Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Al - Am   —

AL NAKBA
See: NAKBA

AL QAEDA   (or al-QAEDA)
See: Osama bin LADEN,   NINE-ELEVEN ATTACKS,   POLITICAL ISLAM,   BLOWBACK

ALGERIAN WAR
The vicious colonial war of the French imperialists which began in 1954 and lasted until 1962. [More to be added.]
        See also: PARIS MASSACRE OF 1961

ALGORITHM
A recipe or explicit step-by-step procedure to accomplish some goal. In mathematics this is usually required to involve only a finite number of discrete steps, though some algorithms may involve apparently infinite loops which are eventually broken out of, thus bringing the procedure to an end.
        Are there algorithms in politics, or methods similar to this? Yes, there are some! For example, the mass line method of revolutionary leadership involves the endless repetition of this three-step algorithm:
        1) Gather the ideas of the masses about what to do;
        2) Process (select from) these ideas in light of the revolutionary goal and the principles of revolutionary Marxism, and in light of a scientific study of the objective situation;
        3) Take these concentrated ideas back to the masses, popularize them more broadly, and lead the mass movement on this basis.
        Each iteration of this 3-step algorithm is designed to advance the mass struggle in the direction of social revolution, or toward a new level of achievement in that revolution.

ALIYAH (or ALIYA)
[Hebrew:] The immigration of Jews to Palestine (either to that part of Palestine which is now incorporated into Israel, or to the remaining non-Israeli parts of Palestine as broadly defined). In Hebrew, the word literally (and originally) meant “to ascent or rise”. However, since the advent of the ultra-reactionary nationalist Zionist movement in the late 19th century, it has been used to mean the “immigration to Palestine/Israel.”

ALIENATED LABOR
The past wealth created by labor which now exists as capital and no longer belongs to the workers who produced it, and furthermore which now confronts the workers as an alien force dominating them and working against their interests.

“To the same extent as political economy developed ... it presented labor as the sole element of value and the only creator of use-values, and the development of the productive forces as the only real means for increasing wealth; the greatest possible development of the productive power of labor as the economic basis of society. This is, in fact, the foundation of capitalist production. ... But in the same measure as it is understood that labor is the sole source of exchange-value and the active source of use-value, ‘capital’ is likewise conceived by the same economists ... as the regulator of production, the source of wealth and the aim of production, whereas labor is regarded as wage-labor, whose representative and real instrument is inevitably a pauper (to which Malthus’s theory of population contributed), a mere production cost and instrument of production dependent on a minimum wage and forced to drop even below this minimum as soon as the existing quantity of labor is ‘superfluous’ for capital. In this contradiction, political economy merely expressed the essence of capitalist production or, if you like, of wage-labor, of labor alienated from itself, which stands confronted by the wealth it has created as alien wealth, by its own productive power as the productive power of its product, by its enrichment as its own impoverishment and by its social power as the power of society.” —Marx, TSV, 3:258-259.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!
This is the great and long-time primary slogan of the world revolutionary movement. Though in America this is commonly thought of as just a slogan in the U.S. during the 1960s, it is much, much older than that! And, when the term ‘people’ is properly understood in the Maoist sense, it does in fact concentrate the central political goal of socialist revolution.

“It is common knowledge that already in its programme the Social-Democratic Party expressed the unshakable conviction that really to satisfy the urgent needs of the mass of the people all power must be in the hands of the people. If the mass of the people do not have the entire state power in their hands, if any organ of power not elected by the people, not liable to dismissal, and not entirely dependent on the people, is allowed to remain, it will be impossible really to satisfy the urgent and universally admitted needs of the people.
        “The Social-Democratic Party has always exerted every effort to spread this indisputable truth among the proletariat and among the whole people.... In guiding the proletarian struggle at every stage in its development and under all circumstances, the Social-Democratic Party, as the conscious champion of the aspirations of the working class, must constantly bear in mind the general and fundamental interests of this struggle as a whole. Social-Democracy teaches us not to forget the general interests of the working class for the sake of particular interests; not to allow the specific features of the individual stages of the struggle to cause us to forget the fundamental aims of the struggle as a whole.” —Lenin, “The Fight for Power and the ‘Fight’ for Sops” (June 14, 1906), LCW 11:27.

ALLIANCES — Temporary
        See also: UNITED FRONT

“Only those who are not sure of themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances even with unrealiable people; not a single political party could exist without such alliances.” —Lenin, What Is To Be Done (1902), (Peking: 1973), p. 19; International Publishers ed. (1969), p. 18.

ALTERITY
[In contemporary French bourgeois philosophy and related areas:] “Otherness”; the entity in constrast to which an identity is constructed. What this actually means (if anything), and why such obfuscating terminology is being used in the first place, is unknown to us.
        The term has been frequently used in recent years by the obscurantist writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Sartre used this term in an apparently different way to denote “separation”, in contrast to “reciprocity”.

“Alterity is a philosophical term meaning ‘otherness’, strictly being in the sense of the other of two (Latin alter). In the phenomenological tradition it is usually understood as the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed, and it implies the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of an alternative viewpoint. The concept was established by Emmanuel Lévinas in a series of essays, collected under the title Alterity and Transcendence (1999[1970])....
        “The 20th century definition of alterity is the process of people becoming altern, by being misunderstood as different from a dominant view, due to race, class, gender, ethnicity and other defining traits.
        “Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s theology of Alterity was introduced in a symposium on ‘Remaking History’—the intention of which was to ‘Challenge the masculine orthodoxy of history writing.’” —From the entry on “alterity” in the Wikipedia (accessed on June 7, 2014).

ALTHUSSER, Louis   [Pronounced (roughly): al-toos-er]   (1918-1990)
A French academic philosopher often described as a “Marxist”, but whose supposed “contributions” to Marxism are difficult for a revolutionary Marxist to see. He was a life-long member of the Communist Party of France, which was a revisionist party for the entire period that Althusser was a member. Although he criticized it from time to time, he never left it. He also opposed the great student uprising in France in 1968 as “infantile”. Nevertheless, Althusser and those he influenced remain popular in “left” student academia.
        One of Althusser’s pet theories is that Marx remained “under the spell of Hegel” only for the first part of his life, and that Marx made an “epistemological break” with Hegel in his writings starting in the late 1840s. (As opposed to this, most Marxists recognize that while Marx and Engels did in fact break with Hegel’s idealism before the 1840s, they continued to uphold the dialectical approach they first learned from Hegel (and then put on a sound materialist basis) throughout their lives. There are thus no grounds for seeing any sort of “epistemological break” between “the early Marx” of the mid 1840s and “the later Marx”.)
        Althusser’s notion of the “later Marx’s” dialectical and historical materialism is also quite distorted. He views things through a “structuralist” lens, or in other words, through one sort of restrictive bourgeois lens. This involves interpreting Marx as an anti-humanist and anti-historicist (thus having Marx supposedly agreeing with the positivist viewpoint of Karl Popper, who lambasted what he called Marx’s “historicism”). Althusser also had an affinity for various pseudo-scientific intellectual fads and philosophies such as Freudian psychoanalysis, and used the confused notions from such spheres to corrupt Marxist concepts such as dialectical contradiction. Like most academic Marxists, Althusser was fixated on long, meandering and essentially worthless discussions of ideology, into which he also inserted a lot of psychoanalytic nonsense. Althusser divorced Marx from political practice and activity, which is not surprising since this reflected his own academic approach to “Marxism”.
        Althusser suffered from life-long bouts of mental instability, and in 1980 he murdered his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, and was locked up in a psychiatric hospital. While his reputation suffered because of this, it is surprising how seriously he is still taken by many revolutionary-minded students at universities! Among the many other academics (some of whom also have thought of themselves as “Marxists” at times) who were influenced by Althusser are Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Nicos Poulantzas, Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and even Che Guevarra’s one-time theoretician, Régis Debray.
        See also: OVERDETERMINISM

“The full extent of Althusser’s ignorance was laid bare in his posthumous memoir, The Future Lasts Forever (1994), where he confessed to being ‘a trickster and a deceiver’ who sometimes invented quotations to suit his purpose. ‘In fact, my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I... knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx.’” —Francis Wheen, Marx’s Das Kapital (2006), pp. 109-110.

ALTRUISM
The subordination or sacrifice of one’s own personal interests to those of others. The opposite of egoism.

AMERICA IN DECLINE
The relative decline of the United States in economic and political power, and eventually also in military power, in relation to other countries. The U.S. came out of World War II as by far the strongest imperialist country, although the originally socialist (and later state-capitalist) Soviet Union rivaled it during the Cold War when there were two competing superpowers.
        At the end of World War II the U.S. share of the capitalist world’s total industrial production was a remarkable 56.4 percent! [Yen Yao-chun, “The Economic Origins of U.S. Imperialist Policies of Aggression and War”, Peking Review, Jan. 27, 1961, p. 12, online at: https://www.massline.org/PekingReview/PR1961/PR1961-04.pdf] At that time the U.S. share of world industrial production was around 50%. By 1960 the U.S. share of world GDP had dropped to 38.4%, and by 2012 it had further dropped to 22.5%. And in real terms (using purchasing power parity conversion rates) the decline of U.S. production as a share of world production has fallen even more sharply. [For further information on the declining share of world GDP in the U.S., and its rise in China and other countries, see: N.B. Turner, Is China an Imperialist Country?, section 7, online at: https://www.bannedthought.net/International/Red-Path/01/RP-8.5x11-IsChinaAnImperialistCountry-140320.pdf] Moreover, in manufacturing specifically, China has already surpassed the United States as the leading industrial nation.
        Politically the U.S. is also declining relative to other imperialist countries, though more slowly. China’s rapid economic rise, along with its increasing alliance with Russia, the other BRICS nations, and its growing influence in Africa and elsewhere, is leading to a steady relative decline in political influence for the U.S., and is likely at some point to lead to some qualitative shifts in world political power. The decision by a number of long-time imperialist collaborators with the U.S., such as Britain and Germany, to take part in the new Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank against U.S. wishes is one recent sign of this.
        The relative decline of U.S. military power is of course developing much more slowly, though it will also inevitably follow in the wake of the continuing decline of American economic power. China’s military power is growing at a pace the U.S. cannot keep up with due to America’s increasing economic problems, and China is showing more military assertiveness in not only the China Sea and East Asian area but also in Africa. Moreover, the U.S. is having more and more difficulty keeping the imperialist system it still dominates under military control. It now seems simply unable to pacify many parts of the world, such as Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and expanding parts of North Africa including Libya, despite endless wars in those regions.
        Everywhere you look, the economic, political and military problems of the United States are increasing, and the ability of the U.S. ruling class to deal with those escalating problems is diminishing. For more than half a century American imperialism has indeed been in a long period of relatively slow decline, but today the speed and seriousness of that decline certainly appears to be increasing fast.
        See also: RISE AND FALL OF KEY MODERN ECONOMIES,   UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT,   CHINA—“Loss Of” (by U.S. Imperialism),   SHANGHAI COOPERATION ORGANIZATION

“In the United States, the scent of decline is in the air. Imperial overreach, political polarization, and a costly financial crisis are weighing on the economy. Some pundits now worry that America is about to succumb to the ‘British disease.’ Doomed to slow growth, the U.S. of today, like the exhausted Britain that emerged from World War II, will be forced to curtail its international commitments. The most convincing explanation for British decline [is that] the country failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930s. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable. In short, Britain’s was a political, not an economic, failure. And that history, unfortunately, is all too pertinent to America’s fate.” —Barry Eichengreen, an American bourgeois economist, in Project Syndicate; reprinted in The Week, Nov. 26, 2010, p. 50.
         [It is interesting that bourgeois ideologists, and especially bourgeois economists, simply cannot admit that there could possibly be any fundamental problems with capitalism which can explain why America is in decline, or why Britain suffered a similar fate in the past. They insist that there “has to be” political policy mistakes which are the causes of such declines. In reality, these declines are primarily due to inherent problems within the capitalist system of production which, of necessity, and in the imperialist era especially, lead to intractable overproduction crises and also to very pronounced uneven development in different capitalist countries. Political decisions can retard or speed up these changes, but the basic motive force is in fact in the internal contradictions within capitalist-imperialist economics. —S.H.]

AMERICA IN DECLINE — Foreign Perceptions Of
The continuing economic and political decline of the United States has become more and more apparent to growing numbers of people all around the world. And, in particular, the advent of the very serious financial crisis of 2008-2009 during the Great Recession, whose epicenter was the United States, brought this home to both allies and opponents of American imperialism as never before. This financial crisis was only just barely contained, and could have very easily gotten much worse, with even a possible collapse of the U.S. dollar and the whole world financial system. This awakened many observers to how truly precarious the U.S. and world capitalist financial system now is. Many are now holding their breath about what might possibly happen “next time”!
        In China the national bourgeoisie which came to power after Mao’s death took especial note of this U.S. fragility. As one ex-CIA analyst in frequent contact with Chinese generals remarked, “When the U.S. economy was battered during the global financial crisis of 2008, the Chinese believed America’s long-anticipated and unrecoverable decline was beginning.” Later he notes the new recognition on the part of Chinese leaders that “America’s relative decline has accelerated faster than they had anticipated”. [Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015), pp. 16 and 200.] And, indeed, the growing worries within the U.S. ruling class about the rise of China are very much connected to their own deep fears (only occasionally openly expressed) about their own decline.
        Other imperialist powers such as Germany, Japan, Britain and France watch with alarm as the imperialist hegemon, the United States, seems to be unable to “pacify” ever larger parts of the world—most notably, of course, in the Middle East, Afghanistan and north Africa. On top of this, the U.S. ruling class seems to them to be getting more inept, more at a loss about what to do, more irresolute, and even more erratic and irrational (especially when it comes to issues such as climate change). And this negative perception has taken a qualitative leap with the election of the quixotic and dangerous new president, Donald Trump. Since World War II the other imperialist countries in the Western camp have been both forced and willing to follow the lead of the U.S. in managing the world imperialist system. But as they see the old hegemon faltering they are waking up to their own “necessity” to take more responsibility for continuing the imperialist domination and exploitation of the world in their own interests. One major aspect of this is the push to greatly expand their independent military power and assertiveness by Japan, Germany and other other imperialist countries. This is also encouraged by the U.S. since it subconsciously knows that its own past military control of most of the world is slipping from its fingers.

“German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday declared a new chapter in U.S.-European relations after contentious meetings with President Trump last week, saying Europe ‘really must take our fate into our own hands.’
        “It was the toughest review yet of Trump’s trip to Europe, which inflamed tensions rather than healing them after the U.S. president sparred with the leaders of Washington’s closest and oldest allies on trade, defense and climate change.
        “Merkel, Europe’s de facto leader, told a packed beer hall rally in Munich that the days when her continent could rely on others was ‘over to a certain extent. This is what I have experienced in the last few days.’
        “The comments came as Europe watches Britain preparing to leave the European Union and now faces antagonism from Washington.
        “... Although relations between Washington and Europe have been strained at times since 1945, before Trump there has rarely been such a strong feeling from European leaders that they must turn away from Washington and prepare to face the world alone.” —Michael Birnbaum and Rick Noack, “Merkel Sees Stark Change in U.S. Ties”, Washington Post report reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 29, 2017, p. A2. [This is one of many illlustrations of the rapid decline in U.S. political influence in the world today. —Ed.]

AMERICA IN DECLINE   [RCP Book]
A book published in 1984 by Banner Press in Chicago, an imprint of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which talked about the economic and political decline of the United States and, as the subtitle stated, attempted to provide “an analysis of the developments toward war and revolution in the U.S. and worldwide in the 1980s”. Within the RCP and its milieu this work was referred to as AID. It is of course quite obvious now that this book was absurdly premature both economically and politically and did not at all present a correct analysis.
        AID was written by Raymond Lotta, a prominent leader of the RCP specializing in political economy, with Frank Shannon (the pseudonym of another RCP member who also focused on political economy), and, as mentioned in the Acknowledgements, the writing of the book was done under the overall direction of Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the RCP. It was labeled “Volume One”, since the plan was to publish at least two more volumes in the series, which were, however, never completed. By the end of the 1980s it was already becoming clear even to the RCP that their analysis was at least not fully correct, but it was not until 2000 that they published a self-critical document entitled “Notes on Political Economy” which attempted to determined the reasons for (some of) the serious errors in AID. (For an extensive discussion of this misdiagnosis of their earlier errors as well as the many new errors in that self-critical document see: Scott H., “Notes on Notes on Political Economy” (February 2000), online at: https://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/NotesNPE.htm)
        AID follows Lenin’s early pamphlet, “A Characterization of Economic Romanticism” (1897), in mistakenly putting forward the “anarchy theory” of capitalist economic crises (i.e., that the anarchy of production due to the existence of “many capitals” and the absence of any overall economic planning is what leads to crises). Actually, the primary cause of crises is the overproduction of capital and the fact that the growth of the market cannot keep pace with the growth of production. The “anarchy of many independent capitalist producers” is at most a very secondary problem. Also following Lenin’s early writings (and going against Marx) AID in at least two places actually puts forward “Say’s Law”, as for example in the erroneous statement that “the expansion of capital requires the continual perfecting of the division of labor and generates its own demand and markets.” (p. 260) Shades of Ricardo! Thus even AID’s analysis of the U.S. capitalist economic crisis which had already been developing since around 1973, is completely mistaken—not to mention the political expectations of either world war or social revolution in the U.S. by the end of the 1980s.
        It is true, however, that by 1984 America had already entered a long period of economic decline. Politically it got a short breath of fresh air and temporary “triumphalism” with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. But the overproduction crisis that started in the early 1970s has continued and slowly worsened, and in the new century has taken a turn for the worse. America today is in fact in decline, both economically and politically. However, the RCP didn’t understand the correct reasons for this development, nor did it understand just how slow and drawn out this decline would turn out to be.

AMERICAN DREAM, The
A bourgeois fantasy inculcated into large sections of the people in the United States during the modern capitalist-imperialist era, according to which every person will enjoy an increasingly prosperous life providing only that they work hard. In addition, this aptly named Dream promises the masses that their children will be even more prosperous and successful. The limited material basis for this Dream was the extraordinary exploitation of the rest of the world by U.S. imperialism which, for a time, did allow the ruling class to permit the living standards of at least a considerable section of the working class (and especially the top crust, or “labor aristocracy”) to improve during the quarter century following World War II. (But even then only because of union organizing, strikes, and other forms of struggle.)
        When the post-World War II boom ended in the early 1970s the modest improvements in the lives of the U.S. working class also pretty much ended. However, during the next quarter century of the Long Slowdown, the real wages, benefits, and conditions of life of American workers declined only a little. But starting with the new millennium and especially with the Great Recession (of 2007-09), and continuing in its aftermath, millions of Americans have been losing their jobs, or having their wages and benefits cut in a bigger way, and many of them have also been losing their homes. Similarly, college tuition is jumping up wildly, and more and more families are unable to send their kids to college. It is suddenly becoming apparent to millions that the so-called American Dream is not coming true after all. We have entered a period of massive disillusionment about this. However, so far, the American people have not begun to understand that this is due to the very nature of capitalism, and many of them still look for one or another set of bourgeois politicians to restore their fading dream for them.

“Americans are obsessed with terrorism, China, and other threats from beyond our borders, said Gregory Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times. But the biggest threat to our future comes from the recent and dramatic erosion of ‘that rather nebulous notion we call the American dream.’ An ABC News/Yahoo News poll last week found that only half of us still believe in the dream—defined as the promise that ‘if you work harder you’ll get ahead.’ More than 40 percent no longer think that’s true. The Great Recession may explain some of this gloom, but polls from as far back as 1995 have documented ever-rising doubts about the dream. This is alarming news, because ‘the dream is the glue that keeps us all together.’ In this ‘diverse, highly competitive society,’ it’s the belief that our lives and the lives of our children will get better that keeps our myriad ethnicities, races, religions, and regions ‘from ultimately tearing each other apart.’
         “Americans have every reason for their doubts, said Ronald Brownstein in [the] National Journal. The 10-year period between 2000 and 2009 was ‘an utterly lost decade for many, if not most, Americans.’ In inflation-adjusted dollars, the incomes of white families declined 5 percent over the decade, while the incomes of Hispanic families dropped 8 percent, and those of African-American families, 11 percent—an almost ‘unimaginable’ reversal, after decades of steady progress. More than 12 million people fell into poverty. Even though the population grew by 25 million, fewer people held jobs at the end of the decade than when it began. If Americans feel as though ‘the ground beneath them is cracking,’ can we blame them?” —“The American Dream: Going, going... gone?”, The Week, Oct. 8, 2010, p. 23.

“It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” —George Carlin, quote on NJ.com.

AMERICAN ECONOMY
See: UNITED STATES ECONOMY

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
See: THINK TANK

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
Any of a series of quite erroneous ideas, theories or doctrines popular within various circles in the United States that this country is somehow so different from others that the political and historical laws and processes that work everywhere else do not apply here. Examples include:
        1. The theory that political classes do not exist in the U.S. to the same degree they do in other countries, that the capitalist class does not really exercise a class dictatorship here, and therefore that there is no necessity in the U.S. for an actual proletarian revolution to overthrow a ruling bourgeoisie. (This version of American Exceptionalism has been promoted by various revisionists, including some of the leaders of the so-called Communist Party USA.)
        2. The theory that the U.S. has been uniquely blessed by nature, by history, by its remoteness from Europe or by divine benevolence to pursue a more moral and peaceful course than other countries, and especially as compared to the countries of Europe. (This notion goes back to colonial days, but remains popular especially among religious patriots.)
        3. The theory that American imperialism, if it is admitted to exist at all, is more benign and enlightened than that of all other imperialist powers in history.
        4. [Sort of a corollary to the last notion:] The theory that the United States is destined to spread its “unique gifts of democracy and capitalism” to all the other countries of the world. (This version has been quite popular within the U.S. ruling class since the late 19^th century, and has become a common “justification” for U.S. imperialism and its nearly constant wars of aggression.)

“Among [European societies], under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” —Thomas Jefferson, letter from France to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 11:48-49. Online at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/print_documents/amendI_speechs8.html [Jefferson seems here to both proclaim American exceptionalism and to be worrying that it may not last for long! —Ed.]

“Belief in ‘American exceptionalism’—the notion that this country is divinely sanctioned with ‘a special mission’ in the world—has become a litmus test of patriotism, said Michael Kinsley. Indeed, ‘the theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters.’ I find this conceit both puzzling and dangerous. ‘Does any other electorate demand such constant reassurance about how wonderful it is?’ Belief in exceptionalism has consequences, because its first tenet is that ‘the rules don’t apply to us.’ Thus, when we choose to start a war like the one in Iraq, the United Nations becomes irrelevant; when we lack the money to pay for our benefits and goodies at home, and our world-shaping ambitions abroad, we borrow what we can’t afford. [We believe] our greatness is destined by the stars...” —Summary of the comments of the bourgeois political columnist Michael Kinsley on Politico.com; quoted in The Week, Nov. 19, 2010, p. 14.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR
An organization of American trade unions, formed in 1881, on the guild principle. This meant that it had member unions for specific skilled trades, such as carpenters, plumbers, electricians and locomotive engineers. Thus it primarily organized the labor aristocracy on the basis of separate skilled trades rather than all the workers at a company based on their common exploitation by that company, let alone all the workers in a particular capitalist industry.
        The A. F. of L. has always been only a reformist organization and has always strongly opposed revolution and socialism. It favors “class cooperation” and openly supports the capitalist system. It consistently opposes the political class struggle, and serves to seriously divide the American working class. It gives active and consistent support to the policies of U.S. imperialism, including aggression and genocidal wars.
        In 1955 the A. F. of L. merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, with the merged A. F. of L.—C. I. O. continuing the very same bourgeois trade union political line as before. In the modern period this has been a more notorious sell-out organization even with regard to workers’ wages and benefits. It is the most important bourgeois organization within the ranks of the “labor movement”.

AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS — Public Support For
There has been a major decline over the past decade in the confidence of Americans about many institutions, including the branches of government, banks, churches, newspapers and TV news, big business, and especially the U.S. Congress. The chart at the right shows the overall decline in confidence for all the American institutions surveyed as a whole. However, some institutions such as the U.S. military and police (unfortunately) continue to have widespread support, while the confidence in many other institutions has dropped quite precipitously.
        The table below shows the Gallup Poll results for some particular institutions in both June 2006 and June 2016. It shows the percentage of people interviewed who say that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the specific institution, as well as the change in the percentage points of those who say this over the decade. It should be remembered of course that, because of the way they are conducted, such opinion polls generally are biased toward the views of the rich and “middle class”. Thus the real opinions of the American people toward all these institutions is no doubt lower still. Furthermore, as the capitalist economic crises further develops, and social institutions continue to decay, these figures will undoubtedly fall further in the future.

AMIN, Samir   (1931-2018)
A prominent Egyptian-born Marxist-influenced economist, who spent the last part of his life in Dakar, Senegal. He was variously associated with dependency theory; the “World Systems Theory” viewpoint; the quasi-Marxist trend known as “Third World Marxism” (and he is said to have introduced the contentious term ‘Eurocentrism’ in 1988 which has sometimes been used to condemn Marx and Marxism); and with the Marxist-Keynesian Monthly Review School.
        Amin’s Egyptian father and French mother were both medical doctors. He was schooled in France and graduated with degrees in statistics and economics in 1956-1957. While studying in Paris he joined the revisionist Communist Party of France, but later broke with Soviet-style “Marxism” and was for a time associated with circles there who were influenced by Maoism. His university thesis was about the origins of underdevelopment in the Third World, and this was his central focus after that. After graduating, Amin returned to Cairo and worked for 3 years in government economic research. Then he worked from 1960-1963 as an adviser in the Ministry of Planning in Mali. From 1963 to 1980 he was associated with the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP), the last ten years as its director. In 1980 Amin left IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar.
        Amin was a prolific author, but his many books were usually short and sometimes tended to have an air of hurried superficiality to them. Furthermore, he had a poor writing style and it is often hard to understand exactly what views he is putting forth and defending. It is likely that this reflects the continuing confusion in his own ideas. Among his many works available in English are: Imperialism & Unequal Development (1976), The Future of Maoism (1981), Eurocentrism (1988), Maldevelopment (1990), Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (1997), Spectres of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions (1998), The Liberal Virus (2004), Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World (2006), The World We Wish to See (2008), The Law of Worldwide Value (2010), Global History—a View from the South (2010).
        As that last title suggests, Amin viewed the world as “North versus South”, the “center versus the periphery”, or the developed world versus the Third World. This tends to blur the very different characteristics of different countries such as by lumping China together with Mali and Senegal. Although he does constantly mention imperialism, he thinks of imperialism in a somewhat non-Marxist way (rejecting Lenin’s conception of the equivalence of capitalist imperialism and monopoly capitalism).
        Amin attributed the exploitation of and dominance over the Third World by the “center”, or “North”, or “the triad” (the U.S., Europe & Japan), as being due to “five monopolies” which the “center” possesses: 1) technology; 2) control over the global financial system; 3) access to natural resources; 4) international communication and the media; 5) the dominant military forces and means of mass destruction. These 5 monopolies are said to allow the extraction of “imperialist rent” from the periphery, though exactly what this means, and precisely how this is done (beyond just unfavorable terms of trade), are never clearly explained. Amin also believed that he had somehow transformed the Law of Value into something qualitatively deeper, which he called the Law of Worldwide Value. This vague notion seems to have the effect of making the concept of surplus value more complex, less definite, and less clearly understandable.
        In discussing the crisis of modern capitalism Amin pretty much followed Sweezy, Baran and the Monthly Review School, as he himself noted. But he added to this some further dubious innovations. He viewed the entire period of 1873 to 1945 as being one long economic crisis, which seems to reflect something like the General Crisis of Capitalism Theory. Then there was his bizarre claim that modern capitalism now has a “Third Department” to it (in addition to Departments I & II which Marx described, the departments for the means of production and for consumption goods). This Department III supposedly absorbs surplus value in the form of financial speculation and the like. There is undoubtedly a huge sphere of financial speculation in modern capitalism, but how it helps to clarify anything by calling this a “Third Department” of production is never explained. —S.H.

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