NAFTA — The North American Free Trade Agreement
An international trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico that allowed
U.S. manufacturers to move factories to Mexico, especially, and to then import goods made
there with low-wage labor back into the U.S. without major tariff penalties. Many politicians,
both Democrats and Republicans, were in essence bought off by the big corporations in order to
achieve and maintain this anti-labor trade agreement.
The NAFTA agreement was signed on Dec. 17, 1992
by President George H. W. Bush and his counterparts in Canada and Mexico, and went into effect
on January 1, 1994. Many politicians, including Barack Obama,
have criticized or opposed NAFTA during their electoral campaigns but then changed their
position once elected. (I.e., they lied about their real position.) President Trump also
promised to renegotiate or terminate NAFTA in his election campaign in 2016. He did end up
slightly “renegotiating” it under the new name, the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA),
to make it somewhat more favorable to the U.S. ruling class and, a concession to the Democrats,
to ease just a few of the many anti-labor aspects of it. This revised version of NAFTA was signed
into law by President Trump on January 29, 2020, and he now claims that he kept his promise
to “get rid of NAFTA” (by mostly just changing its name!) and the Democrats now claim that they
made NAFTA “more labor friendly” in all three countries (though the anti-labor essence of the
agreement hadn’t changed at all!). In other words, more bourgeois demagogic politics as usual.
“When Obama was bidding for the Democratic presidency nomination in 2008,
he defined himself as a candidate of ‘hope and change’ in a number of ways. He thrilled
labor audiences in primary states such as Wisconsin by denouncing policies that had
saddled the United States with NAFTA, the permanent normalization of trade with China,
and yawning trade deficits. Obama promised to scrap the secretive, ‘backroom-deal’
negotiating style of ‘Fast Track’ agreements that elbowed the Congress and the American
people out of the process. He talked about renegotiating NAFTA to add safeguards for the
environment and labor rights. If Canada and other trading partners rejected changes,
Obama said he was open to exiting the agreements altogether. It seemed as if a new day
was dawning when it came to the trade policy—or, at the very least, in the approach of
a too-frequently-compromised Democratic Party.
“Then came reports that Obama’s
senior economic adviser, Austin Goolsbee, had quietly assured the Canadians that the
candidate’s statements were not to be believed—that his populist appeals in working-class
towns battered by trade-related layoffs and factory closings ‘should be viewed as more
about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.’ When the news
broke, before the critical Ohio primary, Obama aides pointed political journalists toward
reports that his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, had apparently had
aides provide similar ‘not to worry’ assurances to the Canadians. Reporters who had never
bothered to connect the dots between trade policies, shuttered factories, and the
righteous indignation of Ohio workers were lapping up the ‘he-said, she-said’ scrap. The
controversy grew so intense that Obama had to address it. He told a Cleveland TV station:
‘I think it’s important for viewers to understand that [the claim that he was saying one
thing to workers and another thing to Wall Street elites and foreign governments] was not
true.’
“Obama lost Ohio, but he won enough
other states to secure the nomination. Then, within days of assembling the delegates he
needed, Fortune magazine featured an interview with the candidate headlined ‘Obama:
NAFTA Not So Bad after All.’ Reminded that during the primary season he had referred to
NAFTA as ‘devastating’ and suggested he might use an opt-out clause in the trade agreement
... Obama replied, ‘Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and
simplified.’
“‘Politicians are always guilty of
that, and I don’t exempt myself,’ Obama continued. Abandoning the tough talk of just a few
months earlier, Obama sounded an awful lot like the free-trader the Canadians had been
assured he would be.... Fortune was satisfied.”
—Robert W. McChesney and John
Nichols, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless
Democracy (2016), pp. 136-138. [The authors then elaborate on how Obama not only lied
about NAFTA but went on to promote numerous other free-trade deals that would further
harm American workers. They do not, however, “connect the dots” themselves, nor conclude,
as they should have done, that Obama was just another politician representing the
interests of the capitalist class, rather than those of the working class. —Ed.]
NAKBA
al-Nakba, which means “the Catastrophe”, was the expulsion in 1948 of vast numbers of
Palestinians from their country by the Israeli Zionists. Up until
that time the large majority of people living in Palestine were
Arab Palestinians, but the Zionists were intent on ethnic
cleansing (and often even outright genocide); that is, on forcing the Palestinians off of
their own lands and out of their own country. At least 750,000 Palestinians were forced out of
Palestine in the original 1948 Nakba, which was about half of the then Palestinian population.
Many of those Palestinians still live in refugee camps in Lebanon to this day. More Palestinians
have been forcibly expelled in later Zionist murderous attacks, and at present (January 2024) the
Israeli Zionist military is attempting to force a very large number of additional Palestinians
out of the Gaza Strip area by destroying their homes and any possibility of living there again.
This is already being described as a new Nakba.
See also:
Wikipedia Nakba entry
“Israel expelled most of the majority Palestinian population in 1948, and
has prevented them from returning to their homes ever since. Hundreds of towns and villages
were leveled to the ground, a crime that Palestinians call al-Nakba (the Catastrophe). But
Israel did not stop there. It repeatedly attacked Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, killing
thousands more.
“Suddenly stateless and without the
benefits of citizenship, Palestinian refugees were extremely vulnerable and had very few
rights.... 71 years later, not much has changed for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, who
continue to be denied basic civil rights as well as their most fundamental right: to return
to their homeland.
“These Palestinians have different
experiences than other Palestinians, even as they share a common struggle and identity.
They are not living under Israeli occupation. Israel does not allow them to visit their
homes, much less live there. As exiles, they have a different perspective from Palestinians
in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the part of Palestine that became Israel.”
—From the announcement of the 2019
North America Nakba Tour in support of stateless Palestinians in Lebanon.
NAPOLEON — Russian Campaign of 1812
A disastrous military campaign by Napoleon against Russia during which most of his invading
army was destroyed.
The famous graphic at the
right, by Charles Joseph Minard, provides a great deal of information about the campaign.
“Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen, the thick band shows the
size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia. The width of the band indicates the size
of the army at each position. In September, the army reached Moscow with 100,000 men. The path
of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower
band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. The remains of the Grande Armée
struggled out of Russia with 10,000 men. Minard’s graphic tells a rich, coherent story with
its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over
time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional
surface, direction of the army’s movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat
from Moscow. It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” —Edward Tufte
NARCISSISM
“Love of oneself” or obsession with oneself, and one’s own personal interests, well beyond
any reasonable level of ordinary self-concern and self-esteem that people usually have. In other
words, an extreme form of egoism or egocentrism. In politics this usually means an
obsession with oneself, one’s reputation, career, success, authority, leadership, fame, and the
like. Most bourgeois politicians are narcissistic to one degree or another, with someone like
Donald Trump being an extreme and downright sociopathic
example.
Even in revolutionary politics, someone who
rarely or never admits making mistakes, or who can virtually never criticize themself, or who
invariably blames all difficulties that arise entirely on others, might well be suspected of
narcissism or something like it. At bottom narcissism is based on a lack of real focused concern
for the welfare of others.
“Up to 6 percent of the U.S. population, mostly men, is estimated to have
had narcissistic personality disorder during some period of their lives. And the condition
manifests in confoundingly different ways. People with narcissism ‘may be grandiose or
self-loathing, extraverted or socially isolated, captains of industry or unable to maintain
steady employment, model citizens or prone to antisocial activities,’ acccording to a review
paper on diagnosing the disorder.
“Clinicians note several dimensions on
which narcissists vary. They may function extremely well, with successful careers and vibrant
social lives, or very poorly. They may (or may not) have other disorders, ranging from
depression to sociopathy. And although most people are familiar with the ‘grandiose’ version
of narcissism—as displayed by an arrogant and pompous person who craves attention—the
disorder also comes in a ‘vulnerable’ or ‘covert’ form, where individuals suffer from internal
distress and fluctuations in self-esteem. What these seeming opposites have in common is an
extreme preoccupation with themselves.”
—Diana Kwon, “What Is Narcissism? The
latest science on a widely misunderstood psychological condition”, Scientific American,
September 2023, Vol. 329, #2, p. 54. [As the article brings out, a fully scientific description
and analysis of what is now called Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is still being worked
out, and there are at present no established medical treatments for the disorder. However, in
revolutionary politics we would consider political education and struggle the basic methods of
treatment. —S.H.]
NARODNAYA VOLYA (PEOPLE’S WILL)
“The secret political organization of Narodnik terroists formed in
August 1879 following the split in the Zemlya i Volya organization. It was headed by an
Executive Committee consisting of A. I. Zhelyabov, A. D. Mikhailov, M. F. Frolenko,
N. A. Morozov, Vera Figner, Sophia Perovskaya, A. A. Kvyatkovsky, and others.
“While still adhering to the
Narodnik utopian-socialist ideas, Narodnaya Volya believed also in political struggle,
regarding the overthrow of the autocracy and the achievement of political freedom as a
major aim. ‘The Narodnaya Volya members,’ Lenin wrote, ‘made a step forward when they
took up the political struggle, but they failed to connect it with socialism’ [LCW 8:72].
“Narodnaya Volya fought heroically
against the tsarist autocracy. But, going by the erroneous theory of ‘active’ heroes and
a ‘passive’ mass, it expected to achieve the remaking of society without the participation
of the people, by its own efforts, through individual terrorism that would intimidate and
disorganize the government. After the assassination of Alexander II on March 1, 1881, the
government was able, by savage reprisals, death sentences, and acts of provocation, to
crush it out of existence. Repeated attempts to revive the organization during the
eighties ended in failure.
“While criticizing Narodnaya Volya’s
erroneous, utopian programme, Lenin expressed great respect for its members’ selfless
struggle against tsarism and had a high opinion of their technique of secrecy and their
strictly centralized organization.” —Note 78, Lenin, SW I (1967).
NATIONS — Origin Of
As with every other historical phenomenon, nations have their history, a beginning and an eventual
end. Modern nations generally arose with the development of capitalism, and the need for new
capitalist ruling classes in various areas to obtain not only economic but also political control
of the population.
“Nations are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois
epoch of social development.” —Lenin, LCW 21:72.
“The British, French, Germans and Italians formed into nations during the
victorious march of capitalism and its triumph over feudal disunity.” —Resolution of the
Russian Communist Party, 1921, quoted in L. Harry Gould, Marxist Glossary, 1946.
NATIONAL BOURGEOISIE
The section of the bourgeoisie during a new democratic
revolution which (unlike the comprador or
bureaucrat bourgeoisie) is an intermediate class (between the people and the enemy), and
portions of which may be won over to side with the people in that struggle. The national
bourgeoisie is a class out for itself, and which strives to control the nation in its own
class interests, which brings it into conflict with foreign imperialist intervention in the
country. If it achieves power it may still be in conflict with foreign imperialism, but it
also comes more powerfully into conflict with the proletariat and its allies such as the
peasantry.
To continue to regard the national
bourgeoisie as an ally (or potential ally) of the proletariat once the new democratic
revolution is complete (or where there is no need for, or possibility for a new democratic
revolution) is an extremely serious rightist or revisionist error.
“With the overthrow of the landlord class and the bureaucrat-capitalist
class, the contradiction between the working class and the national bourgeoisie has
become the principal contradiction in China; therefore the national bourgeoisie should
no longer be defined as an intermediate class.” —Mao, “The Contradiction Between the
Working Class and the Bourgeoisie is the Principal Contradiction in China” (June 6, 1952),
SW 5:77.
NATIONAL DIGITAL CURRENCIES
Capitalist nation-states are more and more concerned to transition their economies away from the
use of physical (printed) money, and into some “online” or digital format. There are a variety
of reasons why governments want to do this, such as to make it easier to tax all sales of
commodities, to stop criminal financial transactions, to keep track of what people are doing, and
so forth. But the biggest reason of all is due to the growing necessities for them to force
people (especially wealthy people) to spend their money (in order to keep their ever-more
crisis prone capitalist economies functioning. (See: “Negative Interest Rates, and Abolishing
Cash Money”, by S.H., Apr. 26, 2015, at:
https://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/CurrentCrisis/2015/NegInterestRatesAndAbolishingCash-150426.pdf )
The simplest way of doing this is to just stop making printed currency available at all, and to
require all purchases to be in the form of digital transfers of money from one account to another.
However, there is a lot of resistance to such an abrupt abandonment of physical cash money. So in
order to get people more use to the idea of money as simply being digital transfers between
accounts, and in light of all the foolish excitement over Bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies, many countries are now beginning to create
and promote their own crypto-style digital national currencies which do not exist in any physical
form (other than bank account balances). Few people yet understand all the sinister motives of
capitalist governments which are involved in all this!
“Over the last 12 months, more than 60 countries have experimented with
national digital currencies, up from just over 40 a year earlier, according to the Bank for
International Settlements.” —New York Times, “China Is Charging Ahead With Its
Digital Currency”, March 2, 2021.
NATIONAL INTERESTS (Under Capitalism)
What are often described as “national interests” in a capitalist state are in fact the
interests of its ruling class, the bourgeoisie. Thus when the U.S. government tells
Americans that it is in the “national interests” of the United States that it should
make war against Vietnam or Iraq, we should understand full well that this is only a
camouflaged way of talking about the class interests of the capitalists who currently own
and control the country.
“It’s in our national interest to prevent this from happening [the
collapse of the giant insurance corporation AIG]. This is beyond a company and beyond
its shareholders. It’s in our national interest.” —Hank Greenberg, former head of AIG,
pleading on CNBC for the U.S. government bailout of the company, Sept. 16, 2008. The
government proceeded to do just that, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars,
because Greenberg’s ruling class pals who were running the government felt exactly
the same way.
“Great powers have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.
They only have permanent interests.” —Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary,
mid-nineteenth century. Quoted in Robert Smith Thompson, The Eagle Triumphant:
How America Took Over the British Empire (2004), p. 101.
NATIONAL LIAISON COMMITTEE
An alliance of revolutionary groups in the U.S. “New Communist Movement” of the early
1970s, which unsuccessfully attempted to transform this alliance into a new united
revolutionary communist party. It consisted of the Black Workers Congress, the Puerto
Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, and the Young Lords Party, all of which were
organized on national or ethnic lines, and the Revolutionary
Union, which was mostly white, though it also had members from other “races” or
ethnicities, including Chinese-Americans. Unfortunately this alliance fell apart, and
the RU went on to form the Revolutionary Communist Party in
October 1975 mostly by itself.
“The National Liaison Committee (NLC) was formed in the summer of
1972, marked by the coming together of the Black Workers Congress (BWC), organized
in 1970, the Puerto Rican Revoutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), originally
(1969-72) the Young Lords Party, and the Revolutionary Union (RU). At the time this
was an important advance for Marxist-Leninist forces.
“(For a time another
organization involved in the NLC was I Wor Kuan, an opportunist organization
brought into the NLC at the insistence of PRRWO. IWK quickly showed its bankrupt
character and fled from the NLC.)
“At its inception the NLC set
for itself two basic tasks: common work and ideological struggle, that is, the
linking up with the actual mass struggle of the American people especially the
working class and building of a new communist Party through forging a unified
ideological and political line.
“The NLC was formed based on
the recognition that in the U.S. there is only one working class, a single
multinational proletariat, and this multinational proletariat, especially the
industrial proletariat, is the main and leading force of the revolution. The NLC
was united around the need to build the Party of the proletariat to act as its
vanguard at the earliest time in accordance with placing ideological and political
line in the forefront and on the basis of establishing deeper ties with the masses,
especially the working class. Further principles of unity of the committee were
upholding Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought and opposition to revisionism and
Trotskyism.
“In the latter part of 1973,
BWC and PRRWO began a rapid process of degeneration and disintegration—the result
of a qualitative retreat by these organizations into nationalism and other forms
of bourgeois ideology which were closely linked with this nationalist outlook—though
all of this was put forward in the guise of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought.
This turn toward opportunism, linked with the antics of D. H. Wright within the RU,
resulted in a split between the BWC and PRRWO on the one hand and the RU on the
other, and caused the breakup of the NLC in late 1973.
“For more on the history of
this period see the article, ‘Marxism, Nationalism and the Task of Party Building:
History and Lessons of the National Liaison Committee,’ in The Communist,
Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 1977).” —Bill Klingel and Joanne Psihountas, “Important
Struggles in Building the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA” (Oct. 1978), p. 47,
online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/Pamphlets/ImportantStrugglesInBuildingTheRCPUSA-1978.pdf
The issue of The Communist referred to is online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RCP/TheCommunist/TheCommunist-RCP-03-Fall-Winter1977.pdf
NATIONAL ONLINE LIBRARY
A proposal to make all books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other sorts of printed material,
available on the Internet with free access to them by everyone! This is indeed a
completely good and sensible idea, which—however—is incompatible with the bourgeois concept
of “intellectual property” which insists that
everything, including even the right to read books and publications, must belong to
private individuals or corporations, or those who pay money to them. In bourgeois society
even some of the most sensible ideas, such as having a national online library available
to everyone, are blocked and prohibited because of the capitalist profit motive.
But how, then, would writers of these
books and materials make a living, people want to know? Under socialism the answer is
simple: writers, like every other working person, will be paid wages or salaries. Even
under something like the present capitalist system it would actually be cheaper for
society to just have the national library (funded by the government) pay the writers a
reasonable amount for the right to post their work online for everybody. (See the quote
below on this point.) But vested corporations and the ruling class in general won’t agree
to such a thing. And the independent Internet Archive website (at
archive.org), which has attempted to do this on its own
in the form of an “online lending library”, has been forced to make its own approach to
accomplishing this so cumbersome, confusing and inconvenient that not many people actually
make regular use of it.
There are some attempts to create online
libraries of Marxist and revolutionary books and materials, though they mostly have to
refrain from posting materials still under copyright. One such site is the Marxist
Internet Archive at Marxists.org. Another such
library of online revolutionary materials, which focuses more on Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
works, is BannedThought.net
“A national library online could offer free and enticing books from
private publishers and fairly reward copyright holders. Right now, public libraries
can scrounge up a measly $3 per capita for books. Writers earn perhaps $5 billion to
$6 billion annually from U.S. book royalties—less than a third the amount by which
Bill Gates grew richer in the 12-month period ending last summer.” —David Rothman,
“Books in Cyberspace: Why not create a national library online?”, U.S. News &
World Report, May 4, 1998.
NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE
An ultra-reactionary American ruling class magazine founded by William F. Buckley in
1955. Racist and semi-fascist in its outlook, it has been and continues to be very
influential in conservative ruling class circles.
“[Here are] some of Buckley’s early insights into nationalism
and race:
• 1957: On Spanish
[fascist] military dictator Francisco Franco: ‘An authentic national hero.’
• 1961: On South
African apartheid: ‘Black Africans,’ when left to their own devices, ‘tend to
revert to savagery.’
• 1965: On ending
segregation [in the U.S.]: ‘[A] suddenly enfranchised, violently embittered Negro
population... will take the vote and wield it as an instrument of vengeance,
shaking down the walls of Jericho even to their foundations, and reawakening the
terrible genocidal antagonisms that scarred the Southern psyche during the days
of Reconstruction.’”
—The Nation magazine,
December 21-28, 2015, p. 6.
“NATIONAL SECURITY” (As the Term is Used in Bourgeois Discourse)
Although capitalist ruling classes talk about “national security”, it is obvious that what
they most centrally mean by that term is the continued security of their own class,
and their continued rule not only within their own country but also in whatever parts of
the rest of the world which they currently dominate. Terms such as “national security”
simply must be understood in class terms if we are to make any sense of what our rulers
say.
“According to received doctrine in scholarship and general
intellectual discourse, the prime goal of state policy is ‘national security.’
There is ample evidence, however, that the doctrine of national security does not
encompass the security of the population. The record reveals that, for instance,
the threat of instant destruction by nuclear weapons has not ranked high among the
concerns of planners. That much was demonstrated early on, and remains true to the
present moment....
“McGeorge Bundy, national
security adviser during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies ... [commented that]
... ‘I am aware of no serious contemporary proposal, in or out of either government
[the U.S. or Soviet Union], that ballistic missiles should somehow be banned by
agreement.’ In short, there was apparently no thought of trying to prevent the sole
serious threat to the United States, the threat of utter detruction in a nuclear
war with the Soviet Union.” —Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (2016),
pp. 180-181.
[The explanation, of course,
is simple from the Marxist-Leninist point of view: Imperialist countries are
unwilling to give up the weapons which allow them to dominate major parts of the
world even if the continued existence of those weapons puts their own
existence at risk. Capitalist-imperialism is indeed a maniacal social system. —S.H.]
NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1947
“Under the National Security Act of 1947, Washington had already
forged the basic instruments for its exercise of global power—the Defense Department,
the air force, the National Security Council (NSC), and the CIA. Through parallel
changes in signals intelligence, the NSA emerged by 1951, completing the apparatus of
covert power. Under Eisenhower, an expanded NSC would serve as its central command
and brain trust for fighting the Cold War, meeting weekly to survey a fast-changing
world and plan foreign policy. At the same time, the expanding CIA became his
executive strike force for securing the new system of subordinate elites [in other
countries].” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise
and Decline of U.S. Global Power (2017), p. 54.
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY — Spying on Close Allies
“Apart from tracking terrorists, the NSA has conducted extensive
surveillance of allied nations, both their leaders and governments, to more efficiently
control the nexus of subordinate elites that has been the fulcrum for US global power
since the mid-1950s. What is the aim of such sensitive surveillance, which runs the risk
of serious political repercussions if exposed? Here, the history of colonial policing
provides a precedent that explains the strategic logic of current eavesdropping.
“Just as colonial police forces
once watched thousands of local elites to assure their continuing collaboration with
European empires, so the CIA and the NSA have monitored several hundred national leaders
worldwide who now play an analogous role in America’s global dominion. Aggressive
international surveillance provides Washington with the information needed to maintain
its hegemony—operational intelligence on dissidents (once communists, now terrorists)
to be countered with covert action or military intervention; basic political and
economic intelligence to give American diplomats an advantage in bilateral or
multilateral negotiations; scurrilous information about the activities of national
leaders useful in coercing their compliance; and, perhaps most important, a sense of
omniscience when it comes to independent foreign elites, from Berlin to Bogota, Jakarta
to Johannesburg.” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century (2017),
p. 127. [This is the perspective of a liberal historian. Marxists would give more
emphasis to the dialectical contradictions which exist, and which are definitely
worsening, between the various imperialist countries themselves. —Ed.]
NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION
The right, or in some cases the falsely claimed “right”, of nations to determine their own form
of social organization, leadership, government, economy, culture, etc., entirely by themselves
without any external interference. Most essentially, this includes the right to first exist
as a separate nation politically, economically, and in other respects. Obviously, in the present
capitalist world, this is generally something to be supported. It is international
imperialism, especially that of the United
States, that is most opposed to the right of national self-determination for other
nations.
Marxists, of course, and in the context of the
present capitalist-imperialist era, usually support this right for nations in general, as part of
our determined opposition to world imperialism. However, there are exceptions. Lenin explained
that efforts to maintain the unity of the revolutionary working class movement within the Russian
empire could often be more important than supporting national self-determination. (See quote below.)
And after the imperialist powers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were finally defeated in World
War II, Marxists, along with all anti-fascist people, insisted that for the time being Germany
and Japan had lost that full right of national self-determination. It was properly insisted, for
example, that the remaining Nazis had to be removed from power in Germany and suppressed—no matter
what the national feeling in Germany was at the time. Then too, there are often conflicts between
what is deemed the national rights of one nation and that of another. Support for the national rights
and national self-determination of the Kurdish people, for example, should clearly take precedence
over the falsely claimed rights of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran to control and govern what should
actually be parts of a separate nation of Kurdistan rather than parts of those countries. In most
cases, the exceptions to the general principle of supporting national self-determination arise in
imperialist countries and their unjustified areas of external control or interference, or else in
messy situations that have resulted from their previous control and misrule, as in the Middle East
and other former colonial areas.
Looked at from a longer perspective, beyond that
of the current capitalist era, there are also big problems with the notion of national
self-determination. Since the state will no longer exist in communist society, the world
communist society of the future can of course not consist of separate nation-states. The exact
organization of the future communist world will be something for the people then to work out. But
adherence to the notion of national self-determination might well be one sort of obstacle which
interferes with the construction of that new world. In short, national self-determination is a
a much more complex thing and a much more dialectically self-contradictory issue than many people
today seem to understand.
“We surely cannot deny to any nation that right whereon our own government
is founded, that every one may govern itself according to whatever form it pleases, and
change these forms at its own will; and that it may transact its business with foreign
nations through whatever organs it thinks proper, whether King, Convention, Assembly,
Committee, President, or anything else it may choose. The will of the nation is the only
essential thing to be guarded.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Gouverneur Morris, March 12,
1793.
[But what determines the “will” of
a nation? Whichever internal power can forcefully dominate all the others? And must human
society really always be organized into “nations”? After all, Homo sapiens has
existed for several hundred thousand years, and nations only came into existence less than
10,000 years ago. (And in some future world communist society, isn’t it desirable—and
virtually necessary—that humanity not be split up into competing nations?) And even
just in the present capitalist nation-state era should not the proletariat in every country
try not only to seize power at home, but to also aid the proletariat the masses in other
lands to do the same; and when such seizures of people’s power are won, to unite to the
maximum degree possible with other revolutionary states? Jefferson’s principle is indeed
appropriate and applicable in many situations, such as where it is employed to oppose
foreign imperialist intervention in other nations for the purpose of setting up comprador
regimes. But as an absolute principle which is supposedly valid at all times and places...
no, it is surely not that. —S.H.]
“In our draft Party programme we have advanced the demand for a republic
with a democratic constitution that would guarantee, among other things, ‘recognition of
the right to self-determination for all nations forming part of the state.’ Many did not
find this demand in our programme sufficiently clear, and in issue No. 33, in speaking
about the Manifesto of the Armenian Social-Democrats, we explained the meaning of this
point in the following way. The Social-Democrats will always combat every attempt to
influence national self-determination from without by violence or by any injustice. However,
our unreserved recognition of the struggle for freedom of self-determination does not in
any way commit us to supporting every demand for national self-determination. As the party
of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and
principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality
rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the
very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in
isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive
to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity,
etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
—Lenin, “The National Question in
Our Programme" (July 15, 1903), LCW 6:454.
[Lenin is here explaining that the
support for national self-determination is not an absolute, Kantian universal sort
of principle that people should always and everywhere uphold. On the contrary, in the
context of the Russian Revolution (for example) there was this higher principle: Upholding
the unity of the proletariat of all the nationalities in Russia. Only in exceptional cases
did that generally higher principle have to give way to acceptance of separation of the
existing proletarian struggles within an existing single country into different struggles
in multiple separated countries. The point to emphasize here is that our support for the
right of national self-determination is not an absolute! On the contrary, our absolute is
our support for the world proletarian revolutionary struggle which is based on the real
long-term interests of the people of the whole world! —S.H.]
NATIVIST MOVEMENT
This was an anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, pro-eugenicist, racist movement in the
United States which peaked during the early decades of the 20th Century. It was both a dominant
ideology within the arising U.S. capitalist-imperialist ruling class itself at that time, and
also—because of their influence and efforts—a powerful reactionary movement among large sections
of the white Protestant masses themselves. And of course this trend of reactionary, anti-ethnic,
racist thought never completely died out, and has in recent decades been making a comeback
(under other names) in the anti-immigrant demagogic movements at the present time.
“Today’s vehement demands to stop immigrants are neither new nor
proportional to their numbers. Immigrants arriving between 2000 and 2010 constituted
approximatedly 3 percent of the United States population, while those arriving between
1900 and 1910 constituted 8.9 percent of the population. The nativist movement, as
anti-immigrant campaigns were once called, began a century and a half ago, directed
first against the Irish, later against those arriving from southern and eastern Europe.
The case against these European immigrants was remarkably similar to today’s complaints
about those at our gates: They steal jobs from the native born, they are costly to
taxpayers, they don’t respect American values, and they are inclined to be criminals.
[Now, as then, mostly bull shit, of course. —Ed.]
“This does not mean that history
repeats itself. Up through at least the 1920s nativists primarily targeted Catholics
and Jews. And their bigotry was quite possibly shared by the majority of white Protestant
Americans....
“[A new book, The Guarded Gate:
Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law that Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other
European Immigrants Out of America, by Daniel Okrent (2019)] explores who these
nativist leaders were and how their elite status allowed them to pass off bogus claims
as science. Nativist leaders were among the most distinguished men of the country; upper
class, highly educated and Protestant, men who personally had nothing to fear from new
immigrants....
“Their class privilege is important
because then, as now, critics tend to associate bigotry with poor, uneducated rural and
working class people, a misleading analysis.
“All scientists [within this
nativist trend], and all boasting familiarity with Mendelian genetics, these nativists
nevertheless considered loyalty and ‘shiftlessness,’ for example, to be genetic
characteristics....
“Henry Goddard’s famed Kallikak
study of ‘defectives’ persuaded more than 30 states to impose forced sterilization on
the ‘feeble-minded.’ He also tested arrivals at Ellis Island and ‘found’ that 83 percent
of the Jews, 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians were either ‘morons’ or
‘imbeciles.’
“... by the 1920s eugenicists were
ranking ethnic groups as superior or inferior, and their work was considered
state-of-the-art science, taught in standard biology textbooks. Up to World War II
nativist bigotry could be found across the political spectrum, Socialists [so-called!
—Ed.], anarchists, civil rights leaders (including W.E.B. Du Bois), Jewish leaders and
feminists tried unsuccessfully to formulate progressive versions of eugenics. Few of the
mainstream eugenicists, however, considered Jews and people of color as desirable
immigrants. The young Eleanor Roosevelt—who would later become an outspoken
anti-racist—described someone as ‘an interesting little man, but very Jew,’ and allowed
that she’d ‘rather be hung’ than attend another ‘Jew party.’ The most influential
opposition to nativism came from a different section of the wealthy: industrialists who
wanted the cheap labor only immigrants could provide....
“Nativism’s denouement was the
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Previous immigration restrictions targeted particular
groups—notably people from Asia—but this comprehensive law aimed not just to limit
immigration but to preserve white Protestant dominance in America. It assigned a quota
to each nation, ranging from 51,000 for Germany to 2,000 for Russia to 1,100 for the
entire African continent.” —Linda Gordon, “The Original Wall: A history of the 1920’s
nativist and eugenicist movements that shut down immigration to America”, New York
Times book review section, July 7, 2019.
NATO
See: NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION
NATURAL DISASTERS
Growing numbers of what we still call “natural disasters” are in fact not completely
“natural” at all! Instead, they are more and more being caused by human activity directed
by the ruling capitalist class in order to increase their profits, and almost totally
without regard to what their polluting factories and machines are doing to the climate
and to humanity. It is not just through their endless wars that the capitalist-imperialists
kill so many people, but in many other ways as well.
See also:
EXTREME WEATHER EVENT
[Speaking of contemporary American capitalist society:] “During
good times, it’s easy to deride ‘big government’ and talk about the inevitability of
cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and
wants to know that their government has their backs. And if there is one thing we
can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon
Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled
coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many
thousands—are going to keep coming.
“Over the course of the 1970s,
there were 660 reported [major] disasters around the world, including droughts,
floods, extreme temperature events, wildfires, and storms. In the 2000s, there were
3,322—a fivefold boost. That is a staggering increase in just over thirty years,
and clearly global warming cannot be said to have ‘caused’ all of it. But the
climate signal is also clear. ‘There’s no question that climate change has increased
the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events,’ climate scientist Michael
Mann told me in an interview, ‘including drought, intense hurricanes, and super
typhoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially
other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the
scientific community.’”
—Naomi Klein, This Changes
Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014), p. 107. [Klein is only a reformer,
but what she says here is correct. —Ed.]
NATURAL SCIENCE
Those sciences (including physics, chemistry and biology) which deal specifically with the natural
world, and thus are directly concerned with matter and energy and their interrelationships in both
living and non-living things.
“Natural science is one of man’s weapons in his fight for freedom. For the purpose
of attaining freedom in society, man must use social science to understand and change society and
carry out social revolution. For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must
use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.”
—Mao, “Speech at the inaugural meeting of the Natural Science Research Society of the Border Region”
(February 5, 1940). Also in Quotations, Ch. 22.
NATURAL SELECTION [Evolutionary Biology]
At the most abstract level natural selection is the propagation of certain configurations
of matter relative to other configurations by virtue of the effects that they have on the world.
The English biologists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace formulated the theory of
evolution by natural selection to account for the diversity, complexity and functionality of
life. Natural selection is a powerful and ever-present condition of biological nature, but it
does not exist as an independent “force”; it is simply the consequence of certain ubiquitous
features of this biological nature, namely variation (not all individuals are the same), heredity
(some of those differences can be passed on to offspring) and differential “competence” (some
variants happen to be more well suited to the prevailing conditions in an environment). Those
variants that happen to be more competent at dealing with the constraints and challenges of a
particular environment will automatically tend, on average, to have the opportunity to produce
more offspring of their likeness more regularly than other variants (and, willy-nilly, be able
to pass on those traits that conferred this greater success). Cumulative natural selection,
taking place over many generations wherein “small but useful increments” (to borrow a phrase
from Darwin) are added to existing configurations, is perhaps the most important mechanism by
which biological complexity and diversity are generated. However, natural selection need not
result in change per se; it can also maintain existing configurations, favouring them over
alternatives that arise in a population, if those existing configurations are better suited to
the environment. Like so much in biology and other complex systems, the answer to the question,
“What will happen?”, will be, “It depends”.
Biological organisms, which always exist in the
context of other organisms, have, through billions of years, evolved and adapted to live in each
other’s presence and to benefit from this proximity. This has resulted in vastly different
strategies for eking out an existence. The members of one lineage may evolve to exploit the
members of another lineage, which will themselves evolve to avoid being exploited or to mitigate
the harm done by exploitation; thus selection can result in biological “arms races”, and this is
certainly an important feature of the struggle between hosts and parasites and predators and
prey. Selection can also favour cooperative alliances (known as “symbioses”), in which two or
more parties allocate resources in a mutually beneficial way. Exploitation and cooperation have
evolved many times independently throughout the history of life, and they are present in varying
degrees all throughout the tree (or web) of life. Within species, selection can also favour
different behaviours or “strategies”, for example with regard to mating preferences and resource
allocation in familial groups. However diverse the strategies, adaptations and complexes produced
by selection, they only ever get to be selected if they can “pay” for themselves; that is, if the
cost of their use does not, on average, outweigh their benefit. The sheer diversity of life, and
the ubiquity of both exploitation and cooperation (and all the gradations in between) shows that
there is certainly a lot hidden within this basic formula! But it is important to realise that
there is nothing deeply mysterious about this; it all comes back to the qualifier, “It depends”
(“it” being the pressures imposed by the environment, and the existing features and constraints
of the organism—themselves products of past selection and evolution).
Selection can effect change at vastly different
speeds, it can reverse direction, it can tend towards stable equilibrium, and it can produce
recurrent patterns. This is all ultimately grounded in the everyday, mundane goings-on of
material, biological entities interacting with one another.
Modern evolutionary theory recognises that
selection can take place at various levels, from genes to individuals all the way up to species
and even larger categories. Selection is one of several processes in the evolution of life,
which biological science aims to understand by integrating these processes into a coherent
framework. —L.C.
NATURE — Dialectics Of
[Intro material to be added... ]
“Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious
dialectics from German idealist philosophy and apply it in the materialist conception
of nature and history. But a knowledge of mathematics and natural science is essential
to a conception of nature which is dialectical and at the same time materialist.”
—Engels, Preface to the 1885 edition of Anti-Dühring, MECW 25:11.
“... in nature, amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same
dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern
the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws which similarly form the thread
running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to
consciousness in thinking man.... And finally, to me there could be no question of
building the laws of dialectics into nature, but of discovering them in it and
evolving them from it.” —Engels, ibid., MECW 25:11-13.
“And since biology has been pursued in the light of the theory of
evolution, one rigid boundary line of classification after another has been swept
away in the domain of organic nature.... It is precisely the polar antagonisms put
forward as irreconcilable and insoluble, the forcibly fixed lines of demarcation and
class distinctions, which have given modern theoretical natural science its restricted,
metaphysical character. The recognition that these antagonisms and distinctions,
though to be found in nature, are only of relative validity, and that on the other
hand their imagined rigidity and absolute validity have been introduced into nature
only by our reflective minds—this recognition is the kernel of the dialectical
conception of nature. It is possible to arrive at this recognition because the
accumulating facts of natural science compel us to do so; but one arrives at it more
easily if one approaches the dialectical character of these facts equipped with an
understanding of the laws of dialectical thought.” —Engels, ibid., MECW 25:14.
“Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern
science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing daily,
and thus has shown that, in the last resort, nature works dialectically and not
metaphysically....
“An exact representation of the
universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of
this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of
dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life
and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring,
MECW 25:23-24. [Engels also slightly expanded the first paragraph above in his
additions to the text of Anti-Dühring available at MECW 25:633, where he
added that Nature “does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring
circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.” He then referenced the work of
Darwin as a demonstration of this. —Ed.]