Workers' Opposition

The Workers' Opposition was a faction of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that emerged in 1920 as a response to the perceived over-bureaucratisation that was occurring in the Soviet Union. It was led by Alexander Shlyapnikov and Alexandra Kollantai and was in essence a left-wing communist movement designed to ensure that the promises made by the Bolsheviks at the time of the October Revolution were kept.

Specifically the Workers' Opposition demanded a greater economic plan that would increase production, Russia to be ruled by the trade unions, the equalisation of wages, the free distribution of food, and the gradual replacement of monetary payment with payment in kind. They also argued against the use of bourgeois specialists in the running of industry and warned against what they perceived to be the emergent "cult of personality" surrounding Vladimir Lenin.

However, at the tenth congress of the Communist Party, in 1922 Lenin successfully managed to have the Workers' Opposition proscribed. Thereafter Shlyapnikov and Kollantai became politically marginalised.

In many ways the Workers' Opposition inherited the mantle of internal left-wing opposition of the earlier Left-Communists.