Marxism Without The Leninism

When I first joined the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in 1969, we encountered a group of very old (they must have been at least fifty!) socialists. They were members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), and they met monthly at the public library in downtown Portland. Occasionally we'd talk to them and even buy a copy of their newspaper, The Weekly People.

If you've read one issue of The Weekly People, you've read them all. The SLP's political program had almost nothing to do with current events, so there was little news in the paper. Instead, it read very much like some Jehovah's Witness tract--the Truth laid bare for all to see if only you have eyes.

The Party is based on the ideas of Daniel DeLeon (interesting Wikipedia article here), who combined Marxist theory with Wobbly sensibilities. The SLP believes in One Big Union, but instead of the IWW, it is the Socialist International Union (SIU). The key, according to every issue of The Weekly People, is to show how the SIU can be organized to effect workers taking over the means of production.

And that led directly to the most prominent feature of every issue of The Weekly People--organization charts (pdf). That's it--with a perfectly constructed organization chart, utopia can be achieved in America today. It's that simple.

It's important to point out that the SLP are not Leninist revolutionaries. They foresee no violence. It's not that they're pacifists, but they think the properly organized SIU will simply vote the capitalists out of the factory. No vanguard Party is necessary, nor is overthrowing the state, but instead the masses need to be properly organized.

The SLP comrades were nice people. How could it be otherwise? They proposed a simple, democratic, non-violent route to a socialist society. "Marxism without the Leninism" is the way I recall them describing themselves. Indeed, Leninism is the totalitarian doctrine--eliminate that and all that's left is a feel-good, harmless, free-unicorns-for-everybody sect. I have argued before that Marxism will never die--the we're poor because the rich people stole all the money meme is so easy to believe. But Leninism (and hence, Trotskyism) will die. So why isn't the SLP more popular?

Partly that's because they're just so easy to make fun of. We, being young and self-righteous, teased them mercilessly. They weren't happy with us, but they didn't run away, either.

And then partly it's because they've aged out of activity. They were middle aged in the 70s, which puts them into their 80s today. Once an organization passes a certain demographic, it becomes impossible for them to recruit younger people. That fate was obvious to us looking at the SLP in the 1970s, and it appears that the Socialist Workers Party is going the same direction. Indeed, I think that's what will happen to all so-called vanguard Parties.

I don't know when The People ceased to be a weekly. They first started publishing on-line in 1999, and by that point it was a monthly. In 2008 they dropped print publication and it became an internet quarterly. The last issue of that appeared in Spring, 2011. Apparently anybody with any journalism skills has since passed away.

Their website contains this very interesting document, entitled Technology & Job Loss. (Indeed, that topic also concerns the last published issue (pdf) of The People, in a letter exchange between a member and National Secretary Robert Bills.)  What the document demonstrates is how and why socialism is inherently Luddite.

The document's lede:

Computers, cell phones and the Internet are just a few of the technological marvels created over the last few decades that have brought tremendous changes into our lives. Now we can communicate with our families, friends and coworkers from anywhere at anytime just by picking up a cell phone or connecting to the Internet. 

These and other new “consumer” technologies unquestionably have eased the lives of millions of people in many ways. New technology, however, has not been restricted to consumer items. Industry also has seen its share of advances with effects that have devastated the lives of millions of workers.

Further along, they say

Labor-displacing technology is becoming more evident even in our everyday lives. Self-service grocery checkout lanes are replacing clerks, ATM machines are replacing bank tellers and automated airline kiosks are replacing ticket agents. The driving force behind these technological advances is the elimination labor. You know it, we know it and the ruling class that “earns” its living by destroying yours knows it too.

 So let's reduce the argument to bullet points:

• Automation is good for consumers.
• Automation is bad for workers because it leads to unemployment.
• The capitalists want to save on labor expenses.
• To save on labor, capitalists invest in automation.
• Their savings comes out of your hide.
• Therefore workers should oppose automation.

Now the first point--automation is good for consumers--is true because automation lowers the cost of doing business. It's convenient for consumers to be able to use a cell phone, and it saves money to use automated check-out lanes. What Marxists fail to notice is that all economy exists for the benefit of consumers--what's good for consumers is good for people.

The second point is unproven, but historically it's false. The rise of the automobile certainly increase unemployment amongst blacksmiths, but it didn't increase unemployment overall. Likewise, the demise of the checkout clerk will lead to a smaller retail workforce, but the consumer savings will result in money being spent on something else. For the current, very drastic round of automation, it is not clear whether the historical precedent will hold. (I think it will.)

The third and fourth points are also true, but the capitalists are not the primary beneficiaries. In the long term (not very long), price competition will lower prices to account for the cheaper labor costs. Thus the capitalist benefits by remaining competitive, but he doesn't make any extra profit. Walmart, for example, admits that upfront, and automatically passes any labor savings directly on to the consumer.

The fifth point is true for workers narrowly construed. The benefits of the automobile certainly came out of the blacksmiths' hide. But it dramatically raised the standard of living for everybody else in society, including, eventually, former blacksmiths.

And the last point is just a silly example if you carry things to illogical extremes. At what point do we turn off new technology? Will we really be richer if we reinstate human telephone operators as opposed to automatic switching? The Amish have chosen this path--they have turned off innovation at the end of the nineteenth century. Of course the Amish are correspondingly poor.

By ignoring benefits to the consumer, socialists completely lose any value in innovation. Workers and capitalists are not the only economic actors. The most important actor is the consumer, because it is by the consumer that we measure the standard of living.

Anyway, I'm sorry to see the Socialist Labor Party go. Unlike Trotskyists, they are an honorable and harmless sect. They're the oldest socialist party in the US, dating from 1876. They represent a unique part in American history. I'll miss them.

Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is? After all, I'm almost old enough to join them.

Further Reading:

• The Decline Of American Trotskyism
• Is Marxism Dead?
• Paying The Pastors

Women's Lib

Feminism comes in a variety of flavors, ranging from the laudable (even heroic, as in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali), to the harmlessly silly (Slutwalks), to the downright malign (e.g., academic feminism). But the Marxist version of feminism occupies its own little circle of hell, and that's where we now turn our attention. The reason is this excerpt from the Oppression of Women resolution presented at Socialist Action's 2012 convention. The author is Christine Marie.

I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that Marxists regard labor as the epitome of humanity--that trait that most distinguishes us from animals. It is our ability to work for a living that drives civilization, creates wealth and culture, and enables freedom. If only it weren't for those &*#% capitalists stealing the value of our labor and exploiting us, then all would be well.

I suppose the more academic Marxists have mellowed a bit, and acknowledge that there are other values in human life besides labor, and hence work is only first among equals in the pantheon of good things. But Socialist Action (SA), being a political organization, simplifies things for us masses. By their lights, we don't work to live, we live to work. Our work is all that counts.

The goal, therefore, is to put as much of human activity into the paid labor force as possible. Parents shouldn't take care of their own children. Instead, they should send the poor dears to paid daycare centers, where union-scale workers (gender-neutral, of course) will raise them in a professional, politically correct, and loving manner, all supervised by the workers and farmers government.

But the poor dears are themselves a problem. Procreation, unfortunately, distinguishes between male and female, and so inhibits the free movement of women into the paid labor force. Thus birth control and abortion are to be championed. There is, after all, no better baby than a dead baby--how can you get any work done with those little tykes yammering and whining all day long. Eventually I suppose we'll refine the art of test tube babies to the point where both women and men are rendered redundant.

In the meantime, the people who get women pregnant are men, those evil bastards. It's precisely that kind of discrimination that dooms women to earn only 76 cents for every man's dollar. To remedy this egregious fact of life a comprehensive affirmative action plan for women is needed. Some sort of equal pay for equal work scheme has to be devised, so even though a woman takes a six month maternity leave, she should earn just as much as the guy laying bricks. Or something like that.

So I'm not going through this article bullet by bullet--it's too boring, and you can read it yourself if you really want to. It's all the same Trotskyist boilerplate that I remember from my youth. I'll limit this post to two topics: abortion and affirmative action.

The abortion issue has been decided in this country. Even if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, by the end of the year all fifty state legislatures will craft laws that basically reestablish the status quo. Nobody apart from some Taliban-style fundamentalists wants to ban abortion outright. And likewise, very few are comfortable with expanding abortion "rights" beyond the first three months of pregnancy. A large majority of the American people support the existing framework, however reluctantly.

I am part of that majority. I reject the facile equation between abortion and murder. Aborting a ten-week old fetus is just not the same thing as murdering a ten-year old child. It just isn't--get over it. By the same token, I reject the facile equation between abortion and health care. Unlike standard medical care, abortion is fraught with moral choices and competing interests between woman, child, and family. Abortion is not the same thing as gall bladder surgery. It just isn't--get over it.

So I agree with Bill Clinton--abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I'll add another term to that list: shameful. My wife and I have a friend who, under great pressure from her husband of the time, chose to abort her second child. I thought that was tragic then, and I think our friend thinks so now (though I have not discussed it with her). Her daughter has no siblings, and her grandchildren will have no cousins or aunts or uncles. I find that terribly sad. People who have abortions have failed in a fundamental human activity. I realize it's sometimes necessary and one shouldn't cast blame, but it's never a good thing. To abort a child because of some short term financial exigency as our friend did, is, I think, deeply shameful.

SA casts it in terms of "reproductive freedom." They mean a freedom to engage in the paid labor force on terms equal with men. They accompany this with some very bizarre economic reasoning arguing that capitalists oppose reproductive freedom because it hurts their profits. The reasoning falls short, but I'll have to save that for some future post. Personally, I think "reproductive freedom" (at least regards abortion) is true only in the Janis Joplin sense: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

I used to get very upset by affirmative action. University campuses are ground zero for the effort, and there is no question that affirmative action has affected my career negatively. Not disastrously, mind you, for I am now a full professor with a six figure salary, who served in academic administration for a decade. But were I female I would be at a more prestigious institution, would have advanced further through the ranks, and would have had a much easier time finding jobs.

I resented it partly because it hurt my career, but also because I didn't see why I should be blamed for every body else's problems just because I'm a white male. I am no more responsible for slavery than you are (regardless of your race or gender), and I've never beaten my wife. I have tried to treat all my colleagues and subordinates as fairly and honestly as possible--and I think most college administrators make that same effort. It's bizarre that one third of the population (white males) should be collectively forced to sacrifice for the remaining two thirds of supposedly oppressed people.

SA maintains that "[a]n effective working-class program ... for affirmative action to achieve gender equality in all trades and professions that we are fighting to maintain" is necessary. I don't see how affirmative action enhances gender equality at all. All it does is breed resentment and promotion by gender rather than merit.


Further Reading:

• Seeking the MRS Degree
• Women's Work
• Marxism & EvoPsych
• Socialist Action on Virginity

Collapsing Pensions

What a difference forty years makes.

When I was a Trotskyist I found articles about pensions and benefits boring. Who cares about all that stuff? I thought to my twenty-year-old self. Now I care, though I'm still afraid the topic will put my younger readers to sleep.

This post is based on three recent articles. The first, from The Militant by Alyson Kennedy, is an account of a demonstration in Charleston, WV, by United Mine Workers (UMWA) retirees surviving on a pension from the bankrupt Patriot Coal Co. The second, from Socialist Viewpoint, is by the irrepressible Gregg Shotwell and concerns Michigan's new Right To Work For Less law. And finally, is an article in today's Wall Street Journal by Andy Kessler on the Pension Rate-Of-Return Fantasy.

Frankly, the retired mine workers are mostly screwed--either them or the taxpayers. Kennedy does a pretty good job in laying out the problems:

In 2007 Peabody Energy spun off most of its union mines to form Patriot Coal Corp. A year later Patriot bought Magnum Coal Co., an Arch Coal spinoff. More than 90 percent of “Patriot” retirees today never actually worked for Patriot.

Of course Patriot's first obligation is to shareholders, and not to retirees. So naturally the miners get the short end of the stick. But it gets worse:

Both the number of coal miners and the proportion who are members of the UMWA has declined dramatically over recent decades. Only about one-quarter of working miners are members of the UMWA today, down from 43 percent in 1994. Today there are about 82,000 active miners in the U.S., down from some 89,000 in January of last year and from 175,000 30 years ago.

Kennedy says that Patriot is responsible for 10,000 UMWA retirees with 13,000 dependents, many of whom suffer from black lung-related illnesses. She doesn't say that Patriot Coal Co. today employs a grand total of 4,100 people, only 1,600 of whom are in the UMWA. So Patriot is responsible for six times as many retirees as current employees--there is no way in Hades that this is going to end well.

The only bright note in Kennedy's article is

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, in a videotaped message, promised to press for the Coalfield Accountability and Retired Employee Act, which would transfer money from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund, a government fund for restoration of mined land based on taxing coal production, to the UMWA 1974 Pension Plan.

The CARE Act is supposed to prop up the union’s pension plan — which faces insolvency as a result of declining unionization and funds lost through speculative investments — as well as cover retirees who lose benefits when coal bosses file for bankruptcy and reduce taxes on employer payments to benefit plans.

Ah yes--those funds lost through "speculative investments," as if Patriot had taken the pension funds to Las Vegas for vacation. And that brings us to Kessler's article:

In June of 2012, Calpers lowered the expected rate of return on its portfolio to 7.5% from 7.75%. Mr. Milligan suggested 7.25%. Calpers had last dropped the rate in 2004, from 8.25%. But even the 7.5% return is fiction. Wall Street would laugh if the matter weren't so serious.

... 

The right number is probably 3%.

For the past 30 years the rate of return on investments has averaged about 8% annually. Pension plans have invested with that number in mind--at that rate your money doubles in about eight years. But since 2008 the rate of return is only about 3%, and doubling your money takes more than 20 years. Naturally all kinds of pension plans are now underfunded.

The common solution for this touted by the "bourgeois media" (Trotsky-talk for non-Communist newspapers) is a defined contribution plan rather than a defined benefit plan. This puts pension fund risk on the backs of the employee rather than the company, and unions tend to oppose it accordingly. After all, if the rate of return declines to 3%, that's going to affect the defined contribution plan just as much.

But I will argue that on average, employees will be better off with a defined contribution plan. There are three reasons:

1. Employees will pay more attention to their investments than some hired pension manager will. They are less likely to follow the herd. In some cases they'll make big mistakes and lose a lot of money, but in most cases they'll come out ahead. Professional managers can lose their jobs by not following the herd, even if the know the herd is wrong. They won't buck the trend.
2. My defined contribution pension plan is mostly invested in TIAA-CREF (a fund for teachers). TIAA-CREF's fiduciary responsibility is to its investors. This is different from Patriot Coal, who a) has a primary fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, and b) doesn't really know how to manage a pension plan to begin with. They're going to screw it up.
3. Defined benefit plans give everybody an incentive to lie. This is most evident for the public employee unions. The union bigwigs want to brag about their bargaining chops and will negotiate the biggest pension deal they can, even if the math makes it totally impossible. And elected politicians are always generous with taxpayers money, especially since the taxpayers won't get the bill until twenty years later. Thus both the unions and the politicians have every reason to make promises that can't possibly be kept. To a lesser extent, that's true in negotiations between the UMWA and Peabody Coal. Whoever did the negotiation for the company is long since retired (or deceased) and completely out of the loop. The workers are left out to dry. Indeed, Peabody Coal doesn't even exist anymore.

The promises in defined benefit plans are not worth the paper they're printed on. Especially in the public sector, a large number of plans are simply going to default. It looks to me like the UMWA pensions are headed in the same direction. Think Cyprus, folks.

In a slightly different vein, Mr. Shotwell writes a totally depressing article about what he calls the Right To Work For Less law in Michigan. Its real moniker is the Right To Work law, but Mr. Shotwell's addendum is accurate. Wages will go down. But wages will go down anyway. The union scale is just unaffordable, and those jobs will be either out-sourced or automated or both. 

I think Mr. Shotwell pretty much throws in the towel in this article. His purpose is to justify paying union dues in a Right-to-Work state. He can't really give a good reason. The best he comes up with is this:

A union is forged in trust and camaraderie. If a union stands for anything other than fellowship between workers, it’s probably a front for a commercial enterprise.

That's just it. All a union can provide these days is trust and camaraderie. That's something, but it won't pay the bills.

Further Reading

• Trouble in the Faculty Lounge
• Where the Customer Always Comes Last
• Union Man

The Decline of American Trotskyism

Where were you on April 30th, 1975?

That was the day Saigon fell. For reasons I no longer recall, I was by myself in some fleabag motel in rural Utah. As I watched the TV news, including the now iconic footage of the last American helicopter leaving the embassy, I stood up and cheered. Hooray for the end of the war. Hooray for the Vietcong and the heroic Vietnamese people. Hooray for the victory of world socialism.

That was the day I started my trajectory towards the Republican Party. And, I believe that day represented the high water mark for global Trotskyism.

Another red letter day in my life was April 24th, 1971. Along with 300,000 other people, I demonstrated against the war in San Francisco. Add the 500,000 who marched in Washington, it was the largest antiwar demonstration ever in US history. The effort was organized in large part by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), albeit with many allies. April 24th represents the short-lived apogee of Trotskyist influence in the US, a fact noted by none other than J. Edgar Hoover.

After the April 24th demonstration, the YSA may have had 2,000 members or more. Most of them, like me, were to leave the Movement in a few years. Why?

Now Trotskyist dogma has it that success breeds more success. The Party took significant credit for forcing the US out of Vietnam, and further, if the American defeat was an anti-imperialist victory, then this should lead to a bigger Movement and a greater radicalization. On this theory, the Party initiated "The Turn," that is an all-out effort to engage the American working class. Beginning in 1975, we were all pressed to get jobs organized by industrial trade unions. Also at this time the Party physically relocated to "working class" areas--thus was founded the Hyde Park branch on Chicago's South Side, where I was assigned.

The Turn was an abysmal failure, and the SWP gradually became the politically irrelevant organization it is today. Conventional wisdom has it that The Turn was based on a prediction--the "inevitable" radicalization of the working class--rather than any reality. On the basis of this prediction the Party suddenly abandoned the campus movement. By the time reality intervened, the Party had lost whatever momentum it had obtained.

After the fall of Saigon, the campus movement just died. Before that date I was part of world history--a movement much bigger than just my comrades and me. After that date, I felt like I was a member of a tiny sect, rather like the Hare Krishnas. Far from being inspired by the victory of the Vietcong, instead it was very demoralizing. We learned that, while we may have tapped into antiwar sentiment, our sympathies for the Khmer Rouge were well out of the mainstream. The news from Indochina didn't help--reports of mass murder in Cambodia and the boat people exodus from Vietnam rather dampened enthusiasm. Even The Militant issued a halfhearted retraction of its long-time support for the Khmer Rouge, blaming US bombing for the setback.

So the Party was faced with 2,000 YSA members with nothing to do. Further, we were no longer recruiting from campuses, which means comrades were getting older. I turned 24 in 1975; my days as a campus radical were surely numbered. One can fake it at 25, but by age 30 it becomes harder to imitate a student. All those people would fade away. Something had to be done, and quickly. And hence the fast and very deliberate turn to the "working class." It didn't work, but then doing nothing wouldn't have worked, either.

The Turn was very controversial within the Party. Many thought that simply abandoning the campus movement (after all that hard work) was a big mistake. At this point I am no longer an eyewitness, but I gather that Socialist Action (SA) split from the SWP around this issue in 1983. (They say that it's because the SWP "abandoned" Trotskyism, but I think that's a rationalization.) The nice thing is we have something that historians have always dreamed of--a controlled experiment. One Party (SWP) turned toward the unions, and the other Party (SA) kept a foot on campus. How have their fates differed?

The SWP has certainly gotten the worst of it. Despite enormous efforts the Turn simply didn't work. There was no radicalization among the working class, at least as represented by industrial unions. Ronald Reagan defeated the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Eastern Airlines Machinist's strike ended in a major defeat. Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union went on strike against Hormel in Austin, MN. That led to some exciting times, but ultimately the strike was defeated.

I can't think of a single successful strike in which the SWP participated. Needless to say, they got demoralized, which led to their de facto withdrawal from active union work. No wonder the Party started just "talking socialism." They have not recruited new members. Today comrades have aged out of union activism, with most of them being in their 60s. Unsurprisingly union work has largely disappeared from The Militant. 

Socialist Action appears to have done better. With the end of the war, they had to find a new connection to campus radicals--and hence their turn to radical environmentalism. Indeed, there isn’t an environmentalist wheeze that they haven't bought in to, from genetically modified foods, to global warming, to anti-fracking. This is the primary political difference between SA and the SWP. The SA embraces environmentalism, while the SWP views it as a petty bourgeois movement. The former is appealing to students (who didn't used to care about jobs); the latter tries to win workers, who very much care about the jobs that radical environmentalism kills.

It is very difficult to estimate the demographics of Socialist Action. They no longer publish a list of chapters or branches, and they are very coy about their membership. But searching their web page for "ysa" (here standing for "Youth for Socialist Action") yields only a few hits from the recent past. It appears that SA's YSA is nearly as moribund as that from the SWP. So long term, they suffer from the same demographic problems as the SWP.

Nevertheless, it is clear that SA is younger than the SWP. They have an impressive list of 30-somethings in their movement, which the SWP lacks. So it will be awhile before they age out of activity in the way the SWP has. That said, I think their long term future is bleak. It certainly is not obvious that socialism is a cure for environmental problems, and postponing such a cure until after the World Revolution won't appeal to student radicals who want a more immediate solution. And further, environmentalism does compete with economic growth, and students today are much more interested in jobs than they used to be. I don't think it's a winning cause.

There are other things that work against world Trotskyism, like the collapse of Soviet and Chinese communism. In the early 70s, in an effort to talk me out of my folly, my dad said that Trotsky was an historical figure, rather like Robbespierre, and not a relevant model for a modern political movement. That may not have been true in 1970, but it is certainly true today. So if I had to bet on one of these Parties being successful, I'd put my money on the SWP, if only because they've "abandoned Trotskyism,"

But I don't think any of these organizations will have any impact on America's future.

Further Reading:

• Barry Sheppard: A Wasted Life
• New Media: Socialist Action's Second Best Friend
• Trotskyism and New Media
• Is the SWP a Cult?

Seeking The MRS Degree

Susan Patton recently wrote a now infamous letter to the Daily Princetonian urging young, female Princetonians to make sure they find a husband before they graduate. It brings to mind an essay I wrote some years back but never published. OK--it's off topic for this blog, but I'll have something up about Trotskyism before the weekend is out. Meanwhile, this might just entertain...

There’s a college near where I live whose name you would all recognize. I withhold it to protect my privacy. It used to be a women’s school, but some decades ago it generously agreed to admit men. Perhaps 25% of students are male. This is a very elite, expensive, private school. I recently spoke with a faculty member there, a charming woman named Carole who teaches classical Greek and Latin. These topics, as you all know, are in high demand on today’s marketplace.

Why? Why would a young woman, or her parents, spend $50K/year to study, among other things, Greek or Latin? Not that there’s anything wrong with learning that; I briefly thought about studying Latin myself once. But as EduBubble never tires of pointing out, the price is just too damn high. So either the young woman is stupid, or her parents are even dumber, or there are a lot of really, really clueless employers out there who put just ordinary stupidity to shame.

Or not. I have mockingly referred to this college as “a finishing school for young ladies.” It was a sexist joke that I’d tell to my friends, and not intended seriously. But as I talked to Carole it dawned on me that it’s true. This name-brand college - post-modern, ultra-feminist, career-woman pretensions notwithstanding - is, indeed, a finishing school for young ladies. And as such it is likely worth every penny in tuition it charges.

Suppose you are a not-exceptionally-beautiful young woman from an upper-middle-class family who prefers not to get her hands dirty. Bravado talk notwithstanding, she needs to show that she will be an excellent wife and mother for a man of some substance - a doctor, say. Such gentleman - our lady can only hope - will not be attracted to the bimbo, and if she can establish her credential as a piano-playing, Latin-spouting, tasteful and classy young woman, then she has a chance. Latin may have no purchase in the marketplace, but when it comes to educating a doctor’s son or daughter, it is a very valuable skill indeed. In the marriage market Latin rules over C++ any day.

And so there it is. As a finishing school for young ladies it’s a very good one. This is nothing to be ashamed of, and they should be ashamed of being ashamed of it. There is nothing wrong with the business model, and this college will never go bankrupt.

Barry Sheppard: A Wasted Life

Like many elderly people, Barry Sheppard has written his memoirs (here and here).

My grandfather did the same, though unless you share his passion for lumber mill technology from 1910 through 1940, it will not long detain you. My mother also wrote a memoir--she is a much better writer than either my grandfather or Mr. Sheppard, and while her life was unusual, it isn't significant. I once read the reminiscences of a very modestly successful businessman--also insignificant, but spellbindingly written. Only a few in this genre have more than sentimental value--Sam Walton's ghostwritten effort comes to mind. With all of these books--whether significant or not--my closing thoughts are usually this was a life well lived.

But not so with Mr. Sheppard's opus, to which my reaction is pathetic. Instead of admiration, I feel sorry for him.

Why?

It's not for technical reasons. Mr. Sheppard is a capable, if pedestrian, writer. The book is not uneventful--Mr. Sheppard did interesting things, including two round-the-world trips back when such were relatively rare. And it certainly isn't for lack of detail--quite the opposite. Indeed, it comes in two volumes, and I must now admit that I haven't read the second one. I have read the comprehensive review here.

Instead, unlike most memoirists, Mr. Sheppard suffers from a very weird form of megalomania. It's not that he exaggerates his own abilities, but he hugely overstates the importance of his work. His goal, after all, is to overthrow the existing world order and replace it with something different. He is simply delusional. His delusions result in a boring book, and a life's work utterly devoid of wisdom, moral purpose, or meaning.

Mr. Sheppard, born in New Jersey in 1937, graduated with a degree in mathematics from MIT. There he met Peter Camejo, a fellow student, and together they gravitated toward Trotskyism. Mr. Sheppard played a lead role in the founding of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in 1960, and then advanced to a leadership role in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He became National Organization Secretary (sort of like senior vice president) of the SWP in 1970. The SWP was loosely aligned with the world Trotskyist movement, called the Fourth International, and Mr. Sheppard represented the Party at the International headquarters in Brussels for several years.

A key indicator of the book's weakness is that nearly all the references in the bibliography are from The Militant, or from other publications of the SWP, or related organizations. In other words, Mr. Sheppard reads only what he or his colleagues have themselves written. There is no critical distance, no contrary opinion, indeed, no knowledge whatsoever. He's spent his entire life inside an echo chamber. This leads to some wacko statements that are just assumed to be self-evident. For example, on a visit to Calcutta in 1969, he writes

In Calcutta in Bengal on the east coast of India, there was even more poverty and worse living conditions than in Bombay. I met Silan Banerjee, the leader of the group there, and we traveled around the city by taxi. I was astounded when we went around a huge traffic circle around a park, the centerpiece of which was a statue of Queen Victoria seated on her throne. There she was in all her regal splendor in the midst of so much squalor for which the British were responsible.

Now how are the British responsible for the squalor in Calcutta? Was Calcutta a fabulously wealthy city prior to the British arrival? Hardly--it was the British that founded the city in the 18th Century. People moved there for the same reasons people move to cities today--for jobs and opportunities. Kolkata, as it's now known, has 14 million inhabitants. Further, 1969 was more than 20 years after independence. If the Indians wanted to tear down Queen Victoria's statue, they had plenty of opportunities to do so. The fact that she still sits there, in front of Victoria Memorial Hall, says something about the Indian view of the British. It is obvious that Mr. Sheppard never read anything, nor did he even talk to anybody before forming his silly opinion.

The whole book is like that--a mile wide and an inch deep--full of ill-considered opinions about which Mr. Sheppard knows nothing.


Mr. Sheppard clearly believes his own propaganda. Indeed, he must be guided by the Holy Spirit or something, because in the entire first volume it is impossible for him to make an important mistake. We read about the Schactmanites, and the Burnhamites, and the Cochranites, the Swabeck group, the Robertsonites and the Wohlforthites, not to mention the Weiss clique. Those are just factions within the SWP. In the larger Left were various splinters of SDS, the Progressive Labor Party, and the Communist Party (known collectively as "opponents.") Through all this hubbub and turmoil, Mr. Sheppard keeps a firm hold on the Truth. To him and his close friends, and to them alone, is True Revolutionary Doctrine revealed.

And indeed, that is the whole purpose of the memoir. Younger comrades are supposed to read these words and learn how Truth was maintained for twenty five years in the SWP.

Unlike with my ancestors, there is no sentimental purpose. And unlike Mr. Walton, Sheppard accomplished precisely nothing. And that's what makes it so pathetic. Here's a guy who actually believes he's got a stranglehold on Truth, but over his entire career has absolutely nothing to show for it. There is no mass political movement. The organization to which he has dedicated his life is today irrelevant (he bitterly refers to it as a cult). The Fourth International is in disarray. At no time and in no place has Trotskyism ever been an important actor on the world stage. It's a total waste.

Few of us lead important lives. Mr. Sheppard has led an unimportant life, though he thinks he's made some huge contribution. He hasn't. The guy's a loser. But that's not the worst of it. He writes

The paper [Boston Globe] wrote, the SWP “flies Vietcong flags and roots for a Cong victory in Vietnam.” The first of these assertions was generally not true, but the second one certainly was — and we were now far from alone in this opinion among opponents of the war.

And that's just it. The SWP and the YSA were never anti-war. They were very much pro-war, but just for the other side. For twenty years, Mr. Sheppard and the Party supported the Vietcong and the Khmer Rouge. I don't blame Mr. Sheppard for the killing fields--he's not important enough to bear any responsibility. I don't even blame Jane Fonda. But how can one go through a long life and say I supported the organization responsible for the mass slaughter of two million innocent people. In my own little way, I helped that organization win their war. Is this something to be proud of?

I pity Mr. Sheppard. What a wasted life.

Update: You can download the first volume of Mr. Sheppard's book in pdf format here for free. Don't worry--it's legal. The second volume is not for free and is overpriced, which is why I haven't read it yet. I do wish both books were available on Kindle (I would pay for that).

You Can't Eat A Hipster

This post is inspired by the Kotkin - Florida debate about the extent to which the Creative Class contributes to urban welfare.

Back in the day, when I was a Trotskyist in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), there was an effort to get comrades involved in union fractions. A fraction is a group of comrades who participate as a collective in a union (or on campus) to advocate a for revolutionary socialist perspective. The model for this work was the famous union fractions of yore--communist involvement in the UAW sit-down strikes and the Minneapolis Teamsters' strike in the 1930s. The latter is engagingly recounted in Farrell Dobbs' classic book, Teamster Rebellion.

In the 1930s unions really could shut the economy down. By the late 1970s that ability was much more limited, but that didn't stop us from trying. It is that distinction--disrupting the entire economy versus a labor action against a small-time capitalist--that roughly divides basic industry from the less important stuff. Thus comrades tried to get jobs in basic industry, organized by the UAW, the United Steel Workers, the United Mine Workers, etc. They were (in those days) less interested in AFSCME or the teachers' unions.

I am reminded of this because of Joel Kotkin's emphasis on the material boys. These are the guys who drill for oil, build new manufacturing plants, or are farmers. While likely unaware of his neo-Trotskyist sympathies, Kotkin nicely echos our efforts in basic industry. Like Trotskyists, he believes value is created by the hewers of wood, the diggers of coal, and the molders of steel. Hence thriving cities are places like Dallas and Houston, Charlotte and Nashville, and Indianapolis and Oklahoma City.

Contrast this with the neo-Schumpeterian Richard Florida, who has long touted the Creative Class. These are the artists, the counter-cultural youth, gays, immigrants, eggheads, denizens of Starbucks. Creative class folks are always looking for the Next Big Thing, the idea that'll just knock your socks off. Forget those old, fuddy-duddy material boys--creative destruction is our future. Down with fracking; up with Google. In Florida's vision, the successful cities are New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and perhaps Portland or even Pittsburgh.

Left off of either list are the old rust-belt cities: Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo. Kotkin's remedy for these towns is more manufacturing. Meanwhile, Dr. Florida prescribes cool bars, nice restaurants, and walkable streets.

I guess I'm still enough of a Trotskyist to side with Mr. Kotkin on this, but not without reservations. His basic point is certainly correct: wealth comes from creating something that people want to buy, and at the core this includes food, energy, housing, clothing, transportation. The hipsters produces none of those things directly. The world will always depend on the material boys.

Trotskyists dismiss the creative class as petty bourgeois parasites, and unfortunately I sense the same tendency in Mr. Kotkin. The truth is that given real products that people want to buy, then the creative class adds substantial value on top of that. For example, the material boys grow wheat, but the creative class financial wizards create futures options and financing opportunities that ultimately make wheat much cheaper for the consumer. Trotskyists treat Wall Street as if it were a casino, but it's not--it is essential to the modern marketplace.

Likewise, one can't eat Google, but Google has made foodstuffs cheaper and more readily available. Advertising, logistics, financing, packaging and R&D are all ways that the creative class adds value. But the material boys have to be there first.

And this Mr. Florida doesn't seem to understand. His view that cities need to welcome the creative class and then everything else will follow is precisely backwards. He is absolutely correct that the creative class adds substantial value, and he is also correct that creative folks thrive in densely populated, diverse, interesting cities. But he's got the cause and effect arrow backwards. It's the material boys who create the cities which the creative class can then move in to. Without the material boys, the hipsters have nothing to work with--they're artists without a canvas.

So I think Mr. Florida's plan--for cities such as Cleveland or Detroit to build gentrified, bohemian neighborhoods in hopes the creative folks might move in--is the wrong way round. If the material boys are already there, then the hipsters will construct their own neighborhoods. Arguably that's what's happened in Portland--first came Weyerhauser, and then came the silicon forest, and after that the Pearl District turned into Florida's dream. Portland's economy has always depended on real products that people want to buy.

Similarly, no amount of artsy-fartsy decorating is going to revive the city of Detroit. Absent something like automobile manufacturing, the city is toast. Formula One races are nice, as is Greektown and the monorail, but those are at the top of the economic pyramid, not the foundation. To revive Detroit, somebody needs to start an industry building something that people want to buy. There's no other way around it.

In some respects, both Mr. Kotkin and Mr. Florida are wrong, and the error exists also in what I've said above. My Trotskyist heritage leads me to segregate the material boys from the hipsters into distinct classes. Kotkin and Florida make the same mistake. In fact, the two groups will increasingly be the same people. Additive manufacturing (3D printing), for example, will involve both kinds of skills, in a manner similar to the traditional craftsman where both design and woodworking are embodied in the same individual.

Second, manufacturing will never employ very many people, and thus cannot support big city populations. The size of the creative class is also limited by opportunities to create value--there aren't that many of them. Most people will work in the service sector, from which they will earn some share of the return from manufacturing.

And finally, it is possible for a few cities to beat the odds. New York and San Francisco both have successful hipster economies, despite no manufacturing of note. New York thrives on finance (and will continue to do so, new financial centers notwithstanding), fashion, art, and retailing. I have posted elsewhere about what I think is New York's golden opportunity for additive manufacturing, but we can all dream. It probably won't happen. Still, New York is not dying in the way Mr. Kotkin seems to indicate. Likewise, the Bay Area survives on software. Boston and Pittsburgh live on eds and meds.

But this model doesn't scale. There simply isn't a big enough market for two dozen eds & meds cities, nor can the country support more than a handful of financial centers. For everybody else but the lucky few, the material boys come first, followed by the creative class.

So it is true--you can't eat a hipster. But it is also true: Man cannot live by bread alone.