What’s Left?

John Lancaster in the upcoming LRB,

"So: a huge unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialised. That is literally nobody's idea of how the financial system is supposed to work. It is just as much an abomination to the free marketeer as it is to the social democrat or outright leftist. But the models and alternatives don't seem to be forthcoming: there is an ideological and theoretical vacuum where the challenge from the left used to be. Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more – if only to clarify thinking and values, and to provide the chorus of jeering and Schadenfreude which at this moment is deeply appropriate. I would be providing it myself if I weren't so frightened."

There's too much truth in this for me to be comfortable. There have been - isolated - left commentators who have put forward emergency or long term economic recovery plans - but few who have go to the root of the matter in proposing a different kind of society, other than those who simply repeat the same old mantras of 'worker's democracy'. It's not enough.