CONCEIT (“INDISPENSABILITY”)
“The danger of conceit. Don’t play the braggart. Our cause depends
on the many for its success and the few play only a limited role. While the few, that
is, the leaders and cadres, play a role that should be recognized, it is not a role
of signal importance. The role of signal importance is played by the masses. The
correct relationship between the cadres and the masses is such that, necessary as the
cadres are, it is the masses who do the actual work, with the cadres giving leadership,
a role which should not be exaggerated. Would things be in a mess without you? Things
can get along without you, as history and many facts of life can testify.... Confucius
has been dead for ages and today we have a Communist Party in China, which is surely
wiser than Confucius; this goes to show that we can do better without Confucius. As
for good people, they are not indispensable either. Would the earth stop turning
without them? The earth will go on turning all the same. Things will proceed as usual
or perhaps even better.” —Mao, “Speeches at the National Conference of the Communist
Party of China: Concluding Speech” (March 31, 1955), SW 5:166.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Concentration camps made their appearance with the advent of
capitalist imperialism. Where there is imperialism, there is
the resistence to it on the part of the subjugated peoples. This always presents a serious
problem for the conquerors, to find some method to keep the oppressed masses of people under
control, docile, and unable to organize and fight against the imperialists. One method
imperialist powers everywhere have learned to use is to force the people to leave their
homes and villages and to live within concentration camps. These are essentially big
prisons, where the inmates activity can be continuously monitored, and where the people can
be kept away from revolutionary ideas and organizers.
In addition, since imperialist wars are
always, in essence, wars against the people of the subjugated country, concentration
camps have very frequently functioned as death camps in actual practice, and even purposeful
genocidal mass extermination camps at times (as by the Nazis).
Concentration camps are of undoubted use
to imperialists, and certainly do make organizing the people to struggle against their
foreign oppressors more difficult. And yet, the use of concentration camps by the
imperialists is also a self-exposure. And the experience of anti-imperialist struggles over
the past century and more shows that a determined anti-imperialist revolutionary movement
can overcome not only the enemy’s use of concentration camps, but all their vicious
tactics.
“The laws governing warfare and conflict make no reference to
concentration camps. But for more than a century, concentration camps have been a
venue for wholesale war crimes and the symbol of the worst abuses against civilians
in wartime.
“It was a Spanish general,
Valeriano Weyler, who established the first reconcentrados or ‘concentration
centers’ in Cuba in his drive to suppress the 1895 rebellion. Britain introduced
concentration camps on a massive scale during the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. To deny
the Boer guerrillas food and intelligence, Gen. Lord Kitchener ordered the British
Army to sweep the Transvaal and Orange River territories of South Africa ‘clean.’
Civilians—women, children, the elderly, and some men of fighting age—were herded
from their homes and concentrated in camps along railway lines, with a view to their
eventual removal from the territory. The Boers, to whom these camps became a symbol
of genocide, called them laagers.
“The Nazis developed a vast
network of Konzentrationslager, using them at first to hold political
prisoners, later slave labor, and finally to annihilate European Jewry and to kill
large numbers of Poles, Russians, and Gypsies. Of the nearly 6 million Jews killed
under Hitler’s ‘Final Solution,’ 2 million died in Auschwitz, the main extermination
camp.”
[The writer then describes over
a number of paragraphs the wretched humanity he personally witnessed when he and
others from the British TV network ITN arrived at an Serbian concentration camp for
other ethnic groups in Bosnia in 1992.]
—Ed Vulliamy, “Concentration
Camps”, in Roy Gutman, et al., eds., Crimes of War (2007), p. 121.
[There have been many other
horrible examples of concentration camps over the past century, including those
used by the Japanese imperialists in World War II in China, the Philippines, and
other countries; and by the United States in its long imperialist war against
Vietnam. In Vietnam some of these were given the euphemistic name of “Strategic
Hamlets” by the U.S. military.]
CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND, THE [Engels]
An important early book by Engels (1845) which exposed the extreme misery of the English
working class of the day and put forward the revolutionary idea that only socialism could
truly end, once and for all, the misery of the workers living in capitalist society.
“Engels got to know the proletariat in England, in the center of
English industry, Manchester, where he settled in 1842, entering the service of a
commercial firm of which his father was a shareholder. Here Engels not only sat in
the factory office but wandered about the slums in which the workers were cooped up,
and saw their poverty and misery with his own eyes. But he did not confine himself to
personal observations. He read all that had been revealed before him about the
condition of the British working class and carefully studied all the offical documents
he could lay his hands on. The fruit of these studies and observations was the book
which appeared in 1845: The Condition of the Working Class in England. We have
already mentioned what was the chief service rendered by Engels in writing ... [this
book]. Even before Engels, many people had described the sufferings of the proletariat
and had pointed to the necessity of helping it. Engels was the first to say
that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the
disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward
and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat
will help itself. The political movement of the working class will inevitably
lead the workers to realize that their only salvation lies in socialism. On the other
hand, socialism will become a force only when it becomes the aim of the political
struggle of the working class. Such are the main ideas of Engels’ book on the
condition of the working class in England, ideas which have now been adopted by all
thinking and fighting proletarians, but which at that time were entirely new. These
ideas were set out in a book written in absorbing style and filled with most authentic
and shocking pictures of the misery of the English proletariat. The book was a
terrible indictment of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and created a profound
impression. Engels’ book began to be quoted everywhere as presenting the best picture
of the condition of the modern proletariat. And, in fact, neither before 1845 nor
after has there appeared so striking and truthful a picture of the misery of the
working class.” —Lenin, “Frederick Engels” (1895), LCW 2:22-23.
CONFABULATION
To revise or fill in gaps in one’s own memory of events through
unconscious fabrication. In other words, to unconsciously change one’s own memories.
Confabulation is not the same as conscious lying, and is something that people are completely
unaware that they are doing. There is, however, extensive scientific proof that virtually
everyone does do this, to one small degree or another. We all tend to at least slightly
rewrite our own personal histories within our own minds—generally in a more favorable
direction. We not only “lie” to ourselves in this way, we are completely convinced by many
of those lies! We human beings are complex and not wholly admirable creatures.
At the same time, it is reasonable to suppose
that while confabulation is itself unconscious, the tendencies toward doing it must
certainly be much stronger in an individualist-focused bourgeois society where people are
brought up and conditioned to think of themselves and their own personal image in such an
obsessive and self-promotive way. In a socialist or communist society, where people become
comfortable with criticism and self-criticism, and get used to facing up to their own
shortcomings and struggling against them, there will be much less social pressure leading to
the unconscious adoption of the internal psychological mechanism of confabulation.
However, especially in present-day society,
the fact that people are capable of confabulation especially with regard to revising the
story of their own role in incidents which might be painful for them to remember in the way
they actually did happen, has to be kept in mind when comrades collectively review their
political practice. Even when we know very well that a person did something that they
staunchly deny, we should not necessarily assume that they are consciously lying. On the
other hand, we should not always view what we recognize as a totally honest statement by a
comrade as necessarily being the real complete truth of the matter, either. For reasons of
confabulation as well as the basic weaknesses in the reliability of the individual human
memory in general, the real story about some event is much more reliable when it comes from
multiple sources including contemporary documents.
“A thiamine deficiency can lead to the development of Korsakoff’s syndrome,
one symptom of which is confabulation: Sufferers make up fantastical stories, believing
them to be true.” —New York Times, National Edition, March 20, 2022, p. 3.
[While such extreme forms of
confabulation may be caused by medical problems, it is well to remember that healthy
people—all of us!—also confabulate in much less obvious ways, at times. —Ed.]
CONFESSIONS — Forced (or Under Torture)
In bourgeois society arrested people are regularly brow-beaten by the police, or even physically
beaten or otherwise tortured, until they confess to crimes which they did not in fact commit.
Of course this is an extreme form of injustice, which is much more common in contemporary
capitalist society than some might suppose.
Unfortunately, similar injustices have also
sometimes occurred in socialist society, especially in the Soviet Union during the Stalin
era. This too we completely condemn, and resolve to never allow it to happen again.
“Percentage by which someone is more likely to make a false confession
if they are sleep deprived: 177%” —“Harper’s Index”, Harper’s magazine, July 2019,
p. 9. (From a study by Professor Shari Berkowitz, California State University, Dominguez
Hills, CA.)
CONFESSIONS — False or Insincere
A variation on the sort of forced confessions (even under torture) described in the entry
above, which does not (normally) involve physical coercion of any kind, has sometimes also
occurred in socialist society, including within the Communist Party of China during the Mao
era. There was often heavy social pressure put on comrades who were viewed as making errors
to write self-criticisms. This in itself is not wrong! But what was very wrong was that
to some extent a political culture arose where cadres who were criticized began to too
readily criticize themselves in an insincere manner when they did not really believe that
they were in error or had done anything wrong. This was done in order to “take the heat off”
or to retain one’s office or political position by pretending to accept and agree with the
criticism.
It is a disgusting and unprincipled thing
to criticize yourself when you actually do not think you are in the wrong! Marxists
need to have the courage of their convictions and refuse to do such a thing. Wasn’t it
Mao who said that communists need to have the spirit of “going against the tide”?
Of course, when we are criticized or
disagreed with we should listen carefully to those criticisms and disagreements and
modestly try to see if there is some good basis for them, either entirely or perhaps
only partly so. It is certainly wrong to dismiss criticisms or differences without really
trying to see if there is some truth in them. But if you do carefully listen to criticism
and are still not convinced that you are wrong, you owe it to the revolution not to
change your mind! And this is true even if you are in a minority of one. Of course if the
political party or organization establishes a policy or view which you disagree with, you
may well have to publicly defend and promote it as part of the requirements of
democratic centralism. But even in that case
you should hold to your own opinion until you are convinced you are wrong, and not pretend
otherwise to your comrades.
Because it is all too easy for comrades to
fall into the sort of liberalism that leads
them to make insincere confessions, those who are calling for the self-criticism should be
very alert to the possibility that even when it comes it may not be completely genuine! In
particular, self-criticism which seems way too extreme should probably just be rejected out
of hand.
“In his Oct. 23, 1966 self-criticism, Deng Xiaoping repeatedly
admits that he (and Liu Shaoqi) opposed the masses and the mass movement, and opposed,
violated and failed to use the mass line. He admitted that ‘In this present movement
of the Cultural Revolution, comrade [Liu] Shao-chi and myself are the people in the
Party and the Central Committee who represent this bourgeois line.’ However, in light
of the fact that Deng returned to these very same bourgeois policies when he later
regained power we may legitimately question the sincerity of his self-criticism. His
criticism reeks with toadyism not only towards Mao but also towards Lin Biao and Chen
Boda. In fact it’s so disgusting that even his own apologists had to excise part of
it about Lin Biao. It seems clear that already in his self-criticism he is working to
return to power someday. All in all there is no doubt that Deng was merely feigning
agreement with the judgment rendered on him by the masses and the CCP.”
—Scott Harrison, The Mass
Line and the American Revolutionary Movement, chapter 37, online at:
http://www.massline.info/mlms/mlch37.htm
[Deng’s 1966 “self-criticism” is available in: Chi Hsin, Teng Hsiao-ping: A
Political Biography (1978), pp. 54-64.]
CONGRESS — United States
Almost all U.S. government
and national institutions are appropriately in ever lower esteem in the eyes of
the American people. But as the results of a series of Gallup polls over the years
show (see graph below), this is especially true of the United States Congress.
Although most Americans still have a very low class consciousness and do not at all
currently understand just why Congress does not work in their interests, they
certainly do recognize more and more clearly that this is the actual situation. The
“Non Sequitur” cartoon at the right shows a glimmering of recognition of the source
of the problem by the masses.
See also below.
“There was a tenfold increase in corporate federal lobbying by the
1980s [as compared to 1972]—such that it eventually became a $9 billion industry
by 2014—and K Street became synonymous with this burgeoning major industry, much
like Madison Avenue or Wall Street. Where better to find insider lobbyists than
from former members of Congress? In the early 1970s, 3 percent of retiring or
exiting members became lobbyists; by 2013 the figure was more like 50 percent,
often earning seven-figure incomes after their stint in ‘public service.’
Washington, DC, accordingly, went from a sleepy middle-class town of bureaucrats
to a booming metropolitan area of high-rolling lobbyists and fat cat government
contractors.” —Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready
(2016), p. 196.
“When I became a member of Congress, I was conscious of the fact that
I was joining an organization that, according to recent polling, is less popular than
head lice, colonoscopies and the rock band Nickelback.” —Representative Derek
Kilmer (Democrat, Washington). Quoted in “Quitting Congress: The Exit Interviews”,
New York Times, May 5, 2024.
CONGRESS — United States — Committees Of
The radical-liberal journalist, William Greider, wrote a book entitled Who Will Tell the
People? The Betrayal of American Democracy, about the corruption of politics in Washington,
D.C. This book became the basis for a PBS documentary with the same name. Greider’s friend,
Dean Baker, recalled shortly after Greider’s death one very telling thing in that documentary.
There was an interview with a reporter who talked about how he came to really appreciate the
extent of the corruption in Washington. The reporter explained that someone asked him “why do
you think members of Congress sit on the banking committee?” The reporter gave the textbook
answer about sitting on the committee to oversee the regulations and laws on banking. His
questioner responded, “they sit on the banking committee to get money from bankers.”
[Story taken from Baker’s memorial article “William Greider and Secular
Stagnation”, in Counter Punch, Dec. 31, 2019.]
Baker notes that while people immediately recognize the almost certain truth of this remark,
they often still find it both stunning and enlightening!
“I was told at the beginning [of my period in Congress] that I had to raise
$250,000 [in political donations to his party] if I wanted to be on certain committees.
And if I wanted to be on more important committees or committees with broader jurisdiction,
I needed to raise even more money. Buying a committee seat is not something that most
Americans know that members of Congress have to do.” —Representative Ken Buck
(Republican from Colorado) upon his retirement from Congress after 10 years. Quoted in
“Quitting Congress: The Exit Interviews”, New York Times, May 5, 2024.
[What this Congressman didn’t bother
mentioning is that these “donations” they have to raise come almost entirely from the rich
and their corporations, and generally from those corporations who want to in effect buy
the votes they need in Congress. Thus the corrupt bourgeois political parties routinely
require their elected “representatives” to sell that representation to the corrupt
corporations. And everybody involved can pretend that what is obviously going on really
isn’t going on. It all works out very nicely. —Ed.]
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”
—Mark Twain, Selected Writings of an American Skeptic
CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM (So-Called!)
A U.S. ruling class organization whose purpose was to try to ensure that the American
capitalist-imperialist outlook dominated ideology and culture throughout the world,
including in the U.S. itself. It was set up by the CIA in 1950,
and largely funded by them. In 1966 the New York Times and other publications
revealed that the CCF was a CIA front organization. The next year it changed its name to
the “International Association for Cultural Freedom”, and from then until its dissolution
in 1979 much of its funding came from another U.S. imperialist source, the Ford Foundation.
The CCF and the IACF founded and financially supported a large number of anti-Communist
publications designed to appeal to liberal ideologists in many different countries, and
attempted—with substantial success—to buy off many such people. A few of the publications
the CIA started in this way still continue to be published, including the China
Quarterly.
For more information on the CCF (from the
usual “establishment perspective” of course) see the Wikipedia article at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom
“The CIA’s methods of cultural engineering were far more subtle
[than those in the Soviet Union] but no less effective. The agency spent an inestimable
fortune on the war of ideas, subsidizing the intellectual and creative labors of those
who were deemed politically correct and seeking to marginalize those who challenged the
‘crackpot realism’ of Cold War orthodoxy. The main front organization used by the CIA
to spread its largesse and influence was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘a kind of
NATO,’ in one critic’s words, founded in 1950 to counter the propaganda efforts of the
Soviet bloc. The Congress for Cultural Freedom grew to become one of the biggest arts
patrons in world history, sponsoring an impressive array of book publishing start-ups
and literary magazines—including the influential Encounter and Paris
Review—as well as art exhibits, literary prizes, concert tours, and international
conferences held in Paris, Berlin, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio retreat
overlooking Lake Como [in Italy]....
“Many leading artists and
intellectuals fell into the ranks of the CIA’s generously funded culture war, including
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell,
Isaiah Berlin, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Mark Rothko. But the recipients
of CIA sponsorship paid a price: their intellectual independence. As historian Frances
Stonor Saunders observed, ‘The individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were
expected to perform as part ... of a propaganda war.’ Those who took agency funds
became ‘cheerful robots’ of the Cold War, in C. Wright Mills’s memorable phrase.”
—David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s
Secret Government (2015), pp. 330-1. [Talbot is a liberal writer and journalist.
—Ed.]
CONJECTURE
1. Inference from defective or presumptive evidence; 2. A conclusion deduced by surmise or guesswork.
[Both from: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Ed., 1993].
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns
of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of facts.” —Mark Twain, quoted in The
Economist, April 13, 2013, p. 20.
[Mark Twain was a brilliant humorist! But
the serious point behind this witty remark is that while science does have its strong
features—such as in insisting that hypotheses ... or conjectures! ... should be fully
and carefully tested through careful experiements to see if they are actually correct—still,
the sciences are more prone to arbitrariness and wild ideas when it comes to the initial selection
of those hypotheses (or conjectures) in the first place! This is why it is always a good idea
in science to be at least a little suspicious of theories that are not yet extensively tested and
checked out. —S.H.
CONSCIOUSNESS [Philosophy of Mind]
Consciousness is today often proclaimed by those who are totally imbued with
philosophical idealism to be “the great mystery” or the
“puzzle of our age”, if it is not instead completely dismissed as a totally unsolvable
enigma. In reality it is no such thing! In fact, consciousness is quite easy to
understand in its essence, though as with most philosophical or mentalistic terms it can
always be dug into further. (Mentalistic terms, such as thinking, recognizing, remembering,
happiness, despair, consciousness, etc., are high level summary ways of describing the
exceedingly complex neurological functioning of the brain, and the various brain states
that develop as the brain fairly quickly undergoes its internal changes.) The first thing
to recognize here is that there are a number of different levels of description of
consciousness, or different things that people are getting at by the term, or which they
are concerned with. We will just talk about some of them.
First of all, to be conscious
of something simply means to be aware of it. Certainly no big deal! To be
conscious that it is raining is simply to be aware of the fact that it is raining.
Consciousness, in this simple and straightforward sense is therefore a close synonym for
awareness. And it is something that everybody understands, at least if they have managed
to graduate from the third grade in elementary school.
However, the remark that consciousness
just means awareness will likely seem pretty superficial and uninformative to a
neuropsychologist studying the brain. What such a scientist wants to know is exactly
what is going on in the brain when it is correct to say that a person is conscious of
something, or is aware of it. And how neural activity “gives rise to consciousness” (as
it is often quaintly put). These are obviously considerably tougher questions, which are
concerned not with giving a high-level gloss of one mentalistic word in terms of other
mentalistic words (which is what philosophers of mind have sometimes limited themselves
to), but rather with a scientific investigation of the brain itself, its structures,
sub-regions and their interactions, and the sorts of internal changes it undergoes as
people become conscious of something. This could obviously get extremely complicated,
and in theory even involve the states of billions of neurons and their varying connections
and firings. But that complete neural story would be way too complicated to grasp
and make sense of. So what is really needed in the discussion of consciousness is
something much less complicated than that, but nevertheless deeper and more informative
than simply defining consciousness as awareness. What we actually need is a higher level
summary of all that neuronal change and complexity, or in other words, a comprehensible
general description or two about what is actually going on in the brain. There have been
a number of such hypotheses, some of them more plausible, insightful, and better supported
by scientific experiment than others.
One of the very best of these provides
a general high level description of what is going on in the brain at the moment when a
person becomes immediately conscious of something. This is the “global workspace”
theory, that there is a particular region of the brain (now known to be located in the
prefrontal cortex) which has access to a huge amount of the stored information in the
brain (though not absolutely all of it), and when one piece of that information enters
this global workspace region the person is then thinking about that thing (or is
immediately conscious of it). In other words immediate consciousness is a process of
brain-wide information sharing which is enabled by activating the global neuronal
workspace with the appropriate data. There is now some very considerable scientific
evidence for this theory, which is presented quite well in Stanislas Dehaene’s 2014 book,
Consciousness and the Brain. This now seems to be the best and leading scientific
theory about what it means to say that a person is immediately conscious of something
(in terms of what is actually happening in the brain).
However, the word ‘consciousness’ is
even more commonly used in a more general sense to talk about not what a person is
thinking of right at that very moment, but rather about the things that they know or
understand or believe. When we ask someone whether they are conscious of the existence
of the capitalist ruling class in present-day society, we are asking about how they
view the world in general but not necessarily about what they are thinking of at that
particular moment. So we need a high level description of what consciousness means in
this more general sense as well, which will have to be something different than having
a piece of information enter the person’s global neuronal workspace.
The best overall explanation of what
consciousness means in this general sense is that it is simply a matter of having an
internal mental model of the world which includes all the information we are
conscious of. Similarly, the supposed riddle of “self-consciousness”, is easily
explained. We have self-consciousness if our internal models of the world include a
model of our own selves, including not just many of our physical aspects such as our
appearence, but more importantly many of our mental aspects (our knowledge, ideas,
opinions, memories, etc.). Insofar as a person’s internal model of the world and of
themself corresponds with the actual reality (and it never does so totally), the person
truly understands the world and themself.
Another way to think of consciousness
(both immediate consciousness as well as having an internal model of the world) is as
a key part of an internal monitoring program of the brain. Every self-sustaining
complex system needs some considerable internal monitoring in order to keep functioning.
In the human body there are many such systems, some of them quite automatic and often
based on cybernetic principles such as negative feedback. These include the lungs and
breathing system, the systems which internally regulate the oxygen, glucose and numerous
other chemicals in the blood, and many similar sorts of systems within individual cells.
But the brain itself also needs an overall internal monitoring system. A crude analogy might
be with the operating system of contemporary personal computers, though the monitoring
system of the brain must of necessity be much more sophisticated than current PC operating
systems (and include, for example, extensive semantic components). Some philosophers have
argued against the notion that there must be monitoring system within the brain on the
grounds that this is the homunculus idea (that there is
a little guy in the brain directing things, who then needs a little guy in his
brain to direct him, and ad infinitum). However, monitoring systems by no means
generally require their own internal monitoring systems. PC operating systems, for
example, do not require their own internal operating systems reaching back to infinity.
The higher “executive functions” of the brain are well known to reside in the prefrontal
cortex, and the brain areas which constitute (or “create”) human consciousness in both its
primary senses should be viewed as important parts of this internal brain self-monitoring
system.
Thus consciousness is pretty easy to
explain and to comprehend. It is not at all an inexplicable mystery involving
qualia, or some such thing, as some idealist philosophers
maintain. Yes, we can always dig deeper. We can investigate further the nature and precise
organization of the brain and the organization of its global workspace and precisely how
that region is massively connected to the rest of the brain. Similarly, we can investigate
the internal model of the world which we have in our mind/brain, precisely where it is
located, how the information is stored and how it is organized. We can come to more deeply
understand how the brain’s own internal monitoring system works. But, for us materialists,
the basic story of consciousness has never been the supposed perplexing mystery that
idealists claimed it to be, and the more detailed scientific understanding of consciousness
in human beings (as well as in other animals) continues to grow rapidly. —S.H.
See also below, and:
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS,
CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
CONSCIOUSNESS — In the Labor Process
“We pre-suppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee conducts
operations that puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But
what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect
raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of
every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the
laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on
which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his
modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is
no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands
that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with
his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of
the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys
it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his
attention is forced to be.” —Marx, Capital, vol. I, ch. VII, sect. 1,
(International Pub. ed., p. 178; Penguin ed., pp. 283-4).
[This passage deserves much
closer attention and careful reflection than it is usually given by readers. Marx
seems to be suggesting that not only is this conscious intent and purpose in
the labor process the thing that distinguishes human labor from the activity of
spiders, bees, etc., but—in the context of his conception of the labor theory of
value as whole—he seems to be implying that this somehow explains why human
labor, and only human labor, can create surplus
value in the capitalist production process. But Marx does not explain here, or
elsewhere, why this difference in labor consciousness allows human labor alone
to create new value. Why does this matter? Moreover, if this difference nevertheless
does somehow explain why human labor power can generate surplus value, then we
would be forced to admit that some future computer consciousness controlling machinery
might also be able to create surplus value in a capitalist system of production.
In other words, labor which was definitely “exclusively human” on this definition in
Marx’s era may not always be so! (This idea is explored further in
Android Thought Experiment and in
Labor Theory of Value—Revised Form.) —S.H.]
CONSEQUENTIALISM
1. The view that only the consequences of an act are relevant in determining its
moral justification, not the motives or intentions or “duty” of the person performing the
act. Marxist ethics is an example of a consequentialist ethical theory, while Kant’s
ethics is an example of one which is not.
See also:
DEONTOLOGY
“In examining the subjective intention of a writer or artist, that
is, whether his motive is correct and good, we do not judge by his declarations but
by the effect of his actions (mainly his works) on the masses in society. The
criterion for judging subjective intention or motive is social practice and its
effect.” —Mao, “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” (May 1942), SW 3:88.
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
An idea promoted by the radical American economist, Thorstein
Veblen, in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), that the capitalists
used a significant portion of the wealth they stole from the working class to build extravagant
mansions, buy expensive works of art and fancy yachts, and in other wildly wasteful ways, all
in order to show off their high social status and make their fellow capitalists livid with envy!
Veblen thought that even the “middle class” had become infected
with this sort of attitude, and explained many American customs in terms of it. Having a large
lawn around one’s home, and having it mowed and kept neat, for example, allowed the middle class
to emulate the English lords with mansions surrounded by fields of grazing sheep. The 1950’s
middle class notion of “keeping up with the Joneses” took this attitude a step further.
However, it is not always sufficiently appreciated
that it was not just to impress and belittle other capitalists that led the rich to their profligate
levels of conspicuous consumption, but also the fact that this resulting “respect” by others of
their class then also led to further business opportunities, and further privileges and influence
for them. They were not just showing off, but perhaps semi-consciously using the technique of
ostentation in order to help gain further wealth and influence.
CONSPIRACY THEORY
A theory that a secret conspiracy existed (or continues to exist) which led to some event,
most often some well-known event such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in
1963. Generally conspiracy theories are foolish nonsense cooked up by individuals who may
or may not be right in being suspicious about some event, but who often construct elaborate
stories to explain the event which are based on little or no evidence or investigation.
Thus, while an occasional conspiracy theory might turn out to be true, in general such
theories are a triumph of suspiciousness over investigation.
Sometimes young or naïve revolutionaries
will construct or adopt conspiracy theories about capitalist society. Thus when first learning
about social classes and the dictatorship of the ruling capitalist class, they might jump to
the silly conclusion that this means that there are periodic secret meetings of all the
important capitalists in a big room somewhere where all the important decisions are made.
Such folks are not sophisticated enough to understand that all the ordinary public
institutions of American society, including the Presidency and executive branch, the Congress
and the judicial system, are themselves the means by which the capitalist class makes
its decisions and rules. While there may indeed sometimes be secret meetings of important
big-shots, for the most part the mechanisms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie are quite
open and public. However, the fact that this system of rule is actually the
dictatorship of one class, the bourgeoisie, is something that is almost never openly
admitted, and may not even be fully understood by all of those who are actually exercising
that class dictatorship.
CONSTITUTION — United States
A remarkably reactionary and undemocratic document which most Americans have been indoctrinated
to absurdly believe is the basis for a supposed system of genuine democratic government. In its
original version it even upheld slavery! And, as it is interpreted today by the capitalist ruling
class and their Supreme Court, it still upholds the total domination of the country by the richest
1% and their corporations.
See also:
“TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY” [Wilson quote]
“The Constitution ... recognizes slaves as property and obliges the Union
government to protect this property.” —Marx, MECW 19:36.
“Late in his life, as [James] Madison prepared his notes on the
constitutional debates for publication, he wrote that his views on suffrage had matured and
changed in the intervening years. ‘The right of suffrage,’ he now wrote, ‘is a fundamental
Article in Republican Constitutions.’ He reasserted his belief that, for the republican
system to succeed, the government needed to reduce the great wealth of the few to benefit
those without property. He no longer thought of the Constitution as primarily necessary to
protect the few from the tyranny of the majority. Instead, Madison changed course and now
defended majority rule as the single ‘vital principle of republican government.’ After
reviewing this and other evidence, [Robert] Dahl writes, ‘I have little doubt that if the
American Constitutional Convention had been held in 1820, a very different constitution
would have emerged from the deliberations.’ That same year, noting the Constitution’s
complicity with slavery, future president John Quincy Adams wrote, ‘The constitution is a
compact with Hell, and a life devoted to its destruction would be a life well spent.’”
—Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, People Get Ready (2016), pp. 161-2.
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE
An estimate periodically made by the U.S. government based on surveys of “consumers” (the
public) as to whether they are confident about their current and future ability to buy all
the things they need. It is one of a number of estimates of people’s psychology that are
important predictors of the state of the economy in the near-term future. Like virtually
all government economic statistics, it seriously distorts the true situation (as the news
report below amply demonstrates).
“Despite record levels of consumer confidence and almost full
employment [according to official government statistics! —Ed.], 4 in 10 American
consumers are struggling to pay for basic needs. Of adults between 18 and 64 years old,
39.4 percent said they had trouble with at least one of four basic necessities—housing,
utilities, food, or health care. Those in trouble include one-third of families with at
least one working adult.” —CBSNews.com report, quoted in The Week magazine,
Sept. 7, 2018, p. 32.
CONSUMER MANIPULATION (By Capitalists)
It is rather easy for capitalists to manipulate their customers in many different ways. The quote
below mentions just one such way: How the product is described on the packaging.
“Just Two Words on a Cookie Label Can Mess Up How It Tastes, Study Finds
(Excerpt)
“Human taste buds are easily manipulated.
With just a few simple words, researchers have found the same chocolate chip cookie can go from
tasting scrumptiously sweet and moist to unpleasantly bitter and stale. It all depends on what
the label tells us.
“When 58 adults from Ohio State University
were given three cookies to sample, the ones labeled ‘New and Improved’ were deemed significantly
tastier than the ones labeled ‘Consumer Complaint’. Both samples were perceived as having a
different flavor and texture to the third cookie labeled ‘Factory Typical’, despite the fact that
all three cookies were... exactly the same.
“‘We had both negative and positive bias–but
the negative bias was much bigger,’ explains food scientist Christopher Simons from Ohio State
University. ‘On one hand, it’s not surprising. On the other hand, the degree of the impact was
really surprising.’
“When given a displeasing description, it
seems our love for cookies can easily crumble away. Our brains immediately start looking for the
negatives–a classic human bias that has been observed with other foods like cheese and vegetables.
What is interesting about this new study, however, is that it shows even highly likeable foods,
like chocolate chip cookies, can leave a bad taste in our mouths when accompanied with certain
words.”
—Carly Cassella, “Science Alert” (internet
news service), January 28, 2022. [Of course capitalist marketers have known all along that certain
phrases, such as “New and Improved”, help sell things (and whether or not the product really is
“New and improved” in any real way). But this article goes on to suggest that new research of this
sort might lead marketers to further change their tactics, and to especially avoid any hint or
indication of anything negative about the product (no matter how real). The goal, of course in
capitalist marketing is not to be honest and truthful, but to sell, sell, sell. —Ed.]
CONSUMER PRICE INDEX (CPI)
An index of the change in the cost of living in the U.S. which is issued by the Bureau of
Labor Statistics each month. (The CPI-U is for urban areas, and is the one most commonly
referred to.) If the price of a weighted basket of goods and services of the sort that the
“average person” supposedly regularly buys goes up by 1.5% from the month before, the CPI
is said to rise by 1.5%. This figure is distorted by the government in a variety of ways,
including in the selection of which goods to include in this “basket”, the mathematical
weight given to each item, and so forth. Up until the 1990s this index was somewhat more
reliable, though even then no separate statistical series were kept for different classes
and class strata. (Thus the true cost of living can be going up much faster for the poor
than it is for the rich.) But starting in the Clinton Administration the statistical
distortions became qualitatively worse. More recently, with the
“chained CPI” technique now being used, cheaper goods are
regularly substituted for more expensive goods in the basket, making the published CPI
even more phony.
The graph at the right, for the years
2001-2007, compares the official CPI increase percentages with what they would have been if
the method used up until the Clinton years had been continued. As you can see there is a
difference of roughly 3 percentage points between the two! [This graph is
taken from Kevin Phillips, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global
Crisis of American Capitalism (2008), and is based on calculations by the Shadow
Government Statistics website.] A good rule of thumb, therefore, is to add 3
percentage points to whatever the government claims the CPI inrease rate is.
See also:
ECONOMIC STATISTICS—Distortion Of,
INFLATION
“The U.S. consumer price index continues to be a testament to the art
of economic spin. Since wages, Social Security cost-of-living increases and some agency
budgets are tied to it, the government has a vested interest in keeping it as low as
possible.” —Columnist John Wasik, Bloomberg News, 2007.
CONSUMER SPENDING (Consumer Share of the Economy)
It is frequently claimed that consumer spending constitutes about 70% of the U.S. economy
(i.e., 70% of GDP). Upon closer inspection, however, this claim does not hold up.
“We often hear consumer spending is 70% of economic activity since
‘personal consumption expenditures’ total $10 trillion out of $14 trillion in GDP. But
this overstates the importance of consumers to the U.S. economy. PCE includes imported
goods such as consumer electronics, which mainly stimulate foreign production. It also
includes nonconsumer items, such as spending by religious groups. All told, household
‘out-of-pocket’ spending drives roughly 40% of U.S. economic activity.” —Michael
Mandel, “Reconsidering Consumers’ Impact on the U.S. Economy”, Business Week,
Sept. 28, 2009, p. 17. [The 40% estimate is based on the consumer outlays for
domestically-produced goods and services, plus half of import-intensive goods, plus
15% of health-care services.]
As that article also notes, the official “personal consumer expenditures” (PCE) portion of
U.S. GDP includes:
• Operating expenses of private
organizations, such as religious groups, and other nonprofit organizations (NGOs) in
excess of sales of goods and services (2% of GDP): However, most of this expenditure is
actually controlled by boards of directors or government funders rather than by households.
• Imputed services (10% of GDP):
Items like the “rental of owner-occupied nonfarm housing”—what, according to idiotic bourgeois
economic theory, you “pay yourself” to live in your own home! But imputed services do not
actually represent household cash outlays or any direct support whatsoever to U.S. economic
activity.
• Import-Intensive Goods (12% of
GDP): Includes clothes, electronics, motor vehicles and parts, gasoline, and other goods with
large import components. But half or more of this expenditure supports foreign production
rather than U.S. production.
• Health-Care Goods and Services
(15% of GDP): Includes almost all health-care outlays by not only consumers, but also by
HMOs and government programs like Medicare. Only about 15% of this category comes directly
from households (though they pay for it all through wage deductions, taxes, or other types of
ripped-off value that workers create).
• Domestically Produced Goods and
Services (31% of GDP): Any consumer good or service produced mainly in the U.S. for sale
here. This category does directly feed into domestic economic activity.
Thus while all wealth comes ultimately
from workers acting on the natural resources of the world, the direct contribution of
consumer-controlled expenditures to the U.S. economy is only in the neighborhood of 40%.
“The top two-fifths of the income distribution accounts for about 60
percent of spending in the economy; the bottom two-fifths, about 22 percent.”
—New York Times, National Edition, July 4, 2024, p. 3. [This is another way of
admitting that rich people in a capitalist economy have more to spend, and are therefore
of relatively more importance in maintaining consumer demand and other forms of
spending (such as investment). Obviously! —Ed.]
CONSUMERISM
A term often used by both leftists and bourgeois commentators to describe the current mania in
capitalist society for accumulating material possessions. Often, the term will be used when the
commentator in question is too timid (or ignorant) to use the other ‘c’ word. The term
conveniently lets the basic relations of production of capitalism off the hook, because
it makes it seem as though the drive towards commodification and endless buying and selling is
a pathology deriving from outside capitalism (perhaps emanating from “human nature”, a lack of
religious values, or some such. Proposing that capitalism itself should be done away with is
clearly too scandalous for many of these commentators); it also instills the notion that
capitalism is sustainable, so long as people employ “sensible” consumption. Those who push such
notions seem to want to feel that they are “doing something” to alleviate the horrible damage
that capitalism does to the planet and the people on it, while leaving the basic relations of
production, which provide the objective conditions out of which consumer mania arise from,
intact.
Corollaries of consumerism have also been
identified, for example the “marketing orientation” as elucidated by the late Swiss psychoanalyst
and socialist Erich Fromm. He wrote of how the structures and
habits of thought associated with the production and sale of commodities has seeped into
human-to-human relations, affecting even the most intimate aspects of human existence. These are
in fact organic extensions of capitalist production (not simply by “allowing”, as Fromm suggested,
“our means to become our ends”), for capitalism must, by necessity, always seek new ways of
converting capital into more capital and henceforth breaking down every barrier to capital’s
expansion. One of the most insidious examples of the utter depravity of consumerism (i.e., the
current mode of capitalism as it relates to human psychology and social life) is the modern
advertising industry, which constantly aims to find new ways of exploiting personal vulnerabilities
and fears—indeed, engendering such pathologies which it then promises to “fix”—as a means of
cajoling the target audience to buy the product in question. As the writer and activist Noam
Chomsky has remarked, the current system aims to make people as stupid as it’s possible for a
human being to be. Consumerism is part-and-parcel of a society that has reached such extremities
of sickness and filth that many people are even willing to riot over Nike shoes, as happened
recently across the United States when the company released a line of “special edition” sneakers!
Providing a systemic critique of this alienation and bringing it to the masses is one of the most
urgent tasks for revolutionaries, within the broader and more long-term framework of fighting
against material incentives as primary motivations for work.
Material possessions are one of the things that
capitalism has dangled in front of the proletariat to trick them into thinking that they have a
fundamental, objective stake in maintaining the system. Unfortunately, this has worked quite
effectively for a long time, though this is perhaps reaching its limits as the negative aspects
of work under capitalism (such as longer working hours, psychological problems, and stress and
work-related illnesses) have become overtly associated with the self-evidently mindless and
destructive drive to subjugate all of life towards the production of more stuff. Many people are
increasingly turning towards job security and quality of life rather than money as their ideal
reward system for work. Under socialism, there would be a clear drive to improving the overall
material state of the society (in particular in oppressed and poor parts of the world), but this
would be geared towards facilitating cooperative human relations, eliminating hunger and disease,
emancipating work, and bringing culture and intellectual fulfillment to the masses. —L.C.
CONTACT-TRACING [Epidemiology]
Contact-tracing is one of the key parts of the basic method of controlling, and—if done properly and
thoroughly—completely ending and eliminating an epidemic in some specific country or region.
Contrary to what many people have come to think because of the totally inept handling of the
Covid-19 outbreak in the U.S. and in other parts of the world, the
control and ending of any epidemic is not at all difficult in theory. Here is how you do it: 1) You
test everyone who seems to have possible symptoms of the disease; 2) You also test all the
recent contacts of those who have symptoms, whether or not these contacts themselves yet have
symptoms; and, if necessary, the contacts of the contacts; 3) You completely isolate and carefully
treat all those who test positive for the disease until they recover (or die); and 4) Of course, if
vaccines are available, you also vaccinate as much of the population as you can. That is really all
there is to it! However, for diseases which are infectious before the victims typically show any
symptoms (such as Covid-19), this contact-tracing, testing and isolation aspect of the process
becomes especially key in controlling the outbreak.
However, this method requires that the health
authorities have adequate tests (both in quality and quantity). If they don’t, then they have to
resort to the much cruder method of locking down (ordering people to
shelter-in-place) the larger population of those who only
might possibly have been infected. During this period of lockdown, steps can be taken to
improve the quality and quantity of tests for the disease, and also work on treatments and vaccines.
If action is taken early enough, then only a small part of the population needs to be locked down.
If, through gross incompetence action is seriously delayed, then the entire population of the
country may need to be locked down in this fashion. And if that lockdown is then lifted before
adequate testing and contact-tracing becomes available, the disease will resume spreading unimpeded.
In the case of Covid-19, millions of people will needlessly get the disease, and possibly hundreds
of thousands of people will needlessly die in the United States alone. This level of incompetence
and indifference to the welfare of the people is an exceptionally serious crime of mass murder. And
the most guilty political authorities should be punished severely for it, including with prison time,
as soon as the people are able to do so.
“Testing! Testing! Testing!” —The strong advice from the World Health
Organization in early 2020, about how to deal with the rapidly spreading new corona virus
disease. The U.S. was unwilling (and to a secondary degree, unable) to follow this advice.
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
A broad categorization of the sorts of bourgeois philosophy typically engaged in in modern
European countries. It finds its primary precursers in Hegel and
Kant, especially. It is generally highly speculative and
“metaphysical” (in the worse sense of that word). It also
strongly tends toward esoteric terminology and obscurity, often with coinages of new terms
which are rarely adequately defined. It often seems that philosophers in this milieu are more
concerned to obfuscate than to clearly state anything, perhaps because if they were to make
things really clear the vacuity of their work would be all too obvious.
Continental philosophy has a bad reputation
even within other areas of bourgeois philosophy, such as
analytic or
linguistic philosophy (which has been much more
common in English-speaking countries).
Virtually no one describes themselves as
a “Continental philosopher”; instead they are much more likely to characterize themselves as
being within one of the many specific sub-areas or schools encompassed by it, such as French
philosophy, absolute idealism, phenomenology,
existentialism, structuralism,
deconstructionism, and so forth. But bourgeois philosophers
in general dislike being pinned down and categorized. They consider that demeaning.
However, some of the well-known philosophers
who we can quite clearly place in the Continental Philosophy category are (in addition to Hegel
and Kant): Nietzsche, Croce,
Heidegger, Jaspers,
Collingwood, Adorno, Husserl, Sartre,
Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas,
Derrida and Badiou.
Analytic philosophers sometimes consider
Marxist philosophy to be another variety of Continental philosophy, in part because
some Continental philosophers have been superficially influenced by Marxism (such as
Althusser and Badiou). Adherents of genuine Marxist philosophy
(dialectical materialism) consider this inclusion to be a total insult.
CONTRADICTIONS — Among the People — Resolving
“The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or
controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method of discussion, of
criticism, of persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression.”
—Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (Feb. 27, 1957),
Quotations, 1st ed., 1966, p. 52.
CONTRADICTIONS — In Nature
The dialectical contradictions which exist in nature (the physical world) itself. According
to Marxist dialectics, there are contradictions not only in human thought and human society,
but also in the physical world. Those who don’t understand the basic idea of dialectical
contradiction often fail to understand this. Thus Engels quotes Eugen Dühring as saying
“Contradiction is a category which can only appertain to a combination of thoughts, but not
to reality.” [Anti-Dühring, MECW 25:110.] Engels responds by pointing out that
Dühring incorrectly identifies contradiction with absurdity, and therefore
says that contradiction cannot occur in the real world. In short Dühring is not talking
about dialectical contradiction at all, but
rather about logical contradiction. Dialectical
contradiction is a matter of oppositions (or conflict) within things and processes,
while logical contradiction is simply a matter of simultaneously affirming a statement and
denying it. Yes, it is unfortunate that the same term, ‘contradiction’, is used for these two
very different things, but we are stuck with this situation for historical reasons. An
educated person must come to understand that the term ‘contradiction’ means something different
in different contexts. In speaking of contradictions in nature we are of course talking
about dialectical contradictions, and not logical inconsistencies.
[More to be added... ]
CONTRADICTIONS — Within Capitalist-Imperialism
Here are just a very few of the endless economic and social contradictions within the Capitalist-Imperialist World and within American society:
• Between capitalist social production and the private appropriation of what is produced.
• Between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, within each country and around the world.
• Between foreign imperialist predation, exploitation and control and the desire of all
countries to have total control over their own affairs.
• Among the ferociously competing imperialist powers.
• Between the proclaimed equality of nations and the domination of most of the world by
U.S. imperialism, and most of the rest of the world by other imperialist powers.
• Between the universal bourgeois desire that nation-states must continue to exist vs.
the inevitable desire of every imperialist country to control the whole world and end the independence of other countries.
• Between the insistence on the inforcement by each nation of its own national borders,
and the universal bourgeois demand that its own capitalists be allowed to operate unrestricted throughout the whole world as if no borders exist at all.
• Between proclaimed American democracy versus the ever-greater fascist restrictions on freedoms
of speech, assembly, and action.
• Between the public bourgeois glorification of competition and the desire of
every corporation to extend its degree of monopoly control of the market for the goods it produces.
• Between the capitalist necessity for the endless expansion of capital and the finiteness of the globe.
• Between the claimed political equality of rich and poor within bourgeois “democracies” and
the plain fact that the rich and their money mostly determine not only who wins elections, but even which candidates get taken seriously.
• Between the claimed equality of races and ethnic groups in bourgeois society and
the actual virtually universal discrimination against peoples whose race or ethnicity differs from that of the dominant part of the ruling class.
CONTRADICTIONS — Within Socialism
See: SOCIALISM—Contradictions
Within
CONTRAT SOCIAL
One of the most important works by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, which was published in Amsterdam in 1762. The full title is Du contrat social;
ou, Principes du droit politique [The Social Contract; or the Principles of Political
Law]. The central theme of the book is the claim that every society should be the result
of a social contract between the people. This is obviously
a bourgeois perspective, and a philosophically idealist conception. But in the context of
feudal France in the 18th century this ideology played a very progressive revolutionary role.
It put forward the demands for bourgeois equality, the abolition of the privileges of the
land-owning aristocracy, and the establishment of a bourgeois republic to replace the monarchy.
It thus helped prepare the ground for the great French
Revolution of 1789.
CONTROLLING OUR OWN THOUGHTS
Do we have an obligation to control our own thoughts, as well as our own actions? Yes, of course we do.
We also have an obligation to help other people control their own thoughts in a way that benefits the people,
or at the very least doesn’t threaten others with any harm. However, this does not mean we favor “thought
control” in the vulgar, bourgeois sense of attempting to forcibly “brain
wash” them against their will! On the contrary we seek to control the thoughts of other people through
reasoned discussion and argument, and sometimes open criticism. And if we are decent people, who
conscientiously work for the welfare of others, we hope that others will also help us control our own
errant thoughts, through discussion and through social criticism where necessary.
Bourgeois culture often disagrees with this approach.
For example there is an old popular song, written by Frank Loesser for his Broadway musical, “The Most
Happy Fella” (1956), “Standing on the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By”. And in this song there is
the notable line, “Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking...” What is this line
suggesting? That perhaps it might be okay for a guy to merely “think” about forceably grabbing a girl
and having his way with her? Perhaps even imagining raping her?! Well it’s not okay, even to think
about doing things like that! And there is something dreadfully wrong about any society that even suggests
otherwise. Of course it is not wrong for a guy to recognize a pretty girl, to be attracted to her, to wish
to get to know her, and so forth. But our thoughts too must be socially defensible, even if we are seldom
called upon to defend them publicly (because they are usually unknown to others).
But what about the wonderful 16th Century German peasant
song, that Die gedanken sind frei? Shouldn’t our own private
thoughts, at least, be truly free? Actually no! Not if they clearly go against the interests of the people,
or arise from desires harmful to the people. Die Gedanken Sind Frei was a protest song against the
feudal ruling class, with their oppressive and exploitative Lords and their Church which was determined to
get people to meekly go along with that horrible system. And today too we are working for people to be able
to think freely about the current exploitative capitalist-imperialist system, and how about it could be
different—no matter how much the authorities disapprove of such thoughts! Yes, of course we want people to
be free to think, but we also want to do our best to help them think in ways that promote the basic
interests of the working class and masses of people.
“The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive, is when we recognise
that we ought to control our thoughts.” —Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), volume I,
chapter III: “Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals — continued”, page
101.
CONVERGENT EVOLUTION
The independent evolutionary development of similar anatomical or other traits separately in
different lineages of organisms.
CONVICTIONS [Of Crimes]
Being convicted of a crime under a bourgeois legal system does not always mean that the person
is actually guilty of anything; there are many false convictions in the contemporary American
“justice” system, for example. Furthermore, there are many actions which bourgeois governments
call crimes which should not be so called. This often includes people “illegally gathering”
to protest wars, racism and other forms of injustice in society, “illegally speaking out” at
times and places where they are not allowed to do so, “illegally” attempting to stop people from
harming them (such as scabs crossing a picket line or employer’s goons sent to attack them), etc.,
etc.
“More than 2,000 people [in the U.S.] who were falsely convicted of serious
crimes have been exonerated in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled
by two law schools. The most common causes of erroneous convictions were false testimony,
mistaken eyewitness identification, and the planting of guns and drugs by police.”
—Associated Press news report, quoted in The Week magazine, June 1, 2012, p. 16. [Of
course most people who are falsely convicted are never fortunate enough to be exonerated.]
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor
to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” —Anatole France, Le
Lys Rouge [The Red Lily] (1894), chapter 7.
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page
A very influential modernist school of painting, sculpture and architecture during the period of
the Russian Revolution and in the early Soviet Union, which itself was influenced by the slightly
earlier modernist school of literature and art known as