UNCONSCIOUS, The
1. The active mental processes (or high-level
characterizations of the functioning of the brain) which are outside the range of the subject’s
awareness. This includes the brain processes that occur when a person performs routine tasks
“without thinking about them”, such as walking, or driving a car while thinking about something
else. But it may also be said to include similar sorts of characterizations of brain processing
which people are normally incapable of being consciously aware of. Thus we may be aware that we
have recognized somebody’s face, but we are not aware of the precise complex processing in the
brain that allows us to actually do this. In this sense, most of the processing that the
brain does is unconscious.
2. [In Freudian
and similar types of psychoanalysis:] The part of the mind (or “psychic apppartus”) that does
not ordinarily enter the individual’s awareness, and which is repressed, but which may be
manifested indirectly by slips of the tongue, otherwise inexplicable actions, or in dreams, and
which can supposedly be brought into conscious awareness through psychotherapy. The
unconscious, in such theories, refers to “psychic activity” which concentrates eternal
and immutable motives and desires, including taboo sexual and domination wishes. However, there
is little or no scientific evidence that the “unconscious” actually exists in this Freudian
sense. It is just a wild hypothesis of pseudoscientific psychoanalytical theory.
See also:
SUBCONSCIOUS
UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM
One of a number of basic theories in the Marxist milieu for what causes capitalist economic
crises. Marx called these events “overproduction
crises”, though he actually put forward at least three different explanations for
them—overproduction (or underconsumption), the
anarchy of capitalist production, and
the falling rate of profit theory).
(And the followers of Marx have constructed even more crisis
theories besides those three.)
Underconsumption is just another way of
looking at overproduction; they are two sides of the same coin. Underconsumption is in
relation to what the masses of the people actually need and want, and results from their not
having enough money to buy those commodities. Overproduction is in relation to the real market
demand (and not in relation to what people need and want!), but likewise results from
people not having the money to buy all the things that are produced which they do in fact need
and want.
Some of the early bourgeois theorists of
underconsumption (such as Rodbertus, but including even
Sismondi, the best of them) put forward undeveloped and often quite
naive theories that tended to discredit this type of explanation for capitalist economic
crises. In particular, many of them thought that simply raising wages would prevent such crises.
(It is actually impossible for the capitalists to raise wages to that degree; they would go
broke! In any case, they are definitely unwilling to even give it a try!) Furthermore, because
of the multifaceted explanations which Marx himself gave for crises, even many Marxists do not
understand that his central, and most essential, explanation was in fact a much more
sophisticated form of underconsumption/overproduction theory than bourgeois economists like
Rodbertus put forward. Hence the name he used for the phenomenon! Most of us defenders of the
“underconsumption” theory of crises follow Marx and instead refer to them as “overproduction
crises”. Consequently the term “underconsumptionism” is used mostly by opponents of
overproduction theories of capitalist economic crises.
It should also be noted that Marx’s theory of
overproduction focuses primarily not on the excess consumer commodities themselves
(which are produced relative to the market demand), but rather the excess capital that
is created which in turn can be used to produce so many “excess” commodities. In other words
Marx is focusing on the overproduction of capital, rather than the overproduction of
consumer commodities. This also explains why the term “overproduction” is superior to
“underconsumption” in his theory.
See also below and:
OVERPRODUCTION CRISES
UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM — Marx’s Supposed Rejection Of
There are a great many statements in Marx’s Capital, and in his other writings (including
Theories of Surplus Value), in which he makes clear that his basic
theory of capitalist economic crises is the Overproduction
Theory. And, indeed, Marx even calls these crises by the name overproduction
crises. However, as the introductory entry on UNDERCONSUMPTIONISM above
notes, there are two competing crisis theories in Marx’s writings: the
anarchy theory and the
falling rate of profit theory. Those who favor
one or the other of these theories instead of the overproduction theory prefer to call
that theory “underconsumptionism”. And they have scoured Marx’s writings looking for the slightest
clue that he also rejected “underconsumptionism”. They’ve found very few such statements, and
even those are totally misconstrued. The specific passage from Marx which has been cited most
often is the following from volume II of Capital:
“It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of
effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any
other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis
[in the form of the pauper] or of the swindler. That commodities are unsaleable means only
that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e., consumers (since commodities
are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were
to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that
the working-class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be
remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence,
one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages
rise generally and the working-class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual
product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound
and ‘simple’ (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. It appears,
then, that capitalist production comprises conditions independent of good or bad will,
conditions which permit the working-class to enjoy that relative prosperity only momentarily,
and at that always only as the harbinger of a coming crisis.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. II,
chapter 20, part 4, (International ed., pp. 410-411; Penguin ed., pp. 486-487.)
First of all, just who is Marx criticizing here? Engels, who edited volume II, comments in a
footnote to this paragraph that “possible followers of the Rodbertian theory of crises” should
take note of this passage. So we immediately see that Marx’s comments were directed against naïve
underconsumptionists such as Rodbertus, and not at all against the whole notion that
underconsumption by the masses is a central aspect of capitalist crises.
In fact, Marx makes it absolutely clear that
underconsumption is indeed central to crises in the first sentence in the above passage where he
says that “It is a sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective
consumption, or of effective consumers.” Several times over the years I’ve heard people quote that
sentence as part of their attacks on “underconsumptionism”. I’ve often wondered—do these people
even know what a tautology is? To say that something is a tautology is definitely not to say that
it is false, as some of these people seem to think! But it is true that Marx wanted to emphasize
here that the forced underconsumption by the masses is by no means the whole story—that though it
is certainly true, there are also other contradictions involved in crises.
There is another critical sentence in the above
passage which I’ll repeat, but this time with the key part of it—the part that is unaccountably
neglected by many—put in bold type: “But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the
semblance of an profounder justification by saying that the working-class receives too small a
portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share
of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always
prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working-class actually gets
a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption.”
It should be clear once again here that Marx is by
no means denying that crises are in fact ultimately caused by the fact that the working class
receives wages which cover only a part of the value which they create. But his point is that the
complexities of the contradictions involved in crises, and the complicated way they develop, means
that simply raising wages cannot possibly prevent crises from breaking out. This is true for any
number of reasons. It is true because even if wages are raised, workers will still be exploited
(though to a lesser degree). Capitalism cannot continue without the continuous extraction of
surplus value from the workers. But more to the immediate point,
it is also true because crises are postponed by means of the expansion of credit—consumer credit,
government deficits, and so forth. So when these financial bubbles pop we have a crisis—even though
wages are typically increasing at the time. To imagine that crises can be prevented by simply
raising workers wages—even by raising them substantially—is in large part to fail to understand all
the many additional contradictions at work on top of the most basic contradictions.
Marx’s point—in emphasizing that wages usually rise
in the period just before crises break out—is that simple-minded crisis theories which recognize
only that the consumption of the masses is forcibly restricted are completely inadequate. It’s not
that Rodbertus was wrong about this basic point; on the contrary he was entirely correct about it.
But this much is totally obvious; it is a “mere tautology.” What Rodbertus and others like him
could not do was work out the full story, and explain all the additional mechanisms at work which
both prevent crises for a time, but then inevitably lead to their sudden outbreak just when it
seems the capitalist economy will fly forward unimpeded forever.
I should also add here that while what Marx says in
the above passage is certainly true, it is a bit misleading in another way. A substantial increase
in the real wages of the workers—either through actual wage raises, or a fall in consumer prices,
or a cut in workers’ taxes—can in fact help to postpone or possibly somewhat mitigate the severity
of a crisis. But just as extending the workers more credit can only ward off the crisis to some
degree and/or for a limited period of time, the same is true of any real increase in wages.
Eventually a crisis will break out in any case because none of these things truly resolves the
underlying contradiction—that the workers are still being paid for only part of what they produce
and therefore cannot possibly buy back all of it. No increase in wages—no matter how great—can
permanently prevent a new crisis from developing. If the capitalists were suddenly to all go crazy
and to actually try to pay the workers enough to buy an equivalent amount to what they produce then
the capitalists themselves would soon go broke and the entire system would collapse. —S.H.
[From a section of my work in progress, An Introductory Explanation of Capitalist
Economic Crises].
UNEMPLOYMENT — U.S.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has many statistical series for unemployment rates.
The “U-3” series, is the official unemployment rate, and the series that the government
is willing to let the public see. It is therefore the series which the bourgeois media gives
almost exclusive attention to. But this official unemployment rate does not include the millions
of unemployed people who have gotten so discouraged by the job situation that they have not
looked for work in the last few weeks. Nor does it include people who want to work full time but
can only find part-time work. The “U-6” series does include many of the people in these
two categories, but still excludes many other people who are actually unemployed, and who would
get a job if work was available for them.
The BLS uses these official definitions:
U-3 Series: “Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor
force (official unemployment rate).”
U-6 Series: “Total unemployed,
plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for
economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally
attached to the labor force.”
Marginally attached to the labor
force: “are those who currently are neither working nor [currently] looking for work
but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime
in the past 12 months.”
Discouraged workers are “a
subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently
looking for work.”
Persons employed part time for
economic reasons “are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had
to settle for a part-time schedule.” —From the notes to each month’s BLS Unemployment
Report.
[Note that every one of these
“definitions” distorts the truth. U-3 is not at all the “total unemployed” (as they
go on to tacitly admit themselves!); U-6 does not include all those who would work
if jobs were actually available; “discouraged workers” actually excludes a large number of
those who really are discouraged about finding work; and so forth. Even the BLS’s
definition of the size of the labor force itself seriously
distorts things (and tries to make the unemployment situation look much better than it is)
by simply not counting millions of unemployed people as being in the labor force at all!
—S.H.]
[Refer to the graph at the right.] “The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate
Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for
SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in
1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes
short-term discouraged workers.” —John Williams, on his Shadow Government Statistics
website at
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts
See also:
COMPUTERS—and Unemployment
UNEMPLOYMENT — World
The total unemployment in the entire world, from data before the severe world economic
crisis struck in a major way at the end of 2008, was said to be more than 1 billion workers!
(One-sixth of the entire population of the world, and a much higher than that percentage of
the world’s total work force!) This includes both the totally unemployed, and also those who
are drastically underemployed (working only a few hours a week, whenever they can find it).
[This estimate comes from Charges McMillion, chief economist at MBG Information Services, a
Washington D.C. consulting firm. Quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 21,
2010, p. 23.]
“Globally, 2.5 billion people are unemployed, underemployed, economically
inactive, or engaged in subsistence labor (constituting a global reserve army almost twice
the size of the world’s employed labor force). The result is abysmally low wages—with 39
percent of the world’s workers earning less that $2 a day. Meanwhile, multinational
corporations are enjoying record profit margins from the super-exploitation of this cheap
labor and the robbing of everything under the sun, thereby endangering the planet itself.”
—John Bellamy Foster, in a letter to supporters of Monthly Review, Sept. 2011.
UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM AND CAPITALIST-IMPERIALISM
A law of capitalism, which is greatly intensified in the modern imperialist era of capitalism,
is that different enterprises, different industries, different sectors of the economy, and
production in different capitalist countries as a whole, develops very unevenly. Moreover, in
different time periods there is also uneven development, including among different capitalist
countries. A country which zooms ahead of others during one period may well fall behind at a
later period. And it is with regard to countries, and especially countries in the
imperialist era that this uneven development becomes especially significant, for it is one
of the underlying factors which lead to terrible wars between imperialist countries (including
World War I and World War II).
There are a wide variety of reasons which
explain this uneven development among countries. Some imperialist countries may possess
colonies or have rights in their neo-colonies that others do not. Some may be better prepared
to export capital to other countries. Other countries which were once more victimized by
outside imperialism may break free to some extent and become better able to develop their own
national economy. Some countries may already be deep in debt, while others have more freedom
to expand production by promoting further debt growth. Even differences in the superstructure
of society may be significant, as when one country has a better developed legal system which
promotes the sanctity of business contracts. Similarly, one country may have a superior
educational system to another. These are just a few of the great many reasons why one
capitalist country, during some given period, may be able to far outstrip the economic
development of another capitalist country.
Historically, capitalism first developed in a
really intensive way in Britain. This led to Britain becoming more powerful and dominant than
countries like Holland and France. In 1850 the U.S. share of world industrial production was
only 15%, while Britain’s was 39%. Germany’s share was also far below Britain’s.
As capitalism developed into its imperialist form in the last part of the 19th century, other
capitalist countries began to catch up, especially Germany and the U.S. From 1870 to 1913
British output expanded only 2.25 times, while Germany’s increased almost 6 times and the U.S.
by 9 times! Britain lost its status as the sole “superpower” of that age, and World War I
developed among the two contending groups of imperialist countries to see which would dominate
the world. World War II was really “round two” of that contest. The U.S. emerged as by far the
most powerful imperialist country, both militarily and economically. Nevertheless, in the
aftermath of World War II many other capitalist countries, including defeated Germany and Japan,
began developing faster than the U.S. (in large part because of the greater destruction
of capital in those countries during the War).
Then, too, in the mid-1950s the Soviet Union was
captured from within by a rising new bourgeoisie. At first, based on its tremendous economic
advances during its socialist period, the Soviet Union, even as a capitalist country, continued
developing faster than the U.S. But then, because of its destruction of socialism, the masses
turned against the Soviet system. And the greater degree of monopoly, bureaucracy, and the
growing corruption in the U.S.S.R. led to a great fall in its rate of GDP expansion. It was
hopelessly losing out to the U.S. and the “Western World”, and it knew it. For a while it looked
very much like there would be a new world war, involving nuclear weapons, to settle the issue.
(The world is very fortunate that this did not happen, because we certainly came close to it!)
But then Gorbachev and the other new rulers of the Soviet Union recognized that they could not
prevail that way either. The only path left to them (within the overall framework of capitalism,
which is all they could comprehend or aprove of) was to switch over to Western-style monopoly
capitalism. This final destruction of the Soviet Union led to an unprecedented further collapse
of the economy, and even two decades later it has not fully recovered.
Meanwhile, the other great socialist country,
China, was also captured from within by capitalist-roaders. In the socialist era China had
overall been expanding its economy much faster than that of the U.S. and the “West” generally.
This continued during the transition period, and then over the past couple decades has possibly
even further speeded up. The Chinese revisionists have proven to be much more successful than
the revisionists in the Soviet Union were in switching over to Western-style monopoly capitalism
(for reasons we won’t get into here). So the world today, even in the midst of a growing overall
world capitalist economic crisis, is still made up of one rapidly rising imperialist power—China.
This suggests that there might be some real dangers of a major war between China and
the current top-dog imperialist country, the U.S., at some point over the next few decades.
“Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.”
—Lenin, “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” (Aug. 23, 1915), LCW 21:342.
“The uneven distribution of the railways, their uneven development—sums
up, as it were, modern monoplist capitalism on a world-wide scale.” —Lenin, “Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, Preface to the French and German Editions, (July 6, 1920),
LCW 22:190.
“It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which
today is everywhere lagging terribly behind industry, if it could raise the living standards
of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still
half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital. This
‘argument’ is very often advanced by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism. But if
capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a
semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions
and constitute premises of this mode of production.” —Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage
of Capitalism”, Ch. IV, (1916), LCW 22:241. [Although capitalism has now finally “developed
agriculture” in the form of giant agribusiness, it has not done so for the benefit of the
people, vast numbers of whom still starve to death every year around the world. —S.H.]
UNION OF IRANIAN COMMUNISTS (SARBEDARAN)
An Iranian Maoist organization formed in 1976, which organized uprisings and guerrilla warfare
in Iran, but suffered some serious defeats and setbacks especially during the 1980s. A large
part of their membership and leadership was killed in battle or executed by the reactionary
Iranian government. After those disasters it struggled to rebuild its organization and the
revolutionary movement in Iran. In 2001 the UIC(S) became the Communist
Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist).
It is unclear how much influence Sarbedaran had
within Iran itself, though it was quite influential in Iranian student groups abroad, including
the United States. The UIC(S) always viewed Iran as a semicolonial, semifeudal country, rather than
as a fully capitalist country. It also always recognized the absolute need for, and strongly
supported, revolutionary violence to overthrow the oppressive regime in Iran, and opposed the
revisionists of the Tudeh Party. However, there were some substantial struggles over political
line and strategy within the organization which were greatly amplified by their military defeats
and government suppression efforts.
After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Sarbedaran
expanded its work in Iran and tried to prepare for uprisings and guerrilla warfare, while also
participating in some working class and peasant struggles. And around 1981 it began some limited
actual guerrilla warfare in the Kurdish areas of Iran. On January 25, 1982 the UIC(S) launched
an armed uprising against the Islamic Republic in the vicinity of Amol (near the Caspian Sea).
This failed and many members and leaders were captured and shot.
The UIC(S) was then in disarray for a fairly
long period. However in the spring of 1983 it held its 4th Conference and in the spring of 1984
it participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement (RIM). Throughout this period some Sarbedaran members and cadre were still being
arrested and murdered by the government. In 1985 they tried anew to organize a militant struggle
against the Islamic Republic, but it once again failed. A long summation by the UIC(S) of some
of these very negative experiences, entitled “Defeated Armies Learn Well”, was published in the
RIM magazine, A World to Win, in late 1985. [See:
http://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1985-4/AWTW-04-Iran-DefeatedArmies.pdf
(PDF: 22 pages, 4,329 KB).]
The Wikipedia (from which some of the information
in this entry is taken) says that in the late 1980s the UIC(S) dropped some of their old slogans
and strategies such as “Peoples’ war in rural areas and uprising in cities”, and instead put
forward a new strategy with the slogan “Protracted People’s War: Siege the Cities via Villages”.
It is unknown to us how successful the revised strategy has been so far.
On May 1, 2001, the Communist Party of Iran
(Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) was formed as the continuation of Sarbedaran. However, there is still
a website at
http://www.sarbedaran.org/language/index.htm which has some new and old documents
posted in various languages.
UNITED STATES IMPERIALISM
[Introduction to be added...]
“U.S. imperialism, which looks like a huge monster, is in essence a paper
tiger, now in the throes of its death-bed struggle. In the world of today, who actually
fears whom? It is not the Vietnamese people, the Laotian people, the Cambodian people, the
Palestinian people, the Arab people or the people of other countries who fear U.S.
imperialism; it is U.S. imperialism which fears the people of the world. It becomes
panic-stricken at the mere rustle of leaves in the wind. Innumerable facts prove that a
just cause enjoys abundant support while an unjust cause finds little support. A weak
nation can defeat a strong, a small nation can defeat a big. The people of a small country
can certainly defeat aggression by a big country, if only they dare to rise in struggle,
dare to take up arms and grasp in their own hands the destiny of their country. This is a
law of history.
“People of the world, unite and
defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs!” —Mao, from his statement of May
20, 1970; Peking Review, Special
Issue, May 23, 1970.
UNITED STATES IMPERIALISM — and Democracy
“We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent
of its population... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy
and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity. We
should cease to talk about the raising of the living standards, human rights, and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in
straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the
better.” —George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning of the Department of State,
Department of State, Policy Planning Study 23: Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1948, vol. 1 (part 2), Feb. 24, 1948, p. 23.
[Of course later on the
U.S. government recognized the need to both employ military force to
maintain its empire and at the same time to verbally pretend to be
supporting peace, freedom and democracy around the world. They have learn quite
well to use the words while rejecting the actual concepts. —S.H.]
UNITY OF OPPOSITES [Dialectics]
See also:
CONTRADICTION—Dialectical,
DIALECTICS,
ONE-INTO-TWO
“Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is
the fundamental law of the universe. This law operates universally, whether in the
natural world, in human society, or in man’s thinking. Between the opposites in a
contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things
to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but they differ in accordance
with the different nature of different things. In any given phenomenon or thing, the
unity of opposites is conditional, temporary and transitory, and hence relative,
whereas the struggle of opposites is absolute.” —Mao, “On the Correct Handling of
Contradictions Among the People” (Feb. 27, 1957), SW 5:392.
UNITY OF THE WORLD
The physical universe is a unified system, consisting of myriad separate material parts
which nevertheless interact with each other to various degrees. This unity of the world
arises from the fact that these parts can and do interact with each other. They do so
through the forces which have been discovered, namely gravity, electro-magnetism, and the
weak and strong nuclear forces, and perhaps also through some additional physical
forces yet to be discovered.
It is possible to absurdly exaggerate the
unity of the world, however, such as via the mystical notion that “all is one”.
According to the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, for
example, reality is a unified, eternal, indivisible, unchanging and motionless single
entity, and all the movement and interaction between people and things that we seem to
see are mere illusions! Of course it is difficult for modern scientific people to
understand how such a view could ever have been taken seriously.
Obviously a more dialectical perspective
is called for here. There is both unity and difference in the world, both connection and
distinction, both interaction and effective non-interaction. The unity of the world
consists more in the possibility of occasional exceptional interactions between
two different things than it does in actual universal, constant, equipollent, mutual
interactions. It may well be that every single particle of matter is connected to every
other one through gravitational and/or other forces, but in most cases such connections
are inconsequential. The gravitational tug of the planet Neptune has no detectable effect
on my fingers in the typing of these words, even though science does currently assume that
some such ultra-minute tug actually exists.
Any coherent notion of
cause and effect requires such a dialectical view
of the unity of the world.
The world is a unity in another important
way as well: there are not two separate, unconnected aspects to it, the physical
and the mental (or “spiritual”); instead, mental phenomena such as ideas, thoughts
or memories, are merely special ways of looking at aspects of certainly highly organized
complexes of matter (e.g., brains) and their functions and processes. (See:
MONISM)
“The real unity of the world consists in its materiality...” —Engels,
Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:41.
UNIVERSALS (vs. PARTICULARS or INDIVIDUALS) [Philosophy]
Universals are abstractions (abstract concepts), which are usually generalizations
derived from particulars (such as individual material things) which have a physical
existence in the world.
There is a long tradition in idealist
philosophy, going back at least to Plato, in arguing that in addition
to the specific material objects in the world there also actually exist (perhaps even in some
“deeper” sense!) abstract entities which embody the “idea” or “form” of a given sort of object.
For example, according to this idealist conception, in addition to all the actual chairs in
the world there also exists the idea of “chair” (or “chairness”) which is just as much
a part of reality as are all the specific chairs. But while that idealist conception that ideas
are on an existential (or ontological) par with material objects
is total nonsense, it is a fact that we do have the abstract concept of a chair, and
that abstract concept is different from (and not identical to) any specific chair. (If some
particular chair that is extremely similar to our concept of a chair is destroyed, for example,
our concept of a chair is still not in any way destroyed.)
Philosophers, therefore, have long discussed
the relationship between universals and particulars (or individual things), and idealist and
metaphysical philosophers have often been very confused and
mystified by this relationship. The central difficulty here comes from an inadequate
understanding and analysis of what abstraction is.
However, to deeply understand the nature of abstraction itself, one must apply materialist
dialectics. It appears to me that Lenin was making an attempt in this direction in the
following, though it is not certain that everyone will find this helpful (since the discussion
itself is quite abstract):
“To begin with what is the simplest, most ordinary, common, etc., with
any proposition: the leaves of a tree are green; John is a man; Fido is
a dog, etc. Here already we have dialectics (as Hegel’s genius recognized): the
individual is the universal...
[Lenin then quotes a passage in
German and Greek about the views of Aristotle on this subject. The English translation
of that passage is: “For, of course, one cannot hold the opinion that there can be a
house (in general) apart from visible houses.”]
“Consequently, the opposites (the
individual is opposed to the universal) are identical: the individual exists only in the
connection that leads to the universal. The universal exists only in the individual and
through the individual. Every individual is (in one way or another) a universal. Every
universal is (a fragment, or an aspect, or the essence of) an individual. Every universal
only approximately embraces all the individual objects. Every individual enters
incompletely into the universal, etc., etc. Every individual is connected by thousands
of transitions with other kinds of individuals (things, phenomena, processes), etc.
Here already we have the elements, the germs, the concepts of necessity,
of objective connection in nature, etc. Here already we have the contingent and the
necessary, the phenomenon and the essence...” —Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics”
(1915), LCW 38:361. [This is from a rough manuscript that Lenin did not have a chance
to prepare for publication during his lifetime.]
UPPER PALEOLITHIC (LATE PALEOLITHIC)
The European pre-historical period from about 35,000 to 11,000 years ago. The Upper
Paleolithic and first part of the Neolithic are generally
divided into six principle cultural periods (which overlap somewhat): The Chatelperonian
(35,000-30,000 years ago); the Aurignacian (34,000-30,000);
the Gravettian (30,000-22,000); the Solutrean (22,000-18,000); the Magdelenian
(18,000-11,000); and the Azilian (11,000-9,000). [Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind
(1988), pp. 145-6.]
See also:
PALEOLITHIC
UTOPIAN SOCIALISM
[To be added... ]
“It is natural that utopian theories, which before the era
of materialistic critical socialism contained the rudiments of the latter within
itself, can now, coming belatedly, only be silly, stale, and basically reactionary.”
—Marx, Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Oct. 19, 1877, Marx-Engels: Selected
Correspondence (Moscow: Progress, 1975), p. 291. [In a slightly different
translation in MECW 45:284.]
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The vast U.S. imperialist military forces have divided the whole world into six regions, with
separate military command operations for each. These are the six area Unified Combatant
Commands. (There are, in addition, four more “functional” UCCs in charge of special military
functions, such as strategic bombers and ICBMs.). The six area commands are:
The U.S. is a large country with a more self-contained economy than many countries. However,
it is also a major part of the world economy, and is dependent on the world market for
considerable sales of its products, as well as for foreign investment in both directions.
The chart at the right shows the varying dependence of particular U.S. industries on foreign
sales in general, and also specifically on sales to Europe and the Middle East. (It should
be noted that this chart shows the foreign sales only for the biggest corporations which
are included in the Standard & Poor’s 500 list. Thus the average foreign sales of about 1/3
of their production is not true of the U.S. economy as a whole.)