Unions and Work From Home

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

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

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

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

Office attendance is slumping again and bosses have a warning: We are a worse company when you stay home. 

In buildings across 10 major U.S. cities, office occupancy has fallen back below 50% for the past three weeks, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks security swipes into offices. The drop comes despite new return-to-office mandates that affect more than 600,000 workers and counting.

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

Also cited is the damage it does to downtowns:

“Everything from daycare to public transportation, toll roads, fuel and fuel taxes, auto purchases and maintenance, dry cleaners, nail spas, restaurants, clothiers, hair stylists, dog walkers, nannies and office leases suffer when people work from home,” said Dean Porter of Houston. “Mayors and governors and too many managers want people back commuting.”

Workers who do a good portion of their job remotely contend they aren’t obligated to prop up the office, or an office-centric economy.

“It is not my responsibility to save downtown by going back to the office,” said Merrik Wright of Miami. “The average worker should not be in charge of something that just costs us time and money.” 

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

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

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

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

Mr. Cummings had support.

According to Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson, his fellow customer service reps in Minneapolis had discovered that remote work “was safer, saved them money on commuting and childcare, gave them more time for rest and with their families and more control of their work space.”

That’s why Knutson and leaders of other AT&T locals launched a grassroots campaign aimed at keeping Work from Home (WFH) as an option at AT&T, the most heavily unionized telecom company.

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

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

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

Mooney defended his role in negotiations with Verizon over WFH last year. During those talks, other CWA bargaining committee members like Local 1400 President Don Trementozzi had to overcome Mooney’s initial opposition—voiced during union caucuses — to extending remote work opportunities for Verizon customer service reps.

Then and now, Mooney’s questioning of WFH resonated not only with east coast Verizon locals, dominated by technicians, but also some rank-and-file radicals who belong to those locals. Echoing Mooney’s concerns, one long-time activist and fellow Labor Notes supporter told me that WFH “takes away our bargaining power, leaves people more atomized, and gives management too much control.”

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

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

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

Three decades ago, I was similarly ambivalent. As a national union rep between 1980 and 2007, I had much first-hand familiarity with the workplace culture of telephone company service reps and the different (and more blue-collar) world of inside and outside “plant technicians.” ... Most cable guys loved being able to take their trucks home at night and go directly to customers’ homes the next morning. Union-minded telephone techs wanted their co-workers to report to a central location every day, so they would have more regular contact with shop stewards.

After I helped a group of 1,500 customer service reps in New England get a first contract in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t long before the company now known as Verizon wanted to do a “trial” of work from home. One reason for our resistance to that proposal was the fear that collective action in newly organized call centers would be more difficult, if everyone was isolated at home and not working under the same roof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

• Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY
• Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks
• Lost in the Amazon

 

Workers' Voice Doesn't Understand Deficits or Taxes

Source: CATO Institute

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

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

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

Today the debt is $31.4 trillion, or 133% of U.S. GDP, a 25% jump from 2016. This is the highest level of national debt in U.S. history.

The debt problem has at its root the crisis of capitalism’s profitability. The fall in this profitability, starting in the 1980s, prompted the rich to attack the conditions of the American working class through cuts in public services, anti-union attacks, and factory closures of companies that opted to move to other countries—mainly China—in search of better conditions to generate profits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Montejero writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• The Harm Reduction Team
• It's Not Just About Abortion

Oberlin, 2023

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The news yields a bit more information:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen, Amen!

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• Wittenberg, 2022
• Cuba Needs More Communism!

 

Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Lost in the Amazon
• Teachers Can't Teach

Oppression!

My Trotskyist friends are big on oppression. 

Using The Militant's search bar for "oppression" yields 398 hits since 2018.  A similar search on the Left Voice website generates 109 pages of hits, each citing 10 incidences of the word--or nearly 1100 hits since 2017. My friends at Socialist Action don't give me a numerical count, but the first page yields 20 hits, and I don't know how many pages there are. The comrades at Worker's Voice also don't do a tally for me, but I counted 300 hits before I got tired of scrolling.

They're obsessed with the oppressed.

As a retired faculty member at a regional college, I have definitely been a victim of oppression. My salary was too low, my office was too small, my research contributions weren't properly recognized, and I had to spend twelve (12) hours per week in the classroom teaching! Oh the misery, the humiliation! No wonder I retired.

Of course my oppression is nothing compared to that of one of my colleagues who is triply oppressed--despite her similar status as a full professor. She's female, she's a POC (person of color in today's terminology, though her skin tone is indistinguishable from mine), and she's queer (formerly a synonym for weirdo). Her oppression is somehow three times worse than anything I've ever suffered, and accordingly she feels triply more sorry for herself than I ever did. As a white male, I'm supposed to feel sorry for her, too, and to hang my head in remorseful guilt.

She likely attributes her oppression to being minoritized and marginalized. I'm not sure what those words actually mean, but I think she does that to herself. She's the author of her own problems.

Marxists believe oppression stems from the theft of surplus value from workers. In this view workers receive a wage (which is determined by the market), but which is always less than the true value of their work, as supposedly determined by the labor theory of value. The difference between this theoretical value and the wage is the surplus unjustly extracted by capitalists and is perceived as oppression.

Michael Roberts gets into the weeds how surplus value is calculated here. The fundamental formula is

Marx's original equation for Rate of Profit (P) is

where s is the surplus value (i.e., what most people would call "profit), c is the total capital stock, and v is the total cost of labor. This is intended to be measured for the entire economy--not just for any individual company.

Mr. Roberts has a very hard time estimating these quantities since Marx's definitions don't match the way the terms are currently used or quantities tabulated. E.g., Marx refers to v as the variable capital, as opposed to fixed capital represented by c, but in modern terms it roughly means total wages.  More, the rate of profit is to be calculated only for the global economy as a whole--for which it is nigh impossible to collect data. It is meaningless to apply the formula to an individual firm.

In a word, the formula is useless, which is why nobody besides Mr. Roberts and a few of his friends bother to try to calculate it.

But Mr. Roberts does say that

The bottom line of the rate of profit formula should be restricted to the capitalist sector and not include public sector or residential housing capital.

Since both I and my POC colleague worked for the public/non-profit sector, we contributed nothing to the productive economy and therefore our salaries should not be included in any calculation of surplus value. In other words, nobody makes a profit off of our labor. We are NOT oppressed--not even a little bit. It doesn't matter what our skin color is or how small our offices are.

As stated, the Marxian concept of surplus value is valid only for the global economy as a whole--it can't be used for any individual firm, much less for a particular worker. Based on Marxism, it's impossible to say that the Walmart worker is more oppressed than, say, the CEO of Citibank (who is, ultimately, merely an employee of the company, albeit a very well compensated one). So while we know that public employees are not oppressed at all, we can only speculate about the oppression of actual workers.

Still, Marxian ambiguity notwithstanding, I'll suggest that the degree of oppression depends on the size of one's wage. That is, the surplus value that a capitalist can withhold from a low wage worker is less than what he can obtain from a high wage worker. So if the unemployed are not oppressed at all, then also the minimum wage employee is minimally oppressed. There isn't much value from which to extract any surplus. Accordingly, the CEO of Citibank is way more oppressed than the Walmart worker.

Besides me, other people who aren't oppressed are people who don't have jobs. I've gone from being not oppressed as a college professor to now being not oppressed as retiree living off my savings. The last time I was actually "oppressed" was when I worked as a taxi driver in Chicago 50 years ago--that being the last time I actually created value for anybody. Similarly, unemployed people aren't oppressed, nor are those who have left the workforce for any reason--not just retirement. Homeless people--despite their dire straits--are also not victims of oppression. They're part of the lumpen proletariat, a term which meaning I'd broaden to include the lumpen intelligentsia, e.g., college professors and their ilk.

Such is the topsy-turvy land of Marxist economics.

My Trotskyist friends will argue that I'm taking Marx too literally, and perhaps they're right. This is probably one of the many ways in which Marxist economics doesn't make any sense. If Mr. Roberts' herculean efforts at calculating the rate of profit fails, it's because the task is essentially impossible and the results are meaningless. No company measures its success on the global rate of profit, nor does any worker gauge their well-being on so ill-defined and irrelevant a concept. Even I admit that my career as a professor wasn't completely useless--a few of my students really did learn something. Though I will be the first to admit that I could have spent my time better, and I'd advise anybody who asks not to work for higher education.

My Trotskyist friends have broadened oppression way beyond its Marxian roots. If Marxist economics is hopelessly vague, then modern Trotskyism is a ball of confusion. In their world, not just workers are oppressed, but so are women, POCs (but not all POCS), "queer" people, and trans people. How all those groups fit into any Marxist category is beyond me. I've written about the so-called "oppression" of women here, and found the concept wanting.

I think Trotskyism attracts people who want to feel sorry for themselves. That certainly includes the academic precariat--who have voluntarily chosen their own misery but nevertheless want to blame it on somebody else. It includes much of the LGBTQIA+..., some of whom are mentally ill and probably rightly do feel sorry for themselves.

In summary, I believe the modern Trotskyist version of oppression is simply self-pity, and it's sad that the concept plays such a large role in their newspapers.

Further Reading:

• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• The Harm Reduction Team
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

Cozzarelli on Chicago's Mayor Race

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson
(source)

Tatiana Cozzarelli, one of Left Voice's better and more interesting columnists, writes about the city of Chicago. I moved to Chicago back in 1972 to help build the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) branch there. In subsequent years I drove a cab for five years, and eventually graduated from the University of Chicago. In total I spent 13 years living in or near the City of Chicago, and it is the town to which I am most sentimentally attached. While there, I cast the worst vote I ever cast in my entire life--I voted for Jane Byrne for mayor in 1979!

To atone for my sins, were I still a Chicagoan I would have voted for Paul Vallas, who Ms. Cozzarelli describes as (links omitted)

Vallas was a “law and order” candidate funded by big business and conservative donors, and he was strongly supported by the Chicago police union. He received over $1 million from Trump voters and even spoke at a fundraiser for anti-queer far-right group Awake Illinois. He is the former CEO of Chicago public schools and supports a program of pro-charter privatization, attacking the Chicago public school district and the Chicago Teachers’ Union [CTU--ed].

Among the biggest issues in the election were crime (aka "law and order"), the city's imminent bankruptcy (the chief concern of "big business and conservative donors"), and the total failure of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Mr. Vallas, to his credit, at least addressed those concerns. His opponent ignored them.

His opponent and ultimate victor in the race was Brandon Johnson, a very progressive Democrat who Ms. Cozzarelli describes this way:

Johnson is a former public school social studies teacher. He left teaching to become a staff organizer with the CTU and was in that position during the 2012 teachers’ strike. He spoke out against police brutality and anti-Black racism, making speeches in the Black Lives Matter movement. He ran on a progressive platform, promising to invest in affordable housing, public schools, and public transportation — paid for by taxing big corporations.

Police brutality is a problem, but a relatively minor one. Anti-Black racism is mostly not a problem--at least not in the way Ms. Cozzarelli imagines it. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a fascist organization which never had the depth of support that our friendly journalist supposes. But worst of all, Mr. Johnson wants to tax productive businesses to fund things that don't need to be funded: e.g., housing, schools and transportation.

Nevertheless, Ms. Cozzarelli agrees with Mr. Johnson in every particular. She's against police brutality (who isn't?), she's against anti-Black racism (again, who isn't?), and she's in favor of good things paid for by magic unicorns and the tooth fairy. Put more generally, Ms. Cozzarelli supports the progressive Democrat platform down the line, on everything from excessive Wokery to antisemitism.

So why isn't she a Democrat?

Unlike an elected legislator, the mayor is directly responsible for running the city, including the police and the budget. Winning and taking this position is qualitatively different from taking a legislative position, where a socialist could run on an independent ticket and primarily use the position for protest votes and to advance class struggle.

This is a very profound paragraph! Apparently it's OK for a socialist to be in a legislative body, (e.g., Kshama Sawant in Seattle) who, like Ms. Cozzarelli, is allied with the Democrats 99% of the time. But the minute a Democrat actually wins executive office, then, like Mr. Johnson, they run headlong into reality and discover that compromises have to be made. In other words--unlike a city councilwoman or kibitzing journalist--they can no longer count on the magic unicorns to come through in a pinch.

Ms. Cozzarelli will claim she doesn't believe in magic unicorns. But she uses different verbiage that mean the same things. Here's an excerpt where I have italicized places where words like "unicorn" and "tooth fairy" could be freely substituted.

Refusing to support Democrats does not signify relegating ourselves to the sidelines of class struggle.  We should participate side by side  in every struggle of the working class and oppressed, discussing the need for our own party, for our own program and highlighting the need to fight to end this oppressive system.

So let's consider a serious problem Chicago has: crime. According to Wikipedia, Chicago had 796 murders in 2021. Of those, 398 (50%) were cleared by the police--that is, the police arrested and charged somebody with murder. That means that 50% of all murderers in Chicago got away scot-free! No wonder Mr. Johnson wants to hire more detectives--Ms. Cozzarelli disagrees with that because she's worried about the poor criminals and apparently cares not a whit for the parents whose children were killed. Of course that's a position she can hold only as long as she has no responsibility for anything.

On the day Ms. Cozzarelli's article was posted, Walmart issued a press release announcing the closure of four stores in Chicago, most notably including the one in Chatham at 83rd and Stewart. This is an all-Black neighborhood--the last time I drove through there about 15 years ago it was a tidy, working-class community. The Walmart store likely served 100,000 or more people in that part of town.

While Walmart was too polite to say so, a major reason for the store losing money was shoplifting. The police never arrested the culprits, and if they did the DA wouldn't have charged them. I'm sure Ms. Cozzarelli thinks the shoplifters are all single moms desperately trying to feed their children--but she'd be mistaken in that belief.

To the contrary, shoplifting in Chicago is a criminal enterprise, probably much like this report from New York:

Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.

Of course professional shoplifters likely minimize the number of times they're arrested, and they also steal the most valuable items, so despite being only a third of arrests, they probably account for a majority of the expense. So by putting 327 people in jail, more than half of all shoplifting in New York would stop. 

The stats are likely very similar in Chicago. Jailing relatively few individuals would make the difference between a profitable store and an unprofitable, closed store.

Who pays for the shoplifting? It's certainly not the Walton family! Does Ms. Cozzarelli really believe that shareholders will pay for her friends' stealing? No, the people who pay are the minimum wage employees and their comparably poor customers. Whole neighborhoods will now not have a convenient grocery store because Ms. Cozzarelli and her BLM comrades defend wholesale theft.

It's worth noting that the Chatham store was comprehensively looted during the George Floyd/BLM riots. I'm pretty sure that Ms. Cozzarelli didn't participate in the looting, and I doubt she does any shoplifting, either. Somewhere in her character is basic human decency and common sense, which unfortunately she hides behind an army of unicorns and tooth fairies.

Further Reading:

• 63rd & Halsted
• Chicago: Ilona Gersh Runs for Mayor
• Left Voice and the SWP

 

Steve Clark's Bizarre Book Bazaar

Steve Clark (MILITANT/ÖGMUNDUR JÓNSSON)

The astonishing thing about the book fair recently held in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, is that Steve Clark attended it. Mr. Clark is a member of the Troika, namely the three-person team that constitutes the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Of those three, he is the junior member, both in age and rank. His seniors are Jack Barnes, the National Secretary of the Party, and Mary-Alice Waters, who is Jack's significant other and head of Pathfinder Press. Comrades Barnes and Waters are both octogenarians. I believe Comrade Clark is a year or two younger than I am, which suggests he's about 70.

Mr. Clark, despite his status, rarely lets his picture be published, which likely explains why he's infrequently seen at public events, and has never run as an SWP candidate for any election. It's weird that he'd travel all the way to Erbil to be photographed sitting in an easy chair like a crown prince, attended to by hijab-clad women. Indeed, the phrase "crown prince" describes him rather well given his youth and status compared to the other two royals. He's the son that comrades Barnes and Waters never had.

Two other adjectives are inspired by the picture: old and frail. In knew Mr. Clark from the Chicago branch back in the early 1970s. He looked old then--the early onset of male-pattern baldness didn't do much for youthful good looks. He rose to the challenge, leveraging his appearance to seem more serious and mature than his fellow comrades. Today he just looks old--much older than 70.

Frail may be an artifact of the photo: being seated and surrounded by much younger, standing people will make anybody look frail. Still, I don't know what Mr. Clark actually does. He writes for The Militant only occasionally. He has no formal responsibility of which I am aware. I suggested in the past that he was in ill-health. Which may be true, but he can't be all that decrepit if he is able to fly from New York to Erbil and back.

I've dubbed Mr. Clark the Sycophant in Chief. If the Party had state power, he'd be the guy in charge of the concentration camps. He behaves the way you'd expect a good crown prince to behave.

Anyway, I think he joined the Movement after I did, and partly because of that bald pate made himself felt right away. He was always behind closed doors in some important meeting or another, or taking an urgent phone call. In those days the Revolution was serious business, and comrade Clark was in the thick of it. It was only a matter of time before fate called and he ascended into heaven the National Office to sit at the right hand of the National Secretary and his wife. I never saw him again except from a distance, as he has decorated the dais of every Oberlin conference since.

The current issue of The Militant has two articles by Ögmundur Jónsson: Book fair reflects class politics in Kurdistan and Iraq, and Socialist Workers Party author speaks on new title at book fair forum. From the former we learn that this is the fourth book fair that Pathfinder Press (the SWP's publishing house) has attended in Erbil. Pathfinder set up a large booth and sold 1200 books over the 11-day event. The organizers of the fair put the attendance at 600,000 people. (By comparison, last year Amazon sold about 330 million print books and an additional 300 million e-books.)

From the latter article we discover that Mr. Clark flew all the way to Erbil to deliver a talk to 50 people at the book fair. He was accompanied not only by Mr. Jónsson (who I believe is based in London), but also by Joe Young, from Toronto. The round trip airfare from New York to Erbil (basic economy) is over $1300 per person. It may be a bit more from Toronto and a bit less from London, but the Party spent the better part of $4000 getting these folks to Erbil. That doesn't include the cost of food and lodging, or the cost of transporting all the Pathfinder books to and from the site. If the trio sold 1200 books at an average price of $10 per, then total revenue comes to around $12K--which also has to cover the cost of printing the books.

Of course this makes no sense. It obviously makes no financial sense, and it doesn't look to make much political sense, either. Why should the third most important man in the Socialist Workers Party fly all the way to Iraq just to give a speech to 50 people? Is the Revolution really that desperate for eyeballs? My former comrades need to explain what they expect the political benefits of this extravagance to be.

Reading between the lines of Mr. Jónsson's article, I doubt his speech was especially well received. While Mr. Jónsson acknowledges the crime committed by Saddam Hussein in Halabja, he writes

Clark noted the importance of holding a book fair in Erbil, a city both in Kurdistan and Iraq. “The U.S. rulers have brought so much devastation to Iraq,” he said, pointing to the killings of hundreds of thousands due to Washington’s wars of 1990-91 and 2003 and the destruction still evident in Baghdad and other cities.

He fails to note that absent the American invasion the Kurds would likely have been wiped out. More, America has protected the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq from Turkish depredations. The Kurds love the Americans--why wouldn't they? I think it probably doesn't matter if you're a Communist or a Nazi or an Islamophobe or even a Jew--if you're an American you'll be warmly welcomed no matter what.

In addition, I think Mr. Clark makes one error of fact--probably minor. He says

“The U.S. rulers continue to assert their domination over Puerto Rico, which is the largest colony in the world today. The Kurdish people are the largest nation without a country, so you have something in common.”

This is not true. The Kurds have a population between 30 and 45 million. The Hakka minority in southern China and Taiwan number around 80 to 120 million people. The Dravidian peoples of southern India and Sri Lanka number around 250 million people. These are just two examples of other peoples who don't have their own country.

Back in the day--early '70s--the Revolution really was serious business. But nobody in today's SWP expects any imminent revolution--it's all put off into the distant future like the second coming of Christ. So it doesn't really matter who leads the SWP anymore. Steve Clark and his fellow royals imagine themselves to be indispensable, forgetting de Gaulle's maxim that "the cemeteries are full of indispensable men."

In the meantime they can play games with comrades' dues and sustainers. Comrade Clark's bizarre trip to Erbil's book bazaar is a case in point.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us
• Chicago: Ilona Gersh Runs for Mayor
• John Studer Makes a Boo-Boo