In 1929 Communist Parties around the world were purged of so-called "Right Oppositions" by the Communist International as the world Communist movement lurched towards the revolutionary left. Together with his factional co-thinker Jay Lovestone, Ben Gitlow was expelled from the party as purported supporters of Nikolai Bukharin in the USSR in opposition to the hardline faction of Joseph Stalin. The expelled Communists followed Lovestone into a new organization, the so-called Communist Party (Majority Group), which actually included a small fraction of the membership of the regular Communist Party.