The story so far: some capitalists behaved very badly. While this was going on, the socialists didn't ask questions because they were too busy spending the receipts that flowed from that behaviour. Now, the socialists – who were happy to look the other way during the good times or even to delude themselves into thinking that they were responsible for them – want to use the ignominy of the capitalists to seize the kind of power they thought they had lost forever.
You may quibble at my use of the word "socialist" to describe people who generally present themselves as friends of the free market, and who have repudiated full-scale nationalisation (even of the banks at a moment when that option might have appeared irresistible). So, as someone who spent her formative years on the Left, let me make clear that I am using the word to designate those who accept the primary tenet of Marxist ideology: that the economy can and should be controlled by the state.
In the hard version of this creed, it is acceptable for government to become totalitarian in order to accomplish such control. The softer version – which prevailed in much of Western Europe and Britain – was committed to achieving this through democratic means. By the end of the 1980s, the hard version had collapsed and the soft version was discredited.
Then, suddenly – a miracle! Free-market economics, which seemed to have won the historical argument hands down, is imploding. Now the very people who had embraced it as, at the very least, a milch cow for public-spending adventurism, can see an "opportunity". Yes, that is the word that both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have taken to using to describe the current economic apocalypse.
In Gordon Brown's fantasy, this is an "opportunity" to exercise control over the whole world. Not just stricter regulation by national governments of their own economic institutions, but a wondrous new level of international regulation by supranational functionaries – to be appointed by whom? A World Government agency accountable to no electorate and with no democratic mandate from the populations over whom it will wield such power? Trotskyists used to say that Stalinist Russia had failed to achieve Utopia because it had embraced "socialism in one country" rather than going for "world revolution". Now, we are being told that Labour's market-led social justice programme failed because it opted for "regulation in one country" instead of understanding the need for "world regulation".
Maybe being an ex-Marxist is a bit like being a lapsed Catholic: you never quite get rid of the old thought patterns.
In the more overheated renditions of the Brown theme, there is talk of a "global vision for fairness", in which the very poverty that is being visited upon all the developed economies will somehow make it possible to redistribute wealth to the developing world.
Is he quite mad? Does he actually believe that the economic failure of rich countries will do anything but impoverish poor countries even further? Or that the moral righteousness of the intention to cure world poverty will, in itself, constitute some kind of cure for the banking collapse?
Meanwhile, Mr Obama – who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom – talks of an "opportunity" to "reorganise our priorities". He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America's failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming ("we made the wrong choices"), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country's economic problems.
Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?
If it is the latter, then he is making a pitch for old-fashioned Roosevelt-style government-expenditure programmes which take money out of the productive part of the economy and bring state intervention into play in new dimensions of national life. It did not work for Roosevelt and it will not work now.
But maybe sentimental mythology matters more than historical reality: what Obama and Brown are both trying to do is to put themselves on the benevolent, morally attractive side of the argument by saying: we – your government – will act, intervene, take positive steps to help you. We will not stand by and let the hurricane winds of the economy blow you down. (Mr Brown has actually used the word "hurricane" to describe the crisis, as if it were a natural disaster which no one could have prevented.)
What neither the Prime Minister nor the President can admit is what is becoming more obvious every day (and which has been admitted by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key): there is precious little that any politician can do to resolve the present economic problems. The values of assets and property are simply going to have to fall from the grossly inflated points they reached under the debt bubble to what are generally accepted to be realistic levels. Then people will start to do business again – as eventually they must – and confidence will gradually return.
So are these politicians pretending that they have answers out of wilful deceit – out of the need to keep playing the game for partisan advantage? Or are they simply attempting to maintain some degree of public optimism about the future? (After all, an "opportunity" sounds better than a "debacle".)
Well, I grew up with the Left and what this looks like to me is a power grab: a seizing of the moment by the forces which always believed in state domination. The Left sees an opening here, first for telling a critical lie about the historical origins of this crisis, which was propelled as much by the Left-liberal determination to spread prosperity through easy credit to the poor, as by the greed of bankers. And then, out of the wreckage, to restructure the economy along the lines that it always wanted, complete with central controls over the pay levels in private financial institutions.
We are being led to believe that public debate should be all about economic mechanics when it should really be about political principle: just how many freedoms do we want to lose while governments pretend that they are the solution?
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