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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
WORLD OUTLOOK
[To be added...]
WRONG
[To be added...]
Glossary Home Page and Letter Index