Abstract
There are fashionable terms that are at once misleading and revealing. The third way is one of them. There was a time when this concept had a genuine meaning. Back in the 1950s, for the so-called revisionists in Eastern Europe it spelled the search for democratic socialism that had nothing to do with its Stalinist perversion but was not a return to capitalism either. For some radical dissidents in the West it had the same signi?cance: it was their way of telling Moscow and Washington a plague on both your houses during the period of the Cold War. But that con?ict is over, the neo-Stalinist empire has collapsed and capitalism is triumphant. In its new reincarnation, the third way does not even envisage the dismantling of capitalism. All it proposes is to put a coat of varnish on top. As applied by its chief practitioner, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and as interpreted by his guru, Anthony Giddens, the model has been described, unkindly though not unfairly, as that contradiction in termsThatcherism with a human face.
Highlights
There are fashionable terms that are at once misleading and revealing
The term became fashionable once again when, on the international scale, the establishment began to lose the full control of the situation
As we saw, the leaders of that respectful Left have fully endorsed the new rules of the game, heavily twisted in a reactionary direction: bowing to the gospel of globalization, they accepted the uncontrolled flows of capital over frontiers and, domestically, they became the eager practitioners of the religion of the market and of the cult of private enterprise
Summary
There are fashionable terms that are at once misleading and revealing. The “third way” is one of them. With the gospel of globalization shaken by the Asian crisis and its consequences in Russia, Latin America and beyond, with the pensée unique, as the French call the ruling ideology, losing its monopoly for the first time in years, a new New Left has a possibility to help the movement from below to search for an alternative that is both radical and internationalist and to put pressure on these governments.
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