The 2008 global financial crisis was an event of huge significance. We continue to live in its aftermath. It should have heralded the end of an epoch. The dogma, corruption, disinformation, errors and misunderstandings that structured neoliberalism’s financialised market system were revealed in grim detail. However, the best the mainstream left could do in response was to offer a moralising critique of corporate bankers’ untrammelled greed and the connivance and laxity of the sector’s regulators. Key figures on the left nodded along with the neoliberal right’s claim that the system had broken down, or that it had been in some way corrupted. None were willing to acknowledge that these malfunctions and corrupt practices were simply surface effects of deep flaws in the system’s core.

The truth of the matter is that a crisis had been building since the serial financial shocks of the 1980s, and – given that pretty much every politician believed that the positive outcomes of ‘the markets’ far outweigh the negative – in many respects it was inevitable. What we needed was a new system of democratically regulated money creation and investment. We needed democratic state institutions that controlled the animal spirits of the market and forced financiers to play within strictly policed rules. We needed a fully inclusive economy replete with secure, well-paid and socially useful jobs. And, of course, we needed politicians who were not totally committed to the rigid doctrines of the financial sector. The left’s popular message should have been this: the way we organise our economy is deeply flawed; we need to rebuild on firm foundations; the economy we build should be guided by the best available understanding of how our monetary system works and driven forward by an unyielding commitment to the common good.

Some on the margins of the left did make such arguments, but it was their willingness to make them that saw them marginalised in the first place. Bowing and quaking before the unforgiving goddess TINA (‘there is no alternative’), the left had abandoned the economic engine room and handed it to financial technocrats decades before the 2008 crisis.