ABSTRACT
The technocratic Left of the 1970s was a decidedly hard-headed variant of earlier incarnations, a characteristic embodied, for example, in the greater use of Marxian rhetoric, particularly theories of capitalist crisis, to condemn gradualist social reform which had deprived ‘the public at large of the chance to pressurize, criticize or support more radical change’. Real social change, it was argued, would only come from ‘a revolutionary reform of the mode of production, distribution and exchange in the system as a whole’1-and much of the Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) as it emerged throughout the 1970s was designed to further this technocratic goal.
