KANT, Immanuel (1724-1804)
German idealist philosopher who has historically played an extremely negative role in
ethics and philosophy in general, and whose influence has also adversely affected Marxism
at times. [More to be added.]
See also entries below, and:
philosophical doggerel about
Kant.
KANTIAN AGNOSTICISM
[To be added...]
KANTIAN ETHICS
There are several strands to Kant’s theory of ethics. He started from the
idealist position that there is some inherent “voice of
conscience” which establishes the truth about what is right or wrong, where reason cannot.
(This is factually completely wrong; we know very well that the
consciences of different people can give them very different
and opposed views about what is right or wrong, that the conscience is originally programmed
for you by the attitudes of your parents and others around you when you are very young, and
that the conscience can even be reprogrammed later.) Kant also believed in religious fashion
that the world must ultimately be one of freedom and justice, and—seeing that there is much
injustice around us—believed that this must mean that there is another life after this in
which God can “redress the balance”.
Thus Kant absurdly believed, from religious
impulses, that moral principles are a priori knowledge,
which are not learned, but which a person knows by instinct. (However, he did allow that a
person may learn through experience how to apply these moral principles and how to
actually do what is right.)
While perceiving that morality could not be
based on individual self-interest, Kant became fixated on the notion of absolute moral laws
which must take a universal form. He viewed moral principles as a question of absolute duty
which every person must be guided by no matter what the consequences. Ludicrous as it is, he
actually believed that moral principles (or moral maxims)
must have no exceptions whatsoever. Thus he maintained that lying is always
wrong even if someone will be injured or murdered if you tell the truth in some situation.
Kant’s famous (notorious?) doctrine of the categorical
imperative forms the heart of his theory.
Kant opposed any form of
naturalistic ethics which bases morality on human concepts,
on our social existence, and on our collective needs and interests. As such, Kantian ethics
is profoundly opposed to the Marxist-Leninist Class
Interest Theory of Ethics.
See also:
DEONTOLOGY
KANTIAN IDEALISM
[To be added...]
See also:
A PRIORI,
DING-AN-SICH
KASAMA PROJECT
A small new U.S. revolutionary group centered around the Kasama website. Mike Ely and
friends started the Kasama website (now at
http://kasamaproject.org/) in December 2007, and soon developed a fairly
large regular readership. An initial posting on Kasama, and still its central and most
important document, was Mike Ely’s
“9 Letters to Our Comrades”, a fairly extensive critique of the
Revolutionary Communist Party. Many of the core people associated
with the Kasama site are folks who were earlier in or around the RCP.
In April 2008 the core group formed a
communist organization called the Kasama Project.
KAUTSKY, Karl (1854-1938)
German skin-deep socialist theoretician and leader, who became a renegade from Marxism.
[More to be added...]
KEYNES, John Maynard (1883-1946)
A famous liberal British economist and diplomat. He represented the British Treasury in
international negotiations during and after both the First and Second World Wars.
Keynes’ most famous work is his General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), often called the General Theory
for short. [More to be added.]
See also below, and:
BASTARD KEYNESIANISM.
KEYNESIAN DEFICIT FINANCING
Keynes rejected the standard bourgeois economic dogma, known as Say’s
Law which holds that capitalist production always creates its own markets. (I.e., that it
automatically creates a market equal to the full value of all the commodities produced.)
However, he thought the failure of capitalism to do this was just a sometime thing,
which could be controlled and circumvented by the goverment overseers of the capitalist economy.
(He did not at all understand, let alone agree with, the Marxist theory of
surplus value and how its very generation ensures that
capitalist production is never able to create markets equal to the full value of the
commodities produced under this system.)
When “gluts” or
overproduction did appear, along with a recession and rising
unemployment, Keynes said that one major way to eliminate these problems was to
“prime the pump” (i.e., get things working “properly” again)
by having the government hire the unemployed and pay them wages from either money borrowed from
the rich, or else from money that the government just prints up instead of obtaining it from
taxes. He thought (quite erroneously) that once things were running smoothly again, the
government could start running surpluses instead of deficits, and—with proper management—over
time the deficits and surpluses would even out, and this procedure could be applied
indefinitely.
In his General Theory magnum opus Keynes argued
that the public works projects were not themselves essential and were merely a side benefit.
The real boost to the economy was due to the government budget deficits themselves and the
putting of money (in whatever way) into the hands of those who would actually spend it. He
even stated (correctly!) that it would work just as well to hire workers to dig useless
holes, and then fill them up again! The point was to somehow get money into their
hands which they would then spend.
Although “Keynesian deficits” are named after
Keynes, he was not the first to come up with the idea. Other bourgeois, and especially social
democratic, economists in Germany and Sweden not only came up with the same basic idea before
Keynes, but even started using it to good effect before Keynes wrote his General Theory.
In Sweden, for example, Gunnar Myrdal talked the government there into applying deficit
financing which greatly mitigated the Depression, and a similar thing happened in Germany.
[The Marxist view of Keynesian deficit
financing and its limits... To be added.]
See also:
“MILITARY KEYNESIANISM”
KHRUSHCHEV, Nikita Sergeyevich (1894-1971)
[Outside of the U.S. his name is often transliterated from Cyrillic as ‘Khrushchov’ rather
than ‘Khrushchev’.] Soviet revisionist ruler who led in the complete destruction of socialism
in the Soviet Union.
Born near Kursk, as a boy he was a shepherd
and later a locksmith. He was almost illiterate until the age of 25. In 1918 he joined the
Communist Party [Bolsheviks] and fought in the Civil War. He received most of his education
as a Party member and at the same time rose rapidly in the Party organization. In 1939 he
was made a full member of the Politburo. During World War II he organized guerrilla warfare
in Ukraine against the German invaders, and afterwards was in charge of the economic
reconstruction of the region. In 1949 he was in charge of a major reorganization of Soviet
agriculture.
When Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev
became First Secretary of the CPSU. At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 he gave a secret
speech (soon leaked) denouncing Stalin and his errors and crimes,
but from a bourgeois standpoint, not a Marxist-Leninist one. The next year he demoted his
main rivals, Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, and consolidated
his personal power. From then on he more and more promoted the process of changing what
remained of socialism into state capitalism. He further
promoted the expansion of privileges for high-ranking Party members, economic “reforms” that
made production more dependent on profits, material bonuses to workers (rather than moral
education and rewards), etc.
Internationally Khrushchev’s policies wavered
between contention and co-operation with U.S. imperialism. On the one hand he made “peaceful
competition” with capitalism his basic program, and the insistence on reformist, electoral
policies for all other “Communist” parties not already in power. In line with these policies he
tried to cut various deals with U.S. imperialism. On the other hand, after the U.S. installed
nuclear missiles in Turkey which were aimed at the USSR, Khrushchev rather recklessly attempted
to do the same thing in Cuba. This led to the Cuban
Missile Crisis, a game of “nuclear chicken” between U.S. imperialism and Soviet
“social-imperialism” (socialism in name, imperialism in deeds) which almost led to World War
III. The “liberal” regime of President John Kennedy was quite willing to launch such a war if
Khrushchev did not back down, even if it did mean the horrible deaths of hundreds of millions
of people! Khrushchev, for all his crimes and faults, at least had sense enough to back down
and withdraw the missiles he had en route to Cuba. After that Khrushchev reverted once more to
a general policy of appeasement and co-operation with U.S. imperialism, to the detriment of
the world revolution.
By cozying up to U.S. imperialism, acting in
an imperialist manner himself, and by taking the capitalist road within the Soviet Union,
Khrushchev and his fellow revisionists also provoked a split with Mao’s China which was
determined to keep to the proletarian revolutionary road.
By 1964 Khrushchev’s fellow revisionists in
the leadership of the Soviet Union were becoming weary of him and his economic and political
failures, and forced him from power.
How is it possible that a man of
peasant/proletarian origins, who was educated and developed by the Communist party of Lenin
and Stalin, and who provided service to the socialist cause for decades became the leader in
the destruction of genuine socialism? The fundamental lesson here seems to be that no matter
what one’s class origins, no matter what one’s education, no matter what one’s prior
contributions, a person can change his class stand and ideology, especially if he is in a
society that is quite conducive to that. The Soviet socialist system as it developed under
Stalin was largely top-down and paternalistic, with the masses having little power to
directly control their own lives and little ability to supervise the leadership of the Party
and government. Though Stalin did not intend to create a new bourgeoisie within the
higher ranks of the Party, this is what happened, in part because Stalin himself promoted
the special privileges and rewards for what later came to be called the
nomenklatura. In effect, people like Khrushchev were
educated early on by the Party as communists, and then “re-educated” later on as
revisionists. Once people like that achieved full power themselves, socialism was soon
demolished.
See also:
FIVE REQUIREMENTS FOR SUCCESSORS TO THE
REVOLUTIONARY CAUSE OF THE PROLETARIAT
KNOWLEDGE
[To be added... ]
See also below and:
HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
KNOWLEDGE — Certain
[To be added... ]
See also:
AGNOSTICISM, and
the essay “Do We Know For
Certain That the Earth Goes Around the Sun?”.
“But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt
of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that
a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless
eternal truths, final and ultimate truths?
“Certainly there are.... If it
gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted
that certain results obtained by these sciences [mathematics, astronomy, mechanics,
physics and chemistry] are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason
these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their
results have this validity.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:81. [Note
that of course Engels’ comment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle equal two
right angles is only valid in Euclidian geometry. —S.H.]
“Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field..., and as even Herr Dühring would realize if he had any acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which deal precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:84.
KOLKHOZ (Plural: KOLKHOZY)
A collective farm in the Soviet Union; a cooperative of multiple peasant families who were
paid on the basis of the quantity and quality of the labor contributed. After 1929, when the
rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture began, the kolkhoz became the dominant
form of agricultural enterprise. During the pre-World War II period a kolkhoz included
an average of about 75 households, but starting in 1949 many kolkhozy were merged
together and by 1960 each one included about 340 households. Although the chairman of each
kolkhoz was nominally elected, in practice they were usually appointed by the regional
government authorities.
Soviet agriculture also had separate “Machine
Tractor Stations” which provided mechanical farming equipment services to the collective farms,
but these were merged with the enlarged kolkhozy in 1958. By 1961 each collective farm
had production quotas negotiated with the State Procurement Committee, as determined by
centrally planned agricultural production goals for each region, and sold their products to
the state agencies at contracted prices. Production in excess of those quotas, and from small
garden plots operated by individual families, was sold on the kolkhoz market at
prevailing market prices.
KONDRATIEV, Nikolai D. (Also spelled: Kondratieff) (1892-1938)
Russian semi-Marxist proponent of the existence of long-term economic waves, often called
Kondratiev Waves after him. (See below.) In the early 1920s he engaged in a theoretical
dispute with Leon Trotsky over this issue, in which both his and
Trotsky’s arguments left more than a little to be desired.
Kondratiev was a member of the peasant-based
Socialist-Revolutionary Party before the October Revolution, and briefly a member of the last
Kerensky government. After the Revolution he focused on academic research, and in 1920 founded
the Institute of Conjuncture. (Modern advocates of “conjuncture
theories” please note!) He was a proponent of the Soviet New Economic
Policy (NEP) and argued for the primacy of agriculture and consumer goods rather than heavy
industry in order to develop the Russian economy. By 1927 he no longer had any influence on
Soviet economic policy.
While it is no doubt true to say that
Kondratiev was not really much of a Marxist, his treatment by the Stalin regime was quite
outrageous. According to the Wikipedia, he was arrested in July 1930 and accused of being a
member of an illegal and proably non-existent “Peasants’ Labor Party”. In August 1930 Stalin
wrote a letter to Molotov asking for Kondratiev’s execution. However he was first imprisoned
for a term of 8 years. In 1938 he was re-tried and condemned to another 10 years in prison,
but was executed on the same day the edict was issued, as part of Stalin’s Great Purge.
KONDRATIEV WAVES
Long-term economic “waves” or cycles postulated by Nikolai Kondratiev from an empirical
study of 19th century European economic history. While there were definitely periods
of economic activity above average and below average during that century, Kondratiev could give
no convincing reason for thinking that there was some internal governing mechanism for these
changes which would justify calling them “waves” or cycles. Furthermore, his empirical evidence
was so weak that he variously claimed that these long waves had a period of 45, 50 or 60
years.
Ironically, there may be good reasons for
postulating long-term economic waves during the capitalist-imperialist era! (See my work
in progress, “An Introduction to Capitalist Economic Crises”, at
http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/index.htm, especially chapters 4 and 5,
for more on this. —S.H.)
KROPOTKIN, Peter [Pyotr Alexeyevich] (1842-1921)
Russian anarchist. Though opposed to Marxism, his writings on ethics and related
topics have considerable interest, especially Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution
(1902) and Ethics (1922). Though weak in class perspective and revolutionary political
theory, he showed considerable insight into questions of the evolution of cooperation and the
social nature of ethics.
KULAK
A Russian term which originally meant a “grasping”, well-off peasant, but which was later
defined to mean a peasant who employed labor, and who thus exploited poor and often
landless peasants. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union appropriately targetted the kulaks,
and sought to eliminate them as a social class. Unfortunately, this was to a large degree
not accomplished by the most appropriate means of turning the kulaks into first
ordinary peasants and then rural proletarians. Instead, during the collectivization campaign
of 1930-33, directed by Stalin, millions of peasants who were officially classified as kulaks
were either shipped off to forced labor camps or else died of starvation. Moreover, it seems
that many of these were actually middle peasants, and not “kulaks” at all.
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