Anti-Revisionism - Background

Background

Self-proclaimed anti-revisionists firmly oppose the 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, even when they themselves could very easily be defined as such. They also reject Trotskyism and its "Permanent Revolution" as "hypocritical" by arguing that Leon 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 Joseph 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 blame for the formation of that class on Khrushchev and his successors, and not on Stalin. 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, representing the interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie respectively).

During the Sino-Soviet split, the governments of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong and the People's Republic of Albania under Enver Hoxha proclaimed themselves to be taking an anti-revisionist line and denounced Khrushchev's policies in the Soviet Union. 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 and other "new communist movement" communist parties. A short time later, anti-revisionist groups were further divided by the Sino-Albanian split, with those following Albania being loosely described as Hoxhaist.

On the whole, the original 1960s-era anti-revisionists tended to take a careful, selective approach to the Cuban Revolution and the way it soon aligned itself with Soviet ideas and practice, criticizing the latter action, while simultaneously acknowledging some aspects of Cuban self-described socialism as genuinely revolutionary — in particular the writing and thinking of Che Guevara. Anti-revisionists also took a hopeful approach towards the Vietnamese communists, expressing confidence that they too were genuinely revolutionary-communist in their aspirations, and supported their struggle against the United States in the Vietnam War — a side which, ironically, got a lot of support from the Soviet Union, anti-revisionists' "state capitalist" enemy.

Several present-day communist parties worldwide still see themselves as explicitly anti-revisionist, but not every such party 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, but the communist movement as a whole and anti-revisionists from the Maoist and Hoxhaist camps in particular tend to insist North Korea is a revisionist state, however many if not most Hoxhaists and Maoists are critically supportive of North Korea on grounds of Anti-imperialism.

Anti-revisionists aligned with Enver Hoxha and the line of the Albanian party of labor argue that Mao Zedong thought is itself a form of revisionism. Hoxhaists insist that Mao's Three Worlds Theory contradicted Marxism–Leninism and existed only to justify Mao's alliance with the United states that began in the early 1970s and his meeting with Nixon during the Sino-Soviet split that Enver Hoxha and the Hoxhaists opposed. Hoxhaists also argue that the theory of New Democracy and People's War were revisionist and anti-scientific. The Hoxhaist camp came into existence during the Sino-Albanian split.