As I understand the term capitalism, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are quasi-monopolies or oligopolies that politically dominate the world. I do condemn the current system of plutocracy very strongly. When I talk about capitalism, I mean private business. There is a difference between the economic system that the US has now and what it had in 1970. There are two different forms of capitalism, you might say—this one I call extreme capitalism, or plutocracy, in which businesses dominate the state. I’m definitely against plutocracy, but I don’t wish to identify capitalism with plutocracy, because there are other forms of capitalism that I have seen in my life. Basically, businesses shouldn’t decide our laws.

So your political orientation would be to some kind of social democracy with a mixed economy?

Yes. But that’s economic; and my political orientation is democracy and human rights. But to have democracy means the people control the state, which means the businesses don’t. So, in terms of economy, yes, I favour having private businesses. I don’t think state restaurants could have made the meal we just had.

Control and ownership are not the same. Some people propose a capitalist-market solution to data harvesting and surveillance, which is that people should ‘own’ their data and be paid a tiny amount for surrendering it to a company. This is a complete red herring and won’t solve any practical problems. Another approach, adopted by the new European Data Protection Directive, is to require people to give ‘consent’ for their data to be collected. That’ll help against certain things—namely, data collection by systems that you never knew you were using, or never agreed to use. But it’s so easy for them to get formal consent that it’s a worthless barrier. Any site that has a Facebook ‘like’ button, or a Google Analytics tracker, just needs to include in its Terms and Conditions—which nobody reads—a statement saying: ‘I consent to my visit being recorded by various other sites that have an agreement with this one.’ I call this ‘manufacturing consent’. Consent regulations may be useful against Facebook, because it’s been tracking visitors to thousands, if not millions, of websites for many years, and hasn’t even bothered to get this sort of consent—so Facebook is in trouble if it uses any of this data. But in future this will probably just be a formal restriction, and not a matter of substance. We should not allow any collection of data that goes beyond the minimum that is inescapably necessary for the site to do its main job—and then we should develop technology to reduce that minimum-necessary amount.

[...] there are various ethical issues in life. If you look at a store, for example, there are different ethical questions that can arise, and you wouldn’t expect that one requirement would fix them all. For instance, the store can mistreat the staff. The solution to that might be to encourage unionization, have strict laws to prevent wage theft. Then there’s discrimination, which is mistreatment of those who aren’t staff but would like to be. There are other issues that affect the customers only—for instance, are the products what they are said to be? A union might ensure the staff get paid, but might not care about cheating the customers. There are multiple ethical issues; and we shouldn’t expect that correcting one kind of injustice automatically corrects the other kinds.

Given that that’s the case, again, are there related political campaigns that you would support?

Putting an end to massive surveillance that endangers human rights. For this, we need to require that all systems be designed to limit the amount of data they can collect. You see, data, once collected, will be misused. The organization that collects them can misuse them; rogue employees of that organization can misuse them; third parties, crackers, can break into the computer system and steal the data and misuse them; and the state can take them and misuse them. Laws restricting the use of the data, if properly enforced, would limit misuse by the organization collecting the data, and maybe to some extent misuse by the government—though not enough, because the state will usually give itself exceptions to do what it wants. It will write the laws so it’s allowed to get those data, and use them to find whistleblowers and dissidents.

What do you think about the idea of creating socialized alternatives to the data-hoarding tech giants—as mooted in these pages by Evgeny Morozov?

I think it makes little difference whether data are collected by governments or by companies, because either way the data menace whistleblowers and dissidents. Whatever data businesses collect, the state can easily get.

[...] our argument—our claim of counterperformativity—is that those assumptions made possible, via their gaming by market participants, the construction of securities that radically undermined them.

In a stimulating contribution to the literature on performativity in economic life, Elena Esposito points to the pervasiveness of what, drawing upon the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, she calls ‘second-order observation’. Translated into our terms, it is not simply that mathematical models in finance have performative and counterperformative effects, but actors observe or anticipate those effects and act accordingly. A recurring suspicion that actors within finance have about the many models that involve the bell-shaped normal distribution, on which extreme events are very unlikely, is that their use can have the counterperformative effect of increasing the likelihood of those events.

[...] Nor do we for a moment intend that investigation of the performativity or counterperformativity of mathematical models should displace other forms of analysis of finance. For instance, the rise of options and other forms of derivatives cannot be understood in isolation from broader processes such as the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the rise of free-market economics and of deregulatory impulses. To take an example of a quite different kind, Chicago’s open-outcry trading pits were places of the body as well as of the use of Black’s sheets—and specifically places of male bodies, places often uncomfortable for women. The patterns of interpersonal relations among options traders left their traces on price movements, and, more generally, the structures of financial markets—including the advantages enjoyed by incumbents—remain important, even in today’s world of algorithmic trading. The causes of the global financial crisis go far beyond the counterperformative process on which we have focused, and centrally include phenomena of the sort focused on by political economy of a more traditional kind, including Marxist political economy. As such, all we would claim is that ‘performativity’ is a useful addition to the conceptual toolkit necessary for understanding economic life. Mathematical models are by no means the only phenomena that have a performative aspect, but they are ever more important. An algorithmic economy is an economy of logical operations and mathematical procedures, and therefore a mathematical economy.

The reality that Britain was already a world power in 1914 also apparently raises no problem; Germany’s ambition to become one was the intolerable cause of the war. As David Calleo long ago pointed out, the boot was if anything on the other foot. Britain’s overweening global status made any steady balance of power within Europe impossible, destabilizing the continent once Germany became its leading economy. In short, as Lenin said, it was the uneven development of imperialist competition that made a major war between the rival predators at some point inevitable. Unable to handle imperialism as a general phenomenon of the period, Winkler is finally reduced to a play on words to pin the blame on Berlin. [...]

The basic premise of The Age of Catastrophe is that ‘the Bolshevik reign of terror was more than just a reaction to the extremely difficult situation in early 1918 both inside Russia and beyond, for it necessarily resulted from Lenin’s plan to create a new communist society within a backward country’. The distortion here is the phrase ‘Lenin’s plan’. Unlike Fascism, Leninism never produced a general political theory to justify one-party rule; party autocracy was always understood as an undesirable but unavoidable historical necessity in the particular conditions of Russia. As Winkler’s analysis shows, neither Lenin nor Trotsky thought it was possible to create a communist society in Russia alone. When Trotsky’s call for world revolution at Brest-Litovsk was answered with mass demonstrations and strikes, the SPD leadership in Germany exerted every effort to undermine the movement, hardening the very isolation that Winkler himself acknowledges was one of the main reasons for the dictatorial methods of the Bolsheviks. The notion of a direct route to socialism and communism in such confinement was Stalin’s, not Lenin’s. Anyone with an iota of historical curiosity must pose a question that The Age of Catastrophe avoids: what might have been the consequences of a forthright defence—by Kautsky, for example—of the Bolshevik revolution and a call for solidary insurrection in the West in 1918, for both the course of Russian political development and the prospects for socialism in western Europe?

Of course the emergence of a revolutionary threat to capital on the left was a key condition for the rise of Fascism in both Germany and Italy—as too in Spain, though not in Romania or Japan—triggering at once a force of counter-revolutionary violence against it from below, and an accommodation, intending cooption, of this force by the established elites of land and money from above, for the common purpose of crushing labour. This was an objective dynamic, for which it is absurd to blame the newly born KPD or PCd’I, as if they should have decided not to exist. On the other hand, contra Winkler, Social Democracy bore a prior, subjective responsibility for the rise of Fascism, at least in Germany, first by rallying to the inter-imperialist war of 1914, without which Nazism would never have become a significant force, and then by ensuring that the forces of old-regime reaction—the army, the Junkers, the Krupps and Thyssens—were preserved intact in 1918–19, indeed welcomed as allies in putting down the revolutionary left. That was avoidable, as Fascist hatred of Communism was not. The Age of Catastrophe praises the SPD as a force for national unity while condemning every attempt at mass mobilization from below as an irresponsible putsch. Yet on Winkler’s own telling, Ebert’s readiness to resort to counter-revolutionary violence not only prompted the left-wing USPD to resign from his provisional government, but also ‘opened up an unbridgeable chasm between the moderate and the radical elements in the German workers’ movement’ once Noske crushed the Spartacist revolt.