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If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentrali…

[...] Market fundamentalism is self-evidently false. Contra Karl Polanyi’s classic account, he says, capitalism does not homeopathically reform itself. Pure capitalism may be impossible, as Polanyi insisted; but in Mann’s view it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to …

[...] the reproduction of capitalist social relations depends upon waves of cost-cutting, labour-saving investment but also on levels of employment that generate the income and surplus income that sustain this process—a difficult balance that over the long term might lead to permanent unemployment …

Previously Marx had been sceptical of if not hostile to America, seeing it in the mirror of Tocqueville’s literary travelogue as the land of completed democracy, but also of a hypocritical middle-class religiosity. His views on the pre-Civil War US were contradictory: he dismissed it as a backward …

Until April 1849, Marx subscribed to a two-stage theory of revolution: a bourgeois-democratic stage—political emancipation—out of which the conditions for a workers’ revolution—human emancipation—would emerge. But even before the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte, the progression of this so-called ‘…