WAGES — Falling
[Intro to be added...]
“Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for
inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a
year—from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist
for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. ‘That takes men and puts them back at
their earnings capacity of the 1950s,’ Greenstone says. ‘That has staggering
implications.’” —“The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man”, Bloomberg
Business Week, Aug. 29-Sept. 4, 2011, p. 26.
WALL STREET
The center of the financial district in New York City, and—by extension—a nickname for
the entire financial industry in the U.S.
“If we are Rome, Wall Street’s our Coliseum.” —Paul Farrell,
business news reporter with MarketWatch.com, August 2007.
“When as a child I first read stories of brokers jumping to their
deaths after the 1929 Wall Street crash, I thought they were meant to illustrate
the humanity of the situation. After reading about people’s anger at bailing out
banks [in this latest financial crisis], I now understand that they were actually a
manifestation of what the public wanted to see: the villains having the deceny to do
themselves in.” —Harald Anderson, letter to the editor, The Economist, Feb. 13,
2010.
WAR—“Who Started It?”
[Intro material to be added... ]
“All philistines and all stupid and ignorant yokels argue in the same
way as the renegade Kautsky supporters, Longuet supporters,
Turati and Co.: ‘The enemy has invaded my country, I don’t
care about anything else.’
“The socialist, the revolutionary
proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: ‘The character of the
war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker
was, or in whose country the “enemy” is stationed; it depends on what class is
waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a
reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the
imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie
(even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty
as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world
proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world
slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of “my” country (for that is the
argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realize that
he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point
of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the
acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.’” —Lenin, “Proletarian Revolution
and the Renegade Kautsky” (Oct.-Nov. 1918), LCW 28:286-7.
“WAR ON DRUGS”
A cynical, decades-long program conducted by the U.S. government in the name of “fighting”
illegal narcotics. The real aim is to control and regiment the population, particularly the
Black and lower working class population, and to act as a cover for continued U.S. interference
in the internal affairs of other countries. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the aim of the war
on drugs is to find a solution to the “superfluous people” who were left out of Ronald
Reagan’s free-market fundamentalist reforms. Actually, the war started under Richard Nixon,
but it gained both momentum and ideological clout during Reagan’s presidency, and continues
to this day in roughly this spirit.
The war on drugs reveals with unusual clarity
the class component of state policy. Those who have been imprisoned are predominantly Black
and Latino working class people, thrown behind bars on charges that would not even count as
criminal offences in many other major capitalist states. The people who benefit most greatly
from the flow and trafficking of narcotics remain relatively unscathed. Firstly, they are
often themselves members of the ruling class or are closely linked to them, and hence can
afford better legal representation in the event that they are caught; they can also distance
themselves from the grubby business “on the ground” by hiring underlings to do their dirty
work; they can hide their transactions more effectively (Noam Chomsky, writing around the
time of the U.S. invasion of Panama, asked sardonically why George Bush did not also order
commando raids on major New York banks, who were known to be benefitting from keeping drug
money); etc.
Secondly, the war on drugs is characterized
by an enormous amount of corruption. The police officers and detectives who staff narcotics
bureaus and drug task-forces are themselves often in the pay of, or are in collusion with,
drug dealers and traffickers. Thus, the people that they tend to actually target will be
easy pickings, i.e. those who have already been stigmatized with the image of immersion in
a drug-infested culture.
The war on drugs also incorporates the
anti-cartel program in Mexico, which has experienced a horrific spiral in violence between
the state and powerful drug cartels there (which have now become so powerful that state
employees regularly complain that their resources and equipment are inferior to those of the
cartels!). Ironically, many experts agree that the power of these criminal organizations is
aided by anti-drug policies in the US, which has taken such an inflexible line on drugs such
as marijuana that the demand from within the U.S. supplies a ready market for the cartels, who
battle viciously for hegemony of transit routes to the United States.
Another front in the war on drugs involves
the very bloody civil war in Colombia, an ongoing, decades-long struggle between nominally
Marxist guerillas called the FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército
del Pueblo, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army) and the Colombian
state and its capitalist-landlord benefactors. The Colombian military has benefitted from
aid and training providing by the U.S. government, which claims that this assistance is
primarily for the purpose of executing an anti-drug effort. However, even the U.S. government’s
own agencies and research bodies affiliated with it (like the RAND Corporation) acknowledge
that the FARC-EP plays a relatively minor role in the drug trade, and that the right-wing
paramilitaries (allied both to the landlords and the official military) are by far the geater
participants and beneficiaries of narcotics trafficking and production (indeed, the
involvement of the Colombian government puts the FARC-EP’s collusion to shame); the RAND
Corporation also found treatment programs to be much more cost effective than interdiction.
The militarization of the drug war, then, is clearly something that primarily serves purposes
other than fighting drugs! In Colombia, the U.S. involvement is simply counter-insurgency
against a leftist group fighting the capitalist-landlord configuration that controls the state
there.
Colombia is also a key U.S. ally in the region,
which has seen the coming into office of various left-leaning governments, notably those of
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. The Colombian state continues to be an
important strategic resource for U.S. imperialist interference in the affairs of Latin America.
Interestingly, Colombia is also where the U.S. government, then under the leadership of John F.
Kennedy, initiated its policy of reorienting Latin American militaries from their hitherto
role of “hemispheric defense” to “internal security” (fascist repression). This template was
then adopted by the bourgeoisies in other Latin American countries, which experienced a
series of bloody coups and militariy dictatorships, virtually all of which were supported by
the United States. Now that the pretext of the Cold War has been lifted, the war on drugs
provides the required cover for U.S. intervention. The guerilla threat has little to do with
narcotics; the FARC-EP are much more troublesome in the sense of their targeting of oil
pipelines and occupation of mineral-rich areas that the government wants to open up to
exploitation by multinational corporations. Colombia, incidentally, has by far the worst
human rights record in the Western hemisphere, and one of the world’s largest internally
displaced populations. This is the true face of the war on drugs, largely hidden from view of
American audiences, who are more accustomed to associating this campaign with what they are
shown on TV shows about police, crime dramas, etc. —L.C.
“WAR ON TERROR”
An ongoing program by the American and other imperialist states around the world to “combat”
and “defeat” terrorism. This purported aim is necessarily completely ridiculous, as capitalist
states are themselves the biggest perpetrators and supporters of terrorism in the world, and
there is certainly no talk of ending that! Nevetheless, this program does target certain
terrorist organizations who oppose the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism, particularly
Islamist groups in the Middle East who want to expel the Western presence in their countries.
The war on terror has both a law enforcement
and a military component. The latter aspect has actually contributed to a sharp increase in
terrorism (at least in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan that have been targeted and
destabilized by imperialism), as anticipated by some agencies of the U.S. government itself. It
has, however, acted as a cover for an expansion of state power over its own population, through
increased powers of electronic surveillance and wiretapping, arrest and detention, the
criminalization of protest, the furtherance of a type of quasi-fascist public discourse about
“values” and “civilization”, the increasing normalization of torture, and a further expansion
of military spending at the expense of urgently needed social programs. The war on terror has
also been used by dictatorial regimes to increase their bargaining power and prestige with the
imperialists, as they can present themselves as valuable and necessary bullwarks against
Islamist extremism while continuing to rob and terrorize their own people.
The law enforcement aspect of the war has
yielded some successes in the stated aim of neutralizing terrorist cells in the imperialist
centers, but the broader war, which is overwhelmingly militarized, has been spectacularly
stupid and self-defeating from the point of view of achieving the bourgeoisie’s more central
aims (and, ironically, will probably come to undermine the law enforcement aspect, given the
hatred generated by military action and occupation). The countries and communities that are
targeted by the war on terror invariably end up becoming even more distrustful and hateful of
the U.S. government; they correctly perceive what liberal bourgeois commentators and other
“experts” can’t: that the invasions and occupations undertaken in the name of fighting
terrorism are actually criminal operations aimed at controlling natural resources and gaining
geopolitical leverage. In many cases these actions even lead to large segments of the
population actively assisting groups who fight against the invasions, and who thus come to earn
the designation “terrorist”, whether or not they are involved in killing civilians. However,
it should be noted that even the term “civilian” can mean different things. People who are
collaborating with the occupation, for example, can technically be civilians, and such people
have certainly become the targets of insurgent attacks. In Iraq, for example, entire segments
of the population supported armed groups who were fighting against and killing American troops;
even the comprador state now in power in Bagdhad has insisted that the U.S. military leave their
country because acquiescing to American demands has simply become too embarrassing!
On the other hand, of course, the U.S. government
has no choice, when other measures fail, to engage in these aggressive actions if it is to
maintain its control of strategically important parts of the world. Thus whatever the
imperialists do will eventually blow up in their faces (unfortunately, at the cost of hundreds
of thousands and even millions of working class and peasant lives). This is yet another example
of capitalism’s contradictions: capitalist-imperialism cannot possibly serve both the
fundamental interests of the people it represents (i.e the ruling class in the imperialist
states, and secondarily the comprador bourgeoisie in the dominated countries) and the masses
that it is bullying and harrassing. This elementary fact is completely lost on liberal
bourgeois comentators, who believe that the root cause of antagonism between U.S. imperialism
and the world’s masses orginates in “errors” made by U.S. presidential administrations, military
commanders, etc! Thus we hear these commentators talk about things like the U.S. “commitment”
to the people of Iraq (as though that were the focus and driving force of its criminal
enterprise in that country), while ignoring the very reasons for the invasion and devastation
of that country. These commentators simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what the
internal record of their own favored state says about the actual reasons and ambitions
propelling imperial policy.
The war on terror, needless to say, has killed
far more people than the terrorists it is purportedly trying to root out. Interestingly, many
of the same terrorists being captured and killed were once in cahoots with the CIA in
Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, when the United States was funneling weapons
and money to the religious fundamentalist forces of the mujahedeen. This covert operation was
the most expensive in CIA history, and involved the cooperation and further financial backing
of the clerical-fascist regime in Saudi Arabia and the fascist military dictatorship in
Pakistan (which was funding its involvement partly through drug trafficking). It is also a
massive source of corruption and waste. But its useful features for the bourgeoisie—ideological
and police-state regimentation of the population in times of increasing hardship for the
workers, and a cover for further imperialist intervention—are so great that the bourgeoisie is
quite willing to overlook these negative aspects and keep promoting it as, at worst, a
“necessary evil”, but more often as a “moral duty”.
More recently, the United States has made
increased use of “unmanned aerial vehicles” or “drones” (remote controlled aircraft carrying
bombs), particularly in Pakistan. One of Barack Obama’s first actions as President was to order
a drone strike in a Pakistani village where some militants were thought to be present. The
attack wiped out dozens of civilians. The drone program in Pakistan has killed hundreds of
civilians over the past few years, angering and inflaming both the Pakistani masses and rotten
Pakistani government (who, if for no other reason than self-preservation, have had to make a
show of condemning these examples of U.S. terrorism and mass murder).
U.S. policy makers have indicated that the war
on terror may last for decades more, if not indefinitely. Conveniently, this is also the
timeframe in which China, the United States’ premier imperialist competitor, is expected to
increasingly flex its military and economic muscle. A perpetual war on terror provides an
excellent pretext to keep ramping up military spending and garrisoning the planet with
military bases and naval forces, though an eventual full-blown “Cold War” with China will do
the job just as nicely! —L.C.
WAVE-PARTICLE DUALITY
A central aspect (dogma?) of the theory of quantum mechanics
that maintains that light and all other matter simultaneously has characteristics which
must be understood by assuming that it is a wave, and other characteristics which must be
understood by assuming that it is composed of discrete particles. The idea of wave-particle
duality was first formulated for electro-magnetic radiation (light) by early quantum physicists
such as Max Planck and Niels Bohr, and for matter in general by
the British physicist Louis de Broglie, and is now the standard view within quantum mechanics.
However, some physicists (such as Richard Feynman) have denied that this is really true.
“I want to emphasize that light comes in this form—particles. It is
very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you
who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving
like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave—like particles.
“You might say that it’s just the
photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every instrument that has been
designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering the
same thing: light is made of particles.” —Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of
Light and Matter (1985), p. 15.
“This strange phenomenon of partial reflection by two surfaces can be
explained for intense light by a theory of waves, but the wave theory cannot explain how
the detector makes equally loud clicks as the light gets dimmer. Quantum electrodynamics
‘resolves’ this wave-particle duality by saying that light is made of particles (as
Newton originally thought), but the price of this great advancement of science is a
retreat by physics to the position of being able to calculate only the probability
that a photon will hit a detector, without offering a good model of how it actually
happens.” —Richard Feynman, ibid., pp. 36-37.
WEAKEST LINK
The point in a chain at which it is most vulnerable to breaking. For those seeking to break
the chain, this is a point to be concentrated on. For those seeking to keep the whole chain
together, this is also a point to be concentrated on!
“In science, our knowledge is only as strong as the weakest link in
the chain of understanding.” —Stephen Rothman, a prominent (non-Marxist) American
biologist, Lessons From the Living Cell (2002), p. 17.
WEALTH DISTRIBUTION — In the U.S.
The graphic at the right shows the actual United States wealth distribution (in quintiles), i.e.,
the proportion of wealth that the top 20% of the population owns, the proportion owned by the
next 20%, and so forth. Also shown is what the average American thinks the wealth
distribution is, and what the average American (even in this bourgeois society) thinks it
really ought to be. Note that Americans are greatly underestimating the proportion of
all wealth that the top 20% owns (in reality about 84%), and vastly overestimating the
wealth that the bottom 20% owns. (Because of their extremely small percentage share of total
wealth, both the “4th 20%” value (0.2%) and the “Bottom 20%” value (0.1%) are not even visible
in the “Actual” distribution.) [From: Michael Norton & Dan Ariely, “Building
a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time”, Perspectives on Psychological Science,
vol. 6, #1 (2011).]
Moreover, even within the top 20% of the
population the wealth is very concentrated in the top few percent. Some estimates indicate
that the top 1% of the U.S. population, the biggest bourgeoisie, owns nearly 50% of all the
wealth. [J. B. Davies, et al., “The global pattern of household wealth”,
Journal of International Development, vol. 117 (2009).] The concentration of
wealth in the U.S. today tops even that of 1929, just before the Great Depression of the
1930s!
WEALTH EFFECT
The correlation between an individual’s actual personal wealth, or more typically their
perceived wealth, and their willingness to buy things and go further into debt. People
in contemporary capitalist societies have been conditioned to borrow and spend more when they
feel that their net wealth is increasing—even if they still have very large debts.
During the U.S. housing bubble of the years
2003-2007, for example, the fact that the market value of homes was increasing rapidly for a
few years led many people to take out a second mortgage, or refinance their existing mortgage
with a cash-out option (i.e., to get an additional loan from the bank in return for signing
over more of the value of their house to the bank). This seemed like a good idea to them at
the time, because the capitalist media led them to believe that home prices would continue to
rise indefinitely (and therefore that their net wealth would continue increasing indefinitely).
Since the housing bubble popped, and the “Great Recession”
hit, millions of these people have already lost their homes. As is nearly always the case in
the end, the “wealth effect” turned out to be a dangerous illusion for the mass of working-class
people.
“Economists have only recently devoted serious study to how a decline in
housing prices affects consumer spending, not least because this is the first decline in
the average price of an American home since the Great Depression [of the 1930s]. A 2007
review of existing research by the Congressional Budget Office reported that people reduce
spending by $20 to $70 a year for every $1,000 decline in the value of their homes.
“This [negative] ‘wealth effect’ is
significantly larger for changes in home equity than in the value of other investments,
such as stocks, apparently because people regard changes in housing prices as more likely
to endure.” —“Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices”, New York Times,
Oct. 18, 2011.
WEATHER UNDERGROUND ORGANIZATION
A very small but notorious U.S. revolutionary organization of student orgins which existed
from 1969 to 1977, with little in the way of developed revolutionary theory, no mass
practice and no mass base. It is known mostly for its initial violent demonstration in
Chicago in October 1969 against the U.S. imperialist war of aggression against Vietnam (the
“Days of Rage”), and its sporadic and very counter-productive
campaign of bombings of U.S. government buildings up through the mid-1970s.
The WUO was originally a faction of the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the tiny faction in control
of the SDS National Office in its last days. (Indeed, their antics were major factors
in wrecking what remained of SDS and making those its last days.) Like most of SDS, the
Weatherman faction was quite marked by its white, petty-bourgeois origin and makeup. While
it did take a very strong stand against U.S. imperialism, and also strong stands in favor of
Black liberation and women’s liberation, it had little or no connection with the working
class, and seemed not even to want any such connection. It was more aligned with the
youth counter-culture. Thus one of its characteristic capers was to aid a jailbreak and
escape for Timothy Leary, the LSD drug guru!
For the most part the bombings it carried
out were symbolic and did little actual damage. In one case they blew up a woman’s bathroom
in the Pentagon, for example. These bombings were an expression of the helpless rage that
those unconnected to mass movements often feel against oppressive governments. Looking back
at those days, one former member of the group expressed their frustration this way:
“We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is
itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for
people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your
white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit
genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.”
—Naomi Jaffe, in the documentary The Weather Underground, produced by Carrie
Lozano and directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, 2003.
The terrible crimes of capitalist-imperialism do indeed demand a response! The trouble
was that what the WUO decided to do was actually extremely counter-productive. The occasional
bombings they engaged in did no serious harm at all to the U.S. government. And they had the
effect of turning large numbers of ordinary American people, including students, more
against the anti-war movement and any idea of revolution, than towards it. By
thus finishing off SDS as a mass student organization they made it more difficult both to
build the anti-war movement and to educate more young revolutionaries.
In December 1969, the Chicago police and
FBI raided the apartment of local Black Panter leader Fred Hampton, killing Hampton in his
sleep (he had been drugged by a police agent) and Mark Clark, and wounding three other
people. In early 1970, in response to this unprovoked murderous raid, the WUO issued a
“Declaration of War” against the U.S. government, shifting to underground, covert activities
only. This declaration was however mere posturing. It was more rage by helpless individuals
cut off from any mass base actually capable of changing the situation.
While always very small, by 1976 the FBI
estimated that the WUO was down to less than 30 active members. They completely disbanded
by the end of 1977, and many of them turned themselves in to the authorities.
See also:
PRAIRIE FIRE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
WEATHERMAN
The original name of the Weather Underground anarchist-like
revolutionary organization.
“WESTERN MARXISM”
A petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism which has developed at universities in capitalist
countries in the “Western” part of the world. The revolutionary heart of Marxism is virtually
entirely cut out in this milieu, and the major focus is the sphere of culture, which is discussed
in pretentious academic and esoteric language. So-called “Western Marxism” reflects decadent
bourgeois ideology far more than it does Marxism. My advice is that you don’t waste your time
with this sort of garbage; it can only corrupt your brain. —S.H.
“Western Marxists therefore placed far greater emphasis on the importance
of what Marx called superstructure—culture, institutions, language—in the political
process, so much so that consideration of the economic base sometimes disappeared
altogether. Unable to change the world, they concentrated on interpreting it through
what became known as ‘cultural studies’—which established its own hegemony on many
university campuses in the final decades of the twentieth century, transforming the study
of history, geography, sociology, anthropology and literature....
“That realm [of the superstructure]
was defined far more broadly than Marx ever imagined. It encompassed any and every sort
of cultural commodity—a pair of winklepicker shoes, a newspaper photograph, a pop record
and a packet of breakfast cereal were all ‘texts’ that could be ‘read’. The critique of
mass culture from early theorists influenced by the Frankfurt
school was gradually supplanted by a study of the different ways in which people receive
and interpret these everyday texts. As cultural studies took a ‘linguistic turn’—evolving
through structuralism, post-structuralism,
deconstruction and then
postmodernism—it often seemed a way of evading politics
altogether, even though many of its practitioners continued to call themselves Marxists.
The logic of their playful insistence that there were no certainties or realities led
ultimately to a free-floating, value-free relativism which
could celebrate both American pop cultural and medieval superstition without a qualm.
Despite their scorn for grand historical narratives and general laws of nature, many seemed
to accept the enduring success of capitalism as an immutable fact of life. Their subversive
impulses sought refuge in marginal spaces where the victors’ dominance seemed less secure:
hence their enthusiasm for the exotic and unincorporable, from UFO conspiracy theories to
sado-masochistic fetishes. A fascination with the pleasures of consumption (TV soap
operas, shopping malls, mass-market kitsch) displaced the traditional Marxist focus on
the conditions of material production.... No systematic critique of monopoly capitalism
could be achieved since capitalism was itself a fiction, like truth, justice, law and all
other ‘linguistic constructs’.” —Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital (2006), pp.
105-7.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? [Book by Lenin]
An extremely important book by Lenin which was written at the end of 1901 and which first appeared
in early 1902, and whose full title was: What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement.
This book has played an important role in the establishment of communist parties not only in Russia,
but also in many other countries.
“In issue No. 12 (December [1901]) of Iskra, Lenin published his
article ‘A Talk with Defenders of Economism’ which he later called a conspectus of What
Is To Be Done? He wrote the Preface in February 1902 and early in March the book was
published by Dietz in Stuttgart. An announcement of its publication was printed in Iskra,
No. 18, March 10, 1902.
“What Is To Be Done? played an
important part in the struggle for a revolutionary Marxist party of the working class in Russia,
and in the victory of the Leninist Iskra trend in the committees and organizations of
the R.S.D.L.P. and at the Congress in 1903.
“In 1902 and 1903 the book was widely
distributed among the Social-Democratic organizations in Russia; it was found during police
searches and arrests of Social-Democrats in Kiev, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhni-Novgorod,
Kazan, Odessa and other towns.” —Note 80, Lenin Selected Works, vol. 1 (1967).
WHERE DO NEW THINGS COME FROM?
In answering this question the first essential bit of wisdom was stated by the ancient Roman
materialist philosopher Lucretius: Ex nihilo nihil fit. “Nothing can be made out of nothing.”
[From his great work De Rerum Natura, “The Nature of Things”.]
“So do new things arise ex nihilo, out of nothing? No, they arise
through the transformation of older things which had a different character, a different
essence (in the relevant respects). Thus ice does not arise out of nothing, but through the
transformation of something else, liquid water, under certain conditions (low temperatures).
Similarly, human beings did not suddenly appear out of nothing, nor out of some idealist
‘Godhead’, but rather we developed out of earlier forms of life, most recently from pre-human
ape-like hominids. And life itself did not originally ‘develop out of nothing’ (whatever that
might be taken to mean), but through the transformation of at least moderately complex
organizations of non-living chemical compounds.
“Sometimes we speak as though something
new and wonderful appeared out of the blue, out of nowhere, but really it is not true, and
when we stop to think about and investigate its origins this becomes clear. New things, and
changes in general, are a matter of the transformation of the old into the new, rather than
the miraculous creation of the new out of thin air.
“From this first basic and rather
obvious principle, we can derive a number of subsidiary principles, such as:
“1) To make something new, you
must start with something else which already exists, and find a way to transform it.
“2) Often there will be several
different existing things which can be transformed into more or less equivalent new things;
but...
“3) In these cases, one of the
existing things will almost always be more easily transformed into the new thing than any of
the others. (There’s almost always a ‘best way’ to proceed.)
“4) Thus a careful analysis must
be made of existing things to see what to start with in constructing the new thing.
“5) The old thing which can most
easily be transformed into the desired new thing may be quite unlike the new thing in important
respects. It may be glaringly deficient in the very characteristic that we are most interested
in, and thus be overlooked at first. (For example, it is vastly easier to transform an acorn
into an oak tree than it is to transform a maple tree into an oak tree—even though in many
respects the maple is much more like the full-grown oak than a little acorn is.)
“6) Since anything new is derived
from something old, it will still contain elements or aspects of the old thing.
“7) The only way the undesirable
remaining aspects of the old thing within the new thing can be eliminated is through a series
of further transformations. It is irrational to expect that something totally new can
be created through a single transformation. (Is anything ever really ‘totally new’? Certainly,
in the sense that its essential aspect(s) or characteristics may be completely new. But there
are always at least some other aspects of the thing which are not new. Thus there is
some little bit of truth to the point of view that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’, even
though it is essentially wrong.)
“Let us now apply these subsidiary
principles to a few of the many issues involved in social revolution. Why, for example, must
there be the transitional stage of socialism between capitalism and communism? It follows
immediately from principles 6 and 7. Socialism is the whole period during which a series of
transformations turns capitalism into communism.
“Next, how can the proletariat, which
originally and for long periods is unconscious of the need for revolution and of its
revolutionary role, come to be the revolutionary force which transforms society? Through its
own step-by-step transformation. From principle 1 we must find the ways to help transform the
proletariat into a conscious revolutionary force.” —Scott Harrison, excerpt from Chapter 31
of The Mass Line and the American Revolutionary Movement, online at:
http://www.massline.info/mlms/mlch31.htm
WILL OF THE PEOPLE
There are two sayings that are worth carefully considering and comparing. The first is something
I once found in a fortune cookie, and which expresses the essential democratic ideal: “The will
of the people is the best law.” But here’s a little different idea that is also very good:
“Salus populi suprema est lex.” [The good of the people is the highest
law.] —Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, III, 3, 8.
So which is it then? Should the highest law be the “good of the people” or the “will of the
people”? Obviously there is a lot to be said for both views. But if we are forced to choose
between them, the “good of the people” has to be the highest ethical and political principle,
since after all, people do not always choose to do what is actually in their own best interests.
On the other hand, Cicero’s statement can be interpreted in a very
paternalistic manner, and those who rule paternalistically can
easily start to promote their own self-interest rather than the interests of the masses. For this
reason, over the long run the safest place for important political decisions to be made, is by
the people themselves.
So our solution to this puzzle must be along
these lines: To allow (and indeed insist on) basic democracy among the masses while at
the same time finding a way for those who better understand the real and long-term interests
of the people, and how those interests can best be satisfied, to educate them about this and
help them to avoid working against their own true interests.
Fortunately Marxism-Leninism-Maoism has found
a brilliant way to do just this. A political party to educate and lead the masses must be drawn
from among the masses and must constantly refresh itself with the best new representatives from
the masses. Such a party must devote itself to studying society scientifically, and carefully
studying the objective situation. And such a party must itself be constantly supervised by the
masses it leads, always be open to mass criticism, and always be willing to purge elements who
start to think only of their own personal welfare and interests. But most of all, such a party
must lead the masses in a truly democratic way, using the mass line
method of leadership. This is our way of combining democracy and the wisdom that comes
from all the previous experience and investigations of people throughout history. —S.H.
“To link oneself with the masses, one must act in accordance with the
needs and wishes of the masses. All work done for the masses must start from their needs
and not from the desire of any individual, however well-intentioned. It often happens that
objectively the masses need a certain change, but subjectively they are not yet conscious
of the need, not yet willing or determined to make the change. In such cases, we should
wait patiently. We should not make the change until, through our work, most of the masses
have become conscious of the need and are willing and determined to carry it out. Otherwise
we shall isolate ourselves from the masses. Unless they are conscious and willing, any kind
of work that requires their participation will turn out to be a mere formality and will
fail. ... There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than
what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their
own minds instead of our making up their minds for them.” —Mao, Quotations, ch. XI;
originally from “The United Front in Cultural Work” (Oct. 30, 1944), SW 3:236-7.
WILLIAMS, Robert F. (1925-1996)
A radical American civil rights leader and proponent of armed self-defence for
African-Americans being terrorized by not only the Ku Klux Klan and individual racists, but
also sometimes by the local, state and national governments of the U.S. When Williams was
a boy his grandmother, a former slave, gave him the rifle that his grandfather had used to
defend himself in an earlier period. Williams became president of the Monroe, North Carolina
chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and 60s. He also organized the Black Armed Guard to defend
the local Black community against KKK attacks. His 1962 book, Negroes with Guns,
further promoted armed self-defense, and served to inspire many others, most notably Huey
Newton and the Black Panther Party.
During a period of high racial tensions in
the area, a white couple linked to the KKK was stopped by an angry crowd of Blacks. Williams
escorted them away from the potential trouble and sheltered them in his own home. Ironically,
the state then charged him with kidnapping! Since there was no hope for a fair trial nor any
kind of justice, Williams fled the country and went to Cuba. From there he made regular
radio broadcasts to Southern Blacks on “Radio Free Dixie”, a station he established with the
help of Fidel Castro’s government. This station’s signal was hypocritically jammed by the
U.S. at the same time they condemned Cuba for jamming U.S. propaganda broadcasts directed
against that country!
The NAACP, Black religious leaders such as
Martin Luther King, the liberal white civil rights movement, and even the revisionist
(so-called) Communist Party, USA, all opposed Blacks arming themselves in self-defense
against racist attacks. In a 1964 letter to his lawyer, Conrad Lynn, Williams wrote that
“... the U.S.C.P. has openly come out against my position on the
Negro struggle. In fact, the party has sent special representatives here [to Cuba]
to sabotage my work on behalf of U.S. Negro liberation. They are pestering the Cubans
to remove me from the radio, ban THE CRUSADER [a newspaper Williams published] and to
take a number of other steps in what they call ‘cutting Williams down to size.’...
“The whole thing is due to the
fact that I absolutely refuse to take direction from Gus Hall’s idiots... I hope to
depart from here, if possible, soon. I am writing you to stand by in case I am turned
over to the FBI...”
In 1965 Williams and his wife left Cuba to settle in China, where he was warmly welcomed.
He was, however, never a Marxist or a communist. In August 1966, during the Cultural
Revolution, he and the Communist Party of China organized a major demonstration against
the continuing discrimination and oppression of Black people in the U.S. His
speech on that
occasion appeared in the Chinese publication Peking Review. In 1968 he was invited
home to the U.S. by Conrad Lynn and other supporters in order to run for U.S. president!
But he wisely decided that until he could reasonably be assured that he would not be sent
to prison he should not return. He did return to the U.S. in late 1969, where in the period
of warming relations between the U.S. and China his knowledge of China was welcomed at the
Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. There were continuing attempts
to extradite him to North Carolina, however, and this finally happened in 1976. However, by
then there was significant support for him from the left and from Blacks, and the charges
against him were soon dropped. In the years that followed Williams continued to work at the
Center for Chinese Studies. He died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1996.
For more information and a list of further
sources, see the Wikipedia
entry about Robert Williams, from which much of the material here has been taken.
WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE
The Marxist conception that the class struggle, and the proletarian state which
enforces the rule of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie after the socialist revolution,
will gradually “wither away” and cease to exist.
The revolutionary Marxist view is that
every state is the organized agency of one
social class which exists for the purpose of maintaining by force
(“when necessary”) its own dictatorship over one or more other classes. Specifically, our
view is that the socialist state exists to exercize the dictatorship of the proletariat
over the remnants of the bourgeoisie it overthrew as well as over any new bourgeois elements
that might arise in the early stages of the new socialist society. But we intend to organize
that socialist society so that it will gradually transform the class outlook of the older
generations, and even more importantly, bring up the new generations with socialist and
communist consciousness. This will be done through both educational means, and by continually
transforming the relations of production and distribution in the direction of communism.
Before too many decades pass there will no longer be any bourgeoisie left and there will no
longer even be any basis for the creation of new bourgeois outlooks. By that point there will
no longer be any need or use for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or for the state at
all, and it will cease to exist.
Of course there will still need to be social
organization, the planning and organization of production, the organization of education,
health services, and so forth. However, this will be handled by the agencies of communist
civil society, and there will no longer be any agencies of
force whose task is the suppression of one class by another. That is, the
state—properly speaking—will have ceased to exist.
WOLFF, Richard D. (1942- )
American Marxist-influenced economist who promotes a liberal-radical form of
syndicalism. For many years he taught economics at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since his retirement in 2008, he has continued writing
and speaking about economics and the U.S. and world economic crisis, and has taught frequent
classes at the Brecht Forum in New York City. He is also loosely associated with the
Monthly Review School, and has posted a series of articles on
the MR blog site. Many of his articles and video lectures are available on his own website at
http://rdwolff.com/ Politically,
Wolff has been part of various reformist projects; he was a founding member of the Green
Party in New Haven, Connecticut, and was its mayoral candidate in 1985.
Wolff seems to avoid using the word
‘syndicalism’ to describe the form of socioeconomic society that he promotes, as if he is
trying to hide or deny that characterization. However, there is no mistaking that syndicalism
aptly describes his views. We see this in his focus on the central role of the “board of
directors” under modern corporate capitalism—and, supposedly, under what he calls socialism!
He doesn’t explain how all the workers at some large corporation could themselves simply
become a new board of directors for the company. More importantly, he seems to be trying to
avoid any discussion about how the whole economy of a post-capitalist society could be
coordinated and managed. This first gives the impression that he has some sort of mystical
or magical conception of how the masses might be able to run not just one company but the
whole of society, immediately and directly, without a party or a state, etc.
However, the reason that Wolff usually does
not think any mention is needed of how this overall economic organization of society might
occur under socialism is that he tacitly assumes that the exchange of commodities will
continue forever under some type of market socialism.
Sometimes this is more overt, as in his statement that “commodity production has nothing to
do with capitalism... nothing”. [From his “Intensive Introduction to
Marxian Economics” video lectures, 2009.] Thus he thinks capitalism can be ended
without ending commodity production and the exchange of commodities in the marketplace. This
is, most essentially, why Wolff is not really a Marxist. The perpetual continuation of the
law of value is required in his scheme. And this in turn
means that the germ of an inevitable return to the present form of capitalism in inherent
in his scheme as well! Capitalism cannot be completely and permanently gotten rid of while
any form of commodity exchange still exists as the basic form of economic distribution, as
Marx was the first to point out.
Philosophically Wolff is an
epistemological agnostic, as evidenced by
his bizarre claim that there are no right or wrong theories in economics, and that Marxist
political economy is just “different” from bourgeois political economy. He is a partisan of
the vague philosophical notion of “overdetermination”, which argues that there are a whole
host of causes of things—which is another way of opposing the view that there are very
definite specific causes of things. He openly proclaims his support for “non-determinism”
in economics, and in general. He is also an implicit philosophical amoralist, as with his
apparent claim that all criticism of capitalism from a moral perspective is invalid. (This
view is often falsely attributed to Marx.)
All of Wolff’s conceptions, in philosophy,
political economy and politics, are highly eclectic. One
example of this is his strong advocacy of Freudian
psychoanalysis, which is a pseudoscience. Also demonstrating this electicism, Wolff was
one of the principal founders of the academic group, the Association of Economic and Social
Analysis, in 1988, and has been an editor of and contributor to its
revisionist journal Rethinking Marxism.
Much of Wolff’s economic writing has been
done in collaboration with Stephen Resnick, and they claim to have developed a “new
approach” to political economy. The two central thrusts of this “new approach” are
supposedly a focus on social class (which of course initially derives from Marx, but which
they reinterpret based on the writings of Louis Althusser
and Étienne Balibar) and, secondly, an opposition to “economic determinism” (which reflects
an idealist philosophical perspective). The result, therefore, is quite far removed from
genuinely Marxist political economy.
Even Wolff’s definition of capital itself
is a bourgeois distortion of Marx; he states that “capital equals money used to make more
money; this is all capital is”. [Ibid.] It is true that the basic
way to analyze capitalist production is with the M-C-C’-M circuit of capital (as Wolff
does.) But nevertheless, the vast bulk of productive capital at any time does not exist in
the form of money, but rather in the form of factories, machinery, raw material, etc. One of
the big problems that people in bourgeois society have in coming to comprehend how capitalism
works is that they do not really understand what Marx means by (productive) capital. Instead
of focusing on factories and machines, they tend to think of just money, and—worse yet—of
what Marx called fictitious capital (such as stock
market “values”). Wolff does his students a tremendous disservice by reinforcing that
bourgeois bias. Wolff goes on to say that in any society “technically we have land, machinery
and capital”. This is definitely not Marx’s view of what capital is! For him, industrial
capital (at least) only exists within the capitalist mode of production. Capital is that
which allows the capitalists to exploit their workers by extracting surplus value from them
in a very definite mode of production. Of course we can talk about “capital” under socialism
or communism too, but it is then a very different concept.
Wolff also fails to fully and correctly bring
out the fundamental causes of capitalist economic crises. He attributes crises to a fall of
real wages and the consequent increase in debt on the part of the workers. This implies (very
falsely) that capitalist crises would not occur if real wages were not cut. Wolff doesn’t
seem to understand at all how the very existence of the extraction of
surplus value (and the expropriation of it by the
capitalists) is the real root cause of crises. Similarly, Wolff’s suggestion that the
capitalists are able to “manage” crises by simply switching back and forth between private
capitalism and state capitalism is at best a very limited half-truth. He doesn’t seem to
understand Marx’s view that the real resolution of crises involves the destruction of excess
capital.
Richard Wolff has helped introduce many
young people to some aspects of Marxism, and in a country as politically backward as the
United States is today this is no doubt a good thing. But unfortunately, in the process of
introducing Marx to students he also distorts Marx, and socialism, in some most essential
respects. Marx was, if anything, a communist revolutionary; but Wolff is only a reformist
syndicalist.
WORLD CONTRADICTIONS—FUNDAMENTAL
The most basic dialectical contradictions in human society for the whole world, and therefore,
those contradictions which are driving world social development. The most fundamental of all
world contradictions is that between social production and private appropriation, or—in
political terms—between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But there are also major world
contradictions between the imperialist powers and the nations they exploit and oppress, and
among the imperialist nations themselves.
“What are the fundamental contradictions in the contemporary world?
Marxist-Leninists consistently hold that they are:
the contradiction between the
socialist camp and the imperialist camp;
the contradiction between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries;
the contradiction between the
oppressed nations and imperialism; and
the contradictions among
imperialist countries and among monopoly capitalist groups.”
—A Proposal Concerning the General
Line of the International Communist Movement: The letter of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China in reply to the letter of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union of March 30, 1963 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963),
p. 6.
Since the time that was written, the “socialist camp” has unfortunately disintegrated and
collapsed (for now). But the other three world political contradictions all still exist, and
are now even intensifying once again. In addition, we should these days add yet another
major world contradiction: that between the rapidly intensifying capitalist destruction of the
environment and the desire of the people to maintain the world in a livable condition.
WORLDVIEW (or WORLD OUTLOOK)
A worldview, or world outlook, or Weltanshauung [in German], is some
distinctive way of viewing the world and/or human society. Examples include the worldviews of
native peoples in the Amazon forest, the dominant worldview of polytheistic slave society of
ancient Rome, the contemporary Christian fundamentalist worldview, the mechanical materialist
worldview of some scientists, and the more fully scientific dialectical materialist worldview
of revolutionary Marxists. Philosophically, these very different worldviews fall into two
categories, idealist worldviews and materialist worldviews. From a political
perspective, worldviews are associated with the interests and outlook of one or another social
class.
Sometimes rather small differences in outlook
are characterized as “differing worldviews”, such as the sets of different views that Republicans
and Democrats have in the U.S. today, and lie behind the so-called “culture wars” between them.
Of course, from our Marxist point of view, these are just relatively minor variations on a theme,
with both being philosophically idealist (for the most part), and also obviously bourgeois (in
that they reflect the attitudes of the American capitalist-imperialists). The profoundly different
worldviews are those which have, in the one case, an idealist philosophical outlook and which
represent the class interests of the ruling bourgeoisie, or in the other case, a scientific
materialist philosophical outlook and which solidly represents the class interests of the
revolutionary proletariat.
Every worldview has a certain “inner logic” or
inner “rationality” or “way of thinking” to it. In the case of a scientific worldview this
inner rationality will indeed be truly rational, at least in its essentials. But in the
case of religious, bourgeois, or other non-scientific worldviews, it would be more correct to
describe this as a quasi-rationality or pseudo-rationality. For example, in a religious worldview,
which assumes the existence of a God and human “souls”, it will seem to
make sense within that worldview that heaven and hell also exist, as places where these
“souls” go after they leave the human body when it dies. Of course in the Marxist
scientific materialist worldview this is all complete nonsense, since (for one thing) there can
be no such things as “disembodied” minds or “souls” to begin with, and therefore no such things
as gods and devils (let alone realms where these fantastic entities “rule”).
Being truly rational involves not only reasoning
in a logical way, based on facts and evidence, but also having a scientific materialist worldview
which allows and promotes this.
See also:
REMOLDING ONE’S WORLDVIEW
WORLD WAR I
[Intro to be added... ]
“It is proved in the pamphlet that the war of 1914-18 was imperialist
(that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was
a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and
spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.” —Lenin, “Preface to the French and German
Editions” (July 6, 1920), Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, LCW
22:189-190.
WORLD WAR II — Defeat of Fascism
“Only the temporary and bizarre alliance of liberal capitalism and
communism in self-defense against this [fascist] challenger saved democracy, for the
victory over Hitler’s Germany was essentially won, and could only have been won, by
the Red Army.” —Eric Hobsbaum, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,
1914-1991 (1994), p. 7. [Of course the “democracy” referred to here is only
bourgeois democracy. —S.H.]
WORLD WAR II — Predictions Of
Marxists, from Lenin on, recognized that with the semi-stabilization of capitalism after
World War I that another imperialist world war would occur before too many years, and that
imperialist wars are inherent in capitalist-imperialism as a system. Here are some specific
predictions:
[Comments by the liberal American journalist George Seldes writing in
1929. He had interviewed Lenin in the early 1920s, sometime before his death in early
1924.]
“On another occasion he [Lenin]
showed the same stubborn prejudices which characterize all the revolutionary leaders.
“‘When is the war between Japan
and America coming?’ he asked. He was assured there would be no war because there are
no causes for war. ‘But there must be war,’ he insisted, ‘because capitalist countries
cannot exist without wars.’” —George Seldes, You Can’t Print That!, (Garden City,
NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1929), p. 221. [Of course events proved Lenin to be
extremely prescient about a future war which very few others at the time saw coming;
and George Seldes proved to be a liberal fool! —S.H.]
“Instead of the stability and super-imperialism foretold by the
reformists, we see the greatest disintegration, the greatest instability in capitalism
today, both in its economic substructure and in its political-social and ideological
superstructure. The contradictions are becoming sharper and are making straight for a
new imperialist war, either of the imperialists against the Soviet Union or of the
imperialists among themselves, to determine the re-division of the world (a combination
of both is possible).” —Eugen Varga, The Decline of Capitalism (London: Communist
Party of Great Britain, 1928), p. 15.