Revisionism Opportunism Empiricism

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and trade union organisations, opportunism means exploiting the strength of the working class not to secure its demands, but to secure the position and privilege of the leaders themselves.

Such leaders effectively balance between the two main classes of society, but remain, in the last analysis, committed to preserving a "peaceful coexistence between the working class and the capitalists.

But certain would-be 'revolutionaries', taking the occasional left wing speeches of such leaders at face value, seek through political compromises with them to find a short cut to the mass membership of their organisations.

Such behaviour, dropping both principles and programme in the hopes of easy pickings, is also opportunism.

One of the currents that argues that the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union in the mid 1920s amounted to a reversal of the gains of the October 1917 revolution and the establishment of the bureaucracy as a new ruling class in what was now a "state capitalist" regime.

This superficial analysiswhich sees the Kremlin bureaucracy in a one-sided, a-historical way-is now most often encountered in the British Socialist Workers Party (formerly the international Socialists).

The founder of IS, Tony Cliff, was correctly expelled from the Fourth International in 1950 for his refusal to support either China or North Korea against military attack by Perhaps the most common failing of would-be revolutionaries, empiricism is an approach to the class struggle based not on any depth of analysis but on the superficial appearances of events.

The empiricist sees history as succession of "facts" and single "exceptional" events, and not in the Marxist manner as a process unfolding as a result of internal laws of motion.

Engels summed up the empiricist approach:

"In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot for the trees." (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific).

Empiricism therefore produces in those groups which follow this method, repeated, abrupt and apparently arbitrary shifts of policy with each turn in the political situation, since for them, policies are based not on the fundamental processes of the class struggle but on surface appearances alone.

The empiricist consistently claims to recognise "reality"but is in fact consistently surprised by events, and left chasing after them.

Pabloism, state capitalism and rank and fileism are among the most obvious empirical tendencies.

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