Workers' Opposition

The question posed

The Workers' Opposition formed at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920. The question it raised was who administers production in a workers' state. As enterprise management shifted to one-man authority during the civil war, old technical cadres returned, and the unions were pushed out of the management of production, this current demanded that administration of the national economy be transferred to the trade unions.

Its leading figures were Shlyapnikov of the metalworkers' union, Kollontai, and Medvedev. Their ground was the party programme itself: because the 1919 programme designated the unions as the bodies administering production, the opposition presented its demand as the implementation of the programme.

The dispute

Lenin defined the demand as a syndicalist deviation. His case was that with the working class dispersed by civil war and famine and its composition altered, the unions had no capacity to administer the national economy, and he defined their role as mass organizations and schools. Trotsky argued from the opposite direction for turning the unions into organs of the state, so the dispute had a three-cornered structure.

Kollontai's pamphlet The Workers' Opposition, published ahead of the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, widened the argument into the question of bureaucratization. She argued that the party apparatus did not trust the creativity of the working class and was substituting administrative instruction for it, locating the root of the problem in the manner of rule rather than in class composition.

Defeat and after

The Tenth Congress adopted Lenin's resolution on the role of the unions and passed the ban on factions at the same time. The second was decisive. With organized activity by groups holding programmatic views prohibited, the opposition lost its basis, and at the Eleventh Congress in 1922 a protest document by the opposition was made the subject of investigation, after which the group effectively dissolved.

The paths of its members diverged. Kollontai moved into diplomatic service and continued to work, while Shlyapnikov and Medvedev were arrested repeatedly in the 1930s and Shlyapnikov was shot in 1937. The question the Workers' Opposition raised, the role of workers themselves in the administration of production, returned repeatedly in later debates on self-management and in the Soviet reform discussions of the 1980s.