real utopias

One of the many unsolved puzzles bequeathed to us by the global financial crisis is the abject failure of left wing politics to reap any benefits.

That the many attempts to theorize the crisis of 2008, the deepest crisis since the Depression, have at best been inconclusive should not be all that surprising. After all, as Michael Bernstein noted in the late 1980s, a half-century after the Great Depression there was not yet any general agreement on the causes of that economic collapse. Another quarter century later, such a consensus over that long passed crisis has still not emerged. Yet if we on the left want to assess the likely outcome of the recent crash and develop a meaningful response, we need to at least clarify some of the issues involved.