p Lenin’s considerations concerning the concrete reasons for the emergence of revisionist vacillations are of tremendous value in the light of the analysis of the present-day difficulties faced by the international communist movement.

p Lenin connected these reasons with objective processes. He wrote: “These departures cannot be attributed to accident, or to the mistakes of individuals or groups, or even to the influence of national characteristics and traditions, and so forth. There must be deep-rooted causes in the economic system and in the character of the development of all capitalist countries which constantly give rise to these depar- tures.”  [337•1 

p Analysing these reasons, Lenin laid special accent on these four factors: 1) the growth of the working-class movement; 2) differences in the levels of the economic development of the individual countries; 3) contradictions in the development of capitalism; and 4) the diversity of the bourgeoisie’s tactics of fighting for its class interests and domination.

p “One of the most profound causes that periodically give rise to differences ... is the very growth of the labour movement. ... The enlistment of larger and larger numbers of new ’recruits’, the attraction of new sections of the working people must inevitably be accompanied by waverings in the sphere of theory and tactics, by repetitions of old mistakes.”  [337•2 

p Lenin returned to this idea again and again, and wrote, for instance, that “the growth of the workers’ party often attracts many opportunists to its ranks.... It is also true that in our day socialists of bourgeois origin most often bring to the proletariat their timidity, narrow-mindedness and love of phrase-mongering rather than firmness of revolutionary convictions.”  [337•3 

p These remarks of Lenin’s are of very great importance today.

p The growing scope of the socialist revolution and its tangible successes, the rapid growth of the ranks of the international communist movement (from 400,000 during the October Revolution to almost 50 million today) have inevitably resulted in the fact that the communist ranks have been joined by men and women lacking the necessary experience, immature and untempered in the flames of class battles. It is among these newcomers with origins in different social groups, that the vacillations, which have petty-bourgeois class roots, arise and assume the form of diverse revisionist streams reflecting influences which are bourgeois in ideological content.

p L. I. Brezhnev observed: “Fresh millions of people belonging to various social strata are being drawn into vigorous political action. Many of them enter politics with a great store of revolutionary energy, but with rather hazy ideas about how to solve the problems agitating them. Hence the vacillations, the swings from stormy political explosions to political passivity, from reformist illusions to anarchic im- patience.”  [338•1 

p Another factor observed by Lenin, which objectively has an effect on the emergence of revisionist vacillations, is the diverse social structure which is determined by different levels of development of social production in the various countries. He wrote: “The rate at which capitalism develops varies in different countries and in different spheres of the national economy. Marxism is most easily, rapidly, completely and lastingly assimilated by the working class and its ideologists where large-scale industry is most developed. Economic relations which are backward, or which lag in their development, constantly lead to the appearance of supporters of the labour movement who assimilate only certain aspects of Marxism, only certain parts of the new world outlook, or individual slogans and demands, being unable to make a determined break with all the traditions of the bourgeois world outlook in general and the bourgeois-democratic world outlook in particular.”  [338•2 

p Different countries in various parts of the globe are involved in the great world-wide battle against imperialism. 339 Their uneven social structure and local experience, which now and again obscures the many-faceted picture of the world’s advance towards the new social system, may, rather cannot but, produce some weaknesses and mistakes, and feed the revisionist vacillations.

p Lenin said that a constant objective source of differences was also the “dialectical nature of social development, which proceeds in contradictions and through contradictions”.  [339•1  Explaining this idea, Lenin wrote that capitalism “develops, organises and disciplines the workers”, while oppressing them, capitalism itself “creates the elements of a new system, yet, at the same time, without a ’leap’ these individual elements change nothing in the general state of affairs, and do not affect the rule of capital”. It was the inability to take a dialectic view of all the contradictions of living reality, which included different tendencies, and the view that these tendencies were mutually exclusive, that led to such one-sided revisionist trends which either “regard reforms as a partial realisation of socialism” or rejected the “petty work, especially the utilisation of the parliamentary platform”.  [339•2  “In practice, the latter tactics amount to waiting for ’great days’ along with an inability to muster the forces which create great events.”  [339•3 

p Applying this theoretical analysis to the practice of the revolutionary movement in Russia, the CPSU saw as an expression of bourgeois influence on the proletariat the denial that it was possible to combine legal and illegal forms of working-class struggle. It was expressed, on the one hand, in the denial of the illegal Social-Democratic Party, in minimising its role and importance, in the attempts to curtail the programme and tactical tasks and slogans of revolutionary Social-Democracy, etc., and on the other, in the denial of parliamentary work by the Social-Democrats and their use of other legal opportunities. Both revisionist trends did harm to the cause.

p Lenin wrote: “Both of them hinder the thing that is most important and most urgent, namely, to unite the workers in big, powerful and properly functioning organisations capable of functioning well under all circumstances, permeated with 340 the spirit of the class struggle, clearly realising their aims and trained in the true Marxist world outlook.”  [340•1 

p The practice of imperialism in our day breeds numerous similar contradictions, and revisionist tendencies are objectively fed by their one-sided interpretation.

p Thus, it is well known that the economic, scientific and technical successes of socialism and the class struggle have forced the capitalists to make definite concessions to the working people in the social sphere, so as to cover up the growing intensity of their exploitation. Uncritical and onesided use of such phenomena as allegedly being voluntary concessions on the part of imperialism to the working class, tends to produce Right opportunist, revisionist illusions. In actual fact, the greater the attempts by imperialism to adapt itself to the situation the deeper are its antagonisms. Today, more than ever before, imperialism has exposed itself as a system of social and national inequality and oppression.

p “Finally, an extremely important -cause of differences among those taking part in the labour movement lies in changes in the tactics of the ruling classes in general and of the bourgeoisie in particular.”  [340•2  “The zigzags of bourgeois tactics intensify revisionism within the labour movement and not infrequently bring the differences within the labour movement to the point of an outright split.”  [340•3  Elsewhere Lenin said that realistic-minded politicians must see the ideological and political trends which spring from the counter- revolutionary influences on the working-class movement.

p This source of revisionist vacillations has become especially dangerous. L. I. Brezhnev said at the International Meeting: “The tremendous social break-up of the pillars of the old world taking place under the onslaught of socialism and all the revolutionary forces is meeting with growing resistance from the bourgeoisie. To safeguard its positions it strives to use all the economic and political possibilities of state-monopoly capitalism. In the capitalist countries, anticommunism has been elevated to the status of state policy. To erode the communist and the whole revolutionary movement from within is now one of the most important directions of the class strategy of imperialism.”  [340•4 

p The imperialist bourgeoisie also seeks to exert its corrupting influence on the communist movement within the world socialist community. Imperialism tries to put pressure on the socialist world in the economic, political, ideological and every other sphere.

p The involvement in revolutionary action of more and more millions of men who come from different social sections, the involvement in the revolutionary process of broad masses of peasants in countries lagging in their economic development through the fault of imperialism—all of this makes it imperative that the new and complex political tasks in each individual country should be tackled on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, creatively and in the light of principle.

p In view of the successes of the communist movement—the rapid growth of the Communist Parties in the socialist countries, the overcoming of the split within the working-class movement and the alliance of Socialists and Communists in a number of countries—there arises the need constantly and persistently to work to foster the new Party members in the Marxist-Leninist spirit. Underestimation of this work may and does lead to the most undesirable consequences.

p Equally serious tasks in the ideological and political education of the Communists arise in view of the intensified subversive activity of the imperialists. A knowledge of the main lines of present-day ideological subversions by imperialism makes it necessary to take due measures to ward them off, and to organise an offensive against bourgeois ideology, as otherwise the less steadfast and mature men may fall captive to bourgeois falsifications and slide into revisionist vacillations and betrayals.

p Ideological subversions clearly designed to inflate revisionism include denigration of the Soviet people’s heroic past, distortions of the genuinely democratic nature of the socialist political system, speculation on the national interests of the socialist countries, and use of peculiarities of different social and age groups (intelligentsia, youth) to undermine their ideological principles.

More active ideological work by the Communist Parties along these lines should preempt the development of revisionist tendencies and frustrate the efforts of bourgeois propaganda.