The sneering contempt for which Trotskyists view Liberals has stuck with me all these years. Indeed, I'm still proud of saying that I've never voted for a Democrat (even though that's not strictly true). It's odd that I should bear that animosity. My extended family are all loyal Democrats. My mother (who grew up during the Depression) thought FDR was a saint, and loved Eleanor even more. My wife usually votes for the donkeys (I vote, and she un-votes), as do my kids. In their defense, I'll note that they're all low-information voters--i.e., the sort that typically vote Democratic.
So my dalliance with anti-Democrat Trotskyism could be seen as simply adolescent rebelliousness--except that it's not. Indeed, there is a history of ex-Trotskyists becoming Conservatives, most famously James Burnham. Burnham, one of the founders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) split from the organization in response to the Stalin-Hitler pact. He later went on to receive a Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan (my kind of guy!).
There are continuing stories about how neoconservatism is descended from Trotskyism. The beef is that the neocons, like Trotskyists, believe that political power can effect nation-building, social change, as in the Iraq war. I will confess that I was a strong supporter of the Iraq war at the time, a position which I've since had cause to reconsider. Still, I think the connection is pretty far-fetched. Despite some superficial similarities, I think the Trotsky-neocon thing is mostly romantic myth.
Hatred of the Democratic Party is something that Trotskyists don't share with the Stalinist, Communist Party tradition. The Communist Party allied itself with the "progressive" wing of the Democrats, campaigning actively for Democratic politicians. Thus they successfully insinuated themselves into real positions of power. The SWP called this class collaboration and viewed it as a betrayal of the working class. Accordingly, Trotskyists--always principled--never had any real influence on anybody. As it turned out, the Communist Party didn't accomplish very much either.
But this is a real difference. Ex-Communists can simply gravitate to the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and live happily ever after. Ex-Trotskyists don't have that option--at least not as easily. Thus my sense is that there are a lot more Conservative ex-Trotskyists than there are Conservative ex-Communists, at least per capita.
To get further we need to make a semantic distinction between conservative and Conservative. The two words are really very different. Conservative is a political movement, exemplified for my generation by William F. Buckley. It holds that the human character is intrinsically flawed, that government will always tend toward evil, and that the social engineering schemes so beloved by Democrats, Communists & Trotskyists alike are bound to fail. Unlike Libertarians, Conservatives put great stock in mediating institutions, i.e., institutions they see as protecting the individual from government, including Church, family, law, and civic life. Conservatives tend to be more religious, more law-abiding, more family oriented, and more civically engaged than most citizens. Mormons are Conservative.
On the other hand, conservative is a psychological trait, such as exhibited by a conservative investor. A conservative wants to preserve the status quo above all else. conservatives are not really a political force, but they have a great and deleterious influence on politics. Any public policy attracts a constituency which lobbies for the preservation of that policy--biofuels is an excellent example. It doesn't matter if the project is initiated by Democrats or Republicans, but once begun conservatives will rise to its defense en masse. The Amish are conservative, as are Hasidic Jews.
So it is possible to be both Conservative and conservative, such as Pat Buchanan. Even Buckley tended that way, with his famous quote that Conservatives should "stand athwart history yelling stop!" But the real conservative Party in America today isn't the Republican--instead it is the Democratic Party. The Dems are now in the uncomfortable position of having to defend all the failing social engineering programs from the New Deal and the Great Society. Some are a travesty, not just the aforementioned biofuels subsidy, but also indefensible policies like affirmative action and Title IX.
More seriously, the great entitlement programs are falling apart. The nation is now so in hock for pensions, benefits, medical care, social security, etc., that there isn't enough money in the entire universe to make good on the promises. Look for some bodacious financial haircuts, and soon. Democratic conservatives--think Jerry Brown or Michael Bloomberg--are scrambling against all odds to preserve the status quo.
No institution is more conservative and more Democratic than academia. My colleagues (pathetic losers) are tying themselves up in knots trying to rationalize the existing educational model. Here's an example of a very conservative (vaguely incoherent) effort to defend the professoriate. The problem with conservatism is it will inevitably lose. Technology conspires against it, and at the end of the day people will choose a freer, richer life over the rule-bound, rent-enabling, impoverishing conservative regime.
So now I can tell you why Trotskyists hate Democrats. Democrats, not Conservative, but very conservative, are all-in standing athwart history. Trotskyists are also not Conservative, but nor are they conservative. Trotskyists always described themselves as radicals. And this is a very good description--they were (and are) honestly, sincerely, and consciously against the status quo. Upper case or lower, Trotskyists are anti-conservative.
In this they differ from the Communist Party. The Stalinists at very least had to defend the Soviet Union, and all that went with it, including detente, and whatever the latest foreign policy wheeze was. Further, by participating in government--however surreptitiously--they acquired a vested interest in defending it. The Communist Party further tied it's hands by getting involved in internal, Democratic Party politics, which intrinsically made them conservative.
Trotskyists had no such conflict. By remaining powerless and pure of heart, they are passionately anti-conservative. That's why they appealed to adolescents, and beyond that, that's why they appealed to me. For I still share that anti-conservatism--it's moderated slightly with old age, but I detest the Democratic Party precisely because they're conservative. Likewise, I hate academia for the same reason.
So I've gone from being a Trotskyist to being a Conservative, but the personality trait--anti-conservatism--remains constant.
To the barricades, Comrades! Down with the Academy!
Further Reading:
Friday, June 7, 2013
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
The Writer's Computer
Note: I am working on a longer piece that's not cooked yet. Rather than rushing it through, I'm posting this admittedly off-topic item instead. I hope it entertains.
I wanted to buy the writer's computer. Unfortunately no product goes by that name, and so I had to choose something else. Like most people, I'm cheap, lazy, and picky. What I bought was the Samsung Chromebook.
The best computer for you depends on what you're going to use it for. In my younger days I earned a living as a Fortran programmer. I used to love DEC VAX computers--does anybody else remember those machines?
Today, however, instead of programming I use a computer for writing. As a science professor coming up through the ranks, MSWord was the software of choice. In it's heyday it was really good. The equation editor (which I needed a lot) was excellent. I had to write assignments for my students, and also scientific papers for publication. MSWord did both tasks wonderfully.
Today, however, MSWord is no longer optimal. First, the program has just gotten too big. The menus are too complicated, and no longer very intuitive. Second, it no longer works very well. We had to put together a book-length document for an accreditation visit, and the pagination, table of contents, and indexing features are buggy and, frankly, almost unusable.
Finally, MSWord was designed for an era when words were intended to be printed out on a physical page. The great virtue of the program is you can design the page appearance precisely and easily. Things like margins, font type and size, indentation, etc., can be tweaked to perfection. For the hard copy MSWord can't be beat, even today. I still use it for exams and printed homework assignments.
But mostly I don't write for the printed page anymore. My current writing consists of two projects. First, I'm writing this blog. Second, I am writing a freshman level science text book. The latter is not the heavy tome you remember from college--instead it is intended exclusively as an e-book. It is full of hyperlinks, and I am purposely omitting pagination from the draft. The TOC has to be the hyperlink variety--page numbers do not exist.
I quickly found that MSWord was not the appropriate tool for the job. So I started using Google Docs (gDocs). This has pros and cons. The big pro was that the software is web-native. It is easy to put in internal and external links, and the program will let you completely banish page numbers if that's what you want to do. Unlike MSWord, the TOC generates hyperlinks just fine. Further, with the push of a button you can turn the whole thing into a web page. That format (while it still looks like crap) has all the functionality that I want the end product to have. It's the way I proofread the book. And finally, gDocs is free.
There are three disadvantages. First, the equation editor is hard to use and not very flexible. Similarly, Google's drawing program is primitive, and I greatly prefer Microsoft's Excel to any of its competitors.
The second issue is that gDocs is not made for big documents. My textbook is already 150,000 words long, and contains many equations, drawings, and pictures. It takes gDocs five minutes or more to load it all. Obviously, I'm using it outside its design specs. I experimented using MSWord, but that simply doesn't work. It doesn't give me output that looks anything like what I want to see. So I've put up with gDocs' shortcomings.
The third issue is related to the second. That is, even after loading it was extremely slow. I couldn't type faster than about 10 wpm--the software wasn't able to handle the data speed. Especially when I was away from home--e.g., at Starbucks--the whole thing became unusably slow. So I was stuck--going back to MSWord or equivalent seemed wrong, and using gDocs was impossible.
The computer I'd been using when on the road was a little ASUS netbook that I bought back in 2010 or so, running Windows 7. As a longtime XT user, I loved Windows 7--it was fast, intuitive and flexible. It's the operating system I have on my home laptop and at work. Using gDocs on my laptop (which never travels) didn't have the throughput problem, but I assumed that was simply because I've got fast internet at home.
Anyway, in a last ditch effort to rescue my book in its current format, I splurged on a Samsung Chromebook. It cost me $249 plus tax--shipping was free. I figured if gDocs can't work properly on a "native" computer, then the software is totally flawed and I'd need to start over anyway.
I love the device, and over the past couple of weeks it's become my main machine.
The Chromebook is about a pound lighter than the ASUS--a difference that I think must be mostly battery weight. The ASUS has a longer battery life (at least 8 hours), while I have to recharge the Chromebook every night. But the battery is good enough to last me for three hours at Starbucks, and I don't want to sit there any longer than that, anyway.
The Chromebook has a much nicer keyboard than the ASUS. With the latter I always had the problem that the cursor would instantly move to some arbitrary place, sometimes highlighting paragraphs of text that would then be deleted. Thank God for the crtl-Z key. That still happens sometimes with the Chromebook--I think it's a feature of the trackpad--but much less frequently. The Chromebook is larger, which means the keys are more widely spaced and it's easier to type.
The Chromebook starts up instantly. It goes to sleep just by shutting the lid. If I didn't have it password protected, it would wake up in about a second. Even from a shutdown start it's running in under 15 seconds. By comparison, Windows 7 now seems excruciatingly slow--that seems to take close to a minute to wake up. My computer at work requires up to five minutes to boot because The Man loads in a lot of network connections.
The main advantage is that my gDocs problems have mostly disappeared. I can type full speed at Starbucks, or anyplace else, and it works just fine. It still takes three or four minutes for my book to load into memory--I guess there's no solving that problem. I can live with that.
I do have some issues. It doesn't yet support Dropbox--I really need that. I miss not being able to use Excel. Google's photo viewer is unacceptably inferior to the Windows version. So I am not able to use the Chromebook exclusively. If I could only take one computer with me to a (wifi-equipped) desert island, it would have to be the Windows 7 laptop. But I find that the Chromebook is the instrument of choice for the vast majority of my computing.
Further Reading About Writers:
I wanted to buy the writer's computer. Unfortunately no product goes by that name, and so I had to choose something else. Like most people, I'm cheap, lazy, and picky. What I bought was the Samsung Chromebook.
The best computer for you depends on what you're going to use it for. In my younger days I earned a living as a Fortran programmer. I used to love DEC VAX computers--does anybody else remember those machines?
Today, however, instead of programming I use a computer for writing. As a science professor coming up through the ranks, MSWord was the software of choice. In it's heyday it was really good. The equation editor (which I needed a lot) was excellent. I had to write assignments for my students, and also scientific papers for publication. MSWord did both tasks wonderfully.
Today, however, MSWord is no longer optimal. First, the program has just gotten too big. The menus are too complicated, and no longer very intuitive. Second, it no longer works very well. We had to put together a book-length document for an accreditation visit, and the pagination, table of contents, and indexing features are buggy and, frankly, almost unusable.
Finally, MSWord was designed for an era when words were intended to be printed out on a physical page. The great virtue of the program is you can design the page appearance precisely and easily. Things like margins, font type and size, indentation, etc., can be tweaked to perfection. For the hard copy MSWord can't be beat, even today. I still use it for exams and printed homework assignments.
But mostly I don't write for the printed page anymore. My current writing consists of two projects. First, I'm writing this blog. Second, I am writing a freshman level science text book. The latter is not the heavy tome you remember from college--instead it is intended exclusively as an e-book. It is full of hyperlinks, and I am purposely omitting pagination from the draft. The TOC has to be the hyperlink variety--page numbers do not exist.
I quickly found that MSWord was not the appropriate tool for the job. So I started using Google Docs (gDocs). This has pros and cons. The big pro was that the software is web-native. It is easy to put in internal and external links, and the program will let you completely banish page numbers if that's what you want to do. Unlike MSWord, the TOC generates hyperlinks just fine. Further, with the push of a button you can turn the whole thing into a web page. That format (while it still looks like crap) has all the functionality that I want the end product to have. It's the way I proofread the book. And finally, gDocs is free.
There are three disadvantages. First, the equation editor is hard to use and not very flexible. Similarly, Google's drawing program is primitive, and I greatly prefer Microsoft's Excel to any of its competitors.
The second issue is that gDocs is not made for big documents. My textbook is already 150,000 words long, and contains many equations, drawings, and pictures. It takes gDocs five minutes or more to load it all. Obviously, I'm using it outside its design specs. I experimented using MSWord, but that simply doesn't work. It doesn't give me output that looks anything like what I want to see. So I've put up with gDocs' shortcomings.
The third issue is related to the second. That is, even after loading it was extremely slow. I couldn't type faster than about 10 wpm--the software wasn't able to handle the data speed. Especially when I was away from home--e.g., at Starbucks--the whole thing became unusably slow. So I was stuck--going back to MSWord or equivalent seemed wrong, and using gDocs was impossible.
The computer I'd been using when on the road was a little ASUS netbook that I bought back in 2010 or so, running Windows 7. As a longtime XT user, I loved Windows 7--it was fast, intuitive and flexible. It's the operating system I have on my home laptop and at work. Using gDocs on my laptop (which never travels) didn't have the throughput problem, but I assumed that was simply because I've got fast internet at home.
Anyway, in a last ditch effort to rescue my book in its current format, I splurged on a Samsung Chromebook. It cost me $249 plus tax--shipping was free. I figured if gDocs can't work properly on a "native" computer, then the software is totally flawed and I'd need to start over anyway.
I love the device, and over the past couple of weeks it's become my main machine.
The Chromebook is about a pound lighter than the ASUS--a difference that I think must be mostly battery weight. The ASUS has a longer battery life (at least 8 hours), while I have to recharge the Chromebook every night. But the battery is good enough to last me for three hours at Starbucks, and I don't want to sit there any longer than that, anyway.
The Chromebook has a much nicer keyboard than the ASUS. With the latter I always had the problem that the cursor would instantly move to some arbitrary place, sometimes highlighting paragraphs of text that would then be deleted. Thank God for the crtl-Z key. That still happens sometimes with the Chromebook--I think it's a feature of the trackpad--but much less frequently. The Chromebook is larger, which means the keys are more widely spaced and it's easier to type.
The Chromebook starts up instantly. It goes to sleep just by shutting the lid. If I didn't have it password protected, it would wake up in about a second. Even from a shutdown start it's running in under 15 seconds. By comparison, Windows 7 now seems excruciatingly slow--that seems to take close to a minute to wake up. My computer at work requires up to five minutes to boot because The Man loads in a lot of network connections.
The main advantage is that my gDocs problems have mostly disappeared. I can type full speed at Starbucks, or anyplace else, and it works just fine. It still takes three or four minutes for my book to load into memory--I guess there's no solving that problem. I can live with that.
I do have some issues. It doesn't yet support Dropbox--I really need that. I miss not being able to use Excel. Google's photo viewer is unacceptably inferior to the Windows version. So I am not able to use the Chromebook exclusively. If I could only take one computer with me to a (wifi-equipped) desert island, it would have to be the Windows 7 laptop. But I find that the Chromebook is the instrument of choice for the vast majority of my computing.
Further Reading About Writers:
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Bangladesh Factory Disasters Are Good For Capitalism!
Louis Proyect posts an article revisiting Marx's contention that the rate of profit will inevitably fall. Apparently this thesis is questioned by Michael Heinrich (whose turgid style exceeds that of Marx himself), Michael Roberts, and the somewhat clearer Chris Harman.
Indeed, the only reference to any actual data in the article are the Bangladeshi disasters. More than 1,100 people were killed in the factory collapse on April 24th. It is a pity for the global economy that the death toll didn't exceed 2,000--or even 10,000! For that matter, if the recession goes on much longer, we should probably just nuke Dhaka--millions of Bengali casualties should send the Dow over 30,000.
Mr. Proyect will surely accuse me of taking him out of context, and I'll plead guilty. I honestly do not understand the logic that connects the initial premise with the conclusion, but even absent my exaggeration the conclusion is just absurd. Poverty is not good for capitalism.
Part of the argument appears to claim that capitalists make more money by trading with poor countries than trading with rich ones. This is given a technical term--unequal exchange--and supposedly underlies the phenomenon of imperialism. The argument claims (as best I can determine) that the poorer the country, the more lucrative the trade. By this measure, trading with Bangladesh or Paraguay will be more profitable than commerce with, say, Canada or Japan. Then why, oh Marxist sages, is Canada our largest trading partner?
Marxists generally believe that wanton destruction spurs economic growth. There is a fascinating (and completely wrong) article by Bruce Pardoll in this month's Socialist Action (SA). Pardoll writes
Unlike Michael Heinrich, Mr. Pardoll takes the declining rate of profit as good coin. He cites the following data:
I think Mr. Pardoll (and probably also Mr. Harman and Mr. Proyect) is confusing operating margins with return on investment. Now this is an easy mistake for Marxists to make because they don't consider capital to be a factor of production. Marxists arbitrarily ascribe all value to labor. They claim that capital is just stored labor. Well--maybe. But then an egg is just a stored chicken, and one can argue indefinitely which came first. However capital first arose, it now generates value on it's own.
So capitalists earn money by extracting value from capital--not from labor. And this value, usually known as profit, is also called the return on investment. Other measures include the price/earnings ratio, or yield. There is no direct connection between operating margins and profit. There is no long term trend indicating declining returns on investment--nor can there be since the value of capital will decline in proportion to the profitability. The true measure of the health of the world economy is when profits are high. Pardoll, Proyect, and the Heinrich controversy mostly just miss the boat.
So Marxists bamboozle themselves into believing absolutely impossible things. Unlike, say, Milton Friedman, Marxist economics is the enemy of clarity. They depend on convoluted, complex texts to hide the obvious. At some level Mr. Proyect (who, unlike his correspondents, is a competent writer) understands this. He expresses justified reluctance getting involved in the whole debate, saying
Further Reading:
The principal thesis is presented in a quote from Chris Harman:
Marx’s basic line of argument was simple enough. Each individual capitalist can increase his (or occasionally her) own competitiveness through increasing the productivity of his workers. ... As a consequence, there will be a downward pressure on the ratio of profit to investment – the rate of profit.Then follows a couple thousand words of very dense argument before we finally arrive at Mr. Proyect's conclusion:
Heinrich is correct, I suppose, to point to deficiencies in this approach but does not do enough to acknowledge that Marx understood how the system could continue going forward mercilessly and relentlessly to maintain profits. A look at the recent fires in Bangladesh should be sufficient to make that case.So somehow, we start with an assertion about the declining rate of profit, and end up with fires in Bangladesh maintaining or improving profits for global capitalism! In between is a rabbinical exegesis on ancient texts, beginning with Marx's Kapital, and including many commentaries thereon. Methinks these gentlemen have gotten so involved in their argument that they've lost contact with reality.
Indeed, the only reference to any actual data in the article are the Bangladeshi disasters. More than 1,100 people were killed in the factory collapse on April 24th. It is a pity for the global economy that the death toll didn't exceed 2,000--or even 10,000! For that matter, if the recession goes on much longer, we should probably just nuke Dhaka--millions of Bengali casualties should send the Dow over 30,000.
Mr. Proyect will surely accuse me of taking him out of context, and I'll plead guilty. I honestly do not understand the logic that connects the initial premise with the conclusion, but even absent my exaggeration the conclusion is just absurd. Poverty is not good for capitalism.
Part of the argument appears to claim that capitalists make more money by trading with poor countries than trading with rich ones. This is given a technical term--unequal exchange--and supposedly underlies the phenomenon of imperialism. The argument claims (as best I can determine) that the poorer the country, the more lucrative the trade. By this measure, trading with Bangladesh or Paraguay will be more profitable than commerce with, say, Canada or Japan. Then why, oh Marxist sages, is Canada our largest trading partner?
Marxists generally believe that wanton destruction spurs economic growth. There is a fascinating (and completely wrong) article by Bruce Pardoll in this month's Socialist Action (SA). Pardoll writes
To begin with, World War II never touched American shores. War production eliminated the Great Depression and spurred the greatest decade of U.S. economic growth (5.9%) of the 20th century. By the end of the war average white workers, almost 30% of whom were unionized, saved fully 25% of their gross wages. The U.S. was now by far the #1 economy in the world! Except for the neutral nations, Europe lay in ruins. The stage was set for the U.S. to dominate the world economy.Flattening Europe and killing millions of people resulted in the prosperity of the 1950s--that's what I learned when I was in the Socialist Workers Party. But Pardoll's assertion that "war spending" got us out of the Great Depression is absurd. Quite the contrary--war spending led to rationing of many essential consumer goods, and impoverished much of American society. Building bombs adds no economic value and doesn't make anybody richer. Construction of the Interstate Highway System, mostly designed and ready to go by 1938, didn't get built until 1954 because of the war. Many non-Marxists think that, had it not been for the war, the 1950s boom would have happened in the 1940s.
Unlike Michael Heinrich, Mr. Pardoll takes the declining rate of profit as good coin. He cites the following data:
Gross profit rates in the U.S. were 20.8% between 1959-69; 17.9% from 1969-79; 15% from 1979-90; 11% from 1991-2000 (during the ballyhooed Clinton years); and 8.3% in 2001. After-tax profit rates were 6% in 2000, 5% in 2005, an upward spike to 6.75% in 2007 (due in large part to rapidly growing real estate and derivative sales profits in the first half of the year), and then back down again to 5.9% in 2008.It sounds dire, awful, no-good, terrible--doesn't it? Fortunately for the world economy, these figures are mostly irrelevant, and then mostly good news. What I believe Pardoll refers to as declining rates of profit are more commonly called operating margins (he cites no source for his data, so I don't know what it refers to). And I think there is a general consensus that operating margins are going down--that just means that we're all getting richer. Companies like Walmart and Amazon actively work to reduce their operating margins to a minimum. For them, small margins result in lower prices, large sales volumes, and significant profits. What's there not to like?
I think Mr. Pardoll (and probably also Mr. Harman and Mr. Proyect) is confusing operating margins with return on investment. Now this is an easy mistake for Marxists to make because they don't consider capital to be a factor of production. Marxists arbitrarily ascribe all value to labor. They claim that capital is just stored labor. Well--maybe. But then an egg is just a stored chicken, and one can argue indefinitely which came first. However capital first arose, it now generates value on it's own.
So capitalists earn money by extracting value from capital--not from labor. And this value, usually known as profit, is also called the return on investment. Other measures include the price/earnings ratio, or yield. There is no direct connection between operating margins and profit. There is no long term trend indicating declining returns on investment--nor can there be since the value of capital will decline in proportion to the profitability. The true measure of the health of the world economy is when profits are high. Pardoll, Proyect, and the Heinrich controversy mostly just miss the boat.
So Marxists bamboozle themselves into believing absolutely impossible things. Unlike, say, Milton Friedman, Marxist economics is the enemy of clarity. They depend on convoluted, complex texts to hide the obvious. At some level Mr. Proyect (who, unlike his correspondents, is a competent writer) understands this. He expresses justified reluctance getting involved in the whole debate, saying
For me, wading into the Michael Heinrich controversy is a little like eating my spinach—it is good for me in the sense that it forces me to engage with an important aspect of Marxology.Unfortunately, I think Mr. Proyect is wasting his time--from my brief perusal, Mr. Heinrich writes nonsense and is not worth the investment.
Further Reading:
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Canaries In The Coal Mine
This post is partly inspired by an article in The Militant by Kennedy and Farley. They report on another demonstration by the United Mine Workers (UMWA) in St. Louis. The targets are Patriot Coal Co., and also Judge Kathy Surratt-States, who is supposed to rule on the Patriot's bankruptcy petition today (May 29th). I haven't found any news of a decision on the web as of now.
The union claims that Patriot was spun off from Peabody Coal and Arch Coal precisely for the purpose of destroying the union. All the UMWA mines are now owned by Patriot; they employ 2000 miners and are responsible for the pensions of 20,000 retirees. The union is probably correct, but it makes no difference. If the union mines are unprofitable, they are unprofitable regardless of who owns them. I've posted on this issue before here and here.
I have recently finished reading The Box, by Marc Levinson, a history of the shipping container and the revolution in world shipping. It is an excellent book--well worth reading. The analogy to the coal industry is surprisingly exact.
As a person who joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) on the West Coast, I soon encountered the name of Harry Bridges. He was the long-time head of the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union (ILWU), which had a lock on the West Coast ports. We Trotskyists hated him--he was a Stalinist, reformist, labor-skate, sell-out, and probably a few other things besides. By the same token, the employer's association also hated him--he was a Stalinist, Commie Pinko, union thug who hated America. That Mr. Bridges hailed from Australia resulted in that last expletive, and also in numerous government attempts to deport him, despite his naturalized citizenship.
With enemies like that, what could go wrong? Not much, really. His fearlessness inspired awe among the rank and file, and his credibility among ILWU members allowed him bargaining flexibility that few other union leaders had. As a result, in 1960 ILWU signed the Modernization and Mechanization Agreement (MMA), substantially changing the work life for longshoremen.
Up through the 1950s, most freight was shipped as breakbulk cargo. Longshoremen would load freight one piece at a time, stowing it carefully in the hold. At the other end the freight was similarly unloaded. This was backbreaking work, and worse, it took a week or more to unload and then load a single ship. The entrepreneurial genius in Levinson's story is Malcom McLean, the man who "invented" the container, i.e., a box that could be packed by the shipper, loaded whole onto a truck, and than packed easily on a ship. The big advantage is that ships could be turned around in port in about 12 hours.
Of course containerization meant that most longshoremen would be unemployed. And prior to the MMA, the unions came up with very imaginative make-work schemes, such as the "strip and stuff" requirement. Under this rule any container arriving on the pier had to be emptied and then repacked by longshoremen--a process that effectively made the container uneconomical. The result was that shipping traffic was falling dramatically at West Coast Ports, and both the shippers and Mr. Bridges realized that something had to change.
What the MMA gave to the employers was "...the contract, working and dispatching rules shall not be construed so as to require the hiring of unnecessary men." In compensation the union got money--quite a lot of it. There were generous retirement benefits, and the A-listers (the top of the two-tier workforce) got guaranteed hours. The labor force was reduced solely through natural attrition--no layoffs were planned.
Indeed, no layoffs were necessary. Because of the MMA there was a huge spike in port traffic, and every longshoreman was busy. For the first time in many years many B-listers were promoted to the A-list. In the long run, of course, many fewer longshoremen are employed today, and freight transport costs have come down by about 90%. We are all vastly richer as a result.
The MMA was a success, but Harry Bridges was condemned as a sell-out. His East Coast counterpart, International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) head Teddy Gleason didn't sell out, but was much less successful. His circumstances were more difficult and he didn't have Mr. Bridges' credibility, so there was no MMA equivalent until the late 60s. By this time the bargaining power of the union was greatly reduced, and a lot of longshoremen were left with nothing.
President Kennedy put it well in 1962:
And this brings us back to the coal miners. Coal mining has been automated--yes--but the big change is fracking. Natural gas replaces coal with only a fraction of the labor investment, and is cleaner and cheaper for the end user. Accordingly, domestic demand for coal is down about 10% since 2008. So union coal miners are gradually being put out of business. The question is--is the UMWA more like ILWU under Harry Bridges, or like the ILA under Teddy Gleason?
I think the answer is more like the ILA. They do not have a leader with the credibility of Mr. Bridges, and their bargaining position is muchU, much weaker. Patriot Coal is good example--you can't strike against a bankrupt company, and you can't go on strike if you're retired. So the UMWA is doing the only thing it can do--sending bus loads of miners to St. Louis to throw a temper tantrum or two. It won't help.
So here's the good thing unions do: they put some friction in the works. In the long run the world needs fewer coal miners. But we can't just turn them out on the street. Harry Bridges' great genius was to find a way to enable mechanization, while still being fair to people already in the profession. By the same token, the UAW got bailed out by the government and they've been made (mostly) whole. I don't think the UMWA has been that wise. There just aren't enough of them and their bargaining power is too small. With luck they'll get some kind of government bailout. I rather hope so.
Automation here we come. You can hear it already. Just listen to the canaries in the coal mines.
Further Reading:
The union claims that Patriot was spun off from Peabody Coal and Arch Coal precisely for the purpose of destroying the union. All the UMWA mines are now owned by Patriot; they employ 2000 miners and are responsible for the pensions of 20,000 retirees. The union is probably correct, but it makes no difference. If the union mines are unprofitable, they are unprofitable regardless of who owns them. I've posted on this issue before here and here.
I have recently finished reading The Box, by Marc Levinson, a history of the shipping container and the revolution in world shipping. It is an excellent book--well worth reading. The analogy to the coal industry is surprisingly exact.
As a person who joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) on the West Coast, I soon encountered the name of Harry Bridges. He was the long-time head of the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union (ILWU), which had a lock on the West Coast ports. We Trotskyists hated him--he was a Stalinist, reformist, labor-skate, sell-out, and probably a few other things besides. By the same token, the employer's association also hated him--he was a Stalinist, Commie Pinko, union thug who hated America. That Mr. Bridges hailed from Australia resulted in that last expletive, and also in numerous government attempts to deport him, despite his naturalized citizenship.
With enemies like that, what could go wrong? Not much, really. His fearlessness inspired awe among the rank and file, and his credibility among ILWU members allowed him bargaining flexibility that few other union leaders had. As a result, in 1960 ILWU signed the Modernization and Mechanization Agreement (MMA), substantially changing the work life for longshoremen.
Up through the 1950s, most freight was shipped as breakbulk cargo. Longshoremen would load freight one piece at a time, stowing it carefully in the hold. At the other end the freight was similarly unloaded. This was backbreaking work, and worse, it took a week or more to unload and then load a single ship. The entrepreneurial genius in Levinson's story is Malcom McLean, the man who "invented" the container, i.e., a box that could be packed by the shipper, loaded whole onto a truck, and than packed easily on a ship. The big advantage is that ships could be turned around in port in about 12 hours.
Of course containerization meant that most longshoremen would be unemployed. And prior to the MMA, the unions came up with very imaginative make-work schemes, such as the "strip and stuff" requirement. Under this rule any container arriving on the pier had to be emptied and then repacked by longshoremen--a process that effectively made the container uneconomical. The result was that shipping traffic was falling dramatically at West Coast Ports, and both the shippers and Mr. Bridges realized that something had to change.
What the MMA gave to the employers was "...the contract, working and dispatching rules shall not be construed so as to require the hiring of unnecessary men." In compensation the union got money--quite a lot of it. There were generous retirement benefits, and the A-listers (the top of the two-tier workforce) got guaranteed hours. The labor force was reduced solely through natural attrition--no layoffs were planned.
Indeed, no layoffs were necessary. Because of the MMA there was a huge spike in port traffic, and every longshoreman was busy. For the first time in many years many B-listers were promoted to the A-list. In the long run, of course, many fewer longshoremen are employed today, and freight transport costs have come down by about 90%. We are all vastly richer as a result.
The MMA was a success, but Harry Bridges was condemned as a sell-out. His East Coast counterpart, International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) head Teddy Gleason didn't sell out, but was much less successful. His circumstances were more difficult and he didn't have Mr. Bridges' credibility, so there was no MMA equivalent until the late 60s. By this time the bargaining power of the union was greatly reduced, and a lot of longshoremen were left with nothing.
President Kennedy put it well in 1962:
I regard it as the major domestic challenge, really, of the 60s, to maintain full employment, at a time when automation, of course, is replacing men."Substitute "60s" with "2010s" and you have a pretty good summary of today's circumstance. We are beginning a huge new round of automation--millions of people will be thrown out of work. In the long term new jobs will be invented to replace the ones that are lost (how many unemployed longshoremen are still around today?), but that won't help in the meantime.
And this brings us back to the coal miners. Coal mining has been automated--yes--but the big change is fracking. Natural gas replaces coal with only a fraction of the labor investment, and is cleaner and cheaper for the end user. Accordingly, domestic demand for coal is down about 10% since 2008. So union coal miners are gradually being put out of business. The question is--is the UMWA more like ILWU under Harry Bridges, or like the ILA under Teddy Gleason?
I think the answer is more like the ILA. They do not have a leader with the credibility of Mr. Bridges, and their bargaining position is muchU, much weaker. Patriot Coal is good example--you can't strike against a bankrupt company, and you can't go on strike if you're retired. So the UMWA is doing the only thing it can do--sending bus loads of miners to St. Louis to throw a temper tantrum or two. It won't help.
So here's the good thing unions do: they put some friction in the works. In the long run the world needs fewer coal miners. But we can't just turn them out on the street. Harry Bridges' great genius was to find a way to enable mechanization, while still being fair to people already in the profession. By the same token, the UAW got bailed out by the government and they've been made (mostly) whole. I don't think the UMWA has been that wise. There just aren't enough of them and their bargaining power is too small. With luck they'll get some kind of government bailout. I rather hope so.
Automation here we come. You can hear it already. Just listen to the canaries in the coal mines.
Further Reading:
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Book Review: Human Capitalism
We're all petty bourgeois now.
That's the thesis of Brink Lindsey's e-book, Human Capitalism. Lindsey denotes the investment made in skills, abilities and children as human capital. In a previous post I called the concept social capital, and suggested that people so invested were petty bourgeois. The example I used were college professors, who because of their large human capital investment are more like small businessmen than proletarian laborers.
Lindsey quotes Gary Becker as claiming that "some 70 percent of all the capital in the United States today consists of investments in health, knowledge, and skills." In a word, we live in a very different era from the bourgeois world of plant and equipment. This is obvious for companies like Google or Facebook--for these firms human capital is obviously the bulk of their investment.
It's less clear for a company like Walmart, but there, too, the investment is mostly human. Walmart's competitive advantage is logistics, i.e., bringing product directly from the manufacturer to the consumer as cheaply as possible. This involves a lot of algorithm development and computer programming--that is, human capital. The physical plant, by comparison, is very simple--cheaply built, big-box stores, and some trucks.
So are we all petty bourgeois now? Not so fast, says Mr. Lindsey, for he suggests that only about one third of Americans have the human capital necessary to be successful. He puts human capital into three categories: education (including an IQ component), personal charisma, and time management (especially an ability to defer gratification). Many of these qualities are innate--heritable in the technical, current lingo--and therefore difficult to change. But Mr. Lindsey disagrees with Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein who give disproportionate weight to IQ.
Instead, Lindsey suggests that education is among the most significant sources of human capital, and this society can do something about. Most importantly, parents matter. Children are much better served being raised in two-parent families with biological parents, rather than in single-parent or blended families. He recommends all the usual, good advice we hear all the time: talk to your kids, read to them, enrich their lives, care about their schooling. Tiger Moms are better at developing human capital than those with a the kids can raise themselves attitude.
His public policy suggestions all aim to enhance education, including many ideas dear to the Libertarian heart. He advocates for much more competition in K-12 and higher education, breaking up the public employee monopolies and putting parents and children in charge. He strongly opposes the recent trend requiring licensure for many occupations, including lawyers, accountants, interior decorators, teachers, beauticians, taxi drivers, etc., etc. These requirements simply enhance poverty, and here he simply echoes what Milton Friedman said many years ago.
More controversially, Mr. Lindsey advocates for early childhood education programs, similar in purpose to Head Start (a program he acknowledges didn't work very well). Fortunately, he anticipates the potential critic who (like me) suggests that such programs won't succeed. Mr. Lindsey is full of Libertarian humility, and cites Peter Rossi's Iron Law Of Evaluation, which says that "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero." This is accompanied by Mr. Rossi's Stainless Steel Law: "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of the net impact to be zero." All very depressing for potential social engineers.
So what could go wrong? The rising importance of human capital enhances social inequality. Smart, well-educated, hard-working, attractive people (think Richard Branson or Sam Walton) will do extremely well and become billionaires. On the other hand, a person with below average intelligence, raised by a single mom, and neither athletic nor good looking, is pretty much doomed to a life of relative poverty. Opportunities to earn a living through proletarian labor are rapidly closing.
If all of Mr. Lindsey's social engineering suggestions are implemented and maximally successful, then at very best only about 50% of the labor force will have sufficient human capital to compete. In reality, social engineering is likely to result in squat, so we're probably stuck with 60% or more of the population being unable to participate in productive economic activity. Mr. Lindsey suggests that the resulting social unrest will destabilize the entire system, resulting in everybody being poor.
There are two ways to deal with this. One is to set up the Mother Of All Welfare States, where approximately 60% of the labor force would be on the public dole. There are some who suggest that work is a human right, and everybody has a right and an obligation to do something socially productive with their lives. Sitting around drinking beer and watching TV is not a satisfying career. But I think this attitude is easier to change than implementing Mr. Lindsey's social engineering projects. Honestly, I don't think slaving all day for The Man is something everybody wants to do. So the welfare state option could actually work. Think Mitt Romney's 47%.
The second option--the one that I think will actually come to pass--is that new wealth will create new markets, and hence new employment. These new jobs are frequently classed as "personal services," i.e., butlers, maids, gardeners, and other positions that are in some way degrading. Such work exists in part because they award status to the employer at the expense of the employee. And there will be some of this, but I don't think these will be the majority of future jobs. Personal services will still be on offer, but they'll be provided for impersonally--i.e., the service will be sold without the status transfer.
An example is the barista--a job that didn't exist twenty years ago. Today I am an avid Starbucks customer, whereas in my youth I'd go to the local diner and settle for a very mediocre cup of stale coffee. Few people are going to hire their own private barista, but this is an example of a personal service on offer that exists today only because people are rich. When I was a kid growing up in a college town, there was exactly one, mediocre Chinese restaurant. Today there are sushi bars, Indian restaurants, a variety of restaurants specializing in regional Chinese cuisines, good Mexican food, etc., etc. This is all because society as a whole is vastly richer than it was before. Unlike even ten years ago, now there are spas, threading parlors, waxing, massage, dog walking, etc., etc. The list is endless, and as human capital investment makes us richer, the list of personal services will get very much longer.
I predict that the free market will save us from ourselves--just as it has in the past.
Further Reading:
That's the thesis of Brink Lindsey's e-book, Human Capitalism. Lindsey denotes the investment made in skills, abilities and children as human capital. In a previous post I called the concept social capital, and suggested that people so invested were petty bourgeois. The example I used were college professors, who because of their large human capital investment are more like small businessmen than proletarian laborers.
Lindsey quotes Gary Becker as claiming that "some 70 percent of all the capital in the United States today consists of investments in health, knowledge, and skills." In a word, we live in a very different era from the bourgeois world of plant and equipment. This is obvious for companies like Google or Facebook--for these firms human capital is obviously the bulk of their investment.
It's less clear for a company like Walmart, but there, too, the investment is mostly human. Walmart's competitive advantage is logistics, i.e., bringing product directly from the manufacturer to the consumer as cheaply as possible. This involves a lot of algorithm development and computer programming--that is, human capital. The physical plant, by comparison, is very simple--cheaply built, big-box stores, and some trucks.
So are we all petty bourgeois now? Not so fast, says Mr. Lindsey, for he suggests that only about one third of Americans have the human capital necessary to be successful. He puts human capital into three categories: education (including an IQ component), personal charisma, and time management (especially an ability to defer gratification). Many of these qualities are innate--heritable in the technical, current lingo--and therefore difficult to change. But Mr. Lindsey disagrees with Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein who give disproportionate weight to IQ.
Instead, Lindsey suggests that education is among the most significant sources of human capital, and this society can do something about. Most importantly, parents matter. Children are much better served being raised in two-parent families with biological parents, rather than in single-parent or blended families. He recommends all the usual, good advice we hear all the time: talk to your kids, read to them, enrich their lives, care about their schooling. Tiger Moms are better at developing human capital than those with a the kids can raise themselves attitude.
His public policy suggestions all aim to enhance education, including many ideas dear to the Libertarian heart. He advocates for much more competition in K-12 and higher education, breaking up the public employee monopolies and putting parents and children in charge. He strongly opposes the recent trend requiring licensure for many occupations, including lawyers, accountants, interior decorators, teachers, beauticians, taxi drivers, etc., etc. These requirements simply enhance poverty, and here he simply echoes what Milton Friedman said many years ago.
More controversially, Mr. Lindsey advocates for early childhood education programs, similar in purpose to Head Start (a program he acknowledges didn't work very well). Fortunately, he anticipates the potential critic who (like me) suggests that such programs won't succeed. Mr. Lindsey is full of Libertarian humility, and cites Peter Rossi's Iron Law Of Evaluation, which says that "The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero." This is accompanied by Mr. Rossi's Stainless Steel Law: "The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of the net impact to be zero." All very depressing for potential social engineers.
So what could go wrong? The rising importance of human capital enhances social inequality. Smart, well-educated, hard-working, attractive people (think Richard Branson or Sam Walton) will do extremely well and become billionaires. On the other hand, a person with below average intelligence, raised by a single mom, and neither athletic nor good looking, is pretty much doomed to a life of relative poverty. Opportunities to earn a living through proletarian labor are rapidly closing.
If all of Mr. Lindsey's social engineering suggestions are implemented and maximally successful, then at very best only about 50% of the labor force will have sufficient human capital to compete. In reality, social engineering is likely to result in squat, so we're probably stuck with 60% or more of the population being unable to participate in productive economic activity. Mr. Lindsey suggests that the resulting social unrest will destabilize the entire system, resulting in everybody being poor.
There are two ways to deal with this. One is to set up the Mother Of All Welfare States, where approximately 60% of the labor force would be on the public dole. There are some who suggest that work is a human right, and everybody has a right and an obligation to do something socially productive with their lives. Sitting around drinking beer and watching TV is not a satisfying career. But I think this attitude is easier to change than implementing Mr. Lindsey's social engineering projects. Honestly, I don't think slaving all day for The Man is something everybody wants to do. So the welfare state option could actually work. Think Mitt Romney's 47%.
The second option--the one that I think will actually come to pass--is that new wealth will create new markets, and hence new employment. These new jobs are frequently classed as "personal services," i.e., butlers, maids, gardeners, and other positions that are in some way degrading. Such work exists in part because they award status to the employer at the expense of the employee. And there will be some of this, but I don't think these will be the majority of future jobs. Personal services will still be on offer, but they'll be provided for impersonally--i.e., the service will be sold without the status transfer.
An example is the barista--a job that didn't exist twenty years ago. Today I am an avid Starbucks customer, whereas in my youth I'd go to the local diner and settle for a very mediocre cup of stale coffee. Few people are going to hire their own private barista, but this is an example of a personal service on offer that exists today only because people are rich. When I was a kid growing up in a college town, there was exactly one, mediocre Chinese restaurant. Today there are sushi bars, Indian restaurants, a variety of restaurants specializing in regional Chinese cuisines, good Mexican food, etc., etc. This is all because society as a whole is vastly richer than it was before. Unlike even ten years ago, now there are spas, threading parlors, waxing, massage, dog walking, etc., etc. The list is endless, and as human capital investment makes us richer, the list of personal services will get very much longer.
I predict that the free market will save us from ourselves--just as it has in the past.
Further Reading:
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Anarchy!
This post is inspired by Andrew Pollack's article in Socialist Action (SA) about "autonomous horizontalism." The article is first in a two-part series critiquing Marina Sitrin, who Pollack describes as "one of the most prolific, visible and eloquent theorists of 'horizonalism' and 'autonomy'." I, being out of the Leftist loop, had never heard of her before, but I have now resolved to read one of her books.
Dr. Sitrin (Ph.D., Stony Brook, in Global Sociology (!?)) has a beautiful webpage (linked above), where the tagline reads "dreaming the impossible." Now that is certainly true, for there is nothing realistic in anything she posts. As practical politics it is all nonsense, and making fun of her is way too easy. That's precisely what Mr. Pollack does.
So I don't know what "autonomous horizontalism" really is, but it comes with a wonderful slogan, borrowed from the Zapatistas: From below, and to the Left. To me it sounds like anarchism puffed up in academic lingo. The core thesis, according to Pollack, is that revolution is OK, but the participants should never take state power. I suppose power corrupts, but as Pollack points out, it's really difficult to visualize the end game without it.
The anarchist's dream, which as a Tea Partier I sympathize with, is that government is evil, and any form of state power is an infringement on liberty. It is precisely this sentiment that leads the Tea Party to advocate for limited, constitutional government. Liberty and the constitution are, in our view, inextricably linked--the constitution was written to prevent tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. For example, the Bill of Rights are all statements of things that congress cannot do, even by unanimous vote.
Two things separate the Tea Party from impossible dreamers represented by Dr. Sitrin. One is we recognize that government is necessary--an evil necessity to be sure, but very necessary. Countries without governments are not places where you or I would want to live: Somalia, Syria, Central African Republic. Where government fails it is replaced not by impossible dreamers, but instead by street gangs. In existing anarchic societies, people are totally dependent on kin, tribe and neighbors. Secular society is impossible.
The second difference between us and anarchists is the latter regard corporations as evil. In a word, they buy the Marxist myth: we're poor because the rich people stole all the money. Tea Partiers are smart enough to understand that's not true--rich people (excepting crony capitalists or other instances where government extorts money by force) created wealth. Bill Gates made us all richer by enabling the personal computer. Dr. Sitrin depends as much as I do on the Google Guys. These people didn't steal money--they created it. Ayn Rand describes it quite correctly.
There are people who live "off the grid," and as a matter of personal pride don't participate in our technological society. The Amish are like that--they've never paid a cent to Mr. Gates, or even to the electric company. But the Amish are nevertheless forced to pay taxes--government has a power of coercion that even the largest corporation lacks. Corporations make us richer--government makes us poorer. Dr. Sitrin has it half wrong.
While Dr. Sitrin admits to being an impossible dreamer, Mr. Pollack asserts something he thinks is "reality." In reality, his reality isn't any more real than Dr. Sitrin's. The example he gives is revealing:
Their cause is completely lost. Mr. Pollack is just as much an impossible dreamer as Dr. Sitrin. He believes money can be created out of thin air if you just throw a big enough temper tantrum.
There are some fundamental things on which Dr. Sitrin and I disagree--that's why she's a Leftist and I'm a Republican. But on some deeper, moral level, we agree. We both believe that individual liberty is the touchstone for a humane society. We disagree in our assessment of the current situation, and we disagree on what tools to use to make the world better, but I think we both subscribe to the same fundamental concept of liberty. Right and Left we may be, but we're nevertheless distant cousins.
Not so with Mr. Pollack. He doesn't believe in liberty at all. He calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which (though he will deny this) will involve the mass murder of millions of people, certainly including both Dr. Sitrin and me. Accordingly he sympathizes with governments in North Korea and Cuba, calling both a step forward for human progress. I'm sure Dr. Sitrin and I agree about North Korea (though she does seem to be a bit fuzzy on Cuba).
So is it a surprise that SA will devote numerous articles criticizing "autonomous horizontalism"? Given the honest unreality of the anarchist project, why do they care? They care because anarchism has become the Leftist movement of the day. It still subscribes to the Marxist meme (we're poor because the rich people stole all the money), but it rejects Leninism in all it's vile forms. Gone are the useless vanguard parties, gone is the obsolete concept of "democratic centralism," gone is the support for regimes like North Korea or Zimbabwe, gone is the evil "dictatorship of the proletariat" language. In other words, for all it's fairy tales, anarchism is socialism for the modern age.
This is totally consistent with the way the modern economy is increasingly organized. Economies of scale are getting smaller and smaller. Big institutions--from car manufacturers to state universities to the federal government--provide less and less added value. It is now possible for individuals and small groups of individuals to generate huge amounts of wealth--witness Google and Facebook. Manufacturing, education, and health care are rapidly evolving into cottage industries, connected by the Internet and governed by the "invisible hand" market.
Leninists--here represented by Mr. Pollack--subscribe to the biggest fairy tale of all. They believe that everything under the sun can be run bureaucratically from some Central Plan. They're for Jack Barnes--Master Of The Universe.
That is not a winning program.
Further Reading:
Dr. Sitrin (Ph.D., Stony Brook, in Global Sociology (!?)) has a beautiful webpage (linked above), where the tagline reads "dreaming the impossible." Now that is certainly true, for there is nothing realistic in anything she posts. As practical politics it is all nonsense, and making fun of her is way too easy. That's precisely what Mr. Pollack does.
So I don't know what "autonomous horizontalism" really is, but it comes with a wonderful slogan, borrowed from the Zapatistas: From below, and to the Left. To me it sounds like anarchism puffed up in academic lingo. The core thesis, according to Pollack, is that revolution is OK, but the participants should never take state power. I suppose power corrupts, but as Pollack points out, it's really difficult to visualize the end game without it.
The anarchist's dream, which as a Tea Partier I sympathize with, is that government is evil, and any form of state power is an infringement on liberty. It is precisely this sentiment that leads the Tea Party to advocate for limited, constitutional government. Liberty and the constitution are, in our view, inextricably linked--the constitution was written to prevent tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. For example, the Bill of Rights are all statements of things that congress cannot do, even by unanimous vote.
Two things separate the Tea Party from impossible dreamers represented by Dr. Sitrin. One is we recognize that government is necessary--an evil necessity to be sure, but very necessary. Countries without governments are not places where you or I would want to live: Somalia, Syria, Central African Republic. Where government fails it is replaced not by impossible dreamers, but instead by street gangs. In existing anarchic societies, people are totally dependent on kin, tribe and neighbors. Secular society is impossible.
The second difference between us and anarchists is the latter regard corporations as evil. In a word, they buy the Marxist myth: we're poor because the rich people stole all the money. Tea Partiers are smart enough to understand that's not true--rich people (excepting crony capitalists or other instances where government extorts money by force) created wealth. Bill Gates made us all richer by enabling the personal computer. Dr. Sitrin depends as much as I do on the Google Guys. These people didn't steal money--they created it. Ayn Rand describes it quite correctly.
There are people who live "off the grid," and as a matter of personal pride don't participate in our technological society. The Amish are like that--they've never paid a cent to Mr. Gates, or even to the electric company. But the Amish are nevertheless forced to pay taxes--government has a power of coercion that even the largest corporation lacks. Corporations make us richer--government makes us poorer. Dr. Sitrin has it half wrong.
While Dr. Sitrin admits to being an impossible dreamer, Mr. Pollack asserts something he thinks is "reality." In reality, his reality isn't any more real than Dr. Sitrin's. The example he gives is revealing:
As I write this, teachers in Greece are preparing for a strike tomorrow (Tuesday, May 14), likely to be followed by another strike on the 17th, and the distinct possibility of solidarity strikes on both days. The government has responded by threatening to impose—for the third time this year—“mobilization” orders, in essence breaking the strike by enrolling all teachers overnight into the military, AND thus making it “illegal” for them to walk off their jobs.Mr. Pollack suggests that the teachers should take state power--his view of a realistic solution. But it won't work any more than Dr. Sitrin's impossible dream. The teachers are government employees, i.e., they live off the taxpayer. They create no wealth--instead they consume it. The money they earn is confiscated by force from the people who pay taxes. Now the problem is that the taxpayer in Greece--and by extension, the government--is broke. There is no more money. The teachers can riot and scream obscenities at the Troika and break piggy banks all they want, but they still won't get paid.
Their cause is completely lost. Mr. Pollack is just as much an impossible dreamer as Dr. Sitrin. He believes money can be created out of thin air if you just throw a big enough temper tantrum.
There are some fundamental things on which Dr. Sitrin and I disagree--that's why she's a Leftist and I'm a Republican. But on some deeper, moral level, we agree. We both believe that individual liberty is the touchstone for a humane society. We disagree in our assessment of the current situation, and we disagree on what tools to use to make the world better, but I think we both subscribe to the same fundamental concept of liberty. Right and Left we may be, but we're nevertheless distant cousins.
Not so with Mr. Pollack. He doesn't believe in liberty at all. He calls for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which (though he will deny this) will involve the mass murder of millions of people, certainly including both Dr. Sitrin and me. Accordingly he sympathizes with governments in North Korea and Cuba, calling both a step forward for human progress. I'm sure Dr. Sitrin and I agree about North Korea (though she does seem to be a bit fuzzy on Cuba).
So is it a surprise that SA will devote numerous articles criticizing "autonomous horizontalism"? Given the honest unreality of the anarchist project, why do they care? They care because anarchism has become the Leftist movement of the day. It still subscribes to the Marxist meme (we're poor because the rich people stole all the money), but it rejects Leninism in all it's vile forms. Gone are the useless vanguard parties, gone is the obsolete concept of "democratic centralism," gone is the support for regimes like North Korea or Zimbabwe, gone is the evil "dictatorship of the proletariat" language. In other words, for all it's fairy tales, anarchism is socialism for the modern age.
This is totally consistent with the way the modern economy is increasingly organized. Economies of scale are getting smaller and smaller. Big institutions--from car manufacturers to state universities to the federal government--provide less and less added value. It is now possible for individuals and small groups of individuals to generate huge amounts of wealth--witness Google and Facebook. Manufacturing, education, and health care are rapidly evolving into cottage industries, connected by the Internet and governed by the "invisible hand" market.
Leninists--here represented by Mr. Pollack--subscribe to the biggest fairy tale of all. They believe that everything under the sun can be run bureaucratically from some Central Plan. They're for Jack Barnes--Master Of The Universe.
That is not a winning program.
Further Reading:
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Does 2013 Rhyme With 1934?
"History never repeats, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain
Joe Johnson is an old Trotskyist, a one-time comrade of Farrell Dobbs and Vincent Ray Dunne. Dunne was a leader of the famous 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' strike, vividly chronicled by Farrell Dobbs in his excellent book, Teamster Rebellion. Dobbs was also the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1953 to 1972.
Johnson's thesis, in a piece published in Socialist Viewpoint, is that 2013 is an echo of 1934. He predicts a major upswing in the labor movement. His title, also a rhyme on history, is Today's Situation and What Is To Be Done Next. At first impression, Johnson's claim is silly. Upon closer reading--well, it's still silly. But the argument makes for a fun ride.
Johnson begins by pointing out two important innovations that, back in 1934, led to the Teamsters' victory. Most unions in that time were craft unions, and thus divided carpenters from plumbers from electricians from machinists. The Teamsters initiated the concept of industrial unionism, i.e., a union that organized all workers in an industry, regardless of craft. This gave them much more power than they previously had. The second new idea was an ability to connect with the larger community--in Johnson's example the Teamsters successfully turned small merchants into allies.
So how does it rhyme today? Johnson reasonably suggests that today's unions are much more like the craft unions of yore than the industrial unions they claim to be. The union movement has gotten too small and too isolated to effectively counter capital. Strikes are increasingly impossible. Johnson blames anti-union legislation for this--I think more fundamental changes in the economy are a likelier culprit.
In his telling the modern day echo of the Teamsters' industrial union is the fast-food strike! (You never heard of that? That's only because you haven't been reading the Trotskyist literature enough.) Most recently, 500 fast food and retail workers from Chicago's Michigan Avenue went on a one-day strike demanding $15 per hour. There's a nice news account (by Josh Eidelson from The Nation) reprinted in Socialist Viewpoint here. Similar demonstrations took place in New York, Milwaukee, and other cities.
Johnson argues this is a Teamster-like response to a 1934-like problem. Rather than trying to organize individual companies, such as McDonald's or Macy's, as a traditional union is wont to do, instead it goes after the whole shootin' match. Anybody who works minimum wage retail is invited to join--who cares who your capitalist boss is. Beyond this, gone is the traditional union strategy: organize a union, bargain for a contract, and then call a strike if you have to. No--instead these folks went straight to the strike--screw the bourgeois process. It's all very exhilarating and radical--and doomed to fail.
It will fail for at least three reasons:
Joe Johnson is an old Trotskyist, a one-time comrade of Farrell Dobbs and Vincent Ray Dunne. Dunne was a leader of the famous 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters' strike, vividly chronicled by Farrell Dobbs in his excellent book, Teamster Rebellion. Dobbs was also the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1953 to 1972.
Johnson's thesis, in a piece published in Socialist Viewpoint, is that 2013 is an echo of 1934. He predicts a major upswing in the labor movement. His title, also a rhyme on history, is Today's Situation and What Is To Be Done Next. At first impression, Johnson's claim is silly. Upon closer reading--well, it's still silly. But the argument makes for a fun ride.
Johnson begins by pointing out two important innovations that, back in 1934, led to the Teamsters' victory. Most unions in that time were craft unions, and thus divided carpenters from plumbers from electricians from machinists. The Teamsters initiated the concept of industrial unionism, i.e., a union that organized all workers in an industry, regardless of craft. This gave them much more power than they previously had. The second new idea was an ability to connect with the larger community--in Johnson's example the Teamsters successfully turned small merchants into allies.
So how does it rhyme today? Johnson reasonably suggests that today's unions are much more like the craft unions of yore than the industrial unions they claim to be. The union movement has gotten too small and too isolated to effectively counter capital. Strikes are increasingly impossible. Johnson blames anti-union legislation for this--I think more fundamental changes in the economy are a likelier culprit.
In his telling the modern day echo of the Teamsters' industrial union is the fast-food strike! (You never heard of that? That's only because you haven't been reading the Trotskyist literature enough.) Most recently, 500 fast food and retail workers from Chicago's Michigan Avenue went on a one-day strike demanding $15 per hour. There's a nice news account (by Josh Eidelson from The Nation) reprinted in Socialist Viewpoint here. Similar demonstrations took place in New York, Milwaukee, and other cities.
Johnson argues this is a Teamster-like response to a 1934-like problem. Rather than trying to organize individual companies, such as McDonald's or Macy's, as a traditional union is wont to do, instead it goes after the whole shootin' match. Anybody who works minimum wage retail is invited to join--who cares who your capitalist boss is. Beyond this, gone is the traditional union strategy: organize a union, bargain for a contract, and then call a strike if you have to. No--instead these folks went straight to the strike--screw the bourgeois process. It's all very exhilarating and radical--and doomed to fail.
It will fail for at least three reasons:
- The companies are simply incapable of paying $15 per hour. They can't raise prices, and their profit margins are already pretty thin. So the demand is impossible to meet. (Eidelson recognizes this.)
- Retail workers are not in a very strategic position vis-a-vis the economy. There will always be a non-union retail sector, including family-run businesses. Indeed, many Dunkin' Donuts franchises come under that category. No union will ever be able to shut down retail in the way the Teamsters shut down trucking.
- Even if hurdles 1 and 2 are surmounted, then automation will do them in. Long run, Baxter can flip hamburgers better than any human being. With sufficient capital investment, McDonald's can greatly reduce the number of employees. Macy's and Walmart are already being undercut by Amazon.com, who books the same revenue with a fraction of the workforce.
Retail unionism is doomed. And this explains the small turnout--500 retail workers in Chicago is not a very effective strike. It's not even that good--there were 500 people at the demonstration, but only a percentage were actually skipping out on work. This isn't serious, and reading between the lines in Eidelson's piece, the companies don't take it seriously, either. They all took the employees back as if nothing had happened. Actually, nothing did happen.
For the second rhyme--making connections with the community--Johnson points to the Chicago Teachers' Strike. He claims the teachers "were only able to get support by enfolding within their union demands the needs of the community." I think he is on pretty thin ground here. The teachers demands are mostly in opposition to the community, for they insist that property taxes be raised to support their privileged position. I don't think community solidarity had much to do with this strike's success.
To the contrary, the teachers won only because of special circumstance. The 2012 strike was right before the election in Obama's home town, unions are a core part of Obama's coalition, and Mayor Emanuel is closely associated with the Obama administration. This was not a fight Emanuel wanted to take on, so he just caved. In almost every other instance the public employee unions have gotten their clocks cleaned: Wisconsin, New Jersey, and most recently, Michigan. The Chicago teachers are an exception, not the start of a trend.
So I think Mr. Johnson has it mostly wrong. He is correct that, had it been successful, the fast-food strike would be a game-changer. That's the interesting idea which inspires this post. But it was mostly a non-event, and it is nearly impossible to imagine how it can ever be more than that. He badly misinterprets the teachers' strike, which was a once-off success in an election year.
The rest of Mr. Johnson's article goes off the deep end. He writes about forming soviet-style assemblies--councils of working people representing different constituencies: unions, neighborhoods, environmentalists, etc. He asks that these take over government, and suggests Detroit would be a good initial target. He cites the "fact" that Congress has a 90% unfavorable rating as evidence the time has come for revolutionary change. He's just wrong.
So history has no rhyme, and methinks Mr. Johnson has no reason.
Further Reading:
For the second rhyme--making connections with the community--Johnson points to the Chicago Teachers' Strike. He claims the teachers "were only able to get support by enfolding within their union demands the needs of the community." I think he is on pretty thin ground here. The teachers demands are mostly in opposition to the community, for they insist that property taxes be raised to support their privileged position. I don't think community solidarity had much to do with this strike's success.
To the contrary, the teachers won only because of special circumstance. The 2012 strike was right before the election in Obama's home town, unions are a core part of Obama's coalition, and Mayor Emanuel is closely associated with the Obama administration. This was not a fight Emanuel wanted to take on, so he just caved. In almost every other instance the public employee unions have gotten their clocks cleaned: Wisconsin, New Jersey, and most recently, Michigan. The Chicago teachers are an exception, not the start of a trend.
So I think Mr. Johnson has it mostly wrong. He is correct that, had it been successful, the fast-food strike would be a game-changer. That's the interesting idea which inspires this post. But it was mostly a non-event, and it is nearly impossible to imagine how it can ever be more than that. He badly misinterprets the teachers' strike, which was a once-off success in an election year.
The rest of Mr. Johnson's article goes off the deep end. He writes about forming soviet-style assemblies--councils of working people representing different constituencies: unions, neighborhoods, environmentalists, etc. He asks that these take over government, and suggests Detroit would be a good initial target. He cites the "fact" that Congress has a 90% unfavorable rating as evidence the time has come for revolutionary change. He's just wrong.
So history has no rhyme, and methinks Mr. Johnson has no reason.
Further Reading:
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