obliged to build workers' defence squads to defend picker lines against violence from the state and the bosses' armed thugs.
It was Trotsky's recognition of the need to find ways to strengthen and deepen the foothold that had been established in the American trade unions which led to the emphasis on a programme of transitional demands that could popularise socialist ideas among even the most non-political layers.
of the 1938 M transitional demands retain their full force •sixty years later, though others reflect the time in which the programme was developed. We can be sure that if Trotsky were writing a programme in the 1990s a wide range of additional themes would be included, notably the fight against racism, and the siruggle for women's libcration, which receives onlv passing mention in the 1938 programme.
The post-war Trotskyist movement has also responded to the struggle for the liberation of lesbians and gay men, as well as NTERNATIONAL Hoped) countries to maintain the slogan of a workers' and farmers' government, which in 1938 was used by US Trotskyists. The section on "backward countries" needs extensive re-working in the light of subsequent developments, though the emphasis upon the leading role that must be played by the working class, and on a working class programme which includes but goes beyond democratic demands which can win from the peasantry, remains crucial in today's "Third World" struggles.
We have seen many examples in which radical petty bourgeois nationalist leaderships have emerged, mouthing left rhetoric, only to turn sharply against the working class once imperialist rule has been defeated.
But these later developments do been revisit the task which Trotsky took on in 1938, of putting forward a systematic programme to encapsulate the principles, traditions, method and orientation of the Fourth International.
A 1998 programme would begin from the same premise as in 1938: six decades on, the key to the situation remains the crisis of leadership of the proletariat.
The "death agony" of capitalism has been interminably prolonged by the ability of the Stalinist and social democratic leaders to contain and derail the struggles of the working class: Trotsky and Lenin had both warned that no crisis would lead automatically to the end of capitalist rule as long as workers could be forced to pay the price.
But the crisis is entering a new, acute phase with the collapse of the Asian "tiger" economies and panic on the money markets.
The task of Trotskyists and the Fourth International today still, unfortunately, limited numbers - is to work within the struggles and mass movements of the working class for demands which mobilise workers organise them, and in so doing
UNL (details above)
Speakers include * LIVIO MAITAN * ADAM NOVACK in Information Centre, Jerusalem)
Entrance £8 (£6 unwaged). and Advance registration £7|£5 of * GILL LEE * SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY (Ireland) * FZLN (Zapatista Front) * TIKUAH HONIG PARNASS (Alternative