W've written about the Workers Opposition in our book on the Russian communist left, available here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...949588-8255831
Unfortunately not online at the moment, but here's a summary of one of the articles on the left communist fractions:
“1922-3: The communist fractions against the rising counter-revolution” - (
International Review n°101)
The concessions to the peasantry – for Lenin, an unavoidable necessity illuminated by the Kronstadt uprising – were encapsulated in the New Economic Policy, seen as a temporary retreat that would enable a war-ravaged proletarian power to reconstruct its shattered economy and thus maintain itself as a bastion of the world revolution. In practice, however, the search to break the isolation of the soviet state led to fundamental concessions on matters of principle: not merely trade with capitalist powers, which in itself was not a breach of principles, but also secret military alliances with them, as in the Rapallo treaty with Germany. And such military alliances were accompanied by unnatural political alliances with the forces of social democracy, formerly denounced as the left wing of the bourgeoisie. This was the policy of the “United Front” adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International.
Within Russia, Lenin in 1918 had already claimed that state capitalism was a step forward for such a backward country; in 1922, he continued to argue that state capitalism could be made to work for the proletariat as long as it was directed by the “proletarian state”, which increasingly meant the proletarian party. And yet at the same time he was forced to admit that, far from directing the state inherited from the revolution, the state was more and more directing them – not towards the horizon they wanted to reach, but towards a bourgeois restoration.
Lenin quickly saw that the communist party was itself being deeply affected by this process of involution. At first he located the problem primarily in the lower strata of uncultured bureaucrats who had begun to flock towards the party. But in his last years he grew painfully aware that the rot had reached the highest echelons of the party: as Trotsky pointed out, Lenin’s last struggle was focused essentially against Stalin and emergent Stalinism. But trapped within the prison of the state, Lenin was unable to offer more than administrative measures to counter this bureaucratic tide. Had he lived longer, he would surely have been pushed further towards an oppositional stance, but now the struggle against the rising counter-revolution had to pass to other hands.
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:
Trotsky missed a number of opportunities to lead an overt fight against Stalinism, in particular through his reluctance to use Lenin’s “Testament” to expose Stalin and remove him from the leadership of the party;
he tended to lapse into silence during many of the debates within the Bolshevik central organ.
These failings were partly due to questions of character: Trotsky was not an accomplished intriguer like Stalin and lacked his overwhelming personal ambition. But there were more fundamental political motivations behind Trotsky’s inability to take his criticisms to the radical conclusions reached by the communist left:
Trotsky was never able to understand that Stalin and his faction did not represent a mistaken, centrist tendency within the proletarian camp, but was the spearhead of a bourgeois counter-revolution;
Trotsky’s own history as a figure at the very centre of the soviet regime made it extremely difficult for him to detach himself from the process of degeneration. An ingrained “patriotism of the party” made it extremely difficult for Trotsky and other oppositionists to fully accept that the party could be wrong