# Social-Chauvinism Is the Ultimate Form of Opportunism
Source: PSS, Volume 26

Throughout the entire era of the Second International, a relentless struggle raged within social‑democratic parties between the revolutionary and the opportunist wings. In several countries, this ideological divide led to outright schisms (England, Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria). No Marxist ever doubted that opportunism represented bourgeois politics within the workers’ movement—reflecting the interests of the petty bourgeoisie and the alliance of a minuscule fraction of semi‑bourgeoisified workers with “their” own bourgeoisie, in direct opposition to the interests of the vast proletarian masses, the oppressed masses.

The objective conditions of the late nineteenth century particularly intensified opportunism, transforming the exploitation of bourgeois legality into abject subservience to the bourgeoisie, while simultaneously fostering a small stratum of bureaucracy and an aristocracy within the working class—and drawing numerous petty‑bourgeois “accomplices” into the ranks of the social‑democratic parties.

The war accelerated this development, turning opportunism into social-chauvinism and converting the secret collusion of opportunists with the bourgeoisie into an open alliance. Meanwhile, military authorities everywhere imposed martial law and placed restraints on the working masses, whose old leaders had almost universally defected to the side of the bourgeoisie.

The economic foundation of both opportunism and social-chauvinism is the same: the interests of a tiny layer of privileged workers and the petty bourgeoisie, who seek to defend their privileged status—their “right” to a meager share of the profits reaped by “their” national bourgeoisie through the plunder of foreign nations, through the advantages conferred by its great-power status, and so forth.

The ideological and political substance of opportunism and social-chauvinism is identical: the collaboration of classes instead of their struggle; the rejection of revolutionary methods of struggle; the support of “one’s own” government in times of crisis, rather than the utilization of those crises to advance the cause of revolution. If one considers all European countries as a whole—if one looks not at individual figures, however eminent they may be—it becomes clear that it was precisely the opportunist current that emerged as the principal bulwark of social-chauvinism, while from the camp of revolutionaries, more or less consistently across the board, there arose a protest against it. Take, for example, the array of tendencies at the Stuttgart International Socialist Congress of 1907: international Marxism stood opposed to imperialism, whereas international opportunism had already by then embraced it.