The General Strike Fizzles

(Source)

 ‘Twas the Strike before Christmas, when all through the land,
   the workers were stirring, on strike to take a stand…

Madeleine Freeman

The optimism was palpable. Just days before Christmas workers at both Amazon and Starbucks went on strike, along with activist rumblings from students at CUNY. The working class was stirred. The game was afoot. Jeff Bezos would get his comeuppance after all. Left Voice author Madeleine Freeman expressed her high hopes in an article entitled Generation U Raises Its Head with a Roar. Her lede paragraphs (links omitted):

The working class is making history. 

In the middle of the holiday rush and massive profits for big business, Starbucks workers have just joined Amazon workers and gone on strike against one of the largest corporations in the country. Hundreds of workers are rising up against these union-busting companies who refuse to negotiate contracts that would guarantee real wage increases, job protections, and other much-need improvements to working conditions. Amazon and Starbucks workers, who have been at the forefront of a new wave of labor organizing amongst precarious sectors of workers in recent years, have had enough. 

The enthusiasm was echoed by three authors (Pola Posen, Jimena Vergara and James Dennis Hoff) in an article entitled Essential Workers at Amazon Are Rising Up for the Whole Working Class. Professor Hoff, in particular, is a leading spokesman for what I call the Shutdown Caucus--which believes that all workplaces should be shut down immediately, and stay shut down until the bourgeoisie coughs up it's (hypothetical and largely imaginary) trillions in gold coins.

He and his co-authors write:

On Thursday, December 19, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers at several distribution centers across the country began walking off the job in the middle of the holiday rush to protest low wages, awful working conditions, and the corporate giant’s ongoing refusal to recognize or to negotiate with the more than 10,000 workers who have formed local Amazon unions since 2022. ...

This strike is by far the most important labor action by the ALU since the workers at JFK8 formed their independent union in 2021. That first victory against Amazon was a shot heard ‘round the world, and these strikes show that the fighting spirit of that struggle lives on. These workers — many of whom are some of the most exploited and oppressed in the country, including people of color and immigrants often living on the edge of poverty — are facing off against one of the most powerful and ruthless corporations on the planet. 

The inaccuracies abound. First, Amazon claims a US workforce of about 1.1 million, so even at face value the number of strikers is trivial--less than 1%. And worse, Amazon doesn't count the drivers as employees, but rather as employees of contractors. The contractors collectively employ about 400,000 drivers, of which only 10,000 are Teamsters. Since the drivers do not work for Amazon (claims the company), the company disputes any necessity to negotiate with their union.

So the strike did not primarily involve the ALU (newly formed Amazon Labor Union). According to Alex Findijs, participation by the ALU in the walkout was minimus. He writes 

The Teamsters claims 5,500 members at JFK8 but did not report on how many workers had joined the picket lines. A reporting team from the WSWS last Saturday found the warehouse operating normally, with a small picket outside dominated by union officials.

(WSWS refers to the World Socialist Web Site, published by yet another Trotskyist grouplet whose history I have not followed. But the article by Mr. Findijs seems reasonably factual.) 

Speaking from my own personal experience, the packages I ordered from Amazon all arrived as scheduled. The strike was a dud.

Professor Hoff, et al, claim that "...founder, Jeff Bezos, made $48 billion off of Amazon workers in the first three months of the pandemic..." I have been unable to reproduce this figure. The closest I can come is this article from CNBC,  where author Annie Palmer, writing in 2021, reports that

The company forecast operating income of $3 billion to $6.5 billion in the fiscal first quarter, assuming the roughly $2 billion of costs related to Covid-19.

Amazon said sales in the first quarter will be between $100 billion and $106 billion, a slowdown from the fourth quarter of 2020, but an increase of between 33% and 40% from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting revenue of $95.8 billion.

"Operating income" is a proxy for profit, while net sales is the quarter's total revenue. In other words, Amazon's profit margin (before taxes) is about 5%. That means, of total revenue, 95% went to employees of Amazon, its drivers and its suppliers--in other words, to the workers. And that's the problem my friends in the Shutdown Caucus have--if the workers go on strike, they hurt themselves much more than management. They collectively lose 20x more money than the share holders.

That's why strikes usually don't work. Most often it's just the workers shooting themselves in the foot.

But let's not forget Starbucks--where approximately 500 stores were closed by strikers, out of the 10,000 company-owned stores in the US. The employees sacrificed 100% of their paychecks for the lost cause of getting a union contract from Starbucks. Starbucks, like Amazon, operates on thin margins and can't afford to pay a premium to the union. That's why the strikers will never, ever get a contract that is more generous than what Starbucks pays its non-union employees. They'll just close the stores before they do that.

Ms. Freeman puts it this way:

Starbucks has now stated publicly that it will offer a serious contract proposal before the end of the year, but workers say the company is not making good on any of their demands. Further, the company is trying to go around the union by offering concessions on its own terms to head off future organizing efforts at its other stores. One of workers’ central demands is for wage increases, but the company refuses to include immediate raises in the contract — in a slap to the face, the company offered a measly 1.5 percent wage increase for future years.

In any case it all fell apart. The "history making" working class just caved. As Mr. Findijs reports,

Thousands of Amazon and Starbucks workers returned to work this week after launching nationwide strikes. Thousands of Amazon drivers ended their week-long strike on Thursday, while an estimated 5,000 Starbucks workers ended a five-day strike on Christmas Day.

But let's not forget the silliness over at CUNY, as described by this article.

CUNY is the university of the working class of New York and that gives us organic and natural connections to workers including those at Amazon. Our solidarity with these workers is instrumental in furthering class struggle at this moment. Amazon is the largest employer in the United States, only behind Walmart which has no physical presence in New York City. This makes it all the more necessary for us CUNY students to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers as they create history in our very own city.

If the "working class" is conveniently defined as adults without a college degree, then I'll venture that none of our Left Voice authors are members of the working class. They're all at least as petty bourgeois as I am (me being a retired college professor). Their supposed solidarity with Amazon and Starbucks workers is just empty virtue-signaling.

More, I doubt any students are attending CUNY so that they can work in an Amazon warehouse. If they end up being Starbucks baristas, that won't be by choice. Instead they all aspire to professional/managerial jobs. Like their professors, they, too, want to join the petty bourgeoisie. I can't say as I blame them.

Workers don't need more "solidarity." What they need is more money, and that means more revenue from growing, thriving and successful businesses. Going on strike is hopelessly counterproductive.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice & the Election, 2024
• A Woman's Place is ...
• Labor Notes 2022: Starbucks

Oppression!

My Trotskyist friends are big on oppression. 

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

They're obsessed with the oppressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Mr. Roberts does say that

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

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

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

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

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

Such is the topsy-turvy land of Marxist economics.

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

The American Right and Trans Rights

We academic, petty bourgeois types enjoy writing think pieces, letting us expound on the issues of the day. It's a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and the conceit will have it that they make a difference in the world of ideas. In reality, of course, it's a way for the leisure class to occupy its time, because--after all--we don't have to work too hard for a living. We thinkers rely on American capitalism to slough off enough wealth to assure us that life's necessities will take care of themselves.

Our thoughtful essayist for today does his cogitating over at Left Voice (LV)--a leading mouthpiece for the petty bourgeois far-Left. Ezra Brain pens a thinker entitled Polarization, Economic Crisis, and Class Struggle: The Contradictions of the Political Moment. His byline tells us that "Ezra is a NYC based theatre artist and teacher," which suggests that he's not all that worried about where his next meal is coming from. Like me, he relies on the folks who stack produce at the supermarket for his sustenance.

Anyway, Mr. Brain's thinks are as good as anybody's, and his article is worth reading. Obviously I disagree with him. I believe he misses on two counts. He mischaracterizes the American Right, and his opinions on LGBTQIA+... matters are far from the mainstream. I'll close with a note on pronouns.

He writes (links omitted):

One of those strongest tendencies in the national situation is the advance of the Far Right and the escalating attacks on democratic rights — most notably the right to bodily autonomy and the right to vote. This right wing advance has echoes of the “culture wars” of the 1990s and early aughts, but it has some differences. First, this round of right-wing attacks on civil rights is successfully rolling back rights that were already legally enshrined. In other words, rather than just preventing the oppressed from winning more concessions from the state, the Right is successfully taking back concessions already won — such as the right to an abortion.

There is a contradiction here. The words "Far Right" suggest some kind of fringe movement. On the other hand "successfully rolling back rights" supposes support from at least a plurality of the electorate. I think designating what is longstanding Republican opinion as "Far Right" is not accurate. Center Right would be a better term.

And then I think he's factually wrong. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision didn't rule on abortion at all. It merely clarified who in our system of government is supposed to make that decision. The Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision (1973), which ruled that abortion was a "right" under the "penumbras" of the Constitution. The Dobbs decision rejected that (admittedly weak) reasoning and said that, rather than the Court, it is the States that should determine abortion law.

Politically, the GOP is the loser from the Dobbs opinion. Advocating a (more or less) complete ban on abortion was great virtue signaling, and as long as the bans were hypothetical it was a vote getter. (After all, who doesn't want to be pro-life?) But after Dobbs it is no longer hypothetical, and it turns out that near total bans on abortion are very unpopular. See, e.g., Kansas, where abortion rights won a referendum in landslide.

The near total bans now common in red states will soon be overturned by an angry electorate. Mr. Brain's fears are not warranted. The "Far Right" isn't "Far," and it won't be successful in "rolling back" the right to abortion.

Regards trans rights, Mr. Brain opines that

...the Right’s attack is more radicalized than before, as reflected in its goals. For example, the last wave of anti-trans bills was focused on banning trans people — but, as is almost always the case, specifically transfeminine people — from using the public bathroom associated with their gender. This is, of course, a heinous and right-wing attack on basic rights, but it is primarily aimed to restrict trans people’s ability to integrate into public life. Put another way, the attacks sought to restrict which public spaces trans people have access to.

Mr. Brain is inventing "rights" out of whole cloth. Nobody has a Constitutional Right to use the women's toilet--not me, not Mr. Brain, and not anybody else. Standards of public decency are determined by majority rules--and since the majority are by a wide margin heterosexual men and women, it's they who get to write the rules. A reasonable standard (in my opinion) is that people without penises can use the women's toilet if they want to--because people without penises represent no sexual threat to women. Post-op trans women are easily accommodated by this rule. 

These new attacks, however, go further and attempt to attack trans people’s right to transition at all. From attempting to make gender-affirming health care for youth a felony, to designating gender transitions as child abuse, to removing trans health care from Medicaid coverage — the current wave of right-wing attacks on trans health care seek to forcibly detransition people or stop them from ever transitioning in the first place. In this sense, these attacks are aimed at restricting trans people not only in public spaces but also in private ones.

Mr. Brain and I are obviously starting from different places, as his personal webpage shows. He clearly exists somewhere along the LGBTQIA+... spectrum (I don't know enough about it to say where). I conclude he has no children and never will have children, and therefore he knows nothing about being a parent. If he did, he couldn't possibly have written the paragraph quoted above.

I, meanwhile, have children and now grandchildren. Like all parents, I want my children to grow up to be successful and fertile adults. That is, I want grandchildren. I definitely don't want my kids or my grandkids to decide, on their own and at a prepubescent age, to volunteer for irreversible infertility treatments. What Mr. Brain calls "gender-affirming care" really is a felony--as is castrating young boys against their or their parents' wishes.

Given his life history, I'll forgive Mr. Brain for not understanding that. But his opinion will never gain traction among people with children and grandchildren. It's a political lost cause, restricted to the remotest regions of the academic/petty bourgeois Left.

Finally, a comment on pronouns. Mr. Brain, in his CV (pdf), asks that I refer to him as "They" or "Them". I refuse to do that because it's ungrammatical, and Mr. Brain--for all his travails--has no authority to change the rules of English grammar. Like toilet usage, when it comes to grammar it's the majority who get to determine how language gets used.

More--and specific to this blog--one of my purposes here is civil discourse. For that reason I always address my interlocutors with an honorific--usually Mr. or Ms. It's a token of respect despite disagreements. There is no honorific (that I know of) for "they" intended as a singular pronoun. Since our friend has chosen "Ezra" as his given name--commonly associated with men--I have used the corresponding pronoun and honorific: Mr. Brain.

Further Reading:

• It's Not Just About Abortion
• Elections 2021--Race and Transgender
• Book Review: The Future of Higher Education

Has the SWP Moved Right? Or the Republicans Left?

(SWP refers to the Socialist Workers Party, aka "the Party," which publishes The Militant newspaper.)

In a comment thread to the recent post entitled News From the SWP, reader JohnB asks a question. (The entire thread is worth your attention.)

By the way, Dan, a while back you took exception to my assertion that the SWP is moving to the right:

https://trotskyschildren.blogspot.com/2017/08/is-swp-moving-right.html

Have you changed your mind now?

The short answer is No I have not. Indeed, I've gone back and reread my old posts on the topic (here, here, here and here), and I still agree with all of them. Those span a stretch from November, 2019, all the way back to December, 2013. So my opinions about the direction of the SWP have remained remarkably constant. (I surprise even myself. Usually I find my old posts to be somewhat cringeworthy--but not these.)

Beginning in 1975, the Party instituted the Turn, which was a serious effort to get comrades into the unionized, industrial labor force. Ex-SWPers mostly dismiss the effort as ridiculous. Far from building the Party, membership dropped from about 3000 in the early 70s, to perhaps less than a hundred today. The Turn gradually fizzled out beginning in the late 90s as comrades left the movement, and as the remaining members aged into retirement. It never succeeded in recruiting new members.  My review describes the Turn and its consequences succinctly.

While the Turn failed at its intended purpose, it had other consequences. It did drive a lot of people out of the movement--likely including me (though I wasn't really aware of it at the time). The emphasis on being a union member in an industrial fraction never appealed to those of us attending college. I never imagined myself working in a steel mill--I wouldn't have been any good at that.

The Turn's biggest mistake was to move comrades around from city to city--like traveling preachers. This made it impossible for them to establish serious, personal connections with the people they were trying to reach. It prevented comrades from ever developing a career--not even a blue collar career. Not for them was any investment in personal skills or talents. They strove toward the Marxist ideal of a proletarian worker--nothing to lose, not even chains, with only cheap and brute labor for sale.

I felt sorry for my former comrades, because if you never develop a career, and never put down any roots in any one place, and likely never start a family, and more, contribute any extra money you earn to Jack Barnes the Party, then you're in for a tedious, lonely life and an impoverished retirement. They're like Franciscan friars who take vows of obedience and poverty--and lead itinerant, childless lives.

No wonder our now elderly comrades are still working at Walmart or driving Uber cars. They need the money.

But in one respect the Turn was spectacularly successful. One goal was to "proletarianize" the Party--and this has undoubtedly been accomplished. The college-educated sorts, teachers, welfare caseworkers, college professors, grad students--the lumpen intelligentsia all--have been ruthlessly purged. What's left are the blue-collar sorts.

Is it any surprise that they'd thrill to Trump's blue collar appeal? Of course they do.

Now consider the Republican Party, which prior to 1980 was known as the home of the bourgeoisie--the Boston brahmins, the Upper East Side's brownstone denizens, the folks who hang out in Hollywood or Beverly Hills. Their presidents were Eisenhower and Nixon. Then Reagan came along and worked to extend the GOP's reach into the middle class. He didn't talk Ivy League--but was instead an Illinois farm boy, the son of an alcoholic.

The GOP subsequently partially walked back the Reagan Revolution, reestablishing its upper crust credentials during the Bush years--both of whom were Ivy League grads. Bush 1 promised no new taxes--only to renege in obedience to the wealthy. The rich don't mind paying taxes because they can always pass the cost on to the middle and lower classes. It's the middle class that mostly ends up with the bill--and they knew it. That was the end of Reagan's coalition--the blue collars returned to the Democrats.

Obama's relentless efforts to impoverish middle- and working class America spawned the Tea Party rebellion, leading to the Republican sweep of Congress in 2010. For obvious reasons, blue-collar America depends on a literal interpretation of the Constitution for their well-being. For without Constitutional limits on government they become slaves of the Federal bureaucracy--reduced to being wards of the state. To use The Militant's phrase, they become a population to be "administered."

On the other hand, they don't object when the government gives them free money. Of course, the money is never "free." It always comes with strings attached, usually losing your freedom. It is this contradiction--between "don't tread on me" and "give it to me for free" that eventually leads to Trump.

Gone was the longtime GOP fixation on balanced budgets. The party-poopers who worried about the solvency of social security were exiled to the wilderness. Obamacare was fine after the individual mandate was repealed--then it became just another free lunch. A few old-fashioned Republicans now complain about Biden's stimulus--though it is nearly certain that Trump would've done the same thing.

So I think it's a myth that Trump moved the GOP to the right. On the contrary, he expanded government in ways tailored to help his blue-collar base--and at the same time he dissed the pinheads who wanted to "administer" them. Many government posts were left vacant, the universities were defunded, and self-righteous international institutions were appropriately disrespected.

The Dems, by now the party of the lumpen intelligentsia (along with the traditional lumpen proletariat), hated that. How could he! That very hatred thrilled the working class all the more, and along with it Trump's popularity.

The SWP is moved by the same emotions that power the working class. In this respect they differ dramatically from the other grouplets and bloggers on my Beat--all of whom speak for the lumpen intelligentsia.

The SWP and blue-collar America have something else in common--they're old. Old people realize that the world needs boundaries--for without boundaries society simply can't function. In the simple case, a boundary means a literal border wall--as Trump put it "a country without borders isn't a country." It means that sex roles remain reasonably well-defined--one can't switch genders just by putting on a dress. It means that the language of political conversation is English--not Spanish, Chinese, or Tagalog.

It means a balancing act in the right to free speech. Yes, that right is nearly absolute. But the "right" to get a paycheck from a state university is reasonably a lot more restrictive. Professors need to believe at some level in the American civic religion--for if they don't constructive conversation becomes impossible. For this reason, we don't hire KKK members as college professors, no matter how smart or creative they are. Likewise, membership in BLM should disqualify, and for the same reason.

Nikole Hannah-Jones was recently denied tenure at the University of North Carolina. She should never have been hired in the first place.

The SWP sort of understands that. They disdain the fluid model of gender roles championed by the lumpen intelligentsia. They're attitude on race relations is at least sane, unlike that now popular on college campuses. They acknowledge that Jews and Arabs somehow have to live together in Israel/Palestine.

True to its masthead, The Militant is "published in the interests of working people," however inconsistent that may sometimes be.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

Let's get the silly stuff out of the way up front. In a Militant article (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) entitled What is the political road forward for workers in 2020, Seth Galinsky writes

The party’s candidates call for the unions to fight for a government-funded public works program to create millions of jobs at union scale, building schools, hospitals and other things workers need. They say we need to organize to cut the workweek with no cut in pay, to prevent further layoffs.

To accomplish this, they advocate a united front with the Tooth Fairy and her reserve army of Magic Unicorns who can build schools, hospitals, and other things workers supposedly need (but don't really) at no cost whatsoever. Because otherwise their proposal is such a misallocation of economic resources that it will drive us all into dire poverty.

Being socialists, they have to make demands like this, which puts them in common league with the entire far Left along with much of the Democratic Party, all of whom live in the Land of Wishful Thinking.

But once you get past the pro-forma BS, Mr. Galinsky's article, along with a more substantive piece by Naomi Craine (Violent course of antifa, Black Lives Matter threat to working class) begin to make a whole lot of sense. I write here not so much to disagree with them, but rather to expand on the ideas.

Ms. Craine has actually been to Kenosha. She writes

On Aug. 29, I attended a rally in Kenosha protesting the cop shooting of Jacob Blake Jr. on Aug. 23. It had been called by Blake’s family to oppose police brutality and to urge a halt to arson and violence carried out by anarcho-radical forces earlier in the week. At an Aug. 25 protest, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse had shot three Black Lives Matter supporters, killing two.

Although the Aug. 29 rally was called a “Peace March,” one of the speakers, who was not identified by name, declared, “If you kill one of us, it’s time for us to kill one of yours.” He went on to bait Caucasians at the action and closed his speech with the slogan, “Race first.” Several black-clad individuals, some openly carrying weapons, participated as a group in the rally.

Ms. Craine is more diplomatic than I will be, but she correctly hints that BLM (at least the core group) is a fascist gang. I use the word advisedly--not as an epithet--because they subscribe to the fascist meme: We're poor because the foreigners stole all the money. Here "foreigners" is a stand-in for some other racial or ethnic group--often Jews. In France today it's Muslims. For BLM it's "white people", who used to get called "honkies." (BLM doesn't like Jews much, either, though I think dedicated antisemitism is more the specialty of Antifa--another fascist gang, as Ms. Craine points out.)

BLM is not a civil rights organization. They don't believe in civil rights at all--certainly not freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, or even freedom of thought. Their creed is what's mine is mine--and what's yours is mine, too.

I do not believe BLM is a mass organization. Ignore the supposed widespread support it seems to enjoy--most of that is just feel-good virtue signaling by suburban liberals on college campuses, aka useful idiots. The actual organization is only a few thousands, perhaps ten thousand, people. A competent government committed to civil order could put them down in a jiffy.

I don't believe BLM speaks for Black people. Even Al Sharpton is separating himself from them. Their goal is a race war--which Blacks will lose big time simply because they're only 12% of the population. There are some suckers in the white community who are falling for the race war shtick--fortunately they're an even smaller minority. But the longer government stays on the sidelines, the closer we get to an actual race war.

Ms. Craine writes

It is in the course of these fights and broader struggles in the years ahead working people will learn how to defend ourselves in disciplined ways from assaults by the bosses and cops who protect their rule. And we will see more clearly the middle-class character and dangerous anti-working-class course of antifa and the Black Lives Matter leadership.

The first sentence is tooth-fairy Trotsky-talk. But the second sentence is more true than Ms. Craine realizes, blinded as she is by Marxist language. Redefining terms will clarify much.

Who she calls "working people," I will refer to as folks with a positive net worth. It doesn't have to be much: some equity in a house; a small 401K account; or even just a marketable skill that can earn a living. Maybe it's a small fishing boat. Whatever it is, these folks are Trump's base--the blue-collar worker who lives in the bungalow in a working class part of town.  Think Archie Bunker if you must.

And the folks she calls "middle class" I'll refer to as the lumpen proletariat--people who don't own anything, not even a marketable skill. Of course that includes the homeless bums and the welfare queens--among many other people who are simply incapable of taking care of themselves. We can all feel sorry for those folks, but they're not the problem.

The worrisome lumpens appear on the surface to be middle class--think Meathead. They include those who've buried themselves in student loans with no chance of ever paying them back. Or others who can't live within their means and are now hopelessly in hock to credit card companies. Or the many who have fallen off the academic ladder--college dropouts--who despite all that "education", know nothing that can earn them a living. Or ladies age 30 who are still in grad school working on that post-modern Jane Austen monograph. Or those who have finished grad school--PhD in hand--and are now competing in the impossible academic job market. Or the guys majoring in "Black Studies," who have learned nothing more than to see themselves as victims.

These lumpens--these are the dangerous folks. They're the true Meatheads of our age, having no chance of ever earning an honest living. And of course they're bitter, and angry, and above all, envious. Compare them with my wife's immigrant relatives--Uber drivers, orderlies, food service workers--all of whom own their own homes and cars and have a little money in the bank. And they have children and grandchildren. Naturally the lumpens are green with envy! That's why they take it out on restaurant patrons, as Ms. Craine mentions.

Or the spoiled off-spring of the upper-middle class who have only menial jobs to look forward to, and now riot with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (don't you just love that transgressive "k"!). Because at bottom they're stupid and they feel entitled. They never went through the school of hard knocks. They've never had to earn a living.

Those are the people who join Antifa and BLM, for just as Marx predicted, it's the lumpen proletariat who are the soldiers for fascist gangs.

Further Reading:

• Is Jeff Mackler a Racist?
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• A Nation of Shopkeepers

Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

You'd think they'd learn.

Boring Jeff Mackler, retired union hack and National Secretary of Socialist Action (SA), ran for president (of the United States!) in 2016. The campaign was a total flop, consisting only of a half-hearted tour through southern New England. Following the announcement in June, Boring Jeff's candidacy all but disappeared from the pages of Socialist Action.

That was then--only 4 months before the November election. I speculate he ran for Prez only because SA no longer wanted to "critically support" the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), likely because the latter explicitly rejected antisemitism. Mr. Mackler was just a last-minute stand-in candidate so comrades could express their Jew-hatred at the ballot box.

This year--a full 17 months before the general election--one infers they're more serious about running a real campaign. And true to form, Boring Jeff made what I guess he thinks was a dramatic announcement. No--he didn't ride down an escalator. No--he didn't address a crowd of thousands, or even hundreds. Not even dozens.

The big reveal happened at a Socialist Action National Committee Plenum--likely an audience of about a dozen people. Boring Jeff's campaign strategy closely follows that of his apparent mentor--Leonid Brezhnev. Leave it to a bureaucrat to make a bureaucratic announcement to an audience of fellow bureaucrats.

Though this time it's serious--so serious in fact that it looks like Boring Jeff hasn't even changed his shirt since 2016. I sure hope it's been laundered--otherwise the campaign will stink to high heaven.

Jeff Mackler in 2016

Jeff Mackler today

So we'll grant them a pass on 2016, but now they've got 17 months to run a real campaign. Can they actually get it together? Count me skeptical.

Because they're already making excuses:

"At best, and at great cost, socialists are able to achieve “legal” ballot status in just a handful of states—and even then, no matter the seriousness of our campaign efforts, we are consciously excluded from coverage. How could it be otherwise when the nation’s corporate media are owned and controlled by the exact same ruling-class forces that select the candidates to be their representatives in the first place?"

Admittedly, grouplets of about a hundred people don't have the same media clout as the Democratic Party, which got nearly 66 million votes in 2016. Because, you know, 65,999,900 voters were stupid and only went along with the media. Only the last 100 were of sufficient independent mind to vote for Boring Jeff.

But, as said, this year is different. They might actually try to win some attention, just as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) did just by her lonesome. At very least Boring Jeff might ride down an escalator. Or get a Twitter account. Or set up a real Facebook page. Or change his shirt. Or break from the Brezhnevian campaign strategy. Minimally I'd expect them to get on the ballot in a few states--though they make no commitment to do so.

In my day the Socialist Workers Party ran successful campaigns: Jenness & Pulley in 1972, and Camejo and Reid in 1976. Those were the days when pathetic candidates like Boring Jeff were put out to pasture.

Anyway, I've got the perfect campaign slogan for them:

The End is Nigh!

Because, we confront "a near-term climate catastrophe that threatens the future of life on earth." I don't know what "near-term" is. AOC says it's twelve years. I suspect Boring Jeff will grant us a short reprieve--30 years? I hope it's at least that long--I don't want to live long enough to see the end of the world.

Either way, Boring Jeff's proposal is hopelessly inadequate to the problem. He says

We need a party of our own—a mass working-class party based on an independent, reinvigorated, democratic, fighting trade-union movement allied in struggles in the social, political, and economic arenas with the organizations of the oppressed and exploited.

That'll cool the planet! Short of blocking out the sun, a mass working-class party based on... organizations of the oppressed and exploited is the best refrigeration method ever devised by the human race.

Boring Jeff obviously doesn't believe his own bullshit about imminent climate catastrophe.

And neither does the vice-presidential candidate, Heather Bradford, also a member of the

Heather Bradford

National Committee and present at the Plenum. Presumably she raised her hand when they asked for volunteers to be vice president. Ms. Bradford is "the organizer of Socialist Action’s branch in Duluth, Minn., and Superior, Wis., in the Lake Superior region. Bradford works full time as a women’s advocate at a domestic violence shelter and part time at an abortion clinic and as a substitute public school teacher. She is the secretary of AFSCME Local 3558, a delegate to the Duluth Central Labor body, and a union steward."

Nothing dishonorable in any of that (except maybe the abortion clinic), but is she really the lady whose finger you want on the nuclear button in the event Boring Jeff can't finish his term of office? I don't think so.

Ms. Bradford seems more invested in feminism and LGBTQ rights than is seemly for somebody who believes in the imminent end of the world. You'd think she'd focus on the more immediate problem.

For all of that, one wonders why Socialist Action is fielding a presidential ticket at all. Because Jill Stein's Green Party campaign in 2016 echoed Boring Jeff's platform almost 100%, including antisemitism. The Greens are much closer to being the mass working class party that Boring Jeff so desires than SA could ever hope to be. Yet SA labeled the Green Party as middle class, and so excluded them from consideration. Though I fail to see how the Greens are more middle class than SA, represented as it is by teachers' union bureaucrats.

The only reason for a separate SA campaign is their commitment to purist, Brezhnevian tactics. For without the blessing of the Plenum of the National Committee, no person is worthy of running against Donald J. Trump.

By the way, perhaps Ms. Bradford, with her busy schedule campaigning around the country, doesn't realize that it's supposed to snow in her hometown Duluth this weekend (May 18th).

So much for global warming.

Further Reading:

• How Trump Wins
• How Socialist Action Helps Republicans in 2018
• Jeff Mackler on Trade

How Socialist Action Helps Republicans in 2018

My friends over at Socialist Action (SA) claim to oppose the Democrats, but they sure are good at spouting Dem talking points. Two recent articles on their webpage make the case.

John Leslie pens a piece entitled The rise of right-wing violence in Trump's America. While I'll agree with him that there is right-wing violence, it's not at all clear to me that it's "rising." If anything, it seems to me that racial violence, at least, is declining under Trump. Recall that under Obama we had the Ferguson riots, Dylann Roof's massacre of Black churchgoers, along with the rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Here are the results of a relevant Google search from 2013 - 2016. At the top of the list is a piece by Steve Chapman, written in July, 2016, about how pundits thought race relations had worsened under President Obama. By comparison things seem better today.

Of course Mr. Leslie omits left-wing violence--antifa, BLM-inspired murders of cops, strong-arm tactics on campus to prevent free speech, and left-wing antisemitism, often but not always disguised as a plea for Palestinian rights.

My own view is that violence on both sides--while still existent--has declined under Trump. Obama was infuriatingly preachy, all but daring right-wing fanatics to do something stupid & evil, while at the same time winking at racial violence from the left. Trump is neither preachy nor winking. For him violence comes from both sides in roughly equal measure.

The second Democratic talking point comes from Autumn Rain and Erwin Freed entitled Trump administration attacks trans rights. The article is a mess, claiming that Trump is somehow stepping on fundamental human rights.

The lede sentence:

The New York Times reported on Oct. 21 that the Trump administration is “considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

I partially agree with Rain and Freed that the new definition is too restrictive--genitalia at birth may not actually be the most relevant criterion. But I strongly object to transgender people becoming a protected class under civil rights law.

For all the initials, LGBTQI, only the first two or three account for any significant portion of the population--perhaps 5%. The remainder comprise much less than 1%--perhaps as few as 0.1%. They are not a big enough community to deserve special civil rights treatment.

We don't accord such privileges to blind or deaf people, even though we try very hard to be accommodating,  They have to fit in with the rest of society as best as possible. Why should trans people be treated any differently?

Rain & Freed make some completely ridiculous claims.

A popular “common sense” notion is that genetics are rigidly sex-specific. Men and women are said to only have XY and XX chromosomes respectively. Over the last couple of years the renowned journal Nature has published many articles that put to bed the idea that human bodies exist as either purely male or female at any level.

Our authors cite no references from Nature, and I seriously doubt the truth of their assertion. It is long known in genetics that the female gamete contains an X chromosome, while the male gamete contains either an X or Y chromosome. Yes, there are times when it goes wrong, e.g., hermaphrodites, or people with XXY chromosomes. But these circumstances are very rare, and to my mind represent a kind of birth defect. Courtesy and accommodation are in order; a complete rearrangement of social customs is not.

Then there's this:

Not only do people come in all different shapes, sizes, and anatomical make-ups but so do their genes! A person who was assigned female at birth, identifies as a woman, and easily is seen as one may have XY chromosomes in her bladder, or even internal testes.

People come in all different shapes and sizes because (in large part) their genes are different. And the number of individuals with XX chromosomes who have XY chromosomes in their bladder must be vanishingly small. Indeed, I doubt such folks exist at all.

For this we're supposed to change English grammar and invent a bunch of new pronouns. Nor is it reason to let men, however disguised, use women's washrooms. Separate toilets protect women (real ones) from male predators. Though I'd change Trump's standard: if you have a penis, you can't use women's lavatories. Doesn't matter what you had at birth.

So why does this auger a Republican victory in 2018?

If SA were simply a voice in the wilderness, a tiny little grouplet with silly ideas all its own, then it would make no difference at all. Unfortunately their opinions reflect the left-wing of the Democratic party. I know they reject that assessment--they think they're "radicals" who advocate something completely different from the Dems.

But they're wrong. Be it on race, class or gender, along with immigration and environmental issues, their opinion dovetails perfectly with progressive Democrats. There is nothing original in anything they write. The problem with this progressive vision of the world is that it appeals only to about 20% of the population--disproportionately from the upper middle class.

The rest of us call it political correctness, a widely unpopular imposition on American discourse. Deviate even slightly from the correct terminology and you're dubbed a racist, sexist, homophobic, white-supremacist. Through the Obama years this trick worked--any slightly contrary opinion was excised from polite society simply because the language wasn't up to snuff.

Trump ran and won on opposing political correctness. For SA and their Democrat friends, this means he must be a racist, sexist, homophobic white supremacist. He's none of those things, however lewd, rude & crude he may be.

Mr. Trump stands on an anti-PC, cultural platform.

• Traditional mores have value, and they should not be overturned on a lark.
• Immigration is fine, but we should only admit people who love us. Which, contrary to SA, is not restricted to white people.
• We do not need to accept large numbers of indigent, illiterate refugees from failed states such as Honduras, however miserable they may be.
• The US does not have to keep the world safe for democracy. Nor (now that we're energy independent) do we have to defend the Persian Gulf or world trade routes.
• We need to reduce our dependence on China, not for economic reasons, but rather for security.
• Progressive values are an attempt to remake society in some idealistic image--call it socialism. This effort will always fail--see Venezuela for a recent example.
• The wolf at our door is not climate change or some other phony-baloney progressive boogeyman. Instead it's poverty. We're not guaranteed to be a rich country. That means we need to let productive people (e.g., frackers) go about their business with as little red tape and taxes as possible.

Political correctness is resoundingly unpopular in this country--opposed by 75% of the population. Socialist Action, by trumpeting the PC banner, helps in its own small way to get Republican voters to the polls.

Thank you!

Further Reading:

• Is a Blue Wave Coming?
• The "Bureau" on Immigration
• Affirmative Action

Abandoning the Working Class!

As of about three weeks ago I've been retired. True, I'm still on the College's payroll until September 1st, but that's because as a professor I get paid over the summer anyway. My work obligations are finished.

We moved into a new house--much more suitable for an older couple, and closer to the City where our daughter and her family live. I've spent my time settling in, tending our new (much smaller) garden, and assisting my wife in downsizing our possessions. My ambitions are to learn Python programming, to start baking bread, to take up gardening more seriously, and to write more (including this blog), perhaps even a book.

And to do more reading. So far I've read The Count of Monte Cristo, Tyler Cowen's The Complacent Class (which I reviewed here), and I'm halfway through Sebastian Mallaby's excellent biography of Alan Greenspan, The Man Who Knew. I guess this betrays my continued interest in economics.

But the key question--one of political import--is what happens to my class character? By abandoning the working class have I become declassed? Am I now a member of the lumpen proletariat, what not having to set an alarm clock anymore (one of the biggest unsung benefits of retirement)? Or do I retain my prior class affiliation, which is at least nominally working class?

And since one's political opinion is supposedly a function of class character, will my political views now shift in some way? Will I, for example, break down and join that bastion of liberal stupidity, the AARP? (God I hope not!)

I don't think Marx, Engels or Lenin had much to say about retirement. It wasn't much of a thing prior to the 1930s--life expectancy wasn't that long, and productivity wasn't high enough to support a life of leisure. People worked until they dropped dead.

By the 1970s nobody questioned retirement, but instead mandatory retirement became the issue. Should people be forced to retire at age 65? As best as I can gather from bits of this book available on-line, former Congressman Claude Pepper led the effort to abolish any mandatory retirement age for tenured college faculty. So I have colleagues who have kept working long past their sell-by date, much to the detriment of the institution and to the disadvantage of students. As a former college administrator and as a citizen I do think colleges should be allowed to revoke tenure at age 65 or 70, retaining the option to keep employees on via annual contracts. (Actually, I'm not in favor of tenure at all, which renders the question moot.)

As for my Trotskyist friends, they are astonishingly silent on the retirement question. This is odd given that their median age is probably over sixty, and may even be approaching 70. In a word, they're mostly retired.

The most forthcoming is Louis Proyect, who retired back in 2012. Given that he was born in 1945 (three years older than Prince Charles), he is six years older than me. He reports that he enjoyed his job, relished his colleagues, and especially respected his boss--odd things for an unrepentant Marxist to own up to. Though he admits he'd rather be retired. Beyond a discussion of benefits packages (and the shortcomings of Medicare), he has nothing political to say about his new status.

Like me, Mr. Proyect was at least nominally working class--he worked for a paycheck. That said, many (including me, mostly just to tease) have accused him of being petty bourgeois. Certainly our former comrades in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) would call him that, what with his interest in Syrian politics, philosophical disputation, and obscure histories.

Jeff Mackler, the leader of Socialist Action (SA), is (like me) a retired teacher. From this picture he looks to be about seventy years old. When I joined in 1969 (at age 18) I was among the youngest comrades. Mr. Mackler, already in the Movement, is certainly older than I am.

So California teachers can retire with a full (very generous) pension after 30 years of service. If he started teaching when he was 25, he retired at age 55, or fifteen years ago. No wonder he can spend full time proselytizing for SA.

Mr. Mackler almost certainly receives a state pension. I'm different in that I opted for a 401(K) instead, which puts us on different sides of an important issue--what I term the worker/parasite divide. Let's not make too big a deal out of this: Mr. Mackler and I were both public employees and lived off the taxpayers' nickel (though my institution also charged tuition). In that sense we were both parasites. But Jeff continues to receive a check from the State of California, drawing on their woefully underfunded pension system, which means he's depriving today's women and children of much needed social benefits.

I, on the other hand, have saved for my own retirement, albeit with considerable help from the state. But as of now the State of New York owes me not a penny. Were their pension plan to go broke (less likely than in California, but still possible) I will remain whole (or at least as whole as the economy). So unlike Mr. Mackler, I benefit from lower taxes and less money spent on public employees, whereas he's in the other camp. He's a parasite--I'm a "worker."

Mr. Mackler, as far as I know, has never commented on retirement--either his own or on the political status of retirees.

Dianne Feeley is an editor of Solidarity's paper Against the Current. I commented (favorably) on one of her articles here (the link to her article is dead). She describes herself as a retired auto worker, which I remarked was the best kind of auto worker to be. Ms. Feeley is definitely older than I am--she's a former partner of Barry Sheppard, who turns 80 this year.

If anybody is working class, it's Ms. Feeley. I don't know what the rules for retirement are through the UAW, but if it's longer than 30 years I'd be surprised. And that's deserved--auto workers have a physically demanding job. Ms. Feeley's pension is not publicly financed, but is instead a private plan. The problem is that very few private pensions are fully funded, which means her future benefits depend on the fortunes of today's workers, who will have to pony up money for her. So, as happened with mine workers' pensions, her plan could go belly-up. But most private pension plans are insured by the federal government, who promises to make good on any debt--we'll see if that happens. (I think, but am not sure, that my retirement savings are similarly insured.) In the event, Ms. Feeley and I are on the same side of the parasite/worker line--we both benefit from lower taxes and less spending on public employees.

That leaves Jack Barnes, National Secretary of the SWP, who hasn't retired yet, despite turning 77 this year. He became National Secretary in 45 years ago and has been living off his comrades' nickel ever since, sometimes quite luxuriously. (See here and here.) I guess that's fine as long as the comrades are willing to put up with that.

But this guy has never had a job (at least not since his twenties), and therefore has no real pension. Though who knows what he's saved up.

None of these people have said anything about the class nature of retirees.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl
• Old White Man Runs for President
• Whither the SWP

Louis Proyect and the Pro-Poverty Girl

In one of the small incongruities of our age Louis Proyect used to work for Goldman-Sachs, though unsurprisingly only for a short time. Nevertheless, he's on CEO Lloyd Blankfein's mailing list, receiving the annual missive to shareholders. To which Mr. Proyect responds with an open letter.

Goldman-Sachs is in the financial services industry. A brief account of what they do is presented on their webpage here. It is highly specialized. Just as the science literature is mostly opaque to people outside of the discipline, much of what Goldman-Sachs does is unintelligible to the layman. As Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago, specialization is a good thing. It creates more different kinds of jobs and more opportunities for trade. Indeed, specialization is the mark of rich societies--people working in large, deep, complex markets will be wealthier than those living in simple, subsistence-level economies.

Still, opacity leads to paranoia, and especially on the Left (but also on the Right), Goldman-Sachs has come to represent surreptitious villainy and corruption. That the firm's alumni populate the Trump administration is apparently proof-positive the fix is in. Without in any way excusing actual corruption  (which undoubtedly exists), I simply don't believe it is the major problem with our government, and I think these fears are way over-wrought.

Mr. Proyect objects that Goldman alumni Gary Cohn and Steve Bannon now hold high positions in the Trump administration. He just assumes that these gentlemen's ambition is solely to make the world right for Goldman-Sachs. In particular, he condemns them for supporting the repeal of Dodd-Frank.

I don't understand Dodd-Frank--it's a very complicated bill regulating an industry that is to me opaque. I don't think Mr. Proyect understands it either. But I have it on authority from people I trust that it is a highly intrusive, expensive, and vague set of rules that if completely followed would destroy most financial institutions. It is not followed, and is substantially unfollowable. It's purpose is to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis in 2008. Unfortunately, the world's next financial crisis will not remotely resemble 2008, and hence won't be prevented at all. So the primary effect of Dodd-Frank is simply to inhibit business and make people poorer.

Either way, men from Goldman-Sachs know more about Dodd-Frank than either me or Mr. Proyect. And they are no more in favor of a financial crisis than anybody else. So I'm generally inclined to defer to their judgment. Plus I distrust regulations--they hardly ever work as intended.

Then comes the quote that Mr. Proyect reports as being the takeaway:

(Mr. Proyect quoting Mr. Blankfein) Putting aside one’s individual politics, the outcome of the U.S. election raises the possibility of more stimulative tax and regulatory policies, as well as plans for more infrastructure spending. This represents a substantial change in direction for the U.S., and offers many investors and companies a reason for optimism.

So what is it that makes Mr. Blankfein optimistic? Obviously more money for Goldman-Sachs, but not only that. It also means more investment (in capital goods and equipment), more employees, more consumer products, and even more infrastructure. Why is this bad? Mr. Proyect give us a really silly reason:

A reason for optimism? My god, are you are out of your mind, Mr. Blankfein? Scientists have concluded that climate change is threatening a sixth extinction. You really need to read Naomi Klein or even watch Al Gore’s documentary. By seeing everything through the cash nexus, you are losing the thread.

We all know that Mr. Proyect loses sleep because of the apocalypse du jour. Yesterday's hypothetical disasters have conveniently been forgotten: an asteroid hitting the earth, a new ice-age, peak oil, nuclear war, a global pandemic, or perhaps a population explosion. Scientists, who have and will warn us about lots and lots of things that have never happened, are no better at predicting the future than common undergraduates. Mr. Blankfein--long familiar with failed financial forecasts--rightly dismisses such Luddite fever dreams.

(Mr. Proyect could have cited a truer criticism. If all the good things Mr. Blankfein lists are bought from borrowed money, then it probably is bad. For however much it helps us now, we'll have to pay it back in the future.)

But Mr. Proyect is not alone in his criticism. He has a powerful new ally: a little girl. Or at least the statue of a little girl who stands athwart the ambitions of Wall Street's bull in Lower Manhattan.
             

There she stands--in tailored dress and bespoke shoes--steadfast against wealth and prosperity. Odd, because she's as much a beneficiary as Mr. Proyect.

Perhaps these are her shoes, available from Zappos for $60.

Or maybe she's a more petty bourgeois consumer--akin to Mr. Proyect--and shops at Saks Fifth Avenue, where these can be had for around $400.

I couldn't find her dress on-line (maybe I just don't know where to look), but it's obviously store-bought and fits perfectly. If it cost more than $100 I'd be astonished.

Little Miss Statue lives very well at low prices because of the miracle of modern capitalism. Facilitated in part by the people at Goldman-Sachs.

She is no more inclined to live off the land on an eco-friendly subsistence farm than Mr. Proyect is. The odd thing about her statue is that she doesn't have a cell phone. How many well-dressed little girls in Lower Manhattan do you see who don't own a cell phone? Even Mr. Proyect owns a cell phone! Personally I think she's just trying to fake poverty.

So here she is--she and Mr. Proyect--standing firm for poverty for everybody else besides themselves. Not on purpose, but just because they don't understand that a modern economy needs capital to be efficiently allocated. And such allocation is non-trivial--it requires many very specialized employees doing complicated jobs. What the little girl doesn't comprehend is that her shoes and her dress and her cell phone, along with the electricity at her house and the subway that brought her to Wall Street, all depend on finance (among many other things).

On second thought, maybe I give her too much credit. Maybe she knows all to well that her efforts will make the world poorer. Perhaps she's envious, or evil, or selfish, or stupid. I don't know. Whatever the case, there she is, standing fearlessly in front of the bull demanding her welfare check.

The bull knows what's going on. He's raging for a reason. He doesn't see a little girl. What he sees is the poverty devil in disguise.

Down With Poverty!

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Rise & Fall of American Growth
• If You Really Care About the Poor
• Mr. Proyect's Pro-Poverty Alliance