The founding members expressed their solidarity with the positions of the United Opposition around Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev in the Soviet Union, and criticized various aspects of the policies of the Communist International and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (e.g. the Stalinist line of "socialism in one country" and the alliance with the Kuomintang in China) as "revisionist deviations".
Before the 1928 German federal election, the organization experienced its first major split when, with the exception of Hugo Urbahns (who led the Lenin League to its end), all of its prominent politicians left the organization (because of the surrender of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the majority positions in the USSR and the participation in the elections being seen as premature).
The slow but steady process of disintegration soon became unstoppable, especially as the KPD violently attacked the Lenin League within the framework of the politics of the Third Period, where any non-Communist workers' organization was labeled as fascist.
In the Rhineland and Berlin, some of Karl Korsch's supporters joined the organization after their own structures were formally dissolved.
Unlike other small left-wing organizations, however, the Lenin League failed to establish a functional foreign leadership (a group of exiles led by Hugo Urbahns existed in Stockholm) or centralized illegal structures.