Left Voice and the SWP

The personal is political.

That adage is taken to heart by Maryam Alaniz, a correspondent for Left Voice. In a speech she gave to Mexican comrades entitled Trotsky’s Legacy Today: Class Struggle, the Left, and the Need for a Revolutionary Party she shares much about her personal history. Her byline states that

Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist, and PhD student living in NYC. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice.

In the text she identifies herself as a "young worker," though we are not told what "work" she actually does. Is she a truck driver?--in imitation of workers in the 1930s who founded the Teamsters Union, ably aided by the Trotskyist Farrell Dobbs (whose books about the event are still worth reading). Or perhaps she works at Walmart, or Starbucks, or in an Amazon warehouse? Those are all honest jobs done by hardworking people.

But I'll hazard that she doesn't work at anything like that. (If she did she would have told us.) No, Ms. Alaniz is an intellectual and she's much too smart and too valuable to waste her time on honest day's labor. Instead, her role as a "grad student" likely earns her a small income as a teaching or research assistant, or perhaps she's an adjunct professor somewhere. To her this must seem like "work," but it isn't really. What it really is is a claim on a government paycheck--otherwise known as "welfare." In a word, our young lady friend is a grifter.

One does hope--at very least--that her graduate studies are in something useful, like computer science or engineering, or nursing. Something that would enable her to earn an honest living. Again, if that were true I think she would've told us. So I surmise that she studies something utterly useless, such as education or women's studies. The former is just a redoubt for over-the-hill Leftists who can't do anything else, while the latter is propaganda thinly disguised as "scholarship." These topics (and many others) will at best earn her a government paycheck--more grifting--but have no purchase in the marketplace where people voluntarily pay for useful services. Because these services are not useful.

She claims to be a "young" worker, but from her speech I infer she's in her early thirties. That's really too old to still be going to school! She's on the verge of declaring final vows as a Sister in the Convent of the Perpetual Student. These are women who, in their quest for ever more education, take lifelong vows of poverty and chastity infertility. They'll never get married and they'll never have children. And worse--they'll never have grandchildren. 

But I do hope that her parents are proud of her.

I don't know what Ms. Alaniz looks like today, but let me speculate on what she'll look like 35 years from now.

SWP Oberlin Conference Attendees (Photo credit: Mike Shur; The Militant)

I suggest that one of those ladies in the foreground is a spitting image of Ms. Alaniz in the year 2057--a grandma-aged woman who doesn't have any grandchildren, and who spends her free time applauding Jack Barnes' speeches.

The picture was taken at the 2019 Oberlin conference--the annual confab held by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Which is fitting, because the topic of our lady comrade's speech was the task of rebuilding a Trotskyist party today.

From the experience of the Minneapolis and Toledo strikes and at Trotsky’s urging, the American Workers Party emerged in 1934 as a result of a fusion between the Communist League of America and the Workers Party of America. A year later, in 1935, Trotsky helped lead a political struggle within the American Workers Party to have a special tactic toward the new workers and youth of the American Socialist Party, who had been radicalized by international events such as the rise of fascism. The Socialist Workers Party emerged from this experience in 1936. 

Me and my comrades in Left Voice hope to place ourselves within this tradition of struggle in the Trotskyist movement and aim to play a role in engaging and fusing with the most revolutionary elements of the most dynamic phenomena today, making common experiences in class struggle and leading political struggles, using our website as a tool to do so, to reach the sectors we are in dialogue with – left youth, workers, and the oppressed – beyond our forces alone.

Which raises several questions. First, why doesn't she join the existing SWP? One reason is obvious--she's way too young (or they're too old). But that's a social reason, not a political one. Indeed, it's plausible that old people know more about politics than she does and she might learn something.

Second, why bother rebuilding Trotskyism? It didn't work in the 1930s. It didn't work in the 1970s, when the SWP membership was at its apogee, and when I was a member. It has never worked anywhere in the world--ever. It didn't even work during the Russian Revolution! If anything is a proven failure in politics, it's Trotskyism.

Third--and probably most important--is I doubt the SWP would accept her as a member. The Party adamantly opposes the Democratic Party as being agents of the bourgeoisie. This is very much unlike Ms. Alaniz, who despite her professed opposition nevertheless supports every talking point mouthed by any progressive Democrat anywhere--including Bernie Sanders. In other words, she can talk the Trotsky talk--but she can't walk the Trotsky walk. Her political program--from climate catastrophism to supporting the (fascist) BLM movement to outright antisemitism--is straight out of the Democrat Party/Davos playbook.

The real Trotskyists--best represented by today's SWP--realize that 63% of America's white working class (defined as white voters without a college degree) voted for Trump in 2020, as did 37% of Hispanic voters and 10% of Black voters. The latter two numbers are at record high for any Republican candidate--though it also shows that Blacks are somewhat weak in the class solidarity department.

If the working class--I mean the real working class and not the grifters getting a government welfare check--in their majority voted for Trump, then that tells you something about Trump. He's saying something that resonates with the proletariat. The grifters, of course, just like their friends in the Democratic Party, claim that American workers are all racists, homophobes, sexists and deplorables. Only the grifters understand, as does Ms. Alaniz, that the only way to become an anti-racist is to get a PhD in some completely useless subject.

So what's different about the SWP that distinguishes them from all the other so-called Trotskyist grouplets in the country? After all, like me, all those baby boomers who joined the Party in the '70s were recruited off college campuses. We all aspired to be grifters (and a few of us, like me, succeeded). But the grifter wannabes all gradually dropped out or were expelled. What's left are a group of people who sacrificed marriage, family, close friends outside the Party, and a stable life so that they could take jobs at Walmart, in meatpacking plants, in factories, and at Amazon. Whatever their petty bourgeois roots may have been in 1975, spending 45 years in low-wage, boring jobs will turn anyone into a proletarian. (The fact that they donated much of their income to Jack Barnes is a sad story for another day.)

The SWP understands the working class in a way that grifter-wannabe Maryam Alaniz never will. But all is not lost. If she really, really wants to be a Trotskyist, she'll join the Socialist Workers Party.

I don't recommend that. But please--stop being a grifter and build a real career that can earn you an honest living. And get married and have children--so that your parents can have some grandchildren, and so that you can also eventually have some grandchildren.

Don't waste your life on Trotskyism. Remember--Darwin rules. The people who have grandchildren will determine the future.

Note: This is my 400th post since the inception of this blog on December 6th, 2012.

Further Reading:

• James P. Cannon Was Spectacularly Wrong
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• Keith Leslie's International Report