

Mr. Milanovic includes a chart of global Gini coefficients from 1820 to the present. With slight fluctuations inequality has increased from 55 in 1820 to about 75 just after World War II. Mr. Milanovic attributes this to rapid industrialization in the West, coupled with stagnation in the East. Since the war, however, the global Gini has declined, and quite significantly since 2000, mostly because of dramatically higher incomes in China. As of 2018 it stands at about 65.

The first half of the book fairly bristles with Gini coefficients. I never thought them very important--to me the value of capitalism is rising absolute incomes, and not significantly diminished by income inequality. There is no doubt that absolute incomes for most of the world's people have increased dramatically over the past few decades, so enough said. Who cares if Warren Buffett is rich.

But Mr. Milanovic partially changes my mind. No doubt it is true that absolute incomes go up--and that's the true value of capitalism--that's why we want to keep it. But the risk to capitalism stems from a lingering sense of unfairness. The suckiness derives not from the wealth that it obviously generates, but instead from its unequal distribution.

So the question then becomes how to lower Gini coefficients. The book offers no good suggestions, and puts paid to commonly proposed solutions. For example, social democracy only works when there is sufficient solidarity such that all members of society are willing to contribute to a common pool. That breaks down if the rich, young, or healthy refuse to pay for public insurance, or if one ethnic group resents payments to another. Globalization weakens social democracy because labor and capital are separated--capital comes from country A, labor is performed in country B, while the consumer lives in country C.

Mr. Milanovic cites the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev who distinguished two models for history: Athens vs. Jerusalem. In the Athenian model, history is just repeated variations, or perhaps only random chance. There is no larger progression. The Jerusalem model, on the other hand, sees progress in history--perhaps even a teleological purpose.

Within the Jerusalem framework, Mr. Milanovic describes two possible models of progress. One is the Whiggish view that capitalism will simply get better and better, and we'll all get richer and richer. Francis Fukuyama's excellent little book, The End of History and the Last Man, is among the best examples of this genre. Modern journalists often reflect the view with statements like "no two countries which both have a McDonald's franchise will ever go to war," or, perhaps, the ubiquitous, pre-Trump assumption that China would eventually take its place in the law-abiding, international community.

The Trump phenomenon puts paid to any simplistic Whig view. More importantly, Whiggery was ruined by 1914. That cataclysmic collapse of the capitalist world order should never have happened.

Opposing the Whigs are the Marxists, for whom capitalism is merely a steppingstone on the way to socialism or communism. For them, capitalism is beset with irresolvable crises and contradictions that will eventually lead to its downfall. Marxists have no difficulty explaining 1914.

The problem for them, however, comes in 1989, when the workers' states in Russia and Eastern Europe moved backwards--from some form of socialism to capitalism. The transition was most dramatic in China where Deng Xiao Ping led a dramatic counter-revolution. Marxism can't explain that, and it is a problem that my Trotskyist friends struggle with to this very day.

I'm not sure if Mr. Milanovic gives a satisfying account for 1914, but he's got 1989 down pat. He agrees that various communist parties led successful revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, etc. These accomplished two important things: they abolished feudalism, and they threw out the colonial powers. But after that the Communists were like the dog that caught the car: they had no idea what to do with their success. But they'd cleared the way for the development of true capitalism in their countries--and that is what happened in every case.

So Mr. Milanovic puts the Bolshevik revolutions not as a step toward a post-capitalist world, but rather as laying the groundwork for a thriving, capitalist economy. The most successful revolution--which tore up feudalism root and branch--was in China, and is today the most successful capitalist country in the developing world. Compare, e.g., to India, where feudalism was only partially removed, and where capitalism remains stunted.

Mr. Milanovic offers another dichotomy--that between liberal, democratic capitalism and political capitalism. In the former, while the state remains a servant of the bourgeoisie, it retains an independent existence. The state serves as the guarantor of fairness, and hence ensures the survival of the capitalism itself. Liberal democratic societies have a rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, and democratic institutions--along with a fixation on Gini coefficients. Governance is messy, inefficient, and occasionally completely dysfunctional, but the theory goes that long-term, liberal democratic capitalism is the best possible outcome.

In political capitalism, on the other hand, capitalism survives only at the sufferance of the state or the Party. The social contract is that the Party will ensure an ever improving standard of living as long as all political power remains with the Party. China is the archetype for this system, but other examples are Russia, Vietnam, and Singapore. Political capitalism sounds to me a whole lot like fascism.

Political capitalism is vastly more efficient than its liberal neighbors, but it is much more brittle. It's not clear if China can survive a serious recession. Because the very goal is to serve the Party, there is no rule of law, corruption is endemic, and human rights are honored only in the breach. (Singapore looks to be an exception.)

Indeed, corruption is feature rather than a bug--it's how the Party bureaucrats cash in on the wealth created by the bourgeoisie. But they can't engage in too much conspicuous consumption at home--that's why much of their wealth has to be stashed abroad. Hence the houses in Vancouver and New York, the yachts in Miami and Brisbane, and the children attending Harvard and Stanford. Seen in this light, Hong Kong is more important to the Chinese Communist Party than they let on--it is the window by which they can launder their money and get it out of the country. The US threat to withdraw Hong Kong's special financial status is a direct threat to the Party.

There are a lot of ideas in this book--I've barely scratched the surface. I've read parts of it twice and yet am still missing bits. I need to read the whole thing again. As said, it's a very dense book, but it definitely rewards the effort.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Fall of Rome
• China and the United States
• Book Review: The Complacent Class

NOTE: Because of some health issues, blogging is likely going to be on the light side for the next few months.

Returning to Industry?

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)) is launching a drive to sell a "new" book entitled Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party. It's mostly reprint of an older book first published in 1981 under the title The Changing Face of US Politics, which I reviewed here.

Along with three older pieces from The Militant, the only new content is an introduction by Jack Barnes, which you can read in The Militant here. Since I've read and reviewed the original book (albeit six years ago), this post is only about the new introduction.

The opening paragraphs include this:

The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party is about the working-class program, composition, and course of conduct of the only kind of party worthy of the name “revolutionary” in the imperialist epoch.  ...

This book is about building such a party in the United States and in other capitalist countries around the world. It is about the course the Socialist Workers Party and its predecessors have followed for one hundred years and counting.

The comrades have set a goal to sell over 1000 copies of this book, mostly by going door to door in working class neighborhoods. This seems truly bizarre to me. Perhaps the book is a useful read for comrades and ex-comrades, but it is certainly not a worthy propaganda tool. (Propaganda is the Trotskyist term of art for advertising.) A person loosely attracted to socialism is not even going to find the book readable, much less enlightening. It's all about an esoteric, internal squabble within the Party.

It looks like they are not trying to recruit the masses. They want to find those few individuals who actually read the book and are moved by it. There won't be many (likely none), but those people will join the SWP.

The book is horribly out of date. To begin, the proletariat doesn't even exist anymore--certainly not as Marx and Lenin imagined it. For them, "workers" were an amorphous blob of unskilled labor who had nothing to sell besides their time and muscle power. Today that hardly applies: muscle power is nearly irrelevant, and unskilled labor has a small and ever-shrinking purchase in the market place. Today's employees have skills, which means they have invested in human capital, and accordingly they have something big to lose in a revolution.

The proletariat doesn't even look the same as it did in 1981, as the pictures accompanying Mr. Barnes' introduction reveal. An example is this:

Above, miners hold national protest in Washington, D.C., March 1981, a few weeks before 160,000 began 10-week strike, turning back concession contract demanded by mine bosses.
(Picture & Caption credit: The Militant)

As of 2016 coal mining only employed 50,000 people, and with the advent of fracking that number is surely substantially smaller today. A national strike of coal miners is inconceivable today--much of the industry would just shut down for good.

It's the same story for other industrial unions: UAW, USWA, Teamsters, etc. Manufacturing only accounts for about 12% of US employment. That share is shrinking rapidly because of automation. Because of globalization, supply chains extend around the world. The ability of any American union to shut down production is negligible.

The recent GM strike is an example. The UAW was out for four weeks, and eventually settled for a very mediocre contract. Supposedly it hurt GM, but there was never any shortage of cars in American showrooms. Consumers didn't feel the strike at all. The only thing that might have happened is GM, along with its employees, lost market share to their competitors.

Unlike the days of Marx & Lenin, or even the 1980s, the industrial unions are a shadow of their former selves. The SWP acknowledges that: today they work at Walmart and for Uber (insofar as they're not retired).

Mr. Barnes will accuse me of denying the importance of the class struggle.

Denial of the class struggle is nothing new. There are more than enough grandparents to current “theories” about “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” and so on noisily propagated by young professionals and other upper middle class layers today. In 1940 James P. Cannon polemicized against petty bourgeois currents on the eve of World War II who “rail at our stick-in-the-mud attitude toward the fundamental concepts of Marxism — the class theory of the state, the class criterion in the appraisal of all political questions, the conception of politics, including war, as the expression of class interests, and so forth and so on.

There is much to credit in this paragraph. The Party has firmly rejected "petty bourgeois" campus movements. They truly defend the "deplorables," and as much as they disagree with Trump, they argue rightly that the people who voted for him deserve to have their choice respected. They see impeachment for the sham that it is (only a slight exaggeration to call it a CIA plot). They've sided with Gibson's Bakery against the spoiled brats who attend Oberlin College, along with the kooky faculty who really should know better.

As important, they are sane on the issue of climate change. The rest of the "petty bourgeois" left has gone all in on catastrophism. The Militant, while acknowledging there might be a problem (which even I acknowledge), nevertheless rejects the total and immediate destruction of all civilization as a cure. A ludicrously extreme version of this can be found on the new Socialist Resurgence website. When so-called Marxists argue seriously for a return to subsistence farming and mass poverty, then you know something has gone horribly wrong. The Militant has not fallen into this trap.

But--even if you don't like the word intersectionality--the world really has gotten a lot more complicated. If nothing else, the global working class is much richer than they were 40 or 200 years ago. Rich people are not inclined to throw it all away on the unlikely chance Mr. Barnes is right about world history. Rich people can invest themselves in other ways besides their jobs: family, hobbies, church, sports, etc. They don't define themselves primarily as workers. As Paul Le Blanc puts it, organizing the working class today is very much like herding cats. Most workers just won't be interested in a class-conscious message.

Which brings us back to the propaganda campaign. Mr. Barnes writes (emphasis mine):

SWP members, supporters, and young socialists support picket lines, knock on doors, and stand on porches to talk with working people in cities, towns, and farm country, as we carry out such activity on the job and in the unions.

Standing on porches works for bourgeois politicians. All they want from you is that you go vote in November. It's an easy ask that can convincingly be made from the front porch.

But that's not what the SWP wants. They want to change your life. They ask that you stop whatever you're doing and become a revolutionary socialist worker-Bolshevik. Ain't gonna happen just by standing on somebody's porch. For that kind of ask you need to really get to know somebody: babysit their kids, marry their daughter, root for the same football team, etc.

And this is where the Party made a huge mistake. By forcing comrades to move around every couple of years, they actively prevented them from making those strong connections. And this is why the original Turn to Industry never worked, and why selling a few books that nobody is gonna read won't work either.

Further Reading:

• The New "Socialist Resurgence" Grouplet
• George Novack: Then and Now
• Trotskyism & New Media

Comrade Keith L. Writes About China

Comrade Keith L., then part of Socialist Action (SA), contributed a monograph entitled China: A New Imperial Power (pdf) to the 2016 pre-convention discussion bulletin. It is now among the founding documents of the new Socialist Resurgence group.

It's 83 pages long! And I read all of it, not because I had to, but because it really is fascinating. It is chock full of facts and statistics about the Chinese economy, along with interesting figures and maps. Comrade Keith is a good writer, and--at least if you like statistics--it's an enjoyable read. It is exhaustively researched, and while I can't vouch for total accuracy, what data I did double-check survived the experience. Comrade Keith definitely knows his China!

Were he an academic, this is a monograph that could earn him tenure. It's a pity that he writes for such a small, insignificant audience. (Like I should talk--what with my obsession over small, Trotskyist grouplets!)

While the piece can and should be profitably read just to learn about China, Comrade Keith has a larger agenda. He wants to demonstrate to his comrades that China is an "imperialist" power. For me this raises two problems. First, I don't think the word "imperialism" actually means anything. And second, if it does mean what you might think it means, then it's obvious that China is "imperialist," and no 83 page argument is necessary.

To define imperialism, Keith goes back to the original source, namely Lenin's 1916 work, Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It's a five-point test: 1) monopolies play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the creation of "finance capital" and a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of of capital, in addition to the export of commodities; 4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations; and 5) the territorial division of the world into capitalist spheres of influence.

By this definition not even the United States is imperialist, failing to one degree or another on all five counts, most notably on the formation of monopolies. There is no major industry in the US that is dominated by a monopolist.

Consider, for example, Amazon, which is certainly a big company (on some days the world's biggest company by market cap). But it isn't a monopoly in any of its businesses. The retail trade is so competitive that Amazon can barely break even--basically no profit at all. Its cloud computing service, AWS, is profitable, but has to compete aggressively against Microsoft, IBM, Google, and recently, Apple. Amazon Prime is in entertainment, competing against Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney, and now Apple wants to enter that market, too. Whatever else Amazon is, it's not a monopoly.

Comrade Keith conflates "monopoly" with "big." He writes,

One useful measurement for determining the presence of monopoly companies is the Fortune 500 Global list, which lists the 500 largest companies in the world by revenue. How then, do China and other leading imperial powers compare on this metric?

After which he presents data in Figure 3 (p. 19) showing that China had 109 companies in the global Fortune 500 in 2017. Which only proves that China has big companies (like Amazon), not that they're monopolies. "Big" and "monopoly" are not the same thing. (China may have monopolies. I don't know, and Keith never makes the case.)

Similarly, the US has no "financial oligarchy." I assume that means a group of people who could, for example, set interest rates above the market rate. But it's obvious that no US financial institution can set interest rates--probably not even the Federal Reserve. The fluidity of the system is surely one reason why interest rates remain near all time lows (much to the chagrin of any incipient "oligarchy").

If not even the US is "imperialist," then why does Comrade Keith spend 83 pages trying to convince us that "imperialist" is something more than an epithet? The reason lies deep in the DNA of Marxism--Trotskyists need to explain why successful revolutions in the USSR, China, and elsewhere backslid to restore capitalist social relations. And further, this happened gradually without any violent counter-revolution. Now--only 28 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union--Socialist Action and Socialist Resurgence have finally come to terms with this course of events that wasn't supposed to happen.

Per Lenin, an "imperialist" country has to export capital, and China has been doing that at scale. China has accumulated, as of 2016, nearly $1.4 trillion in foreign direct investment, i.e., direct investment by China into businesses in other countries, ranking the country fifth in the world. (See Figure 8 on p. 25.)

China has been investing heavily in African ports, railroads and mining ventures, which makes sense since China is a natural-resource-poor country. In return for importing raw materials, China exported high-end manufactured products. Accordingly, China had a $38 billion trade surplus with Sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 (Figure 12 on p. 38).

They don't treat their African workers well. Comrade Keith quotes one of his sources (p. 32) at length, including this excerpt.

Chinese employers tend to be amongst the lowest paying in Africa when compared with other companies in the same sector. In Zambia, for example, the Chinese copper mine paid its workers 30% less than other copper mines in the country. In general, Chinese companies do not grant African workers any meaningful benefits and in some instances ignore even those that are prescribed by law. Wages above the national average were only found at those Chinese companies with a strong trade union presence. Chinese staff members enjoy significantly higher wages and more benefits than their African counterparts.

So here is my question--and I don't know the answer. What fraction of Chinese loans to a country like Zambia are denominated in RMB (the Chinese currency)? Obviously a lot of it is: Chinese employees on African work sites are likely paid in RMB, as are the costs of materials imported from China. The cost of consumer products sent to Africa are also probably denominated in RMB. On the other hand, salaries, rents and bribes paid to African employees, landlords and politicians must be paid in a hard currency. Which is surely one reason why China is so chintzy on the wages and working conditions.

The point is that RMB debt is funny-money. There is no transparency: China can simply write off RMB debts, or print money to pay for them, or just shoot people who complain about not getting paid back. As a mercantilist economy they don't care about making a profit. They only care about earning hard currency (USD) from the export of manufactured products, net of hard currency expenses spent in Africa acquiring the raw materials. Spending funny-money for those resources is not a problem (though there is a cost in Chinese living standards).

So Tanzania and Zambia, etc., may not be getting such a raw deal. Their actual dollar debt is probably much smaller than what the headline number suggests. The funny-money default will only count against them with respect to China--the rest of the world will ignore it and their credit rating will be unaffected.

Comrade Keith devotes considerable attention to the size and state of the Chinese military, detailing technical advances in the land, air and sea forces. China's annual defense spending is approximately one fourth that of the US--still a hefty sum. The country built its first foreign military base in Djibouti, along with a chain of ports (in Burma, Pakistan and Tanzania, among others) that could easily become military bases. Collectively these are part of the One Belt, One Road system.

Keith suggests that military force could be used to enforce debt repayment from countries like Zambia. This is not likely--not even the US would try to use military force just to enforce debts. The problem with roads, power plants, and mining infrastructure is they can't be repossessed. If Zambia can't repay, then China is plum out of luck. Unlike the US, they have no control over the international banking system.

I think Keith exaggerates China's current military strength. Yes--they are a force to be reckoned with in the South China Sea. But they do not have a blue water navy, and are nowhere close to acquiring one. Their geography--a continental country separated from the larger ocean by island archipelagos, mitigates against it. In the Indian Ocean they are no match for the Indian navy, and they have no power necessary to keep the Straits of Hormuz open should the US decide not to do that for them. I base my opinion on Peter Zeihan's books.

As mentioned, Comrade Keith describes at great length the miserable way that Chinese companies treat their African workforce. I have no cause to disbelieve him--and this alone is reason to read his article. China's foul behavior is attributed to "imperialism" (my emphasis).

The analysis of Tanzania, Namibia, and Ethiopia, as well as several integrated pieces of broader, continental-level analysis, attempt to show the broad trends, categories of interest, and serve as representative examples of Chinese imperialism in Africa. Broadly, it might be said that these primary interests fall into natural resource extraction, exporting of manufactured goods, capital export through infrastructure construction, offshoring of labor-intensive manufacturing, and utilizing Africa’s strategic position both in facilitating trade to and from Europe and in controlling the Indian Ocean. (p. 43)

I think the word "imperialism" adds nothing to this paragraph. The problem isn't "Chinese imperialism," but instead it's just China. China is a big country, humiliated in the 19th Century, that views itself as the Middle Kingdom, and as the world's leading and most important society. It's a very inward-looking, xenophobic culture, and no wonder they treat Africans with complete disrespect, if not contempt.

So the first couple of pages of Comrade Keith's opus are all about "imperialism." But after that you can just ignore the word. Then it's a rollicking good read, You will learn a whole lot about China. Highly recommended!

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade, and China
• China & the United States
• Sam King Defends Lenin's Imperialism