Definitions
The difference between the value produced by labor and the wages paid to workers, which is appropriated by capitalists as profit.
What is Surplus Value?
This 1871 uprising was the first historical example of a workers’ state.
What is the Paris Commune?
The father of Russian Marxism
Who is Georgi Plekhanov?
"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism."
Who is Rosa Luxemburg?
This country’s workers shut down much of the economy in May 1968, with factory occupations involving millions.
What is France?
The separation of workers from the products of their labor, leading to feelings of powerlessness and disenchantment in a capitalist society.
What is Alienation?
This 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day ended with executions that helped establish May Day.
What is the Haymarket Massacre?
This Orthodox priest led the workers’ march to the Tsar’s Winter Palace that ended in Bloody Sunday.
Who is Father Gapon?
"Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
Who is Leon Trotsky?
In this country, workers formed cordones industriales to coordinate production and defense independently in the early 1970s.
What is Chile?
The “underclass” or marginalized segment of society, often seen as disconnected from class struggle due to their lack of stable work.
What is the Lumpenproletariat?
This year-long British strike exposed the capitalist state and was defeated after union and Labour leaders refused to spread the struggle.
What is the British Miners' Strike of 1984-85?
This treaty formally removed Russia from World War I.
What is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk?
"Our demands most moderate are: we only want the earth."
Who is James Connolly?
Oil workers’ strikes in this country played a decisive role in paralyzing the economy and toppling a monarchy in 1978–79.
What is Iran?
This equation gives the rate of profit in terms of surplus value (s), constant capital (c), and variable capital (v).
What is r = s/(c+v)?
This 1981 strike ended when the federal government fired over 11,000 workers, signaling a new era of open union busting.
What is the PATCO strike?
The year serfdom was abolished in Russia.
What is 1861?
"It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic."
Who is Lenin?
This country’s ruling party broke with Stalin after asserting national control over its own state and security apparatus.
What is Yugoslavia?
This dialectical process simultaneously negates, preserves, and elevates a prior form.
What is sublation?
This event in Venezuela in 1989 involved mass riots against IMF-imposed austerity measures.
What is the Caracazo?
The three members that were to be removed from the board of Iskra following the RSDLPs Second Congress.
Who are Axelrod, Zasulich, and Starover?
“World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances.”
Who is Karl Marx? (Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann In Hanover, 1871)
From 1980 - 1981, a mass independent trade union and workers’ movement in this country, mobilized nearly 10 million workers to challenge the Stalinist bureaucracy and fight for a democratic workers’ state.
What is Poland?