Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Mi - Mn   —

MICHURIN, Ivan Vladimirovich   (1855-1935)
Russian horticulturalist whose theory of cross-breeding was based on the idea that acquired characteristics of plants and animals could be inherited. Unfortunately, this erroneous theory was adopted by Trofim Lysenko and became for a long while the official doctrine of the Soviet Union during the years of Stalin and Khrushchev. This led to considerable damage to Soviet genetic research and Soviet agriculture.

MICROECONOMICS
A term used (mostly in bourgeois economics) to refer to studies or descriptions of small and semi-isolated parts of the economy, such as how individual firms or households typically function from an economic perspective. Compare with macroeconomics which studies the overall operation of the economy.

MIDDLE AGES
The period of about 1,000 years, from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire at around 500 C.E. (“A.D.”) to about 1500 C.E. In other words, roughly the period of feudalism in Europe.

“MIDDLE CLASS”
[In common bourgeois usage:] A vague sort of class category, or occasionally more precisely defined on the basis of arbitrary family income ranges, such as “families which have an income of more than $20,000 per year and less than $500,000 per year”. As this example shows, the “middle class” in current establishment parlance includes the greatest part of the American population.
        While bourgeois writers prefer not to talk about social classes at all, they are sometimes forced to do so. But when they do, they do not use Marxist class terms which are defined on the basis of definite relationships of groups of people to the means of production. Instead, vaguely or arbitrarily defined “classes” such as the middle class are referred to. The bourgeois term the “middle class” is the rough equivalent to the Marxist term the petty bourgeoisie, though the bourgeois term also includes much of what we would call the working class or proletariat.
        [More to be added... ]

MIDDLE PEASANT
1. [In China before collectivization in the 1950s:] A peasant (farmer) who owned enough land, work animals and farm equipment, so that he and his family could survive by working their own land. Middle peasants (most of the time) neither hired other peasants to work for them, nor themselves worked for rich peasants or landlords.
2. People in a similar situation at other times and places.
        See also: CHINA—Class Analysis Before 1949

MIKHAILOVSKY, N. K.   (1842-1904)
Russian sociologist, political writer and literary critic who was a prominent ideologist of the liberal Narodniks. Lenin extensively criticized Mikhailovsky’s views in his early work “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” (1894) [LCW 1:129ff].

MILETIAN SCHOOL
See: IONIAN SCHOOL

MILITARISM
        1) The heavy emphasis upon building up military power and using it (what bourgeois experts term “power projection”) to solve problems confronted by imperialism. This program is typically tied to maintaining control of a strategically important region of the world. Militarism is one avenue by which the bourgeoisie might seek to resolve such problems; others including diplomacy, bribery to foreign compradors, sponsoring coups and destabilization in the targeted country, economic strangulation, and other means short of outright war. At various times and for various reasons, different sectors of the bourgeoisie may favor militarism over these alternatives. This could be because of a convergence of the interests of particular capitalists and their representatives and allies in the state apparatus who favor war for their own parochial interests (for example, because they are close to the arms industry or the military, either financially or ideologically), or because the actions that do not deploy overt military force are failing and there is no real choice left but to use it (from the point of view of imperialism’s interests, though of course the capitalist state, when it does pursue war, will always try to portray its actions as being in the interests of “the people”, both at home and in the targeted country).
        In the current capitalist-imperialist era, militarism is a particularly important feature of American foreign policy, and has come to define and characterize it more and more. The United States spends roughly as much as the rest of the world combined on its military; even “in spite” of the end of the Cold War, US military spending has continued to rise. The United States is also the world’s leading exporter of arms and military training, much of which goes to repressive “Third World” dictatorships and other troubled regions.
        2) An ideological framework in which the military is bestowed with almost divine status and adulation by political, media and cultural pundits, who also seek to imbue the masses with the view of a sacrosanct military. This is typically a feature of fascist regimes who want to regiment the population and turn them into mindless foot-soldiers who are ready to die without question. It is also, arguably, a feature of creeping fascism of the sort that some see taking shape in the United States. —L.C.
        See also IRAQ WAR, PENTAGON SYSTEM, LOCKHEED MARTIN

MILITARY EXPENDITURES
One of the most outrageously criminal aspects of the contemporary capitalist world is that the bourgeoisie of virtually every country spends enormous sums on building and maintaining its military forces. Why do they all do this? First, as a powerful force kept in reserve to maintain their rule over their own people, and to put down any mass revolts. And second, for wars or preparations for wars with other countries to steal their wealth.
        Of course it is the imperialist countries which today spend the most enormous sums for wars and war preparations. And the world’s imperialist superpower, the United States, of course tops the list by a very wide margin. Not only does the U.S. spend almost as much as the rest of the nations of the world combined, it is still increasing its military expenditures overall. In 2009, for example, U.S. military expenditures grew by another 7.7%. (Most of the statistics in this entry come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, especially their summary “Recent trends in military expenditure” at: http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/resultoutput/trends.)
        Today the U.S. is engaged in multiple imperialist wars, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yeman, the Horn of Africa, etc. The biggest of these at the moment is in Afghanistan/Pakistan, where in 2010 alone the U.S. will spend more (even in inflation adjusted terms) than its entire expenditures for the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined! [Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, Dec. 25, 2010.]
        World military expenditures in 2009 were estimated to be more than $1.53 trillion! That was an increase of 49% over 2000 (in real terms). The world’s capitalist-imperialists are preparing for even more wars, and even more expensive wars, in the future.

“MILITARY KEYNESIANISM”
Government budget deficits which are occasioned specifically by large military expenditures. Capitalist governments are often very reluctant to spend money on public works or the health and welfare of the working class, even if the main purpose in doing so is to boost the overall economy through Keynesian deficit spending. But capitalist governments are willing to spend much more freely on expanding their military might, and are therefore much more willing to create “fiscal deficits” to boost the economy that way.
        For example, most capitalist countries were not able to even temporarily suspend the Great Depression of the 1930s through large deficit-causing public works programs and other social expenditures; the best that most of them, including the U.S., could do along those lines was to somewhat mitigate the effects of that extremely severe overproduction crisis through rather small government deficits. But all these countries were quite willing to run truly colossal deficits for war production just before and during World War II. That military Keynesianism suspended the Depression until the massive destruction of capital during the war ended it completely.

MILL, James   (1773-1836)
British economist and philosopher, who vularized the political economy of Ricardo. James Mill was a close friend of Jeremy Bentham and the father of John Stuart Mill.

MILL, John Stuart   (1806-1873)
British economist and positivist philosopher. Following in the footsteps of his father, James Mill (see above), and his godfather Jeremy Bentham, he became the most famous proponent of utilitarianism, in the hedonistic form that Bentham gave to it.
        Also following in the footsteps of Bentham and his father, he became the most prominent vulgarizer of classical political economy in the 19^th century. He advocated conciliation between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the interests of the working class, and thought that the contradictions of capitalism could be overcome by reforming the methods of distribution into some vague bourgeois version of “socialism”.

“MILLERANDISM”
An opportunist trend in Western European socialist parties at the beginning of the 20^th century wherein nominally proletarian revolutionary parties struck bargains and agreements with the ruling class which allowed them some participation in bourgeois governments. Also known as “ministerialism”. Millerandism is a term used by Lenin in his 1908 article “Marxism and Revisionism” and elsewhere, and is named after the French “socialist” leader Alexandre Millerand who in 1899 became part of the reactionary French government and helped the bourgeoisie carry out imperialist policies.

MIND
A set of ways of looking at the brain at work. In other words, a set of aspects, characteristics or functions of the brains of advanced animals (especially humans of course). Thus thinking is a high-level characterization of one sort of operation that a brain carries out, while a thought is a high-level characterization of the results of that brain process in a specific situation. Awareness, concern, boredom, worrying, happiness and all the countless other such mental states, are abstract characterizations of the physical states of the brain (which, if they could be described in purely neurophysiological terms would be incomprehensibly complex compilations of the states of neural networks and of millions or billions of individual neuronal states). The mind is not “identical to” the brain; it is rather the collection of all the high-level abstract views which we must necessarily have about how our brain is functioning.
        See also below, and: FUNCTIONALISM, IDENTITY THEORY and philosophical doggerel about mind and matter.

MIND-BODY PROBLEM
The most basic question of philosophy: what is the nature of the relationship between mind and body (or between mind and brain, or mind and matter). The two big schools of thought are materialism (that matter is primary and mind is a characteristic or function of certain highly complex organizations of matter such as brains) and idealism (that mind or “spirit” is primary and that matter—if it really exists at all—is somehow a creation or outgrowth of mind). Dualism, the view that mind and matter are completely independent, is often considered a third option, though to materialists it just seems to be a variety of idealism since it denies that mind is a function or characteristic of certain complicated organizations of matter (brains).

MINISTERIALISM
A form of political opportunism wherein a once-revolutionary party (or particular leaders of it) settle instead for ministerial positions within a bourgeois government rather than continuing to fight for complete political power for the proletariat.
        See also: MILLERANDISM

MINSKY, Hyman   (1919-96)
American bourgeois economist of the Keynesian or “Post-Keynesian” school. He was the son of Menshevik emmigrants from Belarus, and sort of reflected that type of thinking within the more openly bourgeois American context. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard where he was influenced by Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief. He taught at Brown University, the University of California—Berkeley, and then Washington University in St. Louis from 1965 until his retirement in 1990.
        Along with Keynes and almost all other economists strongly influenced by Keynes, Minsky did not understand that economic crises are inherent to the capitalist mode of production. He did not at all understand how crises derive ultimately from the very extraction of surplus value from the working class. But he did recognize that financial crises are inherent in at least the highly financialized form of capitalism as it now occurs in modern America:

“The normal functioning of our economy leads to financial trauma and crises, inflation, currency depreciations, unemployment and poverty in the midst of what could be virtually universal affluence—in short ... financially complex capitalism is inherently flawed.” —Hyman Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (NY: 2008), p. 320. [Of course his claim here that capitalism, correctly organized and managed, could provide “virtually universal affluence” is totally ridiculous!]

“Capitalism is a flawed system in that, if its development is not constrained, it will lead to periodic deep depressions and the perpetuation of poverty.” —Hyman Minsky, quoted in John Bellamy Foster & Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (2009), p. 17. [Foster & Magdoff go on to point out, however, that Minsky did not believe that capitalism would necessarily lead to deep depressions. Instead, he thought that capitalist development could be “constrained”, and major crises could be avoided. In other words, he still had a bourgeois conception of the deepest reasons for capitalist economic crises.]

Minsky correctly viewed speculative investment bubbles as being “endogenous” in (internal to or inherent in) capitalist financial markets. But he attributed this to an inevitable “speculative euphoria” that develops during economic booms. This speculation he viewed as leading to massive debt accumulation, to the point where borrowers are not able to pay off their debts from their regular incoming revenues. Precisely why all this has to be the case, however, he was unable to clearly explain.
        If (a big if!) the workers actually were somehow able to buy all the goods that they collectively produce, then there would be no need for them to go into debt. Moreover, the capitalists could soon accumulate the additional new capital from their profits to expand production and keep the economy booming. Thus there would be no need for ever-larger debt in the economy at all. But, contrary to the conception of Minsky and other bourgeois economists, the workers cannot possibly buy back all that they produce because the value of their wages must always be significantly less than the value of the goods that they produce. Thus everything produced can only be sold if the workers are granted extensive and ever-growing credit. This credit (debt) constantly accumulates until it gets obviously excessive and its further expansion has to be limited more and more. Since the ability of the working class to buy all they produce must be curtailed by eventually restricting credit to them, there comes a time when it no longer makes sense to build more factories to further expand production. So what then are the capitalists to do with all the surplus value they have extracted? More and more they just create means for financial speculation. This is the true explanation for why the capitalists generate such “speculative euphorias” especially towards the end of boom periods, and why financialized capitalism itself inevitably develops. Thus Minsky’s notion that modern financialized capitalism can be controlled, regulated, or returned to a form of capitalism where crises do not develop is total bourgeois nonsense.
        Minsky stressed the importance of the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the U.S.) as the “lender of last resort” during an economic crisis. That, however, seems pretty obvious today. His “Financial Instability Hypothesis” model of the credit system was based on ideas of other bourgeois economists going back as far as Alfred Marshall and even John Stuart Mill. But because he had at least a partial understanding of the instability of modern financial capitalism he opposed the moves of the neo-liberal ideologists of the 1980s to deregulate the economy and predicted that this would eventually lead to intensified problems in the economy—as in fact it has done. But his theory that proper regulation, central bank operations and other government policies would be able to prevent capitalist economic and financial crises is totally erroneous.
        Nevertheless, because Minsky viewed modern financial capitalism, as it actually exists, as unstable and prone to crisis, his views are anathema to most bourgeois economists and the economics profession as a whole. With the outbreak of the major new financial crisis in 2008, however, some bourgeois economists are now giving his theories a more sympathetic look. Many of Minsky’s ideas have also been accepted and promoted by some semi-Marxist, semi-Keynesian political economists, such as those connected with the Monthly Review school.

“Minsky’s proposed solution to financial crisis was state intervention on two fronts: the government should run a big budget deficit and the central bank should pump money into the economy. It will be noted, despite Minsky’s pariah status in economics, that his remedy is exactly what has been adopted [in the current crisis]—in the US, the UK, the eurozone and much of the developed world. The problem is, it has not so far worked. Trillions of dollars of ready money, tax cuts and state spending were shovelled into the world economy to stop the credit crunch producing another Great Depression. Yet all these trillions are up against a powerful backwash of collapse within the real economy.” —Paul Mason, Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, 2009, p. 156.

“What would you say if I sent bonzes and lamas to preach in your country?” —Chinese emperor Ch’ien Lung. Quoted in William Hinton, Fanshen (1966), p. 58. Bonzes and lamas are English terms for Buddhist monks.

MISTAKES — Attitude Towards
        See also: PAST MISTAKES

“Communists should not be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes have a dual character. On the one hand mistakes harm the Party and the people; on the other they serve as good teachers, giving both the Party and the people a good education, and this benefits the revolution. Failure is the mother of success. If there is nothing good about failure, how can it be the mother of success? When too many mistakes are made, there is bound to be a turn-about. That is Marxism. ‘Things turn into their opposites when they reach the extreme’; when mistakes pile up, light is not far off.” —Mao, “Some Experiences in Our Party’s History” (Sept. 25, 1956), SW 5:329.

MNC
See: MULTI-NATIONAL CORPORATION

Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index

MASSLINE.ORG Home Page