Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   J   —

JACOBINS
[To be added...]
        See also: MOUNTAIN AND GIRONDE

JAMES, William   (1842-1910)
American psychologist and philosopher who was a subjective idealist. He was an ideologist of the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie and one of the chief founders of pragmatism, which is their most distinctive philosophical outlook.

JANA ANDOLAN
A term in the Nepali language which means “People’s Movement”. In the recent history of Nepal there have been three major events which have gone under this name:
        Jana Andolan-I was the mass movement in 1990 which ended the absolute monarchy and established a government which was nominally, at least, a constitutional democracy. It was also supposed to eliminate the Panchayat system of local and caste governance in Nepal. However, the monarchy still existed, the King still controlled the army, and he even dissolved parliament and re-established authoritarian control again. The failure of Jana Andolan-I to really change the basic situation resulted in a 10-year People’s War led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) beginning in 1996, and then to:
        Jana Andolan-II in 2006 which overthrew the King again and this time abolished the monarchy completely. This mass movement also led to the “Seven-Party Alliance” which included the CPN (Maoist) [now renamed the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)], and an agreement to end the People’s War, merge the revolutionary army into the regular army, create a new constitution, and so forth.
        However the bourgeois parties [including a revisionist party called the “Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist)”] have failed to honor those agreements. In response, the UCPN(Maoist) led what it called the Jana Andolan-III in early 2010 in an attempt to force the reactionary parties to fully implement that earlier agreement and possibly to further develop the revolution in Nepal. Although this involved huge mass demonstrations and a general strike (bandh), mere protests of this sort were not sufficient to force the reactionary parties to fulfill their promises.
        There have been many threats by the UCPN(Maoist) to launch yet another Jana Andolan, but growing numbers of the members of the UCPN(Maoist) now seem to agree that it will take something much more powerful than mere mass demonstrations to truly change and revolutionize Nepal.

JANATHANA SARKAR (or: JANATANA SARKAR)
Literally, People’s Government. This is the name of the local governments being set up by the masses with the help of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the rural areas they already pretty firmly control.
        See also the document, “Introduction to the Policy Programme of Janathana Sarkar”, by the CPI(M-L) [People’s War], June 1, 2004, at: http://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/PWG/JanathanaSarkar.doc

JANGALMAHAL
[Bengali:] The Jangalmahal, or sometimes two words: Jangal Mahal, and which means “forested belt”, is the region consisting of the largest parts of these three districts in the Indian state of West Bengal: Paschim Medinipur (or West Midnapore), Bankura and Purulia. The population of the Jangalmahal consists mostly of Adivasis or “tribals” (tribal peoples), who are very poor and generally severely exploited and oppressed. There are about 1.3 million Adivasis in the 74 “blocks” (sub-districts) of the Jangalmahal. There has been considerable Maoist revolutionary activity in this region in support of Adivasi struggles against the theft of their land, etc., especially in the area around Lalgarh village in West Midnapore.
        Occasionally the term Jangalmahal is used in a looser and broader sense to cover a much larger region of the forested, tribal belt in parts of five states of east-central India: West Bengal, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar.

“JANUARY REVOLUTION”   (Shanghai, January 1967)
The first major seizure of power away from the capitalist-roaders during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

“Proletarian revolutionaries are uniting to seize power from the handful of persons within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road. This is the strategic task for the new stage of the great proletarian cultural revolution. It is the decisive battle between the proletariat and the masses of working people on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and its agents in the Party on the other.
         “This mighty revolutionary storm started in Shanghai. The revolutionary masses in Shanghai have called it the great ‘January Revolution.’ Our great leader Chairman Mao immediately expressed resolute support for it. He called on the workers, peasants, revolutionary students, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres to study the experience of the revolutionary rebels of Shanghai and he called on the People’s Liberation Army actively to support and assist the proletarian revolutionaries in their struggle to seize power.” —“On the Proletarian Revolutionaries’ Struggle to Seize Power”, Hongqi [“Red Flag”] editorial, #3, 1967; Peking Review, vol. 10, #6, Feb. 3, 1967, p. 10.

JAPAN — History Of — 1930s
        See also entries below and: FEBRUARY 26 INCIDENT, HAMAGUCHI ASSASSINATION INCIDENT, MAY 15 INCIDENT, SEPTEMBER 18 INCIDENT, BIOLOGICAL WARFARE EXPERIMENTS—By Japan in the 1930s-1940s

JAPAN — Imperialist Invasion of China
[To be added...]

JEVONS, William Stanley   (1835-82)
A British bourgeois economist, and one of the founders of the notorious marginalist school of modern bourgeois economic thought.
        See also: SUNSPOT THEORY

JIANG QING   (Old style: Chiang Ching)   (1914-91)
Jiang Qing was Mao Zedong’s third wife, and the most prominent member of the so-called “Gang of Four” who played a prominent role in leading the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and who attempted unsuccessfully to continue the Chinese revolution after the death of Mao.
        After completing elementary school she enrolled in an acting school in Tai’an and at the age of 15 or 16 became part of an avant-garde theatrical group in 1929. In Qingdao in 1930 she began to associate with the Communist Party, and became a member in 1931. She was arrested for political activities and briefly imprisoned in 1933. In 1934 she married the film critic Ma Jiliang, and was divorced in 1937 after a scandalous affair. Not long after the Sino-Japanese War broke out Jiang went to Yanan which was the central base of the revolution. She worked at the Lu Xun Art Institute there, and met Mao. Within a year they were married.
        For many years Jiang Qing did not play much of a public role (required, it is said, by the Party leadership which had not approved of her marriage to Mao). In the early 1960s, however, she began to work on reforming the traditional Beijing Opera, by instilling more up-to-date themes and revolutionary content into it. She played an especially prominent role in promoting revolutionary art, literature, music, drama and films during the GPCR. Many of the model revolutionary Chinese operas of that period were produced with her guidance and direction.
        It seems that she and the other top Party leaders who tried to remain loyal to Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought [as our revolutionary science was then called] failed to use the mass line that Mao always strongly advocated, and failed to unite the great majority of the masses and the Party members against the relatively small number revisionists and capitalist-roaders within the Party. This is why Mao himself gave the friendly advice to this core of revolutionary leaders not to form themselves into a “Gang of Four” (which is the origin of the phrase).
        The revisionists within the CCP bided their time until Mao died on September 9, 1976. Less than a month later, on October 6, 1976, Jiang Qing and the other members of the “Gang of Four” were arrested and imprisoned. A show trial for them began in 1980, and according to the revisionists only Jiang Qing bothered to mount any sort of defense. She stated that she had obeyed the orders of Chairman Mao at all times and always tried to defend Mao and his political line. She also made the famous statement that “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.” At the conclusion of the trial in 1981, Jiang Qing was sentenced to death. In 1983 her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. While in prison she developed throat cancer and in 1991 was released temporarily to a hospital. She reportedly committed suicide before she could be returned to prison. In her suicide note she is said to have written: “Chairman [Mao]! I love you! Your loyal student and comrade is coming to see you!” However, there are also suspicions that she was murdered by her revisionist jailers, to prevent her from becoming a rallying point for Maoists.
        For a long, well-researched article about Jiang Qing and her struggles against revisionism, which is written from a Maoist perspective, see “Chiang Ching: The Revolutionary Ambitions of a Communist Leader”, by Zafia Ryan, at: http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1993-19/Chiang_Ching.htm

“You have been wronged. Today we are separating into two worlds. I am old and will soon die. May each keep his peace. These few words may be my last message to you. Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds. In the struggle of the past ten years I have tried to reach the peak of revolution, but I was not successful. But you could reach the top. If you fail, you will plunge into a fathomless abyss. Your body will shatter. Your bones will break.” —Said to be a prose poem, summation and warning written by Mao shortly before his death and sent to Jiang Qing. [As posted by Mike Ely on the Kasama-Threads website on Oct. 15, 2008.]

JIANG Zemin   (Old style: Chiang Tse-min)   (1926-   )
Top revisionist ruler in China after the death of Deng Xiaoping. He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989-2002, and President of the People’s Republic of China from 1993-2003. Deng groomed him as his principal successor, and called him the “core” of the third generation of leaders of the CCP and PRC. As head of the Party and state he loyally maintained Deng’s revisionist policies.

JOB LOSS CURVE
A graph showing the percentage of jobs lost during a recession beginning at the start of that recession. The graph at the right (from the Calculated Risk website) shows the job loss curves for all the U.S. recessions since World War II. Note that the current “Great Recession” has by far the worse and most prolonged job losses of any of these recessions—even according to distorted official statistics! The graph also shows that there was a small short term boost in jobs because of federal government hiring for the 2010 census project.

JOBLESS RECOVERY
A recovery from an economic recession in terms of renewed GDP growth which is not matched (or only feebly so) in terms of job growth, and the hiring back of workers who were laid off during the recession.
        The first recession in the U.S. to be given this description was that of 1990-91, though a recovery in jobs did eventually occur (as the so-called “Dot.com” or “New Economy” bubble developed). This same phenomenon was even more pronounced in the 2001 recession and its aftermath. Indeed, a considerable part of the very slow job recovery after that recession was actually due to phony statistics rather than to actual job growth. But the most extreme example so far of a jobless recovery has been in the aftermath of the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009. A year and a half after this recession is said to be over by bourgeois economists even the official unemployment rate is still around 10%, and the actual unemployment rate, including long-term discouraged workers who have given up looking for work, is over 20%.
        The fact that jobs are returning ever slower after recessions, or even not at all, is due to two major factors:
        1) The underlying contradictions of the capitalist economy are becoming ever worse, and it is getting harder and harder to resolve them even temporarily.
        2) There is a long term trend under capitalism to drastically improve productivity and to require ever fewer workers to produce all the goods and services for which there is effective market demand. (This is sometimes called the problem of automation.)

JUNK BOND
A bond issued by a capitalist corporation which has a very low rating by the securities rating agencies based on their estimate that company may not be able to redeem the bond when it comes due. In other words a bond issued by a company for which there is some reason to think that it might go bankrupt or otherwise be unable to pay its debts in the future. Unless and until the company actually does go bankrupt, the bonds it issues are not valueless, but they are obviously highly risky.
        Since junk bonds are risky, they command a higher rate of interest. Starting in the 1990s in the U.S., Wall Street brokers began selling junk bonds to the middle-class public in a major way. Obviously the term they themselves were using for these risky investments—“junk bonds”—did not promote their sale! Consequently alternative names such as “high-yield debt” were coined in order to better foist these risky investments off on unsuspecting yet greedy investors.

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