Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party

[Welshy]

Thanks to Miles I have started reading the Manifesto of the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist party. So what I'm wondering is what is the over all opinion various left tendencies have of this early opposition group with in the Bolsheviks?

For those who are curious here's the manifesto on the ICC's webpage:

http://en.internationalism.org/ir/142/workers-group-manifesto-1
http://en.internationalism.org/http%3A/%252Fen.internationalism.org/ir/143/workers-group-manifesto-2
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/144/workers-group-manifesto-3
http://en.internationalism.org/ir/145/workers-group-manifesto-4

[Alf]

Here is a brief summary of our view on the Workers Group. The original article it refers to is in International Review 101, but unfortunately it is not online. It is however contained in our book The Russian Communist Left which can be bought online.
. The summary places the Manifesto in the context of other events in 1923:

In 1923, the first economic crisis of the NEP broke out. For the working class, this crisis brought wage cuts and job cuts and a wave of spontaneous strikes. Within the party, it provoked conflict and debate, giving rise to new oppositional groupings. The first explicit expression of the latter was the Platform of the 46, involving figures close to Trotsky (now increasingly ostracised by the ruling triumvirate of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev) and elements from the Democratic Centralism group. The Platform criticised the tendency for the NEP to be seen as the royal road to socialism, calling for more rather than less central planning. More importantly, it warned against the increasing stifling of the party’s internal life.


At the same time the Platform distanced itself from the more radical oppositional groups which were emerging at the time, the most important of which was Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group, which had some presence within the strike movements in the industrial centres. Labelled as an understandable but “morbid” reaction to the rise of bureaucratism, the Manifesto of the Workers Group was in fact an expression of the seriousness of the Russian communist left:

- it clearly located the difficulties facing the soviet regime in its isolation and the failure of the revolution to spread;
- it made a lucid critique of the opportunist policy of the United Front, reaffirming the original analysis of the social democratic parties as parties of capitalism;
- it warned against the danger of the emergence of a new capitalist oligarchy and called for the reinvigoration of the soviets and factory committees;
- at the same time it was extremely cautious in its characterisation of the soviet regime and of the Bolshevik party. Unlike Bogdanov’s Workers Truth group, it had no truck with the idea that the revolution or the Bolshevik party had been bourgeois from the beginning. It saw its task as essentially that of a left fraction, working inside and outside the party for its regeneration.

The left communists were thus the theoretical avant-garde in the struggle against the counter-revolution in Russia. The fact that Trotsky had, by 1923, adopted an openly oppositional stance was of considerable importance given his reputation as a leader of the October insurrection. But compared to the intransigent positions of the Workers Group, Trotsky’s opposition to Stalinism was marked by its hesitant, centrist approach: