Oehler, Hugo

OEHLER, HUGO (1903–1983). An important figure in the Communist party in the 1920s, Hugo Oehler was especially esteemed by his comrades for his successful efforts as trade union organizer of textile workers in the Deep South and mine workers in Colorado. He was the Party’s district organizer in Kansas when he declared himself a Trotskyist in 1930 and joined the US section of the International Left Opposition.

Elected a year later to the National Committee of the US Trotskyists’ group, the Communist League of America, Oehler for several years played a key role in the American Trotskyist movement and was a frequent contributor to its paper, the Militant. In 1932 he was sent on a tour of Germany to warn the working class of the impending dangers of Nazism and the ineffectiveness of Communist and social-democratic strategies against it. The following year, back in New York, he helped direct the large hotel-workers’ strike, and in 1934 he organized the unemployed as part of the famous strike of the Minneapolis Teamsters.

At an international conference of Trotskyists in October 1934 Oehler spoke against the so-called French Turn—that is, the entry of Trotskyists into the supposedly leftward-moving social-democratic parties. A year later he and nearly a third of his fellow Trotskyists were expelled from the US Trotskyist group for their opposition to this strategy. Oehler and some two hundred other expellees went on to form the Chicago-based Revolutionary Workers League (RWL; often called “Oehlerites” by its opponents), whose official publication was the Fighting Worker, supplemented by an occasional Spanish-language paper, Claridad Proletaria.

Early in 1937 Oehler went to revolutionary Spain as representative of the RWL and wrote extensively of his experiences there. He took part in the workers’ revolt against provocations of the “popular front” police in Barcelona in May 1937, and his pamphlet Barricades in Barcelona is one of the most valuable firsthand accounts of those events that marked a turning point in the Spanish Revolution. After the Barcelona revolt was crushed, Oehler was arrested, held incommunicado for a month and accused of “spying,” but was finally allowed to leave the country.

Oehler continued to head the RWL until he moved to Denver in 1941, when leadership of the group was assumed for several years by Sidney Lens; the RWL disappeared in the 1950s. Increasingly aloof from practical politics, Oehler devoted the last decades of his life to an elaborate project for a scientific philosophy based on his own rather eccentric conception of materialist dialectics.

Lens, Sidney. Unrepentant Radical. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.

Revolutionary History 34 (summer 1988).

Hugo Oehler (1903-1983) Works. Marxists Internet Archives Website. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/oehler/index.htm