Professor Hoff & Harvard

 

Professor James Dennis Hoff pens a piece over at Left Voice entitled Trump’s Attacks on Harvard Are About State Power — Not Antisemitism. His main claim is at least partly right.

Though the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, is using Title VI civil rights legislation to justify a crackdown on universities like Harvard, it’s clear that these attacks are not really about antisemitism or bias; they are about punishing the movement for Palestine and the Left and asserting more direct ideological control of academia.

It is true that the crackdown on academe is not primarily about antisemitism, but antisemitism surely plays a role. Thugs who falsely claim to be "pro-Palestinian" are illegally occupying campus grounds and vandalizing buildings while carrying Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans--slogans that explicitly call for the extermination of the world's Jews. This is intolerable, especially when the thugs are in significant portion foreign students.

But Professor Hoff is surely correct that the major focus is something else. He describes Trump as "Bonapartist," a term which confused me. In 2017 Left Voice posted a piece entitled Trump: A Weak Bonapartist Government, which I found unhelpful. ChatGPT is more useful. It replied (excerpted)

The bourgeoisie is too weak or divided to rule directly, and the working class is too immature or disorganized to take power—so the state acts as a kind of arbiter.

Bonapartism arises during periods of class stalemate, like after a revolution has been defeated or stalled.

Trotsky described it as "the rule of the sword"—a regime where the military or a strongman rules in place of clear class dominance.

I think authoritarian is a reasonably good synonym, and Professor Hoff uses that word elsewhere in his article. It is a common accusation made against Trump by Progressive Democrats, including Professor Hoff.

So is President Trump acting like an authoritarian? I think not--as a comparison with Ron DeSantis illustrates.

Mr. DeSantis took over the New College of Florida in a very authoritarian manner. He fired the board of trustees and replaced them with his own appointees. The trustees, in turn, fired the school president, again replacing her with someone congenial to Mr. DeSantis. Many faculty were let go, or more commonly, chose to leave. The result was a fairly complete transformation from a left-wing to a right-wing institution. Whether you approve of that or not, there is no question that Mr. DeSantis went about it in a very authoritarian way.

Trump is not doing that. He has made no attempt to fire either the president or the board of trustees from either Columbia or Harvard. Instead, he is treating them as he might any other federal contractor, eg, Lockheed-Martin. All such contractors must obey federal regulations in order to keep their contracts, and these days such regulations strongly forbid such items as DEI. Do DEI, says Trump, and you forfeit your federal money.

So I don't think Trump is trying to take over Columbia or Harvard in any way like DeSantis conquered Florida's New College. That's not the goal.

What is Trump's goal? I can't read Trump's mind any better than Professor Hoff, but I can imagine two possible reasons. They're not mutually exclusive.

The first is to fulfill the promise of The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. This claims that higher education (along with education, generally) is not among the Constitution's enumerated powers given to Congress. According to this strand of Conservative and Libertarian thought, both the Higher Education Act (1965) and the formation of the Department of Education (1979) were (and are) not constitutional. The goal, therefore, is to end all federal aid to colleges & universities (along with K-12 education), and return both the responsibility and the authority to the states.

In this sense the goal is not to defund the universities, but only to eliminate federal funding. State funding for higher ed is up to the individual states, and not part of Trump's agenda. It does seem that Trump is dead serious about ending all federal funding. We'll have to see what the courts have to say about this.

I happen to agree with the Heritage Foundation here; I think federal grants to higher ed are, indeed, unconstitutional, especially given the large sums awarded to Harvard and Columbia. But perhaps Trump is not all that inspired by constitutional legalities, then there is another reason why he might go after the Ivies.

Trump is first and foremost a political animal. He is methodically attacking the Democrats at their weakest points, eg, men playing on women's sports teams, DEI, deporting MS-13 gangsters, etc. All of these issues poll very well for the GOP, and skepticism about the huge amounts of money given to places like Harvard is equally popular.

Dissing the elite, Ivy League schools is a political plus. More, they have way too much money, hire too many people, and seem to spend money on completely frivolous things. In Trump's mind all higher education is is a Democratic Party patronage machine--similar to Tammany Hall. If you want to kneecap your political opponents, shutting down their access to patronage jobs is surely a good way to do it.

And hence the diligent efforts to defund the universities. It makes sense.

The first bit of evidence is the relentless growth of the sector--and that despite much lower enrollments since the pandemic. Too many people work in academe. These are mostly patronage jobs given to folks who almost unanimously vote for Democrats.

Second, too many people are going to graduate school. This is most obvious in the humanities--where freshly-minted PhDs are competing for very low-paid adjunct positions. Certainly Professor Hoff is aware of the dearth of tenure-track jobs in English departments all across the country.

Students enroll in English graduate programs because 1) they like literature, and 2) the grad programs are heavily subsidized by the government, and hence they can attend school for free and receive a small stipend for doing so. As the old saw goes, if you subsidize something, you get too much of it--and these are mostly patronage jobs. This problem exists not just in humanities disciplines, but also in the sciences. A baccalaureate degree in biology is worth almost nothing on the job market, and a chemistry degree is not far behind.

Third, Professor Hoff touts the research chops of the major universities. He writes, 

Even at the height of the student protest movements in the 1960s, the federal government continued to expand investments in research and higher education mostly without strings attached. And why not? Research universities not only helped to train a caste of highly competent business leaders and worker-managers, (not to mention less prestigious skilled workers) but produced some of the most profitable and deadly technological innovations of the century, helping the U.S. to develop and maintain its economic and military dominance over the globe for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

This may have been true in the 1960s, but it is much less true today. As noted, we have far too many "business leaders and worker-managers." Academic research has also lost its mojo: we're paying for quantity rather than quality, and much of the research done today is published just to let PhD students graduate. We could cut the research budget by half and not impinge on scientific progress at all.

Beyond which, scientific research is also not among the enumerated powers of Congress. So apart from that narrowly tailored to defense needs, it probably shouldn't be paid for by the feds. Note that the federal government didn't fund research at scale until after WWII--the power grid, the electric motor, the automobile, the polio vaccine, the airplane, and much else besides were all invented without the feds spending a single dime.

In short, I think Trump is right. Whatever his reasons, federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia needs to be zeroed out. 

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Economic Crisis
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard
• The Professors Congress: The International Situation

Tariffs!

AI generated cartoon representing tariffs

The article is by Jason Koslowski, and it appears in Left Voice under the title Notes from a Wall Street Sewer: Tariff Edition. Mr. Koslowski identifies himself as "a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia." In other words, he works for peanuts, having to share his salary with the zillion other PhDs out there seeking a career in academia.

I assume he teaches English given the quality of writing, which is good. 

He gets the most important fact correct: Tariffs are "a tax on imported things." The reason for tariffs is supposedly to make foreign goods more expensive for American consumers, and thereby encouraging us to buy domestically. Or, alternatively, to incentivize the producer to manufacture their products in the US. In principle, tariffs should lower the trade deficit.

He remarks, correctly, that this usually doesn't work, writing "...this plan did not work in 2016. Also, pretty much every expert everywhere says it’s not going to work this time."

I don't blame Mr. Koslowski for taking Trump's justification for tariffs at face value. But in this case I think he's mistaken. I think Trump understands that tariffs won't likely reduce the trade deficit. What he really wants to do is raise taxes. And tariffs, especially disguised as repatriating factories to the US, is a politically acceptable way to raise taxes.

In other words, tariffs are--first and foremost--a tax increase. That's entirely the point. The uncertainty arises when one asks Who is gonna pay the taxes? This turns out not to be an easy question to answer.

The obvious answer, which both our contingent college teacher and "experts" suggest isn't likely, is that American consumers will pay the taxes. But here's the rub: when confronted with a tax increase, people adjust their behavior to avoid paying the taxes. American consumers are no exception: they can substitute the foreign products with American products, or they can decide they don't need as much of the tariffed goods after all. Eg, if Mexican avocados are tariffed, then perhaps our affection for guacamole will be lessened. This option, if it happens, would reduce the trade deficit.

Or it could happen that the foreign producers desperately need the revenue, and so they reduce their prices sufficiently to maintain market share. I think Chinese manufacturers may fall into this category--the Chinese need the US dollar reserve currency in order to buy food and oil from abroad, regardless of whether they end up taking a loss in Yuan terms. This is called mercantilism. In this case it is Chinese producers (both workers & capitalists) who pay the tax. There will be no net decrease in the trade deficit.

A third option is that--because, eg, Americans by fewer Canadian products--that Canadians just simply don't have enough money to buy American products. The result is that the Canadian dollar will decline in value compared to the US dollar. This is good for the Canadian manufacturer because of the favorable exchange rate their products sold in the US are no more expensive than they were before the tariffs were imposed. But Canadian consumers are still worse off--they still won't be able to afford that vacation in Florida. In this case there might be an increase in the trade deficit (Canadians sell just as much, but buy less), and it is the Canadian consumer who ends up paying the tax.

Finally, it's possible that Walmart generates sufficiently high margin on, eg, Mexican avocados that they can just pay the tariff as extra overhead. In this case the Walmart shareholder (and eventually, employees) are paying the tariff tax. This will also have no effect on the trade deficit.

None of these options are mutually exclusive, and it's likely that they will all apply to some degree. Of this we can be certain: every option reduces trade and therefore reduces wealth. As such tariffs are bad for the economy. But that's true for any tax increase--all taxes are bad for the economy. The only advantage of tariffs is that they're politically more palatable.

Of course it gets even more complicated. Mr. Koslowski mentions that other countries will levy retaliatory tariffs, ie, raising taxes even more! And it spirals down from there. But I think this problem is somewhat limited because: 1) the US runs a large trade deficit with the rest of the world, so other countries need to sell to the US a lot more than the US needs to buy from them. So the US will win this kind of war. And 2) the US depends less on foreign trade than almost any country on earth, so it's relatively immune from retaliatory tariffs.

In short, apart from being a tax increase, the effects of tariffs are near impossible to forecast. There are just too many options, followed by options in response to prior options, to know how this is gonna proceed. Anybody who predicts a supply shortage/inflation/higher price for Americans/a recession, or any other disaster may be right, but they're most likely wrong. I predict that Trump's tariffs won't have a huge effect on the American economy. People will respond by minimizing their tax bill, and eventually not much tax will actually be collected.

Mr. Koslowski damages his credibility with his cartoon-like description of the US economy. He writes

I think we should see the tariffs as part of a magic trick Trump is trying to pull off. That trick is to hold together an unstable — that’s the key word — class alliance. To get elected, he had to win over very different sections of the different classes in society. 

First sector of this support: large chunks of the ruling class, the “big bourgeoisie,” the very rich, majority shareholders and big CEOs of big companies. ...

He won a lot of them over. Trump’s selling his party as the most pro-business of the two parties. (Elections are lovers’ quarrels between segments of our masters.) He’s offering massive tax breaks for the rich, again. He’s deregulating the economy, he’s slashing protections on the environment — all this is great for profits.

One part of his appeal to the ruling rich: break the backs of the workers. 

His premise is that there is a fight-to-the-death between bosses and workers. I've discussed this in many previous blog posts, and it's not true. While they have some things to fight over, for the most part bosses and workers have a common purpose: sell as much to consumers as possible.

He asserts that the "big bourgeoisie" have a common interest--namely they're for tariffs. Many of them (in industries like agriculture, auto manufacturing, retailers, etc.) are very much against tariffs. Others (such as tech firms) don't care because they don't export material goods. I don't think there are many big businesses who actually think tariffs work in their favor.

The biggest supporters of tariffs are in fact the unions. Many union members were present at Trump's "Liberation Day" announcement. UAW head Shawn Fain is a strong supporter. And no wonder--tariffs allow unionized workers to collect a rent on top of the market wage--eg, a salary increase roughly equal to the tariff.

Mr. Koslowski's only evidence that Trump is anti-worker is "...he's attacking the National Labor Relations Board." This is small potatoes--the NLRB plays a bit role in the American economy. Indeed, the whole idea of collective bargaining is so last century--supply chains and consumer choices are too diffuse for a strike against any one company to have much significance. Much more impactful are unions as lobbying and political organizations, and it is in precisely that role that Trump is trying to reach out to them. A new tariff will strengthen the union far more than any collective bargaining agreement.

Personally, I'm on the side of Mr. Koslowski's cartoonish bourgeoisie: I think tariffs are on net a bad thing for the economy. They're a tax increase. But politically they make a lot of sense, and for Donald Trump they look to be a winning issue.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain
• Tradable vs. Non-Tradable Goods

Trump & the Working Class

(Source)

Left Voice authors Professor James Dennis Hoff and Jason Koslowski, write an article entitled Is the U.S. Labor Movement Ready for Trump 2.0?. It's a very long article and I'm not going to go through it line by line. But it is truly weird that intelligent, supposedly well-informed people--professors even--should get it all so spectacularly wrong.

They fail in three ways:

1. They don't understand class struggle.
2. They don't understand the role of the unions.
3. They don't know what "solidarity" means.

After an introductory paragraph describing the way Trump--at the behest of the "ruling class"--will "attack" unions, our two academics write

Building a labor movement that can fight these attacks and grow stronger in the process will require not only a radical break with the business unionism of the past, but the active organization and mobilization of the entire working class. It’s up to rank-and-file workers to protect ourselves, not just against the hammer blows on unions that are coming our way, but against the devastating attacks on the working class meant to divide our power, like mass deportations and bigoted anti-trans legislation. 

Their model of society is that the "working class" is in an all-or-nothing, fight-to-the-death struggle against the bourgeoisie--aka the "ruling class." Of course this is wrong--for otherwise why have the workers put up with "business unionism" for all these decades (if not centuries)? The only answer our academic friends offer is that the workers are too stupid to behave otherwise. What they require is leadership from somebody who knows better and who can lead them to the promised land.

Obviously, if all you need for your liberation is a bunch of know-it-alls who've got everything figured out for you, then who better to ask than a couple of college professors? Even better--these college professors imagine themselves as part of the Vanguard Party. There you go--problem solved. Just follow whatever they say and all will turn out just fine.

For proof, just ask the folks in Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea to describe the benefits of following a Vanguard Party.

The problem with our professor-friends' account of reality is that it's wrong. Workers and their bosses do have disagreements, and there is something to fight about. But mostly they're on the same side, that is, both benefit when the firm--both workers and bosses--increases total revenue. They can argue about how the revenue is divided between them, but without the revenue, then there's nothing to fight over.

Have you ever wondered why Starbucks baristas work so hard to get your drink precisely right? It's not just that the boss will get mad if they don't--but even worse, their fellow employees will be just as mad. That's because--deep down, in their heart of hearts--everybody in the store knows that if the customer isn't happy, then the baristas are not long for employment.

The mantra of capitalism is shop till you drop. The mark of a successful capitalist society is a high level of consumption. Because without customers there will be no revenue, and without revenue, nobody--neither worker nor boss--is gonna make any money. The customer is always right! 

The leadership that our academics deride as "business unionism" understands this. A "business union" works to maximize revenue--and then also maximize the fraction of which is paid to the workers. That's why, for example, the UAW was very selective about its strike targets. They understood that a general strike would cut revenue to zero and hurt the workers more than the bosses. So even when on strike, unions try very hard to maintain or even increase revenue.

Our academic friends will never defeat business unionism, because that's the strategy that makes the most sense for workers. Workers, after all, are smarter than academics for one important reason, ie, academics don't have any customers. They get paid by the government no matter how bad they are at their jobs. That's especially true for Professor Hoff, who is a tenured professor--which means regardless of incompetence he can't be fired. His work life is completely different from that of a Starbucks barista.

So the professors misunderstand the working class and the role of unions. But even the unions don't understand the role of unions! That's because--like every other large organization--they evolve into a self-interested bureaucracy. The union is often more interested in maximizing its own revenue rather than the wages of its members. In extreme cases the union is taken over by the Mafia and simply becomes an extortion racket. Las Vegas casinos are mostly unionized--thanks to the diligent efforts of the Chicago Outfit to skim as much revenue off the top as they could. The workers didn't benefit at all.

Even honest unions have to worry about their income--will they earn enough money in dues to make up for the cost of organizing? For retail businesses the answer seems to be mostly No. Neither Starbucks nor Amazon have profit margins big enough to make it worthwhile for a union to organize them. That's why the Teamsters' Union will likely never succeed at getting a contract at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse. The fledgling Starbucks union will be equally unsuccessful, for the same reason. The profit margins (typically 3%) are too small to keep a union solvent.

Our professor friends never have to worry about that. Colleges and Universities don't have to make a profit. The teachers' unions are really good at ripping off taxpayers. That's why they don't understand the conflict between unions and their members.

Finally, we get to "solidarity." This is what the professors write (links omitted):

Without a radical shift in strategy, labor may wind up squandering the relative advantages it still has. 

These include record-high levels of popular support for unions, an increasingly pro-labor workforce made up of young workers ready to organize, and the likelihood of increased class struggle as Trump attempts to carry out the worst of his proposed agenda against workers, immigrants, women, and trans people. A plank of Trump’s platform is the mass deportation of immigrants — which is not just an attack on immigrants, but also a frontal assault on the working class itself, to divide and weaken it. None of our union leaders have spoken yet of this threat. But stopping it requires a labor movement willing to strike for more than its immediate needs at its own workplaces. Stopping Trump here calls for a willingness of workers to strike in solidarity with immigrants and against the state and ICE — technically against the law. Here, again, relying on the state to support unions will weaken us, not strengthen us.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) has been touting the abundance of "solidarity" in Cuba for decades now--most recently here. Solidarity is all they've got there--no food, no water, no medicines, no electricity. The next time our gracious professors encounter a homeless bum, I'm sure he'll be grateful for their "solidarity."

Even the professors have to acknowledge that Trump won the votes of the majority of the working class. They attribute this to a combination of workers being stupid, and/or being racist. But our professors are wrong, of course. The working class is a lot smarter than the they are.

For example, Trotskyist academics will have you believe that allowing more immigrants is good for the working class because of "solidarity." Professor Hoff can believe this because he has tenure and therefore never has to look for a job. But most people realize that if you're looking for a job, you're competing with other similarly qualified people. And more, if there are a lot of similarly qualified people then the average wage for those folks will go down. That's Professor Koslowski's problem--he's an adjunct lecturer working for peanuts because there are so many other folks with useless PhDs wanting the same opportunity.

Then consider the bizarre list of folks that somehow deserve our solidarity. Weirdest is the affection for trans people--that 0.5% of society who somehow think they deserve more rights than the rest of us. The professors also insist that all workers show solidarity with the Hamas death cult, which demands the extermination of all Jews. That's not gonna make anybody any richer. It won't even make the Palestinians richer. 

So why did most workers support Trump? That's easy. Trump is for prosperity. Prosperity means more consumption, more revenue, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and smaller government.

Me--I'm also for more prosperity, which is why I voted for Trump. Unlike the folks on the Progressive & Trotskyist Left, whose goal is to destroy civilization and redistribute the carrion to the starving masses. Just like they do in Cuba.

Further Reading:

• The General Strike Fizzles
• The End of Cuban Civilization
• Amazon, Teamsters & Contract

Trump Won! Professor Hoff Says So

Trump divides the working class: four on his left, three on his right.
(Photo source: Doug Mills-Pool)

It seems like every Left Voice author wants to weigh in on Trump's electoral victory. See, eg, here, here and here. But by far the best of the genre is this piece by Professor James Dennis Hoff (associate professor, CUNY English Department) entitled Trump Wants to Divide the Working Class — We Must Fight to Unite It. It's good because--professorial status notwithstanding--Dr. Hoff is a good writer and a clear thinker.

Indeed, the professor's piece is as clear a summary of the returns as you will find anywhere, and if only for that reason I suggest you read it. He writes (links omitted)

In contrast to Kamala Harris, who looks set to receive about six million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, Trump is actually on target to win close to four million more votes than last time — when he and Joe Biden each received the largest number of votes ever in a presidential election. In fact, Trump may win almost as many additional votes this election as there were additional eligible voters. In 2020, there were more than 240 million eligible voters, compared to 244 million in 2024, which is shaping up to be the second largest turnout of eligible voters in history. At the same time, exit polls show that 71 percent of voters said they were voting “for their candidate” rather than against their opponent in 2024, compared to 62 percent in 2020.

And then follows a detailed description of the results, which I condense into bullet points (links omitted):

• "...Harris likely won a smaller percentage (about two points) of votes from women than Biden did in 2022."
• "Meanwhile, Latino voters, particularly Latino men, turned out in record-breaking numbers for Trump. 46 percent of Latino voters chose Trump this election, ..."
• "Trump won 16 percent of the Black vote this election compared to 8 percent in 2020 and just 6 percent in 2016. Harris, on the other hand, lost about ten percent of the Black vote compared to Biden. Most astounding perhaps is that this increase in Black votes for Trump seems to have happened across the entire country: in blue states as well as red states, and in cities as well as suburbs."
• "Even in New York City, where he took more than 30 percent of the vote, Trump performed well in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods."

In other words, Kamala lost by a landslide--she lost ground compared to Biden and other Democrats in almost every demographic constituency you can think of.

Which, of course, begs the question: 

Why has this happened, and how should the Left respond?

His argument begins this way:

While many working people no doubt voted for Trump because they are deeply worried about their own and their family’s economic well-being, many unfortunately also did so with the full understanding that he plans to increase attacks on the rights of women and trans people, that he will likely further weaken already weak labor laws, and that he plans to deport a million so-called illegal immigrants. 

It's not clear to me how Professor Hoff thinks Trump will attack the rights of women. If he's referring to abortion, that's pretty much a non-issue as far as Trump is concerned. It is now a matter for state legislatures (which is where the issue legitimately belongs).

Regarding the rights of trans people, I think our professor friend is on pretty thin ice here as well. Nobody denies the rights of trans people guaranteed under the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Those are rights that we all have--you, me, Professor Hoff, and every last trans person. What Professor Hoff claims is that trans people should have rights beyond those that the rest of us have, eg, the right to use women's restrooms. Neither Dr. Hoff nor I have the right to use women's restrooms--and there's nothing in the Constitution that would guarantee that right to trans people.

Standards of public decency are established at state and municipal levels. There is no reason why trans people should be exempt from those standards. Indeed, the existing rules for bathroom use are very sensible and are designed to protect women and girls from male (ie, anybody with a penis) predators.

Trump's most effective ad campaign (arguably the most effective ad campaign of all time) ended with the tag line Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you. It's an effective pun: they/them can refer to the minuscule portion of the population that is legitimately trans, or it can refer to any special interest (eg, pharmaceutical firms) that tries to take advantage of voters--trans people being among the loudest special interests.

The prohibition of trans people on women's sports teams is equally rooted in biology and common sense. There is no Constitutional right to play on a girl's soccer team. Sorry.

Regards immigration, Professor Hoff writes,

On the question of immigration, in particular, the Right has relentlessly and successfully argued that what they call “illegal immigrants” are not only draining the national coffers, but negatively contributing to everything from unemployment, to low wages and higher rents, and many people — many of them immigrants themselves — are increasingly open to those explanations.

Along with the Professor, I will also take issue with the idea that immigrants are draining the national coffers. Indeed, to the extent they pay sales, property and payroll taxes they are contributing to the national coffers--not least helping to pay for my considerable medical bills covered by Medicare. I'm very grateful for that.

But on the other issues Professor Hoff is just wrong. Immigrants (illegal or otherwise) do compete for jobs and housing. That competition has the market effect of lowering wages and raising rents. Native born and immigrant citizens are right to raise that concern. As the professor points out, "Many Latino voters in those counties [along the Rio Grande] said they voted for Trump because they think stricter regulations on immigration will protect their jobs and livelihoods." Plus the large and sudden influx of immigrants is socially destructive and ruins communities.

Working people are responding to obvious threats to their way of life. They are not irrational victims of Trumpian misinformation and Democratic Party perfidy. Professor Hoff does not give the American working class credit for having an intelligent opinion (which, given that he's a professor, isn't surprising).

Then, in the professor's opinion, Trump is not a friend of the working man. He will, for example, sponsor a bunch of anti-union regulations that will make it much harder for organized labor. He does ding the unions for not being very good at their jobs, writing

Indeed, as Sou Mi explains, while organized labor has made gains for higher paid manufacturing workers, it has largely failed to address the problems of some of its most precarious workers, particularly those in the logistics sector, including Amazon and UPS, who are predominantly Black and Latino ..."

The economics of Amazon and UPS (along with Walmart, Starbucks, and many other companies) preclude a successful union movement--the profit margins are too small. I described that in detail here in an article explaining why Amazon has not yet signed a contract with the new union.

The fact is that today's modern union movement is oriented to the professor types, like Dr. Hoff. Unlike workers in the real world, Dr. Hoff gets his salary from the government--he's on the public dole. Since the government never needs to earn a profit it can be very generous with the largesse. The teachers' unions are especially effective at extorting taxpayers--including new immigrant taxpayers.

I think most workers in the private sector see through the scam and are becoming less interested in unionization--especially since the efforts at Amazon and Starbucks have not led to an improvement in their working conditions.

Professor Hoff tells us

Most working people, after all, know that Trump is also no solution, even many who voted for him. In this sense there are plenty of reasons why the working class shift toward Trump’s ideas this election may be short lived, especially if he actually follows through with his plans for the economy and immigration reform.

My main beef with this paragraph is there are no solutions--there are only trade-offs. Professor Hoff foolishly thinks his silly Marxism is going to solve all problems--he's just wrong. And most people know he's wrong, which is why Left Voice only has about 50 members.

I don't know how durable Trumpism will be, but I think he'll do a better job representing the working class than that cloud of academic pinheads that are at the core of the Democrat Party--including Professor Hoff. 

Further Reading:

• Sam Karlin Makes a Mess of the Middle East
• A Woman's Place is ...
• Unions and Work From Home

Election 2024, Trotskyists' Unanimous Opinion

(Source)

They're unanimous--all the Trotskyist grouplets which I follow believe that a mass, independent working class party is the solution to all America's problems. 

Jimena Vergara, writing in Left Voice states it clearly in her closing sentence.

For this, we need not only a united front against the Right, but also a political party of the working class and oppressed with a socialist program that unites our struggles and gives us the foundation with which to fight for a better world. 

In an article posted in Socialist Action, guest authors Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard proclaim that

Fundamental change only occurs through class struggle. Mass action is the only road toward rebuilding the union movement, independent organizations of Blacks, women and all the oppressed, the revolutionary socialist movement and a mass workers party championing all the oppressed and exploited, and ultimately a socialist revolution.

Meanwhile, The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) in an article by Terry Evans, opines that

The SWP candidates are unionists, joining strike picket lines and building solidarity wherever they go. They’ve explained why workers need to break from the bosses’ political parties and build a party of our own, a party of labor, that can fight to take political power.

A working class party has never existed in the United States. It has existed in other countries (UK, Germany, Canada, etc.), but in every case it has evolved into a "reformist" party that resembles the American Democrats. Many of those parties, like the German Social Democrats led by the formidable Karl Kautsky, are direct heirs of Marx and Engels. It is both ironic and instructive that Marxist parties should end up as bourgeois, reformist institutions.

Our Trotskyist friends never ask why there has never been a successful workers' party anywhere in the western world. (They'll claim the Russian Revolution was a success--though it certainly didn't turn out that way.) The reason for that perennial failure is because Marxism is just wrong.

The basic tenet of Marxism is that the driver of history is the intractable, insoluble, existential conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Only one class can win, and that class must be the proletariat, according to our Trotskyist friends. But this is wrong--workers and capitalists are on the same side in most things: both of them need to maximize sales revenue in order to succeed. For the workers (who often claim more than 90% of revenue) it means more jobs and higher wages. For the capitalist it's the source of profit. Without revenue, both of them will starve.

Consumers are on the other side of the equation. They want better quality at lower prices and with improved service. They usually get what they want--which is why our standard of living has steadily improved since the dawn of the industrial revolution. The customer is always right.

That fundamental misunderstanding of basic economics is why Trotskyists never make any progress with their pipedream. All real workers need to cooperate with their capitalist bosses. Workers definitely do not want to overthrow the whole damn system.

This explains why Donald Trump is a tribune of the working class. He realizes that corporate taxes don't just take money away from the bosses--they take even more money away from the workers. He understands that over-the-top environmental regulations won't just put Exxon-Mobil out of business, but also put all the people who work in fossil-fuel related industries out of a job. Trump realizes that exaggerated Wokery adds a cost to doing business that will reduce revenue and hurt both the capitalists and the workers.

Our Trotskyist friends delude themselves in thinking they own the Truth: that because of their leadership as the Vanguard Party, the scales of false-consciousness shall fall from proletarian eyes, and they shall see the light and flock to the revolutionary banner. In fact, the people most afflicted with false consciousness are the Trotskyist grouplets, which is why they remain grouplets.

The villain of the piece--the organization most responsible for false consciousness--is the Democratic Party. All our Trotskyist friends claim to hate the Democrats. But here the movement divides into two factions: one, led by the SWP, better understands why Trump is popular among real workers, and thus support many of the things Trump does. In other words, they think Trump is the chief agent of false consciousness.

Accordingly, the SWP defend Trump when his positions are defensible. They strongly protested the relentless lawfare as an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans. They object to the expensive, petty bourgeois climate agenda championed by other Trotskyists and their Democrat friends. They oppose the Woke silliness espoused by Democrats and other Trotskyists.

At the same time, they oppose Trump. Terry Evans writes,

Trump seeks to refurbish the image of the Republican Party as a party for workers. But he’s a real-estate-dealing capitalist in search of the highest profits. And his campaign seeks to demonize a section of the working class — immigrant workers with and without papers — in an effort to convince workers this is the cause of their worsening situation, not capitalism. This divides and weakens the working class and labor movement.

They accuse Trump of the same crime for which our other friends condemn the Democrats--namely trafficking in false consciousness. But they realize that the majority of the working class does, indeed, support Trump, and often for good reasons.

The other faction--represented by all other grouplets, but most prominently by Left Voice, subscribe to the Democratic Party's position (at least that of its Progressive faction) 100% of the time. They accuse the Democrats of not really believing what they say they want, but rather of cynically promoting false consciousness.

A classic response from that second faction comes from Left Voice author Tatiana Cozzarelli.  Apparently completely detached from proletarian sensibilities, she writes,

I teach on Wednesday mornings and on November 6, I was met with students who were in a shocked silence. They were in the 6th grade when Trump won the last election and again, this racist, misogynist authoritarian would take the White House. Some of them cried, thinking of friends and family who might get deported.  

For many, it was grief, fear and disbelief. When they hear “mass deportations,” it means their uncle, their mother, themselves. 

What to say to these 19 year olds? I wish I could just tell them it would be okay. That they won’t get deported. That they are safe. 

I can’t promise they will be safe. 

I can’t say to them that in two years voting Democrat will fix it– that would be a lie.

So she teaches at a CUNY school in New York City, where she is also a PhD student in "Urban Education" (whatever the hell that is). She obviously doesn't get around much, and obviously isn't a member of the working class. Trump won a majority of "working class" votes, defined as voters without a college degree. That certainly doesn't apply to Ms. Cozzarelli, who is wasting her time and our money getting a useless PhD.  

Trump won the election--in today's context by a landslide. Trotskyists have no clue why. Trump tells the truth when he claims to be a tribune of the working class. Our Trotskyist friends don't understand reality.

Further Reading:

• Kamala vs. Trump: The Decline of America?
• Whiners & Complainers
• SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign

Left Voice & The Election, 2024

 

(Source)

Sybil Davis and Jimena Vergara co-authored an article on Left Voice entitled Neither Harris nor Trump: Only the Working Class Can Fight the Rightward Shift. It's an analysis of the election as of a few days ago, Oct. 25th, that begins this way:

As the election roller coaster barrels on, the Harris campaign has lost some steam. Popular enthusiasm once drove the campaign to new heights and helped raise over $1 billion. Now Harris is struggling to win over undecided votes and is losing support among sectors that have previously strongly backed Democrats — such as Black and Latino men. After riding high on “vibes” after she replaced Biden and generated a huge wave of enthusiasm, Harris has failed to put forward a compelling vision for a country that is contending with inflation, natural disasters, and an increasingly unstable international situation that includes foreign conflicts that many Americans don’t want to be involved in.

In this context, Trump has repositioned himself to potentially win the election. Every poll shows an incredibly tight race in which either candidate can emerge as the winner. It will all come down to a handful of swing states. In this context, we must have as precise an analysis as possible of the situation and think towards what might happen after the election and what our response to the situation needs to be. 

This is remarkably boilerplate. The mainstream media couldn't have phrased it any better. It's surprising that leaders of the Trotskyist Faction (publishers of Left Voice) can't come up with anything different, given the amazing Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist/Vanguard/Dialectical tools at their disposal. Only the last quoted sentence suggests something unexpected is forthcoming.

Yet there are a few places where our comrades distinguish themselves. The first concerns "Palestine," where they ludicrously claim that Israel is committing "genocide." Without belittling the number of civilian casualties, and even acknowledging the possibility (unlikely, in my view) of war crimes, whatever the Israelis are doing does not rise anywhere near the level of genocide. Even if you take the Hamas figures at face value, under 45,000 people have been killed. This is about 2% of Gaza's population--nowhere close to "genocide." I've covered this before, most recently here. 

Then Comrades Davis and Vergara insist that today's Trump Republicans are "far" right. I guess the adjective depends on where you sit--if you're way off on the far-left Trotskyist fringe, then the Trumpians must seem as if they come from another planet. But no movement that earns roughly half the vote can be "far" anything. Almost by definition, Trump is a mainstream candidate. He has some supporters that might be classed as "far" right--Steve Bannon comes to mind--but Trump himself is not, and neither are most of his supporters.

Of course our authors are here repeating a Kamala talking point--that Trump is the second coming of "Hitler," no less. Whatever else Trump is, he's not a fascist. He has no army of storm troopers. He's not antisemitic. He doesn't hate Black people or Hispanic people ("Latinx" is how the comrades call them). The speaker list at Madison Square Garden included Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Hindus and women. The event was as American as apple pie.

Most recently, Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, has accused Trump of being a "fascist." To which our comrades respond:

Now, whether Trump meets the more precise political-economic definition of a fascist is a complex question that is too big to discuss here. What we can say, though, is that Kelly is correct that Trump is far-right and wants to take more authoritarian measures. But let’s not forget that the people who sent the cops to break up encampments and brutalize students were usually Democrats. The Democrats, too, are moving toward an increased authoritarianism (though not as blatantly and quickly as Trump is).

So even if he's not a "fascist," he's at least an "authoritarian." I'm not sure what that word means--if it means he's gonna use the powers of the office of the president, then he's like all other presidents. There was nothing that happened during his first term that in any way established him as particularly authoritarian. Mss. Davis and Vergara are right to point out that Democrats are equally authoritarian, though the example they give is not a good one. Encampments, blocking traffic and vandalizing property are not protected speech and any government has an obligation to enforce civic order.

Our friends write,

All this is to say: if Kamala Harris wins the election, the election will likely be challenged in court, along with street demonstrations whose character we cannot predict. On Election Day, MAGA supporters might try to intimidate minority voters and prevent them from voting. If Trump wins, the Democratic Party will likely concede. If this is the case, the party of the donkeys will suffer a profound defeat that it will blame on its progressive wing, the movement for Palestine, or Jill Stein. But the blame for any defeat will rest on the Democrats’ shoulders alone: the party is the graveyard of progressive social demands, and broad sectors of the working class, the middle classes, and the oppressed now understand this.

There are many problems with this paragraph.

1. The Trump campaign is MUCH better run today than in 2020, and their campaign has been almost error-free. In particular they have competent lawyers who are filing the lawsuits before the election (and winning some of them) which will make the election much fairer than in 2020. Accordingly, I think any argument that the election was stolen will be much weaker this time around.
2. The Trump campaign is trying very hard to recruit minority voters to their side. Far from trying to "intimidate" them, they're working to get them out to vote--especially Black and Hispanic men.
3. The so-called "movement for Palestine" is a disgrace. It's really a movement for Hamas--if there ever was a fascist movement, Hamas is it. 
4. Obviously if the Democrats lose, the fault will fall on the Democrats--though Republicans will surely take some credit for that outcome. 
5. How our comrades can claim that the Democrats are the "graveyard of progressive social demands" is beyond me. After all, Left Voice's program is 100% identical to that of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party--antisemitism included. So if one is a graveyard, then so is the other.

Comrades Davis and Vergara include these remarks in their final paragraph.

Whoever wins, we will need to fight to protect our rights and win our demands. Hopefully from this united front, a new political party can emerge. A party of workers and the oppressed that fights for socialism. The need to build a political alternative to the current parties is paramount, but so is the fight in the here and now. ... The vanguard and the socialist Left must embrace a revolutionary program and join together to lay the foundation for a new political party of the working class — one that raises high the banner of socialism.

Big words, that. I think Trump will likely win the election, including the popular vote. Which means he'll get at least 75 million votes, and the Democrats only slightly less. Approximately 50 people attended the most recent Left Voice congress. Trotskyists of all denominations have been calling for a labor party since the 1930's, always to no avail. No reason to think our comrade's call today will have a different outcome.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2024
• The Trotskyist Faction on Haiti
• Malik Miah Defends Harvard

Two Takes on Trump's Trials

Two posts opine on the indictments of Donald Trump, both written before the recent charges were leveled in Georgia. The first--by James Dennis Hoff (English prof, CUNY), dated Aug. 4th, entitled Trump Indictments Are About Capitalist Stability, Not Justice--appears in Left Voice. The second, by Terry Evans, appearing in the August 21st Militant (publication of the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) is headed Defend free speech for all! Drop charges against Trump. As the headlines suggest, these take quite different positions on Mr. Trump's travails.

Professor Hoff (in his lede paragraph) is convinced of Trump's guilt, and suggests that the recent indictment from Special Counsel Jack Smith will

... focus exclusively on Trump’s attempts to stay in office by overturning the 2020 election results, thus, as prosecutors claim, defrauding and violating the civil rights of millions of U.S. voters. That Trump is guilty of these charges, and much worse, goes without saying. 

Contrary to Professor Hoff's prejudice, it is not at all obvious Trump is guilty of anything in this indictment. A subsequent sentence in Professor Hoff's paragraph also doesn't ring true. 

And after a political career of spewing hate, advocating violence, and promoting and helping to pass harmful laws against immigrants, women, and people of color, Trump deserves nothing less than to spend what’s left of his pathetic life in jail. 

I don't think Trump has ever advocated violence--quite the opposite--as I wrote back in 2019.

President Trump has turned down many opportunities to go to war. His retaliation against Syria (for chemical weapons violations) was destroying an empty "research facility" in the middle of the night. When Iran shot down a drone, it turned out that he didn't want to kill any Iranians. He rejected John Bolton's desperate pleas to invade Venezuela. He wants to pull our troops out of Afghanistan. He has studiously ignored all the provocations coming from Pyongyang.

...The man is a pacifist. It's that simple.

Indeed, later in his article our friend condemns Trump for wanting to pull out of NATO and refusing US involvement in the Ukraine war--i.e. precisely for his pacifism.

Professor Hoff admits that the 78 (now 91) charges against Trump are mostly an electoral ploy to prevent Trump from winning, though he believes there is a darker, more nefarious motive.

Indeed, this latest indictment has nothing to do with protecting the rule of law, and everything to do with protecting bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere. Trump’s supporters and conservative right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, have argued for months now that the indictments are politically motivated. ... While they are correct that these indictments are part of a broader attempt to keep Trump from winning a second election, ... behind the many damning charges against Trump lies a more fundamental attempt on behalf of a broad sector of capital to defend the stability and legitimacy of the U.S. regime in the midst of a series of ongoing military, economic, ecological, and political crises.

Elsewhere in the article, Professor Hoff uses "ruling class" as a synonym for "broad sector of capital." I believe this nomenclature is a source of confusion.

The "ruling class" is defined by economic status--the very richest in our society who control the most capital. By the most generous definition it includes the top 1%--which includes households earning more than $500K/year. The median salary for a doctor is $400K, so there are many, many doctors who earn enough to get them into the 1%. They may be rich, but they're not exactly members of the "ruling class." By contrast, the top 0.1% earned a minimum of $3.3 million in 2021, which seems like a more reasonable cutoff for membership in the "ruling class."

The problem with Professor Hoff's analysis is that--despite the power over the economy the ruling class possesses--they are much too small in number to determine our cultural and political lives. That kind of influence rests not with the economic elite, but rather with the status elite. The status elite caste includes government officials, academics, journalists, corporate HR departments, and--these days--social media influencers. Indeed, given his academic rank with tenure at a large university in New York City, Professor Hoff is a member of that elite.

No wonder he hates Trump. The status elite universally hate Trump because he represents a direct threat to their status. He wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy (may the heavens forfend!), defund the universities (God help us all), and trash the Woke/climate propaganda (just imagine what the deplorables will believe in then!).

Despite his radical pretensions, Professor Hoff is a loyal member of his caste. Indeed, he even seems to suck up to NATO and the Ukraine war because that's what his caste does. He is definitely against shrinking the federal government and defunding the universities.

If Professor Hoff misconstrues the ruling caste, then he certainly mischaracterizes working class! He writes,

For huge portions of the U.S population, particularly disaffected and downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites, Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric and strongman Bonapartism are the embodiment of a growing resentment of what Nancy Fraser called progressive neoliberalism, and a misguided desire to solve the capitalist crisis through a reactionary and frequently racist attempt to “Make America Great Again” at the expense of the further immiseration of Black and Brown working people.

Typically, Marxists refer to "huge portions of the U.S population" as the working class, not as "downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois whites." Indeed, that latter phrase refers much more to Professor Hoff himself than it does, say, to Walmart employees. Status notwithstanding, economically speaking the professor is a member of the lumpen intelligentsia, whose income (in light of declining enrollments and all) comes mostly in the form of what amounts to a welfare check.

Indeed, defining working class as non-college educated workers, Trump got the majority of those votes (a large majority of white voters, nearly 40% of Hispanic voters, and a still small but record portion of black voters).

Unlike Professor Hoff, who posits some vague conspiracy theory on the part of the "ruling class" to protect "...bourgeois rule and the stability and legitimacy of the capitalist state that facilitates the continued exploitation and oppression of working people everywhere," The Militant's Terry Evans, in his lede paragraph, is very clear about the threat the indictments pose.

Defending constitutionally protected free speech is at the heart of fighting the latest assault on political rights by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department. Special counsel Jack Smith’s second indictment of former President Donald Trump would gut the First Amendment in an attempt to drive Biden’s main rival for the presidency out of the 2024 race and put him in jail.

He buttresses his argument with a quote from Trotsky:

Under capitalism, all suppression of political rights — regardless of who is targeted — “bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history,” Leon Trotsky, who had been a leader of the Bolshevik-led 1917 Russian Revolution, said in 1939.

In other words, the indictments against Trump are a direct attack on Constitutional civil liberties, for which the working class are the chief beneficiaries.

Politicians lie all the time. Under the First Amendment they have a right to lie. Even if Trump had lied through his teeth about the 2020 election (a dubious proposition since Trump likely believed his own bullshit), he still has a First Amendment right to speak. Even if Trump is convicted it is likely that the Supreme Court will overturn the conviction as violating the Bill of Rights. As it should.

I'm proud to say that, in the 1970s when I was a member of the SWP, I stood for the defense of civil liberties in the Party's COINTELPRO lawsuit against the FBI. In those days the rightwing establishment was infringing on the civil liberties of its leftwing opponents.

Today the shoe is on the other foot: it is a leftwing establishment illegally attacking their rightwing opponents. I am proudly still defending civil liberties today. Meanwhile, Professor Hoff is an unabashed supporter of the establishment--and as such he opposes freedom of speech and is betraying his professed allegiance to the working class (which was always mostly fake to begin with).

Further Reading:

• Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY
• Academic Workers on the Rampage
• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart

News From the SWP

I've been ignoring the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) because their paper--The Militant--has not caught my fancy recently. They're following some labor issues that haven't interested me; they waste a lot of pixels on Cuba; they tout ancient books that don't look to be very relevant today. This week's issue, for example, has a long excerpt from American Labor Struggles 1877-1934--surely of purely academic interest.

For all their interest in labor struggles, it was weird that they waited until this week to comment on the defeat of the Amazon union effort--an event that happened on April 9th. I purposely postponed my own account (dated May 1) so to include their response, but I gave up on them. As it turns out author Susan Lamont adds nothing new to the conversation, so no update from me is needed.

The big news is that the pandemic-postponed Active Workers Conference will happen this year from July 22 - 24. Historically these have occurred in Oberlin, OH, and are known informally as "Oberlin Conferences"--a very long tradition in the Trotskyist movement. Some reminiscences of my time at Oberlin are here. 

But these days the Oberlin brand is hopelessly tarnished given the eponymous college's failed and dishonorable crusade against a small-town bakery. So this year's "Oberlin Conference" will instead take place at Wittenberg University in Springfield, OH. Springfield is a mid-sized, struggling, rust-belt town 26 miles east of Dayton International Airport. I, being a geography buff, find it an odd place to hold the affair--so please let me indulge my geography itch to explain why.

I surmise that the Oberlin site was originally chosen because it was close to the Cleveland branch. Indeed, I recall at one such shindig we adjourned to a big hotel in that city for a large campaign rally. The Cleveland comrades played a key role in organizing the event every year. Further, Oberlin was within a couple hours drive of branches in Detroit and Pittsburgh, and not that far from Chicago. Folks from further afield could fly into Cleveland airport (though we Portland comrades drove).

Today the Party has no branches in Ohio, the Detroit branch also no longer exists, and Pittsburgh is a four hour drive from Springfield. The closest branch is Louisville--a three-hour ride. So Springfield seems remarkably inconvenient. Further, while Dayton airport is close by, it is smallish and rather expensive to fly in to. I checked connections from the West Coast (SEA, SFO, LAX--this is how I waste my time) and they're horrible. The layover time in Chicago is as long as five hours.

The closest large airport is Cincinnati (CVG), a bit under two hours away. That's a Delta hub, and nonstop flights are available from LAX, though from SEA or SFO a connection is still necessary. The fares are lower as well. While I didn't check, being a Delta hub CVG is probably easier to reach from Atlanta, Miami, or Texas.

So were I in charge, Wittenberg wouldn't be my top pick. The criteria are: 1) a small-campus setting, 2) near an existing branch, 3) not too far from a major airport, 4) in the Midwest--because that's centrally located wrt SWP branches. There are four branches that meet the Midwest criterion: Chicago, Louisville, Pittsburgh, St. Louis.

• Chicago is a logical choice--definitely centrally located and certainly a big airport. There are a bunch of colleges in the suburbs or further afield that would be an easy reach. Lots of options here, but Chicago is a big city and doesn't really have the "vacation" vibe that is essential to the Oberlin experience.
• Louisville doesn't have a major airport, though CVG is only about 90 minutes away. Otherwise it's a fine choice. The city is charming and the surrounding countryside is lovely. There are lots of colleges both in town and out of town. St. Meinrad's--a Catholic seminary in Indiana--is glorious. Hanover College--halfway between Louisville and Cincinnati--is gorgeous.
• Pittsburgh has a big airport, and the region doesn't lack for colleges. Allegheny College in Meadville has a beautiful campus--but there are many others to choose from. The scenery is spectacular, and the airport offers many nonstop flights. But it's too far east to be easy for comrades driving from places like Minneapolis, Lincoln, St. Louis, or even Chicago.
• St. Louis is literally in the middle of the country, and has the best location. The airport is major. It's an easy drive from Louisville, Chicago, Lincoln, or even Minneapolis. There are plenty of colleges around.

Were I geography czar, I'd pick a college within 50 miles of Louisville. There are plenty to choose from.

In a campaign statement by Roger Calero, The Militant advocates for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. They distinguish themselves from their Trotskyist brethren in not being antisemitic--to their everlasting credit. They rightly describe Hamas as "the reactionary Islamist group that rules Gaza" --certainly true as far as it goes. I'd be less diplomatic and use the f- word banned from this blog.

Mr. Calero also criticizes the Israelis, writing

The spark for today’s crisis is the refusal of the Israeli government to halt attempts to evict 300 Palestinians from 13 households in Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem. Regardless of who “owns” the homes, Palestinians have lived in them since the 1950s.

While the Israeli government portrays this as a private landlord-tenant dispute, Palestinians rightly fear that allowing the evictions would open the floodgate to more, and to Israeli government refusal to ever accept East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Fair enough--it is not antisemitic to note Israeli sins. But as The Militant points out, the Hamas leadership, by launching hundreds of militarily-useless rockets randomly aimed at Israeli cities and towns with the intention of killing civilians, obviously is not representing the best interests of their own people. Of course the Israeli army has to respond in force--any government would do that. For good or ill, the Israelis are acting rationally. Hamas is just a bunch of irrational, semi-suicidal crazies.

The other papers on my Beat are spouting the same-old the Jews are evil, imperialist, colonial-settler, apartheid-mongering, out to gratuitously murder Palestinian children for no reason other than that they enjoy it crap. I've responded many times--by now my answer is predictable. A good example is here.

My friend and former comrade Brian Williams pens a piece entitled Witch hunt against Trump, political rights continues. It's a rousing defense of former President Trump's civil liberties--so rousing in fact that I'm beginning to wonder if they're joining the Republican Party. If so, welcome aboard--but you'll have to cut back on the Cuba enthusiasm.

Mr. Williams even goes a half-step further than I would, defending Rudy Giuliani against the likely unjustified search warrant on his home. And they're probably right--the warrant was unjustified. But I'm mad at Mr. Giuliani right now, for a more incompetent legal team a presidential campaign has never had. Trump's electoral college loss in 2020 was due in significant part to the lawsuits that his lawyers never filed in a timely fashion. Mr. Giuliani only got around to it after the election was over, when it was too late.

I understand the injustice of it all, but I can't work up too much sympathy for Rudy Giuliani. Sorry.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2018
• Oberlin, 2016
• The 47th SWP Convention

Election 2020

Two days after I announced the End of Jeff Mackler's Campaign (posted 9/15), the candidate resurrected himself with a short piece entitled Socialist Action 2020 Presidential Candidate Jeff Mackler: No to Trump’s Coup Threat! (posted 9/17). He repeats every Democratic talking point in the book:

Socialist Action is in no way indifferent to Trump’s threat to cancel the 2020 election or to ignore its results on election day should he lose, or attempts to undermine the right to vote by defunding the Post Office to make the prompt counting of ballots difficult or using U.S. Supreme Court rulings to approve racist gerrymandering of districts and other undemocratic measures aimed at reducing the vote of Black and Latinx people. While we have always exposed the reactionary nature of bourgeois elections and all their anti-democratic aspects, we are far from the point of ceding this institution to would-be tyrants like Trump.

Mr. Mackler's supposed defense of free elections is hypocrisy on steroids. Trotskyists--including Socialist Action--put no faith in "bourgeois elections," and participate in them only until they can put together a big enough mob to overthrow the system illegally, after which all elections will be banned. Or if not, then after the Revolution Mr. Mackler will win with 99.9% of the vote. The remaining 0.1% will be put in front of a firing squad.

My original post elicited a comment from UNAC Blog (United National Antiwar Coalition), which looks like an ultraleft front group for Socialist Action. The comment reads in full,

It seems that during this time, as we go through COVID, have had a massive response to cop killings and racism, as jobs are lost, rents coming due and the capitalist parties moving to the right and showing no way forward, the example of an independent socialist campaign - even a small one- is better than none at all.

I have no complaint about a small, independent socialist campaign--I only insist that it be competently run, especially if it claims the Trotskyist banner. "Competent" means, among other things, choosing a candidate with some minimal level of charisma.

I'll suggest that the Socialist Workers Party campaign of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett fits the bill. They're small, socialist, and in the larger scheme of things completely inconsequential. But they're out on the campaign trail, they seek endorsements from outside their own movement, and I believe they'll be on the ballot in at least a few states. 

If you don't like them, then vote for the Green Party.

True to form, Mr. Mackler hasn't been heard from since Sept. 17th--so I'll stand by my claim that the campaign is moribund. (By the way, whatever happened to Heather Bradford, who was initially chosen as his running mate? Unfortunately she left in the Socialist Resurgence split (h/t commenter John B)and is now a designated non-person--likely one of those destined for the firing squad after the Revolution.)

But back to the Democratic talking points that Mr. Mackler so proudly regurgitates in his lede paragraph.

Mr. Trump has never vowed to remain in office illegally. He has promised to appeal close election results all the way to the Supreme Court, which is his right. This becomes "undemocratic" only if he disobeys a court order--which he's never done and almost certainly won't do. (If he does then everybody, including me, will oppose him.) The Democrat's fearmongering about Trump organizing a coup is just that--fearmongering. (Indeed, it looks more plausible that the Dems organized a coup against Trump beginning in 2016.)

Likewise, the post office is not being defunded. It's got plenty of money through the end of the fiscal year, i.e., through the election. The debate is over next year's funding.

For somebody who is trying to "reduc[e] the vote of Black and Latinx people", Mr. Trump is sure spending a lot of time and money to recruit them as voters. He's gone out of his way to blame only Antifa (the all-white fascist grouping) for the violence, only rarely mentioning Black Lives Matter (the half-white fascist grouping). He's made numerous promises to help the Black community economically--and unlike the Dems, Trump tries hard to keep his promises.

It's worth noting that both Blacks and Latinos are very much in support of the police--unlike the white fascist-types that want to "defund the police." Not even Al Sharpton supports BLM on this issue. Kamala Harris can't make up her mind, and Joe Biden has no mind to make up.

Just recently, Joe Biden compared Mr. Trump to Joseph Goebbels. In other words, the accusations against Trump have gotten so extreme and so far removed from reality that it looks likely to backfire on them.

The New York Times claims to have detailed information about Trump's tax returns, from which the bottom line is that there's nothing in there that we didn't know already. He has no big investments in Russia. He didn't launder money through Russia. He took a big loss on his casinos, which he has been able to deduct from his subsequent income meaning that he's paid no income tax in recent years. He's being audited because of a large refund he got ten years ago, which if he loses he'll be on the hook for $100 million.

He has done nothing illegal--or even unethical. He's simply followed the rules the way they were written, which is what taxpayers do everywhere.

I predict Mr. Trump will win reelection, perhaps by a large electoral vote margin. The reason is (as Conrad Black puts it) that the Biden-Harris ticket is unfeasible. Biden is clearly in mental decline. He can't speak extemporaneously to the media--not even friendly media. He's increasingly unable to even read from a teleprompter. He is simply incapable of being president, regardless of any ideology. He can't state any reason for his candidacy except that he hates Trump.

The Democratic strategy is to a) let Trump destroy himself with his supposedly outrageous comments, and b) to tar him with whatever scandal they can come up with. Meanwhile, Biden is supposed to sit in his basement and appeal to his image as being "a nice guy" who's "one of us." The problem with this is that Trump is a known quantity--the man is an open book. There is no new information to be had about the man, and the notion there's some smoking gun somewhere is an illusion.

This won't work. Trump-hatred will not win a majority of voters, and without a positive reason people won't vote for Mr. Biden. The basement campaign will fail.

What's more mysterious to me is why they're keeping Ms. Harris under wraps. After all, given Joe's age and obvious infirmities, Kamala is likely to be president within the first term. Nobody really knows who she is, and I think the public is too risk averse to take a chance on a complete unknown.

So here's Mr. Mackler's chance! As bad as he is as a candidate, he is better than Joe Biden. At least he had the courage to go up against Paul Duddridge, which is more than I can say for cowardly Joe. And even though his program is completely wacko, at least there is one. The man has something to say.

Mr. Mackler's meager virtues notwithstanding, this blog endorses Donald J. Trump for President.

Further Reading:

• The New Socialist Resurgence Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

Left Voice on Trump's Tulsa Rally

I made some changes to This Blog's Beat, i.e., the list of blogs in the right sidebar I promise to cover fairly regularly. I deleted Counterpunch and the Freedom Socialist Party--the former because apart from Louis Proyect's articles I almost never read it, and the latter because it's boring and useless.

Meanwhile, I've added Left Voice (h/t Louis Proyect) which proves to be an interesting rag full of great discussion topics. I previously described it as "published by a collective of New York City college professors virtue-signalling their revolutionary socialism." That was slightly unfair: they're not all professors, some of them are adjuncts, others teachers, then there are grad students, and at least one taxi driver who's probably fallen off the academic ladder somewhere. But they're all educated, intelligent people who have something to say.

The article for today is entitled The Great American Comeback? Trump Resumes His Re-Election Campaign With Bizarre Speech in Tulsa. The author is Ezra Brain, "a NYC based theatre artist and teacher."

Mr. Brain echoes the MSM that Trump is likely to lose in November. The polls are against him, and now even the betting markets are against him. I will point out that both MSM and the polls were wrong in 2016--but being wrong once doesn't mean they're always wrong. I find Biden to be a singularly unfeasible candidate--an incompetent, senile reincarnation of Hillary Clinton. MSM notwithstanding, I can't believe he'll win the election. So I'm still putting my money on Trump.

Mr. Brain mentions Covid:

The rally was controversial from its announcement. To begin with, experts almost universally agree that holding a rally with thousands of people during the current pandemic poses significant risk to all participants.

I agree with him that holding the rally was a risky proposition. I was shocked and disappointed that most attendees were not wearing masks--it makes them look stupid. I'll also note (as Mr. Brain does not) that the arena was only half full, and that the overflow crowd was mostly nonexistent. There are three theories for why:

1. People were afraid of the virus and therefore stayed away. I know I would not have attended.
2. AOC has a theory that a TikTok mob post went viral and inspired folks to reserve tickets without any intention of attending the rally.
3. Scott Adams goes along with the TikTok theory, but suggests it was a Chinese plot--TikTok is a Chinese company.

I dunno--I think virus fear is the most likely culprit. But some version of TikTok foul play may also be possible.

Mr. Brain is obsessed with "dog whistles." These are words and phrases that are presumably used to communicate "racism" to the intended audience, while leaving the rest of us ignorant. But Mr. Brain is on to the scheme, and so acutely sensitive is he to these dog whistles that he thinks he understands Mr. Trump's motivations even better than Trump himself.

For example, Mr. Brain thinks "thug" is a racial term--a connotation that even I, a retired academic and dedicated right-winger, never realized. Thug is defined as "a violent person, especially a criminal." Mr. Trump has almost exclusively blamed white thugs for the looting and violence--first and foremost Antifa, and more recently also white supremacists. He even blamed the white, elderly bozo from Buffalo who got himself knocked over by the cops. I can't recall Trump ever blaming Black street gangs for the problems, even though they were obviously also involved.

Mr. Brain accuses Trump of using "Juneteenth" as a racist dog whistle. By originally scheduling the rally for that day, and then a few days before rescheduling it, Trump has somehow revealed his inner racism. Huh? If he was so racist, why didn't he insist on holding rally on Juneteenth just out of principle?

Then Trump held the rally in Tulsa--site of a racist pogrom against Black people in March, 1921. The problem with Trump is not racism, but rather ignorance--he doesn't read. All his information comes from cable news, and until Juneteenth and the pogrom hit the news networks he knew nothing about them. This is not dog whistling.

It's not just Trump, but also Joe Biden.

The contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric on the uprisings built to a head when he launched a hypocritical full-on assault on Biden’s record on race. Making a series of shockingly salient points, he pointed out Biden’s personal affinity for segregationists, his terrible voting record, and how the economic policies that Biden has long-supported have impoverished Black Americans. The climax of the attack came with Trump declaring, seemingly unaware of the irony that the statement could just as easily apply to himself, that “racial justice begins when Joe Biden retires from public life.” That Donald Trump, with his decades-long history of racism, was able to mount such a valid attack against his opponent is as clear a sign as any that many of the differences between the two parties are cosmetic. Both Biden and Trump are racists ...

I don't see "Donald Trump's decades-long history of racism." Nowhere has Trump demanded a return to Jim Crow. He doesn't advocate the repeal of the voting rights act. He'd oppose any change in the public accommodations law. Unlike Biden, he's never hung out with avowed segregationists. I've never even heard him criticizing affirmative action! Apart from largely imaginary "dog whistles", Mr. Brain has no evidence of Trump's enduring racism.

I don't think Biden is a racist, either--he's just a Democrat. Democrats are fundamentally unprincipled and don't believe in anything except "higher taxes" and "bigger government." Mr. Biden will go whichever way the wind blows on race. He once hung out with segregationists; today he wants to "defund the police."

Neither Donald nor Joe are more racist than the average septuagenarian white guy.

Mr. Brain writes:

It was on statues that Trump most clearly stoked white nationalist sentiment. After first referencing the Confederate statue in DC that had been taken down and burned by protesters the night before, Trump began to make a series of statements about “our heritage.” These remarks directly played to the most radicalized sectors of his base ...He also said the radical left wants to “tear down our statues and punish and cancel anyone who does not conform to their demands.” 

Some statues should be torn down, and some shouldn't be. The distinction needs to be deliberate and sensitive, and the process legal. What is unacceptable is for a mob of Antifa thugs to tear down statues as an act of violence.

He also made the intentionally vague declaration that “We used to have things, we don’t anymore, because we want to be open.” What exactly these things that we can’t have anymore because we want to be open are, he never clarified.

We used to have football games and tailgate parties. We used to go to concerts and theaters. We used to eat in restaurants. Yet Mr. Brain puts this all into his "dog whistle" category. He really is dense--bordering on kookiness.

Of all people, Mr. Brain should hope that Trump's rally is successful. If only a few people get sick, then likely we can open up theaters sooner rather than later. As a theater person Mr. Brain should appreciate that.

Further Reading:

• Trotskyists on Reopening
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• Our President is a Pacifist