The central thrust of the 1938 Transitional Programme focuses on almost all the key issues still confronting the working class today.
• Defence of living standards;
• Development of serious class struggle politics in the unions;
• Challenging the bosses' stock excuse of ensuring 'viability' by demands for an end to business secrecy, and the opening of the books and plans of the enterprise to elected trade union committees;
• Fighting for workers' control in the workplace, and in whole industries, leading to the development of a workers' plan for production;
• Mobilising around the demand for the nationalisation of separate groups of capitalists, and of banks and the finance houses;
• Defence of picket lines and of working class neighbourhoods;
• The fight against imperialism and war;
• Developing local organisations of working class power to challenge the centralised power of the capitalist state;
• Fighting for a genuine workers' goverment.
Recognising the need to combat Blair's right wing programme for managing capitalism with a fight for socialist policies, we need to spell out what those policies will be, and we need to step up the fight for them in the unions and Labour Party.
We need to make clear our warning that while the election of a Labour government will open up new possibilities for struggle, its actions as it seeks a new compromise with the market system will represent attacks on the indeinterests of the working class.
Historically, this is nothing new: it is the track record of every Labour governmerit, each has restricted itself to tinkering with the capitalist system.
Key demands from the first days of such a government will be that it stop and reverse the Tory attacks on the workers movement and the oppressed.
This means demanding the repeal of the anti-union laws, and of the racist Asylum and Nationality Acts, a lifting of the public sector pay freeze, and replacement of the brutal Social Fund loans schemes with special needs payments. Pensions, state benefits and student grants must be increased to reverse Tory cuts.
All privatisation, market testing and compulsory competitive tendering measures must be halted. Tory restrictions on local government spending must be lifted, along with Section 28 and other restrictive legislation shackling teachers to the bigoted values of Back to Basics.
Labour must halt the Tory hospital closure programme, and inject cash to restore services cut in the NHS, schools and higher education. These policies in themselves go far beyond the timid programme on offer from Blair and co: without massive pressure from the workers' movement it is unlikely that any of them would be carried out.
But a more developed series of demands must also be put forward, which lead the most advanced workers to recognise the limitations and essentially capitalist, pro-imperialist character of the Labour leadership, and the need for an alternative.
• For a crash programme of public works - housing, hospitals, OFFICK DISPUT ATU community care, schools, colleges, transport, infrastructure, energy research, childcare, social services- to create new and worthwhile employment for 4-5 million jobless youth and adults at trade union rates of pay.
• For a shorter working week without loss of pay!
• For a statutory minimum wage to raise the income of the lowest paid, enforced by trade union monitoring in each area.
• Reject Maastricht, the racist Schengen agreements, the EU Common Agricultural Policy and EU subsidies to capitalist monopolies.
• Close and scrap the lethal THORP reprocessing plant: scrap Trident and the British nuclear weapons programme. Begin urgent research into the safe disposal of millions of tons of dangerous nuclear waste already created.
• Troops out of Ireland and the Malvinas. Britain out of NATO. Expel all US bases from Britain.
• Stop aircraft and arms sales to the Indonesian butcher regime:
B OFFICI
DISPUT DOWNING ST, 21 arm the freedom fighters of FRETILIN. In theory any or all of these policies could be implemented by a reforming capitalist goverment in Britain: but in practice each conflicts with the interests of British imperialism, and will be resolutely opposed in practice by Labour in government.
We must also look further ahead at the situation which would confront a new Labour govemment, and the forces that will drive it into conflict with the working class. Like previous Labour governments, Blair would face an instant flight of capital, unhindered by any restriants since Thatcher's deregulation. Sterling's value would plummet, bringing a rapid increase of inflation as costs of imported goods amd materials went 110. The new government would also face mass unemployment, widespread poverty, a built-in massive trade deficit, dwindling North Sea oil supplies and a crumbling infrastructure of housing, schools; sewers, hospitals and transport. Almost ali the stateOFFICIAL ATU owned industries have been privatised, on a scale well beyond any reformist scheme for repurchasing the shares.
Under these pressures the temptation for new realists and old-fashioned reformists will be to scrap any progressive policies and dig in to stabilise the capitalist system - by imposing new wage controls, and by offering conces sions and guarantees to bankers and speculators at the expense of the working class.
Only a radical socialist programme offers any real altemative.
• To stem the flight of capital, traditional Labourite efforts at exchange controls have proved impotent - and appear now to have been discarded by new realism. Instead we call for workers' contral of the banking and financial sector, with the opening of the books to expose the huge hidden deals and swindles, and show the need for nationalisation of the banks, insurance and finance houses to control the sharks and speculators.
• Against soaring inflation, workers' wages and state benefits must be protected by a sliding scale of indexed increases to keep pace point by point with the cost of living as monitored by trade union committees.
• In place of continued redundancies and closures in the name of rationalisation, unions must fight for work sharing on full pay, dividing the work available between the whole existing workforce, under the control of elected trade union committees.
• To generate the increased wealth required to create millions of new, socially useful jobs and increase the living standards of the lowest-paid, pensioners and claimants requires an expansion in production, putting the country back to work. But since the capitalist market finds such expansion unprofitable, preferring to divert investment overseas or into speculation, expansion calls for the expropriation of key industries and socialist planning in place of free market chaos. Britain's coal mines must be renationalised and reopened, and other national assets maximised.
• Privatised industries and public utilities (gas, electricity, telecom, water, etc) must be expropriated, to redirect their vast surpluses and productive potential into a planned expansion rather than the pockets of the rich. To build support for this bold step, trade unions must fight for the opening of the books to show the multi-billion rip-offs involved in • The development of a workers' plan for production to cater for unmet needs and create new jobs must be seen as the way to prove the need for a socialist, planned economy. Included in this plan should be research and development into alternative sources of environmentally friendly energy to replace fossil fuels and potentially deadly nuclear power plants.
• Open up new trading links with the developing and underdeveloped countries of the Third World, ending the old imperialist relationship based on inequality and exploitation.
• Repeal the massive new powers granted to the police by Thatcher and Major. Against police racist and anti- union violence, demand the scrapping of the police, and establishment of theory+practice 9 • A fighting programme for socialists • page four community self-policing. Replace the bosses' courts with their arbitrary, reactionary judiciary with elected, accountable figures and institutions.
These and many other policies relating to the special needs of women workers, black people and ethnic minorities, lesbians and gay men, people with dis abilities and the elderly, must be fought for and popularised - not as a long wooden list, but singly or in appropriate combinations where the opportunity offers through agitation and propaganda at the base of the labour movement and in wider-reaching campaigns. They will be opposed not only by Labour ministers, but also by trade union bureaucrats and those who shrink from revolutionary conclusions to the British capitalist crisis.
Our task is to build a current for socialism, a current in the unions, the Labour Party, in community for socialists and broader campaigns, embracing students and unemployed youth, pensioners and claimants. Insofar as the mass movement runs into conflict with the capitalist aspirations of a Labour government, we can gain a hearing and win support for aspects of our programme. In some instances we will be able to tur specific demands from general propaganda into concrete agitation, even make them the central focus of mass action.
At each stage, in sharp distinction to the Militant school of politics, we must emphasise that the socialist revolution in Britain requires not just maximum demands on a Labour government, but a working class mobilised independently, to fight for its own demands against the employers and the state.
Ouralternatives to Labour's class collaboration are alternatives for the workers, to be fought for by the workers. We offer the alternative of class struggle, consciously carried through to the level of mass action to expropriate the monopolies and the banks, seize the power, smash the existing machinery of the capitalist state, and establish workers' power. That is why our agitation for these policies must be aimed not only at the existing narrow circles of the left in the labour movement, but also into the wider rank and file of the unions and as wide as we can reach into the broader ranks of the working class and the oppressed. looks in-depth at key issues of socialist analysis and strategy.
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Document of Brazilian Fourth Internationalists SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 72, November 19 1994, Page 11 "The PT was incapable of putting forward a Lula proposal for fighting inflation at the most
Raising the Banner of Socialism: Part Two. programme A fighting
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