Has the left blown its big chance of success?
The collapse of unfettered capitalism should have been a golden opportunity for the left. So where did it all go wrong?
It is a rare sunny summer morning and I am on the bus from Stoke Newington to Bloomsbury in central London. In these old, slightly earnest parts of the capital, leftwing politics runs deep: from Karl Marx writing in the British Library to communes in the 70s to today's dogged socialist flyposters. This morning's bus ride does not disappoint. Seated in front of me, en route to Marxism 2009, the pre-eminent British gathering of the international radical left, are a clean-cut man and woman in their early 20s. He is wearing a crisp new T-shirt that reads "Revolución Bolivarana". She has a large rucksack. They are speaking German, but the word "socialism" recurs.
The papers today are full of the recession as usual. On the Today programme, David Cameron has been talking about emergency cuts in government spending, and a union leader has been fiercely defending the wages of public sector workers. It could almost be the heady days of the mid-70s, when capitalism seemed to struggle for breath and all political bets appeared to be off.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/17/left-politics-capitalism-recession