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
“In my opinion, the essence of the argument is: (1) In Kant, cognition
demarcates (divides) nature and man; actually it unites them; (2) In Kant, ‘the empty
abstraction’ of the Thing-in-itself instead of living progress, motion, deeper and
deeper, of our knowledge about things.” —Lenin,“Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science
of Logic” (1914), LCW 38:91.
KENT STATE MASSACRE
An attack on and murders of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4,
1970, who were protesting the U.S. war in Vietnam and the recent U.S. invasion of
Cambodia. The Ohio National Guard fired at the demonstration, killing four students and
wounding 9 others, one of whom was permanently paralyzed.
This massacre led to a nation-wide
student strike which closed down hundreds of universities, colleges and high schools,
involving over 4 million students. This is so far the only national student strike
in U.S. history. The massacre also further turned U.S. public opinion against the
imperialist U.S. war in Indo-China.
Eight of the National Guard soldiers
were later indicted by a grand jury, but the reactionary court system accepted the
absurd claim by the soldiers that they fired only because they “feared for their lives”,
and all the charges were dropped. The Guardsmen had been firing so indiscriminately that
even some people walking by the demonstration, or watching it from afar, were shot. But
there was no way the government was going to seriously discipline its own murderous
troops, whether in Ohio or southeast Asia.
KEY LINK
“As an old saying goes, ‘Once the headrope of a fishing net is
pulled up, all its meshes open.’ It is only by taking hold of the key link that
everything else will fall into its proper place. The key link means the main theme.
The contradiction between socialism and capitalism and the gradual resolution of
this contradiction—that is the main theme, the key link. Grasp this key link, and
all kinds of political and economic work to help the peasants will fall under it.”
—Mao, “Two Talks on Mutual Aid and Co-operation in Agriculture: The Talk of November
4” (Nov. 4, 1953), SW 5:136. [In later years many Chinese leaders, including Deng
Xiaoping, talked in terms of the “key link”, but for them it never meant class
struggle.]
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’s 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,
LIQUIDITY TRAP,
NEO-KEYNESIANISM,
NEW KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS,
“PRIMING THE PUMP”
“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the
hands of which we found ourselves after the [First World] war, is not a success. It
is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it
doesn’t deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise
it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.” —John
Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency”, Yale Review, #22, 1933, pp.
760-61.
KEYNESIANISM
[To be added...]
“Keynes’s basic conclusion can ... be put very directly. Previously it
had been held [by bourgeois economists —S.H.] that the economic system, any capitalist
system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it
came to rest. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium
with continuing, serious underemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what
economists have since come to call an underemplyment equilibrium.” —John Kenneth
Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (1977), p. 216.
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
KIENTHAL CONFERENCE
The second of two important international socialist conferences held in Switzerland in the early
years of World War I, and which attempted to address the question of what socialists should do
about the War.
See also:
ZIMMERWALD CONFERENCE
“The Second International Socialist Conference met at Kienthal
(April 24-30, 1916). The Left wing was more solidly united and stronger than at
Zimmerwald. Lenin secured the adoption of a resolution critizing social-pacifism and the
opportunistic activities of the International Socialist Bureau. The Kienthal Manifesto
and resolutions represented a further step toward an international movement against the
war.
“Zimmerwald and Kienthal helped to
crystallize and unite the internationalist elements, but both Conferences failed to take
a consistent internationalist stand, and did not accept the basic principles of the
Bolshevik policy: conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war, defeat of one’s
own imperialist government in the war, and the organization of a Third International.”
—Note 333, Lenin, SW I (1967).
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.
See also:
SOVKHOZ (State Farm)
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.)
KOREA — North and South
[Intro to be added...]
From an economic standpoint the regime in North
Korea has been a dismal total failure. When the two countries were established the North had
more industrial development than the South, though it is true that most of that in the North
was obliterated by the massive U.S. bombing during the Korean War. Still, even as late as the
early 1970s the per capita GDP of the two countries was virtually the same. Since then, however,
the South, with the aid of the U.S. and Japan, has zoomed upward, while the North has stagnated
and even declined despite aid from the Soviet Union and China. Per capita GDP in the North
is now apparently less than 5% of that in the South. (See the chart at the right which was
posted on a Washington Post blog on 12/19/11.
We can’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it certainly reflects at least the approximate
situation.) One commentator noted that “Each year the dollar value of South Korea’s GDP
expansion equals the entire North Korean economy.”
In agriculture the situation has been even worse
in the North, where major famines have led to the deaths of possibly more than one million
people and the serious malnutrition of many more millions. And that is despite food aid from
China and extensive U.N. emergency food aid.
In our view these differences between South
Korea and North Korea by no means reflect any supposed superiority of capitalism to socialism,
because the North has not really been a socialist country at all (let alone a “communist”
country as it is called in the West). It is not even what Marx derided as “barracks socialism”;
instead, it is the world’s worst example of state capitalism, in effect “one big corporation”
running (and totally mismanaging) the economy to the colossal detriment of the people, and for
the benefit of a tiny few at the top.
KRUPSKAYA, Nadezhda (Nadezhda Konstantinovna “Nadya” Krupskaya) (1869-1939)
A Russian Marxist and Bolshevik revolutionary. She married Vladimir Lenin in 1898, and they
remained devoted to each other. Krupskaya focused her efforts especially on education, not
only on questions of literacy and libraries, but particularly on socialist education. She was
Deputy Minister of Education in the Soviet Union from 1929-1939. She is now best known for her
very interesting and useful biography, Reminiscences of Lenin, published in the USSR
in 1933, and first published in English in Britain in 1960.
“In the summer of 1930, on the eve of the Sixteenth Party Congress, the
Moscow district Party conferences were held. Lenin’s widow, N. K. Krupskaya, spoke at the
Bauman district branch against the methods that Stalin was using in the collectivization
drive, declaring that this programme had nothing in common with Lenin’s co-operative
scheme. She accused the Party Central Committee of ignorance of the peasants’ mood and
of refusing to consult the people. ‘It is pointless to blame the local organizations for
all the mistakes made by the Central Committee itself,’ she declared.
“While Krupskaya was making her
speech, the district committee chiefs got word to [Lazar] Kaganovich, who came round to
the platform when Krupskaya had finished and subjected her speech to coarse and scathing
abuse. He repudiated her argument and added that as a member of the Central Committee she
had no right to utter her criticism from the platform of a district Party conference.
‘N. K. Krupskaya should not imagine’, he declared, ‘that she has the monopoly on Leninism
because she was Lenin’s wife.’” —Roy Medvedev, All Stalin’s Men (1984), pp. 118-9.
[Medvedev was a revisionist, but this report rings true. It demonstrates Krupskaya’s
commitment to using something more like the mass line, and the total rejection of that
method by Stalin and one of his top lieutenants Kaganovich. Krupskaya, like any Party
member, should indeed have had the right to speak out on the line of the Party, especially
in a period leading up to a Party Congress. And there is no reason to believe Kaganovich’s
ridiculous charge that Krupskaya viewed herself as having a “monopoly on Leninism”. —S.H.]
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.
“One problem keenly debated in party circles was the question what to
do with the kulak, or the peasant labelled as such by the authorities, the
peasant who commonly farmed the largest and best plots of land in the village, was best
equipped with animals and machines, produced and held the largest surpluses of grain,
and offered the strongest opposition to Soviet policies, including the policy of
collectivization. Opinons were sharply divided. If the kulak, together with his
land and inventory, were incorporated in the Kolkhoz, he would—so
some party members argued—make an important contribution to its production and efficiency.
But he would also—as others reasonably predicted—exercise a dominating influence over
it, and guide it in directions hostile to the purposes of the party and the state. If,
however, he were excluded from the Kolkhoz, what was to become of him? He could not be
allowed to retain his land and possessions, and constitute an independent unit of
production side by side with the Kolkhoz. He would have to be evicted and expelled from
the region; and this was a harsh measure which few at first were ready to contemplate.
No acceptable solution could be found.” —E.H. Carr, The Russian Revolution from Lenin
to Stalin: 1917-1929 (1979), ch. 16. [Carr was a bourgeois historian, somewhat
sympathetic to the Russian Revolution.]
KURZARBEIT [“Short-Work”]
The German system of dealing with recessions and slowdowns in industry by having all the
affected workers put in shorter hours rather than having some work full time and others be
laid off entirely. This is therefore a means of somewhat equalizing one of the forms of pain
endemic to the capitalist system. This program began in a limited fashion in 1910 in the
fertilizer industry and was introduced in a major way in 1924 at a time when German
unemployment had reached 11%. In the 2008-2010 period of the
“Great Recession” it is estimated that this Short-Work
system saved about 500,000 jobs.
Of course the capitalists would rather just lay off some of the workers, so the government
program in effect bribes the companies not to do so. In other words, it is as much a form of
government subsidy for corporations as it is a method of spreading the lack of work among the
proletariat. And despite the existence of this program, German unemployment rates have still
been fairly high during the past couple decades.
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