Glossary of Revolutionary Marxism

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PALEOLITHIC AGE
The Old Stone Age, or the period from when human beings and our immediate ancestors first started making crude stone tools until about 10,000 BCE, and the advent of agriculture. Generally in reference to the social and cultural developments of Europe and the Mediterranean area. The Upper (or Late) Paleolithic is the period from 35,000 to 10,000 BCE. The last 2,000 years of the Paleolithic (the “Epipaleolithic”) and the first 2,000 years of the Neolithic (the “Proto-Neolithic”) are collectively known as the Mesolithic Age (i.e. 12,000 to 8,000 BCE).
        See also: NEOLITHIC AGE

PARIS COMMUNE
The first proletarian uprising which achieved state power for a time. The Paris Commune was established in Paris in March 1871, and was brutally suppressed after two months. The Commune provided both positive and negative lessons. The positive lessons included a vivid example of the real democracy for the people possible with proletarian rule. Among the negative lessons were the realization that the proletariat was not sufficiently organized and conscious of its tasks, and did not act with sufficient determination against the bourgeoisie to prevent their comeback (which led Marx to add the principle the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to the list of basic principles of Marxism).

“It seems the Parisians are succumbing. It is their own fault, but a fault which was in fact due to their too great decency. The Central Committee and later the Commune gave Thiers, that mischievous dwarf, time to concentrate the hostile forces, firstly because they rather foolishly did not want to start a civil war—as if Thiers had not already started it by his attempt at the forcible disarming of Paris, as if the National Assembly, summoned for the sole purpose of deciding the question of war or peace with the Prussians, had not immediately declared war on the Republic! Secondly, in order that the appearance of having usurped power should not attach to them they lost precious moments (it was imperative to advance on Versailles immediately after the defeat (Place Vendôme) of the reactionaries in Paris) by the election of the Commune, the organization of which, etc., cost yet more time.” —Marx, Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, April 6, 1871, in Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (1975), p. 246; slightly different translation in MECW 44:128.

PATERNALISM
[In Marxist usage:] A method of political leadership (or a political system based on this method of leadership) wherein the authorities or leaders run things on behalf of the ordinary people, make decisions for them, and so forth, in the same way that a father might do for his children. Even if these decisions really are for the benefit of the people for a time, this is still a perversion of Marxism, which since its founding by Marx and Engels, has always championed (at least in theory) a truly democratic society where the people make their own decisions and control their own lives.
        The democratic, Marxist alternative to paternalism is the mass line method of leadership wherein there are still leaders, but the leaders lead not by themselves deciding things for the masses, but rather by seeking to educate the masses in their own real interests and by helping them to organize themselves to implement and satisfy those interests when they are ready to do so.
        By far the worst sin of Stalin (and he was guilty of other very serious crimes as well!) was to rule the Soviet Union in a paternalistic manner. The masses were thus not trained to run things themselves, nor to question or resist their leaders when they seemed to be making changes that went against their interests. Thus when Khrushchev and a new generation of leaders came to power after Stalin’s death—leaders who were now revisionists out for their own welfare and not that of the people—the masses were unprepared to stop them and were lost.
        If the masses accept their status as “children” who are being taken care of by others—even a supposed Marxist revolutionary party trying to serve their interests in the way a father might—then eventually they will be re-enslaved by a new bourgeois ruling class developing out of that once paternalistic party. That is the foremost lesson of the triumph of revisionism in the Soviet Union.

Is this correct? No it is not! This revisionist position denies that there is or can be any contradiction between the national interests of one country (even under socialism!) and those of the people of the world and the world communist revolution, but this is clearly undialectical nonsense. The dedication we genuine communists have is not for our country, but for our international working class and the international communist revolution. Even under socialism, patriotism is dubious at best, and by no means the proper ideological outlook for a Marxist.

PEOPLE, The
1. [In Marxist, especially Maoist usage:] The proletariat and its allied classes and strata, as opposed to “the enemy”.
2. The entire population. (When we anti-revisionist Marxists wish to refer to the entire population we generally use phrases such as: “the people as a whole”, or—better yet—“the whole population”.)

PETTY, Sir William   (1623-87)
An early bourgeois political economist, described by Marx as the “founder of political economy” and by Keynes as “the father of modern economics”. His principal mentor was Hobbes, particularly in matters of taxation. Petty was an original thinker and is credited with the first clear statements of many ideas in political economy, including the labor theory of value, the differential theory of rent, how banks create credit, and the velocity of money circulation. He was also the first economist to put forward public works as a cure for unemployment (which Keynes often gets undeserved credit for).

PETTY’S LAW
The tendency in a capitalist economy for the proportion of the labor force engaged in services (rather than production) to increase over time. Some of the reasons why this occurs (or may occur) include:
        1) The tendency of firms to become specialized, and to “outsource” service functions which were formerly done “in-house”.
        2) Rising incomes for some social classes and strata which leads them to hire others to do what they formerly did for themselves.
        3) The growing difficulty in finding profitable new business opportunities in production, which leads some capitalists to start and promote companies which provide services.

PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM
See: AGNOSTICISM

PHILOSOPHY — Scientific
[To be added... ]
        See also: DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM.

“Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both cases modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW 25:26.

PLATO   (c. 427-347 BCE)
[To be added...]
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Plato.

POPPER, Karl   (1902-1994)
Austrian-British bourgeois philosopher strongly influenced by logical positivism. [More to be added...]
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Popper.

PRAGMATISM
[To be added...]
        See also my essay “Chopping Onions and Pragmatism” at http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/ChoppingOnions.htm.

PRICE
[Under capitalism:] The value of a commodity expressed in money. “Price is the converted form in which the exchange-value of commodities appears within the circulation process.” —Marx, CCPE, p. 66. “Price is the money-name of the labor realized in a commodity.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, Ch. 3, sect. 1: (International, p. 101; Penguin, pp. 195-6.)
        The actual market price, however, tends to fluctuate somewhat around its value based on variations in supply and demand, and also deviates more systematically from its actual value from one industry to another based on the relative amount of machinery being used (because rates of profit tend to get equalized across industries). Prices may also systematically exceed value in industries because of monopoly conditions. Although the prices of individual commodities deviate in practice from their value, considered as a whole the sum of the prices of all the commodities produced in a capitalist system normally equals the sum of the values of all the commodities. When you go to buy something at the store you are concerned primarily with its price, but when you want to correctly analyze and understand the capitalist system of production you must focus first of all on the Marxist concept of value.
        See also: COST-PRICE.
        [Under socialism:] Prices under socialism are set according to a state plan for production and distribution, instead of constantly fluctuating as they do under a capitalist market system. Prices are still set, in part, according to the law of value, though to a gradually diminishing degree as socialism develops in the direction of communism where goods and services are distributed free. Moreover, the socialist state will tend to purposely lower the prices of basic necessities below their value, while somewhat raising the prices of luxury goods above their value. Thus the overall long-term trend for all prices under socialism is to fall, but for the prices of goods and services of special importance to the people (health services, food, everyday clothing, housing, transportation, education, etc.) to fall faster and more sharply.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNAL SOCIETY (or PRIMITIVE COMMUNIST SOCIETY)
The first socioeconomic formation in human history (and pre-history), which lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, and which is characterized by the collective ownership of the means of production (such as the land and nature’s bounty), an absence of social classes and exploitation, a primitive division of labor based only on “natural” factors such as age, sex and physical ability, more or less equal distribution of goods, and a very low level of development of the productive forces. For the most part people in this form of society were nomadic hunter-gatherers, without agriculture or any settled life.
        It is important to note that the people in these societies are/were not biologically “primitive” in any way (at least during the past tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years), but rather their socioeconomic system that is/was primitive, when compared to more advanced societies.
        As of the year 2000 there were very few examples of primitive communal society still left in existence, and even those few which did remain were influenced to various degrees by the class societies all around them. One of the last remaining primitive communal societies (and one of the best studied) is that of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi people of the southern region of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and Namibia. There are about 50,000 Dobe people, who speak a San language which includes various click sounds, and who are nomadic hunter-gatherers subsisting on fruits, nuts, roots and hunted animals. They live in separate social bands of usually 25 to 50 people, with no organizational forms at any higher level. Even within each band there is no formal political or economic organization or leadership, and even very little specialization or division of labor (except along “natural” lines). However, they practice a form of what cultural anthropologists call “situational authority”, where leaders emerge and then disappear based on the varying tasks at hand. And of course there are no social classes. As one anthropologist, Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University, comments: “The Dobe are noted for their fierce egalitarian ethic; when a Dobe hunter makes a kill, he must distribute the meat among everyone in his band. Dobe society does not distinguish between work and leisure time.” And what outsiders would consider work (such as actual time spent gathering food or hunting) usually takes up only a modest part of their day.
        Those people who claim that “human nature” prevents socialism or communism from ever working seem not to know that humanity arose and has spent most of the hundreds of thousands of years of its existence in a form of cooperative society which is based on sharing, cooperation and general equality.

PRIMITIVE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
The social organization in the earliest forms of human society, and especially within primitive communal society. Although class society (primarily capitalism, of course) now exists in almost every corner of the world, there still exists today a few small and remote regions where pre-class, primitive communal society persists. Moreover, the scientific investigation of such societies began back in the 19^th century when such societies existed in larger numbers. This has allowed us to develop some general understanding of how these societies function. It has been found that the social organization of these societies is/was very much simpler than has developed in class society, and—in particular—nothing like a government or a state existed.
        One widespread modern summary theory is that of the American anthropologist Elman Rogers Service (1915-96) who postulated the following four levels of social organization (in his book Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, 1962):
        Level 1 — Band: Bands are groups of roughly 25 to 50 people, who have no higher form of social organization. While there will probably be other similar bands nearby, sharing a common language and culture, there is no formal organizational structure by which they relate to each other. Moreover, even within a single band itself there is no formal structure, no established leadership. As mentioned in the entry for PRIMITIVE COMMUNALISM above, the only form of leadership is a “situational authority” wherein some particular person might on this occasion or that take a temporary leadership role in some specific task (such as a hunt). Such an absence of government and institutionalized authority is possible only because there are no social classes, and a deeply entrenched culture of cooperation and sharing.
        Level 2 — Tribe: Tribes are groups of a few hundred to a few thousand people. This higher population density usually requires an increased dependence of plant food based on some form of low-intensity farming (such as by harvesting crops which were planted but perhaps not otherwise well-tended). Because of such primitive farming, tribes are most often sedentary at least for a few years. (The exhaustion of the farm land might then lead to a relocation to another spot for a few more years.) Anthropologist, Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University, elaborates: “While there are status differences in tribes, these differences are generally fluid; social organization is governed by kinship ties. Tribal-level societies are led by headmen—individuals who have a formal position of power that they occupy through achieved status instead of inherited status. These headmen continually have to gain the support of the people they lead in order to keep their position.” The Yanomamö people in the Orinoco basin are one example of this social organization level. They have a slash-and-burn form of agriculture based on plantains, sweet potatoes and tobacco, and relocate their villages every three years.
        Level 3 — Chiefdom: Thousands of people, with a hereditary chief. There is a higher and more important level of status distinctions than in tribal societies. Edward Fischer remarks: “Politics and economics are built on the idea of redistributive exchange, in which gifts entail obligations that can often be converted into political power.” More intensive agriculture is required to support this level of society. An example is the Trobriand Islanders in New Guinea. A chief or nobleman inherits his position from his mother’s brother, rather than from his own father. And yams are both the economic basis and the social symbol of Trobrian society.
        Level 4 — Nation-State: Typically millions of people in a complex class society with a strong centralized authority supported by armed power (police and army). The first states arose in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE.
        Social organizational “level 1”, the band, is the form of primitive communal society, and organizational “level 4” is obviously the form in not only modern capitalist countries, but also in all other class-based socioeconomic formations (i.e., in slave and feudal society). Levels 2 and 3 are transitional social organization forms that bridge the gap between classless primitive commualism and the major forms of class society in the world today.

PROBLEM OF EVIL
An internal logical flaw in the conception of God as put forward by many religions including Christianity. The religious doctrine is that God is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and omnibenevolent (all good). The trouble is, given the obvious fact that there is much evil in the world, these three characteristics are logically incompatible and inconsistent with each other. David Hume expressed the difficulty this way:
        If evil in the world is the intention of the Deity, then He is not benevolent.
        If evil in the world is contrary to His intention, then He is not omnipotent.
        But evil is either in accordance with His intention or contrary to it.
        Therefore, either the Deity is not benevolent, or He is not omnipotent.
Of course from the materialist point of view there is one other, much more sensible, alternative: No “Deity” exists at all!
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about the problem of evil.

“To be produced, to be brought to the market, the commodity must at least fetch that market price, that cost-price to the seller, whether its own value be greater or smaller than that cost-price. It is a matter of indifference to the capitalist whether his commodity contains more or less unpaid labor than other commodities, if into its price enters as much of the general stock of unpaid labor, or the surplus product in which it is fixed, as every other equal quantity of capital will draw from that common stock. In this respect, the capitalists are ‘communists’. In competition, each naturally tries to secure more than the average profit, which is only possible if others secure less. It is precisely as a result of this struggle that the average profit is established.” —Marx, TSV 3:83.

PROLETARIAN MORALITY
The morality which expresses the class interests of the proletariat (whether or not individual proletarians are conscious of this).
Compare with COMMUNIST MORALITY.

PROPAGANDA
1. [In traditional Leninist usage:] Oral, printed and visual political views whose purpose is to influence people’s consciousness and mood with respect to multiple issues, or in general (as opposed to the narrow sense of agitation), and to motivate them to take general political action.
2. [In bourgeois usage:] Lies and distortions designed to influence people politically. (They recognize no such thing as bourgeois propaganda of course!)

PROUDHON, Pierre Joseph   (1809-1865)
French sociologist and economist, an ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie. He was a “socialist” of sorts, and one of the founders of the social theory of anarchism.

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