The road followed by revisionism also leads it to betray the working class and labouring masses in their struggles for their immediate demands and against the encroachments of capital.
Marxist-Leninists must stand, and do stand, in the van of the day-to-day struggle of the working class for their immediate economic demands, in their struggle to defend threatened democratic freedoms, in “the general methodical and revolutionary struggle for democracy” and in their actions to prevent world war.
This combination of struggles signifies for us the preparation and ripening of the subjective factors of revolution. That is to say, the consciousness and organization of the proletariat are to be raised in the course of these struggles to the highest level so that it can fulfil its historic mission of socialist revolution.
And that includes the strengthening of the vanguard party, the Communist Party, theoretically, politically and organizationally, and the strengthening of its ties with the masses.
In this sense, day-to-day struggles – the working out of their objectives and means of action – must be subordinated to realization of strategic aims and the final goal.
For the revisionist neo-reformists (as for the classical reformists), “the movement is everything, the final aim is nothing”. In their eyes, the pursuit of successive limited and immediate objectives, the realization of reforms within the framework of the capitalist system supposedly means evolution from capitalism to socialism.
But in wishing in this way to limit proletarian action within the laws, regulations and orders of bourgeois democracy, that is to say, the bourgeois dictatorship, the content of the “movement” itself is changed, becoming qualitatively different. It thus becomes an appendix to the policy of the bourgeoisie, a tool of class collaboration and a means of patching up the capitalist system; it takes a hand in the attempt to save the capitalist system.
This is what the practice of the modern revisionists in the capitalist countries leads to.
Particularly, where struggles for immediate economic demands are concerned, one of their disarming techniques is to oppose the large-scale movements carried out by joint, inter-trade efforts, divide up the working class by trades, enterprises and workshops, and encourage the ideas of craft unionism. They also oppose valid objectives of struggle and substitute for them pseudo-demands acceptable to the bourgeoisie in order to ensure social peace. They advocate capitalist social and economic plans. They use negotiations as a weapon to deter the working class from action. They practise parliamentary cretinism.
Hence in the course of these day-to-day struggles we are duty-bound to expose the modern revisionists before the broadest masses.