MAXWELL’S EQUATIONS
A set of four key equations which collectively organize and describe electromagnetism. The four
individual laws which these equations sum up were actually discovered earlier by other scientists,
but in 1861-62 James Clerk Maxwell brought these laws together in mathematical form in a way which
fully established the unity of electricity and magnetism in a clearer and more profound theoretical
way. Maxwell’s Equations have been formulated in various ways, but the modern method is to
formulate them in terms of partial differential equations in vector calculus, as shown in the
graphic at the right. These four equations represent in turn:
1. Gauss’s Law of Electricity: The electric
flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.
2. Gauss’s Law of Magnetism: No magnetic
monopoles exist; the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero.
3. Faraday’s Law of Induction: The voltage
induced in a closed loop is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux that the loop
encloses.
4. Ampère’s Circuital Law with Maxwell’s
extension: The magnetic field induced around a closed loop is proportional to the electric current
plus displacement current (rate of change of the electric field) that the loop encloses.
A more thorough (and much more technical) discussion
of Maxwell’s Equations is available in the Wikipedia at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_equations
“Although Maxwell’s equations are relatively simple, they daringly reorganize
our perception of nature, unifying electricity and magnetism and linking geometry, topology
and physics. They are essential to understanding the surrounding world. And as the first field
equations, they not only showed scientists a new way of approaching physics but also took them
on the first step towards a unification of the fundamental forces of nature.” —Robert P.
Crease, “The Greatest Equations Ever”, Physics World, Oct. 2004, online at:
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/10/2/1
“The equations of electricity and magnetism that are today known as Maxwell’s
equations are not the equations originally written down by Maxwell; they are equations that
physicists settled on after decades of subsequent work by other physicists, notably the English
scientist Oliver Heaviside. They are understood today to be an approximation that is valid in
a limited context (that of weak, slowly varying electric and magnetic fields), but in this form
and in this limited context, they have survived for a century and may be expected to survive
indefinitely.” —Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist, “Sokal’s Hoax”, New York
Review of Books, Vol. XLIII, No. 13, pp. 11-15, Aug. 8, 1996.
“MAY FIFTEEN INCIDENT” [Japan, 1932]
“In October 1931, Japan’s reactionary military figures and Right-wing
militarists masterminded a coup with the aim of reorganizing the government. They intended
to install General Sadao Araki as Prime Minister to head a dictatorial military regime,
but their plan fell flat. In spite of that, pressure from the army which called for speeding
up militarization became all the more intense. Towards the end of the year, Tsuyoshi Inukai,
boss of the ‘Constitutional Political Friend’s Party’ (Seiyukai), came into power,
and Sadao Araki was appointed Minister of War. In 1932, people of all strata in Japan were
getting increasingly discontented with the government’s reactionary home and foreign
policies. Workers and peasants rose in struggle wave upon wave. Confronted with this
situation, the panic-stricken reactionary ruling circles tried to strengthen their fascist
rule.
“On May 15, 1932, the Right-wing
fascist group ‘Blood Pledge Society’ (Ketsumeidan), with the support of other
reactionary organizations, sparked off terrorist activities with another incident. A group
of young army and navy officers mustered by them broke into the residence of Prime Minister
Tsuyoshi Inukai and shot him. They also attacked the Metropolitan Police Agency. The
incident was designed to force the government to proclaim martial law so that a military
cabinet may be formed and a militarist system instituted. After the death of Inukai, Admiral
Makoto Saito, former Governor of Korea, formed a cabinet, again with Sadao Araki holding
the portfolio of War Minister. While quickening the tempo of militarization, the Saito
cabinet made big efforts to crack down on the people. Communists and progressives were
arrested and persecuted on a mass scale. On October 30, 1932 alone, 1,400 were arrested.
The Japanese people so came under a reign of fascist terror worse than ever.” —For Your
Reference note, Peking Review,
#50, Dec. 11, 1970, p. 14.
MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT
An important radical nationalist movement of Chinese students and intellectuals which grew
out of demonstrations by students at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on May 4, 1919. This
demonstration condemned both the unfair terms of the Versailles Treaty ending World War I
which granted significant territorial concessions from China to Japan, and also the weak
warlord government in control of Beijing which went along with this imperialist deal.
“‘May 4’ refers to May 4, 1919, when the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal
revolutionary movement broke out. In the first half of that year, Britain, France, the
United States, Japan, Italy and other imperialist countries that had emerged victorious
from World War I held a conference in Paris to divide the booty. A decision was adopted
which stipulated that Japan would take over all the privileges previously held by Germany
in China’s Shantung Province. On May 4 that year, the students in Peking took the lead
and held rallies and demonstrations to protest against the decision. When the government
of the Northern Warlords resorted to suppression, the Peking students suspended classes
in protest. Students in other parts of the country quickly rose to express their
solidarity. The Northern Warlord government made mass arrests in Peking, which aroused
still greater indignation among the people of the whole nation. The patriotic movement
so far participated [in] mainly by the intellectuals rapidly developed into a nationwide
movement participated [in] by the proletariat, petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. As the
patriotic movement surged ahead, the new cultural movement against feudalism and for
science and democracy unfolded prior to the May 4th Movement developed into a mammoth
revolutionary cultural movement with the propagation of Marxism-Leninism as its main
current.
“After the founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949, May 4 was officially proclaimed China’s Youth Day.” —Footnote
in Peking Review, vol. 19, #22, p. 12, May 28, 1976.
MAY 16th ULTRA-LEFT GROUP
More formally known as the “May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique”, the term adopted in August
1967 by the central leadership during the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (GPCR) in China in condeming this group or trend. Originally this referred
only to a small group of college students in Beijing who called themselves the “Capital May
16 Red Guard Regiment”, named after the May 16 Circular of 1966 which was the formal beginning
of the GPCR (see entry above). This group secretly distributed leaflets and posted
big character posters condemning Premier
Zhou Enlai, calling him a “black back-stage
supporter of the February Adverse Current” and
a “shameful traitor of Mao Zedong Thought”, and said he had betrayed the spirit of the May
16 Circular. They proclaimed: “Thoroughly wreck the bourgeois headquarters! Hold Zhou Enlai
to account”.
Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Small
Group directing the GPCR viewed this attack on Zhou as sectarian and disruptive of the unity
of the forces leading the Cultural Revolution. Consequently, a campaign was launched against
the Capital May 16 Red Guard Regiment and it was suppressed. The campaign then broadened and
went nationwide against similar ultra-left or sectarian trends, which were collectively
referred to as the “May 16th Ultra-Left Group”, or—in abbreviated form—as “Five-One-Six”.
Thus, ironically, “5-1-6” came from that point on to refer not to supporters of the
May 16 Circular, but rather to ultra-left or sectarian opponents of it.
In August 1967, when Mao was reading
Yao Wenyuan’s article “On Two Books by Tao Zhu”, he cited
the “May 16” group as an example of the counterrevolutionaries who, in Yao’s words, “shout
slogans that are extreme left in form but extreme right in essence, whip up the ill wind of
‘suspecting all,’ and bombard the proletarian headquarters.” Mao himself wrote: “The
organizers and manipulators of the so-called ‘May 16’ are just such a conspiratorial
counterrevolutionary clique and must be thoroughly exposed.”
Although the Chinese press referred to the
“May 16 Counterrevolutionary Clique” as a massive “conspiracy”, it is very doubtful that
there ever was any actual widespread (let alone nationwide) conspiracy. However, this does
not mean that there was not a genuine ultra-leftist sectarian trend within many Red
Guard organizations and elsewhere that was causing serious trouble and needed to be dealt
with. (This is sort of an inevitable result of relying on basically unguided and inexperienced
youth to become the leading force in a revolutionary movement, even for a limited period.)
In particular, this ultra-left trend created
considerable problems within China’s Foreign Ministry, and for China’s relations with other
countries. There were not only protests outside of many foreign embassies in Beijing, some
of those embassies were mildly damaged in attacks, with broken windows and their walls
covered with posters and graffiti. The Soviet and Indonesian embassies were partially burned.
In London there was actually a pitched battle between Chinese embassy personnel and London
police on August 29, 1967. Ultra-leftists within the Foreign Ministry took de facto control
of it, and provoked incidents and quarrels with over 30 countries, including not only the
USSR and old-line imperialist countries like Britain, but even “Third World” countries. In
June 1967 two Chinese-speaking diplomats of the Indian embassy were beaten by Red Guards at
the Beijing airport as they tried to leave the country after being expelled. Some Red Guards
even denounced North Korea’s Kim Il Sung as a “fat revisionist”; and though he may in fact
have actually been such a thing, this sort of “foreign policy” made things very difficult
for China economically and politically and drove it into extreme isolation. And, unfortunately,
this sort of infantile behavior eventually promoted a more rightist foreign policy than would
otherwise have been likely to develop. (This is a big general problem with ultra-leftism;
because of its absurd excesses which must be suppressed, the situation often tends to swing
too far in the other direction and even into revisionism.)
Chen Boda was
originally put in charge of dealing with the “May 16th Ultra-Left Group” but as the anti-“5-1-6”
campaign spread and became more generalized, he was accused of being a secret supporter of
those ultra-left ideas himself, and especially of making accusations against Zhou Enlai. Chen
then became a target of the campaign as well. However, he recovered from that criticism, as
did many others briefly targetted in the anti-“May 16” campaign. (It was Chen’s later close
association with Lin Biao which led to his complete downfall in
1970.) It is said that millions of others were accused of ultra-leftism too, and while this
was often overlooked later, over the long run this probably ended up considerably weakening
the left in China, and helping the capitalist roaders
overthrow the left after Mao’s death. This is another example of how ultra-leftism can play
into the hands of the rightists.
It seems like almost everyone else besides
Mao was also attacked at one time or another by various elements within this ultraleftist
trend, even some of the (so-called) “Gang of Four” themselves! “The ‘bombardment’ against
Zhang Chunqiao in February, 1968, came not only from the
Right, but also from the ultra-Left, a fairly strong group in Shanghai which had broken with
Zhang the year before because they considered him too moderate. This explains why the
librarian [an individual recounting his mistreatment by the ‘Gang of Four’ after their
downfall]—doubtless no ultraleftist himself—could have come to be associated with the May
Sixteenth group. The quarrels and hates between various currents of the Left in Shanghai were
without doubt exploited by the new leaders during the campaign against the Four, and were some
of the reasons that made impossible a coordinated resistance against the Right’s coup.”
[Edoarda Masi, China Winter (1978), p. 308.]
It is an actual fact that, as noted in
Peking Review during the GPCR [Jan. 6, 1967, p. 8] everyone in present-day
bourgeois society is really a target of the
revolution, including the members and leaders of the revolutionary party and, yes,
including even each one of us ourselves! However, it is also a fact that everyone is
not the enemy of the revolution, nor is everyone to be attacked and criticized at
every point in the revolution. Every revolution, to be successful, must unite the vast
majority against the small number of genuine die-hard enemies at that point. Later the
struggle may focus on different issues, and there will be different people to criticize and
different people who resist the changes which are necessary in society and in themselves. But
to make everyone the enemy is the mark of utter foolishness and infantilism, and will
inevitably lead to the complete failure of the revolution. A firm grasp of dialectics is
definitely called for here!
“[Mao] told me ... those officials who had opposed my return to China
in 1967 and 1968 had belonged to an ultraleft group which had seized the foreign
ministry for a time, but they were all cleared out long ago.” —Edgar Snow, from a
report of a conversation he had with Mao in December 1970, Life magazine,
April 30, 1971. Online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/Journalists/Snow-Edgar/EdgarSnow-Life-1971-April30.pdf
MAZUMDAR, Charu (1918-72)
[His family name is also often transliterated from Bengali as “Majumdar”.]
A great revolutionary in India who was the leader of the famous armed Naxalbari uprising of
peasants in 1967, and one of the main founders of the modern Maoist movement in India. He led
in the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969 as a split-off
from the revisionist Communist Party of India (Marxist). In 1972
Mazumdar was captured and tortured to death by police, and the CPI(M-L) fractured into many
pieces. However, the current powerful and rapidly growing Maoist-led revolutionary movement
in India has come together from some of the segments of that old party together with other
Maoist forces who had remained outside of the original CPI(M-L).
Charu Mazumdar was born into a progressive
landlord family in Siliguri, West Bengal, in 1918. Even as a teenager Mazumdar rebelled
against social inequalities, and joined up with the All Bengal Students Association, which
was a group of petty-bourgeois nationalist revolutionaries affiliated with the Anusilan group.
By the age of 20 he had dropped out of college and joined the Congress Party, and became an
an organizer amoung bidi workers. He shifted further left
and joined the Communist Party of India, and worked in the Kisan Sabha, its peasant
organization, with the poor and oppressed peasants in Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling. An arrest
warrant was issued for him, and he had to go underground for the first time.
The CPI was banned at the beginning of
World War II, but Mazumdar continued his peasant organizing work and was elected to the
Jalpaiguri district committee of the CPI in 1942. In 1943, mostly because of the British
imperialist looting of so much of India’s grain and their indifference to the welfare of
the Indian people, a major famine broke out in West Bengal. [See:
Famines—Imperialist Caused] Mazumdar organized a
fairly successful ‘seizure of crops’ campaign by the peasants in Jalpaiguri during this
famine.
In 1946 Mazumdar joined and help lead
the Tebhaga Movement of peasants trying to keep
more of their harvests from the grasping hands of the landlords. This movement helped
shape his conception of revolutionary struggle, and also helped prepare the peasant
masses for future revolutionary struggle. Later Mazumdar worked among tea garden workers
in Darjeeling. In 1948 the CPI was banned by the government, and Mazumdar was imprisoned
for three years. In January 1954 he married fellow CPI member Lila Mazumdar Sengupta.
A growing ideological struggle within
the CPI developed after its Palghat Congress in 1956, and Mazumdar quickly gravitated
toward the revolutionary left wing. In 1962 he was again imprisoned for opposing the Nehru
government’s war against revolutionary China. In 1964 the CPI split, reflecting within
India the Sino-Soviet Split, and Mazumdar joined the breakaway CPI (Marxist). But he
disagreed with the CPI (Marxist)’s electoral policy and decision to postpone armed
struggle until some indefinite point in the far future.
During the mid-1960s Mazumdar organized a
left faction within the CPI (Marxist) in northern West Bengal. He was in poor health in
1964-65 but devoted this time, even while in jail, to studying and writing about the path
of the Indian revolution on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought. This led
to his very influential writings and speeches in the 1965-67 period, which were later
called the ‘Historic Eight Documents’.
In 1967 the CPI (Marxist) [or “CPM” as
it is generally known] betrayed the revolutionary movement by joining with the bourgeois
party, the Bangla Congress, in a coalition government in West Bengal. But on May 25 of
that same year Mazumdar showed there was another road possible by leading the peasants
in the vicinity of the village of Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal in
a historic uprising. The rebels annihilated a notorious police inspector, and took the
first step in launching the New Democratic revolution in India. The state government’s
Home Ministry, headed by the CPM leader Jyoti Basu, brutally suppressed this uprising,
and even murdered 11 women and 2 children in the process. But the ideology of “Naxalism”
spread rapidly and inspired revolutionaries around India and South Asia.
Many revolutionaries within the CPM, from
7 different Indian states, then set up what was originally called the All India
Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries (AICCR), on Nov. 12-13, 1967. This was renamed
the All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (AICCCR), and later
launched the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) as a new revolutionary party, on
April 2, 1969. Charu Mazumdar was its General Secretary. The CPI(M-L) held its first Party
Congress in Kolkata under strict underground conditions in 1970. Mazumdar was re-elected
General Secretary, and the Party Congress put forward its basic programme of protracted
people’s war, including the annihilation (killing) of class enemies.
Of course the Indian ruling class, both
in West Bengal and around the country, mounted a fierce crackdown on this new revolutionary
movement, and this reached a peak during and after 1971 when many key Naxalite leaders
were killed. Mazumdar was apparently betrayed by a renegade Party member, and was arrested
in Kolkata on July 16, 1972. He was taken to Kolkata police headquarters in the Lal Bazar
neighborhood where he underwent the most horrifying and cruel tortures. No one, not even
his family, his lawyer, or a doctor, was allowed to see him. He died at 4 a.m. on July 28,
while in police custody.
Although there were some secondary aspects
of Charu Mazumdar’s precise political line which were in error, including the prescription
that Mao Tse-tung should personally be considered the Chairman not only of the Chinese
Communist Party but also the CPI(M-L), Mazumdar was nevertheless a great revolutionary who
made extremely important contributions to the revolutionary movement in India and the
world. He is a martyr who is rightly well remembered and honored by our revolutionary
movement.
Much of the information
in this entry comes from
http://imp-personalities.blogspot.com/2007/09/charu-majumdar-father-of-naxalism.html
Many of Mazumdar’s political writings can be found in the Marxist Internet Archive at
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mazumdar/
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