In March, 2000, Spectre editor Steve McGiffen was asked to speak to a workshop at the Socialist Scholars’ Conference in New York City on the subject of ‘The Third Way’. Before the workshop he was sent some questions on the subject. Below, we print the questions and his replies.

As the Lisbon declaration makes clear, the so-called ‘Third Way’ is merely a slightly more elegant term for neo-liberalism, whose aim is to destroy the social and political gains of the last two centuries. It has nothing to do with the traditions of social democracy, which in some cases was an attempt to confront the difficulties of making social revolutions in advanced capitalist countries, honest if misguided. As Tony Benn has said, Blairism was merely a way of making the Tory Party re-electable. Its attempt to associate itself with a vaguely-defined concept of ‘modernity’, as well as with any kind of progressive politics, is bogus. For reasons that I don’t pretend are as yet clear to me, the British Conservative Party had ceased to have the capacity to govern. The ruling class thus turned to Blair, who was entirely a media creation - when I saw him speak in the early nineties he was a nobody, just one of hundreds of actual and aspiring backbench Labour MPs. We should not grace Blairism with the status of some kind of alternative ideology. It is a product of the deep tradition fo contempt for working people which is normality amongst a certain layer of English middle class philistine; and the fact that the European Union, through the single market and the euro, has massively eroded the space for democratic discourse within its expanding borders.
I have yet to meet anyone from continental Europe who really understands this. They tend to believe that Blairism is simply the Labour Party catching up with the abandonment of socialism which they perceive as having happened in most of the rest of Europe in the fifties and early sixties. In my experience, however, the space for political discourse and action in France, Belgium, Scandinavia and even (if to a lesser extent) the Netherlands and Germany remains much broader than it is in England. French-speaking social democrats in Belgioum have just issued a recommitment to fundamental values which may be honoured more in the breach as events unfold, but which would be unimaginable in England.
The only way in which Blairism is the lesser of two evils, in the British context, is that in seeking for example to construct a system of education and social services to meet the needs of ‘a modern economy’, (for which read ‘big capital’) it is at least doing something coherent. The Tories had really lost the plot. This is also beginning to be evident at EU level.
‘Does it offer the possibility for the development of a new politics liberated from the constraints of ‘electoral time’ and the ritualization of the electoral process? Does it permit the bridging of parliamentary politics and mass mobilization and direct action?’
There are parties in Europe which are doing this, and in response to their own versions of Blairism. The one with which I am associated, the Dutch Socialist Party, is a prime example. Others are LCR-LO in France and the Scottish SP, the Danish Red Green Alliance and the Swedish Vänster Party. These parties, from different traditions, understand the limitations of bourgeois democracy but do not reject the parliamentary process - they have learnt, or are learning, how to use it, but that it is merely one ‘front’ in the battle.
‘To what extent does the Third Way’s acceptance of the ‘Washington consensus’ and its criticism of the ‘excesses of globalization’ create the possibility for the globalization of labor rights and social struggles?’
Well, it certainly enhances it, but arriving at workable forms of co-operation is proving extremely difficult. There is no agreement about such important questions as the nature of the nation state, forms of representation within a global movement, forms of engagement. Things are emerging, but in a (probably necessarily) chaotic way, so it’s difficult to know how optimistic we can be. Working across cultures and languages is hard, but we have to find ways to do it. It’s important to try to find convincing ‘democratic controls and (forms of) supervision of the supranational multilateral institutions and transnational technocracies’, even if these are in the end doomed, because we have to have a program, and in devising and pursuing it, we educate (including of course ourselves) and agitate.
In conclusion, I’m rather surprised to be asked questions which take seriously the idea that Blairism, or the Third Way, has any kind of progressive content. It’s just the enemy’s not-very-new (when you really look at them) clothes.

Steve McGiffen is editor of Spectre magazine