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!

It's Not Just About Abortion

I never understood why a "right to abortion" is a core programmatic plank of Trotskyism. I didn't get it even when I was a Trotskyist. It seems to me that the dispute is not primarily of economic importance, and therefore it cuts across class lines. Yet to this very day all Trotskyists regard abortion as a working class issue. The recent leak of the Alito draft brings the matter to the fore.

Two articles guide our inquiry. The first, entitled Mobilize in the streets to defeat the attacks on abortion rights! by Delores Underwood and published in Workers' Voice (WV), represents the Trotskyist view as I recall it from my youth. The second, entitled Supreme Court leak fuels debate on defense of families, women’s rights, by Terry Evans and appearing in The Militant, represents a slightly heretical point of view. (The Militant is published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP.)

Ms. Underwood states the Trotskyist case for "reproductive rights" relatively clearly (link and italics in original).

Gender oppression places the burden of domestic and wage labor overwhelmingly on those with reproductive capacity. In today’s capitalist society, the cost to reproduce laborers falls largely on the domestic sphere, and particularly on the shoulders of working-class women: health care, insurance, food, and increasingly, education is paid for not by the regime that requires wage laborers, but by the laborers themselves. As we explained: “The capitalist system wants to have it both ways: It wants women to have children to reproduce the labor force (so it heavily regulates reproductive rights) but it does not want to pay for the cost of social reproduction of labor power.” And in every new crisis of capitalism, women are tasked with new burdens in the realm of waged work and care work. 

To phrase it in my own words via bullet points:

• The capitalist class needs to reproduce workers to maintain production.
• To do this it makes demands on women to have and sustain children--tasks which are very costly and time-consuming.
• Women should get paid for this labor, but they don't. Thus the capitalist class is disproportionately "oppressing" women.
• The capitalist class makes excess profits because of women's unpaid labor.
• Therefore the capitalist class puts restrictions on abortion to maintain this added level of "oppression" and to capture the surplus value (aka, profit) from unpaid labor.

This seems like 90% hokum and 10% truth.

The truth is that total production (usually known as GDP) increases with the size and skill level of the labor force. So no doubt, without new babies there will be no new workers, and as the population dies out production will come to a complete halt. Ms. Underwood has got that right.

But almost everything else is wrong. The primary beneficiary of increased GDP is not the capitalist class, but rather consumers--most of whom are workers. We're the people who buy whatever it is that capitalists and workers produce. Our standard of living depends on GDP.

Parents are the people who benefit most from children. They often rely on their kids to take care of them in their old age, and also if they're lucky they'll have some grandchildren. A fundamental task of being human is parenting children and raising them to be successful and fertile adults.

So I can't take Ms. Underwood's economic rationale for abortion seriously. And frankly, I don't think she takes it seriously either. Her motivation is much more visceral. She writes,

It’s clear that the conservative-majority court is seeking to reinforce the capitalist regime of social reproduction and heteronormativity and setting the scene for further attacks on queer, gender non-conforming, and trans rights.

She apparently has a thing against "heteronormativity." But of course it's those "heteronormal" people who actually have children. I suggest she envies them for just that reason, and it's because of envy that she wants to knock us heteronormal folks down a peg. Envy is what drives her crusade.

She really doesn't like babies. She applauds Black people for not having them.

The [abortion] ban will disproportionately affect Black women, oppressed by class and race, who are already four to five times more likely to have an abortion and are more likely not to have access to contraception.

Of course the disproportionate abortion rate for Black people can be seen as part of a eugenicist conspiracy. I don't believe in the conspiracy theories, but a lot of people do. Indeed, an early campaigner for birth control, Margaret Sanger, championed eugenics as a reason for her cause. By contrast, Kathy Barnette, candidate for senate in Pennsylvania and certainly not a member of the bourgeoisie, is clearly shocked by abortions of Black children.

Just for the record, trans people (at least those who have undergone medical procedures) are completely infertile. This is why parents object so strongly to their grade school children being taught that infertility is a value-free choice for them. No parent wants to raise infertile children.

I read somewhere that the fertility rate for gay people is 0.5--far below the 2.1 reproduction rate. I have no idea how that's measured and I grant no credibility to that specific number. But no doubt the fertility rate for gay people is far below that of heteronormal folks. Parents, rightly, usually love their children  unconditionally regardless of whether they're gay or have downs syndrome. But given a choice, they'd rather have children who will give them grandchildren.

For that reason Downs syndrome babies are typically aborted these days. Likewise, if there ever is a cheap genetic test for homosexuality, then I predict most gay babies will be aborted as well. Will Ms. Underwood still support abortion in that circumstance? Is she ok with the disproportionate abortion of female babies in China? For that matter, does she really think it is good that abortion rates among Black women is four to five times higher than for whites?

Terry Evans--in his article in The Militant--buys into the same hokey economics that Ms. Underwood describes, essentially demanding that capitalists bear all costs related to childbearing.

For working people, access to abortion cannot be addressed separately from the growing pressures tearing at our families. ...

That crisis is accelerating after years of declining real wages; unaffordable housing and child care; longer hours, forced overtime and draining work schedules that cripple family life; and the intolerable weight of mounting household debts. All of this is exacerbated by the biggest price rises in 40 years.

I guess that shared economic theory is what makes them both Trotskyists. But unlike Ms. Underwood, Mr. Evans doesn't envy the fertile. His support for abortion is tepid.

These questions can’t be addressed without a fighting program to win broader access to affordable family health care, child care, housing, jobs, contraception, easily accessible adoption and more. This fight is the road to win an unchallengeable majority to include abortion in all public family planning programs.

The picture accompanying his article shows a mother of three, "forced" to quit her job so to educate her children at home because of the pandemic. The implication is that she made the right choice--that her children are far more important than any career or paid employment. People who have abortions usually don't have three children.

I don't agree with Mr. Evans' economic theory, which is just silly, boilerplate Trotskyism. But unlike most of the Left, he is not extolling infertility as a positive good.

I think abortion has to be legal to some degree. It is an evil necessity imposed on us by modern medicine, which requires humans to make more choices about who lives and who dies. A necessity it may sometimes be, but it is never a good thing. Nobody is ever happier because they had an abortion.

Most of the Left (Mr. Evans excluded) isn't just in favor of abortion. They're support infertility generally, which is why they champion "trans rights" that render people infertile, and also gay rights, that render people infertile. Many people are infertile because they have no choice--and they of course deserve full civil rights as citizens. But nobody should be actively encouraged to give up child-rearing.

I think people who support abortion are envious--they either don't or can't have kids. They want to deprive the rest of us of that joy. It is envy that powers their crusade. Accordingly they describe abortion in euphemisms, such as "reproductive rights,", as "health care," or as a "choice." They don't like babies.

Lots of people depend on that fetus in the womb--not just the mother, but the father, grandparents, siblings, cousins, the school district--and yes, several steps removed, the capitalist. All of them want that baby to be born. Babies are a good thing--gay babies, girl babies, Black babies, even white male babies. 

Babies make people happy.

Further Reading:

• The New Aristocrats
• The New Socialist Resurgence Grouplet
• The Philippines

What's Happened Since I've Been Gone

I guess I need to explain my absence. My cancer came back and I've spent the last four months undergoing chemotherapy. The first few weeks were truly debilitating and I couldn't have blogged even if I wanted to. But after that--I just didn't want to. I was getting bored with my own posts. So with chemo as the excuse I took a break from blogging.

The good news is that the chemo worked--I am now in complete remission. In celebration my wife and I will be taking a vacation, including 12 days on a Caribbean cruise. I've never done that before--it's definitely an old man's holiday. So regular blogging won't resume until early May when we get home, but I'm chomping at the bit to get started again.

I've been gratified to see that even in the absence of new material, this blog has attracted 20 - 30 legit hits per day--pretty good for an amateur covering a very niche topic.

So if I've been sick, then my friends over at Socialist Action (SA) have been going stir-crazy. They managed to post exactly one (1) article during the month of March. I sure am glad I haven't paid for a subscription to the print newspaper--it must be mostly blank pages by now.

The reason for the silence is obvious. SA is unapologetically pro-Putin. To summarize their position in my own words, while they acknowledge that Russia is a capitalist/imperialist state, the country is nevertheless an objective force for progress because it necessarily must oppose the much stronger American imperialism. The real cause of the Ukraine war, in this view, is not anything that Putin or the Ukrainian people have done, but instead it's entirely the fault of "US imperialism"--that largely mythical boogeyman upon which all evil can be blamed.

On April 11th SA's chief honcho and failed presidential candidate Jeff Mackler finally posted a long article explaining at great length the position I've just described. The supposed sins of the USA are catalogued in detail. For example:

• Ukraine is dominated by US-funded fascists, such as the Azov Battalion.
• Fascist snipers shot 100 innocent civilian on Maidan Square in 2014.
• Fascists overthrew the duly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych--forcing him to flee to Russia.
• The US installed (somehow, mysteriously) the fascist prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. 

And so on. He cites no references for any of this--neither as links nor in a bibliography. His only source for the fascist snipers are unspecified remarks by Victoria Nuland--he provides neither the date nor venue for her speech. It's impossible to track this down. His only other source is a booklet authored by--Jeff Mackler--of all people.

In other words, Mr. Mackler just makes stuff up. You can't believe a word he says.

SA's call to action is to demonstrate against the US government for forcing Putin to invade Ukraine--as summarized by their key demand: US Out Now! Hands off Ukraine! Needless to say this is crazy-talk, and will attract no support from anybody on the American political spectrum.

One last thing: I can't let Mr. Mackler's antisemitism go unchecked. The fact that current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish apparently sticks in his craw. The only mention of the man's name is this: "We note with contempt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recently-proclaimed affinity for Zionist Israel’s model of a militarized state aimed at the subjugation of oppressed people."

If Mr. Mackler is nutty, then our comrades in Solidarity are perfectly sane. A long editorial, dated March 2nd, is posted by the "National Committee." The piece is well worth reading, and I recommend you do so. 

I think the article is mostly correct. They unambiguously condemn Russia for the invasion and are not making excuses for Putin. But at the same time they write:

NATO’s expansion into post-Soviet Eastern Europe, up to Russia’s borders, was all the more dangerous because it was not only a power grab, but also ideologically driven by the U.S. establishment’s assumption, after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the crushing U.S. victory over Iraq in the 1990-91 Kuwait war, that its rule was uncontested. It violated assurances that U.S. diplomats at the highest level had made to Soviet leader Gorbachev, and was already called by George Kennan in the 1990s a “tragic mistake” that Russia ultimately would never accept.

This is absolutely correct. NATO should never have expanded east of the Oder/Neisse line (today Germany's eastern border). The extension into eastern Europe has to be seen by Russia as a threat. The Biden administration's biggest mistake was to insist that Ukraine have a hypothetical right to join NATO. Indeed, I think that was the proximate cause of the war to begin with.

Unlike Solidarity, I do not believe NATO should be abolished--I do think it needs to retreat from Russia's borders. The editorial also states that "...NATO and particularly U.S. imperialism are at least equally aggressive and as dangerous as Russian annexationism." I do not agree with the adjective equally here--Putin is by far most at fault.

Contra Jeff Mackler, they write:

It is painful to see how much of the U.S. peace movement swallowed the simplistic story that the events of 2014 in Ukraine, when a spectacularly corrupt pro-Russian government was deposed under pressure of a mass movement (over whether to join a European trade bloc or a Russian-led Eurasian one), were a “fascist coup” and a “genocide” of Russian-speaking regions.

In these claims, some kernels of reality are wrapped inside layers of twisted falsehoods that could (and do) come straight from the Kremlin – as if, for example, violent ultra-nationalist forces, which do exist in Ukraine, are more powerful there than they are in Russia!

I couldn't have put it better myself!

On a completely different topic, news comes that Socialist Resurgence (SR) will unite with a grouplet called Workers' Voice (WV), with the new group adopting that latter name. They write:

We are in agreement about the necessity for principled regroupment of revolutionary groups. The two groups carried out common discussions and practical work for two years and have come to a shared perspective on the fundamental situation facing the working class and oppressed today. On this basis, a congress was held on March 19-20, 2022, in which WV and SR voted to merge as Workers’ Voice. Our congress included observers from the International Workers League, Revolutionary Socialist Organizing Project, Tempest Collective, Corriente Obrera, and affiliates of the Revolutionary Socialist Network. 

As a fused organization, Workers’ Voice brings together two historic traditions of world Trotskyism into a common revolutionary party.

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.)

The Workers' League existed back in my day (1970s), then led by a fellow named Tim Wohlforth. In a play on his name, our derogatory name for them was the Woolies. I did not know them well--there weren't many Woolies in the cities where I lived. I say more about this in one of my earliest posts, here.

The IWL-FI writes a history of their movement--it reads like an endlessly tedious soap opera. I couldn't make much sense of it. Mr. Wohlforth is not mentioned at all--I think he was forced out in disgrace. More useful than the text itself are the footnotes. They're explanatory and can be read independently--and serve as a useful summary.

I've since googled around and discovered that Mr. Wohlforth died in 2019 at age 86. He spent the last decade of his life in Ashland, OR, where he was a member of the Society of Friends Meeting--a tradition he picked up from his childhood. He wrote mystery novels (with some success) and mentored others in that craft. Here is his obituary, and here is a reminiscence. Neither mentions his Workers' League years, but his Wikipedia page does. He is survived by a wife, a son, two grandchildren, and many friends. In other words, he was a successful and accomplished man.

I do wish the new Workers' Voice success. Certainly not in making a world revolution--heaven forbid--but in producing an interesting and useful web page from which I may learn something, and from which I can draw inspiration.

Further Reading:

• American Brezhnevism Today
• What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?
• 'Against the Current' Celebrates 200 Issues

Afghanistan

My Trotskyist friends are all celebrating the defeat of American "imperialism" in Afghanistan, while at the same time lamenting the takeover by the Taliban.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) posts a piece by Roy Landersen entitled US rulers end 20-year-long imperialist war in Afghanistan. The lede:

The U.S. rulers’ 20-year war and occupation of Afghanistan, and the carnage it inflicted on working people at home and abroad, ended with further devastation as the Taliban retook the capital, Kabul, Aug. 15.

By the end, the US had 2500 troops in Afghanistan, which hardly rises to the level of "occupation." The supposed "carnage it inflicted" described in the first clause, in fact prevented the Taliban's "devastation" asserted in the second. Incoherence best describes that sentence, along with the rest of Mr. Landersen's article.

In fact, the American war in Afghanistan largely ended by 2013, after which we provided air and intelligence support to aid the Afghan army. All of this was suddenly withdrawn by President Biden without notice, as Mr. Landersen reports.

In the wake of President Joseph Biden’s April 13 announcement that all U.S. forces would withdraw by Sept. 11, and Washington’s abandonment of its main Bagram airbase without any notice to Afghan government forces, the reactionary Taliban stepped up its military offensive. The Afghan army disintegrated after the withdrawal of U.S. army and air support. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Taliban commanders announced the formation of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

Among that air support taken out of the country were all the Med-Evac helicopters used to airlift wounded Afghan soldiers to hospital. Apparently Mr. Biden expected the Afghan troops to bleed to death on the battlefield just so the US could make a graceful exit.

A better article, albeit with the contradiction already in the headline, posted by Socialist Resurgence and written by Farooq Tariq, is Afghanistan – The U.S. occupation took only human lives; Taliban victory is not a sign of peace. The lede paragraph:

It is now evident that the U.S. imperialism has lost all its human and financial investment in Afghanistan. The Taliban have almost occupied Afghanistan without a fight. What has been spent in Afghanistan in the name of development, “democracy” and training of the armed forces for the last 20 years was unprecedented in the history of the world.

Well--true, of course. The US has needlessly thrown away whatever it has built in Afghanistan, though I doubt the amount--inflation adjusted--was "unprecedented in the history of the world." 

I'm bothered by the word "financial"--I don't know what it means. I believe he thinks the US was invested in Afghanistan for potential business ventures--like Walmart was gonna open up a chain of stores in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. If this is what he suggests, it's ridiculous. Afghanistan was never going to be a trading partner for American consumers.

The reason the US was in Afghanistan was to fight Jihadi terrorist groups that used the country as a base. You may or may not agree with that reason--but that was the reason. It was not an excuse for "democracy," "imperialism," or anything else.

Mr. Tariq admits that the US was partially successful.

Although some human progress has been made: For example, the average age [i.e., life expectancy—editors] has risen from 56 to 64 years, and the number of children who die before the age of five has halved. The literacy increased from 8% to 43%; 89% have access to safe drinking water in the cities. It was only 16% before.

This is not trivial--though it's all gone now, thanks to Mr. Biden's stupidity.

Mr. Tariq claims that "[a]ccording to the Cost of War Project, the United States poured $2226 billion into Afghanistan. This money could have provided basic education and health care all over the world."

Really? Tell that to the girls of northeastern Nigeria, routinely murdered or kidnapped by Boko Haram for the crime of going to school. Or tell that to 10-year-old boys in Uganda and Congo, forced by the Lord's Resistance Army to murder their parents. For that matter, tell that to the girls in Afghanistan--now that the Taliban is in charge, where is their schooling? Absent American "imperialism" it's all gone up in smoke.

For without competent soldiers for protection, any money spent on teachers and textbooks is wasted.

The silliest response to the Afghanistan debacle is that put forth by Ezra Brain, writing for Left Voice, in an article entitled Refugee Caps Are a Tool of Imperialism. Don’t Trust Imperialists to Resolve the Refugee Crisis. The money paragraph is this:

Be it refugee bans or refugee caps, socialists must oppose all imperialist attempts to use borders to restrict the free movement of people, especially refugees from imperialist wars. To put it bluntly: the greatest imperial power in the world, with a coalition of other imperialist powers, attacked, looted, and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years and is now trying to prevent refugees from entering. After 20 years of imperialist occupation, Afghanistan is left impoverished, war torn, and with a growing COVID rate. This is imperialism in its clearest form. Every refugee from the Afghan war — indeed, every refugee anywhere — must be allowed entry into the U.S. and given full legal rights and protections.

Pretty much every word here is wrong. What has the US "looted" from Afghanistan? The country was poor long before we got there and it remains poor today, albeit as Mr. Tariq pointed out, slightly better off than it was before.

But the truly inane demand is that the US accept all refugees from Afghanistan--that would likely be half the population. Beyond the useless claque of New York City college professors that make up Left Voice, there is no political constituency in this country that wishes for this.

It is particularly weird coming from Mr. Brain, an activist in the LGBTQ... community. Suppose only 99% of the Afghans who arrive on our shores are honest refugees--the remainder are instead Jihadis. That means for every million Afghans arriving in Manhattan, 10,000 of them will be hellbent on destroying secular America. I doubt Mr. Brain will do very well when surrounded by 10,000 anti-gay, homophobic, murderous Islamist extremists.

Mr. Brain's demand is ridiculous and very unlikely to come true, but people like him really should be careful what they wish for.

Socialist Action has gotten too small to maintain a proper webpage, and they have yet to post anything about Afghanistan. Which is unfortunate because they represent the dying embers of Brezhnevism in America, and I'd like to know what a Brezhnevist thinks. I predict that, unlike Trotskyists, they'll celebrate the rise of the Taliban--this because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's the same reasoning for their support of Kim Jong Un, Nicholas Maduro, Bashir al-Assad, and even Xi Jinping.

For just like their mentor, Leonid Brezhnev, they support any government that opposes American "imperialism", no matter how vile.

Further Reading:

• Cuba Needs More Communism
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower

Cuba Needs More Communism!

If you agree with my headline, then you're likely a Trotskyist. Without exception the comrades on my Beat are unanimous in support of the "revolution." Though there are some denominational distinctions.

In broad outline, the Trotskyist story goes like this. A few hundred counter-revolutionaries organized demonstrations in cities across the island. While this was in response to rapidly deteriorating economic circumstances, the unrest was greatly magnified by US propaganda, the CIA, and/or reactionary Cubans living abroad. To counter these small and unrepresentative demonstrations, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of loyal "revolutionary" citizens took to the streets to support the "revolution."

Cuba's economic difficulties--according to my Trotskyist friends--stem entirely from the US embargo. The Militant, in an article by Seth Galinski, reports that "as a result of the embargo, they have a critical shortage of hypodermic needles for vaccination." This even though "...Cuba is the only country in Latin America to develop its own vaccines, rated as over 90% effective, and has begun massive distribution."

Which makes no sense. Despite the supposedly knee-capping embargo, Cuba has assembled the advanced biotechnology and sophisticated manufacturing wherewithal to produce a world-leading vaccine. Yet they can't manufacture their own hypodermic needles? It's even weirder since hypodermic needles are manufactured all over the world--not just in the United States--including Europe, Japan and China. Why can't Cuba buy needles from those countries? (Answer: they don't have any money.)

Besides which, hypodermic needles (and other medical supplies) are not under US embargo. Ike Nahem, in one of Socialist Action's poorly produced webinars, proudly announces that his private organization has just shipped six million hypodermic needles to Cuba all by their lonesome. Presumably without violating any US laws.

If Cuba has such a successful vaccine program, why can't they sell doses to other poor countries and earn money to buy needles? (Answer: they don't have an effective vaccine.)

The Militant (along with Socialist Action) claims that the American media has hugely overstated the importance of demonstrations by a few malcontents, by exaggerating both the numbers and the crowd's anger. Mr. Galinski says the NY Times misleadingly labels a photo as an antigovernment demonstration, when if fact it depicts a crowd of enthusiastic revolutionaries. Indeed, Mr. Galinski's article recycles the Cuban government's position hook, line and sinker, taking every word spoken by President Diaz-Canel as gospel truth.

I wasn't there. I don't know how many people marched in which demonstration, but I'm not inclined to believe The Militant. That paper--usually honest reporters--has lost its marbles when it comes to Cuba. More trustworthy is this piece by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker (not exactly a right-wing source) who writes in the lede paragraph,

On Sunday, July 11th, the world took note of a historic event in Cuba, as thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against the government. Many shouted “Patria y Vida!”—Fatherland and Life—the title of a banned but extremely popular rap song that riffs on a slogan coined by the late Fidel Castro: “Fatherland or Death.” Many also shouted “Libertad!”—Freedom—and similar phrases that are not only heretical but, when shouted in protest, illegal in Cuba, where the Communist Party is the sole legal arbiter of political life.

Socialist Resurgence takes a different tack. In an article by Ernie Gotta entitled Defend the gains of the Cuban Revolution! Free the prisoners! End the U.S. blockade!, the lede is this:

The protests in Cuba on July 11 are the symptom of a government in crisis. In some areas, the government used police to crack down on the protests. Marxist activists like Frank García Hernández and his comrades were arrested; Socialist Resurgence calls on the Cuban government for their immediate release.

The key issue is that communists were being arrested! What Cuba really needs is actual, real live Communists in control--not these crazy Castroite fakers. That's what the demonstrators were really demanding. The site reposts an article from the Cuban blog Communistas headlined A call for the freedom of detainees in Cuba.

Left Voice goes further with the idea that the Cuban government is not up to the task. A think piece by Facundo Aguirre suggests that Cuba is a deformed workers’ state, following the path of Stalinist Russia. While much is to blame on the embargo, there is also this.

For a little more than two decades, the Castroist bureaucracy has been promoting a policy of economic opening with the characteristics of restoring capitalist relations. This has led to the development of internal forces that are hostile to the revolution, particularly in the ranks of the bureaucracy itself, which controls the most profitable sectors of the economy. It is this social force of small proprietors that the pro-imperialist gusanos aim to influence as they look for a way to hitch a ride on this social movement. At the same time, imperialism hopes to influence the wealthy bureaucrats as a way to break the unity of the regime.

Of course the policy of "economic opening" was driven by necessity stemming from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to have a growing economy if you don't put people in charge of their own resources. Back in 2013, Socialist Action's Jeff Mackler described the policy well:

The reforms indicate that the Cubans recognize the harsh reality of the economic distortions that have been wrought from their forced isolation from the world market due to the U.S.-imposed illegal embargo/blockade and related imperialist incursions. In a significant sense they are legalizing a reality—that hundreds of thousands of Cuban workers are already “employed” in tiny “business” ventures, trying to make ends meet, while they simultaneously receive subsistence wages from the state for their official job.

Some 178 areas where terminated workers can now operate as formally licensed small-scale business owners have been established.

I posted a response to Mr. Mackler's piece entitled Viva Poverty!, which I think accurately sums up the current situation.

What does Mr. Aguirre propose as the Trotskyist response?

We must not hand over the banner of democracy to imperialism and its agents. Instead, we must fight those forces, demanding an end to repression; freedom for those detained, who are mainly militants of the Left; and insisting on political freedom and freedom of organization for the Cuban masses.

It is necessary to fight for the legalization of the anti-imperialist Left parties and forces that defend the conquests of the revolution. What is required is to raise up the great mass of the Cuban people against the criminal embargo, against the restorationist policies, and against the privileges of the bureaucracy.

In a word, he advocates for more communism. His plea to extend freedom applies only to those folks who agree with Mr. Aguirre. Unfortunately for him, the demonstrations in Cuba--however big or small they were--demanded more freedom. That is freedom to be in charge of one's own life, own property, own money, and to choose a job where one wants to work.

Here we are--the great grandchildren of the "revolution" are still forced to live in abject poverty in a country where food is illegal. The last thing they want is more communism. 

Further Reading:

• Down the Cuba Rabbit-Hole with Mary Alice Waters
• The Militant Visits Manila
• Cuba

Electric Cars

So I really liked the article entitled Electric cars: On the road to a ‘green’ future?, authored by Cooper Bard and published in Socialist Resurgence. It has a lot of very useful information, specifically about lithium and lithium mining. Lithium is used in lithium-ion batteries that are the power source for electric cars. The cited references are especially useful. So I recommend it highly.

Lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, and therefore ideal for low-weight batteries. It is a common element in the earth's crust, but is widely distributed, existing in most places in only trace amounts. Concentrated ores are rare, found disproportionately in South America (esp. Chile and Bolivia), Australia and China. Accordingly, economically viable mines are in short supply, and there is no reason to think the world's lithium supply will grow rapidly.

As one of Mr. Bard's references points out,

If we would like to have a North American standard of living for everyone in the world – say, 1 car for every 2 people – then we would need about 3.4 billion Nissan Leafs. This would use 32% of the identified resources (all known lithium in the world), or 82% of the reserves (all lithium that is currently economic to produce). Even with widespread recycling, that seems like an unsustainable prospect.

And that's just lithium. Mr. Bard mentions cobalt and nickel. Cobalt is mined mostly in DR Congo, with smaller amounts coming from Canada. Nickel is more widely dispersed:

More than 2.5 million tonnes (t) of nickel per year are estimated to be mined worldwide, with Indonesia (760,000 t), the Philippines (320,000 t), Russia (280,000 t), New Caledonia (200,000 t), Australia (170,000 t) and Canada (150,000 t) being the largest producers as of 2020.

For whatever reason, Mr. Bard doesn't mention copper, which electric motors require in large quantities. Indeed, the best response to governments mandating electric cars is to buy copper futures or copper mining stocks, which have doubled in price over the past 18 months. "Chile was the top producer of copper with at least one-third of the world share followed by the United States, Indonesia and Peru."

The common method of mining lithium involves the selective precipitation of various salts in brine pools. At first the ore is dissolved in a large pool, and as the water evaporates the salts crystallize and precipitate out. One then has a mixture of lithium, manganese and boron salts. These are then dissolved in another brine pool, and are again selectively precipitated out (by varying the pH), enabling the isolation of sufficiently pure lithium salts. Turning lithium salts into metallic lithium requires copious amounts of electricity, in a manner similar to aluminum production. Any general chemistry student who did qualitative analysis in a lab will understand the basic principles.

Even if you didn't follow all of that, the bottom line is that mining lithium requires lots of water, and is a process that takes months or even years to complete. The waste products include sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, along with heavy metal byproducts. None of this is good for the local groundwater.

So Mr. Bard is quite right: lithium mining is not good for the environment. And more--there is not enough lithium out there to electrify our transportation system. Similar issues arise in mining the other necessary metals. Copper, for example, is extracted in huge, open pit mines, leaving enormous tailings in their wake. Fracking is a much cleaner, cheaper and less destructive way of producing energy.

I'll take issue with Mr. Bard's description of the Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. He writes,

Clay dug up from what is essentially an exploded mountain is mixed with 5800 tons sulfuric acid a day. The process will require over 3200 gallons of water every minute. The site, operated by Lithium Americas, will generate over 350 cubic yards of mining waste laced with the sulfuric acid [1]. Groundwater may also be contaminated with toxic materials. Anyone who declares this an environmentally safe solution has an odd perspective on environmentalism!

I won't argue with the last sentence, but the rest is misleading. The water is not required by the minute, but rather while setting up the brine pools, i.e., every few months. And similarly for sulfuric acid. Further, there is no groundwater at Thacker Pass--if you've traveled in Nevada you know the place is dry as a bone.

He also writes,

[The Thacker Pass] mine has received the ire both of local ranchers, who have filed lawsuits, and the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, who have delivered petitions and protested the site, as well as organized a 273-mile-long prayer run to promote awareness.

The Ft. McDermitt reservation has 341 inhabitants, and is located about 50 road miles away from the mine. It is not clear to me how the mine will in any way affect the tribe. I also don't see why that small population should have veto power over an enterprise of national significance.

But I agree with Mr. Bard that electrifying our transportation system is not a solution to any environmental crisis. I'll suggest that fossil fuels are much better, cheaper and cleaner.

Instead of fossil fuels, Mr. Bard's suggestion is that we revert to "mass transit," i.e., a 19th century solution to a 21st century problem. He writes,

One bus—whether diesel, hybrid, or electric—can efficiently transport 50 people. A train or tram connected to a renewable city electric grid will provide clean transit to thousands of people over the course of a year. Mass transit has the dual advantage of being both more accessible (and more equitable) and more efficient. Pound for pound, trains, trams, and buses require less and do more.

Which is weird, because the buses in my hometown rarely carry more than half a dozen passengers at a time. Often I see them driving around completely empty. Trams famously travel at 19 miles per hour. On current ridership, there is no way that so-called "mass transit" is more energy efficient than private cars.

More, it's really hard to get to work on mass transit. Randall O'Toole writes,

It doesn’t reach many jobs: The University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory estimates that a typical resident of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas can reach more than twice as many jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit ride. Auto users can reach 12 times as many jobs in 60 minutes up to 67 times as many jobs in 10 minutes as transit users.

Mr. Bard implicitly recognizes that--he phrases transit's advantage as "pound for pound." But surely, "minute for minute" is a much better comparison, and on that "mass transit" loses big time. Mr. Bard apparently assigns no value to people's time.

I believe Larry Ellison dinged rail travel something like this:

A train starts from a place you don't want to start from, leaving at a time you don't want to go, and takes you to a place you don't want to be at, arriving at a time when you don't want to get there. And after all of that you have to get into a car to drive to your destination.

Mass transit works in densely populated cities, e.g., New York. But most Americans don't live that way, and don't want to live that way. Mass transit doesn't work for suburban or rural areas.

Just imagine if the indigenous tribe Mr. Bard otherwise so champions were all forced to wait around for buses. They wouldn't be happy. 

Further Reading:

• Keith Leslie's International Report
• Louis Proyect and the More Poverty Solution
• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge

Amazon Defeats the Union

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) tried to organize the Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, and they failed. The vote was 1798 against and 738 for the union, from a total of 5698 workers.

I get my information from several articles at Left Voice (LV - here, here and here), from Socialist Resurgence (SR - pdf, see p. 4), from Vice (here) and from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ - here and here).

My correspondents give several reasons for the loss. First, they claim that Amazon cheated. There was an "illegal" USPS mailbox set up at the employees' front door to make it easier for them to mail in their ballots--but gave the impression that the company would check the ballots. Employees were required to attend meetings where the union was denigrated. The size of the bargaining unit was inflated to include supervisors and managers, and workers were subject to a barrage of text messages. The WSJ partially disputes some of these points, and I doubt--even if true--that any of this could have swung the election to such an overwhelming extent. If the workers really wanted a union, none of these tactics would've mattered.

Second, the loss is blamed on "business unionism." That is, the union tried to organize from the top down, and failed to do the grass roots work necessary to sway the vote. LV's reporter, Tatiana Cozzarelli, relates that, as a reporter, she found it nearly impossible to interview actual Amazon workers. They weren't involved in organizing activity at all. The union dismissed this, saying that they were keeping them under wraps to prevent retaliation. But to me (and apparently also to Ms. Cozzarelli) it was because the workers just weren't interested. The lopsided vote, along with the large number of non-voters, bears out this hypothesis.

Finally, the WSJ suggests that workers didn't think the union could do anything for them. They already get, as starting wages, $15/hour, which in Alabama is pretty good scratch. Amazon recently announced that, while keeping starting salaries the same, it was raising wages nationwide of many employees by as much as $3/hour. The workers didn't believe a union could improve on that, and then would take a cut off the top for union dues.

Amazon has a reputation (probably never entirely fair) of treating its employees like disposable commodities--as casual labor. If somebody quits, a new worker could replace them easily enough. But this is no longer true, for two reasons.

• There is a labor shortage in this country. Demand for labor is strong as we recover from the pandemic, and the supply of workers is diminishing for demographic reasons.
• Amazon is automating its warehouses. This means that it needs fewer employees, but they require higher skills. They need to work well around complicated and potentially dangerous machinery.

The result is Amazon has to pay higher wages, it has to provide some kind of career track, and it has to cover medical and retirement benefits. It's doing all those things. This is no longer a job for casual labor. Amazon can and will raise wages as much as needed to make sure it has the labor force it needs. If wage increases are what workers are after, they don't need a union--and the workers knows that.

So instead of promising wage increases, the union offered better working conditions. LV guest contributor Michael Goldfield describes it as "dignity."

And, there were not clear sets of public demands the union put forward, just dignity, etc. They should have said, if the union is certified, we will ask for $20 or so per hour, union safety and health committees, longer and more frequent breaks and lunch periods, less monitoring by computers and supervisors, no discussion of output and breaks without a union steward present, etc., demands that could have been developed at public meetings of workers, not to put in stone the examples that I have given.

Unfortunately, this dignity thing is expensive! And not just that--it destroys Amazon's entire business model. The company can't run a business paying employees to take longer breaks, extended lunch periods, and endless discussions with shop stewards.

But the real clinker is the "monitoring by computers and supervisors." Amazon has invested millions in equipment--robots if you will--and it's the robots who drive the speed of work. The investment is wasted if the employees purposely slow down the line. From the company's point of view this is complete non-starter. If the workers can't work, then Amazon will just pick up its robots and move them some place else.

The bargain is: you (worker) promise to arrive on time, every day, and to work as hard as you can during your shift. In return, we (Amazon) will pay you as much as you need to make that happen. For all that, Amazon is doing its best to improve working conditions within the constraint of running an efficient shop, e.g., by rotating workers from job to job to reduce repetitive motion problems.

What the union really asked for was the right to sabotage Amazon's business. The workers, by overwhelming margin, understood that for what it was, and rejected it. Because they realized that a secure future with a solid paycheck, health and retirement benefits will not be forthcoming if the business is destroyed.

This illustrates an important point: the incentives for the union differ from those of the employees. The workers benefit from higher pay and benefits, and reasonable attention to working conditions. 

The union, meanwhile, benefits most by increasing the total number of employees--for union dues increase more by employee number than by salary level. That's why they want to gum up the works as much as possible, for by minimizing worker productivity they maximize headcount. Apparently Amazon employees saw through this scam, too, and understood that their long-term future is not well served by sabotage.

I think the traditional union with contractual bargaining rights is a dead letter. It's very expensive, it leads to an unaccountable bureaucracy, and has incentives that don't correspond to the employees'. A strike to form a union benefited first and foremost the RDSWU--and that's why Ms. Cozzarelli couldn't find many workers involved in the effort.

More successful will be an informal employees' association, similar to what the West Virginia teachers had when they won their strike. An association travels light--it doesn't suffer under the legal and bureaucratic constraints of a legal union, it needs little or no staffing, doesn't need to pay dues to an "international," and is under no contractual or legal constraints.

My Trotskyist friends might call this suggestion-box unionism. And they'd be right in those cases where labor-management relations are good. But if there's any conflict, an association could make life very difficult for their employer. Recall that the West Virginia teachers' association actually called a strike--despite not being a union. Note that Amazon has a reputation for treating workers poorly--no union is necessary to make that case if the charge is true. The company would be forced to respond--as it is currently doing.

By voting down the RDSWU, the workers at Amazon's Bessemer warehouse showed they are much smarter than the college professors and grad students who write for Left Voice and Socialist Resurgence give them credit for.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• "A Program to Unify the Exploited and Oppressed"
• Unionizing Hotels?

Keith Leslie's International Report

Socialist Resurgence (SR) held a convention meeting on March 13th, and issued the usual, Trotskyist-style reports: a Political Report by Erwin Freed, and an International Report by Keith Leslie. The topic for this post is the latter.

Readers may recall Mr. Leslie from our discussion of the long and excellent monograph he wrote while he was still a member of Socialist Action, entitled China: A New Imperial Power (pdf). In those days he was known as "Comrade Keith," and while I credited him with considerable erudition, I faulted him for putting too much weight on the word imperialism--a mostly meaningless term.

Unfortunately, the same error leads him astray in the International Report. He is so convinced that the US is an "imperialist" power, and that China aspires to be an "imperialist" power that he completely misses the historical dynamic. So let's just ignore the word imperialism and try to make sense of things as they really are.

Here's a key graf:

The election of Joe Biden heralds a new effort by U.S. imperialism to halt or reverse the phenomenon of its declining global power. The Trump administration sought to reinvigorate U.S. standing through brash unilateralism, disruption of existing agreements, and trade wars waged on every front, including against both traditional allies and opponents in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, it suffered a series of embarrassing reversals such as the failure of a U.S.-backed coup effort in Venezuela, a partial withdrawal of military forces from Syria, which provoked wide backlash in bourgeois circles, and a negotiated truce in the trade war with China.

The first sentence is partly true. Following WWII the US contributed about 50% of gdp; today the value is a bit over 25%. But this is only relative decline--in absolute terms the US economy has grown like gangbusters. It's just that the global economy has grown faster because it started from a much lower base. In particular, China went from zero to hero once it got over the whole Revolution-Mao-Tse-Tung-mass-murder thing.

The Trump administration, far from trying to "reinvigorate U.S. standing" intended precisely the opposite. His goal was isolationism--and for good reason. To wit:

1. The US depends less on foreign trade than any country on earth (for which data exists) besides Afghanistan and Sudan. Our total trade (imports plus exports) amount to only 26% of gdp. Even Cuba (at 27%) relies more on foreign trade than we do. By comparison, China is at 36%, Canada at 65%, and Germany at 88%. (The leader is Luxembourg at 382%, but for obvious reasons small countries have a greater dependence on foreign trade than big ones.)
2. Yet, despite our relative self-sufficiency, we have been financing global foreign trade through the Eurodollar system. This is known colloquially as "the dollar is the reserve currency." 
3. Owning the reserve currency has some big advantages (we can unilaterally sanction anybody we want), but it comes with a huge disadvantage--we have to run permanent and large trade deficits. That's because everybody else needs dollars in order to finance their trade, and the only way they can get dollars is to sell into the US market. Thus our imports are nearly unlimited, while our exports are capped because our trading partners are hoarding dollars to use as a global currency.

When the US contributed 50% of global gdp, financing the reserve currency was a tolerable expense, and the advantages outweighed the cost. But now the shoe is on the other foot--especially since the US is nearly self-sufficient, and including Canada and Mexico almost entirely self-sufficient. Trump decided (rightly in my opinion) to stop financing global trade, and as a corollary to repatriate manufacturing back to the United States (so we don't have to import the products). Hence all the tariffs on everybody.

If we're gonna withdraw from foreign trade, then there's no reason for us to be the world's policeman. Thanks to fracking, we no longer have much interest in the Persian Gulf--the US Navy has largely withdrawn from that venue. Likewise neither the Indian Ocean nor the Mediterranean are of much concern for us. There's no reason for us to have troops in either Afghanistan or Syria--or for that matter in Germany or the Korean peninsula. Trump--left to his own devices--would have withdrawn US troops from all those locales. Beyond North America and the Caribbean, only the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and the South China Sea remain important trading routes for us.

Put bluntly, the United States has not been acting like an "imperialist" nation. Quite the opposite. Mr. Leslie is pounding square pegs into round holes.

Now let's look at it from China's perspective. (My view is heavily influenced by Peter Zeihan, whose books I reviewed here, here, and here.)

This is what Mr. Leslie has to say:

For its part, China is facing a new series of obstacles to its investments abroad. A number of stops along the Belt and Road Initiative have run into serious issues, with infrastructure falling behind schedule, large debt loads piling up, economic returns underachieving expectations, and a few messy defaults in progress. These experiences reflect the relatively poor investment locations that China has had access to as a newly emerging power. As Chinese capital licks its wounds from this first round of setbacks, it seems likely that the BRI will not succeed, at least in the immediate future, at shaping global economic and trade flows as hoped. China will be forced to increasingly compete with other powers to access more stable investment locations, or intensify its international political and military presence to better secure its existing ones.

Everything he says is very true--I don't disagree with a word of it. But he misses the elephant in the room, and that is--unlike the USA--China is NOT self-sufficient.

• China can't feed itself. According to Mr. Zeihan, their productivity per acre is declining because of a move toward mechanized farming. Recently they've had some bad luck--a major swine flu epidemic, and serious flooding in the Yangtze river basin. China has to buy food on the open market--and for this they need dollars. Mr. Zeihan suggests they're on the verge of famine. China has begun an anti food-waste campaign.
• China depends on foreign energy--especially from the Persian Gulf. While China possesses huge reserves of shale gas, the American fracking method won't work in their geology. So for the moment they have to import most of their energy--and for that they need dollars.

The bottom line is that China urgently needs dollars--and just at a time when the US is no longer providing them. They're trying to turn the RMB into a reserve currency, but this has failed--less than 2% of global trade is settled in RMB. More--China does not run huge trade deficits and has no intention of doing so--so there aren't enough RMB in global circulation to work as a reserve. No major food exporter--the US, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Europe--is willing to accept RMB as payment.

So Mr. Leslie completely misreads the situation. Far from seeking to be an "imperialist" power (whatever that means), the country is desperately trying to keep the wolf from the door. Mr. Zeihan thinks they won't succeed--and I'm increasingly inclined to agree with him.

Conventional Wisdom has it that tariffs are a tax on consumers--prices will go up to reflect the cost of the tariff. But in the case of China this has proven false. They are so desperate for dollars that they're not willing to raise prices and so lose market share. They're simply eating the losses so that they can procure enough dollars to feed themselves.

The situation is that serious.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Capitalism Alone
• China and the United States
• What Marxists Don't Understand About Economics

What's Happening at Socialist Resurgence?

For those of you who don't follow the ins and outs of Trotskyist grouplets, Socialist Resurgence (SR) arose from a split in Socialist Action (SA), as I described here. Nominally, the split was over some abstruse (and irrelevant) issue concerning Syria. In reality, I think the break-up was over leadership. Specifically, SA's chief honcho (and failed presidential candidate) is the incompetent, 80 year old Jeff Mackler. He has been national secretary since SA was founded in 1983.

The problem extends way beyond SA. Gus Hall was national secretary of the CPUSA from 1959 until just before his death in 2000. James P. Cannon, founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), led the organization from 1938 to 1953--though he retired long before he died in 1974. The SWP is now helmed by 81 year old Jack Barnes, who has served since 1972.

So Trotskyism has a problem--their leaders seem to think they own a birthright. There is no bench, no term limits, no succession planning. It's a conceptual flaw in the democratic centralism framework, and it's why the organizations always split after they grow beyond a certain size. I see no indication that SR has addressed--much less solved--this issue.

In commemoration of James Cannon's birthday, SR comrades Ernie Gotta and Erwin Freed pen companion articles about the relevance of his legacy for today. Mr. Gotta writes,

Cannon would likely conclude (I think this is obvious) that the revolutionary leadership of the working class in our present moment is in poor condition. He might suggest that our historic role in 2021 must be in reforging a revolutionary leadership in the U.S. with a deeply internationalist perspective. As we begin resolving the problems of revolutionary socialist leadership in the U.S. through fusions and regroupments, we’ll have to do the same internationally as well.

This is mostly Trotskyist gobbledygook, but a little meaning can be extracted. By "revolutionary leadership," he means the existence of a vanguard party. This is a disciplined organization that is possessed with the precisely correct political line so that it can steer the benighted working class around the dangerous shoals of reformism and ultraleftism until a workers' state beachhead can be established on the other side.

SR possesses at least a tinge of self-awareness in the realization that their organization--perhaps 50 comrades--is too small to qualify as a vanguard that's gonna overthrow the capitalist system. So they have connected with an umbrella group--the Revolutionary Socialist Network--consisting of leftover grouplets from the now defunct International Socialists (along with something derived from the Workers' League). It's a hodge-podge of sectarian grouplets that all believe in almost the same thing but for theological differences. And they can't agree on who their leaders should be--so I think unity is likely a lost cause.

Mr. Freed opines on the importance of the "revolutionary press."

The press is a central component of all Bolshevik organizations. As Cannon said, the purpose of the vanguard party “is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the 20th century: the actuality of the workers’ struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.” Cannon took seriously the paper’s role in realizing these actualities, which Lenin defined as “not merely a collective propagandist and collective agitator, [but also] collective organizer.”

The concept was likely unworkable even in Mr. Cannon's day, but today it is completely ridiculous. The idea is that a single publication (edited by Socialist Resurgence) will have so much credibility among the working class that they won't bother to read anything else. Perhaps that was vaguely realistic dream when each city had only one daily paper and two TV stations--a Revolutionary Press could conceivably gain status in that environment. But today--with 500 channels on TV, millions of channels on YouTube, along with blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc., etc.--the notion that the publication of some tiny grouplet like SR is gonna get heard above the noise is utterly absurd. Not gonna happen. Even the New York Times struggles in this environment, and nobody else has a chance.

Still, they're trying, and unlike their former comrades in SA, they're competent. Their webpage is as good as any of the grouplets--but you can see by the number comments (mostly zero) that their reach is not very far. SR consists predominately (as best I can tell) of graduate students--people whom Lenin would've called the intelligentsia, but whom I refer to as the lumpen proletariat. But they're educated, they write well, and they can organize things like a podcast.

I just listened to a podcast on Socialist Resurgence Radio, an interview between host Alex Coy and SR's resident economist, Osman Keshawarz (a grad student at UMass). I do not have a transcript, so apologies if I misremember something.

1. It's professionally done. The sound quality is excellent, the host is fluent and entertaining, and the guest is smart and well-informed. There is nothing to be ashamed of here. How very unlike the endlessly boring podcasts by Jeff Mackler, hacking his way through a monotone exposition of whatever (I never managed to sit through an entire episode).
2. Mr. Keshawarz, while competent, is still wrong. He thinks wealth accrues in a zero-sum competition between capitalists and workers, where the system is rigged so that workers inevitably lose. In truth, it's not zero-sum--the standard of living of everybody in capitalist societies has steadily increased since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This is because entrepreneurs, via a process of trial and error, try to find the most efficient uses possible for resources (labor, capital, raw materials). Accordingly, there is a continuous ratcheting up of productivity, leading to more wealth across the entire society.
3. Mr. Keshawarz is narrowly correct about the division of the producer surplus. That is, at any given time the producers (workers and capitalists) have to figure out how to divvy up the proceeds between them. But he completely ignores the consumer surplus, i.e., the benefit that accrues to consumers by reducing the costs of production as much as possible. It is the growth in the consumer surplus that drives the persistent increase in our standard of living across the centuries.
   

   

   (Source)

   
   
4. As mentioned, entrepreneurs seek to maximize social utility by a process of trial and error. The purpose of financial markets--in all their complexity--is to reallocate capital from inefficient enterprises to efficient, highly productive enterprises. Of course there is a lot more error than there are successes--most new ventures either fail, or end up as small businesses. Mr. Keshawarz apparently wants the 14,000 people employed by GameStop to keep their jobs forever, despite the fact that the company no longer makes any sense--the world has changed. Even he admits that those employees are today "ripping off their customers." It will be much better if that labor force is reemployed doing something else that is of greater value to consumers.

Anyway, SR is interesting. They write well. They know how to host a podcast. Whether or not they have the precisely correct revolutionary program is above my paygrade. But I am certain that their larger influence on American society and history will be zero.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on the Pandemic
• Socialist Resurgence Demands Steep Wage Cuts for Health Care Workers
• New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend

Pre-Election Mockery

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) concocts more fake controversy with this post:

This week’s print edition of the Militant includes an article “Would a Joe Biden White House Be Better for Cuba?” It has been withdrawn from the online edition. It does not reflect the opinion of the Militant or the Socialist Workers Party. 

Next week’s issue of the Militant will feature an editorial correcting that article.

They did that last July--that is, retracted an article by Emma Johnson published in the prior week's Militant. I read both the offending article and the retraction, and even after all that I couldn't discern the reasons for the retraction. I concluded:

So I count Ms. Johnson not guilty. Her article is actually a clearer statement of what I (sort of) understand to be The Militant's true position. She does not deserve her walk of shame.

So why does The Militant retract an article that doesn't need to be retracted? This is like Tweedledum retracting a piece written by Tweedledee. It makes no sense.

So why the unnecessary retraction? My answer was "It's just clickbait."

So here we go again, except now we have to wait a week to supposedly find out the reason for the retraction. Fortunately for us, the print edition of The Militant is posted in pdf format here. The offending article is by John Warshell and can be found on page six. So it's kind of a game--can I figure out why it's been retracted without being told?

The answer is: No, I can't! For the life of me I have no clue where the author has gone wrong. Mr. Warshell was in the movement when I joined, so he's been a member for at least 50 years now. That he's suddenly succumbed to petty bourgeois wrong-think strikes me as astonishing. The article is total Trotskyist boilerplate--there's nothing in it any Trotskyist of any denomination could find offensive.

Yet I've fallen for the trick again. I will likely write a post about the retraction, and that of an article I should otherwise ignore. I guess I'm just a sucker for clickbait.

Help me out here, folks. Can any of you find the "error" in Mr. Warshell's piece? You have until next Saturday to let us know.

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The ever-incompetent presidential candidate Jeff Mackler strikes again. As readers of this blog know, Mr. Mackler's original running mate was Heather Bradford. After declaring her candidacy in May, 2019, Ms. Bradford was part of the group that split from Socialist Action to form the new Socialist Resurgence grouplet. That happened in October, 2019, which means that Ms. Bradford had five months to campaign with the team before becoming a non-person. 

Her short-lived campaign for veep earned her exactly three (3) mentions on the Socialist Action website. That was a really aggressive, busy campaign schedule! (sarcasm).

Anyway, since October, 2019, Mr. Mackler has campaigned alone, sitting in his basement pontificating via boring Youtube videos watched (or at least clicked on) by dozens of people. But somehow, miraculously, on October 22nd, 2020, a new running mate has suddenly materialized--her name is Ann Montague.

Ann Montague and Jeff Mackler (source)

This is two weeks before the election, obviously too late to get any changes to ballot status. Oh--I forgot--Socialist Action has made exactly zero effort to get on any ballot. So all they'll need to do is modify their campaign literature--the 50 or so copies they've printed up. They'll have to cross out the name "Heather Bradford" and hand-write in "Ann Montague". A couple of comrades working all night should be able to get this done.

I have nothing against Trotskyists running presidential campaigns, no matter how quixotic they may be. But back in the day we took pride in at least being professional about it. If I were in Socialist Action, or for that matter in any denomination, I'd be totally ashamed. This is truly pathetic.

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Getting back to The Militant, the SWP campaign of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett at least meets the professionalism standard. In the issue just before the election, at least three front page articles are directly about the election. Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Jarrett have actually been out campaigning and have gone on tour.

But here is something weird. Back in August The Militant published this statement:

Join the fight to put the Socialist Workers Party 2020 presidential campaign on the ballot everywhere we can! Teams of campaigners are fanning out across Washington state, Tennessee, New Jersey and Minnesota. With backing from working people, the party has already won ballot status in Colorado and Vermont, and is filing in Louisiana Aug. 7. The party’s goal is to be on the ballot in as many states as possible, as we have done every four years since 1948.

So I don't understand why the final list of candidates (published the week of the election) does not indicate ballot status. What's the point of getting on the ballot if you don't tell your readers (and potential voters) about it?

(Source)

If they're on the ballot, one would expect that Kennedy/Jarrett will get thousands of votes--some by accident, more as a random protest against Biden/Trump, and a few intentional. No matter how they come, votes are an accomplishment for the Party. I don't know why they keep their ballot status under wraps.

Anyway I'd like to know how many votes they get.

And even more important, the world wants to know if Boring Jeff Mackler can get more than two dozen votes. I doubt he will. We'll likely never find out because nobody has the time to go looking for the kooks who bothered to write in the name of the most ridiculous candidate ever in American history.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler Quits the 2020 Race! (false alarm)
• Left Voice on Trump's Tulsa Rally
• The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform