IONIAN SCHOOL [Philosophy: 6th century BCE]
The Ionian School of ancient Greek philosophy (also known as the Ionic or Miletian school),
arose in the city of Miletus which was a trading and cultural center of the ancient world
located on the coast of Asia Minor. This was the earliest school of naturalistic materialism
in the history of Greek philosophy, and is also considered to be the first school of
scientific speculation about the nature of the world—i.e., one of the earliest sources of
ideas which could be reasonably viewed as early scientific theories. Its most famous
individuals were Thales, Anaximander
and Anaximenes.
Although they were materialists, the Ionians
were what we would now view as very naïve materialists,
and really had not much of any understanding of how mind and mental phenomena can be viewed as
arising from an appropriate complex organization of matter (a brain). Instead, they were
called hylozoists (those who “put life into matter”), and they seem to have believed
that all matter itself, at least in an elemental way, is actually capable of what we would now
call mental processes such as having feelings. In this way the Ionians could also be viewed as
early precursors of something like the sort of dualism that
Leibniz propounded, as much as true materialists in the modern
sense. This, however, is often characteristic of naïve materialism in general.
“Ionian science was an endeavor marked by a strong interest in uncovering
fundamental laws to explain natural phenomena, a tremendous milestone in the history of
human ideas. Their approach was rational and in many cases led to conclusions supprisingly
similar to what our more sophisticated methods have led us to believe today. It
represented a grand beginning. But over the centuries much of Ionian science would be
forgotten—only to be rediscovered or reinvented, sometimes more than once....
“Scholars in ancient Ionia were
among the first to explain natural phenomena through laws of nature rather than myth or
theology....
“As the Ionian influence spread,
there appeared others who saw that the universe possesses an internal order, one that
could be understood through observation and reason. Anaximander (ca. 610 BC-ca. 546 BC),
a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless
at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not
have survived. In what may have been humanity’s first inkling of evolution, people,
Anaximander reasoned, must therefore have evolved from other animals whose young are
hardier.” —Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (2010), pp.
18-20.
IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR
A scandal during the Reagan Administration in which the U.S. imperialists used secret means
to illegally (and immorally) try to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
“[T]he attrocious misadventure known as the ‘Iran-Contra affair’ was
represented in Washington as a domestic embarrassment for the Reagan administration rather
than a conspiracy to bleed to death the Nicaraguan government, whose only threat was that
of a good example. That countless innocent people were killed [by the U.S. and its agents]
or denied the opportunity to free themselves from poverty, disease and illiteracy was
never an ‘issue’. A subsequent ruling by the International Court of Justice distinguished
the Reagan administration as the only government the court has ever condemned for
‘terrorism’, calling on it to pay the Nicaraguan government $17 billion in reparations.
This was ignored and the matter long forgotten, for it was the slowest news [for the
American media].” —John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (2007),
p. 2. [Pilger notes that, for the corporate media, news that they do not wish to report
is considered “slow news”, i.e., fit for mentioning only when there is nothing else to
talk about—if even then. —Ed.]
IRAQ — U.S. War Against (1991)
This U.S. invasion and war against Iraq occured in January-February 1991. It was the U.S.
imperialist reponse to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait which occurred in August 1990. [More to
be added.]
“On 2 August [1990], the second day of the Iraqi invasion [of Kuwait],
[U.S. Army General] Norman Schwarzkopf had mused aloud that his science adviser should
investigate the feasibility of exploding a nuclear weapon in a high-altitude airburst
over Iraq at the outset of a war to generate an electromagnetic pulse to short out Iraqi
communications and missile launch controls. The Joint Chiefs would soon decide not to
move nuclear weapons into the Persion Gulf, writes the intelligence analyst William
Arkin—in any case, there were nuclear bombs stored at an American air base in southern
Turkey, well within range of Baghdad—‘but a variety of military organizations quietly
began to examine nuclear options. Led by the “special weapons branch” in the Operations
Directorate and the office of the Scientific Advisor at Schwarzkopf’s headquarters, the
Army staff, Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Department
of Energy’s national laboratories all contributed ideas and proposals.’” —Richard Rhodes,
The Twilight of the Bomb (2010), pp. 30-31. [It is important to understand that
U.S. imperialism is trigger happy, even with regard to using nuclear weapons in its
endless small regional wars. They always think about doing so, even if so far
they haven’t done it yet. —Ed.]
IRAQ — U.S. War Against (2003-11)
The U.S. imperialists, together with their junior partners including the British imperialists,
have attacked and invaded Iraq several times in recent decades, in order to seize better control
of its oil resources and to establish a military center for U.S. control of the whole Middle
East. The second and largest war and invasion, also known as the Second Gulf War, began on
March 20, 2003, and finally more or less came to an end in late 2011. (However, it was then
soon followed by yet another U.S. war in Iraq beginning around 2014, this time focused against
the Islamic State (ISIS) forces.)
It is estimated that up to 1.2 million people
have died as a result of the 2003-2011 war, from both the direct results of the invasion and
occupation, and from the sectarian conflict that then erupted between Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds
and other sections of the population. This figure apparently does not include the previous
hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially of Iraqi children, during the severe blockade of
Iraq during the 1990s and up until the 2003 invasion. In the photo at the right, 5-year old
Samar Hassan screams in terror, and is covered in her innocent parent’s blood, after U.S. troops
fired on their car and killed them in Tal Afar, Iraq, on the evening of Jan. 18, 2005. They were
merely taking their other child, Samar’s sick brother, to the hospital.
The stated goal of this war by the American
and British imperialists was to liquidate the threat to their interests posed by Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction” (chemical, biological and,
“potentially” it was claimed, nuclear weapons). Despite exhaustive seaching, no such weapons
or weapons programs were found in Iraq after the invasion, and it became obvious that this
was a mere pretense, which perhaps the imperialists convinced themselves existed because they
needed some excuse to invade Iraq.
The real primary reasons for the attack and
invasion were quite obvious. Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia in the Mideast in its proven
oil reserves. The U.S. State Department, in a memorandum as far back as 1945, termed the
Mideast as a “stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes
in world history”. In addition it was necessary to move the U.S. military forces in the
region out of Saudi Arabia (after the violent attacks by Saudi militants in the U.S. on Sept.
11, 2001). What better place to move them than Iraq, with its huge oil resources, and—as a
plus—right next door to Iran, which the imperialists also expect to attack at some point.
There were also a number of less important additional reasons, such as their need to slap
down Saddam Hussein, a tyrant they had put in power in the first place, but who had grown too
big for his britches (too independent) in their eyes.
From the point of view of actually promoting
the interests and goals of U.S. and other foreign imperialism, this Iraq war and invasion has
been a major and extraordinary expensive failure. Far from quickly seizing control of Iraq
and the surrounding area, this imperialist intervention has further destabilized the entire
region. The offical figure for the U.S. funds spent or allocated on this war (as of Nov.
2010) was already more than $900 billion. Much of the actual cost, however, has been hidden
in the general military and other federal government budgets. The final tally, including all
the expenditures for health care for veterans, replacement of war materials used up in this
war, etc., will be at least $1.5 trillion, and some estimates run as high as $3 trillion. At
a time when the U.S. and world capitalist economic crisis is intensifying as never before,
this war has obviously been an extremely foolish one, even from the point of view of the
interests of the imperialists themselves!
See also:
AMERICAN SNIPER Movie
“Whatever the merits or demerits of earlier US policy might have been,
Washington’s occupation of Iraq from 2003 to 2011 proved a catalyst for chaos, first for
the country itself and then for the wider Middle East where the political balance was
tenuous at best. After the US invasion of March 2003 captured Baghdad in just three
weeks, Washington’s empowered envoy L. Paul Bremer made a series of decisions for his
occupation government that ranged, in the words of the New York Times, from the
‘deleterious’ to the ‘calamitous.’ First, he fired eighty-five thousand members of the
ruling Baath Party, producing ‘the instant impoverishment of entire clans and tribes.’
Then, he abolished the Iraqi military, largely controlled by the Sunni minority,
dismissing ‘hundreds of thousands of men ... with both military training and access to
weapons.’ Finally, the US military under his command gave ‘little thought to the arsenals
and munitions depots ... scattered about the country’ that were soon ‘systematically
looted, sometimes under the gaze of coalition soldiers who did not intervene.’
“Under what the New York Times
called the collective ‘weight of these blunders’ the US occupation erupted in a violent
insurgency within a year. After auditioning a succession of diffident allies, the United
States finally settled on the Shia sectarian leader Nouri al-Maliki, whose eight years
of corrupt, repressive maladministration (2006-14) were crowned by the disastrous ISIS
offensive of June 2014. For nearly a decade, the United States had spent $25 billion
building a modern Iraqi army with the full panoply of armor, infantry, and special
forces. Within a week, however, just five thousand Sunni guerrillas routed a hundred
thousand of these Iraqi (largely Shia) troops, capturing billions of dollars of advanced
weaponry, cities with five million people, and a full third of Iraq’s sovereign territory.
It would take two full years to rebuild this army sufficiently to retake many of these
captured cities, and even then sectarian troops—Shia militia and Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters—did much of the fighting.
“In retrospect, the critical variable
for this imperial misadventure in Iraq was Washinton’s inability to find an effective ally
as surrogate for its exercise of power. In its last years, the shockwaves from this
bungled American occupation and the sustained jihadist resistance were soon felt across
this volatile region.” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017), pp. 74-75.
[As a liberal historian, sympathetic
to the proclaimed goals of the “American empire”, McCoy puts the emphasis here on the
“bungles” the U.S. made in selecting its agents and puppets and in governing Iraq after its
conquest in 2003. He is unable to correctly analyze just why U.S. imperialism is so prone
to making such mistakes, and why they are more and more common. (Hint for Mr. McCoy: It has
something to do with the growing determination of the people of the world to get foreign
imperialist rulers out of their country!) —Ed.]
“IRON LAW OF WAGES”
A misunderstanding of the political-economic theory of capitalism which imagines that no amount of
workers’ struggle can ever succeed in raising wages above the absolute minimum level required for their
survival and reproduction. There were hints of this view going at least as far back as Thomas Malthus
and David Ricardo. But Ricardo also noted that if production (and a fairer distribution, he
should have added!) expand faster than population growth, then it is theoretically possible for real
wages to increase beyond their bare minimum. (So the question, of course, is then to what degree this
actually happens within the capitalist socioeconomic system.)
It was Ferdinand Lassalle, the 19th century German
lawyer and labor movement leader, who was the most prominent exponent of this supposed “iron law of
wages”, and who gave it that name. Marx, in his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” [1875], criticizes
that Programme for its Lassallean elements, including this so-called “law”. Marx implicitly grants
that, yes, workers’ struggles can indeed lead to increased wages. But he is also careful to add (as the
Gotha program itself does not) that “the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a
slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop,
whether the worker receives better or worse payment” [p. 23 of the Peking 1972 edition]. In other words,
yes, the workers can of course through arduous struggle with the capitalists win somewhat higher wages,
but they are still wage slaves, even so.
Marx does state or imply in Capital and elsewhere
that the floor level for wages is indeed at the level of basic human existence, though he also
notes that in different countries the social customs and the powerful struggle of workers can often
raise those wages above that floor level. Things have changed further in the capitalist-imperialist era,
where a large part of the wealth extracted by the imperialist rulers comes from the workers in even more
intensely exploited foreign countries. This enables the imperialists to keep things more peaceful within
their home countries by somewhat more readily giving in to workers’ demands for better wages and working
conditions there. So while one tendency within capitalism is still to keep workers’ wages at the
subsistence level, there are countervailing tendencies which can sometimes raise wages above this
absolute minimum.
See also the discussion of the “value of labor power” in
the entry LABOR and LABOR POWER—Confusion
Between
And for some partial counter-point to the perspective here,
see: WAGES—Falling
“Among the erroneous provisions of the Lassallean programme that was imposed on
the [German] workers’ Association was the so-called iron law of wages, according to which a worker’s
wage can never rise above a bare minimum. The conclusion on the uselessness of the proletariat’s
economic struggle was drawn from this ‘law’. Therefore the General Association of German Workers
(GAGW) refused to take part in the work of the trade unions and denounced strikes, which inevitably
led to its isolation from the main mass of proletarians and predetermined its sectarian character.”
—L. Vasina & Yu. Vasin, Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (Moscow: Progress, 1988),
p. 9.
ISLAMIC STATE (ISIS)
“Indeed, the largest of American prisons, Camp Bucca in southern Iraq,
became the training ground for the most radical of the jihadists, the future leaders of
the Islamic State, or ISIS. By the time that prison closed in 2009, some hundred
thousand detainees had passed through its barbed wire, including the main founders of
the Islamic State—notably its head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, detained there for five years,
and the nine members of his top command. ‘We had so much time to sit and plan,’ a senior
member of the Islamic State recalled. ‘It was the perfect environment. We all agreed to
get together when we got out. The way to reconnect was easy. We wrote each other’s
details on the elastic of our boxer shorts.’ Released in 2009 and soon reunited, the
Islamic State leaders expanded their movement steadily until 2013 when their militant
followers attacked Abu Graib prison, fostering a mass breakout of five hundred inmates,
including ‘senior jihadists.’ As the Islamic State seized cities and towns across
northern Iraq in early 2014, the Baghdad government estimated that seventeen of its top
twenty-five leaders had spend time in US military prisons.” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the
Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017),
p. 144. [Yet more proof that the endless U.S. imperialist “War
On Terror” generates many more terrorists than it kills. —Ed.]
ISOLATED FACTS
As Lenin often remarked, due to the complexity of most situations, and modern society as a
whole, it is always possible to find isolated facts to “prove” any theory whatsoever.
The truth arises not from isolated facts, but from an analysis developed from a
comprehensive evaluation of all the most
important facts. Those who try to understand complicated situations or structures on the basis
of isolated facts and very limited investigation will virtually never succeed.
“In order to depict this objective position one must not take examples
or isolated data (in view of the extreme complexity of the phenomena of social life it
is always possible to select any number of examples or separate data to prove any
proposition), but all the data on the basis of economic life in all
the belligerent countries and the whole world.” —Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism” (1916), LCW 22:190. [Lenin is explaining here how the true class
nature of the inter-imperialist war then in progress had to be determined.]
“To make the picture a graphic one, to obtain a real picture
instead of a heap of disconnected, disjointed, and isolated facts and incidents, to put
a stop to the endless and senseless arguments over particular votings (who voted for whom
and who supported whom?), I have decided to try to depict all the basic types of
‘divisions’ at our Congress in the form of a diagram. This will probably seem
strange to a great many people, but I doubt whether any other method can be found that
would really generalise and summarise the results in the most complete and accurate manner
possible.” —Lenin, One Step Foreward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party (1904),
LCW vol. 7, online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1904/onestep/n.htm. [In this example
Lenin illustrates how a more comprehensive analysis than just “isolated facts” is
necessary in order to understand what had really happened at the Second Party Congress
of the RSDLP, who the different forces were, and so forth.]
“The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries call themselves socialists,
but they are actually abettors of the counter-revolutionaries, abettors of the
landowners and capitalists. This was proved in practice not only by isolated facts, but
by two big periods in the history of the Russian revolution: (1) the Kerensky period, and
(2) the Kolchak period. Both times the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, while
professing to be ‘socialists’ and ‘democrats’, actually played the role of abettors of
the whiteguards. Are we then going to be so foolish as to believe them now they are
suggesting we let them ‘try again’, and call our permission a ‘united socialist (or
democratic) front’?” —Lenin, “Apropos of the Victory Over Kolchak” (Aug. 24, 1919), LCW
vol. 29, online at:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/24.htm. [In this example Lenin
illustrates how only a comprehensive evaluation of other political forces can allow a
correct decision to be made about whether to form an alliance with them.]
ISRAEL — Nuclear Weapons
Israel has had a stock of nuclear weapons for decades. As of 2016 it was estimated that it had
at least 80 of them. [See: NUCLEAR
WEAPONS—Current Arsenals] Among these weapons are not only hydrogen bombs designed
to be used in genocidal attacks against cities, but also tactical nuclear weapons including
nuclear artillery shells designed to be used against army formations (but which might then
lead to more general nuclear war). At least one successful test (and perhaps three) of a
nuclear artillery shell was carried out in the southern Indian Ocean with the cooperation of
the South African aparteid regime in 1979. Israel has refused to abandon its nuclear weapons
or join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has received little if any criticism for
this from the U.S. and the other Western imperialist powers which back Israel.
“And a joint South African-Israeli test, as it turned out, was indeed
what the U.S. Vela satellite had recorded on 22 September 1979. Seymour Hersh broke the
story in his 1991 book The Samson Option, quoting ‘former Israeli government
officials’ who told him ‘that the warhead tested that Saturday morning was a low-yield
nuclear artillery shell.’ The Vela satellite event, his sources also told him, ‘was not
the first but the third test of a nuclear device over the Indian Ocean.’” —Richard
Rhodes, The Twilight of the Bombs (2010), p. 169. [Rhodes says another
“well-informed” source confirmed most of this report to him, though he claimed that
there was only one such test, and that South Africa’s participation was limited to
supplying the island test site. —Ed.]
ISRAEL — War Profiteering Of
[Speaking of the situation during the long Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988):]
“Israel, which had been selling arms to the Iranians, also offered at that time [c.
1984] to assist Iraq. (‘I do not remember even one discussion about the ethics of the
matter,’ an Israeli defense ministry official told the Israeli journalist Ronen
Bergman about the sales to Iran. ‘All that interested us was to sell, sell, sell more
and more Israeli weapons, and let them kill each other with them.’) [Howard] Teicher,
the NSC [U.S. National Security Council] staff person, testified that he attended the
meeting in Jerusalem at which the Israeli foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, briefed
[Donald] Rumsfeld [later U.S. Secretary of Defense] on the offer, as well as the
meeting in Baghdad when Rumsfeld passed the offer along to the Iraqi foreign minister,
Tariq Aziz. Aziz was horrified, Teicher recalled: ‘Aziz refused even to accept the
the Israelis’ letter to Hussein offering assistance, because Aziz told us that he
would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so.’” —Richard Rhodes, The
Twilight of the Bombs (2010), p. 14.
ISRAEL LOBBY (in the U.S.)
The very important and influential pro-Zionist, pro-Israel, political lobby in the United States
focused on promoting ever greater political, military and financial support for Israel by the U.S.
government. Of course the primary reason for such huge and long-standing support for Israel is
not because of any such lobby, but simply because Israel and its role in the Middle East strongly
serves the interests of U.S. imperialism there. But the Israel lobby seeks to further extend and
intensify that U.S. support for Israel. It should also be noted that by no means all American
Jews back this pro-Israel lobby or support Zionism. And, quite ironically, probably the most rabid
participants in the Israel lobby in the U.S. are Christian fundamentalists, whose religious
fanaticism derives from Biblical “prophecies” about “End Times” (and the supposed “return” of
Jesus)!
“[C. J. Polychroniou:] In many circles, there is a widespread impression
that the Israel lobby calls the shots in US foreign policy in the Middle East. Is the power
of the Israel lobby so strong that it can have sway over a superpower?
“[Noam Chomsky:] My friend Gilbert
Achcar, a noted specialist on the Middle East and international affairs generally, describes
that idea as ‘phantasmagoric.’ Rightly. It is not the lobby that intimidates US high-tech
industry to expand its investments in Israel, or that twists the arm of the US government
so that it will pre-position supplies there for later US military operations and intensify
close military and intelligence relations.
“When the lobby’s goals conform to
perceived US strategic and economic interests, it generally gets its way: crushing of
Palestinians, for example, a matter of little concern to US state-corporate power. When
goals diverge, as often happens, the lobby quickly disappears, knowing better than to
confront authentic power.”
—In Noam Chomsky, Optimism Over
Despair (2017), p. 13. [It is also true, however, that there are secondary differences
within the U.S. bourgeoisie over exactly how accomodating to be to Israel, and all bourgeois
parties and politicians sell their services to the rich (and the Israel lobby does have lots
of money). For reasons such as these, some U.S. administrations, such as that of Donald
Trump, are quite noticeably more under the influence of the Israel lobby than are others.
—Ed.]
ITALY — 1920 WORKER’S UPRISING
“In September 1920, Italian steelworkers occupied their mills on the
initiative of their trade union, which was in conflict with the association of
industrialists. The movement started in Turin and Milan, then spread through Piedmond
and Northern Italy across the country, from the metallurgical industry to other
industries and to agriculture. In Sicily and in other areas peasants occupied the
land. The scope of the movement jeoparized the capitalist regime, but the reformist
leaders of the Socialist Party and the trade unions, terrified by the political
character of the movement, adopted a decision to confine it to within the trade unions
and prevent it from developing into a revolution. They also decided to start
negotiations with the industrialists.
“This was a hard blow at the
Italian workers’ movement and showed the leaders inability to lead the mass forces.
Fascism used the confusion within the working class to start its armed offensive in
Italy.” —Endnote 131, LCW 32.
“The revolution in Italy will run a different course from that in
Russia. It will start in a different way. How? Neither you nor we know. The Italian
Communists are not always Communists to a sufficient degree. Did a single Communist
show his mettle when the workers seized the factories in Italy? [This refers to the
events mentioned in endnote 131 above. —Ed.] No. At that time, there was as yet no
communism in Italy; there was a certain amount of anarchism, but no Marxian
communism. The latter has still to be created and the masses of the workers must be
imbued with it by means of the experience of the revolutionary struggle. And the
first step along this road is a final break with the Mensheviks, who for more than
twenty years have been collaborating and working with the bourgeois government.”
—Lenin, “Speech on the Italian Question” (at the Third Congress of the Communist
International, June 28, 1921), LCW 32:465.
IWW
See:
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD
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