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“DEAD CAT BOUNCE”
A false or merely temporary recovery in the stock market or in some other form of bourgeois financial speculation. Typically in a major crisis there is a huge stock market crash fairly early in the process, and then a long period of further, more gradual decline. But some speculators (“investors”) will have money on hand from earlier stock sales or from other sources and will assume that the crisis is not really as bad as it is. They will want to buy stocks near their low values in order to “make a killing” as the market recovers. Often they are so anxious not to miss this “golden opportunity” for a speculator that they will jump in at the first glimmer of hope that there is a stock market turn around, and will thus promote a short-term, false recovery. When it becomes clear that the crisis is continuing and is much more serious than these particular speculators imagined, the market will resume its fall and they will lose additional money. The more serious the economic crisis, the more “dead cat bounces” there will be until the stock market more or less stabilizes at a quite low level.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM
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DEMOCRITUS   (c. 460-c. 370 BCE)
Greek materialist philosopher who championed the view that the world consists ultimately of minute indivisible atoms whose movement and combination required no supernational forces.

DENG Xiaoping   (Old style: Teng Hsiao-p’ing)   (1904-1997)
Capitalist-roader within the Chinese Communist Party, who after Mao’s death led the revisionist dismantling of socialism in China and the return to capitalism.
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DEPRESSION (Economics)
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DIALECTICAL LOGIC
The logic of dialectical reasoning. [More to be added...]

DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
The scientific philosophy which underlies revolutionary Marxism (Marxism-Leninism-Maoism) ... [More to be added...]

DIALECTICS — ANCIENT
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“The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopedic intellect of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.” —Engels, Anti-Dürhing, MECW 25:21.

“When we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.” —Engels, ibid.

DIALECTICS OF NATURE (Book by Engels)
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DICTATORSHIP
“Authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatsoever, and based directly on force.” —Lenin, LCW 10:246. Often reduced, in bourgeois discourse, to personal dictatorship, or absolute rule by one individual.

DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
Proletarian rule. “The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.” —Lenin, LCW 28:236.

“The indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition of dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of ‘pure democracy’, i.e., of equality and freedom, in regard to that class.” —Lenin, “Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (Oct.-Nov. 1918), LCW 28:256.

DIMENSION WORD
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DIVISION OF LABOR
A characteristic feature of industrial production [Cf. Marx, TSV, 3:271.] in which there is specialization in the production process, where the tasks are divided up into simpler and more repetitive smaller tasks, and individual workers are assigned to do just one or a few of these simpler smaller tasks.

“Division of labor is, in one sense, nothing but coexisting labor, that is, the coexistence of different kinds of labor which are represented in different kinds of products or rather commodities. The division of labor in the capitalist sense, as the breaking down of the particular labor which produces a definite commodity into a series of simple and co-ordinated operations divided up amongst different workers, presupposes the division of labor within society outside the workshop, as separation of occupations. On the other hand, it [division of labor] increases it [separation of occupations]. The product is increasingly produced as a commodity in the strict sense of the word, its exchange-value becomes the more independent of its immediate existence as use-value—in other words its production becomes more and more independent of its consumption by the producers.... The division of labor within the workshop is one of the methods used in this mass production and consequently in the production of the product [as a commodity]. Thus the division of labor within the workshop is based on the division of occupations in society.” —Marx, TSV, 3:268-9.

DUMPING
The practice of selling commodities for a lower price in foreign markets than in the home market. This is an illegal practice according to most trade agreements, but is nevertheless quite common. The reasons why companies do this include:
        1) They may have more of a monopoly situation in the home market that allows them extra profits there;
        2) They may wish to simply unload excess production in a way that will not adversely impact their main market;
        3) It may allow them to horn in on new markets in the other countries;
        4) It may allow them to drive their competitors in the foreign markets out of business, after which they will be able to raise prices there to the same high levels as in the home market.
        In general there is much more international competition in modern capitalism than there is competition within home markets, and this is one of the basic factors that makes dumping so common, and makes charges of dumping against foreign competitors even more common!