Transitional arrangements
What kind of programme should the Revolutionary Communist Party adopt?
The British section of the International Marxist Tendency, Socialist Appeal, is launching a new paper called The Communist and refounding the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Will this new party have a programme which follows Trotsky’s 1938 work The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, more popularly known as the Transtional Programme, or will it be closer to that of Socialist Appeal and its immediate forerunner, the Militant tendency?
The aesthetic of the IMT’s open turn calls to mind the early years of the Trotskyist movement, but it is to be hoped that the theoretical innovations which were developed within the tradition will not be abandoned – the conditions which led to those changes still endure.
Enabling Act
Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, written in advance of war in Europe, expected that the constituent assembly demand would no longer be necessary. He expected that a workers’ government would form out of workers’ councils established amid revolutionary upheaval and these institutions would create a workers’ state.
But the tradition in which Socialist Appeal stands, the Trotskyism of Ted Grant, contains a unique take on the process of transition between capitalism and socialism.
Mike Macnair has observed of the Militant tendency’s history:
“At some point between 1965 and the early 1970s (its own histories are unhelpful on when) it developed its distinctive strategic/programmatic conception of a legal revolution, in which ‘Labour’s Marxist Tendency’ would first win control of the Labour Party, then win a general election, then pass an ‘Enabling Act’ through parliament to implement a programme of nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies and so on. The result was a strategic conception much closer to the British road and the ideas of the Labour left than the ideas of any other Trotskyist group were.” [1]
An early mention is found in Ted Grant’s pamphlet The Economic Crisis – What Labour Should Do, published in 1966:
“Clement Attlee in his book Labour in Perspective suggested that Labour should pass an enabling act giving them blanket powers to take action against big capital.” [2]
In considering why Militant adopted this formulation, recall that the labour movement was still experiencing a forward march after 1945. It was in the recent memory of the class that a Labour government could nationalise whole industries, allowing for collective bargaining over pay and conditions. This was expressed by organisations of the Labour Left and by the CPGB.
Though organised as a separate party, the CPGB could not undertake effective electoral work in the postwar period as the British parliament retained ‘first past the post’ and it became clear that the choice for class-conscious workers was a Labour Party which could form majority governments and implement reforms through parliament which could not be won through collective action at work. The CPGB continued to stand candidates in elections, overwhelmingly unsuccessfully, but it was able to influence Labour’s policy agenda through the affiliated trade unions.
A district possibility
What the CPGB could not do, but what various Trotskyist groups could, was organise effectively in Labour as an open faction. By coalescing support around a newspaper – acting as a current/league/tendency but supposedly not as a separate party – the Militant tendency became the most influential Trotskyist group in Labour.
The presence of Militant supporters within Labour at a local level, from its branch and district organisations to its constituency structures which select parliamentary candidates, meant that resolutions could be taken from a branch meeting in a working-class neighbourhood, up to the annual conference and into Labour’s programme and general election manifesto. It also meant that Militant supporters could be selected as candidates for local councils and parliament.
This application of entryism as a long-term strategy necessarily changed Trotskyists in Labour, as evidenced by the Enabling Act concept borrowed from the left wing of pre-WW2 labourism. But this does not necessarily represent a political degeneration into reformism as the point of adopting this position was to advance the class struggle by challenging the ideas of the Labour Right – and the timidity of the Labour Left.
The IMT’s British section advanced the enabling act mechanism in 2017 after Labour advanced in parliamentary representation during a general election in which it was expected to experience a wipeout.
At the time, it seemed possible Labour could get into government, led by the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, and Socialist Appeal editor Rob Sewell wrote:
“To carry out its left-wing programme, Labour will need to stand up to big business. Furthermore, it will need to take emergency measures to deal with their sabotage. Before the war, Clement Attlee, Stafford Cripps and others at the top of the Labour Party spoke of the need for emergency measures or an “Enabling Act” to force through its programme.” [3]
What kind of programme does the working class need if it is to win power?
Mike Macnair has explained the tradition of the minimum-maximum programme, used by the workers’ movement across Europe in the 19th and early 20th century, as follows:
“In a minimum-maximum programme, the maximum part would outline the general idea of communism as a society without classes, state or family as an economic institution, in which production is collectively managed for the human good, and explain briefly why this sort of society is becoming possible, but can only begin to be attained through the working class, as a global class, taking over the running of society.
“The minimum part would outline the minimum commitments to transferring political power from the capitalist class to the working class, without which a workers' party would not participate in a government (whether formed on the basis of an electoral majority or as a provisional government arising from an insurrectionary movement). It would also add some 'immediate' economic demands of a, broadly, currently agitational character.” [4]
This is contrasted with a transitional programme, which abandons the minimum-maximum demarcation. Macnair argues that Trotsky used the term in his 1938 book “in two different and separable senses”. [5]
First, Trotsky writes,
“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 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 conquest of power by the proletariat.” [6]
Macnair comments:
“In this sense the programme is ‘transitional’ between present partial class struggles and the struggle for workers’ political power. Since the minimum programme is a programme for the immediate tasks of workers' political power, the transitional programme would then be transitional from partial struggles and partial demands to the implementation of the minimum programme (in the sense used above).” [7]
Minimum of misunderstanding
Macnair describes the other sense in which Trotsky writes about the transitional programme:
“The second interpretation is that the division between minimum programme (the immediate tasks of workers' political power) and maximum programme (the supersession of classes, state and family in the 'higher stage' of communism) was overcome”. [8]
Trotsky portrays the minimum-maximum programme as a broken bridge:
“Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its programme into two parts independent of each other: the minimum programme, which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum programme, which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum programme no bridge existed. And indeed social democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying.” [9]
Macnair argues that this was not the rationale for the division in the programme:
“The point of having a minimum programme was not to abandon the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. It was to get rid of attachment to utopian speculations about the detailed nature of the communist society [...]
“The transition, and the communist outcome, will be shaped by the choices made by the working class when it has attained political power.” [10]
He concedes that, yes the minimum section contains reforms, but this in itself does not necessitate reformism and the abandonment of workers taking political power as a party’s goal:
“Each of the individual demands of the minimum programme could, on its own, be conceded by capital with the capitalist state remaining intact. But if all the demands of the political part of the minimum programme are implemented - ie, the democratic republic replaces the rule-of-law state and the public debt is suppressed (which requires that the financial sector be nationalised under democratic control) – political power will have been transferred from the capitalist class to the working class.” [11]
Owning the problem
During the years of the left’s leadership of Labour, Socialist Appeal’s supporters worked with others on the Labour4Clause4 campaign, which aimed to reintroduce the commitments of the old Clause IV of the party’s constitution to common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.
Though the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, it demonstrated the commitment of Socialist Appeal to uniting with the Labour Left within the party on a principled basis. Now that the Labour Right is back in control and has purged Socialist Appeal, it would be easy for comrades to retreat from an electoral strategy as a means of the working class taking power.
This course of action would be understandable. Socialist Appeal in Britain has grown on university campuses over the last decade at the expense of established groups, notably the Socialist Workers Party. The focus in the coming years will be maintaining this status as the biggest left group on campus and in organising recruits after graduation into RCP fractions in the unions.
The issue is that although an electoral strategy might not be an immediate priority of the IMT’s British section in founding a party, it will become a priority at some point in the future if the organisation keeps growing. Including at its foundation a commitment in the party programme to an electoral strategy will make this transition easier.
From bourgeois parliamentarism to proletarian parliamentarism
Given the experience of generations of workers in Britain and across Europe after the Second World War, insurrectionary means of achieving change will probably not attract mass support unless there is a prolonged economic collapse.
The bourgeoisie has the mechanism of a general election to restore legitimacy to its state and has adapted its approach to the workers’ movement since the introduction of universal suffrage. In the years after the Russian Revolution but before the Second World War, particularly as the bourgeoisie in some states turned from parliamentarism to fascism, this mechanism might have appeared weak as a means of ideological legitimation for class rule. But no more.
The road to socialism in Britain is thus likely to run through legislative majorities for parties of the workers’ movement – and a constituent assembly to establish a democratic republic. Organisations of the working class and its allies should adopt programmes which will get us on this road.
Citations
1. Entries and exits - Weekly Worker
2. Ted Grant – The Economic Crisis – What Labour Should Do
3. Winter is Coming: Tory party faces civil war and crisis | Socialist Appeal
4. 'Transitional' to what? - Weekly Worker
5. Ibid.
7. 'Transitional' to what? - Weekly Worker
8. Ibid.
10. For a minimum programme! - Weekly Worker
11. Ibid.