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This note is contributed to the Left-Unity List discussion on the contemporary relevance of the Transitional Programme. It presents an attempt to organise and present my own thinking. It follows on from my notes introducing the TP to readers of this list. I have taken much longer over writing it than I intend, and it has ended up longer than I originally wished. It still leaves me with a feeling of dissatisfaction, of not really having got to the roots of what I want to say, but I decided to post the document now, in order to get some views from other list subscribers that might help me go further. In some places I have proposed changes to the TP. In others I have pointed to areas where changes are needed, where I do not have answers of my own to propose (and where I hope list discussion may generate some answers, or at least directions towards them). And in some areas I have pointed to questions about the TP that may not be ‘fixable’ within its own terms. (Notably the question of the party, where I look forward to the opportunity of discussing Louis Proyect’s material on Zinovievism, and Luciano Dondero’s analysis of Rifondazia Communista.)
Only the most exotic of sectarian ‘Trotskyists’ treat the TP as an infallible guide to thought and action in 1996. Such people can be safely and without hesitation consigned to the dustbin of history. From the point of view of this list, – that of examining and studying the potential for unification of the left – the TP is not a bible. It is, or was, the founding document of the Trotskyist movement, and summarised a strategy for proletarian revolution. We recognise that many of us on this list, and very many more outside this list, have spent a great deal of their time in and around organisations that claim to be Trotskyist. I am one of those. Consequently, re-examining the foundations of that Trotskyism is an important part of the process of defining or redefining our current positions, and hence of the process of establishing with whom and how to seek unification. This re-examination is not the same as coming to terms with the practice of individual Trotskyist organisations that we may have been part of. That will only be useful when we know where we are now.
There are different kinds of questions to be asked about the TP. I think the following are the main types:
Are its ‘perspectives’ and theoretical bases still valid? Has it proved effective in practical use? What demands need updating? / What new areas need to be addressed? What remains useful in the approach contained in the TP?
2. Are its perspectives still valid?
2.1 Is capitalism still in its death agony?
It is perhaps stating the obvious to say that announcements of imminent death or disaster for capitalism in 1938 were premature. (This is not to ‘score points’ but simply to state what is true.) The period since WW2 has been characterised by the largest expansions of the capitalist economies in history. This expansion has not solved all the problems of poverty, inequality and injustice of course. In some ways it has ameliorated them, and in others exacerbated them. This expansion is not complete yet. The consequences of microelectronics and related technologies are still being developed, and the impacts of biotechnology and space-based science are only just beginning to be felt. Capitalism today is not short of problems, some of them very serious – structural unemployment, instabilities in the global financial systems (which may in fact no longer be understood even by their leading participants), intractable difficulties in managing state expenditure. There is a constant downward pressure on profitability. But capital is not stagnating. It is in fact more revolutionary than in Trotsky’s time. It builds and tears down again with ever greater ruthlessness. It advances into space, tunnels under the ‘English Channel’, builds ever greater and more hideous cities and systems. It remodels states and regions in the wake of its pursuit of market opportunity, leaving behind it wars, economic devastation or sometimes, economic upsurge, in a pattern that asymptotically approaches chaos. Its momentum is exhilarating or loathsome, depending on your standpoint and character. Perhaps it contains the seeds of problems which it cannot overcome, (or at least tolerate) and which will cause its downfall, but this is not yet demonstrably the case.
Stalinism played an important role in the stabilisation of capitalism in the immediate post-war period, by participating in a ‘spheres of influence’ agreement that divided the world into capitalist and stalinist camps. Within the capitalist countries revolutionary movements were abandoned, undermined or attacked by the stalinists. With the disintegration of the power base of Soviet stalinism, this obstacle to revolutionary development has been removed. But some trotskyists over-estimate the importance of this factor, and leap to triumphal conclusions. In doing so they misjudge the vitality of capital and also of the bureaucracy.
To what extent is capitalism capable of organising itself to circumvent the structural problems which marxists consider it prey to? Are we facing a new, ‘smart’ capitalism? This requires new analyses, examining the significance of the global organisation of business and finance, and the effectiveness of the mechanisms of co-ordination, such as the World Bank. These questions have great implications for revolutionary strategy, especially concerning the possibilities for partial or local revolutions.
2.2 Crisis of leadership or crisis of consciousness?
There is a global assault against the working masses by capital, in pursuit of ever more difficult to achieve profitability. Wage rates and working conditions are being driven down, and new production technologies, combined with the globalisation of business organisation and the privatisation of state services, are disrupting long established patterns of trade union organisation. In many parts of the world trade union membership has fallen to low levels, and union rights have been reduced both by governments and employers. Capital is creating new forms of organisation to develop these attacks – the IMF, the World Bank, the various ‘free trade’ blocs.
The Social-Democratic parties have not of course mobilised against this assault, or even warned against it. Many have transformed themselves and shed their connections with the working class. The Stalinist parties in some parts of the world have simply disintegrated, some before the disintegration of the SU, others after it. But it would be premature to announce the death of either social-democracy or stalinism, as some trotskyists (and others) have. Stalinist parties have won national elections in several of the East European countries, and only failed to win in Russia because of an immense campaign by the forces of capitalist restoration. And Stalinism retains state power in China and other parts of the far east. Among the SDs, the UK Labour Party is the one showing the way to the most complete separation from working class politics. In their ranks the use of the very word ‘socialism’ causes problems. Despite their determination not to lead the workers in defence of their rights, both the SDs and the stalinists retain an ability to confuse and divert the workers.
The class struggle has not been ended by these attacks. In fact some of the most heroic workers’ struggles have arisen because of them. Staley, Liverpool Docks and others come to mind. And it is notable that these struggles quickly encounter the limits of traditional union organisation, and transcend them with original forms of organisation. This creativity in organisation arises in part because the traditional union bureaucracies (and the parties of SD and stalinism) have little willingness to develop the struggle towards victory. And another aspect of this originality is in recognition of the global changes in capital. The Liverpool Docks struggle can no more be won on the Liverpool waterfront than the Staley struggle could be won in the ‘class war zone’. When they take control of their own struggles, workers quickly use new methods (videos, internet etc) to extend their ability to establish and develop solidarity and support. And such initiatives quickly overflow the limits of the struggles in which they begin – for example, a Liverpool Dockers delegation brought the first substantial reports to Britain of the Turkish hunger strikes.
Around the world workers are moving into new organisations. This tendency reflects a recognition of the failures of stalinism and social democracy, but does not yet reflect an ability to overcome the limitations of either. In the USA there is now a Labor Party. In Italy we see the growth of Rifondazia, in Britain the launch of the SLP to challenge the death-grip of the Labour Party. And there are others. New proletarian parties do not face only new challenges. Old problems remain to be attacked and overcome, which earlier parties have failed to defeat – the cluster of problems around working class independence from the interests of the ruling class (especially when dressed up in terms of ‘the nation’).
The problem of the ‘nature of the epoch’ interacts strongly with that of ‘revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary leadership’. This is true almost regardless of the extent to which the ‘Leninist’ party idea is adopted. From an idea of the times in which we live, we derive a plan of action and our ideas about organisation and tactics. At least, this is the approach that we have been used to taking. The new mass parties (and aspirant mass parties in the case of the SLP) do not seem to reflect this approach. Instead they indicate a wish on the part of the masses to organise in the face of major threats to their rights, to unify and to overcome old divisions. If necessary, we seem to hear from them, unity is more important than clarity over past differences; we have new problems to deal with.
Leadership is undoubtedly a factor in the success or failure of revolutions, but if every leadership produced in the history of the proletariat (with the exception of Lenin?) has failed in one way or another, do we not need some new theory of leadership? The bourgeoisie has developed theories of leadership and gained experience in applying them in business and in the military. The revolutionaries have chanted the mantra about ‘the crisis of proletarian leadership’ for nearly six decades without producing an analysis or theory of leadership. It is high time to develop something better.
Some of the problems about leadership arise out of the conception of the ‘Leninist Party’, (in practice usually a Zinovievist or even Stalinist concept has been used) the function of which is to bring into the proletariat a ‘consciousness’ which it is incapable of developing without the assistance of the intellectuals. Trotsky did not accept this formulation of Lenin’s (see the biography of Stalin), but never succeeded in bringing this disagreement to the centre of his thinking about the revolutionary party. We need to attack this question today with determination, to adopt a view on the role of revolutionaries in relation to mass movements.
2.3 Has the TP proved effective in practical use?
The willingness of Trotsky and the founders of the FI to update and innovate is strikingly evidenced by the development of the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ (PMP) in the preparation for World War 2. The FI recognised a growing determination by sections of workers to take up arms against fascism and naziism, and drew up a set of demands that extended and strengthened the sections on military policy in the TP. Such flexibility and creativeness has not always been typical of the Trotskyist movement (although there are many honourable exceptions).
The intention to create a bridge to the masses has often not been adopted by Trotsky’s successors. Even during Trotsky’s lifetime there was hesitation and resistance about the PMP. (The British RSL even refused to publish the TP because of its disagreement with the military sections of the draft.) And during WW2, again with some very honourable exceptions, the trotskyists groups did not succeed in building support among the forces resisting war measures or among the armed resistance movements.
What other instances can be adduced? How did transitional demands function in Paris 68, Ceylon, Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Stalinist collapses etc? To answer this question adequately would require a major book, and preparing it would keep me away from the list discussion I want to contribute to. To summarise, (so briefly as to be grossly unfair to many Trotskyists), the method of transitional demands, that of bridging to the consciousness of the working class, has been applied only inconsistently and irregularly. This has been an important factor (but not the only one) in the failures of Trotskyism since WW2.
To achieve the right balance in a revolutionary policy is far from easy. At different times since 1938, elements of the Trotskyist movement have failed at the sectarian and the liquidationist extremes, in the nearly 60 years since the TP. This is not a reason to reject the programme (either specifically the TP or the idea of a programme generally). Far worse fates have befallen the successors of the Comintern parties who claim allegiance to the programme of Lenin and in consequence built a machinery of repression against the workers unparalleled in the history of the planet. And the SDs who have claimed to be able to live on their wits, without a programme since before WW2, what of them? Have they been able to lead and develop the workers’ struggle as a consequence of their ‘freedom of thought’? As my friend Al Richardson is fond of saying, ‘to ask the question is to answer it’.
2.4 Do we need a programme at all?
A ‘programme’ is exceptionally useful for any group, (please note that the questions of ‘Leninism’ and the ‘Leninist Party’ are not addressed in this note. They are to constitute separate threads on this list in due course.) in defining its perceptions (its ‘world view’) and its proposed solutions in a concise and comprehensible manner. In this respect it is as useful for small groups that have no immediate prospect of influencing the situation as it is for a group that leads tens of thousands of workers. If the organisation is capable of using it (which is not a question that can be addressed here), the ‘programme’ is a kind of compass that can be verified. It allows the organisation to ask itself ‘Are we headed in the same direction as the class?’ and to make whatever decisions flow from the answer.
In addition, a ‘programme’ is a clear statement of the relationship between the revolutionary group and the class. It is a statement of what is ‘on offer’ as a response to the problems of the class. It allows workers to choose among the many competing revolutionary groups (although there may be other factors that influence such a choice). It also constitutes the basis of a relationship between workers and revolutionaries. The ‘programme’ is the first (and only the first of several) important definitions of what workers can expect and demand of a revolutionary regime. If you include freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in your programme, and then fail to deliver on it, then you abandon your right to operate the machinery of state.
Consequently, drawing up your programme is one of the most important tasks you will ever undertake, and one of the most difficult (not excluding your military tasks). Even getting it written is a test of your revolutionary qualities. In analysing the situation, and drawing conclusions about strategy and tactics, your creativity and ability to innovate are stretched to their maximum and beyond. In giving guarantees to the workers you seek to recruit, or to lead, you cast chains for yourself of the most unbreakable metal and invite the world to put them on you. And you cannot avoid doing so – workers know all too well the history of the gulag, and the horrors of the slave labour system operated in the surviving stalinist states ; they will demand and demand again assurances that you can prevent such consequences of the revolution you advocate before they risk their lives and the lives of their families for your programme.
3. What demands need updating? What new areas need to be addressed?
As well as taking account of the changes in the global situation since 1938, we need to consider those areas of struggle which were not adequately addressed by the TP. This section attempts to deal with some of those.
3.1 Struggles over public services and welfare
There is a massive area about ‘public’ services and welfare, which has expanded way beyond what Trotsky was familiar with. We know that struggles over mass services can take on an explosive quality (as in France in late 95, and subsequently in Germany), and that struggles of this kind have the potential to unify workers with the unemployed and ‘the community’ (so-called housewives, children, the retired, the petty-bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia). [Apologies for some of the stale language in use here – I really don’t have time to reinvent the whole jargon of the left.] Such struggles have terrific educational value ; the masses try to understand why the services they depend on are being reduced, removed or made expensive, and in trying to understand that they learn about the finances of the state and of capitalism. They arrive in short order at an understanding of the need to remove the capitalist state, or at the very least to force it against its will to maintain their services. They learn too about their leaders’ unwillingness even to discuss such questions, far less act decisively. Such struggles are likely to arise continuously, and demands are needed to strengthen them and to bring out their revolutionary content.
A dimension of these struggles not often dealt with concerns popular control over the services. When campaigns develop about particular service facilities, there is very often an element of defending ‘our hospital’, ‘our nursery’ etc. Demands in such campaigns need to be formulated to gain from this energy and to pull away from the petty-bourgeois solution of privatisation. In Britain, for example, the Tories often seek to promote the idea of ‘opting out’ of local authority control, for schools which are facing budget cuts. If the availability of money from the state (national or local) is accepted as a premise, then the petty-bourgeois solution will win out. If the campaign is going to win in the long term, it needs to incorporate elements of direct and immediate local democratic control over facilities (reducing the control by the bureaucracy) with challenges to the financial systems of the local and national state. ‘Open the books’ demands can be extremely helpful here – showing who makes a profit out of the services at present, and who makes a profit out of privatisation.
This whole area of struggle over mass services needs a lot more development than anything offered in the TP, but the same principles underlying the formulation of transitional demands in the TP can be used. To undertake a local and immediate struggle can be the key to beginning a strategic struggle against capitalism.
It also requires some overall re-thinking on the question of the role of the state. The ‘withering away of the state’, one of the principal objectives of marxism, has been substantially lost sight of since 1917, to be replaced by consideration of how the “workers’ state” can best be maintained and defended.
3.2 Demands in connection with agriculture and farming
In a great deal of the world the peasantry has disappeared, to be replaced by a numerically much reduced rural proletariat – semi industrial wage workers. Many of the demands in the TP consequently need updating if they are to retain relevance. In addition to this transformation, the increasingly direct links between agriculture and world capitalism puts growing pressure on farmers. Not only do they increasingly have to carry severe financing (interest) charges, and harsh pressures on their contracts from oligopolistic distributors, but also their lives are ever more closely tied into the problems of state finance (e.g. via the EEC or NAFTA). Many of the same things are also true of the fishing industry.
Militancy among farmers, where it occurs at all, tends to be directed quite directly at the policies of the state. France is probably the best example, but there are other recent instances across Europe. The TP as it stands does not offer immediately useful approaches, and needs some considerable development.
The workers have a natural and proper concern with questions of quality and fitness of food, which is not often considered by revolutionaries. Mutinies in the armed services and prisons often result from food problems. During the industrial revolution in Britain, workers established co-operative shops to ensure that fresh, good quality food was available on sale at times that matched their work patterns. (The Co-op store chains are the last survival of this movement, bureaucratised and corporatised out of all recognition.) And Margaret Thatcher never lost the nickname ‘Maggie Thatcher milk snatcher’ which she acquired when she proposed to abolish the provision of the daily milk ration to school children in Britain. Out of such concerns a new proletarian policy towards agriculture and fisheries can be developed. It can also be extended to encompass other problems of capitalist agriculture – such as the threats from biotechnology and from barbaric farm practices which led to ‘mad cow disease’ (which of course spring from capitalist pressures on farming).
A programme for today will also have to deal with the vicious pattern of world trade in primary foodstuffs (and of course other primary products). Offering fair terms of trade, and cancelling debt, would be keys to the alliance with workers and peasants in Africa and other impoverished countries.
3.3 Working against fascism and other oppressive movements and movements
The TP dealt with fascism in power, in several european countries. The situation is different today. Fascist groups exist in many countries and mobilise against workers, racial and sexual minorities and others. Organising against these fascists is literally a life and death question for some. It also provides opportunities for organising defence groups in ways that draw in participants from a wider constituency than usual. Anti fascist defence organisations have the same potential for development towards the workers militia as the other organs of workers defence described in the TP.
The TP did not have to deal with the rise of religious, particularly islamic, reaction, around the world and within working class communities. In order to organise effectively against this new threat, a programme for today must include a powerful statement about religious freedom and toleration. This freedom does not extend to the acceptance of restrictions on free speech. The greatest possible separation between religion and state should always be supported. Where religious reactionaries burn down bookshops and printing presses, or kill writers, workers must show a determination to defend freedom of speech, and drag the intelligentsia into the practical, physical struggle. Likewise, the workers movement needs to challenge the special oppression of women by some religious groups, and to provide support and shelter for the victims.
On the international plane, ‘liberal’ solidarity actions such as trade boycotts and support campaigns for political prisoners often attract widespread support. Too often they do not contain any element of proletarian independence from the state. In order to instil the element of transitionality into such campaigns, we need additional slogans and demands that generate direct action by the workers – trade union action to ‘black’ cargoes to and from oppressive regimes, workers’ aid campaigns. Educational and propaganda material directed against repressive regimes should always aim to indicate how and why the repressive regimes benefit the imperialist states and threaten workers globally.
3.4 Campaigns and actions against environmental damage
At the time the TP was written there was little or no knowledge available to indicate the scale or intensity of the environmental crisis. We now know that the global ecosystem can be damaged irreparably, and that some resources are irreplaceable. And we have come to recognise alarm about the actual and potential consequences.
In the first place, this recognition can be tremendously powerful ammunition in campaigning against the chaotic and uncontrollable production systems of capital. But any positions we develop in this respect must take account of the extremes of environmental damage wreaked in the stalinist states (Chernobyl, the eco-death of the lakes of southern USSR, desertification in central China etc).
We argue that the threats to the global environment (and the special threats they present to some native peoples) flow from unplanned economies driven by the pursuit of profit. Marxist economics provides a key to understanding this crisis, and we need to find ways of making our ideas clear and relevant to the activists in these campaigns.
But central to the transitional approach is to formulate demands that empower and activate the working class. Organised workers have the power to refuse to handle or utilise materials from or for industries that threaten the planet (tropical hardwoods, nuclear waste, whale meat etc). A new section of the TP should be drawn up that works around organising workers for this kind of action – workers investigations into the materials and energy they work with, sources etc. Such demands raise again the questions of power in industry.
3.5 Defending workers rights
The history of the stalinist states is one of the most horrifying stories of the systematic stripping of workers rights. Among the majority of workers around the world, ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ are words that have come to mean the same as ‘stalinism’ – brutal oppression, economic incompetence, no democracy in administrative decision making – in short the opposite of Marx’s vision of communism. The spectre of Stalinism is haunting us. It is a major obstacle to winning workers to revolutionary socialism. In 1938, when the TP was written, the scale of the Stalinist horror was still unimaginable.
To begin to address this problem, we need to offer assurances of respect for workers rights ab initio and to reflect this in the internal life of the movement. The untrammelled dictatorship by one party is not acceptable to workers. We have to ensure that the post- revolutionary governments will provide institutions that will protect their rights at least as well as those provide in the bourgeois democracies (judiciary, media, ombudsmen etc), and that these institutions are democratic to the highest degree. A great deal of work is needed to specify this element of the programme in a presentable and credible form, but it is essential to winning widespread support.
Leading members of the post-revolutionary government, regardless of their other special knowledge and experience, must spend a proportion of their time on special commissions dedicated to the defence and extension of workers’ rights, and to actively promoting the ‘withering away of the state’.
3.6 Political Revolution
The TP recognised only one ‘workers state’, and described that as ‘degenerated’ – namely the Soviet Union. The East European and far eastern post war extensions of stalinism, and the Cuban revolution, were not on the horizon when it was written. In the trotskyist movement an entire epoch of several decades was dominated by discussion of the ‘class nature’ of the states created by these extensions, and the unfortunate participants in these debates agonised over definitions of ‘workers states’ that could encompass the Soviet gulag, the Chinese slave camps and the killing fields of the Pol Pot regime.
In the FSU and Eastern Europe such questions no longer apply. Here we are concerned with the workers revolution against capital, and our primary concern is to formulate demands for the local situations. The question of ‘political revolution’ remains an issue in relation to China and Cuba. Within the trotskyist movement there is a range of positions on both of these states, and these positions determine relations with other groups. Clarification of these positions is another crucial area where the TP needs to be updated.
3.5 Extend the demands about women’s rights
The section of the TP concerning women’s rights could helpfully be extended and strengthened. In particular, more needs to be said about the struggle for women’s rights in ‘backward’ countries, and in industrialised countries we need more explicit statements about ‘reproductive rights’ – contraception, abortion etc. Trotsky wrote some better stuff in Revolution Betrayed than in the TP.
3.6 National questions and race questions
Since 1938 the dynamic of capital has forced enormous population movements onto the world. National questions have assumed new and difficult forms that can often not be addressed by the formulae developed by Lenin and Stalin for the conditions faced by the bolshevik government in assembling the USSR. Trotsky and the FI faced this problem in relation to the blacks of the USA. At one stage they advocated the establishment of an independent black republic, but concluded that this was not a workable solution. Today the same situation is multiplexed across Western Europe, the USA and other parts of the world, with numerous minority populations of recent establishment. Trotskyists have written important material aimed at clarifying the revolutionary programme for societies with mixed populations (Fraser, Leon, C.L.R. James), and we need a discussion of these works to assess how far they produced answers we can adopt for today’s conditions.
In most of the world, the colonial system has been dismantled, only to be replaced by new and harsher forms of exploitation, mediated by the organs of capital such as the IMF and the World Bank. ‘Native’ bourgeoisies and petty-bourgeoisies have sprung up and live well as the tools of the new exploiting mechanisms. For hundreds of millions of people the dream of colonial liberation has turned to the bitterest of ashes in their mouths. Here again, new demands and approaches are required to bring the programme into the 1990s.
3.7 Demands re sexual freedom
Lenin is sometimes accused of a certain sexual ‘prudery’. Despite this, the Bolshevik government wasted no time over granting full rights to homosexuals to conduct the kind of life they wished and over banning discrimination against them in employment and public services. This freedom was reversed by the Stalin regime and homosexuality was criminalised. Trotsky is reticent about homosexuality in Revolution Betrayed and the TP. A new TP for today needs more forceful expression of commitment to sexual freedom as an aim of the revolution. Closely related to this of course is rejection of censorship in all communication media.
In order to arrive at a ‘convincing’ programme, the revolutionaries need to discuss and arrive at workable conclusions that will command mass support, about the protection of children against ‘predatory’ or ‘harmful’ sexual activity.
4. What can we retain of value from the TP?
Class independence, clarity, an insistence on linking of world view to daily practice and tactics – these are the virtues of the TP, both when it was written and now. And its insights can be updated, along the lines I have suggested above. (Or could be if there were not such obstacles to creativity in most of the fragments of the Trotskyist movement.) But there is another substantial limitation to the TP which is not so easily overcome.
The TP does not present a ‘vision’ of socialism, or a clearly convincing statement of its benefits. This is perhaps understandable in the context for which Trotsky was writing. October 1917 was a living memory and inspiration for most of the people he was writing for, and his immediate audience was a layer of oppositional communists and other militant socialists. Moreover, the tasks facing these people were made doubly urgent by the rise of fascism/naziism and the imperialist war drive.
Because of the circumstances of 1938, and because of his own history, Trotsky’s proposal, actual or implied, in the TP, concerns the transformation of production, and the introduction of planning. His notions of a better life, are largely restricted to the abolition of tyranny in the fascist, colonial and stalinist states. He does not have anything to say here about overcoming or abolishing alienation, about establishing community, etc. He is far better on this in, for example, the Copenhagen speech. and he follows in an excellent tradition in his reticence about the new society. Marx & Engels rarely described what they expected to happen after the revolution. Trotsky knew all too well the hostages Lenin had given to fortune with State & Revolution – indeed he exhumed Lenin’s position in his own Revolution Betrayed.
Nearly 60 years later the situation is very different. The words ‘communism’ and ‘bolshevik’ have been debased by the long record of stalinism. The word ‘socialist’ has been rendered meaningless by social democracy. And far too many ‘socialist’ organisations have reproduced in their internal lives one or other of these perversions. Consequently, the very basis of the communist vision needs to be restated, and its basic categories reworked and revitalised.
Whatever the good reasons in 1938 for the TP’s reluctance to advance a description of the communist goal, they do not apply today. Things are very different. The state is incomparably more extensive and pervasive than in 1938, probably to an even greater degree than Trotsky imagined. It penetrates into every corner of everyday life, and if it is to be overthrown, the revolutionaries have to be able to describe not only what will replace it, but also how and when. A workable idea of communism, or at the very least, of the ‘lower stage’ – socialism, has to be made available in a way that corresponds to the reality of the 1990s out of which it must be constructed.
Until this task is undertaken, which renders essential an honest accounting for the October Revolution in all its aspects, and all its consequences, (addressing the question ‘transition to what?’), reworking the programme is a task analogous to that of the interior decorators in the House of Usher.
J.J. Plant
10 October 1996
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