Opportunist

Marxism

Right-opportunism is the tendency to revise Marxism in the direction of liberalism, parliamentarism, economism, gradualism, or class compromise. In Lenin’s polemics, this means stripping Marxism of its revolutionary content while preserving its terminology. In The State and Revolution, Lenin argues that bourgeois ideologists and opportunists “doctor” Marxism by obscuring its revolutionary side, especially Marx’s teaching on the state, revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism gives the same Marxist-Leninist reading of the Second International: its opportunists adapted themselves to the bourgeoisie, while even many “orthodox” Marxists adapted themselves to the opportunists for the sake of unity, allowing opportunism to dominate. In practice, Right-opportunism may support reforms, elections, unions, or legal struggle, but it treats these as substitutes for revolutionary struggle rather than subordinate forms of it.