Glossary | Kimi & Capital

Base (or Economic Base)

Political Economy

The totality of a society's material productive forces and economic relations—the "real foundation" upon which legal, political, and ideological superstructures arise. Includes the prevailing mode of production, property relations, and the technical division of labor.

Example / Metaphor

Like the foundation of a house. You can repaint the walls (laws) or rearrange furniture (politics), but without the foundation (i.e. capitalist relations of production), the whole structure comes down.

See: Historical Materialism; Superstructure

Key Reading

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859 Preface)

Bourgeoisie

Class Analysis

The social class that owns the means of production—factories, land, capital—deriving income not from labor but from property rights, such as the shareholder collecting Amazon dividends while warehouse workers suffer heat exhaustion, or the landlord raising rents without performing maintenance. In Marxist-Leninist analysis, this class divides into the haute bourgeoisie (finance capital, monopolists) and the petty bourgeoisie.

Key Reading

Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Ch. I

Class Consciousness

Class Analysis Strategy/History

The awareness of one's objective class position within the relations of production and the recognition of shared class interests opposed to other classes; essentially the leap from scattered grievances ("my manager is unfair") to collective understanding ("we make the products and could run the factory without him"). For the proletariat, this marks the transition from a "class in itself" (existing objectively) to a "class for itself" (acting with organized political agency).

See: Proletariat; Vanguard Party

Key Reading

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923)

Dialectical Materialism

Philosophy

The philosophical framework underlying Marxist analysis, combining materialism (the primacy of material conditions over ideas) with dialectics (the study of contradiction, change, and the interpenetration of opposites). Reality is in constant motion driven by internal contradictions—like a seed that is simultaneously preserving itself and destroying itself to become a plant—where qualitative changes emerge from quantitative accumulation (the transformation of quantity into quality).

Key Reading

Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism; Engels, Dialectics of Nature; Mao, On Contradiction (1937)

Dialectical Unity of Opposites

Philosophy

One of the three fundamental laws of Dialectical Materialism, describing how contradictory aspects within any given phenomenon (e.g., positive/negative, exploitation/resistance, productive forces/relations of production) exist not as static, external polarities but as a single unity of mutual dependence and interpenetration. These opposites define and presuppose one another while simultaneously negating each other; their internal antagonism drives the quantitative accumulation that eventually ruptures into qualitative transformation. The unity of opposites is conditional and temporary, while the struggle between them is absolute and constitutes the fundamental impetus of all motion and development.

Example / Metaphor

A magnet cannot exist with only a north pole; you need both poles, which push against each other. Or like a rubber band stretched between two fingers—the tension (contradiction) is what gives the system its shape and eventually causes it to snap (qualitative change).

Key Reading

Mao, On Contradiction (1937), Sections I–IV; Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic (1914), "On the Question of Dialectics"

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Strategy/History

The transitional period following the revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class, during which the proletariat uses state machinery to suppress counter-revolution and reorganize production toward socialist ends. Distinguished from bourgeois dictatorship by its class content rather than its institutional form. In Leninist theory, this corresponds to the phase of socialism preceding full communism.

Example / Metaphor

Changing the locks on the factory. Before, only the capitalist had the key (private property). Afterward, the workers' council holds the keys and decides access and production priorities. The "dictatorship" is simply the new class refusing to let the old class retake the building.

See: Proletariat

Key Reading

Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

Historical Materialism

Philosophy Strategy/History

The application of dialectical materialism to human history; the theory that the driving force of historical development is the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production. Social formations evolve through determinate stages as material conditions mature—not because "the Declaration of Independence created democracy," but because colonial merchant capitalism required centralized markets and wage labor, making feudal monarchy impossible long before Jefferson wrote a word, the steam engine preceding the liberal constitution.

Key Reading

Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (1845)

Idealism (Philosophical)

Philosophy

The ontological position that consciousness, spirit, or ideas constitute the fundamental substance of reality, preceding and determining material conditions—the assertion that history moves according to the development of the Absolute Idea rather than the steam engine. Inverts the materialist standpoint by treating thought as the primary architect of the world, suggesting that poverty persists because people lack proper enlightenment rather than because mills sit idle and grain rots in silos. While Hegelian idealism correctly grasped the dialectical movement of concepts, it mystified this motion as unfolding in the ether of pure thought rather than in the bloody soil of class struggle.

Example / Metaphor

Like believing the architectural blueprint physically summons the bricks and mortar into being, or that a restaurant patron's hunger is caused by the existence of the menu rather than the other way around. Idealism places the recipe as the cause of the kitchen; materialism recognizes that one writes recipes only when ingredients, fire, and hungry diners already exist.

See: Materialism (Philosophical); Dialectical Materialism; Historical Materialism

Key Reading

Marx & Engels, The German Ideology (1845), "Ideology in General"; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) [contrast]

Ideology

Philosophy

In the Marxist usage, not merely a system of ideas but a material practice embedded in institutions and rituals that reproduces the existing relations of production. Ideology functions to represent the particular interests of the ruling class as universal, thereby obscuring the reality of class exploitation (class consciousness).

Example / Metaphor

Like water to a fish—completely invisible, yet determining everything about how you move and breathe. Ideology tells you "people have always had bosses" or "prison prevents crime" as if these are laws of physics, not recent capitalist inventions.

Key Reading

Marx & Engels, The German Ideology

Imperialism

Political Economy Strategy/History

The monopoly stage of capitalism defined by Lenin as the merger of industrial and bank capital into finance capital, the export of capital rather than merely commodities, and the territorial division of the world among powers. This creates a structural split between oppressor and oppressed nations, manifest today when Coca-Cola owns Bolivian water rights while Wall Street trades debt for Ghana's hospitals.

Example / Metaphor

Essentially the board game Monopoly in its final stage where one player owns all the hotels and others pay rent simply to circle the board.

See: Finance Capital

Key Reading

Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

Labor Theory of Value

Political Economy

The classical economic theory (developed by Ricardo and radicalized by Marx) that the value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary labor time required for their production. If weaving a coat takes 20 hours and crafting a chair takes 10, the coat tends to exchange for two chairs—the value being crystallized human effort rather than mystical market forces—revealing the asymmetry when billionaires "earn" in minutes what takes teachers decades.

See: Surplus Value

Key Reading

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 1–3

Materialism (Philosophical)

Philosophy

The ontological position that matter precedes consciousness and that being determines thought rather than vice versa; the understanding that feudalism collapsed not because people "had bad ideas" about loyalty, but because plow-based agriculture literally could not support centralized nation-states and global trade, no matter what kings believed. Marxist materialism is "historical" rather than "mechanical"—recognizing that while material conditions set limits, human agency (praxis) operates within and transforms those constraints.

Key Reading

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Means of Production

Political Economy Class Analysis

The material instruments—from server farms to printing presses, assembly lines to cotton gins—along with raw materials and sites used to produce commodities. Ownership of these tools and spaces defines class boundaries under capitalism, determining who must sell their labor to survive and who lives by property rights alone.

See: Relations of Production

Key Reading

Marx, Capital, Vol. I

Mode of Production

Political Economy

The specific historical "operating system" of an economy—the unity between productive forces (technology, labor power) and relations of production (property forms, class relations). Just as Windows and Linux require different compatible programs (laws, family structures, religions), each mode—Slave, Feudal, Capitalist, Socialist—constitutes a distinct epoch with corresponding superstructures.

Key Reading

Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Petty Bourgeoisie

Class Analysis

Intermediate classes situated between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: small shopkeepers, independent artisans, professionals, and self-employed contractors who own small-scale means of production or specialized skills but lack the capital of the haute bourgeoisie. Politically unstable and oscillating between attraction to proletarian revolution and defense of private property.

Example / Metaphor

Like a crab between shells—too large for the working-class shell but too small for the bourgeois one—they often identify with the rich they might become while fearing the poverty they could fall into.

See: Bourgeoisie; Proletariat

Key Reading

Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

Praxis

Philosophy

The dialectical unity of theory and practice; conscious human activity that simultaneously transforms the objective world and the subjective consciousness of the actor, best understood as learning to swim by swimming rather than by flailing randomly or reading alone.

Example / Metaphor

The Black Panthers' free breakfast programs exemplify this: neither mere charity nor mere study of Mao, but the act of feeding children while teaching them police were occupiers, developing new consciousness through activity that challenged state legitimacy.

Key Reading

Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)

Productive Forces

Political Economy

The aggregate capacity of a society to produce use-values, comprising means of labor (tools, machinery, AI), objects of labor (raw materials), and labor power (workers' capabilities). History lurches forward when these forces outgrow their containers.

Example / Metaphor

The Great Depression erupted because mass production technology needed mass consumption, but wages remained stuck at 19th-century levels, straining the system until it cracked.

See: Relations of Production; Mode of Production

Key Reading

Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978)

Proletariat

Class Analysis

The class of wage-laborers under capitalism who, owning no means of production, must sell their labor power to survive—from the Amazon warehouse picker to the Uber driver leasing the car to the adjunct professor on food stamps. This is the only truly revolutionary class because its emancipation requires the abolition of private property entirely, rather than mere redistribution, unifying diverse occupations not by the type of work performed but by having nothing to sell but time under the current rules.

See: Bourgeoisie; Class Consciousness

Key Reading

Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Relations of Production

Political Economy

The social and technical relations people enter into during production—primarily property relations and the organizational form of labor, such as the legal fiction of "private property" applied to factories built by thousands of workers over centuries. These arrangements look like natural rights but are actually social contracts designed to facilitate capital accumulation.

Example / Metaphor

When they become fetters on the productive forces, revolution looms as surely as strained scaffolding collapses under new weight.

See: Base; Productive Forces

Key Reading

Marx, Capital, Vol. III

Reserve Army of Labor

Political Economy Class Analysis

The mass of unemployed, underemployed, and precariously employed workers that capital maintains as a necessary component of the accumulation process—not despite high productivity but because of it. This relative surplus population serves as a discipline mechanism: the mere existence of those desperate for work suppresses wage demands and workplace militancy among the employed under the constant threat of replacement by "someone who’d be grateful for the job." Comprising the floating (cyclically unemployed), latent (agricultural/technologically displaced), and stagnant (chronically marginalized) layers, it swells during crises and contracts during booms, yet never fully disappears because capitalism requires this biological lever to keep wages below the level that would threaten surplus value.

Example / Metaphor

Like a permanent waiting room outside the factory gates filled with hungry applicants. The boss never intends to hire them all; their presence is a "threat display" that makes the workers inside accept speed-ups and stagnant pay without complaint. Uber and DoorDash drivers waiting for surge pricing function as a digital version of this army, pressing down on taxi and delivery wages even when they earn less than minimum wage themselves.

See: Proletariat; Surplus Value; Bourgeoisie

Key Reading

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 25 ("The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation")

Superstructure

Political Economy

The legal, political, religious, artistic, and philosophical institutions and forms of consciousness that arise on the base of a particular mode of production. While the base determines the superstructure "in the last instance," these institutions possess relative autonomy and react back upon their foundation—sometimes lagging conspicuously like religious traditions persisting in scientific economies, sometimes anticipatory like revolutionary art—generally optimized to stabilize the economic structure while maintaining the appearance of independence.

See: Base; Ideology

Key Reading

Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Surplus Value

Political Economy

The quantitative measure of exploitation: the difference between the value created by labor power during the working day and the value of the wage (the cost of reproducing that labor power). Appropriated by the capitalist as profit, rent, and interest.

Example / Metaphor

It is calculable when an iPhone assembler produces $1,000 of value in an 8-hour shift for $120 pay—the $880 difference representing roughly 7 hours of unpaid labor confiscated because the capitalist holds title to the assembly line.

Key Reading

Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part III

Vanguard Party

Class Analysis Strategy/History

The Leninist organizational form conceived as the conscious, disciplined detachment of the most advanced sections of the proletariat, organized to bring class consciousness from outside the economic struggle (which alone breeds only trade-union consciousness).

Example / Metaphor

Functioning like antibodies recognizing a systemic virus that individual cells feel but cannot name, it shows workers who know only that "the foreman is cruel" how that cruelty inheres in capitalism itself and charts the path to worker control.

See: Class Consciousness; Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Key Reading

Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)