80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST search for an alternative by progressive and left circles in Central Eastern Europe is gaining momentum. But it is a striking feature of these endeavours, that the diverse possible elements of such an alternative are still discussed in a very fragmented manner. One of the actual tasks of the left is therefore to bring these elements together systematically . However, in order to develop these elements into a left project, with a potential for contributing to the transformation of the world economy in the foreseeable future, these endeavours have to be linked to the struggle for a new relationship between popular needs, politics, and economics. I am not just stressing the constraints on successful catching-up development that are imposed by the dynamics of the capitalist world economy, and the need to systematically bring back into the debate, from the very beginning, the possible results, on the world scale, of any alternative economic development. Rather, any debate about alternative patterns of development for the national economies of the region (which may be catching-up orientated in several aspects) immediately has to be linked to concepts and strategies of an economic recovery based on an anti-capitalist way of dealing with all human and natural resources of the region, reducing rather than maintaining or only reshaping social inequality on the world-scale. If the lesson learned from the failure of state socialism was only, under new conditions, to try the same again in another (more "flexible") way, this "alternative" will end up as a simple repetition of (more "flexible") capitalist (may be "state-capitalist") catching-up strategies, which will never be a means for worldwide satisfaction of the needs of the majority of the populations. It is instead necessary to combine criticism of the classical state socialist type of protectionism with a criticism of catching-up as the common goal of old protectionism and new selectivism. Secondly, the proposed reorientation of recovery strategies can be only successful if the immediate and comprehensive interests of the population are taken seriously as an inbuilt element of an alternative project. In practical politics, this means that narrowing the gap between popular needs and the political system is not so much a question of left "representation" of these interests ^vithin the given party system, but a struggle for a restructuring of the political system that will open the space for the voice of popular interests in politics. The immediate and comprehensive interest of all producers historically has never been in favour of capitalist catching-up development. Therefore this kind of change in the relationship between economy and politics seems to be a necessary and absolutely basic element in hindering a new socialist project from once again slipping away towards a strategy of simple national or regional ascent within the capitalist world economy, under the auspices of democratic or anti-democratic "centralism" of a self-sufficient 'left' elite.