Callinicos Alex: Protiv trećeg puta

Alex Callinicos: Against the third way

Anti-capitalist criticism

The third way is one of the concepts of revival, that is, the creation of a new, so-called moderate left offered by the "guru" of the new British social democracy, Anthony Giddens. It became the political philosophy of Tony Blair and New Labor in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, and in the United States under Bill Clinton. It was a break with the existing dogmas of classical social democracy and soon became the platform of the political programs of many European social democratic parties. The concept caused a real storm of criticism from the left and the right - from the understanding that the third way is actually a mixture of already existing ideas and policies, i.e. a big hollow or a completely empty political philosophy, Thatcherism carried out by other means, to claims such as those made by Norberto Bobbio about a formula that is neither left nor right and that was also used by the French fascist movement - and Alex Callinicos, who calls it "the best ideological disguise of neoliberalism", gives us exactly that in this book the most well-argued.

Given the passage of the concept in power, the question of the meaningfulness of further discussion arises. There will probably be more attempts to reconcile "entrepreneurship and justice" - the experience of free-market capitalism constantly provokes struggles for social justice. But we still live in the shadow of the Soviet Union and its fall. In the absence of a democratic and progressive alternative in which we would have confidence, the temptation to try to humanize capitalism is irresistible to many. The lesson of this book, as well as the effect of the rule of the third time, is that this project is utopian. The demands of justice are simply, it turns out, incompatible with the logic of capital.

Alex Callinicos is head of European studies at King's College in London, he received his doctorate from Oxford in the field of philosophy. So far, he has published about thirty books in the fields of philosophy, political philosophy, political science, political economy, and a large number of articles in reputable European journals in the field of social sciences. He is the author of several books, including Imperialism and Global Political Economy and Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory.