This underlines the fact that how we explain the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s is not merely "academic". On the contrary, it is enormously important today, both politically and economically, because we are constantly struggling over what lessons the past teaches. Different interpretations of the past lead to different conclusions regarding what can be done at present. But we must not reject orthodox explanations just because they are orthodox. In fact, capitalist reason provides some very helpful tools for understanding capitalism. There are aspects of contemporary economic life that appear to be very well diagnosed by conventional tools. Rather than rejecting orthodoxy because of its ideological predisposition to posit capital as the engine of historical progress, even in periods before capitalism itself existed, and to see workers and noncapitalists as "backward" forces, hindering progress, we need to see it for what it is: a set of ways of understanding the world that is a product of the very world it is trying to explain. Capitalist reason is embedded in and emerges from a particular, ideologically saturated world. Recognising the embeddedness of "reason" in its time is about as close to truth as we are ever going to get with respect to actually existing human communities. We have to resist the desire to dismiss it out of hand, and search instead for the truth in it, truth of which that reason might not itself be aware.