NEGATION (In Dialectics)
Negation in dialectics is not the same thing as negation
in formal logic. In formal logic, negation is the total denial of a statement or
assertion. But as the term is used in discussing dialectics, negation involves the
resolution of a dialectical contradiction which transforms or resolves a thing,
situation or process in certain important respects, while also maintaining some
similarity or continuity with the previous thing, situation or process in other respects.
This is best illustrated by an example:
Capitalism is the negation of feudalism.
The defining social contradiction of feudalism, that between landlords and peasants, is
resolved when capitalism replaces feudalism, and (for the most part, at least) the nobility
and peasantry no longer exist. However, capitalism continues some other aspects of
the broader situation that formerly included feudalism, most notably the exploitation of one
class by another, which now occurs in the form of capitalists exploiting workers.
See also entries below.
[On negation in dialectics:] “Not empty negation, not futile negation,
not skeptical negation, vacillation and doubt is characteristic and essential in
dialectics,—which undoubtedly contains the element of negation and indeed as its most
important element—no, but negation as a moment of connection, as a moment of development,
retaining the positive, i.e., without any vacillations, without any eclecticism.”
—Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Science of Logic” (1914), LCW 38:226.
“The error of formal logic is in its perception of negation as an
external negation between one process and another, which is moreover regarded as an
absolute negation; this approach completely misunderstands reality. The opposite of
this approach is dialectical materialism, that is, scientific observation and study.
Material reality is self-motion, and moreover this self-motion is interconnected. Any
process itself moves forward because of the struggle of contradictions, and through
a sudden transformation it changes to move in an opposite direction. The entire history
of development of any process is constructed of a thesis, an antithesis which negates
the thesis, and a synthesis which is a negation of the negation of the antithesis. The
thesis already contains contradiction or antithesis within it, the antithesis also
contains the thesis within it, and the synthesis incorporates both the thesis and
antithesis. So-called negation, as Lenin has stated, ‘is neither random nor complete
negation, is neither skeptical nor vacillating negation; it is rather negation as an
element which preserves connection, an element of affirmation, i.e., without any
vacillations, without skepticism’. [This is an English translation of the Chinese
translation of Lenin’s comment that Mao used. See standard English translation from
LCW 38:226 in the quotation just above this one.] Negation does not destroy everything
and make a clean break with the past, it is not absolute; things that are in front
contain things that come later, and things that come later contain things that are in
front. Without the motion of negation, there can be no motion of affirmation. All
processes are like this.
“Negation is the ever-higher
development of a process.
“A dialectical negation does
not constitute a complete break with the past or its complete elimination.
“The first negation creates the
possibility of the second negation.
“A dialectical negation is the
cause of movement of a process of development, and this negation manifests itself as
two aspects: one aspect manifests itself as sublation, namely the overcoming of the
principal things of the old entity which are incompatible with preservation; the
other aspect manifests itself as affirmation, namely the provision of status to and
the preservation of the various things of the old entity which are still temporarily
compatible with existence.” —Mao, 1936/1937, marginal notes in his copy of the Chinese
translation of M. Shirokov & A. Aizenberg et al., A Course on Dialectical
Materialism; in Nick Knight, ed., Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism
(1990), pp. 276-7.
“Marxist philosophy, as distinguished from preceding philosophical
systems, is not a science dominating the other sciences, rather it is an instrument
of scientific investigation, a method, penetrating all natural and social sciences,
enriching itself with their attainments in the course of their development. In this
sense Marxist philosophy is the most complete and decisive negation of all preceding
philosophy. But to negate, as Engels emphasized, does not mean merely to say ‘no.’
Negation includes continuity, signifies absorption, the critical reforming and
unification in a new and higher synthesis of everything advanced and progressive
that has been achieved in the history of human thought.” —A. A. Zhdanov, “On the
History of Philosophy”, 1947.
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION
The central notion in the negation of the negation is that of certain common forms of
dialectical development which, in some respects, return
to (or come around again to) where they began, but which in other respects have fundamentally
changed. The pictorial image which best illustrates this is the spiral, or better yet, the spiral
in three dimensions which is known as a helix (e.g., a coiled telephone cord). Each time
around the cord comes back near to where it started, while at the same time being in an entirely
different geometric plane.
How can a process of development both return
to, and not return to, its starting place? This is possible if there is more than one
dialectical contradiction at work. Specifically,
it is possible (and indeed typical, and perhaps even necessary) where one overriding
contradiction works itself out via a sequence of sub-contradictions.
The favorite (and probably the clearest) example
of this for us Marxists is the development of the overall exploitation contradiction according
to historical materialism. The first exploitative
socioeconomic formation was
slave society, where slaves were exploited by slave owners.
Slave society then developed into feudalism, which was different
in many respects from slavery. But in at least one key respect it was the reproduction of slave
society; that is, exploitation still continued, though in a new form (the exploitation of
peasants by the landlord aristocracy). Society was then once again revolutionized, as feudalism
was overthrown by capitalism, and once again a great many things changed. But that same key
respect of exploitation was once again reproduced in a new form, the exploitation of workers by
the capitalists via the extraction of surplus value. [Note,
by the way, that this will be the end of the line for the progressive transformation of the
exploitation contradiction. The only possible further step at this point is the ending of
exploitation entirely, through the overthrow of capitalism, and the building of first
socialism and then communism.]
The negation of the negation, then,
as Lenin summarized it, is “the repetition at a higher stage of certain features, properties,
etc., of the lower [stage]”, and 2) “the apparent return to the old” [LCW 38:222]. It is the
development of a larger or overall contradiction by means of the replacement of one
sub-contradiction with another sub-contradiction which has both differences from, and
similarities to, the earlier one.
See also:
HEGELIAN TRIADS,
SUBLATION
“The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist
mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of
individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist
production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is
the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property for the
producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist
era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the
means of production.” —Marx, Capital, Vol. I, ch. 32: International ed., p. 763;
Penguin ed., p. 929.
[So Marx is saying here that
capitalist private property is the negation of the individual private property that
belongs to the artisan who produces it in a pre-capitalist economy; that the
distribution of goods to individual people under communism is the negation of
capitalist private property; and that communist distribution is the negation of
the negation of the individual property of the individual artisan. In other words, Marx
is explaining this specific example of the development of “private property” relations
in society in terms of dialectical terminology. This, of course, is only one
example of the negation of the negation in economics; political economy abounds
with developments which can be explained in such terms! —S.H.]
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION — Engels’s View Of
See also:
IDEALISM—Origin Of [Engels quote]
“To attempt to prove anything by means of dialectics alone to a crass
metaphysician like Herr Dühring would be as much a waste of time as was the
attempt made by Leibniz and his pupils to prove the principles of the infinitesimal
calculus to the mathematicians of their time. The differential gave them the same
cramps as Herr Dühring gets from the negation of the negation...
“But what then is this fearful
negation of the negation, which makes life so bitter for Herr Dühring and with
him plays the same role of the unpardonable crime as the sin against the Holy Ghost
does in Christianity?—A very simple process which is taking place everywhere and
every day, which any child can understand as soon as it is stripped of the veil of
mystery in which it was enveloped by the old idealist philosophy and in which it is
to the advantage of helpless metaphysicians of Herr Dühring’s calibre to keep it
enveloped. Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled,
boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with
conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the
influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the
grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which
has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of
this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilized and finally once more produces grains of
barley, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As
a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of
barley, but not as a single unity, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold. Species of grain
change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a
century ago. But if we take ... [an] ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an
orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the
gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more
seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers,
and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances
this process of perfection.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1876-1878), MECW
25:125-6.
[Ed. Note: On occasion some
people have objected to Engels’s description here of the “normal” development of
barley grains into plants, etc., as if this showed some teleological or other invalid
viewpoint. That would be irrelevant even if it were true (which it isn’t). If the
word “normal” bothers you in this passage, simply substitute a longer phrase it is
short for, such as “in the way in which it evolved to develop under the appropriate
conditions for its regeneration”. Notice that such a substitution does not in any way
change the validity of the explanation of the negation of the negation that
Engels was presenting. In other words, as I said, these sorts of misconstruals and
pedantic objections are really quite beside the point. —S.H.]
“With most insects, this process follows the same lines as in the
case of the grain of barley. Butterflies, for example, spring from the egg by a
negation of the egg, pass through certain transformations until they reach sexual
maturity, pair and are in turn negated, dying as soon as the pairing process has been
completed and the female has laid its numerous eggs. We are not concerned at the
moment with the fact that with other plants and animals the process does not take such
a simple form, that before they die they produce seeds, eggs or offspring not once but
many times; our purpose here is only to show that the negation of the negation
really does take place in both kingdoms of the organic world.” —Engels, ibid.,
MECW 25:126. [Engels then goes on to give further examples of the negation of the
negation in the inorganic world (e.g., geology), and in the world of ideas (e.g.,
mathematics). —S.H.]
“And so, what is the negation of the negation? An extremely
general—and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important—law of development
of nature, history, and thought; a law which, as we have seen, holds good in the
animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and in philosophy...
It is obvious that I do not say anything concerning the particular process of
development of, for example, a grain of barley from germination to the death of the
fruit-bearing plant, if I say it is a negation of the negation.... That, however, is
precisely what the metaphysicians are constantly imputting to dialectics. When I say
that all these processes are a negation of the negation, I bring them all together
under this one law of motion, and for this very reason I leave out of account the
specific peculiarities of each individual process. Dialectics, however, is nothing
more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human
society and thought.
“But someone may object: the
negation that has taken place in this case is not a real negation: I negate a grain
of barley also when I grind it, an insect when I crush it underfoot.... These
objections are in fact the chief arguments put forward by the metaphysicians against
dialectics, and they are wholly worthy of the narrow-mindedness of this mode of
thought. Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that
something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes.... [T]he kind of
negation is here determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular
nature of the process. I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation. I must
therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible.
How? This depends on the particular nature of each individual case.” —Engels, ibid.,
MECW 25:131.
“Once again, therefore, it is no one but Herr Dühring who is
mystifying us when he asserts that the negation of the negation is a stupid analogy
invented by Hegel, borrowed from the sphere of religion and based on the story of the
fall of man and his redemption.... Men thought dialectically long before they knew
what dialectics was, just as they spoke prose long before the term prose existed.
The law of negation of the negation, which is unconsciously operative in nature and
history and, until it has been recognized, also in our heads, was only first clearly
formulated by Hegel.” —Engels, ibid., MECW 25:132.
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION — Mao’s View Of
Mao frequently referred to the concept of the “negation of the negation” over the years.
But in August 1964 he was reported as saying in one conversation that “this does not exist
at all”. (See first quotation below.) The Sinologist Nick Knight plausibly argues, however,
that Mao did not at all abandon the concept of the “negation of the negation”, but
rather merely used another term (“affirmation, negation”) for essentially the same idea.
(See second quotation below.)
“Engels talked about the three categories, but as for me I don’t
believe in two of those categories. (The unity of opposites is the most basic law,
the transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity of the
opposites quality and quantity, and the negation of the negation does not exist at
all.) The juxtaposition, on the same level, of the transformation of quality and
quantity into one another, the negation of the negation, and the law of the unity
of opposites is ‘triplism’, not monism. The most basic thing is the unity of
opposites. The transformation of quality and quantity into one another is the unity
of the opposites quality and quantity. There is no such thing as the negation of
the negation. Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation … in the development of
things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation.
Slave-holding society negated primitive society, but with reference to feudal society
it constituted, in turn, the affirmation. Feudal society constituted the negation in
relation to slaveholding society but it was in turn the affirmation with reference
to capitalist society. Capitalism was the negation in relation to feudal society,
but it is, in turn, the affirmation in relation to socialist society.” —Mao, in an
informal discussion about philosophy with Kang Sheng and other comrades, August 18,
1964; online as
Talk on Questions of Philosophy.
“It is evident, therefore, that one can find a good number of
references to the concept of the ‘negation of the negation’ in the Mao texts of the
late 1950s and early 1960s. It would appear that Mao’s August 1964 ‘rejection’ of
the concept is thus at odds with his otherwise relatively frequent and positive
references to it. However, parallel to such references to the ‘negation of the
negation’ emerges a different appellation for the concept, one which suggests that
Mao was seeking a label more in keeping with the more fundamental philosophical
category of the unity of opposites. In his important ‘Sixty Articles on Work Methods’
of January 1958, we discover that in referring to the three categories of Marxist
philosophy, Mao did not actually employ the title of the ‘negation of the
negation’:
“‘The law of the unity of
opposites, of quantitative to qualitative changes, and of affirmation and negation,
will hold good universally and eternally.’
“The formula used here to
describe the third philosophical category—‘affirmation’ and ‘negation’—is identical
to that used by Mao in his August 1964 talk on philosophy; ‘affirmation, negation …
in the development of things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation
and negation’. What we have here is merely a change in title, for the substance of
the concept remains unchanged. The concept of the ‘negation of the negation assumes
that the factor which negates the negative (for example, capitalism’s negation of
feudalism) will initially constitute a positive factor, the affirmative. Over time,
however, its positive character will transform into its opposite, the affirmative
becoming the negative, as a new and historically progressive force emerges to
challenge it. This cycle, of negation, affirmation, negation as described by Mao in
August 1964, is in essence no different from that described earlier by himself and
other Marxist philosophers, including Lenin and Engels, under the rubric of the
‘negation of the negation’. Mao’s demonstrable predilection for linking and using
oxymoronic categories (life and death, truth and falsehood, materialism and idealism,
right and wrong, finite and infinite, advanced and backward, to name but a few)
suggests that he would have been unsympathetic to a formula which described a
contradictory process and yet appeared to link like to like: the negation of the
negation. By renaming the concept ‘affirmation and negation’, Mao could leave the
substance of the concept unaltered while bringing its title into line with the
pervasive idea that the unity of opposites exists in all things and processes.”
—Nick Knight, from the Introduction to Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism
(1990), pp. 22-23. [A fuller extract, with citations, can be found at:
https://www.massline.org/Philosophy/Others/Knight-Mao-NegOfNeg.pdf]
NEGATIVE INTEREST RATES
Normally interest rates are positive, which is to say that a bank or borrower of someone’s
money will pay them something for the loan of their money to them.
Real interest rates can be negative if the
rate of inflation is higher than the rate of interest. However, it is also possible for
even nominal interest rates to be negative (without even taking the inflation rate
into consideration). This only happens in very exceptional situations where the government
is arranging things so that banks and other lending institutions are penalized if
they hold too much money without lending it out themselves, which therefore forces the
bank to discourage excess deposits by charging depositors to hold their money. In other
words this situation can only develop, at least on any significant scale, where banks
themselves cannot find sufficient profitable investment opportunities for their “excess”
money; i.e., in the midst of a very serious capitalist economic crisis.
In 2008-2009 the long developing world
capitalist overproduction crisis took a serious turn for the worse in the form of the
“Great Recession”. Although the government proclaimed
that this recession was “over” in the summer of 2009, everybody knows better. The U.S.
and world capitalist economies have been very weak, stagnant, and in-and-out of official
recession since that time. In this situation the capitalist ruling classes of the world
are beginning to panic. Although their own theory says that capitalists will always
invest in new factories and machines in order to increase production and profits, the
actual fact is that the masses are already spending virtually all that they make and can
borrow. And therefore it makes no sense for the capitalists themselves to borrow and
build more factories—when they cannot sell everything that their existing factories
produce. There is a world overproduction crisis,
and therefore there is in effect an “investment
strike” by the capitalists themselves.
By early 2015 it became apparent to the
U.S. government, which is in effect the executive committee of the American capitalist
ruling class, that this period of stagnation was not going to clear up by itself and
that therefore some means had to be found to force consumers to spend more, and
to force corporations to invest in many more factories. The leading, and most
politically acceptable, method of doing this is to adopt policies which lead to
negative interest rates. Those who have lots of money in bank accounts will not
want to see their balances steadily erode, and will therefore be more likely to spend
or invest. The Federal Reserve has already forced some banks, such as JPMorgan Chase,
to in effect charge some of its biggest clients to hold their “excess money”. And all
around the world other capitalist governments have been trying the same thing. In
February 2016 the Japanese government lowered the interest rate on its 10-year bonds to
-0.04% per year, and Sweden pushed its main interest rate further into negative territory,
to -0.5% per year. “Nearly 30% of the global government bond market now trades on a
negative yield.” [Economist, Feb. 13, 2016, p. 7.]
However, so far these slightly negative
interest rates have proven to be rather ineffective. For that reason governments are
trying to figure out how to force even more negative interest rates. One major problem
for them is that people, and even corporations, will simply start taking their money
out of banks if the interest rates get too negative. This is why governments are more
and more thinking about the “necessity” of abolishing physical currency, and forcing
all money to exist only in bank accounts! (See:
ABOLISHING PHYSICAL CURRENCY.)
If that becomes the case, governments can make their negative rates as negative as they
like, and depositors will only have the option to move their money to another country.
If all countries have negative interest rates, there will be no way to avoid the
erosion of the value of money.
Nevertheless, even worldwide negative
interest rates will not save the capitalists. If money is destroyed as a store of value,
then the rich and their corporations will simply shift into using gold or other
commodities for that purpose. The desperation of the capitalist ruling class continues
to deepen as their overall economic crisis intensifies, and it pushes them into one
unworkable scheme after another.
[For further information
on this topic, see my 4-page letter “Negative Interest Rates, and Abolishing Cash Money”
(4/26/2015),
https://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/CurrentCrisis/2015/NegInterestRatesAndAbolishingCash-150426.pdf
—S.H.]
NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS
[Sometimes with a hyphen: neo-classical]
Neoclassical economics is the revised
version of classical bourgeois economics (of Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, et al.) which originally developed as
the “marginalist” school (of
León Walras, Carl
Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and
Alfred Marshall) in the last decades of the 1800s
and which since then has been by far the most dominant form of bourgeois economics.
When most bourgeois economists refer to “economics”, they mean neoclassical bourgeois
economics. There have been some further more minor modifications to neoclassical economics
as it has developed over the century and more since then, including: 1) demoting land
from its place in classical economics as one of the so-called “three factors of production”
(along with labor and capital) to being viewed as just one form of capital; 2) further
emphasis on utility maximization; 3) rational choice theory (insisting that economics is
just a matter of rational choices that people supposedly almost always make in the
marketplace); and 4) the ever-greater abstraction and mathematization of economics based
on these bourgeois principles and the ever-diminishing relevance of all this to the real
world.
In addition, some bourgeois economists
have claimed that there has been a “synthesis” of neoclassical economics with
Keynesianism, though this “neoclassical synthesis” is
essentially still the same thing as before (see entry below).
Monetarism, as in the theories of
Milton Friedman, though considered by bourgeois
economists to be diametrically opposed to the “neoclassical synthesis”, is itself just
another slightly different sub-variety of neoclassical economics.
See also:
ECONOMICS—Bourgeois
“It is only natural that neoclassical economists should work on the
principle that ‘what is good for capitalism is good.’ I only wish that they could
achieve a degree of self-understanding sufficient to admit that this is their
principle and to proclaim it as openly as we radicals proclaim the opposite.”
—Paul Sweezy, “Comment”, in Assar Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New
Left (1977), p. 147.
NEOCOLONIALISM
[Often with a hyphen.] Neocolonialism is the modified form of colonialism which
seeks to hide the real political control and economic domination and exploitation of a
country by one or more outside capitalist-imperialist
countries. An outright, old-style colony is “owned” and openly dominated, exploited, and
administered by some imperialist power. This imperialist overlord maintains its domination
through open military force, putting down any rebellions by the people in the colony, and
by being willing to go to war when necessary against other imperialist predators to secure
that colony as its private preserve and keep other exploiters out. But in a neo-colony
the open, formal, and “legal” domination of the oppressed country is absent. Instead, most
of the same results are accomplished surreptitiously, through the establishment by the
imperialist power of economic and political control through local comprador agents who are
in nominal governmental control of the neo-colony. However, if these local agents fail to
follow the most important orders from the imperialists, they are then forcibly
overthrown and replaced by more compliant lackies.
There are both advantages and
disadvantages to neocolonialism (as opposed to old-style colonialism) from the point
of view of the capitalist-imperialists. By far the greatest advantage is that under
neocolonialism it is vastly easier to fool the people of the oppressed nation about
who is really in control of their country. It is also easier to raise local armies to
do the dirty work of maintaining the real control by imperialists. On the other hand,
there are some increased secondary dangers to the imperialists. Thus their local
agents might get too independent and try to govern more in their own interests rather
than in the interests of the imperialists. This is why periodic coups or assassinations
ordered by the imperialists are still “necessary”, or even military interventions by
them. It is also true that it is more difficult to maintain each neo-colony as the
private preserve of a single imperialist power. Still, on the whole, the great change
from old-style colonialism to neocolonialism—which was primarily accomplished in the
world by (presumed) national liberation struggles in the several decades following
World War II—has proven to be both necessary for the imperialists, and to their own
net advantage.
See also below, and:
NATURAL RESOURCE CURSE
NEOCOLONIALISM — Development Of
Open colonialism began in the early years of capitalism, such as with the conquest of
the New World by Spain, Portugal, France and Britain, and then with the beginning
conquest of India by Britain in the 18th century and of the conquest of the East Indies
by Holland. But as many of the old colonial powers began to weaken, many colonies
(especially in the New World) became formally independent.
In the Americas the newly developing
capitalist power, the U.S.A., proclaimed the “Monroe Doctrine”, that no European power
would be allowed to capture and control new colonies in the New World. Britain, however,
found that it was able to economically penetrate South America quite well. As the
British historian Eric Hobsbawm expressed it, South Amerca became “an informal part of
the British Empire”. This was an
early pioneer form of neocolonialism. To some degree the British also economically
penetrated the U.S. itself, and developed some of the mechanisms of neocolonialism
that way. But the U.S. was growing and developing very rapidly during the 19th century,
and eventually began to challenge and surpass the economic might of Britain.
However, in the last decades of the
1800s capitalism developed into its new imperialist form, a form much more predatory
and voracious. There was a mad rush of the major imperialist countries to carve up
Africa and other regions and establish new outright colonies as their own private
preserves for economic exploitation. The U.S. also joined this mad rush and seized a
number of colonies (including Cuba and the Philippines) from Spain. In World War I
the imperialist countries fought among themselves to see which would be top dog in a
world completely dominated by imperialism and colonialism. World War I did not fully
resolve the issue, and broke out again a generation later in the form of World
War II.
Many colonial countries came out of
World War II with tremendously increased nationalist sentiments, and over the next
few decades a major change happened in the world: the transformation, over most of
it, from colonialism to neocolonialism. This was aided somewhat by some of the
imperialist countries themselves, the ones (including the U.S.) which were late to
the colonial banquet and which stood to benefit by ending the system of exclusive
colonies. The existing imperialist powers tremendously resisted this change, but they
were unable to stop this transformation in most of their one-time colonies. They were,
however, able to co-opt it, to make neocolonialism little different in reality from
the open colonialism that preceded it. The imperialist powers still dominate most of
the poorer countries of the world, and tremendously exploit them, including their
material resources and their cheap supply of human labor.
“After World War II world imperialism underwent some major
changes. One of these very important changes was the forced replacement (in part
because of people’s rebellions) of most outright colonies which had been under
the exclusive control of a single imperialist power with neocolonialism.
Under this new arrangement, most countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle
East and Asia are now officially independent of their former colonial masters,
but are still subject to foreign imperialist exploitation and political or
military interference.
“An aspect of neocolonialism
that still often goes underappreciated is that the neocolonies are now open to
imperialist predation by more than one imperialist power, and actually by
all imperialist powers at the present time.
“This change to
neocolonialism by all the major imperialist countries required the
construction of an imperialist system to regulate this joint exploitation
of the world, and to create and/or impose rules for how these vicious wolves
would prey on the sheep, without constantly coming into bloody conflict against
each other. International agencies, such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the
World Trade Organization were set up to regulate this new imperialist system.
—N. B. Turner, et al., Is
China an Imperialist Country? — Considerations and Evidence (2015), summary
theses numbers 3-5, p. 144-145. Available online at
https://www.bannedthought.net/International/Red-Path/01/RP-8.5x11-IsChinaAnImperialistCountry-140320.pdf
and elsewhere.
NEO-KANTIANISM [Of the Late Nineteenth Century through the Time of Lenin]
“Neo-Kantianism—a reactionary trend in bourgeois philosophy
preaching subjective idealism under the slogan of a return to Kantian philosophy. It
arose in the middle of the nineteenth century in Germany, where at this time there
was an increased interest in Kantianism. In 1865 Otto Liebmann’s book Kant and
the Epigones was published, each chapter ending with the call: ‘Back to Kant’.
Liebmann put forward the task of correcting Kant’s ‘main error’—the recognition of
‘things-in-themselves’. The revival of Kantianism
was helped by the works of Kuno Fischer and Eduard Zeller, and one of the early
representatives of neo-Kantianism was Friedrich Albert Lange who tried to use
physiology as a basis for agnosticism.
“Later, two main schools of
neo-Kantianism were formed: that of Marburg (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, etc.) and
that of Freiburg or Baden (Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, etc.). The former
tried to substantiate idealism by speculating on the successes of natural science,
especially on the penetration of mathematical methods into physics; the latter
counterposed the social sciences to natural science, trying to prove that historical
phenomena are strictly individual and not subject to the operation of any laws. Both
schools put the question of the logical basis of science in place of the fundamental
question of philosophy. Criticizing Kant ‘from the right’, the neo-Kantians declared
the ‘thing-in-itself’ to be a ‘limiting concept’ to which knowledge was tending.
Denying the objective existence of the material world, they regarded as the object
of knowledge not the laws of nature and society, but merely the phenomena of
consciousness. In contrast to the agnosticism of the natural scientists, that of the
neo-Kantians was not ‘shamefaced materialism’, for it asserted the impotance of
science in regard to cognition and changes of reality. The neo-Kantians openly
attacked Marxism, counterposing to it ‘ethical socialism’. In accordance with their
theory of knowledge they declared socialism to be the ‘ethical ideal’ of human
social existence, an ideal to which mankind was striving but which it could not
attain. This ‘theory’ of the neo-Kantians was seized upon by the revisionists,
headed by Eduard Bernstein, who put forward the slogan: ‘The movement is everything,
the final goal is nothing’. Neo-Kantianism was one of the philosophical pillars of
the Second International. In Russia attempts to ‘combine’ neo-Kantianism and Marxism
were made by the ‘legal Marxists’. G. V. Plekhanov, Paul Lafargue and Franz Mehring
opposed the neo-Kantian revision of Marxism. Lenin laid bare the reactionary nature
of neo-Kantianism and showed its connection with other trends of bourgeois
philosophy (immanentism, Machism, pragmatism, etc.).” —Note 18, LCW 14.
NEO-KAUTSKYISM
Recent views and political stances within the nominal “Left” which are similar to, or reminiscent
of, those of Karl Kautsky around World War I. These include:
1. Attitudes about
globalization which grossly exaggerate the extent or
degree to which the world economy has recently become integrated into an single unified
whole, and essentially adopt the view that “ultra-imperialism”
has now arrived, and permanently so.
2. The view that United States imperialism is
in complete and permanent control of the world, both economically and militarily; and the view
that “world imperialism” is essentially identical with “American imperialism”. Some of those
supporting this general position are now finally beginning to recognize that economically
the U.S. is weakening and starting to lose out to China and other rising powers, but still
maintain that militarily the U.S. will remain unchallengeable by other imperialist countries at
least for many, many decades and far into the foreseeable future.
3. Views, such as those of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri that the capitalist-imperialist system has already evolved, or at least is rapidly
evolving, into a new transnational unified system of independent international corporations which
they refer to collectively as “Empire”, in which individual nation states lose their power and
their control over the world economy, and also lose their overall importance.
A primary implication of all these views is
that the long nightmare of inter-imperialist struggle and world wars is now a thing of the
past. Thus, all these versions of neo-Kautskyism are actually dream-worlds of a basically
peaceful capitalist-imperialist future (even if it is admitted that capitalism itself is
exploitive and despicable and that it continually engages in small-scale wars against “Third
World” countries).
See also:
KAUTSKYISM
“There is a tendency that some people have to discount any possibility
of growing economic contentions within the world imperialist system, and to deny even
the possibility that different economic blocs might arise within the current world
system, on the grounds that the U.S. currently has unchallengeable military power and
unshakable military alliances with most of the other powerful countries of the world.
We see this tendency as sort of a neo-Kautskyian view similar to his theory of
‘ultra-imperialism’. First, it fails to take to heart the reality of
uneven development in the world, and the
genuineness of the rapid growth of Chinese economic power in particular, along with
the U.S. economic decline and fragility. Second, it confuses the present situation of
growing economic contention with the possible future development of military
contention. Third, philosophically, it seems to reject the important dialectical law
that ‘one divides into two’.” —N. B. Turner, et al., Is China an Imperialist Country?
Considerations and Evidence (2014), chapter 11. [Available online at:
https://www.bannedthought.net/International/Red-Path/01/RP-8.5x11-IsChinaAnImperialistCountry-140320.pdf ]
NEOLIBERALISM
[Somtimes with a hyphen: neo-liberalism.] A set of economic and political views and
policies used to administer a capitalist state, which is characterized by attacks on (or even
the total destruction of) many previous concessions to the working class, such as unemployment
insurance, welfare and other social programs, including public education; by further attacks
against, and the destruction of, labor unions and whatever little pro-labor legislation may
have previously existed; by promoting the lowering of real wages and, especially,
benefits for workers such as abolishing retirement plans; by a freer hand granted to
corporations to operate as they please and with many fewer (and weaker) regulations, including
weakening or eliminating environmental safeguards; by much lower taxes for the rich and for
their corporations; by international free trade, again for the benefit of big corporations;
and by a general turn back towards the laissez-faire
capitalism of the 19th century. More briefly, neoliberalism is the bourgeois dogma that
everything should be left to the so-called “free market” to work out all on its own, and that
things will always “work out for the best” if unrestrained market forces are given full play.
Thus, neoliberalism is a very reactionary trend in modern capitalist rule which is
serving to dismantle the welfare state and drive down the
working class and the masses.
Neoliberalism became necessary for the
bourgeois ruling class as a means of trying to deal with the long developing U.S. and world
capitalist economic crisis. The leading capitalist-imperialist countries in the world over
the past century made welfare state concessions to their own working classes in order to
keep the peace at home while they plundered the rest of the world. However, with the
growing overproduction crisis these concessions
are no longer “practical”, and to keep corporate profits up they must now be rapidly
eliminated. Neoliberalism amounts to a policy of trying to take out the very negative
effects of the worsening capitalist economic crisis on the backs of the proletariat.
The advent of capitalist-imperialism
initially permitted a temporary interruption in the trend toward the
immiseration of the proletariat in
the advanced capitalist countries, and even allowed for their partial
embourgeoisment and the growth of a
labor aristocracy. But the slowly developing, but
inexorable, world overproduction crisis is forcing the ruling class to reproletarianize
the working class and to renew the overall capitalist process of the immiseration of the
proletariat and the broad masses—even at home.
See also:
SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS
“Some people will obviously have to do with less.... It will be a
bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big
business can have more. Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in
modern economic history compares with the selling job that must be done to make
people accept this reality.” —Editorial, Business Week, October 12, 1974,
as the period of neoliberalism and intensified austerity for the working class began
in the United States.
NEOLIBERALISM VERSUS LAISSEZ-FAIRE
In abstract theoretical terms the bourgeois economic doctrine of neoliberalism is pretty much the
same thing as the more traditional doctrine of laissez-faire.
Both insist that capitalist markets be given “free” and total control of the economy, without
any “interference” from labor unions, mass organizations, or the government. But there are some
differences between the two doctrines, because of their different periods of origin, with
neoliberalism arising in much more difficult circumstances for capitalism. The theory of
lassez-faire, at least, was that if the government just kept its hands off of the so-called
free market, society would run smoothly and for the benefit of everyone. But the proponents and
defenders of neoliberalism are much more determined to suppress—often using force if all else
fails—any and all attempts to regulate the market, no matter how democratically this is attempted.
The basic economic theories are very similar, but neoliberalism is much more anti-democratic, and
even fascistic, in its political inclinations and actions.
“What diferentiates neoliberalism from the older ideal of laissez-faire
is the recognition that a free market will not reemerge if the government simply gets out
of the way. The neoliberal perspective, as first articulated in the 1930s by the Austrian
economist Friedrich Hayek and by Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, holds that if
we want entrepreneurs, financiers, and ordinary citizens to be liberated from state
regulation, strong government rules must protect the market from the state. Milton Friedman,
in a 1951 essay titled ‘Neo-Liberalism and Its Prospects,’ agreed that this project went
well beyond laissez-faire. [Gary] Gerstle [in his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal
Order... (2022)] writes, ‘This strategy was built on a paradox: namely, that government
intervention was necessary to force individuals from the encroachments of government.’ The
historian Quinn Slobodian, in his authoritative intellectual history of neoliberalism,
Globalists (2018), goes further: ‘The neoliberal project was focused on designing
institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against
the threat of democracy.’
“Leftist theorists had long appreciated
the role of the state in defining the market. As Karl Polanyi famously wrote, relishing the
paradox, ‘laissez-faire was planned.’ And indeed it was. To function at all, even ‘free’
markets require extensive rules defining property itself, the terms of credit and debt,
contracts, corporations, bankruptcy, rights and obligations of labor, and so on. The
differences between the New Deal or social-democratic view of markets and the neoliberal
ideal is that progressives want the government’s rules to act as democratic counterweights
to the abuses of capitalism, while neoliberals want them to protect market freedoms. But
both accept that capitalism requires rules.”
—Robert Kuttner, “Free Markets,
Besieged Citizens”, New York Review of Books, July 21, 2022, p. 12. [Kuttner is a
liberal bourgeois economist who believes in “regulated
capitalism”, and therefore opposes neoliberalism which forbids any government regulation
of capitalist markets. —Ed.]
NEOLIBERALISM — Reformist Opposition To
Neoliberalist policies have been forced on the ruling class by the continuing very serious
development of the U.S. and world economic crisis, and their consequent need—to the maximum
degree they can—to take this crisis out on the backs of the working class and masses. (See
the main entry on neoliberalism above.) Thus neoliberalist policies are not really an “option”
or a “free choice” on the part of the ruling class, but rather something that they must
do to defend their own class interests.
However, this is something that many people
do not at all understand. Many liberal reformers condemn neoliberalist policies but
still defend capitalism as a system! This is sheer stupidity. An example of this is Naomi
Klein’s 2014 book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, which—despite
the sub-title—is entirely focused against neoliberalist policies which are leading to
uncontrolled global warming and environmental destruction, but not against capitalism
itself! She says that “the disastrous track record of the past three decades of neoliberal
policy is simply too apparent” and then sums this up as “the failure of deregulated capitalism”.
A few pages later she says: “The core of the problem comes back to the same inescapable fact
that has both blocked climate action and accelerated emissions: all of us are living in the
world that neoliberalism built, even if we happen to be critics of neoliberalism.” In reality,
of course, the “core of the problem” is simply capitalism itself! Instead of going on about
“the rubble of neoliberalism”, as Klein does on her final page, we should be condemning
capitalism itself, as Klein promised to do in her title but then did not have the courage to
follow through on.
Well, this is what we might expect from open
reformists who always promote the absurd notion that capitalism can be made to work for the
benefit of the people. But even more worrisome is the common tendency among those who call
themselves Marxists or revolutionaries to focus their criticisms against “neoliberalism”
rather than against capitalism in general. There is something highly suspicious about
those who just criticize neoliberalism rather than capitalism specifically. Whether they mean
to or not, they are giving the strong impression that it is not the whole capitalist system
which has to go, but instead only certain misguided views and policies of the government
which need to be changed. Revolutionaries should not promote mere reformist notions!
See also: The section on neoliberalism in
the essay “Comments on Sison’s ‘Contradictions in the world Capitalist System and the
Necessity of Socialist Revolution’” (2002), by S.H., online at:
https://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/SisonCr.htm
NEPAL — Maoist Parties In
The story of the many political organizations in Nepal which have called themselves “Maoist”,
or else which have at one time or another supported Mao and/or People’s War, is complex, and
many of the parties have been “Maoist” in name only. Others have been revolutionary or
Maoist for a time, and then changed into social-democratic or parliamentary reformist
parties. There have been a very large number of splits, mergers, conflicting lines within
parties, and drastic shifts in the dominant political lines—usually in a rightist direction.
Here is a brief summary:
The original Communist Party of Nepal was
formed at a meeting in 1949 in Calcutta [now Kolkata], India. It developed in a generally
revisionist direction, though it also included revolutionary activists such as Mohan Bikram
Singh who joined the party in 1953. Singh was born into a feudal landlord family in 1935, but
rebelled against his father and became a Communist.
The first major schism in the CPN occurred
in 1968 when a group led by Pushpa Lal [Pushpa Lal Shrestha] broke away. This new party
developed along the lines of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) with which it was closely associated. [It merged into a new revisionist party,
the CPN (Marxist) in 1987, which later become the CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist).] In 1971
M. B. Singh was finally released after 9 years in prison, and he along with Nirmal Lama founded
the Central Nucleus group which they hoped could unite the various truly revolutionary strands
within the Communist movement. They tried to bring Pushpa Lal’s group into this effort, but
were unsuccessful. In 1974 Singh and Lama founded a new party called the CPN (Fourth Congress)
which soon became the largest of the various nominally Communist parties in Nepal. This party
supported Mao Zedong Thought and a protracted armed revolution which would also require a mass
uprising. However, this party made no immediate progress toward these goals and did not remain
united for very long.
Independently of all this, in 1978 various
factions of the Nepal Communist movement came together to form the Communist Party of Nepal
(Marxist-Leninist). This party was initially founded on the pattern of the Communist Party of
India (M-L), supported the Chinese Revolution, and itself soon engaged in armed struggle on
a limited scale. However, in 1982 it changed its line and abandoned that armed struggle. [In
1990 it merged with another revisionist party, the CPN (Marxist), to form the totally bourgeois
reformist Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).]
Returning our attention once again to the CPN
(Fourth Congress), in 1983 a schism developed between M.B. Singh and Nirmal Lama over the
legitimacy of the Jhapa Revolt, and Singh left to found the
CPN (Masal). In 1984 the CPN (Masal) was one of the parties which founded the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM).
In November 1984 the CPN (Masal) itself split,
with the minority led by M.B. Singh keeping the original name, though it was also known as
the CPN (Mashal-COC). The other faction, which was led by Mohan Baidya [or Vaidya], also
known as “Kiran”, called itself the Communist Party of Nepal (Mashal). While M. B. Singh felt
that the Jhapa revolt was unorthodox and divisive to the Nepalese Communist movement and not
the correct path forward, Kiran and others (such as “Prachanda” [Pushpa Kamal Dahal] came to
believe that the Jhapa rebellion had served to expose revisionism and was the Nepalese
equivalent of the Naxalbari rebellion in India. Kiran now also felt that M.B. Singh was a
right opportunist for constantly postponing the armed struggle. However, these political
differences mostly coalesced after the late 1984 split in Masal, and the precipitating
reasons for the split seem to have been personal, including Singh’s authoritarian leadership
style and a scandalous adulterous affair that he had.
The new CPN (Mashal) also became a member of
RIM alongside the CPN (Masal)—although the CPN (Masal) was later expelled. The CPN (Mashal)
advocated immediate armed struggle, and like Masal was an illegal underground party. In 1986
the party reformulated its ideology from “Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tsetung Thought” to
“Marxism-Leninism-Maoism”. That same year the party attempted to launch a rebellion in
Kathmandu under Kiran’s direct leadership. This was later called the “Sector Incident” and
failed miserably. Just a few police posts were attacked and a statue of King Tribhuvan was
painted black. The failure of this rebellion led to the resignation of Kiran and other party
leaders and the elevation of Prachanda to the position of General Secretary. More significant
than the Sector Incident was the popular uprising against the King and his regime in 1990,
in which a united front of the CPN (Mashal) and the CPN (Masal), called the “United National
People’s Movement”, played a key role. This won some short-term democratic concessions from
the reactionary feudal regime.
In November 1990 the CPN (Mashal) merged with
the CPN (Fourth Congress) and two smaller groups to form the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity
Centre). Shortly afterwards a group led by Baburam Bhattarai and Shital Kumar split off from
the old CPN (Masal) and also joined the CPN (Unity Centre). In a period of economic and
political chaos in 1992 the CPN (UC) joined in a united front with other Communist groups
and called for a general strike on April 6th. Beginning on the eve of the strike the feudal
regime began attacking activists and on April 6th itself the government shot and killed at
least 14 people, some of them bystanders. Events such as this set the stage for the later
People’s War.
In 1994 Prachanda and Bhattarai led a split
away from the CPN (Unity Centre) and briefly formed a second party with that same name. In
1996 they changed that name to the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). [The older CPN (Unity
Centre) party continued and in 2002 merged with part of the old CPN (Masal), which had split
again in 1999, to form a new party, the CPN (Unity Centre-Masal).]
On February 13, 1996 the CPN (Maoist)
launched the 10-year Nepalese People’s War. Although the People’s
War (PW) was initially quite small and primitive it gradually expanded and became more
powerful as it spread throughout the rural areas. For some time the feudal government used
only police forces (actually paramility forces) to attack the revolutionaries, and the Nepal
Army mostly stayed on the sidelines. But gradually the Nepal Army became more active in its
counter-revolutionary efforts and beginning in 2001 the Nepal Army and the revolutionary
forces came into open confrontation. Nevertheless the PW continued to expand and win the
ever-broader support of the Nepalese people. Some entire extensive regions of the contryside
were liberated, and by 2006 some estimates were that the revolutionaries controlled 80% of
the countryside.
And then a very strange thing happened—the
CPN (Maoist) gave up the fight! There has never been a satisfactory explanation from
Prachanda and the other leaders of the party as to just why they did so. In part it may
have been a simple failure of nerve, or a fear that if they actually seized nationwide power
the Indian Army or U.S. imperialist forces might directly intervene. (Of course this
probability existed from the start, which is why any strategic plan for revolution should
not just have been a People’s War until Kathmandu could be captured. That would very
probably only mark the completion of the first stage of the PW, which might very well
be pushed back into the countryside again for a long period because of foreign
intervention.)
In any case, events have proven that aborting
the People’s War was an extremely serious error. True, by ending the PW and forming the
multi-party alliance with the leading non-revolutionary parties, the CPN (Maoist) was able
to get rid of the monarchy, probably once and for all. And the massive support that the party
won during the PW allowed them to win the highest number of votes in the 2008 Constituent
Assembly, and for Prachanda to briefly become Prime Minister. But the real political power
of the old bourgeois-feudalist regime actually still continued—as their control of the Nepal
Army and the early pushing aside of the CPN (Maoist) demonstrated. The even worse problem
was that the CPN (Maoist) itself changed irreversibly into a reformist social-democratic
party with no real possibility of ever getting back on the road to revolution. And the masses
too have been giving up on the party; in the 2013 Constituent Assembly elections they only
won 80 of 601 seats. The percentage of the vote received by the CPN (Maoist), under its
various names, was 29.28% in 2008, 15.21% in 2013, and just 13.66% in the 2017 elections.
Their support has continued to drop as they have become more and more obviously just another
ineffective reformist party.
In 2002 the part of the old CPN (Unity Centre)
which had not gone on to become the CPN (Maoist) merged with the old CPN (Masal) to
form the CPN (Unity Centre-Masal). These were people who had opposed the PW and had not taken
part in it. After the fall of the feudal monarchy in 2006 there were several small factions
which split off from this party, and the largest piece left merged with the CPN (Maoist) in
January 2009, which then changed its name to the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
Additions of groups and individuals like this which had opposed the PW moved that party
further to the right.
Since the UCPN (Maoist) terminated the PW
and continued to move in a rightist direction, there have been several splits of the more
Leftist forces away from it. In 2009 a small faction led by Matrika Yadav split and set up a
new party with the previous name, the CPN (Maoist). In June 2012 a much larger split occurred
when Kiran [Mohan Baidya] and a substantial number of other people broke away to form the
Communist Party of Nepal—Maoist (with a dash). Although this party threatened at times to
relaunch a People’s War it made no moves to actually do so. In fact, it was difficult to see
what the actual differences were between the CPN-Maoist and the UCPN (Maoist). Apparently
the former is a bit more hostile towards Indian intervention in Nepal. There were continuing
efforts within both parties to reunite into a single party, but this did not occur.
At the end of 2015 there were a total of
at least five splinter parties from the UCPN (Maoist). The most determinedly revolutionary
of these groups appeared to be the split-off from the CPN-Maoist led by Netra Bikram Chand
[“Biplap”] which occurred at the end of November 2014. This led to the founding of the
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), without the hyphen and once again using the old name.
However, there were then many rumors for a couple years that at least some of these five
parties would merge back into the UCPN (Maoist), though we believe that only one or two of
them did eventually do so.
When one or two of these small splinter
groups did merge back into the UCPN (Maoist) in 2016 the party changed its name again, this
time to the CPN (Maoist Centre). Of course, by this time, this was a completely
social-democratic party and there was really nothing “Maoist” about it at all. As the
influence of the CPN (Maoist Centre) declined, with the continuing loss of support from the
masses, its leader Prachanda [Pushpa Kamal Dahal] came to the decision to merge his party
into the larger revisionist “Communist” parliamentary party, the CPN (United Marxist-Leninist).
First these two parties formed an electoral front for the 2017 elections and when they came
out on top (mostly because of votes for the CPN (UML)), and after some careerist bickering,
the merger of these two reformist parties, under the simplified and quite erroneous name the
“Communist Party of Nepal”, was announced on February 20, 2018, and formally took place in
May 2018. However, this “unified” party has been anything but actually unified, and as of
March 2021 it appears that it is splitting up into its two primary parts once again.
It thus seems that any genuine revolutionary
Maoist party or movement can only arise in Nepal out of the few small still remaining
independent groups, such as the CPN (Revolutionary Maoist) led by Kiran, and the CPN (Maoist)
led by Netra Bikram Chand. Chand’s party was declared illegal and the Oli-Prachanda government
tried to suppress it in 2020-21. But in early 2021 Chand’s party also formally gave up illegal
struggle and promised to join the “main stream” of electoral politics.
“The long awaited unification of Nepal’s two big communist parties,
Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist) and Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist
Centre) is concluded. The two parties have signed a 7-point agreement that accepts
Marxism and Leninism as [the] guiding principle and calls for establishing [the] party’s
hegemony through peaceful means. As per the agreement the Maoist Centre leader Prachanda
and UML leader KP Oli will hold [the] party president and prime minister’s post by turn.
This marks an end of official Maoism in Nepal, one of the most exiting chapters of the
country’s Left history. Now there is no official communist party in the country that is
guided by Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s thought or Maoism.” —Vishnu Sharma, “Lesson for India
from the Merger of two Left parties in Nepal”, National Herald [Indian bourgeois
newspaper], Feb. 24, 2018. [Apparently what the author means by “official Maoism” is
simply the non-revolutionary and totally phony “Maoism” represented by social-democratic
electoral parties who only falsely claim to be Maoists. Of course there are still
genuine Maoist revolutionaries in Nepal despite the abject opportunist betrayal to the
revolution by Prachanda and his so-called CPN (Maoist Centre) party. —Ed.]
NET PRODUCT [In Socialist or Nominally Socialist Society]
The new value produced in a work place, an industry, or an entire country, during some period
of time (such as a year). This might be defined in somewhat different ways in different societies,
but in the Soviet Union (at least during the state-capitalist period) it was defined as the total of
both the workers’ wages and the generated product (after deducting the value of all used-up
inputs to production). Thus “net product” in this sense amounts to a combination of wages together
with what would be called surplus value in capitalist society. In
a genuine socialist society it does seem inappropriate to continue referring to “surplus value”,
since the entire new product is used to benefit the working class either individually (through wages)
or else collectively (through social programs such as health, welfare, education, infrastructure,
etc., or else through the further expansion of production), all of which are meant to benefit
the working class. On the other hand, in a phony “socialist” society, like the Soviet Union in its
last 35 years, this term seems to be designed for the primary purpose of hiding the resumed extraction
of surplus value from the working class for the actual benefit of the New Bourgeoisie.
Net product is roughly equivalent to what is
called value added in capitalist accounting methods. In the new
state-capitalist Soviet Union, at least from the early 1960s on, the term “net product” for an
enterprise began to be defined as “wages plus profits”. The honesty in this regard was surprising!
“NET PRODUCT (NP) is the new value produced by workers of an enterprise
(association), which includes wages and profit. According to the Marxist theory, NP is
created by live labor alone, whereas congealed labor transfers its value to the goods
produced. NP is a monetary indicator, to be determined by deducting from the gross output of
a given enterprise (out of all expenditures involved in production and sale of goods) material
expenditures on the raw materials, semi-manufactures, auxiliary materials, fuel, power, etc.
(i.e., the labor of others materialized in these expenditues), which are used in the production
process and are the result of the performance of other enterprises. NP of all branches of
material production (industry, agriculture, transport, etc.) comprises the national income.”
—From “Our Glossary”, Social Sciences journal, Vol. XI, #4, 1980, USSR Academy of
Sciences, p. 282.
NET WORTH
The value (in money terms) of a person’s, or group’s, or company’s assets (possessions) minus
their liabilities (debts). If some person, group of people, or a company owe more than they own,
then they have a negative net worth. A vast number of workers and ordinary people—and not
only the very poor and destitute—have a negative net worth, even in this richest of all
capitalist-imperialist countries, the United States. According to the liberal bourgeois economists
Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, who have done extensive research on the issue, “the bottom half
of Americans combined have a negative net worth”. [Ben Steverman, “The Wealth
Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich”, Bloomberg Businessweek, May 23,
2019.]
“Over the last three decades, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw
their net worth grow by $21 trillion, while the wealth of the bottom 50 percent fell by $900
billion.” —“A Letter from the Billionaires Club to Everyone Else”, New York Times, June
24, 2019. [This explains not only why the bourgeoisie is ever richer and the working class
and masses ever poorer, but also just why the bottom 50% of the American population,
considered as a group, now has a negative net worth. —Ed.]
NEUE RHEINISCHE ZEITUNG [New Rhenish Gazette]
Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a newspaper edited by Marx in Cologne from June 1,
1848 to May 19, 1849 when it was forced to cease publication.
“Marx and Engels managed the newspaper, Marx being the editor-in-chief.
It educated the masses, roused them to take action against counter-revolution; its
influence was felt throughout Germany. Because of its resolute and irreconcilable
position, its militant internationalism and the political exposures it published against
the Prussian Government and the Cologne authorities, the newspaper was hounded by the
feudal-monarchist and liberal-bourgeois press and persecuted by the government. In May
1849, at the time of the general offensive of the counter-revolution, the reactionary
Prussian Government took advantage of Marx not being a Prussian subject to banish him
from Prussia. Because of the banishment of Marx and the persecution of the other
editors, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had to cease publication. The last issue
(No. 301) appeared on May 19, 1849 printed in red. In a farewell address to the workers
the editors said that ‘their last word will always and everywhere be: The Emancipation
of the Working Class!’.” —Note 8 to Lenin, Selected Works, vol. I, (Moscow: 1967).
[See also Engels’ article “Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”]
NEUROPLASTICITY
The ability of the brains of humans and other animals to change their physical structure in
various ways. These include: 1) the generation of new neurons (and other brain cells) and the
death of old ones; 2) the modification of neurons (for example, through the addition or
extension of axons and dendrites, or the degeneration of old axons and dendrites); 3) the
establishment of new neural connections (synapses) or the removal of old connections; and 4)
the modification of the strength of existing synaptic connections. Some of these types of
changes are more frequent and important to the ordinary functioning of the brain than others.
As recently as the 1990s it was still commonly thought that new neurons were not generated in
the adult human brain, but this dogma is now known to be false.
Strangely, the overall concept of
neuroplasticity is relatively new. Scientific materialism, however, has recognized from
the beginning that if thoughts, thinking, memories, and so forth change, then the physical
brain must be changing as well. But there was a long history of philosophical idealist
resistance to this materialist conception. However, by now neurophysiology has fully
established that the brain does change as a result of experience, and this is how humans and
other animals learn new information and skills, acquire memories, develop new thoughts, and
so forth.
“[T]he organ of mental phenomena [is] the brain...
“The nervous tissue whose activity
constitutes the basis of intellectual and speech acts is characterized by a high degree
of plasticity and interchangeability.” —Student’s Library: Psychology,
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986), p. 30.
NEUTRON BOMB
A “small” hydrogen nuclear bomb whose physical destructiveness is purposefully minimized
while its production of lethal high-velocity neutron radiation is maximized. The goal is
to kill vast numbers of people, while doing as little damage possible to property. Only
inhuman imperialist monsters could build such weapons, or even conceive of doing so.
“[In 1978] ... I was in full-time active opposition to the
deployment of the neutron bomb—a small H-bomb—that President Jimmy Carter was
proposing to send to Europe. The N-bomb had a killing radius from its output of
neutrons that was much wider than its radius of destruction by blast. Optimally, an
airburst N-bomb would produce little fallout. Its neutrons would kill humans either
outside or within buildings or tanks, while sparing structures, equipment, or
vehicles. The Soviets mocked it as ‘a capitalist weapon’ that destroyed people but
not property. But they tested such a weapon too, as did other countries. [But keep
in mind that at this point the Soviet ruling class was itself composed of
hypocritical social-imperialist monsters.
—S.H.]
“I had opposed developing or
testing that concept for almost twenty years, since it was first described to me by
my friend and colleague at RAND Sam Cohen, who liked to be known as the ‘father of
the neutron bomb.’ He wanted me to evaluate the strategic implications of such a
weapon, hoping I would support his campaign for deploying it. To his great
disappointment, after studying his earnest descriptions of its properties, I told
him I thought it would be too dangerous to develop or possess.
“I feared that, as a low-yield,
tactical battlefield weapon with limited and seemingly controllable lethal effects,
it would be seen, delusionally, as usable in warfare, making U.S. first use in
pursuit of ‘limited nuclear war’ more likely. It would be the match that would set
off an exchange of the much larger ‘dirty’ weapons with widespread fallout, which
make up the bulk of our own arsenal and were all that the Soviets then had.” —Daniel
Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017),
p. 292.
[Another horrifying, but very
plausible, use of neutron bombs might well be by the American capitalist ruling class
against its own people, in order to try to put down insurrections in the big
cities while doing the least possible damage to the buildings and other private
property. Ellsberg, being a naïve liberal, can’t imagine such a thing happening.
But we Marxists know very well that the ruling class is fully capable of doing
monstrous things like this if they feel it is “necessary” in order to maintain their
vicious rule. The deaths of millions means little to the bourgeoisie. Indeed, it is
their ideal sort of weapon. —S.H.]
NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP) [Revolutionary Russia, 1920s]
[Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Politika in Russian]
The basically capitalist economic policy and economic structure of revolutionary Russia which
largely prevailed during the period of the transformation of capitalism into socialism, for the
years 1921-1928, and especially for the early 1920s period. The NEP was a major retreat “back
to capitalism” from what was called “War Communism”, the
economic policy established in part out of dire necessity during the Revolutionary Civil War
years of 1918-1920.
The economic situation in Russia and the former
Tsarist empire was completely desperate after the disaster of World War I; the disruptions of
the revolutionary year 1917 itself; the 3-year war of resistance against the invasions by many
foreign armies (including Britain, France and the U.S.) and the ferocious internal civil war;
and the terrible famine and chaos resulting from all this. The Russian economy had ground almost
to a standstill. So it was necessary to breathe some life into Russian capitalism so there might
later be a basis for transforming that living capitalism into living socialism.
NEP reintroduced capitalist markets, for both
agricultural and most factory products. It restored private farming, which especially benefitted
the kulaks (better off section of the peasantry). Moderate taxes
replaced the compulsory delivery to the state of farm products. NEP split up many large enterprises
back into the separate smaller factories they had been before the War, and returned ownership to
their former owners. Private retail and wholesale trade was once again permitted and encouraged.
The ruble currency was stabilized in 1924-1925. Foreign capitalists were once again allowed to
invest and develop the exploitation of natural resources. So there were many pro-capitalist
changes in the NEP.
On the other hand, the revolutionary state kept
ownership and control of what are called the “commanding heights” of the economy, the banks,
the most important industries and services, foreign trade, and retained the ownership of all the
land. NEP was certainly not intended to be a full and permanent reversion to capitalism, but only
a temporary—even if major—retreat to capitalism.
The new NEP policies actually began to be
implemented in March 1921, though the program was not officially announced until August. One
of the reasons for this delay was that there was an internal struggle within the Bolshevik
party, with many members not initially understanding the need for a even a temporary reversal
to capitalism. It has been pointed out by historians that Lenin had difficulty in persuading the
Party to support War Communism (when it was introduced beginning in 1918); that he also had
difficulty in persuading many in the Party to support the NEP in 1921 (when it had obviously
become necessary); and that Stalin then had difficulty persuading many in the Party to accept
the establishing of the end of NEP, and the full development of socialist planning. It is
interesting that each necessary and major change in direction requires substantial political
struggle!
The NEP was quite successful. By 1928 Russian
(i.e., Soviet) levels of production had finally reached the 1913 level, before World War I and
the social crisis it had brought on. At that point the stage was indeed set for the major new
transformation of the Soviet economy into much more thorough economic socialism. NEP was being
somewhat weakened by the gradual development of socialist industry in the 1920s. But the biggest
leap away from NEP occurred with the advent of the first 5-Year Plan in 1928. However, in some
corners of the Soviet economy a few NEP policies lingered for a few more years, until it was
finally, fully and formally ended in 1936.
“[T]here was the period of the so-called New Economic Policy of the ’twenties,
during which socialized industry (together with finance and transport and most of wholesale
trade) coexisted with individualist peasant agriculture, consisting of between 20 and 25 million
small peasant farms. The relations between socialist industry—the ‘commanding heights of the
economy’—and small-scale peasant agriculture was a market relationship; and industrial ‘trusts’
(as they were called at the time) bought their requirements and sold their products on commercial
principles. Planning was in its early stages and was as yet neither rigorous nor complete in
what it covered. It was frankly regarded by Lenin as a ‘transitional mixed system,’ to endure
for a time while productive power was restored, particularly the productive powers of industry,
in preparation for the next stage: that of actually building a fully socialist economy from out
of this transitional system (which implied, of course, an enormous enlargement of industry
combined with a transformation of agriculture onto some form of collective basis).”
—Maurice Dobb, “Fifty Years’ Achievement: The First Socialist Economy”, in New World Review,
special issue on “50 Years of the USSR”, Fall 1967, p. 80. [What someone like Dobb who was already
an apologist for revisionism calls “commercial principles”, we would frankly call “capitalism”.
—Ed.]
NEW KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS
[Not the same thing as NEO-KEYNESIAN
ECONOMICS!]
This is a particular variety of Keynesianism that began to develop,
especially among American bourgeois economists, in the decade of the 1980s. It is a reaction
against the new classical bourgeois economic assault on Keynes after the application of
Keynesian nostrums fared so poorly in the U.S. economy during the 1970s (with the advent of
stagflation). This “New Keynesian” theory is a further
development or extension of the neoclassical synthesis
created by those such as Paul Samuelson who sought to
blend classical bourgeois economics with Keynes’s ideas. Like the neoclassical synthesis,
therefore, this New Keynesian economics is a form of what Joan
Robinson labelled as “Bastard Keynesianism”.
This New Keynesian economics is an attempt
to give a microeconomic foundation to Keynes’s
macroeconomic theories. It focuses especially on the
issue of “sticky” wages and prices. According to classical bourgeois economic theory, the
forces of supply and demand very quickly adjust all wages and prices. But according to
the New Keynesian economists, these adjustments can be much slower and this can lead to
major problems in the economy such as fairly long periods of involuntary unemployment. In
their view, this also explains why monetary policy (such as changing interest rates) can
often be effective in regulating the economy.
No doubt there is some validity to the
notion of “sticky” wages and prices, but this is still only one small adjustment to what
remains a deeply bourgeois economic theory which is incapable of correctly analyzing
capitalism. The New Keynesian economics explanation of crises and unemployment is hopelessly
superficial and wrong.
“The Depression forced non-interventionists [i.e., those who believe
the economy should be left to ‘take care of itself’—Ed.] to concede ground. John Maynard
Keynes blamed recessions on a shortfall of demand linked to changes in saving and
investment behavior. Governments used both monetary and fiscal policy with gusto in
years after the second world war to maintain full employment.
“Yet the Keynesians’ heavy-handed
approach never sat well with classically minded economists. In 1963 Milton Friedman and
Anna Schwartz published their ‘Monetary History of the United States’, which resurrected
the pre-Depression ‘monetarist’ view that monetary stability can mend all macroeconomic
ills. Other economists, including Edmund Phelps and Robert Lucas, recognized that people
learn to anticipate policy changes and adjust their behavior in response. They predicted
that sustained stimulus would eventually cause inflation to accelerate and were
vindicated by runaway price growth in the 1970s.
“In the years that followed,
Keynesians regrouped, borrowed ideas from their critics and built ‘New Keynesian’ models
(on which much modern forecasting is based). The synthesis of Keynesian and neoclassical
ideas informed a new approach to managing the business cycle. The job was outsourced to
central bankers, who promised to keep a lid on inflation. Adopted around the world, this
approach seemed to work....
“But all was not well. Many
neoclassical economists rejected the ‘New Keynesian consensus’ and worked along separate
lines....
“The New Keynesians had their own
troubles. To satisfy critics they built more mathematical models, which aimed to show
how decisions by rational, forward-looking people could, in aggregate, cause downturns.
The project was quixotic. People are often irrational. Their behavior in groups is not
as predicted by models that treat the economy as a mass of identical individuals. These
models were complex enough to be fitted to almost any story. They could replicate
features of the economy, but that did not amount to understanding why those features
occurred.
“The gap between many neoclassical
economists and the New Keynesians running central banks remained unbridgeable. As Paul
Romer has pointed out in some scathing recent papers, the rival camps were unable to
settle their arguments by appealing to facts, or even to debate politely. You might
suppose that the existence of wildly different business-cycle theories would make
macroeconomists more humble, but no. Improbably, both groups argued that, in the words
of Professor Lucas, the ‘central problem of depression prevention has been solved’.
“The return of depressing
economics
“Where consensus did prevail, it
proved to be misguided. Economists of all ideological stripes cheered on the financial
deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s. The work of thinkers like Hyman Minsky and Charles
Kindleberger, whose writings on financial excess were rediscovered after the financial
crisis [of 2008-9], gathered dust....
“There has been progress since the
crisis.... But the [economics] profession remains in a dangerous and unsustainable
position. The macroeconomic approach favored by economists within central banks,
regulatory agencies and finance ministries has erred repeatedly in its prognostications
over the past decade, predicting that labor markets would heal quickly, for example,
while underestimating the risks of targeting a low rate of inflation. A compelling new
paradigm seems a distant prospect. Nor is it clear economists are capable of sorting out
their disagreements. Macroeconomics must get to grips with its epistemological woes if
it hopes to maintain its influence and limit the damage done by the next crisis. Because
economists have learned one thing: there is always another crisis.” —“Free Exchange:
Diminished expectations”, The Economist, April 21, 2018, p. 66.
[This is an interesting internal
critique of the bourgeois economics profession, which focuses a lot of attention on the
“New Keynesian” trend and their critics. But it is quite obvious, as their total surpise
at the financial and economic crisis of 2008-9 exposed to everyone, that
bourgeois economics is just as hopelessly
confused and mystified about the real causes of
overproduction crises as they have always
been. —S.H.]
“NEW SYNTHESIS” (by Bob Avakian)
A supposed further development of communist theory to a new stage by Bob
Avakian of the RCPUSA. It has been presented by the RCP and by
Avakian himself as “the most advanced representation of communist thinking”. One is temped to
summarize this “new synthesis” by adapting the words of Samuel Johnson: “Sir, your ‘new
synthesis’ is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part
that is original is not good.” But the problem is in finding much of anything substantial
that is really new or original in the first place! To see what an obscure mess of verbiage this
“New Synthesis” really is, take a look at Avakian’s own description of it in the following single
monstrous sentence:
“This new synthesis involves a recasting and recombining of the positive
aspects of the experience so far of the communist movement and of socialist society, while
learning from the negative aspects of this experience, in the philosophical and ideological
as well as the political dimensions, so as to have a more deeply and firmly rooted
scientific orientation, method and approach with regard not only to making revolution and
seizing power but then, yes, to meeting the material requirements of society and the needs
of the masses of people, in an increasingly expanding way, in socialist society—overcoming
the deep scars of the past and continuing the revolutionary transformation of society,
while at the same time actively supporting the world revolutionary struggle and acting on
the recognition that the world arena and the world struggle are most fundamental and
important, in an overall sense—together with opening up qualitatively more space to
give expression to the intellectual and cultural needs of the people, broadly understood,
and enabling a more diverse and rich process of exploration and experimentation in the realms
of science, art and culture, and intellectual life overall, with increasing scope for the
contention of different ideas and schools of thought and for individual initiative and
creativity and protection of individual rights, including space for individuals to interact
in ‘civil society’ independently of the state—all within an overall cooperative and
collective framework and at the same time as state power is maintained and further developed
as a revolutionary state power serving the interests of the proletarian revolution,
in the particular country and worldwide, with this state being the leading and central
element in the economy and in the overall direction of society, while the state itself is
being continually transformed into something radically different from all previous states,
as a crucial part of the advance toward the eventual abolition of the state with the
achievement of communism on a world scale.” —Bob Avakian, “Making Revolution and Emancipating
Humanity, Part I: Beyond the Narrow Horizon of Bourgeois Right” (2007), online at:
http://rwor.org/avakian/makingrevolution/
[Uhhh, OK.... So what exactly is new in this “new synthesis” again? —S.H.]
See also: “EMBRACES BUT CANNOT
REPLACE”
NEW YORK TIMES [Often abbreviated as: NYT]
The leading and by far the most important bourgeois newspaper in the United States. In fact, it comes
pretty close to being the semi-official ideologist and news source for what is generally the core or
usually dominant section of the U.S. ruling class. (The Washington Post is the second most
important bourgeois newspaper in the U.S., while the Wall Street Journal is probably the third
most important such newspaper, though it focuses much more on financial and business news.)
This dictionary includes numerous brief quotations
from the NYT on a wide variety of topics, such as on the level of homelessness in the U.S. and much
other social and economic information and statistics. Is this reasonable to include here, in an MLM
dictionary? As the news organ and representative of the U.S. capitalist ruling class, doesn’t the NYT
lie to the people about a great many things? Yes it definitely does! However, we hate to have
to inform you of this, but it is an unfortunate fact about reality in general, and especially so about
the capitalist-imperialist world of today, that there are absolutely no completely 100%
trustworthy news sources. Even in socialist society there
will at least still be some mistakes and occasional misinformation in newspapers (and other media),
though if the workers and masses are truly running society, at least there will be a whole lot less
misinformation, and certainly an end to purposeful disinformation and lies. But in any
society people need to be trained, and to train themselves, not to be too gullable. And especially so
in bougeois society. If you train yourself in this way you can still learn a lot about what is happening
in the U.S. and around the world even from bourgeois sources like the NYT.
But first you need to understand the sorts of things
they are lying about, and how they typically or generally distort things. Once you understand this,
you can “read between the lines”, as we say, and still get a pretty good idea about what is going on
in the world. So first of all, the NYT journalists are required to correctly quote statements and
information, and will be fired if they totally invent something. (On rare occasions this has happened.)
They are indoctrinated in the standards of bourgeois journalism in this country. Thus if the NYT reports
that the U.S. GDP grew at a rate of 0.3% in the last quarter, you can believe that this is in fact what the
U.S. government reported. But the question then arises, how trustworthy are the U.S. government statistics?!
In fact they are not very trustworthy at all! (See: GROSS
DOMESTIC PRODUCT — Validity Of) So in effect the NYT lies about GDP statistics by reporting them
at the exaggerated level at which the U.S. government has provided. (Curiously, in rare articles the
NYT might even explain how the government is distorting its GDP figures; but they still repeat the lying
government statistics when the government issues them.) In general, the U.S. government finds ways to make
economic statistics look better from its own point of view, by exaggerating GDP growth, diminishing
unemployment figures, and so forth. So those of us sophisticated enough to know in which direction the
government is lying about statistics, and roughly about how much, when we see reports about new statistics
in the NYT we can make our own mental adjustments. And even if we don’t know precisely how much the official
statistics are out of whack, we can still note trends, such as rising unemployment from month to month, etc.
And thus we can learn some rough truths even from the government lies repeated in the NYT. And this goes for
many other government claims as well, besides statistics. But we do have to be rather cautious and
skeptical.
Another way in which the NYT lies is by refusing to report
some stories which are too embarrassing for the American imperialist ruling class, or are too much of an
exposure of their crimes. This is often about the mistreatment and the struggles of the working class and
masses, but foreign affairs is another big area. Recently the well-known and widely-respected journalist,
Seymour Hersh, published a highly plausible article about how the United States secretly blew up the Nord
Stream pipelines which transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. (See:
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream) I wouldn’t say that Hersh
has provided enough information and public sources to absolutely conclusively prove his claim; but as I say
it is a highly plausible theory with some significant evidence that the NYT doesn’t seem to want to mention
even as a possibility (let alone send some reporters to investigate on their own). Maybe eventually, years
from now, the NYT might mention things like this in passing, once they become more or less moot. This is sort
of what they finally did about the murderous U.S. drone attacks on civilians in Afghanistan just as the U.S.
military was already leaving the country in their final few days after a war lasting more than 20 years.
The most fundamental way the NYT lies to its readers is by
unwaveringly adopting a bourgeois (pro-capitalist), and pro-U.S. imperialist, perspective on virtually
everything. When they talk about “American democracy” do they ever really take seriously what is obvious to
us—that it is a sick joke as far as the lives and welfare of the working people goes? Never. Their bourgeois
biases are sickening, and pervade every issue of their newspaper. And yet, many of us have long ago seen
through all that nonsense, and for example know all too well that their elections really are totally phony
(not because of ballot box stuffing but simply because the rich own and control the media, the educational
system, and the largest part of public opinion). Thus we can easily discount and ignore their flagrant
capitalist-imperialist biases.
It is in fact quite possible to learn a whole hell of a lot
about the U.S. and the world from reading the NYT. If we have learned what biases to ignore, and how to read
between the lines, then the NYT is probably the best single American source of news and information that
currently exists. Perhaps only the British magazine, The Economist,
is a better general source of news and information about the world beyond the U.S., and only because it is
the mouthpiece of the British capitalist-imperialists who are just a little bit less protective of their
American capitalist-imperialist allies, who they serve but also resent. —S.H. [02/20/23]
‘I think the [above] entry is pretty good. I’m not sure I’d say the Times represents
the dominant ruling class. It is pretty clearly (increasingly so) in the Democratic camp of the ruling
class, and increasingly partisan at that.
Relatedly, the NY Times’ journalistic standards
have declined markedly over the years. This is related to the advent of online journalism, which made
the model of journalism that previously existed somewhat non-profitable. The NY Times has weathered this
transition better than most all other publications, but at no small cost. The way news is reported now
is different than before as well, with many reporters relying largely on what is trending on Twitter for
leads nowadays. As Sy Hersh said of today’s foreign reporters at the Times compared to a generation ago
“they really know nothing.” On just an empirical level, the Times has gutted their foreign bureaus, and
heavily reduced the number of domestic journalists as well. Local papers have dried up everywhere. It
was previously in an ecosystem of local and municipal newspapers that bigger papers like the Times used
to exist. That is gone now. It is not really possible to make up for this loss. Overall I see this
related in some ways to the anarchy of production. It actually (arguably) would be in the state’s interest
to have a bit more of an independent press establishment, however this does not quite survive in the
present market.
This did not happen all of a sudden. Several times
the Times reduced the number of columns in the paper. There was even internal push back in the 90s when
they switched to color photography given what was seen as a switch to more “consumable” news. Nowadays,
they drive a lot of editorial decisions based on click-rates, something which would be both impossible
and unimaginable/unacceptable previously. The Times has a tight relationship with the state apparatus.
The executive (president’s office) determine a lot of the front page material, just by virtue of the
attention that press conferences at the White House get from the press as well as relationships with
officials in the administration. Top editors prize relationships with officials in state and CIA for
sources, and this leads to certain problems from a neutral (bourgeois) perspective. This is not new,
however things seem to have gotten far more out of whack in the last few years. A few years ago I would
read the times and be just bored with the patterns of reporting. Nowadays, I read it and am often just
shocked by the ideological connection of the paper to the liberal articulations of the Dems these days
(which themselves are increasingly wacky). The eagerness of the paper to eat up stories for instance about
Russian interference in U.S. elections and other related stories is concerning. The situation now seems to
have got them in a bit of spiral with the idea that reporting related hollow claims by CIA/FBI officials is
an antidote against right-ward drift.’
—A.Z., , Feb. 22, 2023, submission to this dictionary
providing additional commentary on the present deteriorating state of the New York Times. [The point about
the NYT probably no longer representing the ruling class as a whole is especially well taken, now
that the rapidly developing economic and social crises in the U.S. are leading the ruling class itself to
be more and more at each other’s throats. —Ed.]
NEWSPAPERS
See also:
NEW YORK TIMES,
BOURGEOIS MEDIA
“Under capitalism, a newspaper is a capitalist enterprise, a means of
enrichment, a medium of information and entertainment for the rich, and an instrument
for duping and cheating the mass of working people. We have smashed this instrument of
profit-making and deceit. We have begun to convert the newspapers into an
instrument for educating the masses and for teaching them to live and run their economy
without the landowners and capitalists. But we are only at the start of the
road.” —Lenin, “The Work of the People’s Commissariat for Education” (Feb. 7,
1921), LCW 32:130.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
—Malcolm X, in a comment on the capitalist media, quoted by Manning Marable.
“In 1990, the average combined weekday circulation of newspapers in the
United States was more than 63 million; by 2021, that number had dwindled to about 24
million.” —New York Times, “Facts of Interest”, October 31, 2024.
“Overall, 2,500 newspapers in the United States—a quarter of them—have
closed since 2005. The country is set up to lose one-third of its newspapers by 2025.”
—New York Times, National Edition, June 30, 2022, p. 3.
[Although newspapers are now
rapidly being replaced by the Internet and other sources, the domination of these news
sources by the ruling bourgeoisie is nearly as complete as with newspapers. —Ed.]
“An estimated 75,000 journalists worked in newspapers in 2006, and now
that’s down to 31,000.... Annual newspaper revenue slipped from $50 billion to $21 billion
in the same period.” —David Bauder, “Newspapers Dying at Rate of 2 Per Week as
Industry Shrinks”, San Francisco Chronicle, July 1, 2022.
NEWTON’S THREE LAWS OF MOTION
The three fundamental laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton
(to some limited degree on the basis of the work of earlier scientists), which are absolutely
central to classical physics.
The First Law states that bodies do not
change their motion (or the absence of it) unless forces are applied to them. (This refers
to net forces; forces which are balanced by equal and opposite forces do not change
motion.) This is also called the Law of Inertia.
The Second Law states that when a net
force acts upon a body the rate at which the momentum changes is proportional to the force
applied. The more general formulation (which allows for varying masses in the object) is
the formula: F = dp/dt, where F and p are vector quantities for
force and momentum. [Vectors, or magnitudes which also have a direction, are
often put in bold type in physics.] If the mass of the object does not change, then the
formula can be slightly simplified to its more common form: F = ma, where
m stands for the mass of the object and a is the acceleration imparted by the
force.
The Third Law states that for every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or in other words all forces come in pairs
which are equal in magnitude but opposite in direction. If you kick a football the force
of the kick will cause the ball to move. But the inertial resistence of the ball will
also be felt as an equal force directed against your foot—which you will certainly feel.
“It is a mark of Newton’s genius that of all the possible statements
about motion, he recognized that three and only three completely define a logically
consistent framework within which all problems of motion can be analyzed
quantitatively. These are Newton’s three laws.” —Ernest Abers & Charles F. Kennel,
Matter in Motion (1977), quoted in Clifford Pickover, Archimedes to
Hawking (2007), p. 94.
NGO
See: NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION
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In the graphic at the right we see a recent survey of where Americans now frequently get their
news information. Note that newspapers are now at the bottom of the list, and even during this
single one-year period, 2016 to 2017, frequent newspaper readership has dropped from 20% to just
18% of the population. Much more dramatic is the current rapid decline in those who watch TV
news and the corresponding rapid increase in those who get their news from the Internet.