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