Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Coa - Col   —

CoBRA
Short for Combat Battalion for Resolute Action. This is yet another Indian government paramilitary force attempting to suppress the Naxalites (Maoist revolutionaries).

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.
        See also: CHANGING MINDS

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
        1. [Original limited sense:] A method of work in the science of psychology which recognizes that behavior typically cannot be reasonably studied, explained and understood without reference to mental states and processes. Thus, a rejection of the naïve approach of behaviorism in psychology.
        2. [More recent sense:] A further development of the basic idea in the first sense, which especially connects up psychology with conceptions and developments in recent work in the philosophy of mind, neurophysiology, and especially in computer science and artificial intelligence research. To a considerable degree, cognitive psychology today is in fact a partial merger of all these spheres of investigation, and is therefore now often referred to with the broader term cognitive science.
        The more recent conceptions of cognitive psychology, at least, tend to be strongly materialist; that is, while they recognize full well that in psychology we must refer to ideas, memories, intentions, attitudes, and many other mentalistic characteristics of humans and other animals, nevertheless all such mentalistic terms are themselves understood to be high-level references to states, operations, and processes within a physical brain. Therefore, despite the insistence of cognitive psychology on talking about the mind, mental states, and so forth, there is no longer any remaining tendency toward philosophical dualism in scientific psychology.

COGNITIVISM
[In ethics:] The first big division among all the various ethical theories that have been developed over the centuries is between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Cognitivism holds that moral judgments are meaningful, and that they are either true or false. Non-cognitivism, incredibly, denies these facts! MLM Class Interest Ethics is of course a cognitive ethical theory. Thus we say a sentence such as “The U.S. imperialist war against Iraq is wrong!” is both clearly meaningful, and definitely true!

See also: GERONIMO PRATT,   RAINBOW COALITION,   and COINTELPRO: FBI’s War on Black America (1989) [high quality 50 min. documentary video by Denis Mueller & Deb Ellis (no longer available on the Internet as far as we know)].

COLD WAR
The long post-World War II contention between United States imperialism (and its bloc) and the Soviet Union (and its bloc). This contention came very close to becoming an inter-imperialist nuclear war at several points, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. But fortunately (and rather surprisingly!), all-out war did not happen. The contention was fierce, however, and involved a number of “proxy wars” by each side against the other, an enormous military arms race, major economic struggle, and so forth. During the first period (up until the mid-1950s), the Soviet Union was still a socialist country—though one with many serious defects—and from then on the Soviet Union was a social-imperialist country (i.e., socialist in name only, but capitalist-imperialist in actual fact). Thus most of the Cold War was an inter-imperialist contention between the two capitalist superpowers armed to the teeth. Humanity is lucky to have survived it!
        See also: NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1947

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
As used by imperialist military machines, such as that of the United States: The killing of civilians in the course of military strikes against “enemy combatants”. This is extremely common, though its wide extent must of course be covered up to the maximum degree possible.
        There are two factors that especially lead to “collateral damage” being so vast: 1) The imperialists don’t give much of damn about the lives of other people, “innocent” or not. And 2) To the great extent that struggles against foreign imperialist military forces are people’s wars, the masses of the people of a country (with the exception of a small number of traitors to the people) actually do become the enemy of the imperialists. And the imperialists quickly come to recognize this and begin purposefully attacking civilians as well as combatants. In a people’s war against the imperialists, the imperialist military forces virtually always become genocidal to one degree or another. And in that case, the occasional admission of “collateral damage” on their part is merely a cover for what is actually part of the ongoing genocide.
        In the event of an all-out inter-imperialist nuclear war, the “collateral damage” might easily amount to billions of people all around the world, especially within both of the imperialist nations at war. It is even possible now that the “collateral damage” could be the destruction of humanity in its entirety.

COLLATERALIZED DEBT OBLIGATION (CDO)
A type of financial security often composed of the riskier portions of mortgage-backed securities; i.e., 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.
        See also: MORTGAGE BACKED SECURITY (MBS);   SECURITIZATION

COLLATERALIZED LOAN OBLIGATION (CLO)
Another type of securitized financial derivative very similar to CDOs (see entry above), except that the securities are backed not by risky home mortgages but rather by risky loans taken out by over-extended corporations. Whereas the crash of CDOs starred in the 2008 financial crisis, the crash of CLOs is likely to star in the next financial crisis—which as of the autumn of 2018 is probably not very far in the future.

“A financial assembly line that went haywire a decade ago and contributed to an economic crisis is gearing up again on Wall Street.
        “Back then, one of the products the banks churned out—bondlike investments based on thousands of mortgages—proved far riskier than most banks, investors and regulators had expected when many borrowers couldn’t pay. The banking system froze, a financial panic ensued and the country experienced its worst recession in decades.
        “This time around, a similar kind of investment, called C.L.O.s, for collateralized loan obligations, are at the heart of the boom. And that’s not the only parallel: The loans are being made to risky borrowers, lending standards are dropping fast, and regulators are easing the rules....
        “C.L.O.s, which have been around since the mid-1990s, are a type of asset-backed security, which is, essentially, a kind of bond. But unlike a regular bond, in which a single company repays interest and principal to bondholders, they combine multiple repayment streams—thousands of monthly credit card, auto loan or mortgage payments, for example—and funnel them to investors.” —Matt Phillips, “Three Letters Wall Street Loves and We Should Fear”, New York Times, Oct. 21, 2018, p. BU-1.

“COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY” (In the Russian Village Commune)
See: VILLAGE COMMUNE—Collective Responsibility In

COLLECTIVISM
1. Living and working together as a group (as opposed to individualism). (See also: JANTELOVEN)
2. An ethical theory based on the collective interests of groups of people (such as classes), rather than on the separate interests of individuals.

COLLEGE COSTS
See: UNIVERSITY COSTS

COLOMBIA
See: FARC-EP,   WAR ON DRUGS

COLONIALISM
Colonialism, or the colonial system of imperialism, is the original and traditional form of capitalist-imperialism, under which each imperialist power forcibly controls, governs and exploits other countries and regions as their own formal (or sometimes informal) colonial possessions. In the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century, the old and new imperialist powers—including Britain, France, Spain, the United States, Italy, Germany and Japan—carved up much of the world into their own colonies. This included most of Africa and large parts of Latin America and Asia. This was the dominant form of capitalist-imperialism up until the first two decades after World War II, during which period most colonies won at least their nominal independence. At that time a more camouflaged version of colonialism, called neocolonialism, became the dominant form of modern imperialism.
        Colonialism is to the advantage of the imperialist ruling class in the variety of ways in which it enables and promotes the extraction of superprofits from the colonial people. Within the home imperialist power, the capitalist system of exploitation is either the only system of exploitation existing, or at least by far the dominant method. That is, workers are hired and the commodities they produce then belong to the capitalist companies, which sell them for a profit. Within a colony this same capitalist system of exploitation can be used, but with much more forcible means of keeping wages low, banning or interfering with labor unions, lengthening the work day and intensifying labor in other ways, and so forth. Thus the rate of capitalist exploitation (the ratio of surplus value to variable capital [wages]), or s/v, can become substanially larger than in the home imperialist country itself. In the past, outright slavery or semi-feudal relations of production were also fairly common in colonies, even after they were long-since made illegal in the imperialist homeland. (And in some ways this has become even easier to get away with in more recent times because of the shift to neocolonialism, in which there is no single imperialist master to blame for such conditions).
        In addition to intensifying capitalist exploitation, other forms of exploitation are also easier to get away with in imperialist colonies, including outright theft—which is far more common than you might imagine. Often the lands and the biological and mineral wealth on or beneath them are simply stolen from the local people by powerful corporations. Then too, a colony can become a captive market for goods produced in the home country, thus enabling higher monopoly prices (and yet more superprofits). Colonies can also become the source for imperial troops, either to be used against the people of that colony or elsewhere in the world. There are indeed a great many ways for an imperialist power to exploit a colony or neo-colony!
        There are, however, some serious disadvantages and drawbacks for an imperialist power to own colonies outright. The biggest of these is the need to constantly try to keep the people under control. Imperial wars to hang on to colonies can become very expensive in terms of money and the lives of imperial soldiers (which leads to political dangers for the ruling imperialists in their home country). For reasons like these, as well as the need to allow other imperialists “a piece of the action” (as an alternative to inter-imperialist war), world imperialism has mostly switched over to neocolonialism rather than open colonial possessions exclusively owned by individual imperialist countries.

COLONY [Imperialist]
A country or territory owned, controlled and economically exploited by the ruling class of another (imperialist) country. In the early period of capitalist-imperialism (from the late 19th century up until World War II), the possession and exploitation of outright colonies was the dominant form of modern imperialism. However, after World War II a variation of capitalist-imperialism, known as neocolonialism, became the dominant form. Unlike colonies, neocolonies are not typically controlled and exploited by just a single imperialist country, but rather in a somewhat more hidden and indirect fashion by multiple imperialist predators, and hence by the imperialist system as a whole.

“Europe needs colonies. She does not even have enough. Without colonies, from an economic point of view, we shall sink to the level of China.” —Eduard David, a German Social-Democrat, during the colonial period of imperialism, and illustrating the strong support for imperialism by revisionists. Quoted in Robert Clough, Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism (London: 1992), p. 41.

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