than this: not only does it draw the political divide between the revolutionary fighters of the Fourth International and the bureaucrats and misleaders, it is also a guide to action, setting out a series of slogans and demands aimed at mobilising and organising the maximum strength of the working class, popularising the basic notions of socialism, and leading wide sections of workers to recognise the need for socialist revolution. The notion of "transitional demands" was not new: the Third and Fourth (pre-Stalin) Congresses of the Comintern had discussed ways of enabling the new Communist Parties to reach and mobilise wider layers of the working class, winning them over from social democratic leaders. The Theses on Tactics in the Third (1921) Congress urged parties to:
"put forward demands whose fulfilment is an immediate and urgent working class need, and they must fight for these demands in mass struggle, regardless of whether they are compatible with the profit economy of the capitalist class or not. "These partial demands, anchored in the needs of the broadest masses, must be put forward by the communist parties in a way which, not only leads the masses to struggle, but by its very 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."
T he Fourth International was not to be a propagandist sect, standing on the sidelines of the class struggle, abstractly denouncing democrats and Stalinists and simply proclaiming the need for revolution.
On the contrary, its forces would intervene into all of the daily struggles of the working class, defending all of the democratic rights and social gains that had been won, while advancing also transitional demands - "the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very foundations of the bourgeois regime."
The scope of the transitional demands was wide indeed. The to understand the workings of the economy, and thus to develop an alternative plan to counter the anarchy of crisis-ridden capitalism and its "free market". The fight against unemployment should include, but go beyond the fight for a programme of public works: it should lead to ways in which the enormous productive power held back by capitalism could be unleashed: "Thus workers' control becomes a school for planned economy ... If the abolition of business secrets is a necessary condition to workers' control, then control is the first step along the road to the socialist guidance of the economy". In this context Trotsky argues that the generalised socialist programme of expropriating the capitalist class should not be allowed to stand in the way of demands for specific firms or branches of industry to be expropriated.
He draws a line between the reformist approach to "nationalisation" - in which lavish compensation 1S paid and the nationalised industry remains part of the capitalist economy (as in post-war Britain) - and expropriation without compensation as part of the fight for the "seizure of power by the workers and [poor] farmers".