Althusser in America

I'm proud of the zoo that Trotsky's Children has accumulated over the years. Of course there are the Trotskyists of various denominations that play the lead role on this blog. But many other grouplets and individuals make cameo appearances. I'm pleased to have dubbed Jeff Mackler (who owns Socialist Action) as a Brezhnevist. Solidarity might best be described as eco-feminist, a term that also fits the Freedom Socialist Party. Then there is the last gasp of the DeLeon movement, represented by the now defunct Socialist Labor Party. Don't forget the late Louis Proyect, a longstanding staple of this blog who was a free thinker. For bizarre species, let's include the Bob Avakian Fan Club--they're self-proclaimed Stalinists.

But surely the rarest bird of all--the very capstone of my collection--is a genuine Althusserist (or is that Althusserite? I'm not sure.), named after the French, Marxist philosopher of modest renown, Louis Pierre Althusser (1918-1990). While I have heard of Mr. Althusser, I confess that I have neither read anything by him nor about him, so an informed criticism of Althusserian dogma will not be found here.

Anyway, America's resident Althusser aficionado is a fellow by the name of Warren Montag. I think the German form of address describes him best: Herr Doktor Professor Montag--anything less is an injustice. For this guy's nose is so far up in the air that he can no longer smell the roses. The good Herr Doktor is the Louis M. Brown Family Professor in Literature in English at Occidental College, and he contributes to an article that during the past week headlined the Left Voice website, entitled ‘A United Labor Movement Can Stop the Far Right’: An Interview with Warren Montag.

Left Voice, as readers may recall, is a quality blog run by a claque of NYC college professors and their groupies. It makes sense that they'd choose the good Professor to inform us about the labor movement and the "far right"--despite the fact that he knows next to nothing about either topic. A more on-the-nose self parody of the petty bourgeois Left is hard to imagine.

For what it's worth, Occidental College is one of those fancy-pants places in L.A. catering to the spoiled youth of the upper middle class--and ripping them off for a pretty penny. The annual sticker price tuition & fees exceeds $60K. For that money they get to subsidize Professor Montag's continuing efforts to elucidate Althusserian thought and practice.

Professor Montag states:

Even if Trump 2020 was a lost cause, there was a clear pathway to the institutionalization of the rule of the Far Right. The GOP’s alliance with the organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers had awakened its primal instincts and showed the party what tens of millions shared with it: racism, misogyny, Christian nationalism, imperialism, the abandonment of the subaltern classes to the gospel of personal responsibility and the sanctity of private property.

There's so much to unpack in this paragraph. First he claims that the GOP is being taken over by the "far right," in which he includes groups such as the Proud Boys. Wikipedia notes that "[t]he total number of Proud Boys members is unknown. Reports estimate membership between several hundred up to 6,000." Let's flatter Professor Montag and accept the high estimate. Recall that 77 million people voted for Trump in 2020--that means the Proud Boys are 0.0078% of all people who voted Republican. This hardly seems like a takeover to me.

Then Professor Montag refers to the Proud Boys as "far right." I'd go further and call them fascist. My shorthand definition of fascism is people who believe we're poor because the foreigners stole all the money. The goal of a fascist group is to restore their chosen race/ethnicity to pride of place. For the Proud Boys, the foreigners are Jews, Black people, and immigrants.

Of course, by my definition BLM is also fascist. The only difference between BLM and Proud Boys is who they class as foreigners. For BLM it's Jews, White people, and immigrants. Reverse the colors and these two groups have an identical ideology. Some people will classify BLM as "far left." I can go along with that, too. But whatever term you apply to BLM, to be consistent you must use the same term for Proud Boys. You can't say one is far right while the other is far left. Pick one.

In reality, the Proud Boys and BLM both live on the dark side of the moon where Left and Right come together. Neither of them believes in civil rights, the rule of law, free markets, constitutional governance--or any of the other principles of a liberal society upon which both Democrats and Republicans largely agree.

Then--to those 77 million Trump voters--Professor Montag attributes a list of sins. It appears that Herr Doktor Montag has never in his entire life met or talked to even one of those voters. Almost all Trump voters will deny being racist. Trump himself denies being a racist, and there is little to suggest that he's wrong. (Trump has never opposed affirmative action; he does not advocate segregation; and unlike BLM, he adamantly defended the right of Black people to use the 911 emergency system.) Professor Montag claims to know what's in the heart of the average Trump voter better than they know themselves--despite never having ever talked to one. I can't take Professor Montag's opinion on this seriously.

Trump voters are no more misogynist than they are racist.

"Christian nationalism" is a pejorative term invented by non-Christians to justify their irrational bias against Christians. Christianity is a lifestyle choice that imposes no cost on anybody who is not a Christian. There is no reason to denigrate it.

"Imperialism" is a completely meaningless term anyway, but how an individual person can commit the sin of "imperialism" is beyond me.

Does Professor Montag really believe that personal responsibility is irrelevant? Surely it is up to the individual to take care of one's health, to tend to one's children, and to maximize one's income as much as possible. Conversely, nobody--certainly not Trump supporters--believes that everything results from individual effort.

Professor Montag paints with a very broad brush. According to Vox, 63% of the white working class (defined as non-college educated whites) voted for Trump. As did 37% of Latino voters and 10% of Black voters. Does our Herr Doktor Professor friend really think all these people are racist, misogynist scoundrels? If so, how does he ever expect there to be a working-class led revolution?

In reality, it's Professor Montag who is ripping off 19 year-olds for the purpose of feeding his Althusser ego-trip. The student loan crisis is at least partly his fault. I hope he'll be contributing his share toward paying off those debts.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler Channels Michael Roberts
• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Good Trump, Bad Trump

A Tale of Two Conferences

The first was A Conference to Support Wealth and Prosperity. The second was A Conference to Support Poverty and Destitution.

Of course I'm being facetious. Those weren't the real names. Journalist Rick Sterling, in an article posted at Socialist Action, tells the truth in his lede paragraph,

Last week (June 8-10) there were two summits in Los Angeles, California:  the Summit of the Americas hosted by the US State Department and the Peoples Summit hosted by US and international activist organizations. The two summits were held in the same city at the same time but could not be otherwise more different.

The Summit of the Americas is the one I'd like to call A Conference to Support Wealth and Prosperity. Unfortunately the name doesn't really fit. Mr. Sterling describes it this way.

Begun in 1994, in the heyday of US international dominance, the Summit of the Americas is officially a function of the Organization of American States. It is meant to coordinate and consolidate US economic, political and cultural interests.

Of course there is nothing wrong with this. "US international dominance" is a given, what with the USA having a bigger population than any other country in the hemisphere, with by far the biggest military in the world, along with a GDP that that is 4x bigger than all Latin American & Caribbean countries combined.  Countries that can trade with the United States will definitely be richer than countries that can't. 

Compare, e.g., the Dominican Republic and Bolivia. Bolivian per capita GDP is $7,900, while Dominican per capita GDP is $17,000. The difference is that the DR has extensive trade with the US, while only 6% of Bolivian exports go to the US. The US is a huge market in which to sell, and a similarly huge agricultural and industrial powerhouse from which to buy. Countries that can trade with the USA have more money, and more products to buy with that money.

Nevertheless, two possible issues rendered the conference a failure. Mr. Sterling reports on one of them.

Despite threats to boycott the gathering by many Latin American and Caribbean presidents, the US chose to exclude Cuban, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This resulted in seven country presidents choosing not to attend: Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, St Vincent, Antigua, Guatemala, El Salvador.  Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said simply, “There cannot be a summit of the Americas if all the countries of the American continent do not participate. Or there can be, but …. it is just a continuation of the old policy of interventionism or disrespect of nations and their peoples.”

Of these, Antigua and St. Vincent are too small to matter, and, as mentioned, Bolivia has no trade with the US anyway. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are "shit-hole" countries--to use Mr. Trump's impolitic but apt phrase--whose citizens are risking life and limb for the chance of a better life in the USA. For that matter, Mr. Trump's moniker applies equally well to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, from all of which large numbers of people are fleeing across the Rio Grande. Collectively, these new immigrants are the "Future Republicans of America." They know what it's like to live in a "shit-hole" country, and they don't want their newfound home to turn into one.

So only Mexico's absence is worthy of note. Mexico is our second largest trading partner, trailing only Canada. Perhaps AMLO is sincere in his demand that all countries participate--including even Antigua and St. Vincent! On the other hand, perhaps he realized the whole affair was a gigantic waste of time and not worth his attention. Besides which he doesn't have much respect for Mr. Biden.

Mr. Sterling links to two articles that make this case. (In this he distinguishes himself from Socialist Action's editor, Jeff Mackler, who rarely cites external references and usually just makes stuff up.) One of them, in The Atlantic by William Neumann, states what I think is the true reason for AMLO's absence.

None of that [preparation--ed] seemed to occur with this year’s meeting, which close observers said was marked by poor planning and a lack of preparation. Despite daunting challenges, such as countering the growing influence of China and Russia and addressing deep poverty that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, the proposals that would normally have been hashed out in detail months ahead of time were, in many cases, slapped together late in the process and not shared in advance with other nations. The whole enterprise evoked the image of a privileged but lazy student who figures he can get an A on the test even if he doesn’t study or do his homework. On the final day, a South American diplomat summed up the meeting in a word: “improvised.”

In other words, Mr. Biden's characteristic incompetence was on full display. On top of which Kamala Harris gave a speech. No wonder Mr. Lopez Obrador didn't bother showing up.

By contrast, the second conference, the Peoples (sic) Summit, fits my description to a tee. It really was A Conference to Support Poverty and Destitution.

Mr. Sterling describes the proceedings this way.

A wide array of domestic and international issues were addressed at the Peoples Summit.  They included Health as a Human Right, Gender Violence, Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice, Cultural Resistance, Youth Organizing Strategies, Justice for TPS and Undocumented Community, Lessons from Below and Organizing Unhoused Communities.  Plus many more.

What's notable is the complete absence of any discussion about how to earn a living! They're all ways in which the money is supposed to get spent. Even assuming all the items on Mr. Sterling's list were beneficial, they all require money to become reality.

Take Honduras as an example. In 2019 the country had exports totaling $7.16 billion, and imports totaling $11.5 billion. This is augmented by remittances representing about a fifth of GDP, or approximately $10 billion. What's amazing is how tiny these numbers are! By comparison, Walmart's revenue in 2019 was $514 billion--or roughly 30x Honduras' foreign exchange earnings.

Obviously, on such a minuscule budget none of the items on Mr. Sterling's wishlist can come to fruition. "Health as a Human Right" is obviously impossible without the cash to pay for it. "Organizing Unhoused Communities" makes no sense with no money. Etc.

Even in an American context Mr. Sterling's remarks make no sense. Walmart generally fixes its operating margin at 3%, which means that 97% of total revenue is used to pay expenses. The biggest expense is cost of sales (mostly paid to product suppliers), which is roughly 75% of revenue. Most of the remainder is paid out as wages to employees--let's estimate the wage bill at about $80 billion spread amongst 2.3 million employees.

The average wage is thus about $35,000 per annum. That has to include benefits. Any additional amount that Walmart pays in taxes will reduce the amount that Walmart can pay in wages. Mr. Sterling wants to tax Walmart--i.e., Walmart employees--so that the "unhoused" (who contribute nothing to the economy) can get "free" housing. This is deeply unfair and makes people poorer.

A Honduran working at Walmart sends money home to support her family--that's a remittance. Mr. Sterling proposes to take away her money and give it to the "unhoused."

"Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice" is just a plea for more subsistence farming. After all, only a peasant on two acres of land is "sovereign," and "climate justice" demands that he work without fertilizers, seeds, and mechanization. I don't think too many peasants will sign up for that lifestyle--and it's a little rich coming from an American journalist who gets all the food he wants from the local grocery store.

I don't doubt Mr. Sterling's intentions--of course he wants a better world. But he has no clue how to get there.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler Channels Michael Roberts
• Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death
• Book Review: Walmart

Wittenberg, 2022

 

Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes addresses conference.
Source: MILITANT/HILDA CUZCO

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) held its annual shindig this year at Wittenberg University, June 9 - 11. The Militant article reporting on the event is entitled Taking the Socialist Workers Party’s program to the toilers. As usual, the title doesn't really say much about the actual content.

It's a very strange article, from which I infer big changes are afoot within the SWP.

I'll begin with a nitpick. They write 

[Jack Barnes] was speaking to some 350 people at the SWP-sponsored International Active Workers Conference in Springfield, Ohio, June 11.

This year’s annual gathering, the largest since 2009, drew attendance from 10 countries... 

I went back and checked, going back as far as 2016. The 2018 Active Workers Conference hosted "nearly 400 participants." So somebody is fudging the numbers--not a good idea when they know I'm gonna call them out on that.

Back to the weird stuff: First, the article is very long. Few Militant articles are longer than a double-page spread, but this one includes an additional full page.

Second, they're calling a convention for December, 2022. Why not wrap up the convention during their stay at Wittenberg? I speculate that the pre-convention discussion will be more intense than usual and they want to give it some time. The political content of the current article is confusing, to say the least. It will take a convention to clear it all up--if indeed they intend to do that.

Finally, the authorship is different. The Militant reports from Active Workers Conferences in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021 were all authored by Terry Evans and John Studer. (There was no conference in 2020, and 2016's report was authored by Naomi Craine.) This article is penned by Terry Evans and Steve Clark.

Mr. Clark is third in command at the SWP, following only Jack Barnes and his main squeeze, Mary-Alice Waters (though Wikipedia claims he's in a gay relationship). Mr. Clark writes for The Militant only when something serious is happening (e.g., here*). Meanwhile, commenter John B seems to suggest that "Terry Evans" (a pseudonym) is the Great Successor, i.e., next in line to succeed Mr. Barnes as National Secretary.

In other words, the Big Guns are writing this post, shoving the work-a-day reporter John Studer aside. This implies there is something more important than usual going on.

For more tea leaves we need to consider the article itself. I'll take on two topics. In both cases they start out with provocative rhetoric, only to retreat to Trotskyist boilerplate.

The first is Ukraine. They write,

The [National Committee] statement gives unconditional support to the fight for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty and demands an immediate end to Moscow’s military operations and occupation.

It demands a halt to all U.S. economic, banking, and trade sanctions against Russia, whose devastation falls overwhelmingly on working people in Russia, undercutting solidarity between workers and soldiers in the two countries. The statement also demands Washington withdraw all  its nuclear weapons and armed forces from Europe.

This is the standard Trotskyist position, held by almost everybody on my beat. They oppose "US imperialism" even if it helps a cause they support, i.e., an independent Ukraine. Like the others, they object to sanctions against Russia and US arms shipments to Ukraine. But...

During a lively question and answer session after Studer’s report, one participant asked whether an SWP candidate elected to Congress would support the U.S. government sending arms to Ukrainians.

“We have no quarrel with how Ukrainians get arms to defend themselves from Moscow’s assaults,” Studer said. “But the longstanding proletarian internationalist position of the communist movement is and remains, “Not one dime, not one soldier for the U.S. rulers and their war machine! No political confidence in the bosses’ government!”

The U.S. rulers do nothing other than advance their own capitalist interests in everything they do. If they extend military aid, it comes with unprincipled strings attached. ...

With the phrase "we have no quarrel...", Clark & Evans point out the obvious contradiction in their position, namely Ukraine's defense depends crucially on weapons from "imperialist" countries. So, unlike their competition, they are aware that what they say makes no sense. More, "lively Q&A" is not something I associate with SWP conclaves--which suggests that the position is under contentious debate. I'm led to expect something beyond boilerplate after the December convention.

The second red flag is the abortion ruling (which was only a leaked draft when Clark & Evans' article was written). Here is the shocker:

In 1973 the Militant  hailed as a victory the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision overturning laws in 46 states that restricted a woman’s access to abortion during the first three months of pregnancy.

“Fifty years of experience in the class struggle have taught us that judgment was inaccurate,” said SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters in opening her conference report. “It soon became clear that the court edict set back the fight to repeal all laws criminalizing or restricting abortion.”

In other words, their support for Roe v Wade was a mistake. Who knew? But again, "lively discussion" ensued, yielding the following exchange:

In the question and answer session later that day, one participant disagreed with Waters’ assertion that an overturn of Roe v. Wade would be positive. She asked Waters what she meant when she said in her report that “the SWP is the party of life, not death.”

“Getting Roe out of the way will create an opportunity for working people to have the discussion we need,” Waters replied. “The job of the courts is not to impose legislation,” as it did in this case, “but to uphold rights and protections that have been wrested from the ruling class in struggles going back to the Bill of Rights.”

So it certainly sounds like they're gonna come out against abortion. But nope, they retreat back to Trotskyist boilerplate, as the next sentence in the quoted paragraph proves.

The 1973 ruling was an obstacle to fighting for access to safe and secure abortions, which is just one part of the broader working-class fight for both women and men today, she said.

I predict that the December convention will either reaffirm the Trotskyist boilerplate positions, or conversely double down on support for American policy in Ukraine and also for a consistent pro-life position.

I also suggest that the December convention may bring with it a change in leadership. Mr. Barnes is too old to be running a Party. Will the new leader be Steve Clark, Terry Evans, or somebody else?

A few other random comments:

The analysis of global politics (beginning with the sentence "But the so-called American Century abruptly came to an end before it had barely begun, ...") is not true. For a better and much clearer analysis, please read Peter Zeihan's latest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. 

Pathfinder Press' latest book is Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. It's a collection of essays by Frederick Engels, George Novack, Karl Marx and Mary-Alice Waters. Oddly, it's favorably reviewed (pdf) by Peter Wood, professor emeritus of anthropology (Boston University) and current president of the right-leaning think tank, the National Association of Scholars.

I'm skeptical the book is of much value. Any work of anthropology that doesn't include human genetic evolution is now hopelessly dated. Obviously Marx, Engels and Novack knew nothing about the subject, and I doubt Ms. Waters is any wiser. Mr. Wood should certainly know better--and maybe he does, but is too polite to say so.

 

* The link is to my article, which contains links to The Militant. These now yield a "page not found" error. For some reason the entire discussion has been deleted by the paper.

Further Reading:

• Wittenberg, 2021
• Down the Cuba Rabbit-Hole With Mary-Alice Waters
• Book Review: Human Diversity

Jeff Mackler Channels Michael Roberts

I intended to ignore Jeff Mackler, the octogenarian leader of a mini-grouplet called Socialist Action (SA). Mr. Mackler, readers of this blog may recall, ran the most incompetent campaign for president ever in history. Indeed, at least partly due to that ridiculous effort, SA is now reduced to a few dozen members.

SA is a "fraternal party" to the Fourth International (FI), an organization of Trotskyist parties around the world. Depending on how you define "membership," FI represents a few hundred to a few thousand people globally. In other words, it's of negligible political consequence. SA's mission is to set this organization on the true Trotskyist straight and narrow--that is, to return it to the concept of Leninist party building, which presumably has been abandoned by their international comrades.

It's a lost cause and a silly cause, and we may ignore it. Nevertheless, to that end three documents have been submitted to the FI, the most recent one entitled Debate in the Fourth International Part III: Capitalism’s World Economic, Political and Social Crises and the Coming Fightback. While authorship is not credited, the "politics in the report below were adopted by the National Committee of Socialist Action/USA..." However, it's obvious that Mr. Mackler is the actual author--he's a good writer and there is nobody else in that organization capable of the assignment--so I'll explicitly credit him here.

Because Mr. Mackler is a good writer, and because the topic is mostly economics, I break my vow to ignore him and will pay the man some attention.

The lede paragraph:

Today, world capitalism’s neo-liberal globalization is best characterized as a new form of organization where global value chains have become the dominant form of production, employing workers for one out of every five job on the planet. From low to high tech commodities, basic consumer goods to heavy capital equipment, food to services, goods for the world market are now produced across many countries, integrated through global value chains.

And this is true! Globalization has enriched people around the world. Bigger markets (and there is no bigger market than the globe) leads to more labor specialization (between countries and individuals), and as Adam Smith pointed out long ago, specialization is what increases productivity and makes people richer. There is a huge literature that makes this case, but I'll just cite three of my own posts, here, here and here.

But Mr. Mackler thinks globalization is evil, writing

This globalization was essentially driven by the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Ever declining average rates of profit, as repeatedly demonstrated by Marxist economist Michael Roberts, were countered worldwide by ever intensifying attacks on working people, ...

I don't think Mr. Roberts demonstrated any such thing. I wrote an (admittedly crappy) post on this some years ago. First, Mr. Roberts suggests a very weird definition of profit that nobody else uses and which has no effect on economic decision-making. Second, his definition only applies to the economy as a whole, and not to any individual company. So there is no way a CEO could make use of this information. Third, the quantities required to calculate "profit" are vague and not obviously tabulated anywhere. So all Mr. Roberts can do is estimate them.

And finally, he defines profit as something related to operating margins rather than return on investment. His ultimate claim is that operating margins have been shrinking over the past decades. I don't think that's true. Of course if it is true this is good--smaller operating margins are better for consumers, who get cheaper prices. Successful companies (e.g., Walmart) have capped their operating margins at 3%--if they go above that they reduce prices.

Profitability is usually and most meaningfully measured by return on investment, which is the quantity that's actually important to the capitalist. Accordingly, the price/earnings ratio is a lead indicator for how valuable a stock is.

Arguing for a falling rate of profit, Mr. Mackler cites Marx.

Simply put, as Marx explains in the first volume of Capital, the average value of any commodity is measured by the average amount of human labor power embodied in it in the course of its production.  Over time, competition compels capitalists to repeatedly renovate their productive facilities substituting machines for human labor power. This initially benefits the first on the market with the new technology and allows them to sell their product at a price above its real value. But as the competition heats up, weaker companies drop out while more serious competitors introduce even more advanced technological innovations and this initial advantage diminishes. 

In time the price and value of commodities tend to reach equilibrium and the corresponding average rate of profit declines in correspondence with the reduced quantity of human labor power embodied. 

And this is all true! I don't disagree with Marx at all. But Mr. Mackler leaves out two important points.

First, as already mentioned, declining profit rates (defined in terms of operating margins) are good for consumers, who get cheaper products. So I am in favor of shrinking profit margins--which as Mr. Mackler points out are often a result of new technology and increased productivity.  This increases our standard of living! If he is trying to convince me that capitalism is broken, this is not a very good argument.

Second, Mr. Mackler does not understand the meaning of "commodity." A commodity is a good which trades only on price. Gasoline is a commodity--people drive around searching for the lowest prices. They don't really care about anything else. So are basic economy airfares--you'll fly on the cheapest airline if all you want to do is save money. Obviously, things sold on commodity exchanges--e.g., copper, iron, wheat--all trade on price and not on any other quality.

Mr. Mackler cites an excellent example of something that is NOT a commodity.

The process [offshoring--ed] included such phenomena as major corporations like Apple employing some one million Chinese workers at near slave wages and hours and selling Apple I-phones for $1,000, only a few dollars of which went to Chinese and other Asian workers at the low end of the value chain.

I think the one million number is an exaggeration, as is the adjective "slave." But the point is mostly correct. In a post from 2013 I document that the assembly cost of an iPhone was only $8, while the sales price was closer to $300. The wages paid to the Chinese workers was 50 cents per hour. Add in the cost of components sourced from around the world, there is still no question that Apple made a healthy profit from the iPhone.

It's still true today, even with inflation doubling or tripling those numbers. The price of an iPhone is not determined by the production cost--and that's because an iPhone is NOT a commodity. Nobody buys it because it's cheap. Instead they appreciate the excellent engineering, the high-end components, the stellar design, and especially the cool factor in owning an iPhone. It's a fashion statement. An iPhone is expensive because Steve Jobs carefully and meticulously nurtured the brand. And for that reason it's very profitable with extremely high operating margins.

A commodity smart phone available on Amazon costs less than $40. That's the cost of production plus a small operating margin. An iPhone 13 sells for 20 times that much.

In Marx's time, almost everything sold was a commodity, and it is understandable that he expressed his economic theory in those terms. But that's not true today--most things Americans buy are not commodities. That is, the competition is not based solely or primarily on price, but rather on other qualities. The Marxist argument for declining profit margins does not apply.

Further Reading:

• Lost in the Amazon
• Socialist Action Believes American Children Should Freeze to Death
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

James P. Cannon Was Spectacularly Wrong

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is introduced by Wikipedia this way:

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.

Among its earliest founders and also its most prominent leader was James P. Cannon, who wrote two books that are likely still required reading for any wannabe Trotskyist: The History of American Trotskyism, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. The former is still well worth reading; the latter is forgettable.

Mr. Cannon spent sixteen months (1944-1945) in jail for violating the Smith Act, later ruled unconstitutional. He wrote many Letters from Prison, now collected in a volume by that name. Among those letters (dated Dec, 1944) is a disquisition on the role of the Party's newspaper, The Militant. Excerpts from that letter are republished in this week's Militant under the headline From prison, Cannon proposed SWP expand reach of ‘Militant’. (I don't have access to the full letter; my comments here are based only on the excerpt.)

I'm not clear why The Militant republishes this. It is so out of date that it provides no guide as to what role the paper should play today. Rather than flattering the The Militant, it makes it look ridiculous. Mr. Cannon's lede paragraphs (ellipses and italics in original):

What kind of a paper will best serve the needs of the new party in the next period which lies immediately before us? We used to think, or rather take for granted, that as we broke out of the narrow propaganda circle and began to get a hearing from the workers, we should aim at changing the weekly into a daily. …

It was also assumed that, as the paper became a “mass” paper, it would be obliged to adapt itself to the political understanding of the average, if not to the lowest common denominator, among its new readers; leaving the more complicated political and theoretical explanations to the monthly magazine. …

By "next period" Mr. Cannon means the immediate future, i.e., the next few years after the war. He predicts that the paper will break out of the "narrow propaganda circle," and become widely read. Of course this turned out to be wrong. Apart from a sharp recession immediately following the war, the American economy entered into a long period of rapid growth that extended for twenty years through the 1960s. Living standards during that time more than tripled.

The reasons for this growth are detailed in Robert Gordon's marvelous book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth--and contrary to what my Trotskyist friends will claim, it has little to do with the wartime destruction of Europe. The fact is that the economy was growing at 6% annually, there was a decades-long labor shortage and so the unions were fat and sassy, and nobody wanted to turn the economy over to know-nothings like Jim Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. The political effect of all of this was an allergic reaction to all things "communist", culminating in the McCarthy senate hearings.

To reach this promised next period, Mr. Cannon details what the Party needed to do next.

But what we have to do next is to reach more and more new people, catch their attention at the moment when they are just awakening from political indifference, and try to reach them with our message regularly. A big national weekly is ideally suited to this task.

He then answers two questions about the role The Militant is supposed to play.

The first question is about the price--it definitely should not be free. (Italics in original; ellipses mine.)

The principle that readers must pay for the paper is a sound one; people are inclined to put a higher value on things they pay for, even if it is a very small amount, than on throwaway sheets which they get for nothing. ... [E]xperience has also shown that it is the principle of paying, not the amount paid, that is most important. The two should not be confused and lumped together.

Mr. Cannon asserts a very capitalist principle, namely that prices mean something. The price is a representation of value, and when people pay for something it means they value it more. How different this is from, say, Cuba, where the ration card is more important than money. Things like housing and medical care--which should have a high value--are given away for free. People don't take care of things they get for free, which is why the housing stock in Cuba is so miserable.

The second question is about the intended audience The Militant is supposed to reach. The paper should serve two audiences simultaneously. The majority of readers, in Mr. Cannon's imagination, will be the unwashed masses, who coming to Trotskyism for the first time will need a simple introduction to the dogma. At the other extreme are folks who have been around the movement for longer and are interested in more substantive and complex articles. Of course there is the spectrum in between--and The Militant will have to accommodate them as well.

As Mr. Cannon points out, the Party did not have the resources for two weekly newspapers--one will have to accomplish both tasks.

Of course it never happened. The Militant never became a mass market weekly and Mr. Cannon's market segmenting problem never arose.

What I found surprising is Mr. Cannon never discusses The Militant as an organizing tool. The model for this was Lenin's paper Iskra, which was used to share information among class conscious workers throughout Russia. Of course Lenin's organization was at that time illegal, which made such information transfer essential. The Militant was not illegal.

In any case, it's all gone awry. Every October the paper has to publish a Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation to comply with postal regulations. This includes circulation figures. From the issue dated October 25th, 2021 (pdf, p. 8), under the  "Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months" category, the "Total Paid Distribution" was 2,553 copies. This is a very far cry from being a mass market weekly.

I think 1972 might represent the high water mark for The Militant's circulation. Thus choosing the postal statement printed in the October 13, 1972 (pdf, p. 26) issue, we learn that "Total Paid Distribution" was 24,605 copies. This is ten-fold better than what they're doing today, but still a far cry from a mass market weekly.

Mr. Cannon served as National Secretary of the SWP from 1938 until his retirement in 1953. That latter year--when the political prospects for communist revolutionaries was at its nadir--must have been when Mr. Cannon recognized the futility of his efforts. The Militant was never going to achieve mass market status in his lifetime.

His successor, Farrell Dobbs, served as National Secretary until 1972, when he retired. And his successor, Jack Barnes--today an octogenarian--still holds the office! This, I think, is a scandal. The Party needs to pass term limits or a mandatory retirement age.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Book Review: Rise & Fall of American Growth
• Trotskyism & New Media

Shootings

This post is in response to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, TX. I find the whole thing horribly depressing, partly because it is inherently depressing, and also because I can't think of any solution to the problem. The proposed solutions--e.g., gun control, or arming teachers--all seem likely to fail.

Ezra Brain, a talented correspondent for Left Voice (published by a group of NYC college professors and their groupies), describes what he thinks is the root problem. The article is entitled The Uvalde Massacre Is the Product of a Heinous System.

He uses a rhetorical technique common to Trotskyism that may be called bait and switch.

The responsibility for this horrendous crime, of course, lays first and foremost with the killer himself who made an evil and reprehensible decision to kill children. Yet, this shooting doesn’t happen in a vacuum and we can’t individualize it. This horror comes within a much larger context of the violence inherent to the capitalist system and the violence particular to the United States empire in decline.

The first sentence is a truism that everybody will agree with. I think it is the only intelligent thing one can say about the event. But the rest of the paragraph, and indeed the rest of the article, dismisses any notion of individual responsibility. He claims "we can't individualize it." The ultimate cause of the massacre is an ill-defined something that Mr. Brain calls "capitalism."

"Capitalism" isn't just the cause of mass shootings--it's the cause of all bad things that ever happen anywhere in America or the world. For Mr. Brain it is the synonym for the Devil.

There are 330 million people in America, all of whom live under "capitalism." Of that number, approximately a dozen turn in to mass shooters each year. (I'm excluding the now ubiquitous gangland-style shootings in our major cities, which I think have a different cause--though no doubt Mr. Brain would blame "capitalism" for those as well.) "Capitalism" offers no clues about how those dozen individuals differ from the rest of us. Indeed, religious language like "possessed by demons" is more informative.

The paragraph following that just quoted introduces "capitalism's" evil sidekick, namely white supremacy. (Links in original.)

This shooting comes just ten days after a white supremacist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo left eleven, all Black, people dead. While there is no evidence currently that today’s shooting was racially motivated, the specter of white supremacy still hangs over the tragedy. Uvalde is 78 percent Latine and, currently, the border patrol — the same institution that detains and abuses migrants and chases them with whips — is currently at the school, potentially intimidating any undocumented parents who need to go pick up their traumatized children.

Three things come immediately to mind. First, despite there being no evidence, Mr. Brain can't help but suggest "white supremacy." This tells us more about Mr. Brain than about the shooting. Second, he uses a word new to me, namely Latine. I'm no expert on silly, petty bourgeois lingo, but I assume it's intended to replace the hopelessly unpopular Latinx--which I described as a degendered dysphemism for Latino and Latina. Latine doesn't seem to be an improvement. Why not just use the word Latin?

And third, the link attached to "chased them with whips" has nothing to do with whips, or with the now thoroughly discredited story that border patrol agents were whipping migrants. Mr. Brain doesn't tell us that the Spanish-speaking residents of the Rio Grande Valley have roots in this country that go back centuries and are in absolutely no danger of being deported. It turns out (Mr. Brain wrote before this was widely known) that a border patrol agent is the guy who finally took out the shooter.

A much more perceptive analysis of who mass murderers are is given by Park Macdougald, in a piece entitled Why young men become shooters. The lede paragraph:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge.  

Men, especially adolescent boys and young men, are in a life-and-death competition for access to female mates. The losers have little to lose and occasionally respond violently. This is a much more specific cause for mass shootings than "capitalism" is--but it's still not very helpful. There are, after all, millions of social outcasts, incels, disabled men, etc., out there, yet only a very few of them become mass shooters. It's still too crude a screen to identify them before they start killing people.

Mr. Brain writes,

It’s a system that has told angry young white men that it is people of color and queer people who are the cause of their distress, a system which has alienated so many young people and left them without hope, a system that has accepted near-constant school shootings in the years since Columbine.

This seems not true. The "angry young men" who become mass shooters are driven mad because of women--not race or homosexuality. Most school shootings are like Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook--they've got nothing to do with race and even less to do with homosexuality. Even the rare cases where race seems to be a factor--Charleston, Waukesha, Buffalo--it probably isn't as much a factor as Mr. Brain thinks. 

The common wisdom is that Mr. Gendron drove to Buffalo to shoot people because he was a racist. I think the causal arrow is precisely the reverse. Mr. Gendron wanted to shoot people, and then devised a post hoc reason (racism) that justified to himself why he was shooting people.

We have to cut Mr. Brain some slack here. If the ultimate motive for mass shooters is frustration with the opposite sex, then Mr. Brain knows nothing about that. He's gay. His solution to what he might call toxic masculinity is for everybody to be androgynous. That's probably why he champions the word Latine. Of course androgyny is not an option for most men--who want to father children and eventually celebrate grandchildren. Whatever the virtues of the LGBTQIA+... community, fertility is not one of them--they don't have a lot of kids, and they're not good at raising them. 

An androgynous, gay man is poorly equipped to understand the psychology of mass shooters. That's why Mr. Brain blames everything on "capitalism."

Further Reading:

• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist
• Book Review: Bronze Age Mindset

The SWP by the Numbers

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

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

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

Here is a copy of my spreadsheet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what could go wrong? Lots of things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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