HEDGE FUND [Capitalist Finance]
A private and aggressively speculative investment fund usually managed by Wall Street insiders
for the benefit of themselves and other very rich investors. The first hedge funds were
designed to try to preserve capital during economic and financial downturns, which is why they
have that name. (“Hedging” against market downturns.) But the nature of most hedge funds today
is that of highly speculative operations hoping to make profits far above those achievable
through ordinary investments in stocks and bonds. They often speculate in foreign currencies
and their exchange rates, the prices of bulk commodities, and in higher profit (but riskier)
foreign investments. This leads them to shift large amounts of “hot money” rapidly from one
investment to another, and from country to country. They frequently use sophisticated forms of
arbitrage, sometimes based on complicated mathematical models.
In addition they often rely on better financial information, on insider knowledge (though that
is supposedly illegal), high-speed computers to make rapid market trades, and other methods
which—in effect—allow them to cheat other investors.
In most countries hedge funds are only very
loosely regulated, if at all. They have grown rapidly in recent decades and are a major
indication of the financialization of the U.S. and world
capitalist economies. They are an additional destabilizing factor in contemporary capitalism.
As of around 2010, U.S. hedge funds have assets under management estimated to be more than $1.9
trillion dollars.
See also:
LONG-TERM CAPITAL MANAGEMENT
HEDONISM [In Ethics]
The view that ‘good’ means pleasure (or relief from suffering), or that everything is (or
should be) done for pleasure (or to relieve suffering).
Hedonism: Maximizing Pleasure and Minimizing Pain. Another
very common ethical theory is that pleasure is the greatest good, and pain the greatest
evil. Therefore, morality consists in striving to maximize the amount of pleasure for
everyone, and striving to minimize the amount of pain. Like most ethical theories, this
sounds fairly plausible at first, but cannot withstand even a cursory critical
examination.
For one thing, human beings have
many other needs and interests besides pleasure and avoiding pain, and far more than
just those two things goes into making the good life.
Suppose some society could be
constructed where everyone (or at least most people) were both very happy and as free
of all pain as could reasonably be arranged. But suppose this society was also an
authoritarian dictatorship, where people had no political freedom, no control over their
own lives, were severely exploited, and so forth. Perhaps this might be some sort of
fascist society where the people were nevertheless psychologically “happy” because of
both extreme indoctrination and the liberal availability of hallucinatory drugs.
Obviously this would be a nightmare society, and not at all a moral society. Even a
somewhat milder version of this sort of thing, such as is pictured in Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World (1932), is a horrible nightmare.
The roots of this ethical theory,
too, go way back. Epicurus (341-270 BCE) held that the practical goal of philosophy was
to secure happiness (or at least to avoid all discomfort), and that pleasure was the
sum total of happiness. The modern theory of “promote pleasure, minimize pain”, however,
derives primarily from the utilitarians (most of whom would be better called “hedonists”,
if that did not have such negative connotations). Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832), in particular, is responsible for giving utilitarianism its
hedonistic twist. Utilitarianism, as its name suggests, was originally concerned more
with “utility” or “usefulness”, but critics raised the question of “useful for what?”,
and that led Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and other utilitarians into this very one-sided
hedonist perversion of what was originally a much more sensible ethical theory. [...]
Experiments have been done on lab
rats that clearly demonstrate that there is a whole lot more to “the good life” than
merely experiencing even the most intense feelings of pleasure. In the brains of all
higher animals (and perhaps many of the lower ones as well), there is a region known as
“the pleasure center”. Tiny wires have been inserted into this region of a rat’s brain,
and things set up so that when the rat pushes a lever, its pleasure center is stimulated.
The pleasure is so intense that the rat keeps pushing the lever over and over again,
until it is physically totally exhausted and unable to continue. It may not even eat,
drink, or do anything else. And eventually it dies. Human drug addicts are sometimes
perhaps in a similar situation, although they generally still have the sense to at least
pull away for some food, water, and sleep once in a while. Nevertheless, it should be
obvious from examples like this that the simple-minded theory that “happiness and the
avoidance of pain” are all that matters cannot reasonably be considered to be the sole
basis of either the good life or of any sort of morality. —S.H., An Introduction to
the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Class Interest Theory of Ethics, Chapter 1, section 1.2C,
from the draft of 6/14/07 as posted at:
http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/MLM-Ethics-Ch1-2.pdf
HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770-1831)
German idealist philosopher who conceived of the world as a single organism developing
through stages via its own internal dialectical logic, and gradually coming to embody
reason.
Hegel’s most important and positive
contribution to philosophy was his development of dialectics,
which was adopted by Marx and then reconstructed in a rational, materialist form.
In ethics, Hegel emphasized the collective
nature of morality and argued that it could not be understood except in terms of the social
relations within the family, among individuals, and within the state.
See also:
Philosophical doggerel about
Hegel.
“Hegel’s logic cannot be applied in its given form, it
cannot be taken as given. One must separate out from it the logical
(epistemological) nuances, after purifying them from the mysticism of ideas: that is
still a big job.” —Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Lectures on the History of
Philosophy” (1915), LCW 38:266.
“Although Hegel himself was an admirer of the autocratic Prussian
state, in whose service he was as a professor at Berlin University, Hegel’s
teachings were revolutionary. Hegel’s faith in human reason and its rights,
and the fundamental thesis of Hegelian philosophy that the universe is undergoing
a constant process of change and development, led some of the disciples of the
Berlin philosopher—those who refused to accept the existing situation—to the idea
that the struggle against this situation, the struggle against existing wrong and
prevalent evil, is also rooted in the universal law of eternal development. If all
things develop, if institutions of one kind give place to others, why should the
autocracy of the Prussian king or of the Russian tsar, the enrichment of an
insignificant minority at the expense of the vast majority, or the domination of
the bourgeoisie over the people, continue for ever? Hegel’s philosophy spoke of the
development of the mind and of ideas; it was idealistic. From the development
of the mind it deduced the development of nature, of man, and of human, social
relations. While retaining Hegel’s idea of the eternal process of development, Marx
and Engels rejected the preconceived idealist view; turning to life, they saw that
it is not the development of mind that explains the development of nature but that,
on the contrary, the explanation of mind must be derived from nature, from matter.”
—Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1896), LCW 2:21.
HEGELIAN DIALECTICS VS. MATERIALIST DIALECTICS
“By the way, half intentionally and half from lack of insight, he
[Dühring] practices deception [in his review of volume I of Marx’s Capital].
He knows very well that my method of presentation is not Hegelian, since I am
a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel’s dialectics is the basic form of all
dialectics, but only after it has been stripped of its mystical form, and it
is precisely this which distinguishes my method.” —Marx, Letter to Ludwig
Kugelmann, March 6, 1968, in Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (Moscow: 1975),
p. 187; in a slightly different translation in MECW 42:544.
“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but
is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e.,
the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms
into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the
real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’
With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected
by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
“The mystifying side of
Hegelian dialectic I criticized nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still
the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of ‘Das Kapital,’ it was
the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre, epigones [inferior imitators]
who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel ... as a ‘dead dog.’ I
therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and
there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression
peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no
means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a
comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be
turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the
mystical shell.
“In its mystified form,
dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and to
glorify the existing state of things. In its rational form it is a scandal and
abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in
its comprehension and affirmation recognition of the existing state of things, at
the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable
breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid
movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its
momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence
critical and revolutionary.
“The contradictions inherent
in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois
most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry
runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis. That crisis is once again
approaching, although as yet but in its preliminary stage; and by the universality
of its theatre and the intensity of its action it will drum dialectics even into the
heads of the mushroom-upstarts of the new, holy Prusso-German empire.” —Marx,
Capital, Vol. I, Afterward to the Second German Edition (Jan. 24, 1873),
(International ed., pp. 19-20; Penguin ed., p. 102-3).
HEGELIAN TRIADS
A conception of dialectics in which an initial state or
situation (the “thesis”) is transformed via its opposite (the “antithesis”) into a new
state (the “synthesis”). Although this is sometimes a helpful way of looking at particular
cases of dialectical development, it is also rather simplistic or misleading in other
cases.
It is often stated that Hegel himself
did not use this terminology, but at the very least the idea is frequently implicit in
his writings. Similarly some Marxists have looked down on this terminology, though the
creators of revolutionary Marxism have sometimes used these terms themselves.
See also:
NEGATION (In Dialectics) (and especially the
quote from Mao there), NEGATION OF THE
NEGATION, SUBLATION
“Triad (Greek, trias)—in philosophy it is the formula
of three-stage development. The idea of three-stage development was first formulated
by the Greek Neo-Platonic philosophers, particularly
by Proclus, and was expressed in the works of the German idealist philosophers
Ficte and Schelling. The triad was, however, developed most
fully in the idealist philosophy of Hegel, who considered that every process of
development traverses three stages—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The second
stage is the negation of the first, which transformed into its opposite by transition
to the second stage. The third stage is the negation of the second, i.e., the
negation of the negation, which means a return to the form existing at the outset
that is now enriched by a new content and is on a higher level.” —Note 47, LCW 1. [The
note goes on to state that (in some cases at least) this triad notion is a scheme
into which reality has been forced quite artificially.]
“And so [according to the Narodnik Mikhailovsky], the materialists
rest their case on the ‘incontrovertibility’ of the dialectical process! In other words,
they base their sociological theories on Hegelian triads. Here we have the stock method
of accusing Marxism of Hegelian dialectics, an accusation that might be thought to
have been worn threadbare enough by Marx’s bourgeois critics. Unable to advance any
fundamental argument against the doctrine, these gentlemen fastened on Marx’s manner
of expression and attacked the origin of the theory, thinking thereby to undermine its
essence. And Mr. Mikhailovsky makes no bones about resorting to such methods. He uses
a chapter from Engels’s Anti-Dühring as a pretext. Replying to Dühring,
who had attacked Marx’s dialectics, Engels says that Marx never dreamed of ‘proving’
anything by means of Hegelian triads, that Marx only studied and investigated the real
process, and that the sole criterion of theory recognized by him was its conformity to
reality. If, however, it sometimes happened that the development of some particular
social phenomenon fitted in with the Hegelian scheme, namely, thesis—negation—negation
of the negation, there is nothing surprising about that, for it is no rare thing in
nature at all. And Engels proceeds to cite examples from natural history (the
development of a seed) and the social sphere—as, for instance, that first there was
primitive communism, then private property, and then the capitalist socialization of
labor; or that first there was primitive materialism, then idealism, and then scientific
materialism, and so forth. It is clear to everybody that the main weight of Engels’s
argument is that materialists must correctly and accurately depict the actual historical
process, and that insistence on dialectics, the selection of examples to demonstrate
the correctness of the triad, is nothing but a relic of the Hegelianism out of which
scientific socialism has grown, a relic of the manner of expression. And, indeed, once
it has been categorically declared that to ‘prove’ anything by triads is absurd, and
that nobody even thought of doing so, what significance can attach to examples of
‘dialectical’ processes? Is it not obvious that this merely points to the origin of the
doctrine and nothing more?” —Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” (1894), LCW
1:163-164.
[It should be noted that years
later Lenin made a deeper investigation of Hegel’s dialectics, and at that time
developed a further appreciation for the concepts of dialectical
contradiction and
negation, though of course he never adopted
the simplistic notion that all phenomena must necessarily conform to the Hegelian triad
scheme. —S.H.]
HEIDEGGER, Martin (1889-1976)
German existentialist philosopher who was influenced by
(and sympathetic to) Naziism. Many of the roots of his worldview go back to German
Romanticism and to a focus on people’s conception of their
place in the world. His book Sein und Zeit (1927) [Being and Time] attempts to
discuss the very abstract concept of “Being” (or existence—but note the mystical capital “B”!)
in the usual absurdly obscure and incoherent metaphysical
way. According to Heidegger, modern humanity has lost the “nearness and shelter” of Being
(whatever that means exactly!) and we are no longer at home in the world as primitive human
beings were. This actually seems to be a reflection of bourgeois angst in the midst of their
own decaying social world order.
Heidegger’s notorious 1933 speech, “The Role
of the University in the New Reich”, called upon Germany to move itself upward into the
primordial realm of the powers of Being (whatever that means!) under the leadership of the
Nazi party. His seminars of 1933-35 likewise bring out the major Nazi influence on Heidegger.
[See: Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy
in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-35, Yale, 2009.] Many adherents of
Continental Philosophy, including some on the
self-proclaimed “Left”, have tried to excuse Heidegger as having had only a minor flirtation
with Naziism, but the evidence shows it was much more than that. (He was a member of the Nazi
party from 1933 until 1945.) It is hard to understand what anyone can see of value in
Heidegger, let alone what those into contemporary academic “Marxism” imagine that they see
there!
HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
A principle within quantum mechanics that states that
certain complementary pairs of physical properties of particles—such as position and
momentum—cannot both be precisely known at the same time. In other words, the more accurately
one of the two complementary properties is known, the less accurately the other can be known
at that time. According to Werner Heisenberg, the idealist German physicist who first
formulated this principle, this is due to the supposed fact that that below very tiny thresholds
the combination of these pairs of complementary properties actually have no well-defined
values at all! A much more sensible (and more materialist) interpretation of this principle
is just that it is not a statement about reality itself being “undefined” below tiny thresholds,
but rather a statement about the limitation of the theory and equations of quantum mechanics
itself to determine what that reality is below those tiny thresholds.
In much popular usage the term “uncertainty
principle” is misused or abused, or at least is quite misleading. One example of this is
the common confusion between the uncertainty principle and the related, but somewhat different,
“observer effect”—that an act of observation or measurement itself has an effect on the
properties of the thing being observed, or in other words changes it. Of course this is
certainly not always the case in the macroworld, and recent research indicates that it may not
always be the case in the microworld either.
HELIX
A coiled shape, such as that of a telephone cord; i.e., a spiral in three dimensions.
See
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION for a pictorial
illustration and further discussion in relation to DIALECTICS
“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but
a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment,
segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an
independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for
the trees) leads into the quagmore, into clerical obscurantism (where it is
anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).” —Lenin, “On the Question
of Dialectics” (1915), LCW 38:363. [A fuller version of this quotation is included
in the entry for HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
.]
HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS (c. 535-c. 475 BCE)
Early Greek philosopher who emphasized many important dialectical themes such as the constancy
of change. While Heraclitus himself seems to have understood the underlying unity of the world
despite its pervasive and inherent dialectical contradictions, his later follower
Cratylus put forward many idealistic views such as that there is
no single ultimate reality.
“It is not possible to step into the same river twice.” —Heraclitus,
quoted by Plato in his dialog, Cratylus.
“Conflict is the mother of all happenings.” —Heraclitus, illustrating his
deep appreciation of dialectics.
“Nature loves to hide.” —Heraclitus. [The profound idea here seems to be
that the true and correct understanding of the world can only come over time though very
extensive and careful investigations. —S.H.]
HILFERDING, Rudolf (1877-1941)
A prominent Austrian-German semi-Marxist economist and social-democratic
(revisionist) theoretician and politician, known especially
for his 1910 book, Finance Capital, which Lenin made extensive use of in preparing
his important work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. For a discussion of
Hilferding’s book, see the separate entry for
Finance Capital.
Though trained as a medical doctor,
Hilferding shifted more and more into writing for the Social-Democratic publications of
Austria and Germany, especially on economic subjects. Karl Kautsky was his mentor, and
Hilferding became one of the top leaders of the Social-Democratic Party
of Germany.
In response to Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s
bourgeois attack on Marxist economics, Hilferding wrote a widely read defense of Marx.
But in other writings he disagreed with the many suggestions in Marx that capitalism might
eventually suffer a catastrophic economic breakdown. Later on he carried that questionable
opinion to a really ridiculous extreme when he suggested that modern finance capitalism, in
the form of monopolistic trusts and cartels, had (or would soon) become “so organized” that
it should be able to eliminate economic crises entirely! (See:
“Organized Capitalism”) This showed that his understanding of the causes of capitalist
economic crises was also incorrect. (He was a partisan of the
falling rate of profit theory of economic
crises.) However many of his conceptions of how capitalism had changed in the imperialist
era, which he discussed at length in Finance Capital, were indeed basically correct.
After the defeat of Germany in World War
I and the removal of the Kaiser (emperor), Hilferding was on two occasions the Finance
Minister in the bourgeois social-democratic governments, including during the period of
hyper-inflation, which he and the government were quite inept at dealing with. These
Social-Democratic governments were also responsible for the policies that led to the murder
of many genuine communist revolutionaries, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Since Hilferding was a Jew (and at least
nominally a “socialist”), he had to flee Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He
lived in Denmark, Switzerland and then France, where he was arrested and turned over to the
Gestapo (German political police) during World War II. He died in 1941 while in their custody,
almost certainly murdered by them.
HINTON, Joan (1921-2010)
American physicist who abandoned physics in outraged disgust after the U.S. used the atomic
bomb to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, and who later became a Maoist and
farmworker in China. She was the youngest scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project which
produced the first atomic bombs, but was heartsick after the U.S. totally unnecessarily used
the bombs to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan. She became an outspoken
peace activist and opponent of nuclear weapons.
In 1948 Hinton went to China on what was
initially intended to be just a prolonged visit. But she remained there the rest of her life,
living in a rural cooperative or people’s commune (when they existed). Together with her
husband, Erwin Engst, an American dairy-cattle expert, she designed and constructed
continuous-flow milk pasteurizers and other farm machinery. She was an ardent supporter of
the Chinese revolution and Mao Zedong, and didn’t waver in her revolutionary enthusiasm. In
2008 she said: “Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural
Revolution. It was a terrific experience.”
Joan Hinton’s brother was the well-known
writer about revolutionary China, William Hinton. (See below.)
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Marxist social science; the science of society including its most general laws and
features, its origin, the motive forces leading to its change and development; the
application of dialectical materialism to
society. The principles of historical materialism include (but are by no means limited to)
the following important points:
1) That human society and history can be
understood scientifically;
2) That, however, material production is
the basis of social life, and social consciousness is the result of social being;
3) That people tend to believe that which
is in their own material interests to believe;
4) But that the dominant ideas of any age
are those of the ruling class;
5) That society and history are made by the
people, by the masses of human beings;
6) That, however, the prevailing mode of
production conditions and sets limits to the changes which can be made in society at any
given time;
7) That human society is composed of social
classes defined primarily by the relationships of different
groups of people to the means of production;
8) That the history of society, since
classes first developed in ancient times, is the history of class struggle;
9) That “at a certain stage of their
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing
relations of production.... From forms of development of the productive forces these
relations turn into fetters” [Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (Peking: 1976), pp. 3-4.];
10) That “at that point an era of social
revolution begins” [Marx, ibid.];
11) That society must ultimately progress
to the stage of communism where classes have ceased to exist;
12) That between capitalism and communism
there must be an intervening transition period (socialism), which can only be the
revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat.
There are whole areas of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
theory which are really subsidiary parts of historical materialism. One such is the MLM
theory of ethics based on class interests;
another such sphere is the mass line theory of revolutionary
leadership.
In social science (properly so called),
historical materialism is the central organizing
theory, and very little in society makes any
sense except in terms of it. The fact that (for ideological reasons) so few people in the
U.S. today are at all acquainted with historical materialism thus explains why so many are
utterly perplexed by what is happening in the social world all around them. Society, rich &
poor, economic crises, politics in general, international wars, and so forth, are all quite
mysterious to them because they lack this central organizing theory to make sense of it
all.
See also:
SOCIAL SCIENCE
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM [Book by Bukharin]
Nikolai Bukharin was reputed to be one of the leading
theoreticians (after Lenin, of course) of the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 Bukharin and Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky wrote a book called The ABC of Communism which was a commentary on,
and a much more detailed exposition of, the Bolshevik Party programme adopted at the Eighth
Party Congress in March of that year. That volume was meant to explain the Programme, its
social context, and the reasons why it said what it did, to the workers and rank-and-file
members of the Party. Just how good it was in doing this is open to debate. In any case, in
1921 Bukharin published his book Historical Materialism, which covered a lot of the
same topics but in a much more abstract and theoretical sort of way. On the whole, this
is a less successful and more philosophically and theoretically dubious book than the
earlier volume.
While this book is called Historical
Materialism, it does not do a very good job of bringing out and emphasizing the main
principles of historical materialism [see entry above]. Bukharin took bourgeois sociology
seriously, and studied it extensively. As his liberal bourgeois sympathizer, Alfred Meyer,
notes, Bukharin “sought to read, digest and incorporate in his writings a great deal of
contemporary bourgeois sociology”. This book shows that strong tendency, and it is in
effect sort of a blend of Marxist points of view and bourgeois sociological views and ways
of presenting things. This leads to a lot of verbiage, with the central ideas of historical
materialism being somewhat lost or greatly deemphasized. Bukharin does criticize many
specific statements by bourgeois sociologists, but at the same time he still takes their
writings seriously overall and himself adopts many of their same modes of thinking.
Even Bukharin’s presentation of important
Marxist ideas is done in an inept way. For example, his chapter on classes and class
struggle comes at the very end of the book, when that should really be a much stronger
central theme throughout the work.
Instead, a major theme throughout the book
(and not just in the chapter on dialectical materialism) is Bukharin’s highly dubious
equilibrium theory. His weak understanding of
dialectics comes out in other ways as well, as in chapter VII where he presents four
stages of revolution as being sequential, when in fact the “mental revolution”,
the “political revolution”, the “economic revolution” and the “technical revolution”
must quite clearly interpenetrate each other to considerable degrees. Other serious
philosophical errors also occur in the book, as for example his treatment at several
points of the very important concept of interests as being
only a psychological question, and not an issue of what objectively benefits people. [Cf.
p. 149 in the Ann Arbor paperback edition.] In general, the discussion of ethics is quite
weak.
Bukharin’s Historical Materialism
was viewed as an important presentation and defense of Marxist theory back in the 1920s,
both in the Soviet Union and around the world. After that time, however, the book was
pretty much forgotten, and this is just as well. Overall, students of MLM will miss little
or nothing of value if they just skip this book. —S.H.
HOBSON, John A. (1858-1940)
An English bourgeois social reformer, liberal-pacifist, economist and prolific author,
best known for his important book Imperialism.
In his earlier books Hobson favored an
underconsumptionist explanation for capitalist
economic crises and denied the truth of “Say’s Law” (long
after Marx did so, but also long before Keynes). This made his
views anathema to the bourgeois economics establishment which forced him out of his
university position. He was then hired by the Manchester Guardian to be their
South-African correspondent. While covering the Second Boer War, Hobson formed the idea
that political imperialism is the direct result of the expansive forces of modern capitalism.
When he returned to England he strongly condemned the Boer War and English imperialism in
general in a series of articles and books. In 1902 he published his magnum opus,
Imperialism, which made him world famous. Lenin made extensive use of this book
when preparing his own very important work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (1916).
“This author ... gives a very good and comprehensive description of
the principal specific economic and political features of imperialism.” —Lenin,
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, LCW 22:195.
HOLY FAMILY [Book by Marx & Engels]
[Full title in English: The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against
Bruo Bauer and Co.] This was the first joint work by Marx and Engels, and was
written in the fall of 1844 and published (in German of course) in February 1845 in
Frankfurt-am-Main.
“‘The Holy Family’ is a mocking reference to the Bauer brothers
and their followers grouped around the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (General
Literary Gazette). While attacking the Bauers and the other Young Hegelians
(or Left Hegelians), Marx and Engels at the same time criticized the idealist
philosophy of Hegel.
“Marx sharply disagreed with
the Young Hegelians as early as the summer of 1842, when the club of ‘The Free’
was formed in Berlin. Upon becoming editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhine
Gazette) in October 1842, Marx opposed the efforts of several Young Hegelian
staff members from Berlin to publish inane and pretentious articles emanating from
the club of ‘The Free,’ which had lost touch with reality and was absorbed in
abstract philosophical disputes. During the two years following Marx’s break with
‘The Free,’ the theoretical and political differences between Marx and Engels on
the one hand and the Young Hegelians on the other became deep-rooted and
irreconcilable. This was not only due to the fact that Marx and Engels had gone
over from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democratism to communism,
but also due to the evolution undergone by the Bauer brothers and persons of like
mind during this time. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Bauer and his
group denounced ‘1842 radicalicalism’ and its most outstanding proponent—the
Rheinishe Zeitung. They slithered into vulgar subjective idealism of the
vilest kind—propgation of a ‘theory’ according to which only select individuals,
bearers of the ‘spirit,’ of ‘pure criticism,’ are the makers of history, while the
masses, the people, serve as inert material or ballast in the historical process.
“Marx and Engels decided to
devote their first joint work to the exposure of these pernicious, reactionary
ideas and to the defense of their new materialist and communist outlook.
“During a ten-day stay of
Engels in Paris the plan of the book (at first entitled Critique of Critical
Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co.) was drafted, responsibility for the
various chapters apportioned between the authors, and the ‘Preface’ written.
Engels wrote his chapters while still in Paris. Marx, who was responsible for a
larger part of the book, continued to work on it until the end of November 1844.
Moreover, he considerably increased the initially conceived size of the book by
incorporating in his chapters parts of his economic and philosophical manuscripts
on which he had worked during the spring and summer of 1844, his historical studies
of the bourgeois French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and a number of
his excerpts and conspectuses. While the book was in the process of being printed,
Marx added the words The Holy Family to the title. By using a small format,
the book exceed 20 printer’s sheets and was thus exempted from preliminary
censorship according to the prevailing regulations in a number of German states.”
—Note 2, LCW 38:563-4.
HOMUNCULUS
[In the long-discredited theory known as
“preformationism”:] A very tiny adult human being that in past ages was naïvely
believed to inhabit a sperm cell and which supposedly became a mature individual merely
through merging with an egg cell and then increasing in size.
[In the philosophy of mind:] The equally
naïve theory that there is something like an entire “little man” inside a human head
who processes incoming information from the senses and comprehends it. This leads to an
infinite regress, since presumably that little man would require an even smaller
little man in his head, and so forth! This theory arose because people could not
yet make sense out of how ideas and other mental phenomena arise in the functioning of a
material brain.
“Many of us ... imagine a little person inside the head watching
sensory inputs, then telling the muscles what to do. It took a long time for
scientists to realize that ascribing thought to a little person inside the head is
the equivalent of asking, ‘What makes a car move?’ and answering, ‘Another little
car inside’ rather than ‘An engine.’ But to explain thinking, it is all too easy to
argue in a circle. And that classic beginner’s mistake is not always innocuous; it
sets you up to view a fertilized egg as also containing a little person inside.”
—William H. Calvin, “The Fate of the Soul”, Natural History, June 2004, p.
55. [Calvin suggests elsewhere in this article that this naïve conception is
one of the reasons that many people oppose abortion
and wrongly view it as being a form of “murder”. —S.H.]
HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE
A committee of the U.S. Congress which focused on attacking communists and even liberal
reformists. The viciousness of this committee was matched only by its remarkable ignorance.
“Although not as famous as its later McCarthy hearings, the 1938 HUAC
testimony had memorable moments. For example, at one point a congressman asked whether
Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was a Communist and inquired if ‘Mr.
Euripides’ was guilty of teaching class consciousness.” —Michael Edmonds, Wisconsin
History magazine, Spring 2011, p. 48; original transcripts in Investigation of
Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Hearings, vol. 4, U.S. Gov.
Printing Office, 1938-1944, pp. 2857-8.
HOUSING BUBBLE
An asset bubble in the prices of houses. In other words,
a tremendous and unjustified rise in the prices of houses due to massive government
financial support and/or one form of private speculation or another.
In the 2003-2007 period in the U.S., for
example, many speculators began buying houses—not in order to live in them themselves—but
in order to sell them again later after the prices rose some more. This was pure speculation,
which was promoted by banks and the government through low or non-existent down payments
and very low interest rates. This particular housing bubble was also promoted by banks
through securitization of mortgages in the form of
CDOs. This allowed the banks to escape any risk on the mortgages
they had already issued, and continue to issue new risky mortgages to those with
“sub-prime” (poor) credit.
Housing bubbles, like all asset bubbles,
always pop eventually, and the 2003-2007 bubble began to pop in late 2007. (House prices
actually peaked in 2006, but at first the declines were quite small.) However, even though
episodes of bubble popping can be dramatic, it takes time for them to completely deflate.
Sometimes they are even partially reinflated for a while. Thus while the recent U.S.
housing bubble has considerably deflated from its peak, it is still a substantial bubble.
For that reason, the government is going to great lengths (and great expense) to try to
“prop up” the housing market, or, in other words to try to reinflate the present housing
bubble. “The government is literally plowing trillions of dollars into the U.S. mortgage
market to keep it afloat”, said Guy D. Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance
in October 2009.
Housing bubbles are a common development
in advanced capitalist countries in the imperialist era. There was a huge housing bubble
which popped in the Great Depression of the 1930s and a bigger bubble which popped in the
late 1980s-early 1990s with the Savings & Loan
Crisis. But by far the biggest housing bubble, especially in the U.S. but also in
Britain, Spain and other countries, is the current one which is by no means resolved yet.
“Should we let housing prices fall? Many smart people say we should.
It seems increasingly clear that we must. For how long can the government prop them
up? Are we never to have a private market in mortgages again? Yet what happens if we
let them fall? Arguably many banks would once again be ‘under water.’ Enthusiasm for
another set of bailouts is weak, to say the least. Our government would end up
nationalizing these banks and it still would be on the hook for their debts. The blow
to confidence would be a major one. I increasingly believe there is no easy way out
of this dilemma and it is a major reason why the U.S. economy remains stuck. Housing
prices must fall, yet ... housing prices must not fall.” —Tyler Cowen, a bourgeois
commentator, on the website MarginalRevolution.com, Sept. 8, 2010; as quoted in
The Week, Sept. 24, 2010, p. 48. [This is one of the many specific contradictions
that the U.S. capitalist economy has gotten itself into. About 80% of U.S. bank loans
are in the form of mortgages, and for many decades now the heavy government promotion
of housing debt is one of the major things that has been keeping the economy from
sinking into a new depression. So they must continue to promote this housing
bubble. But it is getting ever more difficult and costly to do so, and the bubble must
more completely collapse in the end. That is their current predicament. —S.H.]
HOXHA, Enver [Family name pronounced HO-juh] (1908-1985)
The First Secretary of the Party of Labor of Albania, and the leader of that country from
the end of World War II until his death. He also held various powerful government positions
during most of that time. For both nationalist and ideological reasons Hoxha opposed Tito
and Yugoslavia, and thus sided with Stalin and the Soviet Union against them. Hoxha was thus
presumed by many to be an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist, though the form of the supposed
dictatorship of the proletariat in Albania
was highly undemocratic for the working class as well as the bourgeoisie and society was not
truly advanced in the direction of communism.
Hoxha and Albania sided with China in the
Sino-Soviet Split. However, after Mao’s death (and especially from 1978 on) Hoxha began
defaming Mao along with the actual capitalist-roaders in China. Both Hoxha’s theorizing and
his actual leadership of Albania were quite erroneous, and not many years after his death
the regime he led collapsed.
For a defense of Mao and Maoism against the
unfounded attacks of Hoxha, see “Enver Hoxha Refuted”, by N. Sanmugathasan, General Secretary,
Ceylon Communist Party, at:
http://www.bannedthought.net/SriLanka/Sanmugathasan/HoxhaRefuted.htm
HUKOU SYSTEM
The system of household registration and residency permits in China which dates back to
ancient times, but which has also been a prominent feature of the People’s Republic of China.
A registration record officially identifies a person as a resident of some locality and
includes other information including the person’s parents, spouse, and date of birth. In
Chinese the formal name of this system is huji, and a hukou is the residency
status of a person. But informally, hukou is also the name for the system, and that
is what this registration system is called in English.
In 1958 the PRC officially promulgated the
family registration system to establish some general social stability and to control the
movement of people from rural to urban areas. During the socialist period the government
was attempting to keep the migration from the countryside to the cities from occurring in
a premature and disorderly fashion. In general, the movement to the cities was limited to
the workers and families needed to fill the new jobs which were opening up in the rapidly
expanding socialist industries there.
In recent decades, since the restoration
of capitalism in China, the hukou system has been officially kept in place. But to
accomodate both local and multinational capitalist corporations, and their need for cheap
labor from the countryside, it has generally not been enforced. This has led to tens of
millions of migrant workers living technically illegally in the cities, and having no
rights to public housing, education, and other social benefits there. This has created a
massive and growing social problem of gross discrimination against migrant workers. Since
migrant workers are not allowed to enroll their children in urban schools, most of these
children must remain with their grandparents or other relatives in the countryside, which
means they are in effect forcibly separated from their parents. By 2005 there were as many
as 130 million of these “home-staying children”, as they are called in China, with parents
living away from them in distant cities.
In many respects, the lives of migrant
workers in China are similar to that of illegal migrant workers in the U.S. and other
“advanced” capitalist countries. They are needed and exploited by urban capitalists, but
they are paid extremely low wages and are denied many rights and benefits that other
people have. This discrimination against well over a hundred million migrant workers in
China is one of several important factors leading to rapidly increasing social unrest.
Although the central government has loosened its control over the hukou system,
it has mostly just transferred this control and discrimination to the local governments.
And although the movement of people to the cities is now unofficially allowed, the
super-exploitation and discrimination against them that awaits them there is now as bad
as ever. That part of the hukou system still continues unabated.
HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
See also:
AGNOSTICISM, KNOWLEDGE,
REFLECTION THEORY,
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
“For the most valuable result ... would be that it should make us
extremely distrustful of our present knowledge, inasmuch as in all probability we
are just about at the beginning of human history, and the generations which will
put us right are likely to be far more numerous than those whose knowledge
we—often enough with a considerable degree of contempt—have the opportunity to
correct.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:80.
“But as for the sovereign validity of the knowledge obtained by
each individual thought, we all know that there can be no talk of such a thing,
and that all previous experience shows that without exception such knowledge always
contains much more that is capable of being improved upon than that which cannot be
improved upon, or is correct.” —Engels, ibid.
“Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but
a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment,
segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an
independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for
the trees) leads into the quagmore, into clerical obscurantism (where it is
anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes). Rectilinearity and
one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective
blindness—voilà the epistemological roots of idealism. And clerical
obscurantism (=philosophical idealism), of course, has epistemological roots,
it is not groundless; it is a sterile flower undoubtedly, but a sterile
flower that grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful,
omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge.” —Lenin, “On the Question of
Dialectics” (1915), LCW 38:363.
HUME’S PARADOX
The supposed mystery that a small class of rulers can (most of the time!) manage to control
and govern the vastly more numerous masses who they exploit and oppress. Here is the
euphemistic way that Hume himself originally put it (of course without any reference to
social classes or exploitation!):
“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs
with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the
few.” —David Hume, The First Principles of Government (1742).
While certainly regretable, Hume’s “Paradox” should not be too surprising to Marxists
who understand that one of the basic principles of historical
materialism is that the dominant ideas of any age are those of the ruling class. While
the rule of “the few” over “the many” can unfortunately last for a long time, in historical
terms the rule of the exploiters and oppressors is still precarious. All it takes is one
grand moment of revolution to topple the bastards!
HYNDMAN, Henry Mayers (1842-1921)
A founder and leader of the Social-Democratic
Federation in Britain and later one of the founders of the British Socialist Party.
Hyndman was always one of the leaders of the Right wing of the socialist movement in Britain
and a complete opportunist. In 1916 he was expelled from the
BSP for putting out propaganda in support of the imperialist war. He was also hostile to the
October Revolution in Russia and supported imperialist intervention by the West against Soviet
Russia.
“Although Hyndman was a talented writer and public speaker, many members
of the SDF questioned his leadership qualities. He was extremely authoritarian and tried
to restrict internal debate about party policy. At an SDF meeting on 27 December 1884,
the executive voted by a majority of two (10-8), that it had no confidence in Hyndman.
When he refused to resign, some members, including William Morris and Eleanor Marx, left
the party.
“In the 1885 General Election,
Hyndman and Henry Hyde Champion, without consulting their colleagues, accepted £340 from
the Tories to run parliamentary candidates in Hampstead and Kensington, the objective
being to split the Liberal vote and therefore enabling the Conservative candidate to win.
This ploy failed, and the two SDF’s candidates won only a total of 59 votes. The story
leaked out, and the political reputation of both men suffered from the idea that they
were willing to accept ‘Tory Gold’.” —From the Wikipedia article on Hyndman (as of
Feb. 28, 2010).
The total income of all the workers in a given household, from all sources (including
not only wages, but also interest and investment income). (Gross income is the
income before the payment of income taxes; net income is after the payment of
income taxes. Usually the unqualified term “household income” means gross household
income.)