Bear in mind that many countries exist in permanent ongoing crisis, with national tensions now hidden, now flaring up with sometimes bloody results, now hidden again.

Nationalism can cause the sudden fragmentation of seemingly stable states. Think about what happened to the USSR, still a superpower just 20 years ago. Consider too the cases of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia. Yet it can also provide a dynamic towards national reunification, as seen in Germany and Yemen, and one day hopefully in Korea.

For socialists to have intelligent things to say about such developments - and even build political organisations that actually have an impact in such situations - we first need an accurate assessment of what the phenomenon represents.

This is all the more so because some of nationalism’s many, many tanks are parked pretty much on our lawn. In much of the developing world, the last two decades have seen nationalism displace various forms of bastardised socialism as the chief organised political challenge to ruling elites.

And in the advanced industrial countries, the issue of national self-determination crops up time and time again. Should socialists support an independent Scotland? An independent Catalonia or Corsica?

Do we particularly care if Wallonia and Flanders call their marriage a day, or if Quebec wants out of Canada? Does Israel have the right to national self-determination? If not, why not? If so, does that imply the right to exercise it on Palestinian territory?

Yet given the range and extent of what is involved, Marxism has usually taken a surprisingly pick ‘n’ mix approach on these matters, often looking no deeper than immediate realpolitik expediency. If a spot of local revolt destabilises the prevailing imperialism, Lenin reasoned, what’s not to like?

On the other hand, a respectable tranche of famous Marxists - most notably Luxemburg - abhorred nationalism as either bourgeois or petit bourgeois, and therefore reactionary in almost all circumstances.

Things are so bad for the left that Stalin - yes, that Stalin - is considered to have produced major insights into this field. His work on the national question - and I confess to not having read it - is held up as the only halfway decent Marxist theoretical work he ever produced.

There seems no small consistency in all this. And of course, this topic is not going to be resolved by a single Boxing Day blog post. I’ll certainly be reading the comments box with interest. But let me offer a few of my own observations.

The first point to make is that nationalism is an ideology. And like all ideologies - most notably religion - it is infinitely protean. It has many variants and therefore one-line definition. There is no one founding theorist or one classical text.

Some of the key concepts are rooted in major Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and in the French revolution, and can broadly be depicted as progressive. But other ideas in the corpus - more influenced by nineteenth century German romanticism - give it the potential to provide the ideological underpinnings of radical rightist mass mobilisation, in the last analysis in the form of fascism.

Ultimately, insofar as nationalism demands loyalty to the necessarily cross-class construct of ‘the nation’, it cannot form the basis of any viable socialist project. Rosa was right on that score, at least.

And again, there is more than one variant of the concept of national self-determination, which comes in both 1917 Bolshevik and 1918 Woodrow Wilson trims. But the idea is accepted by just about everybody except the nation that oppresses another, and supposedly forms the basis of the current international order.

In general, the left needs to remember that the right of a country to self-determination has nothing to do with whether or not one approves of the regime that will run the show. It is a democratic demand, even if the movement that makes it is itself undemocratic.

But even here, there are problems. If we use distinct languages as a key determinant of which populations can be considered nations, then bear in mind that some 10,000 languages exist. And no-one thinks a world of 10,000 nation-states would be a good idea.

Ultimately we arrive back at taking things on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps there really is no clearer methodology available.

'One would have thought that several decades of experimentation with communism would have convinced most observers that it was a murderous and economically sub-optimal creed. Even its most fervent supporters could scarcely contest the view that it has spectacularly failed to live up to its creators' utopian expectations.

That’s his cue to quote the famous claim – based on the 800-page 1997 French work The Black Book of Communism – that Marxism is responsible for 100m deaths in the twentieth century.

What Thornhill doesn’t mention is that this suspiciously exact death toll is both contestable and widely contested. Clearly the nice round figure has been constructed by a group of rightists as an ideological weapon against the left.

Apply the same methodology to, say, the British empire, fascism or the capitalist system as a whole, and the tally would probably prove greater in all cases.

But ‘your side killed more than our side’ is not the way the contemporary serious Marxist left should tackle this vital issue. There is little point in trading comparative death tolls. There is no doubt that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others were responsible for tens of millions of murders. Let us simply say so.

The point is, these people do not constitute ‘our side’. The genuine left always led the way in criticising what we knew were exploitative class societies, even during historical conjunctures when it suited various ruling classes to support and even arm these regimes.

Let’s take just one example. Don’t forget that Pol Pot was only able to devastate Cambodia because he had the backing of the US imperialism. Washington is an accessory to his crimes.

We have to make it clear that we reject Stalinism – as well as the mistaken anti-democratic position of Lenin and Trotsky - not just in our theoretical literature, but in our political praxis. Hammer and sickle symbolism, and the use of such terms as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ to describe our concept of expanded democracy are both disastrous political PR.

Thornhill’s article goes on to accept that most contemporary Marxists have made such a differentiation, and even points out that it is wrong to blame Marx for Stalin.

’Yet, it seems, the edges of Karl Marx's lips are beginning to twitch again in Europe as fresh attempts are made to reanimate his ideas …

‘How can it be, as a United Nations report recently estimated, that the richest 2 per cent of the world's adult population own more than 50 per cent of global assets while the poorest 50 per cent own only 1 per cent? How can one understand capital without Das Kapital?

Thornhill is specifically concerned with France, where soi-disant Marxist candidates secured 17% of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections.

He then selects a number of random quotes from French politicians of left, right and centre, in an effort to illustrate the supposedly pervasive hold of Marxist ideas in that country.

This doesn’t particularly convince me. If Ségolène Royal talks about the need to "frighten the capitalists", that doesn’t mean she is not essentially a Blairite. If Nicolas Sarkozy condemns about "rogue bosses", he is simply following a long-established right-populist tradition in French politics.

All in all, not a particularly heavyweight article. But an interesting pointer to the possibilities of renewing Marxism in the twenty-first century, nonetheless.

The Financial Times recently hailed the return of Marxism. Sadly, I suspect that Britain’s only serious paper was having a bit of a laugh. You would have to go back beyond the birth of the First International 140 years ago to find the Marxist project in worse organisational shape than today.

The historic experience of Stalinism – however much dissident Marxist traditions distance themselves from it – stands utterly discredited, and discredits everything else that describes itself as Marxist by association.

Social democratic parties – ‘mass workers’ parties’, as we used to theorise them – have undergone wholesale conversion to born-again neoliberalism. Most of them are hardly ‘mass’ anymore. And they certainly haven’t got very many workers in them, either.

The far left is more shriveled, splintered and ineffective than it has been in decades. It has not succeeded in developing social roots, let alone mass membership, in one single country on the planet.

At the root of all this is a sustained erosion of class consciousness and even the most basic levels of class organisation worldwide. Socialist ideology, even in its most distorted forms, is no longer hegemonic in movements of the oppressed.

This is perhaps why there was little working class resistance anywhere to the transformation in the class nature of social democratic parties.

Lenin’s proposition that the working class could not spontaneously transcend trade union consciousness was once hotly disputed. These days, the majority of the working class spontaneously getting there in the first place would be cause for celebration.

In as far as a new anti-capitalism can be said to exist at all – and let’s avoid the elementary mistake of conflating anti-globalisation with anti-capitalism, shall we? – it is on an eclectic ideological basis that dismisses socialism as just another species of ‘productivism’.

Even that bastard offspring of nationalism and Stalinism that prevailed in much of the third world has now been displaced by something even worse.

There is a certain anti-imperialist content to political Islam. The trouble is, it is a reactionary anti-imperialist content.

Blinkered to the last, large sections of the left automatically consider all forms of anti-imperialism as implicitly progressive, as somehow on how side, and send their delegates to Cairo to seek an alignment with it.

Just to compound matters, the leadership of the remaining Marxist movement is almost to a man and woman far too stupid, far too backward-looking even to make an assessment of the world today and to seek the pathway to political renewal. As far as they are concerned, the old formulae work just fine.

So is there any hope? I sometime fear there isn’t, and that there is now little to stop capitalism destroying the planet. Marx himself raised the prospect of ‘the mutual ruin of the contending classes’ as one potential endpoint of history, and the odds on that outcome shorten by the year.

There’s just one thing that stops me topping myself. For all the setbacks since the 1970s, global working class still possesses that unique combination of self-interest, capacity and social weight to provide the foundation for a rational, humanist and radical democratic politics.

And maybe - just maybe - enough of the left can somehow sober up in time to realise that if there is hope, it lies with the proles.

Labour peer Lord Desai is well-known as a Marxian economist, and the material on economics is every bit as good as one would expect from this man's pen. In particular, the exposition of the transformation problem, the Böhm-Bawerk critique and the Bortkiewicz solution is exemplary.

But decidedly shakey on political sociology and the Marxist theory of the state, two of my little pet academic areas. I may venture a review once I have finished the volume. Incidentally, marxist.com - the website of the Grantites - offers a detailed critique in eight full-length articles here.

Anyway, at one point Desai makes the following aside: 'Marxism was also weak in its appeal to American and British socialists. There were followers of Marx in these countries, but Marxism was never a philosophy for a political party of any substantial size.'

That's a straightforward statement of fact, of course. But after reading it, it occured to me that it also applies to all English-speaking countries of which I am aware. There has never been a substantial Marxist current in Canada, Australia or New Zealand, either.

Any opinions as to why this should be? Is there something specific about Anglo-Saxon political culture that makes it impervious to dialectical materialism? I'm genuinely asking. Comments, please.

Obviously one of the tricks of the blogging trade is to pretend that you’ve got a worked out opinion on everything that makes the headlines. But the truth is, I have no expertise whatsoever in animal diseases, and accordingly, not a clue as to the correct Marxist line on foot and mouth outbreaks.

Orthodoxy on the left seems to be that the problem could easily be solved by vaccination, and all that is stopping it happening is that New Labour lacks the balls to stand up to the National Farmers’ Union, which is against the idea because it will scupper exports of British meat.

Among those making just such a case are Johann Hari, the Socialist Party, and leftwing Labour MP Ian Gibson, a biologist by training.

Opponents of vaccination raise the following points against the practice:

It takes four days to work, and even then may not be completely effective. Vaccinated animals can still carry the virus and pass it on, without showing any symptoms.

Nor would it prevent future outbreaks:

There are several strains of foot-and-mouth, and vaccines work against only one strain of the virus. Anyway, animals need booster shots every six months or so.

Additionally, it’s worth adding that the current outbreak seems more or less under control despite the resolutely softly-softly tactics.

The comment box is open for any comrades able to provide theoretical clarity on this one.

If you went on any of the big anti-war demos, you’ll have seen the stickers featuring the star of David and the swastika. That’s justified, because Zionism equals Hitler’s national socialism. Obviously.

On the other hands, several currently popular liberal-left authors make the case that radical Islamism can properly be described as ‘islamofascism’.

The idea is theoretically rooted in the cold war theory of totalitarianism. According to Hannah Arendt, fascism and communism were basically different manifestations of the same phenomena.

Then again, if you’ve read much political history, you probably know that Communist International under Stalinism in the 1930s advanced the proposition that social democracy and fascism were ‘not antipodes but twins’.

In the 1980s, sections of the British left branded Thatcherism as ‘creeping fascism’. Today, there are US websites making the same point about the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, cheap-shot populist shock jocks and newspaper columnist drone on about ‘feminazis’ and ‘health and safety fascists’.

Allow me to sum up here. We can therefore deduce that Zionism = Islamism = democratic socialism = rightwing conservatism = Stalinism = feminism. That’s because all of them = fascism.

And we all know there is only one possible response to fascism, don’t we? Extirpate it. Eradicate it, annihilate it, uproot it. Destroy it before it destroys you.

I mean, you’ve got to watch those bloody union health and safety reps, you know. They start by demanding that management keep the fire escapes clear of boxes, and before you know it, they’re establishing a chain of death camps all the way across Poland.

Most of those advancing ‘= fascism’ arguments do so by means of advancing their own hand-built checklist of what fascism is, and then point out that the object of their opprobrium shares all those characteristics. QED.

Their process of reasoning runs like this: a table has four legs; a dog has four legs; therefore a dog is a table.

This is pretty poor reasoning, despite usually coming from the guys that got into the expensive schools. Analysis of sui generis brands of political thought by lazy analogy does not advance our understanding of them, but rather detracts substantially from it.

And what is the point, anyway? I have no difficulty whatsoever in opposing Israeli brutality to Palestinians, mass murder by flying airliners into skyscrapers, imperialist oil grabs in the Middle East, or oppressive governments anywhere in the world.

But it’s democratic socialism that took me to those positions. Not cod political sociology.

On page 230, Henwood makes this observation:

One of the reasons for the sorry state of Marxian theories of finance ... is the shadow cast by Rudolf Hilferding and his 'Finance Capital'. The book contains something obsolete, misleading, or wrong on almost every page, from minor offenses to major ...

But history has not turned out Hilferding's way ...

My first thought on reading this passage was 'damn right!' Financial capital and industrial capital remain very much separate categories. They simply have not fused with each other in any meaningful sense. Goldman Sachs remains Goldman Sachs, while General Motors remains General Motors.

The bank-centred German model Hilferding (pictured) discussed in his 1910 book has not only not become generalised, but is itself being eroded by US/British-style neoliberalism.

My second thought was that Hilferding's notion of finance capital has been central to Marxist thinking ever since, not least underpinning Bukharin and Lenin's work on imperialism, Cliff's conceptualisation of the USSR has state capitalist.and Kidron's permanent arms economy theory

If Hilferding was wrong, than all of these writers start from seriously mistaken premises and their conclusions surely fall. How many modern neoliberal states can be analytically reduced to state capitalist trusts?

Surely the scriptures cannot be wrong. Or can they? Can anybody offer theoretical clarification on this one?

All of a sudden, the war was no longer about punishing Saddam for the al Qa'eda links it later turned out he simply didn't have. No, the public was reassured, this was a project to crush the Republic of Fear.

Yet I'd stake money that neither Bush nor Blair had even heard of Kanaan Makiya before his book became a useful rationale for their war, unless a hapless Downing Street researcher accidentally stumbled upon the name while undertaking the internet trawl that resulted in the dodgy dossier.

It's an inconvenient fact for the pro-war left, but at least George Galloway did have some sort of track record of once campaigning against the Iraqi dictatorship he was later to brown-nose. There's no evidence whatsoever of Blair ever having displayed solidarity with Saddam's Iraqi victims throughout the years the west was arming the Ba'athist repressive state apparatus.

But the failure of Washington's foreign policy - even by its own lights - poses the question of why the state of democracy in the Middle East is quite so parlous, even when compared to other countries at a similar stage of economic development.

There are partial exceptions to the rule, I suppose. Both Israel and Turkey lay claims to being democratic polities. But many non-European Jews and Arab citizens in Israel, not to mention the entire Kurdish population of Turkey, would surely beg to differ.

There are quasi-democratic institutions in Iran. But control rests with a layer of conservative clerics, which control the right to stand for election and much else.

But none of the above are Arab countries. In the Arab world, democracy is essentially a write-off.

It is true that many Islamist are intrinsically hostile to democracy per se, arguing that the Qu'ran is their constitution. But that cannot be the whole explanation; opinion polls indicate that there is support for notions of political democracy, especially among the younger and more educated layers.

The chief roadblock seems to be the prevelance of what international relations theorists refer to as 'rentier states', supporting themselves through oil rents extracted from the rest of the planet. Because they do not need to extract taxation, they become independent of society, and thus have little need for legitimation.

Their extensive economic resources essentially enable them to co-opt the indigenous bourgeoisie, rewarding it economically through projects conceived and funded by the state. These bourgeoisies, then, have no interest in carrying through bourgeois revolutions.

In short, there are certainly analytical parallels with what certain a Russian Marxist - a writer some leading neoconservatives are reputedly familiar with, of course - said about his own country over 100 years ago.

But it is doubtful that the current class and ideological dynamics in the Middle East facilitate the sort of social transformation Leon Trotsky predicted.

Yet as the Iraq debacle fully underlines, in the twenty-first century at any rate, bourgeois revolutions do not come courtesy of the US and British armed forces, either. There is no M1 Abrams road to liberal democracy.

Nobody wants to imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. But right now, it is difficult to see just what could topple the Arab dictatorships.

I write about this because I am currently around halfway through an original copy of 'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung', which I found in a local charity shop.

In a nice period touch, the opening page is inscribed 'Brenda Watson, Aug. 28th '68'. I have an odd mental picture of this woman as some street fightin' hippy chick, now presumably drawing an old age pension. Here's to you, anyway, comrade.

Forty years ago, it has to be said, my political consciousness was not particularly well advanced. In all truth, my concerns centred more on Lego, Action Man and footie than the state of the struggle.

But even now I have read a book or two on political theory, I cannot see why Mao was regarded as a Marxist thinker of any profundity. I mean, take this quote from p.147: 'Be united, alert, earnest and lively.' Yeah, sound advice in as far as it goes. But is it of much more practical use to a revolutionary than 'be young, be foolish, be happy'?

Perhaps I am missing something. I am aware that Slavoj Žižek - the self-styled 'orthodox Lacanian Stalinist' philosopher inordinately influential among many young comrades, including some who consider themselves Trots - has written an introduction to another of Mao's works, 'On Contradiction'. Can somebody fill me in on what - if anything - I am missing, please?

This is a draft version of a speech I am due to give in the private room of a well-known London restaurant tomorrow, before an audience that will include a number of seriously rich but left-leaning businessmen, and perhaps even some cabinet-level Labour politicians. Believe me, if I told you who is likely to be there, I’d have to kill you.

To be honest, I am slightly nervous, but at the same strangely amused at the prospect of it all; and hey, even if it goes down badly, I am certain to get a damn fine lunch out of the exercise. Thursday may not see a post if I overdo the fine wine. Comrades are invited to improve my prose - and even suggest additional points - before I brush up the final text tomorrow morning. Long post alert! 2,000 words plus.

LENIN maintained in 1913 that [quote] ‘the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true’ [unquote]. That sounds a whole lot catchier than ‘Marxism is capable of yielding useful insights because it captures important partial truths’, but it is the latter conclusion that I am going to argue for today.

It is an easy enough exercise to go through classic Marxist texts and point out the passages that spectacularly haven’t panned out; some 125 years after Marx’s death, it is clear that capitalism - while indubitably heading for one of its cyclical downturns - is nowhere near the point of supposedly inevitable collapse.

Nor - in an era when two-week holidays in Thailand and 42-inch screen plasma televisions are freely available to anybody in a reasonably-paid skilled working class job - does the idea that some process of immiserisation of the proletariat is inevitable stand up to scrutiny.

Yet even now, the basic tenets of Marxism retain an intuitive appeal. In recent months, many mainstream commentators have argued that at least some of his positions are ideas whose time has come. And for the majority of the working population, there remains something plausible about the notion that capitalist social relations of production are inherently exploitative.

In October, The Times carried an article over the headline ‘Karl Marx: did he get it right?’. I doubt if they ran that one past Rupert first. Let me quote an extract:

Marx does seem to have been on to something. His basic point is that there is some good news and some bad news. He gave you the bad news first: capitalism is dreadful. The workers are exploited and the capitalists get rich at their expense. So far, so Lehman Brothers. The good news was that the bad news was bound to come to an end. Capitalism wasn't just nasty, it was doomed. It would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A bit like Lehman Brothers.

The writer concluded that Marx, at the very least, did not get things entirely wrong. And a lot has happened to capitalism, even over the last two months. But it is significant that twenty-five years ago, it would have been assumed that the average recipient of a degree-level education would not have needed such a dumbed-down restatement of the basic Marxist worldview.

The problem is, the Reagan and Thatcher revolution succeeded in relegating Marx to the ranks of also-ran philosophers of centuries past. That situation is now clearly changing, and there is a marked revival in interest in Marx‘s ideas.

In Japan, a Manga comic strip version of Das Kapital is due for imminent release, and is expected to hit the bestseller charts, with predictions that it will sell tens of thousands of copies. If it does, it will be matching the performance of Greedy Capitalism and the Self-Destructiveness of Wall Street, a book written by erstwhile Goldman Sachs high-flyer Hideki Mitani. Even a republished socialist tract from the 1930s has shipped half a million units.

In Germany, the publishing house with the rights to Das Kapital - and it’s not the easiest of works to read - reports that sales are up by a factor of 25 over the last four years. Some of the renewed interest is down to the rise of Die Linke, a leftwing breakaway from the Social Democrats. Meanwhile, the Bishop of Munich - who goes by the name of Reinhard Marx, but is no relation - has written a book that is also called Das Kapital. It has sold 15,000 copies in just a few months.

In France, sales of Das Kapital have reportedly trebled. Even in Russia, a country that has reason to distrust actions carried out in the name of Marxism, more people are said to be buying the work.

Why should this be? Well, Marxism remains the indispensable as basis of all present-day critical social thinking. In a very real sense, it provides the conceptual framework of all modern progressive politics, from social democracy to feminism to postmodernism.

Marxism’s cumulative schema of assumptions, categories and explanations - as developed over the last one and a half centuries - still represents the foundational thinking for all the sundry schools of thought that we now refer to collectively as ‘the left’.

All this, despite the argument from the political right that Marx was a ‘failed prophet’ and his most successful disciples represented little more than a vicious and dictatorial clique of third world tyrants,

Karl Marx was a German writer living in mid-Victorian London. There is no intelligible sense in which he can be held responsible for twentieth-century Russian or Chinese history. Whether one subscribes to historical materialism or not, the events that have transformed those societies are largely the work of their internal and external social dynamics

Meanwhile, Marxist thought and the wider socialist project has maintained an unparalleled hold over the some of the finest minds of the last century.

Marxism is in no sense alien to the traditions of the British labour movement. Marxists were actively involved in the foundation of many major UK trade unions, and an integral constituent of the coalition that formed the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of today’s Labour Party. Both George Lansbury and Herbert Morrison, for instance, were politically formed as members of the Social Democratic Federation.

Even the list of more recent leading Labour politicians who at one time have claimed some sort of intellectual affiliation with Marxism is long. It includes such thought leaders of our time Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke, Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn, Alistair Darling, John Reid and literally dozens of other Labour MPs.

Also worth noting that it was one of the last desperate tactics of the McCain campaign to brand Barack Obama a ‘Marxist‘. Fortunately that did not put Middle America off.

Why this persistent intellectual appeal? Well, there is no doubt that Marxism is the ultimate Big Idea. The sheer scale of its epistemological ambition, its insistence that in social and historical terms it is ‘the theory of everything‘, cannot fail to appeal to those who deal in ideas.

But extracting from the broad scope of the project, I’d like to look in particular at the early philosophical anthropology of the 1840s and Marx’s mature criticism of capitalism.

Alienation one of the central issues of our times. On this account – rooted in Marx’s earlier writings, but clearly present in a more developed form in Das Kapital - capital, the very product of the collective worker’s labour, comes to loom large over the collective worker.

While the nature of the UK economy has been transformed in recent decades, at the base level there is no reason to assume that jobs in call centres or routine white collar work in the financial services sector is at bottom any less alienating that the factory jobs of 40 and 50 years ago.

But equally obviously, few people in unstimulating employment need to have the concept ‘work sucks’ spelled out to them in terminology ultimately derived from the tradition German idealist philosophy.

We are seeing less working class resistance to alienated labour, at least at the level of organised trade union struggle. To a considerable extent, that reflects the major defeats for union militancy in the 1980s, especially the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1984-85.

But there are no grounds for thinking that this process is irreversible, especially at a time when a long period of capitalist boom, driven by ever-rising house prices and massively-expanded access to consumer credit, has been thrown into sudden reverse.

The fightback by public sector unions against the government-imposed pay cap - while marked by a certain degree of prevarication among the unions involved - is by no means defeated yet. The economic climate will probably force them to shut up. But it might just see them put up, too.

There is, moreover, Marx’s wider critique of capitalism. It isn’t necessary to buy in to the labour theory of value or the alleged tendency of the rate of profit to fall, on the back of a rising organic composition of capital, to appreciate the prescience of some of Das Kapital’s major arguments, especially against the contention that nothing can possibly go wrong if only we let the market do its stuff.

This is a time when governments in many countries have had to adopt an overnight U-turn when it comes to some of the free market orthodoxies of the last period. Banks have been nationalised and the longstanding taboo against raising the top rate of income tax has been broken.

In this country, commentators on the centre right have been driven to obvious despair; the pages of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail - and don’t forget, these are often newspapers to which the government defers - have been filled with accusation that Old Labour is back from the undead, and even that Gordon Brown has instituted a Soviet Britain. They are not joking; that is honestly how they see it.

This is entirely nonsensical, of course. Any operative definition of socialism certainly involves redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, not the handing of shedloads of cash to bail bankers out of a crisis of their own making.

These measures constitute Keynesianism in the technical sense of fiscal stimulus, but clearly do not correspond to a full-scale return to the post-war consensus or social democratic ideology as such. In other spheres than banking, privatisation continues unabated, and there is little evidence of direct job creation.

However, they do mark the first shift away from the neoliberal consensus to which both Conservative and Labour governments have been habituated since 1979, and from the leftwing viewpoint, that has to be welcome. This is a turning point.

But does Marxist economics provide an understanding of capitalism superior to that offered by its mainstream counterpart? Are those of us who have mastered its basic texts about to emerge as infallible pundits in 24/7 media demand, thanks to a command of Gnostic wisdom denied to the Harvard MBAs at Goldman Sachs?

The conclusion has to be that – unsurprisingly – there are limits to what any book published in 1867 can tell us about the reality of 2008. If the Marxist left did indeed have any actionable special insight into the real workings of the capitalist system, pensioned-off lefties would have been ten a penny on Wall Street when it was still hiring.

Moreover, it is impossible to carry out serious empirical economic research within Marxist categories. Given the way that economic data is collected, one cannot calculate the organic composition of capital or the rate of exploitation, for instance, in anything other than approximate terms.

It is rather better to understand Das Kapital not as a body of operational economic wisdom, but as a substantial philosophical critique of what happens when capitalism is left to its own devices. Marx’s project was very much to take the ideological presuppositions of the classical political economists, and take them to a reductio ad absurdum.

But capitalism has for most of its existence not been unchecked. It wasn’t totally unchecked in 1867, and is far less so today. Even Britain’s emasculated trade unions can provide millions of workers with elementary protection against capitalist excesses, within a legal framework designed to provide just that.

At the theoretical level, even capitalists know they need effective consumer demand, although that doesn’t stop them imposing de facto pay cuts on their own workforces where they can get away with it.

So within our intellectual framework, what can we add to the debate about capitalism that is now starting for a new generation? Perhaps the most important argument the Marxist left can hammer home is our insistence on the cyclical nature of capitalism as an economic system. Gordon Brown really thought he had abolished boom and bust; it looks like he is just about to find out that he was badly wrong on that one.

Sadly for us, Marx died before he got round to drawing up a definitive account of his theories on these matters. Anything we say on this score has to be constructed indirectly. But the tens of millions that will find themselves out of work across the advanced capitalist countries in the years ahead will make the case more eloquently then words ever will.

Moreover, there is a surprisingly deep ecological vein to be found in Capital, too. Marx very much sees the way in which humanity reproduces itself as being based on the interaction of human labour on nature. Much of it is pertinent at a time when the future of the planet is at stake.

Finally, we can show how the market cannot deliver public goods, despite New Labour’s insistent reliance on such mechanisms. There is no country in the world in which universal education or healthcare is provided without the substantial intervention of the state. We have to transcend the logic of the market and impose the political economy of the working class in its place, crisis or no crisis.

Marx is still a thinker from whom much can be drawn. In Britain, anyway, we haven’t got the level of class struggle it would take to operationalise from theory to practice, and we are handicapped by the ingrained sectarianism of most of the far left. But on a worldwide scale, there are no obvious obstacles in the way of a widespread movement back to basics.

GORDON BROWN might accidentally introduce a state capitalist form of fascism to Britain, Janet Daley openly argues in the Daily Telegraph this morning. You think I’m kidding? Here, read it for yourself:

But Mr Brown may find that, out of political desperation, he has talked himself (and us) into demanding that the state must actually run the economy. Clearly, this is not what he would want …

The danger is that he will be trapped by his own rhetoric and be forced to embrace a form of state capitalism (which is the technical definition of "fascism").

She makes Mad Mel read like an amateur, doesn't she? This whackjob political sociology must rank as some of the most dangerously confused and politically illiterate garbage I have ever read in any national newspaper. Then again, I seem to recall that her colleague Simon Heffer last year advanced the proposition that bank nationalisation marked the beginnings of ‘Sovietisation’ in this country. The government just can’t win, can it?

Given that the prime minister has only got just over a year left in power to build his Thousand Year Reich, he had better get a move on. I mean, it would take at least 12 months to train up a serious paramilitary corps. Maybe he could call them the Brownshirts; the name has an undeniable historical resonance.

Fortunately, I think we can safely discount Ms Daley’s suggestion, at least until New Labour frames some Dutch bloke for setting fire to the House of Commons.

The irony is, I think I recall Ms Daley writing that she was once a member of the International Socialists. Even if I have got that detail wrong, she frequently makes play of her 1960s leftism, in a condescending ‘that’s how I know where the little bastards are coming from’ kind of way.

So when she uses grown-up words such as ‘state capitalism’, it can only be in full awareness of the body of political theory she is referencing. Yet even by the standards set by former Cliffites gone over to the hard right, her take on these matters is quixotic indeed.

The concept of state capitalism is ultimately rooted in the debates within Marxism in the first two decades of the last century, in which Bukharin built on the work of Hilferding to postulate that finance capital had in many countries fused with the state, forming what he dubbed ‘state capitalist trusts’.

According to this colleague of Lenin, all of the imperialist powers of the day could be described in this manner, especially given the extent of state direction in world war one. While Bukharin overestimated the concretisation of what was undeniably a tendency at the time, it is important to stress that fascism – which had not yet arisen anywhere in the world – did not come into the equation.

Later, Tony Cliff – the founder of what is today the Socialist Workers’ Party, and thus I suspect Ms Daley’s early political mentor – expropriated the term ‘state capitalist’ as a device to polemicise against the orthodox Trotskyist position that Russia was a degenerate workers’ state. Fascism does not come into that picture, either.

More empirically, can New Labour’s reaction to the global economic downturn sensibly be described as embracing state economic control anyway? The government has been careful not to buy voting shares in the banks it has propped up. In other words, it has consciously taken ownership but not control. It is bailing out the free market, because it is ideologically committed to the free market.

Accordingly, not only are the boundaries of state property not being extended; in other areas, they are being rolled back. Only last week, Labour confirmed plans to part privatise Royal Mail, something the Tories considered under Major before bottling out of what is clearly an unworkable scheme.

Back in the early 1980s, sections of the soft left debated whether or not Thatcherism constituted ‘creeping fascism’. Such speculation was misguided tosh of the highest order then. Nearly three decades later, the hard right is reduced to playing the same stupid game, and it is surely indicative of just as shaky a grip on reality.

HERE’S an interesting example of intertextuality; Martin Wolf opens a lengthy think-piece on the future of capitalism with this striking five word assertion: ‘Another ideological God has failed’.

The reference, of course, is to the well-known 1949 book ‘The God that failed’, in which six famous former Communists offer readers a heart-to-heart on the reasons for their break with Stalinism.

The title designedly underlines the quasi-theological character that conversion to liberalism had for the intellectuals involved. Can Wolf - one of the leading contemporary representatives of the pro-market and pro-globalisation political right - really be postulating a directly comparable loss of faith?

Even the headline to the piece – ‘Seeds of its own destruction’ – is a paraphrase of Marx, and might add to that initial impression.

But reading on, it is clear that the mere failure of a God is not enough to make him lose his religion, just like all those Anglican priests who do not see atheism as any bar to continued employment in the Church of England.

Wolf does not deny the undeniable; capitalism is changing, and not even he knows where the market economy is headed. But he confidently asserts that it will survive. It cannot be transcended, and must therefore transmute into another isotope of the same element.

Perhaps the key sentence in the entire piece is this one, which comes towards the end:

The era of financial liberalisation has ended. Yet, unlike in the 1930s, no credible alternative to the market economy exists …

If by ‘credible alternative’ is meant a different economic system organised by forces holding state power, he is indisputably right. Here it is important to avoid retrojection; whatever criticisms the contemporary far left levels at the USSR, especially during the 1930s era of the show trials, it did represent a pole of attraction for wide swathes of the working class, in a way that nowhere on earth does today.

China is patently nothing more than one extended workshop for western multinationals with a vast peasant hinterland tacked on, while few truly consider North Korea to be anything other than a hereditary dictatorship hellhole with the temerity to run up the red flag.

Some sections of the left harbour illusions in ‘the Bolivarian revolution’. Sure, redistributing petrodollars in favour of the poor is a good thing in itself, but it essentially equates to social democracy on oil-wealth stilts. Venezuela remains Norway with a hotter climate and more readily available alcohol.

More importantly, is there a credible alternative to the market economy at the intellectual level? Is there a cohesive and detailed blueprint for what something called socialism would entail in a developed economy, such as Britain, today?

Before the left can actively popularise anticapitalism, it needs to devise a sales campaign that can have mass appeal. It has to amount to more than simply ‘re-run 1917’ or ‘nationalise the top 200 monopolies’. I am not sure that the theoretical work has been undertaken.

Unless we can do so, we will let the best opportunity we have had for a generation dissipate, as capitalism simply adjusts from its free market variant to a more statified, authoritarian and protectionist version, with the same people still very much running the show.

EXCITEMENT mounts in my City fringes-based workplace over tomorrow’s anti-G20 demonstrations, with police claims that crusty hoards have commandeered the pub over the road as an operational headquarters.

Our HR department this morning emailed all staff, positively instructing us to ditch the normal dress code – suit and tie if you’ve got an external meeting, smart casual acceptable if not – and camouflage ourselves to merge with the expected anti-capitalist throng.

That presumably gives me licence to turn up in a leather jacket and one of the Che Guevara T-shirts I picked up during my month in Cuba in 2006, which will make a welcome change from my usual attire.

Meanwhile, rightwing commentators are doing their best to convince potential protestors that they are entirely misguided in their ire. I don’t suppose that the readership of the Daily Telegraph includes anarchists and Trots in any real numbers, but yesterday’s column from Janet Daley seems squarely addressed to just such an audience.

Maybe she should get the screed printed up as a leaflet, perhaps under a catchy title such as ‘Why we are not marching’, and pay pro-free market activists to dish it out in the Square Mile on Wednesday and Thursday? Just a thought.

Ms Daley’s primary contention is that capitalism cannot actually be overthrown, presumably because what Adam Smith described as the ‘natural propensity to truck and barter’ is an innate feature of human existence:

Some of the demonstrators in this week's G20 protest jamboree are demanding the "overthrow" of capitalism. Well, there are lots of things than can be done to "capitalism" – it can be undermined, suppressed, sabotaged, even outlawed – but it cannot be "overthrown" because in itself, it has no power.

It is the very opposite, in fact, of a tyranny. It is simply the conglomeration of all the transactions made between individual and corporate players in an open market. Some people may gain power through those transactions but that power is transient and contingent on their own financial success: they are not installed in immutable positions from which they can be forcibly removed in a coup d'etat.

Ms Daley is right in her insistence that capitalism is not a tangible object, in the same sense as a building. Indeed, Marx was explicit that capital should be seen as a social relation.

Social relations, in and of themselves, have no concrete existence. They become manifest not in the relation between individual human beings, but rather in the relations between distinct social classes.

In political terms, this translates as the dominance of the bourgeoisie, as a class, over the proletariat, which in turn entails the subjection of individual workers as members of that class to exploitation.

When G20 protestors demand the ‘overthrow of capitalism’, this really shorthand for the overthrow of the social relations necessarily embodied in generalised commodity production. And as the saying goes, another world is possible.

Again, Ms Daley is formally correct to point out that the power of individual members of the ruling class can in some circumstances be ‘transient and contingent on financial success’. Given the prevalence of mechanisms for the transmission and continuance of class privilege, such instances are rare. But they do occur.

Sometimes the likes of Conrad Black – and surely Janet must know the guy personally – do end up in the slammer. Yet such one-off falls from grace have no impact on the power of the ruling class overall, which is in no way dependent on the fortune of any one of its given constituents.

Those who talk of "overthrowing" capitalism are determined to depict it as a system of government in a precise parallel with socialism, when in reality, capitalism is not a system in the ideological sense. It is, if anything, an anti-system: the aggregation of human behaviour as it goes about fulfilling particular wants and needs.

Here Ms Daley descends into tautology. ‘The aggregation of human behaviour as it goes about fulfilling particular wants and needs’ is a description that applies with equal rigour to any number of modes of production. North Koreans undertake behaviour that fulfils particular wants and needs; I doubt that Janet would herald them as exemplars of capitalism simply on that score.

In political terms, the demands of those on the street will range from the immediate abolition of the state – now there really is an ‘anti-system’, Janet! – or workers’ power as a prelude to the withering away of the state or simply greater consideration for the lot of the losers inevitably generated by the brand of economics Ms Daley propagates so virulently. And there’s more:

It can be described in anthropomorphic terms, such as "ruthless" or "benign" but of itself has no motives and no objectives.

A mode of production may not have motives or objectives in the human sense, but capitalists - as the carriers of capitalist social relations – certainly do. Marx encapsulates this process nicely when he remarks: ‘Accumulate, accumulate; that is Moses and the prophets!’

In their pursuit of accumulation, they are certainly capable of ruthlessness, as the greed of recent decades has fully underlined. Check out a third world sweatshop and you will see what I mean. That is why so many people want to see it replaced with something nicer.

Oh, and if anyone reading this is planning to riot tomorrow, please be considerate and don’t kick anything off too near my workplace. I need to get home in time for tea, so I can look after the kids. Thanks.

LESZEK Kolakowski - the noted Polish-born political philosopher, who has died aged 81 - probably deserves the designation of the embittered former leftist’s embittered former leftist of choice.

His principal work, ‘Main Currents of Marxism’, was widely touted in my undergraduate years as the definitive refutation of Marxism as a doctrine. The book runs to over 1,000 pages in the recently republished three-volumes-in-one omnibus edition, so it is verifiably magisterial in scope.

But wade through what is effectively an invective-laden telephone directory, and the content is utterly predictable; don’t try Marxism at home kids, it only leads to the Gulag Archipelago. Many others have said as much, with both somewhat greater cogency and somewhat greater brevity.

Naturally, the tributes from the usual online suspects - Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Oliver Kamm, Harry’s Place - have been fulsome. And sure, any man who can pen an essay by the title ‘My Correct Views on Everything’ is perhaps worthy of grudging admiration, on that ground alone. Perhaps he'll want that remark inscribed on his tombstone.

Yet all of these pieces seem to take for granted Kolakowski’s chief contention, namely that Marxism as a philosophy was the direct cause of the ugly totalitarianisms that prevailed in so many countries that proclaimed themselves Marxist.

Standing from where we now stand in history, of course, the charge sheet looks bad. The Great Purge, anybody? The Great Leap Forward, peut être? I see your Hungary 1956, and raise you Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

It has rightly been said that it would be better for the contemporary far left to be more scarred by the experience of the twentieth century than it seemingly is, because those would be useful scars to have.

Surely Marxists should have learned not to defend the ruling classes of out-and-out repressive theocracies like Iran, even if they do constitute ‘regional bulwarks against imperialism’. Nor does the US embargo excuse Cuba’s lack of multiparty democracy and trade union rights.

But these errors flow from the stupidity and reductionism of the leaderships of such far left currents as embrace these positions, rather than being in any way intrinsic to Marxism per se.

Marx, remember, was a German public intellectual living in exile in Victorian London. That specific class-divided social formations are riven with internal tensions, which consequently explode with ugly results, cannot meaningful be attributed to him, or to any other individual.

Suppose Marx’s ideas had not attracted followers in any large number, and had remained a charming period piece upheld by a handful of cultists, in much the manner of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy.

Does that mean that Russia and China - to use the most important examples - would, by the middle of the last century, have developed into prosperous liberal democracies? Here we reach the realm of counterfactuals, but I cannot see any good reason to think so.

Historians debate what would have happened to Russia if Stolypin and the westernisers had prevailed. But there were clearly forces within Russia that would have been likely to succeed in derailing that scenario.

Airbrush Lenin and Trotsky out of the picture, and it is entirely possible that deeply reactionary and effectively fascist anti-semitism could have taken power. It is not difficult to imagine Kornilov blazing the trail for Mussolini and Hitler.

Without Mao, Japanese imperialism might have vanquished China, giving Japan access to raw materials and conceivably even manpower that would have made it harder to beat in world war two. Indeed, what if a Kornilovite fascist Russia had signed up to the axis?

As a Pole, Kolakowski had every reason to hate the social system Stalinism imposed on his country. But as history shows us, there are many historical circumstances in which the rulers of Russia seek to dominate Poland.

For him to suggest that Marx - an outspoken proponent of Polish independence - is somehow responsible for this unfortunate propensity is a travesty. Hitchens, Kamm, Cohen and HP really should know better.