After the Second World War, the pressure of the countermovement made decommodification the unacknowledged motor of domestic politics throughout the industrialised world. Parties of the working class, acutely vulnerable to pressure from below, were in government more than 40% of the time in the postwar decades – compared to about 10% in the interwar years, and almost never before that – and “contagion from the Left” forced parties of the right into defensive acquiescence. Schooling, medical treatment, housing, retirement, leisure, child care, subsistence itself, but most importantly, wage-labor: these were to be gradually removed from the sphere of market pressure, transformed from goods requiring money, or articles bought and sold on the basis of supply and demand, into social rights and objects of democratic decision.

This, at least, was the maximal social-democratic program — and in certain times and places in the postwar era its achievements were dramatic.

But the social democratic solution is unstable — and this is where the Marxist conception comes in, with its stress on pursuit of profit as the motor of the capitalist system. There’s a fundamental contradiction between accepting that capitalists’ pursuit of profit will be the motor of the system, and believing you can systematically tame and repress it through policies and regulations. In the classical Marxist account, the contradiction is straightforwardly economic: policies that reduce profit rates too much will lead to underinvestment and economic crisis. But the contradiction can also be political: profit-hungry capitalists will use their social power to obstruct the necessary policies. How can you have a system driven by individuals maximizing their profit cash-flows and still expect to maintain the profit-repressing norms, rules, laws, and regulations necessary to uphold the common welfare?

The 20th-century left had two main founts of inspiration. One lay in Western Europe—above all, the France of the Revolution and the Germany of the Marxist labour movement. It represented the coming future of the most developed and powerful region of the world, supplying ideas and programmes, principles of organization and models of change. It also provided important material support: France was open to radical exiles from every country; the well-organized, dues-paying German labour movement helped to fund its poorer brethren (the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung still does so today). The other source lay on the periphery of global power and wealth, where revolution occurred under the leadership of political currents inspired by European Marxism. The Soviet Union was the first and greatest of these centres, with China and Cuba following in its wake. They offered models for taking power and transforming society to would-be revolutionaries everywhere, not to mention direct financial assistance. At present, Latin America—with its complex social configurations and ideological bricolages—is the nearest thing to a world centre we have today. But that is not much to speak of. The 21st-century left is most likely to be de-centred, and besides, Latin America is probably too small a region to light a planetary beacon—even if the social changes now under way are carried to their utmost limit. For a new left to have true global significance, deeper roots will have to be dug in Asia.

At the end of meetings I’d rather chew off my arm with my own teeth than go back. I thought the smartest people are the ones who didn’t come. Going to the pub afterwards seemed to be the best part.

The commitment of working-class parties to the industrial society, without which they and the working class would not exist, may suggest that there was a massive ideological Chinese Wall dividing ecologists from socialists. In reality, the two also had much in common. The Left was never committed to growth for growth’s sake. Had that been the case, it would never have fought - almost regardless of productivity - for a shorter working day, a regulated labour market and higher ways.

In spite of the lack of strong evidence, the neo-liberal idea that markets should be liberalised as much as possible, because they were the most efficient allocator of prices - including the price of labour - became the dominant ideology, accepted, in one form or another, in most of the world by virtually the entire spectrum of political opinion, including many on the Left.

That feminism had a preferential relationship with the Left, that Left parties upheld women’s demands for political and social equality more consistently and more vigorously than other parties, is difficult to deny. Nevertheless, the alliance between feminism and socialism was fundamentally unequal. It was accepted by socialists only on their own terms, namely that the social struggle between capital and labour was to be recognised as fundamental; the emancipation of women as women depended on the victory of the working class. Feminists who refused the terms of this alliance had to be content with demanding the extension to women of liberal or ‘bourgeois’ rights, assuming that social and economic emancipation would somehow ensue from political freedom. According to the cannon of the established Left, once true universal suffrage was achieved, liberal feminists would rest on their laurels. Those who still felt dissatisfied could opt to join the socialist movement, whose aims were still far from being achieved. It seemed, in other words, that women had to follow, whether liberals or the socialists, but they had to follow.

In a libertarian utopia an employer would be free to implement their own version of the Northern Territory Intervention. As the only private sector employer in a remote Indigenous community, they might choose to pay their workers using a Basics Card that can only be used at a company store. Naturally the store would stock only healthy products like fresh fruit and vegetables. The employer might also regularly test workers for drugs and alcohol — not in order to prevent accidents at work — but in order to encourage workers to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

According to Friedrich Hayek’s definition, this would be coercion. In the Constitution of Liberty he defined coercion as “such control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced to act not according to a coherent plan of his own but to serve the ends of another.”

Libertarians object to coercion by governments. They strenuously object to coercion when it’s directed against employers or corporations trying to sell things like cigarettes, alcohol and junk food. But they don’t object to coercion when it’s part of the labour contract.

So it turns out libertarians don’t have a principled objection to nannying. In some cases, they’re all for it.

Politics for me is not a variant of rational choice theory. It is about base, visceral connections, sentiment, themes and language that grip people; stories and allegories that render intelligible the world around them.

For me socialism is not about science, rather it is firstly, about patterns of resistance and contest as our lives, relationships, families are commodified. Historically, this form of resistance focused on three forms of dispossession: removal from the land through enclosure, from your own labour as your capacity to work was commodified and from a voice and the franchise.