1
The term “Marxism” is not used in the sense of a doctrine that was discovered and introduced by an individual named Karl Marx, but to refer to the doctrine that emerges with the modern industrial proletariat and which “accompanies” the latter throughout the entire course of a social revolution; and we continue to use the term “Marxism” despite the vast field of speculation and exploitation to which it has been subjected by a series of anti-revolutionary movements.
2
Marxism, in its sole valid definition, has three main groups of adversaries today. The first group: the bourgeoisie who proclaim the capitalist commodity type of economy to be permanent and its historical abolition and replacement by the socialist mode of production to be illusory, and consistently reject in its entirety the doctrine of economic determinism and the class struggle. The second group: the so-called Stalinist communists, who declare that they accept the Marxist doctrine of history and economics, but who advocate and defend, even in the highly developed capitalist countries, non-revolutionary demands, which are identical to, when not worse than, the politics (democracy) and economics (popular progressivism) of the traditional reformists. The third group: the self-declared advocates of the revolutionary doctrine and method who, nonetheless, attribute its current abandonment by the majority of the proletariat to defects and initial gaps in the theory that must therefore be rectified and brought up to date.
Deniers—falsifiers—modernizers. We fight against all three, and we consider the third group to be the worst of the lot.
3
The history of the Marxist left, that of radical Marxism, or more correctly, that of Marxism, consists in the successive defensive campaigns waged against every “wave” of revisionism that has attacked the various aspects of its doctrine and method, from the very commencement of its organic and monolithic formation that may be dated to the “Manifesto” of 1848. In other texts we have recorded the history of these struggles in the three historic Internationals against utopians, workerists, libertarians, reformist and gradualist social democrats, left wing syndicalists and right wing trade unionists, social patriots, and now the national or people’s communists. This struggle has affected the lives of four generations and throughout its various stages it is not to be identified with a series of names of individual persons, but with a well-defined and compact school and, in the historical sense, with a well-defined party.
4
This long, hard struggle would have lost its connection with the future resumption of the revolution if, instead of drawing the lesson of “invariance” from this struggle, it were to have accepted the banal idea that Marxism is a theory “undergoing a process of continuous historical elaboration” that changes with the changing course of events and the lessons subsequently learned. This is invariably the justification offered for all the betrayals that have accumulated since its inception, and it explains all the revolutionary defeats as well.