Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Ti - Tn   —

TIANANMEN MASSACRE (1989)
A brutal massacre of the unarmed masses in Tiananmen Square in 1989, who were calling for democracy and protesting the regime led by the capitalist-roader Deng Xiaoping. Many of the protesters were wearing Mao badges and waving Red Books. This revolutionary aspect of the demonstration has been covered up in the West, and the event is portrayed as merely a demonstration calling for bourgeois democracy which was crushed by a (so-called) “Communist” government.
        See also: LI PENG

TIANANMEN INCIDENT (of 1976)
A reactionary demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on April 5, 1976 by demonstrators who gathered both out of respect for Zhou Enlai (who had died earlier that year) and in opposition to the revolutionary line of Mao and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The fact that both of these themes were combined together by the demonstrators led to further suspicions and criticisms (on the part of Maoist revolutionaries) of the role that Zhou Enlai had been playing during the GPCR.

TIME TRAVEL
Although “time travel” is a popular theme in science fiction (usually more aptly referred to as fantasy fiction) it is scientifically impossible, and even logically impossible.
        Of course people, and the world as a whole, are constantly “moving into the future” in their everyday existence. And something seemingly closer to the instantaneous effect imagined for time travel into the future could occur through methods such as biological stasis or hibernation for a certain period, which might conceivably allow a person’s consciousness to suddenly jump from one time period into a far future time period. But this is no more philosophically startling than the fact that when we go to sleep each night and then awaken in the morning our consciousness has jumped 7 or 8 hours “into a future time”.
        But time travel into the past is absolutely impossible. The standard refutation of the idea is the “grandfather paradox”: If it were possible to travel into the past it would then be possible to kill your grandfather in his youth, thus preventing your own birth and your ability to move backwards in time. In short, the idea leads to a logical contradiction. It assumes that the past was both a certain definite way (fixed), and also that it can “later” be changed into something different (which means that it was not fixed).
        Any sort of real time travel, either to the past or to a discontinuous future, involves breaking the chain of cause and effect in the development of the world, and is therefore a scientifically incoherent notion.

TIPPING POINT
A common term for what we Marxists would call a qualitative or dialectical leap.
        See also: DIALECTICAL LEAPS—Popular Terms For

“Most of us are already familiar with the baseline observations made by [Anthony] Barnosky and [Elizabeth] Hadly: The climate is changing fast, and the rate of species loss is accelerating. We know that sea level is rising faster and that both storms and droughts are coming faster and stronger as a result....
        “But Barnosky and Hadly, professors at UC Berkeley and Standford, respectively, have more to tell us about these woeful occurrences. They report on a recent realization in ecology: that what seem like gradual environmental changes can turn on a dime, creating large, sudden change we don’t expect. These are the tipping points, ‘and they happen because, in all walks of life, gradual change accumulates slowly until it hits a certain threshold, and then all hell breaks loose.’
        “Tipping points happen, and we’ve all experienced them.... Many such moments are points of no return.... The world has once again begun to change in a way, and at a speed, that signals that a new planetary tipping point is just ahead.
        “Recent research into tipping points reveals that they are ubiquitous.” —Mary Ellen Hannibal, “Future Shocks”, San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2016. This is a book review of Tipping Point for Planet Earth: How Close Are We to the Edge? (2016), by Anthony Barnosky and Elizabeth Hadly.

TKP/ML
See: COMMUNIST PARTY OF TURKEY/MARXIST-LENINIST

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