Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
IT IS POSSIBLE (just possible; I don't mean to slip into the prophetic mode) that we are at the beginning of a new period of political activism. Globalization seems to be producing not only...
...We devote a significant part of this issue to what happened there and what it might mean...
...we hope to begin a discussion in the near future...
...Capitalism today has effects similar to those that Marx described 150 years ago: "All that is solid melts into air...
...n At this point, the meaning isn't clear...
...And so there isn't, and shouldn't be, a "correct" left line on globalization, but rather a wide range of views on the three critical issues: the politics of global governance, the economics of free trade, and the strategy and tactics of opposition to the current economic regime (or nonregime...
...they are best answered (as the arguments here begin to answer them) in a practical way, with real illustrations and circumstantial detail...
...n In any political movement, even in emerging movements that may never actually emerge, a lot of energy is devoted to the classic question: What ought to be done?—which has a corollary less often mentioned: What ought not to be done...
...We already need, and will need, politicians ready to defend a harder line than this one...
...The third wayers have surrendered without a fight to the earliest conventional understanding of global economics, which rejects the very possibility of a political response–or, more accurately, which requires a sharp curtailment of social democratic politics for the sake of "competitive standing" in the global economy...
...If resistance to capitalist globalization grows, we will return to these questions, always questioningly...
...The Arguments section in this issue is devoted to what diplomats call a "frank" discussion of these questions—specifically of the relation of "tactics and ethics...
...M .W...
...Globalization seems to be producing not only rapid-fire growth, erratic movements of capital, booms and busts, wealth and destitution, but also a politics of resistance and reform...
...The phrase is from Lukacs, writing in 1919 and expressing a set of theoretical certainties that seem wholly implausible today...
...n However the discussion turns over the next years, we must end up with a politics very different from that of today's third way...
...Seattle '99 was a first sign— modest indeed relative to the mass demonstrations of the sixties, but impressive thirty years later...
...There isn't a lot of agreement on what it means economically either, but on that question the lines are pretty well drawn...
...We will continue to print opinions from the different sides...
...It i3 an old left question, never well answered: what does internationalism mean politically...
...The first of these we haven't yet addressed...
...We reprint here the Blair-Schroeder third way manifesto, which doesn't quite admit the extent of the curtailment— with critical annotations by Joanne Barkan, who points to all the evasions, the vague references to leftist values, the efforts to back away from concrete commitments...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
