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CAPITAL (DAS KAPITAL) (The Book by Marx)
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“Capital [is] the greatest work on political economy of our age.” —Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1896), LCW 2:25.

CAPITAL (DAS KAPITAL) — Engels Editorship Of

“Marx died before he could put the final touches to his vast work on capital. The draft, however, was already finished, and after the death of his friend, Engels undertook the onerous task of preparing and publishing the second and the third volumes of Capital. He published Volume II in 1885 and Volume III in 1894 (his death prevented the preparation of Volume IV). These two volumes entailed a vast amount of labor. Adler, the Austrian Social-Democrat, has rightly remarked that by publishing volumes II and III of Capital Engels erected a majestic monument to the genius who had been his friend, a monument on which, without intending it, he indelibly carved his own name. Indeed, these two volumes of Capital are the work of two men: Marx and Engels.” —Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1896), LCW 2:25-26.

CATEGORIES
[In Marxist philosophy:] The most general notions or concepts reflecting the basic and essential properties and uniformities of the phenomena of nature, society and thought, such as matter, motion, time, space, consciousness, contradiction, necessity, chance, quality, quantity, capital, exploitation, etc.

CIRCULATION PROCESS OF CAPITAL
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“All the differentiations in capital arising from the circulation process—in fact the circulation process itself—are actually nothing but the metamorphosis of commodities (determined by their relationship to wage-labor as capital) as an aspect of the reproduction process.” —Marx, TSV, 3:268.

CLASS (Social)

“Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.” —Lenin, LCW 29:421

CLASS STRUGGLE — In Bourgeois Society
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“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
         “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” —Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), MECW 6:485.

CLASS STRUGGLE — In Socialist Society
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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (Psychology)
Internal psychological conflict which arises from incongruous ideas and beliefs held simultaneously. Thus the confusion which results from holding incompatible or incoherent ideas.
        Cognitive dissonance often develops for a period after someone initially changes their mind about some one important idea. For example, if a religious person abandons their irrational belief in God, they might for a time be confused about morality (assuming they previously thought that God’s word was the source of moral principles). Making one change in a person’s ideas often leads to a necessary cascade of further related changes, as the person switches from one general outlook to another, and tries to develop a new coherent overall worldview. Anybody who learns to seriously think at all has to go through this sort of thing. Thinking necessarily involves periods of confusion that take time and further thought and/or investigation to clear up.

COLLATERALIZED DEBT OBLIGATION (CDO)
A share in a package of bonds or mortgages which is most often created in order to hide the high-risk nature of these particular bonds or mortgages. Since the risks of the underlying debt are hidden from view, both credit rating agencies and investors can be fooled into treating these CDOs as more conservative and valuable investments than they really are. The financial institutions issuing the CDOs can therefore trick unsuspecting (but greedy) investors into buying very risky debt by promising high interest rates. Thus even in their actual purpose, CDOs are yet another form of capitalist financial fraud.

COMMERCIAL PAPER
Certificates (IOUs) for short-term loans, often for a 3-month period, from one corporation to another. Holders of these IOUs can also sell them to other corporations.

COMMODITY
1. [In Marxist political economy:] A product of labor made for sale, rather than for direct use. “[A] commodity, that is, a use-value which has a certain exchange-value.” —Marx, TSV, 1:399.
2. [Widespread broad bourgeois sense:] Any product, regardless of whether it is produced to be sold or not.
3. [Narrow bourgeois sense:] A product which is produced by a large number of seriously competing companies, the sale of which therefore cannot create extra profits for any monopolistic or oligopolistic producer. Thus we see comments such as: “PC’s have become a commodity, which is why IBM got out of the business of selling them.”

COMMUNISTS
[Marxist sense:] A person who works to bring about the overthrow of capitalism by the working class, and the transformation of capitalist society into socialism and then into communist society. Communists attempt to do this collectively, which means they form and promote revolutionary parties.

“They [Communists] have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
         “They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.
         “The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
         “The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” —Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Ch. II: MECW 6:497.

“While actively leading immediate struggles, Communists in the capitalist countries should link them with the struggle for long-range and general interests, educate the masses in a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary spirit, ceaselessly raise their political consciousness and undertake the historical task of the proletarian revolution. If they fail to do so, if they regard the immediate movement as everything, determine their conduct from case to case, adapt themselves to the events of the day and sacrifice the basic interests of the proletariat, that is out-and-out social democracy.” —A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement: The letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in reply to the letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of March 30, 1963 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), p. 19.

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” —Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Ch. IV, final paragraph: MECW 6:519.

COMMUNIST REVOLUTION — Bourgeois Fear Of
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“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
         “Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?” —Marx & Engels, opening words to the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), MECW 6:481.

COMPETITION
1. Under capitalism: The antagonistic struggle between different commodity producers for more advantageous conditions of production and sale of commodities and for higher profits.
2. SOCIALIST COMPETITION: A non-antagonistic sport-like contest between different production teams or enterprises to see which is capable of producing more and better goods for the people while at the same time striving to use less labor and fewer raw materials. The better methods developed by the winners are then freely communicated to all other socialist enterprises.

COMPROMISES (Political)
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“The proletarian party must be flexible as well as highly principled, and on occasion it must make such compromises as are necessary in the interests of the revolution. But it must never abondon principled policies and the goal of revolution on the pretext of flexibility and of necessary compromises.” —A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement: The letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in reply to the letter of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of March 30, 1963 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), p. 24.

CONFUCIUS   (551-479 BCE)
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CONSCIENCE
The internalization of morality within an individual to the degree that it becomes an automatic response, akin in some ways to an emotion. (The physical location of the conscience within the brain has been found to be in the prefrontal cortex.)

CONSCIOUSNESS
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COOPERATION — In Nature
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“Of Darwin’s doctrine, I accept the theory of evolution, but assume Darwin’s method of verification (struggle for life, natural selection) to be merely a first, provisional, incomplete expression of a newly discovered fact. Before Darwin, the very people who now, wherever they look, see nothing but the struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleshott and others), once laid particular stress on co-operation in organic nature, the way in which the plant kingdom supplies oxygen and food to the animal kingdom and, conversely, the latter supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, as indicated notably by Liebig. Both conceptions are to some extent justified, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. The interaction of natural bodies—both dead and living—comprises harmony as well as strife, struggle as well as co-operation. Hence, if a self-styled naturalist takes it upon himself to subsume all the manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and meagre axiom ‘struggle for existence’, a phrase which, even in the field of nature, can only be accepted cum grano salis [with a grain of salt], his method damns itself from the outset.” —Engels, Letter to Pyotr Lavrov, November 12-17, 1875, MECW 45:106-7.

COSMOPOLITANISM
A term of derision for fully consistent internationalists, used primarily by those (including Stalin) who seek to combine nationalism and Marxism.

COST-PRICE
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CRAMDOWN
A (usually court-ordered) forced restructuring of a debt load which involves the reduction of the amount owed, in order to allow the debtor to at least be in the position to continue to pay back part of the debt. This happens most often in bankruptcy proceedings.
        Under present U.S. law (as of January 2009) if a person files for “Chapter 13 bankruptcy” (a court-supervised, multi-year plan designed to provide at least partial payment of debts to the creditors), the judge can reduce the amount owed on credit cards, auto loans, student loans and even mortgages on second homes, but not on mortgages on an individual’s principal residence. At present there are proposals to change the law in order to allow cramdowns on these sorts of mortgages as well, as part of the desperate effort to resolve the financial crisis in the U.S. which first broke out in the sub-prime mortgage sphere. At present, banks are often rapidly forcing foreclosures, and then sale of the house to someone else (even at a much lower price), in order to recover as much of the bad loan as they can. If this change is made it might make it somewhat more difficult for the banks to do this, because a judge might cut the mortgage amount owed and allow the person in bankrupcy proceedings to keep their home (thus preventing the bank from selling it again).

CREDIT (Economics)
The benefit granted someone by allowing them to buy goods or services without immediate payment, but requiring payment at some usually definite time in the future. Credit is essential to the functioning of capitalism for a variety of reasons; most fundamentally because the workers who produce all the goods to be sold are not themselves paid enough to buy them all back! Thus, if they are to buy the “excess goods” at all, they must be extended credit to do so. Of course, the repetition of this extention of credit, over and over again, creates a CREDIT BUBBLE (see below).

CREDIT SYSTEM
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“The credit system itself [arose] out of the difficulty of employing capital ‘productively’, i.e., ‘profitably’. The English, for example, are forced to lend their capital to other countries in order to create a market for their commodities. Over-production, the credit system, etc., are means by which capitalist production seeks to break through its own barriers and to produce over and above its own limits.” —Marx, TSV, 3:122.

CRISIS THEORIES (For Capitalist Economic Crises)
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