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Lenins transitional programme Perish or forge full steam ahead

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis of this article is that Lenin's The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917) exemplifies the transitional method — a mode of political argument that does not counterpose abstract socialist slogans to immediate popular suffering, but instead demonstrates that the only realistic solution to the crisis facing the masses requires breaking with capitalism. The article argues that Lenin's genius lay in showing that the "moderate" or "realistic" programme of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries was in fact unrealistic, because it tried to solve the crisis while respecting the capitalists' right to profit. The only genuinely practical measures — nationalising the banks, abolishing commercial secrecy, amalgamating monopolies — could not be carried out by a bourgeois state. They required workers' power. The article thus claims that the transitional method is not a schematic invention of 1938 but the living heart of Bolshevik strategy, forged in the concrete conditions of 1917.

Theoretical Grounding

The article draws on the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule, and on the Leninist conception of the revolutionary situation as a crisis of the whole social order. It situates itself within the tradition that runs from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme through Lenin's State and Revolution to Trotsky's The Transitional Programme (1938). The key theoretical move is the distinction between reactionary and bureaucratic state regulation (which serves the capitalists by stabilising their profits) and revolutionary state regulation (which begins to expropriate them). This is not a technical distinction but a class one: the same administrative measures — bank control, price fixing, rationing — have opposite effects depending on which class holds state power.

The article also implicitly draws on Lenin's theory of imperialism, particularly the analysis of monopoly capitalism and the fusion of finance capital with the state. The argument that commercial secrecy protects not innovation but super-profits is a direct application of Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article is published in July 2024, and its relevance is explicitly signalled by the repeated parallels drawn between the Mensheviks and contemporary reformist parties. The article notes that "the programmes of the left reformist 'socialists' of our present day differ only superficially from their Menshevik forebears." The conjuncture is one of deepening capitalist crisis — inflation, supply chain disruption, energy price shocks, and the war in Ukraine — in which mainstream social democratic and labour parties propose taxation, regulation, and "green new deals" that respect the framework of capitalist profitability. The article implies that these measures will prove as impotent as Kerensky's taxes, because they lack the class power to enforce them. The looming catastrophe today is not famine in Petrograd but climate breakdown, housing crises, and the decay of public services — yet the structural logic is the same: the ruling class will not voluntarily surrender its profits, and any programme that does not confront this fact is utopian in its own way.

Where the Argument Continues

The article is part of the Lenin in a Year series published by In Defence of Marxism. It explicitly points forward to the next instalment, which will cover Lenin's The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (1918) — the question of what the working class does after taking power in a backward, war-torn country. The argument about the transitional method itself finds its fullest theoretical elaboration in Trotsky's The Transitional Programme, which the article references. Readers seeking to understand how this method applies to the present should consult the IDOM series on the transitional programme, and the broader corpus of the Revolutionary Communist International on the strategy of the united front and the transitional demand. The article also implicitly invites comparison with Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, which addresses the opposite error — sectarian refusal to engage with transitional demands.

Connections

  • Lenin, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (1917) — the primary text under discussion.
  • Lenin, State and Revolution (1917) — for the theory of the state that underpins the argument.
  • Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) — for the analysis of monopoly and finance capital.
  • Trotsky, The Transitional Programme (1938) — the classic statement of the method.
  • Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (1930) — for the concrete class analysis of 1917.
  • IDOM, Lenin in a Year series — the broader series of which this is a part.
  • IDOM, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International — for contemporary applications of the transitional method.

Key Quotes

  1. "What Lenin proposed was not yet economic planning, nor even full workers' control. Nevertheless, it pointed clearly in that direction, and would represent the first step towards socialism."

  2. "The 'realistic' Mensheviks... passed laws taxing the incomes of the capitalists. But without taking control of the banks or abolishing commercial secrecy, they had no idea what these incomes really were!"

  3. "The real purpose of commercial secrecy is to hide the fabulous profits being made from the working class – the same workers who were starving in Russia because of the profiteering of the capitalists!"

  4. "In his own words: 'Perish or forge full steam ahead. That is the alternative put by history.'"

  5. "Thus, in this brilliant text, Lenin begins not from a preconceived schema of what is 'possible', but from the pressing needs of the masses and what is necessary."

  6. "It is noteworthy how the programmes of the left reformist 'socialists' of our present day differ only superficially from their Menshevik forebears!"