Opportunism

Within Marxist organizing, opportunism refers to the abandonment of long-term aims in favour of short-term political success, more specifically through affiliation with bourgeois governments. The prototypical example of opportunism is the complacency of Second International social democratic parties towards the declaration of the First World War. In this, critics such as Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin saw an abandonment of the working class character of these socialist parties.

Opportunism emerged with the development of the revolutionary movement of the working class in the second half of the 19th century. At first, its ideological foundation consisted of various forms of pre-Marxian socialism, and its tactics were borrowed from liberal reformists, as well as from various anarchist groups. During the period of the First and Second Internationals, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels criticized the opportunistic concepts and tactical aims of, on the one hand, Ferdinand Lassalle, Eduard Bernstein, and Konrad Schramm, for their direct surrender to the bourgeoisie, and on the other hand, Mikhail Bakunin and Louis August Blanqui, for pushing the working-class movement onto the path of adventurism. After the triumph of Marxism in the working-class movement, opportunism changed its ideological garb, clothing itself in Marxist phrases. In terms of its class nature, opportunism within the revolutionary working-class movement is a manifestation of petit bourgeois ideology and policy. In theoretical terms, it appears sometimes as revisionism and sometimes as dogmatism. Organizationally, it is sometimes manifested as liquidationism and sometimes as sectarianism. In terms of the direction of its influence on the revolutionary movement, it emerges sometimes as right and sometimes as “left” opportunism. One type of opportunism may be transformed into another.

Right opportunism is a changing totality of reformist theories and compromising tactical orientations that are aimed at the direct subordination of the working-class movement to the interests of the bourgeoisie and that abandon the fundamental interests of the working class in the name of short-term partial advantages. The concrete varieties of right opportunism are based on a fatalistic notion that replaces sober-minded consideration of objective conditions with worship of spontaneous economic development, mistakes small-scale reforms for the gradual introduction of socialism, and hopes for the automatic “transformation of capitalism into socialism”. The ideological principles of right opportunism are defense of class “cooperation”; rejection of the idea of socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and revolutionary methods of struggle; accommodation with bourgeois nationalism; and the transformation of legality and bourgeois democracy into fetishes. In most instances, right opportunism is a reflection of the attitudes of certain strata of the petite bourgeoisie or of certain groups in the working class, such as the workers’ aristocracy and the bureaucracy, whose conditions of existence are relatively tolerable.

As early as the late 19th century, right opportunism was widespread in the working-class movement. The revisionist ideas of Bernstein and later the dogmatic conceptions of Karl Kautsky were frequently used by opportunism as its ideological banner. After the deaths of Marx and Engels, the key positions in the major Social Democratic parties of Europe and in the Second International were gradually captured by right opportunists, including Kautsky, Henry Hyndman, and Heinrich Cunow. For many years, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and revolutionary Marxists in other countries waged an uncompromising struggle against right opportunism. After the collapse of the Second International (1914), the opportunist wing of the Social Democratic parties embarked irrevocably on a course leading to degeneration and became the precursor of many contemporary reformist parties, which have inherited the ideas of right opportunism and have completely abandoned Marxism.

With the emergence of the international communist movement, opportunism tried repeatedly to entrench itself in the ranks of the movement and waged a struggle against the theory and practice of Leninism. In the second half of the 20th century, right opportunism in the communist movement has emerged as right-wing revisionism. Draping themselves in the flag of anti-dogmatism and the “creative development of Marxism-Leninism”, its spokesmen (for example, Milovan Djilas, Imre Nagy, John Gates, and in the late 1960s, Roger Garaudy, Ernst Fischer, Franz Marek, and Boris Petkov) have used as ideological sources contemporary bourgeois and social reformist ideology, as well as the views of right opportunists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A sharp struggle developed, as a result of which the ideological positions of right opportunism were destroyed, and its spokesmen found themselves outside the communist movement.

“Left” opportunism is a highly volatile mixture of ultrarevolutionary theories and adventuristic tactical objectives that push the revolutionary working-class movement into unjustified actions and senseless sacrifices and defeats. The foundation of “left” opportunism consists of voluntarist concepts that play on the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The ideological underpinnings of “left” opportunism are reliance on “revolutionary violence” as a panacea for all ills, disregard for the stages of socioeconomic development, and a belief in “spurring on” revolutions and in “cavalry attacks” in economics. Trotskyism is typically cited as an example of “left” opportunism. As a rule, “left” opportunism expresses the psychology and attitudes of groups of the petite bourgeoisie and peasantry and members of the middle strata who fall into an extreme, anarchist revolutionary position when pressured by unrestrained exploitation or confronted with the difficulties of socialist construction. “Left” opportunism tries to push the revolutionary movement onto an adventurist path. Its erroneous actions, disguised in revolutionary, Marxist phraseology, discredit communism, thus playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

In "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin analyzed the essence of “left” opportunism and its various manifestations in the period of the formation of the world communist movement.

Since the early 1960s, the danger of “left” opportunism has increased. Contemporary “left” opportunism is distinguished by the fact that it first emerged as dogmatism and later took the form of “left-wing” revisionism. What is sometimes referred to as a particularly dangerous variety of this most recent “left” opportunist movement is Maoism, which became the state ideology in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. In the communist movement that Marxist-Leninists and “left” opportunists are engaged in, there is a sharp struggle concerning the basic problems of social development: for example, the essential character of the present epoch, the role of the main revolutionary forces, the issues of war and peace, the role of Third World countries, international détente, and ways of building socialism and broadening democracy. Contemporary “left” opportunism attempts to substitute its notions for all the components of Marxism–Leninism, and to split the commonwealth of socialist countries and the international communist movement. It slanderously equates the USSR and the US, referring to them as “the two superpowers,” and seeks to push Communists into taking an adventurist path. The struggle against both right and “left” opportunism is a current task of the world communist movement.

Further reading

• Opportunism and the art of the possible Template:On MIA by Rosa Luxemburg
• Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International Template:On MIA by Vladimir Lenin