BEAUTY
The qualities or collection of qualities in a person or thing which gives great pleasure to the
senses and thus stirs ones emotions. In the 19th century beauty was considered
to be the exclusive, or else by far the main, concern in the philosophy of art. But over the past
century aesthetics has expanded to include a great many other
concerns, such as questions about what sort of thing a work of art is, why art is so important to
human beings and why it has such a great impact on us, what the relation is between art and society,
and so forth. Even the answer to the question “What makes a work of art a good work?”, which was
formerly assumed to be simply beauty has now been greatly expanded to include things such
as the effect of the work upon society, the degree to which the work influences other artists, etc.
In short, beauty, while still quite important in aesthetics, is no longer all-important.
BELL, Daniel (1919-2011)
American bourgeois sociologist best known for his theories of so-called “post-industrialism”
(a term which he coined). His early career was spent as a journalist on various establishment
magazines, including 10 years working for the corporate business magazine Fortune.
A favorite theme in bourgeois sociology is
that capitalist ideology has triumphed for all time and that all other ideologies, and
especially Marxism, are now “dead”. The ruling class therefore welcomed with open arms his
influential book The End of Ideology (1960) which proclaimed the “exhaustion” of
non-bourgeois ideas. His obituary in the Economist (Feb. 5, 2011) wryly noted, however,
that “His timing could hardly have been worse: the 1960s was one of the most ideologically
charged decades in American history.” And, indeed, we are now once again entering another period
of rising anti-capitalist ideology, as is inevitable when capitalism sinks into crisis.
In his book The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society (1973), Bell noted the ongoing relative expansion of service industries (as compared
with manufacturing), the growth of technology industries (as compared with old-line industries),
the rise of what are now often called “knowledge workers” (as opposed to blue-collar and
clerical workers), and the waning of the class struggle in the United States. The first and
second of these trends were indeed occurring, but in characterizing this as the rise of
“post-industrial society” Bell failed to appreciate the absolutely essential nature of the
continuing manufacturing base in any economy. The long-term gradual destruction of the
manufacturing base in the United States, which has been going on for decades now, has become
one major aspect of its extremely serious structural crisis.
Bell’s third idea, about the rise of “knowledge
workers” was also true for a time. But we are now in a period when even “knowledge work” is in
very serious decline in the U.S. One reason is the offshoring
of more and more of this work overseas. The other, deeper, reason is that computers are now
leading to the automation of not just manufacturing and clerical jobs, but also ever-growing
numbers of “high-tech” jobs. Bell’s fourth idea, about the decline of the class struggle in
the U.S. also reflected a temporary phenomenon, which was only possible because of the expansion
of American imperialism and the intensified exploitation of other countries. In recent decades,
and especially since the collapse of the “New Economy” bubble around 2001, the ruling class
has been forced to spread around ever fewer crumbs from the imperialist banquet table to the
U.S. working class. In general Bell recognized some contemporary socioeconomic trends circa
1970, but did not begin to understand the limits of those trends.
Bell’s book The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism (1976) worries that capitalist culture promotes insatiable desires for endless
self-gratification by people, which might destroy the work ethic which he, like Max Weber,
claims was a major factor in the development of capitalism. In fact, this type of unrestrained
consumerism has helped promote huge debt bubbles which have allowed capitalism to avoid sinking
into a new depression for as long as it has. Capitalism needs debt bubbles to function
at all, and a culture which promotes such bubbles is therefore also necessary to it—despite
the obvious fact that all such bubbles must burst in the end.
Daniel Bell considered himself to be a social
democrat at least through the 1970s, and as late as 1978 wrote that “I am a socialist in
economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” However, this was always the
absurdly phony “socialism” of those who think that socialism is compatible with capitalism. Bell
served on a couple Presidential advisory commissions in the 1960s and 1970s, and was a life-long
ideologist of the bourgeoisie. He was always totally opposed to genuine socialism and social
revolution.
BELL’S THEOREM
A logical demonstration, derived by physicist John S. Bell, from the axioms and postulates of
quantum mechanics, that one or the other of the following
two options must be true:
1) We must deny that particles (and other, larger
quantum mechanical entities) have any definite properties until they are measured; or
2) We must allow that the separate and
isolated particles in the universe are somehow connected with others distantly located in a way
which allows instantaneous communication between them. (This option seems to violate
Special Relativity.)
Bell’s Theorem has been used to argue for the
absurd Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum
mechanics and against any possible validity for the
Hidden-Variables Interpretation. Obviously
neither option is very palatable to materialists, though perhaps the second is slightly less
repulsive than the first.)
However, several lines of opposition to the
conclusions of Bell’s Theorem are possible. For example, the conclusions seem to only hold
within the framework of quantum mechanics. If there is some way to investigate particles
(or other aspects of the physical world) in a non-quantum-mechanical way, then Bell’s Theorem
may not even apply. Moreover, we know that in the macro world we have all sorts of ways of
investigating reality in non-quantum-mechanical ways. The issue would then be whether or not
there are similar methods to investigate the micro world.
Another possible line of opposition to Bell’s
Theorem may lie in simply rejecting or reformulating one or more of the axioms and postulates
that Bell used to prove his theorem.
Yet another line of attack on this apparently
idealist theorem is to demand some coherent explanation of what “measurement” is supposed to
amount to in quantum mechanics. (This has never yet been completely clarified.) We should by no
means just assume that Bell’s Theorem is actually sound and applicable to all of reality.
Personally, I’m quite sure that one of these forms of criticism of the Theorem will shoot it
down in the end.
BELL TRADE ACT
A law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1946 which re-established U.S. imperialist economic domination
of the Philippines after World War II, and in effect restored U.S. economic control of the
Philippines. The act had five major provisions: 1) It established reciprocal free trade (which favors
the dominant country) until 1954, after which gradually increasing duties could be imposed on both
sides until 1973 when full trade tariffs could be imposed; 2) The Philippines was prohibited from
imposing taxes on exports to the U.S.; 3) Absolute quotas (limits) were imposed on 7 important
Philippine exports to the U.S. (including sugar, coconut oil, hemp and tobacco); 4) It established a
pegged rate of exchange between the Philippine peso and the dollar, so that the Philippines could
not alter the exchange rate or impose restrictions on the transfer of money to the U.S. [In other
words the U.S. had control over the Philippine currency.]; and 5) Granted the U.S. President the
authority to suspend any part of the act if he should decide that the Philippines was discriminating
in any way against U.S. citizens or business interests.
At the same time the U.S. Congress passed the
Philippine Rehabilitation Act which provided $620 million in war damage payments to the Philippines,
but only on the condition that the Philippines agreed to the Bell Trade Act. (This was the carrot
that the U.S. dangled along with their big stick.) Part of this act also required “parity rights”
for U.S. citizens in the Philippines equal to the economic rights of Filipinos in their own country.
The Bell Trade Act enraged many Filipinos, but the compliant Philippine government voted to accept
it. In 1955 the Bell Trade Act was modified by the somewhat less onerous Laurel-Langley agreement.
BENTHAM, Jeremy (1748-1832)
English moral philosopher and judicial reformer, and one of the main founders of
utilitarianism. Bentham, more than anyone, was responsible
for giving utilitarianism its bourgeois, hedonist twist.
Marx appropriately calls Bentham “an
arch-Philistine” and an “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois
intelligence of the 19th century”. In a footnote he adds: “With the dryest naivete
he [Bentham] takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man.
Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is abolutely useful. This
yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future.... [Bentham is] a genius in the
way of bourgeois stupidity.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. XXIV, sect. 5: (International,
pp. 609-610; Penguin, pp. 758-9.)
See also:
Philosophical doggerel
about Bentham.
BERNANKE, Ben (1953- )
A prominent American bourgeois economist who was appointed by President George W. Bush to
succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the
Federal Reserve System on February 1, 2006.
Four years later President Obama reappointed Bernanke for a second 4-year term. Bernanke has
overseen the Federal Reserves’s greatest increase in power since its initial creation in 1913.
But he was incapable of preventing (or to this point resolving) the great financial crisis
that developed so ferociously in the fall of 2008.
Bernanke is supposed to be one of the
greatest “authorities” on the financial and economic aspects of the
Great Depression of the 1930s, but as the following
quotation shows, he doesn’t even understand the basic cause of that Depression. In
a speech in honor of the ultra-reactionary bourgeois economist, Milton Friedman, he said:
“Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official
representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna [Schwartz,
Friedman’s coauthor]: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re
very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” —FRB Speech: Remarks by Governor
Ben S. Bernanke, At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago,
Chicago, Illinois, November 8, 2002.
Thus Bernanke does not even recognize that depressions are inherent in the
capitalist mode of production! Instead, like most bourgeois economists, he thinks the (last)
Great Depression was entirely due to “mistakes” on the part of government officials. Meanwhile,
he is in charge of the U.S. economy as it stumbles in the direction of the next Great
Depression! While the massive Keynesianism of both the Bush and Obama administrations, which
Bernanke supported, is indeed mitigating the current crisis for a while and to a degree,
that crisis is still developing, and—with ups and downs—will continue to do so. In the
end Bernanke and his fellow bourgeois economists will be left scratching their heads and
wondering, “What the hell happened?!”
BETHUNE, Norman (1890-1939)
Norman Bethune was a Canadian surgeon and Communist who worked in Spain in support of the
Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and who later went to China to work in the medical
core of what became the People’s Liberation Army. He died in China in 1939 of blood poisoning
after nicking himself with a scalpel during a long day of operations on wounded soldiers.
In his early medical career in Canada he
recognized that many of the greatest health problems arose because poor people did not have
adequate access to the health care system; from the failure of the health system to focus on
preventive medicine; and from other consequences of the capitalist social system in general.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s Bethune
frequently sought out the poor and provided them with free medical care. He was also one of
the earliest advocates of a national health care system for everyone (“socialized medicine”).
While in Spain he developed the world’s first
mobile medical unit which administered blood-transfusions and operated on soldiers near the
front lines, thus saving many lives. In China he further developed this idea into more complete
mobile surgical hospitals which saved the lives of a great many revolutionary soldiers. (Other
armies later copied this idea, including the United States Army which developed its “Mobile
Army Surgical Hospital” (M.A.S.H.) units late in World War II and more extensively in Korea
and other imperialist wars.)
After his death, Mao Zedong immortalized
Bethune’s internationalist revolutionary spirit in a very famous essay, “In Memory of Norman
Bethune” [available online at:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_25.htm ].
Ever since then Norman Bethune has been an inspiration to both the Chinese people, and to all
Communists around the world.
“[Comrade Norman Bethune] arrived in Yenan in the spring of last year,
went to work in the Wutai Mountains, and to our great sorrow died a martyr at his post.
What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the cause of the
Chinese people’s liberation as his own? It is the spirit of internationalism, the spirit
of communism, from which every Chinese Communist must learn....
“Comrade Bethune and I met only
once. Afterwards he wrote me many letters. But I was busy, and I wrote him only one
letter and do not even know if he ever received it. I am deeply grieved over his death.
Now we are all commemorating him, which shows how profoundly his spirit inspires everyone.
We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness from him. With this spirit everyone
can be very useful to the people. A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has
this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above
vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people.” —Mao, “In Memory of Norman
Bethune” (Dec. 21, 1939), SW2:337-8.
BHOODAN ANDOLAN [“Land Gift Movement”]
A voluntary land reform movement in India started by Archarya Vinoba Bhave in 1951. It was
launched in the same naïve spirit of the philosophy of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and begged
the landlords to simply give some of their excess land to the landless poor. A few did so,
out of guilt or to appear beneficent or else from fear that they might otherwise lose all of
their land through mass violence. However, compared to the great need for land by the poor,
only a pittance was donated. Moreover, much of the donated land was of poor quality, and
actually unsuitable for agriculture. Even worse, much of the supposedly “donated” land was
actually given in name only, with the rich landlords retaining possession and control in
reality.
For a recent Times of India report
(Dec. 10, 2009) describing how farmers who have supposedly been the “beneficiaries” of this
“Land Gift Movement” are now completely disillusioned and turning to revolution, see:
“Bhoodan Farmers Ready to Emulate Maoists”
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