How are we (if we even are) revisionists? Is there any truth to Stalinist and Marxist-Leninist claims?
If there's an official story, and you revise it, you are, by definition, revisionist.
It is a pretty useless term in my opinion. If you use the definition chegitz uses Marxism is "revisionist" to the core, as changing circumstances mean you need to change your tactics, strategy, programme or theory too.
Exactly.
We revised that St- ALL HAIL STALIN!
If anything they are "revisionists" seeing as they represent a revision of leninism on many key issues. But generally, tthese days revisionism is a pretty useless term.
"Revisionism" is a moronic conspiracy theory that Stalinists(and most Maoists, but not all), use to explain why socialism in the Soviet Union and China collapsed. Obsessed with cult-worship of their 'great leaders', they are unable to explain how if the horrific abuses of power committed by Stalin and by Mao in his later years are all capitalist/Trotskyist lies, then why did these countries revert back to capitalism? Their pat answer is that 'revisionists' seized power after the death of both leaders and 'restored capitalism', Kruschev in the USSR in 1956, Deng Xiaopeng in China in 1976. The Stalinists are never able to explain how such treason could emerge in the leadership of what they claim was a healthy workers state, nor why their was very little or no resistance to such a capitalist coup on the part of the working class, nor do they explain how they will be able to avoid a similar outcome in the future-apparently the 'great leader' will have to be immortal or something like that.
Stalin was actually the arch-revisionist. Khrushchev merely put the icing on the cake. Like the reformist revisionists of the Second International, the bureaucratic revisionists of the Third represented not the workers but a privileged caste of labor aristocrats who had weaseled their way to leadership of the global movement. The Soviet aristocracy, like the corrupt union bureaucracy in the imperialist countries, had no confidence in the world revolution and its social interests diverged from those of the proletariat. Stalin's regime, after beating the working-class opposition through a reactionary alliance with the petty bourgeoisie, abolished partmaximum and enshrined bureaucratic privilege, destroyed the Comintern and revised proletarian internationalism, murdered the leaders of October and eradicated the revolutionary vanguard. The centrist clique turned wartime restrictions on democratic centralism into the permanent despotic mandate of a Great Russian chauvinist empire that resembled the feudal religious state that had collapsed in 1917. Trotsky had correctly predicted the bureaucratic caste would restore outright market capitalism in Russia long before Mao made a curse-word out of "revisionism." Is it not high time to tell the revisionists: don’t you dare hide behind Lenin and the theoretical tradition of the party!? http://www.marxists.org/archive/trot...8/3rd/ti02.htm
Any ideology that does not constantly test and revise its conclusions on the base of practice is a religion, not a political philosophy. Marxism is no exception. Where theory holds, it should be kept and improved. Where it does not, it should be scrapped and reformulated. I find that the term revisionist is generally only used by outmatched hardliners who are unable to explain why strategies and tactics that hold theoretically, but fail practically, should not be modified.
