PUBLIC PROPERTY
Property which (supposedly) belongs to the public, rather than to some private individual.
In reality, in bourgeois society, public property is not really owned by the public! It
is instead owned by the ruling bourgeoisie, and managed by them as they see fit. In some
cases it is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie if the use of the property is made freely
available to the public (as with most roads). In some cases the property is made available
to the public only for fees, which are often substantial, as with certain parks. And
in other cases, so-called “public property” is restricted entirely from public use (as
with the vast military bases and other government operations).
“PUMP-PRIMING”
See: “PRIMING THE PUMP”
PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM
[To be added...]
See also:
GOULD, Stephen Jay
PUPPET TROOPS
Nominally independent soldiers raised and controlled by an imperialist country from the
population within the oppressed country it is exploiting. All imperialist powers have
done this when they’ve been able to, so as to put only the foreign population at risk instead
of their own soldiers. During the 1930s and 1940s, for example, the Japanese imperialists
had the slogan of “using Chinese to subdue Chinese”, a policy which included the use of
puppet troops as well as other measures to divide the Chinese people.
During the colonial era, puppet troops were
more easily seen for what they are. But under neocolonialism
the situtation is in essence the same. Local military forces under the control of the
comprador bourgeoisie or other agents of foreign imperialism are directed to suppress any
rebellions or revolutions, thus making it easier for the foreign imperialists to maintain
real control.
PURCHASING POWER PARITY
The traditional way to calculate the income, standard of living, or gross domestic
product (GDP) in a foreign country is to take the values in the local currency and translate
them into dollars via the current official exchange rate. However, this does not take into
consideration the fact that prices may also be lower in that country than in the U.S. (I.e.,
a dollar exchanged for the local currency may buy more actual goods there than a dollar
buys in the U.S.) Thus a different translation of quantities expressed in local currencies
must be made in order to determine the actual equivalent standard of living, GDP, or other
quantity, relative to the situation in the U.S. This is called the translation into a
purchasing power parity value.
The PPP conversion factor is the
number of units of a country’s currency necessary to buy the same amount of goods and
services in that country as a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States. As noted above,
this is in general not at all the same as the exchange value of that foreign
currency.
PURPOSE
[To be added...]
See also:
TELEOLOGY
PURPOSE — In the Labor Process
See: CONSCIOUSNESS—In the
Labor Process
PUT or PUT OPTION
See: OPTION
“PUT POLITICS IN COMMAND”
See: POLITICS IN COMMAND
PYTHAGORAS (c. 570-c. 495 BCE)
Founder of a mystical religious, philosophical idealist, and
political sect in the Greek city-state of Croton (in Southern Italy). He had many strange
ideas, including the notion that it was wicked to eat beans. Pythagoras was also very mystical
about numbers. His numerological system identified the number four with justice, and he thought
that the number ten was the “most perfect number” (in part because the numbers 1 through 4 add
up to 10). He is said to have proclaimed that “all is number”, after supposedly being the first
to discover that musical notes are related in a simple fashion to the relative lengths of the
vibrating strings that produce them. The Pythagorean Theorem in geometry is also named after
him, though it was known long before his time.
In ancient times Pythagoras was considered a
very wise man and eventually an important philosopher (by the followers of Plato, for example).
But modern scholarship has pretty much shown that this hugely exaggerates his real role in
intellectual history. His followers had the habit of attributing all wisdom, including their
own ideas and discoveries, to Pythagoras, in much the same way that Christians do with Jesus,
and that dogmatists within what should be the revolutionary science of Marxism do with
Marx, Lenin and Mao.
See also below, and:
Philosophical doggerel about
Pythagoras.
PYTHAGOREANS
Members of the sect founded by Pythagoras (see above), and also his later followers. This
peculiar sect required self-discipline, silence, and the honoring of numerous taboos—especially
the strict avoidance of eating meat and beans. Pythagoras and his followers expanded the concept
of the soul (which had originally only meant the physical breath
that leaves the body when a person dies) into a partially mentalistic concept. However, they
still also identified this “immortal” soul with gases, and seem to have believed that the
eating of beans, which led to farting, allowed part of the soul to prematurely escape the
body! (Religion is a very weird thing!) After a person’s death, however, they believed
the soul could be reincarnated into a new body, or into other animals or plants, or to “rejoin”
the universal “soul”. Politically, the Pythagoreans were a secretive, cultish faction of the
slave-owning aristocracy.
The followers of Pythagoras also discovered
that the square root of 2 is an irrational number, which so upset them that they tried to hide
this discovery from the world.
See also:
Philosophical doggerel about
Pythagoras and his followers.
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