Apocalyptic Visions, Reformist Dreams: The Problem With Transitional Demands

The Trotskyist left has had an episodic relationship with the working class for decades. This is evident in the desperate strategies employed by competing groups in order to convince themselves they can overcome their isolation automatically. On the one hand groups like the Militant Tendency (later the Socialist Party) engaged in programmatic formalism arguing that by adopting the correct programme everything would go their way.

The Socialist Workers Party (later the Socialist Workers Network) rightly criticised this programmatic formalism but fell into the opposite but equally mistaken position of programmatic nihilism - demands didn’t matter, only practical engagement in the current moment matters. This position was an echo of the infamous statement of the reformist Eduard Berstein when he said: “For me the movement is everything and the final goal of socialism is nothing”.

Tailing the immediate and cutting it off from the final goal is the philosophical hallmark of opportunism from above and opportunism from below. Lenin argued that a party needed a programme to indicate it’s “line of march” - a programme is a series of promises made to the working class. But necessity dictates that socialists win credibility in the working class by fighting for immediate needs but those “minimum” demands need to be connected to our “maximum” goals - a working class revolution.

The SWN will say that reformists had a programme but they ignored the maximum demands and only focused on the immediate - but this is like saying “Social Democracy made promises they broke therefore we can’t make promises!” The so called “transitional method” of most orthodox Trotskyist groups is problematic and represents another break with the method of Lenin. He wrote:

“At the present time the urgent question of our movement is no longer that of developing the former scattered “amateur” activities, but of uniting — of organisation. This is a step for which a programme is a necessity. The programme must formulate our basic views; precisely establish our immediate political tasks; point out the immediate demands that must show the area of agitational activity; give unity to the agitational work, expand and deepen it, thus raising it from fragmentary partial agitation for petty, isolated demands to the status of agitation for the sum total of Social-Democratic demands.” A programme should also contain: “a statement on the final aims of the Social-Democratic working-class movement — on its striving to win political power for the accomplishment of these aims — and on the international character of the movement.”

Russian socialist Leon Trotsky fell into despair when he faced isolation in Mexico in the late 1930s. Trotsky had led the October Revolution and helped to build the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. But after his exile from Russia he became isolated from any real working class movement. His followers were small in number and didn’t have much authority among workers. This was the case in most countries outside the USA where there existed a moderate Trotskyist party. Isolation from the working class always breeds religious thinking and forms religious sects.

Trotsky proposed a way for the tiny sects that followed him to skip over the long hard work of building up a layer of revolutionary workers by utilising what he called “transitional demands”. Before explaining what he meant by “transitional demands” it’s worth noting that navigating the relationship between the conscious minority and the vast majority of workers has been an ongoing debate in the socialist movement for over a century. The Russian revolutionary Lenin always fought on two fronts – to avoid ultra left isolation and to battle reformism.

This did not mean that Lenin was against fighting for reforms – if revolutionaries didn’t engage in the day to day battles of the working class they’d render themselves irrelevant. Lenin wanted to merge revolutionary politics with the best workers – ultra leftism and reformism both prevent that merger by divorcing revolutionary socialism from the mass of workers. The ultra lefts engage in action by themselves or with other groups belonging to the revolutionary minority – a path that leads to isolation. Calling for “communism” from the sidelines makes that call abstract, it means nothing to workers.

Reformists limit workers to immediate demands and to the boundaries of the capitalist system. The only focus on the day to day struggle and refuse to connect it to an ultimate aim. The semi-anarchist call to focus on struggle and leave socialist to sort itself out is a form of opporuntism too, but from below. It achieves the same break. Both cut off the possibility of connecting socialism with the working class.

This is why Lenin termed ultra leftism and reformism “terrible twins” – they act as opposition to one another but achieve the same results by divorcing the militant minority of workers from the rest of the working class. At least Trotsky, even in his isolation, began from the same starting point as Lenin – the necessity of building a bridge from those conscious of the need for revolution and the majority of workers – a majority who need to participate in a revolution to gain such an awareness. As Marx correctly wrote in 1845:

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

The majority of workers can be won to revolution only in a revolutionary situation. But this can only happen if there are revolutionary workers present in every workplace and community who can mediate every societal crisis with clear demands that lead other workers to the conclusion that the capitalist system must be overthrown and only that a revolution can achieve this. If such a conscious minority is not present the result is always the defeat of the revolution no matter how great or apocalyptic the crisis facing our class.

Trotsky wrote in 1938: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution.” This is obviously a task that all revolutionaries should be engaged in – “building a bridge” from today’s struggles to the future revolution. Hungarian Marxist Lukacs said the same thing when he referred to Lenin’s ability to understand the path from everyday struggles to a future revolt using the phrase “the actuality of the revolution” he said:

“The actuality of the revolution: this is the core of Lenin’s thought and his decisive link with Marx… For the average man first sees the proletarian revolution when the working masses are already fighting on the barricades, and – if he happens also to have enjoyed a vulgar-Marxist education – not even then. For to a vulgar Marxist, the foundations of bourgeois society are so unshakeable that, even when they are most visibly shaking, he only hopes and prays for a return to ‘normality’, sees its crises as temporary episodes, and regards a struggle even at such times as an irrational and irresponsible rebellion against the ever-invincible capitalist system. To him, the fighters on the barricades are madmen, the defeated revolution is a mistake, and the builders of socialism, in a successful revolution – which in the eyes of an opportunist can only be transitory – are outright criminals…

The actuality of the revolution provides the key-note of a whole epoch. Individual actions can only be considered revolutionary or counter-revolutionary when related to the central issue of revolution, which is only to be discovered by an accurate analysis of the socio-historic whole. The actuality of the revolution therefore implies study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat. The development which Marxism thus underwent through Lenin consists merely – merely! – in its increasing grasp of the intimate, visible, and momentous connection between individual actions and general destiny – the revolutionary destiny of the whole working class. It merely means that every question of the day – precisely as a question of the day – at the same time became a fundamental problem of the revolution.”

For Lenin, every struggle was judged from the point of view of the “actuality”, the “reality” of the coming revolution. If the revolution is a real future event, working backwards from what will be required of us during such and event what do we need to do today to prepare? This means that day to day struggles must leave behind an organisational and political legacy that points forward to a stronger and more conscious working class in the coming revolution. The revolution wasn’t some abstraction for Lenin. It was a real event that would be the greatest test the revolutionary left had ever faced. It’s like knowing you will be challenged to a life threatening fight and preparing for it every day.

But Lenin also fiercely argued against those who implied that merely fighting on day to day issues would automatically bring workers to a revolutionary consciousness. This raises a clear problem with Trotsky’s approach – the implication of the transitional demand method was that the demand itself would be enough, combined with force of apocalyptic circumstances, to create a conscious minority of workers. The socialist programme was a matter for the future. But what about the preparation of worker leaders which must happen long before we get to the moment of revolution?

Trotsky wrote: “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.”

Let’s look at that more closely – the conscious revolutionary minority should find demands that are compatible with the consciousness of “wide layers of the working class” but at the same time “unalterably” lead to revolutionary conclusions? Demands that are compatible with “wide layers” of the working class are going to inevitably be reformist demands – as Karl Marx pointed out:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

The majority of workers will inevitably have a consciousness filled with ruling class ideas - until a revolution opens the possibility of winning that mass over to socialist revolution, a conscious assult on capitalism. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci helped to develop the idea of working class consciousness further – he pointed out that each worker has:

“two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacity but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity.”

Workers have a “contradictory consciousness” that includes elements of ruling class ideas mashed together with elements of working class ideas. Breaking the two apart is no simple procedure. Even Gramsci simplifies the problem to some extent.

But there’s a problem with Gramsci’s model of contradictory consciousness – he implies that the labouring activities of workers produce class consciousness while the ideologies of the rich enter into working class minds and get mixed up with those working class ideas. But there must be something about the economic “soil” under capitalism that encourages capitalist “weeds” to grow in workers’ minds. Otherwise the material reality of collective work and the ideas that grow from that collective work would just break through a world of ruling class ideological phantoms. Ideas that do not have a root in social reality wither away. But ruling class ideas have a clear hold over people. No ruling class rules through force alone; they must have compliance too.

Marx understood that workers are alienated by a lack of control over production – this alienation leads workers to see the capitalist economy as an all powerful and natural force that each individual must conform to. From the point of view of an individual worker the idea that capitalism is “our” creation seems ludicrous. Everything under capitalism is a commodity – but the ultimate commodity is human labour because it produces all other commodities and most importantly for the bosses – produces profits. Workers are forced to compete and outbid one another for the right to be exploited by a boss.

This is not to contradict Gramsci’s theory but to deepen it. It means that workers’ attachment to ruling class ideas runs deep – outside of truly revolutionary periods – the very “soil” is fertile ground for ruling class weeds to grow. We are atomised and forced to compete with each other. Our ideas are contradictory and so is our material situation under capitalism. Therefore most social movements will begin with reformist demands – because that’s where workers’ consciousness under capitalism is situated outside of extreme revolutionary situations. Even then the progress of a revolutionary consciousness in the working class majority requires clarification by a prepared minority.

Russia in 1917 began with the calls for “bread and herring” and “down with the war!” and ended with “all power to the soviets!” But it took several months of intense agitation by the Bolshevik Party to win workers over. At each turning point in the class struggle Bolshevik demands were clarified by that struggle and they had been preparing for 20 years. They were the first to fight on every issue that mattered to workers.

That’s why there’s nothing wrong with mobilising on “reformist” demands – like when workers strike calling for higher wages – abstention from such strikes and partial movements fails Lenin’s call to avoid the “terrible twins” of opportunism and ultra leftism, it divorces the militant minority from the mass of the working class – it’s ultra left. The problem lies with the suggestion that there is an automatic progression from reformist demand to revolutionary consciousness – for Trotsky says his transitional demands are those that were “unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat”. He clearly uses the term “unalterably” – once the demand is correct the progress to revolutionary consciousness is “unalterable”.

Trotsky says the transitional demands are necessary because of the “maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions” and the contrast between this and the “immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard”. So he admits that even the leading sections of the workers do not yet have a socialist consciousness and the transitional demand is supposed to build a bridge between this confused unformed vanguard and the confused masses. This is achieved by coming up with reformist demands that capitalism will not deliver. The demand is supposed to enlighten the minority and majority simultaneously.

This obviously disarms the advanced minority and makes them not the bearers of revolutionary politics but the bearers of the transitional, reformist, demands. But then the transitional demand fails as a means of educating a militant minority in clear socialist politics so that they can exercise a pull on the wider working class. Therefore it also fails as a bridge between the mass of workers and a clearly socialist minority because it theoretically disarms the minority. Where does the bridge lead if not to a socialist minority? It’s a bridge that turns back on itself and leads you back where you began. Not very useful for actually crossing to the other side.

This is elitist. The socialists get to know Lenin’s theory of the state and discuss it among themselves internally but when it comes to the key fighters of the working class we just win them on the reformist transitional demand and wait for the demand to enlighten them in the course of struggle. The maximum revolutionary programme becomes a study of historical texts spoken about at internal meetings by socialists who get to know what we’re actually for. But don’t tell the workers outside our ranks!

The whole scenario smacks of desperation – he tells us that transitional demands themselves will inevitably “lead to revolution but also to the masses!” Lenin always understood that the real bridge between the mass of workers and the future revolution wasn’t built on demands alone but that the bridge had to be a mass organisation. Lenin fought ruthlessly for revolutionary socialist ideas but also to build a working class organisation that gave authority to those ideas by leading struggle. To quote Trotsky from 1924’s “The Lessons of October”:

“Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer. That is the principal lesson of the past decade. It is true that the English trade unions may become a mighty lever of the proletarian revolution; they may, for instance, even take the place of workers’ soviets under certain conditions and for a certain period of time. They can fill such a role, however, not apart from a Communist party, and certainly not against the party, but only on the condition that communist influence becomes the decisive influence in the trade unions. We have paid far too dearly for this conclusion – with regard to the role and importance of a party in a proletarian revolution – to renounce it so lightly or even to minimize its significance."

He continues:

“Consciousness, premeditation, and planning played a far smaller part in bourgeois revolutions than they are destined to play, and already do play, in proletarian revolutions. In the former instance the motive force of the revolution was also furnished by the masses, but the latter were much less organised and much less conscious than at the present time. The leadership remained in the hands of different sections of the bourgeoisie, and the latter had at its disposal wealth, education, and all the organisational advantages connected with them (the cities, the universities, the press, etc.). The bureaucratic monarchy defended itself in a hand-to mouth manner, probing in the dark and then acting. The bourgeoisie would bide its time to seize a favourable moment when it could profit from the movement of the lower classes, throw its whole social weight into the scale, and so seize the state power. The proletarian revolution is precisely distinguished by the fact that the proletariat – in the person of its vanguard – acts in it not only as the main offensive force but also as the guiding force. The part played in bourgeois revolutions by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, by its education, by its municipalities and universities, is a part which can be filled in a proletarian revolution only by the party of the proletariat. The role of the party has become all the more important in view of the fact that the enemy has also become far more conscious.”

Demands are one part of a totality that includes not only what we call “the objective situation” but the level of consciousness of the broad masses, the level of consciousness of the leading workers and the level of authority socialist workers have among other workers. The same demand made by different groups of people is not the same demand! Demands should be understood in terms of form and content – a social movement can mobilise under a certain demand but the class content and real intent of the movement (which is often not apparent to the participants in the movement) need to be studied too. This can be done without the formalism that only sees the demands and avoids a crude reduction to the content of the movement, that ignores its political demands.

Let’s say during the Limerick Soviet of 1919, when workers took over the city, a hundred students had gathered outside the GPO in Dublin to protest sellout by the union bureaucracy. William O’Brien and other union leaders promised the Limerick workers they’d spread the strike movement – then never delivered on their promises. Let’s say the students in Dublin call for the strike to spread beyond Limerick and for workers nationwide to occupy workplaces in solidarity with Limerick. Their call certainly demonstrates their solidarity with Limerick and might turn the heads of a few passers by. But if one hundred railway workers, key militants in the industry, had stood in the same place, with the same demands, then the protest would have scared the union leaders and made them have to think about the course of action they were taking. They’d be worried about rank and file resistance within their own unions in solidarity with the Limerick workers. Those one hundred shop stewards would have had the means of realising their demands and that’s what would have scared the bureaucrats.

Demands are ideological – in “What is to be Done?” Lenin quoted Engels from “The Peasant War in Germany” on the significance of ideas in the Marxist movement. Lenin wrote: “the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory Engels recognised, not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two.”

Engels wrote: “It must be said to the credit of the German workers that they have utilised the advantages of their situation with rare understanding. For the first time in the history of the labour movement the struggle is being so conducted that its three sides, the theoretical, the political and the practical economical (opposition to the capitalists), form one harmonious and well-planned entity. In this concentric attack lies the strength and invincibility of the German movement.”

Ideas aren’t closed off from the economic and political battles we engage in – neither can they be regarded in abstraction or isolation from the totality of relations they enter into. Who is making a demand? What purchase do they have? Will people listen to them? How is the demand understood by workers outside the ranks of the left? How do different layers of workers understand the demand? What will other organisations, particularly in the working class, do to skew perceptions of the demand? You can make a demand and have little or no presence in workplaces and communities but reformist NGO’s and unions do – their interpretation of your demand can then gain ground. They “mediate” its perception.

The day to day perception of your demand can be skewed by those groups. Organisational purchase therefore changes the nature of your demands. Trotsky gave his transitional method to his international groupings of supporters – most of whom were tiny isolated sects mainly composed of academics and students. They were given a religious text – told that with the correct reformist demands they could summon up armies of class conscious workers. Reassuring when you are small, but religious, false, hope all the same. This led to a proliferation of Trotskyist sects who all claimed to have the correct demands often using the requirement of demands being acceptable to “broad masses” to offer nothing but reformism to workers – it also led to a gross formalism whereby the material reality of a party like Labour in Britain, as a political expression of the union bureaucracy, faded into the background and the strategy for socialists became one of winning the party to transitional demands. The demands could overcome any reality.

The misuse of the minimum maximum programme of reformist Social Democracy was rightly criticised by Trotsky – because the day to day minimum demands became the real programme of the party and the revolutionary or maximum demands were farmed off to a future that no one really thought would ever come – and when it did come the German Social Democrats conspired with the state to murder revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg. Trotsky admits though that the transitional programme doesn’t remove the necessity of the minimum programme saying:

“The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old “minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers.”

There is still a necessity of engaging with movements on minimum demands – for higher wages or to defend the limited democratic rights workers have under capitalism. Therefore he says the old minimum demands still exist alongside the transitional demands. So we have a minimum programme, a halfway house transitional programme and the need to articulate our maximum programme! What a mess!

And as I’ve already pointed out, the maximum demands of revolutionary socialists need to be articulated clearly not just to educate a militant minority of class conscious workers but also to win over the best working class fighters, who are still outside the left, to that conscious minority – all of which never happens automatically. That’s precisely what Trotsky argued the transitional demands would do – “unalterably” lead to a conflict with capitalism. This is a clearly retreat to the kind of spontaneist theories of class consciousness that led Lenin to write his pamphlet “What is to be Done?” In fact it was pre-Bolshevik Trotsky who wrote the reformist Menshevik reply to Lenin’s “What is to be Done?”. In the booklet “Our Political Tasks” written in 1904 Trotsky argued the Menshevik line:

“In the one case we have a party which thinks for the proletariat, which substitutes itself politically for it, and in the other we have a party which politically educates and mobilises the proletariat to exercise rational pressure on the will of all political groups and parties. These two systems give objectively quite different results.” Lenin’s creation of a party of worker leaders who could pull other workers into struggle and then use that authority to argue for socialist politics, fighting to lead a coming revolution was belittled by Trotsky as “substitution” – while the Menshevik line was to tail the everyday struggles of the working class and treat workers as a mere pressure group on the liberals. Over and over Trotsky demonstrated the same fatalism that was evident in the later transitional method:

“Marxism teaches that the interests of the proletariat are determined by the objective conditions of its existence. These interests are so powerful and so inescapable that they finally oblige the proletariat to allow them into the realm of its consciousness, that is, to make the attainment of its objective interests and its subjective concern. Between these two factors – the objective fact of its class interest and its subjective consciousness – lies the realm inherent in life, that of clashes and blows, mistakes and disillusionment, vicissitudes and defeats. The tactical farsightedness of the Party of the proletariat is located entirely between these two factors and consists of shortening and easing the road from one to the other.”

Here Trotsky argued that the economic situation of the working class creates an “inescapable” drive towards revolutionary consciousness. The job of socialists is to ease the path between the objective situation and the subjective consciousness of the workers. Lenin fought this perspective.

Socialist ideas were first developed by intellectuals like Marx and Engels and came from “outside” the workers movement but these ideas were themselves based on summarising the best past ideas of capitalist thinkers like Adam Smith on economics, French authors on politics and Hegel on philosophy but also on the growing body of experiences of the working class. The further development of Marxism as a body of knowledge could only happen in an organic unity or close relationship with the workers’ movement where the two halves became intertwined – they merged - became the “other side” of one another. Marxism incorporated more particular concrete lessons in the course of the revolutionary struggle of workers, for example in the wake of the Paris Commune of 1871, while those particular lessons were raised to the level of socialist consciousness by being interpreted in the light of the totality of Marxist knowledge. Without this tight relationship theory would become abstract and struggle would be blind.

Therefore Marxism came closer to being a true consciousness of the revolutionary working class. But this development is open ended and constantly in need of renewal through engagement with new struggles – and new theoretical generalisations on the basis of those struggles, made in the light of the whole body of previous Marxist knowledge. Lenin wrote that no struggle would develop automatically into socialist consciousness unless socialists fought for the leadership of it:

“All worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of “the conscious element”, of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about “overrating the importance of ideology”, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers “wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders”. But this is a profound mistake.”

This is a profound mistake! The insinuation that socialism would come about automatically – often as a function of economic development – which was made by overt reformists like the German socialist Eduard Bernstein, and the insinuation that the working class could evolve automatically – through mass struggle – into revolutionary socialist consciousness, made by the Mensheviks and implied by Rosa Luxemburg, was the same fatalistic argument. The transitional demand method falls into the same trap Lenin refused to fall into. So does the programmatic nihilism of groups like the Socialist Workers Network, who refuse to articulate a programme for themselves or for People Before Profit.

Hungarian thinker Lukacs criticised this in his study on Lenin: “However it would be a mechanistic application of Marxism, and therefore a totally unhistorical illusion, to conclude that a correct proletarian class-consciousness – adequate to the proletariat’s leading role – can gradually develop on its own, without both frictions and setbacks, as though the proletariat could gradually evolve ideologically into the revolutionary vocation appropriate to its class. The impossibility of the economic evolution of capitalism into socialism was clearly proved by the Bernstein debates. Nevertheless, its ideological counterpart lived on un-contradicted in the minds of many honest European revolutionaries and was, moreover, not even recognized as either a problem or a danger.”

You can’t escape the necessity of engaging with movements around minimum demands in order to have authority among workers and neither can you escape the necessity of clarifying our maximum revolutionary demands in order to recruit to and educate a significant revolutionary minority of workers who can give a conscious lead to others. Without that organised conscious minority struggle alone will not lead to revolutionary socialist consciousness, but instead as Lenin argues, to subordination to ruling class ideas.

Trotsky clearly reverts to fatalistic and “spontaneist” formulations in the introduction to the transitional programme when he asserts that the sit down strikes in Flint Michigan in the USA were a “spontaneous” striving of the workers. He must have missed the presence of veteran working class Communist organisers like Wyndham Mortimer and others who organised the workers in the car plants and planned the sit down strikes. The Communists printed workplace newspapers and transformed the situation in the car plants. As one worker said: “The Communists were our teachers!” The Communists grew from 7,500 members in 1930 to 40,000 just 7 years later, with over 1,000 members in the car plants alone. Hardly an example of “instinctive striving” as Trotsky puts it. A lot of conscious organising went into building the sit down strike movement.

The vanguard of the working class, the advanced workers, is a much bigger layer of people than the current socialist left and this vanguard is fractured, atomised and has not yet won to socialist politics – therefore you have to win them on the basis of clarifying your revolutionary goals while engaging with all workers on the basis of immediate demands that mobilise them – some of which will be very minimal like “stop water charges!” Maximum demands don’t have to be made in a way that makes the left sound like lunatics – the necessity of breaking the state can be explained by its loyalty to the establishment, by talking about the permanent bureaucracy, using every example of police violence. You must have the ear of workers by hard work in communities and workplaces on everyday demands to get a hearing on revolutionary demands.

I would say we face what I’d call a “fractured vanguard” – the best workers are in many different groups, unions, engaged in varied community campaigns and other forms of activism and not yet won over to socialism. I’ve gone down to picket lines over the last few years and met many of the best fighters – they can be long time union members and yet new to socialist ideas. We are in a process of formation and that needs to inform our approach to organising and demands. We can’t just fight to win Dáil seats on minimal demands and then refuse to use that platform to articulate socialist demands. What was the point of winning the platform? As James Connolly wrote:

“The return of a Socialist candidate does not then mean the immediate realisation of even the programme of palliatives commonly set before the electors. Nay, such programmes are in themselves a mere secondary consideration, of little weight, indeed, apart from the spirit in which they will be interpreted. The election of a Socialist to any public body at present, is only valuable in so far as it is the return of a disturber of the political peace.”

We have to operate on two tracks – utilising demands from workers that help us to support, encourage and initiate immediate struggle. But also offer clear socialist intervention within these movements to challenge others for leadership and to win the movement to revolutionary socialist politics. Movements like the water charges were organised around very basic minimal demands that mobilised broad masses – scrap water charges was the united demand. That demand allowed a coalition of forces, revolutionary and reformist, to come together and initiate a movement greater than the sum of its parts.

Within the movement there were arguments between socialists and the union bureaucracy who wanted to limit the demand for a boycott of bills to prevent the movement putting pressure on Sinn Féin. You began the social movement in one objective situation and the subjective intervention of the movement itself changed the situation requiring a re-assessment of demands. Forces within the movement also intervened to shape demands. At that time the demand for a Sinn Féin led left government was clearly about disciplining the socialist left in the water movement and getting the socialists to come in behind Sinn Féin. The call came from the unions as the social movement declined and they were worried about the growing power of the revolutionary left. That demand could only be understood in context.

Let’s jump back to Trotsky and look at some of the demands Trotsky himself suggested at the time he wrote about transitional demands in 1938. He claims these demands are both popular among large masses and also “unalterably” lead to revolutionary conflict with the system. To emphasise the inevitability of success he had to paint a picture of capitalism in its “death agony”.

An apocalyptic backdrop set the scene and allows him to paint denied reforms as leading automatically to revolution. He first proposed a “sliding scale of wages” – certainly popular among the masses but in a US economy booming during New Deal pre-war mobilisations something that was not exactly unrealisable. A moderate demand. Next he proposed “factory committees” – he says that these would lead to the establishment of workplace “soviets” - workers’ councils. Not a bad demand but realisation would depend on the specific circumstances of the country in question and full realisation – transforming factory committees into soviets would only take place in a revolution and at the call of revolutionaries. Trotsky himself had written back in 1924 that:

“It must not be forgotten that in our country the soviets grew up in the “democratic” stage of the revolution, becoming legalized, as it were, at that stage, and subsequently being inherited and utilized by us. This will not be repeated in the proletarian revolutions of the West. There, in most cases, the soviets will be created in response to the call of the communists; and they will consequently be created as the direct organs of proletarian insurrection.”

In Russia what Gramsci called “civil society” – trade unions, NGOs etc – was weak and the workers’ councils grew up to fill that gap. In modern capitalist countries there are many organisations that mediate between capital and labour that would fight to make the establishment of workplace based democracy more difficult and it would be up to socialists to win workers to it. That was Trotsky’s point in 1924. The state would also intervene to evict workers from an occupied workplace. It’s hard to see how the demand for factory councils “inalterably” leads to revolution.

Other transitional demands he makes like the nationalisation of key industries and the formation of one state bank are part of the standard minimum demand toolbox of most left parties. They hold no special power. Then he calls for the formation of worker’s militias! Is this a demand that’s really popular among broad masses? It certainly brings you into conflict with the state. Even at the time of writing in 1938 the left arming groups of workers would have been seen as a prelude to socialist revolution and so it did not fulfil Trotsky’s own criteria for a “transitional” demand – one that is “acceptable to broad masses” and also leads to conflict with the system. This is closer to a maximum demand and particularly difficult once the world war became inevitable and countries restricted civil liberties.

Another demand he wanted his followers to put out was the call for a “workers and farmers government” – similar to current calls for a left government. But he makes some highly problematic formulations to justify this demand. He says: “If the Mensheviks (Russian reformists) and SRs (radical peasant party) had actually broken with the Kadets (bourgeois liberals) and with foreign imperialism then the workers and peasant’s government created by them could only have hastened and facilitated the dictatorship of the proletariat”

If the reformists in Russia hadn’t been reformists then the reformists wouldn’t have done what the, as reformists, did? This is just plain stupid. The parties of the Russian middle class, the petty bougeoise Mensheviks and SRs , tailed the party of the Russian bourgeois class, the Kadets, because of the gravitational pull of class interests. Asking the petty bourgeois to go against its own class nature is a belief in the supernatural. It smacks of desperation and was the type of point of view criticised by Lenin himself in 1917.

The key question of the Russian Revolution was the solution of the “dual power” dilemma. In February 1917 two opposing powers emerged from the revolution – the provisional government and the working class “soviets” – the workers’ councils. The provisional government was backed by the landlords, capitalists and continued the imperialist war. The soviets were workers’ circles rooted in the workplaces and exercising direct democracy. Only one could rule Russia. And waiting in the wings to exploit any weakness in the revolutionary camp were the monstrous Tsarist generals. Trotsky himself knew there was no middle course between the revolution and reaction, as he wrote in 1930 in his own history of the revolution:

““Either (General) Kornilov or Lenin”: thus Miliukov (bourgeois politician) defined the alternative. Lenin on his part wrote: “Either a Soviet government or Kornilovism. There is no middle course.” To this extent Miliukov and Lenin coincided in their appraisal of the situation – and not accidentally. In contrast to the heroes of the compromise phrase, these two were serious representatives of the basic classes of society. According to Miliukov the Moscow State Conference had already made it clearly obvious that “the country is dividing into two camps, between which there can be no essential conciliation or agreement.” But where there can be no agreement between two social camps, the issue is decided by civil war.”

Lenin offered the Mensheviks a compromise at one point during 1917 – to form a left government based on the soviets, answerable to the soviets, which armed the workers, and which Lenin’s party would not join but support from opposition, promising not to overthrow it. There was no doubt in Lenin’s mind as to the class nature of the reformists. As Trotsky himself wrote in 1930:

“Lenin’s bold changes of policy, always resulting from changes in the situation itself, and invariably preserving the unity of his strategic design, constitute an invaluable textbook of revolutionary strategy. This proposal of compromise was significant first of all as an object lesson to the Bolshevik party itself. It demonstrated that in spite of their experience with Kornilov, there was no longer a possibility of the Compromisers’ turning down the road of revolution.”

This is a far cry from Trotsky in 1938 claiming that in “completely exceptional circumstances the petty bourgeois parties may go further than they wish.” This shows that his transitional demands were based not just on an automatic progression from reformist demand to revolutionary consciousness but also on a false theory of how reformist leaders act in a revolutionary situation. The Mensheviks moved further right as the revoution progressed, ultimately becoming the last mask worn by the capitalist state machine. There has not been one single example in the whole of history of a reformist party leadership becoming revolutionary in the course of struggle – in fact the participation of reformists in countless left governments since Trotsky wrote has shown their political trajectory in power tends in the opposite direction regardless of compulsion from social movements outside parliament – you only have to look at Syriza in Greece to confirm this.

The now dead and discredited International Socialist Organisation in the USA claimed that Syriza were the fulfilment of Trotsky’s transitional method: “Syriza’s programme recalls what Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky described as “transitional politics” – when, in a period of prolonged economic crisis, serious demands of the working class can lead to a major confrontation with the capitalist class”.

This theoretical rubbish was everywhere before Syriza went into power and yet no serious re-assessment of the transitional approach to left government was undertaken after Syriza’s betrayal of Greek workers. Neither was there much talk of the similarity between the reformist “Eurocommunist” Syriza leaders’ strategy of the “long march through the state institutions” and the Trotskyist transitional programme. The former Stalinist adherents of Eurocommunist reformism and the Trotskyist left finally united in their pathetic refusal to tell workers what was coming when Syriza won governmental power. Many on the Trotskyist left gave their former rivals cover to enact a betrayal. But others oppose the transitional method – yet even they’ve ended up with the same approach to the question of government. What’s that about?

The Socialist Workers Network here in Ireland and their sister organisations like the Socialist Workers Party in Britain have traditionally rejected the transitional method. But their alternative is just as fatalistic. They engage in programmatic nihilism. The SWN here in Ireland employ what I’d call the “expression” theory of demands – demands should express the desires of the “best workers” and socialists must simply be the voice of those demands. When I argued that a socialist position on left government should be informed by past experience and Marxist theory I was told by a leading SWN member that that “wasn’t the Marxist method!”

But as Lenin showed, even the best workers will make demands that are not explicitly anti-capitalist and although we should engage with every partial movement against the system we do so to progress a minority of workers in such movements to socialist consciousness. There are demands we make to mobilise and engage large masses of workers and there are demands we make to progress a minority of those workers to socialist consciousness. The “expression theory” of demands is a variation on the old Menshevik lie that by merely echoing what workers raise in struggle the struggle itself will tend to socialist consciousness. Lenin absolutely rejected this:

“Political consciousness was completely overwhelmed by spontaneity — the spontaneity of the “Social-Democrats” – the spontaneity of those workers who were carried away by the arguments that a kopek added to a ruble was worth more than any socialism or politics, and that they must “fight, knowing that they are fighting, not for the sake of some future generation, but for themselves and their children”. Phrases like these have always been a favourite weapon of the West-European bourgeois, who, in their hatred for socialism, strove to transplant English trade-unionism to their native soil and to preach to the workers that by engaging in the purely trade union struggle they would be fighting for themselves and for their children, and not for some future generations with some future socialism. And now the “V. V.s of Russian Social-Democracy” have set about repeating these bourgeois phrases.”

The expression theory of demands, with its focus on tailing immediate struggles, becomes an echo of the transitional programme when applied to left government. Here’s how: the SWN argues that while each particular reformist demand from workers may be delivered by the system, capitalism will not deliver on a whole series of demands. This conflict will lead to revolution and just like with the transitional programme it skips the necessity of building a revolutionary minority who already understand the confrontation is coming and the nature of the conflict.

They rely on an apocalyptic theoretical backdrop just like Trotsky did – they say “capitalism is in decay” and therefore no serious reforms are possible. Sounds very like the orthodox Trotskyist position to me – an apocalyptic situation, a system in crisis, the left takes parliament on the basis of a programme of reforms and revolution will result.

But “decay” is a terrible description of a chaotic and crisis prone system that can mobilise trillions for warfare, that has monstrous state machines capable of crushing revolts. No spontaneous revolt will ever take it down. Crisis? Yes. But capitalism can survive even the climate crisis as a number of authoritarian regimes in a nightmare scenario for workers and minorities. We have to face up to the reality of the system we face and the real preparations necessary to overthrow it.

The strength of the SWN position is that they focus on united front movements on broad demands to draw workers into struggle – the weakness of their position is that they downplay the active role of organised socialists within such movements. While the transitional method makes Trotskyist sects obsessed with the formal demands made by a social movement the SWN instead focuses on the class content of any movement – often downplaying the politics of the groups leading the movement and their aims.

The expression theory of demands rules out “bringing” socialist demands to a movement based on our own assessment of the situation. But we have to do it. The expression theory of demands justifies frenetic jumping from one campaign to the next if a new social movement emerges that socialists must “express”. They reject medium to long term strategies. It’s a recipe for tailing movements and other social forces.

Some in the SWN, particularly in the North, call for a return to the minimum maximum approach and for revolutionary parliamentarianism. But they’ve never explicitly broken with the key thinkers in the South who espouse the expression theory. The SWN at the moment is like an alliance of at least three or four different camps – who theorise separately and never challenge one another in the open for fear they might break the outward illusion of unity. But there needs to be clear and open debates on these issues. You can’t complain about the “old guard” over a pint and never clearly articulate the problem with their political methods.

So where does that leave us? We need to engage with every day to day battle of the working class and be the fighters who express the demands rising from those battles – we also will raise demands that unite reformists and revolutionaries in mass movements like the water charges. United front movements draw workers into struggle and offer a window of opportunity for the revolutionary left to get a hearing on deeper goals.

But we also have to actively set about winning a class conscious minority to socialism by taking an active approach to demands within broader movements. To do this both the transitional method and the expression theory of demands both fail. They don’t operate on both tracks. The ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class – finding transitional, reformist demands that appeal to “broad layers of workers” will just leave movements under the influence of ruling class ideas which are actively encouraged by union leaders, NGOs and others. Neither can we be satisfied to merely “express” the passing desires of workers, even those in struggle. We have to fight as part of every movement against this system and fight for the centrality of the working class and for socialism in every one of these movements. We need a return to the minimum maximum approach – not in its reformist form but as applied by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

On the left government question only the Red Network said clearly to workers: we will vote for Sinn Féin and against Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. We’ll vote to allow Sinn Féin to form a government that excludes the establishment parties – but we’ll do it on a case by case basis and from the opposition benches, from where we can best hold that government to account and also prepare the further fight against this rotten system. We should also warn workers that Sinn Féin are moving rightwards fast on a path to coalition with Fianna Fáil.

In general we need to win authority in the working class by rolling our sleeves up and fighting – on everything from damp in council flats to strikes for higher wages. Then use the authority we’ve won to battle the hold of ruling class ideology and argue for socialism. A serious party needs a programme that indicates our line of march and ties us to promises to the working class. As Lenin wrote:

“To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology… for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism… and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”