In Marxism and Revisionism, Lenin describes how, over the course of their lives, Marx and Engels engaged in a bitter struggle against the incorrect ideas on the left vying for the support of the working class over the course of the 19th Century. During this struggle, they defeated the idealism of the Young Hegelians, the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin, and the mistakes which led to the failure of the Paris Commune, fighting until scientific Marxism became the undisputed path to working-class liberation.
However, the ideological struggle did not end there, and Lenin writes how in the 1890s, a new trend that was hostile to Marxism emerged from “within Marxism itself”. This was represented by the ideas of Eduard Bernstein, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who presented certain reformist “revisions” to core Marxist ideas from within the Marxist movement, including opposing the theory of capitalist crisis, the theory of the class struggle, and the labour theory of value.
All ideologies have a class basis, and Lenin writes how the many forms which revisionism can take are a result of the constant collapse of the petty-bourgeoisie into the proletariat due to its precariousness in the class structure, and therefore represented the emergence of petty-bourgeois ideas within working-class parties themselves. Others viewed it as a product of the labour aristocracy, a small, upper stratum of the working class that had been bribed with the profits of imperialism to oppose the revolutionary interests of their class as a whole.
Bernsteinism is just one of many forms which revisionism can take, and Lenin gives many other examples of revisionist ideas, like the idea that bourgeois democracy “destroys classes and class divisions” making a violent revolution unnecessary, or that alliances with liberals committed to social reforms will advance the class struggle, rather than blunt the revolutionary consciousness of the workers “by linking fighters with elements who are least capable of fighting and most vacillating and treacherous.” He also gives many examples of anti-revisionist struggles within socialist movements, including the struggle against the Mensheviks in Russia, and the struggle against the Independent Labour Party in Britain.
After the Communist International was disbanded in 1943, a directionless international communist movement started to suffer from revisionism more generally, boosted by a bourgeoisie which saw opportunity in undermining the communist movement from within. In the CPUSA, Earl Browder presented a distortion of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, arguing that the United Front between the Soviet Union, Britain, and the USA against Hitler’s Germany was evidence that monopoly capital could present a progressive force for world peace that would extend into the post-war period. He argued that rather than being a temporary and unstable alliance that was at best limited to the defeat of fascism, the working class and monopoly capitalists should seek to unite permanently, and that communists must be the first to champion this unity and to oppose any struggle of class against class. This led to the liquidationist position that there was no need for a Communist Party at all, leading Browder to dissolve the CPUSA and replace it with a loose organisation to lobby the two-party system. William Z. Foster fought a long, hard battle against Browder’s revisionism, refounding the CPUSA in 1945.
In the Soviet Union, Khruschev’s secret speech in 1956 detailing a series of false atrocities committed by Stalin sowed further confusion among the international communist movement, and was used to launch a full-scale attack on everything that Stalin stood for, including socialist collectivisation, the battle against imperialism, and socialism itself. Too weak to understand the situation correctly and challenge Khruschev’s ideas, the vast majority of Communist Parties embraced his revisionist politics wholesale, with the noble exceptions of the Communist Party of China and the Party of Labour of Albania, leading to the Sino-Soviet Split.
Here in Britain, the decline of the CPGB and its failure to wage the ideological struggle resulted in reformist and Eurocommunist revisionism gradually infiltrating the Party and YCL until their agents took hold of the levers of power. At its congress in 1979, the YCL abandoned Marxism-Leninism and democratic centralism from its constitution, replacing them with a “creative application of Marxism”, maintaining Marxist language yet undermining Marxism entirely. The CPGB membership peaked at around 56,000 in 1942, and never returned to that size or strength, declining in both theoretical and organisational ability and gradually alienating itself from the working class.
In her final act as the last General Secretary of the CPGB, Nina Temple dissolved what remained of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1991 in much a similar way to Earl Browder in the 1940s, arguing that “the internationalism of the 1990s will be as much informed by Greenpeace and Oxfam, as communism once was by Marx and Engels.” In other words, anti-communist bourgeois liberalism was correct, and the great revolutionaries: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao should be scorned and forgotten.
The question of how ideologies so alien to Marxism-Leninism and so repulsive to the working class could not only freely enter the Communist Parties in Britain and the US, but also fully capture the leadership and destroy the parties themselves, is a question of utmost importance if future communist projects should succeed. One leading anti-revisionist to look to is William Z. Foster, who wrote one of the best analyses of the revisionism of the Browder years in the CPUSA, tracing its roots and clarifying six ways to engage in anti-revisionist struggle:
Firstly, he argued for an ideological campaign to strengthen Marxist-Leninist education in the Party so that every single member was trained in the fundamentals and was able to identify incorrect applications of Marxism-Leninism when they saw it. Education is absolutely key to fighting revisionism, and education work and self-study should be carried out at every level.
Secondly, the Communist Party should be refounded as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist organisation which rejected bourgeois pacifism and clearly understood its purpose as an organisation to build dual power for the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie through revolution. The Communist Party must overthrow the bourgeois two-party system through an armed uprising, not lobby, support, or reinforce it.
Thirdly, the Party leadership should be refreshed, strengthened, and criticised. Although Browder was the lead architect of revisionism within the CPUSA, the rest of the leadership should also be criticised for failing to oppose it, and should be either replaced if necessary or educated and empowered to oppose incorrect positions effectively in the future.
Fourthly, democratic centralism should be re-established and strengthened. Browder had become more like the leader of a cult than a Communist Party, with Party policy being decided by his speeches and writings alone, and no members of the Party membership or leadership capable of challenging him. A strong Communist Party must promote a healthy atmosphere of internal debate and discussion where every member feels able to engage in criticism and self-criticism from the bottom of the membership to the top of the leadership. Without criticism, self-criticism, and democracy, a Communist Party will become brittle and inflexible, and a bureaucratic and overly centralised leadership can become entrenched.
Fifthly, the Communist Party must strengthen its role as an independent party of the working class, rather than an appendage of the bourgeoisie or their parties. The Party must take active leadership by promoting independent, Marxist-Leninist policies and freely criticising and exposing the liberal, reformist, and revisionist parties and politicians in order to effectively draw a line between them and unite workers around a programme of revolutionary opposition to the capitalist system.
Finally, the Communist Party must improve its class composition. Lenin argues that revisionism is a petty-bourgeois ideology that emerges in working-class parties under the banner of Marxism. To build effective and instinctive opposition to these ideas, the Communist Party should pay attention to the class composition of its membership and actively recruit from the most revolutionary strata of the working class to ensure they form the core of its power.
Revisionism is not a thing of the past, and whether dominant or not, revisionist elements and ideas exist in every Communist Party in the world. As such, it is the responsibility of every communist to engage in the anti-revisionist struggle, to strengthen our Marxist-Leninist education, to fight for healthy, democratic Party structures, and to actively practise criticism and self-criticism in order to confront incorrect ideas when we see them. The history of the CPUSA and the CPGB shows us that the fight against revisionism is an existential one. It is not only a fight against wrong ideas, but also against alienation from our working-class base and co-option by the bourgeoisie, a crucial internal struggle to guarantee the health of the Communist Party and the strength of the revolution to come.
Further Reading
Marxism-Leninism vs. Revisionism, W. Foster et al.
Was Gramsci a Eurocommunist?, R. Griffiths
Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism, Hoxha, E.
The Khruschevites, Hoxha, E.
Marxism and Revisionism, V. Lenin
- What are the impacts of revisionism if communists let revisionist ideas pass unaddressed?
- How did revisionists take hold of the CPGB and collapse the party?
- What mistakes were made to allow this to happen?
- How do we engage in anti-revisionist struggle internally?
- How do we engage in anti-revisionist struggle with other parties?
- In what ways have you noticed Marxism being distorted to accommodate anti-communist ideas and ideologies?
- Are there different types of revisionists? What should our attitude be towards them as communists?
