What is the Third Way?

The term “Third Way” is used by a variety of groups with very different agendas. Some liberal capitalists organizations, such as “The Third Way: A Strategy for Progressives”, use it to try to build a progressive political agenda in the US. Yet, there’s a growing trend in which the term is used to represent something much more radical. It’s often used as a label for an alternative to both capitalism and state socialism. That alternative is commonly called Economic Democracy.

Now we’ve exchanged one term for another. So what is meant by an “Economic Democracy”? While there are several variations, a growing consensus is developing of a decentralized socio-economic system in which the primary economic unit would be a worker-owned, democratic firm rather than an investor-owned corporation. In most models the democratic firms would be based on worker-owned cooperatives that follow the International Co-operative Alliance principles.

One of the amazing aspects of the Economic Democracy model is that, unlike other some other proposals, it is based on real world economic enterprises that have been proven to work. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, for example, has long been proven profitable and very successful. And repeated studies have shown that cooperatives and workplace democracies are, in general, far more productive than capitalist corporations.

There are still many issues to be worked out. But there are people working to solve these issues and great progress is being made quickly. It may be that the long nightmare of capitalism is nearing an end and that humanity can finally awaken to the light of a new dawn.