Reference

Glossary

Short definitions for terms that recur across the record. Jump here from search, or read it through once.

Bourgeoisie

In Marxist usage, the class that owns the means of production. The designated enemy of the proletariat.

Calculation problem

Mises’s 1920 argument: without private property there are no real prices, so a planner cannot compare the scarcity of resources or choose among production plans.

Cheka

The first Soviet secret police (1917), later GPU/OGPU/NKVD/KGB. Instrument of the Red Terror.

Collectivization

Forced merger of private farms into state or collective units. Repeatedly produced famine (USSR, China, Ethiopia, Cambodia).

Democide

R.J. Rummel’s term for murder by government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder — used to count killings outside formal war.

Democratic centralism

Leninist party rule: debate until a decision, then strict unity. In power it becomes centralism without the democracy.

Dictatorship of the proletariat

Marxist transitional state in which the working class, in theory, rules to crush the old order. In practice, a dictatorship of the vanguard party.

Gulag

Soviet forced-labor camp system. Up to 18 million people passed through. Documented by Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum.

Cultural hegemony

Gramsci’s idea that ruling power rests on cultural consent as much as force. The strategic implication: take the schools and the press.

Holodomor

The 1932–33 famine in Ukraine under Stalin, widely treated as genocide. Grain seized, villages blacklisted, borders sealed.

Juche

North Korean official ideology of self-reliance, mixed with Marxism-Leninism and a hereditary personality cult.

Kulak

A relatively better-off peasant. Stalin ordered them “liquidated as a class” during collectivization.

Laogai

Chinese “reform through labor” camp system, the PRC’s analogue to the Gulag.

Long march through the institutions

Strategy of capturing education, media, unions, and bureaucracy rather than storming palaces. Associated with Gramsci and 1960s Western radicals.

Means of production

Land, factories, machines, capital goods. Marxist communism begins with their expropriation.

NEP

Lenin’s New Economic Policy (1921–28): a temporary return of limited markets after War Communism collapsed. Stalin ended it.

Proletariat

Wage workers who do not own the means of production. In the theory, the universal class that will end class itself.

Vanguard party

Lenin’s professional revolutionaries who lead workers, who (he argued) will otherwise stop at trade-union demands.

War Communism

Bolshevik policy 1918–21: nationalization, grain requisition, labor militarization. Produced collapse and famine; replaced by NEP.