Right Opposition

The Right Opposition was the label used by Stalin to describe Nikolai Bukharin and his supporters in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Supporters of Bukharin internationally became known as the International Right Opposition but were offically organised as the International Communist Opposition

Bukharin

Stalin had formed a duumvirate with Bukharin as a means of defeating the Left Opposition of Trotsky and as a means of isolating Zinoviev and Kamenev who had been Stalin's allies until he moved against him. With the left defeated, Stalin moved against Bukharin as a means of consolidating his power. In 1928, he instituted a change in policy rejecting the New Economic Policy and the policy of slow collectivization of agriculture and industry which Bukharin had championed.

Stalin's sudden advocacy of rapid industrialisation and forced agricultural collectivisation moved Bukharin into opposition. At the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1929 the Stalinist majority rejected Bukharin's policies and approved Stalin's Five-Year Plan. Bukharin was stripped of his major party and governmental posts. Subsequently, Bukharin's supporters in the Comintern and Communist parties around the world were systematically purged, including, in North America, Jay Lovestone who had been general secretary of the Communist Party USA and Bertram Wolfe as well as William Moriarty of the Communist Party of Canada.

Bukharin was isolated from his supporters abroad and in the face of increasing Stalinist repression was unable to mount a sustained struggle against Stalin within Russia. Unlike Trotsky who built an anti-Stalinist movement, Bukharin and his followers within the Soviet Union capitulated to Stalin and admitted his "ideological errors". They were temporarily rehabilitated (though were not returned to their former prominence but kept in minor posts) but were ultimately liquidated during the Great Purge trials.

International Right Opposition

Independently, Bukharin's international sympathisers attempted to found their own movement. In the United States, Lovestone and his supporters founded the Communist Party (Opposition) and published the newspaper Workers Age. In Canada, Moriarty formed the Marxian Educational League which was party of Lovestone's CP(O) and affiliated with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Moriarity died in 1936 and by the end of 1939 both the TOronto and Montreal groups had ceased to function.

The International Right Opposition (formally known as the International Communist Opposition or ICO) operated foundering and eclectic groups in various countries and merged with other "right" opposition groups such as the KPO or Communist Party Opposition of Germany led by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer.

For a time the ICO had more adherents than the Trotskyist International Left Opposition and its successor the Fourth International. The ICO had member parties in fifteen countries during the 1930s. The CPO in the US had influence in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) with one of its members heading its largest local, Local 22.

In Sweden the ICO won most of the Communist Party and received 5.7% of the vote in the 1932 elections to the Riksdag outpolling the Stalinist party which received 3.9%. In Germany, the Communist Party Opposition or KPO led by Branderl and Thalheimer won twenty-one seats in the municipal elections in Thuringia in late 1932 compared to thirty eight for the official Communists. In India, M. N. Roy, the founder of the Communist Party of India was won over to the ICO for a period.

The most important ICO group was the Bloque Obrero y Campesino (BOC) in Spain which was for a time larger and more important than the official Spanish Communist Party with its leader, Joaquin Maurin widely respected as a thinker. The BOC merged with Andres Nin's Izquierda Comunista in 1935 to form the POUM which was to be a major party backing the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Maurin became general secretary of the POUM but was arrested early in the Civil War leading to Nin, a former Trotskyist, becoming the POUM's leader.

The ICO and its affiliates considered themselves, not a new international, but a "faction" of the Communist movement involuntary excluded from the Comintern, and anxious to return to it if only the Comintern would change its policies and allow ICO members freedom to advocate their positions within the Comintern.

Initially Trotsky's International Left Opposition had the same objective but they abandoned this concept in favour of forming the Fourth International.

Despite being identified with Bukharin, the ILO generally supported Stalin's economic policies (which Bukharin opposed) such as Five Year Plans to achieve rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of the kulaks and even supported the early Moscow Trials. Their difference with Stalin and the Comintern was over the issue of democracy within the Communist International and the influence of the CPSU in the Comintern and its sections, and over Stalin's international policy, particularly the ultra-left Third Period and the subsequent Popular Front policies.

The International Right Opposition did not survive. A few of its members reconciled with Stalinism. Many ICO members had not come to the opposition movement out of support for Bukharin but because of opposition to Stalin's Third Period policy of ultra-leftism and opposition to forming blocs with social democrats. When the Comintern reversed its policy in the late 1930s and came out in favour of popular fronts, a number of ICO supporters returned to the Comintern fold. Others moved towards social democracy or anti-communism.

Due to Bukharin's capitulation to Stalin in 1934 as well as his isolation from the international movement, the ICO was denied the possibility of his ideological leadership.

As well, as the Moscow Trials entered their second phase and turned against Bukharin and his supporters, disputes broke out within the ICO regarding whether there was any point in continuing with the concept of being an opposition within the Communist movement rather than openly create a new international rival to the Comintern as Trotsky attempted with his Fourth International.

In February 1938, the Revolutionary Socialist Congress in Paris was held where the International Communist Opposition and the London Bureau (led by the Independent Labour Party of Britain) organized the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity. The IBRSU was an eclectic "revolutionary centrist" organisation. "Centrism" refers to the fact that its members vacillated between social democracy and revolutionary Marxism. This underscored much of the ideological problem facing Bukharin's supporters in that they lacked a political space of their own as their ideas had little to differentiate themselves from social democracy and provided little reason for them to have an independent existence.

The International Right Opposition did not survive World War II. Its once significant movement in Germany was forced underground by the Third Reich and ultimately destroyed. The Spanish movement was surpressed by the Stalinist Communist Party and ultimately destroyed by Franco's victory. The groups in France, Belgium in Holland did not survive the Nazi occupation. A large group in Sweden, the Socialist Party, had several members elected to parliament and was more popular than the official Communist Party in the early part of the 1930s. The Socialist Party was able to flourish in the period when the Communist Party was following the ultra-left policies of the Third Period. The Popular Front policies of late 1930s Stalinism, however, effectively squeezed out the Socialist Party and after it suffered a number of splits its membership fell dramatically. Many of its members ended up joining the Swedish Social Democrats.

United States

Lovestone's Communist Party (Opposition) changed its name to the Independent Communist Labor League and then the Independent Labor League of America marking its move away from communism. It also suffered several splits, in early years over the refusal of the majority to criticize Stalin's domestic policies resulting in Ben Gitlow's departure in 1933. Later, a factional dispute developed between Lovestone and Bertram Wolfe over the issue of the war. In 1939 the group saw the war as an imperialist conflict and opposed American participation. After the fall of France in 1940, Lovestone began to change his position and, while still opposing America's joining the war, came out in favour of American military aid to Britain (known as Lend-Lease), while Wolfe continued to support the ILLA's older anti-war policy.

By 1938 it had become clear that reconciliation between the Right Opposition and Stalinism was impossible. As the movement abandoned Communism and moved towards becoming democratic socialists, its purpose as a separate movement became less and less clear. In the United States there was no clear reason for the ILLA to exist when there was already two democratic socialist groups, the Socialist Party of America and the Social Democratic Federation. The reasons for continuing as an organization became even more unclear when the ILLA became divided over its attitude towards the Second World War as well as its attitude towards the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the end of 1940, the leadership of the ILLA decided to dissolve the organization and passed a resolution to that effect at its final convention held on December 28 and 29, 1940.

Its supporters in the United States drifted to the right wing of the labour movement and into anti-Communist activities with Lovestone working for many years both for the AFL-CIO and the CIA. In other countries its supporters either drifted into mainstream social democratic movements, towards more viable anti-Stalinist movements such as Trotskyism or towards Stalinism itself.