What we see there is a dramatic asymmetry in the power of the state. The nation-state remains the absolutely fundamental regulator of labour. The idea that it is dwindling or disappearing as a centre of authority in the age of globalization is a silly notion. In fact, it distracts attention from the fact that the nation-state is now more dedicated than ever to creating a good business climate for investment, which means precisely controlling and repressing labour movements in all kinds of purposively new ways—cutting back the social wage, fine-tuning migrant flows, and so on. The state is tremendously active in the domain of capital–labour relations. But when we turn to relations between capitals, the picture is quite different. There the state has truly lost power to regulate the mechanisms of allocation or competition, as global financial flows have outrun the reach of any strictly national regulation. One of the main arguments in The Condition of Postmodernity is that the truly novel feature of the capitalism that emerged out of the watershed of the seventies is not so much an overall flexibility of labour markets as an unprecedented autonomy of money capital from the circuits of material production—a hypertrophy of finance, which is the other underlying basis of postmodern experience and representation. The ubiquity and volatility of money as the impalpable ground of contemporary existence is a key theme of the book.

[...] Throughout my years in Baltimore, I always tried to maintain some relationship to local politics: we bought up an old library, and turned it into a community action centre, took part in campaigns for rent control, and generally tried to spark radical initiatives; it always seemed to me very important to connect my theoretical work with practical activity, in the locality. So when I got to Oxford, the local campaign to defend the Rover plant in Cowley offered a natural extension of this kind of engagement. For personal reasons, I couldn’t become quite as active as in Baltimore, but it provided the same kind of connection to a tangible social conflict. It also led to some very interesting political discussions—recorded in the book, The Factory and the City, which Teresa Hayter and I produced around it—a fascinating experience. Soon afterwards I read Raymond Williams’s novel, Second Generation, which is exactly about this, and was astonished by how well he captured so much of the reality at Cowley. So one of the first essays in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference became a reflection on his fiction.

but my experience of working in an Engineering department, with its sense for pragmatic solutions, has made me chary of doomsday prophesies

My answer is—oh, but you do: you do subordinate competition in all kinds of areas. Actually, the whole history of capitalism is unthinkable without the setting up of a regulatory framework to control, direct and limit competition. Without state power to enforce property and contract law, not to speak of transport and communications, modern markets could not begin to function. Next time you’re flying into London or New York, imagine all those pilots suddenly operating on the competitive principle: they all try to hit the ground first, and get the best gate. Would any capitalist relish that idea? Absolutely not. When you look closely at the way a modern economy works, the areas in which competition genuinely rules turn out be quite circumscribed. If you think of all the talk of flexible accumulation, a lot of it revolves around diversification of lines and niche markets. What would the history of capitalism be without diversification? But actually the dynamic behind diversification is a flight from competition—the quest for specialized markets is, much of the time, a way of evading its pressures. In fact, it would be very interesting to write a history of capitalism exploring its utilization of each of the six elements of the basic repertoire I outline, tracing the changing ways it has brought them together, and put them to work, in different epochs. Knee-jerk hostility to Wilson isn’t confined to the Left, but it is not productive. Advances in biology are teaching us a great deal about our make-up, including the physical wiring of our minds, and will tell us much more in the future. I don’t see how one can be a materialist and not take all this very seriously. So in the case of sociobiology, I go back to my belief in the value of rubbing different conceptual blocks together—putting E. O. Wilson in dialogue with Marx. There are obviously major differences, but also some surprising commonalities—so let’s collide the two thinkers against each other. I’m not going to claim I’ve done it right, but this is a discussion we need. The section of Spaces of Hope which starts to talk about this is called ‘Conversations on the Plurality of Alternatives’, and that’s the spirit in which we should approach this. I have questions, not solutions.