“NO INVESTIGATION, NO RIGHT TO SPEAK”
“Speaking specifically, people engaged in practical work must at all
times keep abreast of changing conditions, and this is something for which no Communist
Party in any country can depend on others. Therefore, everyone engaged in practical work
must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially
necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise
they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, ‘No
investigation, no right to speak’, has been ridiculed as ‘narrow empiricism’, to this
day I do not regret having made it; what is more, I still insist that without
investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak.” —Mao, “Preface and Postscript
to Rural Surveys” (March-April 1941), Selected Works, vol. 3, p. 13.
“Freedom of science is taken to mean that people write on every subject
which they have not studied, and put this forward as the only strictly scientific method.”
—Engels, criticizing Eugen Dühring and those like him, Anti-Dühring,
Preface, 1878, MECW 25:6.
“NOBEL PRIZE” IN ECONOMICS (So-called!)
A phony, erroneously-called “Nobel Prize”, awarded by the Swedish Central Bank each year to
one or more right-wing bourgeois economists, in an attempt to reinforce the lying bourgeois
conception of what economics actually is. For Marxist revolutionaries this “prize” should be
merely scoffed at as the disgusting travesty that it obviously is.
“In October 2016, the Sveriges Riksbank (Swedish Central Bank) Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—commonly but incorrectly called the Nobel
Prize in Economics—was awarded to two European-born, U.S.-based economists, Oliver Hart
and Bengt Holmström, for their work on contracts related to executive pay. Hart and
Holmstroöm were lauded for having theorized what was thought to be the optimal mix
of risk and incentives in pay packages for corporate executives, thereby determining the
appropriate combination of basic salary, bonuses, and share options. In other words,
they received the Riksbank Nobel Memorial Prize for their efforts to rationalize the
exorbitant paychecks of CEOs and other corporate leaders—a direct service to big
business. In most cases, however, the prize has not been given for such practical
services to business, but has been granted rather to those extending neoclassical
economic ideology.
“In 1901, Alfred Nobel established
five prizes: in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. It
was not until sixty years later, in 1969, that the Swedish Central Bank separately
sponsored the economics prize, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Nobel family,
which nevertheless insisted it be given a different name, to emphasize both the
different source of funding and the fact that it was a memorial award ostensibly in
Nobel’s honor (though in reality simply grabbing onto the prestige associated with the
Nobel prizes), and not one of the original prizes.
“The reasons for the funding of
the economic prize were purely political. In 1968, neoclassical or ‘marginalist’
economics was threatened as never before. The Swedish Social Democratic Party was at
its height. Meanwhile, rebellions were breaking out everywhere against orthodox
economics. The Union of Radical Political Economics (URPE) was formed in the United
States that year. The Riksbank, advised by a young Swedish Social Democrat turned
conservative economist, Assar Lindbeck, opted to establish the prize as a device to
enhance the prestige of neoclassical economics—giving it a monopoly over ‘economic
science’—in its war against Swedish Social Democrats and radical economists. The
original selection committee for the Riksbank Prize included two leading members of
the Mont Pelerin Society (associated with arch-conservative economists Friedrich
Hayek and Milton Friedman), but its driving force then and for the next quarter
century was Lindbeck. In 1971, he published his most popular book, The Political
Economy of the New Left (with a foreward by Paul Samuelson, who had received the
prize the year before). Lindbeck’s book was directed against URPE, and focused its
attacks on Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital and the radical
economics of Monthly Review.
[The editorial then goes on to
document and complain about the fact that this so-called “Nobel Prize” in economics
has been given almost exclusively to “right-wing, ‘free market’ Chicago School”
economists, and that for the last 40 years, at least, not even social democrats or
even genuine Keynesian economists have won the prize—let alone any supposedly real
“leftists” like Joan Robinson or Paul Sweezy. —Ed.]
“Economic historians Avner Offer
and Gabriel Söderberg, in their valuable new book The Nobel Factor: The Prize
in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn (Princeton University Press,
2016), from which much of the above analysis is taken (see also Yasha Levine, ‘There
is no Nobel Prize in Economics,’ Alternet, October 12, 2012), argue that the Riksbank
Prize was embraced by the mainstream media and academia as a genuine Nobel Prize,
carrying the same prestige as all the others. It paid off: the Riksbank and the
conservative economists associated with it achieved their objectives to an extent
that must have exceeded their wildest dreams. The prize has been enormously successful
in narrowing the conception of what constitutes economics—a field that was previously
much wider. The ideology of an economics serving the 1 percent has become entrenched
in academic, policy, and media discourse, with all other approaches downgraded as
eccentric and ‘non-scientific.’ Winners of the Riksbank Prize form a kind of ‘Nobelity’
in economics that has elevated some approaches while practically extinguishing others.
Economics in its hegemonic version has turned quite blatantly and unashamedly into the
‘bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic,’ as Marx wrote of marginalist or
‘vulgar economics.’ An ideological coup indeed!”
—“Notes from the Editors” [John
Bellamy Foster], Monthly Review, December 2016. [It should be added that it has
always gone without saying that no true Marxist economist could ever be considered for
a moment as someone appropriate to award this “Nobel prize in economics” to. And perhaps
it would only have served to further legitimize this totally pro-capitalist Riksbank
prize if it had actually been awarded to a wider range of bourgeois economists, such as
social democrats (in addition to the lone example of Gunnar Myrdal) or to genuine
Keynesians like Joan Robinson. —Ed.]
“NOBODY CARES”
When we revolutionary Marxists talk to people—especially young people—about the problems in
society, both within our own country and around the world, we sometimes get the response
“Nobody cares about that!” Of course that really just means that the particular person and his
or her milieu don’t presently care about that particular problem. In that case, we need to focus
our discussion with them on the social problems they do personally care about!
But what if they don’t seem to care much about anything beyond themselves and their personal
concerns? Here is a portion of a letter that I received recently from a young friend:
“People have been shoving ‘nobody cares’ in my face in response to my
speech and writing since I was a little kid. When I bring up anything beyond the most
puerile level of politics, people say that nobody cares. If it’s related to Palestine,
nobody cares. If it’s related to China, nobody cares. If it’s related to the country that
the person I’m speaking to is from, they don’t care. If it’s related to the United States,
nobody cares. If it’s related to the lot of the people of the ghetto, the people that I
am surrounded by and go to school with, nobody cares. And if it’s related to a book, then
people really don’t care.
“The implications for a revolutionary
Marxist are obvious. If the very people who are supposed to liberate themselves cannot
devote even a moment of their time to independent consideration of the world they live in,
then our work is impossible. If people care more about having sex, getting drunk, and
generally having a good time than they care about improving their own lives, then they
cannot be expected to respond to Marxism.
“My question is thus: What, in your
opinion, is the cause of this apathy? What can be done to combat it? Is it new and specific
to the most affluent parts of the world, or has it been around for a long time?” —M.K.
A partial response to this could perhaps be sort of along these lines:
It is true that if people, young or old, really
do not care about some social problem or existing outrage, they will not want to discuss
it, let alone participate in any activity or struggle against that particular injustice. This is
why our approach to the masses is to first try to determine what issues particular people
or groups of people do already care about, and try to draw them into struggle around those
issues. As they then participate in that one or a few areas of struggle we try to get them to
understand that it is the capitalist system which is responsible for not only the one or
a few issues which do concern them, but for most of the other major problems in contemporary
society as well. That is, we try to broaden and deepen their understanding, and develop them into
people strongly opposed to the whole capitalist-imperialist system.
However, we also understand that there are many
people today who are not sufficiently concerned with any of the very serious problems and
outrages in contemporary society to the point where they are even willing to investigate the
causes of those problems let alone actively join the struggle against them. In a few cases these
will be people who actually benefit from these injustices and will probably never come to be
personally victimized by them nor come to oppose them. This includes members of the enemy
bourgeoisie and those directly working for them (such as the
police and most politicians), for example, but also some members of other classes, such as the
petty bourgeoisie and even some of the better off
working-class sections of the so-called “middle class”.
But the largest part of those who today are
apathetic toward injustice and other social problems will likely be forced by the evil
workings of the capitalist system to eventually become very concerned indeed. If the capitalist
system were really capable of satisfying the needs and interests of the great majority over the
long run, then very few individuals would ever consider rising up against it. But the actual
fact is that the ruling capitalist class, and their system, is in growing economic and political
crisis and is driving more and more millions of people down in this country and around the world.
(See for example the entry on BILLIONAIRES
for one set of statistics about this.)
For those who are not at present consciously
victimized by the capitalist system, we will do what we can to raise their consciousness, but
mostly we will just have to wait for the system which they do not yet recognize as their enemy
to turn against them personally in a much more vicious way. And that day is rather quickly
approaching. In the meanwhile we have to focus our attention on organizing and further politically
educating the sections of the population who are already under attack economically, or because of
national, racial, sexual or gender discrimination, or in the many other possible ways.
It is true that bourgeois society does try, with
considerable success, to get people to focus only on their own individual interests and to be
concerned only with their own private lives. It tries to get them to push out of their minds the
misery of other people in this country and around the world, to forget about U.S. imperialist
wars, global warming and the growing environmental problems, the fact that the working class is
being driven down with declining real wages and benefits and disappearing jobs. But people can
no longer push these things out of their minds when it hits home to them personally, their family
or their friends. And that is what is beginning to happen more and more at the present time.
With regard to the youth specifically, there
are already many youth who are starting to become politically concerned and active. Black and
other minority youth cannot avoid racial discrimination or stop thinking about it even if they
would like to. Still, it is true that many youth in this society at present—including quite
a few who are out of school—are in a situation where they do not yet have to be concerned
about finding a good job and supporting themselves, and who at present have little personal
reason to be concerned about U.S. imperialist wars, environmental destruction, and other major
problems of capitalist society. But most of them will soon be on their own and wondering what
hit them as the current crises of the system intensify. At that point they will no longer be
saying “nobody cares” about those problems, but rather “what in the hell can we do about all of
these problems and disasters?” —S.H.
“When Guatemalan guerrillas enter a village, they don’t hand out tracts
by Marx or Mao; instead they talk to the villagers about their own lives: about how they
see themselves and how they came to be who they are, about their deepest longings and the
things they’ve striven for and hope for, about the way in which their deepest longings
were frustrated by the society in which they lived. Then the guerrillas encourage the
villagers to talk about their lives. And then a marvelous thing begins to happen. People
who thought that their deepest problems and frustrations were their individual problems
discover that their problems and longings are all the same.... and, finally, that out of
the discovery of their common humanity comes the decision that men must unite together
in the struggle to destroy the conditions of their common oppression. That, it seems to
me, is what we are about.” —Greg Calvert, National Secretary of SDS, in a 1967 speech,
quoted in Steward Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy
(1990), p. 77.
NON-COGNITIVISM
A type of bourgeois ethical theory which—amazingly!—denies that moral judgments are meaningful
and either true or false. Non-cognitivist ethical theories deny, for example, that saying
“Genocide is wrong” is a meaningful statement, and also deny that the statement is true or
false! The logical positivists, in particular, claimed
this about moral judgments. Some people in this general positivist tradition, including
Charles Stevenson, went on to claim that moral judgments are
merely expressions of emotion and “commands” that others have the same emotional reaction to
something as the speaker does. (Thus for them “murder is wrong” is roughly equivalent to
“murder—UGH!—and that’s the way you should feel too!”) Another, much more widespread, variation
of non-cognitivism is the notion that moral judgments merely express approval or disapproval,
but are neither true nor false. This is the view of several influential British philosophers
including John Austin and R. M. Hare, and—indoctrinated by them—the
editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Of course, according to our MLM ethical
theory, moral statements are definitely meaningful, and are true or false. Thus we say that
the statement “It will be a very good and important thing to overthrow imperialism and put an
end to imperialist wars!” is both fully meaningful, and definitely true.
“NONFUNGIBLE TOKEN” (NFT)
An absurd ultra-bourgeois project to make digital versions of works of art, or anything else which is
in digital form, into a guaranteed single individual copy, which can then be bought and sold for
profit.
Digital files, whether they represent images, music,
documents, or anything else, can easily be reproduced at essentially no cost. If you have a digital
file of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, it can easily and cheaply be made available
to everyone who wants a copy on their computer or other device. But in capitalist society the owners
of expensive paintings, or music rights, etc., do not like this, nor do many of those who create new
works of art or music in present-day capitalist society. The capitalist ideal for art, music, and
anything else that can be put in digital form, is to find ways to profitably sell the digital copies
(even if it costs virtually nothing to create those copies). Thus in capitalist society it is deemed
a serious crime to make a digital copy of a book, photograph or piece of music without paying the
copyright owners whatever they demand.
But in the case of NFTs things go even beyond this.
The idea here is to create one single digital file (such as one containing a new work of art,
photograph, piece of music, etc.) which alone “is” the work of art, and to only allow another
person to possess or even see that work (except perhaps for a crude rough image of it) if they buy
it from the current owner! So nonfungible tokens are in fact bourgeois
intellectual property gone absolutely mad! Only in
bourgeois society would someone even think about doing something as wildly selfish as this.
The method used to register the ownership of a
particular NFT is though the distributed blockchain accounting scheme so beloved by
cryptocurrency fans. In the same way that the ownership of
Bitcoins can be tracked and proven through blockchains, so can the
ownership and transfer of NFTs. And, presumably, only the owner will have the security code allowing
them to view the work of art, listen to the music, etc.
In early 2021, around when NFTs were first developed,
there was an initial fad that arose. However, since then much of the buzz has disappeared, and
they may now have diminished into a tiny corner of bourgeois snobbishness.
“Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, [are] the newest frontier in the cryptocurrency
gold rush....
“An NFT, in layman’s terms, is a new kind
of digital collectible item that is stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent
record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain, the distributed ledger system that
underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These collectibles can be bought and sold like
trading cards, and the nature of blockchain technology means that once a token is created, it
can’t be deleted or counterfeited. That makes it useful for artists, musicians and others who
want to create limited edition digital goods.
“The NFT market is exploding right now, as
early adopters and cryptocurrency enthusiasts try to cash in on the trend.”
—Kevin Roose, “The Shift”, New York
Times, March 25, 2021.
[The printed copy of Mr. Roose’s full
column that day was available to anyone with access to that issue of the New York Times.
But, as an experiment, he prepared a digital version of the column as an NFT, and presumably
“sold” that one-and-only digital NFT to some “collector” (with the funds going to charity).
We haven’t heard of anyone else doing this, or caring whether or not they do so! —Ed.]
NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION (NGO)
Local, national, or international organizations or associations which are not set up
by governments. They may have been established for, and pursue, any sort of purpose or agenda,
from health and charitable work, environmental causes, cultural pursuits, or more overtly
political sorts of agendas. While these are not government organizations, it must not be
forgotten that we live in a bourgeois world, and therefore most of these organizations are
still financed and run primarily by the rich ruling bourgeois classes of the world, and serve
the interests of the bourgeoisie of one or another country first of all. There are indeed
health NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders, environmental NGOs such as the World Wildlife
Fund, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, and charitable NGOs such as Oxfam, which all do a
lot of work for the benefit of the people. However, few if any of these sorts of NGOs make any
real effort to change this capitalist-imperialist world which gives rise to the awful
problems in the first place, the prolems which they are only attempting to ameliorate. But
besides these well-intentioned (but largely ineffective) reformist NGOs, there are also much
richer and far more influential NGOs such as the Ford Foundation, which in words support
some of these same good causes, but whose actual primary focus and purpose is to keep
the world pacified and under control of U.S. imperialism and their local agents. Because this
is the real central core of contemporary NGOs in general, we revolutionary Marxists tend to be
suspicious of NGOs, and even downright hostile and totally opposed to the most sinister of
them like the Ford Foundation.
“The contemporary Indian economy is unduly influenced by the activities
of carpetbaggers, a ruthless mafia, rapacious mining interests and giant speculators, all
linked to the politics of criminality. The degeneration is so deep, the rot so acute that
these same moneybags are floating thousands of non-government organizations (NGOs) in
order to trivialise the ills of the system so that people are diverted from seeing that
these are endemic to the very system itself and not due to just some bad individuals or
policies.” —Azad, spokesperson for the Communist Party of India (Maoist), “Maoists in
India: A Rejoinder”, Economic and Political Weekly, October 14, 2006.
NONPROFIT SECTOR (Of the U.S. Economy)
The nonprofit sector of the economy includes all sorts of organizations and bodies of many
different types, including religious organizations, charitable groups, professional
associations, business associations, lobbying associations, political pressure groups,
political parties, organizations concerned with certain health issues, environmental (and
anti-environmental!) groups, reactionary indoctrination groups, educational and
scientific associations and many educational institutions themselves,
think tanks, and on and on. And some nominally non-government
organizations (NGOs) are actually de facto agencies of the
U.S. government (and are largely funded by the government); some officially “nonprofit”
health, insurance or other organizations are actually for-profit business organizations.
(Their profits are distributed in the form of high salaries and perks for their top
management, for example.)
In an advanced capitalist-imperialist
country such as the United States, the nonprofit sector is actually quite large. Many
former governmental services are now left to be handled (often very inadequately) by
nonprofits, for example. In 2009 the greatest portion of nonprofit expenditures (which are
improperly included in the GDP statistical sub-category known as “Personal Consumption
Expenditures”) came to about 2% of total GDP. However, a much
larger section of the workforce is employed in the non-profit sector, around 10%. (See the
quotation below.) This large nonprofit workforce is necessary to both further
indoctrinate the population in views acceptable to the ruling bourgeoisie, and also to
co-opt and buy-off a large number of those who would otherwise be dissidents and “trouble
makers” agitating against the bourgeoisie. And this great expenditure on nonprofits is
possible because of all the wealth being ripped off from both exploited American
and foreign workers.
“According to a 2012 report by the Center for Civil Society Studies
at Johns Hopkins University, nonprofit employment represents 10.1 percent of total
employment in the United States in 2010, with total employees numbering 10.7 million.
The nonprofit workforce is the third largest of all U.S. industries behind retail
trade and manufacturing.
“During the Great Recession
(2007 to 2009), the nonprofit sector gained jobs at an average rate of 1.9 percent
per year, while the private sector lost jobs at a rate of 3.7 percent per year.
“The average annual growth rate
for employment has been higher for nonprofits during the 2000-2010 period at 2.1%
whereas the for-profit sector shrank by -0.6%.
“Nonprofit employment by sector
is approximately 57% for health services, 15% for education, 13% for social assistance,
7% for civic associations, 4% for other, 3% for arts and culture, and 2% for
professional services.” —From a posting on Grant Space/The Foundation Center, at
http://www.grantspace.org (accessed April 23, 2013).
NONVIOLENCE
See also: SATYAGRAHA
“I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody
was going to be nonviolent all the time. I’d say, okay, let’s get with it, we’ll all
be nonviolent. But I don’t go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody’s
going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent.
If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent. But as long as
you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me
talking any nonviolent talk. I don’t think it is fair to tell our people to be
nonviolent unless someone is out there making the Klan and the Citizens Council and
these other groups also be nonviolent.” —Malcolm X, speech in New York City, Dec. 31,
1964; included in Malcolm X Talks to Young People (1969), p. 5.
[Malcolm X was talking about the
refusal of racist white America to be consistently nonviolent toward African-Americans
and therefore the absurdity of African-Americans deciding to totally renounce violence
in their own defense. In exactly the same way the working class as a whole—Black and
white and all other components—cannot rationally embrace nonviolence in its class
struggle with a vicious ruling class which absolutely refuses to renounce violence
against us. —Ed.]
NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION (NATO)
An imperialist military alliance created and dominated by the United States, originally for
the primary purpose of opposing and threatening the Soviet Union, and since the fall of the
U.S.S.R. for more general imperialist hegemonic purposes. In the map at the right we see how
this U.S.-dominated imperialist bloc has continued to expand to the east since the collapse
of the Soviet Union, as part of its continued inter-imperialist contention with Russia. Two
member countries not shown on the map are the U.S. and Canada. And since this map was drawn
two more countries were brought into NATO in 2009: Croatia and Albania. As of early 2017,
the comprador rulers of the small country of Montenegro are also seeking to join NATO.
See also:
CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING BY U.S./NATO (1999)
“When NATO was founded, Lord Ismay, the distinguished British General
who served as NATO’s first secretary general, said its purpose was ‘to keep the Russians
out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’” —Scott Ritter, The Washington
Spectator, Aug. 1, 2016, p. 1.
“It was always recognized [by the U.S. rulers] that Europe might choose
to follow an independent course; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was
partially intended to counter this threat. As soon as the official pretext for NATO
dissolved in 1989 [with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its sphere of control], it
was expanded to the east, in violation of verbal pledges to Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. It has since become a U.S.-run intervention force with far-ranging scope, as
spelled out by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who informed a NATO
conference that ‘NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is
directed for the West,’ and more generally protect sea routes used by tankers and other
‘crucial infrastructure’ of the energy system.” —Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?
(2016), p. 45.
“NORTH” VERSUS “SOUTH” THEORY
A theory of the social world today which focuses on the exploitation and/or oppression of
the “Southern” countries of the world by the “Northern” dominant countries. As with the
alternative name, “Center” vs. “Periphery” Theory, it seems the terminology has been
chosen in order to avoid the word ‘imperialism’.
See also:
DEPENDENCY THEORY,
Samir AMIN
“China likes to swaddle its overseas investments in speeches about
‘South-South’ cooperation—even though the country is well above the equator. Latin
America should know from its experience with the U.S. that when you’re doing business
with an 800-pound gorilla, rhetoric is less useful than a solid grounding in economic
reality.” —“China’s Pivot to Latin America”, Bloomberg Businessweek, May 26,
2015, p. 12. [It is interesting that in their zeal to criticize competing imperialist
powers like China, the U.S. imperialists sometimes even go so far as to hint at their
own predations! —Ed.]