I do not fully agree that 2008 was not the beginning of the end. If you look at the data, you see that after 2008 the trend of increasing global trade first stagnated and then started to decline. What was not yet on the agenda was the gradual internal deterioration of US society as well as the deterioration of its international relations, especially with China. At this point at the latest, the Chinese leadership had concluded that they had to go their own way in order not to be sucked into the vortex that US politics was about to become. Which is what they are doing, if you look at the trade figures. Exports to the US have rapidly declined.

It is obvious that this can’t last forever. In that sense, 2008 was a first warning that this way of life of capitalism — to live on a continuously growing mountain of borrowed money — could not continue forever. And then, of course, came the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The latter in particular, in my view, signified the end of a world which US capital could penetrate at will, to sustain a regime run out of Washington and Wall Street that was meant to include the rest of the world, including Russia and China, and the Global South anyway.

We tend to think that the temporality of regimes is the same as the temporality of human beings, that the regime shifts we see coming will happen somehow during our lifetime. That mistake was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who expected to witness the end of capitalism in person. The same for Joseph Schumpeter, certainly for Max Weber, and for Werner Sombart, who in the 1930s thought that he was living in “late capitalism.”

So, in that sense one can say that human beings are prone to misread fundamental change. With the war in Ukraine, it comes to mind that the three major historical moments in the reorganization of capitalism were three major wars. There were the Dutch-English wars of the seventeenth century, when the center of capitalism moved from Amsterdam to London. Then there was World War I and the postwar settlement after 1918, which expedited the end of empire, launched a world of nation-states, and prepared another territorial shift, this time from London to Washington. The third was after World War II, with the Keynesian settlement, which embedded nation-states in a United States–dominated global trade regime.

Maybe we now see a repeat in the sense that capitalism adjusts itself to new conditions, in ways that we cannot yet predict. What is coming to an end now is the liberal international order, backed by US imperialism, which was the result of the breakdown of the Soviet Union: in that case the change happened without a war, but related to the arms race of the 1980s. It seems as if the old adage applies: “War is the father of all things.”

I follow Hayek all the way, up to the point where Polanyi comes into play. He tells us that a society that is exclusively organized by market forces cannot exist. The Polanyian twist of my book is not only that the idea of regulating capitalism from the top of the world by experts is a pipedream. It is also that capitalism needs to be made compatible with the values underlying the different human societies, which cannot be restructured so that they fit the needs of global capitalism. Normatively and politically, things are the other way around: capitalism — that is, the economy — has to be structured so that it is compatible with the needs of people, and these latter resist being structured for capitalism.

Key, here, is that people at some point discover that their market preferences are not sufficient to address their needs. And that those needs cannot be fulfilled simply by aggregating their individual preferences. Polanyi knew all this. He was not only a radical critic of capitalism but also a social conservative. He admitted that the engine of growth may well be capitalism’s drive to accumulation, but he knew at the same time that societies are in essence conservative in that they cannot at will be reorganized at the same speed and in the same way as capitalist growth, meaning “plus-making” (Plusmacherei, as Marx called it) requires.

At this point, we need to take the side of the people against capital. A capitalist society is structured around the needs of capital; a socialist society is structured around the needs of people, living in a community, as Marx stated in the Grundrisse: “The human being is an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” This is what Hayek refused or was unable to accept. And I add: societies differ from one another.

Precisely. And that is what makes economics a moral science, in the sense of the Scottish “moral philosophers,” like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Not a moralizing science, though, one that is telling people how they should behave in order to fit a theory. There is not much difference here between rational choice-economics and Habermasian philosophy, which keeps telling us that we should become universalists and forget about our particularisms in order to become truly moral beings.

In that world, you are pressed to become a universalist: you have to feel as close to a Pakistani peasant or a Norwegian reindeer herder as you feel to your neighbor in the Italian village where you have grown up. People read this and say to themselves: this is demanding a lot, but I’d better not talk about it because that makes me an immoral racist. Philosophy forces you to be a moral universalist; economics forces you to be a universalist utility maximizer.

My argument does not imply that collective identities are set in stone. The historical forms humanity takes are always in a state of flux. No identity, no way of life is without its contradictions or so firmly fixed that they cannot change when they come in contact with others. To that extent, even the fully socialized human being remains capable of change and, therefore, of development. Human beings can learn more or less successfully to live in another society.

Nevertheless, not many people would be able like the Pole Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better-known as Joseph Conrad, to emigrate to another country and become one of its greatest writers in his adopted language. I enjoyed living in several other countries, but I always knew that the nooks and crannies of those societies are not accessible to me, except if I am a social anthropologist. But even these can deeply misunderstand the societies they are studying — the history of social anthropology is full of astonishing examples.

In the book, I distinguish between states and societies. I expressly emphasize that there are fluid borders between nations, unlike state borders that are always binary. From this, it follows that states have to cope with national identities as something that has to be reconciled with its binary structure. Thinking this through, I became an admirer of federalism. A good state allows the different nationalities that exist within its borders to govern themselves to the largest extent possible.

In the book, I also stress that there will always be conflicts to be worked out between the nations within a state and across state borders. A mindless nationalism that fails to distinguish between state and society has nothing promising to offer. To understand the state system, you have to understand its endemic tension with the social communities upon which it is built. At the same time, social communities require capacities for authoritative government to be able to be democratic in the first place; the people, we learn from the Greek origin of the concept, must be able to rule.

This is meant to qualify the overly optimistic conclusions that the likes of Anderson and Hobsbawm have drawn from the historical nineteenth-century record. The age of nationalism saw civil servants, educators, pedagogues, and writers using historical material to construct national languages, curricula, and histories. But the material they used was not freely invented at will, and could not be. It was deeply rooted in history and itself the outcome of long historical processes. How to understand the national identity of the Dutch without considering their shared experiences in the war against Spain?

And the same is true for, let’s say, Italy and Austria: complicated, intertwined histories. In Venice, the best coffee house, Café Florian, is an Austrian one, established when Venice was under Austrian rule — according to some of my Italian friends, proud Italian patriots, the best period in the history of Northern Italy. Nationalist political movements can attempt to shape the historical legacies of collective consciousness to suit their purposes. But even in extreme cases they must draw on historical material. The modern state and modern society rest on history.

I am a socialist in the sense of Marx’s Grundrisse: I see people as necessarily embedded in a society and its dynamics. And a society cannot exist without elements of community. In an introduction to a book titled The Foundational Economy, I argue that there cannot be capitalism without communism — without the collective goods that a society needs to be a society, without which it is not even exploitable by capital. In that sense, I am quite comfortable with someone telling me that my “socialism” is in reality communitarianism. My rejoinder would then be that my “communitarianism” is in reality socialism, to the extent that when we talk about the structure of the community, it is going to be egalitarian, nonhierarchical, one that cares for its members — which, obviously, is the exact opposite of the Hayekian market economy that lets you down if you cannot perform.

That is probably true. But there is a good reason why my thinking led me to Polanyi. Marx died in 1883. As a result, what is not sufficiently present in the Marxian inheritance is the role of the modern state, and especially the modern democratic state. Marx expected to see capitalism disappear before the end of his life. Of course, that did not happen. In part this was because during the conflagration of the Great War, the state got the working class to align itself with the nation, offering social protection and granting democratic rights in return.

How could state struggle trump class struggle? Getting killed in a twentieth-century war by an invading hostile army appeared a greater risk than starving in an economic crisis. To understand national integration as opposed to class integration required a sociological account of capitalism rather than the political-economic one that Marx provides. Marx couldn’t tell me much about how the postwar settlement after 1918 came about. Polanyi, however, could.

I would say that the main mechanism behind this extraction is the global financial system, run out of the United States banking system. If I see that the BRICS countries [the association initially formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] are now attempting to stay clear of the dollarized financial system, then a socialist citizen of a rich countries like Germany should insist that we help an alternative financial system to become viable.

This is linked to the question of what kind of economy we will have after the end of the US empire. I have no doubt that getting there will be a messy and potentially violent political process. If we need democratic control over our economies, and if for that purpose we need national sovereignty to be reinstated, as well as a world in which we collectively have choices, we must be willing to accept the costs of such a transition. In addition, enhancing the well-being of societies and communities requires a massive investment in local collective goods that will have to be liberated from the imperatives of private property and capital accumulation. Then we will have to see how this will play itself out over time.

I am convinced that if we seriously start protecting the foundational economy from the extractive logic of capital, all sorts of opportunities for a gradual move away from capitalism will offer themselves. But that must be understood to be a world-historical process, not something that can be willed into existence by political decree, like Russian president Boris Yeltsin did when he, from one day to the next, decreed the end of communism and its replacement by — American — capitalism.

It is important to stress that this was not about Joe Biden as a politician or person but about a widely shared policy of American expansionism. For now, we don’t know what is going to happen. What does MAGA mean? Does it mean that Trump as president will have to try and heal the many wounds of American society? Or does it mean the restoration of the unipolar world of George Bush I and II?

A complication could well be that Trump may be unable to choose between the two. Restored unipolarity would give him the resources which allow him to keep his domestic elites at bay. On the other hand, turning to the domestic problems of the US allows him to bargain hard with the Europeans to shoulder a larger part of the costs of empire. In the book, I do not so much put my hopes on politicians and policies but rather on structural shifts that force a particular policy dilemma into the foreground to which states and governments then have to respond.

I have stopped bothering about whether I am using the right, politically correct language if the words that have become soiled in the eyes of some are the words that best express the key issues at stake. If the key issue is how to leave behind the global neoliberal regime, then taking back control is indeed the essence of the political program.

Now, there is of course some irony here, because many in the United Kingdom who were behind Brexit had no idea what to do with their regained control, and how much it would demand from them. Still, British voters now at least have a little more of an opportunity to use their collective sovereignty to start addressing the needs of the many, not the few. It is more up to them now than it was before.

Brexit was the first, and is not going to be the last, breakaway from the centralized neoliberal, technocratic, bureaucratic, mercantilistic governance of Brussels. I know that democracy is risky, and that there is no guarantee that people will always make the right, sensible, intelligent choices. I can only say that we must hope they will because in the end there is no other way. Remember the third strophe of the German version of the International:

No saviour from on high delivers

No faith have we in prince or peer

Our own right hand the chains must shiver.