SOCIAL SCIENTIST The almost total rout of the left may be recent, but the force and resolution of its opposition to the capitalist order has been in doubt since the beginning of the Cold War and the "containment" of the Soviet Union. Robert Brenner went further and argued, in the case of the centres of advanced capital, that the subordination of labour and its organizations in the course of national and international class struggles waged by capital and its representatives was the basis of the spectacular and sustained capitalist accumulation of the post-war period2. The fortunes of a compromised and bureaucratic social democracy in the centres of advanced capital, and of developmentalism in the rest of the capitalist world, remained yoked, thereafter, to the health of capitalism itself. The lack of an organised political opposition does not mean today, as its weakness did not mean before, that the political tasks of protecting and managing the process of accumulation against the obstacles presented by nature and culture, as well as coping with the dynamic imbalances of capitalist accumulation, political and economic, can be ignored or neglected. This is itself a form of class struggle, though it should not be forgotten that while it may be quite adequate to the needs of the right, any new left must take the struggle to higher political, economic and cultural levels to fulfill its own historical tasks. The politics of the right since the French revolution has evolved through a series of distinct historical stages, singular constellations of constituencies, ideologies and strategies, in the face of changing configurations of property and the political challenges to it3. Perhaps the most radical reconstitution it executed was the one after the Second World War when the order of property it had to defend, and the domestic and international political situation in which it had to do so, had changed radically enough as to impose a thoroughgoing reconstitution of its ideologies and strategies. Even so, the reconstitution appeared more radical than it actually was. Which the resources it could muster towards it were, for the most part, hardly novel, to the political necessity of stabilising capitalism domestically and internationally in objectively new historical circumstances was added the imperative for dissimulating its real continuities with a deeply discredited past. The effectiveness of the dissimulation can still be seen in the pervasive mis-recognition of right politics as "centrist" from which the right benefits politically and which dogs the understanding of its imperatives and intentions in broad swathes of progressive circles. Nevertheless, objectively necessary changes did not just include the institutions of the welfare state demanded by a