Fighting for a Workers Government

Last week's Socialist Press carried an article by John Lister on the struggle for a workers' government. This week we reprint extracts on the question from two documents: the first is from The Transitional Programme in Today's Class Struggle, adopted on 31 December 1979 by the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee. The second is from the Workers Socialist League Manifesto.

The Workers' Government demand

At each step in the struggle for transitional and democratic demands, Trotskyists must weigh and consider the best tactical means of conducting the fight in such a way as to expose and discredit the existing treacherous mass leaders of the working class.

Such tactics will generally include fighting for workers to place specific demands on those trade union and political leaders that retain mass support for them to break from their present policies of class collaboration and act in the independent class interests of their members.

As the Transitional Programme shows, the culmination of this approach is the formulation of demands on the reformists and Stalinist leaders that they break with the bourgeoisie and form a workers' government.

The slogan can, as the Transitional Programme shows, be used flexibly as an agitational slogan in particular situations. As such its value is that it focusses the attention of the masses on the class collaboration of their leaders and the necessity for a government that will represent their independent interests. In every instance it is vital to couple the workers' government with the necessary programme of transitional demands and with the struggle to mobilise the working class in independent organisations through which it will fight for such demands.

Such an approach is in explicit contrast to the various parliamentary formations passed off by reformist, centrist and Stalinist currents as "workers" or "workers and peasants" governments.

Indeed while the call for a workers' government can be used as an agitational slogan to advance the political consciousness of the working class from the level of spontaneity to the comprehension of the necessity of the revolutionary seizure of power, the culmination of the struggle for this demand must in the final instance—as in Russia in October 1917—be the definitive break with and destruction of the political forms, institutions and state machinery of the bourgeoisie, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The workers' government slogan thus contains within it the dynamic of the class struggle in which the working class, gaining in strength and self confidence, demands increasingly more of its bureaucratic mass leaders to the point where they insist that these leaders break from the bourgeoisie, take power in their own hands, and implement measures in the interests of the proletariat.

As the Transitional Programme stresses, it was:

"the obstinate unwillingness of the Mensheviks and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the July Days, which definitely doomed them before mass opinion and prepared the victory of the Bolsheviks."

Now, just as much as in 1938, it is time to insist that:

"The central task of the Fourth International consists in freeing the proletariat from its old leadership whose conservatism is in complete contradiction to the catastrophic eruptions of disintegrating capitalism and represents the chief obstacle to historical progress.

"The chief accusation which the Fourth International advances against the traditional organisations of the proletariat is the fact that they do not wish to tear themselves away from the political semi-corpse of the bourgeoisie.

"Under these conditions the demand, systematically addressed to the old leadership: 'Break with the bourgeoisie, take the power' is an extremely important weapon for exposing the treacherous character of the parties and organisations of the Second, Third and Amsterdam Internationals."

While promising such leaders revolutionary support against capitalist reaction should they undertake the struggle for power, Trotskyists must maintain their political independence of such leaderships and persist with their own critical propaganda spelling out at each stage the role of the old leaders and the necessary programme of demands to be fought for by the working class.

It is on the construction of such a Trotskyist revolutionary leadership, and not on any ability of the reformists and Stalinists to transform themselves into a revolutionary force that the fate of the struggle for a workers' government and the dictatorship of the proletariat must depend.