Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Pr - Pt   —

PRACTICE   [Term in Marxist Philosophy]
[Intro to be added... ]
        See also: PRAXIS

“Practice is higher than (theoretical) knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of universality, but also the immediate actuality.” —Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Science of Logic” (1914), LCW 38:213.

PRAGMATISM
[To be added...]
        See also my essay “Chopping Onions and Pragmatism” at http://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/ChoppingOnions.htm.

PRAIRIE FIRE   [Music Group]
American revolutionary rock music duo consisting of Mat and Sandy Callahan, which existed from 1971 into the mid-1980s. It was associated with the Revolutionary Union and the Revolutionary Communist Party.
        For further information about its activities and history, see Mat Callahan’s article “Prairie Fire: Rock Maoists”, at: http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/prairie-fire.htm

PRATT, Elmer “Geronimo”   [Later known as: Geronimo ji Jaga]   (1947-2011)
A leader of the Black Panther Party who spent 27 years in prison on trumped-up charges of murder and kidnapping, including 8 years of that time in solitary confinement. Geronimo was targeted by the FBI program known as COINTELPRO, which aimed to “neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary.” [From: LA 157-3436, the partially redacted COINTELPRO file on Geronimo Pratt.]
        In December 1968 Geronimo was in the San Francisco Bay Area attending BPP meetings. At the same time a woman was kidnapped and murdered in southern California as part of a robbery. The woman’s husband, who was also wounded in that attack originally identified someone else as the killer. But a police and FBI informant within the BPP, Julius Butler, then claimed Geronimo Pratt was the killer.
        Since Geronimo was a southern California leader of the BPP, both the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department had him under constant surveillance. The Oakland police also had (illegal) wiretaps of Geronimo in conversations in the Bay Area at the time of the murder. They all therefore knew that he was innocent of the crime. However, they withheld this information, along with the fact that Julius Butler was secretly working for them. Thus, whether they put Butler up to his false accusation or not (and they very probably did, since they were holding serious criminal charges over his head that gave them powerful leverage with him), they definitely participating in the frame-up. This led to Geronimo being falsely convicted in 1972.
        It was not until 1997 that Geronimo’s conviction was overturned. He then won a false imprisonment lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and the FBI, with a reported settlement of $4.5 million (including $1.75 million from the federal government). This was little enough recompense for the ruin of much of his life by the government. After finally being freed, Geronimo worked as a human rights activist with a particular focus on other false imprisonment cases, and participated in the campaign to free the political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
        See also: COINTELPRO: FBI’s War on Black America (1989) [high quality 50 min. documentary video by Denis Mueller & Deb Ellis].

PRAXIS
[Greek: action, doing, activity.]
        In Marxist philosophy and politics this is a pretentious term for what is more usually just called practice. Practice, for us is activity, and especially conscious activity of a political nature. As such it is the activity which is the source of political theory and knowledge, and activity which is appropriately guided by existing political theory and knowledge. If Mao had chosen to write in the highfalutin language of Marxist academics (rather than the language of the masses), he might well have called his famous essay “On Praxis” rather than “On Practice”.
        Those academics and other writers who customarily use the term praxis (such as Labriola, Gramsci, Lukács and Sartre) often write in ways where it is hard to understand precisely what they mean by the fancy terms they use. (Which is perhaps why they use such esoteric terms in the first place; more to impress, than to be understood.) And in at least some cases they use this term in somewhat peculiar ways. Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher of the revisionist Frankfurt School, for example, seems to use the term in a highly idiosyncratic way, which one source describes as meaning: “communicative interaction between people, which is governed by moral norms, and contrasted with instrumental action, e.g. in the production of commodities, which is governed by technical rules”, whatever all that really amounts to, exactly.

“PREACHING TO THE CHOIR”
Directing agitation or propaganda (in Lenin’s sense) at those who already agree with what is being said, rather than trying to reach and win over those who don’t already understand and agree with the ideas. This is a very common failing within most social movements, both left and right.

PREBISCH THESIS (or SINGER-PREBISCH THESIS)
The idea that the terms of trade between raw materials (or “primary products” such as agricultural crops and minerals) and manufactured goods get worse and worse over time, so that countries that depend heavily on the export of raw materials and other bulk commodities should switch over to manufacturing, or at least diversify, as soon as they are able to do so.
        There is obviously some considerable empirical basis for this idea in the modern capitalist-imperialist world. But to be analytically coherent it would be necessary to explicate just how the imperialist domination of Third World countries has led to this very common result. In other words, the thesis should be viewed as just a very secondary corollary to the workings of capitalist-imperialism.
        The “thesis”, or observation, was first made separately by Raul Prebisch and Hans Singer in 1950, based on the extensive study of historical data of the trend in prices of different sorts of bulk commodities and manufactured goods. Bourgeois economists have sought to explain this observation with the claim that there is a “greater elasticity of demand” for manufactured goods, but that makes little sense. In any case, it is undeniable that this very unfair result occurred through the workings of the so-called “free market” which bourgeois economists have always exhaulted.
        There is also some reason to believe that the Prebisch Thesis may no longer be as true or evident as it used to be, no doubt largely because of the great fall in the prices of manufactured goods due to the rapid industrialization and exploitation of cheap labor in China and other parts of Asia. This strongly suggests that the relatively faster increase in prices of manufactured goods (versus bulk commodities) in former decades may have mostly been due to monopoly effects in the industrialized imperialist countries.
        See also: DEPENDENCY THEORY

PRECARIAT
[Apparently a contraction of “precarious proletariat”.] A recently created term, so far used mostly in discussions by young academic Marxists, to refer to a lower and quite insecure stratum of the proletariat, especially temporary and part-time workers who generally have very low wages (often just above the minimum wage, where there is one) and few if any benefits. This term is mostly being used with regard to workers in the advanced capitalist countries (such as the U.S. and Britain), where large sections of the working class were once relatively well paid and comparatively secure because of the existence of strong labor unions and the reformist political influence (social democrats or the equivalent) which created welfare states, but a working class which is now being driven down more and more. Also referred to as the precarized proletariat. Actually, the largest part of the “precariat” consists of young people who have fairly recently entered the labor force and have never had “good and secure jobs”, rather than to older workers who have lost better and more secure jobs—though there are many of them as well.
        While some new theorists view the “precariat” as a new social class, differentiated from the old proletariat in large part by its qualitatively worse and multiple forms of precarious existence, in reality the economic existence of proletarians has mostly been quite precarious all along, and from the very beginning of capitalism. It was the temporary period of the existence of a substantial labor aristocracy in the capitalist-imperialist countries which was the exceptional situation, not any newly developing “precariat”. Thus the precariat, if that is the term which is finally settled on, should be viewed as one of the major lower strata of the proletariat, and not as an entirely new social class. —S.H.

“The condition of the working class in England is becoming daily more precarious.” —Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1842), first sentence; MECW, vol. 2.

PREDATORY LENDING
A common practice in contemporary capitalism whereby banks and other financial institutions issue mortgages or other loans to people in misrepresented or even outright fradulent ways, which end up severely harming these people eventually. Here are a just a few of the huge number of ways of doing this:
       *   Falsely representing an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) as a fixed-rate mortgage, thus exposing the mortgage holder to future payments which they cannot possibly afford.
       *   Failing to clearly and openly disclose balloon payments (very large individual repayments on the loan) which will become due at a later date, and which the mortgage holder will not be able to pay.
       *   Representing initial “teaser rates” (temporary low interest rates) on loans as the interest rate that would continue for the life of the loan.
       *   Signing people up for loans at higher interest rates when they actually have credit ratings that qualify them for lower interest rates. (Many people who were signed up for subprime mortgages over the past decade actually qualified for better mortgages with lower interest rates.)
        Of course people taking out mortgages were also always told that the economy would keep booming and that the prices of homes and property would continue to increase indefinitely. Thus they were led to believe that even if they were unable to make the mortgage payments in the future they could still sell the home and end up with a big profit.
        In the U.S. alone, millions of victims of predatory lending have lost their homes, lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, had their credit ratings ruined, and had their lives disrupted. But the banks have made billions of dollars of profits this way, and only a tiny number of the most blatantly fraudulent mortgage salesmen have gone to jail.

PREDICTIONS — In Economics
See: ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS, ECONOMIC FORECASTING (Bourgeois)

PREFORMATIONISM
See: HOMUNCULUS

PRESENTATION — Methods Of
How should we generally go about presenting ideas to the masses, especially complex ideas which require a fair amount of explanation? What methods should we use? There are various possibilities, including the logical method, the historical method and the simple-to-complex method. Interestingly, each of these three might be considered to be—in one sense or another—dialectical methods, though to my mind the last one of these is the most important dialectical method.
        The logical method of presentation presents first the most elemental ideas, the fundamental building blocks, explicates them thoroughly, and then builds on that foundation to present further aspects of the situation. The historical method focuses on how our understanding developed over time, from people’s earliest and roughest ideas, to their more complete, more sophisticated, and more correct later ideas. And the simple-to-complex method starts with simple and rough approximations of the actual situation, then goes back over the material again and again, getting into things in an ever deeper sort of way each time around.
        Which method, then, is the most important of the three? It depends on the audience, of course, at least to some considerable extent. More emphasis on logical foundations is possible with a more educated and patient audience, for example. But I maintain that the most basic and most important of all of the three methods of presentation being discussed is that of the simple-to-complex.
        Ideally, all three of these methods would be used simultaneously, and in fact the best presentations of complex ideas do try to do this. But the trouble is that at least to some degree the three methods conflict with each other. Often the logical foundations of a complex situation are rather abstruse. Often a full explication of the foundation ideas will mean that the ultimately more important implications that arise from them will have to be postponed for much too long a time. And too much focus on how ideas developed, though important to eventually understand, can lead to long side-tracks about erroneous conceptions and how they had to be overcome. This is why, in my opinion, the simple-to-complex method is the primary method, and why the other two methods have to be accommodated or subordinated to it.
        Marx, in his magnum opus Capital, did in fact use all three methods of presentation simultaneously. His deepest method was that of simple-to-complex. Thus he made some important simplifying assumptions in Volume I of Capital, especially the simplification that commodities are exchanged in capitalist society at exactly their value (i.e., at the precise ratios corresponding to the socially necessary labor time incorporated into each sort of commodity). This quite necessary simplifying assumption was dropped in later volumes. Within that deepest method, Marx then used the logical method of presentation. Thus he spent a great deal of space early on in Volume I explicating the core concept of the commodity. And, finally, within that combined framework, he also made considerable efforts to bring out the historical development of the concept of the commodity, and of the other key concepts in explicating the capitalist mode of production.
        Did Marx get the balance right for these three intertwined methods of presentation in Capital? In my opinion he got the balance pretty closely right for one key audience—namely, well-educated people with a strong socialist inclination and a serious determination to study socialist theory. But experience has shown that Capital is too hard, too demanding, for many less educated and less determined people to master. This is why classes on Capital, and various sorts of introductions to the most important concepts in that work, are necessary. But to say that these sorts of introductions and simplifications are necessary at first for most people is also to agree that for many the presentation method of simple-to-complex needs to be strengthened. Not only was this the case during Marx’s day, it is no doubt even much more the case in the contemporary culture in advanced capitalist countries like the United States, where—because of the Internet and other factors—many youths are now no longer reading serious books at all.
        When we become serious revolutionaries we must more than ever resolve to buckle down and seriously study the works of the great revolutionaries of the past who have created our present revolutionary theories. At the same time, it is important for those of us who have acquired some of this knowledge to help others get started in such a pursuit, by providing them with simplified written introductions to the subject and also numerous study groups where people can learn collectively. —S.H.

“Even after the determination of the [dialectical] method, the critique of political economy could still be arranged in two ways—historically or logically. Since in the course of history, as in its literary reflection, development proceeds by and large from the simpest to the more complex relations, the historical development of political economy constituted a natural clue, which the critique could take as a point of departure, and then the economic categories would appear on the whole in the same order as in the logical development. This form seems to have the advantage of greater lucidity, for it traces the actual development, but in fact it would thus become, at most, more popular. History often moves in leaps and bounds and in zigzags, and as this would have to be followed throughout, it would mean not only that a considerable amount of material of slight importance would have to be absorbed, but also that the train of thought would frequently have to be interrupted; it would, moreover, be impossible to write the history of political economy without that of bourgeois society, and the work would thus be endless because of the absence of all preliminary studies. The logical method of approach was therefore the only suitable one. This, however, is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering continguencies. The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of history, a corrected reflection, but corrected in accordance with laws provided by the actual course of history, since each moment can be examined at the stage of development where it reaches its full maturity, its classical form.” —Engels, writing of Marx’s method, in a review of his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, MECW 16:475.

“Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyze its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connection. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Afterward to the Second German Edition (Jan. 24, 1873): International ed., p. 19; Penguin ed., p. 102.

“His [Lenin’s] speeches were like a spiral; afraid that people wouldn’t understand him he returned to a thought he had already expressed, never repeating it but adding something new. (Some of those who copied his manner of speaking used to forget that a spiral is like a circle and yet unlike. A spiral progresses.)” —Ilya Erenburg, People and Life: Memoirs of 1891-1917 (London: 1961), p. 69.

“The difference between my advanced philosophy courses for graduate students and the undergraduate courses I teach is that—contrary to what you might first imagine—the graduate seminars go much more slowly, cover much less ground, and get into things much more precisely and carefully. The introductory courses slide over many less essential issues and complications.” —Paul Ziff, an American bourgeois philosopher. This is a paraphrase of his comments at the beginning of one of those graduate seminars.

PRE-THEORETICAL CATEGORY
An ill-defined or vague concept based on a crude and undeveloped theory, or where there is no overall theory as yet. Many categories in bourgeois ideology, such as “middle class” might well be considered to be pre-theoretic notions. However, it is probably true that all theoretical terms start out as pre-theoretical notions; some always remain vague and confused, while others are eventually transformed into more definite and precise terms or categories in the course of developing the relevant theory in a scientific manner.

PRICE
[Under capitalism:] The value of a commodity expressed in money. “Price is the converted form in which the exchange-value of commodities appears within the circulation process.” —Marx, CCPE, p. 66. “Price is the money-name of the labor realized in a commodity.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, Ch. 3, sect. 1: (International, p. 101; Penguin, pp. 195-6.)
        The actual market price, however, tends to fluctuate somewhat around its value based on variations in supply and demand, and also deviates more systematically from its actual value from one industry to another based on the relative amount of machinery being used (because rates of profit tend to get equalized across industries). Prices may also systematically exceed value in industries because of monopoly conditions. Although the prices of individual commodities deviate in practice from their value, considered as a whole the sum of the prices of all the commodities produced in a capitalist system normally equals the sum of the values of all the commodities. When you go to buy something at the store you are concerned primarily with its price, but when you want to correctly analyze and understand the capitalist system of production you must focus first of all on the Marxist concept of value.
        See also: COST-PRICE.
[Under socialism:] Prices under socialism are set according to a state plan for production and distribution, instead of constantly fluctuating as they do under a capitalist market system. Prices are still set, in part, according to the law of value, though to a gradually diminishing degree as socialism develops in the direction of communism where goods and services are distributed free. Moreover, the socialist state will tend to purposely lower the prices of basic necessities below their value, while initially somewhat raising the prices of luxury goods above their value. Thus the overall long-term trend for all prices under socialism is to fall (eventually to zero), but for the prices of goods and services of special importance to the people (health services, food, everyday clothing, housing, transportation, education, etc.) to fall faster and more sharply.

PRIME RATE
The interest rate quoted by commercial banks for short-term loans to their best (safest!) commercial customers, usually big corporations. This rate fluctuates based on the cost of money to the banks themselves (the discount rate) from the Federal Reserve, the health of the economy and that of the particular bank, and so forth. Despite the quoted prime rate, banks sometimes charge higher or lower interest rates for particular loans.

“PRIMING THE PUMP”
For the benefit of recent generations we should first say what “priming the pump” is literally, before talking about the analogy used in Keynesian economics! Pumping the handle on old-style mechanical pumps was once the common method used to draw water up from a well. Once water was being pumped out, the damp leather (or similar) seal inside the pump kept air from rushing in at the top (which would allow the partially raised water to fall all the way back down again before the handle was pumped again). So in order to successfully raise water from the well to the spout it was often necessary to pour a bit of water down into the pump mechanism first. This was called “priming the pump”. Once the seal was damp, water could be raised to the spout, and the water being raised continued to keep the seal damp, allowing yet more water to be raised by further pumping.
        Keynes and his followers used this as an analogy for how government deficit financing could get a weakened economy, or one in recession, going strongly again. The problem is that this is a very weak analogy to the true economic situation.
        Keynes understood that sometimes “effective demand” was insufficient to keep the economy going, and that therefore the government had to somehow get more money into the hands of people who would spend it. This is the “priming” part! But he and his followers believed that once this happens the economy should from then on be able to run for a very long time without further government deficits, and even that government surpluses could be successfully managed that would make up for the previous deficits. There are actually some limited circumstances where this can be true for a time. If, for example, the reason for the weakness in the economy was primarily psychological, that people were not going into debt to buy things because they feared they might be layed off, then a fairly short boost to the economy might lead people to abandon their fears, and decide to take out new loans to buy TVs, cars and houses.
        But the problem in the economy eventually gets to be much more basic than something like that; the working class and masses will eventually pile up so much debt that they can’t obtain new loans when they apply for them. In that case, getting government money into their hands will still allow them to buy things but only as long as the government money keeps flowing! In this situation, government deficits still work to keep the economy going, but only as long as they continue (and, for reasons we won’t get into at the moment, for as long as these government deficits keep expanding at an ever faster pace). In other words, no pump is actually being primed, and the economy will not be able to continue on its own.
        However, Keynesian economists deeply believe in this “pump-priming” theory for several reasons:
        1) They see it work on occasion (as with the psychology example) and falsely conclude that it must always work, no matter what the situation.
        2) They have the theory that the Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through this means; if not through government deficits for public works, then at least through massive government deficits accumulated during World War II. (“Military Keynesianism”.) Actually Keynesian deficits did interrupt the Depression, but only the massive destruction of capital during the war truly ended the Depression, and kept it from resuming after the war.
        3) Being bourgeois ideologists, they just can’t believe that capitalism has any internal flaw that might keep it from working smoothly most of the time. They imagine that all problems with the capitalist economy come from the outside and are fairly easily dealt with if the right techniques (such as Keynesian deficit pump-priming) are used. In other words, they don’t really understand how capitalism actually works, and its serious and inherent internal contradictions.

PRIMITIVE COMMUNAL SOCIETY (or PRIMITIVE COMMUNIST SOCIETY)
The first socioeconomic formation in human history (and pre-history), which lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, and which is characterized by the collective ownership of the means of production (such as the land and nature’s bounty), an absence of social classes and exploitation, a primitive division of labor based only on “natural” factors such as age, sex and physical ability, more or less equal distribution of goods, and a very low level of development of the productive forces. For the most part people in this form of society were nomadic hunter-gatherers, without agriculture or any settled life.
        It is important to note that the people in these societies are/were not biologically “primitive” in any way (at least during the past tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years), but rather their socioeconomic system that is/was primitive, when compared to more advanced societies.
        As of the year 2000 there were very few examples of primitive communal society still left in existence, and even those few which did remain were influenced to various degrees by the class societies all around them. One of the last remaining primitive communal societies (and one of the best studied) is that of the Dobe Ju/’hoansi people of the southern region of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and Namibia. There are about 50,000 Dobe people, who speak a San language which includes various click sounds, and who are nomadic hunter-gatherers subsisting on fruits, nuts, roots and hunted animals. They live in separate social bands of usually 25 to 50 people, with no organizational forms at any higher level. Even within each band there is no formal political or economic organization or leadership, and even very little specialization or division of labor (except along “natural” lines). However, they practice a form of what cultural anthropologists call “situational authority”, where leaders emerge and then disappear based on the varying tasks at hand. And of course there are no social classes. As one anthropologist, Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University, comments: “The Dobe are noted for their fierce egalitarian ethic; when a Dobe hunter makes a kill, he must distribute the meat among everyone in his band. Dobe society does not distinguish between work and leisure time.” And what outsiders would consider work (such as actual time spent gathering food or hunting) usually takes up only a modest part of their day.
        Those people who claim that “human nature” prevents socialism or communism from ever working seem not to know that humanity arose and has spent most of the hundreds of thousands of years of its existence in a form of cooperative society which is based on sharing, cooperation and general equality.

PRIMITIVE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
The social organization in the earliest forms of human society, and especially within primitive communal society. Although class society (primarily capitalism, of course) now exists in almost every corner of the world, there still exists today a few small and remote regions where pre-class, primitive communal society persists. Moreover, the scientific investigation of such societies began back in the 19^th century when such societies existed in larger numbers. This has allowed us to develop some general understanding of how these societies function. It has been found that the social organization of these societies is/was very much simpler than has developed in class society, and—in particular—nothing like a government or a state existed.
        One widespread modern summary theory is that of the American anthropologist Elman Rogers Service (1915-96) who postulated the following four levels of social organization (in his book Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, 1962):
        Level 1 — Band: Bands are groups of roughly 25 to 50 people, who have no higher form of social organization. While there will probably be other similar bands nearby, sharing a common language and culture, there is no formal organizational structure by which they relate to each other. Moreover, even within a single band itself there is no formal structure, no established leadership. As mentioned in the entry for PRIMITIVE COMMUNALISM above, the only form of leadership is a “situational authority” wherein some particular person might on this occasion or that take a temporary leadership role in some specific task (such as a hunt). Such an absence of government and institutionalized authority is possible only because there are no social classes, and a deeply entrenched culture of cooperation and sharing.
        Level 2 — Tribe: Tribes are groups of a few hundred to a few thousand people. This higher population density usually requires an increased dependence of plant food based on some form of low-intensity farming (such as by harvesting crops which were planted but perhaps not otherwise well-tended). Because of such primitive farming, tribes are most often sedentary at least for a few years. (The exhaustion of the farm land might then lead to a relocation to another spot for a few more years.) Anthropologist, Edward Fischer of Vanderbilt University, elaborates: “While there are status differences in tribes, these differences are generally fluid; social organization is governed by kinship ties. Tribal-level societies are led by headmen—individuals who have a formal position of power that they occupy through achieved status instead of inherited status. These headmen continually have to gain the support of the people they lead in order to keep their position.” The Yanomamö people in the Orinoco basin are one example of this social organization level. They have a slash-and-burn form of agriculture based on plantains, sweet potatoes and tobacco, and relocate their villages every three years.
        Level 3 — Chiefdom: Thousands of people, with a hereditary chief. There is a higher and more important level of status distinctions than in tribal societies. Edward Fischer remarks: “Politics and economics are built on the idea of redistributive exchange, in which gifts entail obligations that can often be converted into political power.” More intensive agriculture is required to support this level of society. An example is the Trobriand Islanders in New Guinea. A chief or nobleman inherits his position from his mother’s brother, rather than from his own father. And yams are both the economic basis and the social symbol of Trobrian society.
        Level 4 — Nation-State: Typically millions of people in a complex class society with a strong centralized authority supported by armed power (police and army). The first states arose in Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE.
        Social organizational “level 1”, the band, is the form of primitive communal society, and organizational “level 4” is obviously the form in not only modern capitalist countries, but also in all other class-based socioeconomic formations (i.e., in slave and feudal society). Levels 2 and 3 are transitional social organization forms that bridge the gap between classless primitive commualism and the major forms of class society in the world today.

PROBLEM OF EVIL
An internal logical flaw in the conception of God as put forward by many religions including Christianity. The religious doctrine is that God is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) and omnibenevolent (all good). The trouble is, given the obvious fact that there is much evil in the world, these three characteristics are logically incompatible and inconsistent with each other. David Hume expressed the difficulty this way:
        If evil in the world is the intention of the Deity, then He is not benevolent.
        If evil in the world is contrary to His intention, then He is not omnipotent.
        But evil is either in accordance with His intention or contrary to it.
        Therefore, either the Deity is not benevolent, or He is not omnipotent.
Of course from the materialist point of view there is one other, much more sensible, alternative: No “Deity” exists at all!
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about the problem of evil.

PRODUCTION
See below, and: INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION

PRODUCTIVE FORCES
The means of production (the non-human productive forces) together with human labor power.
        See also: “THEORY OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES”

PRODUCTIVITY
Labor productivity is the ratio of output (quantity of commodities produced) divided by the the number of workers (or the number of hours worked by the workers) to produce it. Thus if a given group of workers can now produce 25% more output in an 8-hour day as compared to a year ago, their productivity has increased by 25% over that period. Productivity can be increased through the use of better tools and machinery, through the better organization of labor (i.e., improving labor technique and efficiency), by increasing the amount of work demanded from each worker per hour (speed-ups), and by increasing the number of hours the workers must work each day. (This last method does not improve productivity/hour, but it does improve productivity/day.)
        See also: “LEISURE AGE”

“Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes [i.e., bourgeoisie]. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.” —John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), Bk. IV, ch. VI, sect. 2. [Since Mill’s day some very small proportion of the benefits due to the great advances in the productivity of labor have sometimes been won by the working class through their great struggles, but the vast preponderance still goes to the capitalists.]

“Capital therefore has an immanent drive, and a constant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labor, in order to cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the worker himself.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 12. (Penguin ed., pp. 436-7.)

“The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit.” —Marx, Capital, vol. III, ch. XV, part III: (International ed., p. 259; Penguin ed., p. 368.)

PROFIT, AVERAGE
[Intro material to be added... ]

“To be produced, to be brought to the market, the commodity must at least fetch that market price, that cost-price to the seller, whether its own value be greater or smaller than that cost-price. It is a matter of indifference to the capitalist whether his commodity contains more or less unpaid labor than other commodities, if into its price enters as much of the general stock of unpaid labor, or the surplus product in which it is fixed, as every other equal quantity of capital will draw from that common stock. In this respect, the capitalists are ‘communists’. In competition, each naturally tries to secure more than the average profit, which is only possible if others secure less. It is precisely as a result of this struggle that the average profit is established.” —Marx, TSV 3:83.

PROFITS — U.S. Corporate Profits
In the graph at the right it can be seen that in recent decades the profits of U.S. corporations have not only been rapidly growing in absolute terms, but have even been growing rapidly as a percentage of U.S. GDP. And this is despite the fact that there has been a long slowdown in the rate of GDP growth in the U.S. (and most of the world) since the early 1970s. Corporate profits did dip somewhat during the “Dot.com” recession of 2000-2001, and again, more sharply, in the 2007-2009 period of the “Great Recession”, but soon recovered and then exceeded their previous levels.
        Note that there is no indication here of any long-term decline in corporate profits, of the sort that Marx seemed to envision in vol. III of Capital. And note also that a falling rate of profit did not precede any of the four recessions which occurred during this period, and therefore cannot reasonably be said to have caused them. The declines in profits which occurred were not only limited and temporary, but were clearly a result of these overproduction crises rather than the cause of them. This is some of the very extensive empirical evidence which demonstrates beyond any serious doubt that the theory of the falling rate of profits as the cause of capitalist economic crises is simply not correct. The true cause of overproduction crises is instead the overproduction of capital in relation to the effective demand for commodities which all that real capital can produce. (Or as Engels put it, the expansion of production at a much faster pace than the expansion of the market.) This is the more fundamental and profound theory that Marx created, which has withstood the test of time.

“[T]o begin by asking what is society and what is progress, is to begin at the end. Where will you get a conception of society and progress in general if you have not studied a single social formation in particular, if you have not even been able to establish this conception, if you have not even been able to approach a serious factual investigation, an objective analysis of social relations of any kind? This is a most obvious symptom of metaphysics, with which every science began: as long as people did not know how to set about studying the facts, they always invented a priori general theories, which were always sterile. The metaphysician-chemist, still unable to make a factual investigation of chemical processes, concocts a theory about chemical affinity as a force. The metphysician-biologist talks about the nature of life and the vital force. The metaphysician-psychologist argues about the nature of the soul. Here it is the method itself that is absurd. You cannot argue about the soul without having explained psychical processes in particular: here progress must consist precisely in abandoning general theories and philosophical discourses about the nature of the soul, and in being able to put the study of the facts about particular psychical processes on a scientific footing....
         “The gigantic step forward taken by Marx in this respect consisted precisely in that he discarded all these arguments about society and progress in general and produced a scientific analysis of one society and of one progress—capitalist. And [the Narodnik] Mr. Mikhailovsky blames him for beginning at the beginning and not at the end, for having begun with an analysis of the facts and not with the final conclusions, with a study of particular, historically-determined social relations and not with general theories about what these social relations consist of in general!” —Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” (1894), LCW 1:143-5.

“A progressive never asks people what they want—why should he, when he already knows what’s good for them?” —Derek Bickerton, Bastard Tongues (2008), p. 186. [This criticizes the tendency among “progressives” and liberals toward paternalism, which demonstrates their total ignorance of the mass line.]

PROLETARIAN CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
See: CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS—Proletarian

PROLETARIAN MORALITY
The morality which expresses the class interests of the proletariat (whether or not individual proletarians are conscious of this).
Compare with COMMUNIST MORALITY.

PROLETKULT (or PROLETCULT) ORGANIZATION
A political and cultural movement of the radical intelligensia in Russia (and beyond) from 1917 to 1932, which claimed to be working toward a “totally new” and truly proletarian art and culture which was supposed to be completely devoid of any bourgeois influences. The name comes from the contraction of the Russian words for “Proletarian Culture”.
        The founder and chief theoretician of the Proletkult organization was Alexander Bogdanov, and it was based on his 3-volume work Empirio-Monism (1904-6) which was an attempt to combine Marxism with Machism and positivism. Another very prominent person involved in this movement was Anatoly Lunacharsky, who was the Commissar of Enlightenment (Minister of Culture) in the revolutionary government, and who was Bogdanov’s brother-in-law.
        Bogdanov viewed the Proletkult as the third part of a troika (a Russian vehicle drawn by 3 horses) advancing the revolution. The first two were the proletarian party and the unions. Thus implicitly (and in practice) he viewed the Proletkult as an organization independent of control and supervision by the Bolshevik party. Already by early 1918 Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) and other Bolsheviks were criticizing this unjustified autonomy and independent political line of the Proletkult.
        Originally the Proletkult organization was supported politically and financially by the new revolutionary government in Russia. Under pressure from the Bolshevik party it somewhat reluctantly agreed to educate its members on pre-Revolutionary Russian and world culture. But the artistic styles and forms it mostly promoted were still somewhat far removed from the interests and appreciation of the workers and peasants. Thus it promoted Constructivism in painting and sculpture and Futurism in literature and other arts. Only because of Lenin’s disapproval (in “On Proletarian Culture” [1920; LCW 31:316-7]) did they pull back from focusing on promoting avant-garde experimental art.
        In 1920 the Proletkult was finally brought under better political control. To counteract Bogdanov’s strongly idealist influence in philosophy, Lenin re-issued his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. And the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued some new guidelines, “On the Proletkults”, which restricted the activities of that group to just the arts and even there said that this should be monitored by the Party. Its funding was also reduced, though it still existed in this much diminished form until 1932.

“Despite this setback, Proletkult leaders continued after 1920 to exercise influence in other institutions and on Soviet intellectual life. The Bogdanovists considered the Soviet regime to be not a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but rather a coalition of the proletariat, the poor peasantry and the bourgeois intelligensia. Given the cultural backwardness of the first two strata they considered it likely, under prevailing conditions of state capitalism [during the NEP], that the intelligentsia would emerge as the ruling class. Without challenging the role of the Party as custodian of the political interests of the working class or of the trade unions as custodian of their economic interests, the Proletkult had reserved for itself the role of guardian of the cultural development of the working class, arguing that the transition to socialism required the formation of a proletarian intelligentsia.” —John Biggart, in Harold Shukman, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Russian Revolution (1988), p. 271.

PROPAGANDA
        1. [In traditional Leninist usage:] Oral, visual, and especially printed political views whose purpose is to influence people’s consciousness and mood with respect to multiple issues, or in general (as opposed to the narrow sense of agitation), and to motivate them to take general political action. For Lenin’s discussion of propaganda and agitation, and the distinction between the two, see What Is To Be Done?, chapter III, sect. B, “How Martynov Rendered Plekhanov More Profound”, online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm
        2. [In ordinary English usage, reflecting non-Marxist conceptions:] Lies and distortions designed to influence people politically. (The ruling class recognizes no such thing as bourgeois propaganda of course!)
        Because this word is so loaded in English, we revolutionaries should probably refrain from using it in Lenin’s sense, as what we are then saying would most likely be misunderstood. (Even other Marxists may not correctly understand what we mean!) This highly negative connotation of the word ‘propaganda’ in English is not necessarily true of the corresponding word in other languages. For Lenin, at least, it was not true in Russian. And it is not true in Chinese, either. But in English, alas, the word is completely pejorative for most people, and any reference to “propaganda” as a positive thing is likely to seem jarring at the very least!

“[T]he Chinese word xuanchuan (propaganda), meaning to inform and to propagate, carries a more positive connotation than its English counterpart. Granted that it is still a form of advocacy and conveys a particular point of view, xuanchuan lacks the negative implication of manipulation.” —Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-45 (1994), p. 9.

PROPERTY BUBBLE
An asset bubble in the prices of property, such as in commercial property (business buildings) or in private housing.
        See also: HOUSING BUBBLE, OFFICE SPACE

PROPERTY RELATIONS
[In political economy:] The relations of production expressed in legal terms. Note that personal property (such as a person’s clothes, house or automobile) is not at issue here; in political economy the important matter is who owns and controls the means of production.

PROPOSAL CONCERNING THE GENERAL LINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST MOVEMENT
A famous document by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China which was issued on June 14, 1963, and which was “drawn up under the personal leadership of Comrade Mao Tse-tung”. [Peking Review, #34, Aug. 19, 1966, p. 7.] This was an important document in the ideological struggle between the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in China and the revisionist leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
        [More to be added.]
        This document is available online at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PGL63.html;   http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sino-soviet-split/cpc/proposal.htm; and elsewhere.

PROTAGORAS OF ABDERA   (c. 490-c. 420 BCE)
Ancient Greek philosopher, agnostic, and advocate of democracy within slave-owning society. In the dialogue named Protagoras, Plato presents him as a Sophist, or professional teacher of virtue, and criticizes his ideas from a reactionary point of view.

“Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.” —Protagoras   [By this comment Protagoras seems to have meant that social organization, laws, morality, etc., have not come down from the gods, but have been created by human beings. This stance led to major controversy and hostility towards Protagoras on the part of the Athenian authorities (as well as from Plato), and there is a story that his book was burned and he was forced to flee from the city. —S.H.]

PROTECTIONISM
The creation of barriers to the import of foreign goods into a country, for the purpose of protecting local industry from competition. This is most commonly done through establishing tariffs (taxes) on imports, but it can also be accomplished through import quotas (limits on the quantities of imports of a certain commodity which are allowed in), subsidies to local companies (including export subsidies), manipulation of product safety laws, etc.
        Protectionism is widely condemned by bourgeois economists, on the grounds that it prevents the “most efficient” use of resources. (Economic “efficiency” for them ultimate means the methods which produce the greatest profits for the capitalists, and especially for the profits of the dominant capitalists in imperialist countries.) Some bourgeois economists will admit that protectionism is justified to some extent to protect “infant industries” in a developing country.
        But in general bourgeois economists claim the most extremely negative results arise from protectionism, and even blame the Great Depression of the 1930s on it in large part. (See: SMOOT-HAWLEY ACT.)
        It is true, however, that in overproduction crises each capitalist country tries to protect its own capitalists and put more of the burden on other countries, in part through protectionist measures. This can in fact aggravate the overall crisis to some degree.

PROUDHON, Pierre Joseph   (1809-1865)
French sociologist and economist, an ideologist of the petty bourgeoisie. He was a “socialist” of sorts, but hostile to Marxism, and one of the founders of the social theory of anarchism. Proudhon is famous for the remark that “property is theft”, but he advocated “individual possession” of the means of production, which is an impossibility in modern industrial society, and also clearly shows his petty bourgeois perspective.

“Proudhon criticized big capitalist property from the petty-bourgeois position and dreamed of perpetuating petty property ownership; he proposed the foundation of ‘people’s’ and ‘exchange’ banks, with the aid of which the workers would be able to acquire the means of production, become handicraftsmen, and ensure the ‘just’ marketing of their wares. Proudhon did not understand the role and significance of the proletariat and displayed a negative attitude towards the class struggle, the proletarian revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat; as an anarchist he denied the necessity for the state. Marx and Engels struggled persistently against Proudhon’s efforts to impose his views on the First International. Proudhonism was subjected to a ruthless criticism in Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy. The determined struggle waged by Marx, Engels, and their supporters ended in the complete victory of Marxism over Proudhonism in the First International.
         “Lenin called Proudhonism the ‘dull thinking of a petty-bourgeois and a philistine’ incapable of comprehending the viewpoint of the working class. The ideas of Proudhonism are widely utilized by bourgeois ‘theoreticians’ in their class-collaboration propaganda.” —Note 76, LCW 5:547.

PSYCHOANALYSIS
A scientifically unsupported theory and therapeutic method developed originally by Sigmund Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis is still the dominant form, but there are now many variations on the theme, some of which give less emphasis to the supposed sexual perversions of the human unconscious.
        See also: ERICH FROMM

PSYCHOPHYSICAL PARALLELISM
A common form of dualism in philosophy, in which mental or “psychic” phenomena are supposed to be completely independent of material processes, but nevertheless accompany or “parallel” them. This of course seems completely inexplicable. It is an attempt to believe in materialist cause and effect while simultaneously viewing mind and mental phenomena as being totally separate and independent of any material, physical processes.
        The earliest attempt to explain how and why this might occur was in the form of Occasionalism, wherein religious followers of Descartes (including Malebranche) proposed that this parallelism was simply the result of God’s fiat.
        Other, less overtly religious people, tried desperately to find other explanations. Generally this meant attempting to figure out some way that the incorporeal “soul” or mind, which seemed so totally independent of the body, could nevertheless somehow interact with physical bodies. But no intelligible theory of how this could happen was ever arrived at. Descartes’s own theory that “somehow” the mind and brain connect up in the pineal gland is no worse than any later proposal for dualist psychophysical interaction, though it really proffers no explanation at all.
        In reality the only way that any mental phenomenon, such as my decision to raise my arm, can possibly have any effect on my physical body is if that mental phenomenon itself is properly construed as a high-level view of some functional aspects of my brain, that is to say, of some aspects of a developing complex physical process which includes the functioning of the neural circuits of my brain. The attempt to regard mind (or “soul”) as completely independent of the body inevitably leads to irresolvable mysteries about how these two “totally independent things” can ever possibly interact.
        See also: EPIPHENOMENALISM

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