SAINT-SIMON, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760-1825)
French utopian socialist who had strong sympathies for the
poor, but who opposed working-class revolution. He once appealed to the very reactionary king,
Louis XVIII, to implement his utopian socialist ideas, thus showing just how silly utopians can
be when it comes to their imagined path to a better world!
SALWA JUDUM
Originally an anti-Naxalite (counter-revolutionary) vigilante organization in Chhattisgarh state,
India. It was first set up in 2005 primarily by local reactionaries, but with hidden and then
massively growing and more open state support, participation and direction. The name Salwa
Judum means “purification hunt” in the local Gondhi dialect (though it is sometimes translated
as “peace march” in bourgeois publications), which demonstrates its intent to exterminate all
revolutionary resistance to the ruling capitalists and landlords. The Salwa Judum has often
functioned as an unofficial government para-military death squad. One of the methods used by the
Chhattisgarh government to train and support the Salwa Judum is to select and train many of its
members as SPOs or “Special Police Officers”. This allows the state to pretend that the Salwa Judum
is gradually disappearing when in fact it is merely being partially incorporated into the official
government suppression apparatus.
See also:
“Salwa Judum: A ‘New Front’ of ‘Hidden War’: The Inside Story”, a 16-page pamphlet by the
CPI(Maoist) Chattisgarh State Committee, Nov. 30, 2006 (PDF: 486 KB).
“… his [Raman Singh’s] government unleashed Salwa Judum, a controversial,
brutal system of vigilantism that exposed hundreds of thousands of innocents to two-way
violence—state-led as well as Maoist-inflicted—and uprooted more than 50,000 to be deposited
in slum-like ‘concentration’ camps and rehab shelters. Several Maoist-affected states have
steadfastly refused to adopt Salwa Judum-like approaches. Several senior police officers have
told me on the record as to what a disaster Salwa Judum has turned out. …
“In February 2007, I heard [Chhattisgarh]
chief minister [Raman] Singh boast in Hindi to a room full of incredulous security analysts
and police officers from Chhattisgarh and elsewhere, ‘Salwa Judum cannot be defeated.’ He
carried on: ‘It will be written a hundred years from now. Salwa Judum is showing Gandhi is
alive, showing non-violence is alive… Salwa Judum is like the fragrance of the forest in
summer.’
“Thinking folk resist the temptation
to participate in the theatre of the absurd on account of propriety.” —Sudeep Chakravarti,
a bourgeois analyst, Livemint.com, April 15, 2010.
“Chhattisgarh’s most notable counterinsurgency ploy, arming an anti-Maoist
tribal militia known as Salwa Judum or Peace March, was predictably a violent failure. It
displaced over 50,000 villagers and acted as a recruiting sergeant for the Maoists.”
—The Economist, April 10, 2010, p. 45.
SAMUELSON, Paul (1915-2009)
The most famous and influential American bourgeois economist of the second half of the
20th century. He took the lead in the construction of the so-called
“neoclassical synthesis”, the slight revision of
bourgeois economics that incorporated a taste of Keynes’ views,
without making any fundamental changes to it. He described himself as a “cafeteria Keynesian”,
who just picked out the parts of Keynes’ views that he liked. (The genuine follower of Keynes,
Joan Robinson, used the more apt term for Samuelson and his
like, “bastard Keynesians”!)
Samuelson wrote a famous textbook, Economics,
which was first pulished in 1948 and updated periodically for decades afterwards. It became the
most popular textbook of modern bourgeois economics during that era. Early editions had nothing
about socialism in them, but in response to the New Left upsurge of the 1960s, Samuelson added
a chapter about socialism to show that he was hip. His comments there (and elsewhere) about
socialism and socialist economics are totally worthless, as are his occasional comments on and
criticisms of Marx. But he was a hero to the bourgeois economics world and in 1970 was awarded
the so-called “Nobel Prize” in Economics issued by the Bank of Sweden.
According to The Economist [Dec. 19, 2009,
p. 130] Samuelson felt “some responsibility” for the outbreak of the current major economic crisis,
since he had helped develop the financial derivatives that served
to intensify the crisis. But all he could say by way of excuse is that this proved once again that
“free markets do not stabilize themselves”, which falsely implied that the proper regulation of
the capitalist economy could prevent crises.
SANS-CULOTTES
Literally, “those without pants”. This was originally a derisive term used by the intellectual elite
in France in the period just before the great French
Revolution to refer to those writers who were not under the patronage of the salonnières
(those in the ruling class who sponsored intellectual or cultural meeting places, the “salons”, at
their homes). During the French Revolution, however, this term which was originally meant as an insult
was transformed into a badge of honor, and became the name used for the staunchest radical republican
revolutionaries. Reactionary intellectuals today, though, sometimes still use the term sans-culottes
as a supposed insult for the revolutionary or violent masses.
SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
The idea, put forward by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s student), that
our conceptualization of the world is partly determined by the categories and structure of our
native language. The extreme form of this hypothesis, sometimes called linguistic
determinism, is that our conceptualization of the world is largely or even
entirely determined in this way. However, this view is rejected by almost all linguists
and philosophers. Of course it also goes against historical materialism and even ordinary
common sense, which put forth all sorts of other reasons why we have the various concepts we
do in different spheres. (In politics, for example, we Marxists hold that the dominant ideas
and concepts in society are those of the ruling class, and are certainly not primarily a result
of the specific language we happen to speak!)
But there may be some very partial or limited
validity to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For example, in 2009 it was suggested by Stanford
University psychologist Lera Boroditsky that speakers of languages in which nouns have a
grammatical gender tend to transfer connotations of human gender to inanimate objects. Thus,
according to Boroditsky, Germans tend to describe keys (Schlüssel) in terms like
hard, heavy, jagged and metal, while Spaniards describe keys (llaves) in terms like
golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Schlüssel is grammatically masculine, while
llaves is grammatically feminine. There are many more small hints of this sort, including
many not related to grammatical gender, which may similarly suggest that our languages
do in fact constrain and direct the way we tend to think to some small extent. Still some
skepticism is in order here, and we must firmly reject the idealist notion that language
categories and forms are the primary determiner of our conceptualization of the world.
“One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend
from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality
of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were
bound to make language into an independent realm.” —Marx & Engels, The German
Ideology (1846), MECW 5:446.
“[Whorf] argued, among other things, that the structure of the Hopi
language gave its speakers an understanding of time vastly different from that of
Europeans. Although Whorf’s hypothesis continues to inspire research, a good deal of his
evidence has been discredited.” —Philip E. Ross, “Math without Words”, Scientific
American, June 2005, p. 29.
SAVINGS AND LOAN CRISIS (or “S&L Crisis”)
A major financial crisis in the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s which resulted in the
failure of 1043 savings and loan associations (from 1986 to mid-1995). Savings & loan
companies are a type of financial institution (technically not “banks”) which accept savings
deposits mostly from small investors, and which issue mortgages, car loans, and personal loans.
There were many subsidiary causes of the S&L Crisis, including changes to tax law (which made
speculation in real estate somewhat less profitable than it had been), neoliberal deregulation
of the S&L’s, various financial shenanigans (fraud), exorbitant salaries and looting by top
executives, etc. But the fundamental cause was simply that these companies were caught up in the
speculative fever of a housing bubble and issued a great
many loans which they should not have. William Seidman, former chairman of both the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Resolution Trust Corporation, commented: “The
banking problems of the ’80s and ’90s came primarily, but not exclusively, from unsound real
estate lending.”
The crisis is estimated to have led to losses
of about $160.1 billion. The U.S. government, in bailing out many of the financial capitalists
involved, covered $124.6 billion of that loss. (I.e., the U.S. taxpayers did.) The Resolution
Trust Corporation was the name of the government agency set up to close down the failing S&L’s
and pay off most of their debts. From 1986 to 1995 the number of federally insured S&L’s dropped
almost in half, from 3,234 to 1,645. These figures do not include the large number of failures
of state-chartered S&L’s during this period, or their additional large losses. From 1986 to
1991 the number of new homes built in the U.S. dropped from 1.8 million per year to just 1
million. As a consequence of this crisis federal agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
were given authority to guarantee vast numbers of new mortgages. Commercial mortgage lenders
learned that they need not worry about making lots of risky loans, since if there was major
trouble the government would likely bail them out. And the stage was set for creation a decade
later of the vastly bigger and more serious housing bubble that developed in the years 2003-2007.
SAVIORS (Political)
[Intro material to be added... ]
[The second stanza of the American translation of the
Internationale:]
We want no condescending saviors
To rule us from their judgment hall,
We workers ask not for their favors
Let us consult for all:
To make the thief disgorge his booty
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide, and do it well.
“For the bourgeois world, based upon the principles of these
philosophers [the utopian socialists], is quite as irrational and unjust, and,
therefore, finds its way to the dust-hole quite as readily as feudalism and all the
earlier stages of society. If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the
world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them.
What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who
understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly
understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chain of
historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been
born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error,
strife, and suffering.
“This mode of outlook is
essentially that of all English and French and of the first German socialists,
including Weitling. Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and
justice and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its
own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the
historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is
discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with
the founder of each different school. And as each one’s special kind of absolute
truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned by his subjective understanding,
his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual
training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths
than that they shall be mutually exclusive one of the other.” —Engels,
Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:20.
“SAY’S LAW”
The simple-minded (and grossly incorrect) claim that capitalist production creates its
own demand (i.e. its own full demand), and consequently that there cannot possibly
be any “gluts” or overproduction. This so-called “law” is
one of the fundamental axioms of bourgeois economics, though it often goes unacknowledged.
[Further material to be added...]
“Say’s earth-shaking discovery [Marx is being ironic here!] that
‘commodities can only be bought with commodities’ simply means that money is itself
the converted form of the commodity. It does not prove by any means that because I
can buy only with commodities, I can buy with my commodity, or that my
purchasing power is related to the quantity of commodities I produce.” —Marx,
TSV, 3:119.
SCHUMPETER, Joseph (1883-1946) [Pronounced: SHUM-PAY-ter]
Important Austrian bourgeois economist of the first half of the 20th century.
His father owned a textile factory, and not surprisingly Schumpeter found great virtues in
the capitalist system. He emphasized the importance of change under capitalism, and is
famous in bourgeois circles for his description of capitalism as “creative destruction”.
(Of course this is old news to us Marxists! In the Communist Manifesto Marx and
Engels say “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments
of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations
of society.” [MECW 6:487.])
At a time when most bourgeois economists
denied that economic cycles should even exist, Schumpeter said there were actually three
different ones:
1) A very short-term inventory cycle (which he called the “Kitchin Cycle”, after another
bourgeois economist, Joseph Kitchin), and which lasted 3 to 4 years;
2) An approximately 10-year cycle, which is the industrial cycle that Marx focused on (but
which Schumpeter—loathe to give any credit to Marx—called “Juglar Cycles”, after a
minor French economist, Clément Juglar, who talked about them long after Marx did). These
cycles were erroneously explained by Schumpeter as being due to changes in investment
patterns; and
3) Schumpeter’s version of Kondratiev’s 45-year long-term
waves, which Schumpeter attributed to waves in invention and innovation.
None of his discussion of economic cycles
had much validity, but by bourgeois standards even to have recognized the existence
of any cycles or waves makes you seem rather smart these days!
One of Schumpeter’s students was
Paul Sweezy, the primary founder of the
Monthly Review school of Marxist political
economy. While Sweezy broke away from Schumpeter and bourgeois economics in many ways,
there is still more than a touch of his ideas that were carried over.
SCIENCE OF REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism)
[Intro material to be added... ]
“Marxism-Leninism is a science, and science means honest, solid
knowledge; there is no room for playing tricks. Let us, then, be honest.” —Mao,
“Reform Our Study” (May 1941), SW 3:22.
SCIENTIFIC LAWS
Human beings have found that nature is not completely random and chaotic, but that there
are certain regularities and patterns to it which can be discovered and often quantified.
A scientific law, or law of nature or society, is a statement of an order or relationship
between phenomena that so far as is known always holds true under the stated or implied
conditions. Thus, for example, the law of gravity is a statement about the mutual attraction
(and the strength of that attraction at various distances) between most of the various
forms of matter.
On rare occasions, mere tendencies or
probabilities are sometimes spoken of as laws, as with Marx’s discussion of what he calls
“the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” (in Part 3 of Volume III of
Capital). But the modern practice is to describe such partial regularities not
as “laws”, but simply as “tendencies”. In the way the term is almost universally used in
science today there are never any exceptions to scientific laws. If exceptions to what was
previously thought to be a law are found, then either the scope of the application
of that law is narrowed to exclude such situations, or else (if that cannot be done) it is
no longer considered to be a law at all.
“I do not agree with the view that the universe is a mystery.... I feel
that this view does not do justice to the scientific revolution that was started almost
four hundred years ago by Galileo and carried on by Newton. They showed that at least
some areas of the universe ... are governed by precise mathematical laws. Over the years
since then, we have extended the work of Galileo and Newton.... We now have mathematical
laws that govern everything we normally experience.” —Stephen Hawking, Black Holes
and Baby Universes and Other Essays. [Of course there are still many mysteries in
all the sciences, but there is nevertheless a lot of validity in Hawking’s comment,
especially with regard to everyday scientific phenomena. To maintain that “everything
is a big mystery” is a way of ignoring or opposing science. —S.H.]
SCIENTIFIC THEORY
Scientific theories are the summation of scientific knowledge; theories form knowledge into
a logical and coherent structure and make a whole body of investigations comprehensible. Thus
the formulation of scientific theories is at the core of science and is its highest goal.
(Of course the goal in the application of science is to change the physical or social
world in one way or another.)
On the other hand there have often been
idealist tendencies in science, particularly in cosmology, “theoretical physics”, and the
social sciences, to divorce the construction of theories from the actual results of careful
investigations of nature and society, and to engage in wild flights of fancy with little or
no evidential foundation. Obviously what is needed instead is a dialectical combination of
practice and theory, and of careful investigation and the formulation and testing of theories
based on what has been learned in those actual investigations.
Scientific education should consist primarily
of two things:
1. Learning the scientific
method for science in general, and the specific scientific methods which are useful within
particular sciences; and
2. Coming to understand and appreciate the most
important scientific theories. That is, science education should be “theory-structured”.
Focusing on the explication of the most
important theories in a science actually makes that science both more comprehensible and
easier to learn. Speaking of his own science, Linus Pauling said in the preface to his 1947
book, General Chemistry, “The progress made ... in the development of theoretical
concepts has been so great ... that the presentation of general chemistry ... can be made in
a more simple, straightforword, and logical way than formerly.”
Revolutionary Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism,
is also a science, and mastering it requires the same approach. One must focus on its central
theories and come to understand and appreciate them. And this requires some considerable study
along with participation in the ongoing revolutionary movement.
See also:
CENTRAL ORGANIZING THEORY
SECT (In politics)
In the non-pejorative sense, a sect is simply “a group adhering to a distinctive
doctrine or leader”. [Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.]
However, the word ‘sect’ also carries with it the connotation of small size, and being
outside of the mainstream. Thus a revolutionary sect is a small group which is outside
the mainstream of the revolutionary movement. All new political parties either start off
as sects, or else form out of other parties or mass movements which themselves started out
as sects. There is nothing necessarily wrong about starting out small and different from
the mainstream; but it is foolish and self-defeating for any political group to
permanently remain just a sect, i.e. a small group unconnected to the masses and the mass
movement.
See also SECTARIAN
(below), and: CULT
“The International was founded in order to replace the
socialist or semi-socialist sects by a real organization of the working class for
struggle. The original Rules and the Inaugural Address show this at a glance. On the
other hand, the International could not have asserted itself if the course of history
had not already smashed sectarianism. The development of socialist sectarianism
and that of the real labor movement always stand in indirect proportion to each
other. So long as the sects are justified (historically), the working class is not
yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As soon as it has attained this
maturity all sects are essentially reactionary....
“And the history of the
International was a continual struggle of the General Council against the
sects and attempts by amateurs to assert themselves within the International itself
against the real movement of the working class.” —Marx, Letter to Adolphe Hubert,
Aug. 10, 1871, MECW 44:252.
SECURITIZATION
[In contemporary financial capitalism:] The bundling together of numerous individual
mortgages, or outstanding credit card debts, or auto loans, or other forms of debt
into packages, against which bonds are sold to investors. This allows the banks or
other financial companies which issued the loans to no longer care whether the loans
are ever paid off, and therefore to escape the risk ordinarily involved in making such
loans. Those foolish enough to buy the bonds, however, thereby take on risks which they
have no real way of even properly evaluating. In short, securitization is a method for
the banks and big financial corporations to cheat investors.
See also:
COLLATERIALIZED DEBT OBLIGATIONS (CDOs)
“SEEK TRUTH FROM FACTS”
A phrase from Mao’s writings, which was later given a perverted, revisionist
interpretation by Deng Xiaoping. [More to be
added... ]
“Secondly, there is the Marxist-Leninist attitude.
“With this attitude, a person
applies the theory and method of Marxism-Leninism to the systematic and thorough
investigation and study of the environment. He does not work by enthusiasm alone...
To take such an attitude is to seek truth from facts. ‘Facts’ are all the things
that exist objectively, ‘truth’ means their internal relations, that is, the laws
governing them, and ‘to seek’ means to study. We should proceed from the actual
conditions inside and outside the country, the province, county or district, and
derive from them, as our guide to action, laws which are inherent in them and not
imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring
around us. And in other to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination, not
on momentary entusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively;
we must appropriate the material in detail and, guided by the general principles
of Marxism-Leninism, draw correct conclusions from it. Such conclusions are not
mere lists of phenomena in A, B, C, D order or writings full of platitudes, but
are scientific conclusions. Such an attitude is one of seeking truth from facts
not of currying favor by claptrap. It is the manifestation of Party spirit, the
Marxist-Leninist style of uniting theory and practice. It is the attitude every
Communist Party member should have at the very least.” —Mao, “Reform Our Study”
(May 1941), SW3:22-23.
SENSE DATA
The sensory qualities of things (colors, shapes, smells, etc.) which we supposedly
experience directly, without any rational interpretation, and without any consideration
of the physical objects which may be causing them. Empiricists
usually make “sense data” the foundation of their theory of knowledge, but doing so tends
to beg many questions.
See also:
QUALIA
SERFS — Emancipation of in Russia in 1861
“Peasant Reform—the emancipation of the serfs carried out by
the tsarist government in 1861. The Reform was made necessary by the entire course of
Russia’s economic development and by the growth of the mass movement among the peasantry
against feudal exploitation. The Peasant Reform was a bourgeois reform carried out by
serf-owners. Its bourgeois essence was the more obvious ‘the less the amount of
land cut off from the peasants’ holdings, the more fully peasant lands were
separated from the landed estates, the lower the tribute paid to the feudal
landowners by the peasant (i.e., the lower the “redemption” payments)’ [Lenin, LCW
17:121] The Peasant Reform marked a step in Russia’s transformation into a bourgeois
monarchy. In all, 22,500,000 serfs, formerly belonging to landlords, were ‘emancipated’.
Landed proprietorship, however, remained. The peasants’ lands were declared the
property of the landlords. The peasant could only get an allotment of land of the size
established by law (and even then only with the landlord’s consent), and he had to
redeem it, that is, pay for it.
“The Peasant Reform merely
undermined but did not abolish the old corvée
system of farming. The landlords secured possession of the best parts of the peasants’
allotments (the ‘cut-off lands’—woods, meadows, watering places, grazing lands, and
so on), without which the peasants could not engage in independent farming. Until the
redemption arrangements were completed the peasants were considered ‘temporarily
bound’ and either rendered corvée service to the landlord or paid quit-rent.
The redemption of their own allotments was a direct plunder of the peasants by the
tsarist government and the landowners. The peasants were compelled to pay hundreds of
millions of rubles for their land and this led to the ruin of the farms and to mass
impoverishment.
“The Russian revolutionary
democrats, headed by Nikolai Cheryshevsky, criticized the Peasant Reform for its
feudal character. Lenin called the Peasant Reform of 1861 the first act of mass violence
against the peasantry in the interests of the nascent capitalism in agriculture—the
landowners were ‘clearing the land’ for capitalism.” —Note 56, Lenin SW I (1967).
SERVE THE PEOPLE
[To be added... ]
See also:
PATERNALISM
“The motive of serving the masses is inseparably linked with the
effect of winning their approval; the two must be united. The motive of serving the
individual or a small clique is not good, nor is it good to have the motive of
serving the masses without the effect of winning their approval and benefiting
them.” —Mao, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), SW 3:88.
SERVICE (Political Economy)
“A service is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value, be it of
a commodity, or be it of labor.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. VII, sect. 2:
(International, p. 192; Penguin, pp. 299-300.)
“In general, we may say that service is merely an expression
for the particular use-value of labor where the latter is useful not as an article,
but as an activity.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I: (Penguin, appendix, p. 1047. [Not
included in the International edition])
“Where the direct exchange of money for labor takes place without
the latter producing capital, where it is therefore not productive labor, it
is bought as service, which in general is nothing but a term for the particular
use-value which the labor provides, like any other commodity; it is however a specific
term for the particular use-value of labor in so far as it does not render service in
the form of a thing, but in the form of an activity, which however in no
way distinguishes it for example from a machine, for instance a clock.” —Marx, TSV
1:403-4.
SEXISM
The view that one sex is superior to, or should be given social primacy over, the other.
Since during all human history (at least of class society) men have dominated and oppressed
women, in practice sexism almost always means views which support this domination
and oppression of women. Sexists believe that there are “natural” intellectual and
psychological differences between men and women which supposedly justify this domination
and oppression, and special privileges for men. Revolutionary Marxism is of course totally
opposed to any form of sexism. And we believe that whatever significant differences there
are in average “intelligence” or psychology between men and women in the present society
are due virtually entirely to the differences in the ways men and women are brought up and
educated (or mis-educated).
See also:
WOMEN—Oppression Of
SEZ
See: SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE
SHADOW BANKING SYSTEM
The part of the capitalist financial industry that performs the functions of banks without
formally calling themselves banks, especially facilitating various types of speculation,
and often without being regulated as banks by the government, including investment banking,
hedge funds, exotic securities operations by insurance companies, and the like. Moreover,
even many large banks which do call themselves banks and have their traditional
banking operations regulated, also now participate in these newer, more risky, and
unregulated (or less regulated) types of financial operations beyond the bounderies of
what used to be considered conservative mainstream banking. Much of this involves complex
and semi-mysterious new derivatives such as
CDOs and credit default swaps, and other
financial shenanigans. All of this goes to make up the so-called “shadow banking system”
of contemporary finance capitalism.
“Our current system of financial regulation dates back to a time
when everything that functioned as a bank looked like a bank. As long as you
regulated big marble buildings with rows of tellers, you pretty much had things
nailed down.
“But today you don’t have to
look like a bank to be a bank. As Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, put it in
a widely cited speech last summer, banking is anything that involves financing
‘long-term risky and relatively illiquid assets’ with ‘very short-term liabilities.’
Cases in point: Bear Stearns and Lehman, both of which financed large investments
in risky securities primarily with short-term borrowing.
“And as Mr. Geithner pointed
out, by 2007 more than half of America’s banking, in this sense, was being handled
by a ‘parallel financial system’—others call it ‘shadow banking’—of largely
unregulated institutions. These non-bank banks, he ruefully noted, were ‘vulnerable
to a classic type of run, but without the protections such as deposit insurance that
the banking system has in place to reduce such risks.’
“When Lehman fell, we learned
just how vulnerable shadow banking was: a global run on the system brought the world
economy to its knees.” —Paul Krugman, “Out of the Shadows”, Op-Ed column in the
New York Times, June 19, 2009.
[While it would indeed be
more rational of the bourgeoisie to thoroughly regulate investment banking and other
types of “shadow banking”, the absence of this regulation was not the reason
for the financial crisis which struck so hard in 2008, nor will such regulations
prevent this sort of crisis in the future, as Geithner, Krugman, and bourgeois
economists in general imagine. They can’t understand or admit that such crises are
inherent developments of the capitalist mode of production. —S.H.]
SHAW, George Bernard (1856-1950)
A famous Irish playwright and author, who was strongly influenced by Marxism and a supporter
of the socialist Soviet Union, but who was also much influenced by revisionism. He was a
prominent member of the Fabian Society. It was said of
him that he was a good man who had unfortunately fallen among Fabians!
[Referring to his reading of Marx’s Capital in 1883:] “That
was the turning point in my career. Marx was a revelation... He opened my eyes to the
facts of history and civilization, gave me an entirely fresh conception of the
universe, provided me with a purpose and a mission in life.... [Das Kapital]
achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable—that of changing the minds of
people who read it.” —George Bernard Shaw, quote in Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das
Kapital (2006), p. 90.
SHORT SALE (in Capitalist Housing Markets)
The sale of a house, or other piece of real estate, for less than the nominal “owner”
still owes on his or her mortgage. For example, a family might still owe $250,000 to the
bank when they are forced by capitalist economic circumstances (such as losing their jobs)
to sell their house for only $220,000. Of course the bank will receive that money, not the
nominal seller. The bank normally must approve such a sale, since it will probably take a
loss on its loan (in this case $30,000). Banks are sometimes willing to do this in order to
at least get back part of their mortgage loan.
Short sales are common after the
collapse of a major housing bubble, such as in the U.S.
at the present time. (As of September 2009, there were about 1,000 short sales per month in
the San Francisco Bay Area, or about 14% of the houses being sold.)
The banks have only themselves to blame for this predicament since they were foisting off
expensive mortgages (including sub-prime mortgages)
on people who could not possibly continue to meet their mortgage payments. Meanwhile,
millions of people are losing their homes. The capitalist system simply cannot guarantee
even such a basic thing as a home for the masses of people.
SHORT SELLING (in Capitalist Stock or Commodities Markets)
Selling a financial asset such as a share of stock, or some uniform commodity, which the
seller does not actually own, but which he or she has only borrowed for the purpose.
Speculators do this when they expect the price to decline, and therefore expect to be able
to buy back the item after that price decline. They will then pocket the difference in
the selling and buying prices, after paying a fee to the broker who loaned them the stock
or commodity. If the price of the borrowed asset rises and does not fall, the
speculator will have to buy it back at a higher price, and will therefore suffer a loss.
In brief, selling short is one of a great many methods of speculative gambling that
financial capitalists have come up with.
So-called “naked short selling” is when
the speculator sells the asset before he even borrows it, on the assumption that
he will be able to borrow it before he has to actually deliver it. In the aftermath of
the financial crisis which developed in the fall of 2008 the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission prohibited (first temporarily and then permanently) naked short selling.
SISMONDI, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de (1773-1842)
Swiss economist and historian. Considered by some to be sort of an early socialist.
Marxist attitudes towards Sismondi have varied tremendously. Lenin looked down upon him
as a vulgarizer of Ricardo. But Marx himself (in volume 3 of
TSV which was not available to Lenin at the time he made his judgments) had much more
sympathy toward Sismondi and viewed him as understanding some very fundamental points about
capitalism that Ricardo could not grasp or accept:
“Sismondi is profoundly conscious
of the contradictions in capitalist production; he is aware that, on the one hand,
its forms—its production relations—stimulate unrestrained development of the
productive forces and of wealth; and that, on the other hand, these relations are
conditional, that their contradictions of use-value and exchange-value, commodity
and money, purchase and sale, production and consumption, capital and wage-labor,
etc., assume ever greater dimensions as productive power develops. He is particularly
aware of the fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, unrestricted development
of the productive forces and increase of wealth which, at the same time, consists
of commodities and must be turned into cash; on the other hand, the system is based
on the fact that the mass of producers is restricted to the necessaries. Hence,
according to Sismondi, crises are not accidental, as Ricardo maintains, but essential
outbreaks—occuring on a large scale and at definite periods—of the immanent
contradictions.” —Marx, TSV, 3:56.
Marx does go on to say that Sismondi “wavers constantly” on many issues, and that his
ideas are anything but well-worked out. “He [Sismondi] forcefully criticizes the
contradictions of bourgeois production but does not understand them, and
consequently does not understand the process whereby they can be resolved.” [Ibid.]
Nevertheless, Marx later says that “Sismondi was epoch-making in political economy
because he had an inkling of this contradiction” (the profound difference between
Labor and Capital in the capitalist production
process), that Ricardo could not understand. [TSV, 3:259.]
SIV
See: STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE
SLAM [Student Liberation Action Movement]
This was a multiracial radical student organization based in colleges in New York City from
1996 to 2004, especially Hunter College in Manhattan.
In early 1995 the City University of
New York (CUNY) announced a major tuition increase and threatened to end (and later did end)
the policy of open admissions, which had been won through earlier student stuggles in 1969.
In response the students, under the leadership of an ad hoc coalition, organized a protest
of 20,000 people which surrounded City Hall. This demonstration was attacked by the police,
but the coalition continued and in 1996 transformed itself into the Student Liberation Action
Movement. The group spread to CUNY colleges in all parts of New York City, and worked to
construct a “left culture” among students. But over time the movement gradually lost force,
and SLAM was disbanded in 2004. It did, however, leave a powerful imprint upon the many
college students involved.
See also:
http://SLAMherstory.wordpress.com
for an oral history project by many of the women students involved in SLAM.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The sum total of all the acquired ideas, opinions, views, concepts, knowledge,
theories, dispositions, feelings, moods, abilities, skills, arts, practices, habits,
customs and traditions that exist among the individuals in a society and which reflect
the social being of its members (the material conditions of their lives).
SOCIAL CONTRACT
An idealist theory in which society, law and morality are the result of either a
conscious or implicit “contract” concluded among the people, or between the people and
the state. The idea is that humans have agreed to give up some of their personal freedoms
in exchange for a stable and secure political existence. This doctrine is historically
incorrect, in that (among other reasons) it supposes that human society existed in a
state of complete anarchy and bestiality (or alternately idyllic freedom according to
Rousseau) until the “contract” was concluded. It is a crude, early attempt to understand
how slave, feudal and bourgeois society could have developed. The view arose in antiquity
but received its greatest development with the rising bourgeoisie in
Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
1. A form of the liberal capitalist welfare state mascarading as genuine socialism.
2. Political parties and movements which have this reformist accomodation with capitalism
as their highest goal.
See also:
COMMUNISM—Aims Of
“In the past, social democracy called for using the state to offset,
correct, regulate, and otherwise manage the workings of capitalism. It sought a
capitalism with a human face: one with fewer inequalities of wealth, income, power,
and access to culture. The state was to manage capital investment, regulate markets,
and shape the distribution of income and wealth: all in the interest of a society
with a deeper and more widely shared sense of community. Economic growth and efficiency,
attributed to capitalism, were to be supported while state policy would prevent or
counteract the socially undesirable consequences of private capitalist production and
commodity markets. State interventionist capitalism was the solution; private
capitalism free if state controls and interventions was the problem.
“The social democratic solution
thus constrained what private capitalists could do in their profit-driven competition
with one another and their profit-driven relations with employees and customers. But
it left them in the position of receiving and dispensing enterprise profits. Social
democracy thus left private capitalists with the incentive to weaken, deflect, or
remove those constraints. It also provided capitalists with the means—their retained
profits—to do so. In a sense, this was the historic capitalist-socialist compromise
of the 19th and 20th centuries. Capitalists could keep their positions as receivers
and dispensers of enterprise profits, but the conditions of those positions would be
constrained by social(ist) welfare state policies.
“Whatever the benefits, this
historic compromise set the stage for new struggles. Welfare states became contested
terrains: social democrats sought to strengthen and expand them, while capitalists
sought to reduce, weaken, or eliminate them. From gains, the trend moved in the
direction that favored capitalists. The trend turned into a rout in the 1970s and has
remained so ever since. The capitalists used their profits to improve their business
prospects and performance by, among other strategies, undoing welfare statism. By
lobbying, moving production outside national borders, immigration, common markets,
media campaigns, and countless other mechanisms, the capitalists succeeded in bringing
social democracy to its current sorry state.
“Even where trade unions and
socialist and communist parties were strong, they proved no match for the profits
capitalists could use against them.” —Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan
(2010), pp. 36-37. This is an outline of both the theory of social democracy
and of how history has fully demonstrated the flaw in that theory. Social democracy
has clearly been proven to be a major mistake, and a complete dead-end, for the
working class. Of course this inevitable result was already obvious to revolutionary
Marxists such as Marx, Engels and Lenin even at the very start of this whole
disastrous social democratic experiment!
SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION (Britain)
A socialist organization in Britain in the late 19th century which later merged
with other forces and eventually developed into the Communist Party of Great Britain.
“The Social-Democratic Federation was founded in 1884. Among
the leaders there were reformists (Hyndman & Co.),
anarchists and revolutionary Social-Democrats, supporters of Marxism (Harry Quelch,
Tom Mann, Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx and others); the last-named group constituted
the Left wing of the socialist movement in Britain. Engels criticized the Social-Democratic
Federation sharply for dogmatism and sectarianism and for its lack of contact with the
mass working-class movement in Britain and ignoring of the specific features of that
movement. In 1907 the Social-Democratic Federation was renamed the Social-Democratic
Party which in 1911, together with Left elements from the
Independent Labour Party, founded the
British Socialist Party; in 1920 most of the members of that party helped found the
Communist Party of Great Britain.” —Footnote 47, Lenin: SW I (1967).
SOCIAL FASCIST
A person, party, movement or ideology, which is socialist or communist in name, but
which in actuality operates in a fascist manner towards
the masses. Most revisionist political parties in power are
social fascists to one degree or another. For example, during the revisionist period of rule
in the Soviet Union (i.e., its last 35 years or so), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
was a social-fascist political party. In India the so-called Communist Party of India
(Marxist) [or CPM] is a social-fascist party, as its rule and oppression of the masses in
the state of West Bengal has amply demonstrated. (See:
HERMAD)
SOCIALISM (Socialist Society)
An intermediate and transitional form of society between
capitalism and communism,
characterized in its economic aspect by the principle “From each according to his ability,
to each according to his work,” and characterized in its political aspect by the genuine
control and rule of society by the revolutionary proletariat and its party or parties.
Socialism is still a form of class society,
where class struggle still exists, and bourgeois and proletarian ideology and tendencies
still do battle. The ruling class in a genuine socialist society is the proletariat. But
many countries call (or have called) themselves socialist even though the proletariat
either never had power, or else no longer has power, and where society is not (or is no
longer) advancing towards communism (e.g., China after Mao’s death in 1976).
SOCIALISM — Contradictions Within
[Intro to be added...]
“Any kind of world, and of course class society in particular,
teems with contradictions. Some say that there are contradictions to be ‘found’
in socialist society, but I think this is a wrong way of putting it. The point is
not that there are contradictions to be found, but that it teems with contradictions.
There is no place where contradictions do not exist...” —Mao, “A Dialectical
Approach to Inner-Party Unity” (Nov. 18, 1957), SW5:516.
SOCIALIST-REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
“[A] petty-bourgeois party in Russia, which came into being at the
end of 1901 and beginning of 1902 as a result of a merger of various
Narodnik groups and circles. The S.R.s [Pronounced
ess-airs in Russian. —S.H.] saw no class distinctions between the proletarian and
the petty proprietor, played down the class differentiation and antagonisms within the
peasantry, and refused to recognize the proletariat’s leading role in the revolution.
Their views were an eclectic mixture of the ideas of Narodism and revisionism. In
Lenin’s words, they tried to mend ‘the rents in the Narodnik ideas with bits of
fashionable opportunist “criticism” of Marxism.’ [LCW 9:310]
“The Socialist-Revolutionaries
agrarian programme envisaged the abolition of private ownership of the land, which
was to be transferred to the village commune on the basis of the ‘labor principle’
and ‘equalized land tenure’, and also the development of co-operatives. This
programme, which the S.R.s called ‘socialization of the land’, had nothing socialist
about it. In his analysis of this programme, Lenin showed that the preservation of
commodity production and private farming on communal land would not do away with the
domination of capital or free the toiling peasantry from exploitation and
impoverishment. Neither could the co-operatives be a remedy for the small farmers
under capitalism, as they served only to enrich the rural bourgeoisie. At the same
time, as Lenin pointed out, the demand for equalized land tenure, though not
socialistic, was of a progressive, revolutionary-democratic character, inasmuch as
it was directed against reactionary landlordism.
“The Bolshevik Party exposed
the attempts of the S.R.s to pass themselves off as socialists. It waged a stubborn
fight against them for influence over the peasantry, and revealed the damage their
tactic of individual terrorism was causing the working-class movement. At the same
time, the Bolsheviks, on definite terms, entered into temporary agreements with the
Socialist-Revolutionaries to combat tsarism.
“The Socialist-Revolutionary
Party’s political and ideological instability and organizational incohesion, as well
as its constant vacillation between the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
were due to the absence of class homogeneity among the peasantry. During the first
Russian revolution [1905-07], the Right wing of the S.R.s broke away from the party
and formed the legal Labor Popular Socialist Party, whose views were close to those
of the Constitutional-Democrats (Cadets), while the Left wing split away and formed
a semi-anarchist league of ‘Maximalists’. During the period of the
Stolypin reaction, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party suffered
a complete break-down ideologically and organizationally. During the First World War
most of its members took a social-chauvinist stand.
“After the February
bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, together
with the Mensheviks and Cadets, were the mainstay of the counter-revolutionary
Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie and landlords. The leaders of the S.R.
Party—Kerensky, Avksentyev and Chernov—were members of this Cabinet. The S.R. Party
refused to support the peasants’ demand for the abolition of landlordism, and stood
for the preservation of landlord ownership. The S.R. members of the Provisional
Government authorized punitive action against peasants who had seized landed
estates.
“At the end of November 1917
the Left wing of the S.R. Party formed an independent party of Left
Socialist-Revolutionaries, who, in an endeavor to preserve their influence among the
peasant masses, formally recognized Soviet rule and entered into an agreement with
the Bolsheviks. Shortly [after], however, they began a struggle against the Soviets.
“During the years of foreign
intervention and the Civil War the S.R.s carried on counter-revolutionary subversive
activities. They actively supported the interventionists and whiteguards, took part
in counter-revolutionary plots, and organized terroristic acts against leaders of the
Soviet state and the Communist Party. [Including an attempt to assassinate Lenin
which did succeed in severely wounding him. —S.H.] After the Civil War, the S.R.s
continued their anti-Soviet activities within the country and in the camp of the
White émigrés.” —Footnote 14, LCW 20:566-567.
SOVIETS (Councils)
The word ‘soviet’ means “council” in Russian. During the 1905 Revolution councils,
or Soviets, were first formed in a major way by the workers, peasants and soldiers
to represent their revolutionary interests. After the defeat of the 1905 Revolution these
Soviets mostly ceased functioning. But with the overthrow of the Tsar in the
February Revolution, they sprang suddenly back
into existence as an even greater force. During the course of 1917 they settled down into
being the primary representatives of the workers in their day-to-day struggles against the
capitalists, of the peasants against the landlords, of the ordinary soldiers against the
officer corps, and of all the masses against the flaky bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin understood the nature of the situation, that despite the current practice of the
Soviets as reformist or union-type organizations, they in effect formed a
dual power along with the formal Russian government. He
further recognized that because of this, and because the workers, peasants and soldiers
viewed the Soviets as their own organizations which truly did represent their interests
(unlike the government), that an insurrection could be led with a central slogan being “All
power to the Soviets!” And, of course, Lenin proved to be correct in his assessment.
The strategy of working toward the formation
of “soviets” or councils of workers in other countries as a step toward revolution has so
far not been successful, though it was widely attempted—especially in the first decades
after the Bolshevik Revolution. However, in the
advanced capitalist world no other strategy has worked so far either, and it is still quite
possible that something like workers’ councils will once again prove quite useful in
promoting revolution.
SPARTACUS LEAGUE (Spartacists) [Germany, circa World War I]
Organization of German Left Social-Democrats, formed during World War I.
“The Spartacus League was headed by Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg,
Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin and others. It carried on revolutionary propaganda against
the imperialist war and exposed the aggressive policy of German imperialism and the
treachery of the social-democratic leaders. The Spartacists took up an erroneous
position, however, in regard to a number of important questions of theory and policy:
they underestimated the leading role of the proletarian party in the working-class
struggle, they were afraid of a split with the opportunists, they did not understand
the need for an alliance of the working class and the peasantry and the importance of
the national-liberation movement, they opposed the principle of the self-determination
of nations, including the right to secede and form independent states. In April 1917,
the Spartacists joined the centrist Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany in
which they retained their organizational independence. After the revolution of 1918
in Germany, the Spartacists broke with the Independents and in December of that year
founded the Communist Party of Germany.” —Note 61, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).
SPECIAL PURPOSE VEHICLE (SPV) [Contemporary Capitalist Finance]
A relatively recent variety of a special purpose entity (see entry above). Essentially
SPVs are dummy corporations, usually set up by an investment bank (or major financial
corporation, government sponsored enterprise, etc.), for the purpose
of pretending that some of their financial shenanigans are being done by another company and
to try to safeguard the mother company if something should go wrong in the meanwhile. The
specific task most commonly assigned to these SPVs is to take numerous individual mortgages
or other loans issued by the mother corporation, package them into batches or pools, and then
issue bonds or mortgage-backed securities which are supposedly “secured” by these pools. SPVs
thus played an important role in all the securitization
activity in the recent housing securities bubble that has now (2007-2010) partially
popped.
See also:
STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE (SIV),
CONDUIT
SPINOZA, Baruch [or Benedict] (1632-1677)
Dutch semi-materialist philosopher. Spinoza held that morality is based in human
nature. He defined ‘good’ in various ways, as that which benefits the individual, as
that which brings pleasure, and so forth. Although his ethical theory was not completely
consistent and coherent, and certainly included idealistic elements, it represented a
tremendous advance at the time, and fostered naturalistic and materialistic thinking
in ethics and in philosophy in general.
SPLIT-CYCLE THEORY
The theory that in the imperialist era the capitalist industrial
cycle has “split in two”, i.e., into two separate (though connected) cycles with differing
periods. The short-term cycle, which like the industrial cycle in the pre-monopoly era still
usually lasts from 5 to 10 years, leads to recessions, but most
of these tend to be mild and rather easily dealt with through government actions (such as by
lowering the prevailing bank interest rates, lowering taxes, increasing
Keynesian deficit financing for government expenditures,
and the like). The long-term cycle, which is of much more irregular duration, comes to a head
when government measures can no longer “short-circuit” the developing economic contradictions
which have led to a recession, and therefore which continues to develop into an all out
depression. These depressions can only be ended through the
massive destruction of the excess capital that has built up since the previous depression.
For an elaboration of this theory see “Chapter
5: The Industrial Cycle Has Split In Two!” of my work in progress, An Introduction to
Capitalist Economic Crises at:
http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/Crises05.htm . —S.H.
SPONTANEOUS WORKING CLASS IMPULSES
[Intro to be added... ]
“Social-Democracy [Communism] has established a name for itself, has
created a trend and has built up cadres of Social-Democratic workers. And now that the
heroic proletariat has proved by deeds its readiness to fight, and its ability to fight
consistently and in a body for clearly-understood aims, to fight in a purely
Social-Democratic spirit, it would be simply ridiculous to doubt that the workers who
belong to our Party, or who will join it tomorrow at the invitation of the Central
Committee, will be Social-Democrats in ninety-nine cases out of hundred. The working
class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of
work put in by Social-Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into
consciousness.” —Lenin, “The Reorganization of the Party” (Nov. 1905), LCW 10:32.
STANDING TOGETHER TO ORGANIZE A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (STORM)
A small multinational “revolutionary cadre organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area”,
which existed from September 1994 to December 2002. It was largely composed of students and
young people. Its ideology is sometimes described as “Third World Marxism”.
STORM grew out of a Marxist-leaning
organization in the Bay Area called Roots Against War (RAW), which emerged in the early 1990s
and organized protests around the Gulf War and the Rodney King verdict. STORM originally was
an eclectic mixture of anarchists, communists and revolutionary nationalists, but after some
internal struggle the anarchists left and the organization became more Marxist in tone. Many
members especially respected Mao Zedong and considered him their spiritual leader.
Unlike RAW, STORM had some white members,
though its membership was always more than 75% people of color. Its membership was also more
than 60% women. Reflecting the problems and tensions of American society, the racial, ethnic
and gender composition of STORM, and its leadership committees, was viewed as critically
important:
“Throughout its history, STORM was committed to maintaining itself as
a majority women, majority people of color organization. This commitment also extended
to the areas of mass work in which STORM members collectively worked. Growing out of
theoretical frameworks inherited from revolutionary, third wave and Black feminist
members of STORM developed the ‘Sisters at the Center’ slogan early on in their
organization’s history. Application of this slogan meant a conscious emphasis to keep
women of color and working class women at the center of the organization’s analysis,
program and practice.” —From the Wikipedia entry on STORM.
Interestingly, most of STORM’s membership had never previously been in any other
revolutionary organization. STORM officially dissolved in December 2002. Perhaps part of
the reason for its disbandment can be seen in the Van Jones Affair. After STORM disbanded,
one of its founders and leaders, Anthony “Van” Jones, moved into the inner circles of the
Democratic Party, and was appointed by President Obama as a “special advisor” with respect
to “Green jobs”. In September 2009 he resigned from this position after some right-wing
red-baiting about his past associations. It has been claimed that nearly all the
members of STORM in its last period were also staff members of various social non-profit
organizations. This may have even developed in the direction of a sort of alternative
social-program bureaucracy, which seems to have led to some resentment on the part of those
outside of STORM. It is very doubtful if this sort of thing can be a good social base for
constructing a revolutionary organization.
See also the 97-page pamphlet summarizing the
history, development and disbanding of the group, “Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation
& Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM)”
(Spring 2004), online at:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10717234/Reclaiming-Revolution-history-summation-and-lessons-from-the-work-of-STORM
STATE, The
[In Marxist usage:] The primary instrument of political power in class society, consisting
of organs of administration (government departments), and of force (army and police). There
are also usually auxillary organs (legislatures or parliaments, and courts of law) which
exist both to resolve conflicts within the ruling class and to lend the appearance of
fairness and “complete democracy” to the state. The state is thus a mechanism for class
rule, the embodiment of the dictatorship of a particular class, no matter how camouflaged
it may be.
STATE, The Bourgeois
The bourgeois State is the organ of power and administration which exercises the dictatorship
of the bourgeoisie (or capitalist class) over all other classes, and especially over the
proletariat (working class).
“The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing
the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” —Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the
Communist Party (1848), Ch. I: MECW 6:486.
STATE CAPITALISM
1. The form of capitalism in which the capitalists own the
means of production (factories, machinery, etc.) collectively and as a class, rather
than individually or in small associations (partnerships, corporations, etc.). The Soviet
Union was the prime example after the restoration of capitalism there in the mid 1950s and
until its collapse in late 1991. It seems fair to conclude these days that state capitalism
is unstable and tends to decay back into more traditional forms of monopoly capitalism.
2. [As used by various other left theorists:] Western-style monopoly capitalism, or specific
periods of it during which the state plays a more prominent role than other periods. The
bourgeois state does play a much increased role in the control and direction of capitalism in
the imperialist or monopoly capitalist era (as compared to earlier capitalism); and since the
1930s the role of the state has been further increased in monopoly capitalism. But this state
role is still qualitatively much less than it was in the Soviet Union in the revisionist era
and it is incorrect and confusing to call any period of Western-style monopoly capitalism by
the name “state capitalism” or “state monopoly capitalism”.
STEVENSON, Charles Leslie (1908-1979)
An American bourgeois analytical philosopher in the logical
positivist tradition, who specialized in ethics and aesthetics, and is best known for
his erroneous theory of emotivism in ethics. He studied with
the bourgeois philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and
G.E. Moore in England.
In articles such as “The Emotive Meaning of
Ethical Terms” (1937) and in his book Ethics and Language (1944), Stevenson put forth
the positivist notion that moral statements are “meaningless” (and “unscientific”) except for
their emotive content. This is one variety of non-cognitivism
in ethics. Thus for him, “Killing is bad” would be equivalent to something like: “Killing...
UGH!”.
No doubt many statements in morals do carry
emotive (or emotional) connotations, but they are also factually meaningful and either true
or false (though just which often depends on the precise situation). Thus killing is
normally very wrong because it goes against the collective interests of the people, and
therefore the statement “Killing is wrong” is indeed true in most situations. This is a simple
example of how the scientific investigation of the situation can in fact determine what is
right or wrong, despite what Stevenson thought.
Stevenson’s theory is very similar to, and
is often viewed as merely an elaboration of the ethical theories of A.J. Ayer and other
positivists. They developed such theories because they could not grasp the real basis for
morality, namely people’s collective interests (and in class society, their class
interests).
See also:
CLASS INTEREST THEORY OF ETHICS
STRUCTURALISM
[In linguistics:] A school, or approach, to linguistics which focuses on the structures
or systems of elements in languages. One important success of this approach was in phonemics,
where each separate sound in a language (or phoneme) is identified through its
contrasting interrelationships with the other phonemes. In the broadest sense, all areas
and schools of linguistics are “structural” to some degree. However, there is also a more
specific sense of linguistic structuralism where the focus is on mere surface structures,
and the classification and description of features of utterances. This is often derided as
being woefully insufficient by those, such as Noam Chomsky, who seek to uncover the “deep
structures” which may underlie the grammar of all languages.
[In the other social sciences:] An extension
of the focus in linguistics on structures and their interrelationships, to the elements of
society in general. This was an especially strong movement in France in the 1960s, with the
most prominent individual being the bourgeois anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). A prominent assumption of structuralism is that the
phenomena of human existence are not intelligible except through their interrelationships and
interactions. There is obviously some considerable truth to this, but it becomes highly
questionable when made into an absolute, with no other principles of how to investigate and
comprehend society being accepted. Structuralism, in other words tends to be skewed and
unidimensional in its approach.
On the other hand, since the interrelationships
and interactions of the many sorts of social elements (such as kinship relationships, ideologies,
class relationships, social labor, educational mechanisms, etc.) tend to be highly complex and
go off in many directions, there is a strong tendency among the structuralists to dabble in many
other spheres of investigation where their training and knowledge is quite minimal. The fact
that a person is a trained and experienced anthropologist, for example, does not automatically
make him or her competent to discuss psychology, mythology and religion, philosophy, political
economy and so forth. This tendency in structuralism towards unjustified expansion in the
scope of the discussion often seems to lead it into a semi-coherent mishmash.
There have been attempts (largely
unsuccessful) to extend the structuralist approach to other spheres as well, including
literary theory and criticism, psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory (by
Althusser, for example), and even architecture!
STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE (SIV) [Contemporary Capitalist Finance]
A special type of “conduit” (dummy corporation set up by financial
institutions), which generally uses borrowed money from independent companies to purchase
mortgages and other loans (often of highly dubious quality) from its mother company, packages
them into pools, and then “securitizes” them (i.e., issues
mortgage or loan backed bonds or securities supposedly backed up by these pools), which it sells
to investors. Furthermore, often there are different tranches or slices of these securities
some of which are claimed to be much “safer” than the lower rated slices. Through this convoluted
means, and with the connivance of rating agencies, the investment bank or financial corporation is
fraudulently able to sell securities based on highly dubious loans (including
sub-prime mortgages) as if they were very safe investments.
STRUGGLE — CRITICISM — TRANSFORMATION
A policy stage during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
promoted by Mao and his followers, starting in 1968. As explained by Mao:
“Struggle-criticism-transformation in a factory, on the whole, goes
through the following stages: establishing a three-in-one revolutionary committee;
carrying out mass criticism and repudiation; purifying the class ranks; consolidating
the Party organization; and simplifying the administrative structure, changing irrational
rules and regulations and sending office workers to the workshops.” —Mao, quoted in
“Unprecedentedly
Excellent Situation in China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”, Peking
Review, #44, Nov. 1, 1968, p. 12.
SUBLATION
In a dialectical process, the negation or elimination of an element or aspect (of a dialectical
contradiction) which is however preserved in a transformed or partial way in the resulting
synthesis. In other words, a simultaneous cancelling and preservation of something. This term
was frequently used by Hegel (as in his idealist philosophy about the
historical movement of the “absolute idea”), and is occasionally used by Marxists speaking in
Hegelian language (especially academics!).
In a multi-stage process (involving a series
of sub-contradictions) each of the intermediate stages is sublated by a later or superior
stage, which accounts for both the change in and the continuity of the process as a whole.
One concrete example, in historical materialism, is the development of the exploitation
contradiction in human history. The first stage in the overall development of this
contradiction was slavery, which involved the sub-contradiction between slaves and slaveowners
and the exploitation of the slaves by the slaveowners. This was eventually transformed (or
“sublated”) into the stage of feudalism, which was characterized by the new sub-contradiction
between serfs (or peasants) and feudal landlords, but with still the exploitation of the former
by the latter. Feudalism in turn was later transformed or sublated into capitalism, where another
new sub-contradiction arose, this time between the workers and the capitalists, but still
with the same exploitation of one social class by another class. Note that the term “sublation”
is by no means necessary in describing this overall process; in fact, if the goal is to clearly
explain (rather than to intimidate with esoteric language), the ordinary word “transformation”
seems far preferable here! Note also that the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of
socialism (and then communism) will not involve the further sublation (or transformation) of the
overall exploitation contradiction, but rather its complete abolition. Society as a whole will be
much more profoundly transformed, but economic exploitation itself will be eliminated and
not just transformed.
SUBPRIME MORTGAGE
A mortgage issued to someone with a fairly poor credit rating.
Why would a bank or other financial
institution make such a loan which stands a high likelihood of default? First of all, they
usually charge a higher interest rate and a larger up-front fee. However, one of the main
reasons that sub-prime mortgages became so common in the first decade of the 21st
century is that the issuers of the mortgage (the banks, etc.) found ways to
“securitize” it, i.e. to repackage the mortgage with others and
sell bonds based on them to other investors in a form where their stupidity was not obvious.
(See Collateralized Debt Obligation.) Thus the bank issuing the mortgage
would not suffer even if the mortgage did go into default; that would only harm the
suckers who bought the “sliced-and-diced” securities. Ironically, many of the issuers of CDOs
seem to have got caught up in the marketing hype they generated to sell these wonderful new
investments, forgot just what they were up to, and often kept or invested in these securitized
bad mortgages themselves! Thus they also got caught in this trap of their own making.
“I don’t think it poses any threat to the overall economy.” —U.S.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, pooh-poohing the dangers in the developing subprime
mortgage meltdown, quoted in a Bloomberg.com news report, July 26, 2007. [What became
known as the “Great Recession” began that following December, and over the course of the
next year or so a major financial crisis broke out! —S.H.]
SUN SPOT THEORY (Of Economic Crises)
A theory originated by the bourgeois economist William Stanley Jevons
(1835-82) which claims that the periodic prominence of dark spots on the surface of the sun is
responsible for economic cycles in the capitalist economies on earth. Though erroneous, this is
not quite as ridiculous as it initally sounds! The sun goes through a 11-year cycle of varying
numbers of sun spots, from almost none, to a great many, and back to almost none. These spots
are actually plasma storms, and when they are abundant large quantities of charged particles
are spewed off into space, some of which reach the earth and cause effects here, including the
auroras and interruptions to radio communications. Moreover, the sun’s energy output varies
during this 11-year cycle by about 0.1%, which causes the surface temperature of the ocean to
fluctuate by a slightly larger amount. It is likely, therefore, that there are at least small
changes to crop yields because of atmospheric and weather changes, and this was the basis for
Jevons’ theory. (The astronomer William Hershel noted as early as 1801 that when sunspots were
rare, the price of wheat in England increased.) However, such crop changes are probably fairly
small, and this is only one small aspect of the overall economy. Moreover, neither the peaks
nor valleys of the 11-year cycle of sun spots correlate with the varying periods of 5 to 10
years in the standard industrial cycle.
Clearly bourgeois economists come up with
rather silly theories like this, which try to explain economic crises by “exogenous” factors
(i.e., factors external to the capitalist system), because they simply cannot accept that
capitalism itself has any internal flaw which leads to such crises, despite the fact that
Marx long ago explained in detail how this occurs.
SURPLUS VALUE
“The action of labor-power ... not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over
and above it. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the
value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product, in other words, of the
means of production and the labour-power.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. VIII: (International,
p. 208; Penguin, p. 317.) Or, roughly equivalent, surplus value is the value of the commodities
produced by the workers after deducting their wages, the cost of raw materials and the overhead.
“There is not one single atom of [surplus] value that does not owe its
existence to unpaid labor.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 24, sect. 1. (Penguin ed.,
p. 728.)
[To lay bare the essential character of capitalist production:] “This was
done by the discovery of surplus-value. It was shown that the appropriation of
unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the
worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor-power of his laborer
at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he
paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus-value forms those sums of value
from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the
possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were
both explained.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:27.
SURPLUS VALUE — Absolute and Relative
“The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day, I call
absolute surplus-value. On the other hand, the surplus-value arising from the
curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the
respective lengths of the two components of the working day, I call relative
surplus-value. —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 12. (International ed., ...; Penguin
ed., p. 432.)
SVERDLOV COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY
A higher educational institution originally set up in revolutionary Russia for the further political
education and training of members of the Bolshevik Party.
“The Sverdlov Communist University was formed from courses for
agitators and instructors organized in 1918 under the All-Russia Central Executive Committee
and later converted into a school of Soviet work. After the decision of the Eighth Congress
of the R.C.P.(B.) on the organization of a higher school under the C.C. for training Party
cadres, the school was reorganized into the Central School for Soviet and Party Work; in the
second half of 1919, by decision of the Organizing Bureau of the C.C. of the R.C.P.(B.) it
changed its name to the Sverdlov Communist University.
“This was the first Party higher
educational institution. Lenin showed great interest in the organization of the University
and took part in working out its first syllabus and curriculum.
“On July 11 and August 29, 1919, Lenin
delivered lectures on the state in the University. The text of the second lecture has not
been preserved. On October 24 of the same year, Lenin made a speech to students of the
Sverdlov University leaving for the front.” —Note 106, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).
SWEEZY, Paul Malor (1910-2004)
Paul Sweezy was an influential American Marxist political economist and in 1949 the co-founder
(along with the Marxist historian, Leo Huberman) of the important publication for the American
Left, Monthly Review. Along with Paul Baran and Harry
Magdoff he formed the core of the “Monthly Review school” of Marxist political economy centered
around that magazine.
Sweezy was born in New York City, the son of a
bank executive. He attended an elite prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy and then Harvard
University where he graduated in 1931. He then spent a year at the London School of Economics
where he was first exposed in a serious way to Marxist economic ideas. He returned to Harvard as
a graduate student, where one of his professors was Joseph Schumpeter.
He received his doctorate in 1937, and then began teaching economics at Harvard. During World
War II he was a member of the research and analysis division of the Office of Strategic Services
(forerunner to the CIA), where one of his jobs was in effect to spy on the British
government! (U.S. imperialism was already thinking very seriously about the contention among
the victors in the war for the control of the world that would ensue after it ended.)
In 1942 Sweezy published one of his most
important books, The Theory of Capitalist Development, which summarized Marxist economic
ideas (though with a partially Keynesian interpretation), and argued for what its opponents
call an “underconsumptionist” theory of capitalist
economic crises. This was one of the first books in English to extensively deal with a number
of important topics in Marxist political economy, including the
“transformation problem”.
In 1966 there appeared another important book,
Monopoly Capital, by Sweezy and Paul Baran. This
put forth the theory that modern monopoly capitalism is inherently prone to
stagnation. However, a lot of the argument in that book is actually
about how the capitalists can overcome (at least to a large degree and for a long time)
this tendency. The authors say this can be done through massive corporate waste, through
enormously intensified marketing, through a special focus on military production for the
government, through innovation and new industries, and through the massive build-up of debt of
all kinds (consumer, business and government debt). That last point is the most central, and
does not receive sufficient emphasis in the book. Moreover, it seems to me that their position
here is somewhat between that of Keynes and Marx. Sweezy and Baran seemed to grant the
capitalists too much in the way of an ability to permanently forestall another great depression,
and even—it seems at times—to grant them too much ability to forestall the lesser difficulty of
“stagnation” that they talked about. That is, they did not seem to fully understand that
Keynesian deficits, consumer debt, etc., themselves have definite limits and must fail
in the end, and they may not have realized just how serious this would become for capitalism.
Today, in early 2009, we are already getting a glimmer of the fact that for the capitalists,
the real problem is not just a “tendency toward stagnation”, but something far, far worse: the
inevitability of a prolonged, intractable economic depression.
Politically, Sweezy and Magdoff (who became
co-editor of Monthly Review after Huberman’s death) generally improved their outlook
over time. While initially enamored by Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, they later
developed a more cautious attitude. As time went on they became more appreciative of Mao and
the great Chinese Revolution. However, like most Marxists of their generation they found it
hard to completely break with the triumphant revisionism of the Soviet Union. Sweezy was one
of those who used to talk about “actually existing
socialism” in the USSR, meaning that with all its actual faults, it should still be viewed
as “socialism”. (At least from the mid-1950s on this was definitely not the case!)
The articles that Sweezy and Magdoff themselves
wrote for MR were in general much better than many of the articles they accepted for
the magazine as its editors. While some of those articles were also quite good, there were also
quite a number of others supporting revisionist “Euro-Communism”, reformist politics, and the
like. Late in his life Sweezy admitted that their magazine should also have played a much
greater role in helping to create a new revolutionary proletarian party in the U.S. Interestingly,
after Sweezy and Magdoff died, and under its new editor, John Bellamy Foster, MR has
further improved, and now has a stronger Maoist flavor to it.
See also:
Monopoly Capital (the book).
SYNDICALISM
“Revolutionary syndicalism—a petty bourgeois semi-anarchist
trend that appeared in several parts of Western Europe at the close of the [19th]
century. The Syndicalists repudiated working-class political struggle, the leading role
of the party and proletarian dictatorship, believing that the trade union (syndicates)
could overthrow capitalism without a revolution, through a workers’ general strike, and
take over control of the economy. Lenin pointed out that ‘revolutionary syndicalism in
many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and
parliamentary cretinism’. (LCW 13:166)” —Footnote 50, Lenin, SW 1.
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page
A thought experiment in the philosophy of quantum
mechanics proposed by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, and designed to show
that the idealist Copenhagen Interpretation of
quantum mechanics had to be nonsense. Suppose, said Schrödinger, that you have a cat in
a sealed box where a quantum event (such as the detection or non-detection of the decay of a
radioactive atom) will determine if the cat will live or die (by either releasing a vial of
poison or else not doing so). The Copenhagen Interpretation of the situation is that the cat
is either both dead and alive until the box is opened to see the result, or else that
the cat is neither dead nor alive until the box is opened. Obviously either way is a
complete absurdity. (The defenders of the Copenhagen Interpretation have of course tried to
wiggle out of this predicament, but have not succeeded in coherently doing so!)