A group within the Russian Communist Party that struggled to achieve workers rights and trade union control over industry – by 1922, the Communist Party had condemned their ideas and forced the group to disburse.
The Workers Opposition began to form in 1919, as a result of the policies of
War Communism, which had set a precedence for the domination of the Communist Party over local party affiliates and trade unions. Near the end of the Civil War, the Workers Opposition began agitating against the control of the party, seeking to restore more power to local party affiliates and trade unions.
A sharp controversy, of which accusations of factionalism abound, began over this issue beginning at the Ninth All-Russia Conference of the Communist Party in September, 1920. While all sides recognized the growing Soviet bureaucracy, all sides claimed to offer the only path that would defeat this bureaucracy.
Trotsky with the support of Bukharin, supported transforming trade unions into government organs, and in this way giving unions some control over industrial administration. Lenin and the right wing of the party, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov, and Stalin, stated that unions should not be a part of industrial administration, but that it was the role of the party to teach unionized workers how to administer the whole national economy. They explained that with workers control, the needs of the community and the rest of society could not be controlled; that factories were the property of the community as a whole, and not only the workers who worked in them. Lenin explained: "Why have a Party, if industrial management is to be appointed by the trade unions, 9/10 of whose members are nonparty workers?" (Collected Works, V. 32, Page 50)
The
Workers' Opposition represented the left wing of the party, composed almost exclusively of unionized workers, and was led by A.G. Shlyapnikov, S.P. Medvedev, and later
Alexandre Kollontai. The group demanded that industrial administration be made the responsibility of unions, which would not only mean that workers of a particular factory would have control over that factory, but also that unions would control the national economy as a whole. Kollontai explained that only
workers could decide what was best for
workers – that it was not for party bureaucrats to decide what was needed for the whole society, but it was for workers themselves, the producers of the wealth of society. The Workers Opposition had substantial support among the members of the Communist Party, however the major leaders of the party refused its platform.
