American Brezhnevism Today

Jeff Mackler, in his piece entitled Afghanistan: The Defeat of U.S. Imperialism and the Road Ahead, published in Socialist Action (SA), gets at least one thing right: The US needlessly surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, departing in the most humiliating and disgraceful way possible. Everything else in Mr. Mackler's article is wrong. A typical paragraph:

After 20 years and $2.6 trillion in Pentagon spending, after deploying more than 120,000 U.S. troops at the highpoint of the war – half of them U.S.-financed via Blackwater and other privatized mercenary and war crimes committing forces accountable to no one – after more than 470,000 direct and indirect civilians killed and 2,442 U.S. troops dead and another 20,666 wounded – Afghanistan, among the poorest nations on earth, is once again free of foreign invaders – a critical first victory that blasts open the imperialist-sealed door to the potential for future social progress.

Mr. Mackler attributes every war casualty in Afghanistan to the American forces. Apparently the Taliban never killed anybody. And he ignores the Afghan civil war that started before the Americans arrived and will continue with renewed brutality now that we're gone.

You can't believe Mr. Mackler's numbers. Recall he's the guy who claimed that "between 15 million and 26 million people" showed up for the George Floyd protests--a manifestly ridiculous assertion that not even his own followers believe.

The current article contains at least a few howlers, e.g.,

[Belgian King] Leopold, however, was compelled to grant American robber barons, J.P. Morgan and the Rockefeller billionaires, (today the J.P. Morgan/Chase $trillion mega conglomerate) the mining rights to that nation, rights that they retain to this day.

JP Morgan has a market cap of $470 billion--nowhere close to the trillions that Mr. Mackler claims. This number is easily checked. Further, what mining rights does JP Morgan still have? Certainly no copper mines. The cobalt mines are now owned mostly by China. Unlike me, Mr. Mackler cites no references--I think he just makes stuff up. And how did an article about Afghanistan wind up documenting King Leopold's sins from the 19th Century? This is argument by irrelevancy.

I've already opined about Afghanistan here--no need to repeat any of that. Instead, this post is about American Brezhnevism, which is the way I describe the politics of Socialist Action and its leader, Jeff Mackler.

For those too young to remember, Leonid Brezhnev (1906 - 1982) was, second to Joseph Stalin, the longest-serving general secretary of the Soviet Union, holding office from 1964 until his death. He was a renowned bureaucrat, expert in the internal politics of the Kremlin, and largely immune from any outside criticism. He led his country through the Age of Stagnation (1973 - 1982) during which the Soviet economy shrank relative to the United States (and depending on which numbers you believe, also in absolute terms).

Brezhnev suffered from ill-health beginning already in the mid-70s. By the end he was largely incapacitated, acting a puppet serving the interests of the Politburo. After a short interregnum, he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose attempts at reform led to the demise of the Soviet Empire.

Brezhnev's politics were pragmatic and unprincipled. He viewed the United States as a great power competitor, not as a capitalist/imperialist evil. Accordingly, he allied himself with anybody who opposed the USA, regardless of their opinions on anything else.

The modern variation on Brezhnevism is today known as campism. This is succinctly defined in Socialist Forum this way:

Campism is a longstanding tendency in the international and U.S. left. It approaches world politics from the standpoint that the main axis of conflict is between two hostile geopolitical camps: the “imperialist camp,” today made up of the United States, Western Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Israel (or some such combination) on one hand and the “anti-imperialist camp” of Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other less-industrialized nations on the other.

Campism, like Brezhnevism, is utterly unprincipled. There are no red lines, green lines, demilitarized lines--and certainly no class lines. There is only the USA and its close allies on one side, and everybody else on the other. The truest and best exemplar of campism on the American Left is, indeed, Socialist Action, represented ably by its chief bureaucrat, Jeff Mackler. Indeed, Mr. Mackler supports all of the above listed regimes, at least vis a vis the United States.

Socialist Action has begrudgingly admitted that Russia and China are capitalist. But they still support those countries against the USA. More egregiously, they excuse the gross human rights abuses in North Korea and Iran only because the US opposes them. Mr. Mackler has been a staunch supporter of the vile Assad regime in Syria.

(As an aside, I mention that the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) also still supports the North Korean regime. Assistant Chief Honcho Steve Clark sent a letter to Pyongyang:

“We stand in solidarity with the Korean people’s struggle to reunify the country and restore Korea’s national sovereignty,” Steve Clark wrote for the Socialist Workers Party in a Sept. 9 letter to the North Korean government on the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

So regards the Norks the SWP is similarly guilty. But they're not campist because they never supported the Assad regime, and no longer support the Ayatollahs in Iran.)

What it boils down to is that Socialist Action lets Donald Trump determine their politics for them. They simply do the opposite of whatever Trump says.

So is it really any surprise that Mr. Mackler wants to lend critical support to the Taliban? No--of course it isn't.

We begin with the proposition that the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan is a victory for all humanity... In inflicting this defeat the Afghan people, regardless of the reactionary ideology and practice of the landlord capitalist Taliban leadership, exercised the right of poor and oppressed peoples and nations to self-determination, that is, to be free from imperialist domination and rule.

Despite being "reactionary," the Taliban have struck a blow for freedom and liberty worldwide. I hope Mr. Mackler can go on a speaking tour in Kabul and tell that to a crowd of schoolgirls.

He's willing to give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt.

The Taliban have issued statements indicating that they will not repeat their policies of excluding women and girls from receiving public education and from working more generally. They have indicated that the most reactionary aspects of Shariah law may be modified. No doubt all these statements and proclamations, as well as their initial dealings with the governments of world capitalism, are aimed at demonstrating a semblance of tolerance and stability following two decades of unmitigated chaos under U.S. rule.

No--I don't think it "remains to be seen." Of course the Taliban are going to enforce a strict interpretation of Shariah law. It only depends on how carefully they hide their brutality. And note how Mr. Mackler will now blame the US if the Taliban so much as lays a finger on a schoolgirl.

The other odd thing about the just-quoted paragraph is that it could've been written by Joe Biden (or at least by his ghostwriters). Jen Psaki has said much the same thing. This looks to prove my claim that Mr. Mackler is just a Democrat in thin disguise--serving a role much the same as the CPUSA did when Brezhnev was in power.

Socialist Action is a bunch of unprincipled, Brezhnevist Democrats all the way down.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: Kim Jong Un
• Book Review: Gorbachev
• Jeff Mackler on Trump, Trade, and China

Louis Proyect: January 26, 1945 -- August 28, 2021

Louis Proyect died last Saturday. An announcement is posted on his webpage, which I didn't see until today.

I'm not the person to eulogize him. I never met him personally, and am not familiar with the details of his life. But even from afar, I found him in many ways to be an admirable man.

He had no academic rank, and as far as I know never attended grad school. The man earned an honest living. Yet he was a master historian--mostly self-taught. His lack of academic standing freed him from the corrupting constraints of tenure committees, funding agencies and journal reviewers. He was free to tell the truth as he saw it. He was very knowledgeable about Syria, disagreeing with many of his Leftist friends. I considered him the go-to source for factual information on that conflict.

His blog was wonderful. Very few people can turn a personal blog into an important success--but Mr. Proyect did so, without in any way sullying his reputation by trying to monetize it. He was early to the web, and among its most resourceful users. 

He was an excellent writer. Given the quantity of output it must have come easy to him. His work was always clear and entertaining.

Obviously, I did not share his Leftist/Socialist sympathies. I especially objected to his opinions on environmental issues, about which I thought him ill-informed.

As a polemicist, I often thought his arguments were too ad hominem. Instead of addressing issues, he simply lobbed insults at his interlocutors. Entertaining? Yes. Helpful? No.

Had I known he was dying I likely would not have published my most recent essay--very discourteous but written tongue-in-cheek. Though I don't feel too bad--Mr. Proyect sure could dish it out. I assume he could take it as well.

I will miss Mr. Proyect. His blog was always food for thought, and often fodder for a blog post as well. The world is poorer without him.

Further Reading:

• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• Louis Proyect on "Radical Professors"
• Louis "Lyndon LaRouche" Proyect

The Fourth International--Trotskyist Faction Tried to Ruin my Breakfast

The Fourth International--Trotskyist Faction is represented in the United States by Left Voice, a blog run by a collective of New York City college professors and their groupies. It's a very dicey project.

The very name is weird. For those not in the know, the Fourth International was founded by Leon Trotsky himself in 1938, in response to the Stalinist takeover of the Soviet Union and the associated Third International. So the Fourth International is, by definition, a Trotskyist movement--so what is the point of having a Trotskyist faction within a Trotskyist International?

Trotskyism today is a largely academic discipline, which cadre is disproportionately made up of professors, grad students, failed academics, schoolteachers, and other public employees. They're often called the lumpen intelligentsia, and far from being a proletarian movement, they're more likely a force for fascism. Surely the logo, depicted below in front of a crowd of people presenting a Nazi-like salute, proves the point. It looks like a stylized swastika superimposed on the hammer and sickle, giving new meaning to the Stalin-Hitler pact.

From Who is the Trotskyist Faction in Left Voice

Like college professors everywhere, these people have way too much time on their hands, and so write long, meaningless documents debating Marxist esoterica. The "Manifesto" which recently crossed my radar screen bears the heading The Capitalist Disaster and the Struggle for an International of Socialist Revolution, dated April 18, 2021, and was "approved by the leaderships of the groups of the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International." It's almost 13,000 words long, and it's one of those that I've read (more accurately, skimmed through) so that you don't have to.

The professors are all busy trying to out-Trotsky each other, which is why one needs a Trotskyist Faction inside a Trotskyist International.

None of this is important--and this post is about something really important, namely my breakfast. We'll get to that in a minute, but I have to give you a flavor of the "Manifesto" first.

The new coronavirus spread rapidly — faster than any virus before it — following the same circuits that connect global just-in-time supply chains. While human viruses have frequently followed the flow of goods (the bubonic plague, for example, spread through trade routes for years), the speed and massive scale of globalized capitalism has created a scenario in which diseases can spread throughout the globe in a matter of weeks. This highlights the fact that capitalism not only makes it impossible to establish a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, but that it also increasingly destroys both.

Even just 100 years ago polio was rampant. Two hundred years ago the most widely feared disease was smallpox, which led to a very painful death. The American South was a hotbed for malaria, and not too long ago cholera, dysentery, typhoid and more plagued urban populations around the globe. This describes the "harmonious relationship between humans and nature" that capitalism has supposedly destroyed.

The Covid pandemic, serious as it may be, has a death rate of about 0.3%, preying mostly on older people. Within the first few months some effective treatments became available, and within about year, three or more variously effective vaccines were developed. The leaders of this effort were capitalist pharmaceutical companies in the US, who hired thousands of employees to work on the project--employees who do expect to get paid for their efforts. Which is why the companies insist on patent protection--how else are they supposed to pay their people? (In Cuba, where there are no patents, people get paid about $60/month--roughly a child's allowance.)

My breakfast is a simple affair. I'm a creature of habit and have eaten roughly the same thing for 50 years now. There are three ingredients:

• Oatmeal--the generic brand. The only ingredient is rolled oats (the dehusked grain, flattened to speed cooking time). It comes in an airtight, bug-proof, sealed container. Cost: about 70 cents per day.
• 2% milk--refrigerated, pasteurized and homogenized, typically with a sell-by date two weeks later than my purchase. It is sold in a plastic, air-tight, leak-proof container, carefully designed so it doesn't spill when poured. Cost: about 70 cents per day.

I don't recall how oatmeal was sold in my childhood--though we did eat it occasionally. Without a microwave oven (invented in the 1980s) cooking it was a bit of a chore. When I was very young I recall that the milkman would deliver milk to our home in returnable glass bottles. That was surely much more expensive and less sanitary than what I get today. Obviously, in the intervening years capitalist competition to sell better food for cheaper prices has greatly improved my quality of life.

But nothing compares with the third ingredient: fresh blueberries. Twenty years ago these were only available when in season locally--for perhaps six weeks. The rest of the time I'd have to make do with raisins. Then it became possible to ship blueberries over longer distances--I think this is because they are packaged under nitrogen--i.e., without much oxygen present. This, plus refrigeration, keeps food fresh for much longer.

Today I get fresh blueberries year round. During December and January they come from Chile. In January and February they often arrive from Peru. February and March brings in the crop from Mexico, and also from Florida. April and May 'tis the season in North Carolina, while in June and July they are locally in season here in New York and New Jersey. In August and September we get blueberries from Quebec. Only in October and November are the berries a bit less fresh and slightly more expensive.

You need to read the fine print to know where they come from--you can't tell by the price. That is, shipping blueberries half way around the world so that they arrive fresh at my local Walmart--is much cheaper than a pint of blueberries! It's so cheap that as a consumer I barely notice it. I spend another 70 cents per day for breakfast blueberries.

The total cost of my very delicious breakfast is a bit over $2/day. There is absolutely no way any socialist society could provide me with such an elegant luxury at so reasonable a price. Do they get fresh blueberries year round in Cuba or North Korea?

So imagine my distress when, in 2019, I read about mass rioting in Chile. The riots started because of a fare hike on the Santiago Metro system. So the rioters trashed the Metro, vandalizing stations and destroying rolling stock! That'll show them! They covered much of the city with graffiti, smashing store windows as they went. Of course they fought with police. Here is a picture from Left Voice.

November 12, 2019. Frontline youth facing police repression in Santiago de Chile.
(Picture & Caption Source)

So who are these people who threaten to ruin my breakfast? I certainly hoped they weren't farmers! The last thing I need is for Chilean farmers to go on strike. I needn't have worried. The Chilean blueberries arrived on time and under budget. From the cost of blueberries, I would never have known the rioting ever happened.

Another major Chilean export is copper, mined in the Atacama desert. Did the riots disrupt copper production? I doubt it, because copper prices in 2019 were lower than they were in 2017 and 2018. So apparently the copper miners didn't go on strike, either.

In other words, anybody who did useful work selling valuable products to consumers--those people kept on working. They had to earn a living. So, again, who are those nihilistic dingbats wearing garbage cans on their heads pretending to be revolutionaries?

Of course we know: they're the lumpen class, or more specifically, the lumpen intelligentsia. These are misguided folks who thought if the they went to college they'd get the corner office and earn a big paycheck. What they learned is that the corner office doesn't exist anymore, and big paychecks aren't earned by going to college, much less grad school. So now, as grad students or freshly-minted PhDs, they have no prospects for gainful employment.

Of course they're pissed, and want to ruin it for everybody else. So why not vandalize the subway? It's a lot of fun and it makes you feel like a bigshot.

Fortunately, the workers and farmers of Chile--the real workers and farmers who mine copper and grow blueberries--have kept the country alive and well. The Fourth International--Trotskyist Faction has not succeeded in ruining my breakfast.

Further Reading:

• "A Program to Unify the Oppressed and Exploited"
• The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat
• Malik Miah on the Virus

Afghanistan

My Trotskyist friends are all celebrating the defeat of American "imperialism" in Afghanistan, while at the same time lamenting the takeover by the Taliban.

The Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party) posts a piece by Roy Landersen entitled US rulers end 20-year-long imperialist war in Afghanistan. The lede:

The U.S. rulers’ 20-year war and occupation of Afghanistan, and the carnage it inflicted on working people at home and abroad, ended with further devastation as the Taliban retook the capital, Kabul, Aug. 15.

By the end, the US had 2500 troops in Afghanistan, which hardly rises to the level of "occupation." The supposed "carnage it inflicted" described in the first clause, in fact prevented the Taliban's "devastation" asserted in the second. Incoherence best describes that sentence, along with the rest of Mr. Landersen's article.

In fact, the American war in Afghanistan largely ended by 2013, after which we provided air and intelligence support to aid the Afghan army. All of this was suddenly withdrawn by President Biden without notice, as Mr. Landersen reports.

In the wake of President Joseph Biden’s April 13 announcement that all U.S. forces would withdraw by Sept. 11, and Washington’s abandonment of its main Bagram airbase without any notice to Afghan government forces, the reactionary Taliban stepped up its military offensive. The Afghan army disintegrated after the withdrawal of U.S. army and air support. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Taliban commanders announced the formation of the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”

Among that air support taken out of the country were all the Med-Evac helicopters used to airlift wounded Afghan soldiers to hospital. Apparently Mr. Biden expected the Afghan troops to bleed to death on the battlefield just so the US could make a graceful exit.

A better article, albeit with the contradiction already in the headline, posted by Socialist Resurgence and written by Farooq Tariq, is Afghanistan – The U.S. occupation took only human lives; Taliban victory is not a sign of peace. The lede paragraph:

It is now evident that the U.S. imperialism has lost all its human and financial investment in Afghanistan. The Taliban have almost occupied Afghanistan without a fight. What has been spent in Afghanistan in the name of development, “democracy” and training of the armed forces for the last 20 years was unprecedented in the history of the world.

Well--true, of course. The US has needlessly thrown away whatever it has built in Afghanistan, though I doubt the amount--inflation adjusted--was "unprecedented in the history of the world." 

I'm bothered by the word "financial"--I don't know what it means. I believe he thinks the US was invested in Afghanistan for potential business ventures--like Walmart was gonna open up a chain of stores in Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. If this is what he suggests, it's ridiculous. Afghanistan was never going to be a trading partner for American consumers.

The reason the US was in Afghanistan was to fight Jihadi terrorist groups that used the country as a base. You may or may not agree with that reason--but that was the reason. It was not an excuse for "democracy," "imperialism," or anything else.

Mr. Tariq admits that the US was partially successful.

Although some human progress has been made: For example, the average age [i.e., life expectancy—editors] has risen from 56 to 64 years, and the number of children who die before the age of five has halved. The literacy increased from 8% to 43%; 89% have access to safe drinking water in the cities. It was only 16% before.

This is not trivial--though it's all gone now, thanks to Mr. Biden's stupidity.

Mr. Tariq claims that "[a]ccording to the Cost of War Project, the United States poured $2226 billion into Afghanistan. This money could have provided basic education and health care all over the world."

Really? Tell that to the girls of northeastern Nigeria, routinely murdered or kidnapped by Boko Haram for the crime of going to school. Or tell that to 10-year-old boys in Uganda and Congo, forced by the Lord's Resistance Army to murder their parents. For that matter, tell that to the girls in Afghanistan--now that the Taliban is in charge, where is their schooling? Absent American "imperialism" it's all gone up in smoke.

For without competent soldiers for protection, any money spent on teachers and textbooks is wasted.

The silliest response to the Afghanistan debacle is that put forth by Ezra Brain, writing for Left Voice, in an article entitled Refugee Caps Are a Tool of Imperialism. Don’t Trust Imperialists to Resolve the Refugee Crisis. The money paragraph is this:

Be it refugee bans or refugee caps, socialists must oppose all imperialist attempts to use borders to restrict the free movement of people, especially refugees from imperialist wars. To put it bluntly: the greatest imperial power in the world, with a coalition of other imperialist powers, attacked, looted, and occupied Afghanistan for 20 years and is now trying to prevent refugees from entering. After 20 years of imperialist occupation, Afghanistan is left impoverished, war torn, and with a growing COVID rate. This is imperialism in its clearest form. Every refugee from the Afghan war — indeed, every refugee anywhere — must be allowed entry into the U.S. and given full legal rights and protections.

Pretty much every word here is wrong. What has the US "looted" from Afghanistan? The country was poor long before we got there and it remains poor today, albeit as Mr. Tariq pointed out, slightly better off than it was before.

But the truly inane demand is that the US accept all refugees from Afghanistan--that would likely be half the population. Beyond the useless claque of New York City college professors that make up Left Voice, there is no political constituency in this country that wishes for this.

It is particularly weird coming from Mr. Brain, an activist in the LGBTQ... community. Suppose only 99% of the Afghans who arrive on our shores are honest refugees--the remainder are instead Jihadis. That means for every million Afghans arriving in Manhattan, 10,000 of them will be hellbent on destroying secular America. I doubt Mr. Brain will do very well when surrounded by 10,000 anti-gay, homophobic, murderous Islamist extremists.

Mr. Brain's demand is ridiculous and very unlikely to come true, but people like him really should be careful what they wish for.

Socialist Action has gotten too small to maintain a proper webpage, and they have yet to post anything about Afghanistan. Which is unfortunate because they represent the dying embers of Brezhnevism in America, and I'd like to know what a Brezhnevist thinks. I predict that, unlike Trotskyists, they'll celebrate the rise of the Taliban--this because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's the same reasoning for their support of Kim Jong Un, Nicholas Maduro, Bashir al-Assad, and even Xi Jinping.

For just like their mentor, Leonid Brezhnev, they support any government that opposes American "imperialism", no matter how vile.

Further Reading:

• Cuba Needs More Communism
• Comrade Keith L. Writes About China
• Book Review: The Absent Superpower

Wittenberg, 2021

Octogenarian SWP leader Jack Barnes, with similarly aged Mary-Alice Waters seated at the dais.
(Source: Militant/Dave Wulp)

Just what is to be done, anyway?

You will never find the answer to that question in Terry Evans' and John Studer's account of the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP, aka the Party) conclave (SWP conference: Leading the working class to take power), held this year at Wittenberg University in Wittenberg, Ohio. Such conferences--annual events, but for last year because of the pandemic--have historically taken place at Oberlin College and became known as Oberlin conferences. The venue changed this year because Oberlin College humiliated itself by slandering a local bakery.

The conference had three themes, highlighted on the banner above the podium: 

• Leading the Working Class to Take Power
• Join the Socialist Workers Party!
• Build the Communist Vanguard!

It beggars belief that the SWP--a grouplet of barely 100 comrades--is going to lead the working class to power. 

Socialist revolutions can only be led by parties that have been built and steeled in struggle beforehand. Their members are imbued with the program, the courage and audacity needed to lead millions to take power when it becomes both possible and essential in order to prevent the triumph of reaction.

That's pretty rich coming from cadre whose median age is now over 60 and whose numbers are dwindling through natural attrition. This faith is not based on any historical precedent or material fact--it is simply a religious assertion. They're the chosen people.

The second bullet represents an appeal to those few attendees who were not yet members of the Party--in numbers insufficient to make any material difference. I have no idea what the third bullet means as distinct from the other two.

If those were the three themes of the conference, they are not discussed in Evans' and Studer's article. Instead they highlight three other topics: Malcolm X, Israel, and historical materialism.

The conversation about Malcolm X begins this way:

At the last party conference in June 2019, the banner hanging above the platform read, “Advancing Along the Line of March of the Working Class. Act on Imperialism’s Deepening Political Crisis. Build the Labor Movement. Build the Socialist Workers Party.” No one could have foreseen how today’s capitalist crisis would unfold these last two years, Barnes said, but the SWP acted on what that banner said, never missing a beat in going more deeply to the working class and dealing with challenges posed by the pandemic along the way.

Then follows some boilerplate about how, despite the pandemic, they continued to sell Militants, oppose police brutality, etc., etc. Somehow that segues into this:

Barnes urged participants to read what Malcolm X said about how he had to transform himself to become a revolutionary leader. A precondition for Malcolm acting on his own worth and that of other working people was turning his back forever on the life he led as an uneducated hustler, thief and pimp.

It was in prison that Malcolm started to read and to get his life together. Mr. Barnes claims he was becoming a revolutionary. Instead, he was becoming a devout follower of the Nation of Islam--a religious conversion. Mr. Barnes' own language--"acting on his own worth"--is a weird way of acknowledging that.

What are our elderly comrades, who likely have never smoked a joint in their entire lives, supposed to take away from this? Are they in danger of becoming hustlers, thieves or pimps?

I think Mr. Barnes is reiterating the religious mission of the Party. For if they lose faith in their status as the chosen Vanguard, then the Movement falls apart. Any sense of human worth--much less your "own worth"--stems fundamentally from religious faith. Absent religion, human beings are just animals, and all we usefully do is eat, sleep and fuck.

The second topic--Israel--is introduced this way:

The endurance of Jew-hatred in the imperialist epoch, and its use at times of crisis by the capitalist rulers to divide and crush the working class and its communist vanguard, requires the revolutionary party to champion the fight against it and unconditionally defend the right of Israel to exist today, SWP leader Dave Prince said in the second major conference presentation. It was entitled, “For Unconditional Recognition of Israel as a Refuge for Jews in the Imperialist Epoch: The Stakes for the World Working Class.”

I commend the Party for disavowing the rabid antisemitism found nearly ubiquitously on the American Left. But have they gone too far with this?

If there ever was a chosen people, then it certainly is the Jews. They wrote the Bible--a marvelous and elegant collection of folk wisdom compiled over two millennia and expressed in beautiful language. No other book in the world can compete.

This inspires great envy, and that envy is the source of Jew-hatred. The Germans may have an illustrious and accomplished history--but nothing like the Jews. China may be 5000 years old--but they have produced no book like the Bible. Hinduism can plausibly lay claim to being the world's oldest religion--but they never wrote anything down until recent times.

Everybody envies the Jews, and so even today the Jews are placed at the center of world history. Israel is often held up as the archetype of evil--not because Israel is so sophisticated or threatening, but simply because it's Jewish.

The Party also envies the Jews--but rather than hate them, they want to emulate them. Accordingly they've turned the tables--the Jewish state is no longer the chief threat to world peace. It is instead the key to the coming Revolution! What happens in Israel is somehow very, very important! The Party has put the Jews on a pedestal.

Again--the Party's position is moral, and they don't support Hamas, and for this they deserve credit. But it is a mistake to elevate Israel beyond its status as a small, Middle Eastern country that is home to a persecuted minority. Modern Israel is not really key to anything outside of its immediate neighborhood.

I think Mr. Barnes wants to reinforce his comrades' belief that they are a chosen people, rather like the Jews, which is why he identifies with them. (Besides, I believe many comrades are Jewish, so it makes sense.)

The third topic concerns the importance of historical materialism, which the Party claims has been ignored by the Left. Mary-Alice Waters delivered a speech entitled “Without Historical Materialism There Can Be No Working-Class Unity, No Answer to ‘Wokery,’ No Revolutionary Workers Movement.”

“Historical materialism is under ferocious attack today,” said Waters, “even though you may never hear that world outlook — one of the cornerstones of Marxism — mentioned by name.” The attacks are spearheaded not by the traditional centers of reaction, she added, but by privileged middle-class layers that many consider to be the “progressive” wing of liberal bourgeois democracy.

Historical materialism is the Marxist notion that history is driven by material forces, i.e., economics, and can--at least in broad outline--be predicted. The supposed Marxist advantage is that they understand mechanism by which history works.

The problem with the Marxist view is that it unreasonably elevates economics as history's primary driver. It ignores biological and social evolution, which is not principally about economics. It's about who is most proficient at making babies. The modern world does not look to be very good at that, which is certainly cause for concern. Evans and Studer write

The New York Times  1619 Project was one of the examples of the political war on historical materialism addressed by Waters, as well as “cancel culture” and the counterrevolution on women’s rights represented by the campaign to deny the biological reality of two sexes.

This hints at the true problem: our academic elite's concerns for "transgender rights," for birth control and abortion as positive goods, and for the abolition of the family and all associated traditions and roles--does not augur well for the future of our society. We as a culture will go extinct--with Leftist feminists leading the way to the graveyard.

A vanguard Party has to hold vanguard positions. It can't simply be an Amen Corner for the rest of the Left. By denying the silliest parts of current Leftist ideology, the Party asserts its role as a vanguard, and it also strikes a blow for common sense. I doubt this will prevent the Party from eventually dying out, but it will make it more relevant during its twilight years.

The penultimate paragraph of Evans' and Studer's article is this:

The day after the conference, party supporters met to map out plans for their work organizing the production, printing and distribution of books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries and raising funds for the work of the party.

That's all they have to say about What Is To Be Done Next. That's it. Raise money and print books.

I will argue that the Party is still a radical Left party, and that it still lies loosely within the Trotskyist tradition. But, unlike when I was a member, it is no longer an activist Party. Instead it's a vaguely religious organization that exists for the spiritual comfort of its own members, and that believes itself to be the Chosen Vanguard.

Further Reading:

• Oberlin, 2019
• Oberlin, 2018
• The 47th SWP Convention

Louis Proyect Denies Being a White Supremacist

Does Louis Proyect deny being a white supremacist?

Not explicitly, of course, because if you say you're not a white supremacist, then you probably are a white supremacist. That's all because of white fragility and systemic racism--the very people who deny being subject to it are, in fact, the leading carriers of the disease.

Yet we do have good cause to suspect Mr. Proyect of being a white supremacist. For starters he's white. There's no getting around that--he doesn't even try to deny it. And if white supremacy is indeed a condition that afflicts white people--a problematic population--then there's no reason to exclude Mr. Proyect from the category.

Beyond that, he's Jewish. We all know that Jews profited immensely from the slave trade. Indeed, Mr. Proyect used to work for Goldman-Sachs, a Jewish-led institution if there ever was one, and one that supposedly acquired its riches mostly if not exclusively from slave dealing. Besides, Jews wrote the Hebrew Bible (and the New Testament), admitting that they owned slaves almost from the very beginning, starting with Exodus. (I have an edge on Mr. Proyect here. I'm only half Jewish, so by that genetic quantum I'm less of a white supremacist than he is.)

Mr. Proyect tries mightily to atone for this original sin by allying himself with the most antisemitic organizations possible--notably Hamas (that explicitly wants to kill all the Jews) and BDS (which cancels people for the crime of being Jewish). Sadly, the stain of white supremacy is not so easily discarded.

So he kowtows to the BIPOCs in most humiliating ways. BIPOC is how we're supposed to refer to Black people these days--at least according to the Fac-Staff email list on my campus. It stands for Black & Indigenous People of Color. Though weirdly, the loudest representatives of BIPOCs on my campus aren't much differently colored from me. He's keen on using dehumanizing terms like Latinx (I think it rhymes with minx)--a degendered dysphemism for Hispanic, a people so reduced that they have no purpose in life other than to be oppressed by white supremacists. 

He insists on using the phrase Native American instead of Indian, despite the fact that the people themselves prefer the latter term. Like other white supremacists, Mr. Proyect wants to eliminate all traces of Indian culture from American life. Not just by renaming all the sports teams, but likely by eventually replacing evocative place names like Chattanooga and Kalamazoo. Those represent the evil legacy of white supremacist cultural appropriation.

Unfortunately, in my 50 years following American Trotskyism and 40 years as an academic, I have yet to encounter a succinct definition of "white supremacy." Mr. Proyect is no help here, but he does offer an example of a white supremacist--an archetype if you will.

The poor fellow's name is Matthew Karp, a professor of history at Princeton. Mr. Proyect's account of Professor Karp's sins is an article entitled How Harper’s Magazine Undermines the Struggle Against White Supremacy, which appeared in Counterpunch. The teaser to the article on Mr. Proyect's blog sports a picture of John "Rick" MacArthur, the editor of Harpers who has been "orchestrating this shift to the right." It's probably more accurate to say that he's been orchestrating a shift to common sense.

Mr. Karp's error is that he had the unforgivable temerity to criticize Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 project. Mr. Proyect writes,

[Mr. Karp's] article argues that it is futile to dwell on the racist history of the USA and to instead look forward to breakthroughs like the Civil War, the civil rights movement, etc. Essentially, Karp aligns himself with the cadre of historians that complained bitterly about all the falsehoods they supposedly saw in the 1619 Project. Among them, his Princeton colleague Sean Wilentz barked the loudest at Hannah-Jones. Mostly, the complaints were about her introductory article that stated that the colonists fought for independence in order to maintain slavery and that racism was in America’s DNA.

Now Mr. Proyect is an ace historian--a really good one--and he surely knows more about history than I do. And to his credit, he refuses to say that Mr. Karp's criticism is actually wrong. But in his desperate attempt to suck up to Ms. Hannah-Jones, he can only argue by association--i.e., that Mr. Karp keeps bad company. Here is the rest of the above-quoted paragraph:

Except for Wilentz, the historians took their case to the World Socialist Website (WSWS), an outlet distinguished by its hysterical Henny-Penny warnings that WWIII was always about to break out and that Socialist Workers Party leader Joe Hansen was a GPU agent.

That is, because Mr. Karp agrees with somebody who at some other time said something stupid on a completely unrelated topic, therefore Mr. Karp's criticism is wrong. OK, so it isn't wrong--Mr. Proyect never says it's wrong--but apparently one shouldn't utter it in public.

The fact is--as surely Mr. Proyect knows--that maintaining slavery was important to some American revolutionaries, especially in Georgia and the Carolinas. They were afraid that Britain was going to ban the institution--as indeed Britain did in 1833. But the bulk of the Continental Army--led by George Washington--came from Yankee states: New England and Upstate New York. Those Yankees were abolitionists more likely than not, and in any case were not fighting for "white supremacy."

Obviously the relationship between race and the American Revolution is vastly more complicated than Ms. Hannah-Jones would have us believe. Mr. Proyect is so in hock to bullies like her, who claim the power to exonerate one from being a white supremacist, that he can't even call a simple spade a spade. This is humiliating.

He makes other statements for which he really ought to know better. He channels his inner Democrat, claiming "Republican state governments were working overtime to pass Jim Crow type voting laws." I always thought Mr. Proyect hated the Democratic Party, but here he is echoing a completely over-the-top talking point. The voting laws in states such as Georgia are nothing even close to being like Jim Crow. There will likely be no racially disparate impact at all from that legislation. Like Democrats, Mr. Proyect apparently believes that Black people are too stupid to get a driver's license. I told you he was a white supremacist.

Mr. Proyect writes

This rather obscure observation is supposed to remind us, according to Karp, that history is neither all good or all bad. I am not sure it is necessary to cite Foucault to understand what most children learn in the 8th grade. What they are not learning, however, is how White households ended up with 6.9 times as much wealth as Blacks’.

I think it's obvious that school children are learning about white/Black wealth discrepancies (that may be all they're learning). Mr. Proyect will attribute the problem to "white supremacy." This fails for two reasons:

• Neither he nor anybody else can define "white supremacy" with sufficient precision to make it measurable.
• He attributes all social ills to that one meaningless phrase. Surely Mr. Proyect is smart enough to know that history and sociology are much more complicated than that.

Finally, referring to the fact that Ms. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the Board of Trustees at U of North Carolina, he writes "Somehow, he [Mr. Karp] had not noticed the UNC’s egregious attack on Hannah-Jones’s right to tenure."

Nobody has a "right" to tenure, which is guaranteed by neither the Constitution nor by any reasonable definition of academic freedom. Tenure is an employment contract promising the holder a lifetime job. In this case, tenure meant that Ms. Hannah-Jones would receive a paycheck from the U. of North Carolina for decades to come. Obviously taxpayers in that state have a right to deny her that privilege, and it is the obligation of the Board of Trustees to represent the taxpayers. Which they did until they wimped out, but fortunately for North Carolinians the lady went elsewhere.

I think Ms. Hannah-Jones is a propagandist faking it as a scholar. She's a fraud who should never have been hired in the first place.

I'll admit to being facetious in this post. I don't really think that Mr. Proyect is a white supremacist. Indeed, I don't think he's any more a white supremacist than I am, and I am definitely not a white supremacist.

Further Reading:

• Book Review: The Cult of the Smart
• Teachers Can't Teach
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution

 

Cuba Needs More Communism!

If you agree with my headline, then you're likely a Trotskyist. Without exception the comrades on my Beat are unanimous in support of the "revolution." Though there are some denominational distinctions.

In broad outline, the Trotskyist story goes like this. A few hundred counter-revolutionaries organized demonstrations in cities across the island. While this was in response to rapidly deteriorating economic circumstances, the unrest was greatly magnified by US propaganda, the CIA, and/or reactionary Cubans living abroad. To counter these small and unrepresentative demonstrations, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of loyal "revolutionary" citizens took to the streets to support the "revolution."

Cuba's economic difficulties--according to my Trotskyist friends--stem entirely from the US embargo. The Militant, in an article by Seth Galinski, reports that "as a result of the embargo, they have a critical shortage of hypodermic needles for vaccination." This even though "...Cuba is the only country in Latin America to develop its own vaccines, rated as over 90% effective, and has begun massive distribution."

Which makes no sense. Despite the supposedly knee-capping embargo, Cuba has assembled the advanced biotechnology and sophisticated manufacturing wherewithal to produce a world-leading vaccine. Yet they can't manufacture their own hypodermic needles? It's even weirder since hypodermic needles are manufactured all over the world--not just in the United States--including Europe, Japan and China. Why can't Cuba buy needles from those countries? (Answer: they don't have any money.)

Besides which, hypodermic needles (and other medical supplies) are not under US embargo. Ike Nahem, in one of Socialist Action's poorly produced webinars, proudly announces that his private organization has just shipped six million hypodermic needles to Cuba all by their lonesome. Presumably without violating any US laws.

If Cuba has such a successful vaccine program, why can't they sell doses to other poor countries and earn money to buy needles? (Answer: they don't have an effective vaccine.)

The Militant (along with Socialist Action) claims that the American media has hugely overstated the importance of demonstrations by a few malcontents, by exaggerating both the numbers and the crowd's anger. Mr. Galinski says the NY Times misleadingly labels a photo as an antigovernment demonstration, when if fact it depicts a crowd of enthusiastic revolutionaries. Indeed, Mr. Galinski's article recycles the Cuban government's position hook, line and sinker, taking every word spoken by President Diaz-Canel as gospel truth.

I wasn't there. I don't know how many people marched in which demonstration, but I'm not inclined to believe The Militant. That paper--usually honest reporters--has lost its marbles when it comes to Cuba. More trustworthy is this piece by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker (not exactly a right-wing source) who writes in the lede paragraph,

On Sunday, July 11th, the world took note of a historic event in Cuba, as thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest against the government. Many shouted “Patria y Vida!”—Fatherland and Life—the title of a banned but extremely popular rap song that riffs on a slogan coined by the late Fidel Castro: “Fatherland or Death.” Many also shouted “Libertad!”—Freedom—and similar phrases that are not only heretical but, when shouted in protest, illegal in Cuba, where the Communist Party is the sole legal arbiter of political life.

Socialist Resurgence takes a different tack. In an article by Ernie Gotta entitled Defend the gains of the Cuban Revolution! Free the prisoners! End the U.S. blockade!, the lede is this:

The protests in Cuba on July 11 are the symptom of a government in crisis. In some areas, the government used police to crack down on the protests. Marxist activists like Frank García Hernández and his comrades were arrested; Socialist Resurgence calls on the Cuban government for their immediate release.

The key issue is that communists were being arrested! What Cuba really needs is actual, real live Communists in control--not these crazy Castroite fakers. That's what the demonstrators were really demanding. The site reposts an article from the Cuban blog Communistas headlined A call for the freedom of detainees in Cuba.

Left Voice goes further with the idea that the Cuban government is not up to the task. A think piece by Facundo Aguirre suggests that Cuba is a deformed workers’ state, following the path of Stalinist Russia. While much is to blame on the embargo, there is also this.

For a little more than two decades, the Castroist bureaucracy has been promoting a policy of economic opening with the characteristics of restoring capitalist relations. This has led to the development of internal forces that are hostile to the revolution, particularly in the ranks of the bureaucracy itself, which controls the most profitable sectors of the economy. It is this social force of small proprietors that the pro-imperialist gusanos aim to influence as they look for a way to hitch a ride on this social movement. At the same time, imperialism hopes to influence the wealthy bureaucrats as a way to break the unity of the regime.

Of course the policy of "economic opening" was driven by necessity stemming from the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is impossible to have a growing economy if you don't put people in charge of their own resources. Back in 2013, Socialist Action's Jeff Mackler described the policy well:

The reforms indicate that the Cubans recognize the harsh reality of the economic distortions that have been wrought from their forced isolation from the world market due to the U.S.-imposed illegal embargo/blockade and related imperialist incursions. In a significant sense they are legalizing a reality—that hundreds of thousands of Cuban workers are already “employed” in tiny “business” ventures, trying to make ends meet, while they simultaneously receive subsistence wages from the state for their official job.

Some 178 areas where terminated workers can now operate as formally licensed small-scale business owners have been established.

I posted a response to Mr. Mackler's piece entitled Viva Poverty!, which I think accurately sums up the current situation.

What does Mr. Aguirre propose as the Trotskyist response?

We must not hand over the banner of democracy to imperialism and its agents. Instead, we must fight those forces, demanding an end to repression; freedom for those detained, who are mainly militants of the Left; and insisting on political freedom and freedom of organization for the Cuban masses.

It is necessary to fight for the legalization of the anti-imperialist Left parties and forces that defend the conquests of the revolution. What is required is to raise up the great mass of the Cuban people against the criminal embargo, against the restorationist policies, and against the privileges of the bureaucracy.

In a word, he advocates for more communism. His plea to extend freedom applies only to those folks who agree with Mr. Aguirre. Unfortunately for him, the demonstrations in Cuba--however big or small they were--demanded more freedom. That is freedom to be in charge of one's own life, own property, own money, and to choose a job where one wants to work.

Here we are--the great grandchildren of the "revolution" are still forced to live in abject poverty in a country where food is illegal. The last thing they want is more communism. 

Further Reading:

• Down the Cuba Rabbit-Hole with Mary Alice Waters
• The Militant Visits Manila
• Cuba