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p Right opportunist revisionism, which tends to slide down to liquidationist Social-Democratic positions in politics and ideology, is concentrated on a number of acute political and ideological problems of the international communist movement.

p At the present stage, these problems in the development of socialism are its past, present and future. Let us look in the most general terms at the principal revisionist concepts, bringing out the elements which are most characteristic of the ideologists of Right opportunist revisionism in the various countries.

p The fundamental issues of our day, which are directly connected with massive action by millions of men—the view of the transition from capitalism to socialism, the view of socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the role of the working class in society, the doctrine of the Party of the working class, of proletarian internationalism, and of the role and substance of Marxist-Leninist theory—all these are the problems on which the Communists and the revisionists are fundamentally divided.

p It is characteristic of Right opportunist revisionism to deny the historical necessity of the socialist revolution and the proletarian dictatorship.

p The revisionists switch to the stand taken by the Right Socialists and urge attainment of socialism through evolution and reform. The point is, however, that the reforms they advocate do not go to the roots of the capitalist system. It is well known, too, that the ruling classes do not give up their power of their own accord.

p Right opportunist vacillations are also now and again expressed in the failure to understand the need for the leading role of the Communist Party in the socialist revolution, in underestimation of the Leninist propositions concerning the break-up of the military-police machine of the bourgeois state, and in turning peaceable forms of struggle into absolute, whereas only life, the actual balance of strength, the behaviour of the bourgeoisie in this or that country can alone enable the proletarian vanguard to decide on the concrete ways and forms of socialist revolution.

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p Present-day conditions introduce many new elements into the preparation of the socialist revolution in various countries. The broadest sections of the working people are being involved in the fight against monopoly capital, and under the impact of the scientific and technical revolution the percentage of wage-workers in the population of the capitalist countries has been growing. The Communist Parties have adopted as their weapon Lenin’s thesis that the struggle for democracy and the struggle for socialism are one, and they seek to use it as a means helping to advance towards revolutionary transformations. The fundamental propositions of Lenin’s theory of socialist revolution are just as important today, as they were at the turn of the century.

p The methodological basis on which the revisionists have abandoned the theory of socialist revolution are metaphysical, vulgar, evolutionary views of social development in which gradualness is one-sidedly brought to the fore, while the importance of leaps and radical qualitative changes is ignored.

p The revisionist slander of socialism is harmonised with the general chorus of the ideologists of bourgeois and reformist anti-communism, who deny the socialist nature of the social system in the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries.

p Socialism, which Lenin said was a social order higher than capitalism, requires the solution of the fundamental problem of raising labour productivity and in this connection (and for this purpose) its higher organisation.

p The Right opportunist view of socialism cuts across the scientific view of socialism because it implies the transfer of large-scale industry into the ownership of separate labour collectives; this also applies to the Leftist reduction of socialism to a single act of socialisation, regardless of the material and technical basis.

p “ ’Left’ revisionism attacks the theory and practice of scientific communism, and tries to replace it with a reactionary utopian and military drillground ’socialism’. Its pettybourgeois nationalistic substance is exposed by the preaching of the messianic role of certain countries, mass-scale brainwashing in the spirit of hegemonism, chauvinism and bellicose anti-Sovietism.

p “On the other hand, the Right-wing revisionists preach the concept of so-called ’liberalised’ socialism which denies 344 the leading role of the Marxist-Leninist parties, substitutes for socialist democracy political liberalism of a bourgeois type, negates centralised planning and management of the national economy, and is designed to unleash the blind forces of the market and cutthroat competition.”  [344•1 

p Lenin’s scientific view of socialism also hits at the revisionist inventions that there is some kind of Soviet standardised “model” of socialism. Life has fully borne out Lenin’s scientific prediction that each nation introduces “something of its own to some form of democracy, to some variety of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the varying rate of socialist transformations in the different aspects of social life”.  [344•2 

p Of course, the immense diversity of forms in socialist construction implies loyalty to its principles and its general laws.

p It is in fact against the general laws of the socialist revolution and socialist construction that revisionists from Right and “Left” direct their attacks.

p Thus, the Yugoslav journal Praxis (Zagreb) says that society based on state property in the means of production and centralised planning cannot be regarded as a socialist one. Svetozar Stojanovic in an article entitled “Etatist Myth of Socialism” says such a society should be designated as “etatist”.  [344•3  An article by R. Muminovic in the same journal designates the state forms of economic management under socialism as “administrative socialism” and the “technocratic society”, while the task of strengthening the socialist state system is regarded as a grave theoretical error.

p The contributors to the journal, following in the wake of the main ideas expounded by bourgeois theorists of the socalled industrial society, who obscure the fundamental distinction between socialism and capitalism, keep writing about a “general” tendency towards a strengthening of bureaucracy and technocracy in the modern world, and connect this tendency with the development of science and technology “in general”. In this spirit, R. Supek, in an article entitled “Technocratic Scientism and Socialist Humanism”, draws the 345 conclusion that the “struggle against bureaucracy constitutes one of the key problems in the progressive transformation of society, whether capitalist or socialist”.

p “The socialist countries have many different critics,” Janos Kadar, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, said in his speech at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties. “Our enemies are ceaselessly attacking our system under the most diverse pretexts. It has now become the fashion to identify the concept of the socialist state with bureaucracy. Naturally we still have bureaucratic manifestations and tendencies. We are fighting them by improving the work of the civil service, developing socialist statehood and socialist democracy, actively drawing ever new strata of the working people into social life, enlisting their help in solving various problems. We do not idealise the attained development level in any sphere of social life and are constantly striving to enhance it.

p “This is one side of the matter. The other side is that the socialist state, the power of the working people, is the most democratic state in history, one that has ended the exploitation of man by man and serves the people. Experience shows that the withering away of the socialist state has not yet set in, that in the divided world of today there is a need for its defence function, while its economic, cultural and organisational activity is needed for building a socialist society.”  [345•1 

p Underestimation of the role of the socialist state, distortion of its class character, its equalisation with the bourgeois state is nothing but a departure from Marxism. The social consequences of technical progress under capitalism and under socialism are fundamentally distinct. Both Marx and Lenin gave a theoretical substantiation for the vital necessity of the socialist state throughout the whole period of socialist construction up until the highest phase of communism. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote about the future state system of communist society.  [345•2  Lenin pointed out that “for the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary”.  [345•3  These theoretical conclusions are 346 confirmed by the international experience of socialist construction.

p The Theses of the CPSU Central Committee for the Centenary of the Birth of V. I. Lenin stressed the importance of Lenin’s theory of the state and, what is most important, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Theses say: “The dictatorship of the proletariat means the replacement of democracy for exploiters by socialist democracy for the working people, the beginning of the epoch of genuine government by the people.... The dictatorship of the proletariat is the main instrument in the building of socialism. It enables the working class, all working people, to counter the power of capital, the many connections of the bourgeoisie, its experience in administration, its private-property ideology and psychology with the power of proletarian conviction, class-consciousness, organisation and discipline.”  [346•1 

p Denial that the socialist state is a fundamentally and qualitatively new type of state is the root not only of the revisionists’ theoretical distortions, but also their slanderous assertions that under socialism man is allegedly “alienated”.

p Thus, at a symposium on “Marx and the Present Day” held at Novi Sad in June 1964, the Yugoslav philosopher Predrag Vranicki presented a set of theses entitled “ Socialism and the Problem of Alienation”, which reduced the task of creatively developing Marxism to applying the category of alienation to socialist relations. He insisted: “We must resolutely advance the thesis that the problem of alienation is the central problem of socialism.”  [346•2 

p With their active spread of the idea of “man’s alienation” in the socialist countries the revisionists join the general campaign by bourgeois and reformist theorists over the alleged inhumanity of Marxism-Leninism and socialism.

p The revisionist “models” of socialism are aimed against the political organisation of society under socialism, and their slander on socialism develops into practical political struggle against the fundamental principles of socialism.

p The main elements of the so-called “new” models of socialism are: revision of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the 347 mission of the working class in world history and its theory of the party; substitution of the bourgeois concept of “ pluralistic democracy” for the theory of proletarian dictatorship and socialist democracy; and substitution of “market socialism” concept for socialist economic principles.

p These revisionist views were strongly criticised at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties. In his speech at the meeting, L. I. Brezhnev stressed: “The practice of the socialist countries has reaffirmed the significance of the ideas of Marx and Lenin that the development of socialist society proceeds on the basis of general laws, that in one form or another the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., state leadership of the building of socialism by the working class, is inevitable during the entire period of transition from capitalism to socialism.

p “The whole experience of the political struggle proves again and again that the victory of the trend towards consolidating fraternal relations between socialist states and the progress of the socialist system itself are indissolubly linked with the strengthening of the leading role of the Communist Parties in the building of socialism and communism. Our Party highly values the determined struggle which the Communists of fraternal countries wage against any attempts to weaken the leading role of the Communist Parties, replace socialist democracy with political liberalism of the bourgeois type and erode the positions of socialism. To be as firm as Lenin in defending and upholding the principles of socialism is a lesson life itself teaches us.”  [347•1 

p This was also strongly accentuated in their speeches at the Meeting by many leaders of the fraternal Communist Parties.

p “The content of socialism and its basic principles became an object of ideological and political speculation,” Gustav Husak, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, said about the 1968 events in his country. “Some associated the concept of socialism with pluralist bourgeois democracy and the reformist model of so-called democratic socialism from the programmes of Right Social-Democratic parties.”  [347•2 

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p “The suppression in 1919 of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the first workers’ state in Hungary, by the armed forces of world imperialism, the troops of the Entente, was an instructive lesson to be constantly remembered from the history of the Hungarian working class and our people,” Janos Kadar said at the Meeting. He also gave a reminder of the 1956 bloody counter-revolutionary putsch in Hungary, which had been started by the forces of domestic reaction, incited and supported by international imperialism. These forces used “the now well-known mistakes that really occurred, exploited the confusion in the ranks of the adherents of socialism, coupled with the subversion by the revisionists”.

p “Hungary’s example shows clearly that the imperialists are continuously striving, by various means and methods, to subvert and weaken, and if possible to crush, the new developing socialist countries, t» crush their political system.”  [348•1 

p In fact the revisionist attempts to substitute some form of bourgeois democracy for socialist democracy are one of the ways of undermining the state system of the socialist countries.

p Todor Zhivkov, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, also dealt in detail with this question in his speech at the Meeting. He said: “The key issue of socialist power is the leading role of the working class, the leading role of the Communist Party as the highest form of class organisation of the proletariat. There is no socialist society, nor can there be one, without the leading role of the Communist Party, and this truth has been substantiated by mankind’s entire experience, whether successful or unsuccessful, positive or negative, of the past half century. It is also proved by the fact that all attempts undertaken to alter the nature of the socialist system in this or that country begin with an open offensive against the leading role of the Communist Party.”  [348•2 

p The revisionists usually mount their attacks against the Communist Party in two directions: first, they question its role as the highest form of political organisation of the working class, and as the country’s leading force, and second, they revise the principles of democratic centralism.

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p It is Party discipline and democratic centralism that hinder the revisionists in undermining the Party from inside by spreading anti-Marxist views. That is why the revisionists always do their utmost in order to have the Communist Parties abandon the Leninist principles of Party construction and develop into something like debating societies.

p The grave danger presented by these tendencies was brought out at the Meeting by Gustav Husak, who said: “After January 1968 the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia lacked unity in evaluating the situation and in the question of programme, aims and perspectives, and still less unity as regards concrete and vitally urgent measures.... The working class and its Party were not mobilised in time to defend the gains of the socialist revolution in Czechoslovakia; quite the reverse, the Party leadership gave way before the increasingly aggressive pressure exerted by the anti-socialist and opportunist forces inside the country connected with Western bourgeois circles and supported by them in one form or another.

p “Due to the corrupting activity of Right opportunist forces there was no unity in the Party leadership concerning the degree of danger presented by these phenomena and concerning the way of eliminating them. Often we encountered the desire to thrash out by discussion matters that conflicted with our socialist legality and required immediate intervention by government organs.. ..

“The fact that Right opportunist and partly anti-socialist forces seized control of the bulk of the mass media tended to paralyse the influence of the Party, to mislead Communists and the population, and gradually vitiate the main values and principles of socialism. The threat from the anti- Socialist and counter-revolutionary forces thus became more pronounced. Many fraternal Parties did not receive sufficiently objective information at that time. On the contrary, they had to proceed from evaluations that underplayed or obscured our class and international duties as regards uncompromising struggle against the anti-socialist and opportunist forces in order to safeguard the revolutionary gains of social- ism.”  [349•1  The April and May (1969) Plenary Meetings of the

350 CPCz Central Committee marked the turning point in the development of the situation within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the country.

p The schemes of domestic and external reaction and the efforts of the Right opportunist elements in the socialist countries are aimed at undermining the theory and practice of the proletarian dictatorship. The main method of distorting the Marxist-Leninist teaching of the proletarian dictatorship is the abstract approach, which ignores the class essence of political power, and construction of a metaphysical antithesis between dictatorship and democracy, a denial of the dialectic connection between the two, all of which Lenin had exposed in his lifetime. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a new type of dictatorship, that is, a dictatorship with respect of a minority, and a new type of democracy, that is, democracy for the overwhelming majority of the people, the working people. Under the most diverse forms of political order (one-party and multi-party) the proletarian dictatorship rules out freedom for the enemy, for the opponents of socialism.

p That is why the Communist Parties resolutely condemn and reject the revisionist attempts to pave the way for a political legalisation of the anti-socialist forces. Todor Zhivkov said at the Meeting: “Evidently the crux of the matter is not whether a given country has one or several parties. Obviously, the apologists of the multi-party system under socialism do not just want several parties. They want to see parties with a programme differing from that of the Communist Party. They need opposition parties which would fight against the Communist Party, weaken the socialist countries by their political and social demagogy, disrupt the unity of the working people.

p “What we need is not formal democracy, but the conditions necessary for the development of real socialist democracy, that is, an increasingly broader participation of the working class, of all working people, in running the country, in guiding socio-political, economic and cultural life, which are, indeed, the serious questions that the Communist Parties are working on in the socialist countries.... We are convinced that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat that is the highest form of democracy both because it is the power of the majority of the people, and also because its ultimate objective is riot perpetuation of domination by the working 351 class, but elimination of the class division itself and the construction of classless communist society.”  [351•1 

p The revisionists’ attempts to change the political organisation of society in the socialist countries undermine the positions of socialism and constitute a repudiation of all the general laws of socialist construction, primarily the laws of:

p 1) leadership of the working masses by the working class, whose core is the Marxist-Leninist party;

p 2) proletarian revolution and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship in one form or another;

p 3) solidarity of the working class of the given country with the working class of other countries: proletarian internationalism.

p History has confirmed the importance of these general laws. Ignoring them may inflict (and has already inflicted on many occasions) the greatest harm on the revolutionary communist movement and the cause of socialist construction.

p The principles of proletarian internationalism, first proclaimed in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, essentially boil down to a recognition of the common class interests and aims of workers of all countries, and to their effective class solidarity in the struggle for these interests and aims. Proletarian internationalism is, first, an ideology establishing the unity of interests and aims of the working class of different nations within each country and throughout the world, and second, the policy which springs from this ideology and which is aimed at uniting the working people of all countries and nations in the practical struggle for communism both at home and throughout the world.

p Lenin always emphasised the connection between declarations of internationalism and internationalism in deed. He wrote: “The sad experience of the Second International has clearly demonstrated the immense damage caused by combining, in actual practice, ’general’ revolutionary decisions, formulated in general phrases, with reformist actions—when professions of internationalism are attended by refusal jointly to discuss, in a truly internationalist manner, fundamental problems of the tactics of each individual party.”  [351•2  In another work, he said: “Recognition of internationalism in word, 352 and its replacement in deed by petty-bourgeois nationalism and pacifism, in all propaganda, agitation and practical work, is very common, not only among the parties of the Second International, but also among those which have withdrawn from it, and often even among parties which now call themselves communist.... Petty-bourgeois nationalism proclaims as internationalism the mere recognition of the equality of nations, and nothing more. Quite apart from the fact that this recognition is purely verbal, petty- bourgeois nationalism preserves national self-interest intact.. . . The urgency of the struggle against this evil, against the most deep-rooted petty-bourgeois national prejudices, looms ever larger with the mounting exigency of the task of converting the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national dictatorship (i.e., existing in a single country and incapable of determining world politics) into an international one (i.e., a dictatorship of the proletariat involving at least several advanced countries, and capable of exercising a decisive influence upon world politics as a whole).”  [352•1  In the light of Lenin’s prediction, and in the light of subsequent political practice, the need to fight revisionist departures from internationalism becomes especially understandable.

p Much harm is inflicted on the cause of socialism by the revisionists’ abandonment of solid class unity, international solidarity, fraternal co-operation and mutual assistance in the struggle for the common interests and aims of the working class.

p Right opportunist revisionists neglect the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism. They revise its philosophical foundation—dialectical materialism—and supplant it with the so-called universal-humanistic philosophy which is based on a concept of abstract man. The revisionists deny the principle of the unity of the Party spirit and the scientific approach, and the internationalist character of Marxism-Leninism.

p In actual fact, the real way to a truly humane social system runs only through the class struggle, through the proletarian dictatorship, and not through abstract reasoning about liberty and humanity “in general”.

p The revisionist “anthropological-humanistic” line in philosophy, which has taken shape in recent years, following 353 in the wake of the bourgeois falsifiers of Marxism, has been extensively spreading the slogan of “Back to Marx”, whose purpose is to bring to the fore Marx’s early writings, which allegedly express the true humanistic essence of Marxism, something that was allegedly lost in the subsequent writings of Marx and Engels, and later of Lenin as well. It has already been said above that the abstract humanistic views the revisionists ascribe to Marx were criticised by the founders of Marxism themselves in The Manifesto of the Communist Party and other works of theirs.

p By turning the theory of alienation into the central problem of Marxist philosophy, the revisionists throw out of this theory its cornerstone, namely, the theory of reflection, and together with it the materialist substance of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

p Like the bourgeois philosophers seeking to undermine the authority of Lenin’s theory of reflection (among them A. James Gregor, H. B. Acton and Henry B. Mayo), revisionist-minded philosophers (Gajo Petrovic, Mihailo Marcovic), opposing the Marxist-Leninist view of the process of reflection, discard or question this theory, which is the truly scientific basis of Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge.  [353•1 

p Philosophical revisionism also distorts the Marxist- Leninist approach to the question of truth, the key category of the theory of knowledge. The revisionists (Henri Lefebvre, Leszek Kolakowski, Mihailo Marcovic, Gajo Petrovic) also distort the Marxist view of practice, and put forward arguments which identify the object with the cognising subject, thereby essentially sliding into subjective idealism.  [353•2 

p Back in 1956, one-time Marxist and now the renegade H. Lefebvre declared materialist dialectics to be “vulgar Marxism”. He wrote: “Materialism appears to be a desperate platitude; why demand that it should be interesting if it is a complete system or a mere weapon in the struggle of the working class.”  [353•3 

p Like many bourgeois and reformist falsifiers of Marxism the Right revisionists contrast the Party spirit of MarxismLeninism and the scientific approach and separate philosophy from politics.

354

p “WR*

p The Czechoslovakian philosopher Milan Prucha, for instance, in an article entitled “Marxism and Trends in Phi- losophy”  [354•1  suggests that philosophy cannot be regarded in the direct context of the tasks of any concrete political movement, and believes it to be possible and in fact advisable to “integrate” with Marxism the various philosophical trends by withdrawing them from the “ideological context”. This is essentially an attempt to separate the philosophy of Marxism from its political, class substance, from revolutionary politics (that is, an attempt to make Marxism cease being Marxism, so as to bring this emasculated “Marxism” closer to various trends in bourgeois philosophy. That is the way taken by the revisionists. For instance, Vladimir Filipovic, writing in the same journal Praxis, establishes a “ community” of views on philosophy in the works of Marx and of Edmund Husserl.

p Whereas the bourgeois ideologists have circulated the myth that Marxism is “disintegrating”, slanderously insisting that Marxism no longer exists as a coherent internationalist teaching, whereas the ideologists of reformism have essentially repeated this version,  [354•2  the Right revisionist elements seek every way to back up this lie with their version about the “pluralism of Marxism”. Thus, writing in Praxis No. 6, 1965, R. Supek says that there is no coherent Marxism, just as there is no coherence of thinking in Marx himself; it would be more correct allegedly to speak not of the principles of Marxism, but also of some sort of “horizon of Marxist thinking”.

p This idea of the “pluralism” of Marxism was set out by P. Vranicki in a report “On the Necessity of Different Variants in Marxist Philosophy”, which he presented at the 14th International Philosophical Congress in Vienna on September 1968. He said that Leninism was only one of the variants of Marxism.

p Vranicki, like other advocates of this line, seeks mechanically to invest Marxism with the pluralistic character of bourgeois philosophy, which depends on its idealistic nature, a philosophy which rejects monism and objective truth. Let 355 us recall that the pragmatist William James declared that there were as many truths as there were standpoints.

p These assertions that Marxist philosophy is “pluralistic” and that there are “national forms” of Marxism amount to no more than an attempt to cover up the different variants of the revisionist distortion of Marxism, which has from the outset differed and continues to differ qualitatively from bourgeois philosophic systems in being a coherent scientific world outlook. It remains a coherent internationalist theory, based on the sound theoretical foundation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, an instrument in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the world. Lenin wrote: “The controversy over the question as to what is philosophical materialism and why deviations from it are erroneous, dangerous and reactionary always has ’a real and living connection’ with ’the Marxist social and political trend’.”  [355•1 

p Dialectical materialism, an organic component part of Marxism as a whole, is not just another philosophical science, but an ideological science with the Party spirit. It is a theory and a method not only for cognition but also for the transformation of the world, which is why it naturally rests on analysis not only of objective laws of nature, but also on the laws governing social development.

Marxism-Leninism, the ideological weapon of the working class in its world-wide historical struggle, is internationalist, that is, it is designed for the emancipation of the working class and of all the other working people on the globe.