Regroup, Reassess, Reequip
Some thoughts on programme in the wake of Your Party, by Ian Dolphin
SCOPE: In the wake of the Your Party experience, socialists should assimilate the lessons of the past to prepare for the future. Whatever organisational form that future holds, what that organisation fights for, in terms of programme, is critical. The method of transitional demands developed by the early communist and Fourth International could provide a framework for a necessary conversation around programme for the left. But while the method may be valid, more than a century has passed since this approach was formulated. Is the approach still effective? This short survey will provide historical background on the development of transitional demands and their nature. It will present a brief framework of the factors to be taken into account when working to develop demands in practice, together with a worked example of updating a transitional demand for the 21st Century. It is offered as a contribution to the conversation.
Your Party
In the Summer of 2025, when Your Party appeared as a positive opportunity, rather than a bureaucratic train wreck, 800,000 people expressed an interest in engaging with the new entity. It’s a reasonable supposition that the promise of ”doing politics differently” was a substantial part of the Your Party ‘draw’. Over that same Summer, Oliver Eagleton undertook a series of short interviews with a number of leading participants around the Your Party initiative for New Left Review. The interviews had a broad scope, but focused to a significant degree on issues of organisational form for the new party. Some participants also, perhaps more critically, touched on what programmatic elements the new organisation should prioritise.
One of those interviewed, James Schneider, disengaged from the Your Party project shortly after, but his interview raised some interesting — and challenging — thoughts. Framing his responses around the heavy dominance of conventional electoralism in British politics, Schneider identified some key areas of potential work for Your Party. Drawing from the experience of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Schneider posited an electoral approach accompanied by an insurgent extra-parliamentary mobilisation. To this were added the construction of a series of alliances of the oppressed, as critical elements in a forward path. Perhaps more importantly, the external mobilisation would be located not only in workplaces, but to a very large part in communities. Schneider labelled it “Popular Power”, and suggested very strongly that the primary objective of action in this area was to develop active class-based communities, growing agency, organisation and influence to reach, effectively, conditions close to what might be described as dual power.
Areas of possibility for the construction of ‘Popular Power’ were largely drawn from international experience. Tenant associations featured prominently in the examples presented; their slender presence in the UK contrasted with their weight and significance elsewhere. The opportunity for serious conversations around the issues raised by this, and to a lesser extent the other interviews, appeared to slip away at a national level in the last half of 2025. Your Party became consumed by the conflict between the emerging proto-branches and the bureaucratic clique around Carrie Murphy and Jeremy Corbyn and the shearing forces it created. Refusal to commence the formation of branches for a year, tight control of contact information, expulsion as individuals arrive for a national conference, obscure election and selection processes; none of these practices was going to lead to the development of trust, or fuel the kind of conversation Your Party needed to have about what it was for.
As the left regroups and assesses the experience of Your Party, it is worth revisiting last summer’s conversations and exploring elements of them in detail. Is ‘Popular Power’ posited as simply a support act for parliamentary representation, or is the relationship between electoral representation and the developing agency of the working class and their community allies more complex? What does the gravitational shift towards organising with and in communities represent for the left — put crudely, a different place to sell papers, or something rather more?
Identifying particular areas of work is vital, but cohering a programmatic approach to that effort is also essential, particularly given that historic dominance of conventional electoralism in British left politics noted by Schneider. To understand where we should go, we have to understand where we have been, and locate the programmatic future in the broader movement’s past.
Prologue: The Programme of Social Democracy
Broadly speaking, Pre-First World War Social Democracy had evolved a programme which was sharply bifurcated. This bifurcation saw day-to-day activity focus on a minimum programme of ‘achievable’ reforms, with a maximum programme — socialism —largely confined to abstract propaganda. There were nuances of motivation in this approach. In the case of the centre, identified in the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) with Karl Kautsky, there was a theoretical underpinning based around an expectation that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The right, associated with Eduard Bernstein, developed a perspective that saw capitalism continuing to evolve to meet workers’ needs through a program of reforms. Modern social democrats, including the Labour Party, tend to occupy positions across this spectrum.
Changing the Paradigm
Given the wide political spectrum of those who have engaged with Your Party over the last year, it’s worth pausing to emphasise two further points. In the UK, the Labour Party Programme is identified by many as its electoral manifesto. A party programme should present perspectives on both electoral and non-electoral activity, and emphasise the close relationship and complementarity of the two. There is a more profound difference between the reformist approach and that of the communist left. Whereas a reformist seeks to undertake reforms for the working class, the communist left seeks to develop the empowerment and agency of the class for itself. As Marx argues, from a class in itself to a class for itself.
The Early Communist Parties
The fledgling Communist Parties entered the pre-revolutionary period following the First World War in almost a programmatic vacuum, without a fully articulated and differentiated communist programme. Such programmes that were published, such as the Spartacist Programme adopted by the German Communist Party, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), tended to reproduce the pre-war maximum programme of social democracy, while asserting their will to implement such a programme. This essentially voluntaristic maximalism did little to provide guidance on what communist parties should actually do in practice, other than organising insurrections at appropriate points. Neither did it differentiate between the ebb and flow of class struggle, between the need to tactically advance and retreat appropriately.
These early difficulties were compounded by two factors. The pro-war line of the SPD, and its complicity in the murder of the KPD leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, drove many of the German left into what Lenin termed "ultra-leftism”. The early Comintern’s ”Theory of the Offensive”, articulated primarily by Zinoviev and Bukharin in the Comintern leadership and promoted in the KPD by Bela Kun, held that insurrection and armed actions would ”spark” revolutionary opportunities. The ”Theory of the Offensive” was a major contributor to the catastrophic ”March Actions” in Germany in 1921, where the ”spark” failed to ignite an exhausted working class, leaving the KPD isolated and ripe for repression.
As the communist parties and international reflected on their early practice, particularly in Germany, a number of related programmatic elements emerged:
The tactic of fighting for a united front of workers parties in both offensive and defensive contexts, but particularly in the latter. The unity in action forged in defeating the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920 was held up as a practical example of what the tactic could achieve,
The beginning of an articulation of transitional demands. Such demands were designed to provide a bridge between the day-to-day struggles of the working class and oppressed, and the eventual endpoint of socialism. Transitional demands were envisioned as growing the experience, capacity and agency of the class towards the demand for a government of workers’ parties as a keystone.
An approach based around these elements would encroach on the power of the state and contribute to developing conditions of dual power. This approach, focused on the workplace, mirrors that outlined by Schneider for communities. This is a theme we will return to.
The“Transitional” approach was discussed extensively at early Comintern Congresses, and adopted against fierce opposition from the exponents of the “Theory of the Offensive”. The strategic shift was undertaken under the slogan ”To The Masses” from the Third Comintern Congress in 1921. The Comintern mandated every constituent party to begin the elaboration of a transitional program for their own national context. The resulting programmatic material would be shared with other national parties with the intention of generalising the approach and sharing best practice.
As the Soviet Union succumbed to Stalinism in the mid 1920’s, the Comintern slid towards the maximalism of the ”Third Period”, formally ratified at the 6th World Congress in 1928. Capitalism was judged to be in a state of imminent collapse; transitional demands, the united front and the tactical lessons of the early years of the Comintern were swept away. In Germany, the abandonment of united front approaches to the SPD, now termed ”social-fascist” greatly facilitated the rise of the Nazis.
Schneider’s New Left Review interview discussed and identified a major element of a socialist programme; the potential points of origin for initial steps in the direction of dual power. The early experience of communist parties adds a further piece to the puzzle. An approach that identified a method for the formulation of demands which broke with the programme of social democracy, developed the agency of the class, and which, taken together, could not be realised under capitalism.
The Fourth International
The codification of transitional demands can be found in the founding programme of the Fourth International, ‘The Death agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’ (1938). This document, perhaps more than any other, kept alive the core concept and method of transitional demands. That survival took place against extreme odds.
The physical elimination of virtually a generation of revolutionary cadre by Stalinism and Fascism was accompanied by the loss of the collective memory that generation represented. This, coupled with the destruction generated by the Second World War, warped the post-war perspectives of the revolutionary movement. The loss of so many who might otherwise have formed an experienced leadership in the post-war period left the movement isolated and often exposed to the idiosyncrasies of a few manipulative individuals. Attempts to understand the history of the movement and the nature of a revolutionary programme frequently ran aground because, in large part, the context of their development had been removed or denied.
The limited liberalisation of the Soviet regime under Gorbachev, followed by the complete collapse of the regime, enabled the release and publication of a range of previously ”locked down” material. Regaining access to this material began the process of restoring a significant proportion of the collective memory of the movement. The translation and publication of, for example, the documents and proceedings of the early Comintern congresses are of great significance both historically and practically. This in turn provides an opportunity to validate and appropriately re-integrate lessons into socialist practice, filling out the often highly telegraphed programmatic language with the description, action and discussion that framed and formed them. The report of the debate that follows existed in that period of fractured continuity. It is instructive in its own terms, but it is also offered as an example of how the missing pieces of the narrative can impact the whole. It also reflects the tendency to repeat debates of the past when the original is obscured.
Fractured Continuity: The ”What Next?” Debate.
The journal ”What Next?”, published for a decade or so from the mid-1990s, provided an open, generally non-sectarian forum for Marxists to discuss strategy. Many contributors had a historic connection with the, by then imploded, British Workers Revolutionary Party. In 1998 Bob Pitt and Harry Ratner, two such contributors, wrote an extended critique of the 1938 Transitional Programme and its methodology.
Their critique centred around three main elements:
The core of the 1938 Programme, ”The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” was constructed around a perspective that the Second World War would herald an imminent collapse of capitalism and pre-revolutionary period. In this it was incorrect, and, according to Pitt, the error was not ”a question of this or that mistaken prognosis but of a fundamental error in perspectives”.
That transitional demands were intimately bound up with, and their value exclusively dependent on, a pre-revolutionary, or transitional period.
As a consequence, socialists should not agitate for transitional demands outside that pre-revolutionary period, but focus on helping workers secure minimum demands. This work should be accompanied by a programme of propaganda for socialism.
Pitt and Ratner’s critique was articulated thoughtfully and with great clarity. It is, in many respects, a model of challenging orthodoxy, but it rests on flawed lines of reasoning.
The conjunctural analysis set out in the 1938 Programme was indeed incorrect. It set out a possible or likely outcome of the Second World War as a certainty, and, particularly given the losses suffered by the movement in the war, contributed significantly to the disorientation of the movement in the post-war period. This disorientation included a denial by some, for several years, that the anticipated crisis had failed to arrive. The ”crisis of leadership” highlighted by Trotsky in the 1938 Programme could perhaps have been given a little more emphasis in the ”What Next?” conversation. Socialists from the Healy tradition — certainly from the 1960s onwards — would recognise the tone-deaf, perpetual imminent-crisis/collapse prognosis from their practical experience.
The adoption of transitional demands is posed, particularly by Pitt, as somewhat similar to a zero-sum game, with a stark choice between transitional or minimum demands. In reality, the choice is not ”either/or”, but a choice or combination driven by context. As Trotsky wrote, ”The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old ”minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness” is a fairly clear indication that minimum demands should still play a role within a transitional programme.
In re-creating, effectively, the pre-First World War programme of social democracy, Pitt and Ratner re-create its central problem: that minimum demands become almost the sole focus of practical activity. Similarly, the focus on propaganda for socialism might be taken to imply a model of broadcast and passive reception. Practical implementation work around a transitional demand carries with it active engagement and gathered experience. From a different perspective, this is the difference between a lecture and active learning. Why should the development of experience, self-organisation and agency not be sought in a period of post-war boom? Indeed, Ratner’s contribution to the ”What Next?” debate highlights a success with a transitional demand in precisely this context from his own industrial practice:
”However, I would differ with Bob Pitt’s argument that demands such as the sliding scale of hours were irrelevant during the post-war period. In ”Reluctant Revolutionary” I related how, as a shop steward in the engineering industry, I proposed this demand and got it accepted in my own factory. This took the form of demanding that redundant workers be kept on until alternative work at union rates was found for them elsewhere, and that meanwhile working hours be reduced without loss of pay to absorb the redundant workers. This was fought for in the Platt’s strike of 1949 and was later adopted as policy by a shop stewards’ conference representing over 10,000 workers in the textile machinery industry. There were several strikes in support of these demands which, though they did not succeed in preventing redundancies, forced the employers to concede longer periods of notice with pay in lieu and eventually resulted in statutory redundancy payments guaranteed by law.”
The methodology employed has lasting value precisely because of its focus on developing agency and building the capacity of workers and the oppressed. Put simply, if one regards a programme to be the condensed experience of the class, transitional demands can form the scaffolding for condensed experiential learning by the class.
Pitt and Ratner demonstrate the difficulty in emerging from an organisation bound to a maximalist programme. Their course correction led to oversteer, which landed them in the minimalist slow lane.
Yet there is a further lesson to be drawn from the apparent contradiction between Pitt and Ratner’s versions of their thesis which renders further consideration worthwhile. There is a tendency to speak in broad brush, generic terms about ”the nature of the epoch” or ”prevailing conditions”. Reality has a finer grain, and specific local conditions often trump such generic terms. The experience Ratner describes is the exception that denies the rule as pervasive, monolithic, and all-encompassing. Transitional demands are effective as a multiplier when the class — or elements of it — are in motion. Such motion, even if relatively isolated, can be significantly multiplied by tailored injection of programmatic direction.
Transitional Demands in Detail:
”End Commercial Secrecy”—The Lucas Example
In 1979, a group of shop stewards from a British company were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This eyebrow-raising event recognised the work of “The Combine”; the shop stewards' organisation at Lucas Aerospace. The Lucas story reflects probably the most considered and radical attempt at exerting workers’ control outside a pre-revolutionary situation. It used demands to ”end commercial secrecy” to generate the data which informed a detailed plan for alternative social production.
The arms industry in the UK faced the 1970s with the recognition that the 1965 Wilson Labour Government’s withdrawal of military bases East of Suez, and reorientation towards NATO would provoke major changes. The results of the 1968 defence review stimulated a flurry of mergers, acquisitions and abandoned projects in the UK arms industry.
Workers in one of the major British arms companies, Lucas Aerospace, facing increased offshoring, acted to establish more effective cooperation across the dozen or so unions representing Lucas workers. In 1972 they established ”The Combine”, a representative company-wide shop stewards committee. The Combine was established carefully and inclusively over the course of four and a half years to ensure maximum understanding and solidarity across the company. By 1974 it was strong enough to fight off 800 redundancies. As the Combine strengthened, it added advisory ”services” (effectively working groups) covering a number of areas. Science and technology advice was prominent amongst these services.
Threats of further redundancies led the Combine to seek a meeting with then new Industry Minister in the 1974 Wilson Labour Government, Tony Benn. He suggested that Lucas Management, the Combine and his Ministry formulate a plan to save jobs. The Combine, sniffing corporatism, decided they would instead produce their own plan. Widespread consultation followed across the company, with an emphasis on what socially useful products could be put into production with minimal amounts of retooling of the current plant. The Corporate Plan developed by The Combine articulated 150 possible socially useful projects, with several fully worked examples. This followed a series of in-depth questionnaires assessing technical and human feasibility, and the creative suggestions of Lucas workers. The questionnaires didn’t simply inventory equipment; they also raised the question of alternative ways of running the factory.
Market analyses and economic and social arguments were included in the plan. It took The Combine around a year to develop the plan. Mike Cooley, a leading figure, summed up the challenge: ‘The only way in which we could be involved in a corporate plan would be if we grew it up in a way which challenged the private profit motive of the company and instead talked of social profit.
Three elements are worthy of particular note:
Lucas clearly employed a significant number of highly skilled workers, but the plan was produced by ”ordinary people”.
The plan was formulated by a group-wide shop stewards committee, an unofficial union body.
The plan suggested new and innovative production processes, combining the contributions of theoretical engineers with the tacit knowledge of the shop floor.
Workers in several other parts of the defence industry expressed strong interest and engagement with the Combine’s plan. Workers at BAC Brough, near Hull, faced similar threats of redundancy and closure. The BAC Brough workers, along with BAC Preston, contacted The Combine. They were amongst those who had extended conversations around understanding social profit as a key element of winning support and engagement from the workforce.
The Plan was rejected out of hand by Lucas management. The Labour Government offered tea, sympathy and verbal support. Benn was removed as Industry Minister for his support for workers cooperatives and his objections to joining the EEC.
Lucas: Lessons and Legacy
The Lucas workers challenged commercial secrecy by arguing the case for ”The Right to Know”. A significant proportion of the work undertaken by Lucas was funded by the UK taxpayer. The Combine argued that there should be an absolute right to know how these public resources were being used. This, it could be argued, was a specific tactical realisation of the ”end to commercial secrecy” demand, honed for maximum contextual impact.
The term ”demand” may appear to be an episodic phenomenon; by the dictionary, ”demand” is ”insistent or peremptory”. It might also appear that the act of making the demand is its most important element. The Lucas Combine went beyond that, incorporating the core meaning of the demand into their daily practice; it wasn’t simply a demand, it was part of a rolling process of action monitored (with the technology of the time) by shop stewards across the enterprise.
There is a direct connection between the Lucas Plan and today’s argument for a ”Just Transition” away from fossil fuels and other environmentally damaging products and processes. As the threat of job losses due to AI deployments becomes reality, ending commercial secrecy — and using the financial and other information obtained to develop alternative products — is both relevant and essential.
”An End to Commercial Secrecy” and its Implications
Individual transitional demands are neither universally applicable nor appropriate in all contexts at all times. With that in mind, the ”End to Commercial Secrecy” demand could be further deconstructed as an example of how the approach embedded in a transitional demand might be modelled in practical detail.
Programmatic demands can appear highly abbreviated for impact. It’s worthwhile, then, to take an example of a demand which has been practically deployed in struggle, such as that of the Lucas workers, and break down its constituent elements. What follows is an illustrative suggestion rather than a solution — one potential means of clarification.
This demand is sometimes shortened and simplified as ”open the books”. There are a number of issues with this formulation. Whilst demands around ”an end to commercial secrecy” have a specific point of focus in making financial information public, the demand is not limited to financial information. The broad programmatic context of the demand should be understood clearly; it forms several links in the chain that lead to workers' control and ultimately a planned economy.
Understand the specific context: Threat of closure/reduced working week and pay/redundancies? Strength and experience of union/s numerically and politically in enterprise. Assessment of the balance of forces.
Apply the Demand: For an end to commercial business secrecy. Workers’ scrutiny of business decisions. Disclosure of profit and dividends to representatives of workers in the enterprise. Inventory and disclosure of assets, including plant, equipment together with intellectual property and other non-tangible assets. Communication of outcomes in an appropriate range of media. Schedule face-to-face and hybrid meetings to communicate outcomes.
Outline the Objectives: To demonstrate in action and in context the inner workings of capitalist business practices. To begin to plan what an alternative may look like in the context of workers’ control of a specific enterprise, including costed plans for alternative socially useful production where an industry is justifiably closing — for example, elements of the arms industry or an industry bound to climate change
Establish potential Next steps: To consolidate and generalise experience and build towards workers’ control of the enterprise. To develop calls for solidarity locally and nationally by sector. To take the fight to the community. To build external support partnerships. Generalise the struggle.
The pattern Context > Demand > Objectives > Next Steps may be generally useful scaffolding when formulating transitional demands in collaboration with groups of workers or the oppressed. It should be seen as a tool to enhance understanding by advanced militants and as a guide, rather than as a schema to be rigidly followed. Similarly, one would expect elements of any plan to be critically analysed and modified as the struggle for realisation proceeds. The infinite parameters which interact during the course of real struggle impact the axis and pace of that struggle; class struggle runs to nobody’s script or schema. Understanding and articulating the principles of working class empowerment, self-activity and agency, as objectives, and placing them in the front and centre of consideration are the best guard against reformist degeneration.
The pace of technology-related change is relentless and rapid. This applies to the administration of production in addition to production itself. It is reasonable to ask if the principles that operated yesterday are still operating today, and whether they are likely to operate in the future. It is contentious, but quite possibly accurate, to state that the left has not always factored technology into an assessment of reality. The final section of this document will examine the impact of technology on the transition approach to developing a programme, attempt to assess whether the approach is still valid, and make some projections of possibilities for the future.
Technology and Transitional Demands:
Bringing a Core Demand up to date
Demands focussed around ending commercial secrecy have three principal elements:
inventorying assets,
establishing access and validating financial data, and
contextualising, understanding and communicating both.
The last of these is essential to the key reason for raising the demand; communication is key to developing agency and workers’ control based on that agency. This poses a number of problems. A demand to ”end commercial secrecy” presents a complex issue as relatively simple, and requires further detail to be practically implemented. Accessing complete financial data, particularly in the context of multinational concerns, remains problematic. The financial landscape has grown increasingly complex over the last century, but it is possible to begin to map that complexity and suggest potential solutions. The development of a more comprehensive shared guide based on experience would be valuable.
Modern Financial Systems
Modern financial systems are a long way away from simply replicating ledgers. Understanding their content goes beyond an understanding of accountancy, and potentially into fairly advanced areas of IT systems analysis. This is particularly the case in the context of a large enterprise or other commercial or public entity. The size of the problem, together with its potential complexity, rather begs the question of the capability to meaningfully interrogate such systems, and where that capability is sourced or developed. Without such capability, there will be a range of difficulties in gaining an accurate picture of assets and financial information. The potential for being deliberately misled in these circumstances is strong. The problem is compounded by the fairly common practice of outsourcing software and systems support, or the purchase of a software as a service (SAAS) offering from a cloud-based vendor. The consequence of either of these approaches — outsourcing or SAAS purchase — is to reduce capacity in the enterprise. The particular target entity the demand is placed on, then, may not retain the capability to realise the demand directly from internal resources.
AI
Whether or not the Large Language Model-based systems which are currently described as ”AI” fall into the classical computer science definition of AI, or whether they are systems which might better be described as ”augmented intelligence”, is, for our immediate purposes, moot. Both systems have the following general characteristics;
They feed on the public good of the internet commons, and turn it into private profit. A ”large language model” has to get its language from somewhere.
The algorithms on which the system is based are ultimately the product of human intelligence, with all its quirks, errors and prejudices.
The training materials on which the system's ”learning” is based are similarly selected by humans and may exhibit open or hidden bias.
Whilst noting, and setting aside, the possibility that AI-based tools may help interrogate financial systems, their other characteristics are not necessarily benign. Examples of this are not difficult to find. Perhaps the most notorious is the Google Photos error, which ”recognised” photographs of black people as photographs of gorillas. Whether this was the fault of the training data selection, errors in core algorithms, or both, is far from clear. What was clear was that it took an entity with the resources of Google/Alphabet years to ”fix”. The Museum of Failure proved a little more data on the ”fix”.
”Rather than retraining the algorithm or rethinking its data, Google simply blocked the words “gorilla,” “chimpanzee,” “monkey,” and all related tags from the system entirely.”
When advocating the open release of commercial data, then, multiple human and artificial means of verification may be of value in developing an accurate picture. This requires strong and inclusive workers’ control. The Lucas Combine’s carefully constructed, shop steward-based, plant-by-plant organising model remains an exemplar. The Combine’s data gathering techniques, although from a different era and heavily reliant on the completion of questionnaires, may still offer a means of cross-checking or obtaining certain types of data. It is our job to carry their approach further, modernising as we go.
In the longer term, in terms of data held in IT and communications systems, the left needs to urgently consider its attitude to open source software.
Open Source Software and an End to Business Secrets
Technology has grown to be embedded in almost every form of economic activity. This speaks to a need for the left to understand open source software alternatives to commercial-proprietary software more thoroughly, and to integrate these perspectives into its programme. There is a strong case to be made that this should include participation in advocacy for the use of open source software. Open source software, as the name suggests, is software distributed as open and transparent source code. Such code is freely available and modifiable, and is distributed under an open source license. Outbound open source licenses fall into one of two broad types; restrictive licenses mandate that any changes made to the code are played back into the codebase. Liberal licences carry no such restriction. Open source software is very widely used both as infrastructure (the internet is largely powered by it), or for application delivery.
Open source software is usually produced collaboratively, and is supported by a variety of business models. Generally speaking, the legal stewardship of open source software is vested in a ”neutral” foundation which enforces license terms, and provides minimal collaborative and human infrastructure, in order to facilitate maintenance and development. Examples of such foundations are Apache, which stewards a variety of general infrastructural and application software, and Apereo, which focuses on education.
To return from a necessary digression, software with visible source code can be understood and audited more readily and thoroughly than proprietary software. This transparency reduces — but does not eliminate — the potential to mislead or obfuscate data. Whilst under no illusions that collaboratively produced open source software is somehow ”socialist” in itself, the left and trade unions should advocate its use as part of advocacy for greater transparency and an element of the demand for ”an end to business secrets”. Open Source software development — whilst maintaining the caveat above — assumes a different relationship between individuals engaged in its production. The openness of open source software is a quality that assumes an end to software business secrets at its very core. In this sense, a case can be made that demands to adopt and contribute to open source software are transitional in nature. The advocacy and use of open source software introduces a layer of structural openness into business operations. This not only facilitates the possibility of ending commercial secrecy, but potentially enables workers and their allies to understand and develop new aspects of workers’ control to match changes in the economy.
Open source advocacy, whilst necessary, cannot provide an immediate solution to the issues of access and understanding. Making connections and alliances with groups and individuals with required skillsets and capabilities to interrogate software is an essential component of developing class-based agency. It should become a structured part of the regular activity of both the left and union activists.
Privacy
The growth of internet-based platforms has thrown issues around personal privacy into sharp relief. Mining user attention data, often with little regard for privacy or age differentiation, has become a major feature of modern capitalism. Theorists such as Shoshana Zuboff have argued that the major digital platforms have created a new economic system that extracts private human experience, turns that into predictive data and uses it to influence behaviour. This is contested by those operating from the Marxist tradition, who have argued that this extraction and commodification of attention is a logical development of capitalism in the 21st Century, and not a fundamentally ”new” system. Influencing, or attempting to influence purchasing behaviour on the basis of acquired data has been a significant facet of capitalism for as long as mass media has existed. The increased use of psychological data, for example, in the late 1950’s and 1960s advertising marked a significant stage of this development. Whilst the automated acquisition of personal data facilitated by online platforms marks a further novel stage of development, it does not fundamentally mark a new set of economic relationships.
What is uncontested is that the platforms are provoking a response from governments in the shape of privacy legislation. The left and trade unions should monitor and understand the impact of this legislation. Whilst commonly motivated by an ostensible desire to protect against the appetites of rapacious tech capitalism, privacy legislation may act to hinder transparency where we might desire more, not less. This may occur directly as a result of specific national legislation, or be made significantly more complex by data which crosses national boundaries. The left may generally support privacy legislation, but we need to retain awareness of its nature as a double-edged sword in certain circumstances.
Finally, although beyond the scope of this paper, in understanding the capacity and capability of modern digital platforms, we should differentiate between the use of those platforms under capitalism, and their potential use as elements of a planned economy. There are dangers in this approach, and there is a clear need to address them by paying significant attention to issues around governance and workers’ control. There are also opportunities to explore data-driven flexibility within the context of planning.
Provisional Conclusions
The 1938 programme ”Death Agony of Capitalism and Tasks of the Fourth International” did not drop from the sky, but marked a point of codification of the experience of the communist movement as it emerged from Social Democracy in the period of revolution and reaction which followed the First World War. Elements of the 1938 programme, particularly its suggestion of developing class agency through workers’ control, and developing workers’ control through the programmatic deployment of transitional demands, represent a starting point, not a conclusion, There is much else to consider, including the nature of the organisation the class needs, which this paper does not consider. Adapting transitional demands to the circumstances of the 21st century will require detailed effort to integrate technology — and other factors — with programme. This work has only just begun
That adaptation is profoundly necessary. The Lucas Aerospace story demonstrates the power of an approach based on the integration of ”an end to business secrecy” with a programme of action, education and a determined leadership. As the argument for a “just transition” grows for those in polluting or otherwise harmful industries, demands that help us understand the finance and business practices of the industry, and reach for sustainable alternatives, are essential. The scale of the problem is both enormous and existential. The demand for a ”Just Transition” may prove to be the most significant transitional demand we fight for.
James Schneider was in many senses correct in identifying working class communities as a major facet of the class struggle for the 21st century. Hull, where I live, is not dissimilar to many Northern cities. Its unemployment rate is officially around 7.5%, and is ranked sixth in the ”most deprived local authority” in England list. Preventable mortality rates are significantly higher than the English national average. Traditional industries are, by and large, long closed. There are, put simply, fewer large workplaces to organise around, and many smaller ones it is difficult to reach.
So, what of the orientation towards community that Schneider suggested? The left in Britain have led major community-centred struggles in the past. The St Pancras rent strike, in 1959-60, involved both Communist Party members and ostensible Trotskyists in leading resistance to a Conservative Council’s rent increases. Clay Cross, in the 1970’s saw a small but determined Labour Council take on the Heath Government’s Housing Finance Act. In the 80’s the Poll Tax campaign saw a mass upsurge in community activity. All of which is to say, there is a tradition of struggle in Britain with a community focus. It is not as absent as Schneider suggested, although in some senses it is distinct from the issues he raises. We need to recover the tactical detail of those struggles and build on them. We need to test our recovered programmatic understanding, and re-learn and redevelop methods our movement learned the hard way. If we do not, Reaction
will continue to step in. We need a strong community orientation to help defeat this incursion, and we need to network the lessons we learn from practice as a matter of urgency. The former Your Party Proto-Branch activists could play a critical role in this.
Initial actions will most likely be small-scale. Hull Trades Council has a project they’ve called ’The Unity Shop’. The Unity Shop is part advice centre, part food bank, collecting and distributing food and other necessities for ”families who are struggling, in and out of work”. It operates around the core theme ”Solidarity, not Charity” and is staffed entirely by volunteers. There’s a conversation running about getting the news about The Unity Shop out further, particularly in the large estates that ring the city, and connecting with local campaigns. There’s a natural affinity between the Unity Shop and a campaign against one of Hull’s School Academy chains ending hot meals at lunchtime for primary school age children. The Trades Council perspective is to make connections around activists, to build support and to network those who are drawn into activity. It would be interesting to see that Academy chain’s financial status in a degree of detail — a useful demand for a campaign to raise. This activity has a modest programme; a small part of the activity we need. Community-focused action may start small, but the important thing is, it starts, and it starts informed by the work — programmatic and otherwise — that went before.
I find the example of Lucas Aerospace very instructive, and a good one to follow.