READ AND DISCUSS:

“Very differently worded today”?

In Lesson Three, it was pointed out that, even in the 25 years or so since it had first been written, important changes had taken place that had led Marx and Engels to advise that “no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures” originally listed in 1848.  These changes included the “gigantic strides of Modern Industry”, “the accompanying improved and extended organisation of the working class”, and “the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution [of France, 1848], and then, still more, in the Paris Commune [of 1871].”

1. Even though Marx and Engels recognised that, even by 1872, “this programme has in some details been antiquated”, how many of the Manifesto’s original demands do you think could still be usefully raised today? Do any seem particularly ‘antiquated’?

An updated revolutionary programme

Since 1872, many further significant changes and events have taken place. Just as Marx and Engels would have expected, many other lists of demands have also since been put forward as part of the programme of subsequent revolutionary parties.

There’s certainly no room in this course to look at any of these varied programmes in detail and see how they compare with Marx and Engels’ 1848 original. However, for further reading, it’s definitely worth having a look at (a) what Lenin put forward in 1917, shortly before the ‘October Revolution’, in ‘The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It ²⁸’; (b) the ‘Transitional Programme ²⁹’ written by Trotsky in 1938; and (c) ‘What the Socialist Party Stands For ³⁰’, originally produced by the England and Wales section of the CWI in 2022.

As a general approach to arriving at a set of demands, however, this explanation form Trotsky’s ‘Transitional Programme’ is key: “It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program 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. Classical Social Democracy, functioning in an epoch of progressive capitalism, divided its program into two parts independent of each other: the minimum program which limited itself to reforms within the framework of bourgeois society, and the maximum program which promised substitution of socialism for capitalism in the indefinite future. Between the minimum and the maximum program no bridge existed. And indeed, Social Democracy has no need of such a bridge, since the word socialism is used only for holiday speechifying. The [Stalinist] Comintern has set out to follow the path of Social Democracy in an epoch of decaying capitalism: when, in general, there can be no discussion of systematic social reforms and the raising of the masses’ living standards; 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”.

2. How does Trotsky explain that a ‘transitional programme’ should make a ‘bridge’ between the immediate demands of the workers and the wider need for socialist change for any lasting reforms to be achieved?

“Despotic inroads on the rights of property”

The introductory paragraphs set out by Marx and Engels before the Manifesto’s list of demands emphasise the need for a victorious “proletariat organised as the ruling class” to “centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State” and that “in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property… unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production”.

Lenin’s demands in 1917 included: (1) Amalgamation of all banks into a single bank, and state control over its operations, or nationalisation of the banks; and (2) Nationalisation of the syndicates, i.e., the largest, monopolistic capitalist associations (sugar, oil, coal, iron and steel, and other syndicates).

The Socialist Party’s ‘What We Stand For’ calls for “a socialist government to take into public ownership the top 150 companies and the banking system that dominate the British economy and run them under democratic working-class control and management” and for “a democratic socialist plan of production based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people, and in a way that safeguards the environment”.

3. Do those demands help to explain the need today for the ‘despotic inroads’ into the property of the capitalists put forward in the Communist Manifesto of 1848?