25.07.1996

Transitional method

Linda Addison reports on last week’s CPGB London seminar on Trotsky’s Transitional programme, introduced by Richard Price of the Workers International League (Workers News)

Richard Price began a heated debate in London last Sunday encompassing the nature of programme and the tactics necessary for today. This was part of the seminar series on programme which continues for the next year.

Comrades from the WIL, the Workers Revolutionary Party (Workers Press), ex-Workers Power comrades, including those from the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI), and from the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) were represented at the meeting.

The fact that comrades from Trotskyist and state capitalist traditions had come together for a fraternal discussion with the CPGB further indicates the fluidity and possibilities of communist rapprochement in this period.

The meeting was characterised by comrades attempting to understand and bring together their different views in the struggle for communist programme and Party. Finger wagging and point scoring which has often characterised meetings of a fragmented left in the past were absent.

Richard Price began by setting the Transitional programme in the context in which it was written in 1938 - a period of defeat and what Trotsky anticipated as a pre-revolutionary situation, given the impending capitalist crisis which manifested itself soon after in World War II.

It was not intended as a programme for all times, but its method and conclusions have lessons for today, particularly in Trotsky’s emphasis on the ‘crisis of leadership’. which Richard asserted is still the main question today. The Transitional programme for the WIL is not a Trotskyist aberration, but rooted in the method of Marx and Engels, as evidenced by their approach in 1848 and of the first four congresses of the Third International.

Without a mass Party its programme is an “agitative weapon, but it is not a passive shopping list of demands. It must have answers for the mass.” Transitional demands were explained as the bridge from the present demands of the working class to their conquest of power. The WIL maintains that the approach of the minimum/maximum programme was superseded by the Transitional programme. For the WIL the limitations of the minimum/maximum approach of Kautsky’s Erfurt programme were soon manifested in the reformism of the German Social Democratic Party and the stageist approach of the Mensheviks.

For these comrades there is no connection between the minimum and maximum programmes. Rightist opportunism has its mirror also in a leftist approach. The Party becomes an organised conspiracy, either ignoring spontaneous struggle because it is not revolutionary or worshipping it, with the socialist utopia secretly relegated to the dim and distant future.

Richard emphasised that the fight for and achieving of minimum demands does not necessarily lead to revolutionary consciousness, since if the struggle is not linked to wider goals the employers counter-offensive can soon knock back the gains. A wider perspective of the nature of the epoch and the tasks of permanent revolution underpins the Transitional programme. Without this, as other comrades later pointed out, it can become a tool for reformists and opportunists, just as the minimum/maximum programme has been. Without a revolutionary perspective the Transitional programme became for some organisations such as the Militant Tendency a programme to be implemented by the Labour government, just as the British Road to Socialism was for the ‘official communists’ in the CPGB.

A comrade from the RDG emphasised in discussion the fact that the min/max approach must be firmly tied to a theory of revolution. For him the min/max programme is transitional with the RDG’s theory of permanent revolution being based on the revolutionary democratic road from today to socialism. The Socialist Workers Party has neither a theory of revolution nor a programme. As a result it is maximalist, posing revolution but having no road towards it, while all the time accommodating to spontaneity.

Indeed a certain mechanical stageism seemed to be creeping into the WIL’s approach, as Richard spoke of a “ladder of tasks” which the working class must ascend and the necessity of “addressing things as they are”. The ‘crisis of leadership’ for WIL today means that revolutionaries are apparently redundant if they do not “have the mass organisation capable of overturning the old leadership”. From this the conclusion is drawn that our task today is to make demands on the Labour Party and trade union leaders. Trotskyists must address the limitations in the Transitional programme but “A handful of people cannot write a revolutionary programme, because you need the experience of serious mass class struggle.”

Though no one in the meeting was against making demands on Labour and trade union leaders many in the CPGB felt that the comrades were in danger of setting the 1938 programme in aspic. Today the central question is not so much a ‘crisis of leadership’ but an absence of leadership.

The Labour Party is not the political expression of the working class: it does not have independent organisation. The Transitional programme is in danger of relegating the working class to economic struggle without a perspective for transcending Labourism and trade unionism with the political struggle, which is the prime task of communists.

Though we may only be small groups at the moment our job is precisely to raise the class struggle onto a political level through programme. Programmes of course do not become real until they are seized upon by the mass, but that cannot happen unless the revolutionary section of the class agitates for it.

One comrade from the CPGB replied to Richard Price by saying in order “to break out of reformist consciousness the class must take on the state”. The working class will not win hegemony stage by stage in more and more trade union struggles, but by taking on the main contradictions within the ruling class itself and being the champion of all democratic demands.

An ex-Workers Power comrade disputed the charge of economism and asserted that the Bolsheviks broke with the min/max programme under the leadership of Lenin. Lenin’s April thesis of 1917 was said to be an example of Trotsky’s transitional method with Lenin breaking with the previous stageist approach of socialist revolution being preceded by bourgeois democratic revolution and taking Trotsky’s approach of permanent revolution. Lenin had to carry out a struggle with the Bolsheviks, particularly Stalin and Kamenev, who like the Mensheviks were continuing support of the provisional government.

A CPGB comrade disputed this reading of history saying that though of course the Erfurt programme had its limitations it was a model for the Bolsheviks. The difference between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks was on the interpretation of the programme. Whereas the Mensheviks adhered to the view that the bourgeois democratic revolution must be carried out by the bourgeoisie, Lenin looked to the working class to carry through revolution. The contradictions in the ruling class in Russia put workers’ revolution on the agenda, even though it was not an advanced capitalist country and could not go forward to socialism without international revolution.

The April thesis was a concretisation of the programme in the existing circumstances, not a break. The programme called for a revolutionary provisional government, but the provisional government was not revolutionary. Lenin looked to resolve this in a revolutionary way through the soviets, whereas Stalin and Kamenev had given the programme a rightist interpretation and supported the provisional government.

The Bolshevik minimum programme concretised by Lenin was to overthrow Tsarism by smashing the state. In the conditions of Russia this would not create a bourgeois republic, but an “extraordinary republic”, in which the struggle for working class rule would have to take place.

The comrade from the RDG had a slightly different interpretation of the minimum programme which would take us to a ‘dual power republic’. In this sense it is transitional. The Transitional programme is about the working class taking power, while the maximum programme takes us through socialism to communism.

The comrades from the WRP also had a slightly different interpretation of the Transitional programme from the WIL. For them programmes are always specific and a new conception of programme began with the April thesis and subsequently, with the degeneration of the Third International, different programmes contended. The Transitional programme was specifically about how small groups make contact with the mass movement which is why it is so relevant today.

The comrade from the LCMRCI felt that the min/max approach may have been relevant when capitalism was reformable, but not under imperialism. The Transitional programme must always raise the question of power. He felt that the CPGB’s minimum programme was in fact a maximum programme and that we should reject the approach altogether and embrace fully the Transitional programme. He felt our approach to the minimum programme was a move away from ‘official communism’ to Trotskyism, just as the RDG’s approach was a move away from ‘Cliffism’. Neither was yet fully developed.

This was a view shared by the comrades from the WRP and the WIL. The CPGB’s minimum programme sounded to them like a “leftist maximum programme, which the Transitional programme specifically tries to get away from.” Revolutionary demands such as arming the masses should only be made in a revolutionary situation, otherwise workers will not listen to you. For the WRP the Transitional programme becomes redundant at the moment of dual power because it is specific to a pre-revolutionary situation.

A CPGB comrade rejected the transitional approach of only raising revolutionary demands “an hour before the revolution”. We fight for revolution now as a minimum and as a principle, even if this is only in propaganda. That is why we call it a minimum programme: it is still its scientific name. The opportunists may have dragged the term through the mud, just as they did with the name ‘communist’, but we must reclaim it. The task of revolutionaries is not to “vote Labour because the working class does”, as the WIL comrades urged, but even in a non-revolutionary situation, to fight for revolution. There are no stages that the workers must go through; no law of ‘first a Labour government’, or ‘first a 35-hour week’ before they climb the ladder to its revolutionary peak. Revolutionary struggle can be born out of any fight if it is politicised, if it takes on the state and raises the class to a political class for itself. When the workers take power, our minimum programme has been completed. The struggle for communism - via the transitional stage of socialism - is our maximum programme.

This does not mean that on every demonstration we raise the slogan of, for example, ‘arm the workers’, which was used in discussion as an example from our minimum programme. Slogans must flow from our programme but must of course be relevant to the concrete situation. Arming the workers is a principle which must be included in our minimum programme and which is already concretised not so far from home in the Six Counties.

The WIL thought such demands could be part of our propaganda but should not be raised in everyday agitation, because we would never win the class to such a programme.

The discussion also took in the CPGB’s call for a non-ideological party. Some comrades felt that the Party must be ideological, because ideological questions informed action. One from the WRP said the programme must be informed by a correct world view. There could only be one, to which Party members must adhere.

CPGB comrades explained that non-ideology meant the free flow, not the absence, of ideas. Marxism is a science which must continually interpret and reinterpret the world. Marxism does not reject ideology, but rejects it becoming frozen and so transformed into false consciousness.

Members should be united around actions of the Party, based on an acceptance of the Party programme. But only through the principle of open discussion in front of the class on all questions, including the Party programme, can we guard against opportunist interpretations of the programme for communism.

Though there was still confusion and disagreement on this area, comrades from the WIL noted our organisations’ concurrence on many events, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite our different traditions and historical interpretations.

It was clear at the end of the meeting that there is much discussion that must take place. The positive aspect is that the discussion has begun. Our organisations can be taken onto a qualitatively higher level by theoretical clarification, particularly on questions of programme.

All were agreed that a Party is part of the class. To be such, many views must be free to contend. We hope that the fluidity opening up on the left will develop a process of communist rapprochement necessary to reforge that Party.

How revolutionaries fight to break the stranglehold of Labourism is an area that comrades hope to pursue in future meetings, particularly at the Party school. As well as the series of seminars on programme, it is also being discussed in group meetings at the school in which this discussion will no doubt continue.