“Naturally, when the revolution (and certainly not only in the colonies) “draws close to the decisive moment”, then every mode of action in the Guomindang style, that is to say, all collaborationism, is a crime involving fatal consequences: one can then conceive only of a dictatorship of the possessors or a dictatorship of the workers. But as we have already seen, even in such moments, in order to triumph over parliamentarism as revolutionists, one must have nothing in common with the sterile negation of it.” (p 193)
In other words, its not a question of whether this or that demand can be supported, but whether the purpose of doing so flows from an opportunist or revolutionary perspective. As Trotsky sets out, elsewhere, it is quite different to support a demand for workers' control, where the bourgeoisie is firmly in control, and where it is simply code for class collaboration and corporatism, as against supporting such a demand in a revolutionary situation, in which it actually means the workers seizing control of their means of production, and defending it, arms in hand, as part of a struggle for workers' power in the whole of society.
This is why the use of transitional demands, by much of the “Left”, today, is ill-informed. They are used as some kind of talisman, or else a clever device to trick workers into a revolutionary course. That is not at all the nature of transitional demands. It is not the demand (i.e. the form of words) that makes it transitional, but the set of social conditions existing at the time, which determines whether its use is simply adventurist phrase-mongering, opportunist, or revolutionary. In 1938, when The Transitional Programme was published, Trotsky, wrongly, believed that a revolutionary situation still existed, as prior to WWI. Yet, even in The Transitional Programme, Trotsky sets out the conditional nature of those demands, dependent on the existence of this revolutionary potential in society. For example, in relation to the demand for the nationalisation of the banks.
“However, the state-ization of the banks will produce these favourable results only if the state power itself passes completely from the hands of the exploiters into the hands of the toilers.”
Italy, for years, had a legislated Sliding Scale of Wages (The Scala Mobile), and Heath's Tory government, in the 1970's also introduced an indexation of wages to prices. Heath's Three Day Week, in 1974, could also be viewed as a sort of Sliding Scale of Hours. None of these measures had any transitional, let alone revolutionary content. The same is true of nationalisation by the capitalist state, for example, the nationalisation of banks in 2008.
The position of the ECCI, in criticising support for the demand for a Constituent Assembly as opportunist, simply reflected the Stalinist zig-zag from its own opportunist errors, in Germany, Britain and China, to insane ultra-Left sectarianism that was to become The Third Period. Trotsky quotes Strakhov,
“There [in the colonies], bourgeois democracy cannot exist; only the bourgeois dictatorship, operating openly, is possible It cannot have there any constitutional path.” ( p 193)
That was clearly wrong, even though based upon a correct idea. It again fails to take account of the points above, in relation to different periods and social conditions. The idea behind Permanent Revolution is that it sets out the conditions in which, during a bourgeois-democratic, national revolution, the workers can and do take the lead. It does not mean they will do so, but, where they do, the consequence of this is also that the workers will be led to assert their own class interests, at which point the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie will turn against them.
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