For once, George Bush put it most lucidly. He confessed in his twilight months in office that he had "abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system."

In other words, the consistent application of the inner logic of capitalism would lead to the collapse of the system - not of its own accord but as a consequence of the class struggle.

Although he probably doesn't know it, the ex-president is standing in a distinguished, if cynical, tradition of bourgeois thought.

For example, Benjamin Disraeli told the House of Commons in 1863 that "the best mode of preserving wealth is power."

This is far from irrational. If the ruling class remains the ruling class, that is, if it hangs on to its power, then it knows it will be able to get the show back on the road sooner or later, whatever adjustments and concessions it has to make in the meantime.

In practice, that would mean a resumption of capital accumulation on the basis of the pursuit of the maximum possible profit. Any elite solution to the present crisis will only be a precursor to the next one.

That is why the issue of class power has to be central to the left's response to the crisis.

Of course, we might wish not to start from where we are. As a recent article on the crisis in the London Review of Books noted, with only a touch of exaggeration, "there is an ideological and theoretical vacuum where the challenge from the left used to be.

"Capitalism no longer has a global antagonist, just at the moment when it has never needed one more - if only to clarify thinking and values, and to provide the chorus of jeering, which at the moment is deeply appropriate."

And the Financial Times, recovering some of its ideological poise as 2008 gave way to 2009, described the left across Europe as "bereft of ideas even after a cataclysm for capitalism."

However, notwithstanding the absence of both a global systemic alternative to capitalism and a mobilised and militant working-class movement in the leading capitalist powers, the powers that be are rattled. At the very least, they have lost their post-cold war swagger.

The doyen of financial journalists in Britain Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times put it clearly: "There will be no 'glad confident morning' for free-market principles for a long time to come."

And the editorial in The Economist on October 18 2008 gave a flavour of the disarray on the Establishment Mount Olympus.

"Economic liberalism is under attack and capitalism, the system which embodies it is at bay," it said, adding that "those who believe in it must fight for it."

The Financial Times joined in on December 27 in its leader columns, under the heading "Why free markets must be defended."

The paper was even forced to ask: "Is 2009 the year we should put capitalism out of its misery?" before answering No, to nobody's great surprise.

But saving the system means casting aside the immutable principles the neoliberals have been trumpeting for a generation.

State intervention, up to and including state ownership? No problem. An industrial policy? Most timely. Budget deficits? Not merely permissible, dear chap, but essential.

Obituaries for "Reagan-Thatcherism" are 10 a penny.

The bottom line is that the capitalist politicians have to act to prevent the whole crisis escalating to the point where ordinary people start to look askance at the entire capitalist class - bankers, politicians, academics and journalists - who have sold them this duff bill of goods.

The net stage could only be to raise questions about the integrity of a system resting on private property and driven by private profit.

The actual content of the emergency measures now being applied is, from the elite point of view, secondary to their purpose.

Staying in the saddle in society as a whole is the imperative and the sacrifice of an individual capitalist's concern, or even a group of them, and the abandonment of long-argued political positions is merely necessary collateral damage.

So the ball has been passed to the government with unseemly haste by those who have been shrieking "hands off" at the most modest proposal for regulation or intervention, at least since the spectre of revolution and world socialism was banished in the 1980s.

This is now a challenge for new Labour. Brittan has at least been sensitive to the potential embarrassment this may cause to ministers.

"Many revisionist left-of-centre politicians not only have risked their careers to make the case for market forces but have also had to jettison their deepest lifetime convictions.

"Are they now to stand on their heads and say they have been wrong all along?

"And if they did so, where would they turn?" he wrote.

Indeed. Gordon Brown particularly distinguished himself in fawning on the authors of the current catastrophe.

"Britain needs more of the vigour, ingenuity and aspiration that you already demonstrate," he told the cream of the City at its annual Mansion House dinner in 2007, adding for good measure that their achievements meant we are privileged to live "in an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age."

It is risky betting on history's judgement, but I think we can safely assume that the fickle and elusive arbiter will, in fact, not record 2007 as the threshold of a golden age any more than Britain needs another dose of the "vigour, ingenuity and aspiration" of Lloyds TSB, HBOS and the rest.

Instead, sucking up to the City is off the political agenda and the vigorous bankers are somewhat friendless.

Not that they will worry too much. It was reported last month that the banks are using the cuts in interest rates to widen their profit margins, borrowing cheap and lending dear.

And ministers, while happy to chide high finance over its grotesque bonus packages, are clearly desperate for the City to get its show back on the road before they have to publicly abandon neoliberalism. Two U-turns in a political lifetime may be too much to expect of them.

Nevertheless, politics can change very rapidly at times of crisis. If ordinary people take it into their heads that the people who sustained, profited from and blessed the set-up which led to this crisis are no longer fit to be in charge, then anything can happen.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, right-wing pundit Martin Vander Weyer admitted as much.

While arguing against state aid for the motor industry, he was unabashed that intervention had been necessary for the banks because "if any major bank had failed, taking our current and savings accounts with it, there would have been widespread public disorder and political mayhem."

Disorder and mayhem - the bourgeois nightmare.

The question for the labour movement is perhaps what sort of "disorder and mayhem" the times require.

Already the question is staring to find an answer in practice - "green shoots" only perhaps, but a start.

Certainly, the idea that ordinary people should not have to pay with their jobs and their homes for the bonus-drunk blundering of the bankers is a popular one.

As for the idea that the ruling class is not fit to rule, that, too, may get a hearing for the first time in a generation. Out of such understanding great mayhem grows.