“FEBRUARY 26 INCIDENT”
An unsuccessful militarist armed rebellion in Japan on February 26, 1936.
“After the occupation of northeast China [in the early 1930s],
Japanese imperialism made further inroads into north China from 1933 [on]. Aggression
abroad sharpened class contradictions in Japan. Contradictions and infighting within
Japan’s ruling circles were also growing acute. This was the background against which
the fascist landlords and the Right-wing militarists attempted to set up a military
regime by mutiny.
“On February 26, 1936, at the
instigation and orders of the Japanese militarist forces, 22 young officers led more
than 1,400 corporals and privates in an armed action. They occupied many important
government officies in the capital, including the Ministry of War and the building
of the Metropolitan Police Agency. They attacked the Prime Minister’s official
residence and the homes of elder statesmen, principal ministers and highly placed
officials. They killed the Lord Chamberlain, Minister of Finance and the
Inspector-General of Education and others. By this demonstration of force, they
confronted War Minister Kawashima with an ‘ultimatum,’ demanding the establishment
of a ‘military government.’ The action came to naught because of contention within
the warlord circles.
“After the incident, the Okada
cabinet went out, and Kouki Hirota who had close ties with the warlord circles took
office. Hirota was a member of the ‘Genkai Nada Association,’ a Right-wing
organization. In power, the Hirota cabinet intensified militarization in all fields,
pushed the arms expansion programme as never before, set up a military fascist
dictatorship, and began ruthlessly suppressing the workers’ movement and peasants’
movement. Abroad, it pursued an expansionist policy of aggression with its spearhead
directed ‘northward’ and ‘southward’ simultaneously. In July 1937, the Japanese
militarists flagrantly launched their full-scale war of aggression against China.
In December 1941, they unloosed the Pacific War which brought great disaster to the
Asian people.” —For Your Reference note,
Peking Review, #50, Dec. 11, 1970, p. 14.
“FEBRUARY 28 UPRISING” [Taiwan: 1947]
“The ‘February 28’ Uprising was an armed uprising by the people of
China’s Taiwan Province against the reactionary Kuomintang rule. On February 27, 1947,
when an anti-smuggling officer of the Taiwan State Monopoly Bureau and police were
beating up a hawker in Taipei, they were surrounded by passers-by. The police opened
fire and killed one onlooker. An angry crowd gathered before the police bureau to
state their case. The next day, the shops in Taipei were closed and the people staged
a demonstration in protest. Again they went to the police bureau demanding punishment
for the killers, restitution of damages and the abolition of the Taiwan State Monopoly
Bureau. Three more people were killed and another three demonstrators were wounded.
This incensed the people of the whole province and touched off a large-scale armed
uprising. In a few days most parts of the province were in the hands of the people who
had risen in rebellion. While setting up ‘a committee to handle the affair’ so as to
fool the people, the reactionary Kuomintang government mustered a large number of
troops to carry out suppression. On March 8 the reactionaries began to arrest and
butcher the people throughout the province, killing more than 30,000 people. The
uprising was defeated on March 13.” —Note in Peking Review, #10, March 4,
1977, p. 5.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION [FBI]
The largest and most important of the many national police forces of the United States
federal government, which besides dealing with ordinary criminal activity also:
1) Investigates and arrests foreign spies
and terrorists operating within the U.S. (though it is rather inept at doing this, as the
9/11 attacks by al Qaeda demonstrated); and
2) Investigates, harrasses and sometimes
outright suppresses political activity within the U.S. which the ruling class strongly
disapproves of, even if it is legal and peaceful! This last function is far more
important than most Americans understand, and includes major programs such as
COINTELPRO (now officially “ended” but continuing
under other names). It is customary for liberals in the U.S. to condemn the “state police”
or “secret police” of fascist, revisionist, or other
open dictatorships, but to naïvely fail to recognize that the U.S. itself also
has agencies like the FBI that frequently function in the same ways.
FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM
The central bank of the United States, which was established in 1913 in response to the
very serious financial crisis in the Panic of 1907. There
are 12 Regional Federal Reserve Banks, and a Board of Governors who control the whole system.
The chairman and members of the Board of Governors are appointed by the U.S. President. The
chairman of the Federal Reserve is often considered to be the most powerful person in the
world after the U.S. President. The current chairman is Ben
Bernanke.
The “Fed” (as it is often called for short)
intervenes in the open financial markets via its New York Federal Reserve Bank, and controls
the U.S. banking system partly in this way. Other means it uses include adjusting the bank
discount rate (the rate the Fed charges commercial banks
for short-term loans) and establishing various regulations to directly control the behavior
of financial institutions. The Federal Reserve is charged by Congress with regulating the
money supply, controlling inflation and interest rates, and generally managing the financial
aspects of the national economy. While it can often control the economy to some extent,
ultimately the economic contradictions of capitalism inevitably get out of their control, as
with the current financial/economic crisis that first became so serious in the fall of
2008.
See also:
GREENSPAN, Alan,
TARGET RATE
FEDERAL RESERVE BALANCE SHEET
The financial assets owned by the Federal Reserve System (see above). Since the Fed buys these
assets simply by creating money out of thin air (in effect just printing it), this is also a
measure of how much money the Fed is creating and pushing into the economy via the banks and
other financial institutions. Expanding its “balance sheet” in this way is also known as
quantitative easing, and is in effect a way of expanding
the currency which eventually results in rapid inflation (unless that money can be quickly
pulled out of the economy again without causing a new financial collapse).
In the graph at the right it is apparent that
the Fed has drastically increased its balance sheet since the current economic crisis
qualitatively worsened in late 2008. Note that besides their holdings of nearly a trillion
dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, the Fed has also bought up well over a trillion dollars in
securitized mortgages in an attempt to prop up the
desperately sick housing market. This has pushed the total level up to about $2.3 trillion. As
of Nov. 1, 2010, with the U.S. economy still in very serious trouble with persistent high
unemployment, a new round of “quantitative easing” is about to get underway, which is planned
to increase the Fed’s balance sheet by at least another $600 billion dollars.
FELLOW TRAVELER
Someone who sympathizes with and supports the ideals and program of an organized group
(such as a Communist party), but who is not a member or regular participant in the work
of the group.
“Fellow traveler” is the English translation
of a term (poputchik) originally coined by Trotsky in
1925 to refer to the vacillating intellectual supporters of the revolution within the young
Soviet Union. When the U.S.S.R. later stabilized, the term poputchik was no longer
used. However, the English term fellow traveler was commonly used in the West during
the mid-20th century, in later years most often by reactionaries, to refer to
those sympathetic to the Communist cause or to the Soviet Union, but who were not themselves
members of the Communist party. The term is seldom used within the American revolutionary
movement today.
FENG YU-LAN (Or: Feng Youlan, Fung Yu-lan, Fung Yu-lin) (1895-1990)
“[He] is well known in the West for his classic two-volume
History of Chinese Philosophy. He is an international figure, graduated
from Peking and Columbia universities, who has taught at the universities of
Hawaii and Pennsylvania. After the establishment of the People’s Republic, Fung,
a professor at Peking University, participated enthusiastically in Maoist efforts
at political and ideological reform, engaging in self-criticism to root out his
own bourgeois ideas and to set a good example to other Chinese intellectuals.
Eventually he became an ardent supporter of Mao Tse-tung thought and China’s
leading critic of Confucius during the anti-Confucian campaign during the early
1970s. At this time he was an intellectual consultant to Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing,
and her friends, the group that later came to be called the ‘gang of four.’ Shortly
after Mao’s death in 1976, Chiang and her group fell from power and were publicly
disgraced, a disgrace in which Fung shared, bringing to a humiliating close a
brilliant philosophical career.” —John M. Koller, Oriental Philosophies,
2nd ed., (Scribner, 1985), p. 338.
FEUDALISM
A term used for the last few centuries to describe the
socioeconomic formation which existed in
Europe during the Middle Ages, and also similar sorts of
societies in Asia and elsewhere which lasted into the 20th century and which
still exist in some countries today (though mixed with capitalism). Under feudalism there
are two main social classes, the serfs or peasantry, and the aristocracy or landlord class.
The landlords own the land which the serfs or peasants farm on individual small
plots, usually on a family basis. A certain proportion of the agricultural output which
the peasants produce then automatically “belongs” to the landlord. (The landlords don’t
buy it from the peasants; they just take it.) In addition, in most feudal societies a
landlord had the right to the labor of “his” peasants for a certain number of days per
year. This is called corvée labor. Peasants
were also drafted into armies controlled by the landlord ruling class. Traditionally, the
serfs or peasants were tied to the land and were not allowed to move elsewhere
without the permission of the landlord (which was seldom granted). In short, the feudal
landlords were the ruling class, and the peasants were an oppressed and exploited class,
usually left with barely enough to survive on. Feudalism was in fact only a modified form
of slavery. (The same, of course, is true of capitalism, which is often appropriately
called the system of wage slavery.)
“Many scholars use the word feudal to describe only the vassal-lord,
serf-and-manor system characteristic of medieval Europe. In this book the word is used
in a broader sense to describe a society in which a ruling class, basing its power on
the private ownership of and control over land, lived off a share of the produce
extracted from that land by a class of laboring people. The latter, though neither
slaves nor serfs, were still so closely bound to the land which they cultivated as to
make them little better than serfs of the landed proprietors. It was a society,
furthermore, in which these two classes constituted the main social forces and
determined the contours of development.” —William Hinton, Fanshen (1966), p.
26, talking about feudalism in China.
FEUERBACH, Ludwig [Pronounced: LOOD-vig FOY-er-bach] (1804-72)
German materialist philosopher and atheist who strongly impacted a generation of thinkers who
had been educated in Hegel’s philosophical idealism, including the Young
Hegelians and Marx and Engels in their youth. He was an important link between Hegel
and Marxist historical materialism. Feuerbach
was removed from teaching at Erlangen University in 1830 because of his atheist views.
His opposition to religion originally took
the form of a struggle against Hegel’s idealism, and one of Feuerbach’s contributions to
modern thought was in emphasizing the connection between religion and philosophical
idealism. His overall contribution to philosophy was his strong defense of materialism.
However, Feuerbach, in throwing out Hegel’s
idealism, also tossed out (or failed to fully appreciate) Hegel’s dialectical method. Among
other things, this may have helped lead him in the direction of radical
empiricism (or sensationalism),
which ironically was a step back toward idealism in its Kantian form.
Politically Feuerbach was a liberal democrat.
Late in life Feuerbach did join the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but he never became
a Marxist. He spent his later years living in the countryside.
Among his more important works were “Towards
a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1839), The Essence of Christianity (1841),
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), and The Essence of Religion
(1846). However, for us Marxists it is not so much Feuerbach’s own books which deserve our
attention, but rather the much more important comments by Marx and Engels on Feuerbach. These
include Marx’s brief but amazingly profound “Theses on
Feuerbach” (1845), and Engels’s book Ludwig Feuerbach
and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886).
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