Introduction
In January of 1969, Enver Hoxha of the Party of Labor of Albania published in the Party newspaper a piece titled “The Demagogy of the Soviet Revisionists Cannot Conceal Their Traitorous Countenance”. This theoretical work detailed several important aspects concerning revisionism.
Among these was the relationship between social-fascism and social-imperialism. Prior to the anti-revisionist struggle of Enver Hoxha, these terms were left ill-defined as to how they pertained to a society as a whole, previously being used by figures such as Vladimir Lenin to denote opportunist traitors to the communist movement – Kautsky and co. These people were, in short, “socialist in words, imperialists in deeds”.
Social-fascism was much the same – “socialism in words, fascism in deeds”. This was to no fault of the great minds that were Lenin and Stalin, for revisionism had not taken hold under their leadership and restored capitalism (minus Titoite Yugoslavia in the 1940s).
The social-fascism and imperialism in Hoxha’s era was different, however. In contrast to the Kautskys and Bernsteins who did not take the helm of a previously existent socialist base, Niktia Khrushchev and co. seized power of the first socialist state in history and had the task of destroying it from the top-down.
Hoxha’s work “The Demagogy…” details
this form of social-fascism and imperialism – the dictatorship of the
new bourgeoisie. Among Hoxha’s findings was how social-fascism is the home policy to social-imperialism, the foreign policy:
“Social-fascism in the home policy has social-imperialism as its direct continuation in foreign policy; and while they seek to camouflage fascism with ‘socialist’ phraseology, the Soviet leaders strive to conceal their imperialism with the slogan of ‘proletarian internationalism.’” –Enver Hoxha
Revisionist states are fascistic, but this fascism is unlike the fascism of "conventional" capitalist countries like Hitlerite Germany and Fascist Italy. This fascism is, to quote Hoxha, camouflaged with “socialist” phraseology. To some extent, the same is true with fascism in general, be it with the “National
Socialism” of Hitler or “National
Syndicalism” of Franco. All the same, these are the means by which the fascists – social and otherwise – throw sand into the eyes of the masses.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics after de-Stalinization (1956) and People’s Republic of China after the Reform and Opening-Up are prime examples of revisionist states, and thus we will analyze these two as they pertain to fascism.
Khrushchevite-Brezhnevite Soviet Union
The revisionist Soviet Union, that of the new bourgeoisie, inherited a firm socialist basis developed by Lenin and Stalin in the 1920s-’50s. The task of destroying this foundation would take nearly half a century to do in full.
Contrary to Khrushchevite propaganda, the transfer of power from Stalin to Khrushchev was not a democratic effort of the masses, but a military putsch in all but name. The Stalinist “Anti-Party Group” of Molotov, Kaganovich, and others had attempted to peacefully and democratically oust Khrushchev from power but were halted by General Zhukov and his forces. From this point forward, hopes for restoring the proletarian dictatorship from the “state of the whole people” (that is, of the new bourgeoisie) were dashed (see Kaganovich’s “June 1957”).
The Soviet Union of Khrushchev and later Brezhnev was a military despotism without democratic rights. It was bourgeois, but not a bourgeois democracy. It was the sole rule of the revisionist Soviet Communist Party without other parties of the bourgeois democratic type. In the context of a socialist state, having a single party is needed as the proletariat does not require anymore to represent its interests. However, under capitalism-revisionism, this principle is flipped on its head, and the new bourgeois state becomes aligned with the bourgeois party-states that were Nazism and Italian Fascism.
The capitalist-revisionist Soviet Union operated on a corporatist basis, and represented a particularly brutal formation of state-monopoly capitalism. The workers were lacking in basic labor rights and were confined to the state-operated trade unions. Internal differences between the smaller and larger union republics were intensified, and the poorer union republics were made into internal colonies of the Soviet social-fascist state.
Brezhnevism was merely “Khrushchevism without Khrushchev”, albeit in a much more belligerent form. It sought the total subjugation of the Warsaw Pact states to the whims of the Soviet Union, even entailing invasion and military occupation as seen in, for instance, Czechoslovakia and later Afghanistan.
The crisis of revisionism and its ultimate goal of the total restoration of capitalism would be complete by the late 1980s. Under Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule starting in 1985, the Soviet state would abolish even the outward semblance of socialism and the Soviet Union itself would be dissolved and replaced by the explicitly bourgeois Russian Federation.
People’s Republic of China
The People’s Republic of China was revisionist from its inception in 1949. Its paramount leader, Mao Zedong, was a progressive bourgeois democratic revolutionary, but not a Marxist-Leninist. His historical role would, however, become reactionary in the 1960s with the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” which, as Hoxha stated in
Imperialism and the Revolution, was neither great, nor proletarian, nor cultural, and most of all not a revolution.
Mao Zedong, a petite bourgeois idealist, incorporated many elements of class collaboration into his “thought”, particularly when it came to New Democracy, which advocated a “joint-dictatorship” between non-proletarian and bourgeois classes in contrast to the sole iron rule of the proletariat in Lenin and Stalin’s concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Mao’s view of a “third” form of state echoed the fascistic notion of a “third position” between socialism and capitalism.
“Thus the numerous types of state system in the world can be reduced to three basic kinds according to the class character of their political power: (1) republics under bourgeois dictatorship; (2) republics under the dictatorship of the proletariat; and (3) republics under the joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes.” –Mao Zedong, On New Democracy
As Lenin stated in
What Is To Be Done?, there is no “third” course for the proletariat in class war – there can only be socialism or capitalism. To say otherwise is to commit a massive mistake.
When Mao Zedong died and the Gang of Four was overthrown in 1976, the PRC would become a complete fascist dictatorship under Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Chinese social-imperialism manifested in the formation of semi-colonies and puppet regimes abroad, the invasion of various countries (particularly Vietnam in 1979), etc.
Chinese social-imperialism gained worldwide dominance by the 2000s, when the Chinese state entered into the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. Under Jiang Zemin’s tenure as leader of the Communist Party, the theory of the “Three Represents” was introduced, which allowed large capitalists into the Party and upheld a fascist-corporatist economic model, which was perfected under Xi Jinping in the 2010s.
Today, China is a firm social-imperialist and social-fascist state which maintains among the largest exports of capital of any country via initiatives such as the Belt and Road and Going Global. Internally, it curtails even the most elementary democratic and labor rights and forces its workers to labor under repressive conditions for the benefit of its domestic capitalists as well as Western imperialists. All workers are confined to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and independent union organizing is forbidden. Further, China, like the revisionist Soviet Union and other fascist states, operates under state-monopoly capitalism, with the bourgeois state holding large ownership in the economy.
Conclusion
"[...] Revisionism, which is capitalism in a new form, the enemy of the unity of peoples, the inciter of reactionary nationalism, of the drive towards and establishment of the most ferocious fascist dictatorship which does not permit even the slightest sign of formal bourgeois democracy. Revisionism is the idea and action which leads the turning of a country from socialism back to capitalism, the turning of a communist party into a fascist party, it is the inspirer of ideological chaos, confusion, corruption, repression, arbitrarily, instability and putting the homeland up for auction." –Enver Hoxha, The Khrushchevites
Revisionism has shown itself time and time again to be one of the most combative enemies of the proletariat. It is bourgeois ideology which has the idiosyncrasy of masking itself as proletarian ideology to deceive the workers and suck their revolutionary energies towards its bourgeois purposes.
It must be understood that there is no compromise with revisionist states – they are not “actually existing socialism” (see our previous article on the topic), and they do not warrant even “critical” support. Revisionist states are either social-imperialist (USSR, China, Vietnam) or imperialized by a social-imperialist power (Cuba, Laos, etc.).
To that extent, the revisionist camp of countries must be regarded as as much enemies of the international proletariat as the outwardly bourgeois countries.
Workers of the World, Unite!
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