GRAMSCI, Antonio (1891-1937)
Italian Communist leader and theoretician. Raised on the impoverished island of Sardinia,
a scholarship allowed him to attend Turin University where he was a brilliant student, but
where he was also unfortunately strongly influenced by the liberal idealist philosopher,
Benedetto Croce. In 1913 he joined the Socialist Party. In 1919
he helped found the left-wing newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, and was active in promoting
workers’ councils (“Soviets”) in factories, which were
inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
He became more and more critical of the reformist ideas of the Socialist Party and helped
to form the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. Gramsci was the Italian representative at the
meeting of the Third International in Moscow in
1922, and worked for the Comintern in Moscow and Vienna in
1922-24. In 1924 he was elected to the Italian parliament and returned to Italy to became
the top leader of the CPI.
Mussolini was now in power, and he and his
Fascist regime banned the Communist Party in 1926. Gramsci himself was arrested and spent the
rest of his life in prison. Ironically, his great reputation today, especially in Left academia,
derives from his time in prison where he wrote 34 notebooks, containing over 2000 printed
pages. There are some difficulties in reading these notebooks both because they were just
Gramsci’s own notes, with multiple notebooks being worked on simultaneously, and not
something written for publication, and because of the prison authorities who prevented
him from writing in a way that might be used to “inflame the masses”. This forced Gramsci
to frequently write in an academic and obscure style, and to resort to
Aesopian language, as when he uses the phrase “modern
theory” where he simply means “Marxism”.
Gramsci’s focus in his notebooks on intellectuals and
their role in society, and on literature and culture, of course appeals to academics today,
and explains in part his continuing popularity there. His discussion of the capitalist
state is weak, certainly compared to Lenin’s firm class position
on the issue.
Since he was living in a prison in a Fascist
country, and the Communist Party was mostly suppressed, he did not think the sort of
revolutionary strategy employed by the Bolsheviks in Russia was fully appropriate there.
Instead of such a frontal assault (insurrection), he thought there was the necessity of a
long-term war of attrition, or a “war of position” (like the trench warfare of World War I),
to prepare the way for proletarian revolution. Gramsci’s much discussed notion of
hegemony seems to be related to this, the long-term struggle
between the ideological hegemony of the ruling class and a hoped for alternative ideological
hegemony of the working class forming around its revolutionary party. While in the advanced
capitalist countries there is in fact the necessity for laying the groundwork for an
eventual revolutionary uprising through patient work of organizing and education over
a long period, there is also the danger that in doing so that eventual goal of revolution
will become merely window dressing for reformism and revisionism. This perhaps shows why
academic revisionists are so attracted to Gramsci: they see this possibility not as a
danger at all, but rather more as a welcome perpetual postponement of revolution.
“Pessimism of the Intellect; Optimism of the Will” —A slogan, probably
authored by Gramsci himself, which appeared regularly on the masthead of L’Ordine
Nuovo, the newspaper he edited.
GREAT CAPITALIST MASS EXTINCTION
The currently intensifying great mass extinction of
animals and plants which is being caused primarily by the capitalist system and rule, which
values corporate profits far higher than it does the protection of nature and the environment
for the continued overall benefit of humanity.
Even most biologists imbued with bourgeois
ideology admit that we are already in a period of a great mass extinction of species, but tend
to blame this on “humanity” in general, or over-population, or governmental ignorance, etc.
In other words, even the liberals among them seldom recognize the systemic causes of this
extinction episode, let alone the central responsibility of the capitalist class for it. It is
true that excessive human population growth is secondarily to blame for this mass extinction.
But by far the most important factor is still that the ruling bourgeoisie just does not give
a damn, and while they are in control of world they refuse to take any serious steps to stop
this ever-expanding annihilation of plant and animal species. It is already clear that
this mass extinction will very likely be one of the greatest in the entire history of the
Earth, which includes some very large die-offs many millions of years ago. Indeed, it is not
entirely clear whether our own species, Homo sapiens, will survive the capitalist
era.
“Populations of plants, insects and birds in the U.K. have dropped
precipitously in the past 40 years—more evidence that the world is in the midst of its
sixth mass extinction. The previous one wiped out the dinosaurs.” —Science
magazine, March 19, 2004; quoted in Scientific American, May 2004, p. 40.
GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s
A severe and prolonged economic overproduction
crisis which broke out in all the capitalist countries and which lasted the entire decade
of the 1930s in most of them.
In the U.S. the Great Depression is usually
said to have begun with the stock market and financial Crash
in the fall of 1929. However, the U.S. economy was already entering what we would now call a
recession early in 1929, and the severe conditions we now associate with the Great Depression
developed over a several year period, and didn’t reach their worst point until 1933. There
was then a small upward trend for several years because of New Deal programs and de facto
Keynesian deficits (though they weren’t yet
called that). When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eased off on the deficit financing,
the economy again worsened in 1937-1938. As Roosevelt partially learned his lesson, and
stepped up the government spending again, the Depression eased a bit after that, but didn’t
come to a final end until World War II. For the U.S., therefore, the Depression—from start to
finish—should be dated as lasting from 1929 through at least 1940, or about 12 years.
The Great Depression was partially
mitigated (or in a few countries such as Germany completely interrupted) by the
huge Keynesian deficit spending for public works and war preparations that occurred in most
advanced capitalist countries during the 1930s. It was completely interrupted in all
the imperialist countries during World War II itself, with the truly massive deficit spending
for the war. But it was only the massive destruction of capital during World War II
that truly ended the Great Depression and prevented it from resuming after the war.
[For more on this, see my essay “False Lessons from the Great Depression”, at
http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/False_Lessons.htm.]
See also sub-topics below.
GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s — The Great Unwinding (1929-1933)
Major depressions take a fair amount of time to develop. As mentioned in the general entry
above, in the spring of 1929 there was only the beginnings of a fairly mild recession. Even
after the financial Crash of 1929 (in the autumn) the
immediate condition of the overall economy was still only that of mild to moderate recession.
But over the next 4 years the crisis continued to develop and the overall economy continued
to seriously decline. Unemployment jumped up from 3.2% in 1929 to 24.9% in 1933. And during
this period more than 9,000 banks either suspended operations or completely closed down. A
large part of the entire U.S. financial system had in effect collapsed.
“The great severity of the banking crises in the Great Depression is
well known to students of the period. The percentages of operating banks which failed
in each year from 1930 to 1933 inclusive were 5.6, 10.5, 7.8, and 12.9; because of
failures and mergers, the number of banks operating at the end of 1933 was only just
above half the number that existed in 1929. Banks that survived experienced heavy
losses.” —Ben Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (2000), p. 44.
There was a huge amount of debt built up in the U.S. economy during the boom years of
the 1920s, and because of both increased debt and falling incomes during the Depression the
ratio of debt servicing to national income went up from 9% in 1929 to 19.8% in 1932-33. In
a 1934 survey of home owners with mortgages in 22 different cities, the default rate ranged
from a low of 21% (in Richmond, VA) to a high of 62% (in Cleveland). In more than half of
the cities the default rate was above 38%. The percentages of those behind in their rent on
rented properties was even higher. The financial status of farmers was worse still, and by
the beginning of 1933 45% of all U.S. farms were delinquent in their mortgage payments.
State and local governments were also in serious debt trouble, with 37 cities with populations
greater than 30,000 people and 3 states defaulting on their debt by March 1934. [Bernanke,
op. cit., p. 46.]
The strong deflation
during the Depression served to amplify the debt burdens (because the debt had to be repaid
in currency that had become more valuable and harder to come by). But contrary to the opinions
of some bourgeois economists this deflation was not the primary cause of these intensifying
problems during the first 4 years of the Depression. Bernanke notes that “Although the
deflation of the 1930’s was unusually protracted, there had been a similar episode as recently
as 1921-22 which had not led to mass insolvency.” [Ibid., pp. 46-47.]
The situation with corporate profits during
this period of the unwinding of the economy into deep depression is interesting. The aggregate
corporate profits before taxes were negative in 1931 and 1932, and after-tax retained profits
were negative for all the years from 1930 to 1933. However, the biggest corporations (those
with more than $50 million in assets) maintained positive profits through this entire period!
[Bernanke, ibid.]
The index of industrial production, which stood
at 114 in July 1929 gradually fell to just 53 in July 1932, then picked up just slightly for a
few months before falling back to 54 in March 1933. Thus industrial production had fallen to
less than half its level before the Depression began. [Bernanke, op. cit., pp. 48-49.]
Similar events were occurring in all the other
major capitalist countries, though—interestingly—many of them (including Britain and France)
did not have major banking crises. Most bourgeois economists are quite puzzled by this fact,
since they falsely believe that financial crises were the “cause” of the depression in “the
real economy”.
GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s — Relapse of 1937-38 in the U.S.
As mentioned in the main article above about the Great Depression, there was a weak and partial
recovery in the U.S. from 1933 until 1937, and then a relapse due to the government cutting
back on the budget deficits which had eased the crisis somewhat. This deficit financing was
inadequate to actually bring the U.S. economy back to the level it had reached before the
Depression began, and when it was cut back the economic decline once again resumed.
“The recovery from the Depression is often described as slow because
America did not return to full employment until after the outbreak of the second world
war. But the truth is the recovery in the four years after Franklin Roosevelt took office
in 1933 was incredibly rapid. Annual real GDP growth averaged over 9%. Unemployment fell
from 25% to 14%. The second world war aside, the United States has never experienced
such sustained, rapid growth.
“However, that growth was halted
by a second severe downturn in 1937-38, when unemployment surged again to 19%. The
fundamental cause of this second recession was an unfortunate, and largely inadvertent,
switch to contractionary fiscal and monetary policy. One source of the growth in 1936
was that Congress had overridden Mr Roosevelt’s veto and passed a large bonus for
veterans of the first world war. In 1937, this fiscal stimulus disappeared. In addition,
social-security taxes were collected for the first time. These factors reduced the
deficit by roughly 2.5% of GDP, exerting significant contractionary pressure.”
—Christina Romer, “Economic Focus: The Lessons of 1937”, The Economist, June
20, 2009, p. 82.
[Romer is an American bourgeois
economist and supposedly an expert on the Great Depression. Her point about how “rapid”
the “recovery” was from 1933-1936 is ridiculous! Of course it could be fairly fast
compared to the normal expansion of the economy in boom periods because most of the
idle factories still existed and it was simply a matter of putting people back to work
through government spending. Romer does mention here some of the means by which the
government deficits were reduced in 1937, but she does not mention the even more important
reason—that Roosevelt and his advisers simply did not understand the necessity of
deficits for keeping the economy going and they were actually trying to reduce
them! (This is why Roosevelt vetoed the veteran’s bonus bill.) Romer went on to
mention the “contractionary monetary policy” that the Federal Reserve began to follow in
1936, which was also a (small) factor in the ensuing relapse. But this was of much
less importance than the contractionary fiscal (deficit) policy, and it is a weakness of
her analysis that she seems to put it on a par. And although Romer’s main point in the
article is that “fiscal stimulus” (deficits) should not be withdrawn “too soon”, she
completely fails to understand that in a developing depression it cannot be withdrawn
at all! Indeed, a major part of her article stressed the importance of eventually
reducing those deficits! That is, she—along with all Keynesian-school economists—thinks
that “the pump can be primed” through fiscal
deficits, and the deficits can then be ended. Romer, along with all other bourgeois
economists, doesn’t even begin to understand that it was not Keynesian deficits
which ended the Great Depression—not even the colossal deficits during World War II
itself, but rather the massive destruction of capital on a world scale during the
war that really brought the Depression to an end and kept it from resuming after the end
of the war and the end of those huge war deficits. —S.H.]
“GREAT INFLATION, The” (In the U.S., circa 1968-1982)
A term sometimes used by American economists to refer to a period of rather high inflation
(by standards before and after) that occurred in the U.S. from the late 1960s to the early
1980s. There were actually two bursts of inflation during this period, with peaks in 1974
and 1980. After a long period of relatively low inflation (below 3%/year), the Consumer
Price Index for urban consumers [CPI-U] picked up to 4% to 6% for most of the years in the
1968-1973 period, as the U.S. imperialists further escalated their expensive war against
Vietnam. In 1974 the CPI-U jumped up to 11.0%, then eased off to the 6% to 9% range for
several years. The second burst of inflation (due to govenment deficit financing attempting
to deal with the first act of the long-developing new economic crisis) pushed the CPI-U to
11.3% in 1979, 13.5% in 1980, and 10.3% in 1981, before easing off again in succeeding years.
The phrase “double-digit” inflation comes from this period.
It took a while for the “Great Inflation”
to develop, despite the many years of government deficits during the Vietnam War and the
developing crisis. But when it did develop it was quite harmful to the U.S. economy. In
the same way the vastly larger government deficits in the new millenium (designed to combat
the new worsening stage of the economic crisis) will also come back to plague the economy.
This will, before too many years, make the so-called “Great Inflation” of the 1968-1982
period seem pretty trivial by comparison!
“GREAT INFLATION, The” (In Japan, 1973-74)
A period of very high inflation in Japan during the early 1970s, the worst year being 1974
with a consumer price rise of nearly 30%. This bout of inflation has most commonly been
blamed on the big rise in oil prices with the onset of the “Mideast oil crisis” in October
1973. However, the inflation rate in Japan already reached 10% before the beginning of that
crisis and was still on the way up. It therefore seems pretty clear that the primary cause
of this “great inflation” was the internal economic policies of the Japanese ruling class:
i.e., excessively large government deficits and excessively low interest rates, both for
the purpose of keeping the capitalist economy going.
GREAT LEAP FORWARD
A mass campaign in Maoist China launched in late 1958 and designed to swiftly raise China’s
economic production and technique, especially in the countryside. While the revolutionary
fervor it arose did have a substantial positive effect in some regards, this same fervor—along
with inadequate overall supervision of the movement and serious sabotage by capitalist-roaders
within the Communist Party—led to some major short-term problems including serious famine in
some parts of the country. Local Party officials were frequently reporting bountiful harvests
when in fact the harvests were poor. Overall the GLF was not a success either economically or
politically, though it was also not quite the unmitigated total disaster that anti-Communist
writers have often claimed. It did, however, serve to partially discredit Mao and the CCP in
the eyes of the masses for a brief period. The GLF was officially ended in 1961.
“[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered
an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 [million] a year during the same period
[of the Great Leap Forward]… Thus, in this one geographical area alone, more deaths
resulted from ‘this failed capitalist experiment’ (more than 100 million by 1980) than
can be attributed to the ‘failed communist experiment’ all over the world since 1917.”
—Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize winning economist, quoted in Antony Black, ‘Black propaganda’,
Guardian Weekly, Feb. 24, 2000.
“GREAT MEN” [GREAT INDIVIDUALS]
[Intro to be added...]
“In hindsight, we can usually see that if one scientist did not
discover a particular law, some other person would have done so within a few months
or years of the discovery. Most scientists, as Newton said, stood on the shoulders of
giants to see the world just a bit farther along the horizon. In fact, I give a few
examples in this book in which more than one individual discovered a law within a few
years of one another, but for various reasons, including sheer luck, history sometimes
remembers only the more famous discoverer. Readers may enjoy noting the frequency with
which this happens in the history of science.” —Clifford Pickover, Archimedes to
Hawking (2008), p. 12.
“GREAT MODERATION, The”
A term sometimes used by American bourgeois economists to refer to the period of relatively
low inflation and fairly steady (if mostly unimpressive) economic growth in the United
States which lasted for a couple decades starting around the mid-1980s. In the 1970s and
early 1980s there was a period of stagflation (the
“Great Inflation” coupled with economic stagnation), and by
that deplorable standard the economic situation in the later 1980s and 1990s was much
improved. Of course “moderation” is considered a good thing by bourgeois economists when it
comes to inflation, but not so good when it comes to GDP growth; so the term “The Great
Moderation” seems to refer mostly to the more moderate levels of inflation during that
post-stagflation period.
What was the cause of “The Great Moderation”?
Why did things improve for a while? First, the government cut back on its very loose and
expansive monetary policy and restrained its Keynesian
budget deficits. Second, many American industries “restructured”, i.e., closed
unprofitable factories and cut their workforce. Not only were huge numbers of workers layed
off, but also many lower and middle-level managers were cut. All of these sorts of things
were included under the name of neoliberalism, and amounted
especially to a major new assault on the working class. In addition there was a much more
rapid increase in consumer debt, which helped spur some renewed economic growth for a while.
“The Great Moderation” included one short
burst in economic growth associated with the “New Economy” bubble of the late 1990s. But
that bubble then burst and there was a recession in 2000-2001. After a very slow and shallow
recovery, stoked especially by the rapidly growing housing and financialization bubble, a
new recession started at the end of 2007, and became a major financial crisis in the fall
of 2008. This marked the complete and final end of anything that could reasonably be called
“The Great Moderation”! True, for now inflation is still quite low, but the American and
world capitalist economies as a whole are limping along in a very wounded fashion. This
will remain the case for the coming immediate period, and will eventually collapse into a
much more serious new depression. Moreover, along the way (and because of the continuing
massive Keynesian deficit financing), there will eventually be a major return of inflation
which will far exceed the levels of the 1970s and 1980s.
GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION (GPCR)
A great revolutionary movement in socialist China during the Mao period which sought,
initially, just to transform the cultural and ideological sphere of society, but developed
into a full-scale social revolution wherein the revolutionary proletariat and its allies
led by Mao overthrew the revisionists and capitalist-roaders who had seized considerable
power in the government of China and within the Communist Party of China itself, and which
re-established proletarian revolutionary power for a decade.
The peak years of the Cultural Revolution
were 1966-69, but the preliminary developments started earlier, and in some respects the
GPCR continued until Mao’s death in September 1976. One important article in Peking
Review states that “In 1963, under the personal guidance of Chairman Mao, the revolution
in literature and art was launched in China, marked mainly by the reform of the dramatic
arts; this was, in fact, the beginning of the great proletarian cultural revolution.”
[“Carry the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End”, Peking Review, Jan. 1,
1967, p. 8.] But the GPCR as a truly mass phenomenon began in the spring of 1966. ...
The GPCR consisted of struggle,
criticism and repudiation and of transformation: “The struggle to overthrow
those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, the criticism and repudiation
of the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie
and all other exploiting classes, and the transformation of education, literature and art,
and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic
base.” [ibid., p. 9].
The highest individual target of the GPCR
was Liu Shaoqi, who was appropriately labelled “China’s
Khrushchev”, and was eventually dismissed from his positions and expelled from the CCP. But
contrary to Western bourgeois analyses, the GPCR was not just about getting rid of a few
revisionists like Liu; its goal and purpose was to change Chinese socialist society so that
people like Liu could not arise and achieve high power in the Party and government in the
first place.
[More to be added... ]
See also entries below.
“The great proletarian cultural revolution is in essence a great
political revolution under the conditions of socialism made by the proletariat against
the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes; it is a continuation of the prolonged
struggle waged by the Chinese Communist Party and the masses of revolutionary people
under its leadership against the Kuomintang reactionaries, a continuation of the class
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.” —Mao, a comment under the heading
“Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s Latest Directive”, Peking Review, #19, May 10, 1968,
p. 2.
GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION — Ultimate Failure Of
While Mao still lived, the GPCR was successful in preventing the capitalist roaders from
taking over completely, and managed to both push many of their top leaders like Liu Shaoqi
from power and to re-educate and revolutionize millions of Party members and ordinary
people, at least to a considerable degree. For a time it appeared that the CCP was truly
transformed, and that—for a long period at least—no revisionists could possibly rise to
power in the Party or government. But then, immediately following Mao’s death, the
staunchest anti-revisionists (including the “Gang of Four”)
were purged and arrested. There ensued a short interegnum in which the stage was set for
the return to power of Deng Xiaoping, the second most important capitalist roader after
Liu. And then Deng did in fact lead China back to capitalism.
How was it possible for this disaster to
happen? What were the weaknesses and shortcomings of the GPCR which led to its ultimate
failure? These are extremly important questions that every revolutionary Marxist must
seriously work to answer so as to prevent any similar disaster from occurring again.
[More to be added... ]
GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION — Violence In
As revolutions go, the GPCR was relatively peaceful. But there was some violence that
occurred during the course of it, most of which was instigated among young
Red Guards by the reactionaries in order to discredit the
revolution. The 16-points guidelines laid down by Mao and the CCP Central Committee in
May 1966 explicitly stated that the method to be used was that of reason and persuasion,
and that coercion and violence were not to be used.
“The most important plot and scheme of the very small number of
persons who stubbornly persist in the bourgeois reactionary line is to incite the
masses to struggle against each other. They have secretly organized and manipulated
some people and mass organizations, whom they have hoodwinked, to suppress the
revolution, protect themselves, and to provoke conflicts in which coercion or force
are used in a vain attempt to create confusion. They spread rumors, turned black
into white and shifted the blame for the evil they had done behind people’s backs
on to the proletarian revolutionaries, labelling the latter with the ‘bourgeois
reactionary line.’”
—“Carry the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End”, an editorial summing
up the GPCR in 1966 and laying out its goals for 1967, Peking Review, vol. 10,
#1, Jan. 1, 1967, p. 10.
“GREAT RECESSION”
The most common name for the severe recession in the United States and the entire capitalist
world, which is generally said to have begun in the U.S. in December 2007, and intensified
in the form of a financial crisis in the fall of 2008. As the bourgeoisie measures such
things, this recession lasted 18 months and ended in June 2009. However, most of the serious
aspects of this recession (including extremely high unemployment) still continue. This
recession became the most serious overproduction
crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s,
but bourgeois ideologists refused to call it the beginnings of a new
depression! [From early 2008 I have predicted that this “Great
Recession” will, however, prove to be merely the first stage of a much deeper and prolonged
overproduction crisis that will definitely be called a depression eventually. —S.H.]
Bourgeois economists say that the nadir of
the Great Recession occurred in early 2009, and that production (GDP) began to expand again
at that point. (The bourgeoisie generally considers recessions to be “over” if GDP begins to
expand again, even if production is still far below the peak reached before the recession
began. By this “logic”, if the economy declines by 4% and then later expands by just 1% the
recession is “over”!)
And of course the bourgeoisie gives little importance to the unemployment rate or the general
economic condition of the people in determining when recessions supposedly “end”. As of the
summer of 2012 even the official unemployment rate (which doesn’t count a large part of those
actually unemployed) is nearly double what it was when the Great Recession began. Nevertheless,
in September 2010 the National Bureau of Economic Research, which
American bourgeois economists grant the authorization to decide such things, declared that
this Great Recession ended in June 2009. Any new downturn, they said, would be counted as a
totally different recession.
In the U.S. the Great Recession was initially
reported by the government as a decline of GDP of 3.83%. In mid-2010 the government revised
these figures, stating that GDP had actually decline by 4.15% by mid 2009. This is the
deepest GDP decline since the short but sharp recession in 1946 at the time the U.S. was
converting from war production in World War II.
The government has further revised its estimates of the changes in GDP during the Great Recession
as indicated in the graph at the right. It is now admitted that the recession was deeper than
they earlier claimed, and that the so-called “recovery” has been weaker. Whatever they call it,
it is certainly clear that this overall overproduction crisis has not even fully developed
yet.
GREENPEACE
An international organization devoted to defending the world’s environment and to protests
against commercial whaling and the use of nuclear power. They focus on global issues, including
not only global warming, but also deforestation, pollution of the oceans, overfishing, etc.
They refuse to accept contributions from corporations, governments or political parties (to
lessen the possibilities of being co-opted). Greenpeace had its origins in the peace movement
and anti-nuclear protests in Vancouver, Canada in the early 1970s.
Greenpeace is one of the largest and most active
environmental organizations in the world. Although Greenpeace is a pacifist organization, to its
credit it is willing to risk openly and directly confronting corporations and nations to try to
stop their ever more serious harm to the environment and their ill-considered use of nuclear
power. These “direct action” activities, such as putting their own ships in the path of whaling
vessels and organizing protests against nuclear-powered warships, have earned them the enmity
of the capitalists and especially of the big imperialist powers.
In 1985, in retaliation for Greenpeace protests
against French nuclear tests on the Polynesian island of Mururoa, French military agents bombed
the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior while it was in the Auckland, New Zealand harbor,
and killed a Greenpeace photographer. [For more information about this outrageous crime, see:
“The Greenpeace Affair” in A World to Win, #4 (1985), online at:
http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1985-4/AWTW-04-Greenpeace.pdf]
But this attack on Greenpeace backfired, brought the organization international attention, and
led to its further considerable growth.
Organizations like Greenpeace will obviously
never be able to end the terrible destruction of the environment which characterizes the
capitalist era; that will require the complete overthrow of capitalism worldwide. But the work
of Greenpeace does serve to bring much more attention to this extremely serious damage that
capitalism is doing to the world.
GREENSPAN, Alan (1926- )
American bourgeois economist who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to
2006. Greenspan was a longtime disciple of the notorious bourgeois philosopher of
self-interest and selfishness, Ayn Rand. He even authored
several essays in her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, including one defending
the gold standard.
As Chairman of the Fed, Greenspan mostly
promoted the expansion of credit bubbles, and all sorts of risky behavior by investors
and ordinary people. In one speech in February 2004, he promoted the very dangerous
adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) for home buyers, that now are a
major factor in many of them losing their homes. At the time of his speech interest rates
were very low and were bound to rise later. In fact, just a few months after the speech
Greenspan himself, as head of the Fed, began massively raising interest rates, which had
the effect of hugely increasing mortgage payments for those with ARMs. The inability of
many home “owners” to keep up with their adjustable rate mortgage payments is considered
to be one of the major factors bringing the subprime
mortgage crisis to a head in 2007-2008.
In another speech, in April 2005,
Greenspan openly praised the rise of the subprime mortgage industry:
“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as
subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. Such developments are
representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services
industry throughout the history of our country … With these advances in technology,
lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for
efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. … Where once
more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able
to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that
risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage
lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the
number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s.”
—Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Finance”, April 8, 2005. Federal Reserve System’s Fourth
Annual Community Affairs Research Conference. Federal Reserve Board.
This wondrous new subprime mortgage industry began to collapse in March 2007, and led
to the more general financial crisis of the fall of 2008. Thus Greenspan is appropriately
criticized for his role in the collapse of the housing bubble and for “engineering” that
housing bubble to begin with. However, it is true that if Greenspan had not engineered
that new bubble, the economy would simply have begun collapsing a few years sooner than
it did. Under capitalism it is only bubbles that keep the
economy going! Thus the basic fault here lies not with individuals like Greenspan, but
with the capitalist system of production itself.
Nevertheless, it is true that Greenspan
promoted all sorts of highly risky financial behavior that was bound to come crashing
down eventually. He never met a new type of derivative that
he didn’t like. He didn’t really believe in any form of regulation, and when potential
problems were pointed out he often recommended “self-regulation” (i.e., no regulation of
Wall Street at all). But the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 did shake him a bit.
Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: “I have found
a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed
by that fact.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. “In other
words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not
working,” Waxman said. “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s
precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with
very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” [From the Wikipedia
article on Greenspan, as of 8/28/09. Greenspan went on to admit his error in opposing
the regulation of derivatives and also admitted that financial institutions were not
protecting investors as well as he expected. But what he refused to budge on was his
general faith in the “free market” and the capitalist system in general, which are
the real sources of all these financial and economic problems. Bourgeois economists
are simply unable to learn the most essential lessons!]
As for Mr [Paul] Samuelson’s friend of 50 years, Alan Greenspan, once
chairman of the Federal Reserve, “the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander”—a
devotee of laissez-faire capitalism. “You can take the boy out of the cult but you
can’t take the cult out of the boy,” Mr Samuelson told the Atlantic [magazine]
this summer. “He actually had [an] instruction, probably pinned on the wall: ‘Nothing
from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is
good.’” [From The Economist, Dec. 19, 2009, p. 130.]
GRESHAM’S LAW
“Bad money drives out good money.” Originally put forward when there were gold and silver
coins in circulation, where the idea was that people will first spend the coins where some
of the gold or silver was shaved off, and tend to hang on to the coins in better condition.
This observation has been generalized to many modern “financial instruments” in capitalist
society, where, for example, even if two assets have the same nominal value, people will
preferentially tend to hang on to those assets which they think have the greater inherent
value.
GREYHOUNDS
An elite paramilitary commando force in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and other states in eastern
India, which was created in 1989 in order to suppress the Naxalites
(Maoist revolutionaries). Over the past 5 years, through their ruthlessness and attacks on
the population, they have caused a temporary setback to the revolution in the one state
of Andhra Pradesh. The greyhounds are one of the highest paid police forces in all of India,
even better paid than the elite National Security Guard. Much of their success in A.P. in
the 2004-2009 period, however, has been due to a combination of violence toward the people
and secret paid informants at the village level. The Greyhound force numbers around 2,500,
and usually moves in small bands of 15-25 commandos. They are specially trained for deep
forest pursuit and combat. However, they can also be defeated by the revolutionary forces.
In July 2008, 35 elite Greyhound commandos on a motor launch were attacked and killed by
revolutionaries in Orissa state, which was a huge setback to their operations.
GROSS CAPITAL FORMATION
The amount spent during some given period (such as one year) on new fixed productive assets
in the economy. However, in current bourgeois usage this is a somewhat broader category which
includes not only new fixed productive assets (such as factories, machinery, mines,
transportation and communication facilities, etc.), but also schools, hospitals, offices
for non-productive workers, and private residential dwellings. It should always be kept in
mind that the bourgeois concept of capital differs to some degree from the Marxist
concept!
GROSS DOMESTIC INCOME (GDI)
The total wages, profits and taxes within the economy of a country or region for a given period
(often one year). In theory this is equal to the Gross Domestic Product (see entry below), but
is measured independently and often the two figures differ considerably. Many of the economists
who pay close attention to such things now believe that trends in GDI provide a better indication
than trends in GDP for the short-term direction of the overall economy.
“By the light of GDI, the American economy looks a bit more pallid.
According to the income measure, activity slowed at a 7.3% annual rate in the fourth
quarter of 2008. GDP, meanwhile, recorded a 5.4% drop. And in the third quarter of 2009 ...
GDI continued to contract while GDP notched up the increase that led many economists to
announce the end of the recession.
“The picture painted by GDI throughout
the downturn is one of an economy substantially weaker than indicated by GDP: one more in
line with the employment data and with the experience of most Americans.” —The Economist,
“Unemployment Figures: Slow Going”, March 13, 2010, p. 36.
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP)
The total value (expressed in dollars or some other currency) of all the goods and services
produced and sold within an economy during a given period (usually one year).
A more formal definition of the term, as used
by the World Bank, is: “The sum of gross value added by all
resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes (less subsidies) not included in
the value of the products. It is calculated using purchaser prices and without deductions for
the depreciation of fabricated assets or for the depletion and degradation of natural
resources.”
See also:
GLOBAL GDP
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT — Declining Growth Rates Of
The growth rate of GDP has fallen overall in all the advanced capitalist countries ever since
the early 1970s. Roughly speaking, the growth rate has been less than half of what it was
during the previous quarter century period (the post-World War II boom).
But in addition to this overall qualitative
drop in the growth rate of GDP, there has also been a roughly continuous fall in GDP growth from
decade to decade since the 1940s. The graph at the right shows this for the United States. [More
to be added...]
GROSS NATIONAL INCOME (GNI)
The World Bank Atlas (2004) defines GNI as “GDP plus net receipts of primary income
(compensation of employees and property income) from abroad.” However, strictly speaking, GNI
is actually Gross Domestic Income plus net receipts from
abroad. So in theory GNI is equivalent to GNP, though it is measured independently and may
therefore differ somewhat.
GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT (GNP)
Gross Domestic Product together with net property income from abroad. A generation ago GNP
was used as the primary overall statistic by the U.S. government in describing its economy
and those of other nations. Since the U.S. was receiving tremendous income from abroad,
referring to GNP rather than GDP made the U.S. internal economy look better than it was.
However, as other countries began to receive more and more income from the property their
capitalists own in the U.S., this statistical advantage began to disappear. So the U.S.
switched over to the system that other countries were using, discussing its economy in terms
of GDP rather than GNP.
“Maximization of GNP is not a proper objective of policy. Economists
all know that, and yet their everyday use of GNP as the standard measure of economic
performance apparently conveys the impression that they are evangelistic worshippers
of GNP.” —William Nordhaus & James Tobin, 1972. These two liberal bourgeois economists
were not suggesting that GDP be used as the standard measure of economic performance
rather than GNP; they were instead proposing some broader “Measure of Economic
Welfare”. This proposal has been almost completely ignored by the bourgeois economics
profession, which has little concern for the welfare of the masses.
GSE
See: GOVERNMENT SPONSORED ENTERPRISE
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