[...] an intellectual circles that pays certain lip service to the ideals of Frankfurt School, interdisciplinary quasi-Marxian inquiry, that is actually more and more doing what I call 'freestanding moral and political and legal philosophy'. As if you could talk about morality, politics and law without talking about capitalism, without talking about the economy, without talking about the institutional structure of society, about the mechanisms through which relations of domination are entrenched.

[...] one side of the story is this creeping liberalism. The other reference was to postructuralist anti-normativism, and this is a reference to a French version of critical theory. It's a group of people who are also very brilliant and extremely interesting thinkers, but who have got the idea that the normative perspective of the moral critique of society was essentially useless. And so here you have two equal and opposite ideas. One is that morality is everything and ca be done frmo on high, and the other is that it's some kind of a ruse.

What is left out of this picture? Can I tell you in two words? Left Hegelianism, which is the idea that the people's moral indignation about living in the kind of world we live in actually comes out of a historically situated experience and, when developed, can point beyond it to a better world. [...]

[...] they tended to reduce capitalism to the narrow idea of an economic system [...] capitalism is not an economy. It is something much bigger.

Think of it as something that would be as big as, say, feudalism. It's not about one sector of society, it's about how all the different sectors fit together. And that means that if you want to talk about capitalism, you can't talk about production without talking about social reproduction [...] ca't talk about the economy without talking about the political order that shapes and channels and supports the economy. [...]

[...] it's not that production has disappeared, but the geography of financialised capitalism is very different from the geography of those previous capitalisms. A huge amount of manufacturing is now located in the global South, in the so-called BRICS.

Those parts of the world used to be the hunting grounds for exactly the sort of extractivism and expropriation that you're describing. They were just places to be looted for dependent coerced labour, for land, for mineral wealth. So the form that capitalism took there was not premised so much on the exploitation of free labour power as on the expropriation of unfree, independent populations, who lacked a state to protect them.

I would describe financialised capitalism today as scrambling what used to be a sharper distinction between exploitation and expropriation. It used to be that expropriation was over there, and that was something that you did to people of colour, basically. Exploitation of the free worker, who receives the socially necessary costs of his, and maybe even his family's, own reproduction, that's whites, those are Europeans, that's over here.

These two worlds are completely scrambled now. There is plenty of exploitation over there and there's plenty of expropriation over here, and even the colour line that used to divide these things is mixed up, as workers in the global North, supposedly free workers, are often not paid the full socially necessary costs of their reproduction. They are forced to go into debt in order to meet their present day living costs.

So we have student debt, we have pay day loans we have credit cards, we have mortgages, microcredit. That's not even talking about sovereign debt, which is part of that scrambling. You can be exploited and expropriated at the same time, and most of us actually are. That strikes me as historically new. It's not that production disappears, but it's done by others.

I would want to separate the question of the technology itself from the question of its social organisation. Who controls it? Who profits from it? Who decides how to use it, and where? These are the important social and political questions. [...] the problem with capitalism as a form of social organisation is that it completely removes all those questions from the collective self-determination of the people who have to live with this system. It just hands them off to 'market forces'.