The current period is dominated by two significant realities which have enormous implications for social work: first, the increasing evidence of the damaging and dysfunctional nature of our economically divided society; second, the banking collapse and bailout. The former poses serious questions about the efficacy of individualised interventions which predominate through much of contemporary statutory social work, while the latter flatly contradicts every argument ever made about the cost of welfare being "too great". In this context, there is an opportunity for re-articulating radical traditions within social work that focus on structural, collective and non-pathological models. We begin by offering a critique of ‘old’ Radical Social Work (RSW) noting it’s emergence from the so-called ‘crisis of Labourism’ of the late 1970s, and the leftward shift within key sections of society in the context of working class radicalisation and the emergence of the New Social Movements (NSM), chief amongst these being feminism, anti-racism and service user activism. Paradoxically while the language of opposition to ‘oppression’, which RSW took from the involvement in NSM’s into social work, has become mainstream, the project of wider social transformation and equality of outcome, which it also saw itself as part of, has been completely marginalised within social work. Crucial to the political marginalisation of radical currents resides in the question of the relation of social work to the neoliberal capitalist state. The idea of being ""in and against the state" was cleverly appropriated by the New Right, who had their own agenda to dismantle the welfare state. It is this that explains RSW’s current difficulty at an analytical level - its language of "liberation", "empowerment" and "anti-oppression" are no longer ‘radical’ in the sense that they now sit comfortably within a neoliberal managerial discourse. In order for a dissenting radical current to re-emerge within social work it is essential that an agenda is set out which genuinely challenges the managerialism which has impoverished and demoralised front-line practice, as well as defending and reconstructing the best traditions within social work’s rich history.