Left Voice Demands 5 Things of UAW's Shawn Fain

UAW president Shawn Fain (Source)

Left Voice author James Dennis Hoff demonstrates his astonishing misunderstanding of the labor movement in an article entitled Five Things Shawn Fain and the UAW Could Do Instead of Campaigning for Harris and Walz. The author, a professor of English at City University of New York campus, seemingly has never met a workplace he didn't want to shut down, including his own employer. Had he succeeded in that misguided effort, 40,000 people would have been out of work and without paychecks for an indefinite (probably long) period.

The primary reason for his misunderstanding is Marxism, which on the subject of labor/company relations is completely wrong. In the Marxist world view, the sole goal of labor is to confiscate the capitalist's profit. Marxists see the very existence of profit as a great injustice. Of course they're wrong--capital will have to win a return no matter who owns the means of production. Profit can never be eliminated and the efforts to do so have all led to destruction. See, eg, Cuba, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union.

But that's not the primary error we examine here. There are two ways to judge a company's success: one can measure total revenue, and/or one can measure total profit, which is some fraction of that revenue. Marxists somehow seem to forget about the revenue part. But it is revenue that is split between wages and profit, and without revenue neither the worker nor the capitalist will make any money.

For example, Walmart's net revenue for the year ending June 30th was $648 billion. The net profit was about $16.3 billion, or 2.34% of revenue. The remaining revenue went employee salaries, rents, utilities, etc. The workers can legitimately fight over Walmart's profit. If they got all of it they'd get a 2.34% raise (after which the company would promptly go bankrupt).

But the elephant in the room--the fact that Professor Hoff studiously ignores--is revenue. Increases in revenue--even small ones--will have a much larger effect on workers' well-being than chipping away at the profit margin. After all, the workers get the lion's share of that revenue.

So the workers and their bosses have one big task in common--maximizing revenue. This is very complicated problem, for it depends on the mix of products sold (keeping the optimal mix of products in stock), then pricing them at a level that optimizes revenue, and finally ensuring that the products are displayed attractively and can be purchased by consumers with minimal inconvenience. A given Walmart Super Center will carry approximately 120,000 stock-keeping units, each of which has to carried in proper quantity and priced optimally.

Both workers and capitalists have a strong interest in maximizing revenue. The capitalists certainly understand that--their profit is a fraction of total revenue. And workers understand that--the security of their employment along with the size of their wages ultimately depends on revenue. The union understands it most of all--the dollar value of union dues collected will depend only on revenue.

Which is why workers are not particularly interested in going on strike. Strikes do not enhance revenue. They hurt the company and union alike. Note that the recent UAW strike was structured in a way that minimized revenue losses.

But Marxists don't get it at all. They think it's all about quibbling over profit. Profit is a sideshow for the workers--it's the revenue that really counts. When it comes to revenue, the workers, the company and the union are all on the same side. Consumers are on the opposite side.

In that light, let's now consider Professor Hoff's five demands on Shawn Fain's union.

1: Build the Fight Against the Far Right

"It is a fool’s errand to believe that we can defeat the nationalist, misogynist, xenophobic, racist, and anti-queer politics of the Far Right by voting," says Professor Hoff. He is correct; it's likely that the "far right" is gonna win the election. Win or lose, any party that can get 70 million+ votes in an election can't really be called "far" or "extremist." They are, in fact, rather mainstream.

Then I'm not sure why you'd want to defeat the "far right." UAW workers manufacture a lot of pickup trucks. Who buys them? Does Professor Hoff own a pickup truck? Almost certainly not because he lives in New York City. The consumers who buy pickup trucks live in suburbs, exurbs and small-towns across America. They live in Trump Country. Indeed, I'll bet a lot more Trump voters own pickup trucks than voters in blue states. Why should the UAW leader purposely diss the majority of his customers? Picking a fight with Trump's voters is definitely not a way to maximize revenue. 

When it comes to maximizing revenue, staying out of politics altogether seems like the best bet.

2: Take the Struggle for a Free Palestine into the Workplaces

Surely you're joking, Professor Hoff? How can slaughtering the world's Jewry increase revenue? Even if you think Hamas doesn't intend to kill everybody, I still don't see how siding with a bunch of murderous, nihilist thugs helps make American workers richer. Siding with Israel also probably won't help any. So just stay out of it, which seems to be what Shawn Fain is doing as best he can. He's right.

3: Take Seriously the Fight for a 32-Hour Work Week and Other Progressive Demands 

You can take it as seriously as you want, but please remember that the company is already maximizing revenue. A 32 hour work week (with 40 hours pay) is a nice idea, but it's not something that's affordable on a 3% profit margin. Prices would have to go up--by a lot. Such a rise in prices will lower revenue, not raise it. The workers (and the company and consumers) will ultimately come out losers. This is a demand--from the textbook on Free Lunch Economics--that only an English PhD ignoramus could love.

4: Bring Back the Political Strike and Dismantle Taft-Hartley

As said, Professor Hoff has never seen a workplace he didn't want to shut down. And they should shut down for totally frivolous reasons. Eg,

But why shouldn’t nurses and teachers, for instance, be able to go on strike to support their brothers and sisters who drive the buses and trains, and why shouldn’t working people be able to strike collectively to demand basic human rights like access to healthcare, higher education, child care, and pensions?

Most teachers (and most nurses through Medicare & Medicaid) are public employees and get paid at the expense of other workers. It's workers, after all, who pay the majority of taxes that covers their salaries. As the professor admits, a solidarity strike by teachers serves only to stuff teachers' own pockets, especially his demand for more higher education funding. We have way more higher education in this country than we need, and I don't see why the average UAW member should be forced to pay for it. They each already pay thousands of dollars in taxes to support the professors' unions.

5. Break from the Two Parties of Capital and Build a Class Independent Union Movement

Spitting into the wind, Professor Hoff writes,

But more than anything else, the first and most important step that the UAW and every union in the country could take right now to strengthen its membership and prepare for the struggles ahead is to finally break with the two parties of capital once and for all.

Our Trotskyist friends and their predecessors have been demanding this ever since the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1846. In America it's never happened, and that's because the Marxist model of capitalists and workers permanently locked in a zero-sum fight for profits is just plain wrong.  Workers know that. Workers (real ones--not fake ones like professors) understand that it's revenue that butters their bread, and they're not gonna do anything to stop the flow.

That's why Left Voice only numbers about 50 comrades, and not 50 million.

Further Reading:

• The UAW Strike
  
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
  
• Unions and Work From Home
  

Left Voice on the Economic Crisis

Graph of a crisis happening somewhere (Source)

Kudos to Left Voice author Jason Koslowski for a serious attempt to understand the modern economy, in an article entitled The Economics of Lesser Evilism. But Mr. Koslowski (who self-identifies as "a contingent college teacher and union organizer who lives in Philadelphia") suffers from two serious handicaps in his efforts: 1) he's a Marxist, which means he doesn't understand economics; and 2) he thinks everything is always and everywhere in a crisis.

For all that, Mr. Koslowski writes this paragraph:

Marx writes in Capital that in capitalism, the rate of profit — the rate of return on capitalist investment — tends to fall. That’s because profit only comes from human labor. Capitalists, though — in their endless competition with each other — try to ramp up the productivity of labor. That makes it cheaper to produce a commodity, and can temporarily ramp up profits too, while also reducing the amount of labor needed for production. That’s the problem: capitalism tends to rely more and more on labor-saving techniques and technology, but relatively less on human labor. But as competition drives other firms to adopt that same approach, the rate of profit tends to take a hit; the amount of profit-producing human labor relatively decreases.

This is a model of clarity and concision that is rare in Leftist writing, and which shows that our friend has some talent as a journalist.

Despite that, it's wrong--but let's blame Karl Marx rather than Mr. Koslowski. It's worth taking the paragraph apart.

The first sentence does represent confusion on the part of Mr. Koslowski. He confuses the rate of profit with the rate of return on investment. These are two different things. The "rate of profit" stands for operating profit--aka earnings. That is the percent of total sales revenue that can be counted as profit, which is what Marx meant by the word. Walmart, for example, famously sets this number to 3%. If operating profits rise above that then they lower prices. If they irredeemably fall below that, then they close the store. Thus Walmart--almost definitionally--can never experience a declining rate of profit. It's always 3%.

The rate of return on investment is something completely different: that depends on the stock price. It is calculated by the price/earnings (PE) ratio, namely the price of a share of Walmart stock divided by the (recent or projected) earnings (or profit) per share. Again, using Walmart as an example, the current price of the stock is about $73/share, while the earnings per share for the past year was $1.92. This yields a PE ratio of about 38--roughly typical for an S&P 500 company.

The rate of return on investment (the PE ratio) depends on many things: the marginal rate of return (aka profit), the stock price, current interest rates, and investors' assessment of the company's future. That number can never systematically decline--since if operating margins go down then the stock price will also go down. (Marx has a completely weird way of calculating capital that had nothing to do with the stock price. Nobody today knows how to do the Marxist calculation--not even Michael Roberts.)

The next sentence is also wrong. Profit does NOT come only from human labor, though that is certainly part of it. It's the consumer who sets the value of goods and services--not labor or any other cost of production.

For example, in my old age I prefer to fly business class, which means I'm paying 3x or 4x more than those in basic economy. Most people aren't willing to spend that much money on a plane ticket--and I can do it only because I don't fly all that often. Let's use my most recent trip as an example: RT from Newark to Chicago, my ticket cost $734. By comparison a basic economy seat costs $150 (though the real cost is higher coz they nickel and dime you for everything).

The following statements are true:

• The airline earns a profit on the basic economy seat--probably the margin is similar to Walmart's. Basic economy travel is a commodity, and prices go down as airlines become more efficient. Say the profit margin is 5%.
• My business class seat takes up about twice the space of a basic economy seat. So the business class cabin (which had 16 seats) could have fit 32 people if sold as economy seats. So effectively it costs the airline twice as much to fly me to Chicago than it does the economy passenger.
• More, the airline has to hire an additional flight attendant to take care of us business class folks. And we got "free" drinks. For a longer flight we would've gotten "free" and higher quality meals, but my flight was too short for meal service.
• I don't have to pay any baggage fees.
• All sixteen seats in the business cabin were occupied. That's 16 people who paid something like $700 for a RT ticket.

So an educated guess is that it costs the airline 3x more to fly me to Chicago than a basic economy passenger. Yet the price is 5x higher, or if you account for the nickels and dimes, perhaps only 4x higher. But that's an extra $150 that the airline can book as pure profit--in addition to the 5% they get from all the other seats.

That extra profit comes only because I'm willing to pay for it! And apparently 15 other people made the same choice. When considering my alternatives in making the reservation, I didn't take the cost of labor into account at all. All I considered was the relative value I got from spending an extra $500. What else would I have rather spent $500 on? Nothing, apparently, because I spent it on business class airfare.

The airline priced business class at a level that maximized their revenue. If they charged more, they wouldn't have filled all 16 seats. If they charged less they would have just left money sitting on the table. The cost of labor doesn't enter into their calculation either.

So the labor theory of value is wrong--except for commodities. And on this Mr. Koslowski is correct. The cost of labor (or, more accurately, the total cost of production) does determine the price of a commodity--that's the very definition of a commodity. An alternative definition is that commodities compete only on price--nothing else. Basic economy airfares are a commodity, which is why they cost almost the same independently of airline. Business class airfares are not commodities, which is why they vary widely in price depending on the airline. (Business class travel to East Asia varies from about $3500 to almost $10,000. You choose your comfort level accordingly.)

Mr. Koslowski's last few sentences are mostly correct. To increase their profits companies automate their processes (substituting capital for labor) and thereby lower their costs. But competition forces them to lower their prices, and so there is a declining rate of profit. (Again, this holds true only for commodity products.) But this is a good thing--because it lowers prices. Consumers are better off, and our standard of living improves. Indeed, the major beneficiary of capitalism is and always has been the consumer, which is why our standard of living has risen dramatically since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

Mr. Koslowski thinks the current economy is in a "crisis."

Both campaigns are pitched to win support, and money, from the ruling class. They are offering competing visions of how to return the economy to “normal” after the emergency of the pandemic crisis.

But “normal” is a crisis. The campaigns are funded by a ruling class trapped inside a global economy that’s struggled to grow and return profits for decades. That class’s hunt for profits, amid deep, decades-old contradictions of capitalism, keeps on fueling the danger of financial crisis — the recent market plunge is a sign of that danger — and ever-sharper imperialist conflicts. ... That’s the “order” Trump and Harris want to preserve.

Of course there always is a danger of a financial crisis--that's been true since ancient times. Even socialist heaven-states like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea experience financial crises. So there is nothing capitalists or socialists or anybody can do about that. Other words here--imperialist, contradictions--are just meaningless Trotsky-talk, aka gobbledygook.

But the fact is We are not in a crisis! The long-predicted recession has still not happened. The financial markets have their ups and downs--Mr. Koslowski's article was written on a down day--but there don't seem to be too many bubbles there. Of course there are problems--inflation, housing--but that's all within the normal warp and woof of everyday events.

I will posit (and what follows is not original to me) that we're in stagnation--the complete opposite of crisis. Few people are getting laid off. Few people are hiring. Few people are quitting. The job market is pretty much frozen solid. That wasn't true last year--then there was a serious labor shortage. But in the interim we've admitted millions of new immigrants--quasi-Americans--who have eliminated the shortage (apart from some skilled labor categories).

It's because of quasi-Americans that inflation has gone down. It's because of quasi-Americans that unemployment has begun to tick upwards. Whatever new jobs have been created over the past year, it's quasi-Americans that have filled them. (Most of those new jobs have been in healthcare--disproportionately as home healthcare aides.)

There is no crisis--at least not today. There is no economic crisis. There is no climate crisis. There is no education crisis. There is no democracy crisis. There just isn't any crisis. I know that's a deep disappointment to our Trotskyist friends who are always and everywhere predicting a crisis here and a crisis there and a crisis everywhere.

But they're wrong. At least for now.

Further Reading:

• Cheapskate Consumers in China
  
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
  
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
  

Amazon, Teamsters & Contract

Left Voice journalist and comrade Luigi Morris spent a season last year working in a UPS sorting facility. He did not enjoy the experience, writing,

I get up for work at 3 am, with intense back pain from working this job, and deeply exhausted from working at UPS and various additional gigs to make ends meet. With this contract, there is no substantive change in my life. It doesn’t feel historic. I get better pay, but not enough to make ends meet. I get two more sick days, which as I reflect on the pain in my back, I know isn’t enough. I can only imagine what it feels like for single parents who not only need to struggle to make ends meet for themselves, but also for their children. I think about the parents who can’t even pick up their kids due to back aches and who cannot take days off to care for kids when they get sick.

Which gives him some street cred for this week's article about the new Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and its impending merger with the Teamsters. The article is entitled Amazon Labor Union Affiliates With Teamsters: What Does This Mean for Amazon Workers and the Labor Movement? (with co-author Pola Posen).

Mr. Morris' reaction to warehouse work is not necessarily representative. Indeed.com posts reviews from people who work at Amazon, and they're all over the map: some rate the experience excellent (5), others horrible (1), and most others in between. Among the most positive reviews (as an antidote to Mr. Morris' bad experience) reads

Working at Amazon as a warehouse worker has been a fantastic experience for me. The pay is competitive, and the benefits package is comprehensive, including health insurance and stock options. The management is supportive and encourages career growth through training and advancement opportunities. The work environment is dynamic yet well-organized, ensuring efficient operations while maintaining a positive atmosphere. Overall, I am grateful for the opportunity to work at Amazon and would highly recommend it to anyone seeking a rewarding job with a reputable company.

Indeed.com reports that salaries for NYC Amazon warehouse workers are around $17/hr. It's obviously not for everybody.

Mr. Morris clearly knows a lot about unions. The  Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, NY, JFK8, was successfully unionized in 2022, due in large part to the efforts of Chris Smalls. For more I'll refer the reader to the excellent journalism of Left Voice authors Tatania Cozzarelli and James Dennis Hoff. My comments on their report are here.

Since the union vote, no contract has been signed with the company. To help speed the process along Mr. Smalls is resigning from any leadership role in the ALU, and has arranged (in Mr. Morris' opinion with some subterfuge) for the union to affiliate with the Teamsters--to be designated ALU-IBT Local 1. The idea is that negotiating a contract requires more and different experience than Mr. Smalls can offer--he being a charismatic and successful organizer, but not especially interested in the weeds of a contract negotiation. Presumably the Teamsters are better at negotiating.

I think it's going to be very difficult for any contract to be signed--especially now.

Mr. Morris--as is typical of Left Voice journalists--may know a lot about unions, but he knows nothing about economics. Even worse, he apparently never reads the business pages. For he surely should know (as I document here) that Amazon is actually three, largely independent businesses. By far the most profitable is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which competes in the cloud-computing space with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. By contrast, the Amazon Retail business is just barely profitable, and in 2021 was actually losing money. (The third business is Amazon Prime, which competes with Netflix, et al.)

Amazon retail goes head to head against Walmart, Aldi, Target and Dollar General, among many others. All of these businesses run on very thin margins--Walmart's margin is typically 3%, and we can assume that Amazon Retail's margin isn't any more than that. That means that if Amazon sacrificed its entire profit margin, the workers would get a 3% raise (after which the company would immediately go bankrupt).

3% hardly justifies Mr. Morris' descriptions as "hyper exploitation" and "unchecked exploitation." As a Marxist, Mr. Morris should understand this--Marxists keep yammering about the "declining rate of profit." In general this isn't true, but for commodities it is true--and Amazon and its competitors are very much in a commodity business. Profit margins are reduced to a minimum.

So there's not very much to negotiate for. If Amazon is forced to raise wages, then it will have to shrink the workforce and raise productivity. If Amazon raises prices it will lose market share and earn even less revenue. More, Amazon can't raise wages at JFK8 beyond what they pay at their other warehouses--that would be grossly unfair. There is no way Amazon can give workers any significant wage increase. (I mean in real terms. If inflation goes up then Amazon can raise wages with inflation--since prices and everything else will be going up simultaneously. But that doesn't increase anybody's standard of living.)

It gets worse. The Teamsters need to collect union dues. I'm not saying that's their only goal, but it certainly is essential to their business model. If union dues are 1% of a worker's paycheck, then a 1% raise will simply cover the dues. Given that there's only a 3% margin, letting the union get a third of that is probably a non-starter.

The only way this kind of works is if there is continued inflation. If inflation goes up 2.5%, then the union can negotiate a 2.5% wage increase. Of course this is phony, but they'll take credit for it anyway. And remember that the union is now gonna get its 1% cut, so in real terms the workers will be left worse off.

And it gets even worse than that! Even Mr. Morris should be aware that last Thursday and Friday the Dow Jones went down about 1200 points--3%. The reason is taken to be the weak labor report, showing only 114,000 new jobs were created in July, with unemployment edging up to 4.3%. This is commonly believed to auger the beginning of a recession. (Markets are not always right with their predictions.) Recessions are a terrible time to be asking for raises--indeed, Amazon is more likely to be laying people off.

Unionization efforts work best when there is a labor shortage, such as existed from 2021 into 2023, caused by the pandemic-inspired early retirement of about 4 million baby boomers. Those retirees have since been replaced by 8 million new immigrants--there is no longer a labor shortage, but possibly even a labor surplus. Unions do not do well in such an environment, and ALU-IBT Local 1 will be no exception.

I predict that no contract will be signed in the foreseeable future.

Further Reading:

• Unions and Work From Home
• Professor Wants to Shut Down CUNY
• Book Review: The Everything Store
  

Oberlin? Mackler? Time Takes Its Toll

It appears that there was no Oberlin Conference this year.

I could be wrong. But here it is--three weeks into July--and there is no report on the Oberlin conference. What's more, I don't recall any previous mention of the conference in recent issues of The Militant. Usually they advertise said conferences in advance, inviting people sympathetic to the Party to attend.

The Party refers to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and said Party has been hosting annual conferences ever since I was a member (beginning in 1969), and then probably for years before that. Those conferences have traditionally occurred on the campus of Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio--though in 2021 and 2022 they were moved to Wittenberg College. Because of the pandemic, no conference was held in 2020, which would be the only year they've missed in at least 55 years.

Until this year. Or so it seems. Maybe I'm just jumping the gun and next week there will be a full account in The Militant (the Party's newspaper) on the Oberlin Conference. Or maybe the conference has been delayed for some reason and will happen later this Summer, as happened in 2021.

I hope I'm wrong. I'll be happy to eat my words, or eat crow, or whatever it is an ex-comrade has to eat when he gets it wrong--but if the Oberlin conference really didn't happen this year, that would be bad news. My last post was entitled Is Trotskyism Dead?, and it appears it was prescient.

I can only think of three possible reasons why.

First, perhaps the Party's leaders are just too old. The National Secretary (CEO) is Jack Barnes, born in 1940, turns 84 this year. He's served as leader since 1972, or 52 years. That's longer than Stalin (30 years) or Mao Tse-Tung (32 years) reigned as head of their respective Communist Parties. Comrade Barnes has even out-lasted his bff Fidel Castro, who ruled from 1976 to 2008, retiring at the youthful age of 82.

It's pretty obvious that the SWP has a leadership succession problem.

It's not just Mr. Barnes, but the second member of the Troika (my term for the Party's leadership) is Mary-Alice Waters. She, along with Comrade Jack, graduated from Carleton College in the early sixties--whether at the same time or a year or two apart, I don't know--but she is approximately Mr. Barnes' age. Indeed, she's been his lifelong companion--and at least for much of that time his main squeeze. Party leadership apparently runs in the family.

The third member of the Troika (that's why it's called a Troika) is Steve Clark. Comrade Clark is much younger than Comrades Barnes & Waters--indeed, I think he's younger than I am, which suggests he's about 71 or 72.

Oberlin conferences come in two flavors. In most years they are an Educational Conference, held mainly to get comrades together and touch base with the big ideas. In some years they are a Convention (the last one took place in December, 2022) where the Party approves a new program (called the Political Report) and supposedly elects new leadership. I have compiled the attendance at recent Oberlin conferences here.

Either way--whether it is a Political Report or simply a Keynote Speech--Comrade Barnes has to prepare a major presentation. Plus he has to be physically able to travel. I'll suggest that he is no longer able to complete one or both of those tasks, and therefore leadership succession in the Party becomes an urgent issue.

The second possible reason for no conference is that they're running out of money. As commenter John B wrote here, the Party (as of 2023) has only $6 million left from the $20 million horde it got by selling its building. That cash has to subsidize publication of The Militant, along with costs associated with Pathfinder Press.

A third possible reason--depressing in its own way--is that there is nothing to talk about. The median age of our comrades is probably about 70, they've all attended dozens of Oberlin Conferences, and the notion that they somehow require more "education" seems silly. Plus the travel costs are expensive.

The Party is running candidates for US president and vice-president this year--Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter, respectively. They're doing their usual respectable job of campaigning--its obviously on a small scale, but nobody can accuse them of lack of professionalism. They are working to get on the ballot in at least a few states, notably Tennessee and Vermont.

But their program doesn't inspire. Rachele Fruit says it all: ‘Workers need to form our own party, a party of labor’. A true Trotskyist demand is a demand on the bourgeoisie, and not an exhortation to the working class. Beyond saying that the "ruling class" is evil and does not rule in workers' interests, the Party doesn't demand of the rulers to do anything hard or impossible. There is no demand similar to what Trotsky describes in the Transitional Program.

Indeed, their demand is identical to all the other so-called Trotskyist grouplets. Left Voice's lead slogan is The Presidential Debate Showed the Time Is Now to Build a Party that Fights for Immigrant Rights, Workers’ Needs, and Socialism. (With a title like that who needs to read the article?)

If the SWP styles itself as the Vanguard Party, then Jeff Mackler, while nominally the head of the mostly defunct group Socialist Action, stands alone as the vanguard of the proletariat--I call him Vanguard Man.

Vanguard Man ran for president (of the USA) twice, in 2016 and again in 2020. Mr. Mackler is roughly Jack Barnes' age (perhaps a bit older), which means he's older than Joe Biden. And it showed--apart from a brief tour of southern New England there was no further activity. For some reason Mr. Mackler chose to run again in 2020, running a similarly lackadaisical campaign. Indeed, it was a lot like Mr. Biden's campaigning from his basement. I had fun mocking the attempt with headlines like Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again and Jeff Mackler Quits 2020 Race!

Unfortunately my comedic routine won't be repeated this year--Mr. Mackler appears not to be running in 2024. It seems he has health problems--expected of an 84 year-old--and is no longer able to travel very much. Which means the working class is screwed--after all, once Vanguard Man is gone, there will be nobody left to lead the Revolution. The imperialists will win.

As far as I know, Mr. Mackler has not endorsed any other candidate for president. Apparently none of them rise to the class consciousness of our Vanguard Man. After all, having spent 30 years as a California school teacher and living now probably 30 years into retirement receiving a generous pension from the Golden State--Mr. Mackler surely knows what it's like to be a poor, miserable oppressed worker--just like the shlub at Walmart with no health insurance (who's gonna vote for Trump!).

Compared to comrades Mackler, Barnes and Waters, Joe Biden is a spring chicken--a perfect symbol of youth. But it appears that time has caught up to him as well.

The SWP, despite their advancing age (or perhaps because of it) knows better what the real working class is about:

• That civil liberties are important, and an attack on one (Donald Trump) is implicitly an attack on all American workers.
• The murdering all JewsZionists in Israel is not moral, and is certainly not in the best interests of the Palestinian people.
• That Wokeism is not an ideology that benefits the working class, but instead is a set of Orwellian language and practices mandated by the petty bourgeois, academic elite.

So I'll forgive them their rather silly campaign slogan.

Further Reading:

• The SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign
  
• The SWIP Flips to SWOP
  
• The Decline of American Trotskyism
  

Is Trotskyism Dead?

— ADL (@ADL) June 11, 2024

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2024

When you've lost AOC, you've pretty much lost the argument. It's all very depressing.

As much as I disagree with Trotskyism, as a former comrade and longtime student I've always wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I have tried hard to credit them with good intentions. However wooly-minded, at least they honestly desired a better world.

But for the most part I can no longer believe this. Their pro-Hamas sympathies lead them to call for the obliteration of the world's Jews. After October 7th it is no longer possible to interpret slogans like From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free, or--even worse--Globalize the Intifada, as anything other than demanding the murder of all Jews. 

They will probably claim they don't really want that (I don't believe them), but then there needs at very least to be an asterisk on those slogans. They must clearly state what they do mean. Because--coming from Hamas and without the asterisk--a Free Palestine is just a Judenrein Palestine, and Globalize the Intifada implies nothing other than the murder of Jews worldwide.

They compound the obfuscation by calling Israel's war against Hamas genocide. Whatever else it is (and it's bad enough) it is nowhere near the level of genocide.

Left Voice author Sam Karlin reveals his true feelings in an article entitled Liberal Towns in New Jersey Are Increasing Attacks on Pro-Palestine Activists. His very first paragraph gives the game away (link in original).

Pro-Palestine activists in New Jersey are coming up against repression. Five months ago, a collection of neighbors in South Orange and Maplewood (SOMA) New Jersey came together to form SOMA Collective for Palestine. This group has been advocating for a ceasefire and denouncing Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza in a community that is heavily Zionist. In fact, SOMA is a highly wealthy community and part of the eighth wealthiest congressional district in the country. The fact that the movement for Palestine reached even this community is a testament to its support from large sectors of society.

In this case the word Zionist is just used as a synonym for Jewish. Indeed, the supposed wealth of the Zionists/Jews just shows how despicable they actually are. Needless to say, the "Zionists" are not happy to see people demonstrating in public parks loudly demanding their murder, and do not regard such demonstrations as "free speech." Of course they're upset--and this has nothing to do with "Islamophobia" or "anti-Arab racism," as Mr. Karlin argues later in his article.

Mr. Karlin is an out-and-out antisemite, along with all his comrades at Left Voice, Socialist Action, and Workers' Voice, among other Trotskyist grouplets. They've all bought the pro-Hamas propaganda to the hilt--whether you call them Jews or Zionists, they're evil people whose filthy feet "occupy" supposedly Palestinian land, and nothing less than their murder/exile will solve the problem.

My Trotskyist "friends" have gone from being misguided but good-hearted, to being outright evil. They support the admittedly-fascist Hamas, just like in my day when we supported the Khmer Rouge.

Would Trotsky have supported Hamas? I don't know, but I hope not. He wrote a book entitled "The Jewish Question," which I have not read, but I doubt it advocates the mass murder of all Jews. Left Voice's alliance with Hamas is a betrayal of Trotskyism. And the same is true for most other Trotskyist grouplets.

As I say, it's very depressing. But that's not the end of their problems.

I read somewhere (I believe it was in one of Barry Sheppard's books) that a small organization (such as the Socialist Workers Party--SWP back in the 1970s) will attract a disproportionate share of social misfits. I think that was true, and I'll include myself among that number. Speaking for myself, the Party gave me a ready-made circle of friends, a mission in life similar to joining a religious sect, along with a lifestyle (eg, the no-drugs rule) that I found very congenial. Some others had physical problems (eg, blindness), or were so socially mal-adept that they needed therapy. 

I think that's still true. All of the little grouplets I follow seem to have similar problems, and attract a ragtag list of maladjusted grad students, adjunct faculty, "journalists" (such as Mr. Karlin), theater wannabes, etc. Few if any have the slightest chance of success in larger society, and so it is no wonder that they set themselves up as a "Vanguard Party," thereby anointing themselves with the success that eludes them in real life. In a word, they're just like we were, except that we were more self-aware of our shortcomings than this later generation.

This current crop of Trotskyists are not merely in denial, but they extol their oddities as being somehow an improvement. A disproportionate (I think, a majority) of Left Voice comrades self-identify as queer. I don't precisely know what this means, but to me it's a rough synonym for mentally ill. Indeed, our Left Voice comrades appear to be in some measure mentally ill.

Not that there is any great shame in this--as said, I suffered similarly when I was their age. And such status does not deny one's right to a political opinion. But one should be self-aware enough to realize that most "normal" people will not see mental illness--or queerness--as a positive attribute. And that for a very good reason: queer people are almost by definition infertile. Few parents want to raise a child that proudly proclaims his/her infertility.

So whether they call themselves queer or trans, or even gay--and then raise that to the status of a virtue--that's a non-starter. It will never become a mass movement beyond the infertile queer community. Working class folks will not want to associate themselves with a weird group of losers. If Left Voice wants an impact on the wider world, then they need to keep their queerness to themselves.

Other Trotskyist groups seem to realize that. Both Socialist Action and Workers' Voice, while they still nominally support trans rights, no longer talk much about it. Indeed, the queerest people in Workers' Voice seem to have left the movement.

So the grouplets I've mentioned so far have left Trotskyism. They've descended into Hamas-style, antisemitic nihilism, which in this country--fortunately--will never win widespread support. And they've gotten so obsessed with their own queerness that they're no longer able to communicate with the larger world.

In a word, they've become progressive Democrats. Left Voice, Socialist Action and Workers' Voice all agree with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party 99%. They're more Democrat than most Democrats. Trotskyists are supposed to despise the Democrats, not join them. But these grouplets--while occasionally faking hatred--love the Democrat Party and all it stands for.

Trotskyism is dead...

With one big exception: the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP believes that workers are first of all proletarian. That means disciplined, loyal, trustworthy, and above all,  fertile. Infertility has no place in a Trotskyist program. The SWP despises the Democrat party and all it stands for--especially its progressive wing. It rightly sees progressives as being a petty-bourgeois, incipiently fascist movement.

They may go too far with this. Perhaps--in their hatred of the Democrats--they're all too cozy with the Trump team? Could be. But that's not their most serious problem.

The SWP's problem is captured by the 2024 presidential ticket: Rachele Fruit and Dennis Richter for president and VP, respectively. As The Militant reported here (italics in original),

The Socialist Workers Party nominated Dennis Richter as its vice presidential candidate April 29. Due to health considerations that need attention over the next several months, Margaret Trowe, who had been the party’s candidate, will no longer be able to run.

Mr. Richter joined the Movement back in 1972, and is probably around 70 years old. Ms. Trowe, whom he replaces as a candidate, will likely turn 76 this year. An illness that requires several months to treat is possibly cancer--and from personal experience let me say that cancer is a very time-consuming disease to treat. I wish Ms. Trowe all the best.

In a word, my former comrades are too old--their leaders, Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters, are both in their 80s. The Party is gradually dying out! OK--it's not dead yet, and I do wish them a few more years. 

But the die is cast and the clock is ticking. Trotskyism--even in this pure form--will soon be dead.

Further Reading:

• SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign
  
• Left Voice and the Intifada
  
• Socialist Action's Political Report
  

The Trotskyist Faction on Haiti

Posthumous 1813 painting of Louverture
(Figure & Caption Source)

The Trotskyist Fraction--Fourth International (FT-CI, for some reason they use the Spanish acronym in an English language newspaper) has posted a thundering proclamation about Haiti entitled Declaration: End Imperialist Intervention in Haiti, Solidarity with the Haitian People. The Declaration is authored by a whole raft of acronyms, to wit: 

The following is a declaration from Left Voice in the United States, the MTS in Mexico, the LTS in Venezuela, and the OSR in Costa Rica — all part of the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International (FT-CI) — in the face of a new stage of military intervention in Haiti. It is a call for international solidarity with the Haitian people. 

The errors begin at the top. Here is the lede paragraph.

The forces of U.S. imperialism, the United Nations, and ally countries like France are preparing a new colonial military intervention in Haiti called the “Multinational Security Support Mission.” These are the very powers that have brought Haiti to unprecedented levels of political crisis and social chaos, as a result of recurring foreign military occupations, imperialist plunder, and support for local power groups and business elites. 

Assuming there is such a thing as "US imperialism", then it's weird that it's so dedicated to destroying Haiti. In our Comrades imagination, "US imperialism" is a conscious entity whose primary mission is to screw people over--presumably just for the fun of it. They certainly aren't in it for the money--Haiti's contribution to global GDP rounds to about zero, and it's not worth the cost of sending even a single soldier. Plundering from zero results in zero profit.

The Comrades blame "foreign military occupations" for the turmoil. I think they have this wrong. It is the absence of "foreign military occupations" that leads to chaos--not their presence. The reason the foreigners have left Haiti is not because the Haitians are such doughty fighters against "colonialism," but rather because there is no feasible payback from any continued occupation. Who the hell needs Haiti's problems!?

Haiti's history boasts one world-class genius (Toussaint L'Ouverture), followed by a long succession of illiterate and semi-literate thugs. Toussaint, born a slave, taught himself how to read and write French and as a teenager read the literature of the French Revolution. His goal was not "decolonization," but instead, in the spirit of the Revolution, to end slavery and to gradually (as they became literate) admit the former slaves as citizens of France. Toussaint understood that without French literacy and government, Haiti had no chance of becoming a civilized, modern country. He absolutely did not want independence.

The French, defeated militarily, captured Toussaint by deceit and locked him in a jail up the French mountains, where he froze to death in 1803. Absent their genius leader, his mostly illiterate lieutenants went on a murderous rampage killing all white people and driving the survivors into exile. And so--as Toussaint predicted--Haiti cut itself off from the rest of the world. The country, stuck in poverty, has been led to this very day by a succession of thugs and tyrants. Among the first was the execrable "King Henry," who brutally forced the former slaves back into slavery to build himself a palace named Sans Souci. 

And it's only gone downhill from there, relieved only by occasional and intermittent foreign occupations to enforce some law and order. Far from causing Haiti's problems, it's the so-called "imperialists" who at least temporarily ameliorated them. Our Comrades have the story precisely backwards.

The best thing that could happen to Haiti right now would be an invasion by the US Marine Corps. That would put a quick end to the gangs and the riots, and the people of Haiti could get back to earning a living. But the Marine Corps ain't coming--they'd get too much pushback from the Progressive Left--including our Comrades in the FT-CI--that it wouldn't be worth the hassle. So instead the US is now asking for United Nations "peacekeeping troops" from Kenya, of all countries. 

The Kenyans may be fine people, and Kenya at least has a semi-stable government--albeit 7500 miles away from Haiti. But the problem with poorly trained soldiers a long way from home, supervised by the corrupt and inept United Nations, is one ends up with results graphically described by our Comrades:

These interventions include the 13 years of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) from 2004 to 2017, during which UN “peacekeeping” troops committed atrocious violations of human rights, sexual exploitation, at least 2,000 reported cases of sexual assault against women and minors, as well as the killing of 30,000 Haitians as a result of the introduction of cholera into the country’s most important river in 2010. 

While cholera probably "introduces" itself without any help from the UN, the rest of what they say is certainly true. The UN mission was a disaster.

The Comrades won't have any trouble convincing me that the UN is not a force for good in the world. This is most recently illustrated in Gaza, where UN employees actively participated in the murder of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7th. Which makes the UN at least partially culpable for the disaster that's happened since.

Haiti is beset by street gangs--which our Comrades describe this way:

Haiti’s gangs — a legacy of the dictatorship of François Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude, who oversaw the emergence of the paramilitary “tonton macoute” —  won ground with the help of Haiti’s economic and political elite. In recent years, they have increasingly acted autonomously, through kidnappings and arms smuggling, with the support of different sectors of Haiti’s elite that depend on them as paramilitary security forces of social containment. These gangs act with the implicit consent of the police, carrying out murders, rapes, and lynchings in order to quell social unrest and rebellion.

Haiti’s elite are the ones who have maintained historic links with organized crime, oftentimes with the complicity of imperialist forces; indeed a great part of the military arsenal that the gangs depend on comes in large part from the United States. Some of these influential figures have positions in the “transitional council” and have well-known ties to the gangs.

Street gangs appear spontaneously when there is a breakdown in law and order. They almost always evolve from kin and clan loyalties, and thus are often neighborhood or geographically based. I'm surprised the Comrades think they are evil. After all, in our country Left Voice and the FT-CI advocate for the abolition of the police and for community control of law and order. "Community control" is just another word for street gangs.

More, the Haitian gangs released around 5000 prisoners, which our Comrades should be very happy about. It's a great example of decarceration, which they enthusiastically support.

(Source)

They invoke a power hierarchy that I find implausible. At the top--ultimately calling all the shots--are the mythical "imperialists," who exert control through who knows how. Subservient to them are the pitiable "Haitian elites," who have little choice but to sponsor vicious street gangs. And at the bottom are the gangs and gang leaders, eg, the infamous Jimmy Barbecue, pictured here.

I think our friends have this precisely backwards. After all, it's Mr. Barbeque who has all the guns. It's fanciful to think he works for the unarmed, overweight and effeminate elites. Most likely it's the "elites" who are victimized, being extorted and robbed blind by the gangs. The "imperialists," whoever they are, just sit by and scratch their heads.

The Declaration ends with a list of demands. I'll list them here, with my comments in italics.

• For the right to self-determination of the Haitian people! Haiti needs law & order before they can even think about "self-determination."
• No to imperialist military intervention! Yes to a disciplined force that can defeat the gangs and restore law & order.
• Out with colonial imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean! I still don't know who these supposed "imperialists" are.
• Down with the IMF and the World Bank! What!? The IMF lends money to poor countries. They also issue a so-called "reserve currency" known as special drawing rights. It's useless monopoly money that has no impact on the world economy. The IMF is both harmless and useless. Ditto for the World Bank.
• For a socialist Haiti within the framework of a Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America and the Caribbean! Absolutely! And I'm for the Tooth Fairy and her army of Free Unicorns!

For what it's worth, I'm against the imperialists. I'm also against poltergeists and hobgoblins.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the Intifada
• The Professors' Congress: The International Situation
• Academic Workers on the Rampage

SWP Announces 2024 Presidential Campaign

Left, Rachele Fruit, SWP candidate for president. Right, Margaret Trowe, SWP candidate for vice president.
(Figure & Caption Source)

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) has announced their candidates for US President in 2024. The big reveal happened at a forum in Union City, NJ, and is described in two articles in this week's Militant here and here.

I have several immediate reactions:

• I'm glad they're running candidates. Despite the fact that their program is incoherent and I'm never gonna vote for them, I'm sentimentally attached to the effort. I put too much work into the Linda Jenness/Andrew Pulley campaign in 1972, and especially into the Peter Camejo/Willie Mae Reid campaign in 1976, for me not to care. I'm proud to say that Willie Mae was a good friend of mine back in the day. So Godspeed (or Lenin-speed) to the new candidates.
• Despite my not voting for them, I support them on several specific issues. First, they recognize Hamas for what it really is--namely a fascist thug gang that wants to murder all Jews. Unlike our other Trotskyist friends, the SWP understands that Hamas isn't even pro-Palestinian--all they are is pro-fascism and pro-murder.
  Second, they understand that Trump's legal problems are not because he's such a great criminal, but rather it's an attack on the civil liberties of all Americans. Indeed, they explain that better than I can. My response is to vote for Trump (which is what I intend to do), but I'm happy to have the support from my old friends in the SWP.
• There is nothing in either article about getting on the ballot anywhere, though they are working to get Joanne Kuniansky on the ballot for the New Jersey Senate seat.

OK--enough of a tease: the lucky candidates are Rachele Fruit for president, and Margaret Trowe for vice-president. I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know either of them personally, despite the fact that we were comrades back in the day. Ms. Fruit apparently joined the Party back in 1970, which makes her roughly my age. As best as I can tell from her biography, she's a native of Philadelphia.

She has run for public office many times in the past. Indeed, she's currently running for the US Senate seat in Florida, open due to Rick Scott becoming governor. There is no explanation about who is going to take her place in that campaign. This seems unserious.

She ran for a Detroit Common Council seat in 1973, for governor of Georgia in 2018, and for governor of Florida in 2022. Most people will find it odd that one person runs for various offices in three states, but of course that's what SWP candidates do--they make no effort to go native and be from someplace specific.

We can infer that Ms. Trowe will turn 76 this year. It seems she grew up in Oakland, and she currently lives in the East Bay. From 1997-98 she worked as a meatpacker in Marshalltown, Iowa. If she's a typical comrade she has been posted in many places across the country. Her only run for public office was for vice-president in 2000, playing second fiddle in James Harris' campaign.

Both of our candidates are proud union members, and see that as a key selling point for their candidacy.

Fruit is a hotel worker and a member of UNITE HERE Local 355. Before that, she has been an active member of the American Postal Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, the International Association of Machinists and the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

Ms. Trowe reports the following list:

Margaret Trowe is a unionist who has worked in the shipbuilding, garment, chemical and food production industries. Currently a member of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 125, Trowe is on a leave from her job as a production worker at the Ghirardelli chocolate factory in San Leandro, California, to campaign for vice president.

Apparently comrades change unions as often as the move across states, and only slightly less often than they change their clothes.

Which is sad. Ms. Fruit--who is at least 70--is still working in a hotel. Is she a maid? Had she stuck with just one of those union jobs for--let's say--30 years, she'd be collecting some kind of pension by now. Or at least she'd have a 401K. But as it is, she has to keep working into her 70s.

Ms. Trowe is just as poorly off--still working as a production worker on the chocolate line.

The Party did their comrades a grave disservice by moving them around so much--and for what looks like zero political gain. How do you earn trust or gain a reputation if you never live in a place for more than a few years? 

The list of unions our candidates were/are members of is praiseworthy. Apart from the Postal Workers, all of them are private sector unions. Put another way, they provided real goods and services for consumers who voluntarily paid for what was produced. Mss. Fruit & Trowe are actual, productive members of the working class. No mooching off the taxpayers for these two ladies, which puts them streets ahead of other Trotskyist grouplets who champion the causes of public sector workers (eg, Jeff Mackler--long time member of the teachers' union). By contrast, our friends over at Left Voice are grad students and college professors, clamoring for ever more generous welfare salaries for public college employees, at tax-payers expense.

It's weird that the campaign never mentions two unions that have been much in the news recently: Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union. These are serious--if not entirely successful--efforts to unionize workers who are hard to reach. I understand the SWP doesn't want to be in the same bed as the petty bourgeois fakers over at Left Voice, but in this case there is a confluence of interest and the Party is remiss in not getting on board.

Ms. Fruit summarized the campaign's program here:

“The capitalists’ profits come from exploiting wage labor. The wealthy minority holds state power by dividing the working majority,” Fruit said. “The SWP joins the fight for unity in the working class, for building and strengthening the trade union movement and labor solidarity, for opposing Washington’s wars, for a government-funded public-works program to provide jobs and put an end to divisions between employed and unemployed, and for demanding amnesty for immigrants living and working in the United States.”

My response in bullet points:

• The first sentence is just wrong. In a competitive free market (such as mostly exists in the USA), it is impossible for anybody to be oppressed in the Marxist sense. The second sentence is a gross exaggeration--the "wealthy minority" of whom she speaks is only 0.1% of the population, and despite their economic wherewithal, they're nowhere near numerous enough to "divide the working majority."
• Regards "Washington's wars," the Party seems to be supporting US foreign policy more than opposing it. They support the US arming Ukraine, and they back the US policy regards Hamas (though they appear to have more backbone than Mr. Biden). 
• About immigration, I point out here that the Party's position is somewhat more nuanced than what is said in the above quote.

Margaret Trowe said nothing but the truth, here:

“The Socialist Workers candidates urge workers to organize and act to prevent the Democratic Party’s assault on freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution,” Trowe said. “The Democrats’ witch hunt against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — the attempt to throw him off the ballot, ruin his family and send him to prison — is a blow to political rights workers sorely need. Whoever is targeted today, it is working people who will be targeted tomorrow.”

Enough said. Vote for Trump!

Further Reading:

• Oppression!
• Three Militant Articles on the Economy
• The SWP's 2020 Campaign Platform