Slavoj Žižek, in 1999: At a recent meeting of the leaders of the Western powers dedicated to the ‘Third Way’, the Italian Prime Minister Massimo d’Alema said that one should not be afraid of the word ‘socialism’. Clinton and, following him, Blair and Schroeder, are supposed to have burst out laughing. This says much about the Third Way, which is ‘problematic’ not least because it exposes the absence of a Second Way. The idea of a Third Way emerged at the very moment when, at least in the West, all other alternatives, from old-style conservativism to radical social democracy, crumbled in the face of the triumphant onslaught of global capitalism and its notion of liberal democracy. The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no Second Way, no alternative to global capitalism, so that, in a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian negation of negation, the Third Way brings us back to the first and only way. Global capitalism with a human face.
From the archive, Paul Graham: It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.
Attempts to Escape the Logic of Capitalism |
