– Comrade Enver Hoxha –
The birth of modern revisionism, like the birth of the old revisionism, is a social phenomenon conditioned by many different historical, economic, political and other causes. Taken as a whole, it is a product of the pressure of the bourgeoisie on the working class and its struggle. From the moment they first appeared to this day, opportunism and revisionism have been closely linked with the struggle of the bourgeoisie and imperialism against Marxism-Leninism, have been a constituent part of the capitalist grand strategy to undermine the revolution and perpetuate the bourgeois order. The more the cause of the revolution has advanced, and the more Marxism-Leninism has been spread among the broad masses of the working people, so much the greater has been the attention which imperialism has devoted to the use of revisionism as its favourite weapon to oppose and undermine the triumphant ideology of the proletariat.
This is what happened at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, after the publication of the “Communist Manifesto” and other works of Marx and Engels, and the growth of the influence of Marxism among the working masses of Europe. Precisely at this time reformist trade-unionist currents were spread in Britain, the petty-bourgeois views of Proudhon in France, the petty-bourgeois concepts of Lassalle in Germany, the anarchist ideas of Bakunin in Russia and elsewhere, and so on. This phenomenon appeared again after the heroic events of the Commune of Paris, when the bourgeoisie, mortally afraid of the spread of the great example it set, encouraged the new opportunist trend of Bernstein, who tried to strip Marxism of its revolutionary content and make it harmless to the political domination of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the political and economic conditions were becoming more and more ripe for the revolution and the seizure of power by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie gave all-out support to the opportunist trend of the Second International and used it extensively in its manoeuvres for the preparation for and launching of the First World War.
After the historic victory of the October Revolution, when socialism was transformed from a revolutionary theory and movement into a socio-economic system which had triumphed in one sixth of the world, capitalism was forced to alter its strategy and tactics. Internally, it stepped up its violence and terror even further, began to use the most ferocious means to strengthen its rule even by bringing fascism to power. First of all, it further whipped up its demagogy and propaganda in order to denigrate and distort Marxism-Leninism by inventing new, pseudo-Marxist “theories,” by slandering the Soviet Union and preparing for war against it. At that time Lenin wrote that imperialism,
“…just because it feels that Bolshevism has become a world force, is trying to throttle us as fast as possible in the hope of dealing first with the Russian Bolsheviks, and then with its own.”[1]
In 1918 the British, American, French and Japanese imperialists began their military intervention in Russia. The struggle against the first state of workers and peasants brought all the reactionary forces into a single camp. The opportunists and renegades from Marxism also hurled themselves into the attack on the October Revolution and the proletarian state power. Kautsky in Germany, Otto Bauer and Karl Renner in Austria, Leon Blum and Paul Boncourt in France, rose in fury against the October Revolution and the Leninist strategy and tactics of the revolution. They called the October Revolution unlawful, a diversion from the course of historical development and a deviation from the Marxist theory. They preached the peaceful revolution without violence and bloodshed, the taking of power through the majority in parliament: they were against the transformation of the proletariat into a ruling class. They praised bourgeois democracy to the heavens and attacked the dictatorship of the proletariat.
When the armed intervention against Soviet Russia failed and when social-democracy was unable to stop the creation of new communist parties and the great revolutionary drive of the working masses of Europe, the bourgeoisie pinned all its hopes on breaching the communist front
“…from within and is looking for champions among the leaders of the RCP(B).”[2]
The Trotskyites again brought up “the theory of permanent revolution,” according to which socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union without the triumph of the revolution in other countries. They amalgamated in a single front with the struggle of the bourgeoisie against socialism. Stalin very correctly pointed out that a single enemy front had been created, including everybody, from Chamberlain to Trotsky. The rightists, the Bukharinites also went on the attack against socialism. They were for extinguishing the class struggle, and preached the possibility of the integration of capitalism into socialism.
The strategy of imperialism assumed a more marked counter-revolutionary and anti-communist character, especially after the Second World War, as a result of the alteration in the ratio of forces in favour of socialism and the revolution, which shook the whole capitalist system to its foundations. These changes put the question of the revolution and the triumph of socialism on the order of the day, no longer in just one or two countries, but in whole regions and continents. Imperialism, headed by American imperialism, this time based its greatest hope on the militarization of the whole of its life, on military blocs and pacts, on violent intervention and open war against socialism and the revolutionary and liberation movements of the peoples. However, it pinned very great hopes also on the invigoration and activation of all the opportunist forces in order to undermine the socialist countries and communist parties from within and to bring about their degeneration.
To be continued…
Notes
[1] V.I. Lenin. Collected Works, vol. 28, p. 239, Alb. ed.
[2] J.V. Stalin. Works, vol. 6, p. 278, Alb. ed.
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