MIA > Archive > Kollontai > Workers Opposition
What is the “Workers’ Opposition”? Is it necessary on behalf of our party and the world workers’ revolution to welcome its existence, or is it just the contrary, that the phenomenon is a harmful one, dangerous “politically,” as comrade Trotzky just recently stated in one of his speeches on the trade union question?
In order to answer these questions which are agitating and perturbing many of our fellow workers, it is necessary to make clear:
It is very significant – and to this must be drawn the attention of our central bodies – that the Workers’ Opposition is composed of the most advanced part of our class-organized proletarian-communists. The opposition consists almost exclusively of members of the trade unions, and this fact is attested by the signatures of those who side with the opposition under the theses on the role of industrial unions. Who are these members of the trade unions? Workers, – that part of the advanced guard of the Russian proletariat which has borne on its shoulders all the difficulties of the revolutionary struggle, and did not dissolve into the soviet institutions by losing contact with the laboring masses, but on the contrary, remained closely connected with them.
To remain a member in the union, to preserve the close vital’ contact with one’s union, and hence, with the workers of one’s industry, through all these stormy years, when the center of social and political life has been shifted away from the unions, is not at all an easy and simple task. Foamy waves of the revolution have caught and carried far away from the unions the best, the strongest and the most active elements of the industrial proletariat, throwing one to the military front, another into the soviet institutions, and seating a third by desks covered with green office table cloth and heaps of office papers, books, estimates, and projects.
The unions have been depopulated. And only workers imbued with the strongest proletarian spirit, the real blossom of the rising revolutionary class, remained immune to the dissipating influence of authority, of petty ambition and high positions in soviet bureaucracy. They still stay spiritually welded together with the masses of the workers: that lowest stratum of society from whom they themselves came, an organic connection which could not be severed even by the highest soviet positions.
As soon as the intensity of the struggle on the fronts diminished, and the pendulum of life swung on the side of economic reconstruction, these representative, inveterate proletarians in spirit, the most luminous and staunchest of their own class, rapidly discarded their military garb, gave up their office work in the military establishments, in order to answer the silent call of their comrades, the millions of Russian workers’ who even in Soviet Russia drudge out their shamefully miserable existence.
Through their class instinct, these comrades standing at the head of the Workers’ Opposition became conscious of the fact that there was something wrong: they understood that even though during these three years we have created the soviet institutions and reaffirmed the principles of the workers’ republic, yet the working class, as a class, as a self-contained social unit with identical class aspirations, tasks, interests, and, hence, with a uniform, consistent, clear-cut policy, becomes an ever less important factor in the affairs of the Soviet republic. Ever less does it lend color to the measures promulgated by its own government; ever less does it direct the policy and influence the work and the trend of thought of the central authorities. During the first period of the revolution, who would dare to speak of the “upper” and the “lower” strata? Masses, namely, the laboring masses, and the leading party centers were all in one. All aspirations that were borne of life and struggle at that time found their most exact reflection in the most clearly defined and scientifically grounded formula of the leading party centers. There was no line drawn between the “upper” and the “lower” strata and there could be none. At present, however, this division does exist, and there is no agitation or intimidation strong enough to eradicate the mass conviction that there has grown up a quite new peculiar social layer – that of the soviet and “upper” party elements.
The members of the trade unions, the existing nucleus of the Workers’ Opposition, have understood this fact, or rather, sensed it by their healthy class instinct. First, they found it necessary to come into close contact with the rank and file. To enter into their class organizations, the unions, which, less than any other institution, have come under the destroying influence of cross-current, foreign, non-proletarian elements, viz.: the peasant and bourgeois elements, which by adapting themselves to the soviet regime deform our soviet institutions and divert our policy from clearly defined class channels into the morass of “adaptation.”
Thus, the Workers’ Opposition consists of proletarians closely connected with machine or mine, who are a part and parcel of the working class.
The Workers’ Opposition, moreover, is wonderful in that it has no prominent leaders. It originated as any healthy, inevitable, class-founded movement would originate – from the depths of the laboring masses. It sprouted from deep roots simultaneously in all corners of Soviet Russia, when the appearance of the Workers’ Opposition in the large centers was not even heard of.
“We had no idea whatever of the fact that in Moscow controversies are taking place,” said one delegate from Siberia to one of the Miners’ congresses, “and yet questions similar to yours have been agitating our minds also.” Behind the Workers’ Opposition there stand the proletarian masses, or, to be more exact, the Workers’ Opposition is the class-uniform, class-conscious and class-consistent part of our industrial proletariat – that part of it which considers it impossible to substitute the great creative power of the proletariat in the process of building communist economy by the formal label of the dictatorship of the working class.
The higher we go up the ladder of the Soviet and party hierarchy, the fewer adherents of the Opposition we find. The deeper we penetrate into the masses the more response do we find to the program of the Workers’ Opposition. This is very significant, and very important. This must be taken into consideration by the directing centers of our party. If the masses go away from the “upper” elements; if there appears a break, a crack, between the directing centers and the “lower” elements, that means that there is something wrong with the “upper” elements, particularly when the masses are not silent, but think, act, move, and defend themselves and their own slogans.
The “upper” elements may divert the masses from the straight road of history which leads toward communism only when the masses are mute, obedient, and when they passively and credulously follow their leaders. So it was in 1914, at the beginning of the World War, when the workers believed their leaders and decided: “The instinctive feeling of protest against the war deceives us; it is necessary to be silent, to stifle that feeling and obey the superiors.” But when the masses are in turmoil, criticise their leaders, and use their own brains; when they stubbornly vote against their beloved leaders, quite often suppressing the feeling of personal sympathy towards them; then the matter assumes a serious turn, and it is the task of the party not to conceal the controversy, not to nick-name the Opposition with unfounded and meaningless epithets, but to ponder seriously over the whole matter and find out where the root of the evil is, where the root of the controversy is, what it is that the working class, the bearer of communism and its only creator, wants.
And thus the Workers’ Opposition is the advanced part of the proletariat which has not severed the ties with the laboring masses organized into unions, and which has not scattered itself in the soviet institutions.
Last updated on 1 February 2023