07.10.1999

Semi-religious method

Ian Donovan reviews Leon Trotsky's 'Transitional programme' (edited by the International Bolshevik Tendency, Bolshevik Publications. 1999, pp218, £5)

The publication of this small book by the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT), centred around the founding programme of Trotsky’s Fourth International, is primarily aimed at rescuing from historical oblivion some of the earlier accomplishments of the Spartacist tendency, the IBT’s historical mentors, in order for the publishers to attempt to claim to be the ‘real’ inheritors of this allegedly uniquely revolutionary ‘tradition’.

The material covered is quite wide-ranging in a sense, involving a substantial introduction that demonstrates amply how in many ways Trotsky’s 1938 programme drew on earlier ideas that were put forward in the period of the first four congresses of the Communist International (1919-22). However, true to the method of the Spartacists in shaping their understanding of reality to fit the requirements of their programme, the IBT skirts around one of the central issues for Marxists today - whether there is an inherent logic in a perspective primarily based on a system of economic demands, that can provide a short cut to working class power.

Apart from the introduction and related postscript, which fleshes out a little more the historical similarities with some of the early Comintern’s material, the essential thesis of the book is that modest successes made by the Spartacists in the 1970s in building oppositions to the very rightwing bureaucracy in some American trade unions (in a period of considerable spontaneous economic trade union militancy worldwide) demonstrate that their allegedly unique understanding of ‘programme’ is the only way forward for the working class.

The considerable arrogance of this claim of ‘unique’ correctness is belied by the tiny size of their organisation, having been compelled to start over again after the ‘degeneration’ of their political predecessors into something resembling a miniature composite of the Moonies and the followers of Enver Hoxha. It is worth noting that the great communists, the authentic bearers of the revolutionary tradition, have not historically tended to degenerate into leaders of bizarre and anti-human cults like the Spartacists (and the Healyites, who underwent a similar evolution in the previous generation). Rather, even in the twilight of their lives, they either died of old age still fighting honourably in non-revolutionary times, like Marx and Engels; or they died fighting against degeneration of the revolutionary movement in the face of great events, as did Trotsky and Lenin. For the principal cadres of a genuine revolutionary communism to degenerate into their complete opposite is unknown in the history of Marxism.

The claim of this tradition of so-called ‘anti-revisionist Trotskyism’ to embody a unique revolutionism is exposed by this repeated evolutionary tendency, which in its final form has before provided (and possibly will again) much titillation to the bourgeois tabloid press. Be that as it may, there are still political questions that must be addressed if the revolutionary left is to evolve something better, to re-establish a durable revolutionary tradition that appears to have been simply destroyed with the death of the Bolshevik generation.

Trotsky’s Transitional programme, the most illustrious exhibit in the IBT’s case, is a document of many facets. There is a considerable section devoted to an exposition in programmatic form of Trotsky’s understanding of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state. Whatever one may think of this understanding today, the fact remains that, assuming one shares this view of the nature of the USSR, there is little that is controversial in the perspective put forward concerning the overthrow of the evidently unstable and historically unviable Stalinist bureaucratic regime and the restoration of soviet democracy, combined with defence of the remaining gains of October against attack from the right.

But this is not the main theme of the IBT’s book, not surprisingly with the collapse of the USSR now somewhat stale news. Likewise, the programme of demands for the workers’ movement in fascist countries has only limited relevance in current circumstances. And there is little in the material on backward countries and permanent revolution that had not been elaborated before and in more detail by Trotsky. What is most essential for the IBT, and revealed by the main focus of the IBT’s book, is something other than these things. Rather, the IBT’s book is about perspectives for revolutionary work in capitalist countries, and their own interpretation of this.

The IBT thesis is (1) that the Transitional programme is not a sacred text per se, but rather essentially a method that in all times and places in this imperialist epoch of capitalism provides a bridge from the ‘minimum’ programme of simple reforms (political and ‘economic’) under capitalism, to the ‘maximum’ programme of the revolution; and (2) that the IBT is the unique embodiment of this perspective, because only it (if only it had the forces) will seek to take this ‘method’ into the working class in the trade unions, by building oppositional groupings around the essentials of Trotsky’s programme.

Yet the IBT is only able to claim the former by a considerable modification of Trotsky’s own views on the Transitional programme and the importance of some of its key demands. Since Trotsky authored the document, it is certainly pertinent to take some notice of the significance he attached to its central ‘transitional’ component, the alleged ‘bridge’ between the non-revolutionary situation of bourgeois hegemony and reaction, and those demands within it that, when they are realised, really do herald the coming of the struggle for power by the working class. Such demands as those for a workers’ militia or workers’ control of production, while fruitful subjects for propaganda in the political-ideological war against the ruling class and its democratic pretensions, can only be actually realised by means of mass agitation in a revolutionary situation. So in a sense these demands are certainly ‘transitional’ in that they pose point blank the question of power.

But that is not what Trotsky meant by ‘transitional’. Rather, he regarded particular demands, primarily the sliding scale of wages to provide a built-in defence against inflation, and the sliding scale of hours, sharing out all available work among the whole working class to abolish unemployment, as the central component of his conceptual ‘bridge’ from wage demands and other reforms in the ‘here and now’, to the point at which successful agitation for such demands as the workers’ militia, workers’ control of industry, and the workers’ government itself becomes possible. In other words, these demands, and others like them when such could be formulated by the same ‘method’, were the central component of Trotsky’s conceptual ‘bridge’ from a non-revolutionary situation to a revolutionary one.

Trotsky is quoted by the IBT discussing with his American co-thinkers on the subject of the sliding scale of wages and hours:

“It is easier to overthrow capitalism than to realise this demand under capitalism. Not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism. That is why we are calling them transitional demands. It creates a bridge to the mentality of the workers and thus a bridge to the socialist revolution. The whole question is how to mobilise the masses for struggle. The question of the division between the employed and unemployed comes up. We must find ways to overcome this division.”

In asserting that “not one of our demands will be realised under capitalism”, Trotsky was expounding his central programmatic conception - that capitalism, as he analysed it in the apparently catastrophic prologue to World War II, was doomed to a world-historic crisis in the short term, one that immediately posed the question of its destruction. Trotsky believed that the crisis of capitalism in the 1930s was so acute and capitalism so economically bankrupt that a programme that merely took aim at its economic logic could well be sufficient to finish it off. Thus the catastrophist flavour of the programme, as evidenced in the following extracts:

“The economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already in general achieved the highest point of fruition than can be reached under capitalism. Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already, new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the weight of the social crisis affecting the whole capitalist system weigh ever heavier deprivations and sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems. Democratic regimes, as well as fascist, stagger on from one bankruptcy to another.

“The bourgeoisie itself sees no way out. In countries where it has already been forced to stake its last upon the card of fascism, it now toboggans with closed eyes toward an economic and military catastrophe. In the historically privileged countries - ie, in those where the bourgeoisie can still for a certain period permit itself the luxury of democracy at the expense of national accumulations (Great Britain, France, United States, etc) - all of capital’s traditional parties are in a state of perplexity, bordering on a paralysis of will. The ‘new deal’, despite its first period of pretentious resoluteness, represents but a special form of political perplexity, possible only in a country where the bourgeoisie has succeeded in accumulating incalculable wealth. The present crisis, far from having run its course, has already succeeded in showing that ‘new deal’ politics, like popular front politics in France, opens no new exit from the economic blind alley.”

It would be anti-historical and anti-materialist for Marxists to condemn Trotsky for his writings of this period on the basis of subsequent events. The view put forward in these paragraphs can be placed among the most eloquent expressions of the apparent prospects for the capitalist system at the time, and in terms of analysis was shared (with trepidation, as opposed to Trotsky’s revolutionary optimism) by many sections of the imperialist bourgeoisie, in Europe in particular.

However, history has a habit of playing nasty tricks on even capitalism’s most assiduous and talented analysts and critics, and this is just as much true today as it was in the period in which these passages were written. Barely 10 years later, the capitalist system had not only not collapsed, but, contrary to Trotsky’s seemingly so commonplace assertion that economically capitalism “had reached the highest point of fruition” that was possible under this social system, had embarked upon the biggest and most sustained economic boom in its entire history. This shows that no one person, however great their talent, experience and integrity, can single-handedly grasp all the tendencies of development of such a complex social organism as modern capitalism.

The IBT’s semi-religious method is shown by their quotation of Trotsky’s words on the cover of the book: “Only continuity of ideas creates a revolutionary tradition, without which a revolutionary party sways like a reed in the wind.” This sentiment, insofar as it means that ideas that have more or less correctly explained the world in the past should not be cavalierly scrapped on some subjective whim or fleeting new revelation, has much to recommend it. However, the IBT makes use of this statement in a scriptural manner, to define itself as the unique bearer of a “continuity of ideas” that makes it Trotsky’s sole legitimate inheritor. But in order to do so it has to expend a fair amount of effort trying to fit square pegs into round holes. For instance, in stark contrast to Trotsky’s statement that “not one” of the demands of the Transitional programme “will be realised under capitalism”, the IBT comes up with the following piece of sophistry:

“…Trotsky explicitly indicated that transitional demands are not put forward as structural reforms to the operations of capitalism. They are demands which, if raised skilfully 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 a period of mass unemployment. The call for a ‘sliding scale of wages’, outside of the context of a reduction in the working day, 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” (p27).

The question is, though, why is it not appropriate to raise these demands in all times and all places? Trotsky had very good reason to believe that it was appropriate to make them the centrepiece of the revolutionary programme for an entire epoch, and that “not one” of them could be achieved under capitalism. This was because he believed that “without a socialist revolution - in the next historical period, at that - a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.” It is obvious from the whole tone of the presentation that “in the next historical period, at that” meant a perspective of a few short years before an intractable economic collapse and massive social crisis in which “only the overthrow of the bourgeoisie can open a road out”.

It is perfectly obvious that the IBT itself does not agree with the author of the Transitional programme that “not one” of the demands in that programme can be achieved under decaying capitalism in the imperialist epoch. If it did, it would engage in agitation “year in and year out” for these demands. The reason why it (correctly) says that it is not “appropriate” to do so is precisely because Trotsky has been proved wrong - it is possible for even decaying imperialist capitalism to roughly satisfy these demands in particular times and circumstances.

Many ultra-orthodox Trotskyists have faced this dilemma before, and have chosen different ways to seek to resolve this apparent contradiction - usually by distorting and falsifying post-World War II social reality to fit the catastrophic predictions in the Transitional programme. This litany of scriptural fanatics and flat-earthists has included not only the followers of Gerry Healy, who ceaselessly cried wolf over the imminent crisis and collapse of capitalism for 30 years to ‘prove’ their fealty to Trotsky’s analysis of 1938, in the process creating a bizarre and hyperactive religious sect, but also James P Cannon.

In the face of the newness of the post-war economic revival, the Cannonites’ disorientation was perhaps more understandable, but, just as the American working class was beginning to flex its industrial power and take advantage of the marked revival in the capitalist economy in the late 1940s, they forecast a rapid reversion to economic slump, that would allegedly be far worse that that of the 1930s and lead to an imminent American revolution. The Spartacists insisted that the post-war economic boom was a myth, pointing to the continued existence of a shallow, short-term trade cycle of expansion and contraction in the 1950s to rubbish the idea that any significant change had happened in the economic fortunes of capital.

These futile attempts to stick to Transitional programme ‘orthodoxy’ by claimants to the mantle of ‘pure’ Trotskyism blinded them to the reality of post-World War II social development. One can invent a reality, as did the Healyites and, for a while, Cannon. One can deny that real economic phenomena that contradict one’s ‘programme’ have any significance, as did the Spartacists. Or one can baldly deny that the governing ideas and conceptions of the author of the Transitional programme have any bearing on attempts to ‘apply’ that programme in circumstances as different from those in which it was conceived as chalk is from cheese, as do the IBT. All these are techniques of bending reality to fit the scripture (or ‘programme generating theory’, in the Spartacist parlance), not a proper materialist investigation of social reality.

Transitional demands are an important tool of communists in fighting to win the working class to an understanding of its own historic class interests, to the need to liberate itself in order to liberate the whole of humanity from oppression and exploitation at the hands of capitalism. But they are not some kind of ‘master key’ for this purpose, nor can they be the dominant ethos of the revolutionary programme for an entire epoch. We need transitional demands as a part of the tactics of revolutionaries, but a transitional programme in the sense that Trotsky meant is often chimerical.

Trotsky’s characterisation of the period in which he was writing as capitalism’s death agony (as opposed to merely its decay) was historically specific to the decisive denouement that he believed was imminent. Although World War II, resulting in the deaths of more than 40 million human beings, was the most barbaric event in the history of capitalism, far from bringing on capitalism’s final ‘death agony’, it gave it a new lease of life, by destroying the old ‘colonial’ imperialist domination of Britain and France and replacing it with more sophisticated forms of domination of the world, primarily through imperialist economic muscle, led by the United States.

The imperialist epoch, in terms of massive obstruction of the human progress that would have been possible under socialism, as well as the decay of much of the underdeveloped world in the same period (often prey to imperialist wars against ‘communist influence’ and the like) and the insidious growth of environmental degradation, remains an epoch in which capitalism is a reactionary force on a world scale, and will remain so until the inauguration of world socialism. Trotsky’s observation - that “the objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten” - rings very true today when one looks at the absolute impoverishment of much of Africa and the environmental damage caused by rampant capitalist growth. But, far from stagnating, capitalism since World War II has caused massive damage by its one-sided forms of economic expansion. Hence a programme that is based on an understanding of imperialist capitalism as being primarily characterised by stagnation and decline of the productive forces is bound to lead to an over-emphasis on ‘economic’ demands as central to revolutionary strategy.

While transitional demands such as Trotsky advocated can play an important role in some situations, a more comprehensive ‘bridge’ from the here and now to the socialist future is needed than Trotsky himself envisaged. In particular, what must be stressed is the role of the working class as liberator of humanity from all forms of oppression, not just economic exploitation. The belief that ‘economic’ transitional demands are the central component of a revolutionary programme is shown by the IBT’s showcasing of the US Spartacist League’s modestly successful trade union work in the early 1970s. The fact that Spartacist-supported oppositional groupings in a number of American trade unions achieved reasonable results in a number of union elections in that period, gained a degree of credibility as militants, and played a role in a few struggles of varying degrees of importance, is presented as proof that standing on a programme of ‘transitional’ demands is the only way to fight for revolutionary politics in the working class, and that the IBT, as the Spartacists’ ‘continuators’, are the only ones anointed to do this.

However, it could be observed that in other countries in the 1970s, leftist trade union oppositional groupings that were more or less openly connected to far-left organisations also gained creditable votes in union elections in this period, which both in Europe and North America witnessed no small amount of trade union militancy. It is arguably the case that, far from the Spartacists’ ‘unique’ programmatic approach to trade union work producing these results, in reality they gained from the same environment of trade union militancy as did the Cliffites and Healyites, to mention but two, in Britain.

It is notable that, while standing for paper programmes calling for sliding scales of wages and the like (crowned with the call for a workers’ government), none of these caucuses came near to leading struggles for these demands. In one case, it is true, an SL-supported caucus managed to initiate a union guard to defend a black union member whose home and family were being attacked by racists. But even the workers involved in this action, according to the account (from Workers Vanguard), showed a strong tendency toward liquidating the action and cajoling the cops to take over the task.

It is often the case that workers seeking to defend their interests more intransigently than the incumbent union leaderships, particularly in a period of heightened economic militancy, will vote for and work with ‘reds’ in pursuit of particular aims. However, such militants do not thereby necessarily become revolutionaries, or won to a ‘revolutionary’ programme. Rather, the programmes of such groupings are often less important to many than the potential they have to put pressure on the union and thus help achieve more in the ‘here and now’ than the current leaderships. This phenomenon produced considerable support for leftist oppositional groupings in trade unions in a number of countries in the 1970s - the programmatic small print was largely irrelevant.

In reality a much more comprehensive programme, focusing on the potential role of the working class as the agent of human liberation, is necessary to win militants to a revolutionary position than one centred on ‘transitional’ economic demands that have at times been more or less realised under capitalism.

The IBT, following the Spartacists, invests the Transitional programme with almost magical powers. In Northern Ireland, for instance, the IBT puts forward a number of demands from the Transitional programme, including those for work-sharing on full pay and a workers’ militia (in this case formed from both communities) as an antidote to the sectarian polarisation between the two communities. The IBT, following the Spartacists, put forward the view that the national question in Ireland can only be resolved equitably after the seizure of state power by the proletariat. But the problem is that the national question is also the biggest obstacle to the seizure of power by the proletariat, as it poisons not only the protestant working class, with its deep roots of sectarian bigotry, but also the oppressed catholic community, who (understandably, in a number of ways) often regard the bigotry of their protestant class brothers as more dangerous to their interests than their own Irish nationalist bourgeoisie.

In order to solve these questions, it is not enough to put forward demands that protestant and catholic workers unite (even to form an anti-sectarian, anti-imperialist workers’ militia, which would certainly be a positive development, were it to actually happen), but revolutionaries rather have to seek to put forward positive democratic solutions to the national question in the here and now. ‘Algebraic’ formulations as to what should happen to each community after the revolution are hardly going to break the dominance of unionism and loyalism over protestant workers. Rather we need demands that can be fought for now, and thus open the road to winning the protestant workers to a struggle against oppression. To pose the national question as only soluble after the revolution is to postpone both the solution to the national question and the revolution for an indefinite period, if not forever.

Of course, the issues raised here are only a small part of the re-examination of ideas and strategy necessary to re-arm Marxists in this reactionary period. Political thought can only develop through political struggle, and, as a member of the IBT in the period in which much of the material in this book was being written, I participated to some extent in the debates that led to its publication (after a puzzling gap of around 18 months, I might add).

There was a fairly bitter and acrimonious debate with the majority of the IBT branch in New York over the contents of this book, with the New York-centred grouping arguing that the Transitional programme was all right in its day, but had become obsolete.

Unfortunately, this opposition, though it made some interesting points, essentially accepted that socialist revolution was off the political agenda until such time as economic conditions again approximated those described by Trotsky. Thus the IBT opposition argued that proletarian revolution was not possible in the period of the French May 1968 general strike, this being allegedly a situation where the proletariat had been sucked behind a radicalised section of the petty bourgeoisie, and had not acted as a class, because such proletarian struggles were not possible in the post-war boom.

This error, together with the contention of the leading figure in the New York opposition that Arthur Scargill’s social chauvinist opposition to the European Union was “right”, as opposed to the IBT’s ‘abstentionism’ in refusing to back Scargill’s little-England crusade, meant that, whatever interesting questions they raised, the IBT opposition was essentially liquidationist. In fact, the New York opposition accepted, in an inverted form, the same premise as all those partisans of the Transitional programme who have mangled reality to fit Trotsky’s ‘finished programme’ - the idea that proletarian revolution is impossible in conditions of relative material prosperity.

This contention actually demeans the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, and projects that the only circumstances in which it can grasp its historic mission to liberate humanity from oppression is when it is staring pauperisation and starvation in the face. The future, one can confidently predict from looking back at history, will be much more complex.

Such a narrow vision of the class struggle, which amounts to an ‘economistic’ impoverishment of the potential power of Marxism, needs to be overcome by systematic criticism of the past and re-elaboration of a revolutionary programme based on social reality as it actually is, not as Trotsky one-sidedly thought it was half a century ago.

Ian Donovan