Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

— V —

VALUE [In ethics]
[To be added...]
See also: AXIOLOGY

VALUE [In political economy]
Social labor as materialized in the form of commodities. The amount of value in a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time incorporated into it.
        Any useful object produced by human beings embodies their labor. And in any socioeconomic system there will be objects which are valued by people for the uses they may have and the needs they may fulfil. But only in economic systems which produce and exchange commodities (i.e., most notably capitalism, but also pre-capitalist economies which produced commodities even if only as a secondary feature, and also under socialism (the transition period from capitalism to communism), is there such a thing as the political-economic category of value. What is required for labor to produce value (in this technical sense in Marxist political economy) is that the item produced must first be a useful thing, but also that the actual ultimate user of the item obtain it through exchange. For such exchange to take place there must be some basis for the exchange, i.e., some valuation of the items exchanged. The only rational basis for calculating the relative value of two items being exchanged is the differing amounts of socially necessary labor time incorporated into each.
        “Marx, taking Ricardo’s investigations as his starting-point, says: The value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary general human labor embodied in them, and this in turn is measured by its duration.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part II, Ch. V: (MECW 25:178). “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter I: (International, p. 38; Penguin, p. 129.) “Value exists only in articles of utility, in objects.... If therefore an article loses its utility, it also loses its value.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, chapter VIII: (International, p. 202; Penguin, p. 310.)
        See also: LABOR THEORY OF VALUE, LAW OF VALUE, USE-VALUE, EXCHANGE-VALUE, PRICE

VALUE ADDED
[As commonly used by bourgeois economists:] The value (in terms of selling prices) of the goods produced by a company after deducting the value (in terms of purchasing prices) of all the inputs used in the production process which were purchased from other companies (including raw materials and overhead). Curiously, the wages and benefits paid to their own workers (i.e. the value of the labor power the company purchases) are usually not deducted! This is a major reason why this is a bourgeois economic concept or category, rather than a Marxist category. Thus, roughly speaking, value added (in this bourgeois sense) is equivalent to the raw profits of the company plus the wages and benefits it pays to its workers and managers.

VALUE ADDED TAX
One of the most common forms of taxation used in many countries (as opposed to sales taxes, income taxes, or taxes on profits or assets). Each company is taxed a certain percentage of the value added which it generates. (Note that this is usually defined in non-Marxist terms; see the entry above.) Of course each company then adds the amount of this tax onto the price of the goods it sells.

VALUE, PRICE AND PROFIT [Pamphlet by Marx]
This pamphlet, in other editions entitled Wages, Price and Profit, is an excellent introduction to the concept of surplus value, the inverse relationship of wages to capitalist profits, and other fundamental topics in political economy. It is based on two speeches Marx made in 1865, and is designed to clarify directly to the workers themselves the basic economic workings of the capitalist system. Every Marxist revolutionary should be thoroughly familiar with the contents of this pamphlet and promote its study broadly within the working class.
This pamphlet is available in printed form, and is also available online in several places, including: http://marx2mao.com/M&E/WPP65.html, and http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/index.htm

“MARX: Wages, Price and Profit
        “This pamphlet by Marx (which is also known as Value, Price and Profit) contains a simple explanation of the basic ideas of political economy—value and surplus value.
        “This explanation begins with the sixth chapter. Marx explains what is the value of commodities, the relation of value and market prices, the value of labor power, the origin and nature of surplus value, the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit, how surplus value is decomposed into rent, interest and profit.
        “Thus all the most important conceptions worked out in Capital are here introduced to the reader in an easy and popular way.
        “The pamphlet is based on two speeches made by Marx to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association in 1865. The First International was considering its attitude to the contemporary strike movement and to demands for raising wages: an English delegate, John Weston, put forward the idea that higher wages could not improve the conditions of the workers, since if wages went up, so would prices.
        “In answering him, Marx shows that wages can rise at the expense of profits. He cuts through all Weston’s confusions about ‘currency circulation,’ ‘supply and demand,’ the ‘regulation of prices,’ and proves that a general increase in wages would not mean a rise in prices but a fall in profits.
        “Marx here demonstrates how the science of political economy is an instrument for showing the workers the way forward, and for clearing up such confusions as those of John Weston. Though spoken nearly a hundred years ago, his words remain very contemporary—the same argument continues in the working class movement.
        “In concluding his address, Marx shows that there is no ‘economic law’ which fixes the level of wages and profits. How much shall be paid in wages, how much shall go for profits, is determined in the last analysis by the relative strength of the contending classes, by the class struggle.
        “He states in conclusion that instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ the working class should inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system.’”
         —Maurice Cornforth, Readers’ Guide to the Marxist Classics (1952), p. 39. [It should be remembered, of course, that Marx was speaking about pre-monopoly capitalism. Under monopolistic (or oligopolistic) conditions, the capitalists have a much freer hand to raise prices. —S.H.]

VANGUARD
An advance force at the head of and leading a whole army or movement.

VANGUARD ACTION
[To be added... ]

VANGUARD PARTY
[To be added... ]

VANGUARDISM
[To be added... ]

VARGA, Eugen [“Eugene”] (1879-1964)
[Varga’s original Hungarian given name was “Jenö”; for most of his life and while living in the Soviet Union he was referred to by the German version of his name, “Eugen” (pronounced oy-gen); in the English editions of his books he is usually referred to by the English version of his name, “Eugene”.]
        Varga was a Hungarian-born Soviet political economist who became one of the most famous and influential economists for the Comintern. He made his reputation with his prediction in the mid-1920s of the forthcoming Great Depression. He was also the leading proponent of the General Crisis of Capitalism theory, both in the period between the two world wars, and also in the post-World War II period.
        Varga joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party in 1906, and wrote articles on economics and other topics for the socialist press. In 1918 he became Professor of Political Economy at the University of Budapest, and the next year became the People’s Commissar of Finance and the chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. When that Hungarian revolutionary regime was overthrown (with the connivance of right-wing social democrats), Varga fled to the Soviet Union, and began work for the Comintern. He soon became its leading spokesman on economic matters. In the early 1920s he quickly recognized and gave emphasis to the significant economic recovery in capitalist countries after the sharp post-World War I recession of 1920-21. But by the mid-1920s he was emphasizing that this recovery would be short lived and that a powerful new economic crisis would soon develop (which of course it did). According to M.C. Howard & J.E. King, in their History of Marxian Economics (vol. I, 1989), Varga based this prediction on the increasing organic composition of capital and also on the prospect of reduced employment and ability of workers to consume (i.e., on two very different Marxist theories of economic crisis). But apparently the main thrust of Varga’s argument was based on Marx’s central theory of overproduction of capital (or what its opponents call “underconsumptionism”).
        Varga wrote the economic reports for the Congresses of the Comintern from 1921 to 1935. Many of his writings in this period were focused on the international economic “conjuncture”, and reflected his great efforts to determine and organize the quantitative trends in output, investment and employment in many different countries. He especially investigated the economy of Germany and the economic development behind rising German imperialism.
        For 20 years, starting in 1927, Varga was the chairman of the Institute of World Economics (IWE) in Moscow. In the immediate post-World War II period he predicted a strong economic recovery in the capitalist West, and only later on the development of a new economic crisis—just as he had successfully predicted after World War I. It turned out that he was once again correct, but Stalin and the leadership of the Soviet Union and the Comintern expected that the capitalist world would almost immediately fall back into the Great Depression, which they thought had only been interrupted by World War II. (Those who expected the immediate return of the Depression didn’t really grasp Marx’s explanation that the basic resolution of overproduction crises comes through the destruction of excess capital, which is exactly what had happened in World War II.) This led to Varga’s removal from leadership of the IWE in 1947, and forced a total recantation and self-criticism by Varga in 1949. But after Stalin’s death in 1953 Varga was rehabilitated, and even presented the Stalin Prize in 1954 and the Order of Lenin (in both 1954 and 1959). But the new revisionist leaders of the Soviet Union paid little attention to his predictions of eventual new economic crises in the U.S., and were interested only in accomodation and peaceful co-existence with the West.
        Although Varga was one of the best Marxist political economists of his era, and in general had a remarkably good record of economic predictions, there were also some erroneous aspects and inconsistencies in his theories. For example, the idea that there could be a post-World War II economic recovery for capitalism was quite inconsistent with his theory in the 1930s that there was a General Crisis of Capitalism that could only be ended through social revolution. While he did expect a major recovery after World War II, the boom that followed the war was much bigger and longer than even he expected. By the late 1950s and 1960s he was already predicting a new economic crisis in capitalism, but didn’t understand at all just how long it would take for that new crisis to develop. Of course no other Marxist (let alone any non-Marxist) of that time really understood this either.
        Among Varga’s many books are these which have been translated into English: The Decline of Capitalism (1928); The Great Crisis and Its Political Consequences: Economics and Politics, 1928-1934 (1934); Two Systems: Socialist Economy and Capitalist Economy (1939); The Economic Transformation of Capitalism at the End of the Second World War (1946) [possibly not translated into English: this was the book that got Varga in trouble with Stalin, in which he argued that the capitalist system was more inherently stable than had been previously believed]; Marxism and the General Crisis of Capitalism (1948); Twentieth Century Capitalism (1962); and Politico-Economic Problems of Capitalism (1968). After his death, his selected works in three volumes were published in the Soviet Union, Hungary, and East Germany, but as far as we know these volumes have not been translated into English. The German edition is entitled Ausgewählte Schriften 1918-1964.

“The upsurge of production and the temporary absence of profound overproduction crises in the post-war period in the highly developed countries is primarily the result of World War II. Tens of millions of young men were taken into the army. Millions of others were employed in military enterprises producing instruments of destruction which were destroyed on the battlefields without any benefit to society. Arms and military equipment constituted about one-half of all production. Items intended for long use were not produced. New homes were not built and old ones were not repaired. Supplies of raw materials and manufactured goods were exhausted. Fixed capital was worn out, especially in non-military branches. Tremendous values were destroyed by aerial and artillery bombardments. Instead of real values, monetary means were accumulated: … deposits in savings banks, state loans in the hands of the urban population, and huge sums in bank deposits and government securities held by the capitalists. This extraordinary and significant expansion of the capitalist market led to an intense growth of post-war production in such countries as the United States and Canada, which were not theaters of war.” —Eugen Varga, Kommunist, #17 (1961). Translated into English as “Marx’s Capital and Contemporary Capitalism”, Problems of Economics (IASP Translations from Original Soviet Sources), vol. 4, #9, Jan. 1962, p. 62.
[This is a remarkably good and concise description of how excess capital was destroyed in World War II, even in countries which were not themselves bombed or overrun. Varga went on, in this article, to predict that the post-WWII boom was drawing to a close (he was just a little premature on that) and implied that the (Western) capitalist countries might soon return to stagnation and depression (he was very premature about that—the development of the new crisis period which began around 1973 has been very drawn out and only took a qualitative leap for the worse in 2008). —S.H.]

VARIABLE CAPITAL
Variable capital is the value of the human labor-power purchased by the capitalists (by hiring workers) and employed by them in the production process. It is called “variable” capital by Marx because its value varies (actually, increases) with its use in the capitalist production process. That is, the capitalist pays a certain amount for the labor-power, but ends up with more value than he paid for, through the application of that labor-power to the raw materials and other means of production. (This is the source of surplus value.) In other words, the application of labor-power to the raw materials leads to an increase in the amount of capital.
The rest of the capital employed in the production process is called constant capital, because its use does not itself lead to an increase in value or capital. Thus the value of the raw materials used does go into the value of the final commodity, but remains a fixed amount. The same is true for the apportioned value of the machinery (including its maintenance). So, for example, if a machine can be used to make 10,000 widgets before it wears out, one ten-thousandth of the value of that machine is also transfered to each widget as constant capital.
However, there is a complication here which Marx did not explore. Machines may also be viewed as a way of re-using on many separate occasions the labor-power that went into the construction of the machine. From this point of view, if past labor-power is being re-used again in the present production process, then it should also be considered as variable capital in the present production process, just as much as the additional labor-power of the worker operating the machine is! This complicates the analysis to some degree, but does not change the basic fact that all wealth still comes ultimately from the application of labor to the raw materials of nature. [This topic is discussed further in the entries related to the Labor Theory of Value.]

VEHICLE [Contemporary Capitalist Finance]
A nominally independent or dummy corporation, set up by a mother corporation or bank, in order to hold risky assets under another name, or in order to engage in clandestine, misleading or fradulent financial activity.
See also: SPECIAL PURPOSE VEHICLE, STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE, CONDUIT

VELOCITY OF CIRCULATION (OF MONEY)
The velocity of money, or—spelled out more clearly—the velocity of the circulation of money, is the speed at which money circulates in the economy, or in order words, the average number of times a given amount of money changes hands during a given time period. Thus if the money supply is $1 trillion, and the total amount of goods and services purchased in the economy in one year is $10 trillion, then the velocity of circulation during that year is 10. The velocity of circulation changes from time to time, and it used to be a closely watched figure in the American economy. However, since the 1970s there are so many different types of money (currency, checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, easily convertable investment funds, etc.) that it has become somewhat arbitrary to say precisely what the current money supply is. Moreover, on any given definition of the money supply, that supply has become highly erratic. Therefore monitoring changes in the velocity of circulation is no longer a very useful way to keep an eye on the economy.

VENCEREMOS (Political Organization)
The Venceremos organization (not to be confused with the Venceremos Brigade), was originally a small radical Chicano political group in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1971 about a third of the Maoist organization, the Revolutionary Union, which was then also mostly located in the Bay Area, split off and joined Venceremos en masse. This greatly changed the character of the organization, and turned it into a multinational group with a lot of white students and ex-students.
        The leader of the faction that split from the RU was H. Bruce Franklin, one of the RU’s founders and one of its three top leaders. According to Franklin years later, the reason for the split was mostly that the RU back then was not a fully multinational organization, partly because at that time it referred interested Black people to the Black Panther Party instead. Actually, that was a very secondary issue, which all the RU leadership was soon to agree to change, partly because of the degeneration of the Black Panther Party itself. The real central dispute within the RU was over what basic revolutionary strategy to adopt: 1) merging with the working class, and at the appropriate time mass insurrection; or 2) urban guerrilla warfare led by ex-students and the lumpenproletariat. The Franklin group favored the second course, while the rest of the RU favored the first course. (For more on this, see: REVOLUTIONARY UNION — 1970 Split.)
        The very name “Venceremos”, Spanish for “We Will Win”, derives from a battle cry of Che Guevara. But the connection of this Venceremos organization to Che was much deeper than that. They were in essence proposing an urban guerrilla warfare version of his notorious foco strategy. However, Venceremos was much more talk than action, and it may not have actually undertaken any guerrilla actions. But it was consciously preparing to do so, acquiring arms and expertise in their use, and it definitely expected that armed struggle would not be long in coming. (This is a point that Franklin now seems to deny, according to the Wikipedia.) But their actual activity seems to have been more around reformist issues such as working for prison reform and defending war protesters.
        It seems fair to say that Venceremos was less of a Marxist group, and more of a student-based anarchist organization, which though known for its wild rhetoric and AK-47 logo, soon fell apart and disappeared.

VENCEREMOS BRIGADE
An organization that sends annual volunteer work brigades to Cuba as an act of political solidarity, and for the purpose of further educating them (indoctrinating them?) in the political outlook of the Castro government. (Not to be confused with the Venceremos organization above.)

VENDOME COLUMN

“A statue of Napoleon I was placed atop the bronze column erected in Vendome Square in the center of Paris. Napoleon I made this column from 1,200 captured artillery pieces to show off the victory of his wars of aggression. Called the ‘Victory Column,’ it was a symbol of aggression and chauvinism.
“After its founding, the Paris Commune adopted a decree on April 12, 1871 calling for the dismantling of the column. It pointed out that it was a memorial to barbarism and a glorification of militarism. The Vendome Column was dismantled on May 16. It was restored by the bourgeois government in 1875.” —A note accompanying an article on the Paris Commune, Peking Review, vol. 14, #13, March 26, 1971.

VENTURE CAPITAL
A pooling of financial capital, usually from a number of large investors, from which investments are made in risky (but potentially very profitable) new companies. In recent decades this has been especially focused on seeking out and investing in new technology-based “start-ups” (new companies), in computers, electronics, and bio-genetics. One center for venture capital operations in the U.S. is in Silicon Valley (the southern San Francisco Bay Area). Before the 1990s venture capital was often called “risk capital”.

VERSAILLES [Pronounced (in English): ver-SAI ]
A French city which is a southwestern suburb of Paris. Inside this city is the Palace of Versailles, the provisional palace of the French Emperor which was built in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the time of the Paris Commune, the reactionary government headed by Thiers fled to Versailles.

VIENNA CIRCLE
An influential school of logical positivism founded by Moritz Schlick in the 1920s. It was hostile to not only religion and metaphysics (in the bourgeois sense), but also ethics and abstract social principles of any kind. It took its inspiration primarily from physics. Among its adherents were Rudolph Carnap and Otto Neurath. The reactionary philosopher Karl Popper was strongly influenced by this school.

VIETNAM WAR — U.S. War Crimes In
One of the most horrible imperialist wars of the 20th century was the U.S. War Against Vietnam. On the part of the Vietnamese this was a people’s war against a foreign invader. And therefore, on the American side, it was, and could have only been, a genocidal war against the people of Vietnam. About 3 million Vietnamese were killed in the war, and about 2 million of those were civilians murdered through bombings and in cold blood by U.S. soldiers. This war, along with other U.S. imperialist wars over the past century, puts America in the same league of mass murder and genocide as the German Nazis and the fascists of Imperial Japan.
See also: MY LAI MASSACRE

[From a survey of reviews of the book by Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013):]
        “It turns out that we only thought we understood the Vietnam War, said Jonathan Schell in The Nation. More than four decades after the story of the My Lai massacre alerted Americans to atrocities being committed by U.S. soldiers, author Nick Turse has put together a comprehensive portrait of the war effort that reveals ‘an almost unspeakable truth’: The killing of roughly 500 civilians at My Lai wasn’t an aberration; ‘episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture were in fact the norm,’ all part of a larger campaign against the Vietnamese that resulted in as many as 2 million civilian deaths. By meticulously piecing together witness interviews and newly declassified documents, Turse has ‘once and for all’ disproved the popular idea that U.S. war crimes were the work of ‘a few bad apples.’ The barrel itself was ‘rotten through and through.’
        “Turse, a senior fellow at the Nation Institute, even finds an atrocity that should overshadow My Lai in membery, said Jeff Stein in Bookforum. In 1968, an infrantry division under the command of Gen. Julian Ewell undertook ‘a six-month spree of mass murder, rape, and pillaging’ in the Mekong Delta that pushed the unit’s ‘body count’ to nightmarish heights. One sergeant estimated at the time that Operation Speedy Express was killing more than 1,200 people a month, most of them civilians. This was ‘industrial killing on a mass scale,’ and Turse’s ‘grim but astounding’ book details how it grew out of senior officers’ illogical focus on using the body count as a measure of success. And Turse doesn’t stop there. He shows how the military worked after My Lai to keep similar stories from emerging, dropping investigations and telling witnesses to stay quiet.
        “We shouldn’t have needed a 2013 book to tell this story, said Michael Uhl in InTheMindField.com, a veterans site. Vietnam has used the 2 million figure for years, and enough has been written about pockets of the war that many readers long ago extrapolated what Turse is telling us. Yet even this account could fall on deaf ears, said John Tirman in The Washington Post. ‘There’s little evidence that the public wants to know more about atrocities’—particularly old ones. Reading Turse, ‘I couldn’t help wondering if, 30 years from now, we will see a similarly revealing book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.’ But I was thankful that he had made war secrets a little harder to keep.” —The Week, March 1, 2013, p. 20.

VILLAGE COMMUNE (Russia)
A limited and partial form of traditional rural collective ownership of land in tsarist Russia. Marx had some hopes that this might form a “fulcrum” for the transformation of the Russian countryside in a socialist direction. The Russian Narodniks took this beyond a hope and made it a programmatic dogma. However, after Marx’s day, the further development of capitalism and capitalist relations of production in Russia, including to some extent in the countryside, pretty much destroyed this possibility. Both Plekhanov and Lenin viewed any program of socialist transformation based on the rural village communes as essentially impossible.

“... the analysis provided in Capital does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune [in Russia], but the special study I have made of it, and the material for which I drew from original sources, has convinced me that this commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, but in order that it may function as such, it would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development.” —Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, March 8, 1881, MECW 46:71-72.

“The village commune in [Tsarist] Russia was a communal form of peasant land tenure characterized by compulsory crop rotation and undivided woods and pastures. Its principal features were collective liability (compulsory collective responsibility of the peasants for making their payments in full and on time, and the performance of various services to the state and the landowners), the regular reallotment of the land with no right to refuse the allotment given, the prohibition of its purchase and sale.
         “The Russian village commune dates back to ancient times and in the course of historical development gradually became one of the mainstays of feudalism in Russia. The landowners and the tsarist government used the village commune to intensify feudal oppression and to squeeze redemption payment and taxes out of the the people. Lenin pointed out that the village commune ‘does not save the peasant from turning into a proletarian, yet in practice acts as a medieval barrier dividing the peasants, who are, as it were, chained to small associations and to categories which have lost all “reason for existence”’ [LCW 15:78].
         “The problem of the village commune aroused heated arguments and brought an extensive economic literature into existence. Particularly great interest in the commune was displayed by the Narodniks, who saw in it the guarantee of Russia’s socialist evolution by a special path. By tendentiously selecting facts and falsifying them and employing so-called ‘average figures’, the Narodniks sought to prove that the commune peasantry in Russia possessed a special sort of ‘stability’, and that the peasant commune protected the peasants against the penetration of capitalist relations into their lives, and saved them from ruin and class differentiation. As early as the 1880s, G. V. Plekhanov had shown that the Narodnik illusions about ‘commune socialism’ were unfounded, and in the 1890s Lenin completely refuted the Narodnik theories. Lenin brought forward a tremendous amount of statistical material and innumerable facts to show how capitalist relations were developing in the Russian village, and how capital, by penetrating the patriarchal village commune, was splitting the peasantry into two antagonistic classes, the kulaks and the poor peasants.
         “In 1906 the tsarist Minister Stolypin issued a law favoring the kulaks that allowed the peasants to leave the commune and sell their allotments. This law laid the basis for the official abolition of the village commune system and intensified the differentiation among the peasants. In the nine years following the promulgation of the law, over two million peasant families withdrew from the communes.” —Footnote 72, LCW 19:573-574.

VILLAGE COMMUNE (Russia) — Collective Responsibility In
The collective responsibility for the prompt and full payment of numerous services and obligations, both to the state (in the form of taxes and the provision of recruits into the Tsarist army, etc.) and the landlords (in the form of land redemption installments, etc.), was the compulsory obligation of every member of the Russian peasant “village commune”. This form of collective bondage remained in force even after serfdom was officially abolished in 1961, and up until 1906 after the serious scare put into the ruling class by the 1905 Revolution.

VIOLENCE
[Intro material to be added... ]

“Socialism is opposed to violence against nations. That is indisputable. But socialism is opposed to violence against men in general. Apart from Christian anarchists and Tolstoyans, however, no one has yet drawn the conclusion from this that socialism is opposed to revolutionary violence. So, to talk about ‘violence’ in general, without examining the conditions which distinguish reactionary from revolutionary violence, means being a philistine who renounces revolution, or else it means simply deceiving oneself and others by sophistry.
“The same holds true of violence against nations. Every war is violence against nations, but that does not prevent socialists from being in favor of a revolutionary war. The class character of war—that is the fundamental question which confronts a socialist (if he is not a renegade).” —Lenin, “Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (Oct.-Nov. 1918), LCW 28:285.