Power in the 21st Century E-Book

Michael Mann

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 241

Beschreibung

Michael Mann is one of the most influential sociologists writing today. His three-volume work The Sources of Social Power, the third volume of which has just been completed, has transformed our way of thinking about power and has rewritten the history of human societies. No one interested in understanding how the modern world was shaped, how we got to where we are today, and where we're likely to be heading can afford to ignore this modern classic. Michael Mann is, as John Hall aptly describes him, "a Max Weber for our times." In this new book Michael Mann reflects on the meaning of his project as a whole, both as a contribution to social theory and as a guide to the options and constraints that face the contemporary world now and in the near future. He gives sustained attention to the situation of the United States, the nature of the challenge that may come from China, the unrestrained and perhaps unrestrainable power of finance, and the looming crisis of environmental degradation. This concise and accessible book is the ideal introduction to the work and thought of one of the most original social scientists in the world today. Students and scholars will find the book invaluable, and general readers will find in this book a clear and masterful guide to the key challenges we face in the years and decades ahead.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction

Part One: Powers in Motion

1 Capitalism

2 Militarism

3 Political Power

4 An End to Ideology?

5 Patterns, Cages, Interstices, and a Dialectic

Part Two: The Nature of Social Change

6 States, Strong and Weak

7 Group Agency

8 Outcomes

9 Contingencies of Modernity

10 Our Looming Crisis

Conclusion

References

Copyright © Michael Mann and John A. Hall 2011

The right of Michael Mann and John A. Hall to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2011 by Polity Press

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Introduction

John A. Hall

Michael Mann has always seemed to me to be “our” generation’s Max Weber.1 The most obvious way in which this is so is that of his central theoretical claim: namely, that it is necessary to take into account distinct sources of social power in order to understand both the historical record and the contours of our own world. Just as important is the fantastic historical range of both thinkers, allied to staggering abilities to absorb and condense huge amounts of empirical evidence. Of course, there are subtle differences, some of which Mann remarks upon late in the following text. Weber’s concern with economic, political, and ideological forms of power is developed by Mann into a fourfold scheme that adds to the celebrated trinity an insistence on the autonomy of military power. Then there is a difference in perspective. The extended scholarship that Weber devoted to different civilizations is not fully matched by Mann, despite striking forays made in that direction. But the most crucial difference is normative. It is impossible to overstate the influence of Nietzsche on Weber, leading as it did to his concern with disenchantment—and at times to a politics that had little time for liberal democracy, favoring as it did nationalism together with the need for a charismatic leader to shake society out of the malaise of consumerist dullness. In contrast, Mann is a committed social democrat, as this volume makes clearer than ever before. This reinforces the sense that he is indeed a Max Weber for our times. He is as concerned with our current sense of history, but grounds his work in values that are closer to our own.

Though Mann’s work is very well known, it may be useful to recall something of the grandeur of his attempt at social understanding. He has told us that he began his attempt to develop the tools to understand the historical record as a whole in 1972, imagining at that time that he could manage this in short order and within a single volume. He was incapable of doing this, to our very great benefit! We have instead been offered large books crammed with detail on key turning points, all of them concerned both to advance sociological theory and to help social understanding.

The Sources of Social Power, Volume One: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 AD is a particularly exciting volume, and not just because it introduced a new theoretical scheme. For one thing, the vast historical range covered meant that theoretical claims stood out from historical detail. For another, the treatment of the migration of the leading edge of power from the Middle East to northwest Europe had great narrative thrust, taking the reader along in a dazzling excursus into world historical development. There were great incidental pleasures: an account of the way in which agriculture became prominent due to the early farmers’ “caging” in the great river valleys; analysis of early empires, and in particular a sophisticated description of the rise and fall of Rome; the brilliant foray, based on an original concept of ideological power, into the emergence of the world religions; and an explanation for the rise to world power of the warring states of northwest Europe.

That first volume of Sources made his reputation, and saw him move from the London School of Economics to the University of California, where he still works. In contrast, the second volume, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914, received rather less attention. The book is denser, filled with a mass of empirical detail; perhaps this demanded too much of readers unable to quickly grasp the varied originalities therein. The book continues to make use of his conceptualization of the four sources of power so as to trace again the leading edge of power, fundamentally through describing the interactions of the Great Powers of northwest Europe in the long nineteenth century. What is particularly striking about the volume are set pieces on key factors of social life—making the relative neglect shown to the volume astonishing, at least in my opinion. The chapters devoted to the modern state are the best available, an astonishing tour de force. Just as important is a careful explanation of the nature of class action, stressing the way in which social movements gain their character from the nature of the states with which they interact. Throughout the volume there is a subtle view of nationalism, albeit this is less clearly articulated than it is in key passages of the conversations that follow. And of course, the final chapter describes the moment at which Europeans began to lose their dominance in world historical terms. A case can be made that geopolitical competition between states inside the European sphere had led to progress overall—to the rationalization of states and the spread of economic and political innovation. But this very engine brought disaster once war was allied to industrial might.

Events interfere with academic plans as much as political programs. In the year that this second volume of Sources appeared Mann was challenged, at a Prague conference on nationalism organized by Ernest Gellner, about the ethnic cleansing then taking place in the Balkans. The result of this challenge was a huge diversion from the immediate completion of Sources, resulting in a pair of volumes—Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing—explaining the horrors of the twentieth century. These companion volumes certainly demonstrate the comparative historical sociological skills of a master of the genre. They were clearly hard to write. For the most impressive characteristic of both is the refusal to simply treat, or only treat, the perpetrators of horror as evil. Rather, sense had to be made of the actors involved; the rationality of their actions had to be appreciated and understood. This approach landed Mann in a good deal of trouble, particularly in the eyes of David Laitin, when speaking of “the dark side of democracy.” It may be that the arresting nature of Mann’s title was incautious given that liberal democracy has a relatively clean record as far as ethnic cleansing is concerned. But the title still seems to me brave and significant, forcing us to face the fact that normal people can act in repulsive ways—that ethnic cleansing can be popular and not, as is so often maintained, something engineered by manipulative political entrepreneurs.

There has been a second diversion from the continuation of Sources, albeit this too has done a great deal to enrich the concluding volume, to which we will turn in a moment. Since 1986 Mann has lived in the United States, inside the leading edge of world power, and he has thought more and more about its character. This is driven in part by his extreme dislike of that strand of its foreign policy that led to the invasion of Iraq. Incoherent Empire is a polemic against the imperial pretensions of the contemporary United States, suggesting that they are ill advised and doomed to failure. There is a certain amount of wobbling in Mann’s position here, which we discuss below, much of it revolving around exactly when the primacy of the United States may be lost. For the second reason Mann concentrates so much attention on the United States is the widespread view that world politics are about to change. Only a few years ago there was much discussion of the unipolar moment of the United States; now all eyes turn to the way in which China, and perhaps India and Brazil, look set to add elements of multipolarity to the world polity.

The final volume of Sources is now complete, and it will appear in 2011. It is worth knowing that Mann has wobbled slightly when choosing a subtitle for this volume. The original subtitle was “Globalizations,” referring to different processes that have drawn the world together. Those processes are present in the subtitle currently used, “Empires, Capitalism, and Nation-States”—although, as we see later, this too may be slightly amended. But the nature of the volume is neatly summed up by the following comments made in conversation in February 2010.

In analyzing the world in the long twentieth century, up to today, the most fundamental social institutions have been capitalism, though contested by socialist and fascist modes of production, and nation-states, though at first the leading states also possessed empires and one of them still does. Thus, for example, globalization (a word that should really be pluraled) involves three main principles, the globalization of capitalism, the globalization of the nation-state, and the emergence of the first global empire, the American Empire. Capitalism generates class struggle, while nation-states and empires generate geopolitics, wars and sometimes civil wars. All generate ideologies, which in this period have been mainly secular rather than religious. These are the subject-matter of my most recent work.

Bearing these comments in mind—indeed, referring to them from time to time—will help readers orient themselves in this volume.

So a long intellectual journey has come to an end. The purpose of this book of interviews is to ask Mann about the social structures that constrain us and the options that are left to us in this not-so-new century. It should be made clear that attention does not focus on his final volume, although some of my questions reflect the fact that I read the manuscript early in 2010. Instead the attention is on contemporary circumstances, and on our life chances more generally. Of course, this involves critique, both positive and negative, so that the presuppositions of his work can be laid bare. My firm hope is that the interviews will illuminate his project as a whole, and encourage us to think about the nature of our times.

It may be of use to explain the manner in which this volume was created. The idea came from John Thompson of Cambridge University and of Polity Press, who was keen to hear more about the implications of Mann’s recent work and of his project more generally, having been impressed by lectures that Mann has given over several summers in Cambridge. I have had the chance to engage with Mann’s work over many years, and was delighted to be asked to engage with him in an assessment of the way in which he sees the forces of power at this point of time. An initial set of interviews, based on the divisions that structure this text, took place in February 2010 in Los Angeles. These form the core of this book. But there have been revisions. Readers may be amused to know that interviewing is rather messy, or at least it was in this case. Topics were raised on more than one occasion, with answers to early questions coming by means of digression at later stages. So revisions have reordered the text so as to gain cohesion and focus. And there have also been additions. A reading of the initial set of interviews made apparent some gaps in awareness and brought up questions that needed to be answered. Accordingly, some extra questions and answers in written form were added in July 2010. Despite all this, the character of the whole has been preserved. Occasionally, I have reverted to a topic when it seemed relevant in a different context, as happens in conversation; it is my hope that readers will appreciate these returns.

The ordering of the whole is apparent from the Table of Contents. Part One concentrates on the four sources of power at the core of Mann’s sociological theory, to see how they have worked in the recent past and might work in the near future. Part Two turns to the character of social change, as it has affected us in the past and with an eye as to how it might affect us in the future. The initial intellectual division in the second part—a concern with countries and social groups as sources of change, followed by an examination of recent outcomes and an investigation into the patterns and contingencies at work in our world—is my own. But the stress on environmental matters comes from Mann himself. One can go a little further in this regard. In the early interviews Mann clearly wants to talk about environmental matters. An ironic paradox emerges at this point, at the end of all his labors. The final volume of Sources contains much material about progress. Europeans are seen as having escaped the horrors of their past, to a calmer, softer, less militaristic world. Yet at this moment of hope, a wholly new global problem has emerged which may be capable of undermining recent achievements. At the hour of success, disaster looms.

Note

1 The claim is made at some length in my “Political Questions.” Please note that this and all other texts or authors mentioned in the conversations that follow are fully cited at the end of this volume.

Part One: Powers in Motion

1

Capitalism

JAH: Let us begin this discussion of the sources of social power by considering matters economic. Your view seems to be that capitalism is now firmly entrenched as the dominant economic system of the age.MM: Let me first briefly place capitalism amid the sources of social power. My overall claim is that there are four principal sources, ideological, economic, military, and political, and that in dealing with macro-sociological problems one must normally take all four into account. In analyzing the world in the long twentieth century, up to today, the most fundamental social institutions have been capitalism, though it has been contested by socialist and fascist modes of production, and nation-states, though at first the leading states also possessed empires and one of them still does. Thus, for example, globalization (a word that should really be plural) involves three main principles: the globalization of capitalism, the globalization of the nation-state, and the emergence of the first global empire, the American Empire. Capitalism generates class struggle, while nation-states and empires generate geopolitics, wars, and sometimes civil wars. All generate ideologies, which in this period have been mainly secular rather than religious. These are the subject matter of my most recent work, especially of Volume III of , which I am currently finishing.In answer to your specific question, yes, capitalism is very firmly entrenched in the modern world, and it has gotten more and more entrenched. As it has spread across the world, it has become the only economic power game in town. But capitalism has changed through time and comes in several varieties. In particular the rights of workers in the more advanced countries today are enormously greater than those in the nineteenth century. As capitalism has developed it has become more socially and legally constrained. Virtually the whole population has acquired what T. H. Marshall called “social citizenship,” the right to share in the socioeconomic life of the nation—that is, within capitalism. Of course, it is still “capitalism” in the sense that there is private ownership of the means of production, the worker is separated from control of those means, and more and more of social life has been commodified, available for profit-seeking by capitalists.JAH: But is capitalism also more entrenched in the sense that when it faced a considerable crisis in 2007 and 2008 it was possible to deal with that crisis much more effectively then had been the case in 1929?MM: Maybe; it isn’t over yet. But there are certainly two improvements over 1929. First, governments play a much larger role in regulation now than then, so it is easier for them to intervene with well understood policies, which have been around for a long time, and take short-term corrective action. Second, and perhaps more important, there is far more international collaboration of the organization of capitalism today than in 1929. There were then competitive devaluations and tariffs in the 1930s which made it more difficult for the world economy to recover. It is difficult to say at the moment how quick the recovery will be, but so far this seems like a great recession rather than a Great Depression, and will likely not be as significant as that of 1929. It is also more global in the sense that it shifted a little bit the international balance of power within the global economy, away from the West, more toward Asia. Recovery is being led by Asia, not by the West. This reveals that capitalism is more globally entrenched yet also more globally varied.JAH: Is it likely that capitalism will be more regulated after this crisis, especially if it proves merely to be a great recession? Banks in the United States were vulnerable to regulation for a short period when Barack Obama became President, but they now seem capable of resisting it.MM: I expect a compromise there. I think banks are actually a little more vulnerable to political backlash in the United States than they are in Britain. Republicans and Democrats alike counterpose “Wall Street” (the bad guys) to “Main Street” (ordinary Americans). I expect a little more regulation in the US. But despite this, there is a third major difference between now and 1929: the absence now of substantial organized and ideological opposition to capitalism. After 1929 there were surges in both leftist and rightist opposition, socialism and fascism. It is difficult to see parallels to that right now, another sign of how much more entrenched capitalism is. There will probably be a little more regulation, varying somewhat between countries though amid a little more international collaboration. But as I said, we in the West have not solved capitalism’s current problems.The main problem now is the much greater role and power of finance capital, the increasing financialization of the economy. This means that governments with large debts and deficits feel the need to appease international finance capital. Their currencies or their bonds may be vulnerable to an attack. So they tailor policies toward the needs of bankers more than their citizens. To some extent this has always been true—we see it in the political economy of the 1920s, for example. But it is rampant right now. Keynesian-styled stimulus spending quickly gave way—in Europe at least—to deficit reduction and deflation to protect the value of the currency and the government bond. The first need is the security of the investor, and never mind about the resulting unemployment. And the banks themselves oppose much regulation. They think they have got the perfect solution already: they make lots of money in good times and when the bad times come they get bailed out and capitalism gets saved. So what could be better for them but worse for us?JAH: If there is little new regulation, one can imagine a future in which new tools are created that again cause crisis—leading again to bailout.MM: Yes, it seems very likely that there will be another crisis of a similar nature a few years down the road. We be entering a phase of far more regulation of finance capital by government, but we might not get much of it. Power, not efficiency, rules the world—in my terms, distributive power dominates collective power—and this does not produce optimal results for the population as a whole. The US actually has the highest level of debt but because it is the reserve currency there is little speculative pressure against it. The Europeans—sterling and the euro, and especially the weaker economies of Europe—are under pressure. Governments are appeasing the speculators by introducing deflationary measures that include slashing government expenditures. Many economists think this will prolong the recession, but their advice is ignored.Sovereign debt currently worries governments more than anything else. It is not impossible that we might now get a repeat of the Great Depression, when a stock market crash and some financial instability was intensified into real depression by government cutting of expenditure and tightening of credit. I think that Europe’s conservative governments, in Britain, Italy, France, and Germany, are also taking advantage of the crisis to introduce welfare cuts that they have long wanted, but the basic pressure is coming from the markets, the movements of finance capital. It is bizarre that a financial crisis caused by neoliberalism should—after a short-term of Keynesian solutions—turn into more neoliberalism. It is even more bizarre that the United States, the real home (along with Britain) of neoliberalism, should warn the Europeans against this. It seems that the Americans have learned more lessons from this great recession than have the Europeans. But, I repeat, power, not efficiency, rules the world.JAH: The contemporary absence of trade wars and competitive devaluations is, for sure, so different from the interwar period. Is there any likelihood of the emergence of regional trading blocs, with a consequent attack on free trade?MM: I don’t think it’s very likely. It’s just a possibility for the United States itself. One could envisage a backlash within the United States against international free trade, if the right kind of political coalition were put together, though it is so much against the interests of big American companies that I doubt it is going to happen. But if you think about the interdependence that is arising between Asia and the United States and Europe, and the important role of the overseas Chinese through Asia, you see that this is not a regionally segregated economy. About two-thirds of the globe is significantly interdependent, and some of this is simply transnational.JAH: Is that the case because the United States still regulates capitalism? Does multilateral cooperation depend upon having a hegemonic leader?MM: Not necessarily. It’s true that in the postwar period the United States has been the leading power in international organizations, which have built up bit by bit. The World Trade Organization (WTO) now has legally binding restrictions on what countries can do in the way of tariffs and the like, to which the US is bound as well. Indeed, the US has been fined by the WTO. So there is something gradually building up that is more than just the United States, and indeed the kinds of economic things that the world blames the US for, such as structural adjustment programs, are done with the 100 percent collaboration of the Europeans. Sometimes the Japanese have deviated somewhat, but not the Europeans. If this is a hegemonic order, it’s not just of the United States. It’s also of international capitalism, especially finance capitalism, the most transnational form of capitalism. So I see it as kind of a dual hegemony—of both a class fraction and an American-led geopolitical alliance. The American part of this is also just beginning to be eroded. In particular we now see emerging an economic interdependence between the United States and China, plus Japan and the oil states. Countries other than the United States are pulling the world out of recession, especially China, whose manufacturing industry and exports are recovering.JAH: So this is a mixed system. Nothing could happen without the United States because it has such a prominent role, but a multilateral element of agreement is needed to make it work?MM: Yes, and that multilateralism is expanding. To the extent that there has been coordination, this has for almost the first time centered on the G20. It has been upgraded from a meeting of finance ministers to one of heads of state, and its composition reveals an extension of power from beyond the old West and Japan to the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and especially China. That is a sign of movement in geopolitical power across the world.JAH: There is a counterargument to what you have said. The United States retains enormous power, seen in its capacity to absorb most of the excess capital of the world economy. America might be weaker, but it’s a peculiar sort of weakness where most other leading states seem determined to prop you up.MM: That’s true, and the shifts in power will take a long time. The dollar is going to remain a reserve currency for quite a while yet. There’s no possible replacement for it. The euro has shown its weakness. It has no single directing force, other than the Bundesbank, which is not capable of leading a continent. Greece was bailed out, but mainly by Germany, and the process was politically fraught and far from automatic. More important, it is far from clear that a larger European national economy might receive such aid from Germany. And the Chinese currency is still controlled and restricted in various ways. The United States is going to remain the indispensible economic power for a while yet.JAH: And nobody really has a fundamental interest in knocking the United States off its perch?MM: No. The world economy benefits from a stable reserve currency and its principal actors are risk-averse. They do not want to go through what they fear would be a chaotic transition period from the dollar to a basket of currencies. That will eventually happen but most of the relevant power actors hope it will be slow and long-drawn-out.JAH: So this situation does not resemble that of Great Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, facing a major rival that had both economic and military power.MM: That is correct, but in the British case, even before Germany became a serious threat, the pound as the reserve currency was being assisted by the other major banks, by the German bank, the Russian bank, the French bank. It had become a partly multilateral system, as Barry Eichengreen and others have shown, well before the rivalry with Germany became militarily threatening.JAH: And the British case, in the end, is an example of being knocked off your perch by military exhaustion and huge debts incurred in war.MM: Yes, not merely by any intrinsic logic of capitalist development, since that war was a product not of capitalism but of older great-power rivalry.JAH: A further question about the United States concerns its remaining economic strength. Reports about patent-taking seem to suggest that at the higher end of product cycles the United States still does very well. Further, the United States has a notable capacity to absorb brainpower, most recently that of Indian engineers. Surely, American capitalism still looks rather strong?MM: With patents I’m never quite sure if there is a bias in these statistics, since the Americans developed the patent system and rush to patent things immediately, so the quantity of the patents in the United States would dominate the world. I don’t know the extent to which in reality the US dominates new and highly profitable technologies. I assume, like you do, that some American dominance results from its relatively open immigration policy and its fine universities. In US engineering faculties there are very few “Anglos,” as they say, among the graduate students; they are substantially Asians and other foreign students, perhaps Asian-Americans or recent migrants, though most of them stay and become successful, and that is very important. If you see figures of the ethnic origins of the Nobel Prize winners, the United States is not the biggest per capita winner of Nobel Prizes—Sweden and Switzerland top the list.JAH: Still, some of the Nobel Prize winners from Sweden, Switzerland, and elsewhere end up working in the United States.MM: Exactly. There has also been considerable government assistance in the United States for high-tech industries. Part of it is military spinoff and part of it is just a federal government commitment to high tech. This doesn’t fit well with the image of the United States as being a country of very little government regulation or intervention in industry. In the defense sector and high tech more generally there is a very high level of government sponsorship of R & D.JAH: I have some questions about capitalist behavior. There is a sense in which your works suggests disappointment in capitalists: they spend their time making money, and lack larger geopolitical visions. Have you changed your mind about that?MM: Well, I wouldn’t go quite as far as you’ve said, but I think I would view their behavior along those lines. Of course, there are institutions of collaboration among capitalists, like think tanks and the World Economic Forum, and some of the major industries do plan years ahead, like the energy industry, for example. But I don’t see them playing a large role in geopolitics and in foreign policy unless firms have their own bottom line in view. In foreign policies relating to particular countries there are business lobbies. But overall, I don’t see the directions of foreign policy being determined by the views or interests of capitalism as a whole.JAH: The other way I can put this issue to you is to say that the world might be safer if it thought more in terms of economic advantage and disadvantage. That is a softer language than that of pure power, which has ended up killing so many more people.MM: I think that is to an extent true, at least of advanced or successfully developing countries, though across large swathes of the world capitalists are using coerced forms of labor. But capitalists are dealing with inputs and outputs which are calculable and they obviously try very hard to calculate profit and loss, so they engage in more rational behavior than do state elites and political constituencies mobilized by the elites. There has been so much emotion-driven irrationality in foreign policy in the long twentieth century, and it continues today in the case of the United States and its enemies. I tend to see that in most cases few capitalists have wanted war. Had the state listened to capitalists they wouldn’t have gone into so many wars.JAH: I’d like to take a step backwards, away from this moment of triumph for the capitalist model, to ask about the failure of socialism. Should we conclude than nonmarket systems simply do not work?MM: Well, first there is a long line of research stretching from Dieter Senghaas through Linda Weiss and John Hobson to Ha-Joon Chang and Atul Kohli showing that successful economic development, with the possible exception of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, has never been entirely the result of free markets. From early Germany and the United States to Japan and the East Asian Tigers to India, the most rapidly developing capitalist economies have all enjoyed a high level of government protection, incentives, and overall coordination.It is also the case that state socialism enjoyed a fair measure of economic success during its heyday in the catch-up phase of industrialization. The Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1960s grew its GDP more than any other country in that period except for Japan. And China’s later growth “grew out from the plan,” as Barry Naughton has shown. Of course, we must set that success against the terrible atrocities wrought especially on peasants by Stalin’s forced collectivization and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. GDP growth achieved at the cost of millions dead is not a benefit to its citizens. However, both regimes did at least learn not to do such things again, and Vietnam learned from them how to grow without massive atrocities. The first and second industrial revolutions had seemed to map out quite well what a desirable economic future would be so that centralized planning could help bring it about. It specifically required surpluses to be taken from agriculture and invested in industry, and authoritarian governments had some advantages in that respect. In the industrializing period state socialism paid off.But the Soviet regime never managed to get beyond the industrial phase into post-industrialism, to which centralized state planning seems less appropriate. Its economy was stagnating from the 1970s onward. China and Vietnam then learned from this to decentralize and marketize while still retaining some measure of central control. We don’t know yet whether the consequent boost in growth will continue within their present framework of highly mixed forms of property ownership, or whether they will move into a variant form of capitalism. But Schumpeter argued that capitalism excelled at what he called “creative destruction,” the ability to shift gears to go through crisis into a new economic phase, and that does seem to be the distinctive ability of a decentralized, competitive economy such as capitalism.But the world perceives something much simpler than this—that socialism failed and capitalism succeeded, period. That perception has much more force in the world than any more nuanced judgment. So socialism as centralized planning is almost dead as an ideal. But my own final judgment is different: that its failure was much clearer than its economic failure. Socialist revolution brought swift and seemingly inevitable degeneration into authoritarianism since it never possessed any mechanisms by which an all-conquering revolutionary elite would cede power to more democratic forces.JAH: But is capitalism really the only game in town? The success of contemporary China seems to suggest a greater future for state-directed political economies than you allow.MM: Capitalism is the only game in town. The Chinese game is a little different, since it combines much centralized planning by a ruling communist party with enterprises acting fairly autonomously on markets, which are themselves mixtures of private property and local officials’ de facto property. It is not yet capitalism and it may not even be on the road to capitalism. Chinese institutions that might seem capitalist, like the stock exchange, do not operate autonomously and are substantially phony. The Party has shown in the last two years that it can, at the flick of a switch, move massive resources into infrastructure projects and alternative energy technologies in a way that governments in capitalist economies cannot. It is not state capitalism in Trotsky’s sense since the economy is not controlled by a unified state elite. The Party has actually lost control of many of its officials who are making money out of their effective possession of enterprises, though this is often shared with people who really are capitalist. I call this heterogeneous regime the “Capitalist Party-State.” It controls over 10 percent of the world economy, a percentage that will likely double over the next two decades.I think most Chinese would regard its transition away from state socialism as being pretty close to optimal. Most would wish to have more children and ideally they would like more civil and political freedoms, but they seem willing to trade these for growing prosperity while maintaining social order. This combination is most threatened by massively growing inequality, between town and country, between regions, and between classes. At the top the Party is aware of the need to reverse these trends but it is unclear if they will be able to do much, given their commitment to growth and their loss of control over their own cadres.JAH: Is this to be contrasted to the way in which the market spread within postcommunist societies?MM: For Russia it is a different story. Here the transition was to capitalism. It was also rapid and involved wholesale seizure of public assets by private individuals, especially by former Party and NKVD apparatchiks. It brought not growth but collapse at first, and then it brought only growth based on natural energy resources. And it brought massive inequality. Putin is popular because he provided minimal order out of much chaos and because he seemed to be taking on the new capitalist oligarchs. Neoliberals played a considerable role in this story of failure, though one must concede that Russia’s transition was much more difficult than China’s since its economy was dominated by inefficient industrial behemoths. Neoliberals respond to accusations of failure by saying that their models were never fully applied. The latter part of the statement is true, since pragmatic politicians realized they could never stay in power if they did introduce the whole neoliberal package.But the Soviet-Russia transition reveals the failure of models that regard economic modes of production as primary and self-sustaining rather than having preconditions emanating from the other sources of social power. In this case political power was crucial. The Chinese Communist Party retained political power and managed a transition, to great effect. In contrast, the Soviet Communist Party was deliberately dismantled. It then collapsed and there was a botched transition.JAH: What does this tell us about the chances of development for poorer countries within the newly dominant capitalist world order?MM: We can obviously be more optimistic now than at most points in the last forty years. Many countries are now achieving some growth. It is not just the much-publicized BRICs, but also the whole of Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and even some African countries such as South Africa, Botswana, Uganda, Algeria, and Nigeria. After the failures of both “African socialism” and neoliberalism, it seems that a mixed economy mode of state-coordinated capitalist development, varying according to local resources, might be more legitimate and more successful, though obviously not in uniform fashion across the world. We might be shifting finally into a near-global economy.JAH: I have one final question. To what extent are we really talking about capitalism in any case? Surely the system as a whole is American-dominated? Isn’t it worth remembering that both Karl Polanyi and Maynard Keynes stressed the way in which markets are made by states?MM: It remains capitalism, though in the advanced countries it is a reformed capitalism, one from which rights for workers and for the community have been wrested. It is only partially American, for it actually contains three principal elements: transnational, national (and therefore also international), and American imperial. Indeed, a fourth element often surfaces, the “macro-regional,” so that the capitalisms of the Nordic countries or the Anglophone countries share a certain style. There is a big debate about “varieties of capitalism” that has not yet been resolved. But I think it is safe to say that there are certain national and macro-regional styles that withstand some of the pressures imposed by the tendency of capitalism to escape all national boundaries, and by the dollar and US dominance of some international agencies.Some variations through time are also evident, and the tension between plan and market sometimes appears to have a cyclical element, as Polanyi noted. This is not quite as regular as he suggested, however, for it comes from rather specific processes of interstitial emergence in each period, and it is not clear that these are actually solved by more state regulation. The 1920s were beset by the entwining of economic and geopolitical crises; the 1970s by the interstitial emergence of transnational finance capital networks; and the early twenty-first century will be beset by the unexpected environmental destructiveness of capitalism. The first crisis was managed by more regulation summed up in the word “Keynesian”; the second crisis is still with us, and capitalist market interests are fighting a very strong battle against more state regulation; and the third crisis might end with disaster, not planning. But we will talk about this particular crisis later.