Had he lived long enough to witness it, I’m sure neo-liberalism’s godfather Milton Friedman would have been proud of Cameron and Clegg’s coalition government, which, along with its rightwing media allies, has proven that in order to sell a lie, you just need to make it big enough and repeat it often enough.

It seems remarkable that only two years have passed since the public raged against the profligacy of the bankers and struggled to comprehend the staggering sums of money so hastily handed over to bail out the banks’ recklessness and greed. Back then, with the part-nationalisation of well-known high street banking names and the demands for a crackdown on the lawlessness of the Square Mile, it seemed almost possible to believe that neo-liberalism’s most precious tenets – its opposition to government intervention, its insistence on the virtue of deregulation and the dynamism of the private sector – could never recover credibility. But now look where we are: on the verge of the most ferocious programme of public sector cuts in living memory, cuts blamed almost entirely on the previous government’s ‘wasteful’ intervention and interference, a programme that threatens to transform and reengineer our society whilst we are still reeling from the shock.

In his article, The Axeman’s Jazz, Richard Seymour has set out at length – at some considerable length – many fundamental truths about the mess we are in. I can’t fault his analysis that a combination of stimulus spending, rising unemployment in a shrinking private sector hit hard by the recession and huge subsidies to the financial sector are the real reasons for the rise in levels of public debt, rather than allegedly extravagant government indulgences to the public sector and its employees. I agree, too, that pretending otherwise is a fairy story driven far more by ideology than by evidence.

Richard is also correct in assessing the difficulties that Labour faces. Having itself become a party that embraced free market liberalism, attacks on public sector workers and on welfare recipients, complete with a commitment at May’s election for its own massive cuts programme, the party does indeed now find that it has “few resources with which to criticise the Con-Lib cuts project” – a problem that will persist no matter who wins its protracted leadership battle.

Where Richard’s article is less convincing, however, is in its advice about how the coalition’s Big Lie can best be resisted.

With the starter’s pistol for the cuts programme - the comprehensive spending review - only months away, it is true that now may not be the best time to dwell on a lengthy debate about the best long-term alternatives to capitalism. In theory at least, it should therefore “be enough for us to agree that the cuts aren’t necessary” and that they are “being imposed as part of a political project to reduce the size of the welfare state”. In practice, however, I think this misjudges how successfully the coalition and its media allies have already prepared the ground for an assault on the welfare state, helped by the ammunition provided by Labour’s record in office. Stories about government excess often resonate with low-paid workers facing pay freezes and the threat of unemployment because they reflect the way Labour imported private sector values into the pay of a senior level of public sector managers and consultants within an increasingly distant and unassailable bureaucracy, one designed largely to recreate ‘free markets’ inside the public sector.

The result is that some Tory criticisms of government spending are far more difficult to oppose than others. Rather than defending the apparently indefensible, the temptation for some on the left will therefore be to accept the need for ‘tactical cuts’. The trouble is that, in doing so, they inadvertently validate the idea that overall government spending is out of control.

On the other hand, simply defending a bigger welfare state isn’t a convincing enough argument when some spending, especially massive senior managers’ pay, is obviously impossible to justify. Therefore, as well as explaining that cuts are driven by Tory ideology, we also need to be able to offer our own alternative ideological vision of the kind of welfare state we want – one that explicitly recaptures the arguments for a more democratised public sector, in which an obsession with free market values is banished forever and ‘consumer choice’ is replaced by a genuine transfer of power. Wouldn’t the case for opposing cuts be far stronger if we were offering something more than a return to the way things were before?

Labour should be an important part of this debate, but as a party that has still failed to break with “the neo-liberal ideology underpinning the cuts agenda”, it is difficult to see how its leadership, as opposed to its few remaining left activists, will be able to do so. There is little evidence that the party nationally is prepared to abandon the conventional wisdom that says it must retake the centre of politics at all costs and none of the frontrunners for the party’s leadership seem prepared to gamble that the electorate can be persuaded to listen to more radical ideas, no matter how much the extra-parliamentary left is busy alerting people to the urgency of resisting cuts and “the need for militancy beyond the traditional policies of the trade union leadership”. Furthermore, with local government providing the frontline of cuts, it will also be Labour councils in many areas that are imposing them on working class communities. That is why I think Richard over-estimates “the party’s ability to renew its working class support”.

The danger, considering the general level of cynicism about politics and politicians, is that any shift in public opinion could go further to the right. This risk seems greater if Labour remains wedded to defending its record in government and the only position offered by the rest of the left is a largely negative one, arguing that “the cuts aren’t necessary” whilst the media are busy digging up, or making up, stories that seem to imply the opposite.

If the cuts programme really is so traumatic that people reeling from the shock of its impact look leftward for solutions, they’ll need something more to hope for than the status quo – which brings me back to the need for at least some plans for a different, democratised public sector. So while it should be enough for us to agree that the cuts are unnecessary and driven by neo-liberal ideology, it will probably require far more. That means, alongside opposition to current policies, offering properly formulated, positive alternatives, drawn up collectively through a series of regional conventions involving public sector unions, local campaigns, voluntary organisations and academics.

On the question of how an anti-cuts opposition, one prepared to also debate and devise a new vision for public spending, should be organised, Richard suggests a “multi-party, multi-organisation trade union-based united front”. On paper this sounds like a great idea, but it is also incredibly vague. Will a ‘united front’, for instance, focus its energies on organising national marches in London (as the Stop the War Coalition did repeatedly with increasingly diminishing success)? Or will it be one that draws its strength from the bottom up, from a multitude of local and regional campaigns against cuts? I believe the latter is essential, as it is at a local level that unions and their members will often experience the government’s scorched earth policies most dramatically. The role of a national coalition would be to establish long-term roots and build links between different sets of workers and with wider communities.

Such a strategy acknowledges that union membership and militancy is nowhere near what it once was and also that, at a local level, activists have shown that they are able to more readily put aside their differences to work together. After all, the left has a poor track record for united action and the Socialist Workers Party in particular, which I know Richard belongs to, has a terrible reputation for seeking to dominate campaigning coalitions, for packing meetings, marginalising independent or local activities it cannot control and for placing a higher priority on party-building than on working cooperatively with others. I’m sure that Richard will reject this as unfair – but it’s a far from isolated view.

If talk about unity to obstruct the cuts agenda is serious this time, it can’t mean a demand that everyone simply falls in behind one body such as the SWP’s “Right to Work” front organisation, which I’m afraid has little significance beyond those who are currently involved in it. However, a nationwide anti-cuts coalition that is prepared to reject top-down, hierarchical and authoritarian models of organisation in favour of collective, grassroots political organising, based on solidarity, democracy, openness and respect for others, may yet have a chance of success.

Kevin Blowe is a charity worker, campaigner and proud ‘stopper’ based in Newham in east London. He blogs at Random Blowe