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of conscious opposition to Trotskyist parties in these revolutionary movements within countries for the political overthe international working class throw of the Stalinist bureauwhich might disrupt this cracy and for world revolution.

Quite simply, "revisionism' is a general term meaning the revising, and therefore the abandonment of basic propositions, principles and concepts developed by the revolutionary movement.

Under this general heading go a wide variety of deviations Within the bureaucratic leaderships of workers' political from the positions developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, many of which are explained in more detail below.

When we attack revisionism it does not mean that we regard Marxism as an unchanging. wooden dogma.

Stalinism is the term to describe the politics of the bureaucratic caste headed by Josef Stalin, which rose to political power in the acute economic dislocation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and which remains there to this day.

"The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces.

But the apparatus of the workers' state underwent a com complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class, and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country's economy.

The bureaucratisation of a backward and isolated workers' state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation-not only theoretically, but this time practically-of the But in trying to understand, respond to and intervene in today's struggles, it is necessary to start from and to defend the methods and principles established in the past by revolutionaries who have drawn on their wealth of practical and theoretical experience. theory of socialism country.

The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers state." (Trotsky, Transitional This bureaucratisation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union led directiy to the transformation of the Communist International and every one of the national Communist Parties from instruments of world revolution into the tools and mouthpieces of the Stalinist The Stalinists' privileges and position rested increasingly on balancing between the nationalised property relations of the Soviet Union on the one hand and delas with imperialism on the other-rationalised through Stalin's 1924 "theory" of building "socialism in a single country".

Conscious opposition This drove the bureaucracy states. by the mid 1930s to a position delicate balance of forces.

When in 1933 the crushing of the German working class by the Nazis failed to raise a flicker of interest or life from the Trotsky declared it completely bureaucratised and 'dead for the purposes of revolution'.

He cailed for the buriding of the Fourth International. Stalinism, however, lives on in the various national Communist Parties, still reflecting the counter-revolutionary politics of the parasitic Kremlin In the post war period this bureaucracy has ensured that even the collapse of imperialist control over Eastern Europe, parts of Asia and Cuba nas not led to independent proletarian revolutions.

In fighting Stalinism, we as Trotskyists start out from the defence and extension of the gains of the October revolution-the still-intact nationalised property relations in the USSR and the degenerated workers We argue for the building of In the wake, of the 1933 defeat of the German working class by Hitler, the Stalinist movement: reluctantly abandoned its catastrophic ultra-left policy, and in 1934 adopted the strategy of the all-inclusive "People's Front" against EPIGONISM: Epigones are corrupt the teachings of their le for the Stalinist bureaucracy, w