COOLIES or COOLIE LABORERS
[‘Coolie’ is a derogatory word derived from the Hindi word kuli as well as the
Chinese word wuli which meant “bitter workers”.] Chinese workers who were intensely
exploited and often treated virtually as slaves. (On occasion unskilled laborers of other
nationalities have also been called “coolies”.)
Because of the worldwide anti-slavery
movement during the 19th century, which largely ended the international slave trade by
the middle part of that century (though slavery itself still existed in many countries), the
capitalist exploiters of the world were casting about for new sources of extremely cheap
labor to do the most onerous work. By the 1840s Chinese laborers were being brought to work
on plantations, railroads, in mines and elsewhere in many regions of the world, including
the United States, Hawaii [not yet grabbed by the U.S. though more and more controlled by
U.S. businessmen], British Columbia, Cuba, Colombia, Peru, the Dutch East and West Indies,
British Malaya, and South Africa. Between 250,000 and 500,000 Chinese workers emigrated to
those countries from 1847 to 1874. Many more emigrated from China later and were similarly
super-exploited.
COOPERATION — Evolution Of: Secondary Negative Aspects Of
Human beings are social creatures who have evolved both biologically and culturally to
be highly cooperative in the way that we live. Overall, of course, this is a very
positive thing. However, there may also be some secondary negative aspects to this. It is
quite possible, for example, that our human tendencies toward tribalism,
patriotism, and the ease with which our leaders get us to
follow them—even when it is not in our own interests to do so—are also results of the way
cooperation has evolved in humans and human society. To the degree that these things are
true there must be serious and ongoing efforts (such as education in socialist society) to
counteract these existing negative tendencies in human beings.
See also:
HUME’S PARADOX
“[The article] ‘How to Build a Dog,’ by Lyudmila Trut and Lee Alan
Dugatkin, describes a decades-long experiment in Siberia in which foxes were selectively
bred for tameness, resulting in physical traits we associate with dogs. Turning a fox
into a dog certainly offers insight into how our ancestors tamed other animals. But
maybe it also tells us something about how we tamed ourselves, changing from apes to
modern humans.
“The authors describe juvenile
facial characteristics as a component of the so-called domestication syndrome, and it
does distinguish us from our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Further,
docility is certainly necessary for large groups of humans to cooperate in urban
environments, even if it also predisposes us to ‘follow the leader,’ for good or for
ill.
“Fifty generations of foxes could
be bred in a single person’s lifetime, whereas 50 generations of humankind still take
us back only 1,500 years. How much have we been domesticating ourselves in the 10,000
years since agriculture and the first cities? Culture may be capable of driving biology
faster than we realize.” —Philip Early, of Bainbridge Island, Washington, in a letter
to the editor, Scientific American, Sept. 2017, p. 7.
[Mr. Early’s suggestion here
seems quite plausable: that human beings became more social and cooperative at least
in part because we continued juvenile features, incuding behaviors, into adulthood.
(The retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood is called neoteny in
biology.) But, alas, along with cooperation this may also include a tendency toward
subservience, excessive tendencies to believe what we are told without question, and
small-group thinking. To the extent that these tendencies actually exist within us, it
is necessary to struggle ferociously against them, and to change our culture in order
to do that. This, however, will almost certainly require a social revolution to fully
accomplish. —S.H.]
COOPERATION — In Nature
[Intro material to be added... ]
See also:
KROPOTKIN, Peter
“Of Darwin’s doctrine, I accept the theory of evolution, but
assume Darwin’s method of verification (struggle for life, natural selection) to be
merely a first, provisional, incomplete expression of a newly discovered fact. Before
Darwin, the very people who now, wherever they look, see nothing but the struggle
for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleshott and others), once laid particular stress
on co-operation in organic nature, the way in which the plant kingdom supplies
oxygen and food to the animal kingdom and, conversely, the latter supplies plants with
carbonic acid and manure, as indicated notably by Liebig. Both conceptions are to some
extent justified, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. The interaction
of natural bodies—both dead and living—comprises harmony as well as strife, struggle
as well as co-operation. Hence, if a self-styled naturalist takes it upon himself to
subsume all the manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and
meagre axiom ‘struggle for existence’, a phrase which, even in the field of nature,
can only be accepted cum grano salis [with a grain of salt], his method damns
itself from the outset.” —Engels, Letter to Pyotr Lavrov, November 12-17, 1875, MECW
45:106-7.
COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION (of Quantum Mechanics)
The absurdly idealist philosophical interpretation of
quantum mechanics put forth by Niels Bohr, Werner
Heisenberg, and their supporters. According to this bizarre conception, there is no such
thing as an objective world until it is perceived (or “measured”) by someone. Heisenberg,
for example, stated that “Some physicists would prefer to come back to the idea of an
objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or
trees exist independently of whether we observe them. This however is impossible.”
Another physicist, David Mermin of Cornell University, under the spell of the Copenhagen
Interpretation even went so far as to claim: “We now know that the moon is demonstrably
not there when nobody looks.” It is difficult to believe
that anyone can seriously put forward such nonsense!
In response to this sort of foolishness,
Albert Einstein commented: “The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving
subject is the basis of all natural science.” And he
added, more specifically, that “The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy—or religion?—is
so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true
believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused. So let him lie there.”
[All these quotations are taken from Nick Herbert,
Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (1987).]
See also:
COMPLEMENTARITY,
EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN THOUGHT EXPERIMENT,
SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT,
WAVE FUNCTION
“It seems we all face a fundamental paradox in that it’s impossible
to think about the universe except in terms of its relation to humans. You can’t
make sense of language or even scientific laws or mathematics, without the concept
of an observer, and yet at the same time we know perfectly well that humans are a
very late addition: the universe was here long before us and will be here long after
us.” —Michael Frayn, quoted in “All the World’s a Stage”, New Scientist,
Sept. 23, 2006.
[First of all, it is not
“impossible to think about the universe except in terms of its relation to humans”!
Frayn does this himself in this very paragraph when he mentions that the universe
existed long before humanity came to be, and will exist long after us. What is no
doubt really going on here is the perverse influence of the Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum mechanics which insists on inserting human perception of the world as a
necessary aspect of it. Some people cannot recognize a reduction to absurdity when
it slaps them in the face! —S.H.]
CORNFORTH, Maurice (1909-1980)
British Marxist philosopher who—although a lifelong member of the Communist Party of
Great Britain, a totally revisionist party at least from 1950 on—wrote some very useful
works on philosophy. After graduating from University College, London, in 1929, he was
awarded a research scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was the only
student in a specialized course in logic taught by G.E. Moore, R.B. Braithwaite, and
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cornforth’s first stance in philosophy was that of the early
linguistic analysis style as a follower of
Wittgenstein. This background provided him with the basis for his much later Marxist
critique of bourgeois analytic philosophy in his book Marxism and the Linguistic
Philosophy (1965).
Cornforth joined the Communist Party in
1931 and set up the party’s first organization at Cambridge. He gradually developed into
one of the leading ideologists of the CPGB, especially in philosophy. For example, after
World War II he strongly criticized the aesthetic and philosophical views of the vaguely
semi-Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell, who had become something of an influential
figure in “Left” circles in the years after his death in 1937 while fighting in Spain
against the fascists. From 1950 to 1975 Cornforth was also the managing director of
Lawrence & Wishart, the CPGB publishing house, where he was responsible for launching
the massive effort to publish the 50-volume edition of Marx and Engels Collected
Works. (Unfortunately, after the collapse of the CPGB, Lawrence & Wishart became
just another bourgeois company and notoriously demanded that the Marxist Internet
Archive remove the digital portions of the MECW which they had made freely available
online.)
Cornforth published his first major
work, Science Versus Idealism in 1946, which as its subtitle states was “an
examination of ‘pure empiricism’ and modern logic”. It provides a history of
empiricism and criticizes a large variety of empiricist theories including those of
Hume, Kant and Mach, Bertrand Russell’s “Logical Atomism”, Wittgenstein, “Logical
Positivism” and the Vienna Circle, etc. Another book, In Defense of Philosophy
appeared in 1950, and is similarly focused on criticisms of empiricist philosophical
theories including not only positivism but also its pragmatist variety as in William
James, etc. A more general work, the Readers’ Guide to the Marxist Classics
appeared in 1952. Though this is now a somewhat dated volume which is heavy on the views
of Stalin and has nothing by Mao, it is still valuable.
Cornforth’s most important work is his
3-volume set Dialectical Materialism: An Introduction. The best of this set,
Materialism and the Dialectical Method first appeared in 1953, and the 4th
revised edition came out in 1968. It is a good introduction to many topics, such as
idealism vs. materialism, the Marxist concept of metaphysics,
mechanical materialism, and the Marxist
philosophy of dialectical materialism in
general. Even though the revisionist CPGB was quite hostile to Mao and Maoism after the
“Sino-Soviet Split”, Cornforth continued in this work to put forth some of the important
contributions by Mao to dialectics. The second volume in this series, Historical
Materialism has some good material, but is more strongly infected with a revisionist
outlook, especially in the last two chapters. The third volume, The Theory of
Knowledge also has some good material in it. Another useful and important book by
Cornforth is his reply to Karl Popper’s spurious attacks on Marxism: The Open
Philosophy and the Open Society (1968).
Cornforth’s writings:
• Food and Farming for Victory, Communist Party Pamphlet (1942)
• Science Versus Idealism: An Examination
of “Pure Empiricism” and Modern Logic (1946). Online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/Britain/CPGB-Books/ScienceAndIdealism-Cornforth-1946.pdf
[Searchable PDF format: 18,498 KB]
• Dialectical Materialism and Science (1949; 68 pages).
Online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/Britain/CPGB-Pamphlets/DialecticalMaterialismAndScience-Cornforth-1949.pdf
• In Defense of Philosophy — Against Positivism and Pragmatism (1950)
• Science for Peace and Socialism (c.1950) with J. D. Bernal
• Readers’ Guide to the Marxist Classics (1952). Online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/Britain/ReadersGuideToMarxistClassics-1952.pdf
• Dialectical Materialism: An Introduction (3 vols.)
— Materialism & the Dialectical Method (1953;
4th rev. ed. 1968). A somewhat poor scan of the 4th edition is at:
https://archive.org/details/MaterialismDialecticalMethod
— Historical Materialism (1954; 2nd rev. ed. 1962)
A pretty good scan (but with a few marginal notes) is online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/Britain/CPGB-Books/HistoricalMaterialism-Cornforth-2ndEd-1962.pdf
[Searchable PDF format: 8,986 KB]
— Theory of Knowledge (1955; 3rd rev. ed. 1963)
A somewhat poor scan of the 3rd edition is at:
https://archive.org/details/CornforthTheoryOfKnowledge
• Rumanian Summer: A View of the Rumanian People’s Republic
(1953), co-author with Jack Lindsay. Online at:
https://archive.org/details/RumanianSummer
• “On the Theory of Socialist Revolution”, article in Marxist Quarterly,
July 1956. Seems to accept Khrushchev’s total denunciation of Stalin at face value. Online at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/cornforth/1956/theory-revolution.htm
• Philosophy for Socialists (1959)
• Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965; 2nd ed. 1967)
ISBN 0853151199, online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/MLM-Theory/Diamat/Analytic-LinguisticPhilosophy/MarxismAndTheLinguisticPhilosophy-Cornforth-1967-OCR-sm.pdf
[Searchable PDF format: 8,004 KB]
• The Open Philosophy and the Open Society: A Reply to Dr. Karl Popper’s
Refutations of Marxism (1968) ISBN 0853153841 Online at:
https://archive.org/details/CornforthOpenPhil
• Communism and Human Values (1972)
ISBN 0717803783
• Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in honour of A. L. Morton (1978),
editor ISBN 0853154805
• Communism & Philosophy: Contemporary Dogmas and Revisions of Marxism
(1980) ISBN 0853154309
CORPORATE DEBT
The debt owed by an individual corporation, or else by all the corporations in a given
country or given industry.
Why would a corporation, which has been
making profits and which expects to continue to exist as a profit-making entity, ever go
into debt? Well of course there may be periods, such as during a recession, when its
profits do not cover its expenses, and therefore when it needs to borrow money in order
to “tide it over” until conditions improve and it resumes making profits once again.
Similarly, an individual corporation may find that its product line has fallen out of
favor with consumers and that it needs to borrow money to re-tool or build a new factory
to produce some new or improved line of commodities. But interestingly enough, most
corporate debt is not taken on for rational reasons such as these. Instead, in modern
capitalism a huge amount of debt is often amassed by companies in order buy other
companies, or even for such rather frivolous reasons as to buy back part of their own
public stock! (This last option leads to personal profits for the corporate managers and
the other owners of that stock by driving up the stock price. It amounts to a method of
looting the company.)
You might think that corporations, which
after all often pull in enormous profits from their customers, might generally be flush
with cash, and in numerous cases they are. (See
CORPORATIONS—Cash Hoards Of below.) But
in many other cases companies have not retained their profits as a cash cushion,
or have blown it on unwise acquistions, or have simply been looted by banks, financial
institutions, and so-called “private equity” pirate operations. In these cases the
corporations are themselves very vulnerable if the economy should weaken or develop into
a recession. And if a number of large corporations fail during an economic crisis, that
crisis can then be greatly intensified. This perfectly describes the situation at present
(2018): a great many U.S. corporations are now quite vulnerable if a new financial crisis
and/or economic downturn should occur, despite the fact that corporate profit rates
at present are still near historic highs.
“Among corporations listed on the S&P 500 [stock] index, debt has
tripled since 2010 to one and a half times annual earnings—near the historic peaks
reached during the recessions of the early 1990s and 2000s. And in some parts of the
bond markets, debt loads are much higher.
“One of the big corporate debt
risks is developing largely beyond regulatory oversight. Some United States companies
that were publicly traded in 2008 have since gone private, often precisely in order
to avoid intensified scrutiny from regulators. Many of those companies were purchased
by private equity firms in deals that left the companies saddled with huge debts. Right
now the typical American company owned by a private equity firm has debt six times
higher than its annual earnings—or twice the level that a public ratings agency
would consider high risk or ‘junk’.” —Ruchir Sharma, Chief Global Strategist at
Morgan Stanley Investment Management, a big Wall Street firm, New York Times,
Sept. 19, 2018, p. A-19.
CORPORATE TAXES [U.S.]
“How much tax do corporations pay? In theory, their top tax
rate is 35 percent—one of the highest in the world. In reality, most U.S. companies
pay far less by exploiting tax breaks and loopholes. Of the 500 major companies in
the S&P 500 stock index, 115 paid a tax rate of less than 20 percent over the past
five years. Nearly 40 paid less than 10 percent. Boeing, for example, paid 4.5
percent in taxes on its profits over the past five years, Southwest Airlines paid
6.3 percent, and Yahoo paid 7 percent, according to research firm Capital IQ. General
Electric, one of America’s largest corporations, reportedly will pay little or no
federal tax on its $14.2 billion in global profits for 2010.
“Has it always been this
way? No. As a result of the loopholes and deductions added to the byzantine tax
code in recent decades, corporations pay a far smaller share of total U.S. taxes
than they once did. In the 1950s, Washington collected 30 percent of all its federal
revenue from business taxes. Last year, it was just 9 percent.” —The Week [a
bourgeois news magazine], Sept. 2, 2011, p. 13.
[Of course it is only liberals
who argue about whether corporate taxes are “too low” or not; Marxist revolutionaries
don’t think capitalist corporations should exist at all. —S.H.]
“Corporations are paying the lowest level of taxes in four decades.
Last year companies paid taxes of just 12.1 percent on their U.S. profits, the lowest
share since at least 1972 and far lower than the 25.6 percent they paid on average
from 1987 to 2008.” —A Wall Street Journal report quoted in The Week,
Feb. 17, 2012, p. 38.
“2/3 of US companies pay no federal income tax (and that was true even
before Trump and Congress slashed corporate tax rates).” —Mailing from Mother Jones
magazine, Dec. 28, 2018.
See also: TAX LAWYERS,
TAX LOOPHOLES, INVERSIONS
CORPORATION — As a “Person”
In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern
Pacific Railroad Company that a corporation has some of the same legal rights
as a person, a human being, has. Since then this absurd doctrine has been expanded
by the courts as well as in actual practice to cover other legal rights of persons under
the U.S. Constitution. At present this has reached the point where corporations now
ridiculously claim to have the right of “free speech”, and thus supposedly cannot be
prevented from spending millions of dollars to promote politicians who are in their pocket,
nor from indoctrinating the public with reactionary ideas and opinions that suit them.
Corporate capitalism already essentially controls the U.S. and the world, but this is not
enough for them. They want to keep expanding their control and power until it is
absolute, and the masses have no say whatsoever. Thus one liberal bourgeois constitutional
scholar, Garrett Epps, after attending Supreme Court hearings in 2009, expressed the
opinion that some Justices (such as John Roberts and Antonin Scalia) now seem to feel that
corporations do not simply enjoy the same rights as persons, but rather that they
actually enjoy greater rights than mere people do!
“Corporations are people, my friend!” —Mitt Romney, leading
candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, while campaigning in Iowa,
Aug. 11, 2011.
CORPORATIONS — Cash Hoards Of
During good economic times and booms, capitalist corporations do not generally keep huge
amounts of cash on hand, beyond what is needed for ordinary operating expenses and a
reserve fund for exceptional situations. Instead, they typically use their excess money
to invest in the expansion of production or else to pay off existing debt.
However, at the present time there is
a still-developing long-term overproduction
crisis in the U.S. and world capitalist economies. In this situation most corporations
can already produce all the goods they can sell with their existing factories and machinery
and have no reason at all to expand production to any greater excess over what they have
already done. Moreover, many of them have either little debt or else only have long-term,
low-interest debt, which does not need to be paid off soon. Furthermore, as of 2014
corporate profits are at or near record levels. In this situation U.S. corporations are
accumulating ever-greater hoards of cash which they simply do not know what to do with!
(Many, however, have been resorting to massive stock
buy-backs, to keep their piles of cash from growing quite so fast.)
In the chart at the right we see the
rapid accumulation of cash by American non-financial corporations over the last few years.
(This does not include the huge piles of money that banks and financial institutions have
also accumulated, let alone the trillions of dollars which the Federal Reserve has created
and made available to banks in its programs of quantitative
easing.)
The Economist noted in its caption
for this chart that:
“Corporate America is holding $1.73 trillion in cash, with the top
five companies hoarding almost half a trillion between them, according to a report
published by Moody’s Investor Services. The firm estimates $1.1 trillion (or 64%) of
the total is being held abroad, a 16% increase on the previous year, as companies
choose to take advantage of cheap borrowing costs at home to fund their spending,
rather than face the tax bill when repatriating profits. Technology firms are
increasingly responsible for this stockpiling of money. Tech companies now hold $690
billion in cash between them, more than double their 2009 holdings, and 40% of the
total. Apple alone holds $178 billion.” [May 16, 2015, p. 85.]
“By the Numbers:
“... 2.5 trillion dollars:
[The] estimated value of untaxed cash held overseas by US companies—equivalent to
almost 14 percent of the country’s GDP, according to CNBC.” —Miguel Salazar, The
Nation, Sept. 25/Oct. 2, 2017, p. 4. [Thus an additional reason for the
giant corporate cash hoards which are kept overseas is to avoid taxes on profits if
they are repatriated to the U.S. —Ed.]
CORPORATIONS — Extravagances Of
More and more of the world’s wealth is being captured by the giant multinational corporations.
This continues to be true even while the long-developing world capitalist
overproduction crisis intensifies, which means
that many big corporations are awash in huge cash hoards that they don’t know what to do
with. (See entry above.) This has led a number of them into a trend of creating enormously
wasteful monuments to themselves, on a par with the giant pyramids of the ancient Egyptian
pharaohs. The picture at the right is of the new enormously expensive Apple Corporation
headquarters now under construction in Silicon Valley (California), which is in the shape
of a giant space ship.
“Several months before he died in 2011, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder
and the mastermind of the project, predicted that the spaceship-like structure would
become ‘the best office building in the world’ and that people from everywhere would
travel to see it.
“To prove Jobs right, around 13,000
construction workers have labored for years behind thick, high walls. The site spans
several city blocks. Earlier this year, everything was hidden from view except cranes
and a huge sand pile that rose a few hundred feet high, like the Great Pyramid of
Giza. The scale of the project rivals the ancient Egyptians’ monuments. Every piece
of glass on the four-storey exterior is curved, requiring special panes to be made in
Germany—the largest pieces of curved glass ever manufactured. With a price tag of
around $5 billion, it may be the most expensive corporate headquarters in history.”
—“Versailles in the Valley: The
World’s mightiest technology firms are building monuments to their success”, The
Economist: 1843, April-May 2016, p. 35. [Can you imagine how many starving
children’s lives could be saved if Apple had instead donated this $5 billion to
alieviate world hunger? We are sure that thought
never occurred to the criminal bourgeois hero, Steve Jobs. —Ed.]
CORRUPTION
The extra-legal expropriation of wealth by some group or individuals (usually capitalists
and their servants) for their own benefit and personal aggrandizement. Corruption is
officially regarded as an evil in bourgeois society because it degrades the credibility
of the system in the eyes of the proletariat (and in some cases even destabilizes and
threatens the viability of the system itself). Corruption is supposed to be “policed” by
various regulatory and investigative bodies of the state. However, in the era of
monopoly-finance capitalism, the large enterprises and banks have become so powerful that
most “punishments” they receive are effectively little more than slaps on the wrist
designed to placate public hostility. Occasionally, however, some capitalist or servant
of capitalism is convicted of a particularly brazen crime and much fanfare is devoted to
the need for subsequent reforms intended to “prevent” people like this from being
empowered. Of course, corruption—and the personalities that partake in it!—are themselves
organic outgrowths of the basic relations of production in capitalist society, and are
another manifestation of how capitalists become “the embodiment of capital”. —L.C.
“It is hard to say which has sunk lower in the last three years,
the monarchy or the republic. The monarchy—on the continent of Europe, at least—is
everywhere assuming its final form. Caesarism, at an increasing pace. Everywhere
sham constitutionalism with universal suffrage, an overgrown army as the buttress
of government, bribery and corruption as the chief means of government, and
enrichment through corruption and fraud as the sole end of government, are
irresistibly undermining all the splendid constitutional guarantees, the artificial
balance of forces of which our bourgeois dreamt in the idyllic days of Louis Philippe,
when even the most corrupt were still angels of innocence compared with the ‘great
men’ of today. As the bourgeoisie daily loses the character of a class temporarily
indispensable in the social organism, shedding its specific social functions to
become a mere gang of swindlers, its state turns into an institution for the
protection, not of production, but of the overt theft of products.... The republic,
however, is not faring any better.” —Engels, “The Republic in Spain” (Feb. 1873),
MECW 23:417. [We wonder what Engels would have thought of the vastly more extreme
corruption in America today, when Wall Street swindlers control the government and
have been literally able to loot it and the public of trillions of dollars over the
past few years!]
CORRUPTION — Political
“In the last days of the [parliamentary] session, which ended on
Saturday, the Lower House was concerned almost exclusively with election scandals,
which have sprung up like mushrooms out of the ground and covered every wall of the
Houses of Parliament. There was a fearful stench of corruption, which harmonized
excellently with the odors of the Thames and would have nauseated the honorable
members if they had not been accustomed to such things. In some cases it was a
question of individuals who had bought or sold herds of British voters openly (and
that was the offence) like so many herds of sheep...” —From the “Political
Review” section of Das Folk, Aug. 19, 1859, MECW 16:637. [This German-language
newspaper was published in London and was at this time under the editorship of Marx,
who may have written this item.]
COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE
The theory or claim that on the large scale the universe is the same everywhere else as it
is here where we human beings are. Although this is a reasonable hypothesis, and there is
some considerable evidence for it, it is by no means absolutely certain.
“The most distant and ancient signals we have observed so far are the
cosmic microwaves, the signal primeval. We believe that they began their journey 14
billion years ago, and when we look at them (using a microwave camera), we see the way
the universe looked back then. Of course, that light (microwaves are low-frequency
light) is showing us what existed both a long time ago and very far away; it traveled
14 billion light-years of distance to reach us.
“To say we are looking back in
time, we have to make the assumption that the distant universe, 14 billion years ago,
was very similar to what our nearby part of the universe was like back then....
[T]hat postulate is given a fancy name: the cosmological principle.
Specifically, it asserts that the universe is homogeneous (like homogenized milk; it
is uniform in composition without big lumps) and isotropic (no special directions; no
large scale organized motion; it isn’t, for example, spinning). If you don’t want
other people to realize that you are making a drastic assumption, call it a principle.
Cosmological principle is an awesome name; if you called it the raisin bread
model, it wouldn’t be so compelling....
“There is good evidence that the
cosmological principle is roughly true, at least true enough for our purposes. As we
look around the universe, particularly nearby, we find things that are very similar
to those in our neighborhood. We are in the Milky Way Galaxy..., but there seem to be
huge numbers of similar galaxies out there, spread out and spreading further
throughout space. Pick a small region of sky and, using our best telescopes, count
the galaxies and extrapolate to the regions unexamined, and you conclude that there
are over a hundred billion visible galaxies—most with fewer stars than our Milky Way
has.”
—Richard A. Muller, Now:
The Physics of Time (2016), pp.136-7. Muller is a well-known bourgeois American
physicist.
COUNCIL FOR MUTUAL ECONOMIC AID (CMEA)
An intergovernmental council, known familiarly as Comecon, originally set up in
January 1949 by the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania, to promote
mutual trade and the coordination of the economic plans of the member countries. Even during
the Stalin era the organization tended to serve the economic interests of the Soviet Union
more so than any of the other member countries. (This was an aspect of the “great nation
chauvinism” that Stalin was sometimes guilty of.) But in the revisionist period in the
Soviet Union (mid-50s on) Comecon became more and more simply a means for the social-imperialists
to exploit the other nominally socialist countries under their thumb. This occurred through
bullied and unfair trade agreements, international planning decisions more favorable to the
development of the Soviet Union than to the other countries, and so forth.
Albania joined CMEA in February 1949, East
Germany (the German Democratic Republic) in 1950, Mongolia in 1962, Cuba in 1972 and Vietnam
in 1978. Yugoslavia became an associate member in 1964. In the late 1950s North Korea and
China acquired observer status, though after 1961 China no longer sent observers. After 1961
Albania also no longer participated. Romania weakened its connection to Comecon in 1973 and
moved closer to the European Community.
Comecon was initially hailed by supporters of
the Soviet Union as “the Russian Marshall Plan”. In its early days it did help to develop
the economies of the Eastern European countries. Besides developing general goals for trade
and technical assistance, Comecon organized joint scientific research and development.
In 1954 Comecon moved more in the direction of
economic integration of the member countries through the coordination of the various five-year
economic plans, and in 1955 production priorities were set for each country. Energy policies
were also coordinated. In 1961 “Basic Principles” for the long-term development of member
countries were drawn up. But Khrushchev’s proposals in 1962 for the creation of a single
economic plan and single planning authority for all the countries was rejected by the other
Comecon countries on the grounds that it was a major encroachment on their national
sovereignty. Romania was especially outraged by the Soviet “suggestion” that it should
specialize in agriculture instead of any all-round development of its economy.
In the Brezhnev era the Soviet
social-imperialists further stepped up their efforts to integrate the Comecon economies
under Soviet direction, but there was much resistance to this from all the countries except
Bulgaria whose lacky rulers seemed happy with its assigned agricultural role.
In 1963 Comecon set up the International
Bank for Economic Cooperation as an alternative to the IMF, and in 1970 the International
Investment Bank to finance projects that were part of coordinated five-year plans, and as an
alternative to the World Bank.
The Comecon countries agreed in 1970 to
medium and long-term economic cooperation up to 1980, and a central planning bureau was set
up in Moscow to direct this. In 1987 joint Comecon ventures between some productive
enterprises and research institutes in the USSR and Eastern European countries were
established. But the still crude forms of economic cooperation were illustrated by the fact
that profits from these joint enterprises could be returned in the form of commodities because
of the problems involved in currency negotiations. Overall, trade and economic cooperation
and integration within Comecon declined during the Gorbachev period.
By 1989 the increasingly market-oriented
ideology in all the Comecon countries led to many calls for less economic planning, and there
no longer seemed much point to CMEA to the revisionists. In June 1991 CMEA was formally
dissolved.
See also:
“INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOR”,
“INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST OWNERSHIP”,
“STRUCTURAL INTEGRATION”
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES — Suppression Of
“Without the system of democratic centralism, the proletarian dictatorship
cannot be consolidated. To practise democracy among the people and to practise dictatorship
over the enemies of the people, these two aspects are inseparable. When these two aspects
are combined, this is then proletarian dictatorship, or it may be called people’s democratic
dictatorship. Our slogan is: ‘A people’s democratic dictatorship, led by the proletariat,
and based on the alliance of the workers and peasants.’ How does the proletariat exercise
leadership? It leads through the Communist Party. The Communist Party is the vanguard of the
proletariat. The proletariat unites with all classes and strata who approve of, support and
participate in the socialist revolution and socialist construction, and exercises
dictatorship over the reactionary classes or the remnants thereof. In our country the system
of exploitation of man by man has already been eliminated. The economic foundations of the
landlord class and the bourgeoisie have been eliminated. The reactionary classes are now no
longer as ferocious as hitherto. For example, they are no longer as ferocious as in 1949
when the People’s Republic was founded, nor as ferocious as in 1957 when the right-wing
bourgeoisie madly attack us. Therefore we speak of them as the remnants of the reactionary
classes. But we may on no account underestimate these remnants. We must continue to struggle
against them. The reactionary classes which have been overthrown are still planning a
come-back. In a socialist society, new bourgeois elements may still be produced. During the
whole socialist stage there still exist classes and class struggle, and this class struggle
is a protracted, complex, sometimes even violent affair. Our instruments of dictatorship
should not be weakened; on the contrary they should be strengthened. Our security system is
in the hands of comrades who follow the correct line. It is possible that the security
departments in some places may be in the hands of bad people. There are also some comrades
engaged on security work who do not rely on the masses or on the Party. In the work of
purging counter-revolutionaries, they do not follow the line of purging them with the help
of the masses under the leadership of the Party committee. They rely solely on secret work,
on so-called professional work. Professional work is necessary; it is absolutely necessary
to use the methods of detection and trial to deal with counter-revolutionary elements, but
the most important thing is to carry out the mass line under the leadership of the Party
committee. When we are concerned with dictatorship over the whole reactionary class, it is
especially important to rely on the masses and the Party. To exercise dictatorship over the
reactionary classes does not mean that we should totally eliminate all reactionary elements,
but rather that we should eliminate the classes to which they belong. We should use
appropriate methods to remold them and transform them into new men. Without a broad people’s
democracy, proletarian dictatorship cannot be consolidated and political power would be
unstable. Without democracy, without the mobilization of the masses, without mass supervision,
it will be impossible to exercise effective dictatorship over the reactionary and bad
elements, and it will be impossible effectively to remold them. Thus they would continue to
make trouble and might still stage a come-back. This problem demands vigilance, and I hope
comrades will give a great deal of thought to this too.” —Mao, “Talk at an Enlarged Central
Work Conference”, Jan. 30, 1962; in Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters:
1956-1971 (1974), ed. by Stuart Schram, pp. 167-9.
“COUNTERVAILING POWER”
1. The erroneous theory in bourgeois so-called
“political science” that there are generally two or more centers of political power in society
which oppose each other and serve as “balances” or countervailing forces toward each other. This
notion is directly opposed to the Marxist view of the state as
virtually always being totally dominated by one or another social class to the point where it can
only be viewed as the dictatorship of that ruling class. Of
course, in modern society a relatively tiny ruling class such as the bourgeoisie must deny that
it is exercising a dictatorship and try to pretend that it is merely “one force among many” in
society.
2. The absurd liberal reformist doctrine that in
the United States a coalition of labor unions, small businesses, small investors, “progressive”
social forces and locally-based political parties (and especially the Democratic Party) can
“balance” the power of giant corporations, big banks and Wall Street, and implement and secure
major changes for the better in American society. This view also totally denies that there is a
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the U.S.,
and claims that “potentially at least” there is some actual democracy within American society
today.
The term “countervailing power” was popularized
by the liberal bourgeois economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his book American Capitalism
(1952) where he argued that the otherwise excessive power advantages of huge corporations and
banks could be offset in the labor market by powerful labor unions and within the political
system by these unions in alliance with small businessmen, citizens’ organizations, and so
forth.
The original inspiration for this idea was the
supposed great success of the New Deal in the 1930s. However, the very limited improvements in
capitalist society in the New Deal were only possible because of the extreme economic crisis of
capitalism during the Great Depression and the desperation
of the ruling class itself to maintain control by granting some temporary concessions to the
working class. Moreover, it was only possible for the ruling class to continue many of these
concessions for the quarter century following World War II because that war had temporarily
resolved the U.S. and world capitalist overproduction
crisis. However, that post-war boom came to an end in the mid-1970s, and since then there
has been a long period during which the New Deal social benefits and welfare state have been
gradually rolled back in the direction of eventual total elimination. The unions, the key
economic force which Galbraith and others have identified as a “countervailing power” to
corporations and Wall Street have been weakened to the point where they hardly matter any more.
(The percentage of unionized workers in U.S. private industry has fallen all the way down to
just 7.4% by 2015, and even those unions have little fight left in them. And, as far as political
influence goes, the richest fraction of 1% of the population donates far more to politicians than
all the unions put together now do.)
In short, whatever very limited and temporary
aspect of truth there may have once been to the notion of any “countervailing power” against the
corporations and the banks, it has now disappeared for good. Despite this, there continue to be
liberal reformers who still believe in the theory and still try to fool the working class into
believing it too. (See the quotes below from Robert Reich.)
“[The] ... centers of countervailing power that between the 1930s
and the late 1970s enabled America’s middle and lower-middle classes to exert their own
influence [in opposition to the big corporations and Wall Street]—labor unions, small
businesses, small investors, and political parties anchored at the local and state
levels—have withered. The consequence has been a market organized by those with great
wealth for the purpose of further enhancing their wealth. This has resulted in ever-larger
upward pre-distributions inside the market, from the middle class and poor to a
minority at the top....
“[T]he pay of average workers has gone
nowhere because they have lost their aforementioned countervailing economic power and
political influence....
“[T]he solution is not to create more or
less government. The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is
for. The remedy is for the vast majority to regain influence over how the market
is organized. This will require a new countervailing power, allying the economic
interests of the majority who have not shared the economy’s gains....
“My conclusion is that the only way to
reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the
game [in the American capitalist economy] to become organized and unified, in order to
re-establish the countervailing power that was the key to widespread prosperity five
decades ago.”
—Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary
of Labor in the Bill Clinton administration, in his book Saving Capitalism
(2015), pp. xiv-xv.
[Of course Reich is entirely correct
when he says that the basic problem is “whom the government is for”. But what he
can’t understand or accept is that there is a capitalist ruling class and has been one
all along. He himself admits that the rich totally control the economy and the government.
And yet he still believes in the system that the enemy capitalist class totally controls;
he still imagines that “American democracy” can be made to work in the interests of the
people, despite the fact that it is the total instrument of the bourgeoisie for
maintaining and extending their wealth and political control of the country. —S.H.]
“But over the past three decades, countervailing power has almost
vanished from American politics. Labor unions have been decimated. In the 2012
presidential election, the richest 0.01 percent of households gave Democratic candidates
more than four times what unions contributed to their campaigns.
“Small retailers have been displaced
by Walmart and Amazon. Local banks have been absorbed by Wall Street behemoths.
“And both political parties have
morphed into giant national fundraising machines. The Democratic National Committee, like
its Republican counterpart, is designed mainly to suck up big money.” —Robert Reich, in
a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 21, 2016, p. E8.
[After thus all but admitting that
there is really no objective basis whatsoever for any “countervailing power” within the
American economy or politics, Reich nevertheless went on to say that Hillary Clinton, if
she is elected president, will have to try to construct such a force from the defeated
Bernie Sanders supporters if she hopes to get anything at all accomplished in her term
of office. So what does Reich expect? That Clinton, this repulsive politician who concerns
herself with nothing except her own career, will urge the masses to riot in the streets
to promote real social change? How foolish can you be! —S.H.]
COVID-19
The serious respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 corona virus.
“Covid-19” is a shortened form of “corona virus disease 2019”. It is thought that the virus causing
this disease originally came from bats, and may have had another intermediate animal host before
finally reaching humans. (This is what happened with the related SARS corona virus disease.)
This disease first arose in December 2019,
apparently in a public marketplace where meat from wild animals was sold, in Wuhan, China. The
highly contagious disease then spread around China and the whole world in a major
pandemic. As of late September 2020, one million people around the
world, especially the elderly, have already died from it, and no one knows yet how big the final
total will be. More than one million Americans have caught the disease and over 200,000 have
already died from it.
In China the disease was recognized early on by
physicians as a new and dangerous outbreak, but the local politicians of the fascist regime
there refused to believe it and tried to punish those doctors for spreading unjustified rumors.
The earliest of these heroic whistle-blowing doctors, Li Wenliang, himself contracted Covid-19
and died from it. However, China—to its credit—did eventually start to take the epidemic seriously,
and used the method of contact-tracing and isolating humans from each other to the maximum degree
possible and has almost completely brought the outbreak under control. (But it should also be
added that this has been done in a very authorian way, via extremely strict top-down orders,
rather than by educating and organizing the masses themselves in a mass
line way as would have certainly been done during the Maoist/socialist era in China.)
Curiously, other countries have been slow to
learn from China’s experience, and only began serious measures to try to isolate those infected
after the disease was already partially out of control. This was especially the case in Italy
and Iran early on in the pandemic, though many other countries have followed the same path.
The response by the authorities in the U.S. has
been one of the very worst in the entire world. In the decades before this pandemic the U.S.
government steadily decreased its funding and preparations for such an outbreak—even though
scientists have long predicted that something like this was inevitable some day. In May 2018
the Trump administration closed down the National Security Council’s global health security
unit—the very office that was supposed to make sure the U.S. was ready for such a pandemic and
then lead in dealing with it should it occur. In addition the government speeded up the slashing
of support for hospitals and public health programs in general. During the critical early period
of the outbreak in the U.S., starting in January 2020, Trump and his administration continually
tried to deny or pooh-pooh the dangers of the corona virus disease. Only in late March 2020,
after things got much more perilous, did they start to take some limited though still fairly
ineffective action. Way too little, and way too late, continues to characterize the U.S. response
to the pandemic.
On top of all this, the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control (CDC) decided not to use the World Health Organization’s existing Covid-19 diagnostic
test procedure, and instead started from scratch to develop its own. (This is an example of how
American imperialist arrogance intrudes even into science and health matters!) The CDC’s own test
kits were very slow in coming, and initially they were unreliable, or even failed to work at all.
Thus the U.S. has been extremely slow to start testing sick people to see if they actually have
Covid-19. This in turn seriously interferes with the urgent need to isolate genuine carriers of
the Covid-19 virus. As of late Summer 2020 this sad story still continues; test kits are still in
short supply, not fully reliable, and slow to provide a yes-or-no answer as to whether someone
has Covid-19. Thoughout the year 2020 the disease has been getting more and more out of control
in the U.S., though with varying rates of expansion from month to month. The anti-science and
anti-people attitude of the U.S. ruling class has led to a vastly increased number of deaths in
this country. This is yet another in the endless series of crimes of American capitalist-imperialism,
even within its own country.
Besides the sickness and deaths, the Covid-19
disease pandemic is also leading to extremely serious economic and financial problems in the U.S.
and for the whole world. If the underlying world capitalist overproduction crisis were not so
advanced, this might only be a short term problem. But the danger, and perhaps even the
likelihood at this point, is that the very serious economic and financial impact of Covid-19
might tip the U.S. and the world not merely into a bad recession, but much worse than even
that—into an outright long-lasting depression. We will likely soon find out.
See also:
CONTACT TRACING,
“FLATTENING THE CURVE”,
HERD IMMUNITY,
HOSPITALS
COVIDIOT
[Usually pronounced: cov-idiot] A pejorative term for someone who ignores health and safety
guidelines and advice which is provided by medical experts for the purpose of preventing the further
spread of the Covid-19 disease [see above]. This term arose in the U.S. in 2020 in reaction to the
utter foolishness of many ignorant or reactionary people (especially right-wing Trump followers) who
refused to wear masks in public, follow social distancing recommendations, and avoid unnecessary
social gatherings. Many such people, initially at least, denied that Covid-19 was a serious disease,
or even that it really existed at all. It was, they claimed, a “media invention”.
“Jodi Doering, an emergency room nurse at a South Dakota hospital, is a daily
witness to just how sick our country has become. People severely ill with Covid-19 are flooding
her hospital, suffering also from an extreme case of cognitive
dissonance: They’ve been told the pandemic was a concoction of the fake news media. ‘They tell
you there must be another reason they are sick,’ an exhausted Doering recounted on Twitter this
week. Even while gasping for breath, she says, the patients insist ‘they don’t have Covid because
it’s not real.’ The delusional talk only stops when these patients get intubated or die. ‘It’s
like a f---ing horror movie that never ends,’ Doering says.
“This horror movie is now playing in hospitals
in large swathes of the U.S., most frequently in states where coronavirus denialism is rampant. The
test positivity rate in South Dakota is a breathtaking 58 percent, yet Gov. Kristi Noem continues
to refuse to impose mask mandates or other restrictions. ‘My people are happy,’ she recently said.
‘They’re happy because they’re free.’ Struggling for breath in an ICU, or being zipped into a body
bag, is a strange sort of freedom, but such is the surreal state of the nation’s leadership in the
annus horribulis [horrible year] of 2020.... The scientists may rescue us in the spring
with vaccines..., but how many more people will perish or become debilitated by Covid before they
arrive? Freedom without responsibility is manslaughter.” —William Falk, editor-in-chief, The
Week magazine, Nov. 27, 2020, p. 4.
[The personal freedom to “do as you please”
ends of course when that means harming others. Refusing to follow reasonable rules such as wearing
masks and social distancing in the middle of a pandemic can in fact lead to harm or even the deaths
of other people. And those, like Donald Trump and many of his fanatical followers, who refuse to
establish such reasonable rules and who purposely spread Covid denialism in order to promote
their fascist or semi-fascist political agenda are indeed guilty of mass murder. —Ed.]
CPM
See: COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MARXIST)
CPSU
See: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
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