The SWP (and this blog) Goes AWOL

 

Intramuros, Manila, Philippines
(Source)

OK. I give up. On June 28th (my last post on this blog) I wrote--in entirety--as follows:

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) printed a brief summary of the annual Oberlin Conference held June 12th--14th. Billed as an "International Conference," the agenda reads more like a convention, including a "political report" presented by Jack Barnes.

I assume a longer account of the proceedings is forthcoming--I certainly hope so since the banner looks more interesting than usual. I will get to it, but I'm going to be in the Philippines for the next two weeks so there may be a delay. 

I did go to the Philippines (rather idealized stock photo above). I got back from the Philippines. I had a whole slew of medical appointments (that in the end determined that my cancer is now in remission! Hope it stays that way). I've endured treatments for non-cancer ailments that will accompany me on my slow march toward oblivion. I've read every copy of The Militant since, along with checking Left Voice almost daily, along with visits to other blogs on my beat. 

Jack Barnes at the podium

For all that, no "longer account of the proceedings" has come forth. It appears that Terry Evans and Steve Clark--even with indispensable aid from the ever-reliable John Studer--can manage in over two months to write a couple thousand words describing their "international conference." I'm tired of waiting.

They're either a bunch of lazy, incompetent bums, or something else is going on, or some combination of the above. Lazy and/or incompetent could arise from the advanced age of said authors. Comrade Clark could easily be incapacitated--he hasn't looked healthy in recent photos. I don't know how old Comrades Evans and Studer are, but they're surely both over 70. If I'm gonna blame health on my failure to produce a blog post, then surely the same problems must afflict those who are even older.

More consequential would be Comrade Barnes' decrepitude. Here Kremlinology skills come in handy--unfortunately mine don't rise to the challenge. But if Jack is sick, then the future of the whole enterprise is called into question. Jack has been "national secretary" (don't you just love the Stalinist terminology!) since 1972, or 53 years. I think that's at least 43 years too long.

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" is what some French politician allegedly said, suggesting that nobody is indispensable. But for a small Party with a leadership so entrenched and dependent on the wisdom of one guy, then perhaps said Party can't survive the illness of its leader?

Alternative explanations are possible. Perhaps the Party never intended to write anything more. Why? On the one hand they teasingly claim that "2025 is not 2024!", yet on the other their brief recap is boringly predictable. They make three points:

1. Capitalist rulers are building up their militaries.
2. "Jew hatred and deepening imperialist rivalries."
3. “Why the Fight for Women’s Emancipation Is Inseparable from the Class Struggle.”

It's what they don't mention that is noteworthy. Last year the talk of the town was the latest book, entitled The low point of labor resistance is behind us (my review here). It appears that the "low point" is making a comeback. The book is not mentioned at all in the short article.

The second unmentionable was the expression "women's emancipation," which did not occur in last year's report. Yes, they did mention women, but an explicit connection with the so-called "class struggle" was not made. The Party's position on women's issues has changed over the past few years, and it remains very unclear (see, eg, here and here). Perhaps some clarity is forthcoming?

Regards capitalists and their militaries, the brief account is ever so slightly more specific than last year, writing that "[c]apitalist rulers in the U.S. and elsewhere are building up their militaries and looking for allies as they fight to defend and expand their economic and political reach, pushing inexorably toward World War III." So what else is new? Capitalist and non-capitalist countries are always rebuilding their militaries. The Militant's observation is a truism, and does not auger World War III.

The current issue of The Militant sheds rather little light on the matter, except that the paper is declaring yet another week-long holiday next week, presumably to let our comrades recover from their laziness/incompetence and get their heads in gear long enough to produce an article. Or perhaps Comrade Jack is writing a new book!? Who knows.

Otherwise the issue is just boilerplate all over again:

• The lead headline is about the 3-day long Air Canada strike. Here today and gone tomorrow.
• The second headline is the evergreen ‘As crisis of capitalism grows, workers need to take power’. This is the hopelessly unrealistic demand that The Militant has put forth since its founding in 1928--in almost every issue.
• The "Book of the Month" is a piece from the long forgotten leader of the Burkina Faso "revolution" (1983 - 1987) commemorating Che Guevara. Che--a murderous psychopath--had the good sense to get himself killed while he was still handsome enough to decorate dorm rooms. Both revolutions (Burkina Faso's and Cuba's) are/were miserable failures, with the Cubans now mostly living without electricity.
• They still support open borders, championing a mass demonstration back in 2006.

They continue to get some things right. They understand that Hamas wants to kill all the Jews, in an article entitled Support Israel’s fight to stop a new Holocaust! Hamas must be defeated. Far from being "pro-Palestinian," Hamas is just pro-murder.

There's nothing new here. If 2025 really is different from 2024, then The Militant produces no evidence.

Further Reading:

• The Fading Fumes of Trotskyism
• Cosmetics, Cuba & Mary-Alice Waters
• Oberlin, 2024

Oberlin Summary, 2025

 

(Militant/Hilda Cuzco)

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) printed a brief summary of the annual Oberlin Conference held June 12th--14th. Billed as an "International Conference," the agenda reads more like a convention, including a "political report" presented by Jack Barnes, pictured above.

I assume a longer account of the proceedings is forthcoming--I certainly hope so since the banner looks more interesting than usual. I will get to it, but I'm going to be in the Philippines for the next two weeks so there may be a delay.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2024
• Socialism, 2024
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation

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

Oberlin? Mackler? Time Takes Its Toll

It appears that there was no Oberlin Conference this year.

I could be wrong. But here it is--three weeks into July--and there is no report on the Oberlin conference. What's more, I don't recall any previous mention of the conference in recent issues of The Militant. Usually they advertise said conferences in advance, inviting people sympathetic to the Party to attend.

The Party refers to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and said Party has been hosting annual conferences ever since I was a member (beginning in 1969), and then probably for years before that. Those conferences have traditionally occurred on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio--though in 2021 and 2022 they were moved to Wittenberg College. Because of the pandemic, no conference was held in 2020, which would be the only year they've missed in at least 55 years.

Until this year. Or so it seems. Maybe I'm just jumping the gun and next week there will be a full account in The Militant (the Party's newspaper) on the Oberlin Conference. Or maybe the conference has been delayed for some reason and will happen later this Summer, as happened in 2021.

I hope I'm wrong. I'll be happy to eat my words, or eat crow, or whatever it is an ex-comrade has to eat when he gets it wrong--but if the Oberlin conference really didn't happen this year, that would be bad news. My last post was entitled Is Trotskyism Dead?, and it appears it was prescient.

I can only think of three possible reasons why.

First, perhaps the Party's leaders are just too old. The National Secretary (CEO) is Jack Barnes, born in 1940, turns 84 this year. He's served as leader since 1972, or 52 years. That's longer than Stalin (30 years) or Mao Tse-Tung (32 years) reigned as head of their respective Communist Parties. Comrade Barnes has even out-lasted his bff Fidel Castro, who ruled from 1976 to 2008, retiring at the youthful age of 82.

It's pretty obvious that the SWP has a leadership succession problem.

It's not just Mr. Barnes, but the second member of the Troika (my term for the Party's leadership) is Mary-Alice Waters. She, along with Comrade Jack, graduated from Carleton College in the early sixties--whether at the same time or a year or two apart, I don't know--but she is approximately Mr. Barnes' age. Indeed, she's been his lifelong companion--and at least for much of that time his main squeeze. Party leadership apparently runs in the family.

The third member of the Troika (that's why it's called a Troika) is Steve Clark. Comrade Clark is much younger than Comrades Barnes & Waters--indeed, I think he's younger than I am, which suggests he's about 71 or 72.

Oberlin conferences come in two flavors. In most years they are an Educational Conference, held mainly to get comrades together and touch base with the big ideas. In some years they are a Convention (the last one took place in December, 2022) where the Party approves a new program (called the Political Report) and supposedly elects new leadership. I have compiled the attendance at recent Oberlin conferences here.

Either way--whether it is a Political Report or simply a Keynote Speech--Comrade Barnes has to prepare a major presentation. Plus he has to be physically able to travel. I'll suggest that he is no longer able to complete one or both of those tasks, and therefore leadership succession in the Party becomes an urgent issue.

The second possible reason for no conference is that they're running out of money. As commenter John B wrote here, the Party (as of 2023) has only $6 million left from the $20 million horde it got by selling its building. That cash has to subsidize publication of The Militant, along with costs associated with Pathfinder Press.

A third possible reason--depressing in its own way--is that there is nothing to talk about. The median age of our comrades is probably about 70, they've all attended dozens of Oberlin Conferences, and the notion that they somehow require more "education" seems silly. Plus the travel costs are expensive.

The Party is running candidates for US president and vice-president this year--Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter, respectively. They're doing their usual respectable job of campaigning--its obviously on a small scale, but nobody can accuse them of lack of professionalism. They are working to get on the ballot in at least a few states, notably Tennessee and Vermont.

But their program doesn't inspire. Rachele Fruit says it all: ‘Workers need to form our own party, a party of labor’. A true Trotskyist demand is a demand on the bourgeoisie, and not an exhortation to the working class. Beyond saying that the "ruling class" is evil and does not rule in workers' interests, the Party doesn't demand of the rulers to do anything hard or impossible. There is no demand similar to what Trotsky describes in the Transitional Program.

Indeed, their demand is identical to all the other so-called Trotskyist grouplets. Left Voice's lead slogan is The Presidential Debate Showed the Time Is Now to Build a Party that Fights for Immigrant Rights, Workers’ Needs, and Socialism. (With a title like that who needs to read the article?)

If the SWP styles itself as the Vanguard Party, then Jeff Mackler, while nominally the head of the mostly defunct group Socialist Action, stands alone as the vanguard of the proletariat--I call him Vanguard Man.

Vanguard Man ran for president (of the USA) twice, in 2016 and again in 2020. Mr. Mackler is roughly Jack Barnes' age (perhaps a bit older), which means he's older than Joe Biden. And it showed--apart from a brief tour of southern New England there was no further activity. For some reason Mr. Mackler chose to run again in 2020, running a similarly lackadaisical campaign. Indeed, it was a lot like Mr. Biden's campaigning from his basement. I had fun mocking the attempt with headlines like Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again and Jeff Mackler Quits 2020 Race!

Unfortunately my comedic routine won't be repeated this year--Mr. Mackler appears not to be running in 2024. It seems he has health problems--expected of an 84 year-old--and is no longer able to travel very much. Which means the working class is screwed--after all, once Vanguard Man is gone, there will be nobody left to lead the Revolution. The imperialists will win.

As far as I know, Mr. Mackler has not endorsed any other candidate for president. Apparently none of them rise to the class consciousness of our Vanguard Man. After all, having spent 30 years as a California school teacher and living now probably 30 years into retirement receiving a generous pension from the Golden State--Mr. Mackler surely knows what it's like to be a poor, miserable oppressed worker--just like the shlub at Walmart with no health insurance (who's gonna vote for Trump!).

Compared to comrades Mackler, Barnes and Waters, Joe Biden is a spring chicken--a perfect symbol of youth. But it appears that time has caught up to him as well.

The SWP, despite their advancing age (or perhaps because of it) knows better what the real working class is about:

• That civil liberties are important, and an attack on one (Donald Trump) is implicitly an attack on all American workers.
• The murdering all JewsZionists in Israel is not moral, and is certainly not in the best interests of the Palestinian people.
• That Wokeism is not an ideology that benefits the working class, but instead is a set of Orwellian language and practices mandated by the petty bourgeois, academic elite.

So I'll forgive them their rather silly campaign slogan.

Further Reading:

• The SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign
  
• The SWIP Flips to SWOP
  
• The Decline of American Trotskyism
  

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!

 

Socialist Action's Political Report

Vanguard Man (source)

Socialist Action (SA) split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) back in 1983. It has been helmed by Jeff Mackler since its founding. He was SA's presidential candidate for both the 2016 and 2020 elections, running failed and unprofessional campaigns on both occasions. The man is 82 or 83 years old. It remains to be seen if he'll be the SA's candidate in 2024.

In 2019 SA underwent a split, with a large number (perhaps even a majority) of its members leaving. Notably, the very talented editor of their newspaper, Michael Schreiber, was among the leavers, as was Mr. Mackler's vice presidential running mate, Heather Bradford. How humiliating!

Some of the splitters went on to form the new and short-lived Socialist Resurgence movement. Other leaders of SA, e.g., Erwin Freed and Ernie Gotta (frequent coauthors), formed the core nucleus.

In 2022, Socialist Resurgence merged with a group called Workers' Voice with the new group assuming the latter name. This was hailed as an historic event, which I described as

The "two historic divisions" represent two versions of the Fourth International (FI): that of the United Secretariat, which purports to be the original FI, and the International Workers' League-Fourth International  (IWL-FI), which claims a mission to "reconstruct" the original FI. (A more useless mission is hard to imagine.)

So Mr. Mackler remains leader of SA's remnant husk, which I suggest is now down to about two dozen members. Since the first of the year their webpage has posted four (4!) articles--three of which are by Jeff Mackler, and one by that old Pol Pot supporter, Barry Sheppard. Apparently, apart from Mr. Mackler, nobody with any literary skills remains in the sect. Going back further in time, besides Mr. Mackler the website contains articles by others cribbed off the web. Only Marty Goodman, an SA comrade, occasionally contributes content.

Nevertheless, the "Party" held a convention last November. Insofar as it wasn't a Zoom meeting, it likely took place in Mr. Mackler's living room. The conclave issued a document: Fighting for the Socialist Future Today: Socialist Action Political Resolution. We're told that "[t]he following resolution was approved by Socialist Action’s 20th National Convention in November 2022." Approved it may have been, but the author is undoubtedly Mr. Mackler himself--so I'll give him credit here and not let him hide behind a Zoom meeting fig leaf.

I've taken to calling Mr. Mackler the "Vanguard Man." Normally, in Trotsky-talk, one speaks of the "Vanguard Party," which organization is the custodian of revolutionary tradition and which aspires to lead us toward a socialist utopia. But SA is so small and so depleted of talent that this awesome responsibility now rests on the shoulders of one octogenarian man: Jeff Mackler. Pity the poor proletariat, whose future hangs on such a thin reed.

Anyway, Mr. Mackler is a good writer, and that's the only reason I keep reading this stuff. But in this case he falls down on the job. There are too many typos, e.g., he writes "...right of return of all disposed Palestinians... ." Disposed is obviously the wrong word; perhaps he means dispossessed or dispersed? Not sure. Compare, e.g., with the SWP Political Report that I recently reviewed, in which I didn't find a single typo. It's not a big deal, but it indicates that the talent stack at SA is too small to support a proofreader.

The report is 15,000 words long, or the same length as the SWP's. I'll confess I skimmed through parts of it--much of it doesn't interest me, though perhaps that says more about me than Mr. Mackler.

The document discusses two big issues and several less important ones. The big issues concern "imperialism," especially the American variety, and then "[t]he global warming climate catastrophe."

Mr. Mackler subscribes to a theory known as campism, which I have dubbed American Brezhnevism. That post explains what that means in more detail, but briefly, campism maintains that the chief villain in the world is something called "American imperialism." We're never told what that is or how that operates, but it is apparently responsible for every war casualty anywhere in the world today. Mr. Mackler, for example, blames "American imperialism" for all the war deaths in Syria, and then also in Ukraine. Nobody else is responsible for anything. 

Because of "American imperialism," it is necessary for Vanguard Man to support any and all opponents of said imperialism, no matter how vile. Thus Mr. Mackler lends support to Assad in Syria,  Putin in Russia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is, of course, exactly the same argument that Barry Sheppard made in supporting Pol Pot and his murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia--no wonder Mr. Sheppard is an avid contributor to SA's webpage. However evil those regimes are, they're a lesser evil compared to "American imperialism."

To my mind, it's all a giant conspiracy theory. "American imperialism" does not exist in reality and is present only as a figment of Vanguard Man's overheated imagination.

Mr. Mackler is also a leader of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). Actually, it's not antiwar, but instead pro-war on the other side. They're rooting for Assad, Putin, the Taliban, Kim Jong-un, and China's Xi. Obviously this is not a popular position in the United States, especially since most sane people realize that "American imperialism" doesn't even exist.

Here is something funny. Vanguard Man admits that

With the exception of revolutionary Cuba, a healthy workers state with some inevitable bureaucratic distortions, there are no deformed or degenerated workers’ states in the world today.*

So, but for Cuba, we're all capitalist, imperialist running-dogs these days, the most evil of whom deserve support from those opposed to "American imperialism." But the humor comes from the asterisk, which footnote states,

*Tentative statement pending NC/PC discussion in the class nature of North Korea

As Shakespeare says, "uneasy is the head that wears a crown." Vanguard Man has a weighty decision to make: Is N. Korea a deformed workers' state, or instead only another imperialist, capitalist running-dog? The fate of the global proletariat depends on his answer.

Or not. Vanguard Man will support the Norks over the United States regardless of what their "class character" supposedly is.

I can't let Mr. Mackler's obvious antisemitism pass unremarked. He does say that "Anti-Zionism Is NOT Anti-Semitism." This is true--but the near-converse statement is also true: anti-Semites are always anti-Zionist. Thus anti-Zionism is an unprincipled coalition between those who support a constructive Palestinian nationalism, and those who simply hate the Jews. Vanguard Man is in that latter category because of his "...recognition of the illegitimacy of the racist, Zionist, colonial settler, apartheid state of Israel is today widespread, ..." Nobody but an antisemite could talk about Israel in such angry, vituperative terms. If he really were merely anti-Zionist, he'd use more conciliatory language.

The second big issue is climate change, where he opines:

Here, despite the uncontested facts, the world’s major powers press on to increase fossil fuel production in the face of ever-intensifying killer heat waves, deadly floods and hurricanes, inundation of low lying land masses, drying up and poisoning of major water supplies – all accompanied by unprecedented environmental destruction across the board. Forests are decimated, oceans and rivers are irreversibly polluted, air is poisoned, nature is torn asunder, with no end in sight. 2,000 people died in a single week from the recent heat wave in Spain and Portugal alone! All of the above are the undeniable reality everywhere.

This is just nonsense on stilts. He's cherry-picked random factoids that add up to nothing. He obviously knows nothing about science or scientists. Any legit climate scientist of whatever persuasion will be ashamed to be associated with our Vanguard Man.

I'm not a climate scientist, but I've spent my career as a professor of chemistry with a special interest in thermodynamics. So while I claim no expertise in climate science, I know a hell of a lot more than Vanguard Man. Which isn't hard, because he knows zilch.

The rest of the Report is about topics that are either irrelevant or unimportant: abortion, LGBTQIA+ rights, "Latinx" issues, etc. I don't have time or space, so see the links below if you're interested.

Further Reading:

• American Rights and Trans Rights
• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Cuba Needs More Communism!

Book Review: The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us

Authored by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark, The low point of labor resistance is behind us is the political report adopted by the 49th Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), held on December 12th, 2022. The authors (whom I've dubbed the "Troika") are the long-time (going on five decades now) leaders of the Party. Comrades Barnes and Waters are over 80, while comrade Clark is about 70.

The premise is that the union movement has reached bottom, and because of economic misery workers are becoming more militant and more likely to organize and rebel. This, if true, will reverse a decades long trend that began in the 1970s.

Except I don't think it's true. Just today, in an editorial, the WSJ writes

Union members made up only 10.1% of the workforce last year, down from 10.3% in 2021, according to data released recently by the Labor Department. For a long time the prototypical union shop hasn’t been a private steel plant but a public school, yet the unionized share of government employees also fell.

Though the annual changes look small, they add up: The workforce in 2012 was 11.3% unionized, and in 2002 it was 13.3%. Organized labor hasn’t been able to stop the trend, despite frantic unionization drives, including many aimed at nontraditional members, such as the university graduate students who march under the United Auto Workers banner. Private workers are 6% unionized, down from 8.6% two decades ago. For public workers, it’s 33.1%, down from 37.3%.

Last week ZeroHedge reported similar statistics, along with this rather depressing gem:

The most unionized occupations are public safety (34.6%) and education (33.7%). The lowest are sales (3.0%) and computer and math jobs (3.3%). 

Bad news for Trotskyists, who don't consider cops to be part of the working class.

The Troika might concede that union membership hasn't yet recovered, but they'd insist that the trajectory has changed. Unions, they'd claim, are becoming more militant and better organized, which will be reflected in the overall statistics soon enough. They provide no data for that belief, but are concentrating their efforts in two unions: the bakery workers (BCTGM) and the rail workers. Among the bakery workers, 160 of them have gone on strike in recent months (120 at Ingredion, 40 at Corn Nuts). Both strikes have been settled. This does not auger a surge in labor activism.

The fact is that unions are increasingly irrelevant. There is a serious labor shortage for workers in blue collar professions, and those employees are getting raises. For example, Walmart recently raised starting salaries across the board from $12 to $14 per hour. That's a near 17% raise, for which no strike was required. They're doing this because they need the workers.

The Report consists of 27 sections, ranging in length from a paragraph to a page or two, organized within four chapters. The whole document (not counting prefatory material or illustrations) is about 60 pages long, or approximately 15,000 words. I read it in about three hours.

The first chapter is entitled Opposing US rulers' assaults on freedoms protected by the Constitution and their use of the political police. It describes in detail the unconstitutional persecution of Donald Trump and so-called "MAGA Republicans" by "the government's political police, first and foremost the FBI." It must be noted that the Party has had its own run-ins with the FBI before, notably the COINTELPRO lawsuit in which the Party won $264,000 in damages. Opposing the FBI is consistent with Party history, as the Report discusses at some length.

More, the Party notes that a majority of blue collar workers voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. Trump earned the vote of record numbers of Hispanics and Blacks (though the latter was still a small percentage). Therefore supporting civil rights in this case is in solidarity with the people whom they hope to represent. They cast themselves as being on the side of the "deplorables" and the "bitter clingers."

In their defense, the Report cites Leon Trotsky himself:

"Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppressions of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements."

They are also very clear about who their opponents are.

Democrats, liberals, the "left," and "woke," so-called social justice warriors--not rightist or other reactionary forces--have led the assault against constitutional protections and freedoms in recent decades.

Trotskyists have always opposed the Democratic Party and all it stands for. The Report strongly reiterates that position.

While standing up for civil rights, the Report does not explicitly make clear their opposition to Trump and the Republican Party as agents of the bourgeoisie. Trump's name is mentioned in the Report only in passing, and the Republicans are not mentioned at all. This may lead to some confusion as to whether the Party still is part of the Left. I think they unambiguously are, but the Report would be better if they made that case explicitly.

The second chapter is entitled Capitalism's erosion of the family and the working-class road to women's emancipation. This includes some standard boilerplate:

Central to any communist program is a union-led fight for employment, with wage rates, work schedules, and job conditions necessary for families to live. ...

Jobs, not dependence on welfare programs, open a road forward. ...

Class-conscious workers call for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, with regular hours.

So they're in favor of full employment, but then, after all that, they come out in favor of a comprehensive welfare program: "What is needed is a floor for all families--an income that's sufficient for workers..." to pay for all the bennies. The standard label for such a policy is universal basic income, and was championed by Andrew Yang in 2020.

The weirdest part of the Report concerns abortion. They claim that (boldface mine)

...we fight for women's right to reproductive and maternal health care, sex education (not gender indoctrination), as well as access to the safest and most reliable contraceptive methods and safe and legal abortion.

There is then a long section on how they supported Roe v Wade back in the 1970s, but have now come to regret that choice. The argument isn't entirely convincing. Summarizing in my own words, Roe v Wade short-circuited a national debate on abortion, depriving the working class of an opportunity to come to a decision on their own.

What the current Supreme Court has done, in the Dobbs v Jackson ruling, is simply return decisions about abortion to people in the individual states. They didn't rule on abortion one way or the other. The Party supports this move, and assumes that abortion will eventually be legal everywhere.

But now comes the truly mysterious part (in section 15; boldface mine):

The Socialist Workers Party unconditionally supports the decriminalization of abortion and joins others in fighting for it.

Decriminalization? Why that instead of legalization, as suggested in the prior quote? There is a difference, I suppose, but we're never told what it is.

A hint might be this:

...our communist program has nothing in common with bourgeois and middle-class forces--whether feminists, or campaigners for population control--who in fact advocate abortion as a means of contraception. We reject the pseudoscientific views of those who deny that the issue of human life, a profound moral question for all working people, is always involved in abortion decisions and procedures.

That second sentence is a bit hard to follow because of the double negative (...reject...deny...). It could be more simply written, but I think the mealy-mouthedness is on purpose.

I interpret the Party's position as pro-natalist, i.e., they want workers to have more babies. I think they're right--I describe myself using that word (and not just for workers). It's hard to square pro-natalism with unequivocal support for birth control and abortion. Therefore they equivocate.

The third chapter is entitled The Cuban socialist revolution and our communist continuity. It's much shorter than the first two, and in my opinion is completely wrong. Indeed, I think the Party's whole international analysis is wrong--I'll refer readers to books by Peter Zeihan for a clearer understanding. I'm going to skip over that here.

The fourth chapter--shortest of all--is Forging a proletarian party and educating its cadre. They claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that

The SWP is forging a proletarian party in the United States--a revolutionary political instrument of the working class, whose purpose, as our constitution asserts...is "to educate and organize the working class in order to establish a workers and farmers government, which will abolish capitalism in the United States and join in the worldwide struggle for socialism."

That's a tall order for a Party of about a hundred souls, with an average age in the 60s. The majority of comrades are at or nearing retirement age. Their current leading spokeswoman is Ilona Gersh, who is in her mid-seventies. The leaders are a pair of octogenarians.

What I am most disappointed with is that the Party has not brought in new, younger leadership. While I don't support the Party's goal of revolution and socialism, I have no fear of that ever happening even in my grandchildren's lifetime. But I'm sentimentally attached to my former comrades, and I want the Party to continue to exist. Having the same leadership for 50 years is not healthy. Presuming that the organization will have a meaningful voice when lead by octogenarians is fanciful.

I don't think Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, or Steve Clark are serious about the World Revolution. They're just concerned for their own sinecures--and what happens after that let the devil take the hindmost.

I enjoyed reading the Report. It's well written, entertaining, and not too long. The illustrations are silly--they're mostly pictures of people standing around holding placards, such as shown on the front cover. But the book is professionally produced. I didn't find any typos--if there are some in what I've quoted here, they are mine. Apologies in advance.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2017 (about the 48th Convention)
• Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks
• Has the SWP Moved Right? Or the Republicans Left?

 

Brief Comments on SWP Convention

From the article entitled The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us, by Mary-Alice Waters, we learn that

The heart of the book, from which the title is taken, is the political resolution adopted December 12, 2022, by the 49th Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party. It sets forth the course of action that has guided the party’s work and will continue to do so — the course necessary today to forge mass proletarian parties and an international communist movement able to lead the struggle to end capitalist rule.

I have ordered said book--just published--and am told by the USPS that it will arrive on Jan 30th. I will comment substantively on the political content of the report after I've read it. Parenthetically, Pathfinder is a very professional organization. Ordering was a snap. My only complaint was that shipping charges were very high. (I usually buy my books used on Amazon, or better yet, on Kindle.)

Regards specifics, we don't know where the convention was held (I suggest it was a Zoom meeting), how long it lasted (perhaps over a weekend; 12/12 was a Monday), or how many people were present. It was clearly for members only (true Worker-Bolsheviks). The size of the Party is likely between 100 and 120. Given that conventions are delegated (in my time it was one delegate per five comrades), likely 30-odd people had speaking privileges. The remaining 90 or so comrades could listen in. A Zoom call (or slightly more sophisticated software) would work fine.

I'm very disappointed that there is no hint of a change in leadership. The octogenarian troika will not be able "to forge mass proletarian parties and an international communist movement able to lead the struggle to end capitalist rule." Even worse, the Party is very (small-c) conservative, and has reverted to an ancient, timeworn version of Trotskyism. It will not attract a younger generation. I'll likely have more to say about this after reading the book.

I wish they'd also publish the Organizational Report. I'd like to know how the Party intends to change its tactics. (I suspect there will be no changes.)

Commenter Andrew Chebuhar helpfully links to two Youtube videos starring SWP comrades (Koppel and Britton, plus his own comment here). They're too long for me to listen to them all, but I did partake of the talk by Joel Britton (beginning at 13:47). I recall Comrade Britton as speaking very deliberately, and the intervening 50 years hasn't speeded him up any. But his remarks are brief and his point is clear, so it's worth listening to. But I can read 20x faster than he can talk, so I'll just wait for the book.

The SWP looks doomed. I'll probably die before they do, but it will be a close-run thing.

Further Reading:

• Wittenberg, 2022
• Wittenberg, 2021
• Oberlin, 2019

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Convention

The much touted (at least on this blog) Socialist Workers Party (SWP) Convention supposedly scheduled for this past December has yet to be reported on in The Militant. What gives?

Of course I don't know. I'm sure my former friends and comrades are laughing at me as I employ my best Kremlinological skills to divine an answer--when to them it must seem so obvious. My shame is magnified because I'm not a reporter--all I know is what I read in the newspapers, though now between the lines.

Some possibilities come to mind:

1)    The convention never happened. It was announced once:

The SWP will hold a December convention, Barnes said. Based on discussion by the membership of material prepared by the party leadership, branches will choose delegates to debate and decide the party’s course and next steps, and to elect a National Committee.

As far as I know there was no further public mention of said convention. So perhaps they changed their mind and decided not to hold it?

Evidence against this option: The Militant took a weird two-week break in early December, 2022. Their last issue of the year was dated Dec. 12th, while the next issue was dated Jan. 2nd, 2023. Recall that issues are post-dated 11 days after publication, so the corresponding print dates are Dec. 1 and Dec. 22, 2022. In other words, they worked over the holidays while supposedly holding a convention in early December. By comparison, in 2021 The Militant published all four issues in December.

If the convention never happened, then why the strange publication schedule?

2)    The convention was so routine and so boring that there is no point in even reporting on it. I don't believe that. John Studer and Terry Evans can turn out boilerplate in about five minutes--all they'd have to do is cut and paste from prior conference reports.

3)    In a comment I made the off-hand suggestion that there may have been a split. To which commenter John B replied 

A normal organization might be due for a split, but I think Jack's slack-jawed followers are too tired and worn out for that. 

He's certainly right that a split is very unlikely, but I'd dispute the cause as "tired and worn out." I think it's because comrades are way too much emotionally invested in the movement--they've been in it for 50 years--and they're not gonna abandon it for what is, in the end, some relatively trivial theological dispute.

4)    The topics under debate were not resolved during the December conclave, and so a follow-up meeting is occurring now, as I write this. The Militant is currently on another publishing pause: the Jan. 16 issue was posted online yesterday, the Jan. 23 issue will be skipped, and the next edition will be dated Jan. 30. For reference, the missed issue would have been mailed Jan 12, which means they could easily be holding a convention right now. Or perhaps it's just a National Committee meeting--which given the small membership is virtually the same thing.

5)    Related to the above, the only topic I can imagine that could engender such discord is a leadership transition. I admit that I'm hoping that's what's going on. The Party cannot long survive with octogenarian leaders, and unless they can replace them with younger people the whole enterprise is toast. (See, e.g., Jeff Mackler.) While I certainly don't share the SWP's politics, I'm still happy the Party is still around (it's completely harmless), and I sincerely hope that it outlives me.

There are some other tea leaves in the mix. First, The Militant is making a big deal about Ilona Gersh's campaign for Chicago mayor. Not only is there the piece I discussed last week, but a longer, subsequent post--with a better picture. (Also, many mentions in other articles.) Her key campaign demand is

The SWP says we need a labor party, based on our unions. A labor party would be an instrument to advance working-class struggles, and point the road for working people to take political power into our own hands and establish a workers and farmers government.

This is odd because it's a demand on the working class--and not the ruling class. It doesn't follow Trotsky's transitional program strategy.

Finally, The Militant announced a change in its editorial staff.

Joining the full-time Militant writing staff is Vivian Sahner, a member of the Socialist Workers Party branch in Northern New Jersey. Sahner was the 2021 SWP candidate for lieutenant governor in New Jersey while part of the party’s national trade union fraction at Walmart.

The editorial staff listed in the Dec. 12th print edition is

Editor: John Studer

Managing Editor: Terry Evans

Editorial volunteers: Róger Calero, Seth Galinsky, Emma Johnson, Martín Koppel, Roy Landersen, Jacob Perasso, Brian Williams. 

The staff listed in the Jan. 16th print edition is

Editor: John Studer

Managing Editor: Terry Evans

Editorial volunteers: Róger Calero, Seth Galinsky, Martín Koppel, Roy Landersen, Jacob Perasso, Vivian Sahner, Brian Williams. 

Ms. Sahner appears to have replaced Emma Johnson, maintaining female representation on the panel at one. I believe "Roy Landersen" is a pseudonym for Brian Williams. "Terry Evans" also looks to be a pseudonym--and I'm suggesting that's also for Brian Williams.

The staff listed on-line differs from either of these. It doesn't appear to have been updated, and doesn't include "Roy Landersen."

If there is any significance to this, it escapes me.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the SWP
• The SWP by the Numbers
• Wittenberg, 2021

Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks

The inspiration for this post comes from Left Voice (LV) with an article entitled Labor Notes 2022: Which Way Forward for the Movement?. It was written by a team of Left Voice journalists who attended the Labor Notes 2022 conference, held in Chicago June 17th-19th. 

The article led me to the Labor Notes webpage, and specifically the page reporting on the conference, which contains numerous videos of the proceedings. Most interesting to me was the panel discussion by people who organized the first Starbucks union--I listened to about an hour of the 95 minute video.

The LV journalists describe the conference this way:

It is in [today's] context that the biggest Labor Notes conference ever began today in Chicago. More than 4,000 workers, unionists, activists, labor journalists, and scholars are coming together to debate the strategies and tactics for taking the labor movement forward.

I'm don't think this is entirely accurate--at least based on the portions of the plenary sessions that I watched. Very little debate of "strategies and tactics" took place. Instead there was music, poetry, chanting and inspirational speeches. It had more the feeling of religious revival than any kind of serious discussion. Like a revival, the purpose was group solidarity, a sense of belonging, and a sense of purpose. In this it very much succeeded.

The breakout sessions were more substantive, but even there the word "debate" doesn't really fit. Sharing is a better descriptor. The Starbucks breakout (which is the only one I listened to at length) was show and tell from start to finish. The LV authors report that "...the socialist Left is banned from even handing out pamphlets or newspapers at the event, ..." suggests that debate was never on the agenda.

So here are my impressions of the Starbucks union organizers.

But for one older gentleman (who looked to be about 50, and who was the only person I saw wearing a wedding ring) the others were in their 20s or early 30s. One lady informed us of her pronoun, but the others all looked very normal and heterosexual. The youngest was a lady who started at Starbucks at age 17 and got fired--she is likely now about 20, or perhaps not even that old.

These people LOVE Starbucks. They refer to each other by the corporate lingo, i.e., as "partners." It seems like they buy the Starbucks' Mission and Values statements lock, stock and barrel. They like their customers, they're proud of where they work, and one bragged about the fancy drinks he'd learned to make. It's all very endearing.

Starbucks apparently has a serious management problem. The partners complained that their stores had cycled through a sequence of unsuccessful managers--as many as four or five in a year. This made it difficult for them to do their jobs, and more importantly, impossible to live the Starbucks Dream.

I have criticized unions for adding an extra layer of management to a business, and thereby adding to expenses without improving the customer's experience. But in this case that appears less true. These partners seem more interested in competent management than anything else, and if the company can't provide it they'll try to do it themselves. It won't work, but one can't blame them for trying.

If there's an enemy, it's nobody in the store, but district managers are frequently blamed, and probably with some justification.

I think these partners love Starbucks too much! They regard the company as a family, and as such it's supposed to take care of personal problems. For example, the very young lady mentioned above got fired because she had medical issues and also wanted time off to go to school. The company agreed to keep her on, but demanded that she demote herself and take a pay cut. For a company this is a very reasonable request. But it's not something that a family would insist upon--their favors are dispensed unconditionally. The woman's irresolvable dispute with Starbucks was that they refused to treat her like family member.

In a nutshell, these partners expect way too much from Starbucks. It's not just a workplace, but it's a way of life, a cause, a home, a place that's supposed to love you. To be fair, the Mission and Values seem to promise as much, but in fact there is no way a customer-driven company can meet those expectations from its employees.

It seems to me (and this is very speculative) that the union organizers have no personal life outside of Starbucks. They're not married (apart from the old guy), they have no children, and perhaps they're estranged from their parents. They're not members of a church or involved in other extracurricular that would give their lives meaning beyond the workplace.

The union is not being organized because of low salaries or poor working conditions (though too much overtime was a complaint). Instead the union is needed because the partners aren't getting enough love. They want to be loved and appreciated. And the messenger of that love should, by all rights, be the store manager--who because of the high turnover rate is effectively not there.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone

Failing that, let's all go on strike.

Which brings us back to the article in LV. They write (links omitted)

While labor unions and other organizations of working people have enormous power to fight both the exploitation and oppression of capitalism, the state is always seeking to co-opt, limit, and control that power. And the Democratic Party is one of the main weapons of the ruling class in this process. Unfortunately, both the traditional bureaucracy and the so-called independent unions have ties to the establishment or progressive wings of the Democratic Party. Our union leaders use our dues to campaign for and support Democratic politicians and almost never consult us, except in the most obligatory ways, when endorsing candidates. And those candidates, even when they claim to care about working people, always support U.S. capitalism and almost always endorse war and imperialism abroad.

In light of the video of Starbucks union organizers telling their story in their own words--this seems all fantastically irrelevant. The partners aren't worried about the "exploitation and oppression of capitalism." Quite the contrary--they want to work at Starbucks for a long time, and the last thing they want is for the stores to close and/or the company to go bankrupt. They're definitely not revolutionaries!

The partners don't care about the class nature of the Democratic Party. Most of them are probably Democrats themselves, and in any case it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference.

The LV authors fret about "imperialism." It's a meaningless term, and it has zero relevance to anything that happens at Starbucks. 

In a word, Left Voice lives on a completely different planet from the partners at Starbucks. The latter are sane and honest people who work hard and towards whom I have considerable sympathy. The former are a bunch of overpaid, petty bourgeois college professors.

PS--When I was their age I was a member of and 100% committed to the Socialist Workers Party. That was far less constructive than our partners' 100% reliance on Starbucks for their life's meaning. But I'd advise them (based on my experience) to get a life--that is, do something important that's not part of Starbucks. The best is to get married and have children--nobody will ever love you more than your children. And hopefully you'll eventually have some grandchildren. Failing that, join a church, or a bowling league, or a Friday night poker club. Do something that gives your life structure and meaning that doesn't depend on Starbucks.

Further Reading:

• Lost in the Amazon
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• Unionizing Hotels

A Tale of Two Conferences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Sterling describes the proceedings this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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