18.12.2025

Against action programmes

We need to build a mass party and we need to fight for democracy in the state and in the workers’ movement too. Mike Macnair rejects the standard ‘left Trotskyist’ arguments

As comrade Yassamine Mather stated in her December 4 report of the Socialist Unity Platform fringe event at the Your Party conference,¹ at the session on ‘What kind of programme for Your Party’ I found myself speaking on a panel with four proponents of variations on ‘left Trotskyism’: Vincent David of the International Communist League (Spartacists, originally a 1960s left split from the US Socialist Workers Party)’; HaPe Breitman of the International Bolshevik Tendency (one of the splinters from the Spartacists); Richard Brenner from ‘Marxist Strategy’ (a splinter from Workers Power, itself a 1970s split from the British International Socialists, now the British SWP); and Ted Reese, an independent speaking for the YP ‘DemSocs’, but who has acknowledged training in Marxism from the Revolutionary Communist Group (aka Fight racism, fight imperialism - another 1970s split from the British IS).²

I characterise these groups as offering variants on ‘left Trotskyism’, in contrast to the ‘right Trotskyism’ of the Mandelite Fourth International, the British SWP, and so on. The ‘right Trotskyists’ maintain a sentimental attachment to Trotsky, but interpret ‘permanent revolution’ as implying tail-ending nationalist movements, ‘the united front’ as involving suspension or diplomatic downplaying of criticism (as Georgi Dimitrov argued at the 7th Congress of Comintern), and ‘transitional method’ as amounting merely to promoting currently popular ideas. By this means they have substantially rejected the original Trotskyists’ differences with ‘official communism’ and produced variants on the latter. As a result, in their political practice they promote the construction of broad fronts, intended to be left social democratic (or, in the ‘third world’, left-nationalist). As world imperialism has, since the late 1970s, turned away from substantial concessions to social democracy and left nationalism, these projects tend merely to fail and end in demoralisation.

The ‘left Trotskyists’, on the other hand, are still attempting to construct a revolutionary politics on the basis of (versions of) Trotskyism. The method is that of the 1938 Transitional programme, which states:

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

The Fourth International does not discard the programme 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 framework of the correct actual - that is, revolutionary - perspective. Insofar as the old, partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism - and this occurs at each step - the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very bases of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal programme’ is superseded by the transitional programme, the task of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.³

A ‘transitional programme’ built on this method is not a party programme - a system of proposals that defines a political party, like the 1838 Six Points of the People’s Charter, the 1848 Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, the 1875 Gotha or 1891 Erfurt programmes of the German SAP-SPD, the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier of France, and so on. It cannot be such a programme because it internally defines itself as a “bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution” - that is, it asserts that there is another, real, programme lying behind it.

My four co-panellists at the YP fringe on November 29 were all in agreement that what had to be put forward for YP is an ‘action programme’. Most of the contributors from the floor agreed. The question that is posed by this formula is what counts as ‘action’. Put another way, what counts for the 1938 Transitional programme as “systematic mobilisation of the masses”?

Richard Brenner was most explicit on the point. An action programme was a programme for direct action by the masses, as counterposed to electoral campaigning. It needed to link this direct action to socialist measures: meaning, mainly, expropriations. Again, this attracted extensive agreement.

The British ruling class, he said, is the oldest, craftiest and most cynical ruling class in the world. Hence, it is a fantasy to suppose that a workers’ government could come to power through elections. Imagine that a left party won 600 MPs: the generals and admirals who announced in advance that they would not obey Corbyn would not obey it. Hence, a workers’ government can only come to power through working class councils of action (soviets). These will grow out of building mass direct action.

In responding to the discussion, I made the point that this was a politics of nostalgia for the 1960s to early 1970s. In that period, we had very extensive nationalised industries, public housing, and so on. We had a powerful shop-stewards movement that in a good many larger workplaces could impose substantial elements of workers’ control (albeit not full workers’ control). Since the mid-1970s, however, the capitalist class’s continued control of political legitimacy and the state - and its international character - had allowed all these gains (won, in the case of the shop-stewards’ movement, by direct action) to be rolled back.

I can add for this article that, surprising as it may seem, I agree with comrade Brenner that the British state - the organised bodies of armed men (that is, the armed forces, the police, the prison service, the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, the judiciary and Crown Prosecution Service and the senior civil service) will not permit a left government to come to power - as long as they themselves remain intact. They will intervene long before there are actually 600 left MPs: the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign running since 2016 was and is an operation of the Anglo-American security services to secure the loyalty of any British government to the Atlantic Alliance, and it achieved its immediate central aim in this country by putting in the securocrat, former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir Starmer, as Labour leader.

The problem is to break up the coherence and loyalty of the state. This is not all our work. The British state is in increasing difficulties, but not yet in crisis. It will fall into crisis, probably not that far in the future. Our task, however, is to pose the idea of an alternative to the capitalist-constitutional order, which has the potential to win to the side of the working class rank-and-file members of the state apparatus.⁴

Anti-parliamentary

I don’t know about comrade Reese, but the other comrades - the two coming from the Spartacist tradition and Richard Brenner - certainly think that they are Trotskyists. But their counterposition of ‘direct action’ to ‘electoralism’ is actually a politics denounced by Leon Trotsky as “anti-parliamentary cretinism”:

Parliamentary cretinism is a revolting sickness, but anti-parliamentary cretinism is not much better. We see this most clearly in the fate of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists. The revolution poses political questions directly and at the present stage gives them a parliamentary form. The attention of the working class cannot but be concentrated on the Cortes, and the anarcho-syndicalists will secretly vote for the socialists or perhaps the republicans. To fight against parliamentary illusions without fighting simultaneously against the anti-parliamentary metaphysics of the anarchists, is less possible in Spain than anywhere else.⁵

In Chile in 1972-73, the anti-parliamentarist (and, in fact, guerrillaist; but more generally direct actionist) Movimiento de Izquerda Revolutionaria wound up giving critical support to the Unidad Popular people’s front government - which proved helpless in face of the US-sponsored military coup because of its constitutionalist illusions. The Spanish anarcho-syndicalist CNT union confederation and the Chilean MIR are not the only examples of the political helplessness of parties affected by anti-parliamentary cretinism, when actual pre-revolutionary crisis develops.

There are numerous examples. A large-scale one, though not noted by Trotsky, is that the anti-partyism of the German Revolutionäre Obleute (‘revolutionary shop stewards’) in 1918-19 allowed the rightwing Majority SPD to take largely uncontested control of the Räte workers’ and soldiers’ councils in 1919, through SPD representation via trade union officials, and through the existence of soldiers’ councils in fact dominated by officers (because the revolution in the capital and elsewhere had not reached the point of breaking down discipline in the armies at the fronts). A small-scale but relatively recent one is the extraordinary zigzag course of the British SWP’s co-thinkers in Egypt, the Revolutionary Socialists, in the political crisis in Egypt in 2011-13, from tailing the Muslim Brotherhood, to tailing its ‘secular’ opponents, to the final realisation that these were re-imposing the tyranny of the military regime, which had never actually fallen in 2011.

The problem underlying these repeated failures is that revolutionary crisis poses the question of central coordinating authority, to substitute for the failure and/or sabotage of capitalist economic coordination. Local institutions, like the Russian soviets, German or Austrian Räte of 1918-19, or Chilean cordones industriales of 1971-73, cannot solve this national-level coordination problem.⁶ To solve the problem requires the working class, and in particular the broad layer of activists, thinking politics at the level of general laws, and of independent foreign policy, before a strike wave or crisis breaks down capitalist coordination.

The emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. True. But the act of the working class itself is not only strikes, shop stewards committees and so on. It is also, and just as necessarily, the creation of permanent workers’ organisations - trade unions, cooperatives, collectivist political parties.

Revolutionary crisis

We are, of course, not today in conditions of revolutionary crisis, but - as the Spartacist comrades correctly judge⁷ - in ones of an accelerating global movement of reaction, in which imperialist capital is seeking to take back all the concessions made to the working class - and to lesser national capitals - since 1917.

I should note here that Leninist-CPGB comrades have been arguing since 1991 that we had entered a period of reaction of a special kind - one in which communists were not so much subject to repression as to intellectual marginalisation. Even today, the Trump administration’s repression is directed primarily towards depressing the Democratic Party vote, not towards the suppression of the far left.

My point above is that comrades who are pursuing ‘anti-electoralist’ or ‘direct actionist’ concepts of ‘action programmes’ are seeking to create political organisations that, if they got large enough to be influential, would be useless and dangerous in conditions of revolutionary crisis.

But what would be conditions of revolutionary crisis? This does have a bearing on what revolutionaries should be doing in a period of reaction.

Lenin offered three versions of the same conception of revolutionary crisis, starting in June 1913:

Oppression alone, no matter how great, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation in a country. In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way.⁸

This formulation was not necessary to the analysis that followed. It is very likely that it was directed against Rosa Luxemburg and others’ arguments in 1910-12 in favour of ‘escalating’ the mass movement to demand universal suffrage in Prussia towards political strikes, etc.

He diagnosed the beginning of revolutionary crisis in Russia from the fact that 250,000 people went on strike on May Day, while, on the other hand, the regime was suffering an internal political crisis due to its self-perception that “the autocracy and landowners were unable to ensure ‘peaceful development’, were unable to provide the basic conditions for ‘law’ and ‘order’, without which a capitalist country cannot, in the 20th century, live side by side with Germany and the new China”. The diagnosis was wrong (war in 1914 staved off revolution for another three years). But it was not unreasonable: the deep crisis of the tsarist state was visible to all; May Day has since been practically politically neutered, but in 1913 striking on May Day was an unambiguous act of political identification with revolutionary social democracy. As was true, also, of striking on International Women’s Day in February 1917, the trigger of the 1917 revolution.

Ex-leftists

In 1915 Lenin elaborated the point a bit further in polemic with ex-leftist supporter of the German war effort Heinrich Cunow.⁹ Cunow had argued that the 1912 anti-war resolution of the Basle congress of the Second International rested on “illusory” hopes for a revolution against the war; now that revolution had not materialised, it was necessary to take sides. Lenin argued that there could be no guarantees that a revolution would take place. He went on:

To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms:

(1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way;

(2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual;

(3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action.

Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible. The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation. Such a situation existed in 1905 in Russia, and in all revolutionary periods in the west; it also existed in Germany in the sixties of the last century, and in Russia in 1859-61 and 1879-80, although no revolution occurred in these instances.

Why was that? It was because it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change: namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, ‘falls’, if it is not toppled over.¹⁰

Finally, the argument reappears in Leftwing communism (1920), as part of an argument against precisely the sort of politics that the ‘left Trotskyists’ promote:

The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the 20th century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph.

This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses - hitherto apathetic - who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it.¹¹

It seems to me that repeated revolutions, revolutionary crises, near-revolutionary crises, mass movements that do not issue in revolutionary crises, regime crises without (social-) revolutionary implications, and, indeed, counterrevolutions like 1989-91, confirm the fundamentals of Lenin’s approach. Revolutionary crisis requires both crisis of the old order and the clear unwillingness of those below to put up any longer.

Further, in fact, this unwillingness of those below to put up any longer requires not merely intensity of oppression, but also widespread perception that another way of doing things is possible. I referred above to Lenin’s 1913 reference to masses of workers striking on May Day, and to the February 1917 International Women’s Day strike/demonstration that triggered the revolution. In both cases - and more generally in the global revolutionary wave of 1916-20 - the idea that another way of doing things is possible was given by the existence of the Second International, its constituent parties and their associated unions, coops, clubs and other organisations - and their promotion of socialism and radical democracy as an alternative to the existing order.

In the revolutionary wave of 1944-49 the idea that another way of doing things is possible was given mainly by the USSR and the involvement of the communist parties in the wartime resistance movements. In the weaker global surge of around 1967-79, the imagined alternative remained in part the ‘Soviet bloc’, but focussed more on third-world revolutions, in particular Cuba and Vietnam.

Where are we now (or, what are the present dynamics) from the standpoint of this understanding of revolutionary crisis? We have to begin with the stage of decay or crisis of the regime, how far it is “impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule”. In this field a big problem of Marxist analysis is the loss of the distinction between chronic problems and “crisis” due to the casual use of “crisis” to mean chronic problems (‘housing crisis’, and so on; but equally the early 20th century ‘Revisionists’ and Georges Sorel’s ‘crisis of Marxism’).

US decline

First, the Trotskyists in 1938 falsely diagnosed the death agony of the British empire as the death agony of capitalism. The world capitalist class did not have ‘no way out’ (unlike the Russian autocracy, landowners and Orthodox church in the early 20th century): the USA could take over. The present global situation is not yet the death agony of the American world hegemony: the US is in decline but still in control. It may be that this will entail the end of capitalism, if it turns out to be impossible to destroy the military power of the USA without either a generalised nuclear exchange leading to human extinction, or - the alternative to be hoped for - the proletarian-socialist revolution overthrowing the US constitution. The relative decline of the USA is not yet a crisis: it is more analogous to the beginnings of British ‘declinism’ with the military failings of the Crimean war.

Within this framework, the UK (considered as a firm) has been trading at a loss and paying dividends out of capital since the mid-1980s. This has involved making the UK a tax haven and an attractive place to ‘park’ hot money (the ‘London laundromat’), as well as extensive sales of UK capital assets to overseas capitals (mainly US).¹² The country is approaching the end point at which open bankruptcy is inevitable; and this situation underlies both David Cameron’s plebiscitary frauds in 2011, 2014 and 2016, and the remarkable instability of UK governments since 2016: only false pretences are available, not any actual working policy.

We are not yet in open crisis of the UK regime, but it is possible or even moderately likely in the near future.

On the other hand, there are symptoms among the masses of aspiration to a break with the existing system of rule. These can be seen in the Greek Syriza in 2009-16, in Corbynism in 2015-18, in the initial surge for the Spanish Podemos from 2014, and so on - and recently in the 800,000 expressions of interest in what became the considerably smaller Your Party. These show mass-scale aspirations that there should be an alternative. But these hopes are rapidly disappointed, as the supposed alternatives turn out not to involve any real break with the existing regime.

Alternative

What is absent is any mass sense that an alternative way of doing things is really possible. If we ask why this is the case, the answer is that the left remains in the shadow of the Soviet regime and remains committed to ‘official communist’ politics: socialism in one country/national roads to socialism, the bureaucratically controlled party monolith, and the people’s front.

Until 1989-91 this was a plausible alternative, though always weak in mass purchase in the UK and USA, and tending to decline in plausibility. In 1989-91 the Soviet leadership voluntarily collapsed the Soviet and east European regimes, and did so because - as they openly admitted - their planning regime had failed to deliver results superior to those of the American capitalist empire. The institutional forms of the Soviet regime meant that no-one could effectively resist this collapse (and also that these forms inherently produced demoralisation, so that what the masses saw as an alternative was the illusion that they would get western European living standards).

In the ‘west’ the equivalent is managerialism - both in the bureaucratic structures of the trade unions and workers’ parties, including the SWP, and so on; and in the alliance with ‘human resources’ managerialism that is expressed in commitments to speech controls, ‘safe spaces’ and so on. By these commitments to managerialism, the left asserts that there is no alternative: that the managerialist regime of the state and capitalist management is the only way things can be done.

Getting back the mass sense that another way of doing things is possible will not happen through simple direct action. We cannot be always on strike, always on the streets, and so on. We have to fight for political democracy - both as the central core of a programme for ‘high politics’ and as the central core of a programme for reorganising and rebuilding the workers’ movement.

The comrades who argue for deprioritising issues of democracy in favour of ‘action programmes’ are exactly wrong, and practically serve as small outposts of the ideological fortifications of the capitalist state order.

‘Ideas, unity, action’ Weekly Worker December 4 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1564/ideas-unity-action).↩︎
Socialism or extinction: climate, automation and war in the final capitalist breakdown (Kindle edition 2019), acknowledgments page. The RCG has retained certain fundamentals (anti-parliamentarianism, direct actionism) from early Cliffism, though around 1980 it moved towards Maoist ‘anti-imperialism’ and belief that the ‘western’ proletariat is entirely a labour aristocracy, albeit without full Maoist theory.↩︎
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm: the section, ‘The minimum program and the transitional program’.↩︎
And even some higher ranked ones, like the Helsinki police chief, Gustavo Rovio, who sheltered Lenin after the 1917 July Days; or tsarist general Mikhail Bonch-Bruyevich, who jumped to the Red side in October 1917.↩︎
‘The Spanish revolution and the dangers threatening it’ (May 1931): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain01.htm. Section: ‘The parliamentary cretinism of the reformists and the anti-parliamentary cretinism of the anarchists’ (the whole section is relevant).↩︎
Examples in Otto Bauer’s History of the Austrian revolution (HJ Stenning’s translation, London 1925), chapter 10. For the Russian Revolution there are examples in L Douds Inside Lenin’s government Bloomsbury 2018. Lars T Lih’s long-standing arguments that ‘war communism’ amounted to no more than a retrospective theorisation of a collection of ad hoc emergency measures can provide more. See, for example, ‘Bolshevik razverstka and war communism’ Slavic Review Vol 45 (1986), pp673-88).↩︎
‘The world at a turning point’, December 14 2025: iclfi.org/spartacist/en/2025-world.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/15.htm.↩︎
On Cunow’s politics (so far as relevant to this polemic), see M Macnair, ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’ Critique Vol 42 (2014), pp353-75.↩︎
‘The Collapse of the Second International’, section II: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch09.htm.↩︎
Among various discussions see N Shaxson Treasure islands London 2012; A Hanton Vassal state: how America runs Britain Swift Press 2024 and my review of it in ‘Vanishing capitalists?’ Weekly Worker April 10 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/vanishing-capitalists); plus M Macnair, ‘Class composition in a snapshot’ (part 2) Weekly Worker August 28 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot).↩︎