Glossary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   L   —

See also: ALIENATED LABOR.

LABOR POWER
“By labor-power or capacity for labor is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. 6: (International, p. 167; Penguin, p. 270.) “A commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital.” —Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital”, (MECW 9:202, as edited in Engels’ 1891 edition.)
        Labor power is therefore the worker’s ability to work, which is what is sold to the capitalist for the wages received. Labor power is not the same as labor itself, however! As everyone is aware, once the capitalists sell the products that the workers produce, and even after paying the workers their wages (which means the market value of their labor power), they still have a large surplus left over from which they take their profits. The fact that the actual labor of the workers generates this additional surplus value beyond the workers’ wages (i.e., beyond the value of their labor power) means that the real implicit value of their actual labor must greatly exceed the value of what they sell to the capitalists, their labor power. And therefore labor power and labor must be carefully distinguished if we are to understand the source of the capitalists’ profits.
        The distinction between labor power and labor is often confusing for those new to Marxist political economy. In addition to Chapter 6 of Volume I of Marx’s Capital, another good place to go to clear up this confusion is to carefully read Engels’ 1891 edition of Marx’s pamphlet, “Wage Labor and Capital” and especially Engels’ introduction where he goes into the difference between labor power and labor quite thoroughly. This edition is available in an inexpensive paperback from International Publishers, and available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm. Engels’ introduction is also available separately in MECW 27:194-201.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE [Pronounced: “lassay fair”]
[From the French, meaning “to let people do as they please”.] The bourgeois doctrine which opposes any governmental interference in the economy beyond that necessary to maintain peace and sacred capitalist property rights. This was well-nigh universally accepted by bourgeois economists in the 19^th century, especially after John Stuart Mill popularized it in his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. However, during the imperialist era, and especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, much of the bourgeoisie and many of its apologists came to appreciate that much government intervention in the economy on behalf of the capitalists was highly desirable, and even necessary for the continuation of capitalism. In particular Keynesian economists argued that the capitalist economy had to be carefully “managed”, and even the more traditional economists of the “neo-classical synthesis” school all recognized that the government at least needed to manage interest rates, the money supply, and so forth. After the stablization of capitalism for a long period after World War II, laissez-faire (in a somewhat less pure form) came back into fashion again, often under the new name (for much the same old ideas), neo-liberalism. It is really only with the financial crash of 2008 and the deepening crisis leading toward the development of a new depression that bourgeois economists are once again starting to question their doctrine of near total faith in the virtues of laissez-faire and the “free market”.

LAO ZI [also Romanized as Lao Tzu and Lao-Tse]   (6^th century BCE)
Chinese philosopher and sage, the original source of Taoism. Lao Zi (which literally means “the old master”) inspired the semi-religious Taoist book Tao-te-Ching (“The Way of Power”) which was compiled some 300 years after his death, and which teaches self-sufficiency, simplicity and detachment. From the Marxist standpoint, Lao Zi is of interest mostly because of the primitive, but intriguing, dialectics that he put forward, and also his faith in the people. For example, consider this fine statement attributed to him, which sounds very much like the Maoist mass line:

“Go to the people.
         Live with them.
         Learn from them...
         Start with what they know;
         Build with what they have.
         But with the best leaders,
         When the work is done,
         The task accomplished,
         The people will say,
         We have done this ourselves!”

LEIBNIZ, Gottfried Wilhelm   (1646-1716)
[To be added...]
        See also: MONADS, and Philosophical doggerel about Leibniz.

LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY
The school of philosophy popular in the English-speaking world in the 20th century that holds that many or most (or even all) philosophical problems derive from confusion about the use of words, and are thus resolved by careful analysis of the real meaning of words and phrases. Since they take this as a given they studiously avoid all discussion of the major philosophical questions which philosophers have argued about throughout history, and which their method seems to have little of relevance to say about. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy was the main impetus for this school.

“LIQUIDITY TRAP”
A term originated by Keynes and used by Keynesian-influenced bourgeois economists to describe the situation in an economic crisis where it is impossible to lower interest rates so as to increase the demand for loans (and thus expand economic activity). This can occur either because the prevailing interest rates are already as low as they can go (approaching zero), or else because the increase in the money supply by the central bank does not result in a fall in the prevailing interest rates for some other reason, but instead merely an addition to the idle funds of the banks or holders of the money. (Keynes’ explanation for this second possibility within the context of bourgeois economics is vague at best and neoclassical bourgeois economists deny that it can actually happen. But clearly in a crisis the holders of money often do refuse to lend it or invest it because they fear losing it.) Thus describing a situation as a liquidity trap is simply an obscure way of saying that standard “monetary policy” has become ineffective.
        Clear examples of “liquidity traps” or periods when monetary policy has utterly failed include the First Great Depression (of the 1930s), Japan during the 1990s and since then, and the U.S. economy starting in the autumn of 2008 when the Federal Reserve cut the interest rate it charges banks to essentially zero as the initial financial crisis of the developing Second Great Depression began to take hold.
        Marxist economists avoid the term “liquidity trap” because it reflects confused Keynesian bourgeois notions and does not really clarify the actual situation. It makes far more sense to simply note that the capitalists stop investing and stop loaning money when they are afraid of losing it — i.e., in a major financial crisis associated with an overproduction crisis — and therefore lowering interest rates, even to near zero, soon loses its effectiveness.

LIU Shaoqi   (Oldstyle: LIU Shao-ch’i)   (1898-1969)
High ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party who during the period of socialism was the leader of those in the Party taking the capitalist road toward the restoration of capitalism in China. He was overthrown by the Maoist revolutionaries during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
        Liu was born in Hunan Province to a moderately rich, land-owning peasant family. He was educated in Changsha and Shanghai (where he learned Russian). In 1921-22 he went to study in Moscow, and while there joined the newly-formed CCP. He returned to China and became a labor organizer in Shanghai. His orientation was always more toward the cities than the countryside. He was elected to the CCP Politburo in 1934 and became its expert on matters of organization and Party structure. In 1939 he wrote his notorious book on “self-cultivation”, How to Be a Good Communist. In 1943 he became Secretary General of the Party, then Vice-Chairman in 1949. While Mao was still Chairman of the CCP, Liu became Chairman of the People’s Republic of China in 1958 (i.e., head of state).
        Liu advocated and did his best to institute all sorts of “reforms” tending in the direction of restoring capitalism, such as promoting production above political consciousness; financial incentives and bonuses (as opposed to moral incentives); easing of the restrictions on the market economy (rather than tightening them and steadily restricting the “law of value”); promoting rewards for “loyal cadres” and special treatment for the children of high Party officials; and, in general, promotion of a new privileged strata within the Party and State. As the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution developed in the late 1960s Liu led the sly and semi-camouflaged resistence to it. This had the effect of more and more turning the GPCR against him and his minions as its primary target. In 1967 Liu was informally removed from power, and in October 1968 he was formally “expelled from the Party forever, and stripped of all his positions in and outside the CCP.” He died in November 1969 while under house-arrest back in Hunan. In 1980 he was “rehabilitated” by Deng Xiaoping’s gang of revisionists who seized control of the CCP after Mao’s death in 1976.
        A sympathetic bourgeois biographer, Lowell Dittmer, said of him: “Liu’s life may be viewed as an attempt to combine order with revolution and equality with economic efficiency and technocratic values.” But for Liu “order” meant a turn toward bourgeois rule, “equality” meant an end to class struggle, and “efficiency and technocratic values” meant the capitalist marketplace. Liu Shaoqi was not a personal opportunist; he was quite sincere and dedicated in his advocacy of revisionism. He was all the more insidious and dangerous to the cause of communist revolution because of this.

LOCKE, John   (1632-1704)
English empiricist philosopher. He was a proponent of the idealist notion of “natural rights” in ethics and politics, and was a major influence on those who founded the United States.
        Locke also wrote on political economy, and as Marx said, “championed the new bourgeoisie in every way, taking the side of the industrialists against the working class and against the paupers, the merchants against the old-fashioned usurers, the financial aristocracy against the governments that were in debt, and he even demonstrated in one of his books that the bourgeois way of thinking was the normal one for human beings.” [Marx, quoted in an appendix to TSV, 3:592.]
        See also: Philosophical doggerel about Locke.

LOGIC
Logic is usually defined to be the rules of valid inference or the rules and nature of reasoning. However, if you look at the dominant areas of discussion in books of logic, you will find that they usually only discuss the rules and nature of reasoning insofar as these are related to deduction. Actually deductive logic (or “formal logic”) is only one small part of what should “logically” be called logic. Other important areas of logic in the broad sense that usually receive scant attention include analogic logic (the logic of making analogies), and most important of all, dialectical logic.

LOGICAL POSITIVISM
An extreme form of empiricism that holds that only statements which can be verified empirically have meaning, from which they assume that it follows that all metaphysics, religion, and even ethical principles are “meaningless”, and therefore neither true nor false. (They failed to notice that their very statement of this verifiability principle was also meaningless according to the principle itself!) Logical positivism has been extremely influential in the 20^th century among bourgeois scientists.
        See also: VIENNA CIRCLE

LONG CYCLES or LONG WAVES
This refers to hypothesized long-term economic cycles or waves, substantially longer than the length of the standard industrial cycle that Marx described. The most well-known of these theories is Kondratiev Waves, but there is now a more plausible split-cycle theory for the imperialist era.
        See also: ECONOMIC CYCLES.

LYING
[To be added...]
      See also: CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE.

LYSENKO, Trofim Denisovich   (1898-1976)
Soviet agronomist, and later the top government official for the genetic sciences in the Soviet Union. During the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s (due to the mishandling of agricultural collectivization by Stalin), he came to prominence for spreading good crop management techniques among the peasants. He borrowed and promoted the discovery that the phases of plant growth can be accelerated via short doses of low temperatures and moisture controls applied to the seeds and young plants. But he went on to claim, without good scientific evidence, that these benefits also became “acquired characteristics” which were then passed on to future plant generations. In this he was applying the erroneous genetic theories of the early French naturalist Jean Lamarck (1744-1829) and the Russian horticulturalist Ivan Michurin.
        Thereafter Lysenko rapidly rose in the ranks of Soviet agricultural management because he was saying things that the Soviet government wanted to hear—that there were some easy technical ways to drastically improve agricultural production. (See LYSENKOISM entry below.) Lysenko was the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences from 1940 to 1965, where he formally denounced Mendelian genetics. In 1948 Stalin’s backing ended virtually all opposition to Lysenko and his theories. After Stalin’s death in 1953 Lysenko’s power fell, but increased again under Khrushchev until both of them were removed from power in 1965.
        There is a telling little story about Lysenko; it is said that he posed the following question on several occasions to the scientific workers at what was later called the Englehardt Institute of Molecular Biology in the Soviet Union: “What is DNA?” (That was indeed a question he sorely needed the answer to!)

LYSENKOISM
This is a term that has come to mean something like letting political wishful thinking triumph over scientific fact, or even letting politics dominate and determine what scientific truth “actually is”.
        In the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko (see above) propagated a quack theory of genetics based on the supposed inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, even before the discovery of the central role of DNA in inheritance, the science of biology (and genetics specifically) had determined that (at least normally) there is no such thing as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The giraffe’s neck is long not because its ancestors stretched theirs during their lifetimes, but because the ancestors with naturally longer necks survived, while those with shorter necks died before they could reproduce. (Counterpoint: Recent research seems to show that there really are some exceptional circumstances where there can be some inheritance of acquired characteristics, as with certain bacteria, but the fact remains that even if this is so it is only in highly atypical situations.) There were prominent geneticists in the Soviet Union who knew this full well, such as Nikolai Vavilov, and who were persecuted and sometimes imprisoned for their Mendelian views by Lysenko and the Soviet government. (Vavilov himself was arrested in 1940 and is said to have died of starvation in a Siberian labor camp around 1943.) Lysenko was welcome to his own opinions about genetics, but the persecution of those who disagreed with him was the crime, which was made much worse by the support of Stalin (and later Khrushchev) and the force of the state.
        It is not entirely clear, however, how much direct damage Lysenko and his theories actually did to Soviet agriculture, though certainly there was some significant damage over the long run due to his disruption of genetic research. There were many other problems in agriculture, some of them probably much more important. For example, the brutal “top-down” method of agricultural collectivization carried out by Stalin in the 1930s led to the death of many peasants, the destruction of much of the livestock and to serious crop shortages. The continuing failure to use the mass line to mobilize the peasants to work in their own collective interests remained a major obstacle to the expansion of agricultural production. And insufficient industrial support was also given to agriculture over a period of decades.
        Unfortunately the Lysenko episode has led to some widespread invalid conclusions, even among some Marxists, such as that any “government interference” in science is unjustified, and that scientists and other experts should be basically unrestricted in their activities. Of course any government will appropriately promote and fund those scientists and those theories which it has confidence in. And any government would be within its rights to restrict certain kinds of experiments or technologies for which there is good reason to believe that there are serious potential dangers for the people. Moreover, a socialist government in particular, will certainly find it necessary to criticize bourgeois ideas that scientists, just as any other segment of society, may still promote.
        However, it is true that socialist society should also allow, especially in the natural sciences, “a hundred flowers to bloom, and a hundred schools of thought to content” (as Mao poetically put it). In looking at the experience of socialism in both the Soviet Union and China it seems clear that overall there was not enough freedom of thought and expression in the sciences, nor was there sufficient allowance (and even encouragement!) of new and minority ideas and views. On the other hand it, it was certainly necessary and correct to strongly criticize views and theories insofar as they had a bourgeois ideological component, and sometimes this was also insufficient! Of course this will generally be much more central and important in the social sciences than in the natural sciences.
        See also: INSTRUMENTALISM.

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