Understanding the need to base the programme on an analysis of the objective needs of working people - and not upon fluctuating moods - is the first step in an appreciation of the Transitional Programme. The second step is, as Trotsky put it, "..to bring the mentality into harmony with the objective factors, to make the workers understand the objective tasks".
The 'second step! is, in this sense, mainly a pedagogical one, It involves elaborating a series of demands which, while relating to the real problems facing wide layers, can lead them through struggle to raise their consciousness and grasp ever more inevitably the need for socialism. Such demands create a 'bridgel between the day-to-day struggles of working people and that for socialism.
The guiding element behind applying such a system of demands is not to view them in lisolation' but as links in an ongoing process of raising the consciousness of working people and their allies. Socialist groupings - when small - have no real control over the direction of the class struggle. They have to intervene essarily choose! programme is to be able to select, at any time that demand which can relate to the mentality of given layers and draw them into a struggle • to raise that mentality li 15007 8 917393 misen, prepare These 'layers for further struggies around demands which challenge -ever more deeply - the capitalist system The idea of many socialists - and radicals -that a demand which can be won! should not be raised shows a surprising ignorance of the
method of the programme. Whether or not a demand is won depends, in the final analysis, on the balance of class forces at any particular moment. We can be sure that in the overall process, certain demands will be won and others will not. That is not in itself. key. What is key is that in struggling for a given demand - a 'link' in a chain - layers of people will go through an experience which will deepen their understanding of class society & their resolve to replace it.
Democratic Demands One of the interesting aspects of the Trans¡tional Programme - and one which many lett groups who pay lip-service to it often fail to understand - is that it is divided, in terms of the demands it raises, into three parts. It is important to understand what these demands are, wherein they are different and why they are raised. rate demands (which are particularly mis The first type of demands raised are democunderstood by so - called socialists). These demands relate to peoples' human & political rights which were originally pioneered by the bourgeois revolution. They concern such as the right to free speech, the right to organise in unions, the right to self-determiination & freedom of the press. The original Transitional Programme called for granting, re - instituting and broadening these rights for the mass of people. That was by no means accidental.
eges. These rights are increasingly eroded & taken away as the Istrong statel develops. In Britain today, for example, we face a situation where, over the past decade, Black people have been denied the right to enter the country; workers have been denied the right to strike (under the Tories' Industrial Relations Act); the Irish people have been denied the right to self-determination and women the right to control their own bodies.
Defence of these rights in order to broaden them assumes, seeking to erode them, an integral place in the struggle for socialism. It is begin to struggle for further 'gains' if one is unable to defend & extend democratic rights which have been won over the years. One of the major errors of the left has been a tendency to ignore or 'downplay! struggles over democratic rights as, in some way, a 'liberal' issue. The left have been notoriously absent, example, from the struggle to repeal the 1971 racist Immigration Act or the Anti-Terrorism Act because they are seen as less 'important! than those struggles at an ecónomic level.
This is a basic mistake and reveals an inability to grasp that, at a time when capitalism finds it necessary to erode these rights, to pioneer them can lead to a serious challenge to the capitalist system itself. The building of a mass movement calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Ireland could become for example, a major threat to the stability of the government as the mass anti-war movement did in the USA in the late 'sixties. Transitional Demands The second type of demand raised by the programme are partiall demands, These relate primarily to the struggle on the factory floor around questions such as working conditions & wages (i.e. around the day-to-day defence and improvement of the living standards of working people). Socialists are duty-bound to be in the forefront of these struggles since they teach layers of people the need to organise and the need for elementary class solidarity in the teeth of opposition from the bosses.
While supporting these struggles, however, participating in and leading them, socialists try to broaden this consciousness, to extend it y raising a third type of demand: transition lemands. Such demands - the heart of the pro gramme - question the inability of the capitalist system to satisfy the needs of working people as a whole. While relating to the real problems facing them, such demands pose a solution that encompasses, within it, the need to create a rational, planned economy.
Photo: Andrew Wiard deporte 1971 Immigration Act, April I1th. CRIA demonstration The two most pressing issues facing working people today are inflation and unemployment. It is useless (as do groups like IS) to call for 'more militancy! or 'higher wages! as a solut -ion to these problems. They aren't. In the first place, such calls can lead to increasing fragmentation of the labour movement as the strong unions win claims and the weaker fall ever more behind. In the second place, such calls do not lead ever-wider layers to challenge the system but merely seek 'gains' within it.
The 'answers! provided by the Transitional Programme to these problems - a sliding scale of hours and wages - do the opposite. First of all, they pose the need for the labour movement top the fragmentation which can arise over a period of time as Istrong! unions prosper and meaklanes ao to thamen Secondly, such demands pose a solution that - while stemming from real problems - can help ever -wider layers to grasp the need for a rational, planned economy. Calling for a sliding scale of hours (work sharing) is to call for industry to be run in the interests of the
mass of people and not a profit-seeking few. In other words, such demands 'bridgel the gulf between the struggle for decent wages & jobs and that for socialism by showing that the first can only be won through the second.
These demands can act as a spring-board for yet further demands which question, ever more sharply, the irrationality! of capitalism. To call for a sliding scale of hours might evoke the reply that an individual enterprise is unable to afford it. This can open the way to another demand ('Open the Books') to allow workers access to the secret accounts of the firm. If the books actually prove that such a firm is There are, of course, many groups on the left today who would 'formally' adhere to the able to afford such a claim, this can again open the way to calling for its Inationalisation under workers control'.
The important thing to grasp is that only by a socialist solution can their real needs for jobs and decent wages be met. Deciding what demand to raise at any one time depends upon correctly gauging the level of understanding of the workers in question. While such demands are often raised locally in the first instance -in a given factory or depot - the aim should be to popularise them in the whole labour movement.
the IMG did not realisé that even if 1 abortion facilities' on the NHS were provided,
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with the dynamic of Late capitalist sac lei - it seeks to preserve its powers and its privil-