ZERO-SUM (Game or Situation)
[Game Theory:] A situation where a gain for one participant
necessarily involves an equivalent loss for one or more other participants. (I.e., where the
total gains and losses for all participants sum to zero.) Chess or poker are zero-sum games
because if one player wins, the other(s) must lose.
Bourgeois economists claim that
capitalism is “not” a zero-sum economic system, because even the workers come out of it with
something (generally enough to at least scrape by on). However, all the wealth
that any society produces ultimately comes from the labor of workers acting on the natural
products of the world. Under socialism or communism, all that wealth would belong to the
workers, either individually or collectively. Capitalism modifies this situation in a zero-sum
way; whatever the capitalists take from the workers in the form of open or concealed profits,
the workers lose completely. And this is the very definition of a zero-sum situation.
One recent study by bourgeois economists of
“zero-sum thinking (the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost
of others)”, found that having a more “zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with giving more
support for government redistribution, [and] race- and gender-based affirmative action”, all of
which sound like generally positive reforms (though the degree to which these things can actually
be implemented in capitalist society is highly questionable). On the other hand, where this
zero-sum thinking is inappropriate, it can lead to wrong ideas and bad results. The same
study found that when applied to immigrants (i.e., falsely supposing that jobs and income for
immigrants come at the expense of non-immigrants) leads to public pressure for more restrictive
immigration policies. [See: “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political
Divides”, by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira & Stefanie Stantcheva, NBER working paper
31688, Sept. 2023.] Thus, it is immportant that people are educated to understand just
where zero-sum thinking is appropriate, and just where it is inappropriate, and why that is in
specific cases.
ZETKIN, Clara (1857-1933)
An important and influential German revolutionary socialist and then Communist leader, who
also helped to further develop and strengthen the struggle for women’s rights and equality,
including within the socialist and Communist movement itself. She was the leading organizer
of the first International Women’s Day in March
1911.
Zetkin joined the Socialist Workers’ Party in
1878, which was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)
in 1890. With Bismarck’s ban on socialist activity in 1878 Zetkin went into exile in Zurich
and then Paris. (The Anti-Socialist Law lapsed in
1890.) Zetkin, along with her friend Rosa Luxemburg, soon
became one of the most prominent representatives of the revolutionary Left-wing of the SPD,
and she strongly criticized the revisionist ideas of
Eduard Bernstein.
Zetkin played a leading role in fighting for
equality for women including the right to vote, and was the leader in developing the
socialist women’s movement in Germany. From 1891 to 1917 she edited the SPD women’s
publication Die Gleichheit [“Equality”].
During World War I the SPD took on a social
chauvinist (pro-war) stance, voting for war spending and the policy of
Burgfrieden (truce with the bourgeoisie and promising
not to lead any labor strikes during the war). Zetkin, along with Luxemburg,
Karl Liebknecht, and other prominent Left-wing members
of the SPD very strongly opposed this pro-imperialist war position. Among other anti-war
efforts, Zetkin organized an international socialist women’s anti-war conference in Berlin in
1915. She was arrested several times during the war because of such activity.
In 1917 Zetkin, and many others who opposed
the dominant national chauvinist stance of the SPD during World War I, left to join the
new Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and also
its most Left-wing faction, the Spartacus League which
she co-founded. In 1919 the Spartacus League broke with the centrist USPD to form the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and Zetkin became an important leader of that new
revolutionary party. From 1920 to 1933 when the Nazis took over, she represented the KPD in
the Reichstag (German parliament). She was also a member of the Central Committee of the KPD
from 1927 to 1929.
Zetkin also played a significant role in
international revolutionary politics. In 1920 she interviewed Lenin on “The Women’s Question”.
She was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist
International (Comintern) from 1921 until her death. In 1933 after Hitler took power and
staged the Reichstag fire (falsely blamed on the Communists), Zetkin was forced into exile
once again, this time to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately she died later that same year at the
age of 76, and was buried near the wall of the Kremlin in Moscow.
[Much of the materal in this entry is taken
from the Wikipedia article on Clara Zetkin.]
ZEUGMA
[Also called “syllepsis”.] A figure of speech, generally used to humorous effect, in which
more than one meaning of a word is implied even though the word is only used once. A classic
example is: “She came home in a sedan chair and a flood of tears.” The word “in” is used just
once here, but refers to a means of conveyance in the first part of the sentence (i.e., a
chair with two poles attached at the sides which is then carried by two oppressed workers,
one in front and one in back), and then to an emotional state in the second part of the
sentence. The linguistic humor comes from the fact that the construction suggests that “a
flood of tears” is also a means of conveyance.
Curiously, an expression which is a zeugma in
one language may not be so when translated into a different language. And this helps to bring
out that words which at first seem to have one single absolutely precise meaning are actually
almost always somewhat broad concepts derived through analogies.
In their book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (2013),
Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander employ zeugmas effectively in order to help analyze words
and bring out the ubiquitous role of analogy in human language and thought.
ZHANG Guotao (Old style: CHANG Kuo-t’ao) (1897-1979)
One of the founders and early leaders of the Communist Party of China who became a renegade from
the CCP and a traitor to and enemy of the Chinese revolution. During one period in 1937 he
and the section of the revolutionary army he led refused to obey the orders of the Central
Committee and then he even set himself up as the head of a separate and competing “Central
Committee” of the CCP. His renegade leadership of the Fourth Front Army led to disastrous defeats
and the loss of thousands of Red Army soldiers. At one point he plotted to arrest, and if necessary
kill, Mao and the legitimate Central Committee members. When he abandoned the CCP completely in
1938 he even worked with the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police, Dai Li (often called “China’s
Himmler”), in an effort to destroy the Communist Party. In 1949 he fled to Hong Kong, and then in
1968 moved to Canada. He became a Christian the year before his death.
“Chang Kuo-tao was a renegade from the Chinese revolution. In early life,
speculating on the revolution, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. In the Party he made
many mistakes resulting in serious crimes. The most notorious of these was his opposition,
in 1935, to the Red Army’s northward march [the Long March] and his defeatism and
liquidationism in advocating withdrawal by the Red Army to the minority-nationality areas on
the Szechuan-Sikang borders; what is more, he openly carried out traitorous activities against
the Party and the Central Committee, established his own bogus central committee, disrupted
the unity of the Party and the Red Army, and caused heavy losses to the Fourth Front Army of
the Red Army. But thanks to patient education by Comrade Mao Tse-tung and the Central Committee,
the Fourth Front Army and its numerous cadres soon returned to the correct leadership of the
Central Committee of the Party and played a glorious role in subsequent struggles. Chang
Kuo-tao, however, proved incorrigible and in the spring of 1938 he slipped out of the
Shensi-Kansu-Ningsia Border Region and joined the Kuomintang secret police.” —Editorial
note 5 to Mao’s article “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” (Feb. 1, 1942), SW 3:51.
ZHAO Ziyang (1919-2005)
The third Premier of the People’s Republic of China (1980-1987) and General Secretary of the
so-called Communist Party of China from 1987 to 1989 during the new capitalist era. He was placed
into power by Deng Xiaoping, the “Paramount Leader” of the
capitalist-roaders who seized power in China after the
death of Mao in 1976. Deng liked him because Zhao strongly favored transforming the then
state capitalist system into a more market-based economy, along the lines of Western-style monopoly
capitalism. However, when Deng and his closer followers (including Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and
Premier Li Peng) violently suppressed a mass demonstration against the
authoritarian regime which took place in Tiananmen Square
in Beijing in 1989, Zhao Ziyang criticized that repression and revealed his tendencies toward favoring
bourgeois democracy. Deng liked Zhao’s bourgeois economics, but totally rejected his sympathy for
bourgeois democracy, and thus had Zhao removed from his position as nominal head of the Party. Zhao
was replaced with Jiang Zemin who shared Zhao’s economic views, but
also favored the sort of fascist political rule that Deng always demanded.
After his removal from office, Zhao Ziyang was
placed under de facto house arrest for the next 15 years until his death.
ZHOU Enlai — Role in the Cultural Revolution
Zhou’s role during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR)
has been the subject of considerable discussion and contention. Mao seems to have mostly viewed
him as a loyal supporter of both Mao himself and the GPCR, and when one college Red Guard group
in Beijing (the “May 16 Red Guards Regiment”) attacked
Zhou as a “shameful traitor of Mao Zedong Thought” in the summer of 1967, Mao and the Central
Cultural Revolution Small Group condemned this particular Red Guard faction as “ultra-left” and
suppressed them. Moreover, this led to the suppression of many other individuals as ultra-leftists,
including eventually Chen Boda who was himself originally put in
charge of dealing with the May 16 Red Guards Regiment but was later accused of being supportive
of their views.
During the GPCR Zhou did intervene from time to
time to rescue one or another person who was being persecuted by Red Guard groups. There
actually were a great number of excesses by the Red Guards during the GPCR and it was not wrong
to stop or correct these excesses when possible. (Mao also did so at times, and the major
campaign he authorized against ultra-leftism of the “May 16 Red Guards Regiment” type is an
example of this on a large scale.) Stopping excesses is actually a way of supporting a
revolution and of trying to prevent it from being discredited.
However, Zhou’s “moderating” role sometimes
seems to have gone well beyond merely stopping violence and unjust treatment of basically good
comrades who had made some mistakes. While he apparently agreed with Mao at the beginning of
the GPCR that Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping should be criticized for their views and policies, he strenuously opposed putting
it as strongly as that they were leaders of a “bourgeois reactionary line”. If Zhou had had his
way, it seems that the whole heart would have been cut out of the GPCR, and the whole point of
it vitiated. A revolution requires more than mere slaps on the hands of those who really have
become the enemies of the people!
As the GPCR quickly developed, Zhou, as head
of the Chinese government, put a lot of emphasis on Mao’s slogan, “grasp revolution and
promote production”, and in this he was quite correct. There was in fact a danger that the
necessarily disruptive political revolution might lead to a collapse of the economy—which
would have discredited the GPCR far more than any mere excesses against particular individuals.
(As it was, the Chinese economy did suffer small declines in GDP for three years but then,
because of the political enthusiasm and positive changes in the factories, quickly zoomed
ahead again at an even faster pace. The trend line for the entire 1966-1976 period shows the
initial dip but also an end result that is just the same as if there had been a uniformly fast
advance of around 10% a year over that entire period.)
In early 1967 a number of military marshals
and government leaders raged against the GPCR in what became known as the
February Adverse Current. Zhou did not openly
support this trend, though he let slip his identification with these other veteran leaders
when he referred to them and him together as “us”.
But by far the worst aspect of Zhou’s role in
“moderating” the GPCR was his evident attempt to wait it out, and to then reverse at least
aspects of it by eventually returning the individuals who were overthrown as
“capitalist roaders” to their positions of authority
in the party and government. And the very worst example of this turned out to be his
rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping and the recall of Deng to again be a vice-premier and Zhou’s
designated successor. However, this is something that Mao himself also agreed to, and if Zhou
should be blamed for this so should Mao. It seems that the CCP was too easily fooled by
confessions and phony self-criticisms. Perhaps this is a perpetual problem for people like Mao
who are themselves open and honest about their opinions, when it comes to trying to
politically “treat the disease in order to cure the patient”.
After Zhou’s death a huge memorial gathering
in his honor held in Tiananmen Square on April 5, 1976 turned into a reactionary demonstration
against the whole GPCR. Was this just a case of reactionaries making use of the occasion to
attack the GPCR, or was it actually the view of Zhou Enlai himself and his friends, which they
merely kept mostly silent about while he was alive? Perhaps some of each. Right after Zhou
died Maoist groups around the world, including the RCP in the U.S., wrote articles lauding him.
(See for example: “Chou Enlai (1898-1976): A Fighter for Our Class All His
Life”, Worker for Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Area, February 1976, p. 9, online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Worker-Milw/Worker-RCP-Milw-V1N05-Feb1976.pdf)
But after the April 5th Tiananmen Incident the
view of Zhou by many Maoists turned diametrically around, and Zhou has since then been
routinely condemned as a hidden rightist.
It seems clear that while Zhou publicly
supported Mao’s GPCR he was personally opposed to at least many aspects of it; possibly in his
heart he did not truly support it at all, though he did nevertheless play a fairly important
role in making it possible. Pretty obviously someone like Zhou could not possibly have
initiated or led the GPCR. In any revolution there will be people on the revolutionary side
who do not fully understand and support all the aims of that revolution. But it is wrong to
force such people away and into the enemy camp. That is what was wrong with the ultra-leftists
of the type of the May 16 Red Guards Regiment. They did not understand the necessity in any
revolution of uniting the vast majority against a much smaller enemy. But was it correct to
later on start criticizing Zhou as he more and more seemed to be undermining the GPCR by
bringing back capitalist roaders like Deng? The so-called “Gang
of Four” appeared to be doing this as a somewhat camouflaged part of the
Anti-Lin Biao, Anti-Confucius
Campaign. It seems they may have been quite right to do so. —S.H.
[Comments from a book deeply hostile to the Cultural Revolution:]
“Zhou Enlai’s position in the CCP leadership was on the rise during the Cultural
Revolution. At the Eleventh Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee (1-12 August 1966),
he became the third highest ranking leader of the CCP. After the downfall of Lin Biao in
September 1971, he became second, next to Mao. As his status and power increased, however,
Zhou was facing greater challenges and provocations from the ultraleftist faction of the
CCP leadership who, along with Mao, envisioned Zhou as a formidable anti-Cultural
Revolution force after Mao’s death. And, as indispensable as Zhou was, Mao never
considered him as his successor; rather, Mao often equated Zhou’s meticulous attention
to details and superb skills as an administrator with the neglect of more important
matters and the lack of firm ideological and political conviction.
“From 25 November to 5 December 1973,
enlarged Politburo sessions were convened at Mao’s suggestion to criticize Zhou for his
‘right revisionist line’ and ‘capitulationism’ in foreign policy because of his
negotiations with the United States on the sensitive issue of miliary exchange. Jiang
Qing [Mao’s wife] called the conflict between Zhou and Mao [the] ‘eleventh line struggle
within the party.’ A month later, in January 1974, another general offensive against Zhou
was launched in the name of an anti-Lin Biao campaign known as Criticize Lin and Criticize
Confucius, which was followed by yet another implicitly anti-Zhou movement: that of the
Water Margin Appraisal (1975-1976). The attack on Zhou in both of these campaigns
took the form of allusory historiography in which Confucius and Song Jiang—a capitulator
in the historical romance Water Margin, in Mao’s view—were depicted with
considerable resemblance to China’s current premier.
“Zhou was instrumental in Deng
Xiaoping’s reinstatement as vice-premier in 1973. In December 1974, Zhou, gravely ill
with cancer and escorted by hospital nurses, flew to Changsha to discuss personnel matters
with Mao in preparation for the forthcoming Fourth National People’s Congress. Zhou
recommended Deng for the position of the first vice-premier against Zhang Chunqiao, the
candidate of the Jiang Qing group.”
—From the entry on Zhou Enlai in
the Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by Guo Jian, Yongyi
Song and Yuan Zhou, (2006).
ZHU Rongji (Old style: CHU Jung-chi) (1928- )
Premier of the capitalist regime in China from 1998 to 2003.
Zhu joined the CCP in October 1949, and graduated
from Tsinghua University in 1951 with a degree in electrical engineering. However, he spent most
of his career as a political cadre in the economics and production planning sphere. He was
criticized and labelled a Rightist in 1958 for opposing the “irrational high growth” policies
during the Great Leap Forward. He was pardoned in 1962, but then criticized again during the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and sent to a “May Seventh Cadre School” from 1970-1975 for
re-education. Apparently this attempted re-education didn’t have any positive effect on him.
From 1975 to 1979 Zhu was the deputy chief engineer
for a company run by the Petroleum Ministry and director of the Industrial Economics Institute of
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. When the notorious capitalist-roader
Deng Xiaoping returned to power in 1978 he sought out like-minded
people as economic advisors, and Zhu Rongji in particular. Zhu was formally rehabilitated by the
now revisionist CCP because of his supposedly forward-thinking and bold economic ideas (i.e.,
because he too was a capitalist-roader intent on developing China as a capitalist country). Deng
said that Zhu “has his own views, dares to make decisions and knows economics.”
[Quoted in the article on Zhu Rongji in the Wikipedia, from which some other information here is
also taken.]
Zhu then went to work for the State Economic
Commission as the division chief of the Bureau of Fuel and Power Industry and then as deputy
director of the Comprehensive Bureau in 1979-1982. He was appointed a member of the State Economic
Commission in 1982 and was the vice-minister in charge of the Commission from 1983 to 1987. In
that year he was appointed major of Shanghai. As mayor he won the acclaim of the other enthusiasts
for the return to capitalism by overseeing the development of Pudong, a large Special Economic
Zone situated between the city itself and the ocean. These SEZ’s pioneered in the so-called
“reform” and “opening up” of the Chinese economy to full-scale capitalism and foreign
investment.
Zhu became the vice-premier of the PRC State
Council in 1991, and moved to Beijing. He was also the director of the State Council Production
Office, which focused on industry, agriculture and finance. In late 1992 Zhu became a member of
the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, the highest political
body in China, and retained that position for a decade. He was also the governor of the People’s
Bank of China, illustrating how the top leaders of the bureaucratic national bourgeois ruling
class in China are now financial capitalists. Through this political and financial control, and
with the support of President Jiang Zemin and Premier
Li Peng, Zhu helped force the closure of many state enterprises and
started a large privatization program which led to massive growth of China’s private sector of the
economy.
Zhu was himself Premier of the State Council from
March 1998 to March 2003, and continued and extended those same policies. The Chinese economy
expanded at a rapid pace during these years, though it must be said that this was not really all
that difficult to accomplish. As a new capitalist-imperialist country China did not have the
huge load of accumulated government debt, nor massive consumer and corporate debt, that most major
capitalist countries did. So they could easily stimulate demand to overcome adverse local and
international economic problems, such as the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s. However,
the pro-capitalist economic policies of Zhu and the other PRC bosses led to enormous job losses
for workers as a great many state factories were closed down. It is true that new jobs were
opening up because of foreign investment in China, but these jobs were generally much worse,
with far less security and far fewer benefits. Zhu led capitalist China into the World Trade
Organization in 2001, and because of the very low wages of most Chinese workers, China soon
became the “workplace” of the world, with enormous and fast-rising exports. But as usual, the
capitalist “success story” was founded on a major attack on the working class.
ZIMMERWALD CONFERENCE
The first of two important international socialist conferences held in Switzerland in the early
years of World War I, and which attempted to address the question of what socialists should do
about the War.
See also:
KIENTHAL CONFERENCE
“The First International Socialist Conference met in Zimmerwald
(September 5-8, 1915), and was the scene of a struggle between the revolutionary
internationalists led by Lenin and the Kautsky majority. Lenin united the Left
internationalists into a group known as the Zimmerwald Left in which only the Bolshevik
Party advocated a correct and fully consistent internationalist anti-war policy.
“The conference adopted the Manifesto
‘To the European Proletariat’ which declared that the world war was an imperialist war,
condemned the conduct of the ‘socialists’ who voted for war credits and were members of
bourgeois governments, called upon the workers of Europe to develop the struggle against
the war and demand the conclusion of peace without annexations and indemnities.
“The conference also adopted a
resolution expressing sympathy with the victims of the war and elected an International
Socialist Committee.
“The significance of the Zimmerwald
Conference is described by Lenin in ‘The First Step’, and ‘Revolutionary Marxists at the
International Socialist Conference, September 5-8, 1915’ [LCW 21:383-88, 389-93.]”
—Note 333, Lenin SW I (1967).
ZINN, Howard (1922-2010)
A radical American historian best known for his excellent book, A People’s History
of the United States (1980). This volume appropriately focused on the ordinary people
of the country and their lives and struggles, and not the politicians, generals and
millionaires. Zinn taught for many years at Boston University and inspired many students
and readers of his works. He was also an ardent political activist, especially in the civil
rights and anti-war movements. On his last day of teaching at Boston University he ended
his class 30 minutes early so that he could join a picket line, and urged his students to
go along with him. One hundred of them did so.
“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I
would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’;
I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to
relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice
wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.” —Howard Zinn,
in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994).
ZINOVIEV, Grigory Y. (1883-1936)
An “Old Bolshevik” and a leading member of the Bolshevik party, and then of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union, who was one of Lenin’s lieutenants, but who after Lenin’s death had a very
checkered political career, with shifting alliances such as at times in support of Stalin, and
at other times in opposition to him. He was the Chairman of the governing committee of the
Communist International starting
in 1919, as well as a member of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks (and later of the
Politburo of the CPSU). In 1926 he headed the Leningrad opposition against Stalin and was
expelled from the Party in 1927. Re-admitted in 1928, he was again expelled in 1932, again
re-admitted in 1933, then imprisoned on a charge of terrorism in 1935, after it became known
that he was in a secret alliance bloc with Trotsky who was in exile. Zinoviev was finally
sentenced to death and executed for treason in 1936.
A top leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Vice-Chairman of the CCP (1956-1976), and Premier
of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1976). In the earliest period of
the 1920s and early 1930s Zhou followed the line of the