Idon’t think I have misrepresented Alex Callinicos’s position. I do know that he has misrepresented mine. He says that one of my two criteria of a ‘structural reform’ (as distinct from a measure of ‘mere reformism’) is that it ‘form[s] part of an irreversible process of change’, and proceeds to twit me with the reminder that no progressive measures are irreversible, not even the provisions of the National Health Service. Yet the fact is that I did not advance the rather simple-minded position Callinicos chooses to criticize. What I did state (as the first attribute of ‘structural reform’) was that ‘any reform, to be structural, must not be comfortably self-contained (a mere “improvement”), but must, instead, be allowed self-consciously to implicate other “necessary” reforms that flow from it as part of an emerging project of structural transformation.’ In other words (and in contrast to Bernstein’s ‘the process is everything for me, and. . .the final aim of socialism is nothing’), the popular movement-cum-party attempting a programme of structural reform must constantly articulate both to itself and to its broadest potential constituency the goal of structural transformation/socialism. It is this alone that can situate and make revolutionary sense of short-term struggles and achievements and forestall a situation in which these latter take on no more than the vulnerable half-life of free-standing, one-off ameliorations of some particularly raw attribute of otherwise ascendant capitalism.footnote9

Indeed, such emerging self-consciousness about the long-term imperatives of transformation (and about the logic that must be seen to link the realization of any one advance to the need/possibility for a set of subsequent advances towards a transformative goal) is also the necessary touchstone for realizing the second attribute of any ‘structural reform’ (the one Callinicos does permit me to retain): that it be fought for and realized in such a way as to contribute to the ongoing, cumulative, self-conscious ‘empowerment’—ideologically, organizationally—of the vast mass of the population. Obviously, attempts at structural reform are always prone to collapse into ‘mere reformism’ and/or to contribute to the unhealthy bureaucratization of ostensibly progressive organizations; Callinicos is correct to flag the dangers. But why should this be deemed to be inevitable? In fact, the struggle within the movement to sustain the kind of tough bargaining stance that a transformative process implies is one of the most crucial factors within the politics of the transition.