The "Transitional ProT gramme, drafted by Leon Trotsky, was the main programmatic document adopted by the Fourth International at its founding Congress in Paris sixty years ago - in September 1938. Trotsky had been, with Lenin, a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and had continued to fight on, after Lenin's death, against the decline of the Soviet Union into bureaucracy and the which were imposed upon the Third International (Comintern) under the influence of the arch-bureaucrat Joseph Stalin.
By the mid 1920s Trotsky had lost the battle in the USSR and been driven into exile, but despite Stalin's determined efforts to suppress (and eventually murder) those within the Communist Parties who remained loyal to revolutionary and rejected Stalin's "theory" of building "socialism in one country", he was able to find principled supporters and continued the fight.
Not until the Comintern bad refused to discuss the political lessons of the catastrophic defeat of the German working class after Hitler's rise to power - a victory made easier by the ultra-left policy of the mass German Communist Party, as dictated by the Kremlin - did Trotsky draw the conclusion that the International formed by Lenin to lead the world revolution had become an irreformable obstacle to revolutionary struggles.
He reluctantly concluded that it necessary for the small, beleagured forces which had rallied to his International lett Opposition to begin to build a new, Fourth International to carry forward the legacy of the October Revolution and honestly analyse the class struggle in order to give a lead to the working class.
The Transitional Programme and the Fourth International were both born, as Trotsky put it, "amid the roar of defeats". Stalinism was rampant in the USSR; fascism stalked Europe, and the Spanish Revolution was providing bitter proof of the bankruptcy of Stalin's policy of forming "Popular Fronts" with sections of the bourgeoisie as a means to fight fascism.
Trotsky's text is therefore remarkable achievement, in that while it confronts the grim reality of the period, and spells out the historic defeats that had been suffered, it sets out a confident, optimistic programme of tasks for the Fourth International, based on a continued confidence in the revolutionary power and potential of the working class.
The problem, Trotsky (and the new FI) insisted, was not the strength of capitalism, which he argued was locked in its "death agony", but the fact that workers were prevented by their bureaucratic leaders from feeling and using their strength as a class in order to sweep away this wretched system and lay the basis for socialism. The very first sentence of the Transitional Programme bangs this point home:
"The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat."
In less than 50 pages Trotsky manages to capture the revolutionary commitment which belped drive through the victorious: October Revolution, contrasting this with the bankrupt policies and actions of the various leaders of the working class - the timid trade union bureaucrats, the social democrats making May Day speeches about socialism while seeking only reforms within the capitalist system, and the Communist Parties which, under Stalin's control, had become another means to restrain the strength of the working class, and tools of Kremlin foreign pol1cy.
it the Transitional B Programme even more remarkable nature also organises them.... "It is not a question of proclaiming the final goal to the proletariat, but of intensifying the practical struggle which is the only way of leading the proletariat to the struggle for the final goal... These methods had long been discarded by the Stalinist leaders of the Comintern, who had directed CPs to abandon even the most minimal reformist demands in the search for "popular front" alliances with sections of "liberal", "democratic" or "anti-fascist" capitalists.
Trotsky not only revived the method of transitional demands, but expanded them and brought the argument for them up to date. There was, he argued a glaring contradiction between the fact that objective conditions were ripe for revolution, while the working class was not equipped politically to wage a revolutionary struggle:
"It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily most simple was for the defence of working class living standards through the protection of wages against inflation, with a sliding scale of wages - a demand which nevertheless challenges the 'right of employers to protect their profits at workers expense. A more obvious challenge to the very logic of capitalist "viability" is the rejection of employers' right to slash jobs at will. The call for a sliding scale of hours (popularised as "work sharing on full pay") to share available work throughout the whole working class raises also the issue of who should organise the system, and the question of workers' control.
Other transitional demands take up the same theme, with the call for factory committees to link, organise and lead the most militant workers, establishing "dual power in the factory", and for these committees to demand an end to business secrets, forcing employers to "open the books". Banks and heavy industry were to be among the first for scrutiny by workers' committees, to expose the hidden links, deals and the true scale of profits concealed behind the bosses' pleas of financial pressures.
While it could help build working class opposition to a particular employer, the fight to open the books would also serve a wider purpose: it would begin to train a layer of worker militants tear themselves away from political semicorpse of the bourgeoisie". This lesson has been repeatedly confirmed by events over years, most vividly in recent times by the actions of the British Labour Party up to and since May 1997: despite their massive landslide majority, Blair's team have been determined to keep the bankers and bosses in the driving seat, and to ensure that the working class movement is kept as far away as possible from the real levers of power.
The transitional demand for a workers' government is therefore quite different from the tactical electoral call for a Labour government: it is a fight for the political demands of the working class, which can help to expose the limits of social democracy, to be used "as an antibourgeois and anticapitalist slogan":
"The sections of the Fourth International should critically orient themselves at each new stage, and advance such slogans as will aid the striving of the workers for independent politics, deepen the class character of the pacifist i destroy. retormist As if to underline still further that the transitional demands are designed to go well beyond any parliamentary. solution, Trotsky goes on to spell out a perspective of linking factory committees into local soviets, revolutionary councils of workers' delegates, based on the experience of the Russian Revolution, which can offer coordination and a forum for political debate across a town or city.
Trotsky emphasises the extent to which such bodies, at a time of rising struggle, represent the emergence of dual power, a challenge to the capitalist state and its machinery of repression:
"Dual power in its turn is the culminating point of the transitional period. Two regimes, the bourgeois and the proletarian are irreconcilably opposed to each other. Conflict between them is inevitable. The fate of society depends on the outcome."
So despite the limited numbers and political isolation of many of the Trotskyist forces at the time of the formation of the Fourth International, the founding programme set out a bold series of agitational demands, designed to win wider support among sections of the working class.
This, coupled with the essential principles spelled out in the Transitional Programme - setting out a line of political independence from the social democratic and Stalinist leaderships, up to and including the call for a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR while defending the nationalised property relations