The Transitional Programme fifty years on - pt 2

The nature of transitional demands

In codifying a set of transitional demands into a programme Trotsky finally resolved the ‘programme question’ at the level of method. The TP marked the successful resolution of the programmatic problems that originated with the Erfurt Programme of 1891. It overcame the problem of the disjuncture between the struggle over immediate and partial demands and the struggle for power. It completed the work of the Comintern in this regard. Lenin and the Comintern had an understanding of transitional demands as primarily a bridge to the transitional society during a revolutionary situation. The degenerate Comintern seized on this position—which was only partially correct—in order to condemn the use of transitional demands as opportunist except in a revolutionary situation (prior to dumping them altogether). The reason Lenin’s view of transitional demands was only partially correct was because he had not then worked out the relationship of the general programme to the minimum programme. Trotsky precisely worked out this relationship. He viewed the imperialist epoch as one within which it was possible to tear down the brick wall between minimum and transitional demands. Immediate demands fought for by revolutionary tactics could become the starting point for winning the masses to broader transitional demands: ‘Every local, partial, economic demand must be an approach to a general demand in our transitional programme’.42

Struggles over wage demands could, in circumstances of high inflation, pose questions (the way the cost of living is calculated under capitalism, for example) that workers would seek general answers to. This logic would facilitate the transition from partial demands to transitional, demands provided those transitional demands could be rendered concrete and used as the basis for a mobilisation of workers for struggle:

‘It is necessary to interpret these fundamental ideas by breaking them up into more concrete and partial ones, dependent upon the course of events and the orientation of thought of the masses.’43

Trotsky’s method of firmness and flexibility combined within the framework of a clearly defined strategy is so refreshing compared with the lifeless schematism of that wing of his epigones who think that revolutionary credentials depend on the ability to repeat in all circumstances slogans ripped from the programme and learnt by heart. The ability to take partial struggles as a starting point, generalise them, and then express this generalisation through a concrete demand, is at the heart of the transitional method.

The other addition Trotsky made to Lenin and the Comintern’s position was the use of transitional demands as a bridge not simply to socialism, but to the socialist revolution. The fulfilment of this task, winning the vanguard of the proletariat to the programme of socialist revolution, could only—and can only—be achieved by means of a transitional programme. The programme would, by freeing the proletariat from its bankrupt leaders, clear a path to the revolution. At that point a programme of transition in Lenin’s sense—to socialism—would become necessary:

‘Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day. The tasks of transitional demands is to prepare the proletariat to solve this problem.’44

Transitional demands, providing they really become a focus for mass struggle could introduce a reformist led proletariat to the very need for revolution:

‘It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands stemming from the day’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.’45

Lodged within every transitional demand is the struggle for vital working class needs over capitalism’s pursuit of profit via the establishment of workers’ control over capitalist production and distribution. At the same time each transitional demand contains a call for the organisation of the working class in bodies capable of exercising this control. By fighting for workers’ control and by building organisations that correspond to this fight the working class can block their bosses exercise of his or her ‘right to manage’ against the interests of workers. This denial of managements’ ability to be master in ‘their own’ house is a sort of dual power. Dual power in a single factory must lead to dual power in an industry and indeed in all industries if it is to effectively check the bosses. This in turn will create the beginnings of dual power in society as a whole. In order to defend each and every gain from the inevitable attacks of the capitalists the working class can, through transitional demands, be won to taking this road.

In that sense workers’ control at both a primitive level (over hiring and firing, for example, in a single factory) and an advanced level, (by forcing throughout society the abolition of business secrecy, and the right to veto all plans of the bosses) has the capacity to transform the most basic defensive struggles (against unemployment, for better pay) into offensive struggles leading inexorably towards the creation of a dual power situation. But for this to happen the demands must have an internal logic and interconnection. They are a system of demands, which can only achieve the goal of taking the working class to the threshold of revolution on the condition that they are actually fought for by significant sections of the class and that in the course of that struggle, the demands are extended up to and including the fight for a workers’ government. At the point where the working class, or its vanguard, are fighting in this manner, the transitional programme will be transformed into the programme of soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat:

‘Dual power in its turn is the culminating point of the transitional period. Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletariat, are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Conflict between them is inevitable. The fate of society depends on the outcome.’46

The struggle for transitional demands, therefore, has an integral logic. Each demand has as its essence this logic of propelling the working class further along the road towards revolution. If they are fought for then ‘ever more openly and decisively they will by directed against the very foundations of the bourgeois regime’.47 for this reason it would be profoundly wrong to fetishise the fight for one particular transitional slogan, and conduct that fight irrespective of objective conditions. Transitional slogans, if they are to fulfil their purpose of compelling the proletariat to make ever deeper inroads on capitalism, cannot be used in a timeless fashion. They are rooted first and foremost in actual conditions. The demand for a sliding scale of wages is a case in point. This is nowhere to be found in the Action Programme for France. To those who reverence the TP without either understanding it or being able to creatively develop it, this appears simply to be an oversight. Thus, an article in the old Workers Socialist League’s journal, Trotskyism Today, argued:

‘The Programme of Action in many respects exactly anticipates demands of the Transitional Programme four years later—though the sliding scale of wages and sliding scale of hours were not included and appear not to have been thought of in 1934.’ 48

This is a light minded comment. The sliding scale of hours, while not expressed via that phrase, can be found in the demands of the healthy Comintern and RILU. Workers’ control of hours worked was how it was expressed. As for the sliding scale of wages, it was a demand pioneered in the German communist movement as early as 1923. However—undoubtedly Trotsky did not include it for the simple reason that it was not of central relevance in the given concrete circumstances. Whether or not it had been ‘thought of’ is totally beside the point. It was not relevant. As such it would not have generalised the working class struggle on the wages front. Inflation was not the common grievance of the working class. It could not have been mobilised in a struggle against capitalism around such a demand at that time. Trotsky gives us a fairly obvious reason why not: ‘Brutal defilation is the first step in the plan of the French capitalists.’ 49

In addition if this demand is dislocated from its workers’ control element (the workers’ cost of living index and workers’ and housewives’ committee) it loses its transitional element. It becomes merely partial demand, an immediate reform. And if a situation of monetary stability and low inflation obtains, it will do very little to either mobilise the working class at all let alone generalise a mobilisation of the class. Capitalism could (and has in Italy and Belgium) granted forms of sliding scale which in periods of low inflation do not advance the class towards the socialist revolution. Of course, defence of these sliding scales in a period of crisis and high inflation can become the starting point for transforming the struggle into one for workers’ control. For this reason to have advanced this slogan in the major capitalist powers of Europe or the USA in the period of the long boom, when inflation was relatively insignificant, would have been a departure from Trotsky’s transitional method. He advanced the slogan in the TP not as a universal panacea but as an action slogan for a period characterised by the threat of an enormous leap in prices:

‘Against a bounding rise in prices which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages.’50


The SWP (GB), on the other hand, will counter that in periods where insignificant inflation exists the demand is wrong. This is only half-true. It is inappropriate for such periods, but it should not be junked altogether and forever driven out of the party’s programme. In fact the SWP(GB) hate it at all times because it is a transitional demand, because it challenges trade union reformism. The SWP (GB) opposed the demand in Britain in the 1970s when inflation made it once again timely. Their hostility was rooted in their economism. They wrongly believed that the sliding scale would dampen wage militancy which was, for them, the one and only road to socialist consciousness. The idea that wage militancy could be transformed through a fight to give workers protection against inflation, without at all limiting their demands for additional rises, was anathema to the SWP (GB). Indeed their opposition to the demand became quite infantile. One of their ‘big’ theoreticians, John Molyneux, warned against the demand ‘. . . because it precludes wage claims that exceed price rises.’51

How? Nowhere in the TP does Trotsky say to workers thou shalt not strike for increases in excess of the current retail price index! It merely seeks to direct militancy from the plane of piecemeal demands on the boss for lump sum rises to a higher plane in which workers are challenging the right of the capitalists to use inflation to encroach upon their living standards. Trotsky says that the workers ‘must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it’.52 In no sense should this be read as a warning against high wage demands. Indeed Trotsky adds:

‘There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances—national, local, trade union.’ 53

Clearly the objective conditions determined the use and revolutionary significance of the slogan. The same rule applies to all of the principal transitional slogans.


Pedagogic tasks

Taking objective conditions as his starting point was vital for Trotsky to combat another danger. As well as a wooden counterposing of transitional to immediate demands, Trotsky had to combat tendencies to limit programme to the existing consciousness of the masses. He tirelessly stressed the need to take into account the consciousness (backward or otherwise) of the working class in explaining transitional demands, in adapting them to specific situations. However, he argued that these fundamentally pedagogic considerations could not form the starting point in formulating the central tasks that the party had to arm the proletariat to fulfil. That is, the actual demands in the programme had to correspond to the acute social and political crisis of the world at the end of the 1930s. This objective criterion requires of revolutionaries that they advance demands that are necessary rather than ones which revolutionaries gauge as being possible because of the backward consciousness of a particular working class:

‘Our tasks don’t depend on the mentality of the workers. The task is to develop the mentality of the workers. That is what the programme should formulate and present before the advanced workers. Some will say: good, the programme is a scientific programme; it corresponds to the objective situation—but if the workers won’t accept this programme, it will be sterile. Possibly. But this signifies only that the workers will be crushed, since the crisis can’t be solved in any other way but by the socialist revolution.’54

This spells out clearly that the job of revolutionaries is to lead the workers not to politically adapt to their state of consciousness which in any case is not a fixed or stable thing but undergoes leaps and transformations brought on by crisis and struggle. Transitional demands have to be fought for if they are objectively necessary even though they may appear too advanced in relation to the consciousness of workers at the time:

‘But we cannot adapt the programme to the backward mentality of the workers; the mentality, the mood is a secondary factor—the prime factor is the objective situation.’55

A vexed question that always arises with young revolutionaries and which inveterate centrists can never answer is whether transitional demands can be realised under capitalism. The short answer is no. Because of their inbuilt challenge to the profit logic and mastery of the capitalists over production they are unrealisable as a stable and permanent gain under capitalism. But neither are they simply ‘impossible’ or utopian demands. If they were then they would be unable to address current problems and would be unable to win the allegiance of workers who did not already fully realise the necessity of abolishing capitalism.

Like other serious immediate demands, capitalists can be forced to concede one or another of them temporarily or partially if the working class is strong enough and is threatening the whole system with its actions. Concessions stemming from the struggle for transitional demands can increase workers’ confidence and lead to an offensive struggle. Their successful realisation depends precisely on broadening the struggle to ever wider layers of the working class and interlinking the transitional, immediate and democratic demands until the question of the necessity of a workers’ government to realise them is grasped by the ‘multi-millioned masses’. Organisationally this must be expressed in the massive growth of the influence of the revolutionary party and the creation of soviet-type organs of struggle.

The question of any one demand being realisable or unrealisable, practical or unpractical does not arise in the abstract metaphysical way that this question is usually put. The fate of each separate demand will be settled in the course of struggle. The system of demands will however only be realised by the destruction of bourgeois political and economic power. Lenin, in dealing with the same problem in relation to certain minimum demands, outlined the correct method of dealing with this question. In a letter to Radek in 1910 he argued:

‘The criteria of what is “impractical” within the framework of capitalism should not be taken in the sense that the bourgeoisie will not allow it, that it cannot be achieved etc. In that sense very many demands in our minimum programme are “impractical”, but are none the less obligatory.’56

In dealing with transitional demands Trotsky echoed this point, making clear that these demands were not meant to be a means of ‘tricking’ the workers into socialist struggle, but a means of mobilising them for their vital needs:

‘Not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism. That is why we are calling them transitional demands. It creates a bridge to the mentality of the workers and then a material bridge to the socialist revolution. The whole question is how to mobilise the masses for struggle . . . The revolutionaries always consider that the reforms and acquisitions are only a by-product of revolutionary struggle. If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class will only give one tenth or more of what we demand. When we demand more and can improve our demands, the capitalists are compelled to give the maximum. The more extended and militant the spirit of the workers, the more is demanded and won. They are not sterile slogans; they are a means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible material results immediately.’57


A world programme

The Transitional Programme was a programme for the Fourth International. It was based on the contradictions of world capitalism, the crisis of the Stalinist regime and the experiences of the international proletariat. The opening lines indicate the basis from which the programme starts: ‘The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of leadership’.58

The opening sections are heavily oriented to the problems of revolutionary strategy within the trade unions. Their focus is towards mobilising the workers for a break with established trade union and reformist leaders. Clearly the most immediate (thought not exclusive) field of application for such policies was in the countries where trade union bureaucracies and reformist apparatuses were the decisive obstacles to revolution—the imperialist heartlands. In the discussions of the programme that Trotsky held with SWP(US) members this emphasis is apparent. However, Trotsky goes on to examine the relationship of the trade union oriented transitional demands to democratic demands that have a burning significance for the semi-colonial world. The depth of Trotsky’s grasp of the internationalist nature of the communist programme is revealed in the manner in which he develops the link between democratic and transitional demands. His theory of Permanent Revolution, based as it was on an understanding of the uneven but combined character of development in the imperialist epoch, enabled him to combine the democratic programme and the transitional programme, where the Stalinists and nationalists alike counterposed democracy to socialism:

‘Democratic slogans, transitional demands and the problems of the socialist revolution are not divided into separate historical epochs in this struggle, but stem directly from one another.’59

In particular, it was the experience of the revolutions in Russia, Spain and China that enabled Trotsky to concretely demonstrate how the tasks of the democratic revolution are indissolubly linked with those of the socialist revolution. Trotsky argued that the weight given to democratic demands depended on the degree of backwardness in a particular country, and on the extent of the strength of democratic aspirations. His starting point in raising democratic demands was to solidarise not with the illusions that the masses harboured in bourgeois democracy but with what was progressive about the aspiration (the yearning for freedom of speech and assembly, the right to organise trade unions and political parties). By taking up these demands in conditions where the bourgeoisie refused them or at best used them in a deceitful manner a bridge to transitional and socialist demands could be opened. This is what Trotsky meant when he called for a transitional democratic programme in China, for example. The method of utilising democratic demands in this transitional fashion—enshrined in the programme—was anticipated by Trotsky’s use of the call for a constituent assembly (Cortes) in Spain:

‘The masses of the city and countryside can be united at the present time only under democratic slogans. These include the election of a constituent Cortes on the basis of universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage. I do not think that in the present situation you can avoid this slogan. Soviets are as yet non-existent. The Spanish workers—not to speak of the peasants—do not know what soviets are; at any rate not from their own experiences. Nevertheless, the struggle around the Cortes in the coming period will constitute the whole political life of the country. To counterpose the slogan of soviets, under these circumstances to the slogan of the Cortes, would be incorrect.

On the other hand, it will obviously be possible to build soviets in the near future only by mobilising the masses on the basis of democratic slogans. This means: to prevent the monarchy from convening a false, deceptive, conservative Cortes; and so that this Cortes can give land to the peasants, and do many other things, workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets must be created to fortify the positions of the toiling masses.’60

This method of combining democratic demands with transitional ones, stands in stark contrast to the positions of degenerate Trotskyism today in Latin America, Africa and Asia. They interpret Trotsky’s reference to arming workers with a democratic programme as a ‘primary step’61 to mean the fight for democracy as a distinct stage. Thus they mimic the Stalinist stages theory. The sense of Trotsky’s talk of a ‘primary step’ is clear from the reference above to Spain. A revolutionary fight for the democratic programme can, in certain circumstances, be the first step towards the programme of Soviets. But this step can only be made if the fight for soviets is linked to the struggle for democracy. Neither Trotsky nor Lenin in 1917 before October abandoned the call for the constituent assembly, even while at the same time calling for all power to be placed in the hands of the Soviets. This position reflected the combined tasks of the Russian Revolution, not counterposed stages of that revolution.

The international scope of the TP is equally evident in the section on the USSR. Trotsky elaborates a clear programme aimed at overthrowing the bureaucracy. This section was of vital importance in countering those in the FI who saw political revolution as a mere self-reform process by sections of the bureaucracy. Trotsky made clear that ‘. . . the chief political task in the USSR still remains the overthrow of this same Thermidorian bureaucracy’.62

Trotsky’s programme was prescient in identifying the struggle against social inequality and political oppression as the starting point of political revolution. Hungary and Poland both demonstrate the correctness of his prediction. However, the lack of experience of actual political revolutionary crises necessarily limited Trotsky’s ability to elaborate detailed tactics and demands. He could only begin to elaborate a programme. Once again the actual experiences of the post-war period, in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and, most recently Poland, oblige us to go further. It is proof of the bankruptcy of the FI’s fragments that they emptied Trotsky’s programme of its revolutionary kernel and went backwards to a reform perspective. For their part the Cliffites, with the theory of State Capitalism, abandoned the programme of political revolution altogether. For them there is only the perspective of a new February 1917, a spontaneous democratic revolution. As Cliff puts it:

‘The spontaneous revolution, in smashing the iron heel of the Stalinist bureaucracy, will open the field for the free activity of all the parties, tendencies and groups in the working class. It will be the first chapter in the victorious proletarian revolution.’63

The land of the first successful workers’ revolution must return to chapter one—bourgeois democracy—before the transition to socialism can be effected. The transitional method is abandoned and its place is taken by spontaneism—a position every bit as fatalist and prostrate before the objective process as that taken by the principal fragments of the FI that the Cliffites claimed to be opposing.


Re-elaborating the Transitional Programme

In our book, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, we stated that our objective was the re-foundation of a revolutionary international on the basis of a re-elaborated programme. As we have seen regular re-elaborations of the programme have taken place in the Marxist tradition. The method lodged in the Communist Manifesto was retained in the TP. But Trotsky did not simply reprint the Manifesto because it was, at a methodological level, still valid. He re-elaborated it. He encompassed new developments, new perspectives and a new balance sheet of the class struggle in his programme. This is entirely Marxist. Yet our call to do just the same fifty years on from when the TP was written, has been greeted with horror and dismay by a miscellany of centrist groups that originated from the FI. How dare we propose to tamper with a text, which for them, has become a holy icon! For us the programme must be a guide to action. For them it is something to look at, admire and perhaps even worship. We say clearly that just as Trotsky declared the Communist Manifesto to be his programme, and just as he re-elaborated it to fit new circumstances, so we say the TP is our programme and we simply intend to re-elaborate it for the period we face.

For us the need for re-elaboration stems from several factors. The first and most straightforward, is that it was not complete. Anyone who thinks it was should consider Trotsky’s own remarks about the programme. When the SWP(US) National Committee hesitated in adopting the programme Trotsky re-assured them that it was a general ‘working hypothesis’ that ‘can and surely will be modified in the fire of experience’64. He even offered it as a basis for discussion with the French PSOP led by the centrist Marceau Pivert, inviting the latter to submit amendments. And in his discussions of the programme with the SWP(US) leaders he insisted:

‘The draft programme is not a complete programme . . . The programme is only the first approximation. It is too general in the sense in which it is presented to the international conference in the next period.’65

He believed it lacked a precise enough analysis of the contemporary stage of imperialism and its contradictions and developments. He knew full well it lacked precise slogans for establishing and consolidating of the proletarian dictatorship. He recognised that ‘peculiar conditions in each country and even in each part of the country’,66 would affect the particular focus of the programme when applied in a given nation. In short, Trotsky signalled the areas where he felt further development was necessary.

The first point, concerning the imperialist epoch, is decisive for any re-elaboration of the programme. This is because the lack of this analysis disarmed Trotsky’s followers after the war when his prognoses for acute and prolonged economic crisis failed to materialise, at least in the imperialist heartlands. Trotsky’s perspective as we have seen under-estimated the economic strength of US imperialism.

But not only do we have Trotsky’s own admitted shortcomings that require work from us in the development of the programme, we also have to overcome the distortions of the programme by the centrists. The final factor that renders re-elaboration necessary is the profound changes and their effects on the class struggle and its major protagonists (reformists, nationalists, centrists and revolutionists) that have occurred in the last fifty years. The problems of imperialism in the aftermath of its long boom, the complexities of the struggles in the imperialised world, the effects of its own expansion on Stalinism, the flowering of movements of the oppressed and so on, all have to be encompassed in a re-elaborated programme.

This task would have been considerably easier had not revolutionary continuity been shattered. Had Trotsky‘s epigones re-elaborated his programme in the 1950s many of the difficulties we face today would not exist. And such re-elaboration was possible. In the imperialist countries, where the boom engendered relative social peace, Trotsky’s warning that a strategic retreat might prove necessary should have warned and encouraged the next generation of Trotskyists. It would have encouraged them that, even in the conditions of boom and the isolation of revolutionaries, they could retreat to dealing with a lower level of class struggle, but in a revolutionary manner. Retreat need not mean revision. That retreat, in the face of a capitalist boom, should not have been a retreat back to the minimum programme. It should have looked at the tasks of building opposition inside the trade unions to the reformist bureaucracies. It should have meant developing the tactic of the rank and file movement—the revolutionary use of the united front in the unions—so as to be able to seize every opportunity to exact new gains from the capitalists, encroaching upon their control in the workplace and weakening the ability of the bureaucrats to play their role as lieutenants of capital inside the labour movement. Yet the TP’s call for ‘independent militant organisations’ was left as a dead letter.

The failure to carry out a ‘strategic retreat’ for the imperialist countries by formulating a policy for the unions was mirrored by the failure to re-elaborate the programme to deal with the resurgence of reformism. The TP deals with reformism—in both its social democratic and Stalinist garb—at a very general level. Trotsky firmly believed its death knell had been sounded. He did not feel the need to repeat the tactics towards it any detail. Yet after the war in Britain, Italy, France and West Germany reformism played a vital role in facilitating the stabilisation of capitalism. It saved capitalism and itself. In place of the Transitional Programme’s general denunciation of reformism a programme of action utilising the tactics of the united front was required. Instead, the FI’s fragments in imperialist Europe simply saw every current of left reformism is evidence of Trotsky’s prediction that reformism as a whole was disintegrating. At the level of tactics all the fragments, to one degree or another, capitulated to left reformism, hailing it as centrist or assimilating themselves to it as its left wing.

These failures to develop the programme inevitably disarmed the centrist groupings which originated from the FI. In Belgium 1961 and France 1968 the cost of either abandoning or distorting the transitional method proved to be a tendency to accommodate to the labour and trade union bureaucracy or a tendency to simply tail the workers’ struggles in the hope that they would spontaneously overcome their illusions in that bureaucracy. The same tendencies manifested themselves when the developments of movements of the oppressed (women, blacks, lesbians and gays) developed. With no real point of reference in the Transitional Programme and blind to its methods, the centrists practiced liquidationism or economism.

In the semi-colonies the development of the programme to relate to the rise of petit bourgeois nationalist movements was required. Bolivia in 1952 provided a test case.67 The problem of soviets, of the workers’ and peasants’ government, of workers’ control and the relationship of democratic and transitional demands, could have been rendered precise. The tactics and strategy of Trotskyism, however, were unceremoniously dumped by the epigones. The programme was ignored, not enriched.

And, in the degenerate workers’ states, the need to develop the programme of political revolution was demonstrated by the regular explosions of rebellion against the Stalinist rulers. But here too the foundation stones laid by Trotsky were dynamited, not built upon. Instead fractions of the bureaucracy were tailed.

The crisis of leadership has, in the latter part of the twentieth century, seen a further development. The collapse of the FI means that centrism stands as the major alternative for workers breaking with reformism. The forces of revolutionary communism are a tiny minority. They lack numbers, resources, theoreticians of the stature of Trotsky and many things beside. But these forces exist. Under the banner of the MRCI they are fighting. True, today we must largely fight with the weapons of criticism. In transcending this stage and in overcoming the obstacles we do possess one vital weapon—Trotsky’s revolutionary method. Enshrined in the Transitional Programme are all the answers for us in re-elaborating that programme to meet the new period of social and economic crisis that imperialism has plunged into. By tearing away the shrouds that centrism wrapped Trotskyism’s real method and programme in, we can compensate for all weaknesses. We can prepare our cadre, root ourselves in the class struggle and accumulate experience. We can march forward confidently and produce the new programme, on the shoulders of each previous Marxist programme, especially the TP. And in so doing we will build the new International and new parties that are so desperately needed. In doing so we heed Trotsky’s words:

‘The significance of the programme is the significance of the party . . . Now what is the party? In what does the cohesion exist? This cohesion is a common understanding of the events, of the tasks; and this common understanding—that is the programme of the party. Just as modern workers cannot work without tools any more than the barbarians could, so in the party the programme is the instrument.’68

With such a programme we can arm the working class with a strategy to despatch capitalism into the rubbish bin of history.


NOTES

1 Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (TP), (New York 1977)—all future references to the Transitional Programme and discussions on it are to this edition.
2 Ibid, p111
3 Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, Against the Stream, (London 1986) p183
4 Leon Trotsky, The Crisis in the French Section, (New York 1977) p119
5 Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, (Harmondsworth 1975) p40
6 Leon Trotsky, Whither France?, (London 1974) p50
7 Leon Trotsky, TP, p172
8 Leon Trotsky, Writings 1937-38 (W 37-38), (New York 1976) p284
9 Leon Trotsky, W 38-39, (New York 1974) p232
10 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, (New York 1973) p159
11 Leon Trotsky, TP, p99
12 Leon Trotsky, W 39-40, p291
13 Leon Trotsky, W 38-39, p341
14 Leon Trotsky, TP, p112
15 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38, pp438-39
16 For a full account of the effects of this disorientation see: Workers Power/Irish Workers Group, The Death Agony of the Fourth International and the Tasks of Trotskyists Today, (London 1983)
17 James P Cannon, The Struggle for Socialism in the American Century, (New York 1977) p256
18 Ibid, p263
19 Mandel and Pablo were, with Pierre Frank, the International Secretariat which was based in Paris at that time
20 ‘The World Situation and Tasks of the Fourth International’, Fourth International , June 1948 (New York)
21 James P Cannon, op cit, pp276-77
22 See Mark Hoskisson, ‘Programme in the Imperialist Epoch’, Permanent Revolution No 6 (London 1987)
23 James P Cannon, op cit, p298
24 Duncan Hallas, ‘Against the Stream’, International Socialism 1:53, (London 1972) p39
25 John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution, (Brighton 1981) p179
26 Chris Bambery, ‘The Politics of James P Cannon’, International Socialism 2:36 (London 1987) p77
27 Leon Trotsky, TP, p173
28 Ibid, p111
29 John Molyneux, op cit, p185
30 Leon Trotsky, On France, (New York 1979) p200
31 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp103-04
32 ‘The Yugoslav Affair’, Fourth International December 1948, (New York) p238
33 Leon Trotsky, TP, p113
34 Documents of the Fourth International, (New York 1973) p348
35 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp113-14 (our emphasis)
36 Documents of the Fourth International, p161 (our emphasis)
37 Leon Trotsky, TP, p101
38 Workers Power, Where Next for the NUM?, (London 1985)
39 Leon Trotsky, TP, p114
40 Duncan Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism, (London 1979) p104
41 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, (New York 1973) p80
42 Leon Trotsky, TP, p135
43 Ibid, p102
44 Ibid, p129
45 Ibid, p122
46 Ibid, pp136-37
47 Ibid, p137
48 Workers Socialist League, Trotskyism Today No4, p5 (London 1979)
49 Leon Trotsky, Whither France?, p146
50 Ibid, p115 (our emphasis)
51 John Molyneux, op cit, p152
52 Leon Trotsky, TP, p115
53 Ibid, p115
54 Ibid, p157
55 Ibid, p176
56 V I Lenin, Collected Works Volume 36, p172 (Moscow 1966)
57 Leon Trotsky, TP, pp159-60
58 Ibid, p111
59 Ibid, p137
60 Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution, p137
61 Leon Trotsky, TP, p137
62 Ibid, p145
63 Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia, p264 (London 1974)
64 Leon Trotsky, W 37-38, p343
65 Leon Trotsky, TP, p173
66 Ibid, p173
67 See Workers Power, Permanent Revolution No2, (London 1984)
68 Leon Trotsky, TP, p171

Tue 28, November 2006 @ 19:05