Anti-Revisionist
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In the Marxist-Leninist communist movement, an anti-revisionist is one who favors a stricter interpretation of the ideology in accordance with the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. The term is not pejorative; it is used in self-description by the "anti-revisionists" themselves. The anti-revisionist movement is split as to whether or not to include Mao in the "principal theoreticians" of Marxism-Leninism: Maoists and similar groups typically include Mao in such a position, whereas Hoxhaist or pro-Albania groups do not.
To anti-revisionists, the People's War core of Maoism and the anti-fascism of Stalin's policies are seen as fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism that cannot be abandoned lest the principles of communism as a whole be abandoned along with them. Anti-revisionism is seen by its followers as a healthy, solid, scientific ideological road, devoid of both the alleged corruption and elitism of Trotskyism, and the perceived idealism of Left Communism.
The opposite term, revisionism, is most often used pejoratively. In its original sense, "anti-revisionism" was used at the beginning of the twentieth century during the split between Leninism and Social Democracy. The Leninists called themselves "anti-revisionists" because they opposed the revisionists; that is, opposed the Social Democrats who believed that Marx's ideas should be revised to allow for the possibility of socialistic progress without revolution.
The term anti-revisionist, while a positively-connotated term denoting an opposition to Trotskyism, reformism, left communist currents, and revisionism from the point of view of what adherents claim is a more truthfully revolutionary sector of the Radical Left, is nevertheless usually controversial among those who claim to adhere to it. Groups will sometimes fight over which of them is really the "true" anti-revisionist.
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[edit] Background
Self-proclaimed anti-revisionists firmly oppose the self-proclaimed socialist market economy reforms initiated in Communist countries by leaders like Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. They generally refer to such reforms and states as state capitalist and social-imperialist. They also reject Trotskyism and its "Permanent Revolution" as hypocritical by pointing out that Trotsky himself had at one time thought it acceptable that socialism could work in a single country as long as that country was industrialized, but that Trotsky had considered Russia too backward to achieve such industrialization — what it later in fact did achieve, mostly through his archenemy Stalin's Five Year Plans. In their own right, anti-revisionists also acknowledge that the Soviet Union contained a "new class" or "'red' bourgeoisie," but they generally place the real beginning of the formation of that class on Nikita Khruschev and his successors. Therefore, in anti-revisionist circles, there is very little talk of class conflict in the Soviet Union before 1956, except when talking about specific contexts such as the Russian Civil War (when some agents of the former feudal ruling class tried to retake state power from the Bolsheviks) and World War II (fought principally between communists and fascists, according to the anti-revisionist viewpoint).
During the Sino-Soviet split, the governments of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong and Albania under Hoxha proclaimed themselves taking an anti-revisionist line and denounced Khrushchev's policies. In the United States, those who supported China or Albania at the time were expelled from the United States Communist Party under orders from Moscow, and in 1961 they formed the Progressive Labor Movement. Anti-revisionist groups were further divided by the Sino-Albanian split, with those following Albania being loosely described as Hoxhaist.
Several communist parties in the United States still see themselves as explicitly anti-revisionist. Not every contemporary communist party around the world adhering to elements of anti-revisionism necessarily adopts the label "anti-revisionist"; many such organizations may call themselves Maoist, Marxist-Leninist or even just simply "revolutionary communist". The Workers Party of Korea still claims an anti-revisionist political line; however, this may not be an accurate label either in self-description or description by others, because of the official 'supersedence' of Marxist-Leninist thought in North Korea by the ideology of Juche.
A few anti-revisionists still positively regard the teachings of Enver Hoxha and/or Kim Il-Sung, but this is rare.
[edit] Criticisms
Critics point out that anti-revisionists, like the Communist leaders that preceded them, have an inclination towards the cult of personality, and that an indispensable principle of the scientific method is actually the desirability of revision. Critics also argue against the elevation of a doctrine to the status of unquestionable truth, which they say anti-revisionists do, and that therefore, while anti-revisionism may be ideologically pure, it would be far from scientific. Some critics of anti-revisionism call it a dogma and would even liken it to treating Marxist political theory as a type of religious faith.
Anti-revisionists counter that these criticisms amount to mischaracterization and slander; that there is a difference between development of a party line to arrive at different conclusions, and the attempt of revisionism to, in their view, revise Marxist fundamentals; and that critics' characterization of anti-revisionists, even taken alone, does not correspond to what anti-revisionists do in practice from day to day.
[edit] Anti-Revisionist leaders
Those at a state level claiming an anti-revisionist orientation actually vary very widely in their ideological perspectives from within communism. An amalgamated list of the more famous self-proclaimed Anti-revisionist leaders:
- Enver Hoxha
- Mao Tse-Tung
- Hardial Bains
- Bill Bland
- Harry Haywood
- Bob Avakian
- Prachanda (of Prachanda Path)
- Kim Jong-il
- Jiang Qing
- Gang of Four
- Ludo Martens
- Jose Maria Sison
[edit] Some Anti-Revisionist Groups
- Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
- Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
- Communist Party of the Philippines
- Freedom Road Socialist Organization
- Maoist Internationalist Movement
- Communist Party of India (Maoist)
- Ray O. Light Group
- Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
- Workers Party of Korea
