Opportunism

That's opportunism, pure and simple.

As far as I understand despite my limited knowledge, here in Venezuela we must adapt to the prevailing mentality and social order. Therefore, an individual must live among opportunism, poverty, manipulation and superficiality. It might be a very characteristic Latino idiosyncrasy to behave as in the book "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" by Gabriel García Márquez when it comes to dealing with delicate situations. Everybody knows what's happening, but nobody raises his voice and even if somebody did, nobody would support him. Only enlightenment through education could end the ignorance that is a scourge on our people, from which many other problems arise. However, it's unlikely to expect a government to propose to spread values that threaten its own interests, because it's better for them to keep society ignorant in order to manipulate it with ease.

But Cicero does not seem even to have had a religious sentiment to cover the nakedness of his political opportunism. Not only does he in the Tusculan Disputations put aside in the Platonic fashion all the Homeric tales which anthropomorphize and discredit the gods; but in his treatise On Divination he shows an absolute disbelief in all the recognized practices, including the augury which he himself officially practised; and his sole excuse is that they are to be retained “on account of popular opinion and of their great public utility.”

Opportunism today, as represented by its principal spokesman, the ex-Marxist Karl Kautsky, fits in completely with Marx's characterization of the bourgeois position quoted above, for this opportunism limits recognition of the class struggle to the sphere of bourgeois relations. (Within this sphere, within its framework, not a single educated liberal will refuse to recognize the class struggle "in principle"!) Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie. In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedently violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms, and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie).