During the heady years of Gorbachev's perestroika in the 1980s

Waiting under the old jacaranda outside Maputo's Hotel Polana

Ming China was surely the world's manufacturing and demographic giant.

Shortly after 1500 the Mughals imposed their imperial rule in the inherently fractitious India.

At the very same time the Safavis were ascendent in Iran

The glorious cavalry of Polish feudal szlachta was doomed in the new epoch

Nobody in 1917 considered the revolution in Russia unexpected. The Russian nobility had long been haunted by the specter of serf peasants revolting to avenge their near-slave condition. A modern proletarian revolution had been awaited ever since the European upheavals of 1848. This fear/hope was fed by strikes of industrial workers met with Cossack cavalry charges. No less significant was the growth of the famous modernist intelligentsia, the middle strata of educated specialists who felt stymied by the old aristocratic bureaucracy and the generalized backwardness of their country. The intelligentsia saw itself as the guiding force of epochal renovation. This sense of lofty mission translated into a spate of subversive strategies, from creating a world-class literature to volunteer charitable activism and throwing bombs at the oppressors.

Nevertheless, the empire kept on muddling through and even registered impressive industrial growth mainly because for almost half a century it had luckily avoided losing wars, a typical trigger of revolutions. The tipping points—as observed in many other revolutions—arrived with the costly and morally embarrassing military defeats in 1905 and again in 1917. The soldiers rebelled against their commanders while the police disintegrated. The collapse of state coercion released all the long-repressed specters of rebellion: furious peasant revolts in the countryside; the now armed worker militancy in big cities; the intelligentsia enthusiastically organizing a panoply of political parties and nationalist movements that soon became independent governments in the ethnically non-Russian provinces.

followed the eschatological vision of Karl Marx

Eventually the name nomenklatura would become a pejorative for stolid bureaucrats.

the hopeful spirit of the 1970s German Neue Ostpolitik

Immanuel Wallerstein had been long (and very controversially) comparing communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike.' If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The workers might get a better distribution of material rewards, but not equality or democracy. The more "realist" among labor organizers would reimpose production discipline, compellingly citing external market pressures. The "Iron Law of Oligarchy" in complex organizations predicted that the narrow circle of those making managerial decisions would cut themselves of from the larger group and evolve into a new ruling elite. It might take time before ideological vapor entirely escaped from the cauldrons. Nevertheless the moment would come when the erstwhile organizers turned managers would no longer feel compelled to disguise the reality. The factory would then revert to being a normal capitalist enterprise, and the managers would cash in on their positions. If you wish, it is a sociological version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, but Wallerstein's analysis specified in a clear and logical fashion the structural conditions and causal sequences. He also added an important political caveat: socialism in one country or one factory may not last unless the whole capitalist world.system is replaced by a different historical system where capital accumulation is no longer the paramount priority.

The now sclerotic generation of obedient Soviet bureaucrats formed in the end of the Stalinist purges

their vertiginous self-recasting into capitalists and nationalists

[...] But we should recognize that the Soviet Union was not equivalent to socialism and thereby somehow directly analogous to capitalism. It was something more particular and of a different order.

This is so whether we treat capitalism as a set of practices that can be undertaken by capitalists anywhere, or as an economic system that knits together enterprises, markets, investments, and labor throughout the world. Capitalism is a historical formation, grounded, as Michael Mann would say, in a set of power networks. It has existed for the last 400 years primarily in the form of the modern world-system that Immanuel Wallerstein has analyzed. This is a hierarchical and unequally integrated organization in which the primary units are nation-states and economic actors are crucially dependent on relations with and conditions provided by political power.

To be sure, the idea of a nation-state is in a sense aspirational; the suturing of sociocultural identity to governmental institutions is never perfect; economic integration can itself advance national integration and certainly economic actors also influence government. Yet even if partially a fiction, the nation-state is a crucial formal unit for participation in global affairs, reproduced in political isomorphism. Most international organizations are literally that—structured by nationally organized participation. And states organized in this way provide crucial underpinnings to capitalism. They provide the legal and monetary bases for both firms and markets. They manage, or provide settings for the management of interdependence among different firms, industries, and sectors. By organizing structures of cultural and social belonging, however imperfectly, and sometimes by regulating markets, they organize workforces, consumer markets, and trust. The term "nation-state* may be only shorthand for "efforts to organize politics and sociocultural belonging in terms of nation-states", but the era of capitalism and the era of nation-states have been one and the same. There is no "rea" capitalism, no matter how global, that isn't conditioned by this political-economic and sociocultural organization. The import of this is that existing capitalist prosperity and sustainability depend on nation-states and institutional affordances they have provided. These must be renewed or replaced. Yet for forty years the OECD countries have turned away from this task. Instead they have hollowed out the "welfare state" institutions of the past, reducing costs and pursuing immediate competitiveneas but neglecting the long-term well-being and security of their population and the collective investment that enables future economic participation.

some particularly "obscurantist" or unpatriotic owners

the landlords and large comprador traders

from the early example of Kemalist Turkey after 1918