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ICM
International Communist Movement.

IDEOLOGIST
One who defends or promotes a specific ideology. Those who promote and defend the ideologies characteristic of the bourgeoisie are bourgeois ideologists; those who promote and defend the ideology characteristic of the revolutionary proletariat are proletarian or revolutionary ideologists.

INCOME TAX
A tax on the income of individuals or companies. A progressive income tax is one which taxes those with higher incomes at a higher tax rate. In the Communist Manifesto Marx & Engels called for “a sharply progressive system of taxation” as one of a number of means which might prove to be of use in transforming capitalism into socialism. But as they noted, such a transformation—by whatever means—will only be feasible once the revolutionary proletariat achieves full political power. Before then any reforms along the lines of a progressive income tax will soon be undermined or reversed by the ruling bourgeoisie.

“In the final decades of the nineteenth century, leaders of corporations took huge payouts [from their companies] to establish huge fortunes. One reaction was the passage of an income tax law in 1910 aimed exclusively at only the richest Americans. Those richest Americans quickly developed a counter-strategy to change the new income tax law.
         “They succeeded and thereby spread the burden of the income tax across the entire population, which eventually undermined popular support of the income tax.” —Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan (2010), pp. 23-24.

INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY (Britain)

“Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was founded in Britain in 1993 under the leadership of James Keir Hardie, Ramsay Macdonald and others. It claimed itself politically independent of bourgeois parties but, as Lenin said, ‘it was independent only of socialism but very dependent on liberalism’.
         “On the outbreak of the world imperialist war of 1914-18 the I.L.P. issued an anti-war manifesto (August 13, 1914). In February 1915 the I.L.P. delegates to the Conference of Socialists from the ‘Entente’ countries held in London supported the social-chauvinist resolution adopted at the Conference. From then on the I.L.P. leaders used pacifist phrases to cover up what was in fact a social-chauvinist position. In 1919, the I.L.P. leadership yielded to the pressure of the leftward-moving rank and file and withdrew from the Second International. In 1921 the I.L.P. joined the so-called Two-and-a-Half International, but when the latter fell to pieces, returned to the Second International. In 1921 the Left wing of the I.L.P. broke away from the Party and joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain.” —Footnote 47, Lenin: SW I (1967).

INDIA — Languages Of
It is useful for those of us interested in India and the developing revolution there to have some idea of the complexity of the language situation in that country. The 1961 census recognized 1,652 different languages spoken in India. 122 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people, and 29 languages are spoken by more than 1 million people. Here are some of the most important languages, together with the number of current speakers, locations, etc.:

There are two major language families in India, the Indo-Aryan family (a sub-family of Indo-European), the languages of which are spoken by about 70% of the people, and the Dravidian family in the southeast part of India, whose languages are spoken by about 22% of the people. The early forms of Indo-Aryan from around 1000 BCE are jointly referred to as Sanskrit. All the modern Indo-Aryan languages have developed from Sanskrit in the same way that the Romance languages in Europe have developed from Latin. (Amazingly, there are still about 50,000 native speakers of Sanskrit in India!) Tamil is the oldest Dravidian language and has written records dating back as far as the 3^rd century BCE. The boundaries of Indian states are mostly along socio-linguistic lines.
        Because of the heritage of British colonialism in India, English is also an important language there, especially among the upper classes and the better educated. There are many English language publications. However, nobody knows for sure just how many people in India speak English and it is probably a very small fraction of the total population. Some estimates put the figure as low as 3%, others as high as 10%.

INDONESIA — Military Coup in 1965 — Role of Foreign Imperialism
The U.S. and British imperialists played major roles in encouraging, organizing, supporting, and helping to give a propaganda cover to the murderous military coup in Indonesia in 1965. [More to be added... ]

“In 1990, Kathy Kadane, an American agency journalist, made her name when she revealed that in 1965 CIA officers had passed death sentences on five thousand members of the the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, by handing their names to the insurgent generals.... Britain was no less involved than the US in the coup against Achmad Sukarno, the nationalist Indonesian leader who was willing to work with the PKI....
         “On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in London replied: ‘The crucial question still remains whether the generals will pluck up enough courage to take decisive action against the PKI.’ Gilchrist shared his superiors’ worry that the generals might be pussy liberals. Although the Army was ‘full of good anti-Communist ideas’, he said, it was ‘reluctant to take, or incapable of taking, effective action in the political field’. The Foreign Office resolved on a strategy. ‘It seems pretty clear that the generals are going to need all the help they can get and accept without being tagged as hopelessly pro-Western, if they are going to be able to gain ascendancy over the Communists. In the short run, and while the present confusion continues, we can hardly go wrong by tacitly backing the generals.’ It is difficult to say how far British ‘help’ extended—the relevant files will be kept secret until well into the next century.” —Nick Cohen, “Benetton Ethics”, London Review of Books, July 2, 1998, p. 7.

INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD (IWW)
[To be added... ]

INSIDER TRADING
The buying or selling of stocks or other financial securities by those with “inside knowledge” of the decisions being made by capitalist corporations which will affect the prices of those shares of stock or securities. In capitalist financial theory every buyer or seller is supposed to be allowed equal access to this information (through public publication) before anyone is legally allowed to make use of it to buy or sell, though fully honoring this law is probably actually something of a rarity! Occasionally some blatant case of insider trading is prosecuted. Insider trading is yet another method whereby some financial capitalists cheat the others.

INSURANCE
Insurance is simply a socially-approved-of form of gambling, wherein the person or company taking out the insurance bets that something bad will happen, and the insurance company bets that it won’t. When you buy fire insurance on your house, for example, you are betting that the house will catch fire someday, and the insurance company is betting that it won’t. For you, that is indeed gambling, because it is impossible to be sure whether or not your house will catch fire. But it is a gamble that makes sense because if your house does catch fire, at least you will receive a large payment from the insurance company that will hopefully allow you to repair the damage or else build a new house. If your house never catches fire, then you will still be out the premiums you paid to the insurance company; but, either way, you will not have suffered a catastropic loss. That is why insurance is often a good idea for the person buying it; it eliminates (or at least reduces) their risk of any catastrophic loss.
        While buying insurance is a form of gambling for the person buying the insurance, interestingly it is not really that much of a gamble for the insurance company! This is because while the odds of your particular house catching fire someday are unknown, and probably unknowable, the total number of houses of your type catching fire in your region of the country over the course of an average year is a quite stable and easily ascertainable statistical figure. If the insurance company insures a large enough number of houses it will have a very good idea of the total insurance payments it will have to pay out each year. For them it is not much of a gamble at all; it is actuarial science.

“An insurance company, sanely directed, and making scores of thousands of bets, is not gambling at all; it knows with sufficient accuracy at what age its clients will die, how many of their houses will be burnt every year, how often their houses will by broken into by burglars..., how much they will suffer from illness or unemployment, and what births and deaths will cost them: in short, what will happen to every thousand or ten thousand or a million people even when the company cannot tell what will happen to any individual among them.” —George Bernard Shaw, “The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance”, in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, vol. 3, 1956, p. 1527.

Insurance, therefore, is a way of socializing risk, of equalizing it across the population of insured people. While this can be done in a half-assed fashion via private insurance companies, this is not at all the best way to do it. First, the insurance companies demand to make a profit, which is always absurdly large (and much of which is under the table, in the form of huge salaries and stock benefits for the top managers, for example). Second, they must compete with other insurance companies, which leads to huge marketing operations, vast expenditures for advertising, and so forth. All of this is tremendously wasteful and greatly raises insurance premiums beyond what they would otherwise be. On top of this, private insurance companies regularly try to use all sorts of means to cheat claimants out of the payments due them. (I.e., they are often guilty of various forms of fraud.)
        Clearly, the best way of socializing risk, and for all the people, is through a socialist government insurance program. It can create an immense saving of labor in the administration of this insurance, by having only one insurance agency, rather than dozens of competing companies. It can insure at the actual cost of insuring, and not the bloated prices required by private profits and massive advertising. The administration of insurance benefits can be streamlined, and there will no longer be any reason to try to cheat people out of benefits that are due them. Here, as in every other area, socialism/communism is necessary to run an insurance system that really serves the interests of the people.

INSURANCE DEATH SPIRAL
A situation where an insurance company (or segment of the insurance industry) begins to lose those of its customers who are least likely to file claims, leaving the company with a higher proportion of policy holders who do file claims, which in turn forces them to raise their rates, which then leads to the loss of more customers in a vicious feedback loop.
        An insurance company or segment of the industry (such as fire insurance or health insurance) normally insures a wide cross-section of the public, that is, something close to a representative section of the public. Thus if 4% of all the families in a country have a major health problem in an average year, and the health insurance industry pays out major claims to 4% of their policy holders during the year, their policy holders may be deemed a representative section of the population. The rates the health insurance industry sets are based on their expectations of the rate of payout. But suppose economic hard times come along (as they often do under capitalism), and more and more of those who are in generally good health decide they have to drop their health insurance because they just can no longer afford to pay the premiums. In this case the insurance companies will be paying out claims on a greater percentage of policies and will have to raise their rates. This will force more people to drop their health insurance, which once again leads to higher premiums.
        This situation has actually developed in the health insurance industry in the U.S. at the present time (early 2010), with sudden huge premium increases being demanded by the insurance companies. They really do not want to raise their rates just now because that might lead to more support for a national health care plan which these insurance companies strongly oppose. But to keep their profits up, most of them are now raising their rates anyway. (This is another example of how the interests of an individual capitalist company often trump the interests of the whole industry or the interests of the capitalist class as a whole!)
        In a genuine socialist society there could be no such thing as an insurance death spiral, since every person would automatically be covered by reasonable health insurance and other forms of insurance. The insurance coverage would automatically be “representative” of the whole population, since it would include the whole population.

INSURRECTION
[To be added...]

INTELLECTUAL
[To be added...]

INTENTIONALITY
[To be added...]

INTEREST (Monetary)
[Intro material to be added...]

“Interest is therefore nothing but a part of the profit (which, in its turn, is itself nothing but surplus-value, unpaid labor), which the industrial capitalist pays to the owner of the borrowed capital with which he ‘works’, either exclusively or partially. Interest is a part of profit—of surplus-value—which, established as a special category, is separated from the total profit under its own name, a separation which is by no means based on its origin, but only on the manner in which it is paid out or appropriated. Instead of being appropriated by the industrial capitalist himself—although he is the person who at first holds the whole surplus-value in his hands no matter how it may be distributed between himself and other people under the names of rent, industrial profit and interest—this part of the profit is deducted by the industrial capitalist from his own revenue and paid to the owner of capital.” —Marx, TSV 3:470-1 [Addenda].

INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE
The things which objectively benefit the people, especially considered overall and in the long run. In MLM usage, this phrase assumes we are talking about the people in the Maoist sense, that is, the proletariat and its allies, as opposed to the enemy (the bourgeoisie and its agents and allies). The most central interest of the people in the long run is the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism.

“Our point of departure is to serve the people whole-heartedly and never for a moment divorce ourselves from the masses, to proceed in all cases from the interests of the people and not from the interests of individuals or groups.... Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.” —Mao, “On Coalition Government” (April 24, 1945), SW 3:315.

“In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people.” —Mao, ibid, SW 3:316.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF)
[To be added... ]

INTRINSIC GOOD
[Ethics:] An intrinsic good or intrinsic value is something that is good or valuable in itself, and without considering further goals, needs or interests. Thus for most of us, love and friendship are intrinsic goods, as are most other things which result in joy or pleasure. It would seem that the opposite of an intrinsic good might be an “extrinsic good”, but most often the term used is instrumental good, which better brings out that the thing is useful as an instrument toward achieving some further goal or interest. Of course, many things are both intrinsically and instrumentally good, such as a good meal which is enjoyable in itself and also useful in continuing our lives and giving us the energy to pursue our other goals and interests.

INVENTION
The invention of new machines and new production techniques is something which is furthered by the sociopolitical advancement of society. Invention was much fostered with the advent of capitalism, was additionally fostered with the advent of capitalist-imperialism, and will be fostered to an even greater degree under socialism and communism when workers and technicians come to understand that their new ideas benefit both themselves and the people in general, and not just a handful of capitalists!

“Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialization of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialized.
         “This is something quite different from the old free competition between manufacturers, scattered and out of touch with one another, and producing for an unknown market.” —Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, LCW 22:205.

INVESTMENT
1. [From the point of view of capitalists and well-off people in bourgeois society:] The outlay of money with the goal of “making” (later receiving back) more money or profit.
2. [From the strict point of view of Marxist political economy:] “The conversion of money into productive capital.” [Marx, Capital, vol. III, ch. 6, sect. 2, (International, p. 111; Penguin, p. 207, which has “transformation” instead of “conversion”).

“INVISIBLE HAND”
The absurd idea that the public interest is best served if everyone looks out only for their own private interests, and that the “public good” is somehow mysteriously generated out of all that private selfishness by some “invisible hand”!
        [More introductory comments to be added...]

“But it is only for the sake of profit that any man employs a capital in the support of industry...
         “As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.” —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, Chapter II, (Modern Library, 1937), p. 423.

IPO (Initial Public Offering)
The first sale to the public of stock in a corporation. The company is thus transformed from one which is “privately held” into a “publicly owned” corporation, where it is supposedly slightly more closely regulated by the government.
        Huge fortunes are often made during IPOs, not only by those who previously owned the entire company, but also by the investment banks who arrange the offering, and by stock brokers with inside connections who are allowed to buy the new stock at a low price and then sell it at a much higher price. This is yet another mechanism by which Wall Street financiers rip off small investors.

IRB
India Reserve Battalion. This is one of the many government paramilitary forces seeking to destroy Naxalites (Maoist revolutionaries) in India.

ISKRA [“The Spark”]
The first All-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in December 1900. It had to be published outside of Russia and smuggled into the country. It became a rallying center and focus for establishing Marxist revolutionary groups in a number of Russian cities, and facilitated the real establishment of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (at the so-called “Second Party Congress” in July-August 1903). In late 1903, after Plekhanov went over to the side of the Mensheviks, Lenin left the Iskra editorial board. Plekhanov then co-opted a number of Mensheviks onto the editorial board and it became an opportunist Menshevik newspaper.
        More details about the formation of Iskra, and the struggle within the RSDLP over it, can be found in footnote 5, LCW 5:533-535.