ARAB SPRING
A series of revolts, uprisings and mass demonstrations that have spread throughout the Arab
world (North Africa and the Middle East) in 2011 against corrupt and brutal tyrannies. The
event that initially sparked the movement was the death of a young Tunisian street vendor
named Mohamed Bouazizi, whose fruit stand was shut down by corrupt local officials in Tunis.
His self immolation and resultant death sparked the revolt that led to the ousting of the
dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Inspired by these events, as well as by its own local
outrage (this time the beating death of another young man, Khaled Mohamed Saeed, at the
hands of police) protestors in Egypt mobilized in their millions and ousted dictator Hosni
Mubarak, a long-time servant of US imperialism and collaborator with Israel. The revolts
have spread to Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain, with ruthless subsequent crackdowns by the
authorities.
Where possible, imperialism has tried to
co-opt these movements to its own benefit, as seen most clearly in Libya with the NATO
operation aimed at ousting Gaddhafi and installing a more pliable regime. The region’s
dictators are clearly nervous at their prospects, and have offered a series of concessions
to try to maintain their rule. But these overtures have been seen (rightfully) as “too
little, too late”. On the other hand, the use of repression has only aggravated the
situation, by giving people the sense that they no longer have anything to lose by
protesting.
The uprisings have been largely
liberal-democratic, reformist and nationalist in orientation (with some Islamist elements
becoming more vocal and active as well, particularly in Yemen and Libya); Communist and
Socialist parties have played an active, though as yet relatively minor role (and one
certainly ignored by the mainstream media). Nothing approaching the
mass line method of revolutionary leadership has so far
transpired. The region, even if it does finally rid itself of the awful tyrannies that have
suffocated it for so long, and even if it does boot out imperialism and Zionist aggression,
still has a long way to go in terms of building up Communist mass-consciousness.
In spite of its severe political and
ideological limitations, the Arab Spring is an inspiration to the world proletariat. Even
while events threaten to see the whole process aborted, rebellions in the Middle East show
how, even with misguided politics, it is possible for people to rise up against the
cruelest dictatorships. —L.C.
ARBENZ GUZMÁN, Jacobo (1913-1971)
Guatemalan social democrat who was the democratically elected president of that country from
1950-1954. He was one of the main leaders of the Guatemalan bourgeois-democratic revolution
of 1944-45 which overthrew first the dictatorship of Jorge Ubico y Castaneda and then
overthrew one of his generals who had seized power. After becoming president, Arbenz
instituted large-scale land redistribution to the poor peasants, permitted the organization
of labor under nominally “Communist” leadership, and nationalized portions of the country’s
industry. The U.S. imperialists would not stand for this. In 1954 the CIA
organized a coup, with the support of the Guatemalan military and reactionary classes, and
ousted Arbenz. Thereafter he lived in exile, first in Uruguay, and later in Cuba.
ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN [For the Existence of God]
This is a religious argument for the existence of God that claims that biological organization
and complexity “demonstrate” the agency of a divine “designer”. Adherents of this view will
often point to a highly complex biological entity (like the vertebrate eye or some biochemical
pathway in a cell) and infer from this that it could “only” have come about through divine
agency. This notion was seen to have several glaring problems even before the advent of the
theory of evolution by natural selection as enunciated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell
Wallace. The Scottish philosopher David Hume famously rebuked the design argument by saying
that if design is invoked as an explanation for biological complexity, then the analogy should
be carried further and applied to the designer itself. For example, it would make more sense
to suppose that a team of deities, rather than a single one, was involved in crafting the
biosphere. After all, most human artifacts are produced via inputs by many people (and this
becomes all the more necessary with today’s technology, which has become so complex that whole
teams of people are needed to design and construct even minor components of machines, though
the process of automation is itself offering a countervailing tendency to this in many cases).
Even if we suppose that there was only one designer, this designer need not have been
particularly intelligent; it might well be a bumbling fool who produced the world and its
inhabitants after countless failures.
Secondly, Hume pointed to a logical problem
posed by invoking an all-powerful being: if complexity requires a conscious agent to bring
biological entities into the world, then all the more must this being itself require an
explanation in just such terms. Thus, the design argument doesn’t terminate the regress, but
instead bumps it up another level, and in fact hopelessly aggravates it. Hume mused that
perhaps it wasn’t a mind that produced biological nature, but a process in which countless
configurations were “tried out” and tested. This was a prelude of sorts to the theory of
evolution by natural selection, but in fact evolutionary ideas and notions had been around
since the ancient Greeks. It was, however, Darwin and Wallace who started to properly
formulate these ideas and back them up with empirical content, and subsequent discoveries in
biology have strengthened (while also modifying in important ways) these basic concepts.
Finally, modern neuroscience definitively
shows that minds are products of material processes taking place in highly organised
configurations; they cannot exist as “stand-alone” “things” detached from any material basis,
as such an entity would be devoid of any components required for the requisite processes of
information transfer, retrieval, storage and so forth to take place. Minds are necessarily
late-comers in the universe, and cannot possibly be used as an account for how biological
complexity ultimately originated. —L.C.
ARISTOTLE (384-322 BCE)
As Marx said, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. Engels commented that Aristotle
“was the most encyclopedic intellect” of all the ancient Greek philosophers [MECW 25:21].
He had a more down-to-earth outlook than did his teacher Plato, and
emphasized the observation of nature. Nevertheless he vacillated between materialism and
idealism. He defended slave society and its political economy, and “was the first to analyze
value and the two primitive forms of capital (merchant capital
and money-lending capital)”. In the year 335 BCE he established an important school called
the Lyceum in Athens.
Unfortunately, long after his death Aristotle
was enlisted as an authority by the Roman Catholic Church (with regard to “non-spiritual”
matters), and his ideas have often been considerably twisted because of this. As Lenin put it,
“Clericalism killed what was living in Aristotle and perpetuated what was dead.” [LCW 38:367]
See also below, and:
ENTELECHY,
FINAL CAUSE,
and Philosophical doggerel
about Aristotle.
“Modern science is a newcomer, barely four hundred years old. Though
indebted in deep ways to Plato, Aristotle, and Greek natural philosophy, the pioneers of
the ‘new philosophy’ called for a decisive break with ancient authority. In 1536, Pierre
de La Ramee defended the provocative thesis that ‘everything Aristotle said is wrong.’”
—Peter Pesic, “Bell and the Buzzer: On the Meaning of Science,” Daedalus, Fall,
2003. [Well, of course not everything that Aristotle said was wrong! But in a
Scholastic intellectual climate where his every word
was considered as certain as scripture (as long as it did not disagree with scripture!),
it was clearly very important to knock down Aristotle as a supposed infallible authority.
—S.H.]
ARISTOTLE — and Ethics
“The Greek philosopher Aristotle did not merely condone slavery, he defended
it; he did not merely defend it, but defended it as beneficial to the slave. His view was that
some people are, by nature, unable to pursue their own good and best suited to be ‘living
tools’ for use by other people. ‘The slave is a part of the master, a living but separated
part of his bodily frame.’
“Aristotle’s anti-liberalism does not stop
there. He believed that women were incapable of authoritative decision making. He decreed that
manual laborers, despite being neither slaves nor women, were nonetheless prohibited from
citizenship or education in his ideal city....
“Aristotle thought the value or worth of
a human being—his virtue—was something that he acquired in growing up. It follows that
people who can’t (women, slaves) or simply don’t (manual laborers) acquire that virtue have no
grounds for demanding equal respect or recognition with those who do.
“As I read him, Aristotle not only did
not believe in the conception of intrinsic human dignity that grounds our modern commitment to
human rights, but also has a philosophy that cannot be squared with it. Aristotle’s
inegalitarianism is less like Kant’s and Hume’s racism and more like Descartes’s views on
nonhuman animals: The fact that Descartes characterizes nonhuman animals as soulless automata
is a direct consequence of his rationalist dualism. His comments on animals cannot be treated
as ‘stray remarks.’”
—Agnes Callard, associate professor of
philosophy at the University of Chicago, in an op ed article in the New York Times entitled
“Aristotle Is a Jerk, but We Shouldn’t Cancel Him”, July 23, 2020.
[As her title suggests, Prof. Callard goes
on to say that “Yet I would defend Aristotle, and his place on philosophy syllabuses...”, and thus
presumably she believes that Aristotle’s views should still be studied and taken seriously in
discussions of ethics and political theory. This is in fact foolish nonsense! Of course some
specialists in the history of philosophy will still need to study Aristotle and all sorts of other
totally outmoded and incorrect philosophies. But contrary to the way that philosophy is now taught
in bourgeois society, in socialist society philosophy should be taught as the science it
really should be, and the focus should be on its scientific core—dialectics and materialism—rather
than on all the endless discussions of idealist and reactionary doctrines that have infected it in
past ages. Any focus on Aristotle (or Kant or Wittgenstein) has no more place in most philosophy
courses today than does an extended discussion of the phlogiston
theory in a chemistry class! In most philosophy courses Aristotle, Kant, et al., should still be
briefly discussed, but from a strongly critical persective, and primarily for the purpose of summing
up their erroneous ideas. Moreover, when it comes to Aristotle’s views on morality, ethics and
political theory specifically, there really is very little worth spending much time on there—even
from a scientific critical point of view. At least that’s my experience. —S.H.]
ARISTOTLE — and Logic
[Speaking of Aristotle’s book Metaphysics:] “Highly characteristic
in general, throughout the whole book..., are the living germs of dialectics and
inquiries about it....
“In Aristotle, objective logic is
everywhere confused with subjective logic and, moreover, in such a way that
everywhere objective logic is visible. There is no doubt as to the objectivity
of cognition. There is a naïve faith in the power of reason, in the force, power,
objective truth of cognition. And a naïve confusion, a dialectics of
the universal and the particular—of the concept and the sensuously perceptible reality
of individual objects, things, phenomena.
“Scholasticism and clericalism
took what was dead in Aristotle, but not what was living; the inquiries,
the searchings, the labyrinth, in which man lost his way.
“Aristotle’s logic is an inquiry,
a searching, an approach to the logic of Hegel—and it, the logic of Aristotle (who
everywhere, at every step raises precisely the question of dialectics),
has been made into a dead scholasticism by rejecting all the searchings, waverings and
modes of framing questions. What the Greeks had was precisely modes of framing questions,
as it were tentative systems, a naïve discordance of views, excellently
reflected by Aristotle.” —Lenin, “Conspectus on Aristotle’s Book Metaphysics”
(1915), LCW 38:368-9.
ARM
See: ADJUSTABLE RATE MORTGAGE
ARMS SALES
For decades the U.S. has been, overall, the largest seller of military weapons by far. The
U.S. imperialists are not only directly responsible for most of the many wars over recent
decades, they are indirectly a major contributing factor facilitating and intensifying many of
the other wars. The figures fluctuate from year to year, but in 2011 U.S. arms sales trippled
from 2010 to $66.3 billion. This was 78% of the total world sales of arms in 2011. Russia was a
distant second with $4.8 billion in sales. [Figures from the Library of Congress
Congressional Research Service, as reported in the New York Times, Aug. 26, 2012.]
A large part of current U.S. arms sales are to countries in the already very volatile Persian
Gulf area, where the U.S. imperialists and/or Israel and other U.S.-client regimes are preparing
for a probable attack on Iran.
ART — and REVOLUTION
[Intro to be added... ]
“Politics, whether revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, is the
struggle of class against class, not the activity of a few individuals. The
revolutionary struggle on the ideological and artistic fronts must be subordinate
to the political struggle because only through politics can the needs of the class
and the masses find expression in concentrated form.” —Mao, “Talks at the Yenan
Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), SW 3:86-87.
ARTEL
1. A traditional workers’ or craftsmen’s cooperative
in Russia in the Tsarist era and also after the Russian Revolution of 1917 but before the nearly
universal socialist transformations in industry that produced state-owned workers’ enterprises in the
Soviet Union during the 1920s.
2. A similar sort of agricultural cooperative among
peasant farmers which began to develop after the 1917 Revolution but which became much more widespread
in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Artels were the basic form that Soviet cooperative farming took,
and which lasted for decades.
“The early experience of building socialism in the [Soviet] countryside [i.e.,
before the 1930s] was important for testing the effectiveness of different forms of collective
farming and choosing those which the peasants found suited them best. It was in those years
that three types of collective agricultural enterprises emerged: communes, artels
and associations, differing in their degree of socialization of the means of production
by the peasants, especially the land, and in the proportion of the common effort that the
peasants put into different farming operations.
“A commune was run on the principle
that its members shared all the land and all the agricultural implements which were used in
their common effort. In an artel the peasants had common use of the principal means of
production, while retaining as their personal property meat and dairy cattle, poultry, the plots
around their homes, and some agricultural implements. The associations for the joint
cultivation of the land were set up only on part of socialized farm fields which were
worked collectively with machines and implements bought by all their members.
“In the first year after the 1917 Revolution
more than fifty per cent of all the collective farms were communes, while in subsequent [early]
years the most stable form of collective farming was the agricultural artel.” —Valeria Selunskaya
& Vladimir Tetyushev, “How Collective Farming Was Established in the USSR: Facts and Fiction”,
Moscow: 1982), p. 18, [online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USSR/Economy-CapitalistEra/HowCollectiveFarmingWasEstablishedInTheUSSR-1982-OCR-sm.pdf
].
[The artel form thus became the model for all
the agricultural collectivization in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and beyond. Unlike the
situation in China, where collectivization proceded step-by-step in an ever more socialized manner
all the way up to the Chinese People’s Commune form, rural cooperation in the Soviet Union remained
fixed at the artel level with little or no later effort by the CPSU to transform it into more
socialized forms, let alone into state farms. (Though a number of state farms did exist in parallel
with the much larger number of rural cooperatives.) —Ed.]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
1. The capability of a machine (which is
either a computer or which includes a computer) to perform
actions which—if done by a human being—would be viewed as demonstrating intelligence. (In
this sense, AI only imitates or emulates genuine human intelligence.)
2. The capability of a machine or
artificial entity of some sort to actually be intelligent in various ways. (It is
not commonly understood that the first sense of the term merges into this second sense, and
that genuine intelligence is not the mysterious thing it is often imagined to be.)
More or less everything that
computers can do might be considered to be AI in the first sense, including even just
adding two numbers together. The early work by computer scientists in the field of
artificial intelligence was generally more like the first sense, whereas the goal has pretty
much always been to develop AI in the second sense. At the present time the results of work
in AI research are just beginning to move from the first sense of the term to the second
sense, the real goal.
Serious efforts to develop artificial
intelligence began during the 1950s, and it was not originally understood how difficult it
would be to create computer programs which were truly intelligent. There were many
naïve predictions that computers as intelligent as people were only a decade or
two away. However, this initial and frequently repeated excessive optimism has led many
people to falsely conclude that true AI will never really come about—even though we
are seeing some major breakthroughs at the present time.
Once the initial notions that writing
intelligent computer programs would be easy came to naught, a number of AI researchers
turned to a more serious study of how the human brain works, and efforts were made to
artifically model the networks of neurons which make up the brain. This showed some initial
promise during the 1990s, but then seemed to reach a dead end. However, around 2009 some
new thinking in this area (along with much faster computers) led to a sudden breakthrough.
(See the entry below on ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS.) And now the AI
field is advancing very fast.
These advances in computers and artificial
intelligence mean that jobs which are done by human beings are disappearing ever more
rapidly. One recent study (2013) by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford
University looked at the feasibility of automating 702 occupations and found that 47% of
workers in the United States had jobs with a high risk of potential automation in the near
future. [See: “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to
Computerisation?”, online at:
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf]
Longer term, the situation for employment
is even more dire. Over the next few decades, and largely because of the rapid development
of artificial intelligence, it will be possible to automate the vast majority of jobs out
of existence. Under socialism or communism this would be a wonderful thing! People would
be completely freed of almost all the unpleasant work, and the remaining work—which could
become more of a thing of joy and self-fulfillment—would be rationed out to the population.
Moreover, the scope for individual and collective participation of people in the arts,
sciences and other human pursuits, would be truly opened up to the masses for the very
first time.
However, under capitalism the disappearance
of work will be such a major catastrophe that the capitalist system will likely not survive.
Adding this rapid disappearance of jobs to the still developing world overproduction crisis,
the constant imperialist wars, the capitalist distruction of the environment, and the
already existing misery of literally billions of people, the capitalist-imperialist system
is rapidly demonstrating once and for all that it is totally incompatible with the continued
existence of humanity.
See also below and:
AUGMENTED REALITY,
COMPUTERS—and Unemployment,
DEEP LEARNING,
“FEW-SHOT” LEARNING,
GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,
MACHINE LEARNING
“It’s apparent that society is hitting a tipping point where humans
are engineering our own obsolescence.” —Samuel Greengard, quoted in Robert W. McChesney
and John Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a
Citizenless Democracy (2016), p. 106.
ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK
A computational program loosely modeled on the structure of neurons in the brain and
the varying strength of the interconnections among them. In the simplified representation
at the right each brown circle represents an individual “neuron” (or node). Input data
arrives from the left and is then processed by the input nodes, which send information to
one or more “hidden layers” of nodes, which then finally send data to the output nodes.
While this approach to artificial intelligence computer processing may not be exactly the
way the brain itself works, it has nevertheless been found to be very effective in
simulating a number of brain and mental processes, such as the identification and
appropriate labeling of visual images.
See also:
DEEP LEARNING,
MACHINE LEARNING,
and for more extensive and technical information see the Wikipedia entry at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
“Artificial neural networks [ANNs] are biologically inspired
networks of artificial neurons, or brain cells.
“In a biological brain, each
neuron can be triggered by other neurons whose outputs feed into it, and its own
output can then trigger other neurons in turn. A simple ANN has an input layer of
neurons where data can be fed into the network, an output layer where results come
out, and possibly a couple of hidden layers in the middle where information is
processed. (In practice ANNs are simulated entirely in software.) Each neuron within
the network has a set of ‘weights’ and an ‘activation function’ that controls the
firing of the output. Training a neural network inolves adjusting the neurons’
weights so that a given input produces the desired output. ANNs were starting to
achieve some useful results in the early 1990s, for example in recognizing
handwritten numbers. But attempts to get them to do more complex tasks ran into
trouble.
“In the past decade new
techniques and a simple tweak to the activation function has made training deep
networks feasible. At the same time the rise of the internet has made billions of
documents, images and videos available for training purposes. All this takes a lot
of number-crunching power, which became readily available when several AI research
groups realized around 2009 that graphical processing units (GPUs), the specialized
chips used in PCs and video-games consoles to generate fancy graphics, were also
well suited to running deep-learning algorithms. [One research group] found that
GPUs could speed up its deep-learning system nearly a hundredfold.”
—Tom Standage, “The Return
of the Machinery Question, Special Report on Artificial Intelligence”, the
Economist, June 25, 2016, p. 5.
ARTISTIC STYLE
Every work of art (including every piece of literature and music) is ordinarily viewed as
being in some style. A style, in this aesthetic sense, is a sub-category of works
in that area of art. In painting, for example, there are the styles known as socialist
realism, impressionism, expressionism, cubism, Chinese painting, classical Dutch genre
painting, and so forth. Styles come in hierarchies; thus within the broader style of
classical European painting there is Dutch painting of the 17th century, and within that
style there is the narrower style of Dutch genre painting of that period, and within that
there is the style of Frans Hals, and even within that there is the style of Hals’ painting
“Singing Boy with a Flute” (a style used by Hals in some of his other paintings, but
by no means all of them).
However, while the term ‘style’ can in
analytical contexts refer to either major or minor categories of works of art, and be used
to draw different distinctions at completely different levels, it is common within some art
forms—especially literature and painting—for the term to be used primarily to draw attention
merely to rather superficial differences between the works of different writers, or different
painters, whose overall styles are really essentially the same.
The concept of style is one of the
most important basic categories in aesthetics. Aesthetic criticism, for example, can only
be objective by comparing a work to the standards
appropriate to some particular style.
See also:
LITERARY STYLE
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page