Left Opposition in the United States

chapter 1 Introduction: Left Opposition in the United States

Paul Le Blanc

‘Left Opposition’ refers to what was originally a current in the Russian Com- munist Party. It was in opposition to the corruption and betrayal of the communist ideal by a bureaucratic dictatorship, and it resisted the elimination of workers’ democracy and internationalism from what had been the revolutionary Marxist conception of socialism. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had been the long-time leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik current in the Russian socialist movement, and it was this current which led the Russian Revolution of 1917 that gave birth to the Soviet Republic. After designating itself the Russian Communist Party, it helped create the Com- munist International, meant to facilitate a global transformation from capital- ism to socialism. After Lenin’s death, however, the Russian Revolution’s goal of soviet democracy and the commitment to a liberating revolution worldwide gave way to a bureaucratic dictatorship preaching ‘socialism in one country’ and advancing cynical policies to enhance its own power and privileges. This change did not take place without a struggle – and the struggle was associated especially with what was called the Left Opposition. While Leon Trotsky was one of the leaders in opposing bureaucratic degen- eration, the oppositional current included a number of prominent revolutionary personalities and thinkers: Eugen Preobrazhensky, Karl Radek, Christian Rakovsky, Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krups- kaya, and others collaborated in its efforts at various points, seeking to preserve and advance the original, heroic ideals and perspectives associated with the Russian Revolution, the early Soviet regime, and the Communist International. By the late 1920s, however, powerful forces around the rising dictator Joseph Stalin, consolidating his domination of the Russian Communist Party, were able to smash the oppositionists, and many, including some of the most prominent, abandoned opposition to avoid expulsion from the Communist Party. The fact thatTrotsky and a saving remnant of oppositionists held firm had rami- fications in the world Communist movement in the late 1920s, including in the United States, giving rise to a small but important international movement.1

1 On the general history, see Carr 2004 and Le Blanc 2015a. A primary source for the Left

The Central Figure

To understand this movement, then, one must give attention to the life and ideas of Leon Trotsky.There are a number of useful works that can be consulted to comprehend this brilliant and heroic figure, yet in Trotsky, A Graphic Bio- graphy, Rick Geary usefully summarises key aspects of the story in the book’s first four frames:

In 1917, Leon Trotsky burst upon the international stage as the brain behind the Russian Revolution. He presided over the complete transformation of his country, not merely a change of government but a total restructuring of society on every level. To many, he was the heroic St. George, slaying the dragon of capitalist repression. To others, he was the ruthless and Satanic purveyor of bloody rebellion, the cold, detached the- orist gone mad with power. In truth, he fitted neither of these images. He was a writer, a thinker, a nation-builder – albeit a reluctant one – with deep roots in his Russia’s agricultural heartland. Trotsky’s dream was for a world free from injustice, inequality, and war, and in this he was absolutely single-minded. To him, the ideas of Karl Marx showed the way, and for one brief moment he set the machinery in motion to achieve that end … He lived to see his work betrayed and his ideals perverted by those who seized power after him. He would be ejected from the government he helped to establish and hounded into exile and death.2

Ejected from the Soviet Union in 1929,Trotsky laboured to build a global revolutionary current that would defend and advance the earlier Bolshevik perspectives. Not at all inclined to name the movement which he led after himself, he preferred to call it ‘Bolshevik-Leninist’, although a more common tag was ‘Left Oppositionist’ – but it was the name first given to it by its opponents that really stuck: Trotskyite or Trotskyist. The term ‘Trotskyite’ was particularly pejorative, used by those hostile to the movement, having the connotation that those in

Opposition in the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1928 are the three volumes composed mostly of Trotsky’s writings in this period: Trotsky 1975, 1980, 1981. Especially on the international movement, see: Alexander 1991; Frank 2010. 2 Geary 2009, pp. 3–4. See also Deutscher 2015; Serge and Sedova 2015; Le Blanc 2015b. A succinct collection of Trotsky’s writings in exile can be found in Trotsky 2012.