Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism

—   Ph   —

“But let me also tell you that there are other ML parties [in India] which do not [?] believe in taking up armed struggle but they want it to start much later in the course of struggle. This can be understood as Phase Theory which many revolutionary parties in India conform to. According to this theory, in the first phase one has to prepare the masses through open and legal mass resistance struggles. In the second phase, underground organisation of the movement is carried out, while in the third phase the armed struggle is started. Though these parties had [a] large mass base initially, due to their faulty understanding, they became smaller and smaller. This Phase Theory did not work. But the first of the three revolutionary parties I have mentioned [CPI(ML) (People’s War)] started armed struggle straight away, as they did not believe in phases of revolution. They analysed that a revolutionary situation already exists in Indian society and the people can be organized for an armed movement. Even they believed and understood that armed forms of struggles predate their own existence. Hence they need to lead them with the MLM ideology at the centre. They succeeded while the rest of the groups became weaker and alienated from the oppressed masses. The revolutionary classes and individuals in the society came together in the larger revolutionary groups and these groups expanded over time. On the other hand, those groups which believed that they should spread the revolutionary ideas by going to the parliament or believed that they should start the armed struggle much later, could not carry forward the revolutionary movement. They remained for forty years in the same preparatory stage and are now smaller forces – almost non-existent – even foregoing their character as revolutionary forces. But those who believed from the very beginning that the phase theory is wrong, that the Indian parliament has no relevance in India and that the peoples struggles’ can and should start with armed struggle became major revolutionary forces. They joined hands and merged in 2004 to become Communist Party of India (Maoist) – the largest and the most formidable revolutionary force in India. About ten smaller ML parties still exist, but they have no relevance, leading no major struggle, thereby existing only on paper mainly. One such organization is called CPI(ML) Liberation which contests parliamentary elections in some pockets of the country. People consider it to be a revisionist group like the CPI and CPI(M) which has no radical or revolutionary content and relevance. On the other hand, CPI(Maoist) has emerged as the single largest Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Party of the country after the coming together of all revolutionary forces in India. The movement it leads is still called the Naxalite movement because its origins lie in the Naxalbari village.” —G. N. Saibaba, of the Revolutionary Democratic Front, in an interview, April 15, 2012, online at: https://www.bannedthought.net/India/RDF/2012/120415-SaibabaInterviewSweden.pdf

PHENOMENALISM
One of a number of related theories of knowledge based on the notion that the immediate objects of knowledge are sensations. These theories often argue that all statements about physical objects are equivalent in meaning to statements about various subjective sensations that people have. All these theories are empiricist and idealist to one degree or another.
        A typical expression of phenomenalism is that, in the words of John Stuart Mill, “objects are the permanent possibilities of sensations”. This takes sensations as all that we really know, and seems to imply that there may be no objective reality beyond sensation. It seems to “define away” the objective reality that gives rise to our sensations. Similar views have been held by Bertrand Russell and most other empiricists. Russell held that all talk about physical objects, including their properties and locations, should be translated into talk about human subjective experiences. From our opposed materialist perspective we argue that our sensations and impressions of the world actually arise from, and are based on (to one degree or another), objective reality rather than the other way around, as the phenomenalists would have it.
        Strangely, the views of Mill and Russell might be considered among the “moderate” forms of phenomenalism. Locke and Herbert Spencer also held similar views, recognizing at least that objective reality did exist, though insisting that all we are actually directly aware of is our own sensations. Kantian agnosticism formalized this point of view that human knowledge cannot know anything directly about the real objects that give rise to our sensations, each of which is supposedly an unknowable “thing-in-itself” (ding-an-sich).
        The more extreme forms of phenomenalism merge into outright subjective idealism. Examples of this are in the philosophies of Bishop Berkeley, Ernst Mach, and the loose school of idealist thought known as Empirio-Criticism.
        From the point of view of dialectical materialism all forms of phenomenalism are false since they divorce human knowledge from objective reality and from human practice in relating to objective reality.
        See also: POSITIVISM,   SENSATIONALISM,   SENSUALISM

PHENOMENOLOGY   [Idealist Philosophy]
Literally, the description or study of appearances; but in practice a rejection of a scientific materialist understanding of perception, consciousness, and mental phenomena generally.
        1. One of a variety of wildly confused idealistic theories about perception and mentalistic terms which typically try to discuss their subjective “content” separately from their references or real-world causes. The most prominent proponent of this strange doctrine of phenomenology in the 20th century was Edmund Husserl. He argued that philosophy is not and cannot be objective or scientific, but rather that its central focus should be to explore the “life-world” [Lebenswelt] or the subjective inner life [Erlebnisse] of consciousness (whatever all that is supposed to mean). This actually sounds more like religious meditation than it does philosophy.
        Phenomenologists believe that “truth” is discovered through intuitions and the “direct awareness” of phenomena (whatever that is exactly). Husserl said we should “bracket off” (ignore) any scientific explanations for phenomena in order to see things as they directly and fundamentally appear to our consciousness. Thus to these idealists, the way to view reality is to forget about or deny the existence of the external world (the world outside of the mind).
        Other idealist philosophers of the 20th century who share many or some of these foolish ideas were Franz Brentano, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the falsely termed “Marxist”, Jean-Paul Sartre. Many existentialists besides Sartre also were strongly influenced by these idealist doctrines.
        2. In the 18th and 19th centuries the term phenomenology—though still strongly associated with idealist philosophy—had various different meanings for Kant and others. For Hegel, phenomenology meant the study of the evolution of consciousness (or “spirit”, as he preferred to say)—but not as a modern neuropsychologist might attempt to do this, but rather as a quintessential idealist philosopher would.

“PHENOMENOLOGY is a theory about phenomena, that is, about the nature of philosophical concepts associated with the sensually perceived experience but not limited to perception alone.
        “1) Phenomenology, in one of its meanings, is a philosophical discipline treated differently in the history of philosophy: as a science criticizing sense knowledge (German philosophers of the 18th century, particularly Johann Heinrich Lambert who was the first to use the term ‘phenomenology’; Immanuel Kant); as a teaching about the formation of philosophy and historical forms of consciousness (Georg Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807); as a part of psychology describing psychological phenomena (German philosopher Franz Brentano, 1838-1917; Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, 1853-1920).
        “2) An idealistic philosophical trend and method of cognition whose principles were elaborated by the German idealist philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) in the early 20th century. Phenomenology appears as an opposition to, on the one hand, psychologism in the theory of knowledge which regards cognition [as] identical with sense-experience, and, on the other hand, ‘historicism’ treating philosophy as a description of historical types of world outlooks. The purpose of phenomenology is to reveal the primordial experience of consciousness through the reductive procedure (epoche—abstention from any statement), which implies an intentional suspension of belief in reality in order to get a clear understanding of its nature and achieve a sort of final indivisble unity of consciousness in its intentionality. Husserl’s early theories are marked by a turn from objective reality to intentionality of consciousness (he regarded intentionality as a pure structure of consciousness free from individual—psychological, social and other—charteristics. Phenomenology was one of the sources of existentialism and other trends in modern Western philosophy.” —From “Our Glossary”, Social Sciences, (USSR Academy of Sciences), 1980, number 3, p. 311-2.

PHILIPPINES — U.S. Imperialist Domination Of
See also: BELL TRADE ACT

PHILLIPS CURVE
The claim by many bourgeois economists that there is a “trade-off” between fighting inflation (as measured by changes in wages) and reducing unemployment. That is, supposedly if wages are raised, there will be more unemployment; or if unemployment levels are lowered it can only be done by lowering wages. This false doctrine is quite appealing to the bourgeoisie. It provides them with yet another excuse to try to keep wages low.
        In 1958 the economist A. W. Phillips published his study showing that in Britain for the entire period 1861-1957 this inverse relationship seemed to hold. However, as needs to be constantly reminded to people, correlation is not the same as cause and effect, and past correlations may not continue in new situations. In particular, the period of stagflation in the U.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s showed that both high unemployment and high inflation were indeed possible at the same time. In other situations both low inflation and low unemployment are possible, for a time. (And even if this favorable situation is rare under capitalism, zero inflation and zero unemployment soon become the norm under genuine socialism.)

“By the end of the decade [the 1950s], Keynesian economics had entered the high summer of its self-regard. Leading economists insisted governments could adjust economic conditions like the settings on a thermostat. The economist A. W. Phillips plotted the relationship between unemployment and wages in the United Kingdom over the previous century, and found wages tended to rise when unemployment was low. Enthusiastically conflating correlations and causation, economists concluded governments could glide up and down a ‘Phillips curve,’ trading off unemployment and inflation. In an influential paper published in 1960, [Paul] Samuelson and Robert Solow, two of the most important economists in the postwar era, said the American government could choose from a ‘menu’ of unemployment and inflation rates. The available options included 5 to 6 percent unemployment with no inflation or, if one preferred, 3 percent unemployment with 4 to 5 percent inflation.” —Binyamin Appelbaum, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019), p. 49.

PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA   [Also known as Philo Judaeus]   (c. 20 BCE-40 CE)
The leading representative of Judaic religious philosophy at the beginning of the 1st century, who sought to combine that religion with Platonism and Stoicism. His mysticism greatly influenced Christian theology.

“PHILOSOPHERS’ SHIPS”
A reference to the exiling, on Lenin’s instructions, of a small number of reactionary intellectuals (including a few idealist philosophers) who were hostile to the October Revolution and revolutionary Russia. In the fall of 1922 two German boats carried 160 expelled reactionaries to Germany. In 1923 a smaller number of additional bourgeois intellectuals were expelled by train to Riga, Latvia, or by ship from Odessa to Constantinople. Among those expelled on these several occasions were: Nikolai Berdyaev, Nikolai Lossky, Sergei Bulgakov, and Ivan Ilyin.

PHILOSOPHICAL AGNOSTICISM
See: AGNOSTICISM

PHILOSOPHICAL NOTEBOOKS by Lenin
The collected notes made by Lenin on philosophy and philosophical themes which make up volume 38 of Lenin: Collected Works, 4th edition (in English) (Moscow: Progress Publishers, first printing 1961). This volume is available online in a number of places, including: https://www.bannedthought.net/USSR/Lenin/CW/Progress-4ed-English/LeninCW-V38-M2M.pdf

“Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks contain conspectuses of and extracts from various books and articles, notes on books and articles dealing with philosophy, and also remarks and notes written in the margin or the text of books on philosophy from Lenin’s personal library. The bulk of the material dates back to 1914-15. In these Notebooks Lenin is concerned mainly with questions of materialist dialectics, its laws and categories, from which it may be presumed that Lenin intended to write a special book on dialectics but did not actually do so. Lenin had no intention of publishing this material and his notes, especially those in the margin, are often abbreviated and written in the language of the book studied.”   —Lenin On Language, (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1983), end note #5 (page 268).

PHILOSOPHY — Difficulty Of
See also: PHILOSOPHY—For the Masses below.

“The widespead prejudice that philosophy is something which is very difficult because it is the intellectual activity of a specific category of specialist scholars or of professional and systematic philosophers must be destroyed. To do this we must first show that all men are ‘philosophers’, defining the limitations of this ‘spontaneous philosophy’ possessed by ‘everyone’...” —Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism”, in The Modern Prince & Other Writings, (NY: International Publishers, 1987 [1957]), p. 58.
         [And, indeed, an important part of educating the masses in philosophy is to help them first discover that everyone has “somehow” already picked up a lot of tacit philosophical views from the society all around them, which they are almost unconscious of! Some of this “spontaneous” philosophy may be correct, but some will almost certainly be false. Thus acquiring a fully correct scientific philosophy is as much a matter of “unlearning”, or removing, some erroneous semi-conscious philosophical biases, as it is a matter of learning new principles. However, none of this is really any more difficult than acquiring any other useful and important area of essential knowledge. —S.H.]

“Liberate philosophy from the confines of the philosophers’ lecture rooms and textbooks, and turn it into a sharp weapon in the hands of the masses.” —Mao, (1964?), quoted in “Peasants Can Certainly Study and Apply Philosophy Well”, Peking Review, #37, Sept. 11, 1970, p. 13. [The original source of this quotation is probably Mao’s “Talk on Sakata’s Article” (Aug. 24, 1964), paragraph 3, online in a looser translation at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_28.htm]

“I have always figured that if I can’t explain something I’m doing to a group of bright undergraduates, I don’t really understand it myself, and that challenge has shaped everything I have written. Some philosophy professors yearn to teach advanced seminars only to graduate stuents. Not me. Graduate students are often too eager to prove to each other and to themselves that they are savvy operators, wielding the jargon of their trade with deft assurance, baffling outsiders (that’s how they assure themselves that what they are doing requires expertise), and showing off their ability to pick their way through the most tortuous (and torturous) technical arguments without getting lost. Philosophy written for one’s advanced graduate students and fellow experts is typically all but unreadable—and hence largely unread.” —Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013), p. 12. [Dennett is a bourgeois philosopher, but what he says here is quite laudable. —Ed.]

PHILOSOPHY — Scientific
[Intro to be added... ]
        See also: DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM,   SCIENCE—and Philosophy

“Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing. And even if nature, as a whole, must still be said to move in recurrent cycles, these cycles assume infinitely larger dimensions. In both cases modern materialism is essentially dialectic, and no longer needs any philosophy standing above the other sciences. As soon as each special science is bound to make clear its position in the great totality of things and of our knowledge of things, a special science dealing with this totality is superfluous. That which still survives, independently, of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws—formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring, MECW 25:26.

“‘Competitive markets by their very nature spawn deception and trickery.’ This is not the hyperbole of a diehard Marxist, but the contention of two Nobel prize winners in economics in a new book, Phishing for Phools. Economic models tend to assume that people are informed about the decisions they make; in the jargon consumers have ‘perfect information’. This supposedly enables consumers to make markets work to their advantage. But Robert Shiller of Yale University and George Akerlof of Georgetown University argue instead that this assumption is false. There are plenty of market equilibria, the authors find, where one party is being deceived, or ‘phished’. You may think you are doing well out of markets; you may behave quite rationally; but in fact you are being taken for a ‘phool’.” —“The Economics of Deception”, the Economist, Sept. 19, 2015, p. 82. [For one example of how this works see the entry for CREDIT CARDS. —Ed.]

PHLOGISTON THEORY
An obsolete and long abandoned scientific theory put forward to explain combustion, which was demonstrated to be incorrect by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier in the late 18th century. This is now considered to be a classic example of how science has learned to discard theories once they have been proven to be erroneous.
        The phlogiston theory, which was first put forward in 1667, held that things which can burn contain a fire-like element, phlogiston, which is released when the material burns. Substances which burn in air were said to be rich in phlogiston. When it was demonstrated that the same material burned in a small closed space soon extinguished itself, the theory was patched up by saying that the small amount of air surrounding the burning material was soon satiated with phlogiston and could hold no more of it. The phlogiston theory required a series of such ad hoc patches, including the suggestion at one point that phlogiston must have a “negative mass”. (When major or multiple ad hoc excuses of this sort need to be proposed to keep a theory alive, it is usually a good idea to raise some very serious doubts about the whole theory. For example, the fantastic ad hoc patch to the Big Bang Theory in cosmology, which requires us to believe in a totally inexplicable period of “hyper-inflation of space-time” to keep the theory alive, should raise a serious question as to the validity of that entire Big Bang Theory.)
        The phlogiston theory was replaced by the caloric theory of heat (which itself was later replaced by the theory of thermodynamics) and the recognition that most combustion consists of the rapid combination of oxygen with other elements. (In unusual cases, however, there may be combustion that does not involve oxygen, such as with hydrogen in a fluorine atmosphere or vice-versa.)

PHOENIX PROGRAM
A program of mass torture and murder by the United States CIA and the American military during the U.S. War Against Vietnam. It operated from 1965 to 1972, though similar programs existed before and after that. It was intended to identify and “neutralize” (usually murder) the human infrastructure of the National Liberation Front in southern Vietnam (which was known as the Viet Cong to American forces). Besides many NLF members themselves, this program tortured and “neutralized” a huge number of NLF informers and supporters, as well as thousands of people with no connection to the NLF. And despite its vast extent, it was largely ineffective from a strategic point of view, and failed to destroy the NLF.

“During the war in Vietnam, the CIA’s Phoenix Program deployed systematic torture and often brutal methods to dismantle communist networks in the countryside, producing 46,776 extrajudicial executions but little actionable intelligence.” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017), p. 138. [As a liberal, the American historian McCoy prefers euphemisms such as “brutal methods” and “extrajudicial executions” for torture and murder, though he cannot entirely avoid those terms. —Ed.]

PHOTON
A particle of light or other electromagnetic radiation. Photons are bosons which carry the electromagnetic force.

“Although not in the least controversial today, Einstein’s bold suggestion in 1905 that light must consist of particles [instead of simply waves] was harshly and unanimously dismissed by his colleagues. Later in life, he declared this hypothesis, based on but the shakiest of analogies, to be the most daring idea of his entire career; indeed, it was so daring that it unleashed, among his colleagues, a barrage of scorn and hostility whose magnitude, duration, and ferocity he surely could not have anticipated....
        “The turning point when light quanta at last emerged from the shadows came only in 1923, when the American physicist Arthur Holley Compton astonished the world of physics with his experimental discovery that when an electromagnetic wave approaches an electrically charged particle (an electron in an atom, for instance), it transfers to the particle some of its kinetic energy and momentum, but does not do so as Maxwell’s equations predicted. In fact, Compton found that the wave-particle ‘collision’ that takes place in such a situation obeyed the long-known mathematical rules of collisions between two particles, with the energies of the incoming and outgoing waves matching exactly what Einstein had predicted in his 1905 paper about light quanta. And thus, at long last, light became particulate!
        “It still took three more years for the catchier word ‘photon’ to be coined by the American chemist Gilbert Lewis, but in any case, today the notion of a photon—that is, a ‘wave packet’ of light—is a completely familiar denizen of the physics world, and no physicist would dream of denying its reality.
        “It thus took almost twenty years before the idea of light quanta, the fruit of an analogy conceived in 1905, was taken seriously by physicists—and even after the Compton effect, it still took a bitter battle before the idea was universally accepted. Today, oddly enough, this story is hardly remembered...” —Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (2013), p. 460, 462.

PHRASE-MONGERING
See: REVOLUTIONARY PHRASE-MONGERING

PHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY — Idealist Philosophy In
Beginning with Galileo, or perhaps a bit before, the development of physics and cosmology was for centuries moving in the direction of more materialism and away from religion and philosophical idealism. In the 20th century, however, very strong idealist philosophical trends began to reappear in both of these sciences. In physics this was mostly due to the difficulties in understanding the meaning of quantum mechanics. With the development of the “Big Bang Theory” cosmology also took a major turn toward religion and idealist philosophical conceptions again. Worse yet, in both subjects, theories are now proposed and championed for which there seems to be no possible way of testing them through experiment. In effect recent physics and cosmology seem to be strongly moving back into the sphere of intellectualized religion and away from anything which can be appropriately called science.

“[The theory of] quantum gravitation seems inaccessible to any experiment we can devise. In fact, physics in general is moving into an era where the fundamental questions can no longer be illuminated by conceivable experiments. It’s a very disquieting position to be in.” —Stephen Weinberg, Nobel Prize winner in physics, speaking at a Royal Society meeting; quoted in Clifford A. Pickover, Archimedes to Hawking (2008), p. 33.

“As I am fond of saying, modern theoretical physics as a whole seems much more like a branch of theology than it does science....
        “One of the major problems with theoretical physics today is just that it is so divorced from the real world, from practice, from experiment. [In his book, Michio] Kaku himself says a couple of times that in the final analysis it is experiment which must show whether superstring theory is correct or not. But there is virtually no reference to experimental data in the book. Instead, we are over and over referred to science fiction themes; we even get an ‘explanation’ of how warp drive works on Star Trek!
        “Kaku’s big excuse is that there is no way to test superstring theory today, and probably won’t be for thousands of years! The energy levels necessary, he says, are far beyond anything we can aspire to with present technology. But he also says that the thing the theory really needs is...more theory! He says that if the theory were better developed it should be able to predict the mass of the proton (for example) from prior principles [p. 169]. This would then be some sort of corroboration, at least. (However, it is all too easy to cook up theories that produce ‘predictions’ that you already know the answers to, and then pretend the theory is thus a great success! Cosmologists are always doing this (e.g., with the Big Bang theory); indeed it seems to be their basic modus operandi.)
        “What we really should say here though is this: If a theory is so undeveloped that it is unable to make testable predictions, then it is at best half-baked. (At worst, it perhaps should not be considered a scientific theory at all yet.)
        “On the one hand we are told that the [superstring] theory is mathematically elegant; on the other hand we are told that no one knows how to deal with the mathematics well enough to make a testable prediction. (How elegant is that?!)
        “On the one hand we are told that this is a break-through theory for understanding all the forces of the physical world; on the other hand it is admitted that ‘the underlying physical principle behind string theory is unknown’. [p. 329]
        “At this point I start to wonder again just what the virtues of this string theory are supposed to be anyway! Apparently it’s undeveloped; mathematically intractable; incomprehensible; outlandish; and untestable! Just what the world of science really needs...
         —Scott Harrison, “Review of Michio Kaku, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, Sept. 11, 1995; full review online at: https://www.massline.org/Philosophy/ScottH/hyperspace.htm

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