(This post is much too long. That's because Left Voice has interesting stuff to say.)
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| Washington as Statesman at the Constitutional Convention. Junius Brutus Stearns (1856). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 50.2.1. https://www.vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-8052859/ |
More than 50 comrades gathered in Manhattan. The largest group came from New York, where Left Voice was founded about eight years ago. A second nucleus was from Detroit .... Further members joined from Philadelphia, Los Angeles, El Paso, and other parts of the United States. Guests from our sister groups in the Trotskyist Fraction tuned in from Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and other cities around the world.
The discussion centered around six documents, of which I so far have read only one: Notes on the International Situation (abbreviated here as Notes). This post is a review of that document--and I'll suggest mine is the only commentary on the piece from anybody outside their small grouplet.
Left Voice (LV) is the publication of a group of NYC college professors, grad students and hangers-on, who are now attempting to form a full-fledged, Leninist Party, building on the early heritage of the original Trotskyist movement in the United States, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As the above quoted paragraph makes clear, this core is a very small group of people and they have a very long way to go before they take state power.
Part of that effort means joining the Trotskyist Fourth International (FI), founded by Trotsky himself back in 1938. As with all other Trotskyist grouplets in this country, Left Voice isn't happy with the leadership of the FI, so our professor friends have initiated the Fourth International-Trotskyist Fraction (FT) in an effort to get them back on the straight and narrow. As I commented elsewhere, "the professors are all busy trying to out-Trotsky each other, which is why one needs a Trotskyist Faction inside a Trotskyist International."
Professorial fingerprints are found all over Notes, many of them good. The document is well written, analytical, mostly factual (as far as I can tell), typo-free, and--above all--long. It's 34 pages in pdf format. Trotskyist grouplets in the US collectively produce manifestos on this scale approximately once a month or so. I most recently reviewed Socialist Action's Political Report (authored by Jeff Mackler) last March. Notes is a better version of roughly the same thing, and if you're interested in Trotskyist esoterica it's worth reading.
I'm not going to go through it line by line--that'd take way too much time. Instead, let me address specific issues:
- Economics
- "Imperialism" and Ukraine
- Hegemony
- China
Economics
Notes, as is true of all Trotskyist manifestos, makes passing mention of economics, throwing words and concepts around like they actually mean something. These include the
declining rate of profit, the
crisis of accumulation (which looks like it's not happening), and most importantly, the
class struggle.
Looking at the overall situation today, where there has been a volatile panorama of geopolitical crises, renewed instability in the economy, and a developing dynamic toward class struggle. As a result of the war in Ukraine, capitalist equilibrium is under “significant impairment.” ... This implies that as revolutionaries, we have to prepare ourselves for new forms of class struggle, more radical than what we have seen in recent times.
It seems they agree with their comrades in the SWP, whose most recent political report was entitled The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us, which I reviewed last February. Both grouplets maintain that because of this crisis and that crisis and the other crisis, the class struggle is intensifying and revolution is a-brewing. I've been around politics for over half a century, i.e., long enough to know that's not likely.
As an example, they point to the Yellow Vest movement in France--which has violently resisted President Macron's (very reasonable) pension reforms--as something wholly new and significant. They forget that the French have a long history of throwing rocks and bottles at each other, as memorialized by Charles de Gaulle's famous quote: "how can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
In a word, their mention of Marxist verities are merely pro forma and have no measurable relation to actual world events.
"Imperialism" and Ukraine
"Imperialism" is in scare quotes because I don't believe it exists in any way that Marxists think it does. Notes, at least, tries to explain what "imperialism" means by quoting sacred scripture, namely from Lenin's booklet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,
in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
This word salad, dating from 1916, does NOT describe today's United States or any part of the world economy. The US has no large monopolies, nobody controls the stock or bond markets, there are no international trusts, and the world has not been divided amongst capitalist powers.
Notes uses the word "imperialism" like religious texts refer to the Holy Ghost. If you already believe in it, you'll see it everywhere, but for the non-believer it's unconvincing. Our professor friends have definitely got religion: the word fragment imperial- occurs 87 times in the document!
That notwithstanding, the professors seem to forget their own definition in the rest of the text. It is important to them that they define the "imperialist" quality of the one-time workers' states, Russia and China.
About Russia they write (italics in original):
Thus, Russia emerges with contradictory characteristics as a capitalist state that’s far from sharing imperialist characteristics economically but has some trace of imperialist characteristics at the level of its military. Despite not being a great power, it is a regional power with limited international influence, such as its role in the Syrian conflict.
It's a pity they can't quantify this for us. Is Russia 16% imperialist? Or is that to much to be a "trace"? They invoke Russia's military here as making it more "imperialist," but nowhere in Lenin's book is military size a factor. After all, I think Lenin would class Switzerland as imperialist, despite it not even having a navy.
Notes' description of Chinese imperialism is even weirder.
In the case of China, the growing confrontation is linked to the country’s imperialist ambitions — continuing the CCP policy that restored capitalism in China. Capitalist restoration in China was carried out under the auspices of international financial capital, particularly that of the United States (we expand on this process in the second part of this document). However, due to the specific importance that China’s economy has acquired after the process of capitalist restoration, the Chinese bourgeoisie increasingly needs to project Chinese capitalism in imperialist terms. As the FT, we’ve been developing our characterization of China and its imperialist traits which have strengthened in recent years. Though China is not yet imperialist and U.S. imperialism still maintains an important level of hegemony over the world order, the possibility of any kind of “succession” of U.S. hegemony will not be peaceful or evolutionary — as the proxy war in Ukraine and growing tensions in Taiwan show.
So China is not yet imperialist (presumably that's 0%), but its imperialist traits have strengthened (presumably some number greater than zero--may I suggest 43%?) I am glad that our professor friends are closely monitoring China's descent into "imperialism," but I do wonder by what Leninist standards they are reevaluating the situation.
Of course this is all nonsense, but it's consequential nonsense. For Notes' take on Ukraine depends very much on how "imperialist" Russia is. Notes defines a term known as Campism, which is an error engaged by some Trotskyist grouplets. While some grouplets openly support Ukraine in a war of liberation (e.g., our friends in the SWP), others see the Ukraine war as a proxy fight between two imperialist powers, ie, between the US and Russia. Campists believe one should side with Russia, either because Russia isn't imperialist at all and the war results from NATO aggression. Or because Russia is only slightly imperialist and thus represents a lesser evil. The most important thing is to defeat US imperialism. Jeff Mackler at Socialist Action is a good example of that latter form of campism.
So Notes refuses to support Ukraine (they deny it's a war of liberation), but on the other hand they won't kowtow to Russian "imperialism", of whatever trace quantity. Thus they have come up with their own unique slogan (italics in original):
Not NATO, not Putin, and not the Zelenskyy regime
This is very unclear, expressed as it is as three negatives. It becomes marginally clearer if one rephrases it in positive terms. I come up with
For the Tooth Fairy, For free unicorns, and for a Trotskyist regime
OK--maybe that doesn't clarify very much. But that's the best you're gonna get out our professor friends' endless analysis of "imperialism".
Hegemony
After "imperialism," hegemony must be professors' second favorite word. The word fragment hegemon- occurs 36 times. They make three claims:
- That US global hegemony is still intact...
- but the US is in long-term secular decline, while...
- China is the leading contender to rival/displace the US as a global hegemon.
Unlike "imperialism", these statements are arguably true, and Notes makes as strong a case as can be made. I don't disagree much with the facts they present, but I think they're leaving out much important context.
There is no question that the US is still the world's leading hegemon. Our defense budget is larger than the rest of the world put together, and four times bigger than China's. We have by a big margin the strongest navy in the world. Don't let China's large-scale construction of new ships fool you--our navy is vastly superior. The US is the only power that can patrol global sea lanes, including the Straits of Malacca, Hormuz, and Gibralter, along with the Panama and Suez canals. Flows of energy from the Middle East to either Europe or China and Japan depend crucially on the US navy for protection. By withdrawing its navy, the US could deprive Japan and (especially) China of necessary oil and food imports.
The US remains the world's economic hegemon as well. The US dollar is still the world's reserve currency--well, actually that's not true. It's never been true. The world's reserve currency has been the so-called Eurodollar since at least the early 1960s. Notes misstates the situation here:
The 1944 Bretton-Woods agreement established the dollar as the dominant currency of the world, and the Marshall Plan laid the groundwork for economic penetration in Europe in the name of post-war economic reconstruction. These gave the U.S. significant economic and political hegemony in the capitalist world order.
In fact, Bretton-Woods collapsed within a few years of being signed, and Nixon finally admitted as much when he took the US off the gold standard in 1971. The Eurodollar system grew out of the resulting chaos. It was not planned or designed by anybody--it just gradually evolved beginning in the late 1940s, and by 1960 or so it was well entrenched. My post on the Eurodollar explains it as clearly as I know how (the topic is extremely complicated!).
The Eurodollar system has worked spectacularly well for at least 60 years (much better than Bretton-Woods ever could have), but it is beginning to fray around the edges. And that brings us to America's supposed decline.
Of course the US had to decline in relative terms. This report dates from 2016 and is so a bit dated, but it states that in 1960 US GDP was 40% of the world's economy, while in 2016 it was only 22%. This was certainly not because our country was getting poorer (it wasn't), but because the rest of the world was getting richer faster.
Without going into details (see the above linked post), the Eurodollar system works because the US has run large and consistent trade deficits every year since 1974. Those deficits are what finance global trade. Because of the growth of the global economy, relative to global GDP our trade deficit has been shrinking. This means there is a shortage of Eurodollars (one reason why domestic interest rates are rising) and some countries (e.g., Sri Lanka) no longer have a sufficient quantity to import essential supplies. Other countries are setting up bilateral agreements to trade in their own currencies, e.g., between China and Russia, so they don't have to use the Eurodollar. These agreements may solve a short term problem, but at bottom they are not much more than barter exchange and are not durable.
No other world currency (or currency union) is running a large enough trade deficit to finance global trade. Hence, despite the shortage of Eurodollars, there is nothing on the horizon to replace it. This is terrible news for global trade and puts a severe crimp on the globalization phenomenon. But it's great for American consumers as foreigners desperately compete to sell goods into the American market so as to accumulate Eurodollars.
It gets worse because political sentiment (headed by Trump) is increasingly against permanent trade deficits, since the cost of supporting the Eurodollar is the decimation of our own, domestic manufacturing capability. Hence the latter day imposition of tariff barriers and industrial policies.
So while I acknowledge that Notes is right about America's decline, the context is missing. America may be declining by some accounting measures, but we're waaay better off than any other country in the world. We'll be the last man left standing.
China
If "imperialism" and "hegemon" are our professor friends' favorite words, then there is another important term completely missing from their document: demographics. China, Japan, S. Korea, Russia, much of Europe, and even the Middle East and Latin America are in some stage of demographic decline.
Before we get to China, here's another paragraph about Russia and Ukraine. Russian demography augers the end of Russian civilization--it's child-bearing age population has declined beyond the point of no return. Thus the Ukraine war is the last war Russia will ever fight. After this it will never again have the manpower or the industrial base to field another army. Dead Russian soldiers and destroyed Russian tanks will never be replaced. The strategic goal of the United States is to destroy the Russian military once and for all. To that end, the longer the Ukraine war goes on, the more Russia suffers irrecoverable losses, and it will eventually be taken off the global stage as even a regional power. Thus the US strategy is for the war to go on for a very long time, or, as it is often phrased, to fight to the death of the last Ukrainian.
Like Russia, China, too, is in demographic collapse. Even the Chinese government (sort of) admits this. The United Nations--using Chinese government statistics--reports that as of April, 2023, India surpassed China as the most populous country on earth.
But as is true in so many cases, Chinese statistics are misleading. It is increasingly clear that China has been exaggerating its demographics for some time now. Peter Zeihan, an expert on Chinese demography, says that China lost the population crown to India about ten years ago--not this year. By his measures, China's real population is smaller than the official figures by about 100 million people. Worse, all those missing people are under 45 years old. See the Mr. Zeihan's charts here.
By contrast, Notes ignores demographics altogether. They write (as part of a longer discussion)
China, with its pursuit of new markets for its own bourgeoisie, follows the same economic and political tactics in the Global South that imperialists have done previously. It has also established itself as a major trading ally for advanced economies like Germany , and through brokering new alliances and treaties, it is firmly trying to prove itself as a contender to lead the capitalist world order. Especially as the tendencies toward a new bloc around China increase, they threaten further and greater confrontations, militarism, and conflict.
This is wrong on so many levels. First, the Belt & Road project is collapsing into stinking mountain of defaulted loans and unfinished projects. Second, China is no longer the world's cheapest manufacturer--that crown has been ceded to North America, ie, the US-Mexico combination. Third, China is in dire financial straits, desperately short of Eurodollars, and increasingly unable to fund its purchases of necessary raw materials. While China was Germany's key customer (Germany supplied the machine tools for China's manufacturing plant), the demise of China as an industrial powerhouse has put Germany into a severe recession.
And finally, not only is China's total population declining, but its working-age population is declining even faster. There is no way that China can grow its economy with a shrinking population. Mr. Zeihan predicts that the current Chinese government will collapse within this decade, and that the country's survival as a unified state is in jeopardy. Perhaps he exaggerates--but even if he's mistaken about the timeline, the notion that China will ever compete with the USA for "hegemony" is simply wrong.
That doesn't mean they couldn't try to invade Taiwan (though I doubt they will. They'd lose).
Conclusion
I have spent a long time reading Notes and composing what I hope is a considered critique. I wonder why I do this? Left Voice, like all Trotskyist grouplets, is far too small to have any influence on American or global politics. The authors of Notes are too committed to Marxist theory and are too ideologically blinkered in their perspective in order to see straight. Put another way, they don't seem to read anything beyond what they themselves have written.
That said, I do hope the authors--whom I've teasingly mocked as "professors"--will read what I write. First, I've spent a lot of time on it and it would be a shame if they didn't. Second, I think this will be the only commentary on their work that comes from outside their grouplet--and they should be flattered. And finally, I do think the ideas--both those in Notes and in my response--are worth discussing and considering.
Nothing here will change anybody's mind. Still, I don't believe I've wasted my time.
Further Reading:
