August 31, 2019, saw the passing of Immanuel Wallerstein, best known for his analysis of capitalism as an integrated “world-system.” Throughout his career, Wallerstein looked beyond the national context to pinpoint the transnational relations through which capitalism has created worldwide divisions of labor and political hierarchies.

As well as being a leading intellectual figure, Wallerstein was a sharp critic of capitalism who saw his scholarly interventions as a “political task.” He sought to respond to the shortcomings of existing Marxist analysis in order to help dismantle capitalism itself. Yet his thought was itself grounded in his own historical context, and in the particular realities of a world marked by decolonization and the Cold War.

In 1981, Wallerstein gave an interview to the Italian communist newspaper il manifesto, in which he reflected on the development of his thinking and the political events surrounding it. In this interview, published in English for the first time, he explained how his thought responded to the sterility of the liberal social sciences inherited from the 1950s, the worldwide upheavals that marked 1968, and the need to reinvigorate Marxist thinking after the failure of the Stalinist model.