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Everywhere I turn at the moment, there’s someone telling us what we need to do to repair our financial system. Martin Wolf is the latest to try his hand: his Fixing Global Finance is reviewed this week by Robert Skidelsky in the NYRB.

I’m not qualified to comment on the detail of Wolf’s plan, but it seems that he is pessimistic about the possibility of reform in the short term; Skidelsky shares that pessimism. Both fail to come up with radical options for change. I can’t help but wonder if this failure (and of course not everyone will see it as a failure) has anything with the identity of Wolf and Skidelsky. They are about as eminent as financial experts get, but they are firmly placed inside the system. It may seem natural to consult established experts, but is their worldview preventing us from seeing different futures?

This might be an obvious point, but I was particularly struck by Slavoj Zizek’s way of putting it in his clever little book On Belief. In order to move from a situation where politics is considered merely as a series of pragmatic interventions to a politics of Truth, Zizek advocates not a return to Marx - already a cliche, as he points out - but a return to Lenin.

Two features make Lenin the right man for our times, Zizek says (although he was talking more generally - On Belief was written in 2001).

First, his position outside Marx’s inner circle (Lenin had never met Marx; moreover, he came from a land at the Eastern borders of “European civilisation”):

It is only possible to retrieve the theory’s original impulse from this external position; in exactly the same way St. Paul, who formulated the basic tenets of Christianity, was not part of Christ’s inner circle, and Lacan accomplished his “return to Freud” using a totally distinct theoretical tradition as a leverage … in the same way that St. Paul and Lacan reinscribe the original teaching into a different context

Lenin is also a man for our times because of his explicitly political outlook (the reinvigoration of Marx, by contrast, is deeply apolitical). What Is To Be Done?, Zizek says, is

the text which exhibits Lenin’s unconditional will to intervene in the situation, not in the pragmatic sense of “adjusting the theory to the realistic claims through necessary compromises”, but, on the contrary, in the sense of dispelling all opportunistic compromises, of adopting the unequivocal radical position from which it is only possible to intervene in such a way that our intervention changes the coordinates of the situation. The contrast here is clear with regard to today’s Third Way “postpolitics”, which emphasises the need to leave behind old ideological divisions and to confront new issues armed with the necessary expert knowledge.

I am not as willing as Zizek to embrace Lenin: the consequences of his kind of political intervention are rarely pleasant, and often deeply unpleasant. But the end of Skidelsky’s review - where he castigates Wolf for his lack of historical perspective - does make me think that something along these lines might come to be pass, market theory and politics are readjusted in painful ways:

A willingness by the US government to end macroeconomic imbalances depends on its willingness to accept a much more plural world … Whether, even under Obama, the US is willing to accept such a political rebalancing of the world is far from obvious. It will require a huge mental realignment in the United States. The financial crash has disclosed the need for an economic realignment. But it will not happen until the US renounces its imperial mission.

Hugo Chávez says he intends to give What Is To Be Done to Barack Obama, the definitive Third Wayer, at their next meeting. Somehow, I’m not sure this will have the desired result…

UPDATE (21.07.09): Raincoat Optimism (a fellow member of Bloggers Circle) has more on the Zizek-banking connection, as well as some (rather complicated) reflections on compassionate conservatism.

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