Our Fight for the Transitional Programme

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urker-s Diary Written as the founding document of the Fourth International, after it had become clear that a split from the counter-revolutionary politics of the Stalinist Third International must be carried through, Trotsky's Transitional Programme embodies the basic method necessary for the construction of revolutionary leadership and the mobilisation of the working class to revolutionary struggles.

When it became clear that the sectarian position of the Workers Revolutionary Party, then the British section of the Trotskyist movement, was isolating it from the struggles ofcthe working class and abandoning that programme, it led those sections of the Party which have since formed the Workers Socialist League to question the WRP leadership. In particular the maximum programme put forward by the RP (ie "nationalise all basic industries, banks and land without compensation and under workers' control"), which is the programme of the socialist revolution, was seen to be inadequate to today's conditions since it in no war prepared the working class to undertake the necessary struggle. As the Transitional Programme states: "Only a general revolutionary upsurge of the proletariat can place the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie on the order of the day" [p 24] METHOD In turning to examine the Programme it is clear that its method is different. It draws a distinction between the methods of revolutionaries and the maximum programme of Social Democracy "which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future" and states: 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." [pp 14-15] For Trotsky therefore the task was in struggle within the workers movement to raise the level of political consciousness from a trade union level to that of the socialist programme. The bridge between these levels is the fight for transitional demands.

SECTARIAN

In the course of the fight insid the WRP it became clear that : whole number of their wrong pos itions were derived from a sectariar standpoint. Central to this was end ing the maximum demand of natior alisation with the call for "workers control" . In a socialist society ol course workers would exercise noi "control" over any other form ol management, but directly manage the industries themselves througt factory and industry committees Lenin in the struggle to prepare the Russian Revolution continuously fought for workers' control ever though this was under capitalism This is the tradition of Bolshevism In answer to the bourgeois prepar ations for the military control of the working class, the Bolshevik declaration read out at a session of the Conference on Defence read: thus: "The inevitable result of this situ ation is the complete absence of the rights for the working class; its deprivation of the right to strike etc. The working class must counter this plan with workers' control over production, regulating it not in the interests of finance capital but in the interests of the working masses and the rural poor, not in the inter. ests of an imperialist war but in the interests of peace... [August 8th 1917: weeks before the revolution] The Bolsheviks were only able to put forward this perspective because they had prepared the ground work with demands for open ing the books of the employers to the organised workers movement and workers' control in other forms.

It is essential in preparing a demand for a factory meeting or trade union branch that it is not seen just as a resolution but part of this preparation, a part of mobilising the masses. The demand of "open the books" must therefore include an elected committee of trade union ists: the sliding scale of wages must be determined by trade union based prices committees, and work sharing on full pay must likewise be under trade union control. These necessary struggles show precisely how simply tacking "workers' control" as a formula on the end of nationalisation emerges as the social democratic position of socialism in the distant future.

The leadership of the WRP has, since the split, adapted to some of these positions and includes transitional demands now regularly in their daily Workers Press. Yet this adaptation leaves out the conteni of the Transitional Programme which is that the demands are a part of the bridge over which the working class can develop to acceptance of the revolutionary programme. The WRP leadership's inability to break from their sectarian position was proved by their expulsion of our comrades merely for fighting for this turn and for asking for an accounting of how the WRP had reached its wrong positions.

The Transitional Programme is essentially an international document. The event which decided Trotsky on the need for the Fourth International was the defeat and crushing of the German workers movement by Hitler as a result of the untra-left sectarian position of the Communist Party (who called social-democrats worse than fascists) which split the German working class at the point of greatest danger. There was no reaction to this other than that of Trotsky and the Left Opposition who had fought continuously against Stalin's bureaucratic policies, who immediately began preparations for a new International The Programme begins:

.IT CONTRE C «The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat"

it goes on to show the degenation of the Second (social-democratic) International and of the Third International perverted ›y Stalinism. In putting forward a fight to win the masses in opposition to these movements, the Programme establishes the continuity of the fight for a Marxist revolutionary leadership for the working class.

This is essential to the programme. It is in no way a recipe book of good demands merely to be handed out passively to the working class, It is a guide to action for the building of parties of the Trotskyist Fourth International. If it is separated in any, way from the fight for principled leadership in the workers movement, the Programme loses all meaning.

That is why although sections of Le Pabloite IMG sometimes put forward some of these demands, their position is determined not by the phrases they mouth now but by the political position which they act.

REVISIONS

Their movement broke from Trotskyism in 1953 when forces. arose in the Fourth International saying that Stalinism could be pushed to the left, and revising the basic Trotskyist position on the need for political revolution in Eastern Europe and in Russia. Thus while verbally adhering to the "popular" section of the Transitional Programme the IMG's position abandons the basic principles the Programme carries forward.

Despite the attacks of all kinds of tendencies who attempt to revise Marxism, there is a continuity of ine struggle for the Transitional Programme since Trotsky's assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. This continuity now flows through the Workers Socialist League and its struggle to mobilise workers around the demands and the principles of the Fourth International's founding document. with only 2 against.

"Local trade union branches, stewards committees and trades councils should send delegates to this committee if not already represented. The committee must make the following demands: 1. Access to hospitals' accounts and plans from the Area Health Authority relating also to drug costs, waiting lists and social need.

Completion of enough new hospitals in areas convenient for local people, before any old ones closed.

Automatic increases in government spending to match rising cost of running the NHS.

This must be seen as the beginning of trade union control of the NHS. Investigation of hospital accounts must show the need for nationalisation of drug and medical supply industries, and for the Labour government to start crash hospital building To go forward from this conference, these demands must be acted upon, and the whole labour movement mobilised in defence of the right to free health care. This important fight must be carried through by the E London committee, and similar committees established in every area.

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