>>2639941It was Lenin who coined the term in its modern usage regardless of who you ask, with historical roots in the nominally-Marxist Bernstein alongside non-Marxist socialists, who viewed Marxism as outdated and sought to "revise" it. Lenin defined revisionism's historic roots in non-Marxist socialism, which by his time had decayed and lost its luster compared to Marxism. From Lenin's
"Marxism and Revisionism":
>Marxism [had already gained] an unquestionable victory over all other ideologies in the labour movement. By the [1890s] this victory was in the main completed… But after Marxism had ousted all the more or less integral doctrines hostile to it, the tendencies expressed in those doctrines began to seek other channels. The forms and causes of the struggle changed, but the struggle continued… Pre-Marxist socialism has been defeated. It is continuing the struggle, no longer on its own independent ground, but on the general ground of Marxism, as revisionism.Now a defining feature of revisionism we can take implicitly from this statement is a rejection of Marx and fundamental essences of Marxism
while claiming to be Marxist. All things have fundamentals to them that, when removed, transform them into something else entirely. Capitalism without the bourgeois right to private property is no longer capitalism, modern biology without evolution transforms into pure pseudoscience, etc. Nothing's essentials can be broken up and changed infinitely while remaining the same thing. This is also true with Marxism. Contrary to winging liberals who want to justify reformism and capitulation as "local applications" of Marxism, Marxism cannot just be whatever you want it to be. Regardless of particular aspects, there are universal principles without which Marxism ceases to have any meaning.
To sum that up, revisionists claim to be Marxist (unlike the old non-Marxist socialists) while their actions and politics reject the universal, fundamental principles Marx outlined and the Paris Commune (and later the Russian and Chinese revolutions) proved in philosophy, economics, and politics.
Again, from Lenin:
>In the sphere of philosophy revisionism followed in the wake of bourgeois professorial “science”… The professors treated Hegel as a “dead dog”, and while themselves preaching idealism, only an idealism a thousand times more petty and banal than Hegel’s, contemptuously shrugged their shoulders at dialectics — and the revisionists floundered after them into the swamp of philosophical vulgarisation of science, replacing “artful” (and revolutionary) dialectics by “simple" (and tranquil) “evolution”.So revisionists reject dialectical materialism in the name of "updating" it, either openly falling back to idealism or abandoning the dialectical view of the world for a vulgar and simplistic one. Today, this can be observed with the rise of postmodernist philosophy on one hand and the dominance of vulgar mechanical materialism in the other. More on this when we discuss politics in a bit.
>Passing to political economy, it must be noted first of all that in this sphere the “amendments” of the revisionists were much more comprehensive and circumstantial; 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… 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… It was said, finally, that it would not be amiss to correct Marx’s theory of value, too…So revisionists reject Marx's analysis of how capitalism works at its core. They deny that capitalism inherently trends towards greater and greater monopolization, or argue that this can be reformed out of it. They deny that economic crises are an inherent part of capitalism, and instead argue that they are the work of this or that particularly "greedy" section of the bourgeoisie. They deny that capitalism is heading towards intensified crises and collapse, arguing that it hasn't yet and therefore never will. Lastly, as Lenin points out, revisionists will reject Marx's labor theory of value in one way or another. Today, we can observe this in tendencies that express the "theory of productive forces" or who deny imperialism's intensifying extraction of superprofits from the periphery to the imperial core.
>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. Here we get to the absolute foundation of Marxism that revisionists reject: the theory of class struggle. This is also the wretched core that revisionists always try desperately to hide, because it displays their opportunism for all to see. Revisionists deny or flatten class struggle at home and abroad, and the ensuing interlinked contradictions that spring from it. Today, we can observe this in the postmodernist "intersectionality" framework which denies any chief contradiction and views class as just another "identity" to justify a nakedly liberal "anything goes" mentality in organizing. We can also observe it in "class first" chauvinists of all stripes who deny or downplay the particular forms class struggle might take in different contexts and internationally (such as settler-colonialism in the United States or the existence of a labor aristocracy in the first world) alongside those who deny the significance of racism, patriarchy, etc. in bourgeois society and their roots in class struggle.
It's important to reiterate that what separates a revisionist from a non-Marxist is that revisionists
claim to be Marxist while rejecting Marxism in practice. This is why it's important for all revolutionaries down to the newest member of the Army and Party to sharpen their knowledge through theory and practice, and their build their confidence to criticize and be criticized. Nobody will tell you directly that they are revisionists, and naming and criticizing revisionism must be approached with both nuance and a sledgehammer. For example, Kwame Nkrumah's theory of Neo-colonialism is brilliant, and it must be upheld against racism and revisionism while not allowing that brilliance to cloud our perception of Nkrumah's own revisionist turn. Lenin did this too in his criticisms of Plekhanov and Kautsky, both resolutely standing against their revisionism and combating attempts to sneak in opportunist ideas as criticism of them. In fact he does this in the essay I'm quoting from:
>We shall simply note that the only Marxist in the international Social-Democratic movement to criticise the incredible platitudes of the revisionists from the standpoint of consistent dialectical materialism was Plekhanov. This must be stressed. all the more emphatically since profoundly mistaken attempts are being made at the present time to smuggle in old and reactionary philosophical rubbish disguised as a criticism of Plekhanov’s tactical opportunism.I hope this can give you and other's some clarity, but I'm sure the main responses will be some boring shit along the lines of "huhuh so Maoism is revisionist" or some other stupid attempt at a "gotcha".