The Transitional Program (Annotated): Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International

by Leon Trotsky, International Bolshevik Tendency (Introduction)

The International Bolshevik Tendency has published a new edition of Trotsky's Transitional Program. It is based on the January 1939 version published by the American Socialist Workers Party as edited by Max Shachtman in accordance with the decision of the founding conference of the Fourth International. Discrepancies between the final English version approved by the conference and Trotsky's original Russian-language draft (which had appeared in the May/June 1938 Biulleten Oppozitsii) are noted as well as variants in subsequent SWP editions. The book includes a new introduction, marking the 60th anniversary of the program, and a previously unpublished essay documenting the use of transitional demands by the Communist International in Lenin's time. This edition also includes a selection of valuable articles, originally published in the 1970s by the then-revolutionary Spartacist League, on the history of communist trade union work in America from the Communist Party of the 1920s to the SWP of the 1930s and 40s. There are also a number of articles documenting the SL's exemplary attempts to build class-struggle caucuses on the basis of a full transitional program in key American unions in the 1970s. In greeting the founding of the Fourth International Trotsky proclaimed the Transitional Program as his movement's 'most important conquest.' Today, six decades after the Transitional Program was written, the Bolshevik tradition which the Left Opposition carried forward remains as relevant as ever. • Annotations on translations and context • New introduction • Related documents

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

See also Лев Троцкий

Russian theoretician Leon Trotsky or Leon Trotski, originally Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, led the Bolshevik of 1917, wrote Literature and Revolution in 1924, opposed the authoritarianism of Joseph Stalin, and emphasized world; therefore later, the Communist party in 1927 expelled him and in 1929 banished him, but he included the autobiographical My Life in 1930, and the behest murdered him in exile in Mexico.

The exile of Leon Trotsky in 1929 marked rule of Joseph Stalin.

People better know this Marxist. In October 1917, he ranked second only to Vladimir Lenin. During the early days of the Soviet Union, he served first as commissar of people for foreign affairs and as the founder and commander of the Red Army and of war. He also ranked among the first members of the Politburo.

After a failed struggle of the left against the policies and rise in the 1920s, the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union deported Trotsky. An early advocate of intervention of Army of Red against European fascism, Trotsky also agreed on peace with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. As the head of the fourth International, Trotsky continued to the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent, eventually assassinated him. From Marxism, his separate ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a term, coined as early as 1905. Ideas of Trotsky constitute a major school of Marxist. The Soviet administration never rehabilitated him and few other political figures.