14.02.2013
SWP and programme: Transitional regression ends in a hunch
Is the so-called transitional method the road to revolution? Jack Conrad argues against the economism of the Socialist Workers Party
Tony Cliff distinguished himself from orthodox Trotskyism in the aftermath of World War II because he was able to recognise both Stalin’s palpable success in creating an empire in eastern Europe and the palpable reality of the long economic boom in the west. Events had beached Trotsky’s 1930s expectations. Stalinism did not collapse with the Nazi invasion. Nor was capitalism in its “death agony”.1 In fact, it was Trotskyism that was in crisis. As Cliff himself wittily put it, navigating the class struggle with Trotsky’s Transitional programme, was like people trying to find their way round the Paris metro using a London tube map.
True, when he founded the Socialist Review Group in 1950, Cliff did draw up a 12-point list of “transitional demands”, which were designed to attract and recruit “individual” Labour and trade union activists. Apart from calls for a “foreign policy based on independence of both Washington and Moscow” (11) and the “Withdrawal of British troops overseas; freedom of colonial peoples and offer of economic and technical aid” (12), his programme stayed firmly within the narrow confines of leftwing trade unionism. Eg, “complete nationalisation of heavy industry, the banks, insurance and the land (1), “Two or more workers’ representatives to sit on boards of all private concerns employing 20 or more people” (5), “Abolition of payments for national health service and of private beds” (7), “Sliding scale of adequate pensions based on new and realistic cost-of-living indices” (9).2 So no Cliffite strategy for forming the working class into a revolutionary party, no constitutional demands, no working class championing of women, gays and youth, no answers for Scotland and Wales, no attitude towards the middle classes, no aim of working class state power and communism.
Cliff himself readily admits how “excruciatingly painful” it was to face up to the reality that Trotsky’s prognosis had not come true.3 But come true it had not. Cliff therefore reluctantly concluded that Trotsky’s Transitional programme had been disproved “by life” and that reformism was enjoying a second spring.4 In the fourth volume of his Trotsky biography, Cliff argued that such demands as a sliding scale of wages had been adopted in response to a “capitalism in deep slump” and therefore “did not fit a non-revolutionary situation”. Cliff concluded: “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.”5
Unfortunately, in the 1960s this conclusion went hand in hand with adapting to the merry-go-round of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament pacifism, trade union militancy, student radicalism and anti-fascist popular frontism. The number of Cliff’s followers mushroomed from under a hundred to over a thousand. In 1977 the Socialist Workers Party was founded amidst exhortations that it was “vital to build the organisation quickly.”6 A revolutionary moment was just around the corner and masses of workers were expected to soon flood in.
Not that the newly established SWP was to be equipped with a programme - certainly not a minimum-maximum programme of the kind adhered to by the German Social Democratic Party, the French Workers’ Party and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Instead the SWP was to be built around tailing spontaneous movements, hunches and an almost entirely bogus version of history.
Eg, SWP loyalists take it as axiomatic that they are obliged to reject out of hand, almost as a sacred duty, the minimum-maximum programme of classical Marxism. Their main source of authority here is, of course, Tony Cliff’s dreadful biography Lenin. Hence the apocryphal story. Supposedly the minimum-maximum programme inevitably led to that fateful vote for war credits by the SDP Reichstag fraction in August 1914; and, though it is dwarfed by that act of treachery, the same minimum-maximum structure is blamed for the accommodation shown towards the provisional government and the defencists by Kamenev and Stalin when they took over editing Pravda in the spring of 1917 - cut short in Cliff’s account by Lenin’s return from Swiss exile and his “complete break” with the old minimum programme.7
Yet the fact of the matter is that Lenin pugnaciously defended and, of course, where necessary developed the minimum programme. It mapped out a road under conditions of tsarist autocracy which would culminate in a democratic republic born of a popular revolution. Economically the minimum programme did not envisage Russia instantly going beyond the norms of capitalist commodity production. Nevertheless, at the level of the regime, Russia was to be ruled over by the working class in alliance with the peasant masses. State power in the form of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat and peasantry was the bridge which united the minimum and maximum sections of the programme.
The Bolsheviks were committed to using the salient of state power to help spark the socialist revolution in the countries of advanced capitalism. With the aid of the socialist west, Russia could then embark on the transition to socialism (the first stage of communism) without the necessity of a second, specifically socialist, revolution. The workers’ and peasants’ revolution against tsarism would thereby - given the right internal and external conditions and circumstances - be made permanent. It would proceed uninterruptedly from the tasks of political democracy to the maximum programme and the tasks of leaving behind commodity production, the wages system and bourgeois right.
The fall of the tsar in February 1917 and the emergence of a protracted dual power situation - a bourgeois provisional government (class content being determined by politics not personnel), alongside which stood the workers’ and peasants’ soviets - caused Lenin to adjust - not, as Cliff erroneously contends, carry out a “complete break” with, the minimum programme.8 The revolutionary dictatorship (rule) of the workers and peasants was concretised in the slogan, ‘All power to the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets’. Trotsky’s latter-day disciples - Cliff included - have woefully misrepresented the history of Bolshevism and Leninism. In so doing they stupidly reject as a matter of supposed principle the concept of a minimum section of the party programme: ie, a logically designed series of immediate demands and perspectives under the socio-economic conditions of capitalism, which in their orchestrated fulfilment transform the workers into a class that is ready to seize state power.
And by early October 1917, ready to seize state power they certainly were. However, on the very eve of the second revolution, Lenin declared himself against the “very radical” but “really very groundless” proposal that came from Nikolai Bukharin and Vladimir Smirnov to “discard the minimum programme”.9 These comrades claimed that the division of the programme into minimum and maximum sections was outdated because Russia was about to begin the transition to socialism. The minimum programme was therefore redundant. But Lenin disagreed:
[W]e must not discard the minimum programme, for this would be an empty boast: we do not wish to “demand anything from the bourgeoisie”; we wish to realise everything ourselves; we do not wish to work on petty details within the framework of bourgeoisie society.
This would be an empty boast, because first of all we must win power, which has not yet been done. We must first carry out measures of transition to socialism, we must continue our revolution until the world socialist revolution is victorious, and only then ‘returning to the battle’, may we discard the minimum programme as of no further use.10
And there was always the possibility of being defeated, of having to conduct an organised retreat. Discarding the minimum programme would be “equivalent to declaring, to announcing (to bragging in simple language) that we have already won.”11
Even after the October revolution Lenin repeated the same argument. Against those who wanted to write a programme purely based on soviet power and the transition to full socialism, Lenin warned that it is “a utopia to think that we shall not be thrown back.”12 Hence the continued relevance of the minimum programme and the possibility of having to once again use “bourgeois parliamentarianism”, etc.
Productive forces
Let us turn to Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme - otherwise known as The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International. Trotsky had become convinced that capitalism was more than just decadent and moribund. Capitalism faced immediate extinction, was experiencing its final crisis. As a system it could no longer develop the productive forces - an idea he took, of course, from Marx’s well known ‘Preface’ to A contribution to the critique of political economy (1859):
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins the period of social revolution.13
Though Marx’s ‘Preface’ is flawed in some important respects and goes against the grain of what he wrote elsewhere - it can, after all, be read to mean that the material productive forces, not the class struggle, are the locomotive of history - such an assessment coming from Trotsky, that capitalism had turned into an absolute fetter, was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances of the time.
Before him, Lenin and Hilferding had already laid the foundations by writing penetrating studies of finance capital and the “last stage of capitalism”. And it was not only the left that saw capitalism as being in decline. Bourgeois intellectuals often despaired of further progress under their own system. Pessimism was rife. Eg, the German historian, Oswald Spengler - conservative, Nietzschean and anti-democratic - authored the influential The decline of the west (1918-22). By way of analogy he argued that capitalism had entered its last winter. The soul of western civilisation was dead. The age of caesarism had begun. A theme taken up in Britain by Arnold Toynbee in his A study of history (1934-61).
The 1929 Wall Street crash, the global slump, the forced abandonment of the gold standard, soaring unemployment, the coming to power of Nazi gangsters in 1933 and the fragmentation of the world economy into rival, antagonistic zones conveyed an ever mounting sense of pending doom. Humanity was living at the end of times. For Trotsky, capitalism was disintegrating. Spain, Abyssinia, China were for him but heralds of a general conflagration. Not even the large-scale introduction of new consumer goods, means of transport and technologies, such as vacuum cleaners, telephones, cars, aeroplanes and electronics, reversed the chronic malaise: “Mankind’s productive forces stagnate”.14 All that got Germany, USA, Japan, Britain, Italy and France - the main capitalist powers - moving economically in the late 1930s, putting the unemployed back to work, was preparation for the slaughter of another world war. Fifty million were to die.
Conditions for socialism, said Trotsky, were not only ripe, but overripe. Without a global socialist revolution, all the gains of civilisation were in danger. The main problem being not so much the consciousness of the masses. Rather the opportunism and cowardice of the ‘official communists’ and social democrats: “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership”.15 But, whereas the parties of ‘official communism’ and social democracy each counted in their ranks tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions, Trotsky’s forces were isolated, untrained and minuscule. Perhaps a couple of thousand worldwide. A problem Trotsky solved, at least in his mind, by falling back on what Marxists call ‘spontaneity’.
What he lacked in the real world, he made up for with a programmatic reliance on the elemental movement of the working class around everyday issues, such as pay and conditions. Desperate hope substitutes for harsh reality. The nature of the epoch “permits” revolutionaries to carry out economic struggles in a way that is “indissolubly” linked with the “actual tasks of the revolution”, Trotsky desperately declared.16
The “existing consciousness” of workers is not only the point of departure; it is now, to all intents and purposes, regarded as unproblematic. In the mind, subject and object are blurred one into the other. Though in ‘normal times’ most are not subjectively revolutionary - ie, educated in Marxism - workers are objectively revolutionary because of the reality of capitalism. But in the ‘new times’ no longer was it necessary through education and organisation to win the masses to consciously grasp the need to “change forthwith the old conditions”. Fighting to maintain existing conditions was all that was needed to “win the prize”. The constant tussle over wages and hours, putting in place safeguards against the corrosive effects of inflation and state-funded job creation were painted in gloriously revolutionary colours. A classic case of elevating trade union struggles to the level of socialist politics.
Trotsky reasoned that in general there can, in the epoch of “decaying capitalism”, be no systematic social reforms or raising of the masses’ living standards. Objective circumstances therefore propelled the masses, or so Trotsky believed, to overthrow capitalism, simply because every time the system conceded one spoonful it was forced to take back two. It was in an advanced state of decay. Therefore, he concluded, simple defence of existing economic gains through demanding a “sliding scale” of wages and hours, etc, would provide the initial trigger needed to launch the final, apocalyptic collision with capitalism.
Frankly, it does not surprise me in the least to read Trotsky’s sympathetic biographer, Isaac Deutscher, characterising the Transitional programme as “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”.17
The Transitional programme is certainly marred with the inclusion of all manner of ephemeral facts, figures and personalities. It reads more like an antiquated manual for American SWP trade union activists than a programme for Marxist tribunes of the people.
Trotsky insisted that if the defensive responses of the workers were energetically promoted, freed from bureaucratic constraints, and after that nudged in the direction of forming picket line defence guards, then pushed towards demanding nationalisation of key industries, the momentum would, advance following advance, take at least a minority of the class towards forming soviets and then, to cap it all, the conquest of state power. Or, as Trotsky put it, they would “storm not only heaven, but earth”.
Patiently winning over the majority intellectually and organising the workers into a political party was dismissed as the gradualism that belonged to a previous, long dead, era: the era of competitive capitalism. Now, in the era of collapse, the meagre, squat but tightly organised forces of Trotskyism will lead the masses as if by stealth, steer them through a series of pre-set transitional demands, which, taken one after the other, take them forward.
After a few years, or maybe 10, decisive layers will begin to recognise the Fourth International as their leadership. But the aim of winning state power and ending capitalism internationally will, though, only be revealed to the masses during the final phase of the struggle. Not quite, but almost, socialism as conspiracy. In essence, Trotsky, from a position of extreme organisational weakness, had re-invented the Blanquist putsch or the anarchist general strike ‘road to socialism’. This time the Trotskyites would be the educative elite, the tightly knit, highly disciplined, minority, operating as the command centre. They would drive the entire juggernaut of world revolution through their cogs and wheels of transitional demands, using trade union and other such levers.
Action
No matter how we excuse Trotsky in terms of how things appeared on the threshold of World War II, there is no escaping from the fact that he was wrong in method and periodisation. Trade union struggles are not hegemonic; they tend towards sectionalism, they do not lead to socialist consciousness. Nor was the 1930s capitalist slump permanent or terminal.
Suffice to say, after World War II capitalism experienced what might have been its highest and longest boom. By organising a further deformation of, or retreat from, the law of value, with Keynesian welfarism, nationalisation and the cold war arms economy, conditions were laid for the American century and a sustained and unprecedented period of capital accumulation. More than that, especially in western Europe, reformism - both of the Labourite and ‘official communist’ variety - was given a new lease of life. Hence, instead of the tactics of insurrection and frontal assault being the order of the day, ever wider propaganda, deep organisation and the long war of manoeuvre surely fitted the bill.
The problem was, however, that Trotsky’s epigones either refused to acknowledge the capitalist boom of the 1950s and 60s or, when they finally admitted the truth that Trotsky’s 1938 prognosis no longer applied, they dogmatically stuck to what they Talmudically like to call the transitional method.
Ironically, while the SWP, and its Socialist Review Group and International Socialist progenitors, boasted of being unencumbered by a programme - in effect they boasted of being at sea without a compass - two years before his death, Tony Cliff suddenly decided that the time was right to adopt one. With much fanfare, in September 1998, the SWP’s ‘Action programme’ (now almost totally forgotten) appeared in Socialist Worker.18 This was followed by a glossy brochure and attempts to garner support and finance from local branches of trade unions, trades councils, Labour Party wards, etc. Naturally, there was no in-depth study of the workings of capitalism’s inner-laws and analysis of the system’s state of health. Nor was there any thorough-going debate within the SWP’s ranks culminating in a national conference vote before the launch decision was taken. All it took was for Cliff to have one of his famous hunches and lo it appeared.
Despite claims that radical change was back on the agenda, calls for the abolition of the standing army and its replacement by a popular militia, disestablishment of the Church of England, Irish unity, self-determination for Scotland and Wales, a federal republic, etc, were entirely absent. The ‘Action programme’ consisted of nothing but a trite list of left-reformist demands: stopping closures and the nationalisation of failed concerns; a 35-hour week with no loss of pay; a £4.61 minimum wage; ending privatisation; repealing the anti-trade union laws; state control over international trade in order to curb speculation; an increase in welfare spending and slashing the arms bill; full employment so as to boost aggregate economic demand.
The SWP’s ‘Action programme’ was premised on essentially the same method as Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional programme. Cliff also believed that conditions had become essentially the same.19 Yes, despite working class confidence and self-activity being at a very low ebb and revolutionary consciousness almost non-existent, Cliff decreed that pursuit of even the most minimal demands is all that is needed to see the overthrow of capitalism. Cliff implied that Britain and other core imperialist powers had entered a deep crisis which made revolution imminent: “Capitalism in the advanced countries,” he wrote, “is no longer expanding and so the words of the 1938 Transitional programme that ‘there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and raising the masses’ living standards’ fits reality again”.20 As Cliff once said about the periodisation of Trotsky’s epigones - pure self-delusion. Leave aside “no longer expanding” and no “systematic social reforms” - according to the Office of National Statistics, “Unlike the 1970s and 1980s, real household disposable income per head grew almost continuously through the 1990s and 2000s, irrespective of recessions.”21
Chris Harman, John Rees and Alex Callinicos were tasked with providing theoretical justification. In truth it amounted to intellectual prostitution. They backed the ‘Action programme’ with extraordinarily tenuous stories about rapidly mounting levels of discontent and equally tenuous quotes culled from Comintern’s ‘Theses on tactics’ agreed at its 3rd Congress in June 1921 and Trotsky’s 1934 ‘A programme of action for France’.22 Hence, Alex Callinicos, doing his master’s bidding, quotes Comintern’s ‘Theses on tactics’ as if it was a repudiation of the minimum programme per se, while simultaneously claiming it as a pretext for the SWP’s 1998 ‘Action programme’, which is in actual fact nothing more than a minimalist programme of the centrist type - easily met within capitalism, and within the existing constitution to boot.23 The crucial question of state power is, of course, entirely absent. Anyway let me quote Callinicos’s quote:
The communist parties do not put forward minimum programmes which could serve to strengthen and improve the tottering foundations of capitalism. The communists’ main aim is to destroy the capitalist system. But in order to achieve their aim the communist parties must put forward demands expressing the immediate needs of the working class. The communists must organise mass campaigns to fight for these demands regardless of whether they are compatible with the continuation of the capitalist system. The communist parties should be concerned not with the viability and competitive capacity of capitalist industry or the stability of the capitalist economy, but with proletarian poverty, which cannot and must not be endured any longer ... In place of the minimum programme of centrism and reformists, the Communist International offers a struggle for the concrete demands of the proletariat which, in their totality, challenge the power of the bourgeoisie, organise the proletariat and mark out the different stages of the struggle for its dictatorship.24
Clearly the target of Comintern is not the minimum programme as such. Rather it is the minimum programme of “socialisation or nationalisation” put forward by the centrists and reformists - which was to be achieved peacefully in an attempt to ameliorate the conditions of the workers, boost demand and thereby stabilise society.25 As the resolution explicitly states, the understanding that capitalism cannot bring about the “long-term improvement of the proletariat” does not imply that the workers have to “renounce the fight for immediate practical demands until after it has established its dictatorship”.26 Quite the reverse.
Equally the target of Trotsky’s attack on the minimum programme in the Transitional programme was not Leninism, but pre-World War I social democracy, epitomised by the German party of Bebel, Kautsky, Bernstein, Noske, David and Scheidemann. Like the Bolsheviks it arranged its programme - written mainly by Kautsky - in two sections. The minimum programme “limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society” - furthermore, it must be emphasised, these reforms were within the framework of kaiserdom. As Engels, and in her turn Luxemburg, bitterly complained, the timorous minimum programme of German social democracy declined to even raise the republican demand for the abolition of the monarchy and the imperial constitution. Incidentally, Engels explained that the working class “can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic”.27 True, the maximum programme of German social democracy “promised” socialism. But between the minimum and maximum programme there was, as Trotsky said, no bridge. Indeed, as Trotsky explains, the right and centrist leaders had “no need for such a bridge”, since the word “socialism” is only used for “holiday speechifying”.28
Actually, Trotsky warned his small band of followers that it would be a terrible mistake to “discard” the programme of old “minimal” demands “to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness”.29 Trotsky was prepared to defend existing democratic “rights and social conquests”. He did not, however, view them as having any particular purchase in and of themselves. No, because capitalism was mistakenly considered to be in absolute and terminal decline, it was claimed that every serious economic demand of the workers “inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and the bourgeois state”.30 In effect, spontaneity was combined with revolutionary economism.
This is what the much vaunted transitional method amounts to, and this is the method that the SWP uses to rationalise what is now its habitual right opportunism. From keeping the Socialist Alliance as an Old Labour election outfit to Respect and the popular front with George Galloway, the Muslim Brotherhood and Asian businessmen. From adopting pacifism in the Stop the War Coalition to presenting mundane tax and spend Keynesian palliatives with its Unite the Resistance fake united front. Yet simultaneously, on demonstrations and picket lines SWPers proclaim ‘One solution - revolution’ and demand: “TUC, get off your knees, call the general strike”. That gets new recruits excited and allows the SWP to pose left.
To save the SWP from disintegration will require more than a special conference, the election of a completely new central committee and an end to bureaucratic centralism. In cooperation with other pro-party forces, the SWP needs to develop a genuine Marxist programme.
Notes
1. L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p111.
2. www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/where-swp-coming.
3. T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p14.
4. T Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow London 1982, p117.
5. T Cliff Trotsky Vol 4, London 1993, pp299-300.
6. T Cliff, ‘Why we need a socialist workers party’ Socialist Worker January 8 1977.
7. T Cliff Lenin Vol 2, London 1976, p124.
9. VI Lenin CW Vol 26 Moscow 1977, p169.
12. VI Lenin CW Vol 27 Moscow 1977, p136.
13. K Marx and F Engels CW Vol 29, London 1987, p262.
14. L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p111.
17. I Deutscher The prophet outcast Oxford 1979, pp425-26.
18. Socialist Worker September 12 1998.
19. See T Cliff Trotskyism after Trotsky London 1999, p82.
21. The same source reports: “Between 1998 and 2009 earnings grew on average at a faster rate than inflation”; and that “Household net wealth more than doubled in real terms between 1987 and 2009, from £56,000 to £117,000 in 2008-09 prices” (J Beaumont [ed], ‘Income and wealth’ Social Trends No41 London 2010, p2).
22. See A Callinicos International Socialism No81, winter 1998; and J Rees Socialist Review January 1999.
23. See International Socialism No81.
24. A Alder (ed) Theses, resolutions and manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International London 1980, pp285-86.
27. F Engels MECW Vol 27, London 1990, p228.
28. L Trotsky The transitional programme New York 1997, p114.