RABOCHEYE DYELO [Workers’ Cause]
“Rabocheye Dyelo (Workers’ Cause) was an
Economist journal, organ of the Union of Russian
Social-Democrats Abroad, published at irregular intervals in Geneva from April
1899 to February 1902 under the editorship of B. N. Krichevsky, P. F. Teplov
(Sibiryak), V. P. Ivanshin, and later A. S. Martynov. Nine issues (three of
them double ones, thus making twelve) appeared in all. The editorial board of
Rabocheye Dyelo was the Economists’ center abroad. It supported Bernstein’s
slogan of ‘freedom of criticism’ of Marxism, took an opportunist stand on the
tactical and organizational problems of the Russian Social-Democratic movement,
and denied the revolutionary potentialities of the peasantry. The journal
propagated the opportunist idea of the subordinating the workers’ political
struggle to the economic and glorified spontaneity in the working-class movement,
denying the leading role of the Party. One of its editors, V. P. Ivanshin, also
took part in editing Rabochaya Mysl, organ of the avowed Economists,
which Rabocheye Dyelo supported. At the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P.,
the Rabocheye Dyelo-ists represented the extreme Right, opportunist wing
of the Party.” —Note 4, LCW 7.
RADICAL PHILOSOPHY [Magazine]
A journal of “radical” academic philosophy published in Britain since 1972. Although it
claims to be a journal of “socialist and feminist philosophy” it has little connection
with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism or with revolution. As this summary from its website
demonstrates, it is mostly focused on pseudo-“Marxist”
Continental Philosophy:
“The journal is run by an Editorial Collective and appears 6 times
a year. It features major academic articles by some of the most famous writers in
contemporary left-wing and feminist philosophical, political and cultural thought,
including Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar,
Homi K. Bhabha, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Michèle Le Dœuff, Paul Feyerabend,
Michel Foucault, Axel Honneth, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,
Jean Laplanche, Michael Löwy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière,
Richard Rorty, Peter Sloterdijk, Gayatri Spivak,
Rick Turner, Paul Virilio and Slavoj Žižek. Each issue also has a large and diverse
reviews section (reviewers have included Daniel Bensaïd, Terry
Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Christopher Norris) as well as commentaries,
obituaries, interviews (including Cornelius Castoriadis, Drucilla Cornel,
Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stuart Hall,
Rem Koolhaas, Edward Said, Jeff Wall and Cornell West), news and conference reports.
Radical Philosophy also organises regular conferences.”
Radical Philosophy’s website, which contains all its content from back issues
(though most of it in bourgeois fashion available only for sale or for subscribers), is at:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com
RAWLS, John (1921-2002)
A very influential American bourgeois philosopher in the last half of the 20th
century who specialized in moral and political philosophy. He is basically a philosopher
of bourgeois liberalism. He spent most of his teaching career at Harvard University, and is
best known for what contemporary bourgeois philosophers consider to be his “magnum opus”,
A Theory of Justice (1971).
A Theory of Justice is, however, a
confused and inconsistent work. Because there are many conflicting and fairly obscure
threads in it, it is the sort of work that bourgeois philosophers love to discuss and
“interpret”. One would think that a major work on moral philosophy
(ethics) and political philosophy would begin by clearly stating
what the foundations of morality are. But Rawls does not do that; his obsession is with the
higher level principles of moral and political philosophy which depend on the
foundations of morality which he never coherently establishes. Thus it often goes unnoticed
that Rawls is pretty much just a Kantian when it comes to the
foundations of morality. This is brought out more clearly in another of his books,
Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (2000).
“As in all his writings, he [Rawls] gives pride of place in these
lectures to questions about moral reasoning. He is concerned above all with the logic
of morality, its presuppositions, its principles, and the basic legal and political
institutions that flow from it. Rawls finds inspiration chiefly in the daunting
writings of the great 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He does discuss
other thinkers. David Hume, with whom he begins, raised the question that Kant
attempted to resolve: How can there be universal moral standards untainted by our
passions and interests? Part of Kant’s answer is elaborated in the Critique of
Pure Reason (1781): The very structure of reason, independent of our passions
and interests, provides universal standards. Another part is found in ... his other
works in which Kant develops the idea from a variety of angles that the universal
moral standard takes the form of a law, the
Categorical Imperative, which requires
us to act according to a maxim that we could will to be a universal law. Rawls
concludes with Hegel, who clarified, corrected, and supplemented Kant. But, as in
Rawls’s other writings, Kant is the looming philosophical presence.
“... [Rawls] turns to Kant in
order to make sense of the moral life as it truly is. The implication is that the
history of moral philosophy culminates in Kant and more or less comes to an end in
the Kantian-inspired moral philosophy that Rawls’s own work exemplifies. What Rawls
introduces as a circumscribed scholarly effort to understand Kant is actually a
bold defense of the Kantian idea that the very essence of morality consists in
reasoning correctly on the basis of universal moral laws.” —Peter Berkowitz, “John
Rawls and the Liberal Faith”, in the bourgeois journal, the Wilson Quarterly,
Spring 2002, pp. 61-62.
From the point of view of revolutionary Marxism, this so-called “bold defense” of
universal moral laws is instead just another tiredsome repetition of Kantian doctrine
that has long been seen through on our part as the idealist nonsense that it is! Since
all of Rawls’s arguments in A Theory of Justice and his other writings are
constructed on this Kantian basis, they are all essentially worthless from our point of
view, and would still be so even if they weren’t so confused and obscure. All his endless
discussions of the nature of “justice as fairness”, distributive justice (how goods should
be fairly distributed in a society), and so forth are found to rest on idealist and
bourgeois foundations. Rawls not only appeals to the quintessentially bourgeois
“Social Contract” idea, but also affirms the “right”
of individuals to own and control private property in the means of production as a basic
principle of “liberty”, which is supposedly justified on the basis of human “moral
capacities” and “self-respect”. Thus this supposed paragon of the defense of moral justice
sees nothing at all wrong in the capitalist exploitation of the workers or the imperialist
economic domination and exploitation of the world.
Rawls’s conception of a “well-ordered
society” is that of bourgeois liberalism (meaning “liberalism” in the contemporary social
sense in the U.S., as opposed to conservatism and laissez-faire).
Thus he favored the liberal’s notion of supposed social justice, the regulation of capitalism
and the mere mitigation of some of its worst “excesses”. His whole career was devoted to
giving a theoretical excuse for liberal capitalism.
RECESSIONS — Predicting
It is often noted that bourgeois economists are very bad at predicting recessions (and,
indeed, in predicting the future course of the economy in general). Why is this? It is
simply because they do not understand the basic laws of capitalism; they do not really
know how capitalism works. So instead of making predictions based on a comprehension of
the laws underlying the system, they are reduced to making predictions based on 1) their
biased pro-capitalist belief that the system generally works well, and 2) the expectation
that what has been happening recently will continue to happen, if not considerably improve.
I.e., their “predictions” are at best only a restatement of what has already recently been
happening, along with some “positive thinking” and cheerleading.
See also:
ECONOMIC FORECASTING
“Perhaps the best sign of how difficult it is to know the economy’s
direction is that, as a group, the nation’s professional forecasters have failed to
predict all the recessions since the 1970s, according to data kept by the Philadelphia
Fed. In the last 30 years, the average probability they put on the economy lapsing
into recession has never risen above 50 percent—until the economy was already in a
recession.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times, Sept. 7, 2011.
RED BAITING
1. Attacking or persecuting people for being communists, whether or not they are communists.
2. Accusing liberals and other people who are quite clearly not communists of being
communists, in order to discredit them within bourgeois politics.
In very reactionary countries, such as the
U.S., red baiting typically has this second sense, because—for one thing—there are
not very many actual communists around, and they play little or no role within the dominant
media intra-bourgeois political struggles.
It might be thought that red baiting plays
a positive role in some respects, since in bourgeois politics anything remotely progressive
is soon labeled as “communistic” by some reactionary or other—thus tending to associate
anything at all progressive or in the interests of the people with communism. However, there
is little doubt that on balance red baiting is a very negative phenomenon that primarily
serves the interests of the capitalist ruling class and their indoctrination of the people.
In bourgeois society most people need to learn what their actual interests are, and the
overall nature of social reality, in a step-by-step fashion which usually only fairly
gradually leads them from liberal reformist views to revolutionary and communist views. Red
baiting creates tremendous fears among many liberals about “going too far” or “taking any
further steps” in their ideas or actions against the ruling capitalists. Intellectuals,
especially, can thus become quite emotionally fearful of advancing their own ideas in any
radical direction.
See also:
ANTI-COMMUNISM, McCARTHYISM,
TO BE ATTACKED BY THE ENEMY IS A GOOD THING
“Virtue, it turns out, is the exclusive property of the right. This
was brought to my attention just a few months after I began writing ‘The Ethicist,’ a
weekly column in The New York Times Magazine, when it was denounced by four
periodicals, each more right-wing than the last... [The online National Review
said:] ‘“The Ethicist” Better Termed “The Marxist.”’ I may have earned this encomium
by suggesting that public education was worthwhile, or perhaps by favoring breathable
air. Or air. (Admissions requirements for Marxism have apparently been lowered
precipitately, like some kind of ideological grade inflation.)” —Randy Cohen, “The
Politics of Ethics”, The Nation, April 8, 2002, p. 21.
REFLECTION THEORY [Philosophy]
An important part of the Marxist understanding of the relationship of ideas and the mind
to physical reality; the view that mental conceptions reflect or correspond in
one way or another to aspects of that reality. “At the roots of the theory of knowledge of
dialectical materialism lies the recognition of the objective world and its reflection by
the human mind.” (Lenin)
The term reflection itself, however,
can be somewhat misleading. Marxists are not claiming that this reflection in the
mind or brain of external reality is like a mirror or a camera, which reflects an exact
pictorial image of something. Rather the concept of reflection is much more abstract than
that. Our mental idea of ‘dog’ is not an actual picture of a dog which is somehow formed in
the brain.
“In that section of their outline, they [Christof Koch and Francis
Crick] argue that there must be ‘explicit representations’ in our brains of things we
perceive. By this they mean that if we can see a dog, whatever is happening in our
brains while we’re looking at the dog must be measurable and directly translatable,
if we only knew what to measure and how to translate it. Thus it would be theoretically
possible, by measuring the activity of neurons, to read the mind of someone looking at
Fido and—simply by looking at the pattern of neuronal activity—know they were seeing
a dog.” —Shannon Moffett, The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to
Unlock its Mysteries (2006), p. 82.
[In the same way, the Marxist
Theory of Reflection is not saying that our idea of ‘dog’ (whether we are looking
at one at the moment or not) is some actual pictorial representation of a dog in our
brain, but rather a more abstract correspondence between some complex of neural
connections/activity and actual dogs. By the way, the hypothesized ability of scientists
to read minds in the postulated way has now been demonstrated in the laboratory. In
one experiment a subject was asked to think about a series of things one at a time,
including a hammer. Functional MRI images were made of the brain while they did this.
Later the subject was asked to think about just one of these items. The person thought
about a hammer, and by viewing the fMRI image at that moment the scientists were able
to determine that this was in fact what they were thinking about. This sort of thing is
very crude at present (fortunately, given that this is bourgeois society!), but it does
show that there is some definite correspondence, or “reflection”, in the mind/brain
between our ideas and reality. —S.H.]
When a baby or very young child sees a dog or other thing they may at first not yet be
able to form the idea or concept of ‘dog’. The formation of ideas which reflect reality is a
process that must occur in the mind/brain. Moreover these ideas or concepts must be refined
over time to more adequately reflect reality. (For example, the original concept of ‘dog’
in the child's mind may be that of some one particular dog, rather than of dogs in general.)
Similarly, even much older children and adults will invariably have some ideas which are in
need of much further refinement or even major modification in order to more truly reflect
reality. This is especially apt to be the case with regard to social ideas and concepts
which are systematically distorted by the bourgeoisie in capitalist society.
See also:
SENSATIONS
“[Dialectical] Logic is the science of cognition. It is the theory
of knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man. But this is not a simple,
not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of
abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc., and these
concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science = ‘the logical Idea’) embrace
conditionally, approximately, the universal law-governed character of eternally
moving and developing nature. Here there are actually, objectively, three
members: 1) nature; 2) human cognition = the human brain (as the highest
product of this same nature), and 3) the form of reflection of nature in human
cognition, and this form consists precisely of concepts, laws, categories, etc. Man
cannot comprehend = reflect = mirror nature as a whole, in its completeness,
its ‘immediate totality,’ he can only externally come closer to this, creating
abstractions, concepts, laws, a scientific picture of the world, etc., etc.” —Lenin,
“Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic” (1914), LCW 38:182.
“Cognition is the eternal, endless approximation of thought to the
object. The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not
‘lifelessly,’ not ‘abstractly,’ not devoid of movement, not without
contradictions, but in the eternal process of movement, the
arising of contradictions and their solution.” —Lenin, ibid., LCW 38:195.
REFORMS — Struggles For
[Intro to be added... ]
“Revolutionary Social-Democracy [revolutionary Communism] has always
included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities. But it utilizes ‘economic’
agitation for the purpose of presenting to the government, not only demands for all
sorts of measures, but also (and primarily) the demand that it cease to be an autocratic
government. Moreover, it considers it its duty to present this demand to the government
on the basis, not of the economic struggle alone, but of all manifestations in
general of public and political life. In a word, it subordinates the struggle for
reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for
socialism.” —Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” (1902), LCW 5:405-406.
RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION
The role or position of individuals and groups of people with regard to the ownership and/or
control of the means of production and therefore
with regard to the ownership or control of the economic surplus produced in economic
production. The relations of production are thus the primary determinant of the
class structure of any class society: which classes exist, and
the nature of the political-economic relationships between the different social classes.
Specifically, in every class society there is the central relationship of
exploitation: one class exploits another, and thus lives
off the labor of another.
In capitalist society the relations of
production are as follows:
1) The bourgeoisie
(or capitalist class) owns and controls the means of production, either as individuals,
or in the form of corporations, or sometimes collectively at the state level (as with the U.S.
Postal Service, or with all of industry as in the revisionist Soviet Union).
2) The proletariat
(or working class) has no ownership share or control over the means of production, and therefore
to survive each proletarian must sell his or her ability to work to one or another capitalist
or capitalist corporation or entity. There is thus an exploitative relationship between the the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat: The capitalists exploit the workers, since the source
of surplus value and capitalist profits is the labor of
workers.
3) The petty
bourgeoisie (independent professionals and operators of very small businesses such as
family-run restaurants) are more or less independent of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
They are neither directly exploited by the capitalists, nor do they (for the most part) exploit
the working class.
“The defining anecdote in this final chapter is the tragicomic tale of a
Mr Peel, who took with him from England to the Swan River district of western Australia
£50,000 in cash and 3,000 working-class men, women and children. He overlooked only
one thing: the need to keep his workers separated from the means of production. Finding
land freely available in this empty region they abandoned their employer, leaving him
without even a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river. ‘Unhappy Mr Peel,’
Marx writes, ‘who provided for everything except the export of English relations of
production to the Swan River!’” —Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital (2006), p. 69,
summarizing an historical incident described by Marx in Capital, vol. I, ch. 33.
RELATIVISM (In Epistemology)
The absurdly excessive skeptical view that there is no objective truth, nor any definite truths
about the world. Usually this takes the form of claiming that human beings are incapable
of determining or arriving at any definite truths about the world (including both the physical
world and human society). According to this notion, everything is just a matter of unsubstantiated
opinion. However, in reality, this is usually more of an indication that the holders of
such views are themselves unable to figure out any important facts and truths about the
world. They then foolishly ascribe their own inability and ignorance to everyone else!
Of course there is some degree of
relativity to human knowledge. Humanity certainly does not know everything about the
world, and never will. The extent of our knowledge is increasing over time, and we know things
now we did not know in centuries past. But human knowledge as a whole must still be considered
“relative” in this sense. Furthermore, the world, and things in it, are continually changing, so
in this sense too things are somewhat relative and our knowledge of them is not “absolute”
(complete, permanent or unchanging). Nevertheless, we do know many definite things about both
the physical world and human society, and our knowledge is steadily increasing in both areas.
Relativism, as a philosophical theory, is a wild and totally unjustified exaggeration of
the actual limitations of human knowledge.
Relativism is one of the characteristic views
of those who subscribe to pragmatism, and is also a central aspect
of postmodernism in academia.
See also:
AGNOSTICISM—Epistemological
and Philosophical doggerel about
relativism.
“Old people tend more to relativism; young people tend more to
absolutism.” —Mao, 1937, marginal note in his copy of the Marxist philosopher Ai Siqi’s book
Philosophy and Life; in Nick Knight, ed., Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism
(1990), p. 237.
REMOLDING ONE’S WORLDVIEW (or WORLD OUTLOOK)
Changing one’s viewpoint (worldview) from that of one class
to that of another, generally assumed by Marxists to mean in the direction of a proletarian
revolutionary outlook.
“How should a cadre look at himself? He should look at himself from
the ‘one divides into two’ point of view. He may have his strong points, but he is
sure to have shortcomings. He must not think he is always right. He must understand
that remolding one’s world outlook is not something that can be completed once and
for all. As long as classes and class struggle exist in society, the struggle of the
two world outlooks will go on in people’s minds. Therefore, each of us faces the
problem of eradicating the bourgeois world outlook and establishing a proletarian
one in his mind. This matter of remolding one’s ideology is important both for new
or old comrades, both for those in low or high positions. Furthermore, the heavier
is one’s responsibility, the more important is such remolding, and the greater the
need to remold consciously and be strict with oneself. Anyone who thinks he has no
contradictions in his mind and needs no remolding is harboring a metaphysical
viewpoint that is extremely harmful.”
—“Maxims for
Revolutionaries—The ‘Three Constantly Read Articles’”, an editorial in
Jiefangjun Bao [Liberation Army Daily], translated in Peking Review,
vol. 10, #2, Jan. 6, 1967, p. 8.
RENDITION
In law rendition just means the transfer of a detained person from one jurisdiction
to another. However, in recent years the term has come to be almost synonymous with
extraordinary rendition or irregular rendition, which are euphemisms for the
transfer of prisoners to other places so they can be more brutally interrogated and outright
tortured. Numerous articles in bourgeois newspapers themselves have described how both the
U.S. and Britain, in connivance with at least a dozen other countries, have been doing this
in thousands of cases since their so-called “war on terror” began in 2001. It is yet another
demonstration that this “war on terror” is actually itself a war of terror.
The CIA is the most
notorious practitioner of extraordinary rendition. With the knowledge of and authorization
by top government officials (including the President), it has set up a whole series of secret
detention centers around the world (which are referred to as “black sites” in their own
documents). One such “black site” is in Egypt, where security forces are notorious for their
use of torture.
A report by the European Parliament in
February 2007 stated that the CIA had conducted 1,245 rendition flights, many to destinations
where prisoners could face torture, in violation of article 3 of the United Nations Convention
Against Torture. This report, and its conclusion that many European countries had participated
in these illegal and immoral actions by the CIA, was endorsed by a large majority of the
European Parliament. This, however, has not kept the CIA and U.S. government from continuing
these outrages.
RENT COLLECTION COURTYARD
A world-famous set of over 100 life-sized clay sculptures of oppressed peasants and fierce
class struggle in pre-Liberation China, situated in a feudal landlord’s special courtyard for
the payment of rent. This sculpture set was the work of a team of revolutionary artists led
by Ye Yushan of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, and was created in the early
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution period (1965-66). It was
displayed in the actual “rent collection courtyard” of the despotic landlord Liu Wen-tsai of
Dayi County, Sichuan Province in southwestern China, whose enormous home was turned into a
museum after the revolution.
“Chairman Mao reformed the culture of China to coincide with the new
Chinese Communist Party in many ways. This included changing the context of art expression,
in particular, the creation of the Rent Collection Courtyard. Mao recruited a group of
eighteen professional and amateur revolutionary Chinese sculptors and instructed them to
intermingle themselves with the laboring class to learn from their experiences and stories
of pre-revolution times. The artists lived among the workers and came to empathize with
them, developing passionate feelings themselves against systems of exploitation that are
clearly evident in the features and flow of the scenes.
“The work was a milestone for peasant
representation throughout China, giving the people a voice in a manner that would be caught
in time and never forgotten. In conforming to the peasant class, the materials of which
the sculptures were formed also appealed to them. The clay and straw mixture was cheaper
and easier to use than traditional plaster or bronze, and it is a material available
anywhere in the countryside of which the laborers live. Wooden frames anchor the clay
figures and the outer surface is an amalgam of clay, sand, and cotton. Black glass was used
for the eyes and new carving techniques gave the features an especially dynamic appearance,
an approach incomparable [with] previous clay sculpture.
“The Rent Collection Courtyard was
completed in four and a half months and put on exhibition on October 1, 1965. Peasants
immediately traveled hundreds of kilometers to see the work that truly gave them a voice.
The following year the people demanded another set be added to the work, increasing the
number of figures from 114 to 119....
“The political, moral and artistic
significance of the Rent Collection Courtyard makes it one of the most monumental works in
Chinese history. Its form and attention to detail evokes philosophical and nationalist
agendas from across the ideological spectrum. Drawing from a mass of millions of demoralized
people with a renewed outlook on life, this exhibition brought artistic expression to new
and profound heights.” —Britt Paulson, St. Olaf College, 2004.
The Rent Collection Courtyard was such a powerful work of art that it was widely publicized and
underwent various revisions, incorporating the criticisms and new ideas of workers, peasants,
soldiers and Red Guards. These revisions gave a bolder expression to some of the faces of the
people, and most importantly, the sixth section of the display, entitled “Revolt” was improved
and made more powerful.
Replicas of these sculptures were created and
displayed elsewhere in China, and as recently as 2010 one set was once again displayed briefly
in Beijing, despite the neglect and destruction of most Maoist revolutionary art in contemporary
capitalist China. A wonderful book showing this great work of sculpture was published in the
Maoist period, and may still be available in used book stores: Rent Collection Courtyard:
Sculptures of Oppression and Revolt, 2nd ed. (Peking: 1970). Many photos of both the
original and replica sculptures are also available online, many of which can be found by
searching for “rent collection courtyard” at Google images.
REPEATED STUDY OF THE SAME POLITICAL WORKS
Many works of revolutionary Marxism, such as the major writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Mao, are worthy of not only careful study, but of repeated study. The first
time reading a book like Marx’s Capital, for example, even a serious and dedicated
reader cannot be expected to grasp and remember all the wealth of knowledge, make all the
diverse connections between the multitude of ideas, and fully appreciate all the profundity
that is included there. As Engels remarked, since socialism became a science it must be
pursued as a science—that is, it must be studied. Science requires the extensive thought
that comes from the repeated study of key works.
On the other hand, our political study must
not be limited to just a small number of works, no matter how important they might be,
nor should it be limited to just the classics of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. During the late
1960s in China Lin Biao and his close followers argued that it
was not necessary to read widely, but rather it was enough to constantly re-read Mao’s
Red Book of quotations
and a very few of his articles (such as the
“three constantly-read articles”). In both
their own study and in their political education of others, people were advised: “Don’t be
afraid of repetition. Link up with reality, link up with ideology and link up with work, and
we will no longer be repetitive.” [Peking Review,
“Carry the Mass Movement
for Creative Study and Application of Chairman Mao’s Works to a New Stage”, Oct. 14, 1966,
p. 7.] It is true, of course, that study should be linked up with practice. But it is not
true that only a limited range of highly repetitive political study is necessary. Moreover
to argue that this is sufficient is in fact a way of opposing the broadening and
deeping of everyone’s political education.
We must both engage in repeated study
of the most important revolutionary political, philosophical and economic works, and at the
same time read and study much more broadly than that, so that we can not only truly grasp our
existing science of revolutionary Marxism, but also help extend it and apply it to quite new
situations.
RESCISSION
[Bourgeois business term:] The cancellation of an agreement and reversion to an earlier or
different arrangement. Many business contracts allow the dominant party to get out of its
commitments this way, and rescissions are especially common in the insurance industry. In
other words, rescission is often a legal excuse for what amounts to fraud.
“Rescission is the insurance company practice of canceling someone’s
coverage after the person comes down with a condition that is expensive to treat, such
as HIV/AIDS or cancer. Insurers comb through patients’ medical records to see whether
they left anything off their applications, no matter how minor or unrelated to the
medical problem. Patients have lost coverage for failing to disclose pre-existing
conditions they didn’t even know they had or for clerical errors in their records.”
—“Health reform: Your next steps”, Consumer Reports, June 2010, p. 13. [The
article goes on to note that when the new U.S. health care bill passed in 2010 takes
full effect the insurance companies will still be able to rescind policies, but there
will be some new restrictions on them that may prevent some of the most outrageous
cases.]
REVERSE MORTGAGE
A special type of mortgage in which a homeowner’s
equity is diminished by either a lump sum or by periodic payments
(an annuity), which the mortgage holder pays to the homeowner. It
is a way of selling your home to a bank or mortgage company which usually allows you to remain
living in the home until you die. After your death the bank owns your home, or at least a large
part of what it is worth.
An ordinary mortgage is a loan which people
take out in order to buy a house. They then typically spend decades paying off that loan, and
if they finally do pay it off they end up actually owning the house for real. But many people,
as they reach old age and are no longer able to work, do not have enough income to survive—even
if they do actually own their home with the mortgage paid off. (People’s savings are
most often inadequate, and Social Security payments are definitely paltry.) In this situation
people may have no choice but to sell their home, either directly and immediately, or else via
the mechanism of a reverse mortgage.
While the idea of a reverse mortgage sounds
good to many people, the banks or mortgage companies that issue them typically charge quite
high fees and interest rates on their payments, thus victimizing people who are simply trying
to remain in their own homes in their old age. Reverse mortgages are highly profitable loans
for the banks.
“As all statistics show, the only significant asset that Americans
accumulate during their working years is their home. The economic realities of our times
now require that people draw down that asset via reverse mortgages to fund their
post-retirement years. They will thus not leave their homes to their children. Meanwhile
the mass refinancing of home mortgages by Americans during their working years is also
reducing their home equity as they approach retirement.
“The combination of refinancing
and reverse mortgages is quickly eroding the historically short-lived period of mass
home ownership in the U.S.” —Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism Hits the Fan (2010),
pp. 29-30.
REVOLUTION, SOCIAL
The replacement of one socioeconomic formation
with another, higher one. This implies the replacement of one class as the ruler of society
by another (except in the change from primitive
communal society to slave society, where there was
originally no ruling class; and in the change from socialism to
communism, where the proletariat gradually ceases to exist as a
class.)
Whereas bourgeois commentators often use
the term “revolution” very loosely to mean any change of government except through established
electoral procedures (and sometimes even including that!), Marxists reserve the term
for genuine changes in the form of society, and moreover changes which are progressive and in
the interests of the people (as opposed to
counter-revolution).
“Marxism-Leninism consistently holds that the fundamental question in
all revolutions is that of state power.” —A Proposal Concerning the General Line of
the International Communist Movement: The letter of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China in reply to the letter of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union of March 30, 1963 (Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1963), p. 21.
REVOLUTION — Targets Of
The primary target of the proletarian revolution is of course the bourgeoisie, or capitalist
class, and all their institutions, social arrangements, ways of thinking, and so forth.
[More to be added... ]
However, since even the working class and
Marxist revolutionaries exist in bourgeois society, they are also inevitably infected,
to varying degrees, with bourgeois ideology. Moreover, as new issues and questions come up
in the transformation of bourgeois society into socialism and then communism, some workers
and some revolutionaries will inevitably (if only initially) choose the bourgeois side, or
the “capitalist road”. Thus, even the workers, and even the members of the revolutionary
party itself (including its leaders), are to some degree also the targets of the
revolution!
“Whatever his position, however long his experience in the revolution,
or his age, every one of our cadres must see himself both as a motive force in the
revolution and, at the same time, as a target of the revolution, and therefore must
consciously wage revolution against himself. He must make the best of his strong points
so as to be able to give his all to the revolution. He must also wage a constant
struggle against his short-comings so as to adjust himself to the demands of the
revolution. In the battle to remold himself to the depth of his soul, he should be a
fighting commander who leads his men in the assault on the enemy citadel, not a
coward filled with misgivings and fears. He must be a fearless and thoroughgoing
materialist who is not afraid of being hurt, of losing face, of revealing his thoughts,
of probing his soul, of affronts to his ‘dignity’ or of changing the old existing
order; only so can he be completely emancipated from egoism.
“Cadres at all levels should not
only make revolution against themselves, but should also welcome the help of others in
doing it.” —“Maxims
for Revolutionaries—The ‘Three Constantly Read Articles’”, editorial in
Jiefangjun Bao [Liberation Army Daily], in Peking Review, vol. 10, #2,
Jan. 6, 1967, p. 8.
REVOLUTIONARY UNION — 1970 Split
In late 1970 an ultra-“left” faction of the Revolutionary Union split off and then merged
with a small Chicano revolutionary organization, Venceremos.
This faction consisted of about one-third of the RU in the San Francisco Bay Area, and
was led by the radical Stanford professor, H. Bruce Franklin. The Franklin group favored
a revolutionary strategy that was inspired by Che Guevara’s foco
approach, but adapted to an urban setting, and therefore
developing into urban guerrilla warfare. They
viewed the basis for such a guerrilla movement to be the oppressed nationalities, and
especially the lumpenproletariat among them, along
with radicalized white students and ex-students.
The larger part of the RU, led by
Bob Avakian and Steve Hamilton, rejected that approach as
infantile anarchist ultra-“leftism”, and favored sticking to the basic strategy upon which
the RU was founded: a long period of merging of revolutionaries with the working class
and raising their revolutionary consciousness, followed—at the appropriate time, and when
conditions were ripe—by a co-ordinated national mass insurrection. Of course that approach
is not only the traditional Marxist-Leninist one for advanced capitalist countries, it is
also certainly the correct approach.
“By early 1970, there occurred an increasing polarization between
the more clearly adventurist perspective represented by the Franklins and others in
the RU leadership, and the more ‘economist’ perspective (as characterized by the
opposition) of Avakian, myself, and the majority of the leadership. The issues
crystallized when the former group submitted a position paper on armed struggle
that described a scenario of ‘urban guerrilla warfare’ or a protracted ‘armed
propaganda’ struggle and the clandestine formation of a ‘people’s army.’ Avakian
countered in a paper that argued that such a perspective is impossible in an
advanced capitalist country, that there must be a long period of essentially
peaceful political struggle culminating in a rather sudden mass insurrection when
a significant mass base exists that is supportive of revolution. (The principal
documents in this struggle were reprinted in Red Papers 4.)
“The adventurist line, which
was possibly the dominant tendency in this period nationally [i.e., in the U.S.
student-based revolutionary movement as a whole], was an inconsistent hodge-podge of
Marxism and anarchism. It could be better understood as a mood, a mood of petty
bourgeois impatience and romanticism that found its expression ideologically in a
tendency to grossly exaggerate the readiness of objective conditions for revolution
and consequently a tendency to project a totally unrealistic form and level of
political struggle.
“Absurd as this position may
sound, it was not easy at the time to counter because the alternative view had to
be posed in explaining why more slow patient struggle was necessary and at a much
less ‘revolutionary’ level, which did not sound very exciting by comparison. The
reason for this can be found in the lack of understanding of Marxist theory, and
the class background and limited (limited to outside the working class, largely)
political experience of those who were impressed by this sort of ultra-leftism.”
—Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part II)”,
Theoretical Review: A journal of Marxist-Leninist Theory and Discussion,
#14, Jan.-Feb. 1980, p. 9.
REVOLUTIONARY WORK IN OUR TIMES (RWIOT)
An irregular series of conferences and a continuing extremely loose federation of various
small revolutionary-minded groups and individuals in the United States at the present time.
RWIOT seems to be promoting the idea of “Left Refoundation”, or the reconstruction of a
larger “Left” organization and movement in the U.S. based on some sort of vague “Left”
consensus rather than MLM (revolutionary Marxist) principles. These folks are strongly
opposed to “vanguardism”, sectarianism and dogmatism, which is all well and good—depending
on precisely what they mean by these terms! At least some of the people involved
would seem to wrongly extend these terms to cover many well-established and definitely
correct Marxist-Leninist-Maoist principles, practices and organizational forms. All sins
have opposite sins; and there are also opposite errors to “vanguardism”, sectarianism and
dogmatism—even if the present-day language seems to have not yet created all the labels for
them! For example, opposing MLM principles which have been proven to be correct over long
periods of revolutionary history is wrong even if it is done under the rubric of
“anti-dogmatism”. There is also a fairly widespread feeling outside of the organizations
involved in RWIOT that this general trend strongly leans towards rightism or
economism. On the other hand, it seems to have attracted
a number of young people with limited political experience and education and whose basic
political views are not yet settled.
Among the organizations participating
in RWIOT are: FRSO/OSCL, Solidarity, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), Left Turn,
the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA), and the New York Study Group.
The RWIOT web site is at:
http://www.revolutionarywork.org/
and a discussion of the summer 2009 RWIOT conference (with about 200 attendees), written
by one of the FRSO/OSCL folks, is at:
http://freedomroad.org/content/view/665/228/lang,en/
REVOLUTIONARY WORKERS’ HEADQUARTERS
A short-lived group which split off from the Revolutionary Communist Party
USA, in early 1978, and later merged with other groups to form the
Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The RWH faction was mostly wrong on the
major issues in that split from the RCP. They failed to recognize that after Mao’s death
there had been a revisionist coup in China. It is true that there was an element of error
on the part of the Avakian-led RCP too, namely absolute
support for the “Gang of Four” in China, who themselves
made some very serious errors (such as left sectarianism and failing to use the mass line).
Still, the RCP was correct in its general appraisal of what had happened in China, and the
RWH forces who split off were essentially wrong. Neither the RWH nor its successor
organizations (FRSO itself split in two in 1999) ever fully faced up to this old but
continuing error. When the topic comes up they still tend to focus on what is clearly a
secondary issue, on how to evaluate “the Gang of Four”, and they don’t do a fair and
balanced summation even there.
The other major issues in the 1978 split
were about how to build the revolutionary movement in the U.S. Here too, there was some
error on both sides, though the RCP has maintained a much firmer stance in promoting
revolution. On the other hand, the RWH forces, after merging with other organizations to
form the FRSO groups, have done a better job in joining up with mass struggles. Basically
it seems that the pre-1978 RCP was internally conflicted, and unable to resolve its
internal conflict in a way which would maintain all its major strengths and discard its
major weaknesses. So the post-split RCP kept to its revolutionary staunchness and general
steadiness in revolutionary orientation, but also became more dogmatic, sectarian and
promotive of a cult of personality around Bob Avakian. Worst of all, it renounced the
necessity of joining up with the masses in their struggles as a means of bringing the
light of revolution to them. The RWH and the FRSO groups, on the other hand, have gone in
the diametrically opposite direction. They have been very weak in their public defense of
revolution and revolutionary theory and in the promotion of revolutionary ideas among the
masses. They are now widely viewed as merely reformist organizations in actual practice.
RIGHT AND WRONG
“IX. The relationship between right and wrong
“A clear distinction must
be made between right and wrong, whether inside or outside the Party. How to deal
with people who have made mistakes is an important question. The correct attitude
towards them should be to adopt a policy of ‘learning from past mistakes to avoid
future ones and curing the sickness to save the patient’, help them correct their
mistakes and allow them to go on taking part in the revolution....
“A clear distinction must
be drawn between right and wrong, for inner-Party controversies over principle
are a reflection inside the Party of the class struggle in society, and no
equivocation is to be tolerated. It is normal, in accordance with the merits of
the case, to mete out appropriate and well grounded criticism to comrades who
have erred, and even to conduct necessary struggle against them; this is to help
them correct mistakes. To deny them help and, what is worse, to gloat over their
mistakes, is sectarianism.” —Mao, “On the Ten Major Relationships”, April 25,
1956, SW5:301-302.
“RIGHTS”
[To be added...]
See also:
BOURGEOIS RIGHT>,
“NATURAL RIGHTS”
ROMANTICISM
A term which means related things in different spheres: in the arts generally; in music;
in architecture; and in philosophy. Overall, Romanticism was a cultural movement which
swept across western Europe (and to some degree the early United States) during the
period of roughly 1775 to 1840 or so. It was in part a nostalgic and semi-religious
reaction against the Enlightenment. In place of the
ideas of reason, rationality and a scientific approach to the world that the Enlightenment
championed, Romanticism favored the imaginative, the emotional, the inspired, the heroic,
the nihilistic, the subjective, the self-centered focus on the “pleasure principle”, the
psychological, and often the religious in various idealistic
forms. While there are some positive aspects to this whole temperament, there are obviously
also many negative aspects to it as well.
Romantic art and literature emphasizes
sweeping movement, allegory, imagination, fantasy, romance, mythic tales, and pilgrimages
returning to a lost home or Eden. Romanticism in modern architecture means a flowing,
open style, often based on natural materials and blending into the environment. (As with
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in American architecture, for example.)
Romanticism in music refers primarily
to European classical music of the first half of the 19th century, and
particularly the compositions of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt,
Verdi and Wagner. It has its inspiration both in literary Romanticism and also (somewhat
in conflict with that) with the new ways of thinking opened up by the great
French Revolution. It is characterized by
the expression of the emotions and outlook of the composers together with the somewhat
opposed notion that music can and must express the spirit of the age.
There are many admirable examples of
Romanticism in art, architecture and music; however, in philosophy the situation is quite
different. In this sphere Romanticism is virtually always intellectualized religion
(philosophical idealism) and reactionary in its essence. Not
too surprisingly, Kant is a major figure or influence here, such
as with his idealistic distortion of the concept of free will,
but more centrally with his conception of reality as fundamentally “unknowable” and
ultimately spiritual. Other philosophers or thinkers more commonly referred to as Romantics,
such as Schelling, are even more blatant: With him nature is
a creative spirit aspiring to an ever more complete self-realization. Supposedly human
knowledge of this “spirit” (or “the Absolute”!) cannot be acquired by rational or scientific
means, but only through “intuition” (and even then only by
a select few). This is the sort of incoherent nonsense that characterizes Romanticism in
philosophy.
Politically, the Romantic movement was a
rather mixed bag. One current within it was reactionary; it viewed the triumph of capitalism
with disdain, but constructed an imaginary historic ideal of what Medieval (feudal) society
was like, and longed for a return to it. But another, probably larger current within
Romanticism, also reacting negatively to the new capitalist world, longed to transform it
into something better. Among the more progressive Romantics were Byron, Victor Hugo, Chopin,
Berlioz and Liszt. While their political activities were generally limited and often merely
vaguely radical or utopian, they did strongly sympathize with the masses and their miseries
in capitalist society.
RUSSELL, Bertrand (1872-1970)
One of the best known bourgeois philosophers of the 20th century, and one of the most
overrated. He was constantly changing his mind about almost every topic, philosophical and
political, so it is hard to summarize his “ideas”. For example, at one time during the 1940s he
advocated an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and a few years later championed the
“better red than dead” anti-nuclear movement. For more about his philosophical flightiness,
see the philosophical doggerel
page on him.
However, in his very old age, during the Vietnam
War period, Russell did play a very positive political role, as this letter from him to Chou
En-lai [Zhou Enlai], from Nov. 30, 1965 shows:
Dear Premier Chou,
I am grateful to you for your letter
of October 22. As you know, I am very deeply concerned to make known the nature of the war
at present being waged by the United States against the people of Viet Nam. American
policy is progressing more and more towards economic and political control, usually
obtained by the most atrocious means, of countries which she considers necessary for her
own economic well-being.
We have sought, by all the means at
our disposal, to publicize the many atrocities practised by the United States in the name
of “liberation.” I am heartened by the support which the people of China are giving to the
Vietnamese in their hard-fought struggle for liberation and independence. It is also clear
that the peoples of Latin America, Asia and Africa must similarly resist the imposition of
such cruelty.
For my part I wholeheartedly support
their sturggle and share your view that resistance to the efforts of the United States to
obtain world domination is central to the creation of a lasting world peace.
This struggle is producing a growing
movement in the United States against the cruel and aggressive policies of United States
imperialism. It is arousing the peoples of the world to a new consciousness, which is the
greatest hope for a change in the United States, based on the defeat and elimination of
such policies by the people of America themselves.
Please accept my most sincere
congratulations to the people and Government of China for their unique and remarkable
accomplishments during the last 16 years.
You have my unswerving support for
any actions leading to the easing of the threat of world domination, and, thereby, to our
common pursuit of world peace.
With warm regards,
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
[From
Peking Review,
vol. VIII, #50, Dec. 10, 1965.]
RUSSIAN COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIKS) — Ninth All-Russia Conference
“The Ninth All-Russia Conference of the R.C.P.(B.), held in
Moscow from September 22 to September 25, 1920, was attended by 241 delegates (116 with
the right to vote and 125 with voice but no vote). Among the items on the agenda were:
the political and organizational reports of the Central Committee; the immediate tasks
of Party development; a report of the commission in charge of the Party history studies,
and a report on the Second Congress of the Communist International. The Conference also
heard a report from the Polish Communists’ delegate. Lenin opened the Conference,
delivered the Central Committe’s political report, and took the floor during the debate
on the immediate tasks of Party development. The political report dealt mainly with the
two subjects—the question of war and peace with Poland, and the organization of Wrangel’s
defeat. The Conference passed a unanimous resolution on the conditions of peace with
Poland, and approved the statement by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee on the
specific peace terms drawn up on Lenin’s instructions and edited by Lenin. The resolution
on ‘The Immediate Tasks of Party Development’ provided for practical measures to extend
inner-Party democracy, strengthen Party unity and discipline, combat red tape in
government and economic bodies and improve the communist training of young Party members.
The Conference deemed it necessary to set up a Control Commission, to be elected at
Party congresses, and Party commisssions under gubernia Party committees, to be elected
at gubernia Party conferences. The Conference gave a rebuff to the ‘Democratic Centralism’
group, who denied Party discipline and the Party’s guiding role in the Soviets and the
trade unions.” —Note 91, LCW 31.
RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
Russia dominated the revisionist Soviet Union, and in effect the USSR included most (though
not all) of the areas under Russian imperialist control in that era. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, and the transformation of Russia and the rest of its pieces into
Western-style monopoly capitalism (instead of state capitalism), the Russian bourgeoisie has
more and more been attempting to reassert its imperialist control over that old empire. They
still view countries which are now nominally completely independent, such as Ukraine, Belarus
and Georgia, as regions properly under their thumb. This has already led to some small Russian
imperialist wars.
“Some [geographical labels] reek of colonialism (‘Black Africa’) or
lingering imperialism (‘the near abroad’, Russians’ term for the former Soviet empire).”
—“A menagerie of monikers”, The Economist, Jan. 9, 2010, p. 16.
RUSSIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY (RSDLP) — First Party Congress
“The First Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. was held illegally in Minsk
in 1898 (March 1-3 [13-15 on the western calendar]). The question of calling a congress
was raised by Lenin in 1896 when he was in prison in St. Petersburg. The arrest and exile
of Lenin and other leaders of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle prevented the convening
of the Congress. Preparations for it were continued by members of the Kiev Social-Democratic
organization who had escaped arrest. The Congress was attended by nine delegates from six
organizations—one each from the St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Ekaterinoslav Leagues of
Struggle, two from the Kiev Rabochaya Gazeta group and three from the Bund.
“The Congress decided to merge the
local Leagues of Struggle and the Bund into a single Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party
and elected a Central Committee. Rabochaya Gazeta was recognized as the Central
Organ of the Party. It was announced that the Union of Russian Social-Democrats would
represent the Party abroad. The Manifesto of the R.S.D.L.P., published by the Congress,
declared the Party’s main task to be the struggle for political liberty against absolutism,
connecting that struggle with the further struggle against capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
“By founding the R.S.D.L.P. the First
Congress marked a step forward in mustering the proletariat around revolutionary
Social-Democracy. It did not, however, create a Party that was a united whole and did not
elaborate the programme and rules of the Party. The Central Committee elected at the Congress
was arrested shortly after. Confusion and wavering increased in the local Social-Democratic
organizations and the creation of a unifed Marxist party still remained the chief task for
the Russian Social-Democrats.” —Note 75, Lenin: SW I (1967). [For the reasons mentioned
in this last paragraph, the true founding of the R.S.D.L.P. is generally considered to be
its Second Party Congress.]
