READ AND DISCUSS:

A ‘Transitional’ Approach

The Manifesto stresses that:

a) Communists should fight for every working-class victory, for every temporary reform that can be wrung from the capitalists, but “in the movement of the present … also take care of the future”.

In other words, they should also argue for, and build the forces needed to win, the socialist change of society that can, alone, guarantee permanent gains for the working class; and

b) whenever they intervene in workers’ movements, the Communists “bring to the front … the property question” – i.e. the need to abolish ‘bourgeois’ property.

In other words, in the language of today, they should always stress the need for a socialist society, where the major corporations and banks are nationalised under democratic working-class control and management, as the basis of a democratically planned economy.

1. In Lesson Eighteen, Trotsky explains 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. Isn’t that a very similar approach to the one Marx and Engels are emphasising in the passages above?

A ‘forcible overthrow’

As part of its closing lines, the Manifesto calls for the “forcible overthrow” of existing conditions. Unlike the ‘Utopian’ Socialists, Marx and Engels understood that the capitalist minority wouldn’t simply listen to ‘reason’ and hand over their wealth to the working-class majority, in the interests of creating a better society. No, like all outgoing ruling classes before them, they will resist the efforts of the new rising class – in this case, the proletariat, to push them aside. To succeed in doing that will require the conscious mobilisation of the working class, through its own independent mass party.

However, the working class is different from previous revolutionary classes. As the Manifesto stated at the end of Chapter One, it acts as “the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”. Therefore, as the 1917 Russian Revolution showed, if that overwhelming majority of society is well led and organised, and has won over most of those taken from the working class into the ranks of the forces of the State, the capitalists are left without anyone to fight for them.

2. In what circumstances might it be possible for the “forcible overthrow” of the capitalist class to not actually require very much force?

Workers of the World, Unite!

The Manifesto concludes with its famous lines, “the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of All Countries, Unite!”. Marx and Engels understood that capitalism had engulfed the world in its relentless pursuit of profit. A united global movement of the working class was now needed to allow society to move forward once again.

3. A successful global struggle of the working class requires the leadership of a world party of socialism, an International, based on the ideas that Marx and Engels first set down in the Communist Manifesto. This is what the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) is striving to build. Isn’t it time that you joined the CWI?