Trotsky's Children

Monday, June 6, 2022

James P. Cannon Was Spectacularly Wrong

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is introduced by Wikipedia this way:

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.

Among its earliest founders and also its most prominent leader was James P. Cannon, who wrote two books that are likely still required reading for any wannabe Trotskyist: The History of American Trotskyism, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. The former is still well worth reading; the latter is forgettable.

Mr. Cannon spent sixteen months (1944-1945) in jail for violating the Smith Act, later ruled unconstitutional. He wrote many Letters from Prison, now collected in a volume by that name. Among those letters (dated Dec, 1944) is a disquisition on the role of the Party's newspaper, The Militant. Excerpts from that letter are republished in this week's Militant under the headline From prison, Cannon proposed SWP expand reach of ‘Militant’. (I don't have access to the full letter; my comments here are based only on the excerpt.)

I'm not clear why The Militant republishes this. It is so out of date that it provides no guide as to what role the paper should play today. Rather than flattering the The Militant, it makes it look ridiculous. Mr. Cannon's lede paragraphs (ellipses and italics in original):

What kind of a paper will best serve the needs of the new party in the next period which lies immediately before us? We used to think, or rather take for granted, that as we broke out of the narrow propaganda circle and began to get a hearing from the workers, we should aim at changing the weekly into a daily. …
It was also assumed that, as the paper became a “mass” paper, it would be obliged to adapt itself to the political understanding of the average, if not to the lowest common denominator, among its new readers; leaving the more complicated political and theoretical explanations to the monthly magazine. …

By "next period" Mr. Cannon means the immediate future, i.e., the next few years after the war. He predicts that the paper will break out of the "narrow propaganda circle," and become widely read. Of course this turned out to be wrong. Apart from a sharp recession immediately following the war, the American economy entered into a long period of rapid growth that extended for twenty years through the 1960s. Living standards during that time more than tripled.

The reasons for this growth are detailed in Robert Gordon's marvelous book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth--and contrary to what my Trotskyist friends will claim, it has little to do with the wartime destruction of Europe. The fact is that the economy was growing at 6% annually, there was a decades-long labor shortage and so the unions were fat and sassy, and nobody wanted to turn the economy over to know-nothings like Jim Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. The political effect of all of this was an allergic reaction to all things "communist", culminating in the McCarthy senate hearings.

To reach this promised next period, Mr. Cannon details what the Party needed to do next.

But what we have to do next is to reach more and more new people, catch their attention at the moment when they are just awakening from political indifference, and try to reach them with our message regularly. A big national weekly is ideally suited to this task.

He then answers two questions about the role The Militant is supposed to play.

The first question is about the price--it definitely should not be free. (Italics in original; ellipses mine.)

The principle that readers must pay for the paper is a sound one; people are inclined to put a higher value on things they pay for, even if it is a very small amount, than on throwaway sheets which they get for nothing. ... [E]xperience has also shown that it is the principle of paying, not the amount paid, that is most important. The two should not be confused and lumped together.

Mr. Cannon asserts a very capitalist principle, namely that prices mean something. The price is a representation of value, and when people pay for something it means they value it more. How different this is from, say, Cuba, where the ration card is more important than money. Things like housing and medical care--which should have a high value--are given away for free. People don't take care of things they get for free, which is why the housing stock in Cuba is so miserable.

The second question is about the intended audience The Militant is supposed to reach. The paper should serve two audiences simultaneously. The majority of readers, in Mr. Cannon's imagination, will be the unwashed masses, who coming to Trotskyism for the first time will need a simple introduction to the dogma. At the other extreme are folks who have been around the movement for longer and are interested in more substantive and complex articles. Of course there is the spectrum in between--and The Militant will have to accommodate them as well.

As Mr. Cannon points out, the Party did not have the resources for two weekly newspapers--one will have to accomplish both tasks.

Of course it never happened. The Militant never became a mass market weekly and Mr. Cannon's market segmenting problem never arose.

What I found surprising is Mr. Cannon never discusses The Militant as an organizing tool. The model for this was Lenin's paper Iskra, which was used to share information among class conscious workers throughout Russia. Of course Lenin's organization was at that time illegal, which made such information transfer essential. The Militant was not illegal.

In any case, it's all gone awry. Every October the paper has to publish a Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation to comply with postal regulations. This includes circulation figures. From the issue dated October 25th, 2021 (pdf, p. 8), under the "Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months" category, the "Total Paid Distribution" was 2,553 copies. This is a very far cry from being a mass market weekly.

I think 1972 might represent the high water mark for The Militant's circulation. Thus choosing the postal statement printed in the October 13, 1972 (pdf, p. 26) issue, we learn that "Total Paid Distribution" was 24,605 copies. This is ten-fold better than what they're doing today, but still a far cry from a mass market weekly.

Mr. Cannon served as National Secretary of the SWP from 1938 until his retirement in 1953. That latter year--when the political prospects for communist revolutionaries was at its nadir--must have been when Mr. Cannon recognized the futility of his efforts. The Militant was never going to achieve mass market status in his lifetime.

His successor, Farrell Dobbs, served as National Secretary until 1972, when he retired. And his successor, Jack Barnes--today an octogenarian--still holds the office! This, I think, is a scandal. The Party needs to pass term limits or a mandatory retirement age.

Further Reading:

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Shootings

This post is in response to the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, TX. I find the whole thing horribly depressing, partly because it is inherently depressing, and also because I can't think of any solution to the problem. The proposed solutions--e.g., gun control, or arming teachers--all seem likely to fail.

Ezra Brain, a talented correspondent for Left Voice (published by a group of NYC college professors and their groupies), describes what he thinks is the root problem. The article is entitled The Uvalde Massacre Is the Product of a Heinous System.

He uses a rhetorical technique common to Trotskyism that may be called bait and switch.

The responsibility for this horrendous crime, of course, lays first and foremost with the killer himself who made an evil and reprehensible decision to kill children. Yet, this shooting doesn’t happen in a vacuum and we can’t individualize it. This horror comes within a much larger context of the violence inherent to the capitalist system and the violence particular to the United States empire in decline.

The first sentence is a truism that everybody will agree with. I think it is the only intelligent thing one can say about the event. But the rest of the paragraph, and indeed the rest of the article, dismisses any notion of individual responsibility. He claims "we can't individualize it." The ultimate cause of the massacre is an ill-defined something that Mr. Brain calls "capitalism."

"Capitalism" isn't just the cause of mass shootings--it's the cause of all bad things that ever happen anywhere in America or the world. For Mr. Brain it is the synonym for the Devil.

There are 330 million people in America, all of whom live under "capitalism." Of that number, approximately a dozen turn in to mass shooters each year. (I'm excluding the now ubiquitous gangland-style shootings in our major cities, which I think have a different cause--though no doubt Mr. Brain would blame "capitalism" for those as well.) "Capitalism" offers no clues about how those dozen individuals differ from the rest of us. Indeed, religious language like "possessed by demons" is more informative.

The paragraph following that just quoted introduces "capitalism's" evil sidekick, namely white supremacy. (Links in original.)

This shooting comes just ten days after a white supremacist attack on a supermarket in Buffalo left eleven, all Black, people dead. While there is no evidence currently that today’s shooting was racially motivated, the specter of white supremacy still hangs over the tragedy. Uvalde is 78 percent Latine and, currently, the border patrol — the same institution that detains and abuses migrants and chases them with whips — is currently at the school, potentially intimidating any undocumented parents who need to go pick up their traumatized children.

Three things come immediately to mind. First, despite there being no evidence, Mr. Brain can't help but suggest "white supremacy." This tells us more about Mr. Brain than about the shooting. Second, he uses a word new to me, namely Latine. I'm no expert on silly, petty bourgeois lingo, but I assume it's intended to replace the hopelessly unpopular Latinx--which I described as a degendered dysphemism for Latino and Latina. Latine doesn't seem to be an improvement. Why not just use the word Latin?

And third, the link attached to "chased them with whips" has nothing to do with whips, or with the now thoroughly discredited story that border patrol agents were whipping migrants. Mr. Brain doesn't tell us that the Spanish-speaking residents of the Rio Grande Valley have roots in this country that go back centuries and are in absolutely no danger of being deported. It turns out (Mr. Brain wrote before this was widely known) that a border patrol agent is the guy who finally took out the shooter.

A much more perceptive analysis of who mass murderers are is given by Park Macdougald, in a piece entitled Why young men become shooters. The lede paragraph:

Rampage shooters tend to be losers. The archetype of the modern school shooter, Eric Harris, frequently wrote in his diary about his feelings of alienation and resentment over his lack of social success. “I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman,” begins an entry dated five months before the Columbine shooting, which later devolved into psychopathic fantasies of torture and mutilation. But in an entry from five days later, written after purchasing his first guns, Harris is exuberant. “I am fucking armed. I feel more confident, stronger, more God-like.”

Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista shooter whose “manifesto” was a laundry list of complaints about his loneliness and sexual rejection, felt particularly resentful toward his female classmates, whom he saw as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering”. Unable to attract a girlfriend, he settled on revenge.

Men, especially adolescent boys and young men, are in a life-and-death competition for access to female mates. The losers have little to lose and occasionally respond violently. This is a much more specific cause for mass shootings than "capitalism" is--but it's still not very helpful. There are, after all, millions of social outcasts, incels, disabled men, etc., out there, yet only a very few of them become mass shooters. It's still too crude a screen to identify them before they start killing people.

Mr. Brain writes,

It’s a system that has told angry young white men that it is people of color and queer people who are the cause of their distress, a system which has alienated so many young people and left them without hope, a system that has accepted near-constant school shootings in the years since Columbine.

This seems not true. The "angry young men" who become mass shooters are driven mad because of women--not race or homosexuality. Most school shootings are like Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook--they've got nothing to do with race and even less to do with homosexuality. Even the rare cases where race seems to be a factor--Charleston, Waukesha, Buffalo--it probably isn't as much a factor as Mr. Brain thinks.

The common wisdom is that Mr. Gendron drove to Buffalo to shoot people because he was a racist. I think the causal arrow is precisely the reverse. Mr. Gendron wanted to shoot people, and then devised a post hoc reason (racism) that justified to himself why he was shooting people.

We have to cut Mr. Brain some slack here. If the ultimate motive for mass shooters is frustration with the opposite sex, then Mr. Brain knows nothing about that. He's gay. His solution to what he might call toxic masculinity is for everybody to be androgynous. That's probably why he champions the word Latine. Of course androgyny is not an option for most men--who want to father children and eventually celebrate grandchildren. Whatever the virtues of the LGBTQIA+... community, fertility is not one of them--they don't have a lot of kids, and they're not good at raising them.

An androgynous, gay man is poorly equipped to understand the psychology of mass shooters. That's why Mr. Brain blames everything on "capitalism."

Further Reading:

Monday, May 23, 2022

The SWP by the Numbers

It's the data you've all been waiting for!

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) has finally released the results of the Spring sub drive and fund drive in a chart labeled Campaign to expand reach of ‘Militant,’ books, fund March 12-May 17 (final chart).

Seriously, I keep dinging the paper for not providing any statistics about their membership--probably because the numbers are too depressing. But we can uncover a good deal of information by doing some analysis.

Here is a copy of my spreadsheet.

Branch	Subs quota	Subs sold	Sold/120	# comrades	Funds raised
Albany	35	38	3.5	4	$8,553
Atlanta	90	106	9.9	10	$11,839
Chicago	125	126	11.8	12	$14,291
Cincinnati	90	91	8.5	8	$5,944
Dallas-Ft.Worth	70	81	7.6	8	$4,980
Lincoln	15	18	1.7	2	$504
Los Angeles	130	145	13.5	14	$15,160
Miami	35	36	3.4	3	$5,250
Minneapolis	70	81	7.6	8	$5,640
N. New Jersey	90	92	8.6	9	$7,697
New York	125	126	11.8	12	$17,649
Oakland	100	100	9.3	9	$14,380
Philadelphia	40	41	3.8	4	$4,885
Pittsburgh	50	54	5.0	5	$5,016
Seattle	70	82	7.7	8	$13,681
Washington DC	65	68	6.4	6	$5,042

Totals	1200	1285	120.0	122	$140,511
Subs/comrade		10.71

The Branch column, the Subs Quota and the Subs Sold columns are copied directly from The Militant's chart. The Quota column is irrelevant to our analysis; we only consider the Sold column. Likewise, the Funds raised is transcribed from the chart.

The goal is to determine how many comrades are in each branch. The idea is that the number of subs sold should be proportional to the number of comrades. Accordingly, we are only interested in subs sales attributed to individual branches, so I have omitted the 40 subs sold at book fairs, and also the $1,300 raised directly through the National Office.

While it is still listed on the chart, it was reported last week that the Albany branch is closing down.

“The party is taking steps now to reinforce branches of the Socialist Workers Party in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Miami and Seattle,” Studer said. This is possible because party cadres in Albany have made themselves available to transfer to these cities, get jobs in union workplaces, and help to strengthen the forces the party already has in these cities, all important centers of working-class politics in the United States.

This suggests that were four comrades living in Albany who are moving to the listed cities. As you will see, those towns are in need of reinforcements.

Forum in Albany April 30 heard John Studer, speaking, SWP National Committee member and editor of Militant. From left, other speakers were Beverly Bernardo, Communist League in Canada; chair Jacob Perasso; and Alex Huinil, SWP Albany branch organizer.
(Source, Credit: Militant/Laura Anderson)

Note from the photo that Mr. Huinil is much younger than the typical SWP demographic--so the Party must have recruited somebody during their sojourn in New York's capital city.

Also note, as I reported here, the former Louisville branch moved to Cincinnati. Neither Albany nor Louisville now show up in The Militant's list of branches. This indicates that the Party has only a limited number of cadre--they can't grow the total number of branches. All they can do is rearrange their forces.

Here are some facts about branches. In my day, the minimum size of a branch was five comrades. Perhaps that number has shrunk a bit, but it can't shrink by very much. That's because the Party insists that each branch acquire a physical location--we called them "Halls," which typically include meeting space such as that depicted above. The rent for this real estate must be borne by the comrades in the branch, and splitting it less than five ways seems onerous. So I think the five-comrade-minimum, while perhaps not fixed in stone, is nevertheless a serious number.

(The Party spends a huge fraction of its income on rent. Is this a good investment? I don't quite see the payoff, but I think it's a tradition since the Party was founded in the 1920s. No other organization on my Beat follows suit.)

In order to calculate the number of comrades per branch, I need to estimate the total size of the Party. Commenter John B. has suggested about 100 comrades. I have chosen a slightly higher number--120 comrades, for reasons I'll explain.

Given that, then the average number of subs sold per comrade is 10.71, as shown on the bottom row of my spreadsheet. That's simply 1285 divided by 120. Then of course it's easy to calculate the number of comrades per branch--just take the number of subs sold and divide it by 10.71. That data is given in the column labeled Sold/120. You will note that there are (were), e.g., 3.5 comrades in Albany and 11.8 in Chicago, etc. Obviously it's impossible for a branch to have a fraction of a comrade, so I have rounded those numbers to the nearest integer, shown in the column labeled # comrades--which answers our query.

So what could go wrong? Lots of things:

It all depends on my estimate of the total number of comrades, which might be wrong.
It assumes that the average subs sold per comrade for the Party as a whole also holds for each individual branch. That is, e.g., no branch has any super-salespersons who distort the average.
It assumes that all comrades are true worker-Bolsheviks (i.e. voting members of the Party) and not sympathizers who also go on Militant sales. As a practical matter this distinction might not matter much.

So let's justify the number 120 as the total number of comrades. First, we know that Albany had four comrades since they're going to four different places. 120 is the smallest number I can put in that rounds up to four. Second, we know that all branches have to pay rent for a Hall--and I think this is impossible for three or fewer comrades. Again, 120 is the smallest number I can enter that gets us up to at least four comrades per branch. On the other hand, we know the Party has no extra comrades, so therefore 120 is likely the maximum size of the organization.

There are two exceptions. One is Lincoln, NE, which only has two comrades. But it's not a branch and doesn't have a Hall--they work out of a PO Box. There used to be a branch in Lincoln but it's long since been dissolved. I'll surmise that the comrades remaining there are retired and no longer available for worker-Bolshevik duty. Lincoln is a great retirement home for Trotskyists--one can live there on a social security check.

The second exception is Miami--and as just noted, Miami is one of the places where the Albany comrades are moving to. Note also that Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are short on people as well.

So I will stick with my estimate of 120 total comrades.

Now let's briefly turn our attention to the fund raising effort. I commented on this a long time ago (2012) when the fund quota was $100K, and most of the money was used to pay salaries to Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters. This year they raised over $140K, and I don't know how the money is spent.

So if the total amount raised is proportional to the number of comrades, then it should also be proportional (by hypothesis) to the number of subs sold. The plot below shows a graph--and there is considerable scatter. What gives?

I'll argue that comrades living in cities with more billionaires earn more money than comrades living in cities with fewer billionaires. That's because richer people tend to pay higher salaries and can afford to be more generous. The data bears that out. The yellow data point below (above the trend line, and therefore paying disproportionately more) represents Seattle. The red point is for Oakland (the Bay Area) and the green point is data for New York. These are the three big billionaire cities. By contrast, the point furthest below the trendline comes from Cincinnati--91 subs and $5800.

On an unrelated note, the Party is holding its annual shindig this year again at Wittenberg University, June 9-11.

Further Reading:

Monday, May 16, 2022

It's Not Just About Abortion

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

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

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

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

To phrase it in my own words via bullet points:

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

This seems like 90% hokum and 10% truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For working people, access to abortion cannot be addressed separately from the growing pressures tearing at our families. ...
That crisis is accelerating after years of declining real wages; unaffordable housing and child care; longer hours, forced overtime and draining work schedules that cripple family life; and the intolerable weight of mounting household debts. All of this is exacerbated by the biggest price rises in 40 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Babies make people happy.

Further Reading:

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Lost in the Amazon

My friends over at Left Voice (a newspaper published by a Marxist group of NYC college professors, grad students, and assorted failed academics) have finally found some real workers to champion--Amazon warehouse employees. These workers actually earn an honest paycheck, unlike the teachers, professors, and grad students who just mooch off taxpayers and are the typical topics of Left Voice journalism.

The article, entitled Grassroots Unionism: Lessons from the Victory at Amazon, written by Tatiana Cozzarelli (grad student, Urban Education) and James Dennis Hoff (English Prof, CUNY), is a comprehensive review of the successful unionization effort at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. The authors are competent reporters and good writers--the piece is worth your time.

What always astonishes me is how such intelligent, well-educated academics can be so hopelessly ignorant about basic economics. Here is a lede paragraph (links in original):

Amazon, the second-biggest employer in the United States and the third-largest corporation in the world, has made record profits off the backs of its more than 1.5 million employees, many of whom work in unsafe, sweatshop conditions in warehouses where they are treated like human machines. In 2021 Amazon raked in an astounding $33.6 billion in profits, yet it still pays its warehouse workers on average less than the living wage. Meanwhile, the company spent more than $4.3 million last year alone on anti-union lawyers in an attempt to kill organizing efforts at warehouses across the country, including Bessemer, Alabama, and Staten Island. After all, demands put forward by a union, including the end of forced overtime and a higher wage, would significantly hurt the profits made off hyperexploited workers.

Let's give credit to our authors for linking to sources--most other pages on my Beat don't do that. Accordingly their facts are largely correct--but incomplete because Amazon is really several, mostly independent, businesses. There is the retail business, which produces by far the largest revenue, but which is barely profitable. It competes directly against Walmart and Target, stores which have margins on the order of 3%--it's hard to imagine Amazon's margin is any bigger.

Then there is Amazon Prime, which is mostly in the entertainment business, competing against Netflix and Hulu, etc. I don't believe this is earning much money.

Finally is Amazon Web Services (AWS), competing against Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud, providing basic infrastructure software and hardware for large and small enterprises around the world. AWS is hugely profitable.

Take, for example, the 4th quarter of 2021. During that quarter Amazon had a net operating profit of $3.5 billion. Of that, AWS alone generated $5.3 billion in operating profits, meaning that all other Amazon businesses lost $1.8 billion. In the Q1, 2022, it seems the retail business is barely breaking even.

So unlike what Academicians Cozzarelli and Hoff claim, Mr. Bezos is doing a shit-lousy job of hyperexploiting those poor warehouse workers. Apparently they can't even cover their own salaries and need to be subsidized by the folks over at AWS. If that continues then obviously the retail business will gradually be shut down.

One way to return Amazon retail back to profitability would be to lower the salaries of their employees. If you take our Left Voice friends literally, then Amazon could do that quite arbitrarily--after all, the workers have absolutely no choice but to work at Amazon "where they are treated like human machines." So why doesn't the company do that? There is only one reason--the workers (who are not slaves) will quit. In order to have a work force large enough to get the job done, Amazon has to pay enough in wages and benefits to make it worthwhile for them to come to work. This is effectively the market rate.

The new union now established at a Staten Island warehouse is claiming that Amazon could without penalty raise wages to $30/hour. But naturally there is a penalty--Amazon would have to raise prices to consumers. It costs me $30 to have 24 rolls of toilet paper delivered to my door. I'm willing to pay a little more than Walmart since at my age the home delivery is a real advantage. But if the price were to go up to $45 or $60 then I'd buy toilet paper at Walmart instead (or Target or Aldi or wherever).

Amazon retail is in a very competitive business--they can't arbitrarily raise prices. Now inflation forces them to raise prices--but their competitors are under the same pressure and they all have to do it in together.

Here's the rub that Ms. Cozzarelli and Mr. Hoff don't understand. Jeff Bezos doesn't pay his employees anything--not one solitary dime. The people who pay the employees are the consumers--people like me. It's all fine and dandy when out of sympathy I think warehouse workers should get a raise, but when that cost is inevitably passed on to me I'm gonna jump ship and buy my toilet paper someplace else.

So what's wrong with a union? If all the union did was advertise the plight of warehouse workers and plead for me to pay more for my toilet paper, then there's nothing wrong with the union. But that's not what a union does. An example will illustrate.

There's a guy who mows my lawn for me, and every time he does that I pay him $40. He's running his own business and I pay him directly--there is no company and certainly no union involved.

Ideally I'd do that with the Amazon driver who delivers my package--she drops off the toilet paper and I give her $30. But of course it's not that simple. Probably half that money has to go to the manufacturer, and the other half is spread amongst a whole lot of people. Not only is there the delivery driver, but there are truck drivers, warehousemen, forklift operators, packing & shipping people, etc. It wouldn't surprise me if a couple hundred people touched my box of toilet paper en route from the factory to my house. All of them need to get paid for their services.

I have no way of knowing who any of those people are, and even if I did I have no way of apportioning my $30 between them. So I hire somebody to do that accounting for me--his name is Jeff Bezos. His job (insofar as he has a job beyond building his yacht and cavorting with his girlfriends) is to make sure everybody gets paid their share.

Or, put more generally, that's what management does. Obviously management has to be kept as small and efficient as possible--otherwise it costs me money, and/or the workers I want to pay won't get paid.

The problem with the union is that it inserts another layer of management that I have to pay for. They want control over how overtime is distributed, how long and how many breaks workers get, what the specific job descriptions are, etc. This is just inefficient, and the money will come from me, or more likely it will come out of the workers' hides. Or the AWS employees will have to pay for it, which is also unfair.

I think most Amazon workers understand this. The company's employees in Alabama voted down the union, as did workers at a second warehouse on Staten Island. It is only at the JFK8 warehouse that voted in the union. Ms. Cozzarelli and Mr. Hoff do a good job explaining why that happened--the union had a charismatic champion in the person of Chris Smalls, and management behaved rather stupidly. Without disputing their account, I think it's probably a bit one-sided--one would like to hear the company's side of the story, too.

But Cozzarelli and Hoff do appear to be substantially correct--Amazon has fired several managers from the JFK8 warehouse because they obviously blew it.

Further Reading:

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

What's Happened Since I've Been Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contra Jeff Mackler, they write:

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

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

I couldn't have put it better myself!

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

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

The "two historic divisions" represent two versions of the Fourth International (FI): that of the United Secretariat, which purports to be the original FI, and the International Workers' League-Fourth International (IWL-FI), which claims a mission to "reconstruct" the original FI. (A more useless mission is hard to imagine.)

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Elections, 2021--Race & Transgender

Source: Andrew Harnik/AP, as published in Left Voice

Ezra Brain, a regular columnist for Left Voice, is a smart and interesting guy. His election night summary is excellent, and dated Nov. 3 is entitled Election Night 2021: The Right Strikes Back. Another well written post from Left Voice author Tatiana Cozzarelli is dubbed Teachers Unions Must Fight the Attacks on Critical Race Theory and on Trans Kids. We'll also take a look at Terry Evans' piece from Nov. 22nd Militant headlined What do the 2021 election results mean for the US working class?

I don't have a big problem with Mr. Brain's Election night summary. The article is very well written and definitely informative--but there is nothing in it that is especially Marxist, much less Trotskyist. It is mostly a well-phrased rehash of Democratic Party talking points. The accompanying picture (shown above) is most revealing of Mr. Brain's biases: it shows a bunch of smiling white people, who have deceptively traded in a white hood for a red blazer, and who must all be racists because they're white, and you know they're white because they are so unWoke that there are no Black faces in the picture, and whenever white people get together for any reason, it's because they're racists. And did I mention that they are all white!

The problem for the progressive left is that one can't win people's votes by constantly accusing them of being racists. Surely reporters like Mr. Brain have to make some effort to understand what people are really thinking rather than just assuming they're all hopelessly obsessed with race and can't think about anything else. The best way to understand what people actually believe is to listen to what they say and to take them seriously--and then not assume you know more about their motives than they do themselves.

For example, Mr. Brain writes

"Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican, also ran against critical race theory in schools. Ciattarelli essentially argued against the teaching of the terrible history of racism in the U.S."

I don't think CRT was the primary issue in New Jersey, and nobody is saying that racism and its history shouldn't be taught in schools. That's just a red herring. The real issue in New Jersey was exemplified by Governor Murphy's gaffe, when he said “If taxes are your issue, then New Jersey’s probably not your state.” A vote for Ciattarelli was a vote for lower taxes--not a vote for "racism."

Ms. Cozzarelli apparently imagines that on those rare occasions when us white folks aren't thinking about race, then we're thinking about sex. She writes.

Attacks on trans kids in schools take many forms, from the right to bathrooms to the right to play on sports teams. Eight anti-trans sports bans have passed in the past few months in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana, West Virginia, and Texas. These laws ban trans kids from playing sports on teams that correspond to their gender. Texas’s law was publicly litigated, and trans kids came in to plead their case. 8 year old Sunny Bryant told the Texas State Legislature: “My first visit to the Capitol should have been on a school field trip, not defending my right to exist, but if I don’t show up, you won’t see the real stories. Kids like me whose futures will be crushed, opportunities taken away even before I’m given a chance to try.” Her powerful testimony didn’t stop the bill—it passed in Texas, and others like it passed in multiple states across the country.

I confess I find the problem trans people pose to be intractable. I do know a couple trans women quite well, and both have undergone a strenuous and debilitating medical procedure to make the transition. They are smart, honorable people who have overcome serious odds. I honestly wish them the very best, I hope others treat them courteously and respectfully, and I strongly oppose any infringement on their Constitutional rights. I have no problem with them using the women's washroom--and I can't see why anybody else should have an issue with that, either.

But...

I do have a problem when a junior high or high school boy wakes up one morning, puts on a dress, changes his pronoun, and then claims he's a girl--asserting for himself the right to use the girl's toilet and play on girl's sports teams. Perhaps he's legit--i.e., he really does think he was born in the wrong body and will eventually undergo the medical procedure. Or maybe he's just pwning us, or just trying to get on a varsity sports team, or something less honorable than that. Either way, he devalues the travails of real transgender people, such as the two women of my acquaintance.

My basic disagreement with the Woke left is that I don't believe gender roles are fluid. For almost all of us sex and gender are fixed at birth. For a very few (<1%), something goes wrong (or at least different) and they really are transgender. But the notion that some kid can switch genders at will--which seems to be the dogma of most Trotskyists these days--is simply wacko. I can't take that seriously, and therefore I can't take the Woke notion of "trans rights" seriously.

Men and women, boys and girls, are different--even from birth. Their bodies and brains are constructed differently. Boys are bigger and stronger; girls have a thicker corpus callosum that connects the two halves of the brain. Boys excel in visuo-spatial skills, i.e. they can throw a ball further and aim it more accurately. Conversely, girls excel in verbal skills. Etc.

Letting boys play on girls' sports teams is just unfair, and therefore trans people are going to be left out. I'm sorry--as I said, the problem is intractable. But bathroom rules can be very simple: if you have a penis, you need to use the boys' bathroom. If you don't have a penis--either you weren't born with one or you've had surgery--then you may use the girls' bathroom.

I think a large majority of the world's population agrees with me, and the Woke effort to radically remake gender roles is doomed to failure.

If Mr. Brain and Ms. Cozzarelli articulately represent the Democratic Left, then the The Militant's Terry Evans is similarly adept at arguing for the Republican Right. It's odd that they both identify as "Trotskyists," at least in some loose sense of the term. They both agree on what the end outcome should be: we need a mass labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans, and the working class eventually needs to take state power.

Mr. Evans insists that blue collar white people are members of the working class. Our friends from Left Voice suggest that white folks can be workers only if they're grad students or somehow otherwise associated with the academic left. You need a graduate degree to not be a racist.

Mr. Evans' lede paragraph, in my opinion, represents an accurate description of Left Voice's authors.

The 2021 elections registered a sharp rejection of the anti-working-class politics of the liberal and middle-class socialist wing of the Democratic Party by workers and farmers across the country. From “defund the cops” referendums in Minneapolis and Seattle to the election results nationwide, candidates reflecting these views went down to defeat, taking other Democrats with them.

Regarding defunding the police, Mr. Evans quotes a fellow comrade this way:

“What is of great concern to workers, however, is anti-social violence within working-class communities. In addition to the immediate consequences for those affected, it saps workers’ confidence and tears at social solidarity,” Nelson said. “The rulers’ cops and courts are aimed against us, but it is far better to live under their rule of law than without it, where warlords, gangs and vigilantes fill the gap. ..."

I've expressed a similar point of view, and still assert that our Left Voice friends unwittingly want to deny Black citizens access to the 911 emergency system. This is a shameful position.

The true home for working class Americans of all races--as opposed to the top 10% and the lumpen intelligentsia--is the Republican Party.

Further Reading: