Alex Callinicos

Callinicos, a leading member of the British Socialist Workers Party and secretary of the International Socialist Tendency, has published An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. A regular speaker at World and European Social Forums his views on the direction the anticapitalist movement should take tryto split the difference between the ideas currently in vogue in the movement and the principles of communism.

At the heart of the book is what Callinicos calls a "transitional programme". This phrase derives from Leon Trotsky, who developed a programme on this basis for the Fourth International in 1938. But while Trotsky developed a series of demands linking the contemporary struggles of the working class movement to revolution, working class state power and a planned economy, Callinicos instead presents a series of disconnected reforms together with the vaguest possible explanation of the need for revolution.

For Callinicos his demands "represent responses to contemporary realities, and have all been raised by existing movements. At the same time, the tendency of these demands is to undermine the logic of capital... while not necessarily formulated for explicitly anticapitalist reasons, these demands have an implicitly anticapitalist dynamic. They are what Trotsky called transitional demands, reforms that emerge from the realities of existing struggles but whose implementation in the current context would challenge capitalist economic relations." (p. 140)

Now this is not what Trotsky understood by transitional demands. He explained transitional demands in his 1938 programme as follows, making it clear that each of these demands will only challenge capitalism if they are presented as part of a system linked to the need for revolution...

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