Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Ge - Gh   —

GEITHNER, Timothy   (1961-  )
A top financial official of the U.S. government who was Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration from 2009-2013. He was previously president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he played a major role in the bail-outs of the Wall Street gambling firm Bear Stearns and AIG (an insurance company insuring Wall Street gambles). He is an excellent example of how top government officials in the modern bourgeois state are selected based on their willingness to completely serve the interests of finance capitalism.

“[L]iberal and conservative critics alike consider him [Geithner] excessively generous to big banks at the expense of the public. Evidence gathered by the crisis commission of Congress paints an unflatering picture of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s role before the crisis, when Mr Geithner was in charge, in overseeing banks, Citigroup in particular. Critics fault him for not imposing haircuts on AIG’s counterparties (mostly big banks) as part of the insurance company's bail-out, and for not nationalizing or breaking up big banks such as Citi. His actions and the subsequent financial-reform law, they say, enshrine the bad principle that some banks are ‘too big to fail’.” —“Farewell, Tim Geithner: Lessons Learnt”, The Economist, Jan. 19, 2013, p. 32.

GENERAL AGREEMENTS ON TRADE TARIFFS (GATT)
The predecessor set of trade agreements, and the organization to arbitrate and enforce those agreements, which later became the World Trade Organization (WTO).

“Lenin’s basic point of view was that the imperialist era is the final stage of capitalism, an era during which all the contradictions of capitalism become enormously concentrated and intensified, and therefore an era of interimperialist war, of economic crisis, and of proletarian revolution. And, actually, looking back at the past century, this does not seem to be too bad a summary of what has actually happened—though clearly the era is not yet over and the process is by no means complete.
         “Nevertheless, it is now clear that the imperialist era is stretching out to be a whole lot longer than Lenin envisioned, and that within this long historical epoch there are fairly long sub-periods of war or of relative peace, of economic crisis or of relative economic good times (for the bourgeoisie anyway), and of revolution or of relative political quiescence. Consequently the old formula of the imperialist epoch being characterized as one long general crisis of capitalism no longer seems correct. It now appears much too simplistic.
         “In fact, it has become quite obvious that the capitalist business cycle continues to operate in the imperialist era. That is, there continue to be booms, busts, depressions (or recessions) and recoveries. It is true that the proper analysis of this business cycle in the imperialist era is still subject to dispute. Some people say recessions are now generally much milder (except for the Great Depression of the 1930s of course!), others talk about short waves and long waves, and still others have quite different theories....
         “But however one views the development of the business cycle over the past century, it is undeniable that there was at least one long overall boom in the capitalist world—the quarter-century period after World War II. Thus, from the point of view of economics, at least, it seems really wrong to say that the entire imperialist era has been one of a ‘general crisis of capitalism’.
         “I should note that most modern (post World War II) theorists of the GCC thesis do not deny that the business cycle continues to exist in the imperialist era, nor that there are still booms as well as busts. But this was not the view of most of the Comintern theorists of the GCC back in the 1930s; they did see the Great Depression as an integral part of the general crisis of capitalism. But in light of the long capitalist recovery after World War II, GCC theorists these days are forced to say that the general crisis of capitalism is not the same as one long capitalist economic crisis.” —Adapted from Scott H., “Comments on Sison’s ‘Contradictions in the World Capitalist System and the Necessity of Socialist Revolution’” (Jan. 23, 2002).

But, despite drawing a distinction between the GCC and periodic industrial crises, modern GCC theorists still see intensified economic problems as a very important part of the general crisis of capitalism. For example, the Soviet revisionist writer V. Trepelkov wrote that there are four “major features” of the general crisis of capitalism:

1. “[T]he world is divided into two opposing socio-economic systems, the socialist and capitalist ones…. [T]he change in the alignment of forces in favor of socialism is the most significant manifestation of the increasingly deepening general crisis of capitalism…. The contradiction between the two opposing social systems is the principal contradiction of the modern era.”
         2. “[T]he crisis of the colonial system, a crisis which at a definite stage develops into its breakdown…. A large group of countries that have won political independence are now fighting for their economic independence. Some have opted for the non-capitalist road of development….”
         3. “[T]he aggravation of the internal economic contradictions of the imperialist countries, and the heightening of economic instability and decay. This makes itself felt in sharp fluctuations in the growth rates, in disproportionate economic development, in increasingly frequent crises, in constant under-loading [perhaps this just means the gross underutilization of existing factories —S.H.], in chronic unemployment, in runaway inflation, in the crisis of international monetary relations, in militarization of the economy, etc.”
         4. “[T]he crisis of bourgeois politics and ideology.” [From V. Trepelkov, General Crisis of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), pp. 21-25.]

However, if we look at each of these four “features” we find serious problems for the GCC thesis:

“With regard to point 1), the world was not really divided into a socialist sphere and a capitalist sphere in 1983 when Trepelkov’s book was published, nor is it today. The so-called ‘socialist camp’ at that time was really a competing state-capitalist camp. And a mere 6 or 8 years later much of this so-called ‘socialist camp’, including the Soviet Union itself, fell apart completely.
         “Feature 2), with regard to the crisis of the colonial system, also has some problems. It is true that old-style open colonialism had a world-wide crisis which led to its nearly universal replacement with neo-colonialism. But the completion of this great (but superficial) change actually led to a lot of demoralization (because neo-colonialism is really little better), and probably even to an overall reduction in anti-imperialist struggle around the world for a time. Of course I don’t say that there cannot be struggle in the neo-colonies for ‘economic independence’, but so far this struggle has been mostly under the leadership of national bourgeois forces—which is why it has been so pathetically weak and ineffective. And as for seeking economic independence by some ‘non-capitalist’, but also non-socialist, road—that is certainly a dead-end pipe dream.
         “Anti-imperialist struggle, at one level or another, is a permanent feature of the imperialist era. And as such, it might well be described as a permanent problem for imperialism. But none of this necessarily means that imperialism is in a permanent ‘general crisis’.
         “Let me skip feature 3) for a moment and go on to feature 4), ‘the crisis of bourgeois politics and ideology’. Well, of course, there have been many political crises over the past few decades, but bad as this has been in the ‘West’, it has been worse in the Soviet sphere—which ended up collapsing completely. This general crisis, which is supposed to be ‘a process in which more and more countries depart from capitalism’ has turned out to be more of a general crisis of revisionism, wherein more and more revisionist countries revert to Western-style capitalism. And while there has indeed also been considerable ideological ferment in the ‘West’, actually Western ideologists have been riding relatively high in the saddle in recent years. So much so, in fact, that some of them have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’ and even the ‘end of history’! Unfortunately, the bigger ideological crisis has been within the ranks of revolutionaries and Marxists, many of whom have been losing their bearings. (It is bitter to recognize things like this, but it is the truth of the matter.)
         “So really, if you want to defend the GCC thesis today, it must all come down to ‘feature 3)’, the aggravation of economic contradictions in the capitalist world. And here too there are great problems for the GCC thesis. Here’s one big problem: If this serious aggravation of economic problems is not due to the same contradictions which bring about ‘ordinary crises’, then what is it due to? That should be a really embarrassing question for ‘modern’ GCC theorists, if they were ever to consider it. Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Soviet revisionist economists, nor anybody else (as far as I know), has ever given an answer to this question. And in fact, Lenin said exactly the opposite—that the contradictions of the imperialist era are the very same contradictions as racked capitalism beforehand, but now greatly intensified. So while the GCC theorists started out by denying that the GCC is the same as a capitalist economic crisis, in the end that is pretty much all that is left of their doctrine after the invalid and now-discredited political points are thrown out.
         “It is true, of course, that we can no longer look at capitalist crises in the same way we did in the 19^th century. We are forced by plain and obvious facts to recognize that there are both short term fluctuations in the capitalist economy (still usually called ‘business cycles’) and longer-term, broader ups and downs, such as the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, and the 35-year-long slowdown that began in the early 1970s. And, once again, the very fact that there are also longer-term ups and downs is fatal for the GCC claim of permanent general crisis.
         “The old Comintern theory of the ‘general crisis of capitalism’ cannot be upheld in either its 1930s form, nor its ‘modern’ form. It is a failed, and even incoherent theory, once you start to look at it carefully. Reality is much more complex than that simple theory comprehends.” —Extracts from Scott H., “Comments on Sison’s ‘Contradictions in the World Capitalist System and the Necessity of Socialist Revolution’” (Jan. 23, 2002). See that essay for further criticism of the GCC thesis.

“GENERAL SEMANTICS”
Pseudo-scientific academic cult, with little or no actual connection to the semantics branch of linguistic science.

GENERAL STRIKE
A strike of workers in general, or of multiple important unions, either across an entire country or else in a single city or region, with the goal of trying to force the capitalists, and/or the politicians representing them, to make some important concessions, most often economic, but sometimes political concessions. In most countries general strikes are rare, and are a very powerful expression of working class anger and class solidarity.
        However, there have also been some rather exaggerated or naïve conceptions at times about what a strategy of struggle focused primarily on general strikes can really accomplish. Some people, such as Rosa Luxemburg, have implied that the best strategy for working class struggle is usually, or typically, to work toward building mass strikes, or a general strike. In countries where general strikes are more common, this might make somewhat more sense. But even in those countries it would be really dangerous to assume that a general strike can by itself defeat an armed military response by the ruling class, if that should occur. Certainly the notion that working to build a general strike should be the fundamental strategy for proletarian revolution is extremely dubious. In an advanced capitalist country the far more rational basic revolutionary strategy is to work to educate the working class on the need for an organized mass revolutionary insurrection at some appropriate time, but to actually launch it only when the conditions are clearly ripe for such a drastic measure (as for example in the middle of a very unpopular war or during a severe and prolonged economic depression). To assume that a general strike can be anything more than a possible step in that larger process is to grossly over-estimate trade unionist spontaneity, and to grossly underestimate the repressive violence of which the bourgeois enemy is fully capable.
        See also: SEATTLE—General Strike of 1919

GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
The generalized theory of movement, gravity and space created by Albert Einstein around 1915. It involved some subtle changes in how we understand gravity and space.
        At first there were only two predictions that Einstein was able to make in his new theory of General Relativity which differed noticiably from Newtonian physics: 1) an explanation for the previously unexplained orbit aberations of the planet Mercury around the Sun; and 2) a correction to the gravitational effect on light waves from stars as those waves passed close by the Sun. In more recent times General Relativity has been confirmed in additional circumstances, and is even employed in practical ways, such as in the GPS system now commonly used by millions of people to determine their precise position on Earth.

“Einstein ... arrived at the equations [for general relativity] in late 1915. Whereas Newton imagined gravity as a force that acts across space, Einstein’s equations cast gravity as a property that belongs to space. In Newton’s physics, space was passive, a vessel for a mysterious force between masses. In Einstein’s physics, space was active, collaborating with matter to produce what we perceive as gravity’s effects. The Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler offered possibly the pithiest description of this co-dependence: ‘Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move.’ Einstein in effect reinvented physics.”   —Richard Panek, The 4% Universe (Boston: Mariner Books, 2011), p. 14.

GENERAL WILL
The collective will of a community that expresses its common interests which benefit the community as a whole. This is an important concept in the social philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. In his definition the general will is the common good that any well-formed (normal) citizen would recognize, and is neither that citizen’s own private will nor quite the same as the shared private wills of all individual citizens. The concept of the general will is therefore a rather sophisticated abstraction, in the same way that the class interests of a given social class are a sophisticated abstraction from the totality of all the individual interests of members of that class.

“There is often a great difference between the will of all [what all individuals want] and the general will; the general will studies only the common interest while the will of all studies private interest, and is indeed no more than the sum of individual desires. But if we take away from these same wills, the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out, the sum of the difference is the general will.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice Cranston, (NY: Penguin, 1983), Book II, Chapter 3, pp. 72-73. The words above in brackets are in the original.
         [Ignoring Rousseau’s incorrect psychological focus, what is being said here is that the common interests of members of a group must be abstracted from their individual interests, and are by no means always identical to their shared individual interests. Quite a sophisticated observation for 1762! —S.H.]

GENERATIONAL CHANGE (U.S.)
New generations often have or develop substantially different ideas about various issues in society. This is because they face different conditions and situations in their formative years. And indeed, much of the changing ideas in society are not at all due to people already alive changing their attitudes, but rather to new generations replacing the old ones who die off.
        This is brought out well in the graphical array at the right [from The Economist, Nov. 2, 2019, p. 81]. The 5 small graphs at the top show the changing percentage of the total U.S. population consisting of the so-called “Greatest Generation” (born before 1928), the “Silent Generation” (born 1928-1945), the “Baby Boomers” (born 1946-1964), “Generation X” (born 1965-1980), and the “Millennials” and “Generation Z” (born after 1980). The “Greatest Generation” is now almost completely gone, and the “Silent Generation” is rapidly disappearing. So the opinions of these two generational groups count for less and less in the average opinions prevailing in American society. Meanwhile the views of the youngest generations count for more and more. The four larger graphs included here show the changing views of various generations on four different issues, and also the average weighted view (in the dotted black line) of the whole American population based on the number of people alive in each generation. These selected issues are: 1) Whether communist books should be removed from public libraries; 2) Whether abortion should be allowed for any reason; 3) Whether the government spends too little to improve Black people’s lives; and 4) whether gay people should be allowed to get married. In each case the trend is for more progressive average views over time, but mostly because older, more reactionary, generations are dying out while more open-minded or progressive generations are coming of age. The 8 bar graphs at the right show the proportions of the changing ideas which are due simply to generational change, for these 4 issues and for 4 others.
        It is clear that generational change is extremely important in promoting the overall change in ideas in American society. And social progress depends at least as much on the coming of age of new generations under new conditions and with new experiences as it does on the changing views of older generations.

“On most issues, public opinion changes mainly as younger generations replace older ones. Societies change their minds faster than people do.
        “As recently as the late 1980s, most Americans thought gay sex was not only immoral but also something that ought to be illegal. Yet by 2015, when the supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, there were only faint murmurs of protest. Today two-thirds of Americans support it, and even those who frown on it make no serious effort to criminalize it.
        “This surge in tolerance illustrates how fast public opinion can shift. The change occurred because two trends reinforced each other. First, many socially conservative old people have died, and their places in the polling samples have been taken by liberal millenials. In addition, people have changed their minds. Support for gay marriage has risen by some 30 percentage points within each generation since 2004, from 20% to 49% among those born in 1928-45 and from 45% to 78% among those born after 1980.
        “However, this shift in opinion makes gay marriage an exception among political issues. Since 1972 the University of Chicago has run a General Social Survey every year or two, which asks Americans their views on a wide range of topics. Over time, public opinion has grown more liberal. But this is mostly the result of generational replacement, not of changes of heart.
        “For example, in 1972, 42% of Americans said communist books should be banned from public libraries. Views varied widely by age: 55% of people born before 1928 (who were 45 or older at the time) supported a ban, compared with 37% of people aged 27-44 and just 25% of those 26 or younger. Today, only a quarter of Americans favor this policy. However, within each of these birth cohorts, views today are almost identical to those from 47 years ago. The change was caused entirely by the share of respondents born before 1928 falling from 49% to nil, and that of millennials—who were not born unti at least 1981, and staunchly oppose such a ban—rising from zero to 36%.
        “Not every issue is as extreme as these two. But on six of the eight questions we examined—all save gay marriage and marijuana legalization—demographic shifts accounted for a bigger share of overall movement in public opinion than changes in beliefs within cohorts. On average, their impact was about twice as large.
        “Social activists devote themselves to changing people’s views, and sometimes succeed. In general, however, battles for hearts and minds are won by grinding attrition more often than by rapid conquest.”
         —“Talkin’ ’bout my generation”, The Economist, Nov. 2, 2019, p. 81. (The brief article accompanying the large graphic.)

GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE — How It Can Promote Misinformation and Error
The current forms of Generative AI (see entry above), such as ChatGPT, though perhaps often useful, are very crude in a number of important ways. And in particular, they do not include an explicit internal model of the world which solidly identifies a great many well-established truths and facts about the world in order to self-edit and correct its responses to user’s queries. (See CONSCIOUSNESS entry.) For this reason (among others) these supposed “intelligence” programs can actually make the prevailing levels of scientific and social ignorance of the people in present bourgeois society even worse. Like all technical advances under capitalism, Generative AI can often lead to very negative results, as well as useful results. —S.H. [May 28, 2023]

“How generative AI could promote science denial
        “Erosion of epistemic trust. All consumers of science information depend on judgments of scientific and medical experts. Epistemic trust is the process of trusting knowledge you get from others. It is fundamental to the understanding and use of scientific information. Whether someone is seeking information about a health concern or trying to understand solutions to climate change, they often have limited scientific understanding and little access to firsthand evidence. With a rapidly growing body of information online, people must make frequent decisions about what and whom to trust. With the increased use of generative AI and the potential for manipulation, we believe trust is likely to erode further than it already has.
        “Misleading or just plain wrong. If there are errors or biases in the data on which AI platforms are trained, that can be reflected in the results. In our own searches, when we have asked ChatGPT to regenerate multiple answers to the same question, we have gotten conflicting answers. Asked why, it responded, ‘Sometimes I make mistakes.’ Perhaps the trickiest issue with AI-generated content is knowing when it is wrong. [This is why having access to a reliable world model of at least a great many of the known facts about the world is essential. —S.H.]
        “Disinformation spread intentionally. AI can be used to generate compelling disinformation as text as well as deepfake images and videos. When we asked ChatGPT to ‘write about vaccines in the style of disinformation,’ it produced a nonexistent citation with fake data. Geoffrey Hinton, former head of AI development at Google, quit to be free to sound the alarm, saying, ‘It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.’ The potential to create and spread deliberately incorrect information about science already existed, but it is now dangerously easy.
        “Fabricated sources. ChatGPT provides responses with no sources at all, or if asked for sources, may present ones it made up. We both asked ChatGPT to generate a list of our own publications. We each identified a few correct sources. More were hallucinations [false made-up information], yet seemingly reputable and mostly plausible, with actual previous co-authors, in similar sounding journals. This inventiveness is a big problem if a list of a scholar’s publications conveys authority to a reader who doesn’t take time to verify them.
        “Dated knowledge. ChatGPT doesn’t know what happened in the world after its training concluded. A query on what percentage of the world has had COVID-19 returned an answer prefaced by ‘as of my knowledge cutoff date of September 2021.’ Given how rapidly knowledge advances in some areas, this limitation could mean readers get erroneous outdated information. If you’re seeking recent research on a personal health issue, for instance, beware.
        “Rapid advancement and poor transparency. AI systems continue to become more powerful and learn faster, and they may learn more science misinformation along the way. Google recently announced 25 new embedded uses of AI in its services. At this point, insufficient guardrails are in place to assure that generative AI will become a more accurate purveyor of scientific information over time.”
         —Gale Sinatra & Barbara K. Hofer, “ChatGPT and other generative AI could foster science denial and misunderstanding – here’s how you can be on alert”, May 24, 2023, online at: https://theconversation.com/chatgpt-and-other-generative-ai-could-foster-science-denial-and-misunderstanding-heres-how-you-can-be-on-alert-204897

“Past public ire over high drug prices has recently taken a back seat to a more insidious problem – no drugs at any price. Patients and their providers increasingly face limited or nonexistent supplies of drugs, many of which treat essential conditions such as cancer, heart disease and bacterial infections. The American Society of Health System Pharmacists now lists over 300 active shortages, primarily of decades-old generic drugs no longer protected by patents.
        “While this is not a new problem, the number of drugs in short supply has increased in recent years,and the average shortage is lasting longer, with more than 15 critical drug products in short supply for over a decade. Current shortages include widely known drugs such as the antibiotic amoxicillin; the heart medicine digoxin; the anesthetic lidocaine; and the medicine albuterol, which is critical fortreating asthma and other diseases affecting the lungs and airways.
        “What’s going on? I’m a health economist who has studied the pharmaceutical industry for the past 15 years. I believe the drug shortage problem illustrates a major shortcoming of capitalism. While costly brand-name drugs often yield high profits to manufacturers, there’s relatively little money to be made in supplying the market with low-cost generics, no matter how vital they may be to patients’ health. The shortage includes chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, medications to treat ADHD and other critical drugs. Some patients are able to get their drugs, while others are not, and in some cases patients are getting ‘rationed care.’
        “A generic problem   The problem boils down to the nature of the pharmaceutical industry and how differently the markets for brand and generic drugs operate. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is the fact that prices of brand drugs in the U.S. are among the highest in the developed world, while generic drug prices are among the lowest.... But once the patent expires, the drug becomes generic and any company is allowed to manufacture it. Since generic manufacturers are essentially producing the same product, profits are determined by their ability to manufacture the drug at the lowest marginal cost. This often results in low profit margins and can lead to cost-cutting measures that can compromise quality and threaten supply.
        “Outsourced production creates more supply risks   One of the consequences of generics’ meager margins is that drug companies outsource production to lower-cost countries. As of mid-2019, 72% of the manufacturing facilities making active ingredients for drugs sold in the U.S. were located overseas, with India and China alone making up nearly half of that. While overseas manufacturers often enjoy significant cost advantages over U.S. facilities, such as easy access to raw materials and lower labor costs, outsourcing production at such a scale raises a slew of issues that can hurt the supply. Foreign factories are more difficult for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect, tend to have more production problems and are far more likely than domestic factories to be shut down once a problem is discovered....
        “India is the world’s largest producer of generic drugs but imports 70% of its raw materials from China. About one-third of factories in China shut down during the pandemic. To ensure domestic supplies, the Indian government restricted the export of medications, disrupting the global supply chain. This led to shortages of drugs to treat COVID-19, such as for respiratory failure and sedation, as well as for a wide range of other conditions, like drugs to treat chemotherapy, heart disease and bacterial infections....
        “And while there may be multiple companies selling the same generic drug in the U.S., there may be only a single manufacturer supplying the basic ingredients. Thus, any hiccup in production or shutdown due to quality issues can affect the entire market. A recent analysis found that approximately 40% of generic drugs sold in the U.S. have just one manufacturer, and the share of markets supplied by just one or two manufacturers has increased over time....
        “It is hard to quantify the impact of drug shortages on population health. However, a recent survey of U.S. hospitals, pharmacists and other health care providers found that drug shortages led to increased medication errors, delayed administration of lifesaving therapies, inferior outcomes and patient deaths....”
         —Geoffrey Joyce, Director of Health Policy, USC Schaeffer Center, and Associate Professor, University of Southern California, “Blame capitalism? Why hundreds of decades-old yet vital drugs are nearly impossible to find”, July 20, 2023, full article online at: https://theconversation.com/blame-capitalism-why-hundreds-of-decades-old-yet-vital-drugs-are-nearly-impossible-to-find-206848

GENETIC DETERMINISM
The erroneous view, which is very widespread in modern bourgeois society, that who and what we are is wholly determined by the particular forms of the genes we have, that is by our specific DNA, which we inherited from our parents. This is still the most common form of a more general erroneous view, biological determinism. However, with the completion of the human genome project, many of the adherents of genetic determinism felt a big let-down at how little that had advanced our full knowledge of human beings and how they work. So now the trend is toward the less specific idiocy, biological determinism.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS (GMO)
[To be added...]
        See also: MONSANTO CORPORATION

“GENIUS, Theory Of”   [Chinese: tian cai lun zhi zheng   天才输之争 ]
An absurdly exaggerated theory of Mao’s genius created and championed for their own devious purposes by Lin Biao, Chen Boda and their followers during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, and because of that, also adopted for a while by some of the Red Guards and other sections of the masses.
        On May 18, 1966, Lin Biao claimed, for example, that “each and every one of Mao Zedong’s words is truth and carries more weight than ten thousand words uttered by others.” However, that was right at the very beginning the GPCR, when the struggle between Mao’s supporters and the capitalist-roaders was just being launched. Lin and Chen went even further later on, as they sought to solidify Lin as Mao’s successor. But after Lin’s death, and as the basic political situation stabilized to a considerable degree, Mao strongly criticized this “theory of genius”:

“In my view, behind their [Lin Biao, et al.] surprise attack and their underground activity lay purpose, organization and a programme. Their programme was to appoint a state chairman, and to extol ‘genius’: in other words, to oppose the line of the Ninth Congress and to defeat the three-point agenda of the Second Plenum of the Ninth Central Committee. A certain person [Lin Biao] was anxious to become state chairman, to split the Party and to seize power. The question of genius is a theoretical question. Their theory was idealist apriorism. Someone has said that to oppose genius is to oppose me. But I am no genius. I read Confucian books for six years and capitalist books for seven. I did not read Marxist-Leninist books until 1918, so how can I be a genius? ... The Party Constitution was settled at the Ninth Congress. Why not take a look at it? I wrote ‘Some Opinions’, which specially criticizes the genius theory, only after looking up some people to talk with them, and after some investigations and research. It is not that I do not want to talk about genius. To be a genius is to be a bit more intelligent. But genius does not depend on one person or a few people. It depends on a party, the party which is the vanguard of the proletariat. Genius is dependent on the mass line, on collective wisdom.”
         —Mao, “Talks with Responsible Comrades at Various Places during Provincial Tour”, (from the middle of August to 12 September 1971), SW 9, online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_88.htm Mao’s article “Some Opinions”, which he mentions here, and which includes further comments about “genius”, only became available in English in 2021, and is now posted at: https://www.bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra.GPCR/Chinese/AFewOpinionsOfMine-1970-English.pdf

GENOCIDE
        See also: RESISTANCE TO FOREIGN OCCUPATIONS

GENTILE, Giovanni   [Pronounced: jo-VAWN-ni   jen-TEE-lay]   (1875-1944)
Italian neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher and fascist politician who one reference volume aptly describes as an “ideological mouthpiece for Mussolini”.
        Born in Sicily, Gentile was a professor of philosophy at Naples, Palermo, Pisa and then Rome (1917-1944). In 1918 he also became an Italian senator, and supported fascism from the start. Mussolini appointed him Minister of Education and he was responsible for a revival of religious teaching in the schools. “After his resignation in 1924 he became the first president of the National Fascist Institute of Culture; he remained for the rest of his life the most prominent publicist of the regime and the self-styled ‘philosopher of fascism.’” [Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vols. 3 & 4, (1967), p. 282.] He met his appropriate end when Communist partisans assassinated him in Florence in April 1944, shortly after Mussolini’s overthrow.
        Philosophically, Gentile was a collaborator with and teacher of Benedetto Croce, even though he was the younger of the two and they did end up with some differences in both philosophy and politics. Gentile and Croce first became friends when they found that each was writing a book on Marx’s “philosophical system”, neither of which (it turned out) was of any real value. Gentile’s book, La filosofia di Marx (1899) was written from an orthdox Hegelian perspective.
        Gentile himself propounded an ultra-idealist theory he called “actualism”, in which supposedly nothing is real except the pure act of thought. Thus for him the distinctions between theory and practice, subject and object, and past and present, were mere “mental constructs”. In other words, yet another nutty idealist theory of the world.

“[Gentile] was one of the major figures of the resurgence of Hegelian idealism in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. His ‘actual idealism,’ or ‘actualism,’ represents the subjective extreme of the idealist tradition in that the present activity of reflective awareness is regarded as the absolute foundation on which all else depends. The act of thinking is the ‘pure act’ that creates the world of human experience....
        “Gentile justifies his ‘theory of the spirit as pure act’ in two ways. First, he strives to show that it is the logical outcome of the whole movement of Western philosophical thought since Descartes; and, second, that the ‘method of pure immanence,’ when we arrive at it, provides an adequate and coherent way of explicating our actual experience....
        “The claim that actual idealism is the logical outcome of the main tradition of modern philosophy is interesting chiefly because it throws light on Gentile’s conception of the essential problem of philosophy and the conditions for its solution. Philosophy, for him, as for Fichte, was Wissenschaftslehre, the science of knowledge, the science that, without presupposing anything itself, provides an a priori ground for the presuppositions actually made in other sciences. Decartes’s method of universal doubt can quite naturally be viewed as the first approach to this problem, and Berkeley’s doctrine that esse est percipi is a vital step toward its solution. However, the genesis of actual idealism begins with Kant; and although Gentile arrived at his view through the progressive elaboration of a ‘reform of the Hegelian dialectic’ that had been initiated by Spaventa, he remains fundamentally a Kantian in his determination to confine philosophical speculation to the task of exhibiting the logical structure of actual experience. He is at one with Kant and Fichte in his resolute rejection of any ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ that posits or presupposes a reality transcending actual consciousness.” —H. S. Harris, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vols. 3 & 4, (1967), pp. 282-2.
        [The above extract from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy is part of a longer sympathetic exposition there of Gentile’s “actual idealism” theory. For us materialist Marxists the most important point is probably just to show the connections between his theory and all the other variations on idealism, from Hegel, Kant, Fichte and down to the present day. —Ed.]

GENTRIFICATION
A change in the character of a neighborhood or section of a city which involves the economic displacement of poor and racial or ethnic minority people, and their replacement with “middle class” people (and more whites), the simultaneous trend toward more “up-scale” local businesses, and a significant rise in the prices of houses and rents. This is just one of the many ways in which a capitalist economy further victimizes the poor and minorities.
        One recent study by bourgeois economists in the U.S. showed that the signs of gentrification, such as changes in the educational level, age, and racial composition within a ZIP code area, “is strongly associated with increases in the numbers of grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, and bars, with little evidence of crowd-out of other categories of businesses.” This set of associated changes are also a leading indicator of housing price increases in the area. And even just the entry of Starbucks (and other coffee shops) into a neighborhood by themselves predict and demonstrate ongoing gentrification. “Each additional Starbucks that enters a zip code is associated with a 0.5% increase in housing prices.” [“Measuring Gentrification: Using Yelp Data to Quantify Neighborhood Change” (Aug. 2018), by Edward L. Glaeser, Hyunjin Kim & Michael Luca, NBER Working Paper #24952.]

“The word gentry is used here to describe landlords, rich peasants, and persons who made a career of serving them and their interests (such as bailiffs, public officials, village scholars) whose standard of living was comparable to that of the wealthy and came from the same source—the exploitation of the peasants.” —William Hinton, footnote in his book Fanshen (1966).

GEOGRAPHY — and the Development of Society
[Intro to be added...]
        Two important works by G. V. Plekhanov that relate to this topic are: “Fundamental Questions of Marxism”, chapter VI, and “N.G. Chernyshevsky”, chapter II.

GEOLOGY
        See also below, and: ANTHROPOCENE,   SAND,   SEDIMENT

“An even more potent variation on this [superstitious] theme was belief in geomancy, or the magical influence of burial grounds. The rich prospered, it was said, because their fathers were buried in auspicious places in relation to flanking hills, flowing water, and the prevailing winds. The poor were poor because their fathers were buried in the wrong places. Since the rich, with the help of professional geomancers could often pick their spot while the poor had to be content with whatever sorry ditch they were thrown into, this fate had an inevitability that was hard to beat.” —William Hinton, Fanshen (1966), p. 48. [Hinton was speaking specifically of rural China in the pre-Liberation (pre-1949) era. —Ed.]

GEOPOLITICS or GEOPOLITIK
In the somewhat innocuous abstract sense geopolitics just refers to international politics between nations, and often specifically in relation to their geographical locations. However, as the term is most frequently used in ruling class circles in imperialist countries such as the United States it also carries a strong implication that some powerful countries have the right to boss others around and to exploit and oppress other countries to the extent that they can get away with it. In other words, “geopolitics” in practice is quite often an amoral presentation of power politics in the international sphere, and a theory that implicitly accepts the permanent existence of imperialist powers and superpowers and their right to dominate the world.
        The German term Geopolitik is even more closely associated with these imperialist presumptions. This German school of thought expands on Social Darwinist ideas and views states (nations) as individual superorganisms which exist in a perpetual struggle among themselves for the resources of the world. The notion derived from this in the 1930s was that some countries (especially Germany!) had a right to Lebensraum [“living space”], i.e., to use warfare to expand their territory and areas of political and economic control. This theory was adopted wholeheartedly by the Nazi imperialists during the 1930s, and this ideology supported their launching of World War II against many other imperialist powers and then also against the socialist Soviet Union.
        However, essentially this same basic geopolitical viewpoint was also adopted by all the other imperialist powers before, during and after World War II. Japan had its equivalent program in the form of the creation of the “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (its euphemism for the Japanese empire and sphere of control). Britain, France and especially the U.S. also sought to use the war to retain or expand their spheres of imperialist control at the expense of their opponents. At one point near the end of the war, for example, President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sat down together and carved up the Middle East between them, deciding that Britain would maintain control of Iraq and Iran, while the U.S. would get control over Saudi Arabia and its oil. (Later the U.S. further displaced Britain and became the overall master of the entire Middle East.)
        During the post-World War II period the central aspect of geopolitics took the form of the Cold War between U.S. imperialism (and its bloc) and the socialist Soviet Union (and its bloc). When the socialist Soviet Union was captured by a new bourgeoisie from within, it also became an imperialist power (“social-imperialist”—socialist in name only, and imperialist in reality). From that point on both sides in the Cold War adopted a geopolitical domination program in their mutual contention for the control of the world.
        Since the final collapse of the state-capitalist Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. has been the sole superpower. From its point of view geopolitics has consisted primarily of: 1) The U.S. maintaining and expanding its areas of control and exploitation, and 2) Keeping other imperialist countries (such as Britain, France and Japan) in check as junior partners in its world domination. The recent rapid rise of capitalist China, now becoming an important imperialist power itself, changes the equation once again. A third geopolitical task for U.S. imperialism now is to try to control the rise of China and limit its growing economic and military strength. The geopolitical task for the new imperialist China is just the opposite; to increase its own economic and military strength (including through its fast-growing export of capital) while eating away at the strength of the other imperialist powers, especially its primary opponent—the U.S. How long this new geopolitical inter-imperialist contest can continue without developing into at least proxy wars between the two sides remains an open question.
        See also: MACKINDER, Halford,   “HEARTLAND THEORY”

GERMAN ANTI-SOCIALIST LAW (In 19^th Century)
See: ANTI-SOCIALIST LAW

GERMAN IDEOLOGY, THE
A book written jointly by Marx and Engels in the years 1845-46, but not published in their lifetime. In it they worked out their theory of historical materialism and criticized various contemporary idealist philosophers and ideologists. Although this is an early work, it is also one of the most extensive presentations of historical materialism by Marx and Engels, and thus is extremely valuable. It also contains the basic philosophical conclusions that they both upheld for their entire lives, and later elaborated further.

“The manuscript, amounting to nearly 800 printed pages, was in two volumes, the first of which was mainly devoted to an elaboration of the basic theses of historical materialism and to a criticism of the philosophical views of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, and the second, to a criticism of the views of various representatives of ‘true socialism.’
         “In 1846-1847 Marx and Engels made repeated attempts to find a publisher in Germany who would issue their work. They were, however, unsuccessful, due to the obstacles raised by the police and because the publishers, themselves interested parties, were champions of the very trends combated by Marx and Engels and refused to handle it. Only one chapter appeared during the lifetime of Marx and Engels. That was Chapter IV, Volume II of German Ideology, which was published in the magazine Das Westphalische Dampfboot (Westphalean Steamer), August and September 1847. The manuscript was pigeonholded for dozens of years in the archives of the German Social-Democratic Party. The German text was first published in full [in German] in 1932 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the C.C., C.P.S.U. A Russian translation appeared in 1933.” —Note 36, LCW 1:520.

GERONIMO JI JAGA
See: Geronimo PRATT

GHOSTS
Imaginary entities, supposedly left-over “shades” of dead human beings, which no longer possess a physical body, but which nevertheless are imagined to still somehow have a mind without a brain, and who go about the world with various conscious purposes (such as to “haunt” their former residences). From a modern scientific standpoint this is all simply a laughably incoherent conception, since cognitive psychology now understands very well that mind and mental states are simply aspects or characteristics of the functioning of physical brains of material beings (or else potentially of very advanced computer equivalents). There can therefore be no ghosts, goblins, spirits, gods, or any other disembodied minds or beings.
        It is, however, a quite alarming fact that in the world today, and particularly in the United States, the knowledge of such elementary scientific facts is so extremely poor that a great many people today do believe in such fantastic monstrosities as ghosts!

“In a 2021 poll of 1,000 American adults, 41% said they believe in ghosts, and 20% said they had personally experienced them. If they’re right, that’s more than 50 million spirit encounters in the U.S. alone.”   —Barry Markovsky, “Are ghosts real? A social psychologist examines the evidence”, TheConversation.com, Oct. 24, 2023. [However, even the sociologist Markovsky disappointingly argues that ghosts don’t exist only because “centuries of physics research have found nothing like this...”. Even in arguing against the existence of ghosts he is not sophisticated enough to understand that the whole idea is simply scientifically incoherent nonsense. —Ed.]

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