Introduction to Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Programme
Workers Socialist League pamphlets1970sScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
It is right that one of the first tasks of publication undertaken by the Workers Socialist League, less than a year and half after being established aș a movement, is to produce in pamphlet form the English edition of the Transitional Programme, the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International. The Workers Socialist League was born out of a short but politically rich struggle against the sectarian degeneration of the leadership of the Workers Revolutionary Party, and the International Committee of the Fourth International, a degeneration which had at its core the rejection of the methods and demands of the Transitional Programme. This history made us determined to base our new party on a struggle to take the Transitional Programme into the mass movement of the working class and to place its demands in the forefront of the struggle in the trade unions.
Since the struggle was begun by Marx and Engels, more than a century ago, to build the International Working Men's Association, the working class has fought to establish an international revolutionary leadership as an essential condition for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale. The Third (Communist) International was founded after the First World War following the splitting of the Second International in 1914 when the leaders of Social Democracy in each warring country supported their 'own' ruling class against 'foreign' national capitalist states and the workers they dragooned into war. This betrayal stood in stark contrast to the policy of revolutionary defeatism developed by Lenin, the strategic basis of the victorious Russian Revolution, which directed the working class in each country against its main enemy - the capitalist class at home. But the isolation of the Russian Revolution after 1917, combined with the economic difficulties and contradictions stemming from the fight to defend and build a socialist system in a backward peasant-based economy, emergence within the leadership of the created conditions for the Communist Party of a bureaucratic caste headed by Josef Stalin. This bureaucracy, after the death of Lenin in 1924, further consolidated its political hold over the internal and external policies of the CPSU. The attitude of this clique towards the world revolution, expressed in Stalin's call to build "socialism in one country" was the opposite of the revolutionary internationalism of Lenin and Trotsky, and had a devastating impact on the Communist International, which they turned into a mere extension of their diplomatic manoeuvres with imperialism. In order to carry out this change, the Stalinists had to eliminate and in many cases eventually murder any trace of opposition within the Russian Party, and impose rigid control over the Comintern itself.
The defeat of the German Revolution in 1923, of the British General Strike in 1926 and the Chinese Revolution in 1927, followed by Hitler's victory over the German working class in 1933, finally ruled out, for Trotsky, any perspective of transforming the Stalinised Comintern by . opposition. Having drawn the conclusion that international internal Stalinism had become the major counter revolutionary force within the workers' movement on a world scale, Trotsky began to prepare for the founding of the Fourth International, the founding conference of which took place in Switzerland, on September 3rd 1938.
The conference was attended by some 30 delegates representing groups of Trotskyists in 11 countries - Britain, France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Holland, Greece and Latin America.
Basing itself upon the line of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the Transitional Programme was, for Trotsky, the culmination of two decades of work. It brought together Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state; the nature of the Soviet and Social Democratic bureaucracies as reflecting the interests of world imperialism; the struggle against imperialist war; a programme for colonial workers; a programme for workers in fascist countries and the struggle for å workers' government.
The Transitional Programme must not be seen in isolation, or as the product of à particular historical moment. It arises out of - and crystallises - decades of political and theoretical struggle, above all against the Stalinist degeneration of the first workers' state and the international communist movement. It must therefore be understood and used together with - for example - Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed and the central writings of the Trotskyist movement in the fight against Stalinism. The Programme outlines a system of transitional demands which, because it springs from and carries forward the everyday struggles of the working class but at the same time challenges the control of the employer and is incompatible with the capitalist mode of production, pose in practical terms the question of state power.
Embodied within the Transitional Programme is the bitterest hostility to all forms of class compromise; to the Stalinist concept of 'socialism in one country'; to Popular Frontism; to all kinds of "peaceful coexistence" between class and class. Its bedrock is its insistence that the crisis of human culture is the crisis of leadership of the working class. The opening sentence of the programme declares:
"The world political situation. as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat". To tackle this crisis of leadership requires the severest, most patient struggle within the workers' movement for the material organ of revolutionary consciousness - the revolutionary party. The work of constructing such parties lies at the very base of the Transitional Programme, which was drafted to express the highest point in the historical experience of the working class and to expound clearly to the advanced sections of workers the historical need for a new revolutionary International and for a break with the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism and reformism.
Today all the objective conditions for the development of such an international are present. The world offensive of the working class in response to the economic crisis of the imperialist system creates these conditions. This crisis propels imperialism into world-wide attacks on the working class, attempting to crush workers and so create the political conditions and regimes necessary to restore profitability to the monopolies and banks and the national capitals themselves.
The determination of US imperialism to protect, in the Chilean coup, its domination of the Latin American continent only succeeded as a result of the Popular Front policies of the Stalinists. Chile has to be seen today in the overall context of the resounding victories of the workers and peasants over US imperialism in Indo-China, the removal of the Greek military dictatorship in 1974 and the victory of the MPLA in Angola in February 1975. These events, as in Portugal, where capitalism, weakened by colonial war proved unable to maintain the fascist regime and hold back the working class, underlines the permanent, interconnected, nature of the revolutionary movement of the working class on a world scale. In the deformed workers' states of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe Czechoslavakia in 1968 - drew its strengths from the offensive of the working class in the capitalist states, most importantly the French general strike of May-June 1968.
Today in Britain, we see in response to the strength of the working class, the complete collaboration of the trade union and Labour Party leaders under the pressure of imperialism, with the capitalist state. These bureaucrats, described by Trotsky as "social imperialists" in the policies they advocate, are now integral to the economic strategy of capitalism. State wage control is introduced by them and 'worker participation' schemes set up on their initiative to strike blows at the independence of the working class, as in industry after industry workers demonstrate their determination to defend their wages and conditions. In the trade unions bureaucratic dictats are proclaimed and trade union democracy attacked. , written truly independent trade unions possible under the leadership of the treacherous bureaucracy? He answers firmly - NO! Impossible, he says, are independent reformist trade unions, but:
"Wholly possible are revolutionary trade unions which are not the stock holders of imperialist policy but which set as their task the direct overthrow of the rule of capitalism. In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution. In this sense, the programme of transitional demands àdopted by the last congress of the Fourth International is not only the programme for the activity of the party but in its fundamental features it is the programme for the activity of the trade unions".
". (emphasis added).
Thus 'Trotsky saw that the strength of the Transitional Programme lay not simply in the correct formulation of the demands but in the way these demands are fought for as the programme for the mass movement - "the programme for the activity of the trade unions"
Equally he argued that this fight must be carried through inseparably from the struggle against the bureaucracy and for the revolutionary independence of the Trade Unions. Today it is the struggle of our movement to fight on these principles which has earned the WSL the special hatred of the bureaucracy.
We fought at the 1975 T&GWU Conference to counterpose the demand for the sliding scale of wages to the state controls being railroaded through by Jack Jones. In the Cowley car plants we have been able to lead a fight for work sharing on full pay, and for the ending of business secrets and the opening of Leylands books as the active demand of large numbers of workers. In the social services we have developed and fought at each point for the demand of a sliding scale of state expenditure. This record of struggle stands in sharp contrast to those groups who advance transitional demands in their propaganda, but carry. out little or no fight for them in practice.
The startling relevance of the Transitional Programme today and the response from the working class to its demands when they are presented and fought for completely confirm Trotsky's description of it as "our most capital conquest"
. It is the responsibility of Trotskyist sections internationally to base their work firmly on the fight for this programme. The Workers Socialist League publishes this pamphlet at this time as a practical contribution to the struggle for a Trotskyist party in Britain and towards the reconstruction of the Fourth International on a principled basis.
Alan Thornett April 1976.