p One of anti-communism’s main tendencies today is toward an intensification of its attempts to exercise a political and ideological influence on the working masses, particularly on the organised working-class movement. All sorts of opportunist trends, notably revisionism and social-reformism, serve as the main channels by which anti-communism penetrates the communist movement and the working-class movement as a whole.

p A closer look at the essence of opportunism helps to understand its social role and its relation to anti-communism. By and large, opportunism may be defined as an expression of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois ideology in the working-class movement. It denies the need for the class struggle, the revolutionary remoulding of the capitalist system and the seizure of political power by the working class.

Lenin regarded opportunism in the working-class movement as a social trend that accentuates transient, selfish, mercenary, specific aims to the detriment of the class interests and historic social mission of the proletariat. He noted that the essence of opportunism lay in “sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat”.^^1^^ As he put it, opportunism spelled out mainly class co-operation, a union 187 or agreement between the bourgeoisie and its antipode, the working class. Opportunism’s principal political function is to split the working-class movement and bind large contingents of the working class to the capitalist system politically and ideologically. The fact that the monopoly bourgeoisie receives huge monopoly profits enabling it to “bribe a large minority of workers”, Lenin said, facilitates the spread of opportunism.