Revisionism (Marxism)
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Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
movement, the word revisionism is used to refer to various ideas, principles and theories that are based on a significant revision of fundamental Marxist premises. The term is most often used by those Marxists who believe that such revisions are unwarranted and represent a "watering down" or abandonment of Marxism. As such, revisionism often carries pejorative
Pejorative
Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...
connotations. Few Marxists label themselves as revisionists. The opposing term and concept, even used among Marxists, is Marxist dogmatism.
The term "revisionism" has been used in a number of different contexts to refer to a number of different revisions (or claimed revisions) of Marxist theory:
- In the late 19th century, revisionism was used to describe democratic socialist writers such as Eduard BernsteinEduard BernsteinEduard Bernstein was a German social democratic theoretician and politician, a member of the SPD, and the founder of evolutionary socialism and revisionism.- Life :...
and Jean JaurèsJean JaurèsJean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France. Both parties merged in 1905 in...
, who sought to revise Karl MarxKarl MarxKarl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's ideas about the transition to socialism and claimed that a revolution through force was not necessary to achieve a socialist society. The views of Bernstein and Jaurès gave rise to reformistReformismReformism is the belief that gradual democratic changes in a society can ultimately change a society's fundamental economic relations and political structures...
theory, which asserts that socialism can be achieved through gradual peaceful reforms from within a capitalist system.
- In the 1920s and 1930s, the International Left OppositionLeft OppositionThe Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January...
led by Leon TrotskyLeon TrotskyLeon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
, which had been expelled from the Communist InternationalCominternThe Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
, accused the "revisionist" leadership of the Comintern and Soviet Union of revising the internationalist principles of Marxism and Leninism in favor of the aspirations of an elite bureaucratic caste which had come to power in the Soviet Union. The Trotskyists saw the nascent "Stalinist" bureaucracyBureaucracyA bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...
as a roadblock on the proletariat's path to world socialist revolution, and to the shifting policies of the Comintern, they counterposed the Marxist theory of Permanent RevolutionPermanent RevolutionPermanent revolution is a term within Marxist theory, established in usage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels by at least 1850 but which has since become most closely associated with Leon Trotsky. The use of the term by different theorists is not identical...
. The Soviet authorities, meanwhile, labeled the Trotskyists as "revisionists" and eventually expelled them from the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionCommunist Party of the Soviet UnionThe Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
, whereupon the Trotskyists founded their Fourth InternationalFourth InternationalThe Fourth International is the communist international organisation consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky , with the declared dedicated goal of helping the working class bring about socialism...
.
- In the 1940s and 1950s within the international communistCommunismCommunism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
movement, revisionism was a term used by StalinistsStalinismStalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
to describe communists who focused on consumer goods production instead of heavy industry; accepted national differences instead of promoting proletarian internationalismProletarian internationalismProletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is a Marxist social class concept based on the view that capitalism is now a global system, and therefore the working class must act as a global class if it is to defeat it...
; and encouraged democratic (non-communist) reforms instead of remaining faithful to the idea of communist revolutionCommunist revolutionA communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism, typically with socialism as an intermediate stage...
. Revisionism was also one of the charges leveled at TitoistsTitoismTitoism is a variant of Marxism–Leninism named after Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, primarily used to describe the specific socialist system built in Yugoslavia after its refusal of the 1948 Resolution of the Cominform, when the Communist Party of...
as punishment for their pursuance of a relatively independent form of communist ideology, amidst a series of post-World War 2 purges beginning in 1949 in Eastern EuropeEastern EuropeEastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
by the Soviet administration under Stalin. After Stalin's death a more participatory, more democratic form of socialism became briefly acceptable in HungaryHungaryHungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
during Imre NagyImre NagyImre Nagy was a Hungarian communist politician who was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People's Republic of Hungary on two occasions...
's government (1953-1955) and in Poland during Władysław Gomułka's government, containing ideas that the rest of the Soviet bloc, and the Soviet Union itself, variously considered revisionist, although neither Nagy nor Gomułka described themselves as revisionists, since to do so would have been self-deprecating.
- Following the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and also the Secret Speech of that same year denouncing Stalin, many communist activists, astounded and disheartened by what they saw as the betrayal of Marxist-Leninist principles by the very people who had founded them, resigned from western communist parties in protest. These quitters were sometimes accused of revisionism by those communists who remained in these parties, although some of these same loyalists also shortly thereafter split from the same communist parties in the 1960s to become the New LeftNew LeftThe New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
"anti-revisionistAnti-RevisionistIn the Marxist–Leninist movement, anti-revisionism refers to a doctrine which upholds the line of theory and practice associated with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and usually either Mao Zedong or Enver Hoxha as well...
s", indicating that they, too, were disillusioned by the actions of the Soviet Union by that point in time. Most of those who left in the sixties started aligning themselves closely with Mao ZedongMao ZedongMao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
as opposed to the Soviet Union. E. P. ThompsonE. P. ThompsonEdward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...
's New ReasonerNew ReasonerDuring the crisis of the 1950s within the Communist Party of Great Britain , John Saville and E.P. Thompson created a journal of dissident Communism named the Reasoner. They took the title from an early 19th century publication, created by John Bone, which had been an attempt at renewing and...
was an example.
- In the early 1960s, Mao ZedongMao ZedongMao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
and the Communist Party of ChinaCommunist Party of ChinaThe Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...
revived the term revisionism to attack Nikita KhrushchevNikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
and the Soviet Union over various ideological and political issues, as part of the Sino-Soviet splitSino-Soviet splitIn political science, the term Sino–Soviet split denotes the worsening of political and ideologic relations between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during the Cold War...
. The Chinese routinely described the Soviets as "modern revisionists" through the 1960s. This usage was copied by the various MaoistMaoismMaoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
groups that split off from communist parties around the world. In 1978, the Sino-Albanian SplitSino-Albanian splitThe Sino-Albanian split in 1978 saw the parting of the People's Republic of China and People's Socialist Republic of Albania, which was the only Eastern European nation to side with the PRC in the Sino–Soviet split of the early 1960s.-History:...
occurred, which caused Enver HoxhaEnver HoxhaEnver Halil Hoxha was a Marxist–Leninist revolutionary andthe leader of Albania from the end of World War II until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania...
, the General SecretaryGeneral SecretaryThe office of general secretary is staffed by the chief officer of:*The General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace, a government agency for the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace...
of Albania, to also condemn Maoism as revisionist. This caused a split in the Maoist movement, with some following the Albanian Party of LabourAlbanian Party of LabourThe Party of Labour of Albania was the sole legal political party in Albania during communist rule...
's line, most notably the Communist Party of New ZealandCommunist Party of New ZealandThe Communist Party of New Zealand was a Communist political party in New Zealand from the 1920s to the early 1990s. It never achieved significant political success, and no longer exists as an independent group, although the Socialist Worker organisation is considered organisationally continuous...
and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)The Communist Party of Canada is a Canadian federal Marxist–Leninist political party.The party is registered with Elections Canada as the Marxist–Leninist Party of Canada...
.