Trotskyist AND Revolutionary Marxist

  1. Dear Leader
    I don't think that being a Trotskyist excludes me from the Revolutionary Marxist tendency. What you have been posting (those with it as their tendency) has been agreeable to me, for the most part.

    I hope you don't mind me setting it as my tendency!
  2. Geiseric
    Geiseric
    I know what you mean. I think most people here would more or less agree with the transitional programme, which basically defines us as Trotskyists as opposed to any other tendency.
  3. Workers-Control-Over-Prod
    Workers-Control-Over-Prod
    Most agree with the 'transitional programme'?

    "It is necessary for Communists to enter into contradiction with the consciousness of the masses. . . The problem with these Transitional programs and transitional demands, which don't enter into any contradiction with the consciousness of the masses, or try to trick the masses into entering into the class struggle, create soviets - [is that] it winds up as common-or-garden reformism or economism." - Mike Macnair
  4. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Broody, if anything else, most people here would more or less disagree with that economistic TP. WCOP nailed it.
  5. Dear Leader
    What makes the "TP" "economist"?
  6. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
  7. Geiseric
    Geiseric
    See they've never answered that question sufficiently. Misreading that book is why they call it economist, or because Mike Mcnair said so. They think that the world has communist parties ready for a revolution, not realizing that Communists are starting from fucking scratch across the world, which the TP is aimed at dealing with.
  8. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Broody, there are more than enough Weekly Worker articles discussing this TP deficiency, if you even bother to read them. We comrades aren't spewing ignorant one-liners on the subject.
  9. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    After reading "Lenin Rediscovered" I find it unreasonable to concider the "Transitional Programme" economistic - whether "in the broad sense" or not. Especially when you put this concideration out of its polemical context. I.e. to see it as an absolute fact. In between economism and whatever Lenins position was back in 1902 there was a variety of currents. Not even the "broad sense" can cover all of them. Trotsky's position was probably not economistic in 1904, nor was it 30 years later. And btw, Trotsky's "programme", although many after his death adopted or branded it as a programme, was not really a programme but a discussion document.

    Concider the Russian social-democrat Martynov for instance, who, according to Lih (Lenin Rediscovered), "(..) insisted at some length on the necessity of making economic struggle the centre of tactics. True, economic struggle was to be used for political and revolutionary ends." (...) "Martynov's emphasis on economic struggle was certainly not an endorsement of letting the workers follow a putative natural bent for petty aims [i.e. economism/reformism]. Rather, he wanted vigorous Social-Democratic leadership of the economic struggle." [And,] "he claimed, there was no chance that non-Social-Democratic forces could ever [really] lead the workers."

    Whatever you think of Martynov, our task should not be to discard the "Transitional Programme" of 1938 but to keep in mind the following advice from its author: "The present [pre-revolutionary] epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution." And although Trotsky seems to limit the "old minimum demands" to the "[current] democratic rights and social conquests of the worker", yes, even though he seems to conflate the term minimum demands with the term partial demands, demands once drawn up by the early Comintern; by "day-to-day work" he means the struggle for the (principles of the) minimum programme.

    In other words: welcome Circuit Breaker
  10. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    After reading "Lenin Rediscovered" I find it unreasonable to concider the "Transitional Programme" economistic - whether "in the broad sense" or not. Especially when you put this concideration out of its polemical context. I.e. to see it as an absolute fact. In between economism and whatever Lenins position was back in 1902 there was a variety of currents. Not even the "broad sense" can cover all of them. Trotsky's position was probably not economistic in 1904, nor was it 30 years later. And btw, Trotsky's "programme", although many after his death adopted or branded it as a programme, was not really a programme but a discussion document.
    Comrade, indeed the formal title didn't describe the work as a program, but a contribution to discussions in the Fourth International on that subject.

    However, why were the sliding scales of wages and hours raised at the level of union disputes and not at the level of public policymaking?
  11. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Comrade, indeed the formal title didn't describe the work as a program, but a contribution to discussions in the Fourth International on that subject.

    However, why were the sliding scales of wages and hours raised at the level of union disputes and not at the level of public policymaking?
    The sliding scale of hours was raised a the level of union disputes because it had not yet been fully taken up by the unions at that time. The implementation or defence of the sliding scale of hours however was already in some countries a mainstay of syndicalism. This should explain why Trotsky mainly addressed (revolutionary) trade-unionists. Yet, that does not mean it was "not [raised] at the level of public policy making". Both measures had to be taken up by all the "mass organisations", including the flower of the working class: the revolutionary (political) party. Moreover, it was simply the task of the (revolutionary) socialist and syndicalist to protect the working class from decay and demoralisation in order to keep the troops fit for struggle. Trotsky wrote nothing more, nothing less.
  12. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    The reason I asked was because, in order to take these sliding scales up at the level of public policymaking, one has to look at the history of the scala mobile in Italy. (Really) Bending the stick over to the political, for a moment, but the likes of Lassalle focused almost exclusively on public policymaking when raising appropriate demands.
  13. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    I know. It's touchy. The sliding scale, at the level of capitalist public policymaking, could mean the further state-isation of trade unions. In Belgium, the sliding scale of wages was already implemented in many individual (companies, factories) and even sectoral (industries) cases (through collective labour agreements between trade unions and employer federations) in the early twenties. The socialist trade unions, however, were not fond of general laws in that direction.

    Although, back then, the sliding scale meant a rise of pay when prices went up, it also meant the possibility for capitalist to lower pay when prices collapsed, something that did occasionally occure at the time. If the trade union felt itself bound by a collective agreement, it would not engage in open class warfare with the employers. It would even try to avoid spontaneous actions of the broader working class. On top of that, the trade unions sought explicit support from various governments to exercice pressure on the employers. In exchange the capitalist state demanded social peace.

    A better understanding of what was supposed to be the future programme of the Fourth International, can be derived from an analysis of the more elaborated youth programme of 1938. It is a mixture of transitional/limited demands and minimum demands.
  14. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I know. It's touchy. The sliding scale, at the level of capitalist public policymaking
    Comradely correction: Public policymaking by a pressured bourgeois-capitalist state. Even all the individual capitalists and employer associations put together (direct "capitalist public policymaking" via lobbying) are less likely to bend to such than the bourgeois-capitalist state itself.

    could mean the further state-isation of trade unions.
    Why should we care what happens to the yellow unions? As discussed before, private-sector collective bargaining should be a public-based service monopoly: http://www.revleft.com/vb/private-se...045/index.html

    It was discussed somewhere in the Weekly Worker that the party-movement and the broad union movement should stay independent of one another. Inherently there is little political potential in trade unions (Lassalle) because they must cater to the immediate interests of right-wing workers as well as left-wing ones. The sin of British Labourism is the violation of this, despite the preference of this model by the CPGB over the Continental model.

    In Belgium, the sliding scale of wages was already implemented in many individual (companies, factories) and even sectoral (industries) cases (through collective labour agreements between trade unions and employer federations) in the early twenties. The socialist trade unions, however, were not fond of general laws in that direction.
    That's an interesting Belgian perspective.

    Although, back then, the sliding scale meant a rise of pay when prices went up, it also meant the possibility for capitalist to lower pay when prices collapsed
    The slogan is flawed, in any event: http://www.revleft.com/vb/sliding-sc...609/index.html

    A Post-Keynesian perspective http://www.revleft.com/vb/question-r...html?p=2569886

    A better understanding of what was supposed to be the future programme of the Fourth International, can be derived from an analysis of the more elaborated youth programme of 1938. It is a mixture of transitional/limited demands and minimum demands.
    That deserves a separate thread.
  15. Geiseric
    Geiseric
    What trotsky's saying is that communists need to address the day to day problems of the rest of the working class, in order to build mass organizations which are eventually bound together by the same revolutionary program, and the experience it has in networking. The bolsheviks were doing a lot more things than saying "End capitalism," since the RSDLP was founded.
  16. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    In the Death agony of capitalism, Trotsky wrote: "The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all." [...] "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."

    In The political backwardness of the American workers, Trotsky explained what this meant. "What is this slogan? In reality it is the system of work in socialist society—the total number of workers divided into the total number of hours. But if we present the whole socialist system, it will appear to the average American as utopian, as something from Europe. We present it as a solution to this crisis which must assure their right to eat, drink and live in decent apartments. It is the program of socialism, but in a very popular and simple form.

    Okay. The statement above shows that transitional demands are not so much about connecting the consciousness of the workers with the idea that capitalism is ripe for socialist revolution, as they are about implementing socialist measures in a period of transition between capitalism and socialism. (These demands for socialist inroads on the capitalist economy, probably formed a compromise between Lenin and Bucharin, who wrote some influencing works on the relation between capitalist imperialism and the advent of socialism.)

    The sliding scales, however, don't form programmatic demands but slogans. They represent "the program of socialism", but "in a very popular and simple form": that of the battle cry.The only real demand Trotsky raises in that paragraph is "employment and decent living conditions for all". "Transitional slogans" on the other hand, writes the German communist Talheimer in his discussion document of 1928, "in the sense of the tactical theory of the Third Congress of the CI are, by their nature, as by the period of their use, something else."

    "They are slogans which in the course of the struggle for power, that is, in an acutely revolutionary situation, are taken up and partially realised, even before the working class has established its state power, but where it is already capable, in a number of areas, if not yet in a centralised form, of weakening capitalist rule in the factories and the bourgeois state power, and of strengthening its own class power."

    "The implementation of these measures against the resistance of the bourgeoisie, the attempt to extend them, unfolds the question of power in its full extent. The resistance of the bourgeoisie poses for the working class the alternative: either to wholly lose the partial gains again or to continue advancing further." This implementation, however, is still not the concrete realisation of the programmatic demand that stands behind it.

    So I wouldn't want to categorise Trotsky (I'm not writing anything about Trotskyism) as an economist on the basis of a few slogans devised for the American 'Trotskyists'. His Death agony document remains vague, yes (- like what is the relationship between the reformist trade union demand for the sliding scale and the so called transitional slogan? -); and it has some loopholes. Yet, I have still to read his work on the "backwardness" of the American worker in orde to find out more about his views on the programme he thought was needed.
  17. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    In The political backwardness of the American workers, Trotsky explained what this meant. "What is this slogan? In reality it is the system of work in socialist society—the total number of workers divided into the total number of hours. But if we present the whole socialist system, it will appear to the average American as utopian, as something from Europe. We present it as a solution to this crisis which must assure their right to eat, drink and live in decent apartments. It is the program of socialism, but in a very popular and simple form.
    1) Recall comrade Macnair's criticism of this, calling this slogan for the sliding scale of hours a "Year Zero" evocation.
    2) Will workers take kindly increases in working week hours should they find that working the lesser hours felt good?
    3) There are also lump of labour fallacies to consider.

    The statement above shows that transitional demands are not so much about connecting the consciousness of the workers with the idea that capitalism is ripe for socialist revolution, as they are about implementing socialist measures in a period of transition between capitalism and socialism.
    Trotsky was very confused on this front. There are "transitional" slogans, and then there are transitional measures, and I note that you just quoted Thalheimer on this discussion.

    The sliding scales, however, don't form programmatic demands but slogans.
    And therein lies the confusion.

    The only real demand Trotsky raises in that paragraph is "employment and decent living conditions for all".
    And here's a more fleshed-out solution for "this side" of a revolutionary period: http://www.revleft.com/vb/public-emp...658/index.html

    Even that declaration is still too much sloganeering without concrete policies to achieve it.
  18. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    One reason why Trotsky put trade-union slogans and the question of unions in times of imperialism in the front of his programme:

    "A correct policy regarding trade unions is a basic condition for adherence to the Fourth International. He who does not seek and does not find the road to the masses is not a fighter but a dead weight to the party. A program is formulated not for the editorial board or for the leaders of discussion clubs, but for the revolutionary action of millions. The cleansing of the ranks of the Fourth International of sectarianism and incurable sectarians is a primary condition for revolutionary success." (the TP)
    Trotsky was very confused on this front. ... sloganeering without concrete policies to achieve it.
    I won't argue with that. He has definately written better and less confusing documents on te subject of programme.
  19. Geiseric
    Geiseric
    He wrote the TP with help from Cannon iirc. Even today we have a shitload of inflation which only effects the working class, who can't help but support a "wages to match inflation" slogan. Realistically capitalists will never allow it.