Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Sp - Ss   —

SPARTACUS   (c. 109-71 BCE)
A Roman gladiator who led a major slave rebellion which is known to history as the Third Servile War. He was born in Thrace, and the information about his life before the great rebellion he led is sketchy and untrustworthy. The most common view is that Spartacus was either an auxiliary with the Roman legions who was later condemned to slavery, or else a captive taken by the legions. In any case, he became enslaved and was sold to a trainer of gladiators. In the year 73 BCE he escaped with about 70 others and went to Mount Vesuvius where he was joined by many runaway slaves. He proved to be a good military leader and an excellent tactician. His forces defeated several Roman armies and terrorized many slaveowning estates throughout large parts of Italy, often enlisting more runaway slaves into his army in the process. He was finally defeated by Roman forces led by Marcus Licinius Crassus near the river Silarus in 71 BCE. Most likely Spartacus died in battle, though another story is that he and many of his followers were captured and then executed by the Romans via crucifixion.
        In modern times, and as the recognition of the necessity for rebellion begins to rise among the proletariat as well, the story of Spartacus has become inspirational for our class too. The Spartacus League in Germany at the end of World War I was named after him. (See entry below.) In the U.S. the writer Howard Fast, a member of the CPUSA (which, however, was already a revisionist party), wrote a famous novel entitled Spartacus in 1950 while he was in prison for contempt of Congress. In 1960 this novel was made into a well-known movie by the same name, starring Kirk Douglas.

“Spartacus emerges as the most capital fellow in the whole history of antiquity. A great general (no Garibaldi he), of noble character, a real representative of the proletariat of ancient times.” —Marx, discussing Appian’s Civil Wars of Rome, Letter to Engels, Feb. 27, 1861, MECW 41:265.

“The Spartacus League was headed by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin and others. It carried on revolutionary propaganda against the imperialist war and exposed the aggressive policy of German imperialism and the treachery of the social-democratic leaders. The Spartacists took up an erroneous position, however, in regard to a number of important questions of theory and policy: they underestimated the leading role of the proletarian party in the working-class struggle, they were afraid of a split with the opportunists, they did not understand the need for an alliance of the working class and the peasantry and the importance of the national-liberation movement, they opposed the principle of the self-determination of nations, including the right to secede and form independent states. In April 1917, the Spartacists joined the centrist Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany in which they retained their organizational independence. After the revolution of 1918 in Germany, the Spartacists broke with the Independents and in December of that year founded the Communist Party of Germany.” —Note 61, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).

SPECIAL PURPOSE VEHICLE (SPV)   [Contemporary Capitalist Finance]
A relatively recent variety of a special purpose entity (see entry above). Essentially SPVs are dummy corporations, usually set up by an investment bank (or major financial corporation, government sponsored enterprise, etc.), for the purpose of pretending that some of their financial shenanigans are being done by another company and to try to safeguard the mother company if something should go wrong in the meanwhile. The specific task most commonly assigned to these SPVs is to take numerous individual mortgages or other loans issued by the mother corporation, package them into batches or pools, and then issue bonds or mortgage-backed securities which are supposedly “secured” by these pools. SPVs thus played an important role in all the securitization activity in the recent housing securities bubble that has now (2007-2010) partially popped.
        See also: STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE (SIV), CONDUIT

SPECIALIZATION
See also: DIVISION OF LABOR

“In a word, specialization necessarily presupposes centralization, and in turn imperatively calls for it.” —Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” (1902), LCW 5:470.

SPECULATION   [Capitalist Economics]
[To be added...]
        See also: CASINO CAPITALISM

SPEED-UP
The intensification of labor which is extracted from a worker by the capitalist company. In some cases this is accomplished by literally speeding up assembly lines, though there are also many other methods.
        Speed-ups are especially likely to occur during economic crises or hard times. The bosses know that the workers become desperate to keep their jobs, and that they can therefore push them all the more. For example, a survey by the company Spherion Staffing discovered that 53% of American workers “had been compelled to take on extra tasks since the recession started” [The Economist, July 2, 2011, p. 59.]

SPENCER, Herbert   (1820-1903)
English philosopher and sociologist, and one of the founders of positivism. [More to be added.]
        See also: SOCIAL DARWINISM, PHENOMENALISM

SPIRALS
        See: HELIX, NEGATION OF THE NEGATION

SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty   (1942-   )
Calcutta, Indian-born University Professor of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, N.Y. City, USA. Spivak’s doctoral dissertation on William Butler Yeats, completed while already an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, was directed by the literary critic Paul de Man. While de Man later played a central role in the development of deconstructive literary criticism in the US academy, the discovery of his fascist wartime writings in 1987 also contributed significantly to the ideological crisis of legitimacy of deconstruction. Spivak has always had little if anything substantial to say about the so-called “de Man affair,” i.e., the discovery, exposure and criticism of the wartime writings and the ensuing inquiries into the possible interrelationship of deconstructive theory and reactionary-collaborationist ideology. In her typically cryptic style, Spivak has remarked of her studies under de Man, “I wasn’t groomed for anything.... I took good notes and slowly sort of understood.”
        Nonetheless, it is precisely in the late 1980’s that Spivak’s academic “star” rose significantly with the 1987 publication of her book, In Other Worlds, a collection of essays which had already enjoyed automatic publication in prestigious journals. Although Spivak’s celebrity career began a decade earlier with her 1976 English translation of Jacques Derrida’s de la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology), her still more exotic role as premier postcolonial intellectual served in the late 1980’s to relegitimize and partially “re-invent” deconstruction in ways better suited to the increasingly “global” consciousness of the capitalist “higher education” system.
        In the metropolitan, eclectic imagination of the new bourgeois intelligentsia, however, Spivak is more typically portrayed as follows, from Sangeeta Ray’s 2009 book, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Words:

“Spivak is a literary theorist, a postcolonial critic, translator, feminist, Marxist, and deconstructionist. She has published on every significant social, political, and cultural topic that has engaged our times, while never losing sight of the role of the teacher in the university and beyond... Her commitment to a planetary ethics has produced trenchant criticisms of the racialization of capital...” (p. 3). Etcetera. In a word, Spivak is a “genius” in much the same “grand style” as Herr Eugen Dühring.

This belief, however, that Spivak is or was ever a Marxist or a “communist,” as Spivak herself has asserted, is a fallacy in much the same way that Deng Xiaoping pretended to be a Marxist revolutionary while simultaneously undermining the struggle for socialism and the building of a future communist society. Whereas Deng in reality carried the line of the nationalist bourgeoisie and its bureaucratic apparatus, Spivak is a high-level academic “authority” of the international bourgeoisie, born out of India’s decolonization but nonetheless uncommitted and in fact hostile to the very idea of the destruction of capitalism. On the one hand, a capitalist-roader, and on the other, a capitalist-reader. At last, a very important article for critically reflecting on the role of pseudo-Marxist mystics such as Spivak is Chih Heng’s “From Bourgeois Democrats to Capitalist-Roaders,” Peking Review, No. 13, March 26, 1976, pp. 6-8, 20, http://massline.org/PekingReview/PR1976/PR1976-13a.htm. —JDL

SPLIT-CYCLE THEORY
The theory that in the imperialist era the capitalist industrial cycle has “split in two”, i.e., into two separate (though connected) cycles with differing periods. The short-term cycle, which like the industrial cycle in the pre-monopoly era still usually lasts from 5 to 10 years, leads to recessions, but most of these tend to be mild and rather easily dealt with through government actions (such as by lowering the prevailing bank interest rates, lowering taxes, increasing Keynesian deficit financing for government expenditures, and the like). The long-term cycle, which is of much more irregular duration, comes to a head when government measures can no longer “short-circuit” the developing economic contradictions which have led to a recession, and therefore which continues to develop into an all out depression. These depressions can only be ended through the massive destruction of the excess capital that has built up since the previous depression.
        For an elaboration of this theory see “Chapter 5: The Industrial Cycle Has Split In Two!” of my work in progress, An Introduction to Capitalist Economic Crises at: http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/Crises05.htm —S.H.

SPLITTING OF ONE INTO TWO
See: ONE-INTO-TWO

SPONTANEITY (Of the Masses)
[In Marxism:] Spontaneity is unguided mass activity, that is, struggle which is unguided by conscious proletarian line and leadership.
        For a 12-page elaboration on this topic see Chapter 9 of my book The Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement. —S.H.

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