The waves of public anger against the bankers surge back and forth without political expression. The media scapegoat Fred Goodwin and reduce the crisis to the problem of few greedy bankers. Fear and the loss of trust are not confined to the markets.

The recession has destroyed the compact between the market and the individual which provided the social cement for the neo-liberal order. The government has no alternative set of values or social politics to replace it with.

For a brief period, history is in the public realm and ours for the making. The opportunity will not come again for generations, but the Left needs to rediscover our capacity for collective change. The political fault lines of a new era are starting to take shape. They divide those who believe that privileging the market and individual self-interest is the best way to govern society and those who believe that democracy and society must come before markets.

These fault lines cut across party lines and divide them from within: Thatcherite politics versus elements in the New Conservatism; market Liberal Democrats versus social Liberal Democrats; neo-liberal New Labour versus social democratic Labour.

In our new ebook The Crash – a View from the Left we argue for a politics of democracy and the social. We need a new socialism not dictated by the few from above, but made by the many from below. It will have a number of broad but defining principles. It will be grounded in the interdependency of individuals and the value of equality. It will be democratic, because only the active interest and participation of individuals can guarantee true freedom and progress.

It will be ecologically sustainable and pursue economic development within the constraints placed on us by the earth. And it will be pluralist, because we need a diverse range of political institutions, and a variety of forms of economic ownership and cultural identities, to provide the energy and inventiveness to create a good society.

Its task is not to win the political centre ground – it is gridlocked and dead – but to transform it and embark on the deep and long transformation that will bring about a good society.

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Contributors: Jon Cruddas, Clive Dilnot, Bryan Gould, John Grahl, Colin Hines, Adam Leaver, Toby Lloyd, Lindsay Mackie, Robin Maynard, Richard Murphy, Carlota Perez, Ann Pettifor, Michael Prior, Jonathan Rutherford, Göran Therborn.

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