I was reading Carrillo’s “Eurocommunism and the State” for an article and he did that thing a lot of revisionist do where they go “well everything is revisionism!!! Lenin was a revisionist!!! Marx was a revisionist of himself!!!” Etc. Etc.

But really they are, honestly probably purposefully, obfuscating what revisionism is. For example, he uses the change from war communism to the NEP to post-nep policies as an example of lenin being a revisionist of himself, which…no? That’s not what revisionism is. That’s just applying different policies to material conditions. I mean it gets a little more complicated obviously but I honestly do very much hate it.

  • Marat@lemmygrad.mlOP
    2·
    1 day ago

    It’s approaching the right direction.

    The key difference in my experience is adaptation vs revision.

    For example, saying “revolution can be led by a vanguard party leading the working class” isn’t revisionism, because it still holds the fundamental truths of class conflict

    But “Socialism can be formed by a small group of conspirators taking control of the state and imposinh socialism” is revisionism, as that is, essentially, a form of utopianism or ideologism [I know Blanqui wasn’t a marxist obviously, but you get the point. I’m also debating whether to include economism as a form of revisionism or not]

    Edit: This didn’t really answer that adaptation part.

    A better example would be that if someone said "Socialism could have been reformed into via universal suffrage in early 1800s Britain that [presumably, since that’s what Marx believed] isn’t revisionism [not just because it was what marx believed. I think there’s a section on this in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific].

    But if someone said “socialism can be reformed into via universal suffrage in modern britain” that would be revisionism. It’s one lense seeing two different things and coming to two different conclusions.