—   Inf - Ins   —

INFALLIBILITY
Perfection and infallibility are anti-dialectical notions. Even worse than promoting the idea among others that you are always right, is coming to believe such a silly thing yourself.

“INFANTILE LEFTISM”

INFLATION — Bourgeois Puzzlement About
Although inflation is basically something simple (as mentioned in the entry above), there are special circumstances which can for short periods lead to higher or lower inflation than might be expected simply by comparing the growth of money in circulation to the growth of production. This has caused no end to puzzlement and confusion on the part of bourgeois economists. It has led them to cook up all sorts of erroneous theories about the cause(s) of inflation, about how to deal with it, and so forth. Sometimes all this reaches comical proportions—or at least it would be comical if it did not lead to so much additional hardship for the masses.

“The first principle of war is ‘know thine enemy.’ But as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues raise interest rates to keep the U.S. economy from overheating, there’s a lot they don’t know about the foe they’re trying to contain: inflation.
        “Here are some of the things about inflation the Fed and other central banks are uncertain of: what causes it; what effects it has; what to count in measuring it (stock prices?); how low, or high, it should be; and how to move it up and down.
        “The Fed, in other words, is driving blind. Daniel Tarullo, in a tell-all address at the Brookings Institution in October [2017] after his resignation from the Fed’s Board of Governors, said, ‘We do not, at present, have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking.’”
         —“What Is Inflation Anyway?”, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 26, 2018, p. 32.

INFLATION TARGETING   [Bourgeois Economic Policy]
A strategy by a central bank or other authorities in charge of a capitalist economy in which some definite target rate for inflation is set, and monetary and other measures are frequently adjusted in an attempt to stay within a narrow band around that level of inflation. The alternative ad hoc approach to monetary policy has been more common in the past. “Inflation targeting” assumes that short-term forecasts of inflation rates will be accurate, which is often far from true. In any case, inflation targeting will at most only work as a fine tuning measure, and cannot possibly eliminate the industrial cycle in capitalist economies nor resolve major crises.

INFLUENCER
        1. [General meaning:] A person or thing that influences another. [Oxford English Dictionary]
        2. [In U.S. capitalist marketing and social media lingo:] A person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items, especially on social media.

“About 54 percent of young Americans said they would become an influencer if given the opportunity, and nearly 90 percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money, according to a 2019 report by Morning Consult.”   —New York Times, Aug. 24, 2023, National Edition, p. 3. [This shows, in a very pitiful way, just how corrupting capitalism is even to the masses themselves! —Ed.]

INFORMATION OVERLOAD
This is a common phenomenon in the modern world, especially since the widespread availability of TV, computers and the Internet. The central difficulty with “information overload” is that the great preponderance of the information that many people are being swamped with is just not very important, reliable or useful. Worse yet, excessive attention to relatively unimportant information can distract people from acquiring the most essential information. One way that this happens is that people spend a lot of time “surfing the Internet” for what are actually relatively trivial and transient facts and off-the-cuff opinions, while not putting in any serious effort to acquire the scientific theories and perspectives that would allow them to properly evaluate those facts and opinions. This results in a “dumbing down” of people’s understanding of what is going on in the world and their ability to deal with it. This is a problem for society in general, but it is especially so for young people who are the ones most prone to spend so much time “texting”, visiting social networking sites and otherwise surfing the Web, etc., and so little time reading serious books these days.
        This is also becoming a serious problem in the culture of the revolutionary left. Much more attention needs to be given to having formal study groups and to serious study of revolutionary theory, especially the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao.

INITIATIVE
All revolutionary organizations and parties call for their members and the masses they work with to show initiative, and to not just wait for orders from above. But mere “calling for” initiative will not work at all when there is no true freedom to develop ideas for action, and when actual ideas and initiatives are routinely criticized, condemned and beaten down. This is why parties and organizations which do not really have much in the way of genuine internal democracy can never develop much initiative from their sub-units and from their individual members, no matter how loudly the leaders may call for it. The indispensable connection beween internal democracy and the genuine promotion of the initiative of all the members of the party or group is well brought out in the following quote from Mao. Note that Mao also connects this up with the need for the lower bodies and individual members to be willing to criticize and supervise the higher party bodies! After all, showing any creativity and inititive is in effect also tacitly suggesting some shortcomings in leadership! Truly good leadership knows that they cannot possibly be the source of all correct ideas and good suggestions.

“In the present great struggle, the Chinese Communist Party demands that all its leading bodies and all its members and cadres should give the fullest expression to their initiative, which alone can ensure victory. This initiative must be demonstrated concretely in the ability of the leading bodies, the cadres and the Party rank and file to work creatively, in their readiness to assume responsibility, in the exuberant vigor they show in their work, in their courage and ability to raise questions, voice opinions and criticize defects, and in the comradely supervision that is maintained over the leading bodies and the leading cadres. Otherwise, ‘initiative’ will be an empty thing. But the exercise of such initiative depends on the spread of democracy in Party life. Only in an atmosphere of democracy can large numbers of able people be brought forward.” —Mao, “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” (Oct. 1938), SW2:204.

INNER-PARTY STRUGGLE (And Inner-Party Criticism)

“Opposition and struggle between ideas of different kinds constantly occur within the Party; this is a reflection within the Party of contradictions between classes and between the new and the old in society. If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end.” —Mao, “On Contradiction” (Aug. 1927), SW 1:317.

INNOVATION-ONLY ECONOMIC MODEL
The bizarre theory of many American bourgeois economists that it no longer matters that manufactoring is rapidly declining in the U.S. and shifting overseas, because supposedly most of the world’s innovation and new ideas are still happening in the U.S. In reality, innovation, and ideas for new or improved products, also soon shift to the new manufacturing centers.

“That innovation should always follow manufacturing is hardly surprising. After all, manufacturers conduct 70 percent of all R&D [research and development] in the United States. So what do we think will happen to all that R&D when those manufacturers move offshore?
        “The offshoring of innovation has resulted in a sharp decline in overall R&D intensity in the United States—the percentage of gross domestic product devoted to R&D—relative to the rest of the world. We once had the most R&D-intensive economy in the world. Now we’re eighth.” —Henry R. Nothhaft, a U.S. “entrepreneur” capitalist, lamenting the relative decline in R&D and innovation in the U.S., “U.S. Outsourcing Prosperity”, San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 2011, p. F7.

“INQUILAB ZINDABAD”
Inquilab Zindabad is a phrase in Hindi and related languages which means “Long live the revolution!” This slogan was commonly used by freedom-fighters during the British imperialist rule over India, and remains very popular in the Indian revolutionary movement today.

INSIDER TRADING
The buying or selling of stocks or other financial securities by those with “inside knowledge” of the decisions being made by capitalist corporations which will affect the prices of those shares of stock or securities. In capitalist financial theory every buyer or seller is supposed to be allowed equal access to this information (through public publication) before anyone is legally allowed to make use of it to buy or sell, though fully honoring this law is probably actually something of a rarity! Occasionally some blatant case of insider trading is prosecuted. Insider trading is yet another method whereby some financial capitalists cheat the others.

INSOLUBLE PROBLEMS

“In a broad sense there are no insoluble problems, but only those which, arising from a vague feeling, are not yet suitably expressed.” —Carl Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (NY: Dover, 1959 (1949)), p. 25, expressing an idea credited to Fedrigo Enriques, Problems of Science (1929), p. 5.

INSTANT
A specific moment (or “point”) in time. This is an important mathematical abstraction which has also become part of the conceptual machinery of virtually every human being.

“In contrasting average speed with instantaneous speed we have implicitly utilized a distinction between interval and instant, which is vital for what follows. An average speed is one that concerns what happens over an interval of time—3 hours, 5 seconds, one half second, and so forth. The interval may be small or large, but it does represent the passage of a definite amount of time. We use the word instant, however, to state the fact that something happens so fast that no time elapses. The event is momentary. When we say, for example, that it is 3 o’clock, we refer to an instant, a precise moment. If the lapse of time is pictured by length along a line, then an interval is represented by a line segment, whereas an instant corresponds to a point. The notion of an instant, although it is also used in everyday life, is strictly a mathematical idealization.” —Morris Kline, Calculus: An Intuitive and Physical Approach, 2nd ed. (Dover, 1998 (1977)), p. 17.

INSTANTANEOUS VELOCITY
The limit value of a series of average velocities as one calculates them for ever-smaller periods approaching a single instant or “point in time”. Although people seem to have an intuitive feel for the notion of an instantaneous velocity, it is actually quite a sophisticated concept when worked out with logical rigor.

“[T]he derivative f'(t) of the distance function f(t), [is] the instantaneous velocity of the body. It is to be borne in mind, however, that this is not a velocity in the ordinary sense and has no counterpart in the world of nature, in which there can be no motion without a change of position. The instantaneous velocity as thus defined is not the division of a time interval into a distance interval, howsoever much the conventional notation ds/dt = f'(t) may suggest a ratio. This symbolism, although remarkably serviceable in the carrying out of the operations of the calculus, will be found to have resulted from misapprehension on the part of Leibniz as to the logical basis of the calculus.” —Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development (1959), pp. 7-8.

INSURANCE
Insurance is simply a socially-approved-of form of gambling, wherein the person or company taking out the insurance bets that something bad will happen, and the insurance company bets that it won’t. When you buy fire insurance on your house, for example, you are betting that the house will catch fire someday, and the insurance company is betting that it won’t. For you, that is indeed gambling, because it is impossible to be sure whether or not your house will catch fire. But it is a gamble that makes sense because if your house does catch fire, at least you will receive a large payment from the insurance company that will hopefully allow you to repair the damage or else build a new house. If your house never catches fire, then you will still be out the premiums you paid to the insurance company; but, either way, you will not have suffered a catastropic loss. That is why insurance is often a good idea for the person buying it; it eliminates (or at least reduces) their risk of any catastrophic loss.
        While buying insurance is a form of gambling for the person buying the insurance, interestingly it is not really that much of a gamble for the insurance company! This is because while the odds of your particular house catching fire someday are unknown, and probably unknowable, the total number of houses of your type catching fire in your region of the country over the course of an average year is a quite stable and easily ascertainable statistical figure. If the insurance company insures a large enough number of houses it will have a very good idea of the total insurance payments it will have to pay out each year. For them it is not much of a gamble at all; it is actuarial science.

“An insurance company, sanely directed, and making scores of thousands of bets, is not gambling at all; it knows with sufficient accuracy at what age its clients will die, how many of their houses will be burnt every year, how often their houses will by broken into by burglars..., how much they will suffer from illness or unemployment, and what births and deaths will cost them: in short, what will happen to every thousand or ten thousand or a million people even when the company cannot tell what will happen to any individual among them.” —George Bernard Shaw, “The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance”, in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, vol. 3, 1956, p. 1527.

INSURANCE DEATH SPIRAL
A situation where an insurance company (or segment of the insurance industry) begins to lose those of its customers who are least likely to file claims, leaving the company with a higher proportion of policy holders who do file claims, which in turn forces them to raise their rates, which then leads to the loss of more customers in a vicious feedback loop.
        An insurance company or segment of the industry (such as fire insurance or health insurance) normally insures a wide cross-section of the public, that is, something close to a representative section of the public. Thus if 4% of all the families in a country have a major health problem in an average year, and the health insurance industry pays out major claims to 4% of their policy holders during the year, their policy holders may be deemed a representative section of the population. The rates the health insurance industry sets are based on their expectations of the rate of payout. But suppose economic hard times come along (as they often do under capitalism), and more and more of those who are in generally good health decide they have to drop their health insurance because they just can no longer afford to pay the premiums. In this case the insurance companies will be paying out claims on a greater percentage of policies and will have to raise their rates. This will force more people to drop their health insurance, which once again leads to higher premiums.
        This situation actually developed in the health insurance industry in the U.S. around 2010, with sudden huge premium increases being demanded by the insurance companies. They really did not want to raise their rates just then because that might lead to more support for a national health care plan which these insurance companies strongly oppose. But to keep their profits up, most or all of them raised their rates anyway. (This is another example of how the interests of an individual capitalist company often trump the interests of the whole industry or the interests of the capitalist class as a whole!)
        In a genuine socialist society there could be no such thing as an insurance death spiral, since every person would automatically be covered by reasonable health insurance and other forms of insurance. The insurance coverage would automatically be “representative” of the whole population, since it would include the whole population.

INSURRECTION — Caution With
While revolutionaries of course work toward revolution, and therefore in most countries, work toward insurrection, the actual call to the masses to join an insurrection is not something to be toyed with! Here is what Lenin had to say about this:

“‘Insurrection’ is an important word. A call to insurrection is an extremely serious call. The more complex the social system, the better the organization of state power, and the more perfected the military machine, the more impermissible is it to launch such a slogan without due thought. And we have stated repeatedly that the revolutionary Social-Democrats [who we now refer to as communists —Ed.] have long been preparing to launch it, but have launched it as a direct call only when there could be no doubt whatever of the gravity, widespread and deep roots of the revolutionary movement, no doubt of matters having literally come to a head. Important words must be used with circumspection. Enormous difficulties have to be faced in translating them into important deeds.” —Lenin, “The Latest in Iskra Tactics, or Mock Elections as a New Incentive to an Uprising”, LCW 9:367-69.