The mainstreaming of the populist protesters is also reflected in the fact that, for once, politicians are attempting to reach out to them. Until the unravelling of this crisis, these were groups which could be physically barricaded away from major summits and intellectually dwarfed by the very obvious success of the system they were protesting against. After all, free markets and globalisation lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (largely because of the phenomenal growth not only of China and India but also in places like Africa and Latin America) and made others wealthier than they were under the more closed world between 1945 and 1980.

The change can be gauged from the fact that leaders as powerful as Joe Biden and Peter Mandelson tried to make appeals for patience directly to the people on the streets. Interestingly their appeal was directed to a rainbow group of protesters (including NGOs and trade unions) under the banner of “Put People First” who are drawing attention to poverty, jobs and climate change — all fairly mainstream concerns (unlike, say, anarchy).

Whether the G-20 summit achieves anything concrete or not, events around it clearly show the way the balance of global political economy is swinging leftwards. Given the scale of the crisis and its root causes in financial capitalism this shift is inevitable. Free markets, after all, do not exist in a vacuum — they need popular legitimacy, something which voters in at least the US and the UK had been granting them since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Now, politicians need to manoeuvre around to a new political consensus and social contract.

... contd.