p In the multi-faced propaganda of the ideologues of anticommunism and the revisionist theoreticians the tune of two outworn concepts have been reiterated incessantly for several years—that of convergence and pluralism. These concepts today are so popular that there is a need for them to be examined, if only in brief outline. Whereas the ideologues of convergence derive their concept from the objective tendency towards centralisation and internationalisation of economic contacts on a world scale, the ideologues of pluralism, while deriving their concept from the objective tendency towards national self-dependency and independence, strive to split the whole into parts and attach a separate significance to each of them, to squeeze the international into the purely national and erect this into the absolute.

p A distinctive feature of the ideologues of both concepts is their inability to view and analyse the problem as a whole, 177 in the aggregate of all its separate parts, with its hidden and open tendencies, the general pattern of development. Hence a proneness to reduce the gist of the matter to a detached, isolated phenomenon relating, as a rule, not to the basis itself, but chiefly to the superstructures. Such theoreticians, proceeding as they do from an arbitrary interpretation of the problem, are wittingly or unwittingly playing into the hands of capitalism.

p All this, of course, is no accident. Characteristically, the various theories lauding the capitalist system and its political structure were advanced as a rule during periods of capitalism’s economic boom. Thus, the economic boom of the nineties of the last century saw the emergence of Marxism’s first “refuters”, who prognosticated its obsolescence and inapplicability to any cognition of the laws of development of society. These prophets were the first to pave the way to the glorification of capitalism and to a negation of the revolutionary processes of the class struggle and emancipation of the working people. The appearance of Bolshevism and its struggle against the renegades to a considerable extent neutralised this current.

p Within a decade and a half, however, when capitalism had recovered from the profound crisis that had beset it at the beginning of our century, the revisionist theories of “ultra-imperialism”, "organised capitalism", and the " automatic breakdown of capitalism" made a comeback; there appeared the first ideas about social harmony and the development of society without conflicts. All these concepts, as we know, were exploded by the October Socialist Revolution, and the renegades sang small.

p However, after the capitalist world had recovered from the first imperialist war and the shocks caused by the October Revolution and had entered a period of upswing and temporary stabilisation, the revisionist theories appeared again. Take the second half of the twenties when the antiMarxist theories of "class peace", "the growing of socialism into capitalism" and, vice versa, "the growing of capitalism into socialism", the theories of “spontaneity”, "equilibrium of the two systems", etc., were trotted out by the Right reformists. The victory of socialism in the U.S.S.R., as we know, blasted these theories and the renegades were silenced again.

p One has only to take a closer look at the present-day 178 scene to see once more an omnium-gatherum of revisionist theories, too numerous even to enumerate: the theories of "democratic socialism", "humane socialism", "a productive society", "a non-conflicting society", "an industrial society", and so on. All these tiresome and shoddy ideas are nothing but the echo, a rehash, of the familiar reformist theories of the old apostles of revisionism.

p Today the imperialist bourgeoisie itself is embarrassed as it were by its much-lauded banner and studiously avoids calling itself capitalism. It dexterously borrows the socialist phraseology and together with its agents sings the praises of the bourgeois system and bourgeois democracy while at the same time fighting desperately against the spread of the scientific ideas of socialism. One does not have to be a prophet to foresee the inevitable bankruptcy of all these revisionist theories as well as a recession of the boom which bourgeois propaganda is now extolling.

History develops unevenly. Here is no smooth race track. There are ups and downs, evolutions and revolutions, smooth and uneven processes, ebb and flow, different conditions for the struggle in different countries. At the same time, recurring general tendencies, as a rule, are clearly revealed in historical processes over a comparatively short space of time. It must therefore be stressed again that in the hard and multiform fight against ideological enemies we cannot do without a study of the historical experience of the class struggle. In this connection we should like to deal here in greater detail with the two most dangerous political trends by aid of which the ideologues of imperialism are trying to divert the communist and labour movement from the path of Marxism-Leninism.