WAR
Armed struggle between states, nations, or classes. An extension of political struggle.
(As von Clauswitz put it, war is the continuation of politics by other means.) Nations and
states are of course dominated by one class or another. Since most modern warfare is a
continuation of class politics, and class politics are at bottom a concentrated expression
of economics, the ultimate cause of most modern wars is to be found in capitalist-imperialist
political economy.
See also individual wars such as
WORLD WAR I, and:
VIOLENCE.
WAR—Morality Of
[To be added... ]
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 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.
WARRANT (Capitalist Finance)
A security which gives the holder the right (but not the obligation) to buy shares of stock
in a company at a specified price, and either at any time or else at some definite time in
the future. Warrants are very similar to options, except that
they are issued by the company itself as part of a new share issue, whereas options relate
to shares already in existence.
WATTS, Alan (1915-73)
An influential western interpreter and popularizer of Eastern religious and mystical
philosophies, especially Zen Buddhism and
Taoism. He was born in England and became an Anglican priest,
editor, professor, and finally a free-lance author and lecturer. Watts was widely known for
his enthusiasm for meditation and mysticism.
“WAVING THE RED FLAG TO OPPOSE THE RED FLAG”
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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!
[Add commentary (perhaps from Lenin)
about how Tsarist Russia was the “weakest link” in world capitalism circa WWI ... ]
“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
“The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation
of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold
aspect—use-value and exchange-value.” —Marx, CCPE, p. 27. [Marx notes that this
insight goes back to Aristotle.]
See also:
USE-VALUE and
EXCHANGE-VALUE
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.
WHORF HYPOTHESIS
See: SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
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.
WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig (1889-1951)
Austrian-British philosopher, who founded two major twentieth century schools of
bourgeois philosophy. The first, logical positivism,
was largely inspired by his 1921 work Tractatus Logical-Philosophicus. The second school,
in many respects a reaction against the first (at least for Wittgenstein himself), was
linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s major work in
his second period was his Philosophical Investigations (1953).
See also:
Philosophical doggerel about
Wittgenstein.
WOMEN — Oppression Of
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See also:
SEXISM
WORKERS’ MAO TSE-TUNG THOUGHT PROPAGANDA TEAMS
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WORKING CLASS — Spontaneous Impulses Of
See: SPONTANEOUS WORKING
CLASS IMPULSES
WORLD BANK
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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 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.
WRONG
Failing to meet the expected standards for answering to the common, collective interests of
the people, for the sort of activity in question. In class society, these are of course the
class interests of one or another social class.
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