Marxism and Revisionism

Important article criticizing revisionism written by Lenin to mark the 25th anniversary of Marx’s death, before April 3, 1908, in The Collected Works of Karl Marx (1818-1883), published in St. Petersburg in October 1908. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 17 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Revisionism is an opportunist trend in the international workers’ movement that distorts, falsifies and opposes Marxism under the banner of Marxism. Many theories of Marxism have been confused and disfigured by the revisionists. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Marx’s death, Lenin wrote this article to clarify the laws of Marxist development. He pointed out that Marxism is a doctrine that directly serves to educate and organize the progressive class of modern society, the proletariat, for its own emancipation, and that it has to go through battles at every step in its life course. The development of Marxism, the spread and rooting of Marxist ideas among the working class did not happen overnight. It was achieved in the course of a fierce struggle against theories that had been fundamentally hostile since their emergence in the 1840s. These included, among other things, the refutation of radical Young Hegelian idealism, the struggle against Proudhonist economic doctrines, the elimination of Bakuninism and Dühringism from the ranks of the International. By the 1890s, Marxism had absolutely triumphed over all other trends of thought within the workers’ movement. However, this triumph of Marxism forced the anti-Marxist factions within the international workers’ movement to seek another ways for themselves and change the form of their struggle tactics, which was typically represented by Bernstein’s revision of Marxism, i.e., revisionism. Thus, the struggle continued. Lenin specified that revisionism was already an international phenomenon and that the ideological struggle of Marxism against revisionism at the end of the 19th Century was the prelude for the great revolutionary ideological battle carried out by the proletariat towards victory.

Lenin systematically exposed and criticized the ideological content and essence of revisionism. In philosophy, the revisionists followed the bourgeoisie in preaching neo-Kantianism, advocating “back to Kant”, opposing materialism and revolutionary dialectics, replacing materialism with idealism, and replacing revolutionary dialectics with vulgar evolutionism. In political economy, attempts were made to influence the public by “new data on economic development”. It was said that concentration and the ousting of small-scale production by large-scale production do not occur in agriculture at all, while they proceed very slowly in commerce and industry. It was said that crises had now become rarer and weaker, and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital to eliminate them altogether. It was said that the “theory of collapse” to which capitalism is heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class antagonisms to become milder and less acute.

In the sphere of politics, revisionism did really try to revise the foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class struggle. Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the ground for the class struggle—we were told—and render untrue the old proposition of The Communist Manifesto that the working men have no country. For, they said, since the “will of the majority” prevails in a democracy, one must neither regard the state as an organ of class rule, nor reject alliances with the progressive, social-reform bourgeoisie against the reactionaries. Revisionism is actually a rather rigid, liberal bourgeois viewpoint that deceives the working masses into sacrificing their fundamental interests for real or imaginary temporary benefits. Lenin analyzed the inevitable class roots of revisionism and argued that as the widespread petty producers of capitalism were constantly thrown into the ranks of the proletariat, it was quite natural that the petty-bourgeois worldview would also constantly infiltrate the ranks of the workers’ parties in general. He highly valued the great significance of the Marxist struggle against revisionist ideas and predicted that in the future, with the outbreak of the proletarian revolution all contentious issues would sharpen and that one should distinguish between friend and foe and break completely with revisionism to deal a decisive blow to the enemy and achieve the victory of the proletarian revolution.