Introduction

Finally, what is the programme that revolutionary communists fight for? How do we connect it to the day-to-day struggles of the working class? This is very skilfully dealt with by Leon Trotsky in The Transitional Programme, written in 1938 and adopted by the first congress of the newly formed Fourth International in 1938. Why was it necessary to build a new International?

Along with Lenin, Trotsky led the Bolshevik Party and the working-class to power in the October Revolution of 1917. Both Lenin and Trotsky understood that it was not possible to build socialism in one country, especially in the extremely backward conditions of Russia at the time. That is why they consciously worked to spread the revolution internationally.

The old Second International had degenerated into a number of reformist parties who had betrayed the working class by supporting their own ruling classes during the First World War. Lenin and Trotsky worked assiduously for the establishment of the Third International, which would become known as the Communist International, or ‘Comintern’. Its national sections, the various Communist Parties, were created to provide the working class with the necessary revolutionary leadership in each country.

Unfortunately, in one revolution after another, starting with the German Revolution of 1918, the Communist Parties proved to be either too weak to influence events, or theoretically unprepared for the great tasks that faced them. These defeats led to the isolation of the Soviet Union. This, combined with Russia’s economic backwardness, exacerbated by the devastation of the Russian Civil War, led to the gradual degeneration of the Soviet Republic, with power being usurped by a privileged bureaucracy, headed by Stalin.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, this process began to accelerate rapidly. In these conditions, Trotsky formed the Left Opposition, which advocated a return to the ideals of the October Revolution, to the genuine workers’ democracy of the early years after 1917. A struggle ensued between the rising bureaucracy and the supporters of the Left Opposition. Trotsky was finally expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and exiled in 1928.

The Comintern, having failed to lead the revolutionary movement in one country after another, was transformed by degrees from an instrument of world revolution to an instrument of the foreign policy of the ruling bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

A key turning point came with the victory of Hitler in 1933. The German Communist Party and the Comintern leadership failed to understand the nature of fascism, even seeing in the rise of the Nazis the preparation of conditions which would have allowed the Communists to take power, rather than the total crushing of the German working class, which was its true essence. This allowed Hitler to come to power and liquidate one of the strongest workers’ movements in the world without firing a shot.

In any healthy international, such a catastrophic defeat would have provoked intense debate and internal struggle. And yet, throughout the Comintern the false line of the bureaucracy was accepted with almost no resistance. Trotsky thus proclaimed that the Comintern was dead as a truly revolutionary organisation and declared that a Fourth International had to be built.

What is remarkable about this document is that – as in the case of The Communist Manifesto – it seems even more relevant today than when it was written.

Its opening statement: “The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat”, aptly describes the impasse facing the whole of the international workers’ movement in the present epoch.

The level of degeneracy of the labour and trade union leaders of today is unprecedented. This has left the working class leaderless, and also explains why right-wing, populist demagogues are able to gain traction and appear as if they are speaking for the workers. The responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the so-called ‘leaders’ of the working class.

Everywhere, the reformist leadership of the working class has completely capitulated to the capitalist order. In Britain, the Labour leaders have become a mere appendage to the liberal bourgeois establishment, loyally serving the interests of the capitalist class. The same is true of the Social-Democratic leaders in Germany, and the ex-Stalinists in Italy who dissolved the Communist Party into what has become the Democratic Party, whose leadership is thoroughly bourgeois in its thinking and programme. In the United States, the trade union leaders are tied hand and foot to their own ruling class. The same situation can be seen in one country after another.

Trotsky’s text also seems to be describing the crisis facing capitalism today:

Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth. Conjunctural crises under the conditions of the social crisis of the whole capitalist system inflict ever heavier deprivations and sufferings upon the masses. Growing unemployment, in its turn, deepens the financial crisis of the state and undermines the unstable monetary systems.

And again:

The bourgeoisie itself sees no way out. […] it now toboggans with closed eyes toward an economic and military catastrophe.

At that time he warned that:

Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.

That catastrophe came in the form of the Second World War, with its 55 million dead, with the horrors of the Holocaust, and the generalised destruction that afflicted many countries. Today we are not facing a world war in the immediate period, but we have many local and regional wars, civil wars and armed insurgencies, terrorist attacks, etc., afflicting many parts of the world.

We can say that the present crisis of world capitalism presents us once again with the prospect of either socialism or barbarism. The elements of barbarism are already present in the wars and civil wars, in the famines that regularly affect different parts of the world, in the growing poverty, and with it violence and crime. We have also seen the potential for socialism in the mass class struggles and revolutions in many countries, from the Arab Spring of 2011, to the revolutionary upheavals in Sri Lanka (2023), Bangladesh (2024), and many more.

The question of questions is: how can such mass movements be directed towards the successful overthrow of capitalism through socialist revolution, how can the programme of revolutionary communists become the programme of the masses? This was at the heart of The Transitional Programme.

In a discussion he held with the leaders of the American Trotskyists in March 1938, Trotsky explained that the aim was:

… not to engage in abstract formulas, but to develop a concrete programme of action and demands in the sense that this transitional programme issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism. […] These demands are transitory because they lead from the capitalist society to the proletarian revolution, a consequence in so far as they become the demands of the masses as the proletarian government. We can’t stop only with the day-to-day demands of the proletariat. We must give the most backward workers some concrete slogan that corresponds to their needs and that leads dialectically to the conquest of power.

The essential idea is that the revolutionary party must start from the immediate problems facing the working class, from such questions as inflation, low wages, long working hours, expensive housing costs, healthcare costs, education, and so on. However, it must not stop there. To do so would mean transforming the programme into the classic ‘minimum programme’ of the old Second International, which was disconnected from the ‘maximum programme’ of socialism. This would drag us down into the swamp of reformism.

No, the revolutionary party has the duty to start from the immediate problems, raise demands that offer a solution, but always link these to the need for the working class to take power as the means of concretising those same demands. We have to understand that the overthrow of capitalism through socialist revolution cannot be accomplished by a small organisation isolated from the mass of working people. It can only be carried out by the masses themselves.

As Marx explained, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”. He also explained that “theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”.

The working class is the class that can transform society, but it needs a clear understanding of the tasks before it. The working class also does not reach revolutionary conclusions overnight. The working class enters into struggle over its immediate demands in the workplace, and that is where revolutionary communists must start from.

We do not, however, limit ourselves solely to such demands; we participate shoulder-to-shoulder with the workers in their struggles, but we always raise the idea that in the long run it is capitalism that is the obstacle to them achieving a permanent solution to their problems.

The final victory of the socialist revolution would be unimaginable without the day-to-day struggles of the working class under capitalism. It is through such struggles that the working class begins to understand the true nature of the system they are up against. Over time, and through many experiences, the workers begin to understand that this or that reform, this or that conquest, such as higher wages or a shorter working week, cannot be maintained without removing the capitalist system as a whole.

Revolutionary communists do not adopt a sectarian or ultra-left stance on such questions. What this means is that they do not stand aloof from the mass of working people, they do not belittle their lack of understanding of the need for social revolution and for the overthrow of the capitalist system. They understand that the mass of working-class people learn from experience.

They therefore participate in the day-to-day struggles of the workers, going through the experience of their struggles, and at each stage they base themselves on the conclusions the workers are drawing and use these to raise the general level of understanding. At the same time, they do not sow any illusions in the system, but expose it in the eyes of the masses.

The Transitional Programme has demands that apply to different situations, taking into account the concrete conditions in each country. It has demands that apply to the conditions in developed capitalist countries, to industrialised countries, where workers are concentrated in large factories. It also raises demands for those countries where industry is less developed and a large part of the population still lives in rural, peasant conditions. It raises specific demands that apply to fascist regimes, where democratic slogans could play a role in mobilising the masses.

It also has a section dedicated to the Soviet Union, where the Stalinist bureaucracy had usurped political power. Trotsky raised the need for ‘political revolution’, i.e. a revolution that maintained the conquests of October 1917 – a centralised planned economy – while reconquering power for the working class as the only means of moving society forward to genuine communism.

The essence of transitional demands lies in their immediate relevance to the problems of the working class. Faced with rampant inflation, the call for a sliding scale of wages answers the immediate problem of the falling value of wages. The call for a sliding scale of hours – or for a shorter working week, as we would pose it today – with no cut in wages, answers the problem of unemployment: if there aren’t enough jobs, then share the work out so all have jobs.

However, they do not stop at the immediate problems, but are linked to the fact that if such demands are to be won and maintained, then the working class must pose itself the task of overthrowing the whole system through socialist revolution.

Fred Weston
From ‘The essence of revolutionary communism: new introduction to the “Classics of Marxism”’, Marxist.com
20 June 2025