“IMMATERIAL OBJECT”
Things such as ideas, thoughts, memories, desires, patterns, and various other sorts of
abstract concepts, and also computer software, which—when looked at from a
logical or abstract point of view—are viewed as not being made of material
substances. Four pebbles on the ground near your feet may form the pattern of a square. But
there is no matter involved here beyond the four pebbles themselves. Being in the pattern
of a square does not require any additional matter, just a particular arrangement of the
existing matter. The pattern of a square is nevertheless a characteristic of the four material
pebbles (considered as a set) as they are in fact arranged, and thus depends upon the existence
of matter in that respect. And even the thought in our heads of a pattern of a square
is only possible because of some physical neural network in our brain. In this sense there
are no so-called “immaterial objects” that do not have some sort of material foundation.
See also:
SOFTWARE—Ontological Status Of
[This dictionary includes a number of useful and what we view as generally
correct quotations from the book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire
of Thinking (2013) by the non-Marxist cognitive scientists Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel
Sander. (See for example the entries for CATEGORIES
and CATEGORIZATION.) However, the following quotation
from that book is being presented here because we view it as being instructively
wrong or at least very seriously misleading! After giving the quotation we’ll explain
why. —Ed.]
“Acting on the immaterial world
is no longer a self-contradiction. The [computer] mouse plays the role of a biological
limb, but acts on intangible entities. Thus with the help of a mouse, one can flip
through a virtual book, adjust the volume of a loudspeaker, place items into a ‘shopping
cart’ in a virtual store, and so forth. Immaterial entities can be acted upon no less
than physical objects.
“The mouse is the fruit of a
substantial mental leap. From time immemorial there has been an unbridgeable gap between
the categories of material and immaterial. Thanks to this gap there has
always been a clear-cut distinction between the world we touch and perceive and the world
inside our minds, between what is real and what is imagined, between the concrete and the
abstract, between matter and pattern, between tangible and intangible. If the idea that
a physical action can have an effect on a distant entity is strange, the idea that it can
have an effect on an immaterial entity is even stranger; indeed, it verges on the
paradoxical. Thus the creation of the mouse involved generalizing a property that till
then had been limited to the world of material objects—that is, the property of being
actable-upon. A new category—that of actable-upon objects, far broader than the
category of material objects—came into being when the mouse was conceived of.
This new category toppled our prior assumptions about how we relate to the world around
us, dramatically altering our ontological categories—that is, the set of basic categories
with whose aid we carve up the world.” —Hofstadter & Sander, p. 253.
While it may seem to Hofstadter
& Sander that strange and “paradoxical” things are now suddenly possible because of the
invention of the computer mouse and so forth, such as an “immaterial” object “bizarrely”
being able to act upon a material object and vice-versa, these kinds of things have
actually been commonplaces since “time immemorial”. For example it has always been possible
for a human being to make the mental decision (a supposedly “immaterial act”) to raise
their arm, which then leads to the physical action of the arm being raised. Similarly,
physical events around us lead to changes in our thoughts and ideas all the time; that is,
physical events routinely result in supposedly “immaterial ideas” in our minds. There is
nothing new here whatsoever. This is merely the age-old “puzzle” of the relationship of
mind and matter, which it seems that Hofstadter & Sander are still confused and bemused
about.
Much of the confusion arises from
the terms “immaterial” and “non-physical” themselves. Mind, for example, is called
“immaterial” or “non-physical” in contrast to the human brain. But mind
is actually only a set of highly abstract ways of looking at the logical functioning of
the physical brain. Or to give a more specific example, thinking is only a way of
describing one type of brain activity or function. Thus there are not really
“non-physical things” causing physical results and vice-versa. That is the way we have
traditionally described the situation, but in reality there are only physical, materialist
processes underway in the world—some of which, for our own convenience, we look at from a
partially functionalist or logical perspective.
Software, like mind, is actually
only a way of looking at one part of a computer system from a logical or functional
perspective, rather than on focusing on its material makeup—which must exist, and
which, depending on the situation may be flows of physical electrons, patterns of physical
magnetic polarization on hard drives, etc. Definitely physical things! It is a shameful
disservice of Hofstadter & Sander here to imply or promote an idealist
or dualistic conception of the supposedly “non-physical” nature
of software, mouse pointers, etc. The so-called “immaterial world” is really just as much
part of the physical, material world as everything else is; it is merely a special
way at looking at part of that material world in an abstract logical or functional sort of
way in which we have no reason to be presently concerned about the material basis for those
logical or functional aspects of certain organizations of matter. —S.H.
IMMIGRANTS
One of the many horrible aspects of bourgeois nationalism
is the hostility toward immigrants. In most capitalist countries this hostility leads to
tight restrictions on the number of people from other lands who are allowed to come
there, and the designations of those who arrive in the country without formal permission
as “illegals”. Illegals, are then most often deported back to the country they came from.
Ironically this hostility and routine deportation takes place even in countries such as the
United States which are themselves almost entirely populated by other immigrants and their
descendants! (And for millions of their ancestors this occurred before there even were
such things as “entry visas” and legal restrictions on immigration.)
Ideally we would have a world where people
could live where they choose, move where they choose, and there would be not be “national
borders”, border guards, walls or deportations to prevent them from doing so. However,
such a world of free movement for everyone cannot be created while capitalism still
exists.
Unfortunately, in a world dominated by
capitalist-imperialism, conditions for the masses in many
countries under the thumb of foreign imperialism frequently becomes completely intolerable,
and millions of people are simply forced to emigrate if they are going to survive. So we
have the situation where the world capitalist-imperialist system creates more and more
people who are forced to flee their original country while at the same time the better off
imperialist homelands which dominate and benefit from that imperialist system are extremely
reluctant to admit those millions of refugees. In short, the growing “immigrant problem”
is just another disaster created by imperialism which it refuses to even acknowledge
responsibility for, let alone fix.
IMMIGRANTS — Deportation Of
In the capitalist-imperialist era we live in at present, millions of people are compelled
by poverty and war to leave their homelands and emigrate to other countries, often “illegally”
(i.e., without documents issued by the country they move to). Many of these people are then
deported back to places they came from—regardless of what this might mean for their welfare
or even their lives. Most of the pressure to deport immigrants comes from right-wing
capitalist politicians and their parties and movements. Marxists, revolutionaries and those
on the left oppose such deportations on humanitarian grounds, and work toward the unity of
the working class and the masses regardless of their national origin. Most
liberals and “progressives”
tend to take a more “centrist” position between right and wrong, arguing that some “illegal”
immigrants should be allowed to stay and that the number of deportations should merely be
“reduced”. (This is the typical half-hearted response that we expect from liberals with regard
to many social problems.)
However, there are some situations where even
Marxists and radicals may oppose certain types of immigration, especially in reaction to
colonialism and the ongoing theft of land owned by the people already living in the targeted
country or region by new settlers. There has been an enormous amount of this sort of thing
in history, especially in the capitalist era, including the colonization by Europeans of
North and South America, Oceana and parts of Africa. This sort of ethnic cleansing
continues today in Palestine by the Israeli Zionists.
We Marxists strongly oppose this form of
ongoing theft of land and the expulsion of the people already living there, and even think
that new settlers themselves should be expelled (deported) from their settlements and the
land returned to its rightful owners.
However, there are great limitations on how
far the past crimes of this sort can be fully redressed in the present. Yes,
historically it was wrong for the European ancestors of most Americans today to steal the
continent from the Native Americans who got there earlier and some considerable redress for
those crimes is still appropriate considering the despicable and racist way in which Native
Americans continue to be treated in the United States. But it would be ridiculous to argue
that all white Americans should be “deported” back to Europe, as the cartoon at the right
comically suggests (in appropriate reaction to the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump
Administration). True, that might be poetic justice, but it is simply not sensible or
possible. The fact is that the ancestors of most of the people of the world originally came
from different regions, and very often displaced other existing populations when they did so.
Even the Native Americans themselves originally populated North America in waves, and newer
groups of them displaced earlier groups in specific regions as they did so (as linguistic
and other evidence proves).
So what we must work toward is not a world
in which “everybody goes back where they came from”—which is totally impossible—but rather
a world in which everyone has at least a right to be where they were born and raised; where
people have as much freedom to move to new places as possible providing this does not
mean displacing those already there!; and where past colonizations and population movements
which led to injustices and which still continue are redressed in other ways. Thus
there should be considerable redress to contemporary Native Hawaiians for the historical theft
of their islands, but at the same time Hawaii now belongs to all the people who live there,
no matter when their ancestors arrived. Similarly, while the ongoing Zionist theft of
Palestinian land and the accompanying ethnic cleansing by the Zionists must be stopped as
soon as possible, it is no longer reasonable or feasible to suggest that all Jewish immigrants
to the area over the past century, and their descendants, should be deported. Instead all
the people of that land should be considered to be the equal owners of it. This means,
of course, that Israel as a “Jewish homeland only” is still a racist, genocidal program which
must be brought to an end by the struggles of the Palestinian people and with much stronger
support for the Palestinians by the revolutionary peoples elsewhere in the world.
See also:
DEPORTATIONS—From the U.S.
IMMISERATION OF THE PROLETARIAT
The increasing impoverishment of the working class and masses under capitalism. This is
both a historical observation and a prediction for the future by Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto and also by Marx in Capital. Bourgeois ideologists have
claimed that this has not actually happened, and that the working class has improved its
lot substantially over the decades under capitalism. However there are several important
respects in which Marx’s statement about the immiseration of the working class is clearly
correct.
First, the statement was overall quite
correct for the history of capitalism up to the time at which Marx was writing. The advent
of capitalism and its early development certainly did lead to severe and often increasing
impoverishment of the masses in Europe especially (which was the focus of Marx’s
attention).
Second, while the working class has overall
become better off in the leading imperialist countries during the capitalist imperialist
era, this has come about mostly because of the capitalist desire to cool down the class
struggle at home while they drastically intensify the exploitation of the people in the
rest of the world. Thus on an overall international level the working people of the
world have indeed been further impoverished under capitalism. Well over half the population
of the world at the present time lives in what can only be called extreme poverty, and most
of the rest also live in somewhat less extremes of poverty. (See:
POVERTY—Extreme.)
Third, even within the advanced
capitalist and imperialist countries, there has been a relative impoverishment of
the working class and masses. That is, there has been a massive polarization of wealth in
the hands of bourgeoisie, while the economic welfare of the proletariat has improved at
a much slower pace. In other words, almost all of the new wealth produced by the working
class still goes to the capitalist class. Marx actually focused mostly on this relative
immiseration of the working class, rather than on their absolute immiseration.
This is something that the army of bourgeois critics of Marx almost totally ignore.
Fourth, while there have been periods of
diminishing poverty in many countries, there have also been periods of increasing poverty
in all countries. Moreover, the present period is one of those in which the
immiseration of the workers and masses in most places in the world is definitely increasing
as the world capitalist system sinks into its most severe economic crisis ever. The
immiseration of the working class is definitely underway full speed again in almost all
of the world today.
See also:
NEOLIBERALISM
IMPATIENCE — Dangers Of
See also: PATIENCE
“Change is a matter of gradual development leading up to, and
preparing the ground for, sudden transition. Thus any intelligent effort to bring
about change must not only recognize that a sudden transition or revolution is
necessary at some point (though that is the first element of wisdom), but that
also the ground must be prepared for that revolution through a period of
gradual development. To rationally work to bring about a change is therefore
primarily to concern yourself with fostering the gradual development that must
inevitably occur before the necessary sudden leap is possible.
“Politically, there is the
phenomenon of individuals who long for social revolution with all their heart and
soul, but are too impatient to do the actual work necessary to prepare the ground for
revolution. Because they are so impatient, they abandon the dialectical outlook on
change, focus entirely on the need for a sudden transition, and down-play the effort
needed to lay the necessary ground work.
“Such extreme impatience even
leads people to revise their revolutionary theory to fit their subjective desires.
‘Winning the masses takes time, therefore maybe it is not necessary to win the
masses, or maybe it is only necessary to win a small number of the masses...’ In
such a way are the impatient pushed away from the masses, away from mass revolution,
away from Marxism and toward “left” adventurism or even putschism.
“‘Organizing the masses takes
time, therefore maybe it is not necessary to organize the masses, maybe we can just
suppose that when push comes to shove the masses will spontaneously organize
themselves for revolution...’ In such a way are the impatient pushed toward a form
of anarchism and aloofness from the masses (even if they still recognize the
importance of a vanguard party).
“‘Participating with the masses
in their day-to-day struggle in order to raise their revolutionary consciousness is
too big a job, therefore maybe it is not necessary, maybe it is really only a kind
of reformism dressed up as revolutionary preparations; maybe the masses do not really
need to learn through their own experiences, and maybe we do not need to be there
with them to help them with this summation...’ In such a way does Marxism get turned
into a sort of “leftist” preaching, or a form of evangelism.
“‘Preparing for revolution takes
time and effort, therefore maybe it is not necessary to make extensive preparations,
maybe the masses are almost ready to go right now, maybe the revolution could break
out any day...’ In such a way do the impatient lose the ability to appraise the
objective situation, and start to lose contact with reality. This leads to constant
predictions of revolution ‘within this decade’, or ‘within a couple years’, or even
‘within a few months’—which in turn leads to demoralization when the subjective
predictions do not materialize.
“Extreme impatience can thus
lead to ultra-‘leftism’ in various guises, and to a distortion of Marxism.
“Impatience can be a good thing
or a bad thing. If impatience with the present despicable bourgeois world turns us
into revolutionaries, and gets us working toward bringing about revolution, it is of
course a very good thing. But if that impatience gets out of hand and leads us into
the renunciation of Marxism and the only real path to revolution, it is a very bad
thing. We should be impatient for revolution, but we should not let it make us
crazy.”
—S.H., The Mass Line and
the American Revolutionary Movement, Chapter 31.
“What childish innocence it is to present impatience as a theoretically
convincing argument!” —Engels, “Program of the Blanquist Communards”, Volkstaat,
#73, 1874; quoted in Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder” (April 1920),
Chapter VIII.
“IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY”
See also: EXECUTIVE ORDER,
“DEEP STATE”
“All governmental power of whatever sort shall be vested in a
president of the United States.” —From H. L. Mencken’s suggested revision of the U.S.
Constitution in light of the qualitatively growing powers of the presidency under
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [Since that time the powers of the presidency (both of
the president himself and of his associated “Executive Branch” of government) have
constantly further expanded, in almost an exponential fashion. —Ed.]
“Our country has, quite self-consciously, given one person, the
President, an enormous sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways
that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: one person decides.”
—Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and Justice Department official in the George
W. Bush administration, quoted as the “Quote of the Day” in the New York Times,
National Edition, Jan. 5, 2020, p. 3.
IMPERIALISM or CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM
The term ‘imperialism’ in traditional usage means the political and economic control or
domination of one country by another. In this general sense, Rome was an imperial power,
as was Persia and other ancient empires. However, within revolutionary Marxism the term
‘imperialism’ is generally used as a technical term to mean capitalist imperialism,
or the economic and political form that capitalism has taken during the period
since the late 19th century. Lenin defined imperialism as the highest and final stage of
capitalism, and used the term synonymously with monopoly capitalism.
Among the central characteristics of
capitalist imperialism are:
1) The rise of and near universal domination
of the capitalist economy by joint-stock corporations,
as opposed to individually-owned companies or partnerships.
2) A qualitative increase in the levels of
monopoly or oligopoly within
capitalist economies, especially within each major nation.
3) A qualitative increase in one or another
form of the globalization of capital. In the pre-World
War I period this often took place in the form of cartelization (international monopolies
or agreements among the monopolies from separate nations). In recent decades this has more
frequently taken place in the form of the rise of giant multinational
corporations (MNCs), which though nearly always politically based in a single country,
nevertheless operate and engage in plunder around the globe like international pirates.
4) A qualitative increase in the importance
of the export of capital (as compared with merely the export of commodities, though
that is of intensified importance as well).
5) A qualitative increase in the role of
the capitalist state in the management of the economy, and often the de facto merger of the
state with corporations (such as via bourgeois nationalization
of individual companies or industries for certain periods).
6) A qualitative expansion in the importance
of the financial aspects of capitalism, the financialization
of an ever-growing part of the economy, and the rise in importance of a
financial oligarchy at the apex of the bourgeois
ruling class structure.
7) A qualitative increase in the importance
of the domination and exploitation of other countries by a few militaristic imperialist
powers. This first took the form of outright colonialism, with virtually total economic
and political control of specific “Third World” countries by individual imperialist powers.
But this broke down during the second half of the 20th century, and was replaced with
neocolonialism, wherein the dominated countries are
nominally independent but still exploited and under the general control of foreign
imperialism via the medium of local agents of the imperialists (the
comprador capitalist class).
8) Politically, capitalist-imperialism is
overall a period of world strife, constant imperialist wars whereby the big powers seek to
establish, maintain, or re-establish control over other countries, and even some very
disastrous and devastating world wars among the imperialist countries and against socialist
countries. And, overall, and despite some periods of quiescence, it is a period of the
revolutionary upsurge of the people of the world against the capitalist-imperialist
system.
See also below, and:
NATURAL RESOURCE CURSE,
NEOCOLONIALISM,
U.S. IMPERIALISM,
GERMAN IMPERIALISM—In Nazi Era,
STAGES OF CAPITALIST-IMPERIALISM,
WORLD IMPERIALIST SYSTEM
IMPERIALISM — Contemporary “Rehabilitation” Of
Starting with the genocidal imperialist wars by Japan in China during the 1930s, and the
more general imperialist war which became World War II, ‘imperialism’ became a word to
avoid, in describing their own actions, by the U.S. and other old-line imperialist powers,
including even Britain (though they still talked favorably about the British Empire for
a while). While the Soviet Union still existed, its constant denunciation of Western
imperialism also forced the U.S. and other imperialist powers to continue to deny that
they were imperialists. Indeed the very word ‘imperialism’ was denounced as mere
communist “jargon”, and the masses were taught to avoid using it unless they wanted to
be considered “brain-washed by the Commies”. But with the fading memories of World War II,
and then with the collapse of the state-capitalist Soviet Union in 1991, there soon
developed in the U.S. and Britain, at least, a trend toward rehabilitating the word
‘imperialism’ and trying to find new ways to “justify” it. The old slogans such as the
“white man’s burden” remained on the shelf; but many new comments by capitalist spokesmen
about how imperialism is a postive force if it “spreads democracy” and “helps people
through ‘humanitarian intervention’” have
now come to the fore. The imperialist bourgeoisie has been making a serious effort to
rehabilitate within the liberal intellectual community the absurd notion that imperialism
is a “good thing”. (And the so-called “democracy” that they are trying to spread is merely
a totally phony bourgeois democracy that keeps
foreign imperialism in control of other countries through compradors
or client regimes which follow all the major instructions from abroad.)
“‘It is easy to forget,’ wrote Frank Furedi in The New
Ideology of Imperialism [1994], ‘that until the 1930s the moral claims of
imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global
expansion of the Western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms
as a major contributor to human civilization.... To be an imperialist was
considered a respectable, political badge.’ As the United States emerged from the
Second World War and shed what ‘Atlanticists’ like to call its ‘age of innocence’
(forgetting the slaughter of the Native Americans, slavery, the theft of Texas
[and more! —Ed.] from Mexio, the bloody subjugation of Central America, Cuba and
the Philippines, and other innocent pursuits), ‘imperialism’ was dropped from
American textbooks and declared a European affair. One of the difficulties for
proud imperialists in the immediate post-war period was that Hitler and fascism,
and all their ideas of racial and cultural superiority, had left a legacy of
guilt by association. The Nazis had been proud imperialists, too.
“A serious, if farcical,
campaign to expunge the word from the language followed ‘on the grounds that it
falsely attributed immoral motives to Western foreign policy’. The term was
deemed to no longer have ‘relevance’. Those who peristed in using it as a pejorative
term were ‘disreputable’ and ‘sinister’. They were, wrote one American historian,
‘inspired by the Communist doctrine’, or they were ‘Negro intellectuals who had
grievances of their own against white capitalism’....
“That changed in the 1990s.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the imperialists took heart. The economic
and political crises in the ‘developing’ world, caused by the collapse in
commodity prices and the ravages of debt, would now serve as retrospective
justification for imperialism. Once again, the ‘third world’ needed to be saved
from itself. Imperialism’s return journey to establishment respectability had
begun.” —John Pilger, Freedom Next Itme: Resisting the Empire (2007),
pp. 5-6.
IMPERIALISM — Hypocritical Bourgeois Comments On
It is interesting that various capitalist-imperialist politicians and ideologists have,
from time to time, condemned “imperialism”. Of course, for the most part this means
condemning other imperialist powers, rather than their own. But, on quite rare
occasions some of them have even claimed to oppose the imperialism of their own country
or that of the “Western bloc”, etc. This is most often a demagogic maneuver to try to
show the voters that they—unlike other ruling class politicians—are opposed to the
endless wars and other outrages of imperialism. But strangely, once they gain power
themselves, all of this seems to be totally forgotten.
“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither
communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s
eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force
of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that
means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not
to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus the single most important test of American
foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to
further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation
shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and
anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain.
If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no
amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines
or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our
security.” —Senator John F. Kennedy, in a Senate speech, July 2, 1957, quoted in
David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of
America’s Secret Government (2015), p. 362.
[This pious speech did not
prevent Senator Kennedy from supporting and voting for weapons for the U.S.
imperialist military, nor—a few years later when he became president—from leading
U.S. imperialism in its attempt to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba, or from
trying to maintain U.S. imperialist control of south Vietnam, or any number of other
imperialist actions. There is no greater hypocrite than an imperialist hypocrite
claiming to be opposed to imperialism. —Ed.]
IMPERIALISM — Lenin’s Definition Of
[Intro to be added...]
“And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of
all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a
phenomenon in its complete development, we must give a definition of imperialism
that will include the following five of its basic features: 1) the concentration of
production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created
monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank
capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance
capital,’ of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from
the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of
international monopolist capitalist combines which share the world among themselves,
and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist
powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism in the stage of development in which
the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which
the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of
the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all
territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”
—Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline” (1916),
(Peking: FLP, 1975), pp. 105-6; LCW 22:266-7.
IMPERIALISM — World System of
See: WORLD IMPERIALIST SYSTEM
IMPERIALIST COUNTRIES
See also: IMPERIALISM
“All capitalist ruling classes in this era function within the world
imperialist system and seize all of the world’s wealth and resources they are able to.
However:
a.
The bourgeoisie (including its alliance in some cases with a feudal landlord class)
in most countries is far too weak internationally to exercise significant
imperialist control over other countries, or to organize significant economic
exploitation of them.
b.
In a few countries the ruling bourgeoisie is far stronger, and has quite a free hand
to boss around other countries and/or to economically exploit them to a considerable
degree. These are the countries we call imperialist countries.”
—N. B. Turner, et al., Is
China an Imperialist Country? — Considerations and Evidence (2015), summary
thesis number 2, p. 144. Available online in PDF format at
https://www.bannedthought.net/International/Red-Path/01/RP-8.5x11-IsChinaAnImperialistCountry-140320.pdf
and elsewhere.
“IMPERIALIST ECONOMISTS” [Political Trend among the Bolsheviks]
“Imperialist economists—Lenin’s designation for the
opportunists Bukharin, Pyatakov and Bosh in the Russian
Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) during the First World War. The
‘imperialist economists’ demanded that the Party delete the programmatic statement
on the right of nations to self-determination. They also came out against the entire
minimum programme of the R.S.D.L.P., which envisaged a struggle for democratic
reforms that would facilitate the preparation and transition to the socialist
revolution. Lenin laid bare the opportunistic essence of the position of Bukharin
and those sharing his views, its kinship with ‘economism’—the opportunistic trend in
Russian Social-Democracy at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th. Like the old ‘economists,’ who could not understand the need for the political
struggle of the working class under conditions of capitalism, the ‘imperialist
economists’ did not understand the significance of the struggle for democratic
reforms under conditions of imperialism.
“Certain views of the
‘imperialist economists’ were shared by Left Social-Democrats of Holland, America,
Poland, etc. That is why Lenin called ‘imperialist economism’ an ‘international
disease’ [LCW 35:254].
“A number of articles by
Lenin are devoted to a criticism of ‘imperialist economism’: ‘On the Incipient Trend
of “Imperialist Economism”’ [LCW 23:1-9]; ‘Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)’ [LCW
23:10-15]; ‘A Caracature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’ [LCW 23:16-64].”
—Note 155, LCW 38.
IMPERIALIST OVERREACH
The common tendency of imperial powers—both traditional (old-style) imperialism and modern
capitalist-imperialism—to try to conquer and control more
of the world than they are really capable of holding onto over the long term. In World
War II, for example, the arrogance and impatience of the imperialists of Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy and Japan led them into overextending their empires to such a degree that
they ended up collapsing in complete wartime defeat. This occurred in part because of the
ferocious war against them by competing imperialist powers (especially the U.S. and
Britain); in part because they unwisely took on the ideologically powerful forces of the
socialist Soviet Union and Mao’s Communists in China; and in part because they were trying
to incorporate into their spheres of control many peoples with linguistic and cultural
differences so far from their own that they could not be pacified and socially digested,
such as in Eastern Europe and China, which, for racist reasons, they were not even smart
enough to try to do.
At present the country with the most
obvious and extreme imperialist overreach is the United States, which is still attempting
to hold onto major areas of the world (such as Southeast Asia, the Middle East and
Afghanistan) which keep slipping through their greedy fingers.
“All states that are liberal of naturalization towards strangers are
fit for empire. For to think that a handful of people can, with the greatest courage
and policy in the world, embrace too large extent of domination [is wrong, for] it may
hold for a time but it will fail suddenly.” —Francis Bacon, “Of the True Greatness of
Kingdoms and Estates”, early 17th century, in Selected Writings of Francis Bacon
(NY: 1955), pp. 80-81.
IMPERIALISTS — Racist Attitudes Of
It is commonplace, almost to the point of universality, for imperialists in the capitalist
era to have strongly racist attitudes towards the people of the countries they dominate and
exploit, especially if there are any differences in appearance (no matter how superficial)
between those populations and that of the ruling class at home.
This rampant and vicious imperialist racism
is especially prominent in the training of imperial troops to conquer or put down rebellions
in colonies and neo-colonies. Thus the conditioning of American soldiers during the Vietnam
War to think in terms of enthusiastically “killing gooks”.
See also:
GERMAN IMPERIALISM—In the Nazi Era [Mazower
quote]
For Europeans and Persons
of European Origin
Only.
Dogs and Indians
Not Allowed.
|
“Breech Candy is a club in Bombay [now Mumbai]. The best bath and the
only good swimming pool near the centre of the city. In January 1959 I see that a
placard is still hanging there. [See above.] This irritates me. I refuse to go there.
That night I meet a Swede. I talk to him about this. I maintain that it is indefensible
that the Indian government should still—twelve years after Independence—allow this. He
looks at me and answers:
—‘But they have driven us away
from everything we have built here in India. They have taken away everything that was
ours. But at least they have the decency to let us keep this, our last reservation, to
ourselves.’
He was twenty-eight, had spent
two months in India. Came directly from Uppsala University. They later told me he would
be one of the bright young men of our Foreign Office.”
—Jan Myrdal, Confessions of a
Disloyal European (1968), pp. 22-23.
[It is apparently a popular myth
that a similar sign literally reading “No Dogs or Chinese Allowed” was once posted in
a park in Shanghai. However, in the Huangpu Park in the foreign “Concession” in
Shanghai before World War II there was indeed a sign in English saying that the park
was “reserved for the foreign community” and this sign did also say that “No dogs were
allowed.” Thus the overall meaning was in fact pretty much the same as if it had said
“No Dogs or Chinese Allowed”. And we do not know precisely how the signs in
Chinese may have put it. —Ed.]