Abstract :
The collapse of actually existing socialism and the parallel failure of Western
social democracy and its replacement by today’s neoliberal consensus in combination with
the rise of the ideology of postmodernism1 and the decline of antisystemic movements2
have inevitably led to a corresponding decline of a discussion which was still flourishing a
few decades ago: the discussion on a transitional strategy towards an alternative society.
This was inevitable, because the abandonment by the Left (Old, New, and Green) of any
vision for an alternative society in effect made such strategies redundant. A basic criterion
which we may use in distinguishing between the various transitional strategies which have
been proposed in the past and the few being proposed today is whether a strategy aims at
reforming the present institutions without proposing any alternative institutional
framework, or whether, instead, it aims at replacing the present society’s institutional
framework, that is, the system of the globalised market economy and the complementary
institution of representative ‘democracy’, as well as the corresponding system of values
that constitutes the dominant social paradigm on which the present society is based. On the
basis of this criterion we may distinguish between ‘non-systemic’ and ‘anti-systemic’
strategies.
