There was a rousing crowd chant and an impressive bit of street theatre -- including hooting horns encouraging the aggrieved proletariat working themselves up to storm the Bastille. And I suddenly had this irrational impulse to join the demo.

Yes! The clenched fist and the immortal cry, "La Lotta Continua!" The struggle goes on! What fun it was to be a socialist: all that fabulous solidarity and those rousing songs!

"Arise, ye workers from your slumber! Arise, ye prisoners of want!"

And really, it does seem to chime with the spirit of the age once again. Pull down the fat cats, the rich swells and the political and administrative classes who live off the taxes of the poor. Like aristocrats at Versailles, pillory the privileged class that lives sumptuously by grace and favour of political patronage, while the peasants struggle -- that is, ordinary voters queuing up in their droves for part-time Christmas jobs at Marks & Spencer.

"For reason in revolt now thunders, and at last ends the age of cant!"

However, it would be less than honest to describe my sudden, sentimental urge to fall in step behind the red flag as something prompted by an outraged sense of altruistic justice, or a deep analysis of societal woe. No, it's because the memory of socialism, or identifying with socialism, is so gratifyingly enjoyable. Socialism was more a therapy than a system; it made you feel better about yourself. It made you feel, 'I am a socialist because I am a really nice person who cares about other people, not a selfish, feather-your-own-nest kind of bird'.

And so many classic works of uplifting literature tell us that it is more angelic to be on the side of the humble and dispossessed -- and maybe revolutionary -- than with the hard-faced men who grind the faces of the poor.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Les Misérables; from Zola to Frank McCourt; from Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist to Louisa May Alcott and Little Women ... we see the nobility of being part of the struggling masses. As it indeed spells out on the Statue of Liberty itself, that image inspired by the French Revolution. Away with the selfish capitalists in top hats whose reckless stock-market gambling defrauds the poor of their rewards!

Not to mention the great songs of the Left that gladden the heart with their narrative of sacrifice and solidarity -- none better than Co Meath's Jim Connell's:

"The people's flag is deepest red. It shrouded oft our martyred dead! And 'ere their limbs grew stiff and cold, their hearts' blood dyed its every fold."

Or the paintings, the images and the movies: from Delacroix's iconic picture of bare-breasted Liberty Leading the People to the global merchandising (brilliantly merchandised, as it happens, by capitalism) of a Messianic Che Guevara in his red-starred beret -- socialism has so much colour and drama.

Many movies, too, have coded messages that corporate capitalism is mean, cruel and depersonalising, while the ordinary man and woman toiling away in humble circumstances is morally better and, basically, just nicer.

Billy Wilder's The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine -- one of the best films ever made -- is a devastating indictment of the utter odiousness of corporate capitalism.

Many American movies of the 40s and 50s carried a socialist message, because Hollywood was indeed a hotbed of Communist cells -- just because Joe McCarthy was nasty and brutish, doesn't mean he wasn't on the right track. Elia Kazan disclosed that there had been a red plot in Hollywood to turn Lassie into a socialist parable: the famous doggie picture should have been called 'Lassie Come Home to Your Agricultural Collective'.

Then the glamorous internationalism of all those socialist anthems. How sweet it would be to lift a choral voice once again to those beguiling airs.

"Avanti o populo! Alla riscossa! Bandiera rossa! Bandiera rossa!"

But I came to my senses and resisted the urge to fall into step behind the Socialist Worker banner. Instead, I walked away, giving myself a little mental lecture. Socialism is exciting, seductive and full of great songs and vivid images, but you know it doesn't work.

You've been there. You have come to understand, through bread-and-butter experience, that a working economy means risk by entrepreneurs, investment by capital, dividends for shareholders, fair competition and -- that much-disliked, dirty word -- profit. Without profit, there are no wages for anyone; without the market there is no meaningful trade. Or jobs for anyone.

And let us not forget either that an older version of that fabulous Italian Red Flag went:

"Bandiera rossa! Color del vino: Viva Stalino! Viva Stalino!"

Oh, the devil has the best tunes all right, and I can still be tempted by them.

W