Progressive Governance Conference and the Crisis of the "Third Way"

Workers' Daily Internet Edition: Article Index :

Progressive Governance Conference and the Crisis of the "Third Way"

Fourteen heads of state and government from five continents met in London on July 13-14 to attend a Progressive Governance Conference. The conference was chaired by Peter Mandelson.

Compared with the optimism of, say, the Berlin Conference in June 2000 on "progressive governance for the 21st century", this latest conference on the "Third Way" marked quite a change. Whereas the Berlin conference had the character of an attempt to unite the leaders of the whole world behind the "Third Way", the London conference had the character of the need of a dwindling band of government leaders who are avowedly of the so-called "centre-left" to "renew" the "Third Way", or the "philosophy of progressive politics" as Tony Blair describes it.

Writing in the journal "Progressive Politics" before the conference, Tony Blair first defined the New Labour strategy in which it came to power as "an enduring centre-left response to the Thatcher-Reagan hegemony". This was the deception by which the victory at the polls on May 1, 1997, was accomplished. It was a deception based on creating illusions about, as Tony Blair writes, "a new dynamic in global capitalism over the last decade". But now, as he again points out, "we can more easily discern the limits and tensions unleashed by globalisation. "We are witnessing increasing insecurity in all its forms: terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction on our television screens; the impact of migration and crime on our streets. In the global economy the optimism of the late 1990s has dissipated. Financial markets have fallen. The risks of deflation and prolonged slowdown exacerbate structural problems in much of Western Europe and Japan. Trust towards those in authority has diminished, and the legitimacy of politics is under greater threat than ever before."

As a description of the economic, political, legitimacy and other crises that global capitalism is facing, we would not seek to split hairs with Tony Blair over this summary. This being the case, the illusion that New Labour, governing from the centre-left, would represent everyone except a small right-wing of hereditary peers (which have now been dispensed with) and exceedingly rich (who have not), has become somewhat stretched, to say the least. The reality that New Labour would carry through the Thatcher-Reagan offensive against the working class and people, while attempting to fool the people that here was something new with a programme that was in their interests, has become clear for those that wish to see.

Tony Blair has no compunction in defining this brand of "progressive politics" as standing "in the tradition of revisionist social democracy". But, as usual, he does not enquire into the objective history of this tradition, but defines it as applying the "enduring values of the centre-left". Whether one quibbles with the term "centre-left" or accepts the term as encapsulating the "revisionist social democracy" tradition, the history of this revisionism runs from the social chauvinism of the labour leaders during the first world war who called for the workers to identify their positions with those of their imperialist governments right through to the Labour Party in power occupying Iraq and defending neo-liberal globalisation not so much in the name of the workers as against any recognition of their existence. If the first represented the crisis of opportunism, the last the crisis of neo-liberalism masquerading as social democracy.

This crisis is the crisis that the "Third Way" is facing. As Tony Blair puts it, "the energy that New Labour gained from defining itself against Old Labour and the New Right has substantially diminished since 1997". Tony Blair points out that since September 11 "the world has changed and politics with it", not least in the "contours of US politics". The task of the Progressive Governance conference, as Tony Blair saw it, was to counter the ridiculing of the "Third Way" as a new politics "beyond the Left and Right" and keeping at bay the "left" who want to drift "back towards the failed ideological dogmas of the past".

Tony Blair ended his speech to the conference by declaring: "There is no other way." This is where Tony Blair came in, and this was the content of the conference, of working out how to extend the life of the programme of the "Third Way" and its illusions, that there is no alternative to the programme of the financial oligarchy of reaction and war.

In coming issues of WDIE, we will examine further the content of the Progressive Governance conference, the response of the "left" to it, and what the alternative is, the need for the independent programme of the working class.