WEAK NUCLEAR FORCE
One of the four known forces of nature, which operates
only between certain sub-atomic particles, and which is responsible for most forms of
radioactivity.
WEAKEST LINK
The point in a chain at which it is most vulnerable to breaking. For those seeking to break
the chain, this is a point to be concentrated on. For those seeking to keep the whole chain
together, this is also a point to be concentrated on!
“In science, our knowledge is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain of understanding.” —Stephen Rothman, a prominent (non-Marxist) American biologist, Lessons From the Living Cell (2002), p. 17.
WEALTH
“The wealth of bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation
of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Every commodity, however, has a twofold
aspect—use-value and exchange-value.” —Marx, CCPE, p. 27. [Marx notes that this
insight goes back to Aristotle.]
See also:
USE-VALUE,
EXCHANGE-VALUE
WEALTH DISTRIBUTION — In the U.S.
The graphic at the right shows the actual United States wealth distribution (in quintiles), i.e.,
the proportion of wealth that the top 20% of the population owns, the proportion owned by the
next 20%, and so forth. Also shown is what the average American thinks the wealth
distribution is, and what the average American (even in this bourgeois society) thinks it
really ought to be. Note that Americans are greatly underestimating the proportion of
all wealth that the top 20% owns (in reality about 84%), and vastly overestimating the
wealth that the bottom 20% owns. (Because of their extremely small percentage share of total
wealth, both the “4th 20%” value (0.2%) and the “Bottom 20%” value (0.1%) are not even visible
in the “Actual” distribution.) [From: Michael Norton & Dan Ariely, “Building
a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time”, Perspectives on Psychological Science,
vol. 6, #1 (2011).]
Moreover, even within the top 20% of the
population the wealth is very concentrated in the top few percent. Some estimates indicate
that the top 1% of the U.S. population, the biggest bourgeoisie, owns nearly 50% of all the
wealth. [J. B. Davies, et al., “The global pattern of household wealth”,
Journal of International Development, vol. 117 (2009).] The concentration of
wealth in the U.S. today tops even that of 1929, just before the Great Depression of the
1930s!
“The top hundredth of 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers—that’s 16,000 people—have a combined net worth of $6 trillion. That’s as much as the bottom two-thirds of the population. Meanwhile, a quarter of American families say they have no money in a checking or savings account to cover an emergency, according to Bankrate.com.” —Peter Coy, “An Immodest Proposal”, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 4-14, 2014, p. 10.
WEALTH EFFECT
The correlation between an individual’s actual personal wealth, or more typically their
perceived wealth, and their willingness to buy things and go further into debt. People
in contemporary capitalist societies have been conditioned to borrow and spend more when they
feel that their net wealth is increasing—even if they still have very large debts.
During the U.S. housing bubble of the years
2003-2007, for example, the fact that the market value of homes was increasing rapidly for a
few years led many people to take out a second mortgage, or refinance their existing mortgage
with a cash-out option (i.e., to get an additional loan from the bank in return for signing
over more of the value of their house to the bank). This seemed like a good idea to them at
the time, because the capitalist media led them to believe that home prices would continue to
rise indefinitely (and therefore that their net wealth would continue increasing indefinitely).
Since the housing bubble popped, and the “Great Recession”
hit, millions of these people have already lost their homes. As is nearly always the case in
the end, the “wealth effect” turned out to be a dangerous illusion for the mass of working-class
people.
“Economists have only recently devoted serious study to how a decline in
housing prices affects consumer spending, not least because this is the first decline in
the average price of an American home since the Great Depression [of the 1930s]. A 2007
review of existing research by the Congressional Budget Office reported that people reduce
spending by $20 to $70 a year for every $1,000 decline in the value of their homes.
“This [negative] ‘wealth effect’ is
significantly larger for changes in home equity than in the value of other investments,
such as stocks, apparently because people regard changes in housing prices as more likely
to endure.” —“Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices”, New York Times,
Oct. 18, 2011.
WEAPONS
“Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive.” —Mao, “On Protracted War”.
WEAPONS SALES
See: ARMS SALES
WEATHER UNDERGROUND ORGANIZATION
A very small but notorious U.S. revolutionary organization of student orgins which existed
from 1969 to 1977, with little in the way of developed revolutionary theory, no mass
practice and no mass base. It is known mostly for its initial violent demonstration in
Chicago in October 1969 against the U.S. imperialist war of aggression against Vietnam (the
“Days of Rage”), and its sporadic and very counter-productive
campaign of bombings of U.S. government buildings up through the mid-1970s.
The WUO was originally a faction of the
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the tiny faction in control
of the SDS National Office in its last days. (Indeed, their antics were major factors
in wrecking what remained of SDS and making those its last days.) Like most of SDS, the
Weatherman faction was quite marked by its white, petty-bourgeois origin and makeup. While
it did take a very strong stand against U.S. imperialism, and also strong stands in favor of
Black liberation and women’s liberation, it had little or no connection with the working
class, and seemed not even to want any such connection. It was more aligned with the
youth counter-culture. Thus one of its characteristic capers was to aid a jailbreak and
escape for Timothy Leary, the LSD drug guru!
For the most part the bombings it carried
out were symbolic and did little actual damage. In one case they blew up a woman’s bathroom
in the Pentagon, for example. These bombings were an expression of the helpless rage that
those unconnected to mass movements often feel against oppressive governments. Looking back
at those days, one former member of the group expressed their frustration this way:
“We felt that doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence. That’s really the part that I think is the hardest for people to understand. If you sit in your house, live your white life and go to your white job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don’t do anything about it, that’s violence.” —Naomi Jaffe, in the documentary The Weather Underground, produced by Carrie Lozano and directed by Bill Siegel and Sam Green, 2003.
The terrible crimes of capitalist-imperialism do indeed demand a response! The trouble
was that what the WUO decided to do was actually extremely counter-productive. The occasional
bombings they engaged in did no serious harm at all to the U.S. government. And they had the
effect of turning large numbers of ordinary American people, including students, more
against the anti-war movement and any idea of revolution, than towards it. By
thus finishing off SDS as a mass student organization they made it more difficult both to
build the anti-war movement and to educate more young revolutionaries.
In December 1969, the Chicago police and
FBI raided the apartment of local Black Panter leader Fred Hampton, killing Hampton in his
sleep (he had been drugged by a police agent) and Mark Clark, and wounding three other
people. In early 1970, in response to this unprovoked murderous raid, the WUO issued a
“Declaration of War” against the U.S. government, shifting to underground, covert activities
only. This declaration was however mere posturing. It was more rage by helpless individuals
cut off from any mass base actually capable of changing the situation.
While always very small, by 1976 the FBI
estimated that the WUO was down to less than 30 active members. They completely disbanded
by the end of 1977, and many of them turned themselves in to the authorities.
See also:
PRAIRIE FIRE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
WEATHERMAN
The original name of the Weather Underground anarchist-like
revolutionary organization.
WEBER, Max (1864-1920)
German bourgeois sociologist, born in Erfurt and educated at universities in Heidelberg,
Berlin and Göttingen. He began his professorial career by teaching law in Berlin in 1892,
switched to teaching political economy at Freiburg in 1894, and then economics at Heidelberg
in 1897. (All bourgeois economics, of course.) He did not actually consider himself to be a
sociologist until near the end of his life. In 1897 he suffered a serious mental breakdown and
did no significant work for about four years. Then, for a number of years he was mostly an
unaffiliated private scholar, working on a wide variety of topics. In 1918 Weber accepted the
chair of sociology at the University of Vienna, and finally in 1919 took over the chair of
sociology at Munich.
Max Weber (along with
Émile Durkheim) is widely regarded as one of the
principal founders of “modern sociology”, which from its beginning as an intellectual area of
study at universities was created and developed in contrast and opposition to Marxism. The
philosophical basis that Weber provided for this new subject of academic “sociology” was
neo-Kantianism, of the school associated with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert in late
19th century Germany. This philosophy drew a total distinction between “phenomena”, or the
external world we perceive, and
“noumena”, or the perceiving mind or consciousness. Weber
considered this distinction to be the difference between the basis for natural science and
social science, and this confirms the fundamental philosophical idealism
of Weberian sociology. For example, one of the conclusions Weber drew on this Kantian philosophical
basis, was that sociology could not establish any scientific laws (as is done in physics,
chemistry and biology), but rather only to try to give some plausible explanations for social
developments in their particular historical contexts. Despite this denial of any true scientific
laws in sociology, Weber did suppose that the “probabilities” of human action (such as that people
are likely to act rationally much of the time) allow for some limited understanding of society.
Similarly, Weber promoted the Kantian value/fact
dichotomy which is still so widespread in bourgeois “social science”, and claimed for example
that there is no rational basis for determining moral goals—though he did acknowledge that there
are rational ways to proceed once one set of goals or another are adopted. Of course, for
revolutionary Marxists the setting of moral (and political) goals is a simple and very rational
matter: we say that those things which are in the real beneficial
interests of the proletariat and masses are good and rational goals, including the
central goal of making social revolution upon which so many other goals depend. [See:
Class Interest Theory of Ethics] Like all
Kantians, Weber was opposed to what they snidely call “instrumental rationality” in ethics. For
them paying any attention to what benefits people, let alone classes of people, has no
bearing at all on ethics!
It is difficult for a revolutionary Marxist to
find much of anything whatsoever of real value in Weber’s voluminous writings. Sometimes he just
makes abstract classifications that really don’t explain anything. (Such as his division of
social action into four categories: “traditional action” undertaken because of
long-established cultural norms; “affective action” driven by emotions; “value-rational” action
directed towards achieving social values; and “end-rational action” or “instrumental action”.
Or consider his superficial discussion of “domination” in society, where he focuses on
distinguishing three types of authority: “traditional”, “charismatic”, and “legal-rational”.
What really is the value of such “analysis”?)
Other times Weber is focused on cutting the heart
out of Marxist categories, as when he talks about social “classes” but perverts the idea to mean
various things other than the relationship of groups of people to the means of production.
(In some places he defines “classes” as groups of people defined by the possession of various
skills and other marketable assets, or talks about “housing classes” which include owner-occupants,
tenants/renters, etc.) Similarly he talks about “status groups”, ethnic groups, and numerous
other ways of classifying people, but almost always avoids our Marxist concept of social
classes.)
One of Weber’s best-known theses is that of the
“Protestant ethic”, which supposedly explains why capitalism developed in Europe. (But compare
this superficial theory to the discussions of Marx and other Marxists who go into great depth
about how and why feudalism developed into capitalism.)
There are disputes within academic sociology as
to exactly what Weber’s political views were. Weber’s criticisms of socialism always either
entirely misunderstand what genuine socialism is, or else purposely distort what it is, as in
his claim that socialism inevitably aggravates the problem of bureaucracy. Some argue that Weber
was a proto-fascist; others that he was more of a liberal. The fact that his writings can be
read to support either view already says something very negative indeed about him! One thing is
very clear, however: he was a bourgeois ideologist to his very core. It is strange that even
today, and even on the so-called “left”, there continues to be some interest in his reactionary
views.
“I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals.” —Max Weber, 1895, quoted in Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2014).
WELFARE STATE
[To be added...]
“WESTERN MARXISM”
A petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism which has developed at universities in capitalist
countries in the “Western” part of the world. The revolutionary heart of Marxism is virtually
entirely cut out in this milieu, and the major focus is the sphere of culture, which is discussed
in pretentious academic and esoteric language. So-called “Western Marxism” reflects decadent
bourgeois ideology far more than it does Marxism. My advice is that you don’t waste your time
with this sort of garbage; it can only corrupt your brain. —S.H.
“Western Marxists therefore placed far greater emphasis on the importance
of what Marx called superstructure—culture, institutions, language—in the political
process, so much so that consideration of the economic base sometimes disappeared
altogether. Unable to change the world, they concentrated on interpreting it through
what became known as ‘cultural studies’—which established its own hegemony on many
university campuses in the final decades of the twentieth century, transforming the study
of history, geography, sociology, anthropology and literature....
“That realm [of the superstructure]
was defined far more broadly than Marx ever imagined. It encompassed any and every sort
of cultural commodity—a pair of winklepicker shoes, a newspaper photograph, a pop record
and a packet of breakfast cereal were all ‘texts’ that could be ‘read’. The critique of
mass culture from early theorists influenced by the Frankfurt
school was gradually supplanted by a study of the different ways in which people receive
and interpret these everyday texts. As cultural studies took a ‘linguistic turn’—evolving
through structuralism, post-structuralism,
deconstruction and then
postmodernism—it often seemed a way of evading politics
altogether, even though many of its practitioners continued to call themselves Marxists.
The logic of their playful insistence that there were no certainties or realities led
ultimately to a free-floating, value-free relativism which
could celebrate both American pop cultural and medieval superstition without a qualm.
Despite their scorn for grand historical narratives and general laws of nature, many seemed
to accept the enduring success of capitalism as an immutable fact of life. Their subversive
impulses sought refuge in marginal spaces where the victors’ dominance seemed less secure:
hence their enthusiasm for the exotic and unincorporable, from UFO conspiracy theories to
sado-masochistic fetishes. A fascination with the pleasures of consumption (TV soap
operas, shopping malls, mass-market kitsch) displaced the traditional Marxist focus on
the conditions of material production.... No systematic critique of monopoly capitalism
could be achieved since capitalism was itself a fiction, like truth, justice, law and all
other ‘linguistic constructs’.” —Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital (2006), pp.
105-7.
WFOE
A Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise. This is an acronym common in the business press in contemporary
global capitalist-imperialism to refer to a company which operates in one country (such as China
or Thailand) but which is entirely owned (or at least entirely controlled) by capitalists located
outside that country.
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