DOCTRINE
The body of principles in a branch of knowledge or system of belief. Note that the word ‘doctrine’
is not in itself pejorative in most contexts; all systems of knowledge or belief have doctrines,
including Marxism. (Compare this with the word ‘doctrinaire’ which means dogmatic, and is
definitely pejorative!)
“Our doctrine—said Engels, referring to himself and his famous friend—is
not a dogma, but a guide to action. This classical statement stresses with remarkable force
and expressiveness that aspect of Marxism which is very often lost sight of. And by losing
sight of it, we turn Marxism into something one-sided, distorted and lifeless; we deprive
it of its life blood; we undermine its basic theoretical foundations—dialectics, the
doctrine of historical development, all-embracing and full of contradictions; we undermine
its connection with the definite practical tasks of the epoch, which may change with every
new turn of history.” —Lenin, “Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism”
(Dec. 23, 1910), LCW 17:39.
“DOCTRINE OF THE TWO BOOKS”
The view, originating with Galileo, that there are “two books”
which should guide our thinking—the book of Scripture (the Bible) and the book of Nature (the
study of the natural world).
Christina of Lorraine, the mother of the Grand
Duke of Tuscany who ruled that realm, had expressed her worries that Galileo’s views (such as
that the Earth and the planets went around the Sun) conflicted with the revealed word of God.
Galileo responded to her by letter in 1615, and argued that the book of nature and the book of
Scripture can never truly disagree since they both come from the same source—God Himself.
Therefore, if there is an apparent conflict between the two it can only be because we do not
properly understand the one book or the other. Galileo went on to agree that where there is no
scientific proof to the contrary we should accept the authority of the Scriptures, understood
in their most simple and direct way. However, if we do possess scientific proof of something
which the Bible seems to disagree with, we must reinterpret the Bible. Otherwise the Church
would end up discrediting itself by contradicting manifest truth.
This sort of argument was necessary in the face
of the theocratic rule that dominated Europe at the time, and which had already burned people
at the stake for disagreeing with it about whether the Bible expresses the full and complete
truth about the world (such as Giordano Bruno in the year
1600). But Galileo was being disingenuous here by presenting science as the final authority
when science and religion disagree. And, indeed, that point of view ultimately leads to the
total rejection of the Bible and religion, since even the most central dogma of
religion—that God, a spiritual entity without material form, exists—itself conflicts with
more modern science (specifically cognitive psychology). If you argue that science trumps
religion, as indeed it does, then you must end up dumping religion entirely.
While Galileo was forced to argue in this way
about the supposed validity of the two books, a similar point of view has been argued
in more recent times without even the expedient necessity that Galileo faced.
Stephen Jay Gould, for example, disgraced himself by
arguing that there are two independent “magisteria”, as he called them, the scientific and the
religious, which supposedly have no “right” to poach on each other’s territory. A ridiculous
assertion in this day and age, and a disgusting concession to ancient superstition!
See also:
RELIGION—Versus Science
DOGMATISM
The blind, totally uncritical acceptance and promotion of a doctrine or set of principles without
any consideration of new evidence or changed circumstances and actual conditions. It is the
approach of those who refuse to think about what they are saying and doing, let alone to
really try to improve upon it, and who are instead determined to merely slavishly follow some
previously estabished system of dogma as they understand it, come what may. Dogmatism is very
common in religion, especially of the fundamentalist varieties.
When it appears within politics, and even within Marxism, it is religious approach to politics,
and is totally out of keeping with the scientific method of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, and the
other creators of our revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
It is true, however, that the experience of the
world proletarian revolutionary movement has amply demonstrated, over and over, that the even
bigger danger than dogmatism is revisionism—the totally invalid
revision of revolutionary Marxism in the direction of pro-capitalism and bourgeois ideology. Thus
the scientific approach to revolutionary Marxism is the rather narrow path between these two
kinds of serious errors. If we keep the revolutionary interests of the working class and masses
firmly in mind at all times we should be able to stay on this path, and to soon correct any errors
we ourselves might make along the way.
[Lin T’ung was a representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry who travelled
with William Hinton in China in 1971.]
“Lin T’ung combined reverence for rank,
especially her own, with political rigidity. Her appetite for dogmatism rivaled her appetite
for fish, and the opinions she held at any given moment tended to be absolute. The fact that
they might be in direct contradiction to opinions held earlier or to other opinions held
simultaneously did not seem to bother her. What mattered was her interpretation of the Party
line at the moment and she held to it tenaciously, as if the slightest adjustment, the
slightest doubt, had the capacity to throw her whole world outlook into question. I suspected
that her outward certainty concealed an inner uncertainty. The less secure she felt about a
position the more dogmatically she asserted it. Others said of Lin T’ung, ‘She is so afraid
to be wrong that she is wrong!’ But that, of course, she would not admit, even to herself.”
—William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (1984), p.
47.
“In this way, however, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is
declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves
all dogmatism.” —Engels, criticizing Hegel for his dogmatism and inconsistency, Ludwig
Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Chapter 1, online at:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm
[We draw attention here to the
marvelous insight by Engels—that a true appreciation for dialectics, and its conscious and
continuous employment—is the best way to overcome tendencies toward dogmatism! —Ed.]
DOOMSDAY MACHINE
A weapon so horrendously powerful that its use would bring about not only the death of all the
enemies it is directed at, but of virtually every human being on Earth, including those within
the country that set off the weapon. Why would anyone be so stupid as to create a “Doomsday Machine”,
you ask, and to threaten to use it? A very good question, which gets into the inhuman psychology
of imperialist powers! But during the Cold War between U.S.
imperialism and Soviet state-capitalist “Social-Imperialism”,
both sides actually did create such a weapon and on several occasions came shockingly close
to using it.
This actually-existing Doomsday Machine consisted of
the aggragate total of thousands of hydrogen bombs which both Superpowers possessed and were quite
ready to use. And—worse yet—both the United States and Russia (the successor imperialist power to
the state-capitalist Soviet Union) still possess these doomsday machines—and still threaten
to use them “if necessary”. This real continuing possibility remains by far the most serious threat
to the continued existence of human beings. It is astounding how few people today really understand
the seriousness of this existential threat to humanity on the part of world imperialism.
“At the conclusion of his famous satirical film of 1964, Dr. Strangelove,
Stanley Kubrick introduced the concept of a ‘Doomsday Machine’—designed to deter nuclear attack
on the Soviet Union by destroying all human life as an automatized response to such an attack.
His Russian leader had fatefully installed the system before he had revealed it to the world,
and it was now subject to being triggered by a single nuclear explosion from an American B-52
sent off by a rogue commander without presidential authorization.
“Kubrick had borrowed the name and the very
concept of such a hypothetical machine from my former colleague Herman Kahn, a
RAND physicist with whom he had discussed it. In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear
War and in popular articles in 1961, Kahn had said he was sure he could design such a device.
It could be produced within ten years and would be relatively cheap, one of its main attractions
as a deterrent system. It would cost closer to ten than to a hundred billion dollars, he
guessed—only a fraction of the current budget for strategic weapons—since it could be emplaced
in one’s own country or in the ocean. It would not depend on sending warheads halfway around
the world by expensive planes and missiles that would have to penetrate enemy defenses.
“But, he said, it was obviously
undesirable. It would be too uncontrollable—too inflexible and automatic—and it might fail to
deter, and its failure ‘kills too many people’: in fact, everyone, a result that the philosopher
John Somerville later termed ‘omnicide.’ Kahn was sure in 1961 that no such system had been
built, nor would it be, by either the United States or the Soviet Union.
“The physicist Edward Teller, known as the
‘father of the H-bomb,’ went further to deny that omnicide—a concept he derided—was remotely
feasible. In answer to a question I posed to him as late as 1982, he said emphatically it was
‘impossible’ to kill by any imaginable use of thermonuclear weapons that he had
co-invented ‘more than a quarter of the earth’s population.’
“At the time, I thought of this assurance,
ironically, as his perception of ‘the glass being three-quarters full.’ (Teller was, along with
Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and the former Nazi missile designer Wernher von Braun, one of Kubrick’s
inspirations for the character of Dr. Strangelove.) And Teller’s estimate was closely in line
with what the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military] actually planned to do in 1961,
though a better estimate (allowing for the direct effects of fire, withich JSC calculations
have always omitted) would have been closer to one-third to one-half of total omnicide.
“But the JCS were mistaken in 1961, and so
was Herman Kahn in 1960, and so was Teller in 1982. Nobody’s perfect. Just one year after
Teller had made this negative assertion (at a hearing of the California state legislature which
we both addressed, on the Bilateral Nuclear Weapons Freeze Initiative), the first papers
appeared on the nuclear-winter effects of smoke injected
into the stratosphere by firestorms generated by a thousand or more of the fifty thousand
existing H-bombs used on cities. Contrary to Kahn and Teller, an American Doomsday Machine
already existed in 1961—and had for years—in the form of pre-targeted bombers on alert in the
Strategic Air Command (SAC), soon to be joined by Polaris submarine-launched missiles. Although
this machine wasn’t likely to kill outright or starve to death literally every last human, its
effects, once triggered, would come close enough to that to deserve the name Doomsday.”
—Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday
Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017), pp. 18-19.
DOUBLE-DEALING
[As the term was used in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era:] Praising Party and government
policy in public while privately working to undermine it. (The Russian term for this is
dvurushnichestvo. A “double-dealer” is a dvurushnik.)
Of course similar things have occurred at other
times and places, such as the tactic sometimes used by rightists and
capitalist roaders in China to discredit the revolutionary
line in the Great Leap Forward, the
Socialist Education Movement) and the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by purposely promoting ultra-“left”
excesses.
On the other hand, sometimes people in the USSR,
revolutionary China, and elsewhere, have been incorrectly accused of double-dealing when in fact
their activities were sincere, but were nevertheless foolish and counterproductive. In this
connection it is good to keep in mind the old adage: “Never attribute to malice what can be more
readily explained by simple stupidity.”
See also:
“OPEN AND ABOVE-BOARD”
DOUBT
See also:
UNCERTAINTY,
SKEPTICISM
“One needs to exit doubt in order to produce science—but few people heed
the importance of not exiting from it prematurely.... It is a fact that one usually exits
doubt without realizing it.
“We are dogma-prone from our mother’s
wombs.” —Simon Foucher, Dissertation on the Search for Truth (1673).
“Doubting is correct; doubting everything is not.” —Mao, note in the
margin of his copy of the book by Marxist philosopher Ai Siqi,
Philosophy and Life. [Nick Knight, ed., Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism
(1990), p. 237.]
DOUGLASS, Frederick (1818-1895)
[Born: Frederick Bailey; changed his name to Frederick Douglass in 1838 after escaping from
slavery, and in order to avoid being recaptured.] A great American fighter against slavery and
the oppression of African-Americans, who was also very progressive in his early and determined
support for women’s equality. He also worked for full equality for all other people, including
Native Americans and recent immigrants to the U.S. Through his powerful speeches and writings,
including in his own newspapers such as the Northern Star, Douglass did as much as any
one person to end slavery in the United States.
Although Douglass described himself as being in
favor of “reform” rather than revolution, his ideas about what it would take to win the abolition
of slavery and the other major reforms he championed recognized full well the probable necessity
of the use of violence. He was associated with John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859
and had to temporarily flee to Canada and then Great Britain. During the Civil War he, along with
other Abolitionists, put great pressure on President Lincoln to formally turn the war into a war
for the end of slavery—which Lincoln eventually did with his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
Douglass also recruited Black troops for the Union army and strongly encouraged Lincoln to make
better use of Black soldiers during the war.
After the Civil War Douglass continued his work
in support of civil rights for African-Americans. He was also appointed to several government
positions including de facto ambassador to Haiti in 1887. But he later resigned that post after
a clash with the Benjamin Harrison administration over its attempt to annex a Haitian port to
serve as a U.S. naval base. This was an early example of the resistence within American society
to the signs of the development of modern U.S. capitalist-imperialism.
See also the
extensive article about Frederick
Douglass in the Wikipedia and: UNITED FRONT
[Douglass quote]
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history
of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims,
have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does
nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom,
and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be
both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and
you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them;
and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The
limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [...] Men
might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their
removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives
and the lives of others.”
—Frederick Douglass, in a magnificent
and profound statement, frequently quoted in shorter extracts, from his speech, “Address on
West India Emancipation”, delivered at Canandaigua, New York, on Aug. 3 (or perhaps Aug. 4),
1857; included in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass
(1950), vol. 2, p. 437.
DOXING
Maliciously publicly exposing a person’s private information, such as their name, address, phone
number, Social Security number, and so forth, so that they can be harassed, attacked or victimized
by others. It is a sign of the times (and the contemporary trend toward more fascist actions and
laws) that racists, reactionaries, other jerks, and even government agents, are now doing more of
this sort of thing against minorities and the Left in particular.
See also:
COINTELPRO,
“SWATTING”
Dictionary Home Page and Letter Index
MASSLINE.ORG Home Page
Looking at the ever-continuing decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar—that is, the decline
in what a single dollar will buy—is another way of describing inflation, and
a way that brings it home better to many people. In the graphic at the right we see that even in just the
past two decades the U.S. dollar has lost almost half its value. And as the continual development of the
present overproduction crisis, and its associated financial problems
intensify, this purchasing power decline will inevitably continue and, at times hugely accelerate.