The Transitional Programme and Algeria

THE wholesale betrayals of the Wilson government are forcing thousands of Labour supporters to realise that it is necessary to fight for socialist policies and a new working-class leadership.

It is becoming clear to them that the Socialist Labour League, and its supporters in the Young Socialists over the past few years, were right to attack Wilson, Brown and the Labour leaders for preparing working-class defeat.

During the election year of 1964, the Socialist Labour League was attacked as 'sectarian' and 'ultraleft'. In calling on the workers to vote Labour, we committed the 'crime' of warning that Wilson would capitulate to the bosses, and that a fight for a new leadership must be organised.

Opponents

Among our bitterest opponents was the tiny group of British supporters of the body in Paris called the 'United Secretariat of the Fourth International'. Although still calling themselves "Trotskyists', these gentlemen characterised the Wilson government as left social-democratic' or 'centrist'.

For the last few weeks even the mildest of 'progressives' in the Labour Party have begun to talk about 'betrayal of socialist principles, 'racialism', etc., on the part of the Wilson government.

The supporters of the United Secretariat know that the Socialist Labour League was right about the character of the Labour government, but they shy away from the conclusions.

Our attitude to the General Election and the Wilson government flowed from the fundamental programme of iting reforms are impossibl thout challenging the whol sis of capitalist state powe Marxists must pose basic demands of the masses in such a way that, in the struggle for these demands, the strength, consciousness and leadership for taking working-class power are built up, and the reactionary leaderships defeated. That is the meaning of the "Transitional Programme'.

Perhaps in an attempt to avoid the consequences of the remarkable confirmation of the Socialist Labour League's line in Britain, and the utter disarray of the followers of the revisionist "United Secretariat', some of the latter are circulating in Britain a reprint of an article by Joseph Hansen from 'World Outlook', a duplicated paper of the 'United Secretariat', dated July 23.

Paper attacked Hansen's article is called Is Trotsky's Transitional Programme Applicable to Algeria?' and is concerned exclusively out. In the programme itself, otsky was very explicit:

'It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. 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'. (page 10)

And with particular referce to backward countries like geria:

Each of the transitional demands should, therefore, lead to one and the same political conclusion: the workers need to break with the bureaucracy and its petit-bourgeois supporters, and not from the struggle of the masses themselves for power, which requires the building of independent parties.

Ignores content Thus Hansen reters to certain aspects of the Transitional Programme, but ignores its main content. For example, he excuses the liquidation of whole sections of the revisionist wing of the Fourth International into the Algerian National Liberation Front:

"They did this ('throwing their forces into the National Liberation Front'), in accordance with the criterion at the heart of the Transitional Programme — revolutionists must always go where the main forces in the struggle are to be found, whether Iss leadership.

The 'application' of the Transitional Programme to each particular stage of the international class struggle is not a question of adapting its recommendations for avoiding isolation, but rather of making an independent class analysis and orientating the members of the revolutionary party to the winning of leadership of the masses behind an independent programme.

It is against this background that the Socialist Labour League and the International Committee have fought bitterly against all illusions in the bourgeois-nationalist governBy a Newsletter Correspondent ON Monday, July 26, the Kenyan government ordered Mr. Hosea Jaffe, South Africanborn British teacher, and well-known anticapitalism ouading, Conferens and the tasks of the ment of 'independent' Algeria. It is against this background that we placed responsibility upon the shoulders of Hansen's friends in the 'United Secretariat' for liquidating their forces into the National Liberation Front; the official party of the government, thus playing their own part in rendering the working masses helpless before the right-wing coup of Boumedienne. Capitulation Hansen, Frank and Germain interpreted the Transitional Programme in a different way, in order to render more Page Thre Rommunitiíchen Beröffentlidi pereinigl ThieT fonbon.

Programmer • J. e. BurgharD. ildungen Grfell(rhaft für Arbeiter" doptedi by kh tund Starar. Biemr-psoare.' the ona acceptable their subservience to the bourgeois-nationalists and the bureaucracies of the labour movement.

This capitulation is disguised as 'staying close to the mass movement, 'avoiding isolation', but it stands exposed as a betrayal of the founding programme of the Fourth International, just as it did in East Germany in 1955, in Ceylon in 1964, in Algeria, Britain and the U.S.A. today. (Next week Cliff Slaughter takes up the attitude of Hansen, in the same article, to the government and ruling party in Algeria.)