Glossary of Revolutionary Marxism

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VALUE (In ethics)
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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

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.

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.

VIOLENCE
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“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.