WAGE
[As used by Marx:] The price of labor-power.
Wages may be paid for employing labor-power
by the hour (or other period of time), or as a piece-wage (a set price for the
labor-power used to complete each unit of work done). But either way, the labor-power
which is sold by the worker to the capitalist is (normally) sold at or near its actual
value (i.e., its “value” considered as a technical term
within Marx’s theory of capitalist political economy). Nevertheless, the worker’s actual
labor creates more value in terms of his or her output than the value of his
labor-power which he/she sells to the capitalist for wages. This
surplus value is the source of the capitalist’s profit.
In other words, the wage paid by the
capitalist to the worker does equal the value of his or her labor-power, but it does
not at all equal all the value produced by his or her actual labor. This
distinction between labor and labor-power, while confusing at first, is thus critical in
coming to understand how the capitalist exploitation of workers occurs.
While, strictly speaking, wages should be
considered to be the price of labor-power, it is also possible to analyze either wages
or the work day as a whole in terms of the actual labor the worker performs (and the
full value that it generates). From this point of view the worker is only paid for part of
his or her day’s work, say for 3 hours of the 8 hours actually worked, and works for free for
the capitalist for the other 5 hours. Of course capitalists prefer that you do not
analyze things this way!
Wages are discussed in depth by Marx in
Capital, Vol. I, part 6. It is important for every Marxist to study this section of
capital until they are quite clear on the basic concepts and can help explain them to
others.
See also the entries below.
WAGE SLAVERY
The term “wage slavery” is not mere rhetoric. There are in fact a number of different forms of
slavery. First, of course, there is outright chattel slavery (where the slave is legally owned by
another person (the slavemaster), and forced to work for him without pay, and may be sold or even
openly killed with impunity by the slave owner, if he so chooses. But there are also feudal forms
of de facto slavery, where serfs or peasants cannot be sold, but who are forcibly tied to the land,
and forced to provide grain, other products, and a certain amount of unpaid labor, to the landlord.
And then there is wage slavery under capitalism, which means not only the constant exploitation
of human labor, but also—as Marx states below—means the power of life or death over workers
and their families on the part of the capitalist class considered collectively. And in the
capitalist world of today, many millions of working class people around the world do in fact die
every year because of this system of wage slavery.
“[T]he man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all
conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the
owners of the objective conditions of labor. He can work only with their permission, hence
live only with their permission.” —Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, (Peking: FLP, 1972),
p. 9.
WAGES — As a Percentage of GDP
In the United States and most other capitalist countries the portion of GDP
which has been going to wages and salaries has been falling rapidly for many decades now, even
though what is counted as “workers’ wages” includes the huge salaries of corporate
bigshots and managers. While the working class is being driven down, more and more money is going
to corporate profits, banks, Wall Street firms, and other parts of the financial system, which is
ever more predatory upon the economy and the people. The Federal Reserve graph at the far right
shows the large decline in the ratio of wages and salaries to U.S. GDP since around 1970.
In the other graph (at the near right), we see
more clearly the trends over the past half century in real GDP growth (after inflation) as compared
with the stagnation and decline of real wages (also after inflation). It should be noted, however,
that all U.S. economic statistics are distorted in various ways. GDP has been gradually measured
in ever more phony ways over the past 50 years, which means that the increase in real GDP is not
quite as large as this graph shows. On the other hand, real wages have actually declined more
than the graph shows since many workers are now only much lower-paid part time workers and not
the full time regular workers indicated here. In addition, inflation has actually been higher than
officially admitted, which means that real wages have really declined more than is shown here.
WAGES — Falling
Under capitalism wages must remain low, and must remain in general at or near the rate
which just allows the workers and their families to continue to exist at the level socially
acceptable in the given society, and which allows working class families to raise up new
generations of workers to replace those who get old, sick or die. Capitalists absolutely
need the working class to have no other way to survive other than to sell their
labor-power to them in the form of wages. If wages were to
become high enough so that workers could accumulate large sums and no longer need to work (by
“living off their investments”, say, as financial capitalists do), or even to start or buy
companies themselves, then the capitalists would have nobody to exploit and the capitalist
system would immediately self-destruct. While a few individual workers may be able to do
things of this sort, the overall prevailing level of wages must remain low enough so
that only a very few workers can escape the working class in this way.
Moreover, because of continual technological
advances, the productivity of labor increases year-by-year. Not only does this mean that the
workers produce more during every hour of work, it also means that the value of individual
commodities tends to continually fall (though not necessarily the prevailing nominal prices,
because of inflation). This means that the level of real wages which is necessary to
support working class families in the prevailing manner of subsistence is gradually declining.
In this situation capitalist society has two options: First, it can accept a slowly rising
level of real wages, providing that the workers still keep working (!) and spend their
effectively larger income on new commodities (such as TVs, fancier automobiles and homes,
etc.). This is the option partially (and somewhat reluctantly) accepted by American capitalists
during the quarter-century post-World War II boom
years. Or, secondly, the capitalists can drive down the level of real wages in rough proportion
with the rising productivity of labor. This is the principal “option” that has more or less
been forced on the capitalists during the neoliberal period
from the 1980s on, as their economic crisis has continued to develop and worsen.
Thus overall, and especially in times of
growing international competition and worsening capitalist economic crisis, the capitalists
pretty much need to force the level of real wages to fall. And this, indeed, describes
what is happening in the present situation.
See also:
CHURN,
“IRON LAW OF WAGES”,
LIFETIME INCOME
“Within capitalism, the particular determination of value of the
commodity of labor-power is necessary: if workers would receive considerably more
than the value of the means of subsistence that they have to buy on the market, then
they would in the long term no longer be without property, and would be able to at
least partially free themselves from the compulsion to sell their labor-power. The
restriction of the value of labor-power to the costs of reproduction is a functional
necessity of capitalism...” —Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three
Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (2014), p. 95.
“Men who do have jobs are getting paid less. After accounting for
inflation, median wages for men between 30 and 50 dropped 27 percent—to $33,000 a
year—from 1969 to 2009, according to an analysis by Michael Greenstone, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor who was chief economist
for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. ‘That takes men and puts them back at
their earnings capacity of the 1950s,’ Greenstone says. ‘That has staggering
implications.’” —“The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man”,
Bloomberg Business Week, Aug. 29-Sept. 4, 2011, p. 26.
“Workers capture a smaller percentage of corporate earnings than
they did between 1950 and 2000. One analyst estimates that if the worker share of
earnings had stayed the same in this century, employees would have pocketed a
staggering $10 trillion more in wages over the past 17 years.” —Robert L.
Borosage, “Fed Stranglehold: The economy is rigged against workers”, The Nation,
March 12, 2018, p. 7.
“One-third of the families of frontline manufacturing workers in the
U.S. are enrolled in a government safety-net program like food stamps or Medicaid,
according to researchers at University of California, Berkeley. These factory
employees include machinists, assemblers, and metal workers.” —Washington Post
report as summarized in The Week magazine, May 10, 2016, p. 32.
[Wages have now often fallen so
low that by themselves they are frequently not even adequate to continue the productive
existence of the working class (and provide for the next generation of workers), without
some government assistance in a growing number of cases. However, this assistance can
never do more than bring workers back up to that rough minimum or possibly just slightly
above it according to the basic socially necessary minimum living standards of the
working class in that society. And even then it must be paid for either through taxes or
else through government deficits. During periods of worsening economic crises and rapidly
growing government debt (such as the present time), it gets harder and harder even for
the government to keep providing what amounts to this form of “supplemental wages”. This
can once again lead to real wages dropping below their value (i.e., below the
level necessary to keep the workers alive, productive, and able to reproduce). However,
this itself is not necessarily a problem for the capitalist system if there is already a
large and growing reserve army of the unemployed, including new immigrants. New hires
can replace the older, injured, unhealthy, and otherwise inadequately reliably productive
workers that the capitalists have used up. —Ed.]
“WAGES” — Of the Rich
Wage labor under capitalism, as everyone should be well aware, is the
means by which the great mass of the population (workers or proletarians) survive. Workers
sell their labor power to the capitalists who pay them in
the form of wages. The capitalists then make use of the labor of those hired workers
to create enormous amounts of new value in the form of
commodities to be sold in capitalist markets.
However, not everything called a wage
is really a wage in this sense. That is, the way the bourgeoisie uses the term, “wages” are
not necessarily the price of the commodity labor power. In particular, the top managers of
corporations are compensated in part by what are termed “wages” (as well as with gifts of
stock and in many other ways). These so-called wages must be viewed from a Marxist perspective
as not being wages at all, but rather a portion of the surplus value directly created by the
workers in that corporation (or elsewhere). The petty
bourgeoisie, including the owners of small stores and independent lawyers, doctors and
other professionals, often also set up shell companies or private corporations and pay
themselves a “wage” from the profits of that company which they totally own and control.
It may surprise you to learn that according
to this bourgeois definition, the largest part of even the top “1%” of the income earners
in the U.S. receive the bulk of their supposed “earned income” from “wages”! (Of course they
also receive other forms of income, including interest, dividends, capital gains, etc.)
In the graphic at the right, we see that it is not until we get to the top one-tenth of
one-percent that we find that the income from non-wage sources finally offically exceeds that
of “wages”! [This graphic comes from the NBER Digest, May 2019, published by American
bourgeois economics organization, the National Bureau of Economic
Research. The article notes that the income “earners” discussed here are mostly those who
“own mid-sized companies in the white-collar, skilled service industries”, and adds: “Near the
top—the 99th to 99.9th percentile—they typically own single establishments that offer
consulting, legal, medical and other highly specialized services. Among the top 0.1 percent,
above the 99.9th percentile, the typical company is an auto dealership, beverage distributor,
or large law firm.”] Thus the so-called “earned income” at this high level of 0.1% of the
population (and above) is right at the boundary between the upper petty bourgeoisie and the
big bourgeoisie. As for the big bourgeoisie itself, most of their income comes from interest,
dividends, stock issues and appreciation, capital gains, and the like. None of that is
included in “wages”, at least!
Because the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
includes the grossly incorrectly labeled “wages” of the petty bourgeoisie, and even some
substantial income of the top managers of corporations and other members of the big
bourgeoisie, in their calculations of what they call the average wage levels of
Americans, these figures are in fact considerably exaggerated. This is just one more way
that the ruling class lies to the people.
WALL STREET
The center of the financial district in New York City, and—by extension—a nickname for
the entire financial industry in the U.S.
“Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the
people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall
Street and for Wall Street.” —Mary Lease, a populist reformer speaking on behalf of
the Farmers’ Alliance in 1890, quoted in Bruce Levine, Who Built America?
(1947), p. 147.
“If we are Rome, Wall Street’s our Coliseum.” —Paul Farrell,
business news reporter with MarketWatch.com, August 2007.
“When as a child I first read stories of brokers jumping to their
deaths after the 1929 Wall Street crash, I thought they were meant to illustrate
the humanity of the situation. After reading about people’s anger at bailing out
banks [in this latest financial crisis], I now understand that they were actually a
manifestation of what the public wanted to see: the villains having the deceny to do
themselves in.” —Harald Anderson, letter to the editor, The Economist, Feb. 13,
2010.
WALL STREET PUTSCH OF 1933 (Also known as the “BUSINESS PLOT OF 1933”)
A failed scheme by an inept cabal of reactionaries centered in the Wall Street financial
community to seize political power from the new Franklin D. Roosevelt administration (which
they viewed as “socialist”!) via a fascist military takeover. The plot soon collapsed, in
part because the conspirators foolishly chose the wrong military man to lead it, namely
General Smedley D. Butler, who was appalled by the very
idea. This is a little known episode in U.S. history that the American ruling class is not
anxious for you to learn about, and which it has tried over and over to totally dismiss as
a complete myth.
“Consider ... the Wall Street Putsch of 1933.
“Never heard of it? Few have,
for the financial establishment—along with its media and political henchmen—rushed
out, clucking like mother hens to bury the story and protect the gentlemen of Wall
Street implicated in the plot. But what a story! It was capitalist skullduggery by a
few self-entitled Lords of Wealth trying to overthrow the government and enthrone a
fascist regime friendly to themselves....
“The conspirators [including]
such Wall Street multimillionaires as Grayson M. P. Murphy (banker and Anaconda
Copper Mining head), Thomas Lamont (J. P. Morgan partner), and Robert Stirling Clark
(heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune) were enraged by FDR’s moves [to
ameliorate the Depression for the masses and to tax the rich to pay for it].
Class war, they wailed, claiming that their ‘liberty’ to grab as much profit
as they could was being shackled—and for no better reason than to fund ‘socialism!’
Calling Roosevelt a traitor to his class, these men would later be named as
instigators of the putsch to replace FDR with a military-backed government of
capitalists—i.e., themselves.
“The hero [was] Smedley
Darlington Butler... A retired Marine general, he became a well-known, influential
advocate for veterans. The conspirators considered Butler the perfect choice to lead
their takeover of Washington, and they spent a year wooing him, gradually laying out
their plan.
“Apparently, being super-rich
doesn’t make you super-smart, for the scheme these millionaires devised was hapless
and cockamamie: They planned to oust Roosevelt by enlisting and arming a private
military force made up of thousands of destitute World War I vets who were protesting
their failure to receive federal bonus payments they had been promised. But how to
engage them in the plot?
“Gerald MacGuire, Grayson
Murphy’s bond salesman, was an ex-soldier and an active member of the American Legion
veterans’ organization, so he was the one who first contacted the soldiers’ champion,
Smedley Butler. After several meetings spent discussing veterans issues, MacGuire
finally got down to business, explaining that the financial powers he represented
wanted Butler to create a paramilitary corps of 500,000 vets and march on Washington
to force FDR from the White House.
“As Butler later related,
MacGuire told him that the Wall Street cohort, plus a new group called American
Liberty League (made up of the right-wing bosses of such corporate giants as DuPont,
Colgate, General Foods, and GM), would fund the cause to the tune of $300
million—that’s $5.6 billion in today’s money! MacGuire also claimed that the
Remington Arms Company would supply the weapons.
“As investigative journalist
Sally Denton wrote in her 2011 book, The Plots Against the President, the
conspirators were so out of touch with reality that they actually expected Roosevelt
to accept the takeover without a fight. They figured that (1) he knew he was in over
his head as president, so he’d welcome these stronger people taking control, and
(2) as a member of the patrician class himself, FDR would happily agree to become a
ceremonial figurehead, while the financiers and militarists installed a ‘secretary
of general affairs’ to run the country. Who was their choice to become this
authoritarian SGA? General Smedley D. Butler.
“They chose the wrong general....
The general enlisted Paul Comly French, an investigative reporter he knew and trusted,
to help gather proof of the bankers’ intent. French even got an interview with
MacGuire, who was surprisingly unguarded: ‘We need a Fascist government in this
country,’ he blurted to French, ‘to save the Nation from the communists who want to
tear it down.... The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and
Smedley Butler is the ideal leader.’
“Evidence in hand, Butler got a
US House ‘Special Committee on Un-American Activites’ to conduct a two-month
investigation, which convinced its members that, as Time magazine later
reported, ‘General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly
true.’ The committee opened public hearings on November 20, 1934, with Butler giving
detailed testimony. [However, HUAC refused to listen to any testimony implicating
the top capitalist financiers who were actually behind the conspiracy. —Ed.] The next
morning, French’s exposé ran in both the Philadelphia Record and New
York Post. The story was out and Butler’s gutsy stand had halted the putsch.”
—Jim Hightower, The Hightower Lowdown, March-April 2018.
[Hightower then gets into the
story of the strenuous efforts to cover up this fascist plot, to claim it never
really existed at all, and that Butler’s exposé was just a hoax. These efforts
to ridicule the whole story, to deny its truth, to re-write history, continue to this
very day. However, it should also be pointed out that “progressives” like Hightower
simply do not understand the basic facts about bourgeois society. The capitalist
ruling class is already in control of society even under a bourgeois democracy
where there are formal elections. Fascist coups are attempted in periods of crisis,
and are sometimes successful. But either way, bourgeois so-called democracy or open
fascism, every bourgeois state is in reality the dictatorship of the bourgeois over
the working class and the masses. —Ed.]
WAR
Armed struggle between states, nations, or classes. An extension of political struggle.
(As von Clauswitz put it, war is the continuation of politics by other means.) Nations and
states are of course dominated by one class or another. Since most modern warfare is a
continuation of class politics, and class politics are at bottom a concentrated expression
of economics, the ultimate cause of most modern wars is to be found in capitalist-imperialist
political economy.
See also below, and individual wars such as
WORLD WAR I, and:
VIOLENCE
“War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions,
when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or
political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and
of classes.” —Mao, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War” (Dec. 1936),
SW1:180.
WAR — Abolition Of
“We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can
only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take
up the gun.” —Mao, “Problems of War and Strategy” (Nov. 6, 1938), SW2:223.
“War, this monster of mutual slaughter among men, will be finally eliminated
by the progress of human society, and in the not too distant future too. But there is only
one way to eliminate it and that is to oppose war with war, to oppose counter-revolutionary
war with revolutionary war, to oppose national counter-revolutionary war with national
revolutionary war, and to oppose counter-revolutionary class war with revolutionary class
war.... When human society advances to the point where classes and states are eliminated,
there will be no more wars, counter-revolutionary or revolutionary, unjust or just; that will
be the era of perpetual peace for mankind. Our study of the laws of revolutionary war springs
from the desire to eliminate all wars; herein lies the distinction between us Communists and
all the exploiting classes.” —Mao, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War” (Dec.
1936), SW1:182-3.
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” —Unknown.
[Is this just a cynical bourgeois
attitude? (Compare this remark to Mao’s comments above.) But if humanity is to truly end
war for all time it will, as Mao indicated, have to be through the means of a successful
world proletarian revolution which gets rid of capitalist-imperialism once and for all. If
that is not accomplished, war will certainly continue. And if it continues with its ever
intensifying death and destruction then humanity will not survive. All we can be absolutely
certain of at the present time is that either humanity will get rid of war by overthrowing
capitalism or capitalism will finally get rid of humanity. And in that latter case it will
indeed be true that only the dead will have seen the end of war—because no living people
will remain. —S.H.]
WAR — Just and Unjust
In every war at least one side is wrong; that is, for that wrong side which is waging war against
the interests of the people, the war is unjust. Sometimes both sides are waging
an unjust war, as for example between two imperialist powers struggling to redivide the world.
But often one side in a war is not wrong; it is merely battling the wrong side, and thus is
waging a just war in the interests of the people. Revolutionary wars are of this sort, including
the revolutionary side in a civil war. What is right and just, after all, is simply a matter of
what is in the real long-term interests of the people.
“History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All
wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We
Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive,
just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them.
As for unjust wars, World War I is an instance in which both sides fought for imperialist
interests; therefore the Communists of the whole world firmly opposed that war. The way to
oppose a war of this kind is to do everything possible to prevent it before it breaks out
and, once it breaks out, to oppose war with war, to oppose unjust war with just war,
whenever possible.” —Mao, “On Protracted War” (May 1938), SW2:132-3.
WAR — and “Liberty” at Home
“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is
to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” —James
Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 13, 1798, available at:
http://thefederalistpapers.org/founders/james-madison-quotes
[See also Madison’s fuller
expression of this thesis in the quotation below. Although there is obviously some truth
to this idea, it is a classless analysis, typical of the way the bourgeoisie understands
things. At times of danger a tiny exploiting ruling class virtually always feels the
need to tighten its mechanisms of control over the working class and masses. So yes, a
time of war or when there is a serious threat of war, is a time of greater danger for
bourgeois democracy, but this is actually more
because the ruling class itself feels more deeply that its class dictatorship is under
more immediate threat. Moreover, if the ruling class was already in a state of
heightened concern about maintaining its control over the masses, then the supposed
“necessities of wartime” provide a great excuse to further restrict or eliminate civil
liberties. —Ed.]
“Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent
of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the
known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too,
the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out
offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds,
are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in
republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of
fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals
engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual
warfare.” —James Madison, “Political Observations”, April 20, 1795; ibid.
[This is a better statement,
since it speaks in terms of “the many being under the domination of the few”, but it
still does not talk explicitly about social classes or the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,
which exists even under bourgeois democracy.
We would also remind everyone that America today is indeed “in the midst of continual
warfare”, and has been for many decades and for most of the last century and more of
the capitalist-imperialist era. —Ed.]
WAR — “Who Started It?”
[Intro material to be added... ]
“All philistines and all stupid and ignorant yokels argue in the same
way as the renegade Kautsky supporters, Longuet supporters,
Turati and Co.: ‘The enemy has invaded my country, I don’t
care about anything else.’
“The socialist, the revolutionary
proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: ‘The character of the
war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker
was, or in whose country the “enemy” is stationed; it depends on what class is
waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a
reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the
imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie
(even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty
as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world
proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world
slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of “my” country (for that is the
argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realize that
he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point
of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the
acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.’” —Lenin, “Proletarian Revolution
and the Renegade Kautsky” (Oct.-Nov. 1918), LCW 28:286-7.
WAR COMMUNISM
The period in revolutionary Russia from around mid-1918 until March 1921 when in the midst
of civil war and foreign military invasions, the new Soviet state was forced to employ drastic
economic measures, and ones which would otherwise have at least been viewed as very premature,
in order to defeat the enemies of the revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to muster
all the economic resources in the areas they controlled for the war effort and almost all
industrial enterprises were nationalized. Strenuous efforts were made to centralize the
management of production and distribution to the maximum degree possible within the social
chaos then prevailing.
In this desperate situation all private trade
was officially banned (though it continued illegally to a considerable extent) and a
surplus-appropriation system was put into place in which the peasants were forced to sell all
surplus agricultural products to the state at set prices. Because of the massive destruction
and dislocations of the war a rationing system was established
and widespread labor conscription and the leveling of wages was introduced. Although the
outcome of the military and political struggle was close, these policies did allow the
Bolsheviks to prevail.
It was by no means the original intention of
Lenin and the Bolsheviks to immediately introduce socialism after achieving state power.
“Everybody agrees that the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible,” he
wrote in June 1917 [LCW 25:69]. And in December 1917, after the seizure of power, he still
wrote that “There was not and could not be a definite plan for the organization of economic
life.” [LCW 26:366] But the civil war and foreign invasions forced their hand.
Lenin and most of the other Bolshevik leaders
seem to have expected that once War Communism was firmly established it would continue in
place, only somewhat modified, even after the civil war was won and the foreign invaders
were pushed out. However, it became obvious to Lenin, at least, that the increasingly
desperate economic situation would not allow this. During the war the peasantry put up with
a lot of harsh treatment, and even the confiscation of their agricultural products, because
they feared the return of the landlords if the Bolsheviks were defeated. But black market
activity had mushroomed and the people in the countryside were hungry, cold, exhausted and
none too healthy—disease was widespread. Many city people had fled to the countryside
during the civil war and were in the same serious situation there themselves. The peasants
were now unwilling to produce goods that would simply be requisitioned from them without any
real payment, and even some rebellions broke out. Most factories in the cities had closed
down because of the lack of materials, fuel and available workers. In short the economic
situation was even more desperate once the civil war ended. On top of this the Kronstadt
Revolt of sailors which occurred during the Tenth Party Congress (March 1921) really shocked
the Bolsheviks.
Lenin also acknowledged that mistakes had
been made during the period of War Communism, and particularly in the treatment of the
peasantry. Clearly a temporary retreat back to capitalism in both the countryside and the
city was now necessary. (Although in industry the form it mostly took was worker-supervised
state capitalism.) This retreat was
necessary in order to preserve the worker-peasant alliance that was the backbone of the
revolution.
Just as there was resistance—even within
the Bolshevik party—to the establishment of War Communism, there was even more resistance to
the temporary retreat from it which became known as the New Economic
Policy (NEP). Lenin had great difficulty in convincing the party to go along with this
retreat, and he might not have been successful if it was not for the Kronstadt Rebellion
which so alarmed the party. And once the NEP was in place for a few years, there was likewise
some major resistance from the right wing of the party to abandoning it! Lenin always argued
that Marxism requires a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” and every truly necessary
change in political or economic policy in a revolution is met with resistance and the need
for another round of struggle.
“WAR ON DRUGS”
A cynical, decades-long program conducted by the U.S. government in the name of “fighting”
illegal narcotics. The real aim is to control and regiment the population, particularly the
Black and lower working class population, and to act as a cover for continued U.S. interference
in the internal affairs of other countries. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the aim of the war
on drugs is to find a solution to the “superfluous people” who were left out of Ronald
Reagan’s free-market fundamentalist reforms. Actually, the war started under Richard Nixon,
but it gained both momentum and ideological clout during Reagan’s presidency, and continues
to this day in roughly this spirit.
The war on drugs reveals with unusual clarity
the class component of state policy. Those who have been imprisoned are predominantly Black
and Latino working class people, thrown behind bars on charges that would not even count as
criminal offences in many other major capitalist states. The people who benefit most greatly
from the flow and trafficking of narcotics remain relatively unscathed. Firstly, they are
often themselves members of the ruling class or are closely linked to them, and hence can
afford better legal representation in the event that they are caught; they can also distance
themselves from the grubby business “on the ground” by hiring underlings to do their dirty
work; they can hide their transactions more effectively (Noam Chomsky, writing around the
time of the U.S. invasion of Panama, asked sardonically why George Bush did not also order
commando raids on major New York banks, who were known to be benefitting from keeping drug
money); etc.
Secondly, the war on drugs is characterized
by an enormous amount of corruption. The police officers and detectives who staff narcotics
bureaus and drug task-forces are themselves often in the pay of, or are in collusion with,
drug dealers and traffickers. Thus, the people that they tend to actually target will be
easy pickings, i.e. those who have already been stigmatized with the image of immersion in
a drug-infested culture.
The war on drugs also incorporates the
anti-cartel program in Mexico, which has experienced a horrific spiral in violence between
the state and powerful drug cartels there (which have now become so powerful that state
employees regularly complain that their resources and equipment are inferior to those of the
cartels!). Ironically, many experts agree that the power of these criminal organizations is
aided by anti-drug policies in the US, which has taken such an inflexible line on drugs such
as marijuana that the demand from within the U.S. supplies a ready market for the cartels, who
battle viciously for hegemony of transit routes to the United States.
Another front in the war on drugs involves
the very bloody civil war in Colombia, an ongoing, decades-long struggle between nominally
Marxist guerillas called the FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército
del Pueblo, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army) and the Colombian
state and its capitalist-landlord benefactors. The Colombian military has benefitted from
aid and training providing by the U.S. government, which claims that this assistance is
primarily for the purpose of executing an anti-drug effort. However, even the U.S. government’s
own agencies and research bodies affiliated with it (like the RAND Corporation) acknowledge
that the FARC-EP plays a relatively minor role in the drug trade, and that the right-wing
paramilitaries (allied both to the landlords and the official military) are by far the geater
participants and beneficiaries of narcotics trafficking and production (indeed, the
involvement of the Colombian government puts the FARC-EP’s collusion to shame); the RAND
Corporation also found treatment programs to be much more cost effective than interdiction.
The militarization of the drug war, then, is clearly something that primarily serves purposes
other than fighting drugs! In Colombia, the U.S. involvement is simply counter-insurgency
against a leftist group fighting the capitalist-landlord configuration that controls the state
there.
Colombia is also a key U.S. ally in the region,
which has seen the coming into office of various left-leaning governments, notably those of
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. The Colombian state continues to be an
important strategic resource for U.S. imperialist interference in the affairs of Latin America.
Interestingly, Colombia is also where the U.S. government, then under the leadership of John F.
Kennedy, initiated its policy of reorienting Latin American militaries from their hitherto
role of “hemispheric defense” to “internal security” (fascist repression). This template was
then adopted by the bourgeoisies in other Latin American countries, which experienced a
series of bloody coups and militariy dictatorships, virtually all of which were supported by
the United States. Now that the pretext of the Cold War has been lifted, the war on drugs
provides the required cover for U.S. intervention. The guerilla threat has little to do with
narcotics; the FARC-EP are much more troublesome in the sense of their targeting of oil
pipelines and occupation of mineral-rich areas that the government wants to open up to
exploitation by multinational corporations. Colombia, incidentally, has by far the worst
human rights record in the Western hemisphere, and one of the world’s largest internally
displaced populations. This is the true face of the war on drugs, largely hidden from view of
American audiences, who are more accustomed to associating this campaign with what they are
shown on TV shows about police, crime dramas, etc. —L.C.
“WAR ON TERROR”
An ongoing program by the American and other imperialist states around the world to “combat”
and “defeat” terrorism. This purported aim is necessarily completely ridiculous, as capitalist
states are themselves the biggest perpetrators and supporters of terrorism in the world, and
there is certainly no talk of ending that! Nevetheless, this program does target certain
terrorist organizations who oppose the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism, particularly
Islamist groups in the Middle East who want to expel the Western presence in their countries.
The war on terror has both a law enforcement
and a military component. The latter aspect has actually contributed to a sharp increase in
terrorism (at least in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan that have been targeted and
destabilized by imperialism), as anticipated by some agencies of the U.S. government itself. It
has, however, acted as a cover for an expansion of state power over its own population, through
increased powers of electronic surveillance and wiretapping, arrest and detention, the
criminalization of protest, the furtherance of a type of quasi-fascist public discourse about
“values” and “civilization”, the increasing normalization of torture, and a further expansion
of military spending at the expense of urgently needed social programs. The war on terror has
also been used by dictatorial regimes to increase their bargaining power and prestige with the
imperialists, as they can present themselves as valuable and necessary bullwarks against
Islamist extremism while continuing to rob and terrorize their own people.
The law enforcement aspect of the war has
yielded some successes in the stated aim of neutralizing terrorist cells in the imperialist
centers, but the broader war, which is overwhelmingly militarized, has been spectacularly
stupid and self-defeating from the point of view of achieving the bourgeoisie’s more central
aims (and, ironically, will probably come to undermine the law enforcement aspect, given the
hatred generated by military action and occupation). The countries and communities that are
targeted by the war on terror invariably end up becoming even more distrustful and hateful of
the U.S. government; they correctly perceive what liberal bourgeois commentators and other
“experts” can’t: that the invasions and occupations undertaken in the name of fighting
terrorism are actually criminal operations aimed at controlling natural resources and gaining
geopolitical leverage. In many cases these actions even lead to large segments of the
population actively assisting groups who fight against the invasions, and who thus come to earn
the designation “terrorist”, whether or not they are involved in killing civilians. However,
it should be noted that even the term “civilian” can mean different things. People who are
collaborating with the occupation, for example, can technically be civilians, and such people
have certainly become the targets of insurgent attacks. In Iraq, for example, entire segments
of the population supported armed groups who were fighting against and killing American troops;
even the comprador state now in power in Bagdhad has insisted that the U.S. military leave their
country because acquiescing to American demands has simply become too embarrassing!
On the other hand, of course, the U.S. government
has no choice, when other measures fail, to engage in these aggressive actions if it is to
maintain its control of strategically important parts of the world. Thus whatever the
imperialists do will eventually blow up in their faces (unfortunately, at the cost of hundreds
of thousands and even millions of working class and peasant lives). This is yet another example
of capitalism’s contradictions: capitalist-imperialism cannot possibly serve both the
fundamental interests of the people it represents (i.e the ruling class in the imperialist
states, and secondarily the comprador bourgeoisie in the dominated countries) and the masses
that it is bullying and harrassing. This elementary fact is completely lost on liberal
bourgeois comentators, who believe that the root cause of antagonism between U.S. imperialism
and the world’s masses orginates in “errors” made by U.S. presidential administrations, military
commanders, etc! Thus we hear these commentators talk about things like the U.S. “commitment”
to the people of Iraq (as though that were the focus and driving force of its criminal
enterprise in that country), while ignoring the very reasons for the invasion and devastation
of that country. These commentators simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge what the
internal record of their own favored state says about the actual reasons and ambitions
propelling imperial policy.
The war on terror, needless to say, has killed
far more people than the terrorists it is purportedly trying to root out. Interestingly, many
of the same terrorists being captured and killed were once in cahoots with the CIA in
Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, when the United States was funneling weapons
and money to the religious fundamentalist forces of the mujahedeen. This covert operation was
the most expensive in CIA history, and involved the cooperation and further financial backing
of the clerical-fascist regime in Saudi Arabia and the fascist military dictatorship in
Pakistan (which was funding its involvement partly through drug trafficking). It is also a
massive source of corruption and waste. But its useful features for the bourgeoisie—ideological
and police-state regimentation of the population in times of increasing hardship for the
workers, and a cover for further imperialist intervention—are so great that the bourgeoisie is
quite willing to overlook these negative aspects and keep promoting it as, at worst, a
“necessary evil”, but more often as a “moral duty”.
More recently, the United States has made
increased use of “unmanned aerial vehicles” or “drones” (remote
controlled aircraft carrying bombs), particularly in Pakistan. One of Barack Obama’s first
actions as President was to order a drone strike in a Pakistani village where some militants
were thought to be present. The attack wiped out dozens of civilians. The drone program in
Pakistan has killed hundreds of civilians over the past few years, angering and inflaming both
the Pakistani masses and rotten Pakistani government (who, if for no other reason than
self-preservation, have had to make a show of condemning these examples of U.S. terrorism and
mass murder).
U.S. policy makers have indicated that the war
on terror may last for decades more, if not indefinitely. Conveniently, this is also the
timeframe in which China, the United States’ premier imperialist competitor, is expected to
increasingly flex its military and economic muscle. A perpetual war on terror provides an
excellent pretext to keep ramping up military spending and garrisoning the planet with
military bases and naval forces, though an eventual full-blown “Cold War” with China will do
the job just as nicely! —L.C.
See also:
TARGETED KILLING
WARRING STATES PERIOD (Chinese History: c. 475-221 BCE)
A period of about two and a half centuries in ancient China during which there were multiple
states in northern China which contended against each other and were from time to time in open
warfare with each other. This era followed the Spring and Autumn period and ended when one of
the warring states, Qin, defeated all the others and established the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE.
This was the first dynasty of imperial China.
Both in China, and now sometimes elsewhere in
the world as well, the Warring States Period is especially studied to learn the strategic
lessons that it may hold for international contention in the contemporary world, and for
military and political strategy in general.
“[T]he Warring States period did not involve great military outlays.
Nonviolent competition for several decades constituted the main form of struggle. A famous
strategy was to deplete an adversary’s financial resources by tricking it into spending
too much on its military. Two thousand years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the
Chinese interpretation was that the Americans had intentionally bankrupted Moscow by
tricking it into spending excessively on defense.” —Michael Pillsbury, ex-CIA analyst,
The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global
Superpower (2015), p. 41.
[With regard to the U.S. and Soviet
Union, there may be some truth to the widespread theory that the arms race was promoted in
part by the U.S. in hopes of bankrupting the Soviets, though this also sounds like an
after-the-collapse justification of what was actually a much more dangerous contention.
This was a very serious arms race and there was a real possibility that it might lead to
thermonuclear war. Moreover, the deeper reason why the Soviet Union fell was that its
economy was simply much weaker and already in deeper crisis than that of the U.S. —Ed.]
WASTEWATER BIOLOGICAL SAMPLING
The testing of wastewater in sewage systems to see what viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens, are present,
and how much of each. In the Covid-19 Pandemic this testing has become much more extensive and more important,
especially in light of the extremely inadequate level of testing of sick individuals to see exactly what
pathogens (and which variations) have made them sick. This poor level of testing of individuals was a gross
problem at the very start of the pandemic, became somewhat better in the U.S during the Delta and Omicron
variation surges, and since then has rapidly become quite inadequate again as testing has greatly diminished,
because of the increasing indifference to the health of the people by the bourgeois government. But at least
this new method of wastewater sampling provides a partial and less expensive alternative. Individual testing
is best from the point of view of treating individual patients, but wastewater testing provides quicker and
better summations of the overall trends in disease outbreaks.
“Your questions, answered”
“Because it is increasingly difficult to gauge
infection rates by testing (many tests seem to be done at home or not at all when the symptoms are not
serious) why don’t we switch to the testing of viral loads in sewage water? This would tell us what we
really need to know - what is the viral load in the population of a given geographical area?” – Cheryl W., Tex.
Wastewater sampling is becoming increasingly common
in the United States and other parts of the world for the very reason you stated. It can detect virus
from those who may not even know they are infected and it does not depend on people to actively seek out
testing. A number of cities, towns and universities have been piloting efforts and in the fall of 2020,
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an early warning network that monitors wastewater
from hundreds of sites covering about 100 million people.
Some sites are only testing for SARS-CoV2 right now,
but others are also starting to monitor for flu and other viruses and bacteria. Houston’s wastewater
monitoring program, for example, is constantly innovating its approach. Early on, researchers were focused
on tracking variants of concern like omicron. Now they are starting to be able to look at the mix of viruses
and pinpoint something that may become a future threat. The Houston Health Department publishes its data on
a public dashboard that contains historical data and neighborhood analysis. This week, viral load is up 127
percent from July 6, 2020, when the first data was collected, and the positivity rate is 8 percent.
“When we see a new mutation we ask: are we seeing an
increase over time and space? That would be an indication of something new,” said Lauren Stadler, an
assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. Stadler predicts that
wastewater screening will eventually become “a standard piece of the health infrastructure. Wastewater is
not just wastewater but the real time store of information on community health,” she said.
—From the Washington Post Coronavirus Update
Internet newsletter, May 20, 2022.
WATER MARGIN
A 14th century Chinese novel, written in the vernacular, about a peasant war near the end of
the Northern Song [Old style: Sung] Dynasty (960-1127 CE). This novel is also known as Outlaws
of the Marsh, All Men are Brothers, and by other names. It is attributed to Shi Nai’an
and is often viewed as one of the four great classical Chinese novels.
The leader of the peasant uprising in this novel
is Chao Gai [Chao Kai]. After his death, Song Jiang [Sung Chiang], a representative of the
landlord class who has wormed his way into the ranks of the peasant army, grabs the leadership
and surrenders to the emperor. Mao and other Chinese revolutionaries sometimes made reference to
this novel.
“The merit of the book Water Margin lies precisely in the portrayal
of capitulation. It serves as teaching material by negative example to help all the people
recognize capitulationists.” —Mao, quoted in Peking Review, #6, Feb. 4, 1977, p.
16.
WATERBOARDING
A form of horrifying torture commonly used by both reactionary modern capitalist-imperialist
states and by the tyrannical comprador regimes which they have
set up in “Third World” countries. The U.S. CIA and other
American agencies, are especially fond of this method of torture. In waterboarding the victim
is made to feel like he or she is really drowning (and sometimes actually is).
“Waterboarding is a form of water torture in which water is poured over a
cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the
individual to experience the sensation of drowning. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain,
dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries
including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage,
and death. Adverse physical consequences can manifest themselves months after the event,
while psychological effects can last for years.” —Wikipedia entry on Waterboarding, accessed
on Aug. 8, 2017.
“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I’d approve it. In a
heartbeat. And I would approve more than that... OK? It works... and if it doesn’t work,
they deserve it anyway for what they are doing to us.” —Donald Trump, during his
presidential campaign in 2016, quoted in the Economist magazine, June 3, 2017, p.
55.
WAVE FUNCTION
A central concept in the formulation of quantum mechanics,
especially as it is conceived of within the Copenhagen
Interpretation. However, as the quotation below amply demonstrates, the notion is basically
incoherent, even after a century of pondering by idealistically inclined physicists. Sometimes
physicists talk about a wave function as if it is a description of a particle, and sometimes
they talk about it as if it itself is a physical thing, which has a size and so forth. They also
talk about how the wave function “collapses” in the course of a measurement, though they admit
they have no idea what that is even supposed to mean!
“A wave function can describe an electron moving through space or orbiting
an atom. In chemistry, the wave function is called an orbital. Because wave functions
are not point-like but are spread out, the position of the particle (where it will be
detected) is uncertain. The velocity of the particle, defined by the pattern of the wave
function, is also uncertain. All wave functions vary with time, and the energy of a particle
is directly related to the frequency, by the same formula that Einstein discovered for
photons, E=hf. ...
“This wave function is truly ghostlike.
It can’t be measured. Every point on the function consists of typically two numbers (real
and imaginary parts)—more if there is a superposition. Make a measurement and the new
wave function is much simpler. This was part of the Born-Heisenberg Copenhagen concept, and
it is still accepted today [by physicists wallowing in philosophical idealism!—Ed.] In fact,
today physicists are trying to take advantage of the hidden ghostlike aspects of the wave
function by using them in quantum computers. In computer lingo, an amplitude bit is called
a quantum bit, or qubit.
“The wave function of an electron could
be small in extent, orbiting a nucleus, or large, filling space between Earth and the sun.
If you know its past and the forces acting on it, you can determine (for example, by using
Schrödinger’s equation) what the wave function will be like in the future, but you
can’t examine the wave function with instruments without causing it to change, to collapse.
When you measure the position of an electron, the new collapsed wave function might be highly
localized or spread out with the size given by your measurement uncertainty.
“What does it take to make the wave
function collapse? We don’t know. I’m serious. When physicists don’t understand something,
they frequently give it a name just to be able to talk about the puzzle. In this case, the
thing that makes the wave function collapse is a measurement. As I just said, we don’t
know what we mean by that. Generally, physicists ignore the problem... Some people argue
that it [‘measurement’] requires some sort of ‘consciousness.’ That’s unhelpful, since we
have no good understanding of consciousness. Einstein mocked this claim when he wryly
commented, ‘Do you really think the Moon isn’t there until we look at it?’”
—Richard A. Muller, a prominent American
physicist, in his book Now: The Physics of Time (2016), pp. 199-201.
[Actually, in its essence
consciousness is not all that hard to understand, despite
the endless puzzlement of idealist philosophers about it! In any case, consciousness (human or
otherwise) has nothing to do with the fundamental workings of the physical universe. It should
be quite obvious to any materialist that the philosophy of quantum mechanics, as it is
currently “understood” by idealist physicists, is complete nonsense. —S.H.]
WAVE-PARTICLE DUALITY
A central aspect (dogma?) of the theory of quantum mechanics
that maintains that light and all other matter simultaneously has characteristics which
must be understood by assuming that it is a wave, and other characteristics which must be
understood by assuming that it is composed of discrete particles. The idea of wave-particle
duality was first formulated for electro-magnetic radiation (light) by early quantum physicists
such as Max Planck and Niels Bohr, and for matter in general by
the British physicist Louis de Broglie, and is now the standard view within quantum mechanics.
However, some physicists (such as Richard Feynman) have denied that this is really true.
“Physicists use the wave theory on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and
the particle theory on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.” —William Henry Bragg,
“Electrons and Ether Waves”; quoted in the Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by
Alan L. Mackay, 1994.
“I want to emphasize that light comes in this form—particles. It is
very important to know that light behaves like particles, especially for those of you
who have gone to school, where you were probably told something about light behaving
like waves. I’m telling you the way it does behave—like particles.
“You might say that it’s just the
photomultiplier that detects light as particles, but no, every instrument that has been
designed to be sensitive enough to detect weak light has always ended up discovering the
same thing: light is made of particles.” —Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of
Light and Matter (1985), p. 15.
“This strange phenomenon of partial reflection by two surfaces can be
explained for intense light by a theory of waves, but the wave theory cannot explain how
the detector makes equally loud clicks as the light gets dimmer. Quantum electrodynamics
‘resolves’ this wave-particle duality by saying that light is made of particles (as
Newton originally thought), but the price of this great advancement of science is a
retreat by physics to the position of being able to calculate only the probability
that a photon will hit a detector, without offering a good model of how it actually
happens.” —Richard Feynman, ibid., pp. 36-37.