Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Ba - Bd   —

BABEUF, François Noël   (Later known as Gracchus Babeuf)   (1760-97)
Probably the first revolutionary communist in history! Babeuf was a prominent revolutionary activist in the great French Revolution of 1789. He advocated and worked for not only political equality but also economic equality. When the Jacobin faction was defeated in 1794 and there was a major shift to the right, Babeuf recognized that the full set of ideals of the Revolution had been betrayed. He took the name Gracchus from two ancient Roman brothers who championed the rights of the poor. He formed a secret revolutionary society, which later became known as the Conspiracy of Equals, and was planning an uprising against the government to take place in May 1796. But the plan was was betrayed and Babeuf was arrested and executed. The word ‘communism’ was coined by the utopian socialist Goodwyn Barmby after a conversation with those he described as the “disciples of Babeuf”.

BACON, Francis   (1561-1626)
One of the most prominent early promoters and theorists of the experimental scientific method. His works The Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum (1620) were highly influential in the development of science.
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Bacon.

BAD (Adj.)
1. [In general:] Failing to answer to (or satisfy) certain interests (which interests and whose interests are implied by the context).
2. [In moral discourse in class society:] Failing to answer to the common collective interests of a particular class (which class being determined by the ideology of the speaker).
3. [In classless society:] Failing to answer to the common, collective interests of the people as a whole.
        See also: GOOD

BADIOU, Alain   (1937-   )
A very confused and grossly overrated French petty-bourgeois political radical and idealist (non-materialist) philosopher of sorts, who once considered himself to be a “Maoist”, and still likes to associate himself with what some of his admirers call “post-Maoism”.
        Badiou was strongly influenced by, and somewhat further radicalized by, the great student uprising in France in the spring of 1968. In 1970 he was the founder and leader of the Groupe pour la Fondation de l’Union des Communistes de France Marxistes Léninistes, more commonly called the UCFML [Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist], one of several nominally Maoist organizations in France in that period. He is now a member of L’Organisation Politique which he and some friends founded in 1985 after the dissolution of the UCFML. This group supports immigrant rights and other reforms. However, Badiou no longer believes that there needs to be, or should be, a revolutionary political party in order to transform society!

“Up to the end of the 1970s, my friends and I defended the idea that an emancipatory politics presumed some kind of political party. Today we are developing a completely different idea, which we call ‘politics without party’.” —Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. by Peter Hallward, (Verso, 2001), p. 95. (In the interview appendix.)

Even more absurdly, Badiou now explicitly renounces the class perspective in politics and ideology, and refuses to even think in terms of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie!

“The second thing that has changed over these last twenty years concerns the status of class. For a long time we were faithful to the idea of a class politics, a class state, and so on. Today we think that political initiatives which present themselves as representations of a class have given everything they had to give.” —Alain Badiou, ibid., p. 97.

Badiou’s philosophical views are strongly influenced by Kant, Althusser’s corruption of Marxism and by Lacanian psychoanalysis, along with mathematical set theory. (What a mish-mash!) Badiou is sometimes called an adherent of the “anti-postmodern” strand of continental philosophy. However, for the most part his philosophical ideas are nearly impossible to describe in any intelligeable fashion, since they are almost completely incoherent. But whatever his philosophical views are, exactly, it is clear that he is not a materialist. One commentator argues that Badiou’s philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.
        Badiou’s views on ethics are a blend of Kant, classless nihilism, and his usual general incoherence. [See my commentary: “Alain Badiou: A Pseudo-Maoist Obscurantist”, at: http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/BadiouAndEthics.pdf. —S.H.]
        Oddly enough, for a person who is obviously not a Marxist nor even a real revolutionary, Badiou and his views have recently become something of a fad within radical movements led by intellectuals, not only in North America, but also in desperately poor and exploited countries like India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa! Even some revolutionary Marxists have been attracted to him, though it only serves to discredit their own good judgment! Just how much in politics and philosophy can we possibly have to learn from someone who rejects the class perspective, rejects the need for a revolutionary party (and apparently also for any actual revolution), and who derives his own ideas mostly from either bourgeois ideologists directly, or else from revisionist distorters of Marxism?!
        See also: “Badiou, St. Paul, and the Mass Line” at: http://www.massline.info/Misc/BadiouMassLine.pdf

BAILOUTS, Government
See: GOVERNMENT BAILOUT

BAKUNIN, Mikhail   (1814-76)
Russian anarchist and determined opponent of Marx. He was born near Moscow of aristocratic descent. He took part in the German revolutionary movement of 1848-49 and was condemned to death. In 1855 he was sent to Siberia, but escaped to Japan and then came to England in 1861. In September 1870 he led an abortive uprising in Lyon.
        Bakunin was the most prominent anarchist of his day and the leader of the anarchist opposition to Marxism within the First International. At the Hague Congress of the International in 1872 he was outvoted and expelled. But he and his followers had done major damage to that organization, and it disbanded a few years later.

“Followers of Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist theoretician and implacable enemy of Marxism and scientific socialism. The Bakuninists conducted a stubborn struggle against Marxist theory and the Marxist tactics of the working-class movement. The basic postulate of Bakuninism was the rejection of all forms of [the] state, including that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bakuninists did not understand the historic role of the proletariat. Bakunin propounded the idea of class ‘levelling’, the alliance of ‘free associations’ from below. A secret revolutionary society consisting of ‘outstanding people’ would lead popular revolts that were to begin immediately. In Russia, for example, the Bakuninists assumed that the peasantry were ready to start an immediate revolt. Their tactics of conspiracy, immediate revolts and terrorist acts was sheer gambling and was contrary to the Marxist theory of insurrection. Bakuninism was one of the sources from which the Narodniks drew their ideology.” —Note 9 in Lenin, Selected Works, vol. I (Moscow: 1967).

For further information about Bakunin and his followers see: Marx & Engels, “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the Working Men’s International Association” (1873); Engels, “The Bakuninists at Work” (1873); Engels, “Emigré Literature” (1875); and Lenin, “On the Provisional Revolutionary Government” (LCW 8:461-81).

BALANCE OF PAYMENTS   [International Economics]
1. An overall statement of the financial inflows and outflows for a given country during a given period (such as over one calendar year). There are three components to such an overall balance of payment statement:
        The current account balance includes the value of imports and exports as well as receipts from or spending abroad in other ways, such as through tourism or workers in foreign countries sending money back home. It also includes receipts from foreign property income.
        The capital account balance includes foreign direct investment, sales and purchases of foreign securities (such as stocks and bonds), and sales or purchases of domestic securities by foreigners.
        The third component is any change in the foreign exchange reserves held by the government of that country.
2. The difference between the total inflow (receipts) or outflow (expenditures) in one of the above categories; i.e., either a net surplus or net deficit.
        Changes in foreign exchange reserves are equal to the sum of the current and capital account surpluses or deficits for that period. Thus if there are deficits in the current account or the capital account, the foreign exchange reserves are depleted by that same amount. If the current account and capital account added together are in serious deficit, then the country has a “balance of payments problem”—in that if the trend continues it will run out of foreign reserves and be unable to buy anything more from foreign countries. A “balance of payments crisis” is a problem that has become so severe that immediate action must to taken to change the situation, such as by obtaining an emergency loan from the IMF or from another government, or by devaluing its currency.

BAND
A social group, typically consisting of 25 to 50 people. This is the level of social organization characteristic of primitive communal society. Each band is self-reliant and operates separately and independently from other bands, even those speaking the same language and sharing the same culture. See the entry for primitive social organization for a comparison with other levels of social organization such as tribes, chiefdoms and nation-states.

BANK
A financial institution whose primary activity is the borrowing and lending of money. Banks borrow from the general public, both individuals and businesses, who become depositors in the bank. The banks normally pay only a rather low rate of interest to borrow this money. (Checking accounts usually pay no interest at all.) They then loan out money to others at a higher rate of interest, which is usually the main source of their profits. These loans are to businesses and also to individual people (for mortgages, car loans, and other purposes). To the extent that the bank interest income from loans comes from capitalist companies, the banks share in the surplus value generated by the workers at those companies. The banks centralize idle cash, not only from capitalist corporations but also a great many smaller deposits from workers and other non-capitalists, and serve the necessary capitalist function of accumulating and turning many isolated quantitities of idle money into large chunks of money capital available to companies to use in continuing and expanding production.
        Commercial banks may be either general purpose or focus their activity mostly on certain areas of banking, such as savings banks (or “savings & loans” institutions) which specialize in gathering the savings of many small depositors and in issuing mortgages. Merchant banks specialize in servicing financial needs of businesses and promoting trade, including international trade. Investment banks specialize in handling transactions of large corporations and the rich, including loaning them large sums of money, handling their investments for them, helping arrange mergers and acquisitions of other companies, arranging for IPOs and so forth.
        Central banks are government banks whose primary purposes are to supervise the commercial banks, regulate the money supply, and to try to keep the overall economy running smoothly. They do not accept deposits from individuals. The U.S. central bank is the Federal Reserve. Others include the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan. The European Central Bank regulates the monetary policy of those countries using the Euro currency.
        Finally, there are a few international banks (meaning not those commercial banks which operate internationally, but rather banks set up by associations of many nations which try to regulate the world financial system). Most notably there is the International Monetary Fund, which is a crude sort of world central bank, and the World Bank, which is a world investment bank that in theory, at least, tries to promote economic development in more economically backward (i.e., more exploited!) nations. Both of these are tightly controlled by the imperialist powers, especially the United States.
        See also entries below and: MONEY CREATION BY COMMERCIAL BANKS, ZOMBIE BANK

BANK CAPITAL
There are two main senses of this term: 1) the capital supplied by those who established the bank and the capital required to keep it functioning (either from actual business requirements or from legal requirements); and 2) all the capital concentrated in the bank, including both that supplied by the owners of the bank, and the much larger amount supplied by the depositors in the bank. In the writings of Marx and other Marxists, bank capital is most often used in this second sense, while in the discussions by bourgeois economists about banks, the term is most often used in the first sense.
        In the first sense, bank capital is the capital required to establish and keep operating a bank. Banks make their profits through borrowing money from depositors and lending it out at a higher rate of interest to their loan customers. However, at times depositors also wish to withdraw their money and banks must have some money capital on hand to pay them back. The amount required varies from time to time, but the banks must have enough money on hand to deal with all normal situations. (During exceptional situations, such as a financial crisis, the bank may borrow temporarily from the central bank—the Federal Reserve in the U.S.—to tide it over.)
        In the second sense, the basic function of bank capital is as a source of new capital for the active capitalists in industry to expand production and thus to further increase the extraction of surplus value from the working class. This aggregation and centralization of idle money and its transformation into new capital is an essential process under capitalism.
        See also: FINANCIAL CAPITAL

BANK FAILURES
The bankruptcy of a bank and either its dismantlement or its forced merger with another bank. There are some bank failures every year, even during booms, but during severe capitalist crises there are vastly more failures. In the U.S. the recent numbers of bank failures have been:
        2007:        3
        2008:      25
        2009:    140
        2010:    157
        2011:      61   (Through 7/29/11.)
        These figures show that the claim by bourgeois economists that the U.S. financial crisis ended in mid-2009 is very far from the case. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fund which is used to bail out depositors in failed banks had a deficit of $20.7 billion as of March 31, 2010. The number of “problem banks” (i.e., those at risk of failing) jumped to 775 in the first quarter of 2010 from 702 in the fourth quarter of 2009. As of September 1, 2010, 11% of all U.S. insured banking institutions were at risk of failure, according to the FDIC.
        See also: GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s—1929-1933

BANK PROFIT
Normally the primary source of profit for banks is from borrowing at a low rate of interest, and loaning out the money at a higher rate of interest. But how is it possible for the companies that borrow from banks to pay this interest at all? It is because they have extracted massive surplus value from their own workers. In short, bank profit, to the extent that it comes from the interest charged to capitalist corporations (and therefore to the greatest extent), comes ultimately from the surplus value created by wage labor in material production.
        During the imperialist era another source of bank profit has expanded in a major way—financial manipulations and speculation. This was especially the case for American investment banks in the first decade of the 21^st century, where such a speculative frenzy developed that it seems to have even become for a time the primary source of profits! That is, until the wild speculative bubbles in sub-prime mortgages, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and the like collapsed in 2008.

BARAN, Paul   (1910-1964)
Prominent American Marxist economist associated with the Monthly Review school. He was professor of economics at Stanford University from 1948-1964, and during much of this time may have been virtually the only Marxist economist allowed to hold a position at an American university. Baran’s most important works were The Political Economy of Growth (1957) and Monopoly Capital (1966) co-authored with Paul Sweezy.

BAREFOOT DOCTOR
[In China during the Mao era, and especially during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution:] A para-medical worker with only limited formal training who provided medical services, sometimes only part-time, primarily in rural areas where there were as yet almost no doctors available to the people. They promoted hygiene, preventive health care, and family planning, and treated common injuries and illnesses. They acted as the primary health-care providers at the grass-roots level and brought the first wave of medical care to millions of people who never before had access to any at all.

“Many people say, yes, you’ve got all these para-medical workers, but what kind of level have they got? What kind of doctors are they really? Do they really look after the health of the people? This raises very big questions, including the question of what attributes a doctor should have.
         “Some people think that the most important attributes are to have a lot of degrees, to have gone through a lot of specialist courses, to have a good bed-side manner, and so on. I’m not belittling the importance of professional skill, and mastery of modern techniques. But in my opinion, the most important attribute that any doctor can possibly have is the determination to put the interests of his patients before everything else, to devote his whole life to the service of his patients, of his fellow men. If he has this drive, if he has this motivation, he’s a good doctor. And if he doesn’t have it he falls short of being a good doctor no matter what his technical or professional level is.
         “Peasant doctors have this determination to be of service to their fellow men. To whatever degree their technical or professional knowledge falls short of the ideal, that can be put right in time. And will be put right in time. Because to have a sense of responsibility towards your patients means that you also have the determination to equip yourself with the knowledge and skills to serve their needs. It’s part of the same thing.
         “So I say to those good people who say, ah well, what kind of doctors are they? they don’t really count—I say they do count. I say this is the kind of doctor of the future—this is not an expedient, this is not just a stop-gap measure. This is how doctors of the future will be trained, rooted among the people. They will come from the people, they will be motivated by a desire to serve the people, they will not be separated from the people, by their income, their dress, their motor cars, where they live, or anything else. They’ll merge with the people and serve them to the best of their ability.” —Dr. Joshua Horn, “The Mass Line”, a wonderful 1971 speech available in full at: http://www.massline.info/China/JHorn-ML.htm

BARMBY, (John) Goodwyn   (1820-1881)
A British utopian socialist of the Victorian era. He and his wife Catherine were devoted followers of Robert Owen in the 1830s and 1840s, and were also strong feminists. They then shifted the focus of their attention to radical Christian Unitarianism.

BARTER
The exchange of commodities for each other without using the medium of money. For example, someone might trade a TV set for a piece of furniture. Or on the international level, one country might trade a number of tons of iron ore for a certain large number of bushels of wheat.
        Barter began in prehistoric times, before money even existed yet. The origin of money, in fact, lies in the tendency to compare the value of different bartered goods to a standard commodity (such as gold) which is relatively rare, indestructable, portable, and so forth. In the modern world, large-scale barter between nations is often an indication that no stable or otherwise acceptable common currency is available to smooth the transaction. Within a country, barter is sometimes used between individuals or companies to hide income and thus avoid paying taxes on that income.

BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
Concepts of historical materialism: The base (or “basis”, or “economic base”) is the totality of the underlying relations of production in a given society, or in other words, the underlying economic structure; the superstructure is the totality of all the social phenomena which ultimately arise from this base and depend upon it, but nevertheless also tend to influence the base in its turn. The superstructure therefore includes social consciousness (including all forms of ideology), human social relationships other than those which constitute the relations of production, and institutions and organizations that make up society, such as the State, political parties, law courts, churches, etc.

BASTARD KEYNESIANISM
A term coined by Joan Robinson to refer to various other bourgeois economists (especially Americans such as Paul Samuelson) who adopted aspects of the Keynesian perspective but crudely distorted it in the direction of standard neoclassical bourgeois economics, especially by covertly restoring the supposed validity of “Say’s Law”. The “bastards” distorted Keynes by arguing that, given a certain level of savings, the government could ensure enough investment, which Robinson found little different than the neoclassical claim that savings determines investment, and which ignored the effect of insufficient market demand (underconsumption) upon investment. Robinson complained that Keynes’ concept of “effective demand” had been abandoned and also that there was little concern for understanding what capital actually was.

“Say’s Law implied that there could not be a deficiency of demand; the bastard Keynesian doctrine takes the rate of saving as knowable and then through fiscal and monetary policy arranges an equal amount of investment, thus restoring Say’s Law. [Robinson says:] ‘Under its shelter all the old doctrines creep back again, even the doctrine that any given stock of capital will provide employment for any amount of labor at the appropriate equilibrium level.’” —Marjorie Shepherd Turner, Joan Robinson and the Americans (M.E. Sharpe, 1989, p. 111.)

BAUER, Bruno   (1809-1882)
German idealist philosopher and ideologist who was one of the “Young Hegelians”. He was a bourgeois Radical and became a national-liberal in 1866.

BAUER, Edgar   (1820-1886)
German political writer and “Young Hegelian”; the brother of the better-known Bruno Bauer (see above).

BAUER, Otto   (1882-1886)
A prominent Austrian Social-Democrat, and revisionist ideologist of the Second International.

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