[The Workers' Government demand At each step in…]

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The Workers' Government demand At each step in the struggle for transitional and Indeed while the call for a workers' government can be democratic demands, Trotskyists must weigh and used as an agitational slogan to advance the political consider the best tactical means of conducting the fight in consciousness of the working class from the level of such a way as to expose and discredit the existing spontaneity to the comprehension of the necessity of the treachérous mass leaders of the working class. revolutionary seizure of power, the culmination of the Such tactics will generally include fighting for workers struggle for this demand must in the final instance-as in to place specific demands on those trade union and political Russia in October 1917-be the definitive break with and leaders that retain mass support for them to break from destruction of the political forms, institutions and state their present policies of class collaboration and act in the machinery of the bourgeoisie, and the establishment of the independent class interests of their members.

As the Transitional Programme shows, the culmination The workers' government slogan thus contains within of this approach is the formulation uf demands on the it the dynamic of the class struggle in which the working reformists and Stalinist leaders that they break with the class, gaining in strength and self confidence, demands bourgeoisie and form a workers' government. increasingly more of its bureaucratic mass leaders to the The slogan can, as the Transitional Programme shows, poiht where they insist that these leaders break from the be used flexibly as an agitational slogan in particular bourgeoisie, take power in their own hands, and implement situations. As such its value is that it focusses the attention measures in the interests of the proletariat. of the masses on the class collaboration of their leaders As the Transitional Programme stresses, it was: and the necessity for a government that will represent their independent interests. In every instance it is vital to couple and SRs to take power, so dramatically exposed during the workers' government with the necessary programme of the July Days, which definitely doomed them before transitional demands and with the struggle to mobilise the mass opinion and prepared the victory of the working class in independent organisations through which it Now, just as much as in 1938, it is time to insist that:

Such an approach is in explicit contrast to the various consists in freeing the proletariat from its old parliamentary formations passed off by reformist, centrist will fight for such demands. Barricades in the 1905 revolution Socialist League Manifesto. and Stalinist. currents peasants" governments. dictatorship of the proletariat.

Bolsheviks.' as "workers" or "workers and historical progress.

"The chief accusation which semi-corpse of the bourgeoisie. fought for by the working class.

must depend. Lenin in 1917 the Fourth traditional that they do the political