An introduction to the study of the 'Transitional Program' OCAN 1-320

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SOCIALIST ACTION DECEMBER 1988 9 The long period of capitalist economic stability is coming to an end. A new period of working-class fightback is not far down the road. The new generation of trade-union militants that will be impelled forward by the coming crisis will be forced by necessity to relearn the history of labor struggles and its lessons-and thus avoid unnecessarily repeating the errors of the past.

The "Transitional Program," written by Leon Trotsky and adopted by the founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938, is the fruit of nearly 150 years of revolutionary working-class experience.

As a guide to action, it incorporates the method which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels applied in 1848 to the founding program of scientific socialism, the "Communist Manifesto," and in more explicit detail in their 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League."

The method had been brilliantly applied by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky to the problems of class struggle during the course of the revolution in Russia in 1917. The "Transitional Program" is the basic guideline for revolutionary working-class action in the present epoch. It is at the heart of the programmatic foundation of Socialist Action and will prove to be an indispensable guide to action for the next generation of working-class fighters.

The method of the "Transitional Program" In this document Trotsky brilliantly elucidates the transitional method. He explains that its power and effectiveness derives from its primary revolutionary function: the struggle for workers power.

At the same time, it is the most practical guide for effective action in the day-to-day struggle. It is not limited by the alleged "realizability" or "unrealizability" of the program's demands.

The question of whether or not the demands can be fulfilled, Trotsky explains, "is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter What its immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery."

But Trotsky carefully guards against infantile leftism that would reduce leadership to "revolutionary" sloganizing without regard to the level of mass consciousness. In the introductory portion of the "Transitional Program," he sums up the transitional method: "The strategic task of the next period—a prerevolutionary period of agitation, propaganda, and organization—-consists in overcoming the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat 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 the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from Since World War I, the social system based on private ownership of the means of production has been in a continual state of crisis.

That first world holocaust was followed 21 years later by the horror of an even bloodier second world war. The human race is now threatened with a third world war. And in between, scores of "localized" wars and "police actions" have been waged by the most powerful capitalist states to suppress rebelling subject peoples.

Subjective prerequisites for revolution On the eve of World War II, when the "Transitional Program" was written, Trotsky summed up the objective ripeness of the world for socialist revolution and predicted the impending catastrophe: "All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet 'ripened' for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."

This judgment retains full validity today despite the temporary restabilization of world capitalism in its imperialist strongholds since shortly after World War II. We will examine the reasons for this seeming contradiction in a moment.

Evolution and revolution

Marx and Engels had explained from the outset that when the new mode of production matures within the womb of the old social system, the relatively peaceful process of social evolution cannot automatically be completed. It requires revolutionary force to overcome the resistance of the beneficiaries of the old order.

Those classes which benefit most from the given exploitative social system combat change. They defend, with all the repressive force at their command, the legal and juridical foundations supporting their rights and privileges. Ruling classes never give way to historical necessity without a fight to the death.

Social classes, which history designates to lead humanity forward, become the revolutionary instruments of human social evolution. The capitalist class, for example, led the revolution against feudalism which was blocking a social and economic breakthrough for humanity.

Capitalism, in its gestating phase, required the freeing of the serfs and the formal equality of all men under law, in order to open the road to a massive increase in the productive forces. This objective need caused the capitalist class to be an instrument for human progress.

Similarly, the founders of scientific socialism saw the intrinsic limits to capitalism's progressive role. They deduced from their historical and logical analysis that only the working class can free society from capitalism in its period of decline. And to do this the proletariat must mobilize under its banner all victims of capitalist injustice in a grand struggle to abolish all forms of exploitation and oppression. Rodeo.Ca. fascism," Stalinism, in fact, doomed the working class to impotence and cleared the road for fascism.

What reformism springs from Common to all varieties of reformism is their overestimation of ruling class power and their symmetrical under-estimation of workers' power. This leads them to rule out a struggle to achieve a decisive victory over capitalism. Instead, reformism accepts the domination of capital as unalterable, and the subordination of working-class interests to the profitability of capitalist enterprises as inevitable. The recent history of reformism in the United States is instructive. The labor bureaucracy has adopted the psychology of a junior partner of the U.S. capitalist class. "We're in the same boat," they like to say, "we can't demand more than 'our' employers can pay (and maintain a 'reasonable' profit)." Admonishing workers "not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg," the bureaucracy has led them into a vicious cycle of givebacks.

First rationalized as necessary for keeping failing interprises profitable in order to "save jobs," the givebacks o "needy" capitalists are inevitably followed by granting vage and benefit concessions to all employers, including hose enjoying record-breaking profits.

The policy flowing from the myth of worker-employer partnership" has resulted in a decades-long capitalist feeding renzy. Each bites out of the workers' hide, and each craven :apitulation by the bureaucracy whets the bosses' appetite 'or more.

And in those instances when individual national or local inions attempt to fight back, such as the airline controllers' (PATCO) strike in 1981 or the Hormel packinghouse workers (Local P-9) strike of 1985-86, the labor bureaucracy refuses to give more than token support.

In the case of the PATCO strike, the labor bureaucracy ruled out challenging the strikebreaking court injunctions against effective picketing and prohibited the defiance of "no strike clauses." In effect they barred other airline unions from respecting PATCO picket lines. In the case of the P-9 strike, the entire top-level bureaucracy joined the bosses, cops, courts, and the governor of Minnesota in breaking the The strategy of revolutionary socialism The "Transitional Program" is based on a strategy which is the polar opposite of reformism. Where reformism sees a community of interest between workers and bosses, revolutionary socialism sees a diametric counterposition.

The strategy of class collaboration, which is based on maintaining the profitability of labor's capitalist "partners," demands ever-greater sacrifices from the workers, guaranteeing a declining living standard.

This policy disorients the working class; facilitates its decay, demoralization, and ruin; and thus helps undermine the only creative and progressive class in modern society, and with it, the future of the human race.

The task of revolutionary socialism is to guard against these corrosive effects of capitalism on working-class morale; to advance those demands whose fulfillment is an immediate and urgent working-class need, whether or not they are compatible with the profitability of capitalism. The relation between the immediate needs of the workers and the longer-term socialist goal is dynamically interrelated Hence, when the demands advanced by the workers' vanguard correspond to the vital needs of the broad masses, and if these masses feel that they cannot exist unless these demands are met, then the struggle for these demands will become the starting-point of the struggle for power.

Causes of the prolonged economic equilibrium The labor bureaucrats systematically block the natural tendency of rank-and-file workers to fight back against the employers' assault on their living standards. This is largely due to the priority they give to privileges they have accorded themselves, step by step, in line with their systematic suppression of union democracy.

Their salaries, for example, are no longer pegged to that of the rank and file. Comfortably overpaid, they are in most cases personally insulated from the consequences of their concessions' policy. They tend to impose acceptance of wage and benefit cutswhich do not directly affect them-and energetically maneuver to stifle any spirit of fightback that emerges from the ranks.

Although the bureaucracy may understand that this policy threatens the very existence of the unions upon which their privileges depend, they have greater fear of the rank and file. They know that once mobilized for action in their own class interests, the workers tend to sweep all obstacles out of the road to effective struggle.

The combination of reformist treachery and capitalist repression has allowed the ruling class to extricate itself from each succeeding crisis. This combination has prolonged capitalist stabilization by allowing a gradual increase in the rate of exploitation. The resulting slow but steady decline in the cost of labor power has slowed the decline of the rate of profit and postponed the inevitable collapse of capitalist economy.

The developing breakdown of capitalism But it is only a matter of time before world capitalist economic equilibrium breaks down. The balloon of credit sustaining capitalist expansion will burst and with it will come a period of rapidly accelerated decline in living standards and explosions of class conflict.

The October 1987 stock market crash, massive debt defaults in the neo-colonial world, a growing tide of U.S. bank and "thrift" failures, and the astronomically increasing government and private debt of U.S. capitalism-the bulwark of world capitalism—are unmistakeable symptoms of the system's imminent general collapse.

The coming crisis, moreover, will not be a mere replay of the Depression triggered in 1929. It will most likely take the form of a more intensive version of the "stagflation" in the American economy of the 1960s and "70s. At that time deficit spending, designed to forestall the economic downturn, sent the rate of inflation into doubledigits. But in the next crisis, inflation will more likely reach and ultimately surpass the triple-digit rates that now plague Latin America and other less-developed countries, as the rulers desperately struggle to prop up teetering economies built on a mountain of sand.

This form of capitalist crisis tends more swiftly to force the working class into defensive action. A new wave of union militants will emerge and be driven by events to break through the restraints placed in their path by both capitalists and their labor lieutenants.

Working-class fighters will not take long to form themselves into a class-struggle left wing. They will begin with a struggle to recapture their unions and will quickly find their way to reconquering the highest levels of class consciousness previously achieved by American labor. The "Transitional Program" will win new adherents and is destined to become the program of the next generation of proletarian fighters.

Part II. Transitional Demands: The Sliding Scale of Wages and Hours We are better able to understand transitional demands when contrasted to reformist slogans ostensibly intended to combat specific problems confronted by the working class. Reformism, as we have seen, absolutely insists that demands intended to meet workers' needs be subordinate to alliances with their perceived "allies" among the capitalist class. In this category belong slogans like "Buy American!" and "A guaranteed annual wage!" Both are touted to fight unemployment-but without affecting profitability.

The logic of the "Buy American!" slogan The "Buy American!" slogan, flowing from the bureaucracy's illusion of class partnership, is designed to convince workers that unemployment is caused by their own "shortsightedness." American workers, who "foolishly" buy imported goods because they may be cheaper and better than the domestic product, they argue, lose jobs to America's competitors. The effect of this snowjob is to blame workers for capitalist unemployment. "Buy American!" is more than a publicity campaign to promote purchases of American-made goods, however. Its advocates know that moral pressure is not likely to convince too many people to voluntarily pay higher prices for madein-America products.

The slogan is really intended to mobilize political support for placing tariffs on foreign-made products. This would (continued on page 10)

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after its adoption, struggles.

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