I watched it last night and am still wondering how far round the bend you would have to be to dream up such a totally unfettered free market and expect it to work. The Road to Serfdom, eh? Someone should have pointed out the amount of damage which Thatcher's vision of a free market did to personal and public liberties.

(Thinks. Please don't remind me of the damage which has been done by governments since. I know, but she was the one who so enthusiastically embraced Hayek and Friedman's ideas on unfettered capitalism.)

Never mind. Next week Stephanie Flanders is going to condense the whole of Marxist theory into a single one hour programme. The extent to which she will manage it was possibly indicated by the trailer.

Sorry Steph. Marx didn't decide that the way to solve the inequities of capitalism was to get rid of it. Marx predicted that capitalism wouldn't be abolished by offering socialism as a rational alternative, but that it would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. In Marx's eyes, such a collapse was inevitable and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it or particularly to accelerate it. The whole point of Marxism is not to "offer" an alternative to capitalism, but to make the workers aware of their role in history, so that when the time comes, they'll be ready.