Revolution of 1917. launched in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky in high hopes of extending the victorious but isolated Bolshevik revolution, had to find ways of doing more than restating denunciations of social democratic parties and trade unions, which in many European countries still retained the allegiance of a majority of workers.
The workers " movement after 1919 was much bigger, more politically organised, bureaucratically controlled, and politically divided, than in the days after 1848.
So alongside a more developed and updated agitational programme, with many more socialist elements, the Communist International in its Third and SHOUTI Congresses recognised the need for tactics, notably the 'united front', to enable the new Communist parties to draw closer to social democratic workers, open up a dialogue, and begin to create
shared experiences through which political lessons could be learned.
The notion of political development was the materialist, Marxist notion that "being determines consciousness", and that the most vivid experiences come through struggles against the main
So while the united front policy called for joint action between Communists and social democrats, putting down demands for actions that could both advance the class struggle and put maximum pressure on the social democratic leaders, the programme aimed to key in to the daily problems and issues which were driving workers into conflict with the ruling class.
The Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921 endorsed a Programme for Action in the trade unions, including "new forms of economic struggle" in order "to counter the capitalist attack and go over to the offensive".
We should recall that this post-war, post-revolutionary period was a period of widespread mass action by workers: the challenge was to give a political focus to that action that would develop workers'
consciousness of the need for a socialist alternative:
"The gains the workers
make are in direct proportion
to the degree of direct action
taken, and of revolutionary pressure exerted by the
masses. By direct action is meant all forms of direct pressure on the employers and the state - boycotts, strikes, street demonstrations. the seizure of factories, armed insurrection and other revolutionary activities which unite the working class in the struggle for socialism".
Of course not all of these actions are possible all of the time: some (notably insurrection!) are possible only at the THOSE exceptional moments. To lead towards those
the Comintern adopted a series of lesser, but aynamıc demands.
Linking the workers into a single union per factory
• Establishment of factory committees with representatives of all political currents within the workforce
• Action to challenge redundancy and plant closures, demanding employers be forced to pay unemployment benefit
• The election of control committees to "open the books" of companies attempting to cut wages or jobs
• Factory occupations or work-ins, under workers' control, to challenge closures wnlle maintaining producaon of vital goods
• Wage increases to keep pace with soaring inflation, with struggles led by workers
most economically In une powerful sectors
Workers' self-defence groups to defend picket lines against attack, and prevent suke-orcaking.
The political context of these policies was also important:
"When they struggle for better labour conditions and living standards for the masses and the introduction of workers' control, the Red unions should remember that these problems cannot be lastJaguar workers fighting b Ele BIG CAT EXTINCTIOM ingly solved within the framework of capitalist relations." Struggles and setbacks
We now know of course that the 1920s brought a succession of massive struggles -and heavy defeats for the working classes of Europe, most of whom did not break free from the political domination of their trade union and social democratic leaders.
The Soviet Union, isolated, war-ravaged and economically backward, suffered its own political defeat, as the bureaucratic layer headed by Joseph Stalin within the Communist Party fed on the defeats and setbacks, and after Lenin's illness and death worked to oust, exclude, gag, and eventually exterminate the party's revolutionary wing.
The removal of Trotsky and the Bolshevik revolutionary cadre that had inspired the Russian Revolution went alongside the abandonment of the political legacy of the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Comintern, notably the policy of the united front: this brought a terrible deteat for the powerful but divided German workers' movement, which was left hopelessly split in the face of Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
However workers continued to fight back in many other countries, with powerJaguar workers marched through Coventry to save their plant, but heard no perspective from union leaders ilke T&G leader Tony Woodley (left) on how the fight could be waged and won ful "sit-down strikes" and factory occupations that rocked the establishment in France, and found an echo in the USA in strikes by car workers and a massive organising drive by the Teamsters and other
These contradictory developments are brought together
the 1938 Transitional Programme, drafted by Trotsky as the political plat"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of revolution." form for a new, Fourth International, to challenge the reactionary politics Stalinism.
It was written in discussion with leaders of the US Socialist Workers Party, w nose leaders had been closely involved in the upsurge of trade union struggles in the US: but it also reflected the harsh conditions that prevailed in much of Europe, where the working class was still heavily dominated by social democracy, and by Communist parties which slavishly followed the political line handed down to them from Stalin. Finding the bridge
In developing a programme of demands, Trotsky's focus is therefore very much on precisely the question of the "transition" from defensive, day-to-day struggles for piecemeal reforms and concessions from capitalism to the conscious struggle for socialist demands and the overturn of the system.
The Programme opens by contrasting the objective situation facing the working class, and the desperate political and economic situation of capitalism with the hopeless limitations of the leaderships of the unions and mass political parties, the "conservative bureaucratic machines". And it points to the key task:
"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of revolution.
"This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today's conditions and today's consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat."
Trotsky's "system of demands" weaves together democratic demands, the 'minimum programme' better pay and conditions, and transitional demands elaborated from those in the Action Programme of the Comintern
• Unemployment is challenged by the demand for a sliding scale of working hours to divide the available work among the whole workforce, with no loss of pay
• The falling value of real wages is opposed through the fight for a sliding scale of wages, rising from a strictly guaranteed minimum in line with inflation.
• Employers who refuse or claim they are unable to pay up should be expropriated
• The fight to "open the books" of capitalist enterprises and the economy as a whole to the inspection of workers' committees is elaborated in far greater detail, and seen as an essential starting point for workers' control.
• The expropriation of the banks is seen as a means to facilitate a national plan of production, but also a way to open up cheap credit for poor farmers, linking them with the workers' struggle.
• Trade union defence guards are seen as a starting point to the development of a workers' militia that would confront fascist street gangs and defend threatened neighbourhoods and communities.
• There is an extended discussion of the importance of resisting imperialism and war
• The linking up of factory committees, anti-war struggles, and the defence of workers against attack raises the possibility of "dual power", the formation of workers councils [or 'soviets'] which would effectively take control of whole geographical areas, leaving "two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletarian, irreconcilably opposed each other".
Conspicuously, instead of the demands being seen as any rigid "shopping list", sections of the Transitional Programme examine different combinations of democratic, transitional and minimum demands to be applied in different settings - developing
counties, fascist countries, and in the degenerated workers' state of the Soviet Union.
It is this type of flexible and tactical development of the programme that must guide our approachin 2005.