POLS Exam # 3 Study Guide Key Terms

Bourgeoisie

A term that originally referred to "those who dwell in the city" (and were middle class). Karl Marx used it to refer to that socioeconomic class in capitalist society that owns the means of production (land, banks, factories, natural resources, etc.).

Finance Capitalism

According to Lenin, this form of capitalism historically followed the industrial capitalism that Karl Marx had analyzed. Under this new form of capitalism, large banks and other financial institutions lend capital to corporations. They make capitalists increasingly dependent on such loans, until these lending institutions actually come to control the corporations to which they have been lending money. This concentration of power and wealth eventually leads the financiers and banks to look for new venues in which to invest their capital. One such market is the industrially underdeveloped colonies of imperialist nations.

Industrial Capitalism

According to Lenin, this was the form of capitalism that Karl Marx studied, in which market competition led increasingly to monopolies as corporations were either destroyed or merged with their competitors.

Creative Laborers

According to Marx, every human being has the potential to transform nature by his or her creative laboring activity, but current material and economic conditions (capitalism) prevent most people from realizing that potential. Creative laborers will be the norm in the ideal communist society.

Subsistence Wage

According to Marx, this is the wage the capitalist pays to the worker for his labor. It is just enough to permit the laborer to survive and perhaps to support a family (in order to generate new laborers), but it does not represent the value of the total contribution of the laborer to the production process.

Economic Determinism

Also called "historical materialism," orthodox Marxists attribute this doctrine to Marx. It claims that the ultimate realities in human life, and the basic causes of change and conflict, are not intellectual or spiritual, but economic and material, and that they are essentially beyond intentional human control.

Third Comintern

Began with an antiwar conference of communists in 1915, and was formally organized at its First Congress, in 1919, though not officially begun until its Second Congress, in 1920. Even though thirty-five parties joined in its founding, it was dominated by the Russian communists, who were soon to emerge victorious from the Russian civil war and complete the first successful communist revolution. As Lenin had feared, this third Comintern became a tool of Russian foreign policy. This development eventually discredited it among some non Soviet Marxists, which also dissipated the cohesion of the international communist movement.

Differentiated World System

Communists argue against Marx that capitalism is not a universally uniform economic system, but that there are structural variations between capitalism societies that distinguish them from one another and that determine their behavior in the international system in important ways.

Vanguard of the Proletariat

In Lenin's doctrine, this is the small group of intellectuals that understands the "historical moment"-namely, the appropriate time and circumstances for the communist revolution to take place-and that directs the proletariat accordingly. It implies a significant degree of human voluntarism in historical events that Marx's own thought does not seem to have allowed.

Modes of Exchange

In Marxist theory, a term that refers to the social mechanisms that determine how goods are transferred among people and classes

Historicism

In Marxist theory, the claim that history is composed of major events that mark the beginnings and endings of successive historical stages. These events are strongly influenced by material conditions and processes that are beyond intentional human control.

Means of Production

In Marxist theory, the physical materials and technologies that human beings use to produce material things. Marx focused on changes in these factors and on the impact of these changes on social, cultural, and political life.

Modes of Production

In Marxist theory, the ways in which the activities of producing material things are socially and politically organized. Such organizations may include households, factories, guilds, labor unions, business corporations, and the like. This term may also include more subtle forms of tacit organization and discipline within these formally recognized social structures.

Surplus Value

In Marxist theory, this is the difference between the actual value of what the laborer produces and what the capitalist owner of the means of production pays the laborer for his labor. This difference, minus the costs of equipment and raw materials, is the profit the capitalist makes from the production process.

Modes of Appropriation

In marxist theory, a description of who owns what and the basis for ownership.

Abolition of Private Property

In the Marxist socialist state, there would be no private ownership of the means of production (such as factories, banks, and land), since this would continue to create inequalities in power. Only personal property (food, clothing, shelter, leisure goods) would remain privately owned, and not in excessive amounts.

Contribution Principle

In the transition to a socialist egalitarian society, Marx believed that this principle of rewarding people unequally for unequal labor would be temporarily maintained until material scarcity had been eliminated. At that point, all such inequalities of reward would disappear.

NEP of Lenin

Initiated in 1921, in response to extreme state control of the Soviet economy under "war communism" during the first years of Belshevik rule. Lasting until 1928, it removed many restrictions on free trade, denationalized some smaller enterprises, and allowed greater market freedom in agriculture. New Economic Policy.

Immiseration of the Proletariat

Marx's prediction that capitalist competition and economic cycles would cause extensive downward economic mobility, as unsuccessful capitalists would fall into lower classes and workers would become unemployed and impoverished. This process would lead people to question the desirability of capitalism, and this questioning would eventually lead them to revolt against capitalism and to transform the system into a socialist society.

Dialectical Materialism

Marx's term for the historical changes in economic or material conditions of life that lead to class conflicts that, in turn, lead to new social, political, and ideological conditions.

Superstructure

Marx's term for the ideas the members of a society have about religion, morality, law, and politics. Marx claimed that these ideas were determined by the infrastructure of a society (the means and modes of production).

Trade Unionism

The belief, held by Lenin and other communists, that the development of organizations (trade unions) by workers to engage in collective bargaining with capitalists undermines the proletariat's revolutionary consciousness, because unions are preoccupied with improving working conditions and remuneration within the capitalist system, rather than encouraging workers to overthrow the system entirely.

Proletarians

The working class who, along with the bourgeoisie, constitute a significant socioeconomic class in capitalist society, according to Marx. Members of the proletariat do not own any of the means of production in capitalist society (land, factories, banks, natural resources), and so they must sell their labor to the owners of these means (the bourgeoisie).

Telescoping the Revolution

This is the theory of communists like Trotsky and Lenin that a socialist revolution could perhaps be most easily accomplished at capitalism's "weakest link"-namely, in nonindustrialized, noncapitalist countries. The transformation from a primitive society to a postcapitalist one could, therefore, be accomplished in one giant step-(i.e., "telescoped") rather than in an extended historical process in which capitalism had to mature and develop internal contradictions, as Marx had suggested.

Democratic Centralism

This term refers to a set of principles for organizing parties and states, and these principles were embraced by the communist party in the soviet union. These principles (developed by Lenin) called for open debate-democracy-but also emphasized the need for subordination to duly constituted authorities within the party once a decision had been made-hence, centralism.

Self Managed Worker Councils

Tito's method of transforming human consciousness, in which the alienation of workers is ameliorated by giving them control of factories at the local level.

Class Consciousness

Transforms a group of people who passively occupy the same economic roles-without relating to each other as comrades-into a group of people who actively, collectively seek to transform the economic and social structure of society. Only when the proletariat acquires class consciousness does it become an active force for social change. Only when the proletariat acquires class consciousness can there be a revolution.