By Antony Lerman
The causes of the global crisis lie in corruption, financial manipulation and institutionalised fraud, market rigging, bankers' greed, illegal wealth appropriation exacerbated by the bank bailouts and the promotion of war as a means of generating profits for big corporations at the cost of the poor, the disadvantaged and socially destitute.
The consequences of The Great Recession will extend far into the future.
There's the human cost, the devastating impact on people's lives, whether for us personally, for already disadvantaged groups, the country as a whole, developing nations, or the more than 2 billion people already living on less than $2 per day.
Predictions about the consequences of the deficit-reduction measures proposed are already dire. And for many millions, the debilitating impact of financial retrenchment is a reality today.
Commentators of all political stripes are falling over each other to tell us that state social programmes will collapse. Unemployment will rise massively. Millions will be impoverished.
Health services will be curtailed, pensions reduced, infrastructure projects cut, educational opportunities diminished. Worldwide living standards will deteriorate. And things won't get better any time soon.
The last comparable global economic crisis gave a boost to all-encompassing, radical ideologies that claimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of what the problem was and a complete solution: communism and fascism.
Whatever you think of them – for me, both were disastrous – there is no doubting the immensity of each one's aspiration to remake society.
If, as many claim, "humanity is at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history", where is today's big answer, or bold ideological analysis and recipe for transformation, the movement that's taking the masses by storm? It's not that I want it.
It's just that the circumstances seem so ripe for such a response and yet, unless I'm missing something, nothing comparable has emerged and I'm struggling to understand why.
Perhaps it's because politicians in all countries affected have successfully framed the crisis not only in terms of economic errors but also but also moral deficiencies.
They have offered a sop to the anger of the public, but dampened down speculation about the need for revolutionary change by proposing solutions that are almost exclusively managerial.
Evil may have infected the system and a few bankers' knuckles may have been rapped, but the holy grail will be reached by cutting the deficit. The cuts may get ever more radical, but they're just cuts – what any accountant would tell you to do to get your personal finances in order.
Rebalancing the economy effectively means letting free market forces take care of growth, then incomes and spending can recover. Endure the pain, take the medicine and all will be well.
The global consensus among political leaders sees this is the right approach, with variations as to how far and how fast to go.
It may be keeping dissent in check for now, but it looks to me fragile and was achieved with no little sleight of hand. Can it really be the case that, in effect, a bunch of accountants will solve all our problems?
You don't have to look far to find powerful arguments being made that what happened is not merely natural to the economic cycle and therefore won't simply adjust itself in time.
This approach locates the cause of the global crisis in corruption, financial manipulation and institutionalised fraud, market rigging, bankers' greed, illegal wealth appropriation exacerbated by the bank bailouts and the promotion of war as a means of generating profits for big corporations at the cost of the poor, the disadvantaged and socially destitute.
If economic growth falters, and many are warning that it will, the appeal of an analysis that says the system is fundamentally broken and the economists have been revealed as emperors without any clothes, may dramatically increase.
If then pressure mounts for more radical, root-and-branch solutions, is there anything on offer that may seriously challenge the neoliberal consensus and mobilise the masses?
I have no special command of the landscape, so correct me if I'm wrong, but fully-grown, intellectually coherent political-economic solutions, ready for instant harvesting, look to me to be nonexistent.
Despite claims that Marxism is undergoing a revival, memory of the barbarous uses to which it was put by communist regimes is still too fresh to make it anything more than of minority interest.
And when a radical populist like President Lula da Silva produces 9% growth in Brazil in first quarter 2010, within a basically capitalist economic framework, what thinking revolutionary will see the appeal of Marxism?
So, too, with the anti-globalisation movement directed at G8s and G20s, which anyway seems to have run out of steam.
Green economic and political theories seem far too weak and underdeveloped to gain serious traction and the deficit-reduction bandwagon will only, and almost certainly unfairly, make green solutions look unaffordable.
It may be wrong to rule out something radically new coming from more establishment sources, like the new Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, but don't hold your breath.
Perhaps there are other ideologies in formation, which even now are generating great excitement among those keen to find a new global answer to the global crisis.
Equally, such ideologies will generate deep scepticism and possibly fear in many who distrust wholesale social engineering.
It's true that our current politics are too crude to cope with either satisfactorily, explaining the causes of our current problems or devising and implementing an intellectually coherent and fair set of solutions.
So some new thinking is desperately needed. Nevertheless, for all its inadequacies, I favour a more fox-like, piecemeal, generalist approach to this task, rather than the widespread adoption of a hedgehog-like, all-encompassing ideology.
And yet I fear that we may not escape a deeply damaging bout of the latter at some point over the next 10 years.
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