PIATNITSKY, Osip Aaronovitch [born Iosif Oriolovich Tarshis] (1882-1938)
A “Old Bolshevik” Russian revolutionary from a Jewish working class family in the Lithuanian part
of the Tsarist Empire. He became a Marxist and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP) in 1899 and began political work in Vilna (now Vilnius). Since he was working in the
illegal political underground, one of the pseudonyms he used to avoid capture by the political
police was Piatnitsa (meaning “Friday”), which he later used as his formal Party family name,
Piatnitsky.
Already in 1901, he associated himself with the
Internationalist faction of the RSDLP, which included Lenin, and thus Piatnitsky became one of
what soon came to be called the Bolsheviks. He was naturally proud of that affiliation, and in the
late 1920s he wrote a book about those early experiences, entitled Memoirs of a Bolshevik.
[Available online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USSR/Individuals/Piatnitsky/Piatnitsky-MemoirsOfABolshevik-OCR-sm.pdf
]
Among the dangerous tasks undertaken by Piatnitsky
was the smuggling of Lenin’s newspaper Iskra [“The Spark”] into Russia, and also helped other
Party members cross the border into and out of the Russian Empire. He was arrested in 1902, but
soon escaped and resumed his courier work. Piatnitsky was a delegate to what is called the Second
Congress of the RSDLP in London in 1903, and supported Lenin. This was actually the re-founding of
the Party even though it resulted in the famous split between the Bolsheviks (“majority”) and the
Mensheviks (“minority”). After that Congress he resumed his dangerous work, was arrested again
(and again escaped), and was then arrested for a third time and exiled to Siberia. He was not
freed from that exile until after the Tsar was overthrown in the February Revolution (early
1917).
During the October Revolution period, and in the
period of construction of the new revolutionary government, Piatnitsky had a variety of roles. He
was a member of the Bolshevik Party’s Moscow Committee, and held various government positions. But
in 1921 he moved into the work he became best known for, as a leading member of the Communist
International. He was the Treasurer of the Comintern and head of its International Department. In
June 1923 he was elected as one of the four top leaders of the Comintern’s governing Secretariat.
He remained a top official of the Communist International during the 1920s and half way through
the 1930s. After Grigory Zinoviev was removed as the top leader of the Executive Committee of the
Comintern in 1926, Piatnitsky’s role in the Secretariat was even more important.
However, Piatnitsky continued to also have high
positions within the Russian Party too, including within its Central Control Committee (in charge
of party discipline), and beginning in 1927 as a full member of the Central Committee of the
Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). But during Stalin’s Great
Purges of the late 1930s, a long series of very likely mostly unjustified arrests and
executions, Osip Piatnitsky showed what a truly courageous and outstanding human being he was by
expressing serious doubt that many of the charges against other party comrades were really valid
and justified. This occurred at meetings of the Central Committee. When harshly criticized for
his doubts and comments, Piatnitsky refused to change his position about what he really thought.
Because of this he was removed from membership in the Central Committee in October 1937. Later he
himself was given a summary trial, and executed on October 30th, 1938.
Osip Piatnitsky should be remembered and honored
for being the truly brave and principled Marxist-Leninist revolutionary that he certainly was.
PIATLETKA
Roman alphabet transliteration of the Russian word ‘пятлетка’, which means “five-year plan”, refering
to the basic national economic plans used in the Soviet Union beginning in 1928.
PIECE WORK
[To be added...]
PIGOVIAN TAX
A tax on products or activities which are socially harmful, or have socially harmful side effects,
in an attempt to reimburse society for the costs of repairing that social harm. Or, in the esoteric
jargon of bourgeois economics, a tax on a product with a negative “externality”
which seeks to pay for part (or very rarely all) of the cost of that externality. Examples
are such things as extra taxes on cigarettes, or on automobiles which emit high levels of
pollution.
These are called “Pigovian taxes” after the British
bourgeois economist Arthur C. Pigou, who advocated them in his book The Economics of Welfare
(1920). Such taxes are especially apt to be favored by liberal reformers who seek to mitigate
socially harmful results mostly through laws and penalties on individuals, rather than on
laws or restrictions on capitalist corporations which produce the harmful goods in the first
place.
In a socialist society Pigovian taxes will no
doubt be used as part of the means of transforming society, but the main focus will then be on
the socialist production of goods which are more truly in the overall interests of the people in
the first place, rather than production for profit regardless of the harm to society as is so
often the case under capitalism. And the primary means of changing the harmful behavior of
individuals will be through education, ideology and social peer pressure, rather than through
endless laws, taxes and legal penalties governing individual behavior.
PIKETTY, Thomas (1971- )
A liberal-radical French bourgeois economist whose work is centered on the questions of inequality
of wealth and income in contemporary capitalist society.
Piketty is most widely known for his massive
best-selling (but seldom actually read) book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013;
English translation 2014) which provides a vast amount of data on the growing concentration of wealth
over the past couple centuries, and attempts to explain—from a liberal bourgeois perspective—just
why this has occurred. One central argument in the book is that the growth in the rate of profit of
corporations in advanced capitalist countries persistently exceeds the overall rate of economic
growth (GDP) and this (of course) leads to growing inequality. The central conclusion of the book is
that the growing concentration of wealth into fewer hands is something inherent to capitalism. (Which
indeed it is.) Some liberal or social-democratic ideologists were so impressed by this book that they
dubbed Piketty the “new Marx”! But whereas Marx argued long before Piketty that inequality, and the
increasing outright relative poverty for the bulk of the working class, is inevitable and even
necessary under capitalism, Piketty argues—in liberal fashion—that this is merely due to poor policy
choices by the politicians that the people elect. Thus he proposes that a “possible remedy” for the
inequality problem might be to enact a global progressive tax on wealth
to redistribute some of the wealth accumulated by the rich back to the poor. However, just how this
is to be accomplished when the rich run the governments and own the politicians, Piketty doesn’t say.
In other words, Piketty—like all liberals—fails to understand that the capitalist state is the class
dictatorship of the ruling capitalist class. Thus any proposed “state intervention” to reverse
ever-increasing social inequality is really only possible if the working class first captures state
power through social revolution.
In 2019/2020 Piketty published an even more massive
1000-page tome, Capital and Ideology which amplifies his claims about the role of ideology
in the growth and perpetuation of inequality. But once again, it side-steps the central issue about
how the prevailing ideology can possibly be changed in a class society dominated by the bourgeoisie
and their ideas.
“Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose Capital in the 21st Century
has become the bestselling book on economics in recent years and has transformed the debate on
inequality, refused to accept France’s prestigious Légion d’honneur. He said the
French government ‘would do better to concentrate on reviving growth’ rather than handing out
gongs.” —“The World This Week”, the Economist, Jan. 10, 2015, p. 6.
[Piketty is to be congratulated for
refusing to accept an honor from the French bourgeoisie. But how opposed, really, can he be to
that capitalist ruling class if they want to give him an award in the first place!? —Ed.]
PINKERTON DETECTIVE AGENCY
“The propaganda that the U.S. workers’ movement is something alien and
anti-American has a long history. It was launched nearly a century ago. And its original author
was one of the most infamous characters in American history. He was Allan Pinkerton, the founder
of the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency. Pinkerton made millions of dollars by supplying
employers with gunmen and spies. He posed as an ultra-American, and his anti-labor plots were
manufactured to fit the idea that the leaders of America’s trade unions were foreign agents. His
spies sent twenty innocent coal miners to the gallows in the 1870’s with the lie that they
belonged to an imaginary Irish murder conspiracy, which he called the ‘Molly Maguires.’ And he
asserted that the railroad brotherhoods were established by foreign ‘Communists,’ who fled to the
United States after the Paris Commune. This fantasy is spelled out in Pinkerton’s book about the
national railway strike of 1877—in which about 100 men died.
The spymaster’s book has a curious title.
It is called, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives. It was printed in 1878, and its
pages have faded with time. But the ‘foreign agent’ lie that Pinkerton invented still poisons
the air waves and the temples of capitalist justice. It was used against Dimitrov in Leipzig and
against Communists in Madrid. And it echoed in American courtrooms in many anti-Communist trials.”
—Art Shields, “Early Days in the Communist Party”, Political Affairs, September 1966, p.
31.
PISAREV, Dmitry Ivanovich (1840-1868)
Russian literary critic, materialist philosopher and revolutionary democrat.
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