Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   K   —

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 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.

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.

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 19^th 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.)

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