[...] I began to realize that it was globalization that formed, as it were, the substructure of postmodernity, and constituted the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity was the superstructure. The hypothesis, at that point, was that globalization was a new stage of capitalism, a third stage, which followed upon that second stage of capitalism identified by Lenin as the stage of monopoly and imperialism—and which, while remaining capitalism, had fundamental structural differences from the stage that preceded it, if only because capitalism now functioned on a global scale, unparalleled in its history. You will have understood that the culture of that earlier imperialist stage was, according to my theory, what we call modernity; and that postmodernity then becomes a kind of new global culture corresponding to globalization.