—   Sp - Ss   —

SPACE   [Physics]
The realm in which physical matter and energy exist, and in which events occur. “A boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction” or “Physical space independent of what occupies it—called also absolute space.” [Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. (1993)]

SPARTACUS LEAGUE (Spartakusbund, Spartacists)
Organization of German Left Social-Democrats, formed during World War I.

SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE (SEZ)
A common term used in many different countries for special areas (frequently along the coasts) set aside for the extra benefit of foreign imperialist corporations. For example, in India at the present time SEZs have been established to allow transnational corporations to set up operations on Indian soil which are not even required to obey many of the laws of India which are in force elsewhere in the country.
        China did much the same thing before pretty much the entire country was opened up to almost unrestricted imperialist penetration. Deng Xiaoping specified certain cities for direct foreign investment and adoption of foreign technology. Four cities were originally designated SEZs in 1979, with 14 more added in 1986, along with the entire island of Hainan.

SPECIAL FORCES or SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES
Commandos; i.e., elite military units which are generally highly trained and better skilled (in such things as sniping and assassinations) which are used for raids into other countries and other usually short-term military operations, generally of a secret or surprise nature. Among the Special Forces units in the U.S. military are the Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Air Commandos.

“In a postcolonial world of sovereign nations, nonstate actors such as rebels and terrorists became the main threat to global order [i.e., world imperialism —Ed.], requiring almost perpetual deployments of adaptable forces. As part of a longer-term shift away from a reliance on the military bastions that had ringed Eurasia during the Cold War to a more agile global strike capability, special operations forces experienced a sustained growth. Building upon a relatively small force of 11,600 commandos in the army rangers and navy SEALS, Congress enacted legislation in 1987 forming the unifed Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). After the 9/11 attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave it the lead role in planning the war on terror and executing special operations missions within that plan. Its budget climbed from $2.3 billion in 2001 to $10.3 billion a decade later, comparable to the funding for powerful agencies like the CIA and NSA. Apart from combat capability, its personnel were to serve as ‘forward deployed warrior diplomats’ working ‘in dozens of countries conducting theater security cooperation events to train host nations to eliminate terrorism.’
        “Indeed, by 2015 SOCOM had 69,000 elite troops in the Rangers, SEALs, and Air Commandos deployed to 147 countries, or 75 percent of the world, meaning on any given day they were operating in seventy to ninety nations. Between 2012 and 2014, these forces also ran five hundred Joint Combined Exchange Training exercises in sixty-seven nations.” —Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017), p. 178. [Small update: In 2017 U.S. special forces numbered 70,000 and were deployed in 149 countries, according to statistics published in The Nation, Jan. 15/22, 2018, p. 4. U.S. imperialism is ineed at war against the world. —Ed.]

SPECIAL PURPOSE ACQUISITION COMPANY or VEHICLE [SPAC]   [Capitalist Finance]
One type of “Special Purpose Entity” (see below), which is sort of a dummy corporation, and which in this case is set up for the purpose of raising speculative money from investors in order to take over a private corporation and allow its founders and their bankers to both expand that private corporation and make a huge profit in the process. This is one of the many types of financial manipulations which contemporary finance capitalists are using in order to extract even more profits from the capitalist system, and has become especially popular with regard to enriching new “tech companies”.

“Roughly 30 percent of the 947 special purpose acquisition vehicles (SPACs), which raise money by going public to finance future mergers, that went public since the beginning of 2020 have had to liquidate.”   —“Trump Media Is Facing More Delays over Merger”, New York Times, Aug. 18, 2023. [This shows that not all these financial schemes actually work out as intended! —Ed.]

SPECIAL PURPOSE ENTITY   [Capitalist Finance]
A semi-independent (or dummy) company set up by a corporation or bank to carry out some function that the mother company prefers not to do in its own name. One common use for SPEs is to have them “purchase” dubious loans which the mother company has made, so as to officially get them off their own books and make the financial health of the mother company look better than it is. The SPE will then pay whatever income it receives from the dubious loans back to the mother company. SPEs therefore are generally a form of corporate misrepresentation and fraud. A recent new type of SPE is known as the special purpose vehicle (see below).

SPENDING

“The workers spend what they get and the capitalists get what they spend.” —Anonymous aphorism, sometimes attributed to Michal Kalecki.

SPINOZA, Baruch [or Benedict]   (1632-1677)
Dutch semi-materialist philosopher. Spinoza held that morality is based in human nature. He defined ‘good’ in various ways, as that which benefits the individual, as that which brings pleasure, and so forth. Although his ethical and general philosophical theories were not completely consistent and coherent, and certainly included idealistic elements, they represented a tremendous advance at the time, and fostered naturalistic and materialistic thinking in ethics and in philosophy in general.

“Spinozism—the system of views of the Dutch seventeenth century materialist philosopher Benedict Spinoza, according to whom all things are manifestations (modes) of a single, universal substance, which is its own cause and identical with ‘god, or nature’. The essence of substance is expressed in innumerable qualities—attributes, the most important of which are extension and thought. Spinoza regarded causality as a form of the interconnection of the separate phenomena of nature, understanding by it the immediate reciprocal action of bodies whose first cause is substance. The action of all modes of substance, including man, is strictly one of necessity; the notion of accident arises only in consequence of ignorance of the totality of all the acting causes. Since thought is one of the attributes of universal substance, the connection and order of ideas is in principle the same as the order and connection of things, and the possibility of human knowledge of the world is unlimited. For the same reason, of the three forms of cognition—sensuous, rational and rational-intuitive—the last is regarded as the most trustworthy, in which ‘a thing is perceived singly through its essence or through knowledge of its immediate cause’ (B. Spinoza, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, et de via, qua optime veram rerum cognitionem dirigitur). This method enables man both to know his own passions and to become master over them; man’s freedom consists in knowing the necessity of nature and of the passions of his soul.
         “Spinozism was not only a form of materialism, but also of atheism, since it rejected ideas of god as a supernatural being who had created the world and rules it. At the same time, by identifying god and nature he made a concession to theology. This retreat, as also the mechanical character of Spinoza’s materialism, was due, on the one hand, to the level of knowledge at that epoch and, on the other hand, to the limited progressive nature of the young Dutch bourgeoisie, whose interests were expressed by Spinoza’s philosophy. Subsequently, a sharp ideological struggle, which has continued to the present day, developed round the philosophical legacy of the great Dutch thinker. Idealist philosophy, by taking advantage of the inevitable historical limitations of Spinoza’s views, distorts the materialist essence of Spinozism, which was an important stage in the development of the materialist world outlook.” —Note 26, LCW 14.
         [In my own view, the characterization of Spinoza’s philosophy in this note is a little too enthusiastic. The fact is that there are also idealist elements in Spinoza’s views which along with the materialist elements form the basis for the centuries-long struggle over whether to interpret him as a materialist or an idealist. —S.H.]

SPIRITS
Supernatural beings, such as ghosts, demons, specters, spooks, wraiths, phantasms, apparitions, poltergeists, etc. ad nauseam! And, oh yes, “gods”. These often malevolent beings are imagined to be bodiless and immaterial, yet nevertheless sometimes capable of being seen and interacting with the material world. Of course none of these supposed immaterial agents and intelligences could possibly exist; the very concept of an immaterial mind is not scientifically coherent.
        How could such strange notions arise in the human mind? It seems that in part this may have occurred because people in pre-scientific eras (and also those today who are extremely ill-educated in science) came across natural phenomena which they could not explain, and therefore attributed them to actions of mostly unseen agents. Humans threw stones and spears; so perhaps lightning bolts were being thrown by some powerful entity up in the clouds. It may have been a crude sort of analogy when a better explanation was not yet available.

[After commenting that the belief in unseen spiritual agencies seemed to be universal with “less civilized races”, Darwin continues:] “Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence. As Mr. M’Lennan has remarked, ‘Some explanation of the phenomena of life, a man must feign for himself, and to judge from the universality of it, the simplest hypothesis, and the first to occur to men, seems to have been that natural phenomena are ascribable to the presence in animals, plants, and things, and in the forces of nature, of such spirits prompting to action as men are conscious they themselves possess.’ It is also probable ... that dreams may have first given rise to the notion of spirits...
        “The tendency in savages [sic!] to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences, is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed: my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked. He must, I think, have reasoned to himself in a rapid and unconscious manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence of some strange living agent, and that no stranger had a right to be on his territory.” —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871), in the joint Modern Library edition of The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man, p. 469.

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION
The ancient, but now long discredited, scientific theory that living organisms can arise from non-living matter. (This does not include such things as ferns developing from tiny spores that do not appear to be alive, nor does it include the presumed original development of life eons ago from exceptionally serendipitous associations of chemical compounds.) The theory likely first developed from observations such as that meat left out in the open may seem to “spontaneously” develop maggots. But the interesting thing is that even in careful experiments where the meat or other material was put under a bell jar (to keep insects from laying their eggs on it), larvae still sometimes appeared. (Because parasitical eggs already existed inside the living animal which was the source of the meat.)
        Thus the moral of the spontaneous generation example is not simply that scientific experiments must be made to test theories, but that even if such experiments are done they are not guaranteed to be conclusive. Scientific experiments can indeed prove things to be true or false, but these experiments must be well-designed and take into consideration many things which may not be immediately obvious. Often this means that there must be a long series of experiments before the final truth is arrived at.

SPONTANEOUS WORKING CLASS IMPULSES
[Intro to be added... ]

“... any subservience to the spontaneity of the mass movement and any degrading of Social-Democratic [communist] politics to the level of trade-unionist politics mean preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy. The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class trade unionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics. The fact that the working class participates in the political struggle, and even in the political revolution, does not in itself make its politics Social-Democratic politics.” —Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (2002), (NY: International, 1969), p. 94.

“Social-Democracy [Communism] has established a name for itself, has created a trend and has built up cadres of Social-Democratic workers. And now that the heroic proletariat has proved by deeds its readiness to fight, and its ability to fight consistently and in a body for clearly-understood aims, to fight in a purely Social-Democratic spirit, it would be simply ridiculous to doubt that the workers who belong to our Party, or who will join it tomorrow at the invitation of the Central Committee, will be Social-Democrats in ninety-nine cases out of hundred. The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social-Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social-Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness.” —Lenin, “The Reorganization of the Party” (Nov. 1905), LCW 10:32.

SPUTNIK
The very first artificial satellite of the Earth, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. It was a small sphere with antennas sticking out. The satellite didn’t actually do anything other than emit periodic radio beeps. But it demonstrated the Soviet ability to send rockets around the world.
        The launching of Sputnik led to something of a panic on the part of the U.S. ruling class. They feared that they might be falling behind the Soviet Union in science and technology. One almost immediate result of this panic was a massive new effort to support science education in American high schools and colleges. My own high school in rural Wisconsin got a very nice new science lab because of this!   —S.H.