Politics turns itself into a laughing stock when it resorts to moralising instead of relying upon the enforceable law of the democratic legislator. Politics, and not capitalism, is responsible for promoting the common good.

Capitalism is not an ideology, or a philosophy or a set of beliefs. It is a mode of production, an abstract model of how human beings have been organised to produce tradable commodities - as Marx and Weber explained. However, it can exist in a determinate historical context only if it is structured, regulated, organised, shaped, justified, legitimised, and hence restrained by the interplay of different ideology. To be in favour of capitalism has little meaning, unless one is prepared to favour whatever political organisation of society is required in any given situation to ensure the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist accumulation

Marx, of course, never seriously examined how a society could overcome capitalism and establish socialism. He had defined socialism in the most generic terms of distributive justice - ‘to each according to the work performed’ - to be followed by ‘to each according to needs’. He never developed a theory of socialism, or considered how socialism should be planned, or what forms of communal property should exist within in. He never produced a grand theory explaining how the conditions of capitalist production are themselves produced and reproduced. These conditions are the non-market means whereby market relations are maintained: ideology, culture, politics, the state, the family. There is nothing of any importance in Marx on nationalisation, the public sector, or economic planning. Marx was a theorist of capitalism, who sought to discover how the system worked. He was not a theorist of socialism and was contemptuous of those who wrote utopian blueprints. He was convinced that capitalism would not last for ever, but he never explained how it would be abolished or how it would end. Marx had no doubt that capitalism was the most dynamic system ever to appear on the surface of the earth. It was an unsettled, innovating and expansive system, which would revolutionise the world and draw it together in a tightly knit mesh: the world market. He accurately predicted that the centralisation of capital would develop ‘on an ever-extending scale’, entangling ‘all people in the net of the world-market’, giving capitalism ‘an international character’. As for the political shell which would contain this worldwide formation, Marx and his followers remained silent.

Neither such principled hostility to Soviet communism nor such open exultation at its downfall could be voiced by socialists and social democrats. However arbitrary the exercise of power, gruesome the repression, inefficient the economy and stultifying the bureaucracy, there was no denying that the USSR had achieved at least one of the conditions defining a socialist society: the absence of capitalism. The collapse of the system had not only removed the ‘deformations’ of socialism, but even this one defining feature. Nor could social democrats rejoice at the collapse of the centrally planned economy, because it did not usher in a social-democratic alternative. On the contrary, the ‘market’ turned out to be more uncritically worshipped in what was once ‘the Motherland of Socialism’ than it had ever been in the West.

Reality was not so simple. Liberals, Christian democrats and conservatives lived the collapse of communism with the exhilarating satisfaction of those who had unexpectedly turned out to be on the right side of History. They had denounced communism not as the wrong application of a just principle - socialism - but as the inevitable consequence of a deleterious ideology carried to its logical conclusion. Without the market, they claimed, there could be no freedom. No conscious mechanism for the allocation of resources could provide greater happiness than the innumerable decisions of millions of individual consumers.

The defeats suffered by Swedish, German and British socialists predated the collapse of the USSR and Soviet communism. They created a climate in which those holding out against market forces appeared to be swimming against the tide of history. When communism itself collapsed, this tide became unstoppable. Socialism became the most unfashionable world in the political dictionary. However, socialists did not disappear. Their parties, tossed and battered, survived. They were still the only serious opponents of conservatives. But the could no longer maintain the policies of the past. They could no longer advocate the uninhibited use of state planning to rectify the dysfunctions of capitalism. They could no longer promise to tax and spend. They had to reinvent themselves.

The greens were more in tune with the rapidly developing post-Fordist Zeitgeist than the traditional parties of the Left or Right. Such a Zeitgeist, however, was still that of an elite of ‘post-modern’ intellectuals, who scoffed at the concept of progress as a remnant of eighteenth century rationalist thought. Most ordinary people expected things to get better, as they had done for most of their lives. They were prepared to acknowledge the importance of the environment to any pollster, but failed to exhibit diminishing enthusiasm for the artefacts of the consumer society.

The essence of the ‘green’ idea was that it was necessary to regulate and constrain capitalist firms in order to impose some general - hence ‘collectivist’ - goals, such as a better environment. Ideologically, this was far more acceptable to the Left than to the Right.

The gender conflict was part of a relatively peaceful, but nevertheless momentous, social upheaval, a true revolution which forced everyone - not only socialists- to adjust. Conservatives faced a particular predicament: the traditional family they defended was being eroded by the capitalist system they staunchly upheld. The parties of the Left, traditionally committed to the emancipation of women and their integration into the labour market, were faced with a paradox of the different nature. Women were becoming ‘productive’ workers in unprecedented numbers. According to socialist ideology, this would make them more susceptible to left-wing values. However, women were not, on the whole, joining a skilled and highly unionised proletariat, but a deregulated labour market of the kind socialists had fought against for over a hundred years.