Title: Introduction: Polish philosophical revisionists in marxism
Abstract: The term 'philosophical revisionism in Marxism' has several meanings and applications.In our opinion there are good reasons to restrict it to certain philosophical conceptions in the countries in which Marxism or Marxism-Leninism was/is the official ideology and the "state philosophy." 1 In the case of the Soviet Bloc countries the broader term 'revisionism' is applied to complex political, ideological, and intellectual phenomena that came into being after the death of Stalin in 1953 2 .His death marked the beginning of a new era in these countries, although it became evident only in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev started the process of de-Stalinization with his Secret Speech delivered at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he denounced Stalin's repressive politics.In three Communist countries, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland, philosophical movements revising Marxism happened as a part of this process of de-Stalinization.In Yugoslavia, the Praxis school was a philosophical movement formed in the1960s and 1970s by Gajo Petrović, Milan Kangrga and Mihailo Marković 3 .The members of the school emphasized the necessity for a return to the real Marx distorted by Lenin, Stalin, and 1 At least in philosophy revisionism should not be identified with any creative modification of an existing theory but restricted to the alterations and corrections of a doctrine, i.e., a philosophical conception or its orthodox version that is guarded ideologically and politically. 2There were, of course, earlier modifications of Marxism, starting with the views of Eduard Bernstein and Jean Jaures, Leon Trotsky, and later Titoists.However, Polish revisionists didn't relate to these predecessors.