Reading Group: The Transitional Program

1336 Drake Street,Madison WI 53715

11 December, 2021

Description

Come and discuss the relevance of revolutionary ideas in today's struggles and the communist movement in general. Throughout the history of capitalism, workig class revolutionaries have had to answer a very important question: How do revolutionaries relate to other movements and in general to the working class as a whole? Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "The communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement." In The Transitional Program, Leon Trotsky applies this general approach to the situation in the 1930s. This book cannot be applied directly to today's conditions; however, it has become a brilliant example of how to connect the current struggles of the working class with the need to fight for the socialist transformation of society without separating one from the other. Come and discuss the relevance of this approach in today's struggles and the communist movement in general.