The Mistakes of Rightist Elements of the Communist League on the Trade Union Question¶
Core Argument¶
Here, Trotsky grounds a sweeping indictment of Comintern strategy in a single, irreducible Marxist principle: the party must be the independent vanguard of the proletariat, not fused with the class or subordinated to broader, looser formations. The chapter’s core argument is that every major disaster of the Communist International in the 1920s—China, the Anglo-Russian Committee, and now the French trade-union work of the Left Opposition itself—flows from a betrayal of this axiom. Opportunism, Trotsky insists, always reduces ideologically to a false conception of the party’s relation to other organisations.
The key polemic is against the Stalinist theory of a “two-class party” and the bureaucratic practice of dissolving the vanguard into broader currents to achieve quick, mass influence. Trotsky’s central exhibit is the Anglo-Russian Committee of 1925–26. Stalin, Bukharin, and Zinoviev, he argues, sought to replace the weak British Communist Party with the “broader current” of the Minority Movement, cultivating personal influence over left trade-union leaders like Purcell, Hicks, and Cook through banquets and backstage deals rather than open communist criticism. The party was effectively subordinated to the Minority Movement, ceasing to exist for the masses as an independent force. When the general strike came, these “left” leaders betrayed the proletariat, and the Communist Party, having mortgaged its identity, was left a negligible sect. The Minority Movement was reduced to zero; the conservative trade-union bureaucracy was reinforced. Trotsky draws a direct line from this to the French League’s error: from April 1930, it had effectively surrendered its independence to the Unitary Opposition (UO), a heterogeneous formation whose principal force was the Teachers’ Federation—socially non-proletarian and politically vacillating between the Left Opposition, the official line, and the Right Opposition. The League’s old leadership had pursued a policy of silence, covering up the UO’s mistakes and lack of precision, exactly as Moscow had hushed up Purcell and Cook.
Trotsky is scathing about the defence that Communists must fight for influence “by ideas, not mechanical means.” This, he retorts, is an empty commonplace; the centrist bureaucracy says the same. The real question is whether the orientation is correct. If it is, the masses experience no constraint. The chapter’s most pointed polemic is internal: against comrades who protest the “subordination” of the UO to the League. In reality, Trotsky demonstrates, they are demanding the subordination of the League to the UO—a policy of capitulation masked by revolutionary phraseology. He warns that a revolutionary organisation would be corrupted for a long time if it permitted such duplicity. The chapter closes with a footnote attacking the notion of a bloc with the Lovestoneites in the American league as a project so ignorant of Lenin and Marx as to be barely credible.