Dr Rowan Williams’s red rag to the capitalist bulls

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s article in the new issue of the Spectator – featured on this morning’s Today programme – is already making waves. Dr Williams has form as a controversialist, of course: his remarks about sharia law caused a storm earlier this year, though he insisted that his argument had been distorted and misunderstood. This time I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

To say that Marx was “right” about certain aspects of capitalism is self-evidently a red rag to a bull – as is the Archbishop’s claim that the way in which we talk about the market strays into “what the Jewish and Christian scriptures call idolatry.” Yet in this respect he is only expressing in cerebral and theological language what many people are already feeling about the global financial crisis: witness the reversion to socialist type on the Labour conference floor in Manchester.

The pressure really is on for defenders of capitalism to make their case, and to explain that what is happening does not undermine the case for the market or license untrammelled government intervention in the economic process.