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The Transitional Program (from here on “TP”), which was adopted by the Fourth International (from here on “FI”), at its founding congress in 1938, exists in slightly different versions in various languages. Although some of the differences could be attributed to translation problems, in actual fact this issue is rather more complex.
A comparison between the Russian and English versions, which is outlined below, points out some discrepancies which can’t be clarified in a satisfactory manner.
As it is known, Russian was the mother tongue of Leon Trotsky, and the one in which he wrote (or dictated, as the case more often was in his later years) most of his texts. English became in the mid-1930s and subsequently some kind of lingua franca of the Trotskyist movement worldwide, for reasons that I will not go into here.
This has a bearing on the TP problem, because Trotsky wrote a first draft of the TP in Russian, and it was published in the Russian-language in the Bulletin of the Left Opposition in June 1938 (issue no.66-67, dated May-June 1938). A French translation was published in Quatrieme Internationale, no.8 dated May 1938. An English translation must also exist, but I don’t have it available.
In September 1938, in the midst of great difficulties, the comrades that had gathered for the Founding Conference of the FI adopted after a fair amount of discussion a final text. The English text, as published by the American SWP at the time and ever since, should normally be regarded as the definitive text. But it has certain problems (as we shall see).
In the 1960s/1970s the Trotskyist movement, which had had a big split in 1953, started fragmenting all over the place, all the while growing at a quite unprecedented pace, and getting to countries it had never reached before. One section of this movement, led by the French OCI of Pierre Lambert, realizing that the French-language text of the TP as used by their rivals of the LCR was a royal mess, hit on the brilliant idea of doing a new translation of this document. Where from? But from the Russian, of course!
The Russian-language Bulletin, which had offered to its readers the draft submitted for discussion by Leon Trotsky, never reproduced the text adopted a few months later. This has mislead many (including the French OCI, possibly) into believing that the Russian draft was in fact an “original version”, hence more correct than the English version.
Their reasoning probably might have gone along the following lines: the text that Trotsky wrote and the BLO published is the true, unadulterated version of the TP. All subsequent changes, as evidenced in the English text, are spurious additions to he shunned.
The problem with this kind of approach and in any case in issuing a translation from the Russian draft, is that it disregards the fact that the TP underwent a fairly wide process of discussion. For instance, the Pathfinder 1974 edition includes some 80 pages (which is twice as long as the text of the document itself) of debates between various American comrades and Trotsky. Various sections of the movement discussed the draft and various delegates at the Congress reported on those discussions. And the Congress did adopt a text, which contains some changes with respect to the original formulation of the initial draft.
Now, many more translations into various other languages have seen the light, some based on the SWP(US)’s English version, some on the OCI’s French. A lot of criss-crossing. End-result? In some languages there exist three or four different versions, of quite different value and precision (and that a translator’s problem) but also containing discrepancies in the texts.
In many ways, it is rather astonishing the dearth of interest by the various Trotskyist Internationals in this matter. Even if it does not appear that any of the differences could have programmatic repercussions, this is after all the basic text for anybody who purports to defend the Trotskyist traditions.
There is a notable exception to this deafening silence, and it is the intervention by C.L.R. James at the founding congress itself. As reported in the English version of the proceedings of the meeting, he pointed out certain differences between the English and French translations. (See Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.1, 1978). However, as this intervention was made in the context of the discussion leading to the adoption of a final text, obviously it can not really address the problem that we are considering here.
What is perhaps surprising is that after the publication of these materials in 1978, there was no further attempt to clarify the issues.
And let’s be clear about it: knowledge of the Russian language is not required to pick this up. Given that the French translation by the OCI follows closely the Russian text, any group with both an English- and a French-language component should have spotted the problem. And at the very least queried the differences.
But what happened in 1938 and afterwards so that this to happen?
The 1938 Congress mourned the loss of Rudolf Klement, a very important member of the international secretariat, the administrative body that ran the current affairs of the Fourth International. Klement had been kidnapped and killed just a few weeks previous to the meeting by Stalinist agents. With him had been stolen some valuable materials that were part of the preparation of the congress, and this had an immediate impact on it. Perhaps more importantly, his loss meant that the movement was deprived of one of its very few capable administrators. This also points out under what terrible pressures the Trotskyists were working at the time.
Then came the Second World War, with the murder of hundreds of Trotskyist cadre by Stalinists and fascists alike, which certainly left the movement in disarray. Of course, one of the first to be murdered was Trotsky himself in August 1940.
The post-war events, with the crisis in the FI about what to do with regard to Eastern Europe and China, did nothing to ease the pressure.
But in the more leisurely years of growth and expansion, with so many journals and publications available, including some with a more scholarly character, it could have been the proper time to notice the problem and try to explain/solve it.
At this point in time, it is quite doubtful that any of the participants of the 1938 Conference may still be alive (probably Michel Raptis “Pablo” was the last one to die).
Therefore we can only introduce the discrepancies and hope that a critical edition of the TP be prepared, that would reproduce side by side the Russian and the English texts, with the appropriate annotations. This would certainly help everybody studying the history of the Trotskyist movement.
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Last updated on 4.1.2003