Resistance Marxist Library The Transitional Program & the Struggle for Socialism Leon Trotsky 2 The Transitional Program & the struggle for socialism Resistance Books 1999 ISBN 0909196 83 4 Published by Resistance Books, resistancebooks.com Contents Introduction by Doug Lorimer................................................................5 The Death Agony of Capitalism & the Tasks of the Fourth International by Leon Trotsky...............................21 The objective prerequisites for a socialist revolution......................................... 21 The proletariat & its leaderships.......................................................................... 22 The minimum program & the transitional program.......................................... 23 Sliding scale of wages & sliding scale of hours..................................................... 24 Trade unions in the transitional epoch................................................................ 26 Factory committees.............................................................................................. 27 ‘Business secrets’ & workers’ control of industry............................................... 28 Expropriation of separate groups of capitalists................................................... 30 Expropriation of the private banks & state-isation of the credit system........... 31 The picket line ….................................................................................................. 32 The alliance of the workers & farmers................................................................ 34 The struggle against imperialism & war.............................................................. 35 Workers’ & farmers’ government....................................................................... 40 Soviets................................................................................................................... 42 Backward countries & the program of transitional demands............................ 43 The program of transitional demands in fascist countries................................. 45 The USSR & problems of the transitional epoch................................................ 47 Against opportunism & unprincipled revisionism.............................................. 51 Against sectarianism............................................................................................. 53 Open the road to the woman worker! Open the road to the youth!................ 54 Under the banner of the Fourth International!.................................................. 55 Appendix: A Discussion with Trotsky on the Transitional Program............................................................57 Glossary & Notes ..............................................................................68 4 The Transitional Program & the struggle for socialism Leon Trotsky (1940) Introduction By Doug Lorimer I The “Transitional Program”, as it later became known, was drafted by the exiled Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and adopted as the basic programmatic document of the Fourth International at its founding conference held on the outskirts of Paris in September 1938 under the title “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”. The Fourth International was founded on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War by the Marxist cadres that Trotsky had won around the world in the 1930s to the struggle to defend the revolutionary internationalist politics of the early years of the Third, or Communist, International against the nationalist-reformist politics of the petty-bourgeois Soviet bureaucracy led by Joseph Stalin. In discussions in Mexico City with James P. Cannon and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States prior to the founding conference of the Fourth International, Trotsky pointed out that the “Transitional Program” was “not a complete program”. A complete program, he explained, “should have a theoretical exposition of the modern capitalist society in its imperialist stage”. Further, the document was “not complete because we don’t speak here about the social revolution, about the seizure of power by insurrection, the transformation of capitalist society”.1 A complete Marxist program, then, would contain a theoretical exposition of the fundamental characteristics of capitalist society in its imperialist stage, the seizure of political power by the working class and the objective tasks and line of march of the working class in replacing the capitalist social order with a classless, socialist society. Indeed, as was noted in the first complete Marxist program — the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 — it was precisely their common understanding “of the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results” of the proletarian movement Doug Lorimer (1953-2013) was a longtime leader of the Democratic Socialist Party. 6 The Transitional Program & the struggle for socialism that distinguished the revolutionary communists, as the politically advanced contingent of the working class, from the great majority of proletarians. The “Transitional Program” was more limited in its purpose. While written in parts more in the form of a public manifesto, it was, Trotsky explained in 1938, “a program of action from today until the beginning of the socialist revolution”.2 The central concept behind the “Transitional Program” was stated in the following passage from the document itself: The strategic task of the next period — a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propa- ganda, and organisation — consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the prole- tariat and its vanguard (the confusion and disappointment of the older generation, the inexperience of the younger generation). It is necessary to help the masses in the process of daily struggle to find the bridge between the present demands and the socialist program 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 con- quest of power by the proletariat.3 In addressing himself to the problem of formulating such a system of demands, Trotsky based himself on the past experience of the Marxist movement in formulating a series of measures that the revolutionary workers would propagandise and agitate for the proletariat to fight for in order to overturn the capitalist private profit system and replace it with a democratically controlled system of social production oriented toward the satisfaction of human material and cultural needs. II The first such system of transitional measures was included by Marx and Engels in the “Communist Manifesto”. In the section on “Proletarians and Communists”, Marx and Engels argued that the “first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”. They went on to explain that the working class “will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class”, adding: Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolu- Introduction 7 tionising the mode of production. These measures will of course be different in different countries. Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will pretty generally be applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.4 Marx and Engels wrote the “Communist Manifesto” in anticipation of the outbreak of a bourgeois revolution in Germany, which, occurring under more advanced conditions of capitalist development than the bourgeois revolutions in England in the 17th century and France in the 18th, would “be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution”. Consequently, in the manifesto they urged the “Communists to turn their chief