As markets stagger, as the susurration of socialists' "I told you so's" grows louder, the demand for an alternative - a real alternative, not milquetoast regulation or temporary nationalisation of a few banks - makes itself felt. Next weekend, a conference "On the Idea of Communism" will be held at London University's Birkbeck College: it had been budgeted for a modest 180 participants but now a bigger hall will accommodate 800, and bookings are closed. Arise, ye starvelings, from your slumbers!

Fitting that this takes place in London - where Marx, a century and a half ago, prepared to write Capital ; where Lenin, some 100 years ago, engineered a split in his political party from which the Bolsheviki - meaning "the majority" - were born. London has been for two centuries the home of finance and until 50 years ago, of imperialism. Yet its working class, to Marx's despair, preferred Methodism to him. Can it be roused from its slumbers this time?