Transitional Program = Updated Rabocheye Dyelo-ism ("Economism")???

[Die Neue Zeit]

"Krichevskii advanced his soon-to-be notorious 'stages theory' within this Erfurtian framework. Workers advanced to political class awareness through a series of predictable stages. The first and lowest stage was 'purely economic agitation'. Next was political agitation still strongly tied to immediate economic interests. Then came agitation still linked to economic interests but intended to show how the wider political planks in the Social-Democratic platform (for example, political freedom) were necessary for economic struggle. Finally, came political agitation not tied to economic interests but, rather, to the proletariat's role as leader of the people. At this stage, political agitation should 'embrace without exception all questions of social-political life', since everything affects the class interests of the proletariat." (http://books.google.ca/books?id=8AVUvEUsdCgC&pg=PA294&lpg=PA294&dq=krichevskii+stages+theory+erfurtian&source=bl&ots=5i3q6svIZt&sig=RDY-JaK_p7csygxX1YTywcOmzEE&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA294,M1) (Lars Lih)



Upon re-reading Trotsky's Transitional Program, I am but reminded of this rather provocative statement above by Lars Lih on the background of the "Economist" group that was subject to Lenin's attack in What Is To Be Done?, the Rabocheye Delo group of Krichevskii, Nadezhdin (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/638/lenin.htm) (CPGB review of Lih's book), and so on.



"The first and lowest stage was 'purely economic agitation'"

Check. The very first "transitional demand" raised in the Transitional Program was the call for a "sliding scale of wages":


Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

Notice that this demand is not leveled at the bourgeois-capitalist state at all, but rather at the lower level of union dealings (http://www.revleft.com/vb/sliding-scale-wages-t98609/index.html) (link)!



"Next was political agitation still strongly tied to immediate economic interests"

Check. Indeed, the next demands that Trotsky raised pertained to trade unions (in modern times, calls for the abolition of anti-union laws), factory committees, and their "sit-down strikes" (in modern times, calls for militant workplace occupations and what not).

The CPGB's Mike Macnair had some very interesting remarks on anti-union laws recently, BTW:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/751/crisisand.html


A communist minimum programme requires at its heart the struggle for the democratic republic: election and recallability of all public officials (and hence abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords), the replacement of the standing armed forces with a militia, generalised trial by jury, self-government of the localities, separation of church and state, and so on. But that is an offensive programme for the working class to take political power. The use of democratic demands in connection with defensive struggles against the effects of crisis is the use of selected elements of the minimum programme which are particularly relevant to the crisis.

The first and most fundamental of these is (partially) shared by all the left ‘action programmes’: abolition of the anti-union laws. The slogan should be expressed as “abolition”, not “repeal”: trade unions are illegal at common law (the first anti-union Act of Parliament was the Confederacies of Masons Act 1424; picketing has been unlawful since around the 1240s) and even repeal of everything passed since 1970 would still allow judges to invent new means of penalising unions or reinvent ancient ones.

“Partially shared” because there is a more general democratic principle involved: freedom of association.

[...]

The struggle for freedom of association is a struggle for a general democratic demand. But it is also the struggle for the most elementary need of the working class as a class: to organise itself freely and independently of the capitalist state. Conditions of economic crisis and recession make this need more, not less, urgent.



"Then came agitation still linked to economic interests but intended to show how the wider political planks in the Social-Democratic platform (for example, political freedom) were necessary for economic struggle"

Check. Trotsky then raises the elimination of business secrets to expropriations of the commanding heights (today's "nationalize the top such and such... compensation to be given only on the basis of need" and so on) to picket-line militias. On the subject of business secrets, Macnair had this to say in that same article:


The Trotskyist versions of action programmes contain a demand sanctified by its presence in the 1938 Transitional programme, but none the worse for all that: “Open the books!” The versions of the pro-bureaucratic left (LEAP, SWP, Morning Star-CPB) naturally omit this demand. Implementing it would be as painful for labour bureaucrats - even the toytown miniature bureaucrats of the SWP’s top-down hierarchy of full-timers - as it would be for capitalists.

In the Transitional programme the question is posed as one of workers’ control. And it is indeed true that working class action, in which the administrative and financial staff of a firm act in solidarity with its direct producers, can expose secrets which the employers would prefer to keep hidden. But the question of transparency is much larger than this. Capitalists and bureaucrats alike rely on legal rights to the control of information: official secrecy, commercial confidentiality, ‘privacy’, and ‘intellectual property rights’ (copyright, patents, etc). An outrider is the principle of ‘candour’ applied to justify secret discussions in the civil service and the SWP alike. Private law is used to protect official secrets, as in the Spycatcher case; ‘state security’ is used to protect murky corporate dealings, as in the Al-Yamamah arms scandal. Transparency - the abolition of state and private rights to control the publication of information, and the insistence that the inner workings of state and business alike should be exposed to public view - is thus a democratic demand.

The present crisis poses this question with particular sharpness. The continuing severity of the ‘credit crunch’ is partly due to the fact that it is very hard for lenders to discover whether borrowers are solvent or not. This difficulty flows from ‘off balance-sheet’ transactions, ‘creative accounting’, and murky networks of holding and subsidiary corporations and offshore set-ups of one sort or another. Capitalism, in other words, needs more transparency than it is currently able to deliver. Its baroque efforts to construct secrecy, which served it well in increasing the share of profits at the expense of labour and taxes in the 1970s-2000s, are now paralysing its own ability to function.

Transparency thus extends beyond the simple abolition of legal rights to secrecy. An attack on both ‘offshore’, and the legal doctrine of the separate corporate personality of even wholly artificial companies (Salomon v Salomon) is needed.



"Finally, came political agitation not tied to economic interests but, rather, to the proletariat's role as leader of the people"

Check. Trotsky finally talks about ending imperialist warfare and the formation of soviets:


The slogan of soviets, therefore, crowns the program of transitional demands.



And what did Lenin have to say about Krichevskii's stageism and broad economism (http://www.revleft.com/vb/broad-economism-t99348/index.html)?


It shows that we were right when we identified the basic reason for the crisis in Russian Social Democracy as the leader/guides ("ideologues", revolutionaries, Social Democrats) who fall behind the stikhiinyi upsurge of the masses. It shows that all the ruminations of the authors of the "Economist" letter (in Iskra, No. 12), of B. Krichevskii and Martynov, about the danger of underestimating the significance of the stikhiinyi element or of the grey ongoing struggles, about tactics-as-process and so forth - all these ruminations are exactly a glorification and defence of artisanal limitations. These people who cannot pronounce the word "theorist" without a condescending smirk - who label their own genuflection before simple lack of preparation and lack of development as "a feel for real life" - are, in fact, exposing their failure to understand our most pressing practical tasks. They shout to people who are falling behind: Keep in step! Don't get ahead! To people who are suffering from a lack of energy and initiative in organizational work, from a shortage of "plans" for a broad and audacious approach to the issues, they shout about the need for "tactics/process". At a time when our fundamental sin consists in lowering our political and organizational tasks to the most immediate "tangible" and "concrete" interests of the ongoing economic struggle, all we hear is the same old song: we must impart a political character to the economic struggle itself! To say it once again: this kind of "feel for real life" is literally the same kind as the hero of the popular epic who cries "Many happy returns of the day!" to a funeral procession.



Thoughts?

[davidasearles]

"transitional program" is not transitional if it is not a progarm to resolve the great social question of the day, i.e. if it fails to track the goal of collective control of the industrial means of production and distribution by the workers. Ditto "minimum program". Ditto any kind of reform program.

[gilhyle]

In brief, there are two things to say about this: 1) the method of transitional demands is the most sophisticated political methodology ever devised by Marxism and is the product of almost 100 years of continuously developing Marxist culture (1840s-1930s), but nevertheless deserves review and revision, and 2) it would be a crude and pointless diversion from that debate to try to assimilate the needed criticisms of the transitional method to Lenin's criticisms of economisim.

To go on in slightly more detail: it quite misses the point of the sliding scale of wages to see it as a mere trade union demand, not aimed at the capitalist state. It is aimed at the whole foundation of the capitalist system. The sliding scale demand is designed to neutralise inflation, inflation is the measure of the anarchy of capitalism and the sliding scale demand is the demand that the capitalist class must bear the full cost of the anarchy of their system of production.

JR you then go on to talk about the section in the TP on 'Trade Unions' ....but this section contains no transitional demands, rather it is an introductory section for the following section which argues that the key organisational transitional demand in this area of trade union work is the call for Factory Committees. Again, this is focused on capitalism itself, since it seeks to create dual power within the workplace.

'Open the Books' also goes to the heart of the capitalist political system, which at its best is representative democracy and an administration separated out from the legislature - this system (and the defined/limited system of accounting defined by international accounting standards designed to serve limited information to shareholders only) achieves the key disenfranchising of workers with regard to the day to day administrative decision making in the workplace, in local and national government. Again, an axe blow to the root.

[davidasearles]

In brief, there are two things to say about this: 1) the method of transitional demands is the most sophisticated political methodology ever devised by Marxism and is the product of almost 100 years of continuously developing Marxist culture.

Continual self delusion seems to be more like it.

Collective worker control is going to require a multitude of conscious acts by the bulk of individual workers who have analyzed and decided to accept the burdens and responsibilities that such a system requires. The idea that proposing just the right set of reform demands is going to raise "socialist consciousness" of the workers as opposed to resulting in workers simply concluding their lot cannot be changed no matter what they do has no informed logical basis that I can see.

[gilhyle]

Its not about delusion. Trotsky's method arose at a point in time when it was possible, in the short term, to characterise the gap to be leaped as a subjective one, as a failure of leadership. At the time, such was the balance of objective and subjective forces that this was true, conjuncturally......but it ceased to be true as the series of defeats of the 1930s and 1940s accumulated.

The gap to be passed over became again over time both an objective and a subjective gap. In particular, the return of prosperity to western europe reinstated objective material interests in the avoidance of revolution.

As this difference accumulated, the political situation ceased to be a matter of seizing the leadership of a class which was on the verge of revolution - as it had been in the 1920s.

Arguably, the transitional method ceased to be correct in the wake of the major defeats of the working class between 1978 and 1991 under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. At that point, the objective reality changed its constitution and the transitional method needed once again to be supplemented by a method aimed at building the labour movement, rather than placing a revolutionary leadership in the leading positions of an existing labour movement. This reinstates the minimum programme as a valid programme, because the task of creating a labour movement has been reinstated as an imperative.

Thus it is not that Trotsky was 'deluded' in any sense. No. He accepted that his method was time-bound. He would have produced a different method for the period today, had he still been around.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Arguably, the transitional method ceased to be correct in the wake of the major defeats of the working class between 1978 and 1991 under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. At that point, the objective reality changed its constitution and the transitional method needed once again to be supplemented by a method aimed at building the labour movement, rather than placing a revolutionary leadership in the leading positions of an existing labour movement. This reinstates the minimum programme as a valid programme, because the task of creating a labour movement has been reinstated as an imperative.

Thus it is not that Trotsky was 'deluded' in any sense. No. He accepted that his method was time-bound. He would have produced a different method for the period today, had he still been around.

Now the question arises: What kind of minimum programme? (http://csukblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/debating-the-marxist-programme-videos-from-communist-university-north/) Rawthentic's "On the Consciousness" (http://www.revleft.com/vb/consciousness-people-and-t99545/index.html) thread, for example, shows the overemphasis by Western Maoists on "identity politics." Comrade Mike Macnair argues for a "defensive" position only because he thinks that the minimum programme can have only an "offensive" character or a "defensive" one.

[However, since the 1970s, quite a few outside the Marxist tradition came up with "non-reformist reforms." While admirable, the political vs. economic issues complicate things. Hence my programmatic work towards tackling these complications...]

[Rawthentic]

Jacob:

I asked you to describe how I overemhasize "identity politics" and you still haven't done so.

In fact, it does not focus so much explicitly on identity politics (the idea that a certain group or section of the people in society inherently represent that group or section simply by being a part of it), but more on reformist and economist tendencies.

Do not make strawman arguments about my thread. Address my politics.

[gilhyle]

My own view is that the minimum program needs to focus on

1. the building of a globalised trade union movement

2. complete international freedom of movement of labor

3. Full voting rights for all based only on residence

4. Free trade in agriculture

But it remains true that minimum programmes always need to be designed for the different State structures within which they are applied

[Tower of Bebel]

Arguably, the transitional method ceased to be correct in the wake of the major defeats of the working class between 1978 and 1991 under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. At that point, the objective reality changed its constitution and the transitional method needed once again to be supplemented by a method aimed at building the labour movement, rather than placing a revolutionary leadership in the leading positions of an existing labour movement. This reinstates the minimum programme as a valid programme, because the task of creating a labour movement has been reinstated as an imperative.


Now the question arises: What kind of minimum programme? (http://csukblog.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/debating-the-marxist-programme-videos-from-communist-university-north/)
I think Gilhyle's post is the most informative post I've been able to read in weeks. But because it's so consice, could someone explain to me the link between the parts in bold? What makes (or what would make), unlike any transitional program (negative claim, already explained), the marxist minimum program the only suitable program to (re)build today's workers' movement (positive claim)? Maybe I should know the answer, but at the moment I'm not able to think of the answer.

[gilhyle]

Apologies if Im not clear. Once you set yourself the task, as the key task of the movement as being the building of the Labour movement, then the question arises as to what programmatic basis will it be built upon. Trotsky's transitional demands were designed to help the 'masses' (as they used to be called) to find the bridge from their daily class struggles to the socialist programme. When those struggles dont occur, when the class is disorientated and disorganised, then there is a prior task - to build a labour movement on the basis of conducting day to day struggles.

This was originally done in an era of progressive capitalism, when it possible to gain significant improvements for working people over a long period by organising around demands which capitalism could deliver. Successes reinforced the movement and reinforced belief in the importance of class organisation.

We canot expect that systematically today. We no longer live in an epoch of progressive capitalism. But we do live in an imperialist epoch which has the capacity to lurch from periods which reveal the underlying senility of capitalism to periods which mimic, for short periods, the characterisitcs of the epoch of progressive capitalism.

We must adapt to that more complex reality. We need the ability to build around demands for reforms which capitalism can deliver, as well as insisting on demands that it cannot or is deeply reluctant to deliver.

That has significant implications organisationally. The old model of the revolutionary party and the United Front as the two main forms of political organisation - one based on adherance to the communist maximum programme and the other organised around transitional demands - is no longer adequate. We need the capacity to adapt orgaisationally to the lurching anarchy of capitalism. Our insistence on either a revolutionary party or a mass (reformist) labour party flows from our attachment to the old alternatives of reform or revolution - a counterposition relevant to periods of crisis, not this lurching multi dimensional epoch that imperialism has become. Not that Im advocating the kind of left alliannces that have been popular over the last ten years. Rather, we need to allow the question of political organisation to become problematic again, until the party itself forges a programme around which it is willing to organise. It is the struggle to find that programme, rather than the struggle for a particular party, that should unite communists. The polticial issue is that we dont know the programme for the current period and, I suggest, it is not a matter for small groups of revolutionaries to try to define that programme, to write cookbooks for the present, but rather to struggle to find the demands around which organisation will actually come into existence.

......Im rambling abit.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I think Gilhyle's post is the most informative post I've been able to read in weeks. But because it's so consice, could someone explain to me the link between the parts in bold? What makes (or what would make), unlike any transitional program (negative claim, already explained), the marxist minimum program the only suitable program to (re)build today's workers' movement (positive claim)? Maybe I should know the answer, but at the moment I'm not able to think of the answer.

Comrade, I didn't say that the Marx-Engels "minimum" programmatic approach or even the "Marxist" minimum program (as formulated by the true founder of "Marxism" in 1891) was the only suitable program, considering that my programmatic formulation is somewhat different.

[As I said above to gilhyle, since the 1970s quite a few outside the Marxist tradition came up with "non-reformist reforms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-reformist_Reform)." I honestly did NOT know about Andre Gorz at all until tonight! While admirable, the political vs. economic issues complicate things, hence my programmatic work towards tackling these complications.]

To illustrate this, I'll give a preview of my current work section (bound to be lengthy, and bound to be "richer" with Kautsky quotes than your chat remark (http://www.revleft.com/vb/choo-choo-artifical-t99236/index.html?p=1331145#post1331145) ;) :D ):



Class-Strugglist Assembly and Association: Self-Directional Demands

“The original organizations of the proletariat were modeled after those of the medieval apprentices. In like manner the first weapons of the modern labor movement were those inherited from a previous age, the strike and the boycott. But these methods are insufficient for the modern proletariat. The more completely the various divisions of which it is made up unite into a single working-class movement, the more must its struggles take on a political character. Every class-struggle is a political struggle. Even the bare requirements of the industrial struggle force the workers to make political demands. We have seen that the modern state regards it as its principal function to make the effective organization of labor impossible. Secret organizations are inefficient substitutes for open ones. The more the proletariat develops, the more it needs freedom to organize.” (Karl Kautsky)

In the first chapter, a modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution was outlined, based broadly on the game theory concepts of maximax and maximin, with the latter entailing immediate, intermediate, and threshold demands. Explained earlier in this chapter was the historical and long-term necessity of ensuring that the immediate and intermediate demands being raised “make further progress more likely and facilitate other progressive changes” (Robin Hahnel) as well as enable the basic principles to be, through the emphasis on transnational “ pressure” (class struggle) for legislative implementation, “kept consciously in view” (Karl Kautsky) – thus being consistent with the maximin concept. Nevertheless, in between the maximax and the maximin are demands of a “directional” (as opposed to pseudo-“transitional”) nature which, either individually or combined, would necessitate a revolutionary departure from bourgeois-capitalist social relations specifically (as opposed to coordinator-capitalist, petty-capitalist, and even perceived “socialist” social relations) or from all forms of capitalist social relations altogether. In the case of the latter, at least one demand that is seemingly peripheral but is crucial for the departure was examined in Chapter 2.

[INSERT: The litigation demand raised by Paul Cockshott (http://21stcenturysocialism.blogspot.com/2008/08/programmatic-objectives-of-socialism.html) :) ]

One more detail completes this modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution: some demands are, in the broad sense, “self-directional.” With this particular type of demand, some aspects of it pose immediate concerns, other aspects intermediate ones, still other aspects threshold ones, leaving the remainder to pose directional concerns. The freedom of specifically class-strugglist assembly and association, free from anti-employment reprisals, police agents such as agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement – as opposed to the liberal hollowness of “freedom of assembly and association” – is one such “self-directional” demand.

[Tower of Bebel]

[...] Trotsky's transitional demands were designed to help the 'masses' (as they used to be called) to find the bridge from their daily class struggles to the socialist programme. When those struggles dont occur, when the class is disorientated and disorganised, then there is a prior task - to build a labour movement on the basis of conducting day to day struggles.

[...]

We must adapt to that more complex reality. We need the ability to build around demands for reforms which capitalism can deliver, as well as insisting on demands that it cannot or is deeply reluctant to deliver.

That has significant implications organisationally. [...] we need to allow the question of political organisation to become problematic again, until the party itself forges a programme around which it is willing to organise. It is the struggle to find that programme, rather than the struggle for a particular party, that should unite communists. The polticial issue is that we dont know the programme for the current period and, I suggest, it is not a matter for small groups of revolutionaries to try to define that programme, to write cookbooks for the present, but rather to struggle to find the demands around which organisation will actually come into existence.

......Im rambling abit.
Some belated thanks gilhyle. In my opinion you're not necessarily rambling at all. It helped to get back on track. But I don't know yet were it could lead to though.


[...] my programmatic formulation is somewhat different.
To fully understand your opinion and interpretation of gilhyle's contribution I should read again parts of your Class struggle rivisited? Yet this time with the "prior task [...] to build a labour movement on the basis of conducting day to day struggles" "kept consciously in view" ;).

[davidasearles]

We need the ability to build around demands for reforms which capitalism can deliver, as well as insisting on demands that it cannot or is deeply reluctant to deliver.

It seems a very fanciful eductional theory. Am I the only one to think this? Falsifiable evidence other than hypothetical that this ACTUALLY radicalizes workers?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The process radicalizes reform-oriented workers when they realize that the reforms (which have to meet the two criteria established by Hahnel and Kautsky, so there is a qualitative difference between what I've compiled so far and mere "social-democratic" reforms) "will not fall from heaven" (Kautsky), and can only be achieved, maintained, and extended through class struggle.

[davidasearles]

gilhyle:

We need the ability to build around demands for reforms which capitalism can deliver, as well as insisting on demands that it cannot or is deeply reluctant to deliver.


davidasearles:

It seems a very fanciful eductional theory. Am I the only one to think this? Falsifiable evidence other than hypothetical that this ACTUALLY radicalizes workers?


"Jacob Richter":

The process radicalizes reform-oriented workers when they realize that the reforms (which have to meet the two criteria established by Hahnel and Kautsky, so there is a qualitative difference between what I've compiled so far and mere "social-democratic" reforms) "will not fall from heaven" (Kautsky), and can only be achieved, maintained, and extended through class struggle.


davidasearles:

Is this a testable statement? Or is it merely internally (within the leftist belief system) consistent?

[gilhyle]

s this a testable statement? Or is it merely internally (within the leftist belief system) consistent?

Notwithstnding Quine, internal consistency is actually quite a difficult standard to attain and testability of individual statements constrains us from producing any useful theory. But that is really a discussion for the philosophy forum.

Let me contrast it with a much more fanciful educational theory - I, or a small group of people advocate an ideal and human beings despite their conflicts of material interest, their emotional decision making processes, their varying educational levels, their varying informational sources, etc, etc, all (or rather almost all) just decide, in one grand leap, to adopt a totally different form of social organisation.

thats not what happened in 1917 its not what happened in 1871. Its quite true to say that those events dont seem to accomodate themselves easily to the model of revolution emerging from the building of a labour movement, either.

But that is not decisive.

However, lets be clear there are no Communist models of revoluton that are ever going to be adequately tested prior to their success. And the marxist model, based on class struggle, buildig a labour movement which has the capacity to take over the State as a precondition of taking over the state - itself based on the materialist conception of history - is significantly better articulated than the alternative of preaching and advocacy as a sufficient mechanism for the creation of social revolution.

But even these comments are also off the point of this thread (and another similar thread) discussing minimum programmes.

[davidasearles]

So the way this all works is that you get people to demand what can be granted, and then you up theante to demand things that cannot be granted.

A minum demand - that there be two Saturdays in every week.

A maximum demand - giant rockets be attached to the earth to slow its spinning on its axis - making more time to play during the day and more time to sleep at night.

But as soon as they get the rockets almost built, we instead demand that everyone have a longer night and a shorter day, and for them to adjust the Earth's rotation to acommodate that demand.

[gilhyle]

So the way this all works is ......

Eh, no.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Here's an example of a modern "transitional programme":

The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation (http://www.creative-i.info/?p=1769)


An initial response from individuals, social movements and non-governmental organisations in support of a transitional programme for radical economic transformation
Beijing, 15 October 2008

Notice the lack of Chinese censorship over this material (due to the lack of sufficient political content). I'm surprised that this "action program" of "purely economic agitation" and "political agitation still strongly tied to immediate economic interests" hasn't mentioned the need for living wages, the need to universalize cost of living adjustments, the need for unconditional state aid in worker buyouts leading to co-op formations (the ONLY way to truly end "free markets," as Bakunin himself noted (http://libcom.org/library/a-critique-of-the-german-social-democratic-program-bakunin)), and so on.

[Tower of Bebel]

I'm sorry if this revival is bothering anyone. But could a Transitional Program build a genuine workers' movement? Is it wrong to think that a Transitional program can only capture an already existing workers' movement? In other words, does it really mather whether or not Marxists adopt a transitional or a revolutionary minimum program?

I'm having a personal crisis of theory again :(.

[Rawthentic]

It shouldn't bother anyone, Rakunin.

There is nothing wrong with questioning and interrogating.

[Dave B]

Just for Information, bearing in mind that I am a ‘Guesdeian’ impossiblilist, probably, and therefore more Marxist than Marx?


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm#n5 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm)


And from Karl who I think considered the Minimum programme as taking or fusing the economic struggle with the political;


Marx-Engels Correspondence 1871, Marx to Friedrich Bolte
In New York




N.B. as to political movement: The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement.

On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.


Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone (http://www.revleft.com/vb/../../../../../glossary/people/g/l.htm#gladstone) & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.



http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm)

And perhaps on a related issue, probably the second halve is more interesting on minimising the maximum programme;


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/letters/79_09_15.htm)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Dave, I hope you've received my PM, because this quote pertains to the contents of that PM:


Or is German Social-Democracy really infected by the parliamentary disease and does it believe that through election by the people the Holy Ghost is poured out upon the elected, fraction meetings are transformed into infallible Councils and fraction decisions into unassailable dogmas?

[Coggeh]

I'm sorry if this revival is bothering anyone. But could a Transitional Program build a genuine workers' movement? Is it wrong to think that a Transitional program can only capture an already existing workers' movement? In other words, does it really matter whether or not Marxists adopt a transitional or a revolutionary minimum program?

I'm having a personal crisis of theory again :(.
I think you have a point.However Trotsky does point out that the transitional program builds on the minimum program in establishing a revolutionary demand from a minimum demand for example the issue of the 38 hour working week would be a minimum demand and the transitional program builds on such a demand by 'building the bridge' between this demand and a demand for socialism.The key point from my understanding(could be very wrong but anyway) would be that instead of the transitional program coming after a minimum program ,it replaces it . With the same idea but built on it in the context of revolutionary demands.So in that context a transitional approach would be just as likely if not more of building a workers movement than a minimum approach.

I'm really not sure if that helps ,probably repeating what you already know. I usually stay away from theory but I'm trying to learn so eh feel free to destroy my post if its wrong :)

[Die Neue Zeit]

Why would we settle for a 38-hour workweek even as a reform demand when so much more is possible?


instead of the transitional program coming after a minimum program, it replaces it

There are two kinds of minimum programs, though: the social-democratic / "democratic socialist" program and the long-lost-to-even-Trotskyists Marxist minimum program.

[Q]

I think you have a point.However Trotsky does point out that the transitional program builds on the minimum program in establishing a revolutionary demand from a minimum demand for example the issue of the 38 hour working week would be a minimum demand and the transitional program builds on such a demand by 'building the bridge' between this demand and a demand for socialism.
As a sidenote: Providing the 38 hour working week as an example is pretty silly in any regard. In the Netherlands it was quite common just ten years ago to have a 36 hour working week. This is why I think a 32 hour (4 days, 8 hours) or a 30 hour (5 days, 6 hours) working week is much more to the point.


The key point from my understanding(could be very wrong but anyway) would be that instead of the transitional program coming after a minimum program ,it replaces it .
The Marxist minimum-maximum programme, which Jacob and also Rakunin refer to, has a different starting point then the transitional approach has. The transitional approach starts, as you said, from the current class consciousness and strives to build a "bridge" towards socialism. As a result the transitional approach has a certain handicap: if you focus on the current consciousness, this almost always is an economistic starting point (higher wages, shorter working hours, nationalisations, etc), where then do you start using political demands? In other words: when is the consciousness high enough for you to start agitating for the takeover of society by the working class?

I do not say it is impossible to have political demands in the transitional programme, but there seems to be some arbitrariness in this regard. For example: why did the CWI suddenly started putting forward political demands in the case of Iran? Does this imply that western countries are "democratic enough"? I think this is very confusing.

The minimum-maximum approach has a different starting point. It starts with the assertion that the working class needs to take over society, this in the form of the democratic republic. From there you try to build class consciousness and popularise the idea that workers should rule society, not just the company.


With the same idea but built on it in the context of revolutionary demands.So in that context a transitional approach would be just as likely if not more of building a workers movement than a minimum approach.
That's the question. As Rakunin pointed out, the transitional approach has somewhat of a tailist tendency. This in effect doesn't build any movement pro-actively, it just radicalises what there already is. This can work splendidly in a situation with a huge workers movement, and I think this was the intention of Trotsky in 1938, but anno 2009 we are in a very different situation.

I'm just trying to set some thoughts in order for myself too here, I could of course be very wrong.

[Tower of Bebel]

I do not say it is impossible to have political demands in the transitional programme, but there seems to be some arbitrariness in this regard. For example: why did the CWI suddenly started putting forward political demands in the case of Iran? Does this imply that western countries are "democratic enough"? I think this is very confusing.Democratic demands are put forward in the case of a centralization of state power, especially when it's clearly visible to the whole of society. This was done in the case of Hitler Germany and, of course, during the Iranian protests. Democratic demands are used when they have a mobilizing character. That's why they can be demanded in the Belgian case where the corrupting relationship between the 3 powers (legislative, jurisdiction and executive) is clearly visible and has caused somewhat of a shock among "broad layers of workers".

Both the Marxist minimum and the transitional programme try to achieve a certain bridge. But, as you wrote, both follow a different approach. The bridge of the transitional programme is one between the current level of consciousness and a socialist consciousness. The demands have a mobilizing factor. The discussion on the Marxist programme within the early Comintern stressed this character because the mobilization of the masses was meant to end the isolation of Marxists. It also had to result into a material force capable of overthrowing capitalism. As Gilhyle wrote before: "Trotsky's method arose at a point in time when it was possible, in the short term, to characterise the gap to be leaped as a subjective one, as a failure of leadership".

The Marxist mimimum programme however creates a bridge between bourgeois and socialist society by building a labor movement capable of taking over the state as a precondition for taking over society. Throughout the discussion about the formulation of our immediate (minimal) demands socialist production and proletarian democracy are "consciously kept in view".

So there's the mobilization of "the masses" on the one hand and the building of those masses on the other.

Two other things need to be concidered here.

First there's Gilhyle who pointed out that "arguably, the transitional method ceased to be correct in the wake of the major defeats of the working class between 1978 and 1991 under the leadership of Thatcher and Reagan. At that point, the objective reality changed its constitution and the transitional method needed once again to be supplemented by a method aimed at building the labour movement, rather than placing a revolutionary leadership in the leading positions of an existing labour movement. This reinstates the minimum programme as a valid programme, because the task of creating a labour movement has been reinstated as an imperative."

However, not everyone agrees. To some the transitional programme remains valid. Today it can sometimes be used to build a "gradual" bridge. The old minimum programme is not concidered but again replaced by the transitional programme. In this case consciousness is supposedly build step by step, so that current demands can differ greatly from the ones written in the original Transitional Programme of 1938.

The other thing that needs to be regarded conciders the minimum programme. It goes as follows. As opposed to the more traditional notion of the minimum programme (that of "classical social democracy"), the Marxist minimum is not simply a carrot (with capitalism serving as the stick). It aims at the realization of "the special conditions of [the] emancipation [of the working class]". This realization eventually constitutes the "diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no wise have been achieved"; i.e. the "democratic republic" (a.k.a the dictatorship of the proletariat) and "the armies of the proletariat which would be ready to realize socialism when capitalist development had matured".

There are potential conflicts between both approaches.

First, when drafting a transitional programme, there is the danger not to keep socialist production and proletarian democracy consciously in view. For example, from the perspective of neoliberal reaction the struggle for the nationalization of factories would supposedly mean an "improvement" in the current level of consciousness. Therefor some (still) tend to demand the simple nationalization of enterprises. However, nationalization is quite clearly a capitalist measurement. It does not alter capitalist strategy. The Chinese case is enlightening. The consciousness that can be gained from such a demand is not a socialist one but a petty bourgeois one at best. It's a reformist illusion and cannot be concilliated with the Marxist mimimum programme (there's no such thing as "state socialism" or socialism from above).

Arguably however this approach is a big mistake in the eyes of many Trotskyists as well.

But to discuss whether a certain type of programme is more correct than the other we need to look outside the framework of the actual programme on paper. Otherwise it will turn into mere abstraction. We need to look at the organizational question as well.

[I quoted Engels, Marx and Luxemburg (edit: and Kautsky and gilhyle) without any reference]

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ But most importantly you quoted Kautsky! :D


The transitional approach starts, as you said, from the current class consciousness and strives to build a "bridge" towards socialism. As a result the transitional approach has a certain handicap: if you focus on the current consciousness, this almost always is an economistic starting point (higher wages, shorter working hours, nationalisations, etc), where then do you start using political demands? In other words: when is the consciousness high enough for you to start agitating for the takeover of society by the working class?

I do not say it is impossible to have political demands in the transitional programme, but there seems to be some arbitrariness in this regard.

Both posts above pretty much explain the purpose of this thread in a "magisterial" manner. :D

Now, I quoted this because I wanted to add one more wrinkle to the TP debate: How truly high or low is the "current level of consciousness"?

One can even find working-class folks who vote conservative "by tradition" yet support radically progressive ideas. [By "conservative" I don't mean neo-liberals/neo-cons but paleoconservatives, rare "Red Tories," or folks who lean more towards those aforementioned ideologies than mainstream conservatism because of typical liberal association with Big Business or because of liberal identity politics.]

I'm sure, for example, that "full, lawsuit-enforced freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association for ordinary people, even within the military, free especially from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement" (one of the demands for the DOTP) is something everybody but the most reactionary elements can appreciate at some level... well, except perhaps for the soldiers on strike part. ;)


First, when drafting a transitional programme, there is the danger not to keep socialist production and proletarian democracy consciously in view. For example, from the perspective of neoliberal reaction the struggle for the nationalization of factories would supposedly mean an "improvement" in the current level of consciousness.

I listed two criteria for a Class-Strugglist minimum program (in between the old "classical social-democratic" minimum program and the Marxist one but intended to lead towards the latter, per Chapter 6). You forgot to mention "reform-enabling reforms" (Hahnel).

I haven't gotten to this part yet, but I see modern "transitional action programs" (inherently based on Krichevskii's framework ;) ) as having at least some demands which don't meet the Kautsky criterion but meet the Hahnel criterion. These demands could "transition sideways" into the corresponding Class-Strugglist minimum demands, such as "gun welfare" and explicit calls for "Tobin taxes."

I would just hope that such "programs" don't contain the usual social-democratic defensive slogans anywhere (especially as the lead-in). :(