p The international working-class movement is one of the main streams of the present-day revolutionary process. Antimonopoly feelings have been maturing among broad sections of the working people, while the working class, playing an ever greater role and displaying a militant spirit of revolutionary struggle, has been staging ever more powerful and protracted strikes and taking other action in defence of its economic interests and political rights. In the course of the class struggle, the influence of bourgeois ideology on the working people is being increasingly undermined, anticommunist preconceptions and ideas of class collaboration implanted by bourgeois propaganda and Right-socialist and reformist leaders are being blasted.

p “In its actions against the working-class movement imperialism violates democratic rights and freedoms and uses naked violence, brutal methods of police persecution and anti-labour legislation. Moreover, it has recourse to demagogy, bourgeois reformism and opportunist ideology and policy, and is constantly in quest of new methods to undermine the working-class movement from within and ’ integrate’ it into the capitalist system.”  [286•1 

p With the changing balance of forces on the world arena and the sharpening class struggle in the capitalist countries it is of especial importance to the bourgeoisie to spread the illusion that the working people can secure their aspirations without any revolutionary transformation of society, within the framework of the existing system. These illusions are being spread among the workers by the ideologists of modern reformism, an ideological-political trend which is hostile to Marxism-Leninism, which splits the working class, and which exerts a political and ideological influence on sizable sections of the population in the capitalist coun- tries.  [286•2  Right-wing Social-Democrats continue to be the main 287 vehicles of bourgeois influence on the proletariat. Its policy objectively helps the monopolies and the capitalist state to restrain the proletarian revolutionary action, slows down its struggle for social progress, supports the foreign policy of imperialism, and pursues the anti-communist line.

p During the revolutionary upswing of 1917-23, the working class was split up into two sections: the communist and revolutionary section, and the Social-Democratic and reformist section. This was the result of the long influence exerted by the imperialist bourgeoisie on the upper sections of the working class and the then Right-wing leaders of international Social Democracy, who had long been suborned and corrupted by imperialist hand-outs from their monopoly superprofits.

p The leading workers’ contingents of all countries directed by Lenin, united under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, in contrast to the opportunism which ruined the Second International, and the ultra-Leftist tendencies which have also done the working-class movement much harm.

p Lenin carried on a relentless struggle against all forms and stripes of opportunism, whether Social-Democratic reformism, the vehicle of bourgeois influence within the working-class movement, or revisionism, which helps to undermine the Communist Parties from inside.

There is much fundamental meaning today in Lenin’s warning that it is impossible to carry on a successful fight against imperialism without a principled fight against opportunism. Lenin’s rich legacy continues to be the sharpest weapons in the struggle against opportunist trends even today.