Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

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JACOBINS
The French political radicals belonging to a club which played a very important role in the great
French Revolution of 1789 and its further development. This left-wing political club was founded in 1789 but became even more revolutionary after a group of moderates split from it in 1791. In the 1793-94 period the club, under the leadership of Robespierre, dominated the revolutionary government and in effect it became part of Robespierre’s administration. After Robespierre’s downfall and execution in 1794 the Jacobin club closed down.
        See also: MOUNTAIN AND GIRONDE

“JAL, JUNGLE AND JAMEEN”
A revolutionary phrase adapted from the Bengali language in India which means “water, forest and land”. It represents the demands of the
Adivasi peoples and many others against the insatiable theft of these natural resources by the giant Indian and foreign multinational corporations operating in those regions. This demand is now also taking on a further dimension because of the terrible environmental destruction that capitalist MNCs are wreaking there.

JAMES, William   (1842-1910)
American psychologist and philosopher who was a
subjective idealist. He was an ideologist of the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie and one of the chief founders of pragmatism, which is their most distinctive philosophical outlook.
        See also: NEUTRAL MONISM

JAN ADALAT
[Hindi and related languages:] A people’s court created in guerrilla zones in rural areas, or liberated or partially liberated zones, under the supervision of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). According to the Indian central government, in the first five months of 2011 the number of jan adalats increased to 46 from just 22 in the previous year. Jharkhand had 22 people’s courts (up from 6), Chhattisgarh had 9 (up from 6), Bihar had 8 (up from 5), and Maharashtra had 1. [The Telegraph [Kolkata] (June 20, 2011)]

JAN MUKTI CHHAPAMAAR
[Hindi or related languages:] People’s Liberation Guerrillas, or a raid or action by such a group.

JANA ANDOLAN
A term in the Nepali language which means “People’s Movement”. In the recent history of Nepal there have been three major events which have gone under this name:
        Jana Andolan-I was the mass movement in 1990 which ended the absolute monarchy and established a government which was nominally, at least, a constitutional democracy. It was also supposed to eliminate the
Panchayat system of local and caste governance in Nepal. However, the monarchy still existed, the King still controlled the army, and he even dissolved parliament and re-established authoritarian control again. The failure of Jana Andolan-I to really change the basic situation resulted in a 10-year People’s War led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) beginning in 1996, and then to:
        Jana Andolan-II in 2006 which overthrew the King again and this time abolished the monarchy completely. This mass movement also led to the “Seven-Party Alliance” which included the CPN (Maoist) [now renamed the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)], and an agreement to end the People’s War, merge the revolutionary army into the regular army, create a new constitution, and so forth.
        However the bourgeois parties [including a revisionist party called the “Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist)”] have failed to honor those agreements. In response, the UCPN(Maoist) led what it called the Jana Andolan-III in early 2010 in an attempt to force the reactionary parties to fully implement that earlier agreement and possibly to further develop the revolution in Nepal. Although this involved huge mass demonstrations and a general strike (bandh), mere protests of this sort were not sufficient to force the reactionary parties to fulfill their promises.
        There have been many threats by the UCPN(Maoist) to launch yet another Jana Andolan, but growing numbers of the members of the UCPN(Maoist) now seem to agree that it will take something much more powerful than mere mass demonstrations to truly change and revolutionize Nepal.

JANATHANA SARKAR (or: JANATANA SARKAR)
Literally, People’s Government. This is the name of the local governments being set up by the masses with the help of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the rural areas they already pretty firmly control.
        See also the document, “Introduction to the Policy Programme of Janathana Sarkar”, by the CPI(M-L) [People’s War], June 1, 2004, at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/India/CPI-Maoist-Docs/PWG/JanathanaSarkar.doc

JANGALKHAND
[Bengali: Sometimes two words: Jangal Khand] An alternate name for the Jangalmahal (see below). It literally means “forested realm”, but it seems also to be put forward by some as the possible name for a proposed independent state in India (separating from West Bengal).

JANGALMAHAL
[Bengali:] The Jangalmahal, or sometimes two words: Jangal Mahal, and which means “forested belt”, is the region consisting of the largest parts of these three districts in the Indian state of West Bengal: Paschim Medinipur (or West Midnapore), Bankura and Purulia. The population of the Jangalmahal consists mostly of
Adivasis or “tribals” (tribal peoples), who are very poor and generally severely exploited and oppressed. There are about 1.3 million Adivasis in the 74 “blocks” (sub-districts) of the Jangalmahal. There has been considerable Maoist revolutionary activity in this region in support of Adivasi struggles against the theft of their land, etc., especially in the area around Lalgarh village in West Midnapore.
        Occasionally the term Jangalmahal is used in a looser and broader sense to cover a much larger region of the forested, tribal belt in parts of five states of east-central India: West Bengal, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar.

JANTELOVEN   [Pronounced (very roughly): yahn-teh-low-ven]
A set of social rules that are presumed to be characteristic of Scandinavian culture (Norway, Sweden, Denmark). The word comes from a 1933 novel by the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose about the rural town Jante, where the following laws applied:
        1. You shall not think that you are somebody.
        2. You shall not think you’re quite as good as us.
        3. You shall not think you are wiser than us.
        4. You shall not fool yourself into thinking you are better than us.
        5. You shall not think that you know more than us.
        6. You shall not think that you are more than us.
        7. You shall not think that you amount to anything.
        8. You shall not laugh at us.
        9. You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
       10. You shall not think that you can teach us anything.
        In social and cultural discussions, the word is used exclusively in a negative sense.
        The questions of whether the “Jantelov” exists, to what extent, whether it’s exclusive to Scandinavia and why it exists in the first place, are up for discussion. One’s answer will largely depend on class outlook. Bourgeois ideologues might refer to “Janteloven” in order to equate socialist and egalitarian ideals with “small-town pettyness”. However, other interpretations exist.
        “Janteloven” might illustrate how class struggle in the ideological field leads to different interpretations of concepts that are common to the whole culture. —B.T. [Jan. 27, 2023]
        See also:
IDEOLOGY

“JANUARY REVOLUTION”   (Shanghai, January 1967)
The first major seizure of power away from the capitalist-roaders during the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

“Proletarian revolutionaries are uniting to seize power from the handful of persons within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road. This is the strategic task for the new stage of the great proletarian cultural revolution. It is the decisive battle between the proletariat and the masses of working people on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and its agents in the Party on the other.
         “This mighty revolutionary storm started in Shanghai. The revolutionary masses in Shanghai have called it the great ‘January Revolution.’ Our great leader Chairman Mao immediately expressed resolute support for it. He called on the workers, peasants, revolutionary students, revolutionary intellectuals and revolutionary cadres to study the experience of the revolutionary rebels of Shanghai and he called on the People’s Liberation Army actively to support and assist the proletarian revolutionaries in their struggle to seize power.”   —“On the Proletarian Revolutionaries’ Struggle to Seize Power”, Hongqi [“Red Flag”] editorial, #3, 1967; Peking Review, vol. 10, #6, Feb. 3, 1967, p. 10.

JAPAN — History Of — 1930s
        See also entries below and:
“COMFORT WOMEN”,   FEBRUARY 26 INCIDENT,   HAMAGUCHI ASSASSINATION INCIDENT,   MAY 15 INCIDENT,   SEPTEMBER 18 INCIDENT,   “THREE ALLS”,   BIOLOGICAL WARFARE EXPERIMENTS—By Japan in the 1930s-1940s

JAPAN — Immigration
The demographic trends in Japan are basically for the population to rapidly shrink and for the remaining population to get ever-older on average. Both these trends are extremely negative from the point of view of the capitalist economy. The population is shrinking because of the very low fertility rate, which is itself due to the need for capitalists to work both women and men for long hours and at wage levels that make supporting a family difficult. In addition, for racist reasons Japan has been extremely reluctant to allow large numbers of immigrants into the country. Economic requirements have forced the country to allow a bit more immigration recently, however, as well as much larger numbers of temporary guest workers. Despite this, however, the falling and aging population of Japan continues to put the country at a gradually worsening economic disadvantage as compared with other major capitalist-imperialist countries who allow more immigration.

“Vexed by labor shortages in their rapidly aging country, lawmakers relaxed Japan’s longstanding insularity early Saturday by authorizing a sharp increase in the number of foreign workers.... More than a quarter-million visas of five-year duration will be granted to unskilled guest laborers for the first time, starting in 2019....
        “In the absence of immigration, Japan’s population is projected to shrink by about 16 million people—or nearly 13 percent—over the next 25 years, while the proportion of those over the age of 65 is expected to rise from a quarter of the population to more than a third....
        “Yet the new law, which came under considerable criticism from opposition parties, does not represent an embrace of immigration so much as a deeply ambivalent business calculation.... ‘This isn’t about Japan becoming a multicultural society and it’s not about Japan opening its doors to become more globally oriented,’ said Gabriele Vogt, a professor of Japanese politics and society at the University of Hamburg who has studied migration. ‘This is just very plain labor market politics.’
        “As of October, there were nearly 1.3 million foreign workers in Japan, according to the government. Many employers use the trainees as cheap labor, and they often are abused. Between 2015 and 2017, the government reported that 63 foreign trainees had died from accidents or illness in Japan, with another six committing suicide. Critics fear the new law could simply extend the exploitation of foreign workers.” —Motoko Rich, “Out of Necessity, an Insular Japan Changes Its Tune on Foreign Caregivers”, New York Times, Dec. 8, 2018.

JAPANESE IMPERIALISM
[To be added...]
        See also entries above about Japan, and specific discussion of aspects of Japanese imperialism in entries below.

“In the middle of the twentieth century Japan will meet Europe on the plains of Asia and wrest from her the mastery of the world.” —Japanese Count Okuma Shigenobu, Prime Minister of Japan, 1915. Quoted by Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia (NY: Random House, 1941), title page.
         [Okuma (1838-1922) was part of the Japanese aristocracy and for his services to imperial Japan was posthumously made a prince. The Wikipedia entry on Okuma (accessed on 13 July 2018) notes that he was “an early advocate of Western science and culture in Japan”, thus touting his supposedly progressive views. It somehow fails to mention the imperialist and militaristic intentions of his own and of the entire Japanese ruling class. —Ed.]

JAPAN — Imperialist War Against China (1937-1946)
[Intro to be added...]

“For most of the first four years of the Sino-Japanese War, the United States continued to supply Japan with vital raw materials, the most important of which was oil, so in a way Americans were collaborators in China’s humiliation and despoliation. In 1931, after the Mukden Incident, the headline in the Hearst tabloids provided a succinct summary of the American attitude, wherein its sentimental attachments to China were trumped by China’s strategic unimportance. ‘WE SYMPATHIZE. BUT IT IS NOT OUR CONCERN.’ The same headline could have been written after the Japanese invasion of 1937, even if the sympathy was greater and the knowledge of Japanese atrocities more immediate.” —Richard Bernstein, China 1945 (2014), pp. 54-55. [Bernstein is a bourgeois American historian, so his acknowledgement of American complicity in the Japanese imperialist war against China is all the more interesting. —Ed.]

JAPAN — In and Out of Recession
Around 1991 Japan entered a long period of stagnation, a period of “in-and-out-of-recession” with only weak recoveries in between the recessions. In this it pioneered what has become a more general phenomenon for almost the whole capitalist world (excepting China so far, though China’s rate of GDP growth is also seriously slowing). This increased stagnation amounts to an intensified stage in the long-developing world
overproduction crisis that first began around 1973. In the relatively near future there will undoubtedly be further stages of intensification of this crisis, even beyond the “in-and-out-of-recession” phase.
        The graph at the right shows this weak Japanese economy over the period of 2003 to 2018, with its frequent recessions and short and shallow recoveries in between them.
        Why did Japan “lead the way” in entering this new period of “in-and-out-of-recession” which has now enveloped almost the whole world? Some of the plausible explanations include: 1) Japan has fewer economic resources than the U.S. and Europe, a smaller home market, and less imperialist penetration of the rest of the world; 2) Japan’s birth rate is falling faster than that of most advanced capitalist countries and its population is aging faster; and 3) Japan—for racist reasons primarily—refuses to allow more than a tiny token amount of immigration into the country. (Immigration, by increasing the population and economic activity, itself helps to promote the expansion of the economy.) But all these factors have only served to speed up the process of the development of the overproduction crisis in Japan. That process is continuing everywhere.
        See also: “IN-AND-OUT-OF-RECESSION”

JAPAN — Legal System

“In Japan, nearly 99 out of 100 indictments end in conviction—an outcome sometimes obtained through confessions made under duress.” —New York Times, March 16, 2019.

JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT CAMPS — In the U.S. During World War II
The illegal, unconstitutional and totally unnecessary arrest and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-American residents on the West Coast, including both citizens and non-citizens, at the beginning of the U.S. participation in World War II. This outrageously racist and jingoistic act was carried out after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, even though no American of Japanese descent had been convicted of espionage or sabotage.
        [More to be added...]

“A Jap is a Jap. There is no way to determine their loyalty.” —Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, at the time the Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put into concentration camps. Quoted by Glenn C. Altschuler in a review of Richard Reeves, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II (2015), San Francisco Chroncicle, April 26, 2015, p. N-1.

“We can cover their legal situation ... in spite of the Constitution. The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.” —Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, at the same time, quoted in the same article mentioned above. [Laws and the U.S. Constitution are always just scraps of paper whenever the ruling class feels it needs to dispense with them. —Ed.]

JAURÈS, Jean Léon   (1850-1914)
A prominent leader of the the French socialist movement, and founder and editor of the newspaper L’Humanité. He was the leader of the Right, or opportunist, wing of the French Socialist Party. However, he actively fought against militarism and was assassinated by an agent of the militarists just before World War I began.
        Jaurès and his followers used the pretext of “freedom of criticism” to revise Marxist principles and preached class collaboration between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

JAWAN
A soldier (non-officer). Common term in India and other countries of south Asia.

JESUITS (Society of Jesus)
        1. A fanatical and ultra-disciplined religous organization within the Roman Catholic Church which was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1534 and which has specialized in Catholic education and religious indoctrination, and ideological oppression.
        2. [Jesuit:] One given to intrigue or equivocation. [Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., 1991]
        See also:
INDIVIDUALISM—Within a Revolutionary Party,   LAGRANGE, Joseph-Louis [Alexander quote]

“[F]or the Jesuits, the principle of ‘obedience’ was not just a practical concession to the requirements of efficient action, but a religious ideal of the highest order. ‘With all judgment of our own put aside, we ought ... to be obedient to the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our Holy Mother the hierarchical Church,’ wrote Ignatius [Loyola] in The Spiritual Exercises. This obedience extends not only to actions, but also to opinions and even sense perceptions. ‘To keep ourselves right in all things,’ Ignatius wrote, ‘we ought to hold fast to this principle: What I see as white I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.’” —Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal (2014), p. 40. [This is indeed dogmatism to the point of total fanaticism. —S.H.]

JEVONS, William Stanley   (1835-82)
A British bourgeois economist, and one of the founders of the notorious
marginalist school of modern bourgeois economic thought.
        See also: SUNSPOT THEORY

JHAPA REVOLT
Jhapa is one of the 75 administrative districts of Nepal, and is situated in the southeast corner of the country adjacent to the Indian state of Bihar. Beginning in May 1971 a significant 4-year peasant revolt was initiated there by some young militants of the Communist Party of Nepal. These militants were inspired by the Naxalbari Uprising in West Bengal, India, in 1967, and to some degree this revolt played a similar role in spurring the development of the anti-revisionist Communist movement in Nepal as Naxalbari itself did in India. The Revolt was as much against the revisionist line of the CPN (at least from 1953 on) as it was against the landlords and the Nepal government. Although the Revolt was unsuccessful in the end, and even though some of the people involved are now themselves leaders of the revisionist
CPN(UML), it was nevertheless a significant step forward at the time.
        See also: NEPAL—Maoist Parties In

JIANG Qing   (Old style: Chiang Ching)   (1914-91)
Jiang Qing was Mao Zedong’s third wife, and the most prominent member of the so-called
“Gang of Four” who played a prominent role in leading the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and who attempted unsuccessfully to continue the Chinese revolution after the death of Mao.
        After completing elementary school she enrolled in an acting school in Tai’an and at the age of 15 or 16 became part of an avant-garde theatrical group in 1929. In Qingdao in 1930 she began to associate with the Communist Party, and became a member in 1931. She was arrested for political activities and briefly imprisoned in 1933. In 1934 she married the film critic Ma Jiliang, and was divorced in 1937 after a scandalous affair. Not long after the Sino-Japanese War broke out Jiang went to Yanan which was the central base of the revolution. She worked at the Lu Xun Art Institute there, and met Mao. Within a year they were married.
        For many years Jiang Qing did not play much of a public role (required, it is said, by the Party leadership which had not approved of her marriage to Mao). In the early 1960s, however, she began to work on reforming the traditional Beijing Opera, by instilling more up-to-date themes and revolutionary content into it. She played an especially prominent role in promoting revolutionary art, literature, music, drama and films during the GPCR. Many of the model revolutionary Chinese operas of that period were produced with her guidance and direction. See: BEIJING (PEKING) OPERA
        It seems that she and the other top Party leaders who tried to remain loyal to Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought [as our revolutionary science was then called] failed to use the mass line that Mao always strongly advocated, and failed to unite the great majority of the masses and the Party members against the relatively small number revisionists and capitalist-roaders within the Party. This is why Mao himself gave the friendly advice to this core of revolutionary leaders not to form themselves into a “Gang of Four” (which is the origin of the phrase).
        The revisionists within the CCP bided their time until Mao died on September 9, 1976. Less than a month later, on October 6, 1976, Jiang Qing and the other members of the “Gang of Four” were arrested and imprisoned. A show trial for them began in 1980, and according to the revisionists only Jiang Qing bothered to mount any sort of defense. She stated that she had obeyed the orders of Chairman Mao at all times and always tried to defend Mao and his political line. She also made the famous statement that “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite.” At the conclusion of the trial in 1981, Jiang Qing was sentenced to death. In 1983 her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. While in prison she developed throat cancer and in 1991 was released temporarily to a hospital. She reportedly committed suicide before she could be returned to prison. It is claimed that she left a suicide note which read:

“Today the revolution has been stolen by the revisionist clique of Deng, Peng Zhen, and Yang Shangkun. Chairman Mao exterminated Liu Shaoqi, but not Deng, and the result of this omission is that unending evils have been unleashed on the Chinese people and nation. Chairman, your student and fighter is coming to see you!” —Jiang Qing, as reported in the book by Ross Terrill, The White-Boned Demon (2000).

However, there are also suspicions that she was murdered by her revisionist jailers, to prevent her from becoming a rallying point for Maoists. In that case her “suicide note” may have merely been from something else she wrote, such as perhaps a journal.
        For a long, well-researched article about Jiang Qing and her struggles against revisionism, which is written from a Maoist perspective, see “Chiang Ching: The Revolutionary Ambitions of a Communist Leader”, by Zafia Ryan, at: https://www.bannedthought.net/International/RIM/AWTW/1993-19/Chiang_Ching.htm

“You have been wronged. Today we are separating into two worlds. I am old and will soon die. May each keep his peace. These few words may be my last message to you. Human life is limited, but revolution knows no bounds. In the struggle of the past ten years I have tried to reach the peak of revolution, but I was not successful. But you could reach the top. If you fail, you will plunge into a fathomless abyss. Your body will shatter. Your bones will break.” —Said to be a prose poem, summation and warning written by Mao shortly before his death and sent to Jiang Qing. [As posted by Mike Ely on the Kasama-Threads website on Oct. 15, 2008.]

JIANG Zemin   (Old style: Chiang Tse-min)   (1926-   )
Top revisionist ruler in China after the death of
Deng Xiaoping. He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1989-2002, and President of the People’s Republic of China from 1993-2003. Deng groomed him as his principal successor, and called him the “core” of the third generation of leaders of the CCP and PRC. As head of the Party and state he loyally maintained Deng’s pro-capitalist policies. His successor as the top boss of the Chinese capitalist-imperialist regime was Hu Jintao.

JIEFANGJUN BAO
Liberation Army Daily, the newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army in China.

JIHAD
Arabic word which is generally understood to mean “holy war” in the non-Arab world, though it is more accurately translated into English as “struggle”. Whether such struggle is actually part of a holy war or an anti-imperialist war depends upon the speaker and the context.

JIN
A traditional unit of weight in China and other Asian countries. Jin is the term used in Mandarin Chinese, while the English term is catty (which originated from the Malay word for the same weight, kati). However, many English translations of articles published in China during the Mao era use the term jin rather than catty. A jin (or catty) was traditionally equivalent to 1 1/3 pounds, but has been more precisely defined in terms of metric system units in various countries. In many countries it is now defined to be either exactly 600 grams, or else near to that. In Hong Kong it is still defined as 604.78982 grams (or exactly 1 1/3 pounds). But in mainland China the jin or shijin (“market catty”) is now defined as 500 grams, or 1/2 kilogram.

JOB LOSS CURVE
A graph showing the percentage of jobs lost during a recession beginning at the start of that recession. The graph at the right (from the Calculated Risk website) shows the job loss curves for all the U.S. recessions since World War II. Note that the current
“Great Recession” has by far the worse and most prolonged job losses of any of these recessions—even according to distorted official statistics! The graph also shows that there was a small short term boost in jobs because of federal government hiring for the 2010 census project.

JOB HOPPING or JOB SWITCHING
See:
CHURN

JOBLESS RECOVERY
A recovery from an economic recession in terms of renewed
GDP growth which is not matched (or only feebly so) in terms of job growth, and the hiring back of workers who were laid off during the recession.
        The first recession in the U.S. to be given this description was that of 1990-91, though a recovery in jobs did eventually occur (as the so-called “Dot.com” or “New Economy” bubble developed). This same phenomenon was even more pronounced in the 2001 recession and its aftermath. Indeed, a considerable part of the very slow job recovery after that recession was actually due to phony statistics rather than to actual job growth. But the most extreme example so far of a jobless recovery has been in the aftermath of the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009. A year and a half after this recession is said to be over by bourgeois economists even the official unemployment rate is still around 10%, and the actual unemployment rate, including long-term discouraged workers who have given up looking for work, is over 20%.
        The fact that jobs are returning ever slower after recessions, or even not at all, is due to two major factors:
        1) The underlying contradictions of the capitalist economy are becoming ever worse, and it is getting harder and harder to resolve them even temporarily.
        2) There is a long term trend under capitalism to drastically improve productivity and to require ever fewer workers to produce all the goods and services for which there is effective market demand. (This is sometimes called the problem of automation.)

JOBS — Disappearing
[Intro to be added.]
        See also:
COMPUTERS—and Unemployment,   ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE,   AUTOMATION—The Claim that Automation Creates More Jobs than It Displaces

“The emerging automation wave that [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt called attention to at Davos [in 2014] is going to replace millions of jobs and alter the nature of many of those jobs that remain. Some technology experts like Ben Way expect a loss of 70 percent of existing jobs in the next three decades, with little hope that very many new jobs will emerge to replace what is lost. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Randall Collins expects an unemployment rate in the neighborhood of 50 percent. One need not accept these predictions—they strike us as speculative if not extreme—to see that at the very least what is about to transpire is going to put severe downward pressure on wages and working conditions, which already are deplorable. ‘What does the “end of work” mean, exactly?’ journalist Derek Thompson asked in a penetrating examination of automation in a 2015 issue of the Atlantic. ‘It does not mean the imminence of total unemployment, nor is the United States likely to face, say, 30 or 50 percent unemployment within the next decade. Rather, technology could exert a slow but continual downward pressure on the value and availability of work—that is, on wages and on the share of prime-age workers with full-time jobs.’”
         —Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (2016), p. 20. [It is interesting to see here that even many people who are alarmed about disappearing jobs find it hard to understand just how many existing jobs are going to disappear, and just how soon that will occur! —Ed.]

“We have developed a fairly definite idea that an employer’s business is to eliminate work.” —Rexford G. Tugwell, Industry’s Coming of Age (NY: 1927), p. 37; quoted in Eugen Varga, The Decline of Capitalism (1928), p. 16.
         [Tugwell was a liberal bourgeois economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original “Brain Trust” which developed policy recommendations resulting in Roosevelt’s “New Deal” program. It is true, of course, that since the beginnings of capitalism it has been the goal of every capitalist to produce goods with ever smaller amounts of work and ever fewer workers. These efforts took one qualitative leap with the Industrial Revolution, and are now taking a much greater and more profound qualitative leap with modern automation and artificial intelligence. —Ed.]

“Robots could eliminate 75 million jobs globally by 2022 and create 133 million others, according to a World Economic Forum report released last year. Global manufacturers could also face a potential shortage of 7.9 million workers by 2030, warns a study released last year by the consulting firm Korn Ferry.” —Nick Leiber, “Early Lessons in Robotics”, New York Times, June 7, 2019.
         [Even while many bourgeois economists now recognize that jobs are disappearing rapidly, and new jobs are coming into existence at an ever slower pace, some bourgeois ideologists refuse to believe that any of this could possibly be true! However where are the supposed “133 million” new jobs going to be? In what industries? And the claim that there will be a shortage of workers in manufacturing specifically is utter nonsense given the decades-long decline in world manufacturing jobs that is overall only speeding up. —Ed.]

JOBS, Steve   (1955-2011)
American entrepreneurial capitalist, co-founder of Apple Computer Corporation, and thoroughly despicable individual. He cheated his business partners, tried to deny the paternity of his daughter and had to be forced into making child care payments, among other egregious sins. Of course he is glorified by the bourgeois media in the U.S.
        See also:
CORPORATIONS—Extravagances Of,   ORGAN TRANSPLANTS [AP Report]

JOTEDAR
[Bengali language:] A small landlord; part of a land-holding rural elite. Instead of cultivating the land himself, he leases it out to share-croppers. This term is often used in English-language articles in India.

“JULY DAYS”   [Russia: 1917]
A more or less spontaneous mass revolutionary upsurge in Russia in the summer of 1917, after the overthrow of the Tsar in March (the “February Revolution”), but before conditions and preparations were completed for the Bolshevik Revolution in November (the “October Revolution”).
        See also:
INVESTIGATION—Before Launching Political Action

JUNG, Carl Gustav   (1875-1961)
Swiss psychiatrist, at one time a colleague of
Sigmund Freud, who went on to construct his own psychoanalytic theory rather different from that of Freud—though just as unscientific. “Jung was alive to the potential of the supernatural. He believed in demons and angels.” [David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard (2015), p. 120.] Jung’s theory, unlike Freud’s, put little emphasis on the role of sexual impulses in people, though more emphasis on the role of the pursuit of personal power. His theory centered on the hypothesized deep, “collective unconscious” which individuals supposedly have. Jung’s approach focused on the imagined hidden significance of symbols and concentrated on the supposed symbolic significance of dreams.

JUNK BOND
A
bond issued by a capitalist corporation which has a very low rating by the securities rating agencies based on their estimate that company may not be able to redeem the bond when it comes due. In other words a bond issued by a company for which there is some reason to think that it might go bankrupt or otherwise be unable to pay its debts in the future. Unless and until the company actually does go bankrupt, the bonds it issues are not valueless, but they are obviously highly risky.
        Since junk bonds are risky, they command a higher rate of interest. Starting in the 1990s in the U.S., Wall Street brokers began selling junk bonds to the middle-class public in a major way. Obviously the term they themselves were using for these risky investments—“junk bonds”—did not promote their sale! Consequently alternative names such as “high-yield debt” were coined in order to better foist these risky investments off on unsuspecting yet greedy investors.

JUNKER   [Pronounced: YOONG-ker]
A member of the Prussian landed aristocracy.

JUST (Adj.)
In accordance with the principles of justice; conforming to the standards we have for answering to (or meeting) the common, collective interests of the people.

JUSTICE
        1. [Marxist usage:] A social arrangement that accords with the genuine interests of the people, and thus where there is no oppression or exploitation.
        2. [Bourgeois usage:] A (supposedly) harmonious balance between the “rights” of the various members of society, including the “right” of capitalists to exploit and oppress working people at home and abroad.




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