Papa Marx
The class that owns and controls the means of production under capitalism.
What is the bourgeoisie?
Lenin called this the highest stage of capitalism.
What is imperialism?
Under capitalism, workers sell this to capitalists in exchange for a wage.
What is labour-power?
A change that improves workers’ conditions while leaving the basic capitalist system intact is generally called this.
What is a reform?
The philosophical position that treats matter or material reality as fundamental to consciousness is called this.
What is materialism?
Marx uses this term for workers who must sell their labor-power in order to live.
What is the proletariat?
Lenin distinguished propaganda from this form of political activity, which communicates political ideas in a more direct and accessible way to broader audiences.
What is agitation?
Marx uses this term for a product made primarily for exchange rather than simply for its direct use.
What is a commodity?
This political tendency treats gradual improvements within capitalism as the fundamental path toward socialism.
What is reformism?
The claim that consciousness or ideas fundamentally determine reality is associated with this philosophical tendency.
What is idealism?
Marx’s method of understanding historical development by examining how human beings produce and reproduce their material lives is called this.
What is historical materialism?
The name given to the organized revolutionary party intended to unite the most politically advanced layers of the working class.
What is the vanguard party?
A commodity has a practical usefulness and a value in exchange. Marx calls the first of these two aspects this.
What is use-value?
A demand that addresses an immediate problem while pointing beyond the existing capitalist system toward a struggle for workers’ power is called this.
What is a transitional demand?
Opposing tendencies existing within the same process are called these.
What are contradictions?
Marx argues that capitalism is characterized by THIS conflict between classes with fundamentally different relationships to the means of production.
What is the class struggle?
Lenin uses this term for the political rule of the working class during the transition from capitalism toward communism.
What is the dictatorship of the proletariat?
Marx uses this term for the portion of value produced by workers that exceeds the value of their labor-power and is appropriated by the capitalist.
What is surplus value?
The political strategy that treats winning elections and gaining control of existing governmental institutions as the primary path to socialism is commonly called this.
What is electoralism?
This broad intellectual tendency is associated with skepticism toward universal explanations, fixed meanings, and claims to objective or absolute truth.
What is postmodernism?
Capitalism is not simply a system where some people happen to be rich and others poor. THIS underlying social relationship makes capitalism a distinct mode of production.
What is the relationship between wage labor and capital?
A socialist party wins an election and takes control of the government. That alone does not necessarily mean the working class has taken political power because THIS remains fundamentally intact.
What is the capitalist state?
When capitalist production periodically encounters conditions in which commodities cannot be profitably sold or capital cannot be successfully reproduced, Marxists describe this as this.
What is a capitalist crisis?
The revolutionary Marxist argument against simply “taking over the state through elections” is that the working class must transform this rather than merely occupy its existing offices.
What is the state apparatus?
This American philosophical tradition makes the immediate practical consequences of an idea central to determining its meaning or significance.
What is pragmatism?