Having dreamed it so long, Marxist crisis theorists were ready for action when Lehman Brothers broke the seventh seal and the strait gate swung open. Even the chair of the Federal Reserve worried that “we may not have an economy on Monday.”

The unspoken hope on the Left was that a big crisis would unmask capitalism, revealing that what prosperity people thought they had was false. In the last ten years, we have seen that crisis does not by itself delegitimize capitalism, or threaten the end of capitalism. It brings poorly functioning capitalism, for a while, and legitimates all kinds of measures to restore function, real or false: bailouts, stimulus, austerity, nativism. Yet at the time, socialists imagined a big crisis as the event that would throw all the chips in the air.

Meanwhile, the financial press was discovering its own socialist crisis theorist: Hyman P. Minsky.