Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   V   —

VALUE   [In ethics]
[To be added...]
        See also: AXIOLOGY

VALUE   [In political economy]
Social labor as materialized in the form of commodities. The amount of value in a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time incorporated into it.
        Any useful object produced by human beings embodies their labor. And in any socioeconomic system there will be objects which are valued by people for the uses they may have and the needs they may fulfil. But only in economic systems which produce and exchange commodities (i.e., most notably capitalism, but also pre-capitalist economies which produced commodities even if only as a secondary feature, and also under socialism (the transition period from capitalism to communism), is there such a thing as the political-economic category of value. What is required for labor to produce value (in this technical sense in Marxist political economy) is that the item produced must first be a useful thing, but also that the actual ultimate user of the item obtain it through exchange. For such exchange to take place there must be some basis for the exchange, i.e., some valuation of the items exchanged. The only rational basis for calculating the relative value of two items being exchanged is the differing amounts of socially necessary labor time incorporated into each.
        “Marx, taking Ricardo’s investigations as his starting-point, says: The value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary general human labor embodied in them, and this in turn is measured by its duration.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part II, Ch. V: (MECW 25:178). “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter I: (International, p. 38; Penguin, p. 129.) “Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects.... If therefore an article loses its utility, it also loses its value.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter VIII: (International, p. 202; Penguin, p. 310.)
        See also: LABOR THEORY OF VALUE, LAW OF VALUE, USE-VALUE, EXCHANGE-VALUE, PRICE

VANGUARD
An advance force at the head of and leading a whole army or movement.

VANGUARD ACTION
[To be added... ]

VARGA, Eugen [“Eugene”]   (1879-1964)
[Varga’s original Hungarian given name was “Jenö”; for most of his life and while living in the Soviet Union he was referred to by the German version of his name, “Eugen” (pronounced oy-gen); in the English editions of his books he is usually referred to by the English version of his name, “Eugene”.]
        Varga was a Hungarian-born Soviet political economist who became one of the most famous and influential economists for the Comintern. He made his reputation with his prediction in the mid-1920s of the forthcoming Great Depression. He was also the leading proponent of the General Crisis of Capitalism theory, both in the period between the two world wars, and also in the post-World War II period.
        Varga joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1906, and wrote articles on economics and other topics for the socialist press. In 1918 he became Professor of Political Economy at the University of Budapest, and the next year became the People’s Commissar of Finance and the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. When that Hungarian revolutionary regime was overthrown (with the connivance of right-wing social democrats), Varga fled to the Soviet Union, and began work for the Comintern. He soon became its leading spokesman on economic matters. In the early 1920s he quickly recognized and gave emphasis to the significant economic recovery in capitalist countries after the sharp post-World War I recession of 1920-21. But by the mid-1920s he was emphasizing that this recovery would be short lived and that a powerful new economic crisis would soon develop (which of course it did). According to M.C. Howard & J.E. King, in their History of Marxian Economics (vol. I, 1989), Varga based this prediction on the increasing organic composition of capital and also on the prospect of reduced employment and ability of workers to consume (i.e., on two very different Marxist theories of economic crisis). But apparently the main thrust of Varga’s argument was based on Marx’s central theory of overproduction of capital (or what its opponents call “underconsumptionism”).
        Varga wrote the economic reports for the Congresses of the Comintern from 1921 to 1935. Many of his writings in this period were focused on the international economic “conjuncture”, and reflected his great efforts to determine and organize the quantitative trends in output, investment and employment in many different countries. He especially investigated the economy of Germany and the economic development behind rising German imperialism.
        For 20 years, starting in 1927, Varga was the chairman of the Institute of World Economics (IWE) in Moscow. In the immediate post-World War II period he predicted a strong economic recovery in the capitalist West, and only later on the development of a new economic crisis—just as he had successfully predicted after World War I. It turned out that he was once again correct, but Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Comintern expected that the capitalist world would almost immediately fall back into the Great Depression, which they thought had only been interrupted by World War II. (Those who expected the immediate return of the Depression didn’t really grasp Marx’s explanation that the basic resolution of overproduction crises comes through the destruction of excess capital, which is exactly what had happened in World War II.) This led to Varga’s removal from leadership of the IWE in 1947, and forced a total recantation and self-criticism by Varga in 1949. But after Stalin’s death in 1953 Varga was rehabilitated, and even presented the Stalin Prize in 1954 and the Order of Lenin (in both 1954 and 1959). But the new revisionist leaders of the Soviet Union paid little attention to his predictions of eventual new economic crises in the U.S., and were interested only in accomodation and peaceful co-existence with the West.
        Although Varga was one of the best Marxist political economists of his era, and in general had a remarkably good record of economic predictions, there were also some erroneous aspects and inconsistencies in his theories. For example, the idea that there could be a post-World War II economic recovery for capitalism was quite inconsistent with his theory in the 1930s that there was a General Crisis of Capitalism that could only be ended through social revolution. While he did expect a major recovery after World War II, the boom that followed the war was much bigger and longer than even he expected. By the late 1950s and 1960s he was already predicting a new economic crisis in capitalism, but didn’t understand at all just how long it would take for that new crisis to develop. Of course no other Marxist (let alone any non-Marxist) of that time really understood this either.
        Among Varga’s many books are these which have been translated into English: The Decline of Capitalism (1928); The Great Crisis and Its Political Consequences: Economics and Politics, 1928-1934 (1934); Two Systems: Socialist Economy and Capitalist Economy (1939); The Economic Transformation of Capitalism at the End of the Second World War (1946) [possibly not translated into English: this was the book that got Varga in trouble with Stalin, in which he argued that the capitalist system was more inherently stable than had been previously believed]; Marxism and the General Crisis of Capitalism (1948); Twentieth Century Capitalism (1962); and Politico-Economic Problems of Capitalism (1968). After his death, his selected works in three volumes were published in the Soviet Union, Hungary, and East Germany, but as far as we know these volumes have not been translated into English. The German edition is entitled Ausgewählte Schriften 1918-1964.

“The upsurge of production and the temporary absence of profound overproduction crises in the post-war period in the highly developed countries is primarily the result of World War II. Tens of millions of young men were taken into the army. Millions of others were employed in military enterprises producing instruments of destruction which were destroyed on the battlefields without any benefit to society. Arms and military equipment constituted about one-half of all production. Items intended for long use were not produced. New homes were not built and old ones were not repaired. Supplies of raw materials and manufactured goods were exhausted. Fixed capital was worn out, especially in non-military branches. Tremendous values were destroyed by aerial and artillery bombardments. Instead of real values, monetary means were accumulated: … deposits in savings banks, state loans in the hands of the urban population, and huge sums in bank deposits and government securities held by the capitalists. This extraordinary and significant expansion of the capitalist market led to an intense growth of post-war production in such countries as the United States and Canada, which were not theaters of war.” —Eugen Varga, Kommunist, #17 (1961). Translated into English as “Marx’s Capital and Contemporary Capitalism”, Problems of Economics (IASP Translations from Original Soviet Sources), vol. 4, #9, Jan. 1962, p. 62.
         [This is a remarkably good and concise description of how excess capital was destroyed in World War II, even in countries which were not themselves bombed or overrun. Varga went on, in this article, to predict that the post-WWII boom was drawing to a close (he was just a little premature on that) and implied that the (Western) capitalist countries might soon return to stagnation and depression (he was very premature about that—the development of the new crisis period which began around 1973 has been very drawn out and only took a qualitative leap for the worse in 2008). —S.H.]

VARIABLE CAPITAL
Variable capital is the value of the human labor-power purchased by the capitalists (by hiring workers) and employed by them in the production process. It is called “variable” capital by Marx because its value varies (actually, increases) with its use in the capitalist production process. That is, the capitalist pays a certain amount for the labor-power, but ends up with more value than he paid for, through the application of that labor-power to the raw materials and other means of production. (This is the source of surplus value.) In other words, the application of labor-power to the raw materials leads to an increase in the amount of capital.
        The rest of the capital employed in the production process is called constant capital, because its use does not itself lead to an increase in value or capital. Thus the value of the raw materials used does go into the value of the final commodity, but remains a fixed amount. The same is true for the apportioned value of the machinery (including its maintenance). So, for example, if a machine can be used to make 10,000 widgets before it wears out, one ten-thousandth of the value of that machine is also transfered to each widget as constant capital.
        However, there is a complication here which Marx did not explore. Machines may also be viewed as a way of re-using on many separate occasions the labor-power that went into the construction of the machine. From this point of view, if past labor-power is being re-used again in the present production process, then it should also be considered as variable capital in the present production process, just as much as the additional labor-power of the worker operating the machine is! This complicates the analysis to some degree, but does not change the basic fact that all wealth still comes ultimately from the application of labor to the raw materials of nature. [This topic is discussed further in the entries related to the Labor Theory of Value.]

VEHICLE   [Contemporary Capitalist Finance]
A nominally independent or dummy corporation, set up by a mother corporation or bank, in order to hold risky assets under another name, or in order to engage in clandestine, misleading or fradulent financial activity.
        See also: SPECIAL PURPOSE VEHICLE, STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE, CONDUIT

VENCEREMOS (Political Organization)
The Venceremos organization (not to be confused with the Venceremos Brigade), was originally a small radical Chicano political group in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1971 about a third of the Maoist organization, the Revolutionary Union, which was then also mostly located in the Bay Area, split off and joined Venceremos en masse. This greatly changed the character of the organization, and turned it into a multinational group with a lot of white students and ex-students.
        The leader of the faction that split from the RU was H. Bruce Franklin, one of the RU’s founders and one of its three top leaders. According to Franklin years later, the reason for the split was mostly that the RU back then was not a fully multinational organization, partly because at that time it referred interested Black people to the Black Panther Party instead. Actually, that was a very secondary issue, which all the RU leadership was soon to agree to change, partly because of the degeneration of the Black Panther Party itself. The real central dispute within the RU was over what basic revolutionary strategy to adopt: 1) merging with the working class, and at the appropriate time mass insurrection; or 2) urban guerrilla warfare led by ex-students and the lumpenproletariat. The Franklin group favored the second course, while the rest of the RU favored the first course. (For more on this, see: REVOLUTIONARY UNION — 1970 Split.)
        The very name “Venceremos”, Spanish for “We Will Win”, derives from a battle cry of Che Guevarra. But the connection of this Venceremos organization to Che was much deeper than that. They were in essence proposing an urban guerrilla warfare version of his notorious foco strategy. However, Venceremos was much more talk than action, and it may not have actually undertaken any guerrilla actions. But it was consciously preparing to do so, acquiring arms and expertise in their use, and it definitely expected that armed struggle would not be long in coming. (This is a point that Franklin now seems to deny, according to the Wikipedia.) But their actual activity seems to have been more around reformist issues such as working for prison reform and defending war protesters.
        It seems fair to say that Venceremos was less of a Marxist group, and more of a student-based anarchist organization, which though known for its wild rhetoric and AK-47 logo, soon fell apart and disappeared.

VIENNA CIRCLE
An influential school of logical positivism founded by Moritz Schlick in the 1920s. It was hostile to not only religion and metaphysics (in the bourgeois sense), but also ethics and abstract social principles of any kind. It took its inspiration primarily from physics. Among its adherents were Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath. The reactionary philosopher Karl Popper was strongly influenced by this school.

“The village commune in [Tsarist] Russia was a communal form of peasant land tenure characterized by compulsory crop rotation and undivided woods and pastures. Its principal features were collective liability (compulsory collective responsibility of the peasants for making their payments in full and on time, and the performance of various services to the state and the landowners), the regular reallotment of the land with no right to refuse the allotment given, the prohibition of its purchase and sale.
         “The Russian village commune dates back to ancient times and in the course of historical development gradually became one of the mainstays of feudalism in Russia. The landowners and the tsarist government used the village commune to intensify feudal oppression and to squeeze redemption payment and taxes out of the the people. Lenin pointed out that the village commune ‘does not save the peasant from turning into a proletarian, yet in practice acts as a medieval barrier dividing the peasants, who are, as it were, chained to small associations and to categories which have lost all “reason for existence”’ [LCW 15:78].
         “The problem of the village commune aroused heated arguments and brought an extensive economic literature into existence. Particularly great interest in the commune was displayed by the Narodniks, who saw in it the guarantee of Russia’s socialist evolution by a special path. By tendentiously selecting facts and falsifying them and employing so-called ‘average figures’, the Narodniks sought to prove that the commune peasantry in Russia possessed a special sort of ‘stability’, and that the peasant commune protected the peasants against the penetration of capitalist relations into their lives, and saved them from ruin and class differentiation. As early as the 1880s, G. V. Plekhanov had shown that the Narodnik illusions about ‘commune socialism’ were unfounded, and in the 1890s Lenin completely refuted the Narodnik theories. Lenin brought forward a tremendous amount of statistical material and innumerable facts to show how capitalist relations were developing in the Russian village, and how capital, by penetrating the patriarchal village commune, was splitting the peasantry into two antagonistic classes, the kulaks and the poor peasants.
         “In 1906 the tsarist Minister Stolypin issued a law favoring the kulaks that allowed the peasants to leave the commune and sell their allotments. This law laid the basis for the official abolition of the village commune system and intensified the differentiation among the peasants. In the nine years following the promulgation of the law, over two million peasant families withdrew from the communes.” —Footnote 72, LCW 19:573-574.

VILLAGE COMMUNE (Russia) — Collective Responsibility In
The collective responsibility for the prompt and full payment of numerous services and obligations, both to the state (in the form of taxes and the provision of recruits into the Tsarist army, etc.) and the landlords (in the form of land redemption installments, etc.), was the compulsory obligation of every member of the Russian peasant “village commune”. This form of collective bondage remained in force even after serfdom was officially abolished in 1961, and up until 1906 after the serious scare put into the ruling class by the 1905 Revolution.

See also: WAR

VISHWA HINDU PARISHAD
See: HINDUTVA

VITALISM
[To be added... ]
        See also: ÉLAN VITAL, Henri BERGSON

VOLOSHINOV, V. N. [Valentin Nikolaevich]   (1895-1936)
A Russian Marxist linguist and psychologist, best known for his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929; English translation 1973). He was a close associate of Mikhail Bakhtin and a key member of a group of Marxist scholars around Bakhtin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Voloshinov’s linguistic theories derive primarily from Wilhelm von Humbolt, Ferdinand de Saussure, and his Russian contemporary Nikolai Marr. Voloshinov, however, criticized Saussure’s synchronic (unhistorical) form of structuralism, and instead emphasized the dialectical changes in language over time. He argued that different social classes give many words and phrases quite different meanings, and that there is a continual struggle around this within the superstructure of society. He was also an early proponent of the idea that words derive their meaning from their various contexts. However, in his formulations and thinking—as with that of Bakhtin and the rest of his circle—there does seem to be certain tendencies toward philosophical idealism, or at least modes of expression suggesting such. However, probably unjustly, there were government arrests of some members of Bakhtin’s circle in 1929, which brought the meetings of that circle to an end. Voloshinov himself worked at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad until 1934 when he came down with tuberculosis. He died two years later in a sanitarium.

VOLTAIRE, François Marie Arouet de  (1694-1778)
Great French writer and philosopher of the Enlightenment. He was a deist and historian, and strong opponent of absolutism and Catholicism. One of his most famous works is Candide, which ridicules the pro-religious claim by Leibniz that this is “the best of all possible worlds”.
        See also Philosophical Doggerel on Voltaire.

VORWÄRTS   [“Forward”]
A daily newspaper and central organ of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Wilhelm Liebknecht, a follower of Marx, was one of its editors when it first began publication in 1876. Engels struggled against all forms of opportunism in his writings for Vorwärts. But in the late 19th century, after Engels’ death, many opportunist and revisionist articles were routinely published, reflecting the views then dominant in the SPD and the Second International.
        In reporting about the struggles within the Russian revolutionary movement, Vorwärts sided with the Economists and then the Mensheviks, and did not give Lenin and his followers any opportunity to reply. During World War I the newspaper took a social-chauvinist stand, supporting the German ruling class in the war. After the October Revolution, it carried on extensive anti-Soviet propaganda. It was suppressed by the Nazis in 1933.

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