Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

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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... ]

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

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 sanitorium.

VOLTAIRE, François Marie Arouet de  (1694-1778)
[To be added...]
        See also Philosophical Doggerel on Voltaire.

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