Leon Trotsky, co-leader of the October Revolution and founder of the
Red Army, wrote the Transitional Program in March and April 1938 while living in
exile in Mexico. It was adopted as the program of the Fourth International at its founding
conference in September 1938.
Prior to finishing the draft, Trotsky participated in a series of discussions in late
March 1938 with four leaders of the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP): James P.
Cannon, Vincent Dunne, Rose Karsner and Max Shachtman. The SWP was the most substantial
section of the fledgling Fourth International in terms of size, political capacity and
mass influence. Trotskys discussions with the SWPers helped to clarify certain aspects of
the program and to refine his ideas about how it should be presented. In a 15 April 1938
letter to Cannon, Trotsky wrote:
“Without your visit to Mexico, I could never have written the program
draft because I learned during the discussions many important things which permitted me to
be more explicit and concrete.[1]”
The Transitional Program remains relevant today because it addresses the
central task of our epoch: the mobilization of the working class for power. To be sure,
the world has changed a great deal since 1938. Accordingly, in applying the program,
revolutionaries must distinguish between those passages containing its core programmatic
conceptions and the more descriptive passages that reflect the specific historical period
in which it was written.
By 1938 the world order established at Versailles in 1919 was in shreds. The enormous
social devastation of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and other events preparing
the way for a cataclysmic inter-imperialist bloodbath provided the context for the rather
categorical (and even apocalyptic) tone of some passages in the Transitional
Program. Trotsky wrote:
“The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in
general achieved the highest point of fruition that can be reached under capitalism.
Mankinds productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to
raise the level of material wealth.
· · ·
International relations present no better picture. Under the increasing
tension of capitalist disintegration, imperialist antagonisms…must inevitably
coalesce into a conflagration of world dimensions. The bourgeoisie, of course, is aware of
the mortal danger to its domination represented by a new war. But that class is now
immeasurably less capable of averting war than on the eve of 1914.”
Trotsky expected that World War II would end in a wave of revolutionary explosions just
as World War I had. Moreover, he was by no means alone in anticipating this. On 25 August
1939, a few days before the outbreak of hostilities, the French ambassador told Hitler: as
a result of the war, there would be only one real victor—Mr. Trotsky.[2]
World War II was a catastrophe that cost tens of millions of lives and wreaked
unprecedented destruction. In its aftermath, potentially revolutionary situations arose in
a number of European countries. In France and Italy these were defused, largely as a
result of the treachery of the Moscow-loyal Communist Parties, whose cadres disarmed the
partisans and propped up the post-war anti-fascist bourgeois regimes. Maurice Thorez,
leader of the French Communist Party, advanced the slogan: One police, one army, one
state! In Greece, the Kremlin tacitly supported the British Army, monarchists and Nazi
collaborators in brutally crushing the leftist National Liberation Front (EAM).
The Nazi occupation of Western Europe generated intense hostility toward the indigenous
bourgeoisie (who overwhelmingly collaborated with the fascists), but it also revived
illusions in the anti-fascist imperialists. The Stalinists used the authority they accrued
through their central role in the anti-Nazi resistance and their association with the
victorious Red Army in pursuit of global reconciliation with imperialism. In 1943 Stalin
went so far as to dissolve the Comintern in a demonstration of goodwill toward British and
American imperialism. The New York Herald Tribune observed:
“So far as the present Russian government is concerned, there is no
reason to suspect that the dissolution of the Comintern is merely a gesture. Instead, it
appears far more probable that it is the climax of the process that began when Stalin won
his duel with Trotsky for leadership in Russia—the organization of that country into a
national state run on Communist lines, rather than a center of world revolution.[3]”
By the end of the war, only the Fourth International laid claim to the heritage of the
Leninist Comintern. Yet so many key Trotskyist cadres had been murdered during the war (by
both Stalinists and Nazis) that the Fourth International had ceased to function as a
coherent organization. Individuals and small groups of militants remained active and
carried out some exemplary interventions, but the International was far too weak to take
advantage of the post-war revolutionary opportunities.
The social-democratic organizations, which had ceased to operate during the Nazi
occupation, were revived by the British and Americans as pro-capitalist counterweights to
the influence of the Communists in the European labor movement. Having successfully
contained the upheavals of 1945-46, Western European capitalism, with the support of the
American colossus, went on to enjoy over 20 years of relative stability and prosperity.
During this period, in stark contrast to the 1930s, the reformist leaders of the working
class were able to win some limited but real material concessions from the
bourgeoisie—concessions which had a conservatizing effect upon their base.
Post-War Expansion and the Transitional Program
The rather categorical nature of some of Trotskys formulations in his 1938 draft and
their apparent refutation by subsequent developments have led some ostensible Marxists to
draw the conclusion that the Transitional Program lost its relevance and
applicability in the post-war period. Yet the system of revolutionary transitional demands
that constitutes the core of the program did not flow from Trotskys conjunctural prognoses
of 1938. The performance of the capitalist economy at a given historical moment conditions
the framework within which the class struggle takes place, and thus the immediate
political possibilities, but such conjunctural factors do not affect the revolutionary
Marxist assessment of the objective historic necessity for human society to make the leap
to socialism.
This necessity flows from the qualitative intensification of the global contradictions
of capitalism in what Lenin and Trotsky called the imperialist stage of its development.
Imperialism is characterized by attempts on the part of the most advanced countries to
resolve the crisis tendencies inherent in the capitalist accumulation process through
mechanisms which transfer wealth from weaker to stronger regions of the global economy and
produce extremely uneven patterns of development. In addition to endless military
adventures in the neo-colonies, inter-imperialist competition leads inexorably to world
war.
There is clearly a sense in which the advent of the imperialist epoch marked the end of
capitalisms historically progressive role in developing the forces of production, defined
broadly as global human capacities. The intensified contradictions of the capitalist mode
of production in the metropolitan imperialist regions set the stage for periodic military
conflicts that destroy productive forces on a massive scale. Moreover, imperialism blocks
the diffusion of advanced technologies to more backward regions, thereby retarding the
development of labor productivity on a world scale. On the eve of the 21st century,
capitalism has failed to completely uproot pre-capitalist economic forms in much of the
Third World. It has succeeded in creating a reserve army of the unemployed and
under-employed that comprises more than 30 percent of the global workforce. The inability
of the market to promote qualitative growth in macro-economic productivity (even as it
retains a remarkable capacity to stimulate the micro-productivity of individual
enterprises) confirms the continuing validity of the long-standing Leninist-Trotskyist
proposition that capitalism constitutes an obstacle to human progress.
It is with these considerations in mind that we should evaluate Trotskys comment in the
Transitional Program regarding the stagnation of the productive forces in the
inter-war period. This characterization was one-sided and therefore inaccurate to the
extent that it failed to register the continuing potential for advances in technology and
labor productivity at the level of the capitalist enterprise—although if
there was ever a time in the 20th century that this appeared to be in doubt, it was
certainly during the 1930s. Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed enormous growth in
the productivity of that segment of the global workforce that remains involved in directly
productive activity within capitalist industry, and a massive expansion of material
wealth. In this sense the economic prerequisites for the creation of a planned economy
stand at a far higher level today than in the 1930s.
In spite of the one-sided character of the formulation of the question in the
Transitional Program, it would be unfair to impute to Trotsky the notion that
capitalism, even in the epoch of its death agony, posed an absolute barrier to further
advances in productive technique. In his last major programmatic document, the May 1940
Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World
Revolution, he remarked (albeit off-handedly) that, “technology is infinitely more powerful
now than at the end of the war of 1914-18….”[4]
Despite the new material basis for renewed capital accumulation created by World War
II, post-war capitalist expansion eliminated neither political and social crises nor real
opportunities for the working class to struggle for power. The colonial and semi-colonial
world witnessed a series of major upheavals, from mass struggles for national independence
in Africa and Asia, to successful anti-capitalist social revolutions in China, Vietnam and
Cuba. While potentially revolutionary situations were less common in the advanced
capitalist countries in the post-war than the inter-war period, sharp class struggles
continued to erupt in several European countries long after the working-class upsurges of
the mid-1940s. The May–June 1968 events in France, Italy’s “hot autumn’ in 1969, and the
Portuguese crisis of 1974-75 were clearly all pre-revolutionary situations. A number of
other major class battles of the 1960s and 1970s also demonstrated the potential
vulnerability of the capitalist order even during a period which was generally
characterized by rising working-class living standards and relatively dynamic economic
growth. These included the Belgian general strike of 1961, the Chilean cordones
industriales (workers councils) of 197273, Quebecs 1972 general strike and the 1974
showdown between the British miners and the Tory government. Many of the demands included
in the Transitional Program were every bit as relevant in these struggles as they
had been in comparable situations in the 1920s and 1930s.
The past two decades have seen falling real wages, declining living standards and
growing social inequality and insecurity throughout the developed (i.e., imperialist)
world. Working people are told to get used to the idea that life for their children will
be harder than their own lives are today. In the Third World, hundreds of millions of
human beings are consigned to short and brutal lives of hopeless and desperate poverty.
Those lucky enough to get employment in low-wage newly industrializing neo-colonies are
subject to conditions reminiscent of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Todays
brave new world of instantaneous communication, flexible production and global financial
markets is also one in which tens of thousands of children starve to death daily, and in
which the destruction of the biosphere proceeds inexorably.
Can Capitalism Survive?
The tendency for capitalist economic rivalry to escalate into military conflict
produced two world wars in the 20th century. These were not random events or natural
disasters. They derive from an inner logic of capitalist competition, a logic that compels
each bourgeoisie to continually attempt to improve its position at the expense of its
rivals. In the Fourth International’s 1940 manifesto, Trotsky posed the following
alternatives for humanity:
“The question is whether, as a result of the present war, the entire
world economy will be reconstructed on a planned scale, or whether the first attempt of
this reconstruction will be crushed in a sanguinary convulsion, and imperialism will
receive a new lease on life until the third world war, which can become the tomb of
civilization.[5]”
Imperialism did indeed receive a new lease on life after World War II. But todays
sharpening economic competition between the major capitalist trading blocs reminds us
that, sooner or later, a third inter-imperialist conflict is inevitable. Today, as in
1938, nothing short of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can open a road out.
Contrary to the insistence of capitalist ideologues that communism is dead, and that
Marx’s analysis of capitalism is no longer relevant, a growing number of studies by leftist
scholars in recent years have demonstrated a remarkable conformity between the real
dynamics of capital accumulation since World War II and Marx’s description of the laws of
motion of the capitalist mode of production.[6] A long-term fall in
the average rate of profit, associated with a rise in the organic composition of capital
(the ratio of dead to living labor in production), was evident in a number of advanced
capitalist countries up to at least the late 1970s. Just as Marx anticipated, the
bourgeoisie responded to this profitability crisis with aggressive efforts to jack up the
rate of exploitation of the labor force, and with attempts to resolve the internal
contradiction by extending the external field of production [7] that is, through heightened
inter-imperialist competition for markets and arenas of profitable investment.
The economic malaise of the past two decades is the direct result of a classical
profitability crisis resulting from the contradiction between the labor-displacing
imperatives of capitalist accumulation/competition and the structural necessity of
capitalism to continuously measure material wealth in terms of abstract labor time (i.e.,
the contradictions of the law of value). The only medicine that the capitalist class can
dispense to alleviate such a crisis, short of a new world war and the massive destruction
of the dead labor embodied in capitalist means of production, is a relentless assault on
working-class living standards and trade-union rights. The real history of the capitalist
mode of production in recent decades strikingly confirms Marx’s fundamental insights that
the accumulation of capital must give rise over time to ever greater class antagonisms,
and that these heightened antagonisms present the working class with the opportunity and
the challenge to end the rule of capital and inaugurate a new social order.
Marxists are not alone in viewing capitalism as an unstable and transitory moment in
human history. The few bourgeois theorists who have thought seriously about the future of
capitalism have tended to conclude that a profit-driven system cannot survive over the
long term. In his 1942 opus, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph
Schumpeter asked Can capitalism survive? and answered: No, I do not think it can. In an
interview promoting his influential 1993 tome, Twenty-First Century Capitalism,
Robert Heilbroner, a leading American bourgeois economist, asked:
“Why do none of our philosophers, not even [Adam] Smith or Schumpeter
who are surely partisans of the order, foresee a long untroubled future for
capitalism?
The obvious answer is the sheer difficulty of successfully maintaining
capitalist order….
The crucial difficulty for maintaining economic order takes on many
forms—the indeterminacy of the outlook for investment and for technology; the
unequal distribution of incomes[;]…the technological displacement of labour and the
technological impetus toward cartelization; the inflationary tendencies of a successful
economy and the depressive tendencies of an unsuccessful one. Capitalisms uniqueness in
history lies in its continuously self-generated change, but it is this very dynamism that
is the systems chief enemy. The system will sooner or later give rise to unmanageable
problems and will have to make way for a successor.[8]”
The fundamental problem with capitalism is that everything is subordinated to the
predatory struggle to maximize private profitto measure human wealth in terms of surplus
labor appropriated even as capitalist production requires less and less living labor as a
technical input to production. The full promise of labor-saving technology cannot be
realized by a system governed by the logic of the class exploitation of living labor. To
resolve these problems in a historically progressive manner, a successor system must
provide humanity with the ability to consciously control its social environment and gear
production to the satisfaction of human needs rather than to the perpetuation of class
inequality.
The Role of the Conscious Factor
The capitalist class conquered political power after first establishing its economic
domination. For the working class this process is reversed. A planned economy will not
emerge semi-spontaneously from capitalist anarchy, as capitalism did from feudalism; it
must be created through extending conscious human control over the production and
distribution of the goods and services necessary for society to develop and reproduce
itself. The revolutionary transformation of all existing social relations can only be
initiated on the basis of a high level of political consciousness within the
proletariat.
The centrality of the subjective factor in the struggle for socialism (i.e., a
disciplined political vanguard of the proletariat) lies at the heart of Trotskyism:
“The new parties and the new International must be built upon a new
foundation: that is the key with which to solve all other tasks. The tempo and the time of
the new revolutionary construction and its consummation depend, obviously, upon the
general course of the class struggle, the future victories and defeats of the proletariat.
Marxists, however, are not fatalists. They do not unload upon the historical process those
very tasks which the historical process has posed before them. The initiative of a
conscious minority, a scientific program, bold and ceaseless agitation in the name of
clearly formulated aims, merciless criticism of all ambiguitythose are some of the most
important factors for the victory of the proletariat. Without a fused and steeled
revolutionary party a socialist revolution is inconceivable.[9]”
Trotsky, like Lenin, rejected as objectivist nonsense the notion that capitalism must
inevitably or automatically collapse:
“There is no crisis that can be, by itself, fatal to capitalism. The
oscillations of the business cycle only create a situation in which it will be easier, or
more difficult, for the proletariat to overthrow capitalism. The transition from a
bourgeois society to a socialist society presupposes the activity of living people who are
the makers of their own history. They do not make history by accident, or according to
their caprice, but under the influence of objectively determined causes. However, their
own actions—their initiative, audacity, devotion, and likewise their stupidity and
cowardice—are necessary links in the chain of historical development.
The crises of capitalism are not numbered, nor is it indicated in advance
which one of these will be the last. But our entire epoch and, above all, the present
crisis imperiously command the proletariat: Seize power! If, however, the party of the
working class, in spite of favorable conditions, reveals itself incapable of leading the
proletariat to the seizure of power, the life of society will continue necessarily upon
capitalist foundations—until a new crisis, a new war, perhaps until the complete
disintegration of European civilization.[10]”
While the Fourth International was established to struggle to resolve the crisis of
revolutionary leadership, Trotsky was acutely aware of the enormous difficulties it
faced:
“…shall we succeed in preparing in time a party capable of leading
the proletarian revolution? In order to answer this question correctly it is necessary to
pose it correctly. Naturally, this or that uprising may end and surely will end in defeat
owing to the immaturity of the revolutionary leadership. But it is not a question of a
single uprising. It is a question of an entire revolutionary epoch.
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so
considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings,
brief interludes of truce, new wars, and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must
base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and
possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience and to mature….[T]he great
historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at
the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous
importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of
our policy.[11]”
A rise in working-class militancy will often be met by court injunctions prohibiting
mass pickets, plant seizures, hot-cargoing, sympathy strikes and any other effective
tactics. If this proves insufficient, police pressure is stepped up: pickets and
demonstrators are attacked, union assets seized and workers leaders detained. The mass
media, which normally operates as the ideological police of the ruling class, works
overtime to confuse, divide and demoralize the workers and their potential allies.
Such measures are often sufficient for the capitalists to reassert control, but
sometimes repression can backfire and result in new layers of the population being drawn
into struggle. A deep-going crisis in the bourgeois social order inevitably manifests
itself in division and a loss of self-confidence in the ruling class, and in uncertainty,
confusion and hesitation within the repressive apparatus itself. In such circumstances the
capitalists often come to rely more heavily on fascists and gangs of strikebreakers and
thugs recruited from the patriotic petty bourgeoisie, the lumpenproletariat and backward
elements of the working class.
An effective leadership of the workers movement must anticipate such developments and
be prepared to act swiftly and decisively to neutralize reactionary formations before they
grow. While proper technical preparations for this sort of intervention are essential, the
most important task is the continuing political mass mobilization of the working class as
it awakens to its historic interests through the course of the struggle. The
Transitional Program is an algebraic codification of the essential measures with
which the proletarian vanguard can broaden the scope of struggle and counter the attacks
of the class enemy in a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation:
“The basic conditions for the victory of the proletarian revolution have
been established by historical experience and clarified theoretically: (1) the bourgeois
impasse and resulting confusion of the ruling class; (2) the sharp dissatisfaction and
striving towards decisive changes in the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie without whose
support the big bourgeoisie cannot maintain itself; (3) the consciousness of the
intolerable situation and readiness for revolutionary actions in the ranks of the
proletariat; (4) a clear program and a firm leadership of the proletarian vanguardthese
are the four conditions for the victory of the proletarian revolution.[12]”
Program and Party Of a New Type
In the late 19th century, the leaders of the Second International anticipated that as
the working class grew in social weight, internal cohesion and political maturity, it
would gradually lose its connections to the peasantry and urban petty bourgeoisie and
embrace the socialist project (the maximum component of the classical social-democratic
program). In the meantime, they sought to draw the working class into a unitary party of
the whole class by focusing on the minimum needs of working people within the framework of
capitalism.
The social-patriotic capitulation of the Second International during World War I forced
Lenin to conclude that a bribed layer of pro-capitalist labor aristocrats were actively
promoting false consciousness within the proletariat. This dictated a decisive break from
the conception of a party of the whole class in favor of a party of a new type—a
revolutionary combat party capable of leading the working class in a fight for power.
Lenins recognition of the necessity of organizing a party of the most advanced workers
separately from the more backward layers was his single most important contribution to
Marxism.
The Leninist party of a new type naturally required a new sort of program. The parties
of the Second International claimed to be Marxist, and even revolutionary, but they
considered the maximum program as something for the indefinite future. The Communist
International (Comintern), by contrast, actively sought to address the immediate struggles
of the class in ways that led to revolutionary modes of consciousness and action. The
Comintern under Lenin explicitly advocated the use of transitional demands that would
unite the proletariat across its sectional divisions while also prefiguring the economic,
social and political content of the future workers state, thereby posing, at least
implicitly, the necessity of socialist revolution.
The use of transitional demands does not imply an abandonment of struggles for more
limited objectives. The Fourth International would not:
“…discard the program of the old minimal demands to the degree to
which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it
defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this
day-to-day work within the frame-work of the correct actual, that is, revolutionary
perspective….The old minimal program is superseded by the transitional
program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilization of the masses for the
proletarian revolution.[13]”
Reformists have no use for transitional demands because their activity does not go
beyond the practical task of reforming bourgeois society; indeed, reformism seeks only to
win reforms that are compatible with maintaining the conditions of bourgeois rule, in
particular, rates of profit deemed to be reasonable by the capitalist class. By contrast,
revolutionaries are not constrained to operate within the bounds established by the
imperatives of capitalist profitability:
“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands, inevitably
arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. Realizability or
unrealizability are in the given instance a question of the relationship of
forces….[14]”
Marxists have long observed that the greatest gains for working people tend to come as
by-products of revolutionary struggle:
“If we say that we will only demand what they can give, the ruling class
will give only one-tenth or none of what we demand. When we demand more and can impose 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 means of pressure on the bourgeoisie, and will give the greatest possible
material results immediately.[15]”
Reformists are not alone in their rejection of transitional demands. Sectarian
ultra-lefts also have no use for them. Having already rhetorically embraced the most
extreme formulas, they reject all tactical maneuvers, compromises or partial struggles,
and content themselves with striking poses and issuing fearsomely radical-sounding
declamations, while patiently waiting for the great day when the masses will seek them
out.
Bourgeois Recess and Proletarian Strategic Retreat
In discussing the Transitional Program with the SWP/U.S. leaders, Trotsky
noted that some of his followers seemed to have, the impression that some of my
propositions or demands [in the draft program] were opportunistic, and others…were
too revolutionary, not corresponding to the objective situation.[16] Pointing to the fact that the U.S. was in
the grip of a social crisis without precedent, Trotsky proposed that the SWP should be
more optimistic, more courageous, more aggressive in our strategy and tactics:
“What is the sense of the transitional program? We can call it a program
of action, but for us, for our strategic conception, it is a transitional program—it
is a help to the masses in overcoming the inherited ideas, methods, and forms and of
adapting themselves to the exigencies of the objective situation. This transitional
program must include the most simple demands. We cannot foresee and prescribe local and
trade union demands adapted to the local situation of a factory, the development from this
demand to the slogan for the creation of a workers soviet.
These are both extreme points, from the development of our transitional
program to find the connecting links and lead the masses to the idea of revolutionary
conquest of power. That is why some demands appear to be very opportunistic—because they
are adapted to the actual mentality of the workers. That is why other demands appear too
revolutionary—because they reflect more the objective situation than the actual mentality
of the workers. It is our duty to make this gap between objective and subjective factors
as short as possible. That is why I cannot overestimate the importance of the transitional
program.[17]”
Trotsky was well aware that there are downturns, as well as upturns, in the class
struggle. He even raised the possibility that capitalism might emerge intact from the
impending world war:
“You can raise the objection that we cannot predict the rhythm and tempo
of the development and that possibly the bourgeoisie will find a political
recess—that is not excluded—but then we will be obliged to realize a strategic
retreat. But in the present situation we must be oriented for a strategic offensive, not a
retreat.[18]”
This is an interesting passage because, of course, the bourgeoisie did indeed find a
political recess after World War II. Consequently, revolutionaries in the imperialist
heartlands had little choice but to retreat from a perspective of imminent mass
revolutionary struggle in order to prepare for the future through propagandistic
activities: patiently recruiting and training a new generation of cadres, while sinking
roots in the organizations of the working class. But, for Trotsky, such a reorientation
would not involve abandoning the transitional program in favor of a reformist
minimal/democratic program:
“…we proceed from the inevitability and imminence of the
international proletarian revolution. This fundamental idea, which distinguishes the
Fourth International from all other workers organizations, determines all our
activities….This does not mean, however, that we do not take into account the
conjunctural fluctuations in the economy as well as in politics, with the temporary ebbs
and flows. If one proceeds only on the basis of the overall characterization of the epoch,
and nothing more, ignoring its concrete stages, one can easily lapse into schematism,
sectarianism, or quixotic fantasy. With every serious turn of events we adjust our basic
tasks to the changed concrete circumstances of the given stage. Herein lies the art of
tactics.[19]”
Transitional Demands and the Communist Manifesto
It is often taken for granted by both Trotskys supporters and his detractors that the
idea of transitional demands was first introduced in the 1938 draft. For example, in a
footnote explaining Trotskys use of the term transitional demands during the first of the
series of discussions he held with the SWP leaders in March 1938, the Pathfinder Press
editors assert:
“One of Trotskys most important contributions to Marxist theory and
practice was his development in 1938 of the concept of transitional demands and
slogans, which became the central feature of the programmatic document he wrote
in April for the [Fourth Internationals] founding conference.[20]”
In fact, Trotsky specifically addressed this very misconception during these same
discussions:
“This program is not a new invention of one man. It is derived from the
long experience of the Bolsheviks. I want to emphasize that it is not one mans invention,
that it comes from long collective experience of the revolutionaries. It is the
application of old principles to this situation. It should not be considered as fixed like
iron, but flexible to the situation.[21]”
At its Fourth Congress in 1922, the Communist International passed a motion explicitly
endorsing the concept of transitional demands. Most of the transitional demands included
in the 1938 program had previously been adopted, in one form or another, in various
resolutions of the first four congresses of the Communist International (see Transitional
Demands: From the Comintern to the Fourth International, p 203).
The advocacy of transitional measures can be traced right back to the Communist
Manifesto of 1848. The ten pretty generally applicable demands advanced in that
document included the abolition of landed property and inheritance; a heavily progressive
taxation system; confiscation of property of rebel capitalists; nationalization of
transport and communication; Extension of factories…owned by the state; and Equal
liability of all to labor. Marx and Engels raised these demands as a means to make
despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.
They were not advanced as a means of reforming capitalism, but rather as measures:
“…which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which,
in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the
old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of
production.[22]”
In his 1938 essay commemorating Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto, Trotsky
commented:
“Calculated for a revolutionary epoch the Manifesto
contains…ten demands, corresponding to the period of direct transition from
capitalism to socialism. In their Preface of 1872, Marx and Engels declared these demands
to be in part antiquated….The reformists seized upon this evaluation to interpret it
in the sense that transitional revolutionary demands had forever ceded their place to the
Social Democratic minimum program, which, as is well known, does not transcend the limits
of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, the authors of the Manifesto
indicated quite precisely the main correction of their transitional program, namely, the
working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for
its own purposes. In other words the correction was directed against the fetishism of
bourgeois democracy. Marx later counterposed to the capitalist state, the state of the
Commune. This type subsequently assumed the much more graphic shape of soviets. There
cannot be a revolutionary program today without soviets and without workers
control. As for the rest, the ten demands of the Manifesto, which appeared
archaic in an epoch of peaceful parliamentary activity, have today regained completely
their true significance. The Social Democratic minimum program, on the other hand, has
become hopelessly antiquated.[23]”
Rosa Luxemburg made remarkably similar observations in December 1918, at the founding
of the German Communist Party:
“We are faced with a position similar to that which was faced by Marx
and Engels when they wrote the Communist Manifesto seventy years ago. As you all
know, the Communist Manifesto dealt with socialism, with the realization of the
aims of socialism, as the immediate task of the proletarian revolution. This was the idea
represented by Marx and Engels in the revolution of 1848; it was thus, likewise, that they
conceived the basis for proletarian action in the international field.[24]”
The defeat of the 1848 revolutions compelled Marx and Engels to reassess their earlier
projection of an imminent European socialist revolution. The adoption of the Erfurt
Program in 1891 by the German Social Democratic Party made explicit the division between
the minimum and maximum programs:
“The socialist program was thereby established upon an utterly different
foundation, and in Germany the change took a peculiarly typical form. Down to the collapse
of August 4, 1914, the German social democracy took its stand upon the Erfurt program, and
by this program the so-called immediate minimal aims were placed in the foreground, while
socialism was no more than a distant guiding star.[25]”
In rejecting the minimum/maximum programmatic dichotomy, Luxemburg called for a return
to the original conception of the Manifesto: It has become our urgent duty today
to replace our program upon the foundations laid by Marx and Engels in 1848.[26] She forthrightly asserted:
“Our program is deliberately opposed to the leading principle of the
Erfurt program; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate and
so-called minimal demands formulated for the political and economic struggle, from the
socialist goal regarded as the maximal program.[27]”
Workers Control and Factory Committees
Many critical developments in Marxism have come as a direct result of the experience of
mass working-class struggle. Prior to the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels had
assumed that the conquest of political power by the working class was a matter of gaining
control of the existing (capitalist) state apparatus. But the experience of the Commune
demonstrated that, the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.[28] The Commune was, in Marx’s words, the
political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of
labour.[29]
Workers councils or soviets (which Trotsky saw as crowning the program of transitional
demands) first appeared in the course of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Two other key
transitional demands—workers control and factory committees—derived from the experience of
the Russian Revolution of 1917. Like the soviets in 1905, they had not been advocated by
any leftist party or theoretician, but arose from the logic of the class struggle
itself.
After the Tsar was toppled in February 1917, factory committees sprouted up in many
enterprises. They were organized as delegated bodies embracing workers from every
department, from every union and also unorganized workers. Trotsky described these bodies
as an example of the realization of the united front of the working class.[30] Initially concerned with issues of
wages, conditions of employment and the length of the workday, as the factory committees
gained authority and influence, they began to take up broader social questions. The more
militant of them gradually established a veto over management decisions, and began to
probe company accounts and check financial records. These are the main elements of a
regime of workers control:
“Workers control through factory councils is conceivable only on the
basis of sharp class struggle, not collaboration. But this really means dual power in the
enterprises, in the trusts, in all the branches of industry, in the whole
economy.
What state regime corresponds to workers control of production? It is obvious
that the power is not yet in the hands of the proletariat….What we are talking about
is workers control under the capitalist regime, under the power of the bourgeoisie.
However, a bourgeoisie that feels it is firmly in the saddle will never tolerate dual
power in its enterprises. Workers control, consequently, can be carried out only under the
condition of an abrupt change in the relationship of forces unfavorable to the bourgeoisie
and its state. Control can be imposed only by force upon the bourgeoisie, by a proletariat
on the road to the moment of taking power from them…. [31]”
Factory committees and workers control arise at moments of sharp social crisis, as the
workers come to realize that to defend their interests they must go beyond simple trade
unionism, and begin to challenge bourgeois property rights and management
prerogatives.
Workers control is not a necessary stage in the development of revolutionary
consciousness, but it can play an important role in certain circumstances:
“Under the influence of crisis, unemployment, and the predatory
manipulations of the capitalists, the working class in its majority may turn out to be
ready to fight for the abolition of business secrecy and for control over banks, commerce,
and production before it has come to understand the necessity of the revolutionary
conquest for power.
After taking the path of control of production, the proletariat will
inevitably press forward in the direction of the seizure of power and of the means of
production. Questions of credits, of raw materials, of markets, will immediately extend
control beyond the confines of individual enterprises.[32]”
Factory committees arose in both Germany and Italy following World War I, but in the
absence of effective revolutionary leadership, the capitalists were able to regroup and
reassert their authority:
“The contradictions, irreconcilable in their essence, of the regime of
workers control will inevitably be sharpened to the degree that its sphere and its tasks
are extended, and soon will become intolerable. A way out of these contradictions can be
found either in the capture of power by the proletariat (Russia) or in the fascist
counterrevolution, which establishes the naked dictatorship of capital (Italy).[33]”
In What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, written in January 1932,
Trotsky posed the question of workers control from a somewhat different angle:
“The campaign for workers control can develop, depending on the
circumstances, not from the angle of production but from that of consumption. The promise
of the Bruening government to lower the price of commodities simultaneously with the
decrease in wages has not materialized. This question cannot but absorb the most backward
strata of the proletariat, who are today very far from the thought of seizing power.
Workers control over the outlays of industry and the profits of trade is the only real
form of the struggle for lower prices. Under the conditions of general dissatisfaction,
workers commissions with the participation of worker-housewives for the purpose of
checking up on the increased cost of margarine can become very palpable beginnings of
workers control over industry.[34]”
The Transitional Program carefully distinguishes between workers control (a
form of dual power) and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie. The former represents a
school for the latter: On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will
prepare itself for direct management of nationalized industry when the hour for that
eventuality will strike. With the expropriation of the means of production, the essential
economic content of the dictatorship of the proletariat is established.
Lenins Transitional Program of 1917
During the middle of 1917, under the rule of Kerenskys bourgeois Provisional
Government, the economic situation in war-weary Russia deteriorated at an alarming rate.
Lenin placed the blame for the impending catastrophe squarely on the bourgeoisie:
“The capitalists are deliberately and unremittingly sabotaging
(damaging, stopping, disrupting, hampering) production, hoping that an unparalleled
catastrophe may mean the collapse of the republic and democracy, and of the Soviets and
proletarian and peasant associations generally, thus facilitating the return to a monarchy
and the restoration of the unlimited power of the bourgeoisie and the
landowners.
The danger of a great catastrophe and of famine is imminent. All the
newspapers have written about this time and again….
· · ·
Yet the slightest attention and thought will suffice to satisfy anyone that
the ways of [combating] catastrophe and famine are available, that the measures required
to combat them are clear, simple, perfectly feasible, and fully within reach of the
peoples forces, and that these measures are not being adopted only
because, exclusively because, their realization would affect the fabulous profits
of a handful of landowners and capitalists.[35]”
Lenin did not call on Kerensky to pass a law against capitalist sabotage. Nor did he
content himself with abstract reflections about how all problems would one day be solved
by a future socialist revolution. Instead he addressed the burning issues of the moment
with a series of concrete proposals to revive economic activity, counteract bourgeois
sabotage and broaden the intervention of the masses in economic decision-making. The
principal measures he advocated were:
“1. Amalgamation of all banks into a single bank and state control over
its operations, or nationalization of the banks.
2. Nationalization of the syndicates, i.e., the largest, monopolistic
capitalist associations (sugar, oil, coal, iron and steel, and other
syndicates).
3. Abolition of commercial secrecy.
4. Compulsory syndication (i.e., compulsory amalgamation into associations) of
industrialists, merchants and employers generally.
5. Compulsory organization of the population into consumers societies, or
encouragement of such organization, and the exercise of control over it.[36]”
Taken together these measures represented the same kind of despotic inroads on the
rights of property advocated in the Communist Manifesto. Lenin was quite clear
about the revolutionary implications of his proposals:
“There is no way of effectively [combating] financial disorganization
and inevitable financial collapse except that of revolutionary rupture with the interests
of capital and that of the organization of really democratic control, i.e., control from
below, control by the workers and poorest peasants over the capitalists….[37]”
Lenins program was a transitional one (although it does not seem that the term had yet
been coined) because it connected the immediate problems faced by the workers movement to
the question of proletarian state power.
Transitional Demands and the Left Opposition
In the statement of fundamental principles adopted at its first international
gathering, in February 1933, the International Left Opposition (ILO) declared that it
stood on the ground of the first four congresses of the Comintern.[38] Denouncing the
sterile ultimatism of Third Period Stalinism, the ILO reiterated the importance of both
the united-front tactic and of transitional demands. It called for:
“Recognition of the necessity to mobilize the masses under
transitional slogans corresponding to the concrete situation in each country, and
particularly under democratic slogans insofar as it is a question of struggle
against feudal relations, national oppression, or different varieties of openly
imperialist dictatorship….[39]”
The next year, in the aftermath of an armed fascist attack on the French parliament,
the French section of the ILO published a Program of Action for France drafted by Trotsky.
It called for Abolition of Business Secrets, Workers and Peasants Control over Banks,
Industry and Commerce, a shorter workweek with a pay raise at the expense of the magnates,
Nationalization of Banks, Key Industries, Insurance Companies and Transportation and the
institution of a Monopoly of Foreign Trade. It also advocated the Defense of the Soviet
Union, the Disbanding of the police, Arming of the proletariat, arming of the poor
peasants! and the preservation of public order by workers militias directed by a Workers
and Peasants Commune.[40]
In March 1935, at a meeting of the CGT (the General Federation of Labor the largest
union federation in France) Alexis Bardin[41]
delivered a speech written for him by Trotsky that criticized the union leaderships
utopian/reformist schemes for combating the ravages of the capitalist economic crisis. To
the officials vague talk of using credit as an economic lever, the young militant
counterposed ripping the banking system out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters in
order to make it a lever of social transformation, that is of socialist construction.
Starting from the CGT leaderships own pronouncement that 90 plutocrats own and control the
economy of our country, Bardin proposed: The response should be clear: we must expropriate
them, unseat them, to return to the plundered people what belongs to them.[42] At each point where
the bureaucrats plan blurred the line between class struggle and class collaboration,
Trotskys text sharpened the distinctions.
How to Utilize Transitional Demands
Bardins speech provides an example of how transitional demands should be used to
connect the necessity of social revolution with the immediate practical concerns of an
assembly of trade-union delegates. In a similar vein, during his discussion with the SWP
leaders, Trotsky explained how to relate the demand for the opening of the capitalists
books to other political issues:
“…you have millions of unemployed and the government claims it
cannot pay more and the capitalists say that they cannot make more contributions—we
want to have access to the bookkeeping of this society. The control of income should be
organized through factory committees. Workers will say: We want our own statisticians who
are devoted to the working class. If a branch of industry shows that it is really ruined,
then we answer: We propose to expropriate you. We will direct better than you….This
transitional demand is also a step for the workers control of production as the
preparatory plan for the direction of industry. Everything must be controlled by the
workers who will be the masters of society tomorrow. But to call for conquest of
power—that seems to the American workers illegal, fantastic. But if you say: The
capitalists refuse to pay for the unemployed and hide their real profits from the state
and from the workers by dishonest bookkeeping, the workers will understand that formula.
If we say to the farmer: The bank fools you. They have very big profits. And we propose to
you that you create farmers committees to look into the bookkeeping of the bank, every
farmer will understand that. We will say: The farmer can trust only himself; let him
create committees to control agricultural credits—they will understand that. It presupposes
a turbulent mood among the farmers; it cannot be accomplished every day. But to introduce
this idea into the masses and into our own comrades, that’s absolutely necessary
immediately.[43]”
The masses cannot be mobilized for struggle around transitional demands every day, but
the job of revolutionaries is to seek to introduce these ideas into the working class,
even in periods of relative quiescence. The proletarian vanguard must seek to lead, not
follow, popular opinion.
Trotsky sought to train the cadres of the Fourth International to address the
particular manifestations of capitalist crisis and economic dislocationthatsfactory closures,
wage cuts, layoffs, inflation, bank foreclosures, etc. in ways that pointed toward the
necessity of proletarian revolution:
“Workers militia and workers control of production are only two sides of
the same question. The worker is not a bookkeeper. When he asks for the books, he wants to
change the situation, by control and then by direction. Naturally, our advancing slogans
depends on the reaction we meet in the masses. When we see the reaction of the masses we
[will] know what side of the question to emphasize. We will say, Roosevelt will help the
unemployed by the war industry; but if we workers ran production, we would find another
industry, not one for the dead but for the living. The question can become understandable
even for an average worker who never participates in a political movement.[44]”
Trotsky also proposed that the SWP seek to popularize the call for a sliding scale of
wages and hours:
“Then we have the question, how to present the program to the workers?
It is naturally very important. We must combine politics with mass psychology and
pedagogy, build the bridge to their minds. Only experience can show us how to advance in
this or that part of the country. For some time we must try to concentrate the attention
of the workers on one slogan: sliding scale of wages and hours.
· · ·
Naturally this is only one point. In the beginning this slogan is totally adequate for the
situation. But the others can be added as the development proceeds….What is this
slogan? In reality…[a sliding scale of wages and hours] is the system of work in
socialist society. The total number of workers divided into the total number of hours. But
if we present the whole socialist system it will appear to the average American as
utopian, as something from Europe. We present it as a solution to this crisis which must
assure their right to eat, drink, and live in decent apartments. It is the program of
socialism, but in very popular and simple form.[45]”
When asked, Can we actually realize this slogan?, Trotsky replied:
“It is easier to overthrow capitalism than to realize this demand under
capitalism. Not one of our demands will be realized 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 mobilize
the masses for struggle. The question of the division between the employed and unemployed
comes up. We must find ways to overcome this division.[46]”
Not a Complete Program
In his conversations with the SWP leadership, Trotsky noted that the Transitional
Program was not comprehensive:
“The draft program is not a complete program. We can say that in this
draft program there are things which are lacking and there are things which by their
nature don’t belong to the program. Things which don’t belong to the program are the
comments…. A complete program should have a theoretical expression of the modern
capitalist society at its imperialist stage…. The beginning of the program is not
complete. The first chapter is only a hint and not a complete expression. Also the end of
the program is not complete because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about
the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society into the
dictatorship, the dictatorship into socialist society. This brings the reader only to the
doorstep. It is a program for action from today until the beginning of the socialist
revolution. And from the practical point of view what is now the most important is how can
we guide the different strata of the proletariat in the direction of the social
revolution.[47]”
The program was incomplete in another sense as wellit did not address the specific
social and historical circumstances that play an important role in the political life of
each country. Trotsky expected each section of the Fourth International to use the
international program as the basis for elaborating one tailored to the specific
requirements of the local political terrain:
“The program 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. It
expresses the general tendency of development in the whole world….It is clear that
the general characteristics of the world situation are common because they are all under
the pressure of the imperialist economy, but every country has its peculiar conditions and
real live politics must begin with these peculiar conditions in each country and even in
each part of the country.[48]”
Not only would the program have to be elaborated somewhat differently for each national
section, but the demands advanced in each union would vary according to the specific
situation confronting the workers it represented. The text of the Transitional
Program notes that it would be impossible to enumerate here those separate, partial
demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances—national, local,
professional.[49] This is not because revolutionaries are
indifferent to such issues: The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of
all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or
democratic rights of the working class.[50]
To gain a hearing for their ideas, revolutionaries must do more than simply stand up
and recite passages from the program. As Trotsky explained:
“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 the thought of the masses.[51]”
The program must be applied flexibly and adapted in accordance with concrete
circumstances:
“The relative weight of the individual democratic and transitional
demands in the proletariat’s struggle [in the colonial and neo-colonial countries], their
mutual ties and their order of presentation, is determined by the peculiarities and
specific conditions of each backward country and to a considerable extent—by the
degree of its backwardness.[52]”
Moreover, in the course of any serious struggle, the key demands and their relative
emphasis can vary from one place to another and from one day (or even hour) to the
next:
“During a transitional epoch, the workers movement does not have a
systematic and well-balanced but a feverish and explosive character. Slogans as well as
organizational forms should be subordinated to the indices of the movement.[53]”
Programmatic Extensions Since 1938
The Transitional Program is essentially a distillation of the lessons of the
Bolshevik Revolution—a program for the mobilization of the proletariat for power. As such
it remains a document of profound relevance today. Yet it does not, and could not, provide
permanent, engraved-in-stone answers to all questions for all time. The world has changed
a great deal since 1938. The section on The Program of Transitional Demands in Fascist
Countries is obviously less crucial than it was when Germany and Italy were under fascist
rule. Similarly, the nominal decolonization, as well as the uneven industrialization and
urbanization of much of the Third World has considerably changed the global framework
within which the program of permanent revolution is advanced today as compared to
1938.
The post-war expansion of Soviet power into Eastern Europe was not anticipated by the
founders of the Fourth International. Nor had they foreseen the creation of deformed
workers states in Vietnam, Yugoslavia and China through the agency of peasant-based
guerrilla armies led by insurrectionary Stalinists.
Undoubtably the most important change in world politics since 1938 has been the
counter-revolutionary destruction of the degenerated Soviet workers state, an event that
was anticipated in the Transitional Program:
“The political prognosis [for the USSR] has an alternative character:
either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the
workers state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to
capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to
socialism.[54]”
In the former Soviet bloc Marxists today call for a social revolution to expropriate
the emergent bourgeoisies and their imperialist patrons. In the remaining deformed workers
states (Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea) revolutionaries must combine their defense
of collectivized property with a perspective of proletarian political revolution to
shatter the ruling bureaucracies and establish the direct political rule of the working
class.
A variety of important political issues are not addressed in the Transitional
Program. For example, while struggles for national liberation and the right of
nations to self-determination are upheld, the program does not address the difficult
problems posed when interpenetrated peoples claim a single piece of territory, as for
example in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Bosnia or Israel/ Palestine.
The dynamics and social function of racial, sexual and other forms of special
oppression under capitalism are also barely touched on in the program. There is a call for
the organization of working-class women, but no demands for free contraception, free and
unrestricted access to abortion, free 24-hour childcare or equal access to all jobs. The
defense of democratic rights for lesbians and gays is not mentioned, and neither is the
necessity to oppose state interference in consensual sexual activities and other forms of
victimless crimes. Other important social issues not specifically addressed in the 1938
text include healthcare, housing and education, and the rights of immigrants and political
refugees.
Trotskyist Critics of the Transitional Program
One section of the 1938 program that is clearly in need of updating is the one dealing
with opportunism and unprincipled revisionism. All the organizations mentioned have
long-since disappeared, and in most cases their ecological niches have been occupied by
various groupings misleadingly claiming some political affinity with Trotskyism. Naturally
one of the common characteristics of these opportunist and unprincipled revisionists is
their tendency to view the Transitional Program as an irrelevant relic from a
bygone era.
An early, and influential, critic of the Fourth International and its program was Isaac
Deutscher, Trotskys biographer. A former leader of the Polish section of the Left
Opposition, Deutscher had opposed launching the new international in 1938. In The
Prophet Outcast, the third volume of his monumental biography of Trotsky, Deutscher
dismissed the Transitional Program with a single sentence:
“…the Draft Programme, which [Trotsky] wrote for the
International, was not so much a statement of principles as an instruction on tactics,
designed for a party up to its ears in trade union struggles and day-to-day politics and
striving to gain practical leadership immediately.[55]”
Deutscher’s differences with Trotsky involved fundamental questions of Marxist principle
and revolutionary strategy. Rejecting the struggle to forge a world party of socialist
revolution, Deutscher projected that, under the pressure of the broad scheme of
revolutionary development, the Stalinist bureaucracy would eventually be compelled not
only to acknowledge Trotsky’s greatness, but also to implement essential elements of his
program.
Deutschers projection has been definitively refuted by history. But his attitude toward
the Fourth International and its founding program is echoed by a good many contemporary
Trotskyists, including the International Socialist current (IS) headed by Tony Cliff
centered around the British Socialist Workers Party. In his book entitled Trotskys
Marxism, Duncan Hallas, a long-time IS leader, takes the opposite approach to
Deutscher, suggesting that the Transitional Program was a product of Trotsky’s
detachment from the class struggle:
“Inevitably, his enforced isolation from effective participation in the
workers movement, in which he had once played so big a part, affected to some extent his
understanding of the ever-changing course of the class struggle. Not even his vast
experience and superb tactical reflexes could substitute entirely for the lack of feedback
from the militants engaged in the day to day struggle that is possible only in a real
communist party. As the period of isolation lengthened, this became more apparent. Compare
his Transitional Programme of 1938 with its prototype, the Programme of Action for France
(1934). In freshness, relevance, specificity and concreteness in relation to an actual
struggle, the latter is clearly superior.[56] ”
It perhaps did not occur to comrade Hallas that the prototype could be more specific
and concrete precisely because it addressed a particular concrete situation faced by
French workers in 1934. The program of the Fourth International, on the other hand, had to
deal with the general situation of the international working class for an entire
historical period. It therefore had to be presented in a more abstract manner. But Hallas
has a more fundamental objection:
“Whether or not it is possible to find slogans or demands that meet
these exacting specifications [a bridge from present consciousness to recognition of the
necessity for socialism] depends, very obviously, on circumstances. If at a given time
today’s consciousness of wide layers is decidedly non-revolutionary, then it will not be
transformed by slogans. Changes in actual conditions are needed. The problem at each stage
is to find and advance those slogans which not only strike a chord in at least some
sections of the working class…but which are also capable of leading to working class
actions. Often they will not be transitional in terms of Trotsky’s very
restricted definition.
Of course Trotsky cannot be held responsible for the tendency of most of his
followers to fetishise the notion of transitional demands, and even the specific demands
of the 1938 Programme—most obviously the sliding scale of wages. The emphasis he gave to
this matter was, however, excessive and encouraged the belief that demands have some value
independent of revolutionary organisation in the working class.[57]”
Here we have an attempt to obscure the fact that revolutionary organizations are
distinguished from centrist and left-reformist ones by their programi.e., what demands
they fight for. The question of a groups size and influence in the working class will
largely determine its ability to influence events, but has no bearing on the question of
its fundamental political character. Trotsky had only a handful of supporters in Spain
during that country’s civil war, while Andres Nin’s centrist Workers Party of Marxist
Unification (POUM), which had broken with Trotsky precisely over his sectarian opposition
to class-collaborationism, had thousands of members. To avoid isolation from the masses,
the POUM leaders first blunted their criticisms of the popular front, and then ended up
joining it—an act that Trotsky aptly described as a crime against the working
class.
In an earlier series of articles on the history of the Fourth International, published
in International Socialism between 1969 and 1973, Hallas, then Political
Secretary of the British IS, argued that the Transitional Program was responsible
for many of the problems of the Fourth International after World War II:
“Unfavorable circumstances played a part in the decline in the Fourth
Internationalist movement. More important were the fundamental weaknesses of the 1938
programme, especially its quite wrong analysis of Stalinism.[58]”
This refers to Trotskys rejection of the absurd notion, promoted by the Cliffites, that
the economic system of the USSR was state capitalist, i.e., qualitatively the same as
Britain, the U.S. and other imperialist countries. Another weakness, according to Hallas,
was the assertion that capitalism remains subject to periodic economic crises stemming
from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. During the 1960s, the Cliffites decided
that the capitalists had successfully overcome this problem by creating a permanent arms
economy. Hallas cited Michael Kidron (a leading IS intellectual at the time) who explained
how a leak of capital intensive goods would mean that the rate of growth of the organic
composition of capital:
“…would be slower…[and] could even stop or be reversed. In
such a case there would be no decline in the average rate of profit, no reason to expect
increasingly severe slumps, and so on. Such a leak had been found in the permanent arms
economy.
The consequences of this fact, the contradictions of neo-capitalism, its
prospects and limits; those are the basic problems to be faced by Western revolutionaries
today. The difficulty for orthodox Trotskyists is to accept that these are the problems.
For if they are, Trotsky’s economic catastrophism must be rejected. And with it goes one of
the two pillars upon which the FI was founded. The tiny grouplets of the FI expected to be
swept forward in the tide of economic catastrophe, instead they found themselves stranded
on the ebb tide produced by the 20 years of boom. Hence the irrelevance of the whole
pretentious apparatus of World Leadership, World Congresses, International Executive
Plenums, and all the rest of the paraphernalia borrowed from the Comintern.[59]”
The impressionistic notion that capitalism was no longer subject to significant
economic crises was widespread among petty-bourgeois New Leftists in the 1960s. But today
the IS criticisms of those orthodox Trotskyists who argued that capitalism remained
subject to periodic slumps can only be an embarrassment for those Cliffites who take
Marxist theory at all seriously.
The permanent arms economy theory may now be out of fashion, but Cliffs attitude toward
the Transitional Program has not changed. In 1993 he wrote:
“These transitional demands fitted a situation of general crisis, of
capitalism in deep slump. But under conditions of a massive expansion of capitalism, as
took place after the Second World War, these demands were at best meaningless, and at
worst reactionary. To limit wage rises to the rise in the cost of living was a demand of
the capitalists and against the aspirations of the workers who wanted to improve their
living standards. And in conditions of more or less full employment, a sliding scale of
hours is really meaningless.[60]”
In fact it is Cliffs critique which is meaningless. Trotsky explicitly indicated that
transitional demands are not put forward as structural reforms to the operations of
capitalism. They are demands which, if raised skillfully at appropriate junctures and
taken up by the mass of workers, challenge the whole logic of the profit system. A sliding
scale of hours is not something that revolutionaries would make a focus of popular
agitation year in and year out—it is a demand appropriate in situations of mass
unemployment. The call for a sliding scale of wages, outside the context of a reduction in
the workday, is only appropriate when inflation poses a threat to working-class living
standards. It would make no sense in periods of deflation. Nor does the demand to index
wages to inflation in any way preclude fighting for improvements in the wage scale.
Cliffs criticisms presume that any program advocated by socialists must be a minimal
(i.e., reformist) one. He appears unable to comprehend the idea of raising demands that
are directed not at reforming capitalism, but at transforming the consciousness of the
exploited and oppressed. Accordingly, his critique proceeds from the erroneous view that
the Transitional Program is simply a minimum program composed of impractical or
at worst reactionary reforms.
“Similarly, other demands in Trotsky’s Transitional Programme,
such as the establishment of workers defence guards, workers militia, and the arming of
the proletariat, certainly did not fit a non-revolutionary situation. Sadly many
Trotskyists dogmatically repeated these slogans.
The basic assumption behind Trotsky’s Transitional Demands was that the
economic crisis was so deep that the struggle for even the smallest improvement in workers
conditions would bring conflict with the capitalist system itself. When life disproved the
assumption the ground fell from beneath the programme.[61]”
Cliffs basic assumption seems to be that capitalism is here to stay and that the job of
socialists is to celebrate the struggle for small improvements. Cliff breezily dismisses
the arming of the proletariat and workers defense guards as slogans that do not fit a
non-revolutionary situation. In place of such dogmatic revolutionary slogans the Cliffites
limit themselves to advancing demands that reflect the existing (bourgeois) consciousness
of the masses. The only inconsistency in the IS approach is their persistence in
continuing to identify themselves as revolutionaries. After all, if the arming of the
proletariat and the creation of a workers militia are no longer on the historical agenda,
then neither is socialist revolution.
Alex Callinicos, currently the leading political theorist of the International
Socialist tendency, is somewhat more guarded in his formulations, but he too rejects the
Transitional Program. In a recent book he asserted that, after World War II, the
attempt:
“…to immunize Trotsky’s theories from refutation carried with it
the danger of transforming them into a set of dogmas. All too frequently this danger was
realized. The Transitional Programme drafted by Trotsky and adopted at the First Congress
of the FI in 1938 became an especial object of veneration. This document was thus named
because it contained a set of transitional demands—for example, the indexation of
wages to prices (the sliding scale of wages). These were intended to bridge the old
division in the Second International before 1914 between the minimum programme of limited
reforms attainable within a capitalist context and the maximum programme whose
implementation would require the establishment of workers power. Trotsky argued that the
economic crisis was so acute that the struggle for even the most modest improvement in
working-class conditions would come into conflict with the capitalist system itself.[62]”
Callinicos is not particularly concerned about finding a bridge between the minimal and
maximal programs. Like Cliff, he dismisses transitional demands as useless, unless, at
some hypothetical point in the future, capitalism were to completely exhaust all
possibility of further growth. In the meantime, according to Callinicos, the job of
socialists is to leaven the workers immediate demands with occasional references to the
ultimate desirability of socialism.
In the final analysis all the criticisms of the Transitional Programs
fetishism, dogmatism and catastrophism boil down to advocacy of a return to the
minimum-maximum program of the Second International—that is to say, reformism now and
socialism later (i.e., never). Trotsky was very familiar with this brand of socialism:
“The reformists have a good smell for what the audience wants….But
that is not serious revolutionary activity. We must have the courage to be unpopular, to
say you are fools, you are stupid, they betray you, and every once in a while with a
scandal launch our ideas with a passion.[63]”
Callinicos and Cliff regard this as just so much sectarianism, a charge that no one
could level at the International Socialists, at least in terms of program. Their history
is one of an endless series of political zig-zags driven by adaptations to the existing
prejudices of the strata from which they hope to recruit. Often what seems smart (i.e.,
popular) today turns out to be an embarrassment tomorrow. A classic example of this was
their initial support for British troops in Northern Ireland:
“The breathing space provided by the presence of British troops is short
but vital. Those who call for the immediate withdrawal of the troops…are inviting a
pogrom which will hit first and hardest at socialists.[64]”
While the IS stock-in-trade is rank and file trade-union economism, their opportunist
appetites sometimes find expression in political adaptation to non-proletarian elements as
well. In recent years the revolutionary IS offered electoral support to several openly
bourgeois candidates (e.g., South Koreas president Kim Dae Jung in the 1992
election, and Nelson Mandelas African National Congress in 1994).
The Cliffites have also long exhibited an unhealthy enthusiasm for the 1979 Islamic
Revolution led by Irans arch-reactionary Ayatollah Khomeini. Reflecting on the
significance of Khomeinis triumph almost a decade later, Callinicos argued that the
Iranian left should have been:
“…demanding that the mullahs wage a revolutionary war
against the US and its allies, that, as I wrote at the beginning of the war [with Iraq],
they make Teheran the beacon of genuine revolution throughout the region—granting
the right of self-determination to the Kurds, Arabs and other national minorities,
establishing organs of popular power, fighting for the liberation of women from the
Islamic yoke (Socialist Worker, 4 October 1980).[65]”
The rather stark contrast between the Cliffites’ rejection of Trotsky’s transitional
demands as meaningless and unrealizable and their willingness to call on the Iranian
theocracy to carry out a genuine revolution reveals that the flip-side of their
craven opportunism is a breath-taking capacity for self-delusion.
We Must Tell the Workers the Truth
Although some critics of the Transitional Program characterize it as
opportunist because it contains demands aimed at intersecting the immediate concerns of
the working class, most criticisms boil down to the complaint that it is too far ahead of
the present consciousness of the class. In discussion with his American supporters in
1938, Trotsky addressed this objection:
“The program must express the objective tasks of the working class
rather than the backwardness of the workers. It must reflect society as it is and not the
backwardness of the working class. It is an instrument to overcome and vanquish the
backwardness.”
He expanded on this later in the discussion:
“We must tell the workers the truth, then we will win the best elements.
Whether these best elements will be capable of guiding the working class, leading it to
power, I don’t know. I hope that they will be able, but I cannot give the guarantee. But
even in the worst case, if the working class doesn’t sufficiently mobilize its mind and its
strength at present for the socialist revolution—even in the worst case, if this working
class falls victim to fascism, the best elements will say, We were warned by this party;
it was a good party. And a great tradition will remain in the working class.
This is the worst variant. That is why all the arguments that we cannot
present such a program because the program doesn’t correspond to the mentality of the
workers are false. They express only fear before the situation. Naturally if I close my
eyes I can write a good rosy program that everybody will accept. But it will not
correspond to the situation; and the program must correspond to the situation. I believe
that this elementary argument is of the utmost importance. The mentality of the class of
the proletariat is backward but the mentality is not such a substance as the factories,
the mines, the railroads, but is more mobile and under the blows of the objective crisis,
the millions of unemployed, it can change rapidly.[66]”
Today, 60 years after the Transitional Program was written, the Bolshevik
tradition which the Left Opposition carried forward remains just as relevant as ever. And
that political tradition, codified in the founding programmatic document of the Fourth
International, remains central to a historically progressive resolution of the crisis of
proletarian leadership.
Notes:
1. Leon Trotsky,
Letter to James P. Cannon, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1976), p 317
2. Leon Trotsky, The
Twin Stars: Hitler-Stalin, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1973), p 122
3. Herald
Tribune (New York), 23 May 1943
4. Leon Trotsky,
Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World
Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York: Pathfinder Press,
1973), p 184
5. Leon Trotsky, The
World Situation and Perspectives, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1973), p 147
6. See: Gerard
Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The Economics of the Profit Rate: Competition, Crises and
Historical Tendencies in Capitalism (Brookfield, Vermont: Elgar Publishing Co.,
1993); Fred Moseley, The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States
Economy (London: Macmillan, 1991); Anwar Shaikh and Ahmet Tonak, Measuring the
Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994); Murray E.G. Smith, Invisible Leviathan (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994); Union for Radical Political Economics, Empirical
Work in Marxian Crisis Theory, special double issue of Review of Radical
Political Economics, Vol. 18 Nos. 12, 1986; Michael J. Webber and David L. Rigby,
The Golden Age Illusion: Rethinking Postwar Capitalism (New York: Guildford
Press, 1996)
7. Karl Marx,
Capital, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p 353
8. Globe and Mail
Magazine (Toronto), May 1993
9. Leon Trotsky, Open
Letter for the Fourth International, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1935-36) (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), p 27
10. Leon Trotsky, Once
Again, Whither France? Leon Trotsky On France (New York: Monad Press, 1979), p
79
11. Leon Trotsky, Manifesto
of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution,
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), pp
217-18
12. Ibid., pp
216-17
13. Leon Trotsky, The
Transitional Program, Bolshevik Publications, 1998, p 37
14. Ibid., p
389
15. Leon Trotsky, The
Political Backwardness of the American Workers, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p 129
16. Leon Trotsky, A Summary
of Transitional Demands, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p 232
17. Ibid., p
235
18. Ibid., pp
235-36
19. Leon Trotsky, On the
Question of Workers Self-Defense, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1973), p 103
20. Writings of Leon
Trotsky (1937-38) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976), note 290, p 488
21. Leon Trotsky, The
Political Backwardness of the American Workers, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p 129
22. Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
Selected Works in One Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p 52
23. Leon Trotsky, Ninety
Years of the Communist Manifesto, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937-38) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1976), pp 23-24
24. Rosa Luxemburg, Speech
to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), p 405
25. Ibid., pp
407-8
26. Ibid., p
408
27. Ibid., p
413
28. Karl Marx, The Civil
War in France, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Selected Works in One
Volume (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p 288
29. Ibid., p
294
30. Leon Trotsky, Workers
Control of Production, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1971), p 80
31. Ibid., p
78
32. Ibid., p
81
33. Ibid., p
82
34. Leon Trotsky, What
Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat, The Struggle Against Fascism in
Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), pp 241-42
35. Vladimir I. Lenin, The
Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, V.I. Lenin Selected Works in Three
Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), Vol. 2, pp 241-42
36. Ibid., p
246
37. Ibid., p
266
38. The International Left
Opposition, Its Tasks and Methods, Documents of the Fourth International (New
York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p 23
39. Ibid., p
24
40. Leon Trotsky, A Program
of Action for France, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35) (New York: Pathfinder
Press, 1971), pp 21-32
41. Alexis Bardin is
mentioned by Jean van Heijenoort in his book With Trotsky in Exile (Harvard
University Press, 1978), p 74:
“In Grenoble there was a young teacher, Alexis
Bardin, who had strong Trotskyite sympathies; he even had two brothers in the Trotskyite
group in Paris, one of whom, Boitel, played a leading role there. Alexis Bardin and his
wife, Violette, were soon authorized by the Isère prefect to visit Trotsky and
Natalia. Bardin, who was a member of the Socialist party, was involved in Grenobles
political and trade union life. The conversations between Trotsky and him revolved around
local politics. Trotsky was interested in the smallest details, enjoying the chance to
immerse himself in practical day-to-day activities. Bardin was becoming more and more
active in local affairs, and some of his speeches at trade union meetings were written by
Trotsky.”
42. Leon Trotsky, From the
CGTs Plan to the Conquest of Power, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1934-35) (New York:
Pathfinder Press, 1971), p 223
43. Leon Trotsky, How to
Fight for a Labor Party in the U.S., The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), pp 120-21
44. Ibid., pp
121-22
45. Leon Trotsky, The
Political Backwardness of the American Workers, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), pp 127-28
46. Ibid., pp
128-29
47. Leon Trotsky,
Completing the Program and Putting It to Work, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p 138
48. Ibid., p
138
49. Leon Trotsky, The
Transitional Program, Bolshevik Publications, 1998, p 38
50. Ibid., p
39
51. Ibid., p
50
52. Ibid., p
58
53. Ibid., p
40
54. Ibid., p
62
55. Isaac Deutscher,
The Prophet Outcast (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp 425-26
56. Duncan Hallas,
Trotsky’s Marxism (London: Bookmarks, 1979), pp 96-97
57. Ibid., p
104
58. International
Socialism No. 60, July 1973
59. International
Socialism No. 40, October/November 1969
60. Tony Cliff,
Trotsky: The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star (London: Bookmarks, 1993),
p 300
61. Ibid., p
300
62. Alex Callinicos,
Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p 40
63. Leon Trotsky,
Completing the Program and Putting It to Work, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), p 145
64. Socialist
Worker, 11 September 1969
65. Socialist Worker
Review, September 1988
66. Leon Trotsky, The
Political Backwardness of the American Workers, The Transitional Program for Socialist
Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), pp 126-27
Posted: 05 February 2010