In defence of the transitional method

Posted on behalf of Daniel Lopez

Hey! Ok, so I've got a few thoughts on this article. But first, a clarification. I wouldn't take Omar's position to be Socialist Alternative's. Not that I disagree with him, or even think that many comrades would. It's just that we don't have an organisational view on the Transitional Program or method. This does reflect a scepticism that the International Socialist Tendency has always had towards the orthodox Trotskyist obsession with programs. Not that I'm accusing the the Alliance of this, its just the tradition that Soc. Alt comes from. Similarly, what I write here is my take. We haven't discussed the article as a group and come to a position on it.

Now, personally, I prefer a conception of socialist strategy based on Lukacs, for a range of reasons that I'm going to have to write up in an article one of these days. In short, I feel that Trotsky's brilliance was as a day-to-day political leader following that as a journalistic historian. His political interventions in the late 20s and 30s are as good as Lenin's in his day. They still define the politics of fascism, united fronts, etc. And The History of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of magnificent. Yet, I feel that Trotsky was never a really  thorough-going theorist. Many of his terms - and I think the transitional program is a perfect example of this - tend towards stasis and are open to fetishisation. Permanent revolution is another example. Lukacs, on the other hand, of the classical Marxist tradition, understood the dialectic the best. Also, I am a big supporter of Gramsci. But this is all a digression.

Now, I could pick out a lot of things with the article. For instance, I feel like the distinction between "immediate, democratic and transitional" demands is arbitrary. Each of these types of demand can, given the context, simultaneously be an other type, or all three. So, immediate demands - defined by the article as ones arising from the economic struggle at the point of production - can be democratic. The right to strike, for instance. They can be transitional - the 8 hour day in a deep economic crisis. "Democratic" demands are experienced "immediately" by the people to whom they most apply. The experience of homophobia is an immediate reality for gays and lesbians. Similarly, they almost always have an economic dimension - sexism and wage parity, for example. And in a sufficiently revolutionary situation, almost every demand can be transitional. Yet, things that were previously transitional - for example, almost all of the demands Marx and Engels put forward in 1848 - can be achieved, or at best, become quite moderate.

But, again, back to the main game: I wanted to raise two main points. They are 1) the issue of context and 2) the question of for whom we are formulating demands and a program.

So, firstly, context. Interestingly, the two major influences the article cites - Lenin and Trotsky - are explicit that their political context makes a transitional approach possible. Both strongly imply that it would be impossible outside a revolutionary context.

So, Trotsky writes: "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..." (All emphasis my own)

And

"The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution."

And Lenin writes: "The present epoch is revolutionary precisely because the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society, and the struggle for these demands is therefore bound to develop into the struggle for communism."

This talk of epochs is not just window dressing or a rather orthodox stylistic flourish. It is real. As Lukacs points out in his excellent book "Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought", the first thing that differentiated Lenin from his more moderate social-democratic comrades in Germany was that his political practice was always oriented towards a revolutionary situation that was in reality becoming tangible. Lukacs terms this the "actuality of revolution".

For Lenin, revolution wasn't a pious dream or a utopia. It wasn't abstract, it was actually something on the objective horizon. On the other hand, in the late 1800s in Germany, it was only possible to conceive of revolution in the abstract. I.e., the actual, real forces that would create a revolutionary situation were too well buried by the healthy appearance of capitalism. This is what created the dichotomy between minimum and maximum demands became orthodoxy. So, on this point, I agree with Omar. Maybe a genius leader or core to the SPD could have avoided this, but its impossible to say. Indeed, the absence of the actuality of revolution has wrecked more groups than state repression. Remember the 50s? Nowhere in the west was revolution on the agenda. As the Trotskyists cruelly found out, the best transitional demands couldn't overcome the objective situation.

Whereas, if you read one of the earliest drafts of the RSDLP's program by Lenin, available here: [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dec/draft.htm], he is absolutely explicit. It is a work in progress. And it's validity is not the product of abstract deliberation, but of the real political questions that face real strata in Russian society. In other words, it is written in terms of the actuality of the Russian revolution.

Now, how is this relevant? Simply put, we can't even perceive the dim outlines of what a revolution would look like in this country. So, to pretend that our demands lead towards a revolution, simply because they logically contradict the priorities of capitalism, is equal parts voluntarism and Utopianism. It is also unhelpful rhetoric because it prevents us interrogating the real strengths and weaknesses of different campaigns and demands by insisting on dressing everything up as somehow transitional.

And at any rate, comrades in the Alliance have never argued that their approach grasps the objective key to some revolutionary situation.

Rather, Holmes writes: "Many demands might appear modest but neoliberalism is going 100% in the opposite direction in every single area. Our overarching slogans of “Community need, not developer greed” and “People before profit” summed it up and our message really appealed to a significant number of people... Overall, in the given situation, our Moreland program was a transitional one. It implied a radically different set of priorities and pointed towards a different sort of society even if we really only touched on this."

At best, this is an argument (a disputable one, at that), that logically the Moreland program goes beyond capitalism. (And here, I would like to note, there is a difference between contradicting the priorities of capitalism and actually posing measures to overcome it.) It isn't an argument that the program is the key to the revolutionary situation, or even to taking mass struggle forward. Indeed, I have never seen Alliance comrades argue that their strategies and demands are founded on an objective analysis of the tasks of revolution in Australia. And well that it is so! As I have tried to show, in both Lenin and Trotsky's view, this is precisely what transitional demands had to do. And as I have argued, I think it is impossible to do this in Australia today.

This is not the case everywhere in the world. I would argue that in much of Southern Europe the "actuality of revolution" is rapidly becoming visible, as it has been in Venezuela for years. In those countries, it is possible to start formulating a strategy for socialist revolution, including demands and programs.

Yet, so far, this is all an argument about the objective situation. The other side of it is subjective - I.e., what is the working class and other oppressed groups thinking and fighting for? In Australia, there are precious few struggles (this borders on another debate, I know). And those that exist are tiny and usually at a low level of politics and militancy. The few exceptions only serve to highlight this fact.

So, there is no evidence, and nor has any been presented, than any sections of the Australian population regard anything put forward by the Socialist Alliance as key issues to fight around. This is a strong formulation, obviously. And I certainly don't deny that the Alliance comrades have had some success (and I still wish you well!) in winning popular support for aspects of your program. But, there is a difference. There is no evidence whatsoever that any section of the population sees nationalisation as a key political issue for solving the crisis of capitalism, or the problems that face their lives. Most people don't even see that there is a crisis of capitalism. And nationalisation is hardly part of the political vocabulary anymore. Rather, what your election results prove to me is that some thousands think your election rhetoric is more agreeable than the other parties. This is good, but lets not dress it up as more than it is!

Now, I'm not saying Socialist Alternative does anything much differently. We decide on campaigns that are intended to mobilise layers broader than our own. And we try to present those campaigns popularly and to take the struggle seriously. But we are under no illusions that any of it is transitional. Take the fight for same sex marriage or Palestine. Not a jot of it is transitional (notwithstanding the fact that a just solution for the Palestinians is not possible under capitalism.) Why? Simply because the key questions of the Australian revolution are not visible. We could speculate, but that would be abstract and metaphysical. And we do make he argument that oppression will always exist under capitalism, so  thorough going opposition to oppression needs to challenge it. But this is just propaganda. Useful propaganda, sure.

Rather, when the crisis intensifies, and layers of the population start to move and politicise, in a dialogue with them and in struggle, hopefully we will be able to contribute towards an understanding of the key questions of revolution in this country. And, if appropriate, we could codify that into a set of demands or program. But that is a long way off. For the moment, an attempt to outline transitional demands, in my view, is inevitably utopian. This is because the context, at the moment, almost completely overrides our capacity for subjective intervention.

So on to my second major point. This flows to some extent from my above comments. The question has to be asked: who is formulating the transitional program, or demands, and for whom? Trotsky and Lenin both firmly believed - again, as evidenced by their quotes - that the main criterion for correctness in a program or demands was the working class.

In addition to the Trotsky I have already quoted, he says a revolutionary epoch is "when every serious demand of the proletariat and even every serious demand of the petty bourgeoisie inevitably reaches beyond the limits of capitalist property relations and of the bourgeois state."

And, in addition to that which I have already quoted, Lenin writes this: "It is not a question of appealing to the proletariat to fight for the ultimate goal, but of developing the practical struggle which alone can lead the proletariat to the struggle for the ultimate goal …

The present epoch is revolutionary precisely because the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society."

Once more, the talk about the proletariat should not be taken as window dressing. The proletariat is not just a theoretical object to be wheeled out to give justification to whatever program a party leadership is putting forward. To be loyal to the actual meaning of Lenin and Trotsky, we have to understand their words as saying that only demands which actually relate to the working class and oppressed masses can be validly considered transitional.

Once more, there is no evidence that anything much the Alliance (or Socialist Alternative) puts forward fits this criteria! Thousands of votes in Geelong and Moreland is the best Holmes can come up with. But this a hardly constitutes an independent demand, let alone struggle that in any way borders on the revolutionary!

Indeed, based on this understanding, no one in Australia is in a position to put forward genuine transitional demands or a transitional program. Partly because the situation doesn't allow it, as per my first major point. And partly because no one has even one tenth of the connection to the working class that would be required to start working this question out.

So what can we do today? Formulate priorities for ourselves. We aren't talking for the class, or even a section of it. We are just deciding what the socialist groups will put their resources into. We all agree this involves throwing ourselves into struggles. We all agree that this at times means leading struggles. And, the relative importance of an issue to Australian politics is a big factor. And finally, we all (although we perhaps differ about the definition of this) agree this means building a revolutionary Marxist cadre. Where we seem to differ is simple. None of this can or should be understood as transitional.

So, all of this argument about transitional demands and methods aside, I believe that the real issue is a little more prosaic. Basically, in my view, the priorities that Socialist Alliance have set don't help to build a serious, cadre based revolutionary group in Australia today.

I was quoted in the article as questioning the local council election strategy, but my rationale for this wasn't given - the selection of my quote was ambiguous. While I still welcome Sue's win and the high vote in Geelong, I can't for the life of me imagine how you will recruit and train young, serious Marxist revolutionaries in Moreland, while campaigning around local council issues. Even the Labor Students I know couldn't care less about council issues. I have never in my whole political career met a serious radical who even knew about local council issues. Maybe I'm wrong here. Please prove me so! But I seriously doubt it.

But at any rate, I believe that it is a serious mistake to defend the strategy of intervening into local council elections in terms of the transitional program or the transitional method! As I have tried to show, using the same quotes as the original article, it's utopian and substitutionist.

Posted on behalf of David Joseph

"This does reflect a scepticism that the International Socialist Tendency has always had towards the orthodox Trotskyist obsession with programs." Daniel Lopez

I think it is a weakness in a Marxist organisation to not have a position on anything far less their "method".

An organisation explaining how they organise themselves how they prioritise their work (ie what is their method?) could actually help those of us who see them as a serious organisation understand their activities more clearly and not to feel a sense of déjà vu as to the mythical IST stick being bent, now this way.

Obviously Socialist Alternative is not the SWP but it may be advantageous for them, just one more time, to actually "bend the stick" and realise that its own fetishism with "orthodox" obsessions, needs to be addressed.

The "orthodoxy' is not some caricature invented after Trotsky’s death it existed with the Left Communists. As there are groups and individuals who have carried forward their bibles (2nd International, Stalinism, Maoism...) so there are others which have carried forward the revolutionary tradition of the Bolsheviks and far from being sceptical about, detest the bible carriers of old and their pale replicas around today.

If they do "bend the stick" they might see that individuals and organisations having understood and worked at defining a program are not "orthodox" and that many even come from the IS tradition itself.

Then some quotes are given: an interesting one from Lukacs "the first thing that differentiated Lenin from his more moderate social-democratic comrades in Germany was that his political practice was always oriented towards a revolutionary situation that was in reality becoming tangible." "Always orientated towards a revolutionary situation" Such a person would obviously become extremely frustrated in present day Australia according to how some see it.

Strange then also to see Lenin's words from 1899, "...written in terms of the actuality of the Russian revolution..." erupting six years later in 1905. How this can be used as a reason not to develop a programme today, a codified set of ideas that the maximum number of people agree on, that organisational cadres can lead with in their local area, unaligned militants can understand, at last why Revolution is needed. No longer need they be made to lose interest through the epitaph "..and the other thing we have to do is end capitalism and build socialism!"

The development of the programme is the educational tool that develops the organisations' cadres, just the current debates Socialist Alternative members are engaged in around the issue of Party and Programme, has benefited them and their organisation has gained from this debate; a debate which I hope continues and strengthens.

Establishing a programme is a tool for Marxists, especially those in a propaganda group, to develop methods of intervening in class activities. It is how it tests those policies, those actions which had a greater impact than just what the group could muster. It would offer the opportunity to more closely involve militants in further developing the revolutionary weapons the class will be need, helping to change trade union militants, community agitators into class conscious fighters.

I read Dave Holmes response first and liked it so much I read Daniel's I'll re-read DH's response again but after reading DL's article Dave's was on the mark.

Posted on behalf of Allen Myers

* * *

I think that it is Dave Holmes, not Daniel Lopez, who misunderstands what Lenin and Trotsky were talking about in the passages quoted by both of the current writers. Lenin and Trotsky were not talking about bridging the gap between consciousness and the need for socialism in general. They were talking about how to do so in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations or, at the least, periods of mass radicalisation.

Dave Holmes writes that “we can expect great social and political turbulence in the years ahead”. Indeed we can, but that doesn’t mean that we are now in a period like 1848 or 1918-21 or the late 1930s. Socialists today should be preparing the kind of organisation that will be most effective in such turbulence, not acting as though it has already arrived. When the Comintern resolution stated that “the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society”, it was talking about the situation in Europe in 1921, not expressing an eternal truth for all locations. That phrase does not describe the situation in Australia today, so revolutionaries in Australia today need to relate to a situation in which modest working-class demands do not threaten the existence of capitalism.

Agitation and propaganda

If masses of working people are struggling for something, then a well-thought-out slogan can help to build their struggle. It becomes transitional, not because of any timeless logic, but because it helps to direct a struggle more consciously in the direction of socialism. In Russia in 1917, “All power to the soviets” was transitional because it connected the consciousness of masses in motion with the necessity of overthrowing the Provisional Government. But if the Bolsheviks had raised that slogan in 1913, the working masses would have regarded them as lunatics.

If there is no significant struggle going on, then any particular slogan is useful or not depending mainly on its propaganda value: does it help to raise the consciousness of those who hear it? The problem here is the difference between propaganda and agitation. Short slogans/demands are suited to agitation, to helping masses in motion to decide what to do next. Propaganda, by definition, is concerned with explaining ideas in some detail.

It seems to me that, under the rubric of “transitional demands”, Dave Holmes and the Socialist Alliance more generally have been jumbling agitation and propaganda in a way that is not useful for the socialist cause. Let’s consider the slogan of nationalising the banks, which Socialist Alliance is going to make a major theme of its federal election campaign. Would bank nationalisation be progressive in the current situation? Yes? Would the current government resist the demand? Yes. Would the demand therefore be transitional? No.

In his first article, Comrade Holmes wrote, “The call for nationalisation of specific sectors of the capitalist economy is definitely a transitional demand”. But the idea that a particular demand is transitional in and of itself, regardless of context, is just wrong.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I think it is fine for Socialist Alliance to raise the demand in its election campaign. But there is no significant mass movement trying to deal with the problems caused by private banking. So the slogan “Nationalise the banks” is not agitational; it might be in other circumstances, but it isn’t in Australia today. To put it another way, the slogan doesn’t really relate to current working-class consciousness. Banks are hated, yes. But most people regard them as an unavoidable evil, something they can’t do anything about. There is no mass movement or campaign seeking to stop banks from doing what they do to ordinary people’s lives.

The slogan’s usefulness at present can therefore only be propagandistic. But to be successful as propaganda, the slogan has to be connected to an explanation of the realities of capitalist class society and the need for socialist revolution. If Socialist Alliance election material presents this explanation, great. But if the material doesn’t explain that, then it will risk misleading its audience. If the answer to evil banks is simply “Nationalise the banks”, and this demand is presented only or primarily in the context of an election campaign, then what most of the audience will hear or read is that the scourge of banking can be overcome by electing enough candidates committed to nationalisation. The clear implication would be that there is no need for a powerful and well-organised mass movement; vote for good candidates and parliament will solve the problem for you.

Moreland council campaign

It is to be hoped that Socialist Alliance’s propaganda for the upcoming federal election will be based on an understanding of the differences between agitation and propaganda. If it is, it might avoid some of the problems evident in the Socialist Alliance Moreland council campaign. Comrade Holmes notes: “The platform outlined in our election leaflet is a mixture of immediate and democratic demands”. That is, it contained no transitional demands, even by the loose definition that seems to be accepted in the Socialist Alliance. Despite this, he goes on to declare that it was transitional anyway: “Overall, in the given situation, our Moreland program was a transitional one. It implied a radically different set of priorities and pointed towards a different sort of society even if we really only touched on this.”

This deprives “transitional” of almost any meaning. According to Comrade Holmes, you don’t have to say anything explicit about a workers’ government. You don’t have to present even one transitional demand, let alone a “system of transitional demands … unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat”. Even your immediate and democratic demands need be no more than what most small-l liberals could agree to. Nevertheless, you can still receive the approbation “transitional” because of what your very modest demands “imply” or “point towards” in a very unspecific way.

The justification that the article offers for this position is that “neoliberalism is going 100% in the opposite direction in every single area” of those mild democratic and immediate demands. But the political alternatives being offered to the working class are not limited to neoliberalism or socialist revolution. Keynesian liberals and various streams of social democracy are also opposed to neoliberalism, or at least offer a milder version of it. They don’t get a huge run in capitalist politics at the moment, but that can and will change very quickly if socialists start to attract a larger following. (And there are also right-wing populists who will claim to oppose various aspects of neoliberalism.) So it is tactically unwise, as well as being untrue, to spread the idea that opposing neoliberalism is sufficient to be “transitional” in the meaning that the Comintern and Trotsky attached to the term.

It should also be noted that the reformist idea that elected members of capitalist legislative bodies can solve working people’s problems for them, which I pointed out is implicit in a nationalisation slogan that doesn’t connect to the idea of workers’ power, appears quite blatantly in the Socialist Alliance’s Moreland election leaflet. “Imagine a council that fights for you”, declares one of the leaflet’s subheadings. Not “a council that assists your fights” or “a council that helps you organise to fight”. A council that fights for you, once you’ve voted for it, so you can go back home until the next election. This comes, I suggest, from trying to be agitational rather than propagandistic when the only thing you can reasonably agitate for is people’s votes.

Communist Manifesto

Briefly, it seems also necessary to try to undo some of the confusion created by Comrade Holmes’ effort to attribute his notion of transitional demands or “the transitional method” to Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. He writes: “It contains 10 demands outlining what a revolutionary workers government would do. This is very much a transitional program, which, if carried out would constitute a huge step in moving towards socialism.”

Comrade Holmes is correct when he says that the 10 points in the Communist Manifesto “outlin[e] what a revolutionary workers government would do”. But he is therefore wrong when he calls them “demands” and even more wrong when he says they constitute a transitional program. The 10 points are not slogans that lead workers from their current consciousness to the necessity of the conquest of power. They are measures that “will be pretty generally applicable” “in most advanced countries” only after the proletariat has been raised “to the position of ruling class”. That is, they are guidance for future revolutionary governments, not slogans to mobilise the workers to overthrow existing governments.

Of course, some of the actions that Marx and Engels said would be carried about by a revolutionary workers’ government were capable of being the basis of transitional demands. Abolition of inheritance rights or introduction of a progressive income tax or free public education must have related to the consciousness of many European workers in the 1840s. But it seems unlikely that a large number of workers “in most advanced countries” would have been prepared to go to the barricades for the gradual elimination of differences between town and country by a more equal distribution of the national population (point 9). It is similarly unlikely that many workers would have fought to centralise credit, communications and transport “in the hands of the state” (points 5 and 6) while that state was still the capitalist or semi-feudal state that many of them were organising against. Comrade Holmes has thrown two quite different things into the same bag and then, finding them in the same bag, has declared that they must be the same thing.

A common thread

Reading Comrade Holmes’ first article and his response to Comrade Lopez, it is possible to discern a meaning of “transitional” that is quite different from what was meant by Lenin or Trotsky when they used the term. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would say that Comrade Holmes calls “transitional” any even vaguely progressive demand that is or might be opposed by the relevant government, provided only that the demand is raised by people whose hearts, either covertly or openly, hope for revolution some day.

If that sounds too harsh, think about what other approach could convert the Socialist Alliance’s Moreland election leaflet demands for “extend[ing] and upgrad[ing] bike paths” or “regular ward accountability meetings” into parts of a “transitional program”.

For those not in the know, Comrade Holmes has a much longer history of promoting what he calls “the transitional method”. In October 2006, when it was still in question whether the DSP would liquidate itself into Socialist Alliance (the majority leaders were still insisting that they would never even consider such a thing), Comrade Holmes wrote an “educational” article for DSP members explaining something that he called “the transitional method of party building”. He assured his readers that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had all been practitioners of this party-building “method”, although he didn’t cite any evidence or even any instance where anyone other than himself had ever used the phrase. The argument was: “A few people will be willing to directly join us [the DSP] but hundreds and thousands will be willing to join a broad left, socialist party — if we can reach them. This is the fundamental idea behind the Socialist Alliance project.”

Comrade Holmes here was engaging in the same abstraction from time and space as in his “transitional demands”, already referred to above. If Trotsky in 1938 said that thousands of US workers were ready to join a Labor Party, then of course “hundreds and thousands” of Australian workers would be ready to join a similar party in 2006. In the real world, the Socialist Alliance today has fewer activist members than the DSP did when it launched that unfortunate project.

I am, however, grateful for Comrade Holmes’ current articles. My recollection of the 2005-08 dispute within the DSP is that “It’s transitional” was the most frequent reply of the majority whenever the minority objected to a majority adaptation to reformism. But everyone will have their own, often differing, recollections, and there is no way to settle something like that. Comrade Holmes has now made appeals to past events unnecessary by expressing the merging of “transitional” with “reformist” in the thinking and practice of the Socialist Alliance. Vote for a council that will do your fighting for you!

Posted on behalf of Chris Slee

Daniel Lopez quotes Lenin as saying: “The present epoch is revolutionary precisely because the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society, and the struggle for these demands is therefore bound to develop into the struggle for communism”.

Lenin’s description of the “present epoch” as “revolutionary” seems to imply that he thought that the world, taken as a whole, was ready for revolution at that time (the early 1920s?).

Trotsky’s statement (in the Transitional Program, written in 1938) that: “The present epoch is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work but because it permits this work to be carried out indissolubly with the actual tasks on the revolution” has a similar implication.

This does not mean that Lenin and Trotsky thought a revolution was possible in every country immediately. Rather (if I understand them correctly) they thought that the world economic and political situation would periodically give rise to potentially revolutionary situations in various countries.

In reaching this conclusion, I believe that both of them took account of not only the economic hardships endured by the working class, but also the question of war. The world had experienced the horror of the first world war, and more wars were expected if capitalism was not overthrown. (In 1938 the Spanish civil war and the Japanese invasion of China were in progress, and the second world war was imminent).

Today once again economic crisis and war are features of the world situation, but we also face the threat of environmental destruction, including climate change.

The need for a socialist world is more urgent than ever. But both the level of socialist consciousness and the level of working class struggle vary markedly between different countries.

In part, this is due to the uneven impact of the world economic crisis on different countries (e.g. Greece versus Australia). But I don’t think economic conditions alone are the sole determinant of either the level of struggle or the level of political consciousness.

Political factors are also important, including the experiences of past victories and defeats, the quality of leadership of the unions and other social movements, and the strength of the socialist movement.

In Australia, both the level of struggle and the level of political consciousness are fairly low. Both need to be rebuilt.

Building a socialist party should go hand in hand with building movements and struggles (trade union, environmental, anti-racist, etc)

Of course, given our limited resources, we can’t do everything we would like to do. In part, decisions by a socialist party on which movements to prioritise are a result of a conscious choice. But such decisions may also be affected by particular events.

For example, the fact that Socialist Alliance won a seat on Moreland Council meant that it was both possible and necessary to get more involved in campaigns around local issues. (This does not mean we will be solely involved in such campaigns, and forget about broader national and international issues.)

The demands that socialists raise can vary widely. Some will be intended to help promote immediate action by groups of people in struggle. Others are intended to sow the seeds for future action.

Daniel says: “There is no evidence whatsoever that any section of the population sees nationalisation as a key political issue for solving the crisis of capitalism, or the problems that face their lives.”

In the short term, the demand for nationalisation is a theme for propaganda. It aims to challenge the idea that there is no alternative to private ownership of the means of production.

But if it gets a good response it could become a theme for mass action at a later stage.

I think it can be called a transitional demand, because I think it helps to advance the consciousness of the working class by encouraging them to question who should own the means of production. But the terminology is not important, if we can agree that it is a useful demand.

Posted on behalf of Narendra Mohan Kommalapati

"If you fight you may lose the battle. If you don't, you have already lost" -- Brecht

I have followed with interest the debate over Dave Holmes' article on the Transitional method. In my 15 or so years of decidely un-Trotskyist work in the Maoist movement, the transitional method of working on the felt needs of various sections and classes was accpeted as common sense across all fronts. The alternative was to either ignore the method in favour of individual and small vanguard adventurist actions or an incompatible admixture of mass action and vanguardist terror alongside more abstract theoretical propoganda.

I am surprised at claims that the method relates to only pre-revolutionary (whatever that might mean) or revolutionary situations. If I may quote from history, among the earliest writers who elaborated on the method was Bund socialist Aleksander Kremer "........Thus the task of the Social Democrats consists of constant agitation among the workers on the basis of existing petty needs and demands. The struggle provoked by this agitation will train the workers to defend their own interests,........and in the final analysis ..confront them with more serious questiobns demanding a solution......" This in 1893! Twenty years before the October revolution.

I cannot comment on Allen Myers' differences with Dave Holmes and the latter's alleged leaning towards reformism. But Myers' criticism begs the question why -- after breaking away from the alleged reformism, tilt towards reformism -- ( I gather from Chris Slee's reply that Myers is in the RSP) hasn't the RSP grown into a major organisation? Surely if the reformist trend was the reason for the decline in Socialist Alliance's strength, the lack of it must have seen a significant growth in the RSP. Or, the matter is not so simple as it seems?

Comrade Allen Myers of the Revolutionary Socialist Party takes me to task for my presentation and response to Daniel Lopez.

What is the context?

Allen argues that the passages I quoted from the Comintern’s 1921 Theses on Tactics and Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program are concerned with “revolutionary or prerevolutionary situations or, at the least, periods of mass radicalisation”.

I think this is wrong for both documents.

The context of the 1921 Comintern theses was precisely the fact that the capitalist class in Europe had managed to achieve a certain stability after surviving the deep popular unrest following World War I. And in 1938, were Britain, France, the United States — let alone Italy, Germany or Spain which were in the grip of fascist dictatorships — in a period of mass radicalisation? Clearly not.

The most general context of these documents, which gives them their continuing relevance, is the imperialist epoch and the ongoing crisis of capitalism. On a world scale, this is an explosive period of wars and revolutions but this obviously doesn’t mean that we have revolutionary or prerevolutionary situations in all countries all the time. But the political situation can turn quite quickly — which is what we are seeing in Greece and Spain today.

What we value most in these two documents is the method they advocate, which is of general applicability.

That is the certainly the way the Democratic Socialist Party — to which both Allen and I both belonged for a long time — always understood the matter. Thus the 1994 Program of the DSP says that a key task is:

How to help the masses to cross the bridge from demands and forms of organisation that stem from their day-to-day struggles against capitalist exploitation and oppression to the level of political consciousness and action required to impose revolutionary socialist solutions. [1]

At the time this was written Australia was definitely not in a state of mass radicalisation or anything approaching it, however much there may have been important struggles around particular issues.

 ‘Capitalism will have to die’

Allen argues that:

… revolutionaries in Australia today need to relate to a situation in which modest working-class demands do not threaten the existence of capitalism.

Obviously a fight for more public toilets in Moreland doesn’t in itself threaten the system. But overall I think Allen’s claim is dead wrong. The Comintern Theses have it right:

The present epoch is revolutionary precisely because the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society, and the struggle for these demands is therefore bound to develop into the struggle for communism.

Elsewhere in the Theses it says that as the mass struggle develops “the working class will come to realise that if it wants to live, capitalism will have to die”. [2] In its remorseless, ruthless drive for profit at all costs, neoliberal capitalism is heedlessly stoking climate change which threatens the continuation of life on our planet. At the same time it is trying to roll back the gains won by the masses in over a century and a half of struggle.

Look at Greece! The modest hopes and dreams of millions of ordinary people have been smashed, despair is growing and the suicide rate is soaring. Wages and pensions have been slashed; the bosses are pushing for a six-day working week; medical care is evaporating; the country is being sold off to international corporate carpetbaggers; a fascist movement is being created; and so on.

The transitional method which we use is designed to bridge the gap between people’s present consciousness — which I defined as one in which “distress, insecurity, apprehension and concern on so many levels is widespread and growing” — and the consciousness of the need to get rid of profit-mad capitalism.

Moreland election campaign

Allen doesn’t like our Moreland election platform with its “mild” immediate and democratic demands that “most small-l liberals could agree to”. Again, I prefer the assessment of the Comintern Theses: “the most modest demands of the working masses are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society.”

Of course, as I stressed in my presentation, a platform is one thing. We now have to do what we can to bring it to life in the struggle.

Allen puts the most contorted negative interpretation on our platform subhead “Imagine a council that fights for you”. He claims it translates as:

Not “a council that assists your fights” or “a council that helps you organise to fight”. A council that fights for you, once you’ve voted for it, so you can go back home until the next election.

Yes, the slogan could mean that but apart from Allen I doubt that anybody would take it that way. But when you are on a mission to prove that the Socialist Alliance is reformist or adapting to reformism I guess you see the world through somewhat foggy glasses.

There has been a great response to Sue Bolton’s election win. Many people feel they have a real fighter on their side inside the council. Of course, Sue is only one voice among 11. But what if a majority of councillors shared Sue’s political outlook? Then Moreland residents would indeed have “a council that fights for you”. It would give them more confidence to press their demands, with a progressive council providing strong leadership and support.

Was our platform as a whole transitional? Clearly it did not explicitly call for a workers government. But if you took the trouble to read the whole leaflet you would find:

The Socialist Alliance is an anti-capitalist, activist party. We contest elections for all levels of government, but unlike other parties we don’t see parliament as the main vehicle for social change. Election campaigns for us are part of our year-round work campaigning in workplaces and communities.

We help to build movements capable of bringing about the change we need: change that benefits ordinary people and the environment, and that can lead to a democratic, socialist society, run by and for working people.

The platform of demands together with the overall slogans (“Community need, not developer greed” and “People before profit”) was a great package in the situation facing residents in Moreland. It was a good example of the transitional approach.

Communist Manifesto

In my original presentation I touched on the Communist Manifesto:

We can look at the first communist program, the Communist Manifesto of 1847. It contains 10 demands outlining what a revolutionary workers government would do. This is very much a transitional program, which, if carried out would constitute a huge step in moving towards socialism.

Allen says I am wrong to call them “demands” and am “even more wrong” when I say “they constitute a transitional program”. If this is the case, I have a number of fellow sinners.

For instance, Doug Lorimer, today a comrade of Allen’s in the RSP, in his introduction to the Resistance Books edition of the Transitional Program, refers to them as a “the first such system of transitional measures”. [3]

These measures are transitional in the sense that even for a newly installed workers' government the elimination of capitalism is a process. It moves forward both as the technical-material conditions come into existence and as popular political support consolidates.

Nationalisation of the mines and banks

As I explained in my original presentation, Socialist Alliance intends to raise the call to nationalise the mining/resource sector and the banks. We think it is very important to make propaganda around this issue.

Many people are angry about the free ride given to these corporate bludgers with their huge profits and low tax rates.

A particular target group for our propaganda about the mining giants is those people concerned about climate change. Meaningful action on global warming is impossible if the resource sector remains in private hands. In my talk I pointed out that:

It is especially important to win support for this call in the environment movement, which has generally not attached any importance to questions of private ownership of the country’s economic infrastructure (especially its energy resources and infrastructure).

Allen, however, is concerned that we will present the wrong message.

But to be successful as propaganda, the slogan [of nationalisation] has to be connected to an explanation of the realities of capitalist class society and the need for socialist revolution. If Socialist Alliance election material presents this explanation, great. But if the material doesn’t explain that, then it will risk misleading its audience.

We have already started explaining our nationalisation call through articles in Green Left Weekly and through Socialist Alliance statements. Obviously a lot more needs to be done. Our candidates will also highlight the issue.

It is worth noting that our draft document Towards a Socialist Australia calls for the main elements of the economy to be owned and controlled by society.

Whether our material will satisfy our critic is doubtful but I would be happy to be surprised here.

Notes

[1] Program of the Democratic Socialist Party (New Course Publications: Chippendale, 1994), p. 67.

[2] Alan Adler editor, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (Ink Links: London, 1980), p. 286.

[3] Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program & the Struggle for Socialism (Resistance Books: Chippendale, 1999), p. 6.

Posted on behalf of Daniel Lopez

* * *

I would like to reply once more - I will mainly respond to Dave Holmes' last post, but in so doing, I hope I will touch on some other issues that have been raised.

The Communist Manifesto and after

The Communist Manifesto was issued on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. This determined so much about it, from its tone, to its specific content. And, while Marx and Engels obviously viewed it as a program, they were also using it to proclaim the arrival of a revolutionary new world-view. As such, it is a much more radical document than most "transitional programs" have been.

Yet, following the defeat of the wave of struggle in 1848, Marx and Engels consciously retreated into intellectual work, until they resumed their interventions into politics, with the founding of the I.W.A. They did so in light of explicitly elaborated and articulated arguments analysing the political situation - what Trotskyists tend to refer to as a perspective.

So, here is how Marx explained the period after 1848 in his Inaugural Address to the First International:

"After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, all party organisations and party journals of the working class were, on the continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labor fled in despair to the Transatlantic Republic, and he short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral degeneration and political reaction..." (From the Inaugural Address to the I.W.A.)

Yet, following this period of reaction - in which, I note, poverty and bloodshed were the daily norm for a defeated working class - things begun to change. Here is how Engels later explained it.

"When the working class of Europe had again gathered sufficient strength for a new onslaught upon the power of the ruling classes, the I.W.A. came into being. It's aim was to weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid out in the [Communist] Manifesto. It was bound to have a programme which would not shut the door on the English trade unions, the French, Belgian, Italian and Spanish Proudhonists and the German Lassaleans."

So we see here very clearly that a different situation, and a different state of working class consciousness calls for a very different approach. Although they didn't use the term, Marx and Engels could be said to have viewed this programme as "transitional". Yet, it was not primarily the program that would move consciousness on, but, as Engels explains:

"The events and vicissitudes in the struggle against capital, the defeats even more than the successes, could not but demonstrate to the fighters the inadequacy hitherto of their universal panaceas and make their minds more receptive to a thorough understanding of the true conditions for the emancipation of the workers. And Marx was right. The working class of 1874, at the dissolution of the International, was altogether different than from that of 1864, at its foundation." (This quote, and the above one taken from Engels' 1890 preface to the Communist Manifesto)

Engels goes on to describe how Proudhonism, Lassaleanism, and even apolitical English trade unionism were receding, in favour of socialism, albeit what we would now recognise as increasingly reformist socialism.

Why do I raise this? It seems like we have agreement that the context - an analysis of the concrete totality of capitalist society and the state of class struggle - define the scope for transitional demands.

Well, I raise it because the context in which Marx and Engels made what could be called, broadly speaking, programmatic interventions was completely different to today. Also, it is clearly evidenced that Marx and Engels took their lead from the state of consciousness of the class, and even so, did not expect the programme itself to revolutionise consciousness, but only to articulate changes that were already happening.

The situation in Australia, 2012

Holmes cites the Comintern Thesis which argues that the basic demands of the working class are incompatible with the continued existence of capitalist society, and argues that it is an accurate description of capitalism in Australia today.

This is, not to put too fine a touch on it, a total misreading of the Australian political situation. The Australian economy - almost uniquely in the western world - has been expanding for years. The mining sector alone is making vast profits, as is the banking sector. The bottom has not fallen out of Australian real-estate, despite something of a slow down. To imagine that in this context that the ruling class is not capable of granting concessions is downright bizarre.

Indeed, they are openly discussing granting concession, without a fight: Labor is thinking (tepidly, I'll grant) of raising the dole, and the Liberals want to introduce a more generous parental leave scheme. And to go further, as Holmes does, and argue that workers will literally start dying if capitalism continues... well, really!

All of this could be illustrated vividly with statistics, but I take the points I raise to be matters of common knowledge.

In the depths of crisis-stricken Spain or Greece, perhaps the situation is approaching something like that which the Comintern thesis described. But not here. It is true that workers are largely on the defensive. But where they fight, the Nurses for example, they can drive liberal state governments to a stalemate, or even score small victories. And so far, the Federal Labor government has only attacked indirectly, via the carbon tax and inaction over interest rates and prices. This is not a situation in which anything even remotely like a transitional struggle is possible. Masses will not be moved into radical struggle by the best programmes.

But what of the situation politically? The left is weaker and more moderate than it has been for years! The Greens have shifted clearly to the right, and at any rate, don't represent anything in terms of working class politics. The socialist groups have a tiny following. Abbot is most likely going to be our next PM. Only a minority oppose government policy towards refugees, and it's a demoralised minority. Virtually the only progressive issue with mass traction is same sex marriage! And even that has stalled. That the news is dominated by mind-numbing scandal after scandal is indicative of the extraordinarily low political level. Maybe there is "distress, insecurity, apprehension..." and the rest of it, but it is not expressing itself in progressive ideas or class struggle.

Anyway, even if I am only half right about the political situation, even if it is much better than what I say it is, the only way to argue that the Australian political context in early 2013 in any way resembles those that spurred Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky to formulate 'transitional' programmes is via an act of extreme imagination.

And anyway, the other ingredient, a mass party, does not exist. All the Marxists who talked about transitional programmes, or their equivalents, were in a position to lead, at least thousands, if not tens of thousands. (Trotsky was a partial exception to this - he expected to lead tens of thousands, which was in itself a problem.) In Australia, how many people are we actually talking about? In Moreland, does the Alliance have more than 20 members? That's probably about how many Socialist Alternative has in Moreland.

Why do I stress these admittedly slightly depressing points? Because we have got to look reality in the face. The moment we start imagining a reality that we prefer is potentially the moment we start the slippery slide into sectarianism or opportunism. Sectarianism lives in its own imaginary world, where abstract formulas, universally applied, hold the truth. And opportunism lives in a rotten world that is made bearable by nice phrases and sophistry. Both share in common a refusal to look at the world, as it actually is, from the vantage-point of historical materialism. Both describe the world in more comforting terms. And both are a dead end that is all too easy for small groups, frustrated with their limited influence, to end up in.

So, what are we really talking about?

Well, I've tried once more to debunk the idea we can meaningfully use the concept of a transitional programme to orient our strategy today. But lets put that to one side. The more I think about it, the more I think that the historical/theoretical debate about the transitional program is a huge furphy.

I think both Dave Holmes and Chris Slee tellingly concede what is really at stake here. And it is not mass struggle. Chris concedes most clearly, both the point about the political situation and that the slogan for nationalisation has no audience in the working class. But, none-the-less, he argues, it could be a seed for the future:

"In the short term, the demand for nationalisation is a theme for propaganda. It aims to challenge the idea that there is no alternative to private ownership of the means of production. But if it gets a good response it could become a theme for mass action at a later stage."

So, it is propaganda. But wait, it is propaganda with an added bonus: wishful thinking. Maybe one day it could be the basis of mass action. But then again, even the most abstract propaganda hopes one day that it could inspire action.

Dave Holmes concedes something similar when he slips into describing the call for the nationalisation of banks and the resources/mining sector as propaganda.

Of course, the Socialist Alliance's Moreland electoral campaign, programme and all, was more than just propaganda. Obviously a component was electoral, and now, in wake of the victory, a component involves campaigning and agitation against inappropriate development.

And anyway, there is whatsoever wrong with propaganda! No group will ever build without both abstract and concrete propaganda.

But lets call things by their name. What we are talking about is not a transitional program, but a strategy embarked upon by a small socialist group. The primary goal of this strategy cannot be to effect any sort of transition. It would be dangerous to imagine you could even build a mass movement. Rather, the main goal is to build your profile by convincing people through words and deeds. This is what every group in Australia is limited to at this stage.

The only transition that will happen is that you might convince a few people of socialism. Good for you. But then, don't we all do that?

The issue is that by calling this a transitional method, I believe you are trying to give what is quite a moderate orientation a revolutionary veneer. And as I have said before, I can't for the life of me see how you could possibly build a serious Marxist group around local council issues.

Socialism in one council?

Last time I raised this, I was met with righteous incredulity. How could I possibly discount the struggle in the suburbs, where most people spend most of their lives?! (NB, I live in Preston, shop at the market, and I voted for Sue Bolton!)

Well, I don't discount the suburbs. But then, I also don't discount the struggle in the docks and mines. But I don't notice the Alliance prioritising work in the docks and mines. I also don't discount the struggle in the armed forces. But I don't notice you doing any work there either.

So, if we are being serious, we have to admit that small groups make choices about where to orient. My group has, for years, oriented, on balance, more towards campus work. For a range of detailed reasons, we have been gradually shifting away from this. I'd say our day to day work is now roughly split three ways: into campaigns, into the campuses and into those workplaces where we have concentrations of members. Overarching all this is a routine of stalls, meetings, educational work, and of course our Marxism conference (which I am delighted has been opened up to Socialist Alliance comrades!).

For us, it all feeds together; we meet a variety of people in a variety of locations, and we convince them, via Marxist education and via our interventions into campaigns, that we are a group worth taking seriously.

I'm not saying we get it all right, and I'm not saying the Alliance gets it all wrong. But when we embark on a new campaign or orientation, we have a clear headed discussion of the merits and drawbacks. As I hope I've made clear, the rhetoric about transitional methods gets in the road of this.

So, back to Moreland. I have my doubts still. Let me take a guess. At the meeting in Coburg over inappropriate development, I think I noticed on Facebook that something like 60 attended. Well done! But, how many people were under 30? Were there more than 5 under 30, who weren't your members? I will buy you a beer if you can honestly say there were. Why do I guess this? It stands to reason that the main people concerned about inappropriate development will be homeowners with a vested interest in the area. All the young people in Coburg rent (I should know, I did for a few years).

And what about the political dynamic? I can imagine that you would encounter and foster some bitterness towards Labor through this campaign, that's true. But do you really think that opposition to inappropriate development pushes people towards an anti-capitalist world view? The obvious answer to inappropriate development is better regulation. OK, I admit, soviets would be better regulators of local development than bourgeois institutions! But I suspect you will have a harder time convincing Morelanders of that than me.

So, do you really think that you will build a Marxist cadre in a politically quite moderate campaign whose main audience are homeowners approaching (or past) middle age? Or any other local council issue, for that matter. Indeed, I am worried that you will burn your existing cadre out by insisting they spend hour upon boring hour learning and agitating about bike paths, etc. At least in Yarra there is the looming issue of public housing to fight about. But nothing even close exists in Moreland.

Now, I would like to anticipate a response. Of course, building a group is not the only reason for orienting to a campaign. Only a sectarian would say that. No socialist group will be built without selflessly supporting campaigns and struggles. But, when we are small as we are, sometimes we have to pick our battles. And it makes sense to pick those battles which the most help to build revolutionary groups. Until such a time as we are big enough to fight on all fronts.

This is straight forward, but understanding this point is the difference between being a Leninist, committed to building a revolutionary Marxist party, and a movementist who tails behind struggle after struggle, only to end exhausted.

Anyway, I hope I haven't been to blunt. So maybe I'll end by reiterating my enthusiasm for the growing culture of debate on the Australian far left... For too long, these conversations have been left unsaid. And short of convincing people, the experience and process is beneficial in itself.

Acknowledgement:

I got most of the quotes I used about the Communist Manifesto and the founding of the First International from Karl Korsch's excellent Marxism and Philosophy, specifically the essay on the Marxism of the First International. Amongst other points, it stresses the same point I make about context. Korsch's work can be read as an attempt to historicise Marxism itself.

Comrade Daniel Lopez’s second response has the merit of making even clearer his view of how a socialist organisation should orient itself politically. Obviously we have a number of disagreements. But I do agree with Daniel’s “enthusiasm for the growing culture of debate on the Australian far left … For too long, these conversations have been left unsaid.” If we can have a real dialogue, that has to be a step forward. It is certainly a precondition for unity, although not in itself a guarantee.

Marx and Engels

In his section on the Communist Manifesto and the First International, Daniel stresses that the context in each case “was completely different to today”. But who is arguing against this? The situation in Russia in 1917 was also different to today but we can still draw some useful lessons from the revolution there.

The important thing is that Marx and Engels also used a method which is applicable today. For instance, in regard to his 1864 Inaugural Address to the First International,[1] Marx later wrote to Engels: “It will take time before the reawakened movement allows the old boldness of speech. It will be necessary to be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo [firm in action, gentle in manner].”[2] Dare I say it, this is an example of a transitional approach: the form of the message is adapted to the state of consciousness of the masses.

Daniel is keen to stress that a program by itself does not revolutionise consciousness.

Also, it is clearly evidenced that Marx and Engels took their lead from the state of consciousness of the class, and even so, did not expect the program itself to revolutionise consciousness, but only to articulate changes that were already happening.

Popular consciousness is shaped, in the first place, by capitalism and its crises. This is not in dispute. But how should we develop our program? Our demands are a tool which we use to relate to people. Their basic content should be formulated according to the objective situation, but the form of presentation must take account of the state of popular consciousness. The more skilfully we can present our ideas, the better will we succeed in catching people’s attention. But nothing will happen without strenuous effort on our part.

What period are we in?

Daniel takes issue with my assessment of where things are at in Australia today.

The Australian economy — almost uniquely in the western world — has been expanding for years. The mining sector alone is making vast profits, as is the banking sector. The bottom has not fallen out of Australian real estate, despite something of a slow down. To imagine that in this context that the ruling class is not capable of granting concessions is downright bizarre.

I think this is a very superficial way of looking at what is going on. The description I gave is much more concrete:

What is the objective situation in Australia today? Neoliberal capitalism is pushing on all fronts to roll back the gains made by the working class over the last 150 years or so. Everything is under threat or actual attack: the environment on which we depend for life itself; people’s wages and conditions; the conditions of life in the cities (public transport, education, healthcare, the amenity of life in the suburbs); welfare (for the old, the sick, people with disabilities, the unemployed). By scapegoating refugees and Muslims our rulers are fostering deep divisions in the community. Our civil liberties are being eroded. We are a dependable cog in the US war drive. And so on.

Are we in a revolutionary situation? Obviously not. But “distress, insecurity, apprehension and concern on so many levels is widespread and growing”. The concessions that maintained social peace in the postwar period are inexorably being dismantled (that’s what neoliberalism is about) and we can expect great social and political turbulence in the years ahead. In some countries (e.g., Greece, Spain, Egypt) the situation is explosive, but not yet revolutionary.

The Australian economy might well be doing better than those of most other advanced capitalist countries. But still the welfare state is being rolled back on all fronts. It was a product of three things: pressure from below by generations scarred by the Great Depression; the postwar boom; and the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. That’s all changed now and the welfare state is not coming back.

Daniel mentions the real estate boom. Are we supposed to feel good about this? It is a disaster for ordinary people. As prices rise the dream of buying your own home recedes for more and more people. And those who do achieve home “ownership” via a mortgage are in an increasingly tenuous position as job security is held hostage to capitalist restructuring and the inexorable growth of casualisation, deregulation and outsourcing.

Of course, the capitalist class may concede something here and there. Daniel mentions the talk of an increase in the dole. Obviously an extra $30 or $50 per week would slightly ease the desperate situation of the unemployed. But it won’t change the basic reality that being out of work in Australia is a grim business with a host of soul-destroying consequences for those affected.

The mining boom has generated vast wealth but is it really lifting the quality of life of a big section of the working class? I don’t think so. A small layer of workers may get a high gross income but the dominant fly-in-fly-out work regime has a terrible effect on relationships and family life. And often these workers are forced to pay huge rents. Moreover, the effect on ordinary people in the mining towns is dire: rents soar out of reach, services collapse, and community breaks down as a rootless itinerant population swamps the locals.

The main beneficiaries of the mining boom are the mining capitalists. In theory the wealth below the surface belongs to all of us but the mining corporations pay minimal royalties and make huge profits. That’s one reason Socialist Alliance has decided to use the election period to raise the call for nationalising the mining-resource sector under community control.

What ordinary person feels confident about the future? Fewer and fewer, I would suggest.

(So far, I have said nothing about climate change. Yet this is fast becoming the major issue — the framework in which all other issues will unfold. I will deal with it below.)

The validity of the transitional method

Daniel says that:

This is not a situation in which anything even remotely like a transitional struggle is possible. Masses will not be moved into radical struggle by the best programs.

He appears to think that unless the struggle has reached a certain stage or an organisation is large enough, a transitional approach is not relevant. But it is clear that even in quiet times, even for a small organisation, this is the method we should use. In fact, unless we retreat to simply making abstract propaganda for socialism, what other method can we use?

In 1940, for example, before the United States had entered World War II, Trotsky had discussions in Mexico with leaders of the Socialist Workers Party on the so-called “Proletarian Military Policy”.[3] In a situation where conscription was overwhelmingly accepted by the working class (because of its fear and hatred of Hitlerism), this was an attempt to draw the class line inside the imperialist military machine. Demands included the right of soldiers to be able to express political opinions, for military training to be carried out under trade union control, and for soldiers to be able to elect their officers.

The Proletarian Military Policy never went beyond a campaign of propaganda and had little impact but it showed Trotsky’s dynamic concept of revolutionary politics, always trying to formulate our basic ideas in a way in which they might achieve some traction in popular consciousness.

We can’t simply enunciate the timeless truths of socialism. We have to get out there and find the ways to insert ourselves into real live politics and have an impact on the consciousness of people.

Municipal work

I think Daniel’s comments on socialist involvement in municipal struggles are dead wrong.

In the case of the Socialist Alliance campaign in Moreland, not surprisingly, we did not expect to win. While we took the development of our platform very seriously, we would be the last to deny that our victory involved a level of accident. But now Sue is a councillor and we are doing all we can to act on our platform demands where that is possible.

Daniel argues:

But do you really think that opposition to inappropriate development pushes people towards an anticapitalist world view?

… do you really think that you will build a Marxist cadre in a politically quite moderate campaign whose main audience are homeowners approaching (or past) middle age? Or any other local council issue, for that matter.

The profit-crazed developer feeding frenzy across Melbourne’s suburbs is one more example of corporate greed versus the needs of the community. That’s why a lot of residents related to our campaign message in Moreland and Geelong. And, yes, for some people involvement in such struggles can be a step in a journey towards “an anticapitalist world view”.

Daniel says that the “obvious answer to inappropriate development is better regulation”. Well, fine, except that most councils are not regulating the developers but are instead accommodating to their ceaseless and remorseless pressure. And when a council actually does oppose a particular development, the state government or VCAT is likely to overrule it. What can be done about this? Only the development of more and more massive and determined campaigns to assert the rights of the community over private greed.

All this is part of the struggle for a different future. Will Daniel’s “Marxist cadre” come out of such campaigns? Perhaps he attaches a different meaning to the term. For us, socialist activists will come out of real struggles. They are not produced on some academic assembly line. Theoretical knowledge is fine but unless it helps us relate to, and become involved in the real fight going on in society it will remain abstract and rather beside the point.

Daniel’s deconstruction of the Coburg residents’ meeting is false. As far as I can see the single biggest age cohort in the campaign is people in their thirties. They are trying to build a life in the area but then the neoliberal juggernaut bears down on them — as it does in so many other realms of the lives of ordinary people. But in any case, socialists support the campaign and are involved in it and we shall see what happens.

What should socialists be doing?

Daniel says:

… if we are being serious, we have to admit that small groups make choices about where to orient.

Socialist Alliance makes choices too. We also try to prioritise our work. But socialist groups still have to justify the choices we make. The possibilities of recruitment is one criterion but it can’t be the only one and certainly not the main one.

For instance, socialists simply must be involved in the refugee movement, irrespective of the immediate recruitment possibilities. It would be unthinkable not to be involved.

I think Socialist Alternative’s activity is heavily skewed towards a propagandistic approach and recruitment based on this. To my mind this is what explains the hostility of Omar and Daniel towards the very idea of a transitional method.

This leads to two very serious gaps in Socialist Alternative’s activity: the organisation does not stand in elections and does not relate in any meaningful way to the issue of climate change.

Socialists should run in elections

Socialist Alternative says it is not opposed to running in elections in principle but the time is not right for them. In fact, it has never stood in elections. The old International Socialist Organisation, from which Socialist Alternative split in 1995, also never stood (except when part of Socialist Alliance). I think this is a serious failing, especially in today’s political situation.

I do not accept the argument that the organisation is too small to do it. Within the limits set by our limited financial and activist resources, Socialist Alliance has always stood in state and federal elections and sometimes in council elections. (The old Democratic Socialist Party, to which I belonged, first stood in the 1975 federal Whitlam dismissal election and regularly thereafter.)

We are not electoralists but elections are an absolutely invaluable means of getting socialist politics out to a wider audience. Socialist participation in elections allows us to reach out to people and to measure our forces. It forces us to refine our message and to couch it in a transitional form. When we stand we can’t simply say socialism will be superior to capitalism. We have to put forward a transitional approach, with a mixture of basic and intermediate demands, linking the problems people face with the need for a workers government and the reorganisation of society.

An obvious step towards great unity on the left would be some sort of united socialist ticket in state or federal elections. Done properly it could arouse real enthusiasm and have an impact, especially on left-leaning Greens supporters. And it could be an important step along the road to an eventual uniting of left forces in a common organisation.

Socialists must help build climate movement

This brings me to the issue of global warming and climate change. As the perspectives document adopted by the Socialist Alliance at its January 2013 conference states:

47. A defining feature of politics today is the refusal of the capitalist class and its political representatives to confront the global climate crisis. Their wilful negligence promises to devastate nature, kill most of humanity and reduce civilisation to scattered remnants. The Socialist Alliance does not believe this refusal is due to ignorance or chance. It stems from the fundamental need of capitalism to prioritise near-term private profit — even when the eventual cost to the system is its own destruction.[4]

This is what the recently adopted Socialist Alternative Declaration of Principles says:

9. Capitalist exploitation of the working class and the natural world has created a situation where the profit system threatens the habitability of the planet. We oppose attempts to halt climate change and environmental destruction through measures that place the burden on working class people and the poor. We instead demand fundamental social and political change that directly challenges the interests of the ruling class. The environmental crisis can only be solved under socialism, where the interests of people and the planet are not counterposed. [5]

As far as it goes, I agree with these individual points but nevertheless for a socialist group this paragraph is absolutely and totally inadequate and completely unconvincing. We need a transitional approach here. We need to be involved in the movement. Readers can check out the Socialist Alliance Perspectives document (points 47 to 55).

55. As a party with no commitment to defending capitalist interests, the Socialist Alliance makes the fight to preserve the climate, along with the rest of the environment, a vital thread running through all its activities. We use our media to tell the truth about the climate emergency, and to publicise the actions of environmental campaigners. We organise our members to support and take the lead in campaigns to halt climate-damaging industries such as coal-seam gas and other fossil fuels. We support campaigns to build clean, zero-carbon-emissions alternatives to current industry and agriculture. We support campaigns that explicitly target the fossil fuel industry as a “rogue” industry, such as the fossil fuel divestment campaign. Struggles such as these help generate alliances between farmers, environmentalists, unionists and urban communities, breaking down divisions between country and city and between communities and individuals. They provide an opportunity for socialist ideas to reach beyond the urban centres, challenging the politics of conservative populism in the suburbs and in the bush.[5]

Also relevant is the Socialist Alliance Climate Change Charter.[6] Obviously this is work in progress but I think it is a very good start.

We are involved in the climate arena and are always looking for openings for activity and dialogue with serious people and forces around issues and campaigns.

To my knowledge Socialist Alternative is not involved in the climate movement and does not even comment on the issue in any serious way. Why is this? We are talking about most of the world’s population perishing and serious problems are already apparent (in Australia: heatwaves, bushfires, floods and hurricanes and the consequences that flow from these).

This seems definitely to be an issue where applying Daniel’s recruitment-is-the-top-priority criterion leads to a big mistake. Actually, I think serious efforts around this issue are not only essential but can win people to the socialist cause. But if we restrict ourselves to simply saying that socialism will solve the issue, then we won’t make much headway.

If Socialist Alternative could join with us in our efforts here that would be a major gain and would be a very big step along the road to socialist unity and a big expansion of the socialist movement.

Notes

1. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm.

2. Marx to Engels in Manchester, November 4, 1864, Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers; Moscow, 1975), p. 140.

3. See, for example, James P. Cannon, “The Military Policy of the Proletariat” [October 12, 1940], http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/mpop.htm.

4. See http://www.socialist-alliance.org/page.php?page=1258.

5. See http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7613:sas-statement-of-principles&Itemid=546.

6. See http://www.socialist-alliance.org/page.php?page=674.