On Friday night I found myself in my local Hackney pub, and it was just my luck that I ended up in a debate with two incredibly clever Italian academics - one of whom was a committed communist (or to be more exact, a Bolshevist). By the end of the night there had been such a degree of intellectual flagellation that I kind of wished we’d been talking about football and tits.

So as not to have wasted the drunken ramblings, I thought I would post some of the most interesting points that came out of the conversations about the current mess we’re in…

Firstly, during the discussion with Paulo (the communist), we spoke about how strange the current situation is for the left. During a time when unbridled capitalism is looking like a decidedly shit model for organising our economy, you’d think that left-wingers would be shouting from the rooftops in unison.

For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of extreme-left in-fighting, all you need to know is that people who agree about 95% of how the world should be run, argue a lot about the last 5%.

Paulo explained to me that his particular brand of Communism holds Lenin up as an absolute legend. Now I’m not a communist, but I also think Lenin was basically a genius (it could be argued that he caused the death of many millions of people but that isn’t a debate to be had here). However, one of the key things I’d observed about Lenin is this: far from simply practising some ultra-slick version of Communism where the state runs everything in an incredibly efficient manner, he was an utter pragmatist. He actually let the private sector get on with it, capitalist-style, with his New Economic Policy.

I find it very interesting that Lenin is still seen as a hero of Communism, when one of his major policies had distinct elements of capitalism. It got me thinking that today we are potentially looking at the opposite situation: whoever comes up with the policy that gets the economy on any sort of straight and narrow will most likely be held up as a hero of capitalism, even though it is now clear that any policy will involve a huge amount of state intervention.

There are interesting parallels with John Maynard Keynes. His work paved the way for the multi-national corporate reality we are now faced with (with all the associated ‘free market’ phrases) despite his approach advocating massive state intervention in the dealings of private companies.

An even more interesting parallel can be found between the economic policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and those of the father of Fascism, Benito Mussolini. It’s easy to forget that Mussolini had come up with the idea of Fascism a lot earlier than Hitler - he came into power in 1922 more than a decade before his German counterpart - and a lot of the ideas he expressed were not branded fully extreme until much later.

Faced with the economic collapse following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, borrowing ideas from Mussolini to control the economy with the state was a logical thing to do. And in terms of stopping people from starving to death, and generally ensuring there were some jobs as the country fought off the Great Depression, it worked.

Roosevelt’s interventionist economic policies (most widely-known as the New Deal) are often painted as actions of ‘the left’. This is despite the substance of the New Deal basically being borrowed from some of the most extreme right-wing groups in history. When George Bush and his supporters refer to ‘freedom haters’ there is an implicit criticism of any economic policy that affects the free market. Now that Bush has signed off a $700bn intervention, this seems rather irrelevant. As options run out for politicians dealing with today’s crisis, it is important to make a clear distinction between the pragmatic actions we can take to maintain stability, and the political philosophy of the individuals who find themselves making the decisions.

Today we have a potentially volatile situation where extremism could take hold quite easily. As problems spread from the financial sector to the rest of the economy, starting to blame other people will become easy, and twats like BNP leader Nick Griffin could potentially hold appeal with promises of decisive action. We must be clear that decisive action is required, but that the moderate masses are capable of delivering it.

Going back to my conversation with Paulo, it struck me as missing the point to talk about how the left might put their differences aside to address the current crisis. It is to me unimportant whether we call the action we need to take as ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ as no-one really knew what that meant in the first place, let alone now that the world has been turned upside by events of the past week. As long as we haven’t got a bunch of Fascist pigs or Communist dictators running the show then I’m happy.