G-7 (Group of Seven)
An economic forum of the seven leading advanced industrial economies in the world, whose
finance ministers meet several times a year to discuss problems in the world capitalist economy
and to arrange for co-ordination of economic policies. It was formed in 1976 when Canada was
added to the previous “Group of Six” (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the
U.S.).
See also: G-20 below.
G-8 (Group of Eight)
A primarily political forum (rather than economic) of the G-7 countries (see above) together
with Russia, which meets about once a year in attempts to resolve actual or potential political
disagreements and conflicts.
G-20 (Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors)
An expanded forum created by the G-7 (see above) in 1999, for consultations on the international
financial system and the world capitalist economy, and for coordination of national economic
policies. It consists of the biggest developed and “emerging” world economies which represent
90% of global GNP, 80% of world trade (including European Union internal trade), and roughly
two-thirds of the world population. Its members are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada,
China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi
Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the U.S., the United Kingdom and the European Union.
GAME THEORY
The study, often highly mathematical, of interdependent decision making. Since this subject
is mostly pursued by bourgeois economists and mathematicians, the assumption is usually
made that the current generally selfish human nature in bourgeois society is fixed for all
time. This colors and distorts all the “findings” of this “science”. The major founding
work of economic game theory was Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), by
John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.
“GENERAL SEMANTICS”
Pseudo-scientific academic cult, with little or no actual connection to the
semantics branch of linguistic science. [More to be added.]
GENERAL WILL
An important concept in the social philosophy of Jean Jacques
Rousseau. In his definition the general will is the common good that any
well-formed (normal) citizen would recognize, and is neither that citizen’s own private
will nor quite the same as the shared private wills of all individual citizens. The concept
of the general will is therefore a rather sophisticated abstraction, in the same
way that the class interests of a given social class are a sophisticated abstraction from
the totality of all the individual interests of members of that class.
“There is often a great difference between the will of all [what
all individuals want] and the general will; the general will studies only the common
interest while the will of all studies private interest, and is indeed no more than
the sum of individual desires. But if we take away from these same wills, the pluses
and minuses which cancel each other out, the sum of the difference is the general
will.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice
Cranston, (NY: Penguin, 1983), Book II, Chapter 3, pp. 72-73. The words above in
brackets are in the original.
[Ignoring Rousseau’s incorrect
psychological focus, what is being said here is that the common interests of members
of a group must be abstracted from their individual interests, and are by no means
always identical to their shared individual interests. Quite a sophisticated
observation for 1762! —S.H.]
GLOBAL WARMING
The rise in the average surface temperature of the Earth due to the emission of certain
gases into the atmosphere which cause it to more efficiently trap the radiant energy
from the sun, leading to a result similar to what occurs in a greenhouse. The most
important such gas is carbon dioxide, much of which is now being released into the
atmosphere by humans burning fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum.
GLOBALIZATION
[Intro material to be added... ]
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases
the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
“The bourgeoisie has through
its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production
and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has
drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All
old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being
destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life
and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries
whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in
material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of
individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and
narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national
and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
“The bourgeoisie, by the
rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated
means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.
The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters
down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one
word, it creates a world after its own image.” —Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the
Communist Party, Ch. I: MECW 6:487-8.
GLUTS
See: OVERPRODUCTION
GOD
An hypothesized “spiritual” (immaterial) human-like entity who is unseen but who
supposedly exists everywhere, is all-powerful, all-knowing, and who created the physical
world and everything in it including human beings. This is a goofy, philosophical
idealist and unscientific notion if ever there was one,
since it supposes that a non-material “thing” is the source and cause of the material
world. From a genuine materialist perspective the
concept of God is simply incoherent and absurd.
See also:
PROBLEM OF EVIL, and
Philosophical doggerel
about God.
GOOD (Adj.)
1. [In general:] Answering to (or satisfying) certain interests. (The specific
interests at issue are normally clear from the context.) Thus a good knife is one
that is sharp, doesn’t rust or easily break, keeps its edge well, and so forth, because
these are our usual interests in knives. A good apple is typically one that
is unspoiled and unblemished, tastes good, and so forth because these are our usual interests
in apples. On the other hand, if you are making an apple pie, what you will view as a good
apple may differ somewhat, because in that case your interests are somewhat different. (A
good pie apple is not necessarily a good eating apple; it might not be as crisp or pleasing
to look at, for example.)
2. [In moral discourse in class society:] Answering to (or satisfying) the common, collective
interests of a social class (the class being implied by the ideology of the speaker).
3. [In moral discourse referring to classless society:] Answering to (or satisfying) the
common, collective interests of the people as a whole.
GOVERNMENT SECURITIES
Bonds or similar entities issued by the government and sold to investors. Marx noted
that “These are not capital at all, but merely outstanding claims on the annual product of
the nation.” —Marx, Capital, vol. 2, Ch. 17, sect. 2 (International, p. 349; Penguin,
p. 353.)]
See also:
BOND
GRAMSCI, Antonio (1891-1937)
Italian Communist leader and theoretician. Raised on the impoverished island of Sardinia,
a scholarship allowed him to attend Turin University where he was a brilliant student, but
where he was also unfortunately strongly influenced by the liberal idealist philosopher,
Benedetto Croce. In 1913 he joined the Socialist Party. In 1919
he helped found the left-wing newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, and was active in promoting
workers’ councils (“Soviets”) in factories, which were
inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
He became more and more critical of the reformist ideas of the Socialist Party and helped
to form the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. Gramsci was the Italian representative at the
meeting of the Third International in Moscow in
1922, and worked for the Comintern in Moscow and Vienna in
1922-24. In 1924 he was elected to the Italian parliament and returned to Italy to became
the top leader of the CPI.
Mussolini was now in power, and he and his
Fascist regime banned the Communist Party in 1926. Gramsci himself was arrested and spent the
rest of his life in prison. Ironically, his great reputation today, especially in Left academia,
derives from his time in prison where he wrote 34 notebooks, containing over 2000 printed
pages. There are some difficulties in reading these notebooks both because they were just
Gramsci’s own notes, with multiple notebooks being worked on simultaneously, and not
something written for publication, and because of the prison authorities who prevented
him from writing in a way that might be used to “inflame the masses”. This forced Gramsci
to frequently write in an academic and obscure style, and to resort to Aesopian language,
as when he uses the phrase “modern theory” where he simply means “Marxism”.
Gramsci’s focus in his notebooks on intellectuals and
their role in society, and on literature and culture, of course appeals to academics today,
and explains in part his continuing popularity there. His discussion of the capitalist
state is weak, certainly compared to Lenin’s firm class position
on the issue.
Since he was living in a prison in a Fascist
country, and the Communist Party was mostly suppressed, he did not think the sort of
revolutionary strategy employed by the Bolsheviks in Russia was fully appropriate there.
Instead of such a frontal assault (insurrection), he thought there was the necessity of a
long-term war of attrition, or a “war of position” (like the trench warfare of World War I),
to prepare the way for proletarian revolution. Gramsci’s much discussed notion of
hegemony seems to be related to this, the long-term struggle
between the ideological hegemony of the ruling class and a hoped for alternative ideological
hegemony of the working class forming around its revolutionary party. While in the advanced
capitalist countries there is in fact the necessity for laying the groundwork for an
eventual revolutionary uprising through patient work of organizing and education over
a long period, there is also the danger that in doing so that eventual goal of revolution
will become merely window dressing for reformism and revisionism. This perhaps shows why
academic revisionists are so attracted to Gramsci: they see this possibility not as a
danger at all, but rather more as a welcome perpetual postponement of revolution.
GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s
A severe and prolonged economic overproduction
crisis which broke out in all the capitalist countries and which lasted the entire decade
of the 1930s in most of them.
In the U.S. the Great Depression is usually
said to have begun with the stock market and financial crash in the fall of 1929. However,
the U.S. economy was already entering what we would now call a recession early in 1929,
and the severe conditions we now associate with the Great Depression developed over a several
year period, and didn’t reach their worst point until 1933. There was then a very slow and
weak upward trend for several years because of New Deal programs and de facto
Keynesian deficits (though they weren’t yet
called that). When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eased off on the deficit financing,
the economy again worsened in 1937-1938. As Roosevelt learned his lesson, and stepped up the
government spending again, the Depression eased a bit after that, and then came to an
effective end with World War II. For the U.S., therefore, the Depression—from start to
finish—should be dated as lasting from 1929 through at least 1940, or about 12 years.
[More to be added... ]
GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION (GPCR)
A great revolutionary movement in socialist China during the Mao period which sought,
initially, just to transform the cultural and ideological sphere of society, but developed
into a full-scale social revolution wherein the revolutionary proletariat and its allies
led by Mao overthrew the revisionists and capitalist-roaders who had seized considerable
power in the government of China and within the Communist Party of China itself, and which
re-established proletarian revolutionary power for a decade.
[Much more to be added... ]
GRESHAM’S LAW
“Bad money drives out good money.” Originally put forward when there were gold and silver
coins in circulation, where the idea was that people will first spend the coins where some
of the gold or silver was shaved off, and tend to hang on to the coins in better condition.
This observation has been generalized to many modern “financial instruments” in capitalist
society, where, for example, even if two assets have the same nominal value, people will
preferentially tend to hang on to those assets which they think have the greater inherent
value.
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