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p One of the features of the development of MarxismLeninism is that at various stages of the class struggle it has to come to grips uncompromisingly not only with the avowed anti-Marxist ideas and teachings of the imperialist bourgeoisie but also with various forms of revisionism.

p Acting within the communist and working-class movement in the capitalist world and in some countries of the socialist community, revisionism recasts the general laws of the socialist revolution and of socialist construction under the guise of “anti-dogmatism” and “taking specifics into consideration”.

p In the mid-1960s the international communist movement witnessed an activation of revisionism. Compelled to adapt themselves to the new balance of forces, to the influence of the world socialist community on the course of international development, imperialism and revisionism began to look for new “arguments” and methods of fighting socialism and the revolutionary working-class movement. One of these new elements in the ideological struggle of the 1960s was the animation of “ultra-Left” opportunism and revisionism, which used the “arguments” of Maoism. Grave aftermaths also stemmed from the actions of Right-wing revisionism in the latter half of the 1960s in a number of Communist parties of Western Europe and some socialist countries of 188 Eastern Europe. Ernst Fischer in the Communist Party of Austria, Roger Garaudy in the French Communist Party and the Right-wing revisionists in Czechoslovakia sparked a serious crisis in some areas of the European communist and working-class movement (the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia were part of this crisis).

p What were the basic specific features of the revisionism of the 1960s? What were the fundamental elements of the ideology of contemporary revisionism at the beginning of the 1970s? In what lay their scientific untenability and reactionary character? The most evident specific feature of the revisionism of the second half of the 1960s was its international character. For instance, the Communists of Czechoslovakia, Austria and France came into collision with revisionism in 1968. The revisionists of those countries had close contact with each other and a common language— antiSovietism. But this fairly widespread social phenomenon evidently has its own common social mainsprings. The change in the world balance of forces in favour of socialism and the steadily growing role played by the world revolutionary process were misrepresented in the revisionism of the end of the 1960s. Revisionism comes forward as a reaction to the enhanced unity of the international communist movement and to the impressive successes achieved by the USSR and the other countries of the socialist community in building the new, developed socialist society. The economic reforms that some of the developed socialist states began to put into effect in the 1960s were used by the anti-communists and revisionists for a further distortion of the theory and practice of socialist construction in the spirit of the theories of “a single industrial society” and “convergence”.

p Yet another specific feature of the revisionism of the close of the 1960s, namely, its attempts to misconstrue the social aftermaths of the scientific and technological revolution, is linked with economic problems.

p Let us consider in some detail the ideology of modern revisionism as exemplified by the actions of the Fischer-Marek 189 group in Austria, the Garaudy group in France and the revisionists in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

p In the Communist parties of Austria and France some intellectuals began to succumb to the pressure of new and more sophisticated forms of bourgeois ideology and revise the philosophical foundations of Marxism-Leninism. One of the first manifestations of this philosophical revisionism was seen in the pronouncements of Roger Garaudy, Ernst Fischer and a number of Czechoslovak writers in 1963 at a conference held in Liboce (near Prague) in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the birth of Franz Kafka. Outwardly these pronouncements touched on a fairly abstract philosophical problem, namely, the problem of “alienation”, which Kafka discussed in artistic form from the standpoint of existentialism.

p It will be recalled that in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Karl Marx showed how and why in capitalist society the labour of man is alienated, turned into activity alien and hostile to him. Further, Marx demonstrated that only the socialist revolution and communist society were able to and had the mission of transcending capitalist alienation of labour, of the product of labour, of the implements and means of production, of people toward each other.

p In existentialism alienation is stripped of its concrete historical, class character and converted into an abstract, extrahistorical, eternally anthropological and insurmountable collision between the individual and society. Under monopoly capitalism the petty bourgeois sees himself also turned into a toy of blind and incomprehensible social forces. However, his disgust with and even his protest against the dominant forces of monopoly capital remain a Utopian and hopeless “rebellion” and “rejection”.

p Garaudy and Fischer departed from Marxist-Leninist views, went over to an existentialist interpretation of alienation and as early as 1963 began to revise the philosophy of Marxism. At the Liboce conference in May 1963 the 190 revisionism of Garaudy, Fischer and the Czechoslovak writer E. Goldstiicker was sharply criticised by Professor Alfred Kurella of the GDR. “My objections,” Professor Kurella later wrote, “were aimed mainly at the striving to attribute all the misfortunes of this world to alienation, at the extension of that concept which led even to attempts to regard the forces of nature, before which primitive man was helpless, as ’ancient and natural’ forms of alienation. According to Garaudy man tried to counter this alienation by creating idols. These ideas, which do not square with the modern level of research into the relations between man and nature and with the fundamentals of art, cannot be regarded as an ideological enrichment of scientific socialism.”^^2^^

p In retrospect it may be said that at the 1963 conference an ideological alliance of the revisionists of France, Austria and Czechoslovakia took shape, and it was formalised in 1968-1969. In 1965, Zbigniew Brzezinski published the books Alternative to Partition. For a Broader Conception of America’s Role in Europe^^3^^ and (in collaboration with Samuel P. Huntington) Political Power: USA/USSR. Similarities and Contrasts. Convergence or Evolution?^ in which he oriented anti-communist propaganda toward energetic support of these revisionist actions in the socialist countries and the Communist parties of Europe. In the same 1965 the ideological evolution of Garaudy and Fischer gave further confirmation of the hopes and calculations of the anticommunists.

p Garaudy’s attitude at the conference of Marxists and Christians sponsored by the Catholic St. Paul’s Society in Salzburg, Austria, was also typical of the revisionism propounded by him. In his paper at the Salzburg conference, published under the heading From Anathema to Dialogue, he entirely rejected the principles of scientific materialism and revised some of Marxism’s fundamental propositions.

p He defined Marxism as a “methodology of historical initiative” for the realisation of “total man”. Christian and generally religious myths were equated to the Marxist 191 negation of the present and to the prevision of the future. But this prevision was interpreted as the construction of models, as a creative project in a subjective-idealistic, existentialist understanding of the word “project”, as a manifestation of the freedom of the individual and a negation of the objective laws of development. Garaudy rejected the Leninist theory of reflection, offering his concept of a cybernetic model instead.

p In the dialogue with Christians Garaudy absolutised the active aspect of cognition only as an act of the abstract individual, as an expression of purely individualistic and voluntaristic “practice”, thereby revealing the socio-political orientation of his revision of scientific materialism and of the dialectical-materialist theory of cognition. He counterposed other “models” to the “Soviet model of socialism”.

p His speech at the conference showed that he had in fact shifted to the stand proposed in 1960 by Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his book A Critique of Dialectical Reason, intended to complement Marxist philosophy with existentialism.

p A similar revision of Marxism-Leninism from a somewhat different angle was urged by Ernst Fischer. In “Marxism and Ideology”, an article carried by Weg und Ziel, the theoretical organ of the Communist Party of Austria, in 1965— shortly before he had published it in a supplement to Rindscita, organ of the Italian Communist Party, under the title “Closer to the Truth”—Fischer attempted to differentiate between ideology as a partisan, socially-conditioned outlook and scientific truth as such. He interpreted every sociallyconditioned ideology as false, distorted or “alienated” consciousness, and every truth as being incompatible with partisanship. From this position he urged the “renunciation of ideology” in Marxism. He wrote that in evaluating ideas they should not be defined as “bourgeois” or “socialist” or “ antiMarxist”, but that they should be assessed solely as “true” or “false”.

p In the discussion of Fischer’s article conducted by Weg und Ziel, the Austrian Marxists Friedl Fiirnberg and Ernst Wimmer (No. 6, 1965), Hans Kalt (No. 9) and Walter 192 Hollitscher (No. 9) showed that these ideas of Fischer’s were scientifically untenable and reactionary. A fundamental distinction between the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat, of its Marxist-Leninist theory, and the ideologies of all the other classes of bourgeois society is that the partisan ideology of the working class does not clash with, but requires an objective scientific knowledge of all things and phenomena so that they may be successfully remoulded.

p However, Fischer did not heed this criticism. A year later he published a book under the title Art and Coexistence, in which he linked his philosophical revisionism with anti-Sovietism. Polemising openly with the Leninist teaching of the partisanship of literature and art, he interpreted the partisanship of Soviet art as a manifestation of a “new form of alienation”, as a result of the “ institutionalisation and bureaucratisation of power” under socialism. He declared that the entire socialist superstructure of Soviet society is “hostile to man” and as “proof” offered A. Solzhenitsyn’s story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He rejected the entire selfless struggle of the Soviet peoples under the leadership of the CPSU and slanderously identified the epochal achievements of this struggle with the negative consequences of the Stalin personality cult. Repenting that he had himself been a “Stalinist”, he embraced anti-communism and anti-Sovietism under the guise of combating “Stalinism”.^^5^^

p The link between opportunism and bourgeois ideology becomes more pronounced on the basis of anti-Sovietism.

p This link is eloquently demonstrated by Wolfgang Leonhard, a West German Sovietologist and one of the most active exponents of anti-communism, in the book Division of Marxism into Three Parts. Genesis and Development of Soviet Marxism, Maoism and Reformist Communism? In this book Leonhard, who has for many years been preaching bellicose anti-communism in literature and on West German radio and television, extols modern revisionism, which he calls “reformist communism” for its anti-Soviet orientation and divisive, nationalistic activities. On the pretext of 193 combating “Stalinism” and propagating “human socialism” or “socialism with a human face”, this revisionism absolutises the negative consequences of the Stalin personality cult, denies all the historic achievements of the more than halfcentury development of the new, socialist society in the USSR, and rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat and the objective laws of the socialist revolution and of the period of transition from capitalism to socialism. Influenced by the present schools of bourgeois subjectivist-idealist philosophy, particularly existentialism, this revisionism renounces philosophical materialism and materialist dialectics, adopting abstract humanism and the philosophy of “practice” instead. It falsifies the integral teaching of MarxismLeninism, laying claim to “creatively developing” and even “rejuvenating” it. This, Leonhard asserts, is the only kind of “Marxism” that has a future.

p The ideologists of Right-wing opportunism coalesce with the exponents of “Left” opportunism, the Maoists, neoTrotskyites and the petty-bourgeois “New Left”, who have proclaimed Marcuse a “Marxist thinker”.

p When Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was published the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the USA and other statemonopoly capitalist countries had entered a new stage. The first social effects of the scientific and technological revolution had begun to manifest themselves. These new social developments were differently portrayed by Daniel Bell of Columbia University in The End of Ideology^^1^^ and by Marcuse in his One-Dimensional Man. The war of US imperialism against the heroic Vietnamese people, the broad movement of American Blacks and the student unrest had obviously undermined the frankly apologetic bourgeois ideology. The myths about the “Great Society” in the USA, about the “new horizons” and prospects of the “American way of life” had crumbled. The word “deideologisation” quickly took root in the capitalist world and the anti-communists are endeavouring to use this against Marxism-Leninism, which they claim is obsolete. The “Left” revisionists are urging a 194 return to utopianism and the renunciation of faith in science. In the same spirit, the Right-wing revisionists urge the abandonment of partisanship, of a class evaluation of ideas and events. Garaudy in the dialogue with the Christians and in the book Realism Without Shores (1966) and Fischer in the book Art and Coexistence call for coexistence in the sphere of ideas as well.

p Having begun with a revisionism of the philosophical principles of Marxism-Leninism and with a shift to antiSovietism, the Right-wing revisionists in the West European capitalist states went over in 1968 to the massive peddling of their anti-Marxist ideas. These ideas were given their fullest expression in Garaudy’s For a French Model of Socialism (1968) and The Great Turn of Socialism = (1969),^^8^^ and in a series of books by Fischer and Marek under the heading What Marx Really Said (1968) and What Lenin Really Said = (1969).^^9^^ One of the underlying ideas of this revisionism is that of the “pluralism” of Marxism, and one of the end products of these ideas is the “new model of socialism”. Another “contribution” of the revisionists to the elaboration of new, pressing issues generated by the scientific and technological revolution and by the contradictions of statemonopoly capitalism is their absolutisation of the role of intellectuals in the revolutionary process and their negation of the revolutionary role of the proletariat.

p Let us make a closer study of these elements of revisionism on the basis of a critical analysis of the above-mentioned works by Garaudy and Fischer.

p At the close of the 1960s the revisionist idea of the “ pluralism” of Marxism and of the “pluralism” of models of socialism attempted to make capital chiefly out of the negative consequences in the socialist world resulting from the anti-Leninist policies of China’s leaders. Following in the footsteps of the anti-Leninism of the rabid enemies of Marxism, the revisionists preach the need for different “variants” of Marxist theory and different “ models” of socialism. While the anti-communist Wolfgang 195 Leonhard lists three forms of Marxism “(Soviet Marxism, Maoism and reformist communism”), Fischer distinguishes four “modern variants” of Marxism: “Marxism as a ‘ scientific outlook’, as a ‘philosophy of man’, as a ‘structure’ or ‘system of concepts’ and as a ‘scientific method of examining history and political initiative’.”^^10^^ If in this way MarxismLeninism is turned into an eclectic conglomeration of all sorts of ideas, if Marxism is taken to mean the purely arbitrary, speculative constructions of different schools of the “critically thinking elite”, and if Marxism is associated with the primitive ideas of Maoism that have nothing in common with it, then nothing will remain of it as a scientific theory. But there can only be one scientific objective truth, a truth that does not depend for its content on the subjective opinions of various authors, a truth that faithfully mirrors objective reality in all its wealth, diversity and dialectical development. This truth is the theory of Marxism-Leninism in its continuous enrichment and development. Its objective character has been tested and reaffirmed by decades of socio-historical practice, by the experience of the proletarian class struggle and by the building of socialism. Its specificity lies in the fact that it is not confined to abstract generalities but covers the entire wealth of concrete, multiform and changing reality. This objective truth cannot break down into “Soviet”, “Chinese”, “French” and other “national truths”.

p The universality of Marxist-Leninist theory does not exclude but, on the contrary, presupposes a strict account of the concrete historical conditions, of the concrete features of one country or another and of the diversity in the manifestation of the general laws of the class struggle and of the socialist revolution. In generalising the experience of recent years, the 1969 Moscow International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties noted that “following the victory of the socialist revolution in many countries, the building of socialism on the basis of general laws is proceeding in various forms, which take into account concrete historical conditions 196 and national distinctions”.^^11^^ These distinctions of forms, and account of concrete conditions and national distinctions have nothing in common with an arbitrary and subjectivist “ construction of cybernetic models of socialism”. They are founded on objective factors that are cognised on the basis of an integral scientific theory. In itself the method of modelling as an instrument of cognition does not contradict science, provided an account is taken of the entire sum of the objective laws of the object underlying one model or another. But the method of “constructing models” suggested by modern revisionism violates all the conditions of scientific modelling, for it ignores the objective reality of socialism and the laws of the class struggle and the socialist revolution, replacing this socialism with diverse varieties of antisocialist or Utopian visions and falsifications of socialism.

p Garaudy’s criticism of the “Soviet model” of socialism boils down in the long run to a negation of the leading role played by the Party of the working class in the building of socialist and communist society. He regards it as the enemy of “human subjectivity”, whose outburst comprises, in his opinion, the substance of the “cybernetic turn” in modern society. Fischer urges the replacement of all Communist parties by a “coalition of Left forces”, “of Marxists and non-Marxists, of Communists and Social-Democrats, of Catholics and Protestants”.^^12^^ For Garaudy a “pluralist attitude to philosophy” must be the indication of the future party: “It cannot have an ‘official philosophy’ and it cannot in principle be idealistic, materialistic, religious or athe- istic.”^^13^^

p This preaching of pluralism and the abolition of the Marxist-Leninist Party of the working class, this negation of the Party’s role of leader and organiser essentially mirror the revisionists’ adulation of bourgeois democracy, admiration of the parliamentary struggle and negation of the inevitability of and need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the same time this pluralist ideology of Right-wing opportunism reflects the petty-bourgeois individualism of the exponents of 197 these ideas, their elitist distrust for the organised working-class movement and their organic non-acceptance of the principles of democratic centralism.

p This provides further evidence of how the revisionists approach the socialist state: they, too, see only negative aspects, an element of bureaucracy, etatism and alienation. In solidarity with anti-communists like Leonhard or Brzezinski, the revisionists suggest abolishing the socialist states as quickly as possible for the sake of a transition to a “self- administration of producers”, referring, in particular, to the “ Yugoslav example”. In this, too, modern revisionism does not display originality. Day-to-day experience shows the steadily growing role played by the Communist parties of the working class and the need for the socialist state in order to ensure the complete triumph of communism. This is demanded not only by the objective internal requirements of developed socialist society but also by the conditions of the struggle between the two opposing world systems, between capitalism and socialism.

p A new element in many of the revisionist pronouncements at the close of the 1960s as compared with the revisionism of the past is the claim to have theoretically resolved the problems of the scientific and technological revolution. Their points of departure are: a) the denial that under state- monopoly capitalism the working class plays a revolutionary role; b) the absolutisation of the role played by intellectuals and by their “critical thinking”;^^14^^ c) the absolutisation of the mass media and means of manipulating public consciousness; and d) the denial that the social consequences of the scientific and technological revolution differ fundamentally under socialism and capitalism.

p It is nonetheless unquestionable that for its role in social production and for its role in the revolutionary process the proletariat of the industrialised capitalist countries has been and remains the principal force of the socialist revolution.

p As regards the intelligentsia, its numerical growth and its role in the context of science’s conversion into a direct 198 productive force, the Communist parties adhering to the positions of creative Marxism-Leninism had been studying these new developments long before the appearance of the writings of Garaudy or Fischer. In the Main Document adopted by the 1969 Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties it is stated: “In this age, when science is becoming a direct productive force, growing numbers of intellectuals are swelling the ranks of wage and salary workers. Their social interests intertwine with those of the working class; their creative aspirations clash with the interests of the monopoly employers, who place profit above all else. Despite the great diversity in their positions, different groups of intellectuals are coming more and more into conflict with the monopolies and the imperialist policy of governments. The crisis of bourgeois ideology and the attraction of socialism help to bring intellectuals into the anti-imperialist struggle.”^^15^^ The conditions are arising for a broad working-class alliance not only with the peasants and the urban middle strata but also with the bulk of the intelligentsia. The need for this alliance is becoming more apparent in dealing with questions of war and peace and democracy, and democratic control of production and of cultural, information, scientific and educational institutions.

p An indication of this is the New Left movement. Uniting a segment of radical intellectuals and young people, mostly students, lacking ideological and organisational homogeneity and easily succumbing to the influence of the revolutionary verbiage of the Maoists or the Trotskyists, this movement signified a shift to the Left. Where the Communists were able to free the participants of the New Left movement of their anti-communist prejudices and of the influence of the Maoist and Trotskyist splitters, the majority in the movement began gravitating toward a union with the workingclass movement, seriously studying the theory of MarxismLeninism and waging a more consistent and organised struggle against imperialism. At the same time, this movement provided further evidence that the intelligentsia has by no 199 means become part of the proletariat and has not, as Garaudy claims, formed a “new historic bloc”. The intelligentsia retains its specific features as a special social stratum in the state-monopoly capitalist states despite the scientific and technological revolution.

p The problems of the scientific and technological revolution and its social consequences are resolved quite differently in developed socialist society. This society, it was re- emphasised at the 24th Congress of the CPSU, faces the historic task of organically combining the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution with the advantages of the socialist economic system. Moreover, socialism fosters the further union between the socialist working class, the socialist peasantry and the new socialist intelligentsia and the gradual erasure of the essential distinctions between town and countryside and between labour by brain and by hand in the process of building the classless communist society.

p Here the working class remains not only society’s main productive force but also the leading force in the drive for communism. Its revolutionary spirit, discipline, organisation and sense of collectivism, the growth of its cultural and educational level and political activity, and its communist ideology determine its leading role in the development of mature socialist society. This is most fully reflected by the natural heightening of the leadership provided by the Communist Party as the highest form of the working class’s political organisation and as the vanguard of all working people in a socialist society.

p In the 1960s the question of the role played by the Communist Party became the focus of the struggle between the Marxist-Leninists and the different schools of revisionism. In early 1968 the revisionists in Czechoslovakia used the motto of “democratising socialism” to demand the diminution of the activity and influence of the Communist Party and its self-removal from power, from the direction of economic policy, from the guidance of the mass media, and so on. In areas where these demands encountered little resistance they 200 were immediately utilised by anti-socialist elements to set up a “spontaneous movement” as a counter-balance to genuinely socialist organisation and consciousness. The mass media were seized b,y petty-bourgeois revisionist ideologists and propagandists and used for undermining the influence of the socialist administration, the working-class organs of power.

p It must be noted that modern revisionism frequently uses the growing influence of new mass media on public opinion, particularly television and the cheap gutter press with its huge circulation, to manipulate people’s minds, spread anticommunist ideology and reinforce anti-communist prejudices in the capitalist countries. Although most of the new mass media are run by the monopolies, the governments and the political parties of monopoly capital, they give the growing democratic, anti-monopoly forces new opportunities for influencing people and spreading the truth.

p Were the seemingly all-powerful US press agencies and radio able to avert the worldwide anti-American feeling and movement in defence of the peace and independence of the peoples of Indochina? The torrents of anti-communist propaganda can no longer halt the growth of the world socialist community’s influence on the minds of people in the rest of the world and stop the proliferating interest in the ideas of socialism, in the theory of MarxismLeninism.

p It is evidently not a matter of absolutising the role and significance of the mass media but one of placing them under democratic control, of perceiving the laws of the overall intensification of the ideological struggle on a global scale, of the Communist parties’ correctly using the new possibilities being created by the scientific and technological revolution for moulding a revolutionary class consciousness. In the Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, a massive campaign was unfolded at the end of the 1960s against the reactionary newspaper baron Axel Springer, whose daily publications with their multimillion circulation poison people’s 201 minds with anti-communism and misinformation. A situation can and should be created where the worker will adopt a critical attitude to such misinformation and ultimately reject it. When even the Springer press has to write anxiously about the growing influence of the more than 300 factory newspapers published by the German Communist Party and disseminated at the largest factories in West Germany and about the growing influence of GDR radio broadcasts on public opinion in West Germany, this strikingly disproves the revisionists’ capitulatory thesis that the media for the mass manipulation of the public mind in the hands of the monopolies are omnipotent.

p Relative to the fundamental distinctions between the consequences of the scientific and technological revolution under capitalism and socialism, the revisionists’ negation or disregard of these distinctions are refuted by the experience and achievements of developed socialist society. Unlike monopoly capitalism, socialism is able to successfully resolve for the welfare of man and mankind the problems related to the rational use of natural resources, air and water pollution, urban development, mass motoring and the emergence of a “consumer society” with the rise of the living standard and cultural level. The advantages of the socialist system of secondary and higher education have received worldwide recognition long ago. Growing recognition is being received throughout the world by the new qualitative aspects distinguishing life in developed socialist society from the American way of life: the all-round promotion of each person’s creative abilities, the true socialist humanism that permeates culture, education and everyday life, the mounting social activity and consciousness of the people and the assertion of new moral values.

p In the latter half of the 1960s vacillating Marxists degenerated from a revision of the philosophical principles of Marxism to a total rejection of Marxism-Leninism, to apostasy. The most dangerous were those manifestations of revisionism which took place in a ruling Communist Party 202 when a section of its leadership not only failed to wage a consistent struggle against revisionism but for a time itself slid into revisionist positions: this refers to the crisis in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

p The decisions of the CPC Central Committee’s plenary meeting in December 1970 and the 14th Congress of the CPC (May 1971) contain a detailed analysis of how the ideology and policy of revisionism, which had become an instrument of anti-communism, prepared the ground for this crisis. Anti-Sovietism and nationalism were the common denominator of the anti-communist and revisionist forces in Czechoslovakia. By dissociating themselves from the class position of proletarian internationalism and gradually yielding to the pressure of bourgeois nationalism, that acted under the banner of anti-Sovietism, the ideologists of revisionism in Czechoslovakia tried to create a massive basis for anti-socialist actions.

p The broad popularity of the ideas of socialism made the anti-socialist forces fight them under the revisionist slogan of “improving” or “democratising” or “liberalising” socialism.

p The “new model” of socialism suggested by the revisionists thus proved to be a petty-bourgeois model of “ consumer” socialism. The common foundation of all these versions of revisionist models was their rejection of the leading role of the working class and its Marxist-Leninist Party in a socialist society. With this was linked the revisionist rejection of the class approach to the question of state and power under socialism, in other words, a revision of the pivotal issue of the entire theory of Marxism-Leninism, namely, the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. With this “model” is also linked the revision of the political economy of socialism directed toward abolishing planning, rejecting the priority of class policy over economics during the period of socialist construction, and proclaiming market self- regulation as the basis of the economy.

p A profound critical analysis of the.reasons for the crisis in Czechoslovakia and the role played by revisionism in 203 precipitating it is given in the “Report of the CPC Central Committee on the Party’s Work and Social Development after the 13th Congress of the CPC and the Party’s Further Tasks”. “In the period when Czechoslovakia became the object of the concentrated pressure and ideological subversion of Western anti-communist centres,” Gustav Husak said at the 14th Congress of the CPC, “which directed their activities toward discrediting socialist principles and values, kindling nationalistic and anti-Soviet feeling and fanning petty-bourgeois prejudices, the Party leadership’s unprincipled policy resulted in the key positions in culture, the social sciences, the mass media and also the public organisations and state and Party organs being taken over by people who lacked staunchness and even by those who did not adhere to socialist positions.”^^16^^

p Further, he noted: “An objective analysis of the course of events during that period makes it plain that without the opportune internationalist assistance of our closest socialist allies, the power of the working class and working people in our country would have been defeated.. .. This internationalist act saved the lives of thousands of people, ensured the internal and external conditions for peaceful and tranquil labour, strengthened the Western boundaries of the socialist community and destroyed the hopes of the imperialist circles for a revision of the results of the Second World War.”^^17^^

p Thus ended one of the most dangerous and serious actions of the revisionists at the close of the 1960s. Thus was foiled one of international anti-communism’s strongest trumps— revisionism in Czechoslovakia. It is necessary to recall these lessons of the struggle against revisionism because the Rightwing revisionists in the CPC leadership in 1968 went to considerable lengths to misinform the international workingclass and communist movement of the actual substance of the crisis in Czechoslovakia and the CPC and of the extent of the counter-revolutionary threat in that country, coalescing here, too, with the mammoth anti-Soviet campaign that 204 was launched throughout the world by the ideologists of imperialism and anti-communism.

p Present-day revisionism has a number of specifics. One of them springs from its attempts to make capital out of the consequences of the scientific and technological revolution by accusing Marxism-Leninism of ignoring this problem. Actually, it was Marx who theoretically substantiated the role played by science in the development of the productive forces and showed that science naturally tended to turn into a direct productive force, while Lenin charted the ways of using science and technology during the building of the new, socialist society.

p Similarly untenable are the attempts of the revisionists to reject the dictatorship of the proletariat under slogans of “liberalisation” and “democratisation” and to identify it with the errors generated by the personality cult and subjectivism. The abstract, non-class interpretations of the revisionists conceal their attempts to replace the leading role of the working class by the leading role of the petty- bourgeois “spiritual elite” with arguments about a “pluralist” society, and to discredit the administrative mechanism of socialist society under the guise of combating the “apparatus”.

p In actual fact the development of the working class of socialist society is accompanied by the growth of its influence on social processes. This finds concrete expression also in the growth of that class’s political vanguard, its Marxist- Leninist Party. By consciously shaping the world outlook of millions of people, the Communist Party of socialist society creates for each person the conditions for his all-round, harmonious development, for his conscious, enterprising, responsible and creative participation in social life, for his real participation in the management of social affairs.

p It is the Party that makes sure that the scientific and technological revolution results not in comfortable idleness and consumer ideology, a withdrawal into the petty world of philistine or even acquisitive moods but in more leisure time 205 and a higher level of culture and education that would lead to the moulding of the citizen of communist society.

p In the capitalist world the scientific and technological revolution cannot yield and is not yielding the effects the revisionists speak of. On the contrary, the role of the proletariat is growing, the economic (monetary) and spiritual crisis of bourgeois society is mounting and the mass political army of the socialist revolution is emerging.

p Neither anti-communism nor revisionism have been or will be able to halt the increasing interest that the masses, particularly the young people, are showing in MarxismLeninism. Even the New Left movement, in which anti- communist prejudices and revisionist ideas persist, is finding that its finest segment is drawing steadily closer to the workers and the communist movement, adopting the ideological positions of true Marxism-Leninism and joining in the active and organised anti-imperialist struggle. But even here a systematic, uncompromising struggle by the Communists against all manifestations of revisionism is the condition for the triumph of this trend.

p At present the ideologists of anti-communism in the USA and West Germany are tending to urge reideologisation because “deideologisation” is making it increasingly harder to counter the growing influence of the proletariat’s revolutionary scientific ideology.

True, anti-communism is looking for and sometimes finding new renegades among the multimillion-strong workingclass movement and vociferously praising them with the aid of the mass media. But these outcasts cannot halt the irreversible consolidation and strengthening of the militant unity of the world communist and working-class movement. The lessons of the struggle against revisionism in the 1960s have not passed in vain, and there is every reason to regard the future with optimism.