The Rivista del manifesto finds itself in a crisis so serious that its founders and editors have decided to suspend publication. It is not a financial crisis: we continue to sell an average of over eight thousand copies an issue, and our deficit is small enough to be easily recoverable, even without the help of advertising or public contributions. The political constituency to which the journal is addressed remains sizeable, and preoccupied with the same issues that concern the editors. So what do we mean by a crisis and why do we feel it puts in question the project of the journal? It is my view that—at least as things stand—the journal has exhausted its ‘motivating impulse’, for reasons that are both objective and subjective. The Rivista del manifesto remains a fine product—‘very interesting’, we are often told—but it has become inadequate not only to its own ambitions, however unrealistic these might have been, but also to present needs.

The journal was launched as a political initiative in 1999 by a group of people from a variety of sometimes conflicting backgrounds and traditions, and has always drawn on a wide and diverse pool of contributors. But we did not decide to work together by chance, or on the basis of the lowest common denominator of agreement—a mere disdain for the current state of things. Rather we shared a joint discourse of analyses and expectations, ideas and proposals, that needed to be tested and developed, but gave us a minimum collective identity. It could be summarized in three points, which at the time of the journal’s foundation were by no means taken for granted by the Left at large.

1. A novel—neoliberal and neo-imperial—order had emerged from two epoch-making ruptures: the collapse of actually existing socialism, and the reorganization of capitalism in the wake of a new technological revolution. What did it comport? An omnivorous domination of the economy over every other area of life; the domination of the economy in its turn by the market, and of the market by huge multinational corporations and financial conglomerates; the uncontested supremacy of a single Great Power, with an entourage of subaltern allies and new forms of colonization in the developing world; the decline of political democracy, weakened by the transfer of power to institutions far removed from any popular control, and the exhaustion of its own inner substance.

From the start, it was plain that this new world order exacted enormous costs, exacerbating every familiar material contradiction of capital—inequality, exclusion, instability—and adding new evils: civic, moral and environmental degradation. It was equally clear that these were not a temporary price to be paid for progress. They would be long-lasting, strengthening trends. It was already possible to foresee the symptoms and mechanisms that would soon complicate the functioning of this system, bringing economic crisis and geopolitical conflict, a resort to wars and more open forms of authoritarianism. On the agenda was not, in the phrase of the time, a ‘two-thirds society’ guaranteeing a privileged existence or at least security to most of the world’s population, while temporarily sacrificing and excluding the other third, whose eventual rescue could be entrusted to global economic development. The reality was that this order threatened the well-being, stability and civic existence, even the satisfaction of basic needs, of many individuals and populations. In our national setting that meant the task was not, as the established Left maintained, to make Italy a ‘normal’ country. It was to put in question the international ‘norm’ that Italy was so ill equipped to deal with, yet by which it was conditioned.

2. No less formidable than its contradictions were the strength and stability of the new global order. It possessed overwhelming technological, financial and cultural power, as well as military force. It had acquired new means of co-opting, manipulating, atomizing or repressing even some of those forces, suffering under its dominion, that ought to have resisted it. It was freed from the restraints that had been imposed upon it by the workers’ movement—understood, whatever its own bitter divisions, as the totality of classes, traditions, organizations and states that had struggled against the capitalist system, setting its mark on an entire century; and which had now entered into crisis as a political subject.

Such were the conditions in which the Third Way was born: the idea that the new world order could and should be accepted though its most glaring faults might be mitigated, even while guaranteeing market freedoms. Its adherents spoke of limited reforms to redistribute a greater sum of wealth, of checking environmental degradation by measures downstream from production, of replacing a now too-costly universalist welfare state with equal opportunity to compete for all, and some protection for the losers. Politics would be revived by enhanced executive power, world governance assured by a wise concert of the leading powers, peace and democracy secured by humanitarian military interventions endorsed by the un. This was a vision doomed to failure; one that would not only inflict repeated electoral defeats on the centre left, but undermine its bases of support and destroy its morale.

But the same conditions that rendered vain the illusions of the Third Way also disabled any prospect of opposing the new order effectively by pure contestation from below, relying on the molecular growth of alternative experiences and values in social movements, which neither sought nor acted to impinge on major economic decisions, or institutional structures of rule. For the dangers of the times were too great to allow a strategy only for the long run, and the power of the system was too pervasive not to channel and dam the growth of such movements themselves. The very issues they raised, just because they were so huge and complex, needed more than ever forces and resources on a commensurate scale to resolve them.