Friedrich Engels Against Opportunism and Revisionism

By nazariya123 on August 5, 2026

The fight against Opportunism-Liquidationism-Revisionism is a constant struggle that communists have been entrenched in since the formation of proletariat parties became the general trend from the 1860s. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who spent the entirety of their adult lives embattled with the petite bourgeoisie and its ideological influences over the working class’ movement, found themselves in this new fight in the age of the proletariat parties. In the first half of their political lives, it was reformism, utopian socialism and anarchism which represented the petite bourgeois influence among the proletariat. Marx and Engels’ bitter struggles against the likes of Proudhon, Max Stirner and Michael Bakunin as part of the International Workingmen’s Association (retrospectively called the First Communist International) led to developments which saw the isolation and eventual elimination of these representatives of bourgeois from among the proletariat’s organization. This was the victory of Marxism as a scientific truth and as the ideology of the proletariat, now formally accepted.

In the course of these ideological struggles, Marx and Engels led the revolutionary upsurges that hit many European nations around 1848, exposing the superiority of Marxism against Bakunin’s attempts at anarchist insurrections. As they entered the later part of their lives, Marx and Engels were both quick to recognise that the formation of proletariat parties in Europe was a welcome development, though it also came with the caveat that a new struggle against petite bourgeois ideology was to be fought now. Instead of fighting Marxism from the outside, the petite bourgeois liberal influence on the proletariat now attempted to come from within the ranks of proletarian parties working on Marxist lines. For the longest time, the two comrades had roughly split up their duties, with Marx focusing on political economy and revolutionary strategy while Engels focused on philosophy, military affairs and sciences. But with Marx’s passing, it fell upon Engels to not only carry out his given tasks but also Marx’s side of the work as the leader the young proletarian parties looked up to for guidance. On this 5th August, let us remember Comrade Engels, one of the five great teachers of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism by looking at his historic contribution in fighting the very first battles against Opportunism-Liquidationism-Revisionism and seek inspiration for our ongoing fights today.

Over the passage of a decade or so after the first parties were founded in the first half of the 1860s, they matured to the point of line struggles emerging in concrete forms among their ranks. The earliest fight came in 1875 when the General Association of German Workers led by Ferdinand Lassalle merged with the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (also called the Eisenachers) led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht to form the German Social-Democratic Party. The Lassalleans represented the petite bourgeoisie already, aiming for what Marx called a “Royal-Prussian state socialism.” Meanwhile Bebel and Liebknecht led the Eisenach party with guidance from Marx and Engels and their First International, with the Eisenach party taking firm positions against all reactionary trends. On the other hand, Lassalle regarded the state as a supra-class organization and, in conformity with that philosophically idealist view, he believed that the Prussian state could be utilised to solve the social problem through the setting up of producers’ co-operatives with its aid. Lassalle directed the workers towards peaceful, parliamentary forms of struggle, believing that the introduction of universal suffrage would make Prussia a ‘free people’s state’. To obtain universal suffrage, he promised Bismarck the support of his Association against the liberal opposition and also in the implementation of Bismarck’s plan to reunite Germany ‘from above’ under the hegemony of Prussia. The Eisenach party and other groups (the socialist sectarians) had strongly opposed this Prussian chauvinism. Lassalle repudiated the revolutionary class struggle, denied the importance of trade unions and of strike action, ignored the international tasks of the working class, and infected the German workers with nationalist ideas. His contemptuous attitude towards the peasantry, which he regarded as a reactionary force, did much damage to the German working-class movement. Marx and Engels fought his harmful utopian dogmatism and his reformist views.

When the Eisenachers merged with the Lassalleans, Liebknecht along with the Lassalleans drafted the Gotha Programme for the new party’s first Congress. Marx and Engels delivered scathing critiques of the program, instantly recognizing how the Eisenachers gave up its revolutionary program for opportunist unity with the Lassalleans. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx attacks the reformist slogan of ‘a fair distribution of the products of labor,’ and exposes the theoretical confusion behind this slogan by stating that “the distribution of the products of labour, must always be a consequence of the mode of production.” He likewise attacks the reformist slogan of ‘state aid under democratic control,’ and shows that the aim of the working class must be “to revolutionize the present conditions of production.” Marx also attacks the conception that, relatively to the working class, all other classes are only one reactionary mass. It is necessary to examine concretely the actual position of each class at each stage of history, and not lump them all together as ‘reactionary.’ Thus the workers may fight together with sections of the capitalists against feudal survivals, together with the lower middle class for certain democratic demands, and so on. This important contribution was further developed by Comrade Lenin in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy when he argued that the proletariat must align with the peasantry to complete the democratic revolution first before continuously advancing to socialism. Comrade Mao developed this further to analyse the conditions of semi-colonial semi-feudal nations, developing the concept of New Democratic revolution and the four-class alliance (proletariat, peasantry, petite bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie) in such countries. Most importantly, Marx attacks the reformist slogan of a ‘free state,’ and shows that “between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” Thus, this very first battle made it clear that the struggle for seizure of state power, for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the principle struggle for communists and any compromise with this is a death march towards opportunism. The critique by Marx and Engels was so scathing that Liebknecht, the drafter of the Gotha Program pushed for a motion at the Congress to scrap the entire program, which was passed. Marx and Engels then focused on demolishing Lassallean influence all over Europe, ensuring that they lost all presence among workers. Lassalle ultimately had an accidental positive effect, in that his ideology diverted the spontaneous growth of the German working class movement away from the path of reformist trade unionism and co-operativism and allowed for the possibility of alternative organised paths for the German working class for the first time.

By 1880s, more parties had cropped up in Europe, and Engels made a nuanced analysis in that they opposed the restoration of the Communist International at this time, arguing that the task during this time was the formation of self-dependent nation-based communist parties.¹ Comrade Stalin (upon the dissolution of the Third International) and Comrade Mao both reached the same conclusion nearly 80 years after Marx and Engels. Meanwhile on the party front, the German Social-Democratic Party had taken in a large number of petite bourgeois intellectuals which provided the basis for an opportunist section within the party. Engels said they tried “to get rid of the Anti-Socialist Law at any cost and to do so ignominiously by means of moderation and meekness, tameness and toadying.”² He poignantly opposed the surrenderist approach of the opportunists and argued that a split in the party was inadvertent when dealing with such opportunists. Engels said that the eventual split would “serve to elucidate the situation and we shall be rid of an element that in no way belongs to us.”³ Thus Engels abundantly made it clear that there could be no coexistence for communists with Opportunist-Liquidationist-Revisionist elements in the long run. This was only going to develop further. Marx and Engels were heavily involved in the formation of the French Worker’s Party through their guidance of Paul Lefargue and Jules Guesde (called the Collectivists). This party too, was already stuck in a struggle between the Collectivists and the Benoit Malon and Paul Brousse-led Possibilists who held the belief that workers could gradually win a majority in the municipalities, thus creating broader public service and setting up a gradual transfer of the means of production into the possession of the municipal authorities (municipal socialism). Engels firmly opposed the Parliamentarianism of the Possibilists whose slogan was ‘politics is the art of the possible’ thus outrightly admitting that opportunism drove their politics. All possibilities were an opportunity to this group in the French Workers Party. The argument concerned diametrically opposite attitudes to the party’s political programme: whether the struggle against the bourgeoisie should be fought as a class struggle or whether the class nature of the movement and the revolutionary programme should be opportunistically renounced in all cases where such renunciation would win it more followers and more votes in elections. Engels pointed out that the Possibilists were “sacrificing the proletarian class character of the movement.”⁴ Engels also worked as a revolutionary propagandist during this time by writing to numerous parties across the world, informing them of the struggle within the French party and highlighting the dangers of opportunistic surrender of revolutionary program as the Possibilists were arguing for. After participating in these struggles, Engels pointed out, “it would seem that any workers’ party in a large country can develop only through internal struggle, as indeed has been generally established in the dialectical laws of development…. Such being the case, it would be sheer folly to advocate unification. Moral homilies are of no avail against teething troubles which, circumstances being what they are today, are something that has got to be gone through.”⁵ When the small group of Collectivists split with the Possibilists, Engels made the keen insight that, “to be momentarily in the minority and have the right programme is at least better than having no programme and a large, though almost entirely nominal and bogus, following.”⁶ Better fewer, but better, as Lenin would go on to say years later.

After the passing of Marx in 1883, Engels wrote, “my misfortune is that since we lost Marx I have been supposed to represent him. But now that I am suddenly expected to take Marx’s place in matters of theory and play first fiddle, there will inevitably be blunders and no one is more aware of that than I. And not until the times get somewhat more turbulent shall we really be aware of what we have lost in Marx. Not one of us possesses the breadth of vision that enabled him, at the very moment when rapid action was called for, invariably to hit upon the right solution and at once get to the heart of the matter. In more peaceful times it could happen that events proved me right and him wrong, but at a revolutionary juncture his judgment was virtually infallible.”⁷ Despite Engels' own apprehensions and the historic loss of Comrade Marx, Engels spent the remainder of his life continuing the revolutionary work he and Marx had been doing together. The final 10 years of his life were to be marked with greater conflict against opportunism and revisionism. In 1891, things came to a head with the German Social-Democratic Party becoming the largest communist party in the world. The party, under Engels’ guidance, had combined legal and illegal forms of struggle to expand and successfully led a movement to repeal the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany. With the law repealed, the party prepared for a Congress in Erfurt. Prior to this, Engels already realised that opportunists in the party leadership were preparing for an attempt to liquidate the party’s line in this Congress. To counter this, Engels published the Critique of the Gotha Program, despite opposition from the party leadership. The Erfurt Program once again consolidated an opportunist program for the party. Engels' writings were also being edited and censored by the opportunist leadership of the party. During this time, Engels wrote, “Liebknecht has just played me a fine trick. He has taken from my introduction to Marx’s articles on France 1848-50 everything that could serve his purpose in support of peaceful and anti-violent tactics at any price, which he has chosen to preach for some time now, particularly at this juncture when coercive laws are being drawn up in Berlin.”⁸ It is believed that Engels' assistant, Karl Kautsky, a future revisionist of great disrepute, also had a role in facilitating this revision of Marx and Engels’ writings. The opportunist leadership in the party tried to cast the 1848 revolutionary uprising as a peaceful congregation led by Engels, which was the opposite of the truth. The uprising was an armed one, led by Engels in Germany. Engels rose in defence of the strategy and tactics of the 1848 revolutions, countering the opportunist attempt to revise history and negate the revolutionary path taken in the 1848 attempts at revolution. Like terrified intellectuals, Bernstein wrote off the 1848 armed uprisings as a beaten path never to be treaded on again. Engels fought back against these attempts. Engels worked tirelessly during this period to write the Critique of the Erfurt Program, exposing the opportunist line within the German Social-Democratic Party.

Comrade Engels’ valiant struggle for the revolutionary proletarian line, the preservation of the lessons of the 1848 armed revolutionary uprisings and the strategy and tactics of these uprisings mirror the fight in India against Opportunism-Liquidationism-Revisionism. As Comrade Engels highlighted, only by this internal struggle can the proletarian party truly grow. Therefore, one must take up the attitude of active engagement in the struggle against opportunism, liquidationism and revisionism if one seeks to advance the New Democratic revolution in India once again, just as persistently and thoroughly as Comrade Engels did.