Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   W   —

WANG MING   (1904-1974)
A leader of the Communist Party of China in its early middle period, who was trained and indoctrinated in the Soviet Union and then became a top leader of the CCP when he returned to China in 1929 as one of the notorious “28 Bolsheviks” group. Wang was dogmatic and ultra-“left” in his outlook, and had little appreciation of the requirements for a successful revolution in China. Wang called Mao’s line a “nationalist deviation” from Marxism-Leninism, though clearly this only really meant that Mao rejected control of the CCP and its line and policies from Moscow.
        During the desperate days of the Long March Mao became the top leader of the CCP, but it was only with the Rectification Campaign of 1942 that the ideological line struggle against the dogmatism of Wang Ming and his followers was completed.
        In 1956 Wang went to Moscow for medical treatment and never returned to China. During the Sino-Soviet dispute he sided with the revisionist Soviet Union against China and wrote many articles denouncing Mao and the CCP. Wang died in Moscow in 1974.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

WHORF HYPOTHESIS
See: SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

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
[To be added... ]
        See also: SEXISM

WORKING CLASS — Spontaneous Impulses Of
See: SPONTANEOUS WORKING CLASS IMPULSES

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

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