SUBBOTNIK
[From the Russian word subbota, meaning “Saturday”.] Voluntary unpaid collective labor
performed for the public good by communist-spirited workers on their own time (often Saturdays).
Although “subbotnik” is the more common and more general term, sometimes similar events performed
on Sundays were called “voskresniks”. The practice was initiated by Bolshevik railroad workers on
the Moscow-Kazan Railway in April 1919. It was then popularized by the Communist Party, and the
first nationwide subbotnik in Russia was held on May 1, 1920. Subbotniks were most commonly
organized for cleaning public streets of refuse, maintaining parks and other public facilities,
gathering recyclable materials, and performing numerous other public services.
Lenin was pleased and excited by the development
of subbotniks, and regarded them as early seeds of a future communist society based on free
voluntary labor rather than on wage labor which must necessarily continue to characterize
production overall during most of the socialist transition period from capitalism to communism.
In the picture at the right, Lenin is one of the subbotnik volunteers carrying away a heavy log
during the Kremlin area clean-up on May Day, 1920.
Subbotniks continued during the Stalin period,
and even during the revisionist state-capitalist period after Stalin’s death. (For example,
“Lenin Subbotniks” were held annually around the time of the anniversary of Lenin’s death.)
Unfortunately, subbotniks soon lost their voluntary character and became virtually obligatory for
worker participation. This is another aspect of how Soviet society came to be governed by orders
from the top, rather than through the ideological education of the masses, and the use of the
democratic mass line method of leadership. But perhaps the
tradition of subbotniks still did encourage some small degree of public-spiritedness, even
during the revisionist period.
“The first communist subbotnik was held on April 12, 1919, by railwaymen
of the Sortirovochnaya marshalling yards of the Moscow-Kazan Railway. Subbotniks were soon
being held at many other enterprises in various cities. The experience of the first communist
subbotniks was summed up by V. I. Lenin in A Great Beginning (Heroism of the Workers in
the Rear. ‘Communist Subbotniks’) [LCW 29:409-34.]
“An all-Russia subbotnik was held on
May 1, 1920, with over 425,000 people in Moscow alone participating, including V. I. Lenin,
who, together with Kremlin army cadets, worked on clearing away rubble on the territory of
the Kremlin.
“Lenin’s article ‘From the First
Subbotnik on the Moscow-Kazan Railway to the All-Russia May Day Subbotnik’ was brought out
on May 2, 1920, in a specially published handbill Per vomaisky Subbotnik, which was
drawn up, set and printed during the May Day subbotnik by the staff of the newspapers
Pravda, Izvestia, Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn, Bednota, the ROSTA
Telegraph Agency, and by the workers at the printing-house of the All-Russia Central
Executive Committee.” —Note 42, LCW 31.
SUBCONSCIOUS, The
1. The mental activities just below the
threshold of consciousness. Or, those active mental processes (i.e., the overall characterizations
of brain processes) which, though not fully conscious at the time, could have been so, and which
serve to influence further conscious ideas and processes. This is the everyday, innocuous
conception of the subconscious.
2. [In Freudian
and similar psychoanalytic theories:] A hypothesized borderland area between the conscious and
unconscious parts of the mind. According to Freud, the “psyche” has three layers—the unconscious,
the subconscious, and the conscious. The unconscious is the
underlying foundation of the psyche that ultimately determines the whole conscious life of the
individual and of society as a whole. He viewed the subconscious as a frontier battle zone which
is invaded by non-reformable unconscious desires, which are in turn “censored” by the individual’s
so-called “super-ego” (or social conscience). There is little or no scientific evidence to support
this precise theory, and it has largely fallen into disrepute even in bourgeois circles.
SUBLATION
In a dialectical process, the negation
or elimination of an element or aspect (of a dialectical contradiction) which is however preserved
in a transformed or partial way in the resulting synthesis. In other words, a simultaneous cancelling
and preservation of something. This term was frequently used by Hegel (as
in his idealist philosophy about the historical movement of the “absolute idea”), and is occasionally
used by Marxists speaking in Hegelian language (especially academics!).
In a multi-stage process (involving a series
of sub-contradictions) each of the intermediate stages is sublated by a later or superior
stage, which accounts for both the change in and the continuity of the process as a whole.
One concrete example, in historical materialism, is the development of the exploitation
contradiction in human history. The first stage in the overall development of this
contradiction was slavery, which involved the sub-contradiction between slaves and slaveowners
and the exploitation of the slaves by the slaveowners. This was eventually transformed (or
“sublated”) into the stage of feudalism, which was characterized by the new sub-contradiction
between serfs (or peasants) and feudal landlords, but with still the exploitation of the former
by the latter. Feudalism in turn was later transformed or sublated into capitalism, where another
new sub-contradiction arose, this time between the workers and the capitalists, but still
with the same exploitation of one social class by another class. Note that the term “sublation”
is by no means necessary in describing this overall process; in fact, if the goal is to clearly
explain (rather than to intimidate with esoteric language), the ordinary word “transformation”
seems far preferable here! Note also that the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of
socialism (and then communism) will not involve the further sublation (or transformation) of the
overall exploitation contradiction, but rather its complete abolition. Society as a whole will be
much more profoundly transformed, but economic exploitation itself will be eliminated and
not just transformed.
See also:
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION
SUBPRIME MORTGAGE
A mortgage issued to someone with a fairly poor credit rating.
Why would a bank or other financial
institution make such a loan which stands a high likelihood of default? First of all, they
usually charge a higher interest rate and a larger up-front fee. However, one of the main
reasons that sub-prime mortgages became so common in the first decade of the 21st
century is that the issuers of the mortgage (the banks, etc.) found ways to
“securitize” it, i.e. to repackage the mortgage with others and
sell bonds based on them to other investors in a form where their stupidity was not obvious.
(See Collateralized Debt Obligation.) Thus the bank issuing the mortgage
would not suffer even if the mortgage did go into default; that would only harm the
suckers who bought the “sliced-and-diced” securities. Ironically, many of the issuers of CDOs
seem to have got caught up in the marketing hype they generated to sell these wonderful new
investments, forgot just what they were up to, and often kept or invested in these securitized
bad mortgages themselves! Thus they also got caught in this trap of their own making.
“I don’t think it poses any threat to the overall economy.” —U.S.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, pooh-poohing the dangers in the developing subprime
mortgage meltdown, quoted in a Bloomberg.com news report, July 26, 2007. [What became
known as the “Great Recession” began that following December, and over the course of the
next year or so a major financial crisis broke out! —S.H.]
SUBURBS
“Despite all the talk about people moving back to big cities, more than 91
percent of population growth in the U.S. metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2010 occurred
in suburbs rather than in city cores. Today, more than 60 percent of Americans live in
suburbs, and non-whites constitute 27 percent of suburbs’ population.” —The Week,
June 24, 2011, p. 20, reporting information from the New York Times.
“For more than half a century, Americans have fled the cities in their
millions, heading away from crime and poverty towards better schools and safer neighborhoods
in the suburbs. Now poverty is catching up with them. According to two new reports from the
Brookings Institution, over the past decade the number of poor people in the suburbs has
jumped by a whopping 37.4% to 13.7 million, compared with some 12.1 million people below the
poverty line in cities. Although poverty rates remain higher in the inner cities, the gap is
narrowing.
“Suburban areas largely escaped during
earlier downturns, but not this time. Support groups say people are using safety-net programs,
such as food stamps or unemployment insurance, who have never applied for them before. They
are often making tough choices. ‘It’s mortgage or food,’ observes [one person]...
“The reports paint a grim picture.
Poverty rates are expected to continue to increase. Non-profit organizations are having to
do more with less staff and less funding. Almost a third of them have had to lay off staff
because of lost grants, and one in five has had to reduce services. And with state and local
governments lacking cash, more funding cuts are expected.” —The Economist, “Mortgage
or Food”, Oct. 16, 2010, p. 39.
SUEZ CANAL
An economically extremely important canal in Egypt connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Red
Sea and the Indian Ocean. This canal was dug by the Egyptian people themselves from 1859 to 1869.
However, the Suez Canal Company which managed it was under the control of the French and British
imperialists, especially the latter. Even before the discovery of oil in the Middle East, and
the eventual huge importance of oil in the world economy, this canal was very important in
facilitating the imperialist plunder of India and other countries in Asia and Africa.
In July 1956 the Egyptian government nationalized
the Suez Canal, which the British and French imperialists viewed as unacceptable. They first put
pressure on Egypt to “internationalize” the canal. When that scheme failed, Britain and France,
together with Israel, waged a war of aggression against Egypt and attempted to control the canal
by military force. However, the United States imperialists, the hegemonic overlords of the region,
and for reasons of their own inter-imperialist contention with Britain and France, refused to
acquiesce in this British-French-Israeli invasion. In the face of Egyptian military resistance
and U.S. opposition, Britain, France and Israel were forced to withdraw. The last batch of
invaders were pushed out on December 22, 1956.
SUN SPOT THEORY (Of Economic Crises)
A theory originated by the bourgeois economist William Stanley Jevons
(1835-82) which claims that the periodic prominence of dark spots on the surface of the sun is
responsible for economic cycles in the capitalist economies on earth. Though erroneous, this is
not quite as ridiculous as it initally sounds! The sun goes through a 11-year cycle of varying
numbers of sun spots, from almost none, to a great many, and back to almost none. These spots
are actually plasma storms, and when they are abundant large quantities of charged particles
are spewed off into space, some of which reach the earth and cause effects here, including the
auroras and interruptions to radio communications. Moreover, the sun’s energy output varies
during this 11-year cycle by about 0.1%, which causes the surface temperature of the ocean to
fluctuate by a slightly larger amount. It is likely, therefore, that there are at least small
changes to crop yields because of atmospheric and weather changes, and this was the basis for
Jevons’ theory. (The astronomer William Hershel noted as early as 1801 that when sunspots were
rare, the price of wheat in England increased.) However, such crop changes are probably fairly
small, and this is only one small aspect of the overall economy. Moreover, neither the peaks
nor valleys of the 11-year cycle of sun spots correlate with the varying periods of 5 to 10
years in the standard industrial cycle.
Clearly bourgeois economists come up with
rather silly theories like this, which try to explain economic crises by “exogenous” factors
(i.e., factors external to the capitalist system), because they simply cannot accept that
capitalism itself has any internal flaw which leads to such crises, despite the fact that
Marx long ago explained in detail how this occurs.
SURPLUS VALUE
“The action of labor-power ... not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over
and above it. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the
value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product, in other words, of the
means of production and the labour-power.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. VIII: (International,
p. 208; Penguin, p. 317.) Or, roughly equivalent, surplus value is the value of the commodities
produced by the workers after deducting their wages, the cost of raw materials and the overhead.
See also below, and:
Value, Price and Profit
“There is not one single atom of [surplus] value that does not owe its
existence to unpaid labor.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 24, sect. 1. (Penguin ed.,
p. 728.)
[To lay bare the essential character of capitalist production:] “This was
done by the discovery of surplus-value. It was shown that the appropriation of
unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the
worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor-power of his laborer
at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he
paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus-value forms those sums of value
from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the
possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were
both explained.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:27.
SURPLUS VALUE — Absolute and Relative
“The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day, I call
absolute surplus-value. On the other hand, the surplus-value arising from the
curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the
respective lengths of the two components of the working day, I call relative
surplus-value. —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 12. (International ed., ...; Penguin
ed., p. 432.)
SVERDLOV COMMUNIST UNIVERSITY
A higher educational institution originally set up in revolutionary Russia for the further political
education and training of members of the Bolshevik Party.
“The Sverdlov Communist University was formed from courses for
agitators and instructors organized in 1918 under the All-Russia Central Executive Committee
and later converted into a school of Soviet work. After the decision of the Eighth Congress
of the R.C.P.(B.) on the organization of a higher school under the C.C. for training Party
cadres, the school was reorganized into the Central School for Soviet and Party Work; in the
second half of 1919, by decision of the Organizing Bureau of the C.C. of the R.C.P.(B.) it
changed its name to the Sverdlov Communist University.
“This was the first Party higher
educational institution. Lenin showed great interest in the organization of the University
and took part in working out its first syllabus and curriculum.
“On July 11 and August 29, 1919, Lenin
delivered lectures on the state in the University. The text of the second lecture has not
been preserved. On October 24 of the same year, Lenin made a speech to students of the
Sverdlov University leaving for the front.” —Note 106, Lenin, SW 3 (1967).
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