Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

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A POSTERIORI
[Latin: literally, “that which follows after”.] The opposite of a priori. An a posteriori statement is one which can only be known to be true or false on the basis of experience. Thus, in reality, all of human knowledge is a posteriori in the strictest sense, though in a looser sense some types of analytical knowledge (i.e., that which is derived from other knowledge, especially in logic or mathematics) are often considered to be a priori rather than a posteriori.

A PRIORI
[Latin: literally, “that which precedes”.] The opposite of a posteriori. A statement which can (it is claimed) be known to be true or false prior to (or independently of) any experience.
        Of course no statements can even be understood at all by new-born infants; it requires considerable experience before even simple statements can be understood, let alone be formulated or be reasonably judged as true or false. So, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as any genuine a priori knowledge. Even innate behavior, such as the urge to suckle by infants, is not “knowledge” in the propositional sense. (Infants do not “know” that it is good or important to suckle; this is merely something which evolution has led them to do.)
        However, there is a looser sense of the term a priori, meaning something which can be determined or known by extrapolating from existing knowledge without the necessity for further experience or investigation of the world. Sometimes this is described as “reasoning from self-evident propositions”, though that can be terribly misleading. The most persuasive examples of this sort of thing are in logic and mathematics where it is, for instance, quite possible to derive some new mathematical knowledge (such as a previously unknown theorem) merely through thinking about the abstract logical relationships of already known mathematical entities, such as numbers or geometrical figures. Of course this would not be possible if our previous experience in the world had not led us to create abstractions like numbers and lines and triangles.
        Another sort of thing that can loosely be called a priori knowledge, is due to recognizing shared elements of meanings of words. Thus we know that all bachelors (in the usual context) are unmarried men simply from the definition of the word, and not from any investigation conducted among all the bachelors of the world. But here again, this implies we have enough previous experience in society to have correctly learned the meaning of that word.
        Idealist philosophers, however, have often argued that—besides these sorts of commonplaces—there is another, much more important, kind of a priori knowledge. One of the worst offenders in this area was Kant, who claimed that all knowledge of the world gained through sensory perception (experience) was unreliable and contraposed it to a priori “authentic knowledge” such as of forms of sensibility (space and time) and reason (cause, necessity, etc.). In actuality, our concepts of space, time, cause, necessity, and other such abstractions are every bit as much derived from human experience in the world as is any bit of everyday knowledge; the process is simply larger, longer and more complex.
        Because idealist philosophers have tried to promote this sort of invalid extention and interpretation of the term a priori, for materialists it has come to be a warning flag that idealist nonsense is on the way! Neither of the terms a priori or a posteriori is commonly used by materialists except when criticizing bourgeois ideologists.

[Criticizing Dühring:] “This is only giving a new twist to the old favorite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself. First the concept of the object is fabricated from the object; then the spit is turned around, and the object is measured by its reflection, the concept. The object is then to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:89.

“ABSOLUTE MUSIC”
A term used in bourgeois discussions of music theory to describe music which is supposedly free of external references, ideas or associations. Instrumental music, without lyrics and without any other explicit associations to ideas, human institutions, interests and the like, is thus categorized as “absolute music”. However, the fact that neither the composer nor any lyricist gave any explicit and definite guidelines to the sort of ideas and associations that the music should give rise to does not mean that the music does not nevertheless give rise to various definite ideas and such in the minds of its listeners. Moreover, most types or styles of instrumental music have conventional ideas and references associated with them because of their historical development or milieu.
        In classical European music, where the term is most common, forms such as fugues, sonatas and symphonies are often considered to be “absolute music” (unless they have reference “programmes” associated with them). The opposite of “absolute music” is considered in bourgeois circles to be “programme music”, where there are explicit lyrics or other definite guidelines to the listener as to what ideas or moods the various parts of the music should give rise to.
        Marxists have usually argued that in reality there is no such thing as “absolute music” in the bourgeois sense, and that all music has various kinds of human, social, and class associations, whether it has explicit lyrics and listening guidelines or not. See for example the articles: “Has Absolute Music No Class Character?”, by Chao Hua, and “Criticize the Revisionist Viewpoint in Music”, by Chu Lan, both in Peking Review, #9, March 1, 1974.

ACCUMULATION
[To be added...]
        See also: CAPITAL—ACCUMULATION OF, PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION.

“ACTUALLY EXISTING SOCIALISM”
This is a phrase that was (and sometimes still is) used by those who recognized that many countries which called themselves “socialist” (especially the Soviet Union during its last decades) had severe shortcomings, but who could still not bring themselves to admit that these countries were not really socialist at all! In other words, this is a phrase that was used by those who were unable to recognize revisionism and phony socialism when it stared them in the face. This syndrome was especially common among older Marxists who had developed emotional attachments to the Soviet Union in its earlier socialist period, and who could not face the fact that the nature of the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed from socialism to state capitalism.

ADIVASI
A term used in India (often not capitalized) to refer to what is in English often called a “tribal”, or person of a tribal community, most of whom live in the hilly, forested areas of a number of states in east-central India. The word Adivasi literally means “old inhabitant”, and is a general term for any of a variety of ethnic and tribal groups who are believed by many to be descendants of the earliest inhabitants of what is now India. They are a substantial minority of the population in India, constituting about 8.2% of the population, or over 84 million people as of the 2001 census. One major concentration of Adivasis is in the Jangalmahal region. Because the Adivasis live closer to nature than most Indian societies, they are particularly vulnerable to the environmental degradation frequently caused by capitalist corporations. Their lands are frequently stolen from them for agricultural, mining or industrial development. For these reasons, many Adivasis have joined the Maoist revolutionary movement in India.

“Tribals are the most marginalized section of Indian society, worse off than even the Dalits (formerly referred to as Untouchables). Around 49.5% of tribals live under the official poverty line, 76.2% are illiterate and almost 30% have no access whatsoever to doctors in clinics. Displaced from their land and discriminated against in the industrial job markets [they] are now fighting to keep their [remaining] land, their only remaining resource.” —Sudha Ramachandran, “India Drives Tribals into Maoist Arms”, Asia Times, Jan. 16, 2010.

ADLER, Victor   (1852-1918)
A leading founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (in 1888-89). Later a prominent revisionist and reformist politician in that country during the period of the Second International. He took a centrist position during World War I, advocating “class peace” and opposing any revolutionary uprisings by the working class.

ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE (ARM)
A loan (or mortgage) to buy real estate (buildings or land) for which the interest rate is periodically adjusted, often every 6 months. The new rate is determined in relation to some common short-term interest rate, such as that of the 6-month U.S. Treasury bill. ARMs are designed to transfer the risk of rising inflation from the loaner to the borrower. While many ARMs specify a maximum interest rate, it is always much higher than the initial rate. Moreover, in recent years banks and financial companies have marketed ARMs which set the initial rate artificially low for a certain limited period as a come on. The family taking out the loan is then hit with a massive shock of a much higher monthly interest payment when the first interest “adjustment” is made.

ADVANCED ACTION
[To be added... ]
See also: VANGUARD ACTION

AESOPIAN LANGUAGE
Aesop was an ancient Greek story teller (c. 620-564 BCE) who used fanciful tales (or fables) to instill various morals or practical conclusions in his readers. That is, he put forward various ideas in a quite round-about way.
        Because of the oppression and censorship by the ruling bourgeoisie, Marxists and other revolutionaries have also often been forced to put forward their ideas in “round-about” or euphemistic ways that are frequently referred to as Aesopian language. For example in Russia in the 1890s, revolutionaries frequently had to refer to the followers of Marx and Engels as “the disciples” (rather than Marxists) when writing in the legal press. Similarly, while in prison during the Mussolini fascist period in Italy, the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci had to use the circumlocution “modern theory” when he simply meant Marxism. Of course it is always better to speak plainly and openly when we can!

“This pamphlet was written with an eye to the tsarist censorhip. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in an allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language—to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up the pen to write a ‘legal’ work.” —Lenin, from the Preface to his 1917 edition of “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, LCW 22:187.

AESTHETIC OBJECT
A work of art. Most of the philosophical discussion around this topic centers on whether a work of art is a physical object, or some other kind of thing (such as an “idea”, “illusion”, or even something that “doesn’t really exist at all”!). In the case of a painting or a statue it seems at first quite reasonable to say that the work of art is a physical object, either the physical canvas covered with paint or the physical statue made of bronze, wood, or some other material. But what about a woodblock print that exists in multiple copies, none of which is more “original” than any of the others? What about a song? Or a new dance? Are they physical objects? Or a novel? Is it “really” the original manuscript (even if that differs from the final changed printed version that the author approved, and which exists in a million equal copies?). Or what about a poem that is recited verbally and never written down at all? These are the sorts of questions that arise. To cut a long story short, in my own opinion a work of art of any kind is actually a pattern or arrangement of some sort that is created by the artist and which can—in theory at least—be replicated in many individual copies, each of which is a token of that particular type. (See: types/tokens.) This, by the way, is not an idealist theory, but rather a materialist theory that undercuts idealism on this issue. —S.H.

AESTHETICS
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy concerned with art. In popular usage, as well as in older bourgeois philosophy, aesthetics is often viewed as being focused on “the beautiful”, but actually the explication of beauty is just one of many issues in aesthetics, and not even the most important issue. Some of the many other questions in the philosophy of art are:
        What sort of thing is a work of art? (Is it a physical object? An abstraction? An “illusion”, as some have claimed? Or what?) (See AESTHETIC OBJECT entry above.)
        What makes a work of art a good work?
        Why does art have such an impact on human beings?
        What is the relationship of art to society?
        See also: Philosophical doggerel on aesthetics.

AGITATION
1. [Wide sense:] Oral, printed and visual political works or activity whose purpose is to influence people’s consciousness and mood, and to motivate them to take political action.
2. [Narrow (Leninist) sense:] As above, but specifically with respect to a single issue.
        See also: PROPAGANDA

“Those who make nation-wide political agitation the corner-stone of their programme, their tactics, and their organizational work, as Iskra does, stand the least risk of missing the revolution.” —Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” (1902), LCW 5:513.

AGNOSTICISM — About the Existence of God
Claiming not to know, or the view that one cannot know, whether or not God exists. Agnosticism in this sense is most commonly a liberal evasion of what in this modern scientific age should be considered common sense materialism, that no such thing as a “disembodied mind” (as gods and ghosts are supposed to be) can possibly exist.

AGNOSTICISM — Epistemological
Philosophical, or epistemological, agnosticism is the view that no one can really know anything about the world, at least with any certainty.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about agnosticism.

“Agnosticism (from the Greek words ‘a’ no and ‘gnosis’ knowledge) is a vacillation between materialism and idealism, i.e., in practice it is vacillation between materialist science and clericalism. Among the agnostics are the followers of Kant (the Kantians), Hume (the positivists, realists and others) and the present-day Machists.” —Lenin, “Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Death of Joseph Dietzgen” (May 5, 1913), LCW 19:80.

ALIENATED LABOR
The past wealth created by labor which now exists as capital and no longer belongs to the workers who produced it, and furthermore which now confronts the workers as an alien force dominating them and working against their interests.

“To the same extent as political economy developed ... it presented labor as the sole element of value and the only creator of use-values, and the development of the productive forces as the only real means for increasing wealth; the greatest possible development of the productive power of labor as the economic basis of society. This is, in fact, the foundation of capitalist production. ... But in the same measure as it is understood that labor is the sole source of exchange-value and the active source of use-value, ‘capital’ is likewise conceived by the same economists ... as the regulator of production, the source of wealth and the aim of production, whereas labor is regarded as wage-labor, whose representative and real instrument is inevitably a pauper (to which Malthus’s theory of population contributed), a mere production cost and instrument of production dependent on a minimum wage and forced to drop even below this minimum as soon as the existing quantity of labor is ‘superfluous’ for capital. In this contradiction, political economy merely expressed the essence of capitalist production or, if you like, of wage-labor, of labor alienated from itself, which stands confronted by the wealth it has created as alien wealth, by its own productive power as the productive power of its product, by its enrichment as its own impoverishment and by its social power as the power of society.” —Marx, TSV, 3:258-259.

ALTHUSSER, Louis   [Pronounced (roughly): al-toos-er]   (1918-1990)
A French academic philosopher often described as a “Marxist”, but whose supposed “contributions” to Marxism are difficult for a revolutionary Marxist to see. He was a life-long member of the Communist Party of France, which was a revisionist party for the entire period that Althusser was a member. Although he criticized it from time to time, he never left it. He also opposed the great student uprising in France in 1968 as “infantile”. Nevertheless, Althusser and those he influenced remain popular in “left” student academia.
        One of Althusser’s pet theories is that Marx remained “under the spell of Hegel” only for the first part of his life, and that Marx made an “epistemological break” with Hegel in his writings starting in the late 1840s. (As opposed to this, most Marxists recognize that while Marx and Engels did in fact break with Hegel’s idealism before the 1840s, they continued to uphold the dialectical approach they first learned from Hegel (and then put on a sound materialist basis) throughout their lives. There are thus no grounds for seeing any sort of “epistemological break” between “the early Marx” of the mid 1840s and “the later Marx”.)
        Althusser’s notion of the “later Marx’s” dialectical and historical materialism is also quite distorted. He views things through a “structuralist” lens, or in other words, through one sort of restrictive bourgeois lens. This involves interpreting Marx as an anti-humanist and anti-historicist (thus having Marx supposedly agreeing with the positivist viewpoint of Karl Popper, who lambasted what he called Marx’s “historicism”). Althusser also had an affinity for various pseudo-scientific intellectual fads and philosophies such as Freudian psychoanalysis, and used the confused notions from such spheres to corrupt Marxist concepts such as dialectical contradiction. Like most academic Marxists, Althusser was fixated on long, meandering and essentially worthless discussions of ideology, into which he also inserted a lot of psychoanalytic nonsense. Althusser divorced Marx from political practice and activity, which is not surprising since this reflected his own academic approach to “Marxism”.
        Althusser suffered from life-long bouts of mental instability, and in 1980 he murdered his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, and was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. While his reputation suffered because of this, it is surprising how seriously he is still taken by many revolutionary-minded students at universities! Among the many other academics (some of whom also have thought of themselves as “Marxists” at times) who were influenced by Althusser are Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Nicos Poulantzas, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and even Che Guevarra’s one-time theoretician, Régis Debray.

ALTRUISM
The subordination or sacrifice of one’s own personal interests to those of others. The opposite of egoism.

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
[To be added...]
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about this topic.

ANARCHISM
[To be added...]
        See also: CHOMSKY, Noam

ANTAGONISM
[In Marxist usage:] Irreconcilability.
        See also: CONTRADICTIONS—Dialectical

ANTI-DÜHRING
This famous book by Frederick Engels, published in 1878, was directed against a crude petty-bourgeois theory of socialism put forth by Eugen Dühring. The formal title of Engels’ book is Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft (Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science). Engels did such an excellent job of exposing Dühring and at the same time putting forward the essentials of his and Marx’s much more coherent and profound theory of scientific socialism, that Anti-Dühring has ever since its publication been considered an essential textbook of Marxism.

[This book analyzes] “highly important problems in the domain of philosophy, natural science and the social sciences. This is a wonderfully rich and instructive book.” —Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1896), LCW 2:25.

AP&P
This is the jargon being used in the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA for the following mouthful: “The culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian.” AP&P is thus a short-hand reference to what most people would simply call the ghastly personality cult which the RCP has created around its leader Bob Avakian.

APPRECIATION (Economics)
An increase in price or exchange value.

APTHEKER, Herbert   (1915-2003)
A historian specializing in African-American history, and a long-time leader of the revisionist Communist Party, USA. His book American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) was pathbreaking and important, but it seems he was never really a revolutionary Marxist.
        Aptheker joined the CPUSA in 1939, and remained loyal to it until 1991, when at around the time of the collapse of the revisionist Soviet Union he left with the social-democratic breakaway group, the Committees of Correspondence. He strongly defended Soviet social-imperialism in 1956 when it invaded Hungary, and again in 1968 when it invaded Czechoslovakia.
        After the death of Aptheker and his wife, his daughter Bettina wrote a book [Intimate Politics (2006)] in which she claimed that her father had repeatedly sexually molested her from the age of 4 until the age of 13—but that she had not remembered this until writing that book! We may not know what to believe about that accusation, but we can be very sure that Herbert Aptheker was definitely a revisionist.

AQUINAS, St. Thomas (1225-74)
The most important Scholastic philosopher and theologian of the Roman Catholic Church.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Aquinas.

ARISTOTLE   (384-322 BCE)
As Marx said, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. Engels commented that Aristotle “was the most encyclopedic intellect” of all the ancient Greek philosophers. He had a more down-to-earth outlook than did his teacher Plato, and emphasized the observation of nature. Nevertheless he vacillated between materialism and idealism. He defended slave society and its political economy, and “was the first to analyze value and the two primitive forms of capital (merchant capital and money-lending capital)”. In the year 335 BCE he established an important school called the Lyceum in Athens.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Aristotle.

ARM
See: ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE

ART
See below and: AESTHETICS and AESTHETIC OBJECT.

ASSET BUBBLES
[To be added... ]
        See also: HOUSING BUBBLE.

AUSTIN, John   (1911-60)
Bourgeois British philosopher of the linguistic or ordinary language school, who was both educated and taught at Oxford University. His approach to philosophy centered on the extremely careful and detailed analysis of everyday language and its implications, even to the point of pedantry.
        See also: DIMENSION WORD

AVAKIAN, Bob   (1943-   )
American revolutionary, the Chairman and dominant leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party since its formation in 1975. Avakian was raised in a middle-class family (his father was a judge), and was educated at the University of California in Berkeley, where he became radicalized in the 1960s. He participated in the Free Speech Movement there and, though white, was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. He was active in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and was a leading figure in the Revolutionary Youth Movement II faction of SDS.
        In 1968 he was a co-founder of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (in the San Francisco area), which soon became a nationwide organization, the Revolutionary Union, by absorbing SDS collectives from other parts of the country. In 1975 the RU transformed itself into the RCP, with Avakian as the Chairman of the Central Committee. While Avakian was always a top leader of the RU/RCP, after several political struggles and splits in the organization he emerged after 1978 as the single dominant and effectively unchallengeable leader.
        Avakian should get the credit for being the person most centrally responsible for the creation of the RCP, but also the blame for being the person most centrally responsible for wrecking it as an organization with any serious prospects of leading a revolution in the United States. He played a similar role internationally. Avakian took a lead in arranging for the creation of the international organization of Maoist revolutionary parties, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), but then through doctrinaire insistance on what its policies should be, played the leading role in disabling it as a functional organization.
        In 1979 the new revisionist ruler of China, Deng Xiaoping, came to the United States on a state visit. Avakian personally led a demonstration that the RCP organized against Deng, which resulted in a conflict with the police. Avakian and others were charged with several felonies. While the charges were still pending, Avakian went into “exile” in France in 1981. While all the charges were dropped against him in 1982, he remained in a sort of romantic self-imposed exile in France for a couple more decades. (As many have joked, since Marx and Lenin were in long periods of exile, Avakian thought that he needed to be too!) His current whereabouts are kept secret by the RCP, since he is viewed by himself and his party as “irreplaceable”.
        Avakian has a strongly authoritarian and anti-democratic streak (in practice and also even in theory: consider the title of his 1986 book, Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?), and the Party he leads has never allowed serious internal dissent. Always rather egotistical, Avakian has more and more demanded and achieved the creation of a grotesque personality cult around himself within his Party. The RCP has become pretty much a one-man operation, as far as new ideas and thinking go, as exemplified especially in Avakian’s supposed “New Synthesis” of communist theory.
        See also: AP&P, “EMBRACES BUT CANNOT REPLACE”, INSTRUMENTALISM, and the “THREE OURS”.

AVERAGE PROFIT
See: PROFIT, AVERAGE.

AXIOLOGY
The branch of ethics concerned with “value”. The study of “value” separate from ethics in general is based on the mistaken idea that “values” are not derivable from factual relationships and must somehow be appended “from without”.
        See also: DEONTOLOGY

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