Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Inf - Ins   —


INFALLIBILITY
Perfection and infallibility are anti-dialectical notions. Even worse than promoting the idea among others that you are always right, is coming to believe such a silly thing yourself.

“INFANTILE LEFTISM”

“Infantile Leftism is a kind of absolutism because it renders ideals absolute; it is unaware that ideals can only be realized in accordance with prevailing conditions.” —Mao, September 1937, marginal note to his reading of the work Philosophy and Life by his friend and comrade, the Chinese Marxist-Leninist philosopher Ai Siqi. [From: Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism, ed. by Nick Knight, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 235.]
         [Of course there are many kinds of “infantile leftism”. One kind, for example, might be to try to implement full-scale communist society, including its basic economic principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, immediately after the proletarian seizure of political power, and without any recognition of the need for a transitional period of socialism first. But a great many of these various kinds of infantile leftism, including this one, are also examples of taking ideals (such as communism) too absolutely, as something to be immediately implemented, fully and completely, and without any attention being paid to the current objective conditions and the level of consciousness of the working class and masses. That was the general philosophical point that Ai Siqi was making, and that Mao summed up in his usual clear and concise fashion. —Ed.]

INFILTRATION
See:
ENTRYISM

INFINITESIMAL
A quantity which is imagined to be “infinitely small” (that is, smaller than any quantity which you can specify) and yet still not zero! Although this notion is rather obviously incoherent and thus quite illogical (as well as being an idealist philosophical notion), it is a curious fact that this very half-baked concept was rather successfully used for a couple centuries to initially establish the important new branch of mathematics we now call the differential and integral
calculus. All talk of “infinitesimals” in mathematics, at least by serious mathematicians, disappeared when the concept of a mathematical limit was created and fully clarified. (See also below.)

“INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS”
Another name for the differential and integral
calculus in mathematics. This name arose very early in the history of the development of the calculus when its rational logical foundations (centered around the concept of a limit) were as yet unknown. The attempt was therefore made to characterize calculus as the manipulation of “infinitely small” but still non-zero quantities. The concept of the “infinitesimal” is now recognized full well to be logically incoherent, but the name “infinitesimal calculus” is still sometimes used for historical reasons. It would be best if that term were now completely abandoned as the historical and outmoded intellectical relic that it is.

INFLATION
The general rise in prices of goods and services. Inflation is most often caused by the expansion of the money supply in an economy faster than the rate of expansion of the economy itself (i.e., faster than the rate of growth of production). Thus if the government runs large budget deficits and pays for them not by borrowing from other countries or from the rich within its own country, but simply by printing up more money, inflation will inevitably develop.
        Most modern capitalist countries actually purposely plan for a low rate of inflation (rather than stable prices) because they believe this will spur economic growth. Inflation does have the effect of gradually wiping out debts, so it can in fact have this result to a degree and to the extent that further growth is limited by already excessive debt.
        However, if an overproduction crisis has advanced to the point where debt must increase extremely fast, that much debt can only be eliminated by inflation at intolerably high levels. Therefore, inflation is not really a solution to overproduction crises.
        See also below, and:
CONSUMER PRICE INDEX,   DEFLATION,   DOLLAR—Purchasing Power Decline,   GREAT INFLATION,   HYPERINFLATION,   REFLATION,   STAGFLATION

“Inflation that is persistently too low can pose serious risks to the economy.”   —Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, saying the central bank will focus on fostering a strong labor market while tolerating higher inflation, New York Times, “Quote of the Day”, August 28, 2020.
         [This was the attitude of Powell and the Fed as they first allowed inflation to run wild and get quite out of hand during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It is simply not true that capitalist governments try to completely stop inflation; in fact they promote it, though they must also try to keep it from jumping up at “too fast” a rate. It is a contradiction that they find ever harder to deal with. —Ed.]

INFLATION — Bourgeois Puzzlement About
Although inflation is basically something simple (as mentioned in the entry above), there are special circumstances which can for short periods lead to higher or lower inflation than might be expected simply by comparing the growth of money in circulation to the growth of production. This has caused no end to puzzlement and confusion on the part of bourgeois economists. It has led them to cook up all sorts of erroneous theories about the cause(s) of inflation, about how to deal with it, and so forth. Sometimes all this reaches comical proportions—or at least it would be comical if it did not lead to so much additional hardship for the masses.

“The first principle of war is ‘know thine enemy.’ But as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues raise interest rates to keep the U.S. economy from overheating, there’s a lot they don’t know about the foe they’re trying to contain: inflation.
        “Here are some of the things about inflation the Fed and other central banks are uncertain of: what causes it; what effects it has; what to count in measuring it (stock prices?); how low, or high, it should be; and how to move it up and down.
        “The Fed, in other words, is driving blind. Daniel Tarullo, in a tell-all address at the Brookings Institution in October [2017] after his resignation from the Fed’s Board of Governors, said, ‘We do not, at present, have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking.’”
         —“What Is Inflation Anyway?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 26, 2018, p. 32.

INFLATION TARGETING   [Bourgeois Economic Policy]
A strategy by a central bank or other authorities in charge of a capitalist economy in which some definite target rate for inflation is set, and monetary and other measures are frequently adjusted in an attempt to stay within a narrow band around that level of inflation. The alternative ad hoc approach to monetary policy has been more common in the past. “Inflation targeting” assumes that short-term forecasts of inflation rates will be accurate, which is often far from true. In any case, inflation targeting will at most only work as a fine tuning measure, and cannot possibly eliminate the industrial cycle in capitalist economies nor resolve major crises.

INFLUENCER
        1. [General meaning:] A person or thing that influences another. [Oxford English Dictionary]
        2. [In U.S. capitalist marketing and social media lingo:] A person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items, especially on social media.

“About 54 percent of young Americans said they would become an influencer if given the opportunity, and nearly 90 percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money, according to a 2019 report by Morning Consult.”   —New York Times, Aug. 24, 2023, National Edition, p. 3. [This shows, in a very pitiful way, just how corrupting capitalism is even to the masses themselves! —Ed.]

INFORMATION OVERLOAD
This is a common phenomenon in the modern world, especially since the widespread availability of TV, computers and the Internet. The central difficulty with “information overload” is that the great preponderance of the information that many people are being swamped with is just not very important, reliable or useful. Worse yet, excessive attention to relatively unimportant information can distract people from acquiring the most essential information. One way that this happens is that people spend a lot of time “surfing the Internet” for what are actually relatively trivial and transient facts and off-the-cuff opinions, while not putting in any serious effort to acquire the scientific theories and perspectives that would allow them to properly evaluate those facts and opinions. This results in a “dumbing down” of people’s understanding of what is going on in the world and their ability to deal with it. This is a problem for society in general, but it is especially so for young people who are the ones most prone to spend so much time “texting”, visiting social networking sites and otherwise surfing the Web, etc., and so little time reading serious books these days.
        This is also becoming a serious problem in the culture of the revolutionary left. Much more attention needs to be given to having formal study groups and to serious study of revolutionary theory, especially the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao.

INFRASTRUCTURE
Infrastructure, as the term is most often used in discussing an economy (such as that of a nation or a region) means the accumulated systems of “public” (i.e., government) works which enable or promote other economic activity, such as roads, bridges, dams, water treatment and sewage systems, airports, sea ports, and so forth. Infrastructure may also include some privately-owned systems, such as railroads, pipelines, electricity generation and distribution systems, communication systems, and so forth. In comparing the infrastructure levels of two different countries it is necessary to ignore the fact that some comparable systems may be government owned in one country and privately owned in the other.
        An undeveloped country or area is characterized by poor or inadequate infrastructure which makes production, transportation and communication difficult and expensive. A long-developed economy in an advanced capitalist nation will likely reach a sort of high-level stasis in its infrastructure, with new infrastructure being mostly for the purpose of replacing old infrastructure. From 1980 to 2017 the public infrastructure of Britain and Germany remained nearly constant on a per capita basis. [Data here from The Economist, Sept. 22, 2018, p. 37-38.] In the U.S., government investment in infrastructure per capita has increased about 40% during this same period, though overall per capita infrastructure in the country (including privately owned) has probably not increased as much. When there is already high government debt it becomes easy to let infrastructure maintenance slide. On the other hand, additional infrastructure investment is a means of artificially promoting the expansion of the general economy. A large part of the increase in the U.S. has actually been due to government worries about the weak economy, and hence essentially the promotion of a form of
Keynesian deficit spending, especially since the Great Recession began. Liberals, in particular, have been strongly pushing for much more infrastructure spending, and often talk about how roads and bridges are deteriorating or are on the verge of collapse. (There is some partial truth to this, in part because of the growing stress on infrastructure due to climate change.)
        The biggest and fastest expansion of infrastructure in all of human history has occurred over the past 70 years in China. After the initial major development during the Maoist period, the per capita investment of infrastructure in China from 1980-2017 went up by a factor of 10. While infrastructure spending has recently shown signs of slowing down in China (though it may pick up again soon because of the now weakening capitalist economy), such spending still accounts for about one-fifth of China’s GDP—far above almost all other countries. And the per capita level of infrastructure investment in China has now reached or exceeded that in Britain and Germany.

“Raising money for repairs is harder than finding the cash for flashy new projects that you can stick your name on. In recent decades America has built many useless new roads, yet the fraction of existing road surfaces that are too bumpy has risen from 10% in 1997 to 21% today. Potholes gradually damage vehicles that drive over them. Faulty locks on the Kiel Canal, which connects the Baltic and North seas, leave ships queuing to get through; sometimes they are forced on a detour around Denmark. Maintenance failures can also lead to fatal catastrophes like the recent bridge collapse in Genoa in Italy.
        “Yet if the costs of skimping on repairs can become tragically apparent, it is hard to spot maintenance shortfalls across the economy as a whole.... [The article notes that the best investigation of this issue, in Canada, suggests that public infrastructure maintenance should be at least at an annual level of around 3.3% of a country’s GDP.]
        “Penny-pinching governments often let infrastructure crumble regardless. Even stimulus programmes typically favor vanity projects. After the [2008-9] financial crisis America spent twice as much per person on transport projects in sparsely populated areas as it did in cities, where the needs are greatest.” —“In Praise of the Basics: Captain Sensible”, The Economist, Oct. 20, 2018, p. 14.

INITIATIVE
All revolutionary organizations and parties call for their members and the masses they work with to show initiative, and to not just wait for orders from above. But mere “calling for” initiative will not work at all when there is no true freedom to develop ideas for action, and when actual ideas and initiatives are routinely criticized, condemned and beaten down. This is why parties and organizations which do not really have much in the way of genuine internal democracy can never develop much initiative from their sub-units and from their individual members, no matter how loudly the leaders may call for it. The indispensable connection beween internal democracy and the genuine promotion of the initiative of all the members of the party or group is well brought out in the following quote from Mao. Note that Mao also connects this up with the need for the lower bodies and individual members to be willing to criticize and supervise the higher party bodies! After all, showing any creativity and inititive is in effect also tacitly suggesting some shortcomings in leadership! Truly good leadership knows that they cannot possibly be the source of all correct ideas and good suggestions.

“In the present great struggle, the Chinese Communist Party demands that all its leading bodies and all its members and cadres should give the fullest expression to their initiative, which alone can ensure victory. This initiative must be demonstrated concretely in the ability of the leading bodies, the cadres and the Party rank and file to work creatively, in their readiness to assume responsibility, in the exuberant vigor they show in their work, in their courage and ability to raise questions, voice opinions and criticize defects, and in the comradely supervision that is maintained over the leading bodies and the leading cadres. Otherwise, ‘initiative’ will be an empty thing. But the exercise of such initiative depends on the spread of democracy in Party life. Only in an atmosphere of democracy can large numbers of able people be brought forward.” —Mao, “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” (Oct. 1938), SW2:204.

INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE (And Inner-Party Criticism)

“Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end.” —Mao, “On Contradiction” (Aug. 1927), SW 1:317.

“We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.
        “But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.” —Mao, “Combat Liberalism” (Sept. 7, 1937), SW 2:31.
         [Note that while many people (i.e.,
liberals, in the Maoist sense) oppose ideological struggle on the grounds that it supposedly disrupts unity, Mao takes the exact opposite point of view—that ideological struggle leads to greater unity. The apparent unity that comes from the absence of ideological struggle is superficial, phony and always collapses eventually. —Ed.]

“Another point that should be mentioned in connection with inner-Party criticism is that some comrades ignore the major issues and confine their attention to minor points when they make their criticism. They do not understand that the main task of criticism is to point out political and organization mistakes. As to personal shortcomings, unless they are related to political and organizational mistakes, there is no need to be overcritical or the comrades concerned will be at a loss as to what to do. Moreover, once such criticism develops, there is the great danger that within the Party attention will be concentrated exclusively on minor faults, and everyone will become timid and overcautious and forget the Party’s political tasks.” —Mao, “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” (Dec. 1929), SW 1:111-112. [The precise form of this and the following quote is taken from Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1966), p. 263.]

“In inner-Party criticism, guard against subjectivism, arbitrariness and the vulgarization of criticism; statements should be based on facts and criticism should stress the political side.” —Mao, ibid., SW 1:112.

“Inner-Party criticism is a weapon for strengthening the Party organization and increasing its fighting capacity. [At present] in the Party organization of the Red Army, however, criticism is not always of this character, and sometimes turns into personal attck. As a result, it damages the Party orgnization as well as individuals. This is a manifestation of petty-bourgeois individualism. The method of correction is to help Party members understand that the purpose of criticism is to increase the Party’s fighting capacity in order to achieve victory in the class struggle and that it should not be used as a means of personal attack.” —Mao, ibid., SW 1:110.

INNOVATION-ONLY ECONOMIC MODEL
The bizarre theory of many American bourgeois economists that it no longer matters that manufactoring is rapidly declining in the U.S. and shifting overseas, because supposedly most of the world’s innovation and new ideas are still happening in the U.S. In reality, innovation, and ideas for new or improved products, also soon shift to the new manufacturing centers.

“That innovation should always follow manufacturing is hardly surprising. After all, manufacturers conduct 70 percent of all R&D [research and development] in the United States. So what do we think will happen to all that R&D when those manufacturers move offshore?
        “The offshoring of innovation has resulted in a sharp decline in overall R&D intensity in the United States—the percentage of gross domestic product devoted to R&D—relative to the rest of the world. We once had the most R&D-intensive economy in the world. Now we’re eighth.” —Henry R. Nothhaft, a U.S. “entrepreneur” capitalist, lamenting the relative decline in R&D and innovation in the U.S., “U.S. Outsourcing Prosperity”, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2011, p. F7.

“INQUILAB ZINDABAD”
Inquilab Zindabad is a phrase in Hindi and related languages which means “Long live the revolution!” This slogan was commonly used by freedom-fighters during the British imperialist rule over India, and remains very popular in the Indian revolutionary movement today.

INQUISITION
A tribunal organized by the Roman Catholic Church for the prosecution of “heresy”. It was originally set up in France during the 12th century C.E. and then formally established by Pope Gregory IX (13th century C.E.) to suppress what were viewed as heretical religious trends within Christianity. In later centuries it became infamous for its suppression of all sorts of progressive and scientific ideas. It was characterized by its use of torture and murder, especially in the case of the Spanish Inquisition. In Italy it burned
Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600, and threatened Galileo with the same if he did not recant his view that the Earth goes around the Sun (rather than vice versa). The Inquisition represents the most extreme form of the perpetual war of religion against science, though that war continues in fortunately somewhat moderated form. The Inquisition still exists (now under the formal name of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”), though it has been quite a while since they have been able to burn anybody at the stake.
        See also: IGNORANCE [Galileo quote]

INSIDER TRADING
The buying or selling of stocks or other financial securities by those with “inside knowledge” of the decisions being made by capitalist corporations which will affect the prices of those shares of stock or securities. In capitalist financial theory every buyer or seller is supposed to be allowed equal access to this information (through public publication) before anyone is legally allowed to make use of it to buy or sell, though fully honoring this law is probably actually something of a rarity! Occasionally some blatant case of insider trading is prosecuted. Insider trading is yet another method whereby some financial capitalists cheat the others.

INSOLUBLE PROBLEMS

“In a broad sense there are no insoluble problems, but only those which, arising from a vague feeling, are not yet suitably expressed.” —Carl Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (NY: Dover, 1959 (1949)), p. 25, expressing an idea credited to Fedrigo Enriques, Problems of Science (1929), p. 5.

INSOLVENT (Adj.)
Having liabilities greater than the current reasonable market value of all assets. In other words, a company or bank is insovent if it does not have enough money either on hand, or else which it can raise in short order by selling assets, to cover its liabilities to both shareholders and those to whom it owes money (including depositors in the case of banks).
        See also:
ZOMBIES

INSTANT
A specific moment (or “point”) in time. This is an important mathematical abstraction which has also become part of the conceptual machinery of virtually every human being.

“In contrasting average speed with instantaneous speed we have implicitly utilized a distinction between interval and instant, which is vital for what follows. An average speed is one that concerns what happens over an interval of time—3 hours, 5 seconds, one half second, and so forth. The interval may be small or large, but it does represent the passage of a definite amount of time. We use the word instant, however, to state the fact that something happens so fast that no time elapses. The event is momentary. When we say, for example, that it is 3 o’clock, we refer to an instant, a precise moment. If the lapse of time is pictured by length along a line, then an interval is represented by a line segment, whereas an instant corresponds to a point. The notion of an instant, although it is also used in everyday life, is strictly a mathematical idealization.” —Morris Kline, Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach, 2nd ed. (Dover, 1998 (1977)), p. 17.

INSTANTANEOUS VELOCITY
The limit value of a series of average velocities as one calculates them for ever-smaller periods approaching a single instant or “point in time”. Although people seem to have an intuitive feel for the notion of an instantaneous velocity, it is actually quite a sophisticated concept when worked out with logical rigor.

“[T]he derivative f'(t) of the distance function f(t), [is] the instantaneous velocity of the body. It is to be borne in mind, however, that this is not a velocity in the ordinary sense and has no counterpart in the world of nature, in which there can be no motion without a change of position. The instantaneous velocity as thus defined is not the division of a time interval into a distance interval, howsoever much the conventional notation ds/dt = f'(t) may suggest a ratio. This symbolism, although remarkably serviceable in the carrying out of the operations of the calculus, will be found to have resulted from misapprehension on the part of Leibniz as to the logical basis of the calculus.” —Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), pp. 7-8.

INSTRUMENTS OF PRODUCTION
The tools, machinery and technology used in economic production. This category is part of the
means of production (which also includes raw materials, land, buildings, etc.).

INSTRUMENTAL GOOD
See:
INTRINSIC GOOD

INSTRUMENTALISM
        1. [In the philosophy of mind:] The view that mind and mental phenomena (such as thoughts, ideas, memories, hopes, etc.) are merely “convenient fictions” which do not really objectively exist. Thus instrumentalism in this sense is a type of
naïve materialism similar to eliminative materialism. But whereas that theory claims mentalistic terms can and should be dispensed with entirely, instrumentalism admits that mentalistic terminology is indispensable in our everyday vocabulary for describing, explaining and predicting human behavior—even though (supposedly!) minds, ideas, memories, and other mental things “don’t really exist”. (Yes; it’s an utterly ridiculous theory. It fails to recognize that mentalistic terms are not only necessary but are entirely valid high-level summaries of states of the functioning physical brain in its tremendous neuronal complexity.)
        2. [In ethics:] A term used to denigrate interest-based, utility-based and similar naturalistic theories of ethics by their (usually Kantian) idealist opponents.
        3. [In the philosophy of John Dewey:] The view that concepts and theories are merely “instruments” or tools for dealing with a situation, which cannot genuinely reflect the underlying reality, and cannot really be considered true or false. Hence, a subjective idealist doctrine fully in tune with the pragmatist spirit.
        In recent years the RCPUSA and those who have been around it have used the term in something like this third sense, though often expressed more vaguely or crudely, as in Bob Avakian’s comment: “By ‘instrumentalism’ here I mean torturing reality in the attempt to make a distorted version of reality an instrument of certain aims.” [“Bringing Forward Another Way”, Fall 2006, online at: http://revcom.us/avakian/anotherway/index.htm] Mike Ely, among others, has pointed out that Avakian himself “both condemns and practices instrumentalism”, and uses the method of “manipulating people by fudging the truth” such as by putting forward apocalyptic predictions of imminent revolution in the U.S., imminent Christian fascism, and the like, which surely Avakian must have known were not actually true or reasonable.

INSURANCE
Insurance is simply a socially-approved-of form of gambling, wherein the person or company taking out the insurance bets that something bad will happen, and the insurance company bets that it won’t. When you buy fire insurance on your house, for example, you are betting that the house will catch fire someday, and the insurance company is betting that it won’t. For you, that is indeed gambling, because it is impossible to be sure whether or not your house will catch fire. But it is a gamble that makes sense because if your house does catch fire, at least you will receive a large payment from the insurance company that will hopefully allow you to repair the damage or else build a new house. If your house never catches fire, then you will still be out the premiums you paid to the insurance company; but, either way, you will not have suffered a catastropic loss. That is why insurance is often a good idea for the person buying it; it eliminates (or at least reduces) their risk of any catastrophic loss.
        While buying insurance is a form of gambling for the person buying the insurance, interestingly it is not really that much of a gamble for the insurance company! This is because while the odds of your particular house catching fire someday are unknown, and probably unknowable, the total number of houses of your type catching fire in your region of the country over the course of an average year is a quite stable and easily ascertainable statistical figure. If the insurance company insures a large enough number of houses it will have a very good idea of the total insurance payments it will have to pay out each year. For them it is not much of a gamble at all; it is actuarial science.

“An insurance company, sanely directed, and making scores of thousands of bets, is not gambling at all; it knows with sufficient accuracy at what age its clients will die, how many of their houses will be burnt every year, how often their houses will by broken into by burglars..., how much they will suffer from illness or unemployment, and what births and deaths will cost them: in short, what will happen to every thousand or ten thousand or a million people even when the company cannot tell what will happen to any individual among them.” —George Bernard Shaw, “The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance”, in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, vol. 3, 1956, p. 1527.

Insurance, therefore, is a way of socializing risk, of equalizing it across the population of insured people. While this can be done in a half-assed fashion via private insurance companies, this is not at all the best way to do it. First, the insurance companies demand to make a profit, which is always absurdly large (and much of which is under the table, in the form of huge salaries and stock benefits for the top managers, for example). Second, they must compete with other insurance companies, which leads to huge marketing operations, vast expenditures for advertising, and so forth. All of this is tremendously wasteful and greatly raises insurance premiums beyond what they would otherwise be. On top of this, private insurance companies regularly try to use all sorts of means to cheat claimants out of the payments due them. (I.e., they are often guilty of various forms of fraud.)
        Clearly, the best way of socializing risk, and for all the people, is through a socialist government insurance program. It can create an immense saving of labor in the administration of this insurance, by having only one insurance agency, rather than dozens of competing companies. It can insure at the actual cost of insuring, and not the bloated prices required by private profits and massive advertising. The administration of insurance benefits can be streamlined, and there will no longer be any reason to try to cheat people out of benefits that are due them. Here, as in every other area, socialism/communism is necessary to run an insurance system that really serves the interests of the people.
        See also below, and:
“DEAD PEASANTS INSURANCE”

INSURANCE DEATH SPIRAL
A situation where an insurance company (or segment of the insurance industry) begins to lose those of its customers who are least likely to file claims, leaving the company with a higher proportion of policy holders who do file claims, which in turn forces them to raise their rates, which then leads to the loss of more customers in a vicious feedback loop.
        An insurance company or segment of the industry (such as fire insurance or health insurance) normally insures a wide cross-section of the public, that is, something close to a representative section of the public. Thus if 4% of all the families in a country have a major health problem in an average year, and the health insurance industry pays out major claims to 4% of their policy holders during the year, their policy holders may be deemed a representative section of the population. The rates the health insurance industry sets are based on their expectations of the rate of payout. But suppose economic hard times come along (as they often do under capitalism), and more and more of those who are in generally good health decide they have to drop their health insurance because they just can no longer afford to pay the premiums. In this case the insurance companies will be paying out claims on a greater percentage of policies and will have to raise their rates. This will force more people to drop their health insurance, which once again leads to higher premiums.
        This situation actually developed in the health insurance industry in the U.S. around 2010, with sudden huge premium increases being demanded by the insurance companies. They really did not want to raise their rates just then because that might lead to more support for a national health care plan which these insurance companies strongly oppose. But to keep their profits up, most or all of them raised their rates anyway. (This is another example of how the interests of an individual capitalist company often trump the interests of the whole industry or the interests of the capitalist class as a whole!)
        In a genuine socialist society there could be no such thing as an insurance death spiral, since every person would automatically be covered by reasonable health insurance and other forms of insurance. The insurance coverage would automatically be “representative” of the whole population, since it would include the whole population.

INSURRECTION
A revolutionary uprising of the masses with the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and seizing political power. In the modern capitalist world such uprisings generally need to be, in order to be successful, well organized and led by a strong and disciplined political party with very extensive connections with the working class and masses and which has very widespread support from them in this endeavor. Moreover, successful insurrections cannot normally occur at any old time, but rather only under exceptional conditions where the ruling class is in disarray and at each other’s throats, and where the masses are suffering much more than usual, and are therefore much more desperate than usual; as for example, in times of chaos due to major unpopular wars and/or serious and prolonged socioeconomic crises.
        The strategy of mass insurrection was used successfully by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the
October Revolution in Russia in 1917, though it is true that this then led to a period of desperate civil war and foreign imperialist intervention. This sort of civil war and foreign invasion is something that is quite likely to develop following future successful insurrections as well, and should be prepared for in advance.
        A quite different strategy for revolution, protracted People’s War (PPW), was developed by Mao Zedong and used successfully in China in the 1930s-1940s. But in advanced capitalist countries, at least, the revolutionary strategy of insurrection after an extensive period of mass education, organization and other preparation, still seems to most Marxist-Leninist-Maoists as appropriate, necessary and correct. (And this is what Mao himself thought too.)
        Mao’s strategy of protracted People’s War required very special conditions, including a large, backward, mostly peasant country with poorly developed transportation and communication systems, and a militarily weak and technologically unsophisticated government, where peasant-based guerrilla warfare could take place in isolated rural areas; where the growing success of such warfare could lead to the development of growing revolutionary-controlled rural base areas; and where the countryside could gradually come to surround the cities. While there do remain some areas of the world where conditions are still somewhat like this, much of the world, including even much of the so-called “Third World”, is no longer like this. For this reason, the scope for any reasonable chance of success of PPW has been rapidly diminishing in the world in recent decades. Over the past 75 years the world has become much more urbanized; the technologies of communication and transportation have zoomed ahead; government militaries have become much more mobile and destructive; there is now satellite surveillance and remote bombing by rockets and drones; and foreign imperialism has come to provide much greater support to the military machines of the comprador countries it dominates. For reasons such as these the areas where PPW might still work has severely declined over the decades. It is vitually impossible that such a strategy would even work in China any more. But it is still possible that PPW might work in some places, such as in South and Southeast Asia, especially if combined with urban insurrection at the appropriate time.
        However, it seems virtually certain at this point that in growing numbers of countries the most rational and best strategy for socialist revolution is urban insurrection.
        See also: LEVÉE EN MASSE,   OCTOBER ROAD

INSURRECTION — Caution With
While revolutionaries of course work toward revolution, and therefore in most countries, work toward insurrection, the actual call to the masses to join an insurrection is not something to be toyed with! Here is what Lenin had to say about this:

“‘Insurrection’ is an important word. A call to insurrection is an extremely serious call. The more complex the social system, the better the organization of state power, and the more perfected the military machine, the more impermissible is it to launch such a slogan without due thought. And we have stated repeatedly that the revolutionary Social-Democrats [who we now refer to as communists —Ed.] have long been preparing to launch it, but have launched it as a direct call only when there could be no doubt whatever of the gravity, widespread and deep roots of the revolutionary movement, no doubt of matters having literally come to a head. Important words must be used with circumspection. Enormous difficulties have to be faced in translating them into important deeds.” —Lenin, “The Latest in Iskra Tactics, or Mock Elections as a New Incentive to an Uprising”, LCW 9:367-69.

“INSURRECTIONISM”
Generally this is a term of abuse used against Lenin’s basic strategy of revolution (the “
October Road”) by those who reject that strategy and instead favor urban guerrilla warfare and the supposed universal applicability of the strategy of protracted people’s war to all countries, regardless of their very different circumstances.




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