Secondly however, I was struck by the parallels between the political debates within the anti-capitalist movement and today's climate movement. Callinicos writes that his book comes from the "revolutionary Marxist tradition" and that many in the anti-capitalist movement might uncomfortable with that. He continues though that he offers the arguments in it "as a contribution to debate within the movement and in the hope of persuading more people that another world is indeed possible". The same could be said if it was presented to many radical environmental activists today.
Callinicos opens his contribution with a discussion of how capitalism destroys the planet. Today I would hope that few socialist authors would ignore the ecological crisis, but in 2003 this was much less common. Callinicos' arguments, which located the climate and environmental crises within the capitalist system of accumulation, feel as important as ever. He shows that it is the very nature of exploitation within capitalism which makes it so destructive to people and planet. Again, with an eye to contemporary debates about the war in Ukraine, Callinicos continues to show how this system then drives imperialist conflict.
For those who took part in the various manifestations of the anti-capitalist movement - protests, social forums and so on - it is easy to forget the swirl of ideas that ran through them. Callinicos notes that the nature of the movement itself was contested - was it against capitalism? Against globalisation? To what extent were the various demands (the eradication of "third world" debt, solidarity with migrants etc) a united movement or the temporary coming together of different strands? The section that looks at "varieties of anti-capitalism" is useful because it reminds us that debates around localism, autonomism, reformism and top down change haven't gone away. Indeed the climate crisis has amplified them.
Callinicos' fraternal, but powerful, critique of the ideas of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are particularly important today. Hardt's "appeal... to the novelty of 'network movements', the idea that political disagreements will somehow spontaneously resolve themselves thanks to the logic of the struggle" is reminiscent of the "beyond politics" and "movement of movements" approach taken by some in the leadership of Extinction Rebellion. Callinicos notes that these ideas were not new in the early 2000s, but "prevalent during the Second International" up to the First World War.
But perhaps the most important section of An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto is that on "imagining other worlds". Here Callinicos takes quite a theoretical critique of the market to show how a future world based on "justice, efficiency, democracy and sustainability" requires a break from an notion of capitalist organisation. In particular he argues hard that for democratic, socialist, planning of the economy. Callinicos argues that the "planning" which took place in the Soviet Union was neither democratic nor socialist, and instead:
As a first approximation, by socialist planning I mean an economic system where the allocation and use of resources are determined collectively on the basic of democratic decision-making procedures central to which is the majority principle...But his vision of a democratically planned economy is nuanced, taking up complex organisational issues which link concepts like "individual rights" to wider collective interests:
A planned socialist economy is democratic but that does not mean it would always rely on the majority principle. There are many cases in which other decision procedures are appropriate: part of the point of the concept of individual rights is to identify those areas where individuals should be able to exclude all others from participating in decisions that primarily concern them. For example... one of the achievements of capitalism has been to establish that individuals have the exclusive right to decide what sort of work they should undertake... It seems to me that a socialist economic system in general would respect and indeed extend this right.
Back in 2003 anyone putting these arguments would have also had to answer the closely related question of "how do we get there?" The same is true today, and Callinicos argues that while we need a revolution to create such as society, a revolution based on the working class, he also is mindful of the way the anti-capitalist movement threw up immediate demands that needed to be fought for. Some of these can be brought together as "transitional demands", which are "reforms that emerge from the realities of existing struggles but whose implementation in the current context would challenge capitalist economic relations". Today the demand for "millions of climate jobs" would fit this framework. Workers fighting for climate jobs and a just transition today are part of both wining real reforms and challenging capitalism.
Twenty years after first publication An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto pays re-reading but not just for historic interest. While some of it is of course a little dated and some specifics have changed, it remains a model for how to approach the multi-faceted, but radical social movements that we are seeing in the 2020s - from Black Lives Matter to the Climate Strikes.
Related Reviews
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy
Callinicos - Making History
Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons
McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos, Kouvelakis, Pradella (eds) - Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism
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