X CONGRESS OF THE RCP(b)
PRELIMINARY DRAFT RESOLUTION OF THE X CONGRESS OF THE RCP ON THE SYNDICALIST AND ANARCHIST TENDENCY WITHIN OUR PARTY
1. In recent months, a distinct syndicalist and anarchistic tendency has become evident within the ranks of the Party—a tendency that demands the most resolute measures of ideological struggle, as well as the purging and revitalization of the Party.
2. This tendency is, in part, attributable to the influx into the Party of former Mensheviks, as well as to workers and peasants who have not yet fully assimilated the communist worldview; but above all, it arises from the influence exerted on the proletariat—and on the RCP—by the petty-bourgeois element, which is extraordinarily strong in our country and which inevitably gives rise to oscillations toward anarchism, especially at moments when
the situation of the masses has sharply deteriorated due to crop failures and the profoundly ruinous consequences of war, and when the demobilization of a million‑strong army throws hundreds of thousands of peasants and workers onto the streets, unable to immediately find proper means of livelihood.
3. The most thoroughly developed theoretically and the most clearly articulated expression of this
tendency {alternative: one of the most fully elaborated and so forth expressions of this tendency) are the theses and other literary works of the group known as the “Workers’ Opposition.” Particularly revealing, for example, is the following thesis: “The organization of the administration of the national economy shall be vested in a All‑Russian Congress of Producers, united in professional
production unions, which shall elect a central body responsible for managing the entire national economy of the Republic.”
The ideas underlying this and numerous similar pronouncements are fundamentally flawed in theory, representing a complete break with Marxism and communism, as well as with the practical lessons learned from every semi‑proletarian and genuinely proletarian revolution.
First, the concept of “producer” conflates the proletarian with the semi‑proletarian and with the small commodity producer, thereby departing in a fundamental way from the core notion of class struggle and from the essential requirement of precisely distinguishing between classes.
Second, the reliance on non‑party masses—or the flirtation with them, as expressed in the aforementioned thesis—is no less a radical departure from Marxism.
Marxism teaches—and this teaching has not only been formally affirmed by the Communist International in the resolution adopted at the Second Congress of the Comintern (1920), concerning the role of the proletarian political party, but has also been practically confirmed by our own revolution—that only the political party of the working class—the Communist Party—is capable of uniting, educating, and organizing such an avant‑garde of the proletariat and of the entire working mass, a vanguard alone able to withstand the inevitable petty‑bourgeois oscillations of this mass, the ineradicable traditions and recidivisms of trade‑union narrowness or trade‑union prejudices among the proletariat, and to direct the entire unified activity of the proletariat—that is, to lead it politically, and through it to guide all working masses. Without this, the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible to realize.
The mistaken understanding of the Communist Party’s role in relation to the non‑party proletariat—and subsequently in relation to both the first and second factors in regard to the entire working mass—constitutes a fundamental theoretical deviation from communism and a drift toward

X CONGRESS OF THE RCP(b)
syndicalism and anarchism, a tendency that permeates all the views of the “Workers’ Opposition” group.
4. The X Congress of the RCP declares that it regards as fundamentally misguided all attempts by this group and by other individuals to defend their erroneous views by invoking Article 5 of the economic section of the RCP program, which is devoted to the role of trade unions. This paragraph states that “trade unions must move toward the actual concentration in their hands of the entire administration of the national economy as a single, unified economic entity,” and that they “thus ensure an unbreakable link between central state administration, the national economy, and the broad masses of workers,” “drawing” these masses “into direct participation in the management of economic affairs.”
As a preliminary condition for the state toward which “trade unions must advance,” the RCP program, in the same paragraph, proclaims the process of “increasingly freeing trade unions from guild‑based narrowness” and of expanding their reach to encompass the majority of workers, “and gradually, eventually, all workers without exception.”
Finally, in the same paragraph, the RCP program emphasizes that trade unions are “already, in accordance with the laws of the RSFSR and established practice, participants in all local and central organs of industrial administration.”
Instead of taking account of this very practical experience of participation in governance, instead of further developing this experience in strict conformity with the successes achieved and the errors corrected, the syndicalists and anarchists put forward the immediate slogan of “congresses—or a congress—of producers,” “electing” bodies responsible for administering the economy. The guiding, educational, and organizing role of the Party toward the trade unions of the proletariat, and of the latter toward the semi‑petty‑bourgeois and outright petty‑bourgeois masses of workers, is thus completely bypassed and eliminated; and instead of continuing and refining the practical work of building new forms of economic organization already begun under Soviet power, what emerges is a petty‑bourgeois– anarchist destruction of this work, capable only of ushering in the triumph of bourgeois counterrevolution.
5. Beyond its theoretical incorrectness and its fundamentally flawed approach to the practical experience of the economic construction initiated by Soviet power, the Congress of the RCP perceives in the views of the aforementioned group—and of similar groups and individuals—a grave political error and an immediate political danger to the very existence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In a country like Russia, where the petty-bourgeois element overwhelmingly predominates, and where, as a result of war, devastation, impoverishment, epidemics, and crop failures, extreme intensification of need and widespread popular suffering are inevitable, the moods of the petty-bourgeois and semi-proletarian masses exhibit particularly sharp fluctuations. These fluctuations swing now toward the consolidation of an alliance between these masses and the proletariat, and now toward bourgeois restoration; and the entire experience of the revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries demonstrates with absolute clarity and compelling force that, unless the unity, strength, and influence of the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat are maintained at all costs—even under the slightest weakening—nothing but restoration (the reestablishment) of capitalist and landlord rule and property can emerge from such oscillations.
Therefore, the views of the “workers’ opposition” and similar tendencies are not only theoretically mistaken; they also practically express petty-bourgeois and anarchistic vacillations, undermining the steadfast guiding line of the Communist Party in practice and, in effect, aiding the class enemies of the proletarian revolution.
6. On the basis of all this, the Congress of the RCP, firmly rejecting the aforementioned ideas—which embody syndicalist and anarchist tendencies—deems it necessary:
first, to wage a relentless and systematic ideological struggle against these ideas; second, the Congress deems the propagation of these ideas incompatible with membership in the RCP.

X CONGRESS OF THE RCP(b)
While entrusting the Party’s Central Committee with the strictest implementation of these resolutions, the Congress also points out that special publications, collections, and the like must—and indeed should—make room for the most thorough exchange of views among Party members on all the issues mentioned above.
First published in 1923 in the Collected Works of N. Lenin
(V. Ulyanov), Volume XVIII, Part I

Printed from manuscript