The Anatomy of Revisionism added
Click here to go to the book in the document archive.
Note:
A review of this book is coming. This is a rare book, hard to come by. It is also dated and has some drawbacks today, mostly due to struggles that have taken place, since the book was written, over white utopianism, the principal contradiction, the theory of the new bourgeoisie in the party, and Enver Hoxha's ideas. Other potential points of disagreement include Edwards' claim of when the labor aristocracy became a majority of the u.$. working class. Nonetheless, the book has an edge compared to much of what's on the Internet, because it relates revisionism to the growth of parasitism since Lenin's time and suggests a sociological explanation of revisionism in terms of parasitism.
MIWS therefore sees no reason why Maoists should limit themselves to distributing works by Hoxhaites and other anti-Maoists, such as Bill Bland, on counterrevolution, revisionism, or anti-communism, as correct as those works are, when there are hundreds of Web pages mentioning those works but nobody talking about The Anatomy of Revisionism. MIWS chalks it up to nihilism, laziness, or simply a lack of resources. Not reading these books can turn into a form of nihilism. So, people should be on the look out for old material that may be little-known but is significant. MIWS now intends to increase the readership of Anatomy by a hundred-fold via the Internet. Edwards was saying in the early '70s that the labor aristocracy was a majority of the u.$. working class in the '50s and that, by the time of writing, recognizing the extent of parasitism was a life-or-death question of revisionism-or-Marxism. What can one say about people denying the realities of parasitism in 2007, almost four decades later?
It's not MIWS's intention to build a cult-type following around Edwards. In spite of this, when you have two quality books written by the same author under their name, biographical questions may come up out of curiosity about what else he or she has written, but mostly because of Liberalism and individualism. It's a tricky issue because finding out what someone has written that isn't listed in a common database can actually be a form of intelligence activity. Frankly, MIWS knows little about the author biographically. Readers will recognize that Edwards is the same author who wrote Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. Biography would be interesting only to the extent it pointed in the direction of other works by the same author. MIWS isn't looking into this and hasn't inquired about this, but those who do should use public sources only, such as the Web page indicating Sraffa read writings by an "H. W. Edwards," and maybe not even that. As far as these individual books, it doesn't matter, because they would be correct even if the author turned out to have links to British or u.$. intelligence.
In regard to the preparation of this document, this wasn't a quick scan-and-click job. There was a manual component to preparation. There was an effort to preserve formatting and some of the layout, and original typos/misspellings etc. were kept, but there is an element of humyn error. Those with questions should consult the original book. Liberties with formatting were taken, particularly with the headings in the reference notes section.
2007 July