The idea that the world economy is about to undergo a re-run of the 1930s is becoming so common among mainstream economic commentators that is in serious danger of becoming a cliché.

But when likes of George Soros toy with that idea, they do so for express symbolic effect. Resort to any notion of a return to the years of Great Depression is the kind of talk purposely designed to shake people up. It is, in effect, the most serious warning it is possible to give.

That decade is deeply entrenched in the collective memory of the free market right as the years in which the wheels nearly came off the capitalist show.

We’ve all seen the black and white newsreel footage; the Jarrow March, the soup kitchens, the Hoovervilles, the rise of fascism in country after country.

Many of us will augment those pictures with the stories we heard as children from older members of our families who were caught up in the crosscurrents. In my case, educated men were reduced to shining shoes for a living, or ignominiously deported from countries in which they tried to find work without a work permit.

It’s worth noting that this still is 2008 and not 1931; some sections of the left have at times given the impression that they would relish a slump of Great Depression proportions, on account of the effect they imagine this would have in radicalising popular political consciousness.

Given the sheer extent of the human misery this would entail, that is unforgivable. It also seems to forget that – at the level of government, at least – the principle beneficiary of hard times is all too often the reactionary right.

Little wonder, then, that the ‘1930s in slow motion’ perspective developed by Tony Cliff at the start of the 1990s proved to be wishful thinking during a period which saw the start of sustained capitalist expansion, disastrously wrong-footing the Socialist Workers’ Party for an entire period.

What conclusions can we draw? At the very least, the financial markets crisis of 2008 is likely to mark an important political turning point. When governments of the ideological stripe of George W Bush are forced to resort to state intervention on a titanic scale, it cannot fail but to bolster case for tighter regulation of the free market.

It suddenly turns out that the very things that globalisation supposedly rendered impossible for nation states in this day and age – the nationalisation of major financial institutions, or a ban on short selling, for example – can be done in no time flat if need be.

Deregulation has been an integral component of neoliberalism as it has emerged in the west over the last 30 years. One of the first actions of the Thatcher administration was to scrap wage, price and exchange controls, and it followed through with the Big Bang in 1986.

The climate is all of a sudden very different, and could expand the political space available to modern social democracy, and perhaps revive a current that has sometimes seemed at death’s door in recent years.

But what if the pessimists are right? Such a possibility must be at least measurable. In that case, the basic underlying question of all economics – which class gets what – is back on the agenda in a way it has not been for a long time.

That will mean an audience for radical answers to that question. Perhaps it’s not for nothing that the Archbishop of Canterbury has suddenly taken to favourably mentioning of Karl Marx.