Kamala vs. Trump: The Decline of America?

Left Voice author Sou Mi (who I think is female; apologies if I have that wrong) has written a think piece entitled Kamala Harris Wants to Revive an Empire in Decline. It's a well-written, worthwhile read that in my view is wrong in important ways. 

The confusion starts at the top. This is the "hook" paragraph--that's supposed to tempt you into reading the rest of the article.

As November pulls closer and the specter of another Trump presidency looms large, Harris is trying to present a different project for the future: one based in restoring a “rules based order” where the rules are fundamentally set by U.S. imperialism.

Only the last word grates--"imperialism" is a meaningless word that adds nothing to the paragraph. The paragraph would be better if she just omitted it, eg, rules are fundamentally set by the U.S. 

"Imperialism" occurs 22 times in the article, and all such mentions should be deleted, either as I illustrated above, or by substituting real institutions like "US foreign policy." Because foreign policy at least comes with an address (Foggy Bottom) and has somebody in charge (Antony Blinken). Unlike "imperialism," which is at best a vague conspiracy theory.

Otherwise she is quite correct--that Trump and Harris represent a decision point for American foreign policy. This observation is not original to her--it's been widely discussed in the mainstream media.

She paints the choice between the two this way. She says Harris

...has not only positioned herself as the heir to an administration that put diplomacy back on the table, but also presented a vision for the future: one based in the realization of an American leadership that will restore a “rules based order” through both diplomacy and might, and where the rules are fundamentally set by the U.S. imperialism.

This seems true. Kamala aspires to take us back to the good ol' days when America ruled the waves, owned the foreign exchange medium, and guaranteed world peace. 

Sou Mi accurately summarizes Trump's position, which I'll describe in my own words. Labelled "America First," it suggests that the US should withdraw from global affairs, mind it's own business, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, let the devil take the hindmost. When the enemy gets within 12 miles of our shores, then and only then will the world's greatest superpower be roused to action.

I exaggerate slightly. Trump is not quite as hands off as I've described, but only because he's forced to compromise with reality. The US really does have trade relations with other countries that need to be protected, notably with Mexico and Canada, but also with Europe and S.E. Asia. Those trade routes will require US policing. And more, the US has cultural and religious allegiances beyond our shores, eg, Israel, which even though it is of no strategic value whatsoever, we are bound to protect. (It does have economic value.)

But at his core, Trump is a pacifist. He does not want America involved in any war. He follows in the tradition of two prior pacifists, Nixon and Reagan, both of whom described the American strategy as having the biggest, baddest, meanest military the world has ever seen--and then never using it. "Peace Through Strength" is how previous generations (and Sou Mi) put it. It's Trump's strategy to a tee.

So the debate is between "The War Party," represented by Kamala, Liz Cheney, the journalists at The Bulwark, the CIA, and most college faculty. And "the Peace Party," championed by Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, journalists at ZeroHedge, and (apparently) most of America's working class.

I'm not sure which side Sou Mi is on: is she pro-War or pro-Peace? I don't think she knows, so befuddled is she by all those imaginary "imperialists" floating around in her head. I also don't really know what side I'm on--I can see virtues in both points of view. But I'll be voting for Trump.

So why now? Why is this choice presented to the American public in this election? Sou Mi has an answer (my emphasis).

Harris’s proposals... come amidst the growing tensions of an empire in decline, especially amidst the retreat of globalization when the United States, based on the export of manufacturing and exploitation of cheap labor in the global south (and particularly through the restoration of capitalism in China), and debt-fueled consumption, was able to rearticulate a unipolar order behind it.

Sou Mi's view is that, with the "empire in decline," there are two possible responses. One is, in spite of that, to double down and re-establish our weight in the world. This is what Kamala proposes to do. The other is to retreat into a shell and acknowledge defeat--the Trump strategy. Or, instead of War Party and Peace Party, we can think of them as the Recovering America's Greatness Party and the Surrender Party (which weirdly reverses the terminology the parties use to describe themselves).

I dispute that America is an empire in decline. For good reasons during the Cold War, the US served as the world's policeman, and provided the world with a reserve currency by running huge trade deficits. This enabled an unparalleled period of global economic growth, including, most notably, in China (bringing 400 million people out of poverty). Sou Mi ludicrously describes it as an act of "exploitation," which it definitely wasn't. It was, instead, an act of great generosity (albeit extended only to America's allies--and not to miscreants such as Cuba).

The question thus arises, can America continue to be so generous? Trump says no; Kamala responds yes. The problem is that, while America has certainly gotten richer over the past 70 years, the rest of the world has gotten richer faster and caught up. So Sou Mi is partly right: in relative terms, the US has declined, and is therefore no longer able to finance global trade as it once did. While in domestic terms our trade deficit has not yet declined, today as a fraction of total global trade it is too small a percentage to finance global trade.

In finance parlance, this is known as a shortage of eurodollars--and countries that don't have enough eurodollars (eg, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Africa, and on the cusp, China) are no longer able to import basic necessities such as food and fuel.

Whatever Kamala's intentions, she will not be able to reverse this relative decline in eurodollars, and the result will be a crimp in globalization. As there is no other reserve currency on the horizon, despite this shortage the Eurodollar will remain the world's reserve currency for the foreseeable future. The only country that can literally "print" eurodollars is the United States--we're sitting in the catbird seat.

Then there is our role as the global policeman. We guaranteed European borders, allowing European countries to all but defund their militaries. And likewise for Canada, Japan and the Philippines, among others. This, by itself, made people richer. We made the same guarantee to countries in the Middle East, fighting wars over Kuwait.

But being the world's policeman is expensive! And US taxpayers have to pay the bill. Trump has decided we don't need to do that anymore. For example, our efforts to keep the Red Sea open have come to naught--we're using million dollar missiles to shoot down the Houthi's thousand dollar drones, obviously not a sustainable operation. Technology has changed the nature of warfare. 

There's no reason for us to police the Red Sea--that's a job for the Europeans. We no longer have much interest in defending European borders. If Russia invades the Baltic states, we're probably not going to rise to their defense. We're not patrolling the Indian Ocean--India, Japan and China can fight over that one.

More, the Middle East is on its own. We still have an outpost in Qatar, but I predict that's not long for the world--Trump will bring them all home. The US has no dog in any fight over the Persian Gulf--we don't import any of their oil, and we have no reason to defend their sea lanes. That's up to the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese to work out. Good luck!

That's Trump's plan. Kamala says we're still gonna be the world's policeman. That's popular within the intelligence community and in the faculty lounge--but not among many common voters. It's one reason why I think she'll lose the election.

Sou Mi's article is worth reading. Apart from the gratuitous use of the word "imperialism," hers is an intelligent point of view.

Further Reading:

• The Eurodollar
• The Professor's Congress: The International Situation
• James P. Cannon Was Spectacularly Wrong

Sam Karlin Makes a Mess of the Middle East

 

Left Voice calls this "genocide"
(https://www.anera.org/how-big-is-gaza/)

Left Voice author Sam Karlin contributes a piece entitled The Demand for a Ceasefire Has Met Its Limits. He's got it all wrong. The article is a mess from top to bottom.

The major thesis is that the primary demand of leftist radicals--Ceasefire Now--is no longer useful. It is inconceivable, says Mr. Karlin, that Israel will ever agree to a ceasefire (by which he means unilateral Israeli surrender).

He may have written his piece a day or two early, but the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has recently announced that Hamas is destroyed as a military entity. Hence there already is something of a ceasefire in Gaza, and Israel has moved its forces to the Lebanon front. There is still some fighting in Gaza, but it is now reduced to individuals and small groups acting without any coordination.

Of course the huge civilian project remains: reconstructing Gaza and creating a political environment that will allow the enclave to thrive. That means defeating the ideology that requires the murder of all Jews, and replacing it with some win/win arrangement that serves the interests of both peoples. This will take a very long time--and may not succeed at all. In the latter case Gaza will remain an open-air prison as it has been for past decades.

But that's not Mr. Karlin's goal. His goal is

An end to the genocide, a full withdrawal of the U.S. military from the Middle East, the dissolution of the settler-colonial Zionist state, and full right of return for Palestinians and a free, secular, socialist Palestine from the River to the Sea are still achievable goals. They must be achieved, however, not through appeals or pressure on imperialism, but on international class struggle against imperialism.

The genocide has never happened--Gaza's population has been growing by over 2% annually--a birth rate higher than almost anyplace in the world. Prior to the war, life expectancy in Gaza was 75.7 years, which is above the global average (73.3 years). When it comes to genocide, the Israelis are pathetic failures. 

His goal of a "free, secular, socialist Palestine" is manifestly impossible. No party to the conflict wants a secular state: the Jewish rabbinate in Israel doesn't want that, and neither does Hamas, which insists on an Islamic state. Mr. Karlin needs to tell us who (beyond the 50 people in Left Voice) regard secular as a plausible outcome? Socialist is equally unpopular and desired by precisely nobody.

Then Mr. Karlin has this cockamamie picture of global politics.

Israel serves the vital role of an enforcer of U.S. interests in the Middle East. While the U.S. benefits from having Israel as a regional attack dog, Israel benefits from its relationship with the United States; an ally in the world’s main imperialist power allows it to project strength well beyond its size and population. For this reason, neither country can afford to seriously abandon the relationship, even in the current context, in which Israel is creating conditions that greatly harm U.S. imperialism’s broader interests.

The boogeyman in this scenario is something called "U.S. imperialism," an entity that doesn't exist. It's a meaningless word, and it explains precisely nothing about the relationship between the US and Israel. Israel is important to the US primarily for cultural and religious reasons, but also because it is a vital link in global trade, contributing much of the software for Silicon Valley. For those reasons it's more important to the US than any other country in the Middle East.

Consider the competition: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Sudan, and increasingly also Egypt, are all failed states, with unstable governments and rapidly declining economies. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are absolute monarchies, which lends them a patina of stability and good governance, but absent the oil wealth it's all a house of cards. The only politically stable countries in the region are Turkey and Iran--both of which exist on high, unassailable plateaus that have protected them from invasion throughout the centuries. But "stable" doesn't mean successful, and neither of those countries has a solid economic future.

The USA, especially as expressed by presidential candidate Donald Trump, just wants to wash its hands of the whole mess. We don't need the oil. We don't need the cotton. We don't lack for sand or camels. The Middle East (outside of Israel) is worth nearly nothing to us. Not even the oil is important--that's problem for Europe, China and Japan, not the USA.

The only thing we import from the Middle East are problems and terrorists.

Gaza is of no economic or strategic value to any country, least of all the United States. Israel would gladly transfer ownership of it to Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Neither country wants it, and Egypt would be hopelessly destabilized by taking it. So Israel--for both practical and humanitarian reasons--will now be responsible for rebuilding Gaza.

Apart from the temporary deployment of the US Navy in the region, the US has about 34,000 troops in the Middle East. If you believe Mr. Trump, that's about 33,999 too many. The presence of the US military there will only shrink. Not because of the demise of "US imperialism," but rather because of the demise of the region's countries as partners in a global economy.

The problem in Lebanon is that Hezbollah has made much of northern Israel uninhabitable, and the Israeli government needs to get those citizens back in their homes. Not all northerners are Jewish; recall the Hezbollah rocket that killed 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights. Israel rightly regarded that as an attack on its citizens and responded appropriately. Hezbollah has tens of thousands of rockets that it fires indiscriminately at Israeli civilians--and not just in the north.

As even Mr. Karlin must realize by now, Hezbollah (along with Hamas) is a cat's paw of Iran. For whatever reason Iran has a thing against Israel--they've been chanting Death to Israel for decades now, and they obviously mean it quite literally. Israel has to defend itself from Iran, and also from Hezbollah. Unlike the indiscriminate rocket fire from Hezbollah, Israel has very cleverly and successfully eliminated Hezbollah's officer corps. Now it has to eliminate the rocket stash--and then people on both sides of the border can return to their homes and live peacefully.

Mr. Karlin makes some implausible claims:

As anyone with a shred of credibility has pointed out for a year now, Netanyahu has everything to gain from prolonging the Israeli offensive in Gaza; he literally faces the possibility of going to prison as soon as he leaves office.

Mr. Netanyahu may or may not have legal problems, but the defense goals of his government have near universal support within Israel. There is no way the prime minister's legal issues have any influence.

This has fully emboldened the Israeli Far Right to pursue their long standing goal of expanding their settler-colonial regime to the West Bank and now Lebanon.

The "settler-colonial" phrasing is just an antisemitic slur. And nobody suggests Israel is going to annex southern Lebanon--that makes no sense at all. They just need to destroy Hezbollah's rockets.

Our author greatly exaggerates the importance of the Biden administration's efforts at a ceasefire. I think there are two possible reasons for their efforts, neither of which are particularly serious.

1) The administration wants to help Kamala win the election, for which she desperately needs the Arab votes in southeastern Michigan. Many of these voters are descendants of Maronite Christian immigrants from Lebanon and Syria--I wonder how much sympathy they have for Hamas? 

2) Antony Blinken--probably the most incompetent secretary of state this country has ever had--is lusting after a Nobel Prize, which would be his if only he could negotiate a unilateral Israeli surrender. To Mr. Netanyahu's credit, that has not happened.

It's got nothing to do with "US imperialism," whatever that is. Mr. Karlin has no clue.

Further Reading:

• The Trotskyist Faction on Haiti
• Left Voice and the Intifada
• "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

 

A Woman's Place Is....

(By janeyhenning - Flickr: stirring, CC BY 2.0)

Allegedly we Trump-supporting, MAGA-types will finish the title sentence with: A woman's place is in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. The Trotskyist retort is that we want deny women their Constitutional rights--and even their humanity--by forcing her back in the kitchen. We're not gonna force her to do anything.

But now comes The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) with a feature article entitled Fight for women’s rights expanded when millions joined the workforce, authored by Maggie Trowe. I'm not clear how Ms. Trowe will complete the sentence. How about

A woman's place is on the construction site, wearing steel-toed boots and pregnant?

Or perhaps the boots should be replaced by steel-toed high heels? Either way our young lady needs to be pregnant. The working class depends on it. Ms. Trowe's lede paragraph:

The falling birth rate and rising obstacles workers face to being able to afford to raise children have become key issues in the 2024 presidential campaign. Decades of employer attacks on wages and working conditions have made starting a family much more difficult for workers and produced conditions that reinforce the second-class status of women under capitalism. 

And, later on, she writes

The U.S. birth rate in 2023 was 1.62 births per woman, down from 3.65 in 1960, and below the rate required to maintain the population.

Capitalist pundits who used to write articles warning of the dangers of “overpopulation,” now sound alarms about the “increasing burden of too many old people.” Their real concern is that with fewer young, healthy workers the capitalist class can’t count on a sufficient supply of labor to exploit.

There's a minor technical error here: Ms. Trowe's number is the fertility rate (the average number of children women bear over a lifetime), and not the birth rate (which was about 11 live births per 1000 women in 2021). But her larger point is absolutely correct. As a nation (and also as a working class) we don't have enough babies! More women need to get pregnant, like pronto!

Weirdly, in the same issue The Militant publishes an editorial praising Cuba, where the fertility rate has declined from just under 4.7 in 1963 to 1.57 today. It's been below 2.1 (the rate necessary to sustain the population) since 1978. So when it comes to having babies, the Cubans can't even keep up with the USA, where the fertility rate didn't drop below 2.1 until 2007. Unlike the US, Cuba can't accept immigrants. Indeed, folks are fleeing the island faster than they're being born, and Cuba's population is in absolute decline. Not exactly a role model for a baby boom.

Still, much credit to Ms. Trowe because she is the only Trotskyist on my beat that even mentions declining fertility rates. At least she acknowledges the problem.

She writes,

The average cost of childbirth today is $18,865. For those with insurance, the average off-the-top expense is $2,854. Feeding a hungry newborn can set you back $50 for a can of baby formula at Walmart. A box of Pampers is $35. When you add these to the persistently high cost of rent, food, transportation and child care, is it any wonder young workers have doubts about raising a family or that women are putting off decisions about whether to have children?

And she is right! It's very expensive to raise a child--and always has been. Though I'd argue that it's cheaper now than anytime in prior human history. When my daughter was born we toyed with buying cloth diapers and laundering them, presumably saving money. We quickly gave up on that and went for the disposable kind. Does anybody today still have to launder diapers?

So what's the SWP's solution to the not-as-sorry-state-of-affairs-as-it-used-to-be? For that Ms. Trowe turns to the SWP's presidential candidate, Rachele Fruit, who tells us exactly what we should do. Ms. Trowe describes her view this way,

Such a party [a hypothetical labor party --Ed] would fight for a massive, federally funded jobs program to put millions to work at union-scale pay, for wage and benefit adjustments so that every time prices rise our wages go up automatically...

Another name for this program is inflation. If you increase the money supply (needed to pay the additional wages) without proportionately increasing the quantity of goods sold, then everything just has to cost that much more.

How is this going to make raising a child cheaper?

Chief SWP honcho Jack Barnes describes the Party's economic plan this way:

At the same time, in face of capitalism’s accompanying curse of unemployment, the working class and unions must fight for a shorter workweek, with no cut in pay. And for a massive, government-funded program of public works to provide jobs at union-scale wages building housing, schools, hospitals, child care centers, rural development and other things working people need.

So the number of unemployed construction workers is probably around 1%. As a society we're maxxed out on construction--we can't possibly build all that extra stuff that Mr. Barnes (and also Ms. Fruit) thinks are needed without not building the stuff already under construction.

There's only one way around it--grow the labor force. As Ms. Trowe points out, non-pregnant women are already working, so now we need to get those pregnant ladies out of the kitchen and on the job as well. Girl, put on your hard hat and steel-toed high heels and get your tush busy building that new school that Her Brilliancy Rachele Fruit says we need. Even if you're pregnant. Especially if you're pregnant--who needs a new school if there won't be any children? 

Lay that cinderblock on the wall--from a scaffold 20 ft up in the air. High heels are really good for climbing ladders. Clean out that old asbestos. Girl, you gotta do your share--our socialist future depends on it. Set a role model for your sisters for appropriate choice of footwear. We need the babies and we need the construction workers. Remember, construction work (esp. asbestos removal) is safer for babies than smoking or using cocaine.

A few weeks ago I had a new roof installed on my house. About ten guys came over and did the job in a bit over six hours. No women--it was rampant discrimination. Surely a pregnant lady can climb ladders, not lose her balance on a sloped roof, haul 50 lb bags of shingles around, and handle a nail gun. It's never too early for a baby to start absorbing proletons and learning the benefits of a hard day's work. Pregnant women need to do their share!

Apparently being pregnant isn't hard enough. The SWP's economic plan says they also have to install roofs.

Nobody on my side of the aisle will require a pregnant woman to stay barefoot in the kitchen. But if you're pregnant, it does rather seem like a good idea. Much better than enduring 90 degree heat on a hot roof. The woman in the picture doesn't exactly look unhappy.

It's easy to poke fun at Ms. Trowe's article and the Party's nonsensical economic agenda. But I have to give Ms. Trowe a lot of credit--at least compared to other tendencies on the Trotskyist left. She at least understands that to have a socialist society--or any kind of society--there have to be children. She realizes that "freedom" doesn't reduce to the freedom to kill your baby. There are other more important things in life--like loving your child, and having a husband who can do the dirty, dangerous jobs that men often have to do, and who can earn you a living.

She understands that abortion has to be legal--it's an unfortunate corollary of modern medicine. But it's not a virtue. It's not something to be proud of.

Ms. Trowe is on the right side of a basic issue. And my poking fun at her kinda misses the point--which is to honor and cherish pregnant women. I think Ms. Trowe agrees with me.

Further Reading:

• Whiners & Complainers
• The SWIP Flips to SWOP
• The American Right and Trans Rights

 

Socialism, 2024

The Socialism Conference, apparently an annual event, was held this year in Chicago and attracted 2,000 participants. I was not present, but fortunately Left Voice's intrepid reporter, Ben Marenlensky, was there and covers all the details. The article is Socialism 2024 Conference: We Need to Address the Donkey in the Room. Which is a clever title given our author's concerns about the Democratic Party.

While there may be a donkey in the room, I can't help but notice the elephant in the room--namely the oversized Hamas flag decorating the dais. I don't know for sure how the conference participants interpret this flag, but it's unambiguous what Hamas means by it: that all Jews in Israel/Palestine should be killed and/or driven into exile. And if you take another of their slogans seriously--Globalize the Intifada--then all Jews around the world should be murdered.

Our conference participants--to avoid being accused of antisemitism--have watered this down slightly. For the word Jew, they substitute the term Zionist. The idea is that Jew is an ethnicity or religion, while Zionism is a political belief. Therefore--in their mind--the murder/exile of all Zionists in Palestine/Israel is A-OK. Go for it. No more ballots. Only bullets. Zionism is a capital offense.

Of course within Israel, 95% of all Jews are also Zionists, so this seems to be a distinction without much difference. In the US the populations don't overlap as exactly--while most Jews are Zionists, so are a large number of other Americans. But no matter--they all deserve to die.

But don't you dare accuse any of the participants of antisemitism. Quite the contrary--they love the Jews, and claim to have their best interests at heart. Bullshit.

Mr. Marenlensky opening paragraph reads, (links in original

The Socialism Conference is an annual event hosted by Haymarket Books in Chicago. This year, it brought together about 2,000 left-wing activists and academics of various tendencies, especially social democrats and Trotskyists, but also Stalinists, Maoists, anarchists, national liberationists, and social justice groups. This year’s conference took place in the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and a U.S. election in which both major parties repeatedly declare their unwavering support for Israel. Attendees of Socialism, in contrast, were united in support for Palestine, and there was a genuine desire for ideas about how to best combat Zionism and U.S. imperialism.

Fortunately, the dishonest term "genocide" appears only twice in Mr. Marenlensky's piece. Unfortunately, "genocide" was a major topic of discussion at the conference--practically every speech was about that. I've taken it on in many posts, eg, here, so I'm going to ignore it for now.

So enough about the elephant; let's get back to the donkeys, ie, the Democrats.

Mr. Marenlensky follows the standard Trotskyist position, namely there is a sharp class line running through society. There are bourgeois organizations, and then there are labor organizations--and never the twain should meet. The picture is muddied a bit (actually, a lot) by the existence of petty bourgeois groupings, that at bottom are really just stalking horses for the bourgeoisie. The Socialism Conference appears to be one of those.

A fundamental Trotskyist principle is to Never Cross the Class Line, ie, under no circumstances should one support bourgeois organizations or parties. Therefore it is fine to team up with unions--those are working class groups. But the Democratic Party is (in Trotskyist sociology) a bourgeois party and one should never support it no matter what.

Forming a coalition with working class organizations is called a united front. Forming a coalition with a bourgeois party is called a popular front. The Stalinist communist parties were big on popular fronts--and that is why (in the Trotskyist imagination) they lost so many battles (eg, the Spanish Civil War). So Mr. Marenlensky, being a Trotskyist, is adamantly opposed to any alliance with any part of the Democrat party. That's a popular front that crosses the class line, and is therefore doomed to failure.

The problem for Mr. Marenlensky is that the Socialism Conference is, inherently, a popular front. The comrades in that movement want to work with Progressive Democrats, including voting for Progressives Democrats in elections. That crosses the class line and is an absolute no-no.

So his first task is to criticize the way the conference is organized. He writes, referring to the Democratic party,

So much energy on the U.S. Left is wasted trying to galvanize support for a party that presents itself as the most responsible manager of capitalism. That energy could be spent campaigning for a workers’ party that fights for socialism. The Socialism Conference should have been an opportunity for both sides of this debate to confront the question in a constructive, comradely way. Unfortunately, this opportunity was largely squandered for a combination of political and structural reasons.

The "political and structural" reasons reduce to this: the Conference's participants want to have some impact on the real world. In the real world, Progressive Democrats have money and power and the ability to win elections. Trotskyists have none of that. Despite (or more likely, because of) their stand on high principles, Trotskyists never have any power or influence at all. All they do is kibbutz from the sidelines. So teaming up with Progressive Democrats just makes nothing but sense.

At least that's the way the conference organizers see it, and probably also a large majority of the participants. For these people the whole point of the conference is to tighten the alliance with segments of the Democratic Party, and to win over as many as they can to their ideas. What Trotskyists see as crossing the class line is seen by Conference attendees as practical politics.

And the attendees are not wrong. Progressive Democrats do occasionally win some real victories, notably in Blue States. All sorts of progressive policies are in place in California and New York, eg, rent control, prevailing wage laws, decriminalization of marijuana, social welfare efforts and social justice efforts. One can criticize them for only winning half a loaf--but the Trotskyists have never won any loaf--they've never succeeded in winning even a few crumbs.

As a political movement, Trotskyism is a proven failure. It's never been a success anywhere in the world, which is why the Socialism conferees don't have time for Trotskyists. For example, compare the Socialism Conference (2000 attendees) with Left Voice's recent convention (50 attendees; my review here). Would Left Voice--at their convention--allowed outsiders to discuss the virtues of forming popular fronts? Not likely--that conversation would not be allowed.

Likewise the Conference leaders and attendees are not interested in "forming an independent labor party," which is the rallying cry of all Trotskyists, including Left Voice. And for good reason: it's never happened, and it never will. There's no point in putting it on the agenda.

In his final paragraph, Mr. Maralensky puts it this way, claiming that Lenin (1870 - 1924) offered a useful guide to modern American politics.

In his seminal pamphlet, What Is To Be Done, Lenin describes a “marsh” of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, and that our task is to “fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!” In other words, it’s not enough to struggle against collaboration with the class enemy, but also against those who want to turn toward, accommodate, or coddle the collaborators. The Socialism Conference needs to be organized in a way that facilitates this struggle, and Marxists need to be willing to wage it.

He is spitting into the wind. 

Further Reading:

• Is Trotskyism Dead?
• Nazis
• Unions and Work From Home

Whiners & Complainers

(Source)

Tatiana Cozzarelli must really hate her job! She writes

Another school year is starting at the City University of New York (CUNY).  We’ll arrive on campuses that are dilapidated and falling apart. Broken elevators and escalators plague campuses across the city. Some departments are in a last-minute scramble to hire adjuncts for classes. It’s an affront to us as workers and to our students who deserve a quality education. 

Even though I’ve spent all week preparing for the semester, adjuncts and many others don’t get paid until two weeks into the semester. I have $30 in my bank account and I have to borrow money from friends again. Some adjuncts are on food stamps. Adjunct wages — and wages for most CUNY faculty and staff — are just not enough. We’ve been working with an expired contract for a year and a half, which means a year and a half without raises despite skyrocketing inflation and cost of living in New York City. 

Such is the start of the school year at CUNY. 

Those are the lede paragraphs from an article in Left Voice entitled CUNY Workers and Students Will Write A New Chapter of Class Struggle This Semester. While I never worked for CUNY, I am retired after long service at SUNY, New York's other public college & university system. Like CUNY, SUNY suffers from many of the same problems: declining enrollments, too many faculty & staff for the existing population, an aging infrastructure, and fewer jobs for graduates. Left Voice has covered some of those problems.

I'll take issue with one of Ms. Cozzarelli's claims--from my experience I think she exaggerates CUNY's state of disrepair. On the other matters she is likely correct. Adjuncts and grad students are poorly paid. Of course the reason for the stingy salaries is not because of evil administrators. It's because there are way more adjuncts and grad students available than there are classes for them to teach. Salaries are low to spread the money around as far as possible.

So if it's that bad, why does Ms. Cozzarelli still work there? She really should quit her job. She'd make more money doing almost anything else, eg, driving an Uber car. She identifies herself as a PhD student in "urban education," and she'd probably qualify as a teacher in New York state (and almost any other state). That job would definitely pay better than being an adjunct at CUNY. Why doesn't she do that?

No good reason, I fear. I suppose she wants to be a tenured professor somewhere. I don't know how many professorships there are in "urban education," but it can't be very many. So I think she has unreasonable expectations. Meanwhile, she is being supported in some part by CUNY students' tuition, but mostly by tax dollars from New York State and City taxpayers. In a word, she's on the public dole--aka welfare. If she went and got a real job she'd save us all a lot of money, and also lead a happier life.

Go back and read the above quoted paragraphs again, for what immediately follows is probably the biggest non sequitur of the year.

As I realize that none of the outlets in my windowless classroom work, it’s hard not to think about the billions of dollars being sent to kill Palestinians. There are no universities left in Gaza.

So there you have it. Not only does CUNY have to fix all the outlets and escalators, and pay the adjuncts and grad students more, but CUNY also has to settle the war in Gaza. She probably needs to take that up with her department chair, or if she's serious, even the Dean!

Is Ms. Cozzarelli really so foolish as to believe that some administrator at CUNY is gonna solve the war in Gaza? And why just Gaza? What about the war in Ukraine? Not to mention the starving children of Darfur. She should talk to her Dean about those problems as well.

She's not serious. But wait--Maybe she is? It's "billions" of dollars being wasted in Gaza, and Ms. Cozzarelli has her eyes on that prize. Apparently all of those billions (ALL of them) should be spent on CUNY to fix all the outlets and to give her a big fat raise. What should her salary be? $100K? $300K? Hell, let's go for it--Ms. Cozzarelli should demand at least a million, what with all the moral virtue on her side.

Left Voice author Maryam Alaniz, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, takes her antisemitism anti-Zionism seriously. She really believes that every Zionist in the world should be murdered. As such, she's a strong supporter of Hamas, an outfit she dubs "pro-Palestinian." Hamas is no more "pro-Palestinian" than the Khmer Rouge was pro-Cambodian. Hamas--if given the power--will not just murder all Zionists, but probably the major portion of the Palestinian population as well. It is a death cult, pure and simple.

Ms. Alaniz believes that Israel is exclusively responsible for all civilian war deaths in Gaza. She's wrong. Hamas bears at least half the responsibility--in any war it takes two to tango. The political benefits of dead women and children accrue entirely to Hamas--and discredit Israel. Accordingly, Hamas has worked hard to put as many women and children in harm's way as possible.

She pens an article in Left Voice entitled As Classes Start, Universities Begin a New Wave of Repression Against the Palestine Movement. She writes,

The administrative bureaucracies of the U.S. academy have played a key role since the start of the movement for Palestine to discourage and repress students and staff speaking out against the genocide. In that sense, the university presidents and bureaucracy are strategically linked to maintaining the interests of the bipartisan regime as well as the material interests that many of these universities have with the state of Israel.

There are two obvious errors in these paragraphs.

1. There is no genocide happening in Gaza. The war has gone on for nearly a year now, and Israel has come nowhere close to killing all 2.3 million Gazans. Even if you believe Hamas' inflated figures of about 40,000 dead (not all of whom were civilians), the war has hardly made a dent in the overall population. If Israel were intent on genocide, surely they would have eliminated most Gazans by now. It's not like they don't have the weaponry to do so. Use of the word "genocide" in this context is blatantly dishonest.
2. It is not true that "administrative bureaucracies of the U.S. academy have played a key role ...  to discourage and repress students and staff speaking out against the genocide." Nobody is being discouraged from speaking out. However vile, supporting Hamas and the murder of all Zionists is still protected speech in this country. What is NOT protected is camping out on university property, harassing and threatening other students, disturbing the peace at all hours of the day & night, and committing various acts of vandalism. Universities have an obligation to punish those violent protests.
   
   As an aside, I will add that demanding the murder of all Zionists should disqualify one from a professorship at any American university. There is no constitutional right to a job.

So, apart from her irrational antisemitism anti-Zionism, why does Ms. Alaniz even care? She, too, is a PhD student in NYC, studying who-knows-what (obviously nothing useful), and like her colleague she ardently believes her paycheck welfare check isn't high enough. She writes,

Clearly, the struggle against Zionism within universities has shown the way that these institutions act like businesses and landlords under capitalism, always looking out for their bottom line and afraid to upset their donors. The encampments encouraged us to think of a new kind of university: one that is free, open to the public, run by faculty, staff, and students for the working class and oppressed.

Ms. Alaniz, living as she does off the public dole, is not part of the working class, and she's not oppressed. She's a parasite mooching off other people's tax dollars. What she wants is even more of those tax dollars. She is asking for a blank check, where only the people who spend the money get to allocate it, while the people who pay the money should have no say. 

The third complainer falls into a completely different category. Left Voice author Pola Posen actually has a real job providing real goods and services to consumers around the world. She works at an Amazon warehouse, and writes to complain about how she was mistreated during the Prime Day promotion. The article is entitled “The Myth of Our Disposability”: Reflections from an Amazon Warehouse Worker on Prime Day. The article has one big virtue: the word "genocide" doesn't appear even once.

I can't argue with her. I have never worked at an Amazon warehouse. It is obviously a very demanding job, and many people don't like it. Though I think some people do, but Ms.Posen is certainly entitled to her opinion. 

Ms. Posen writes,

Amazon created Prime Day, its own commercial holiday, in 2015. The holiday reflects Amazon’s global ascendency and the increasing centrality of the logistics industry in the United States. Other companies, like Walmart, Target, and Temu, have been forced to create their own sales in July to compete with Prime Day. In the United States, there are about 170 million Amazon Prime members, or about half of the country’s population. Amazon Prime is enormously popular, but our warehouse labor is invisibilized—the hours, stress, and life force that this mammoth industry extracts from us and relies on to feed its own rise.

The company made $14.2 billion in profits during Prime this year, an 11 percent increase from last year. That same week, I earned $900 for working a mandatory 60 hours.

At least one correction: Amazon didn't earn $14.2 billion in profits from Prime Day--that was its total revenue. Profit only made up a small fraction of that--probably in the low single digit percent. The rest went to pay utilities, debt service, taxes, and--getting the largest share--labor. Ms. Posen's salary came out of that $14.2 billion. The 11% increase in revenue from last year benefits the workers more than the capitalists.

Then the capitalists don't pay Ms. Posen's salary. It's the 170 million Amazon Prime members who pay her salary (along with the profits, however big or small they are). The video she links to says it all--Ms. Posen, along with her colleagues, provide customers with all those myriad goods and services, and add so much convenience and joy to the world that we should be forever grateful.

I know I am. I use Amazon Prime once or twice per week. In my old age going to the store isn't as easy as it used to be. I pay the $140 annual fee along with for all the goods that are delivered. Some of that payment accrues to Ms. Polen--and she deserves every penny! I don't begrudge her a cent.

If her pay is too low, don't blame Mr. Bezos. Blame people like me. We consumers, we're fickle. A small price increase will send us to Walmart or some other competitor. Amazon's revenue will go down, and take Ms. Posen's salary down with it.

Ms. Posen, who works very hard at an honest job, has a right to complain. I'll consider paying more for the dish detergent I buy.

Further Reading:

• Cozzarelli on Chicago's Mayor Race
• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Left Voice and the SWP

Oberlin, 2024

 

84 year-old Jack Barnes, leader of the Socialist Workers Party since 1972.
(Source)

“Every class struggle is a political struggle.” With that statement Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers PartyI [SWP - ed], opened his report to an International Socialist Educational Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. ...

Barnes was quoting an 1895 tribute by communist leader V.I. Lenin to Frederick Engels, who along with Karl Marx founded and led the modern revolutionary workers movement. In October 1917, after the horrors of more than three years of imperialist war, the Bolshevik Party, under Lenin’s leadership, led the working class and exploited peasants in Russia to the conquest of power and establishment of the first workers state in history. It was the world’s first victorious socialist revolution.

That is an excerpt from Steve Clark's long article reporting on the 2024 Oberlin Conference held June 13-15, 2024. The article is entitled Forging a proletarian party in the class struggle today.

I previously suggested that there was no Oberlin conference this year, offering to eat crow if I was proven wrong. Well, I had a large helping of finely cooked, elegantly spiced crow for breakfast this morning--in honor of the fact that I'm happy to be wrong, as detailed in my previous article. Why it took Mr. Clark more than two months to write the report, I don't know. I also don't understand why the event wasn't advertised in advance (at least not that I noticed).

I will say the lack of advertising didn't make much difference in attendance--Mr. Clark reports that 330 comrades and friends attended, including visitors from Australia, France, UK, Iceland, Greece and Norway. This is in line with attendance in previous years.

Friend and commenter John B. points out that nothing much of importance seems to have happened this year. And he's right--but this year's report has a noticeably different tone from those of prior years. Previous reports from Oberlin have led off with the topics of the day, followed by (at least in attenuated form) what the Party is gonna do in response.

That's not true this year. Mr. Clark's article is mostly about the past--beginning with that 1895 quote from Lenin. Current events are reserved to the very end, and there is almost no discussion of the Party's tasks for the coming period.

It's all very sentimental. It has a swan-song vibe to it--as if Mr. Barnes is in his final year of leadership. It's more a funeral than a new beginning.

As detailed in my last post, both capitalists and workers have a strong, common interest in maximizing a business's revenue--on that they are very much on the same side. Indeed, labor almost always gets the lion's share of revenue. The necessity to maximize revenue dwarfs the conflict over how it's divided between wages and profits. With no revenue, there won't be either. Marx never understood that.

Quoting Mr. Barnes, Mr. Clark writes,

“Workers and our allies need a party of independent working-class political action — class against class — in factories and other workplaces, in army barracks, and in the neighborhoods, towns and streets where working people live and labor.”

The Party has been demanding this since its inception in 1938. More, this is the key demand of all the "Trotskyist" offspring that this blog covers--they all want an independent working class party. Indeed, Marx and Engels made the same demand in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. If there ever was a consistent theme in Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism, it's that there needs to be an independent labor party.

In the United States that has never happened. There have been labor parties in other countries--eg, Canada and the UK. And many European countries still have Social Democratic parties, which were originally founded by Marx himself (and led, in Germany, by the redoubtable Karl Kautsky). Yet all labor and social democratic parties have evolved toward "reformism," and in the modern era have faded into insignificance. In Germany recent polling gives the Social Democrats only 14% of the vote.

The reason is because Marxism is wrong. Class struggle does NOT drive human history (though it is a factor, probably minor). Revenue is more important to workers than profit. A zero-sum conflict between workers and capitalists does not exist.

If Marxism were right, then why is the SWP today still a tiny party of 330 comrades and sympathizers with an average age of about 70? They haven't grown. They haven't convinced any large number of people of the correctness of their opinions.

Mr. Clark (describing Mr. Barnes' speech) gives a long list of positions the Party has taken that he says have since proven correct. He touts the most recent political report entitled The low point of labor resistance is behind us (my review here). The major thesis of that book, published in 2022, is that the union movement has been revived and will start growing again. Recent evidence for that are successful strikes at Amazon and Starbucks, and by the UAW.

And the Party was correct (at least in a minor way). In 2022 we had a major labor shortage and all workers--union and non-union alike--were getting significant raises. Whether that caused inflation or was the result of inflation is a chicken-egg question that I won't answer--but it did happen. And it made it look as though unions were on the upswing.

But that's not true today. Today 4+ million new immigrants have joined the labor force. All the help wanted signs that decorated stores and restaurants in 2022 have disappeared. Labor participation rates are at a recent high. 

There is no labor shortage. The days of easy raises for employees is over. Indeed, white collar workers--especially in the tech industry--are taking pay cuts, often big ones. That trend may be spreading into the blue collar field as well. The Party was right in 2022. Now it's wrong.

Even if you grant that the Party was right in 2022, it was also wrong. Because many of the successful strikes were by public employee unions, eg, teachers, college professors and grad students, social welfare workers, etc. These are described in loving detail by our friends over at Left Voice, a Trotskyist grouplet made up of college professors and assorted failed academics. But public employees--however occasionally necessary their services--do not improve our standard of living. They're paid from taxes paid involuntarily mostly by working people, and not from revenue which comes from consumers voluntarily spending their money on products they want to buy. Growth in the public employee unions does not represent the revival of the labor movement.

The Party--to its great credit--has mostly championed revenue-making businesses that actually improve our lives. Their candidate for mayor of Chicago in 2023, Ilona Gersh, was a good example of this.

Among the most ludicrous of the supposedly correct positions is (italics in original),

The Socialist Workers Party said, “No!” U.S. imperialism has lost the Cold War, not won it. The fall of the Stalinist apparatuses eliminated a class-collaborationist crutch the imperialist rulers had relied on for more than six decades to undermine national and class battles the world over and block extension of the socialist revolution.

Note to Mr. Barnes and all other comrades: The US won the cold war. The Soviet state, born of the supposedly successful Russian Revolution of 1917, has disintegrated. Russia is but an empty husk of its former self, suffering demographic, economic, technological, and now military decline. Even if it somehow wins the war in Ukraine, it will be a pyrrhic victory that won't help at all.

But Mr. Clark does correctly note that world disorder is increasing. Some of that is technological: eg, the Houthis are firing thousand dollar drones at ships in the Red Sea while the US Navy is shooting them down with million dollar missiles. This is obviously unsustainable.

Or put more generally, because of the Soviet Union the US had to acquire allies around the world. It did that by bribing them with foreign aid, by granting them tariff-free access to US markets, and by militarily guaranteeing their borders from invasion. But today the Soviet Union is no longer a threat. We don't need all those allies, and countries that used to get aid from Uncle Sam (Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Egypt, South Africa, etc.) are just shit out of luck.

We're the most self-sufficient country on Earth.

Like their Trotskyist competitors, the Party is obsessed with the word imperialism. It's an imaginary boogeyman invented by Lenin designed to bamboozle the ignorant. At bottom, it's just a giant conspiracy theory. The word fragment imperial- occurs in Mr. Clark's essay 31 times. This is just meaningless Trotsky-talk.

The Party takes the honorable position on two issues. First, it truly understands that Hamas is a murderous, fascist organization. The compare Hamas to Nazis. The comparison isn't wrong, but I think it's more precise to compare them with the Khmer Rouge. They're not motivated by ideological fascism so much as just murderous nihilism. If there's any method to Hamas's madness, I certainly don't know what it is.

Second, they understand that the egregious lawfare against Donald Trump is an attack on the basic civil liberties of all Americans. The SWP has long defended civil liberties, going all the way back to the Smith trials of the 1950s. Their defense of Trump is entirely consistent with that proud tradition. Kudos.

The final paragraph of Mr. Clark's report is this.

It’s along that historic line of march, Barnes said, that a tested proletarian party will be forged in class battles, capable of organizing and leading the great working-class majority in the United States in a mass revolutionary movement that will decide which class will rule.

Big words, that. Mr. Barnes likely expressed that same thought 52 years ago when he first became National Secretary. In the intervening decades it doesn't look like he's made any progress. Indeed, the opposite. His tiny band of aging comrades are not the next generation of fighters, and Mr. Barnes--still pretty fit for an 84 year-old--looks every bit his age.

The Good Bye has taken too long. The Socialist Workers Party needs new leaders and a new program.

Further Reading:

• Amazon, Teamsters & Contract
• SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign
• Cuba Needs More Communism

Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain

UAW president Shawn Fain (Source)

Left Voice author James Dennis Hoff demonstrates his astonishing misunderstanding of the labor movement in an article entitled Five Things Shawn Fain and the UAW Could Do Instead of Campaigning for Harris and Walz. The author, a professor of English at City University of New York campus, seemingly has never met a workplace he didn't want to shut down, including his own employer. Had he succeeded in that misguided effort, 40,000 people would have been out of work and without paychecks for an indefinite (probably long) period.

The primary reason for his misunderstanding is Marxism, which on the subject of labor/company relations is completely wrong. In the Marxist world view, the sole goal of labor is to confiscate the capitalist's profit. Marxists see the very existence of profit as a great injustice. Of course they're wrong--capital will have to win a return no matter who owns the means of production. Profit can never be eliminated and the efforts to do so have all led to destruction. See, eg, Cuba, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union.

But that's not the primary error we examine here. There are two ways to judge a company's success: one can measure total revenue, and/or one can measure total profit, which is some fraction of that revenue. Marxists somehow seem to forget about the revenue part. But it is revenue that is split between wages and profit, and without revenue neither the worker nor the capitalist will make any money.

For example, Walmart's net revenue for the year ending June 30th was $648 billion. The net profit was about $16.3 billion, or 2.34% of revenue. The remaining revenue went employee salaries, rents, utilities, etc. The workers can legitimately fight over Walmart's profit. If they got all of it they'd get a 2.34% raise (after which the company would promptly go bankrupt).

But the elephant in the room--the fact that Professor Hoff studiously ignores--is revenue. Increases in revenue--even small ones--will have a much larger effect on workers' well-being than chipping away at the profit margin. After all, the workers get the lion's share of that revenue.

So the workers and their bosses have one big task in common--maximizing revenue. This is very complicated problem, for it depends on the mix of products sold (keeping the optimal mix of products in stock), then pricing them at a level that optimizes revenue, and finally ensuring that the products are displayed attractively and can be purchased by consumers with minimal inconvenience. A given Walmart Super Center will carry approximately 120,000 stock-keeping units, each of which has to carried in proper quantity and priced optimally.

Both workers and capitalists have a strong interest in maximizing revenue. The capitalists certainly understand that--their profit is a fraction of total revenue. And workers understand that--the security of their employment along with the size of their wages ultimately depends on revenue. The union understands it most of all--the dollar value of union dues collected will depend only on revenue.

Which is why workers are not particularly interested in going on strike. Strikes do not enhance revenue. They hurt the company and union alike. Note that the recent UAW strike was structured in a way that minimized revenue losses.

But Marxists don't get it at all. They think it's all about quibbling over profit. Profit is a sideshow for the workers--it's the revenue that really counts. When it comes to revenue, the workers, the company and the union are all on the same side. Consumers are on the opposite side.

In that light, let's now consider Professor Hoff's five demands on Shawn Fain's union.

1: Build the Fight Against the Far Right

"It is a fool’s errand to believe that we can defeat the nationalist, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, and anti-queer politics of the Far Right by voting," says Professor Hoff. He is correct; it's likely that the "far right" is gonna win the election. Win or lose, any party that can get 70 million+ votes in an election can't really be called "far" or "extremist." They are, in fact, rather mainstream.

Then I'm not sure why you'd want to defeat the "far right." UAW workers manufacture a lot of pickup trucks. Who buys them? Does Professor Hoff own a pickup truck? Almost certainly not because he lives in New York City. The consumers who buy pickup trucks live in suburbs, exurbs and small-towns across America. They live in Trump Country. Indeed, I'll bet a lot more Trump voters own pickup trucks than voters in blue states. Why should the UAW leader purposely diss the majority of his customers? Picking a fight with Trump's voters is definitely not a way to maximize revenue. 

When it comes to maximizing revenue, staying out of politics altogether seems like the best bet.

2: Take the Struggle for a Free Palestine into the Workplaces

Surely you're joking, Professor Hoff? How can slaughtering the world's Jewry increase revenue? Even if you think Hamas doesn't intend to kill everybody, I still don't see how siding with a bunch of murderous, nihilist thugs helps make American workers richer. Siding with Israel also probably won't help any. So just stay out of it, which seems to be what Shawn Fain is doing as best he can. He's right.

3: Take Seriously the Fight for a 32-Hour Work Week and Other Progressive Demands 

You can take it as seriously as you want, but please remember that the company is already maximizing revenue. A 32 hour work week (with 40 hours pay) is a nice idea, but it's not something that's affordable on a 3% profit margin. Prices would have to go up--by a lot. Such a rise in prices will lower revenue, not raise it. The workers (and the company and consumers) will ultimately come out losers. This is a demand--from the textbook on Free Lunch Economics--that only an English PhD ignoramus could love.

4: Bring Back the Political Strike and Dismantle Taft-Hartley

As said, Professor Hoff has never seen a workplace he didn't want to shut down. And they should shut down for totally frivolous reasons. Eg,

But why shouldn’t nurses and teachers, for instance, be able to go on strike to support their brothers and sisters who drive the buses and trains, and why shouldn’t working people be able to strike collectively to demand basic human rights like access to healthcare, higher education, child care, and pensions?

Most teachers (and most nurses through Medicare & Medicaid) are public employees and get paid at the expense of other workers. It's workers, after all, who pay the majority of taxes that covers their salaries. As the professor admits, a solidarity strike by teachers serves only to stuff teachers' own pockets, especially his demand for more higher education funding. We have way more higher education in this country than we need, and I don't see why the average UAW member should be forced to pay for it. They each already pay thousands of dollars in taxes to support the professors' unions.

5. Break from the Two Parties of Capital and Build a Class Independent Union Movement

Spitting into the wind, Professor Hoff writes,

But more than anything else, the first and most important step that the UAW and every union in the country could take right now to strengthen its membership and prepare for the struggles ahead is to finally break with the two parties of capital once and for all.

Our Trotskyist friends and their predecessors have been demanding this ever since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1846. In America it's never happened, and that's because the Marxist model of capitalists and workers permanently locked in a zero-sum fight for profits is just plain wrong.  Workers know that. Workers (real ones--not fake ones like professors) understand that it's revenue that butters their bread, and they're not gonna do anything to stop the flow.

That's why Left Voice only numbers about 50 comrades, and not 50 million.

Further Reading:

• The UAW Strike
  
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
  
• Unions and Work From Home