What is Marxist Glossary for the 21st Century As huge numbers of people are suddenly wanting to talk about Marxism and socialism, communism, fascism, etc., the discussion has been impeded by not having a common agreement on the meaning of these words. How can we talk when even those of us who consider ourselves Marxists […]
Ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, and ethics that expresses and defines relationships among people. It is a shared set of beliefs about how the world is and ought to be. An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas that motivate one’s goals, expectations and actions. It is a conceptual framework that […]
Political economy: Political economy, in the widest sense, is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society. Production and exchange are two different functions. Production may occur without exchange, but exchange—being necessarily an exchange of products—cannot occur without production. Each of these two […]
A revolution is an abrupt and notable change in the pattern of events, both in its Marxist and non-Marxist meaning. From the standpoint of Marxist philosophy, revolution is composed of both objective and subjective aspects. The economic revolution is objective and takes place as qualitatively new means of production replace the old. On that basis, […]
Relations of production are the connections between people and property, that is, the ownership pattern, in the process of production. The ownership pattern determines the placement and role of classes — exploited and exploiters — in the process of production. The process of production consists of the division of labor, stage of development of technology, […]
Production: Production is the mental and physical power of humanity that operates on nature and changes the material provided by nature to create means of life, goods and services. It is a major component of the economy, and distribution is the other. In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but […]
Private property is private ownership of socially necessary means of production, the products of labor and all the things that dominate the productive life of the individual and classes. Private property is a social power based on the property rights, which ultimately determine the productive relations of society. Property as an economic category is always […]
Women Potters Tending Fire By proletariat, [is meant] the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition](Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, 1848.) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its […]
Marxist Glossary grew out of the organizing for the 2010 Detroit Social Forum, followed by Occupy in 2011, after which there was an increased demand for Marxist education. In my weekly unit meeting we discussed putting together some educational material and wrote a list of 10 words on the back of an envelope. That list […]
The day after the women’s march TV pundits were asking questions like: How can the women’s march be made into a movement? Duh. It IS part of a movement, one which has been visible since at least 2010. Dec. 7, 2010, Wikileaks released a group of cables, and this release included cables about the extreme […]