“WORKING
OPPOSITION”
OR FROM MARCH 1021
NOTES ON THE COVER.
Copy] of Lenin
NB p. 25.
“. 12 p. 13 e. 18
4 — the demagogy of the Machists
NB: P. 36 | cf. p. 33 regarding SNH, NB chapters; centers
– She failed to take the time to reflect on improving the conditions of the workers.
Amtpich
I1011NI-
“III?
NOTES WITHIN THE TEXT.
[3] ... Most characteristic—and this is something our centers simply cannot afford to overlook—is that the opposition includes the vanguard of class‑organized proletarians, the communists...
[4] ... As soon as conditions eased on the military front and the pendulum of life began to swing toward economic reconstruction, these typically proletarian figures—spiritually reinvigorated, the most brilliant and steadfast representatives of their class—hurriedly cast off their “field jackets,” leather waistcoats, and set aside the folders of outgoing and incoming papers on their desks, in order to heed the silent call of their class brothers: the factory and plant workers, the millions of Russian proletarians who, even in Soviet Russia, were leading a life of hard labor, a wretched and shameful existence...
[5]. ... In our ranks, there was no awareness that in Moscow debates and discussions were raging about the role of
“THE TRADE UNIONS,” a delegate from Siberia remarked at the miners’ congress, “while we were already preoccupied with the very same questions that stand before you today.”
Behind the working opposition stand the proletarian masses—or, more precisely: the working opposition is that class‑bound, class‑conscious, and class‑mobilized segment of our industrial proletariat which holds that the great creative power of the proletariat in the task of building a communist economy must not be subsumed under the mere formal banner of the dictatorship of the working class...
[7] ... Why, then, did the trade unions—stubbornly refusing to buttress their arguments with scientifically grounded principles—insist on “collectivity,” while the defenders of the “specialists” simultaneously championed “individual leadership”? Precisely because, though both sides denied it “in principle,” two fundamentally irreconcilable historical perspectives lay at the heart of this dispute. Individual leadership is, in essence, flesh of the flesh of the individualistic (that is, self‑generated) worldview of the bourgeois class.
Individual leadership—that is, the will of a person severed from the collective, “free,” isolated—manifesting itself in every sphere, from the affirmation of an autocratic head of state down to the autocratic rule of a factory director—this is the highest wisdom of bourgeois thought...
[9] ... This shows that our Party is experiencing its first serious crisis since the beginning of the revolution—and that we must not dismiss the opposition with cheap slogans like “syndicalism.” Instead, all comrades must pause to reflect: what has triggered this crisis?...
[12] ... Pushed aside in the early stages of the revolution...
this social group of shrewd masterminds of capitalist production—obedient, hired hands, splendidly compensated servants of capital—has, with each passing day, come to wield ever greater influence and importance in politics.*
Need names? Every worker comrade who keeps abreast of our domestic and foreign policies will surely recall more than one such figure...
[13–14]... Given the catastrophic state of our economy—still largely structured around the capitalist system (“wages paid in money,” wage scales, occupational categories, etc.)—the upper echelons of our Party, seized by a sudden faith in the creative powers of the workers’ collectives, seek salvation from economic turmoil in whom? In those who hail from a bourgeois‑capitalist past, in the entrepreneurs and technicians whose creative capacities in the realm of economics have been clogged by routine, by habits, by the very techniques of capitalist production and management.
[15] ... It suffices to recall the zigzag course of our policy toward the peasantry—a course that led us from a “policy oriented toward the poor” to a policy aimed at the “economically industrious, hardworking peasant proprietor.”
Let this policy course bear witness to political sobriety and