People often ask us: ‘But what is your positive alternative?’ The truthful answer is that we have no total project of reform to hand, because we don’t believe in trying to work out an ideal order in advance of concrete social demands. When social movements do emerge, we should study very closely what sorts of reasons bring ordinary people into them. In 1989, for example, it is clear that socialist values were still alive for many citizens, and informed the ideas of democracy and freedom much more than liberal doctrines. So in that case we have to look back at the history of Chinese society since 1949, which is not exhausted by the dictatorship of the CCP or the failures of central planning, but contained other features as well to which people were attached. In the fifties and sixties, for example, there was a system of cooperative medical insurance in rural areas which meant that local people organized themselves to help each other, setting up funds and providing services. Since the state-run health system is now collapsing, why don’t we learn some positive lessons from this? There are still some socialist fragments in China today, which few of us have thought seriously about. Cui Zhiyuan once tried to say something about the Anshan experience, but he confused most of his readers and lost the debate that followed.6 But I think his basic impulse was right. We should look with an open mind at historical practices of the past, without trying to copy them. An unprejudiced intellectual curiosity is something all Chinese intellectuals need today.

The whole southern region of Africa—stretching from South Africa and Botswana through the former Rhodesias, Mozambique, Malawi, which was then Nyasaland, up to Kenya, as the north-east outpost—was characterized by mineral wealth, settler agriculture and extreme dispossession of the peasantry. It is very different from the rest of Africa, including the north. West African economies were essentially peasant-based. But the southern region—what Samir Amin called ‘the Africa of the labour reserves’—was in many ways a paradigm of extreme peasant dispossession, and thus proletarianization. Several of us were pointing out that this process of extreme dispossession was contradictory. Initially it created the conditions for the peasantry to subsidize capitalist agriculture, mining, manufacturing and so on. But increasingly it created difficulties in exploiting, mobilizing, controlling the proletariat that was being created. The work that we were doing then—my ‘Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective’, and related works by Legassick and Wolpe—established what came to be known as the Southern Africa Paradigm on the limits of proletarianization and dispossession.

That’s where the idea of autonomia—of the intellectual autonomy of the working class—first emerged. The creation of this concept is now generally attributed to Antonio Negri. But in fact it originated in the interpretation of Gramsci that we developed in the early 1970s, in the Gruppo Gramsci co-founded by Madera, Passerini and myself. We saw our main contribution to the movement not as providing a substitute for the unions, or for the parties, but as students and intellectuals who were involved in helping the workers’ vanguards to develop their own autonomy—autonomia operaia—through an understanding of the broader processes, both national and global, in which their struggles were taking place. In Gramscian terms, this was conceived as the formation of organic intellectuals of the working class in struggle. To this end we formed the Colletivi Politici Operai (CPOS), which became known as the Area dell’Autonomia. As these collectives developed their own autonomous practice, the Gruppo Gramsci would cease to have a function and could disband. When it actually was disbanded in the fall of 1973, Negri came into the picture, and took the CPOS and the Area dell’Autonomia in an adventurous direction that was far from what was originally intended.

One of the attractions of going to Calabria, for me, was to continue in a new location my research on labour supplies. I had already seen in Rhodesia how, when the Africans were fully proletarianized—or, more precisely, when they became conscious that they were now fully proletarianized—this led to struggles to get a living wage in the urban areas. In other words, the fiction that ‘We are single males, our families continue to live peasant lives in the countryside’, cannot hold once they actually have to live in the cities. I had pointed this out in ‘Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective’. It came into clearer focus in Italy, because there was this puzzle: migrants from the South were brought into the northern industrial regions as scabs, in the 1950s and early 1960s. But from the 1960s, and especially the late 1960s, they were transformed into class-struggle vanguards, which is a typical experience of migrants. When I set up a research working group in Calabria, I got them to read the social anthropologists on Africa, particularly on migration, and then we did an analysis of the labour supply from Calabria. The questions were: what was creating the conditions for this migration? And what were its limits—given that, at a certain point, instead of creating a docile labour force that could be used to undermine the bargaining power of the northern working class, the migrants themselves became the militant vanguard?

Two things emerged from the research. First, capitalist development does not necessarily rely on full proletarianization. On the one hand, long-distance labour migration was occurring from places where no dispossession was taking place; where there were even possibilities for the migrants to buy land from the landlords. This was related to the local system of primogeniture, whereby only the eldest son inherited the land. Traditionally, younger sons ended up joining the Church or the army, until large-scale, long-distance migrations provided an increasingly important alternative way to earn the money necessary to buy land back home and set up their own farms. On the other hand, in the really poor areas, where labour was fully proletarianized, they usually could not afford to migrate at all. The only way in which they could do so was, for example, when the Brazilians abolished slavery in 1888 and needed a substitute cheap labour force. They recruited workers from these deeply impoverished areas of Southern Italy, paid their fares and resettled them in Brazil, to replace the emancipated slaves. These are very different patterns of migration. But generally speaking, it is not the very poor who migrate; it is necessary to have some means and connections in order to do so.

Another idea, to which you provide much greater theoretical depth, but which nevertheless comes from Braudel, is the notion that financial expansion announces the autumn of a particular hegemonic system, and precedes a shift to a new hegemon. This would seem a central insight of The Long Twentieth Century?

Yes. The idea was that the leading capitalist organizations of a particular epoch would also be the leaders of the financial expansion, which always occurs when the material expansion of productive forces reaches its limits. The logic of this process—though again, Braudel doesn’t provide it—is that when competition intensifies, investment in the material economy becomes increasingly risky, and therefore the liquidity preference of accumulators is accentuated, which, in turn, creates the supply conditions of the financial expansion. The next question, of course, is how the demand conditions for financial expansions are created. On this, I relied on Weber’s idea that inter-state competition for mobile capital constitutes the world-historical specificity of the modern era. This competition, I argued, creates the demand conditions for the financial expansion. Braudel’s idea of ‘autumn’ —as the concluding phase of a process of leadership in accumulation, which goes from material to financial, and eventually to displacement by another leader—is crucial. But so is Marx’s idea that the autumn of a particular state, experiencing financial expansion, is also the springtime for another location: surpluses that accumulate in Venice go to Holland; those that accumulate in Holland then go to Britain; and those that accumulate in Britain go to the United States. Marx thus enables us to complement what we have in Braudel: autumn becomes a spring elsewhere, producing a series of interconnected developments.

First of all, we should not exaggerate the extent to which China has broken the pattern. The level of per capita income in China was so low—and still is low, compared to the wealthy countries—that even major advances need to be qualified. China has doubled its position relative to the rich world, but still that only means going from 2 per cent of the average per capita income of the wealthy countries to 4 per cent. It is true that China has been decisive in producing a reduction in world income inequalities between countries. If you take China out, the South’s position has worsened since the 1980s; if you keep it in, then the South has improved somewhat, due almost exclusively to China’s advance. But of course, there has been a big growth in inequality inside China, which thus has also contributed to the world-scale increase in inequalities within countries in recent decades. Taking the two measures together—inequality between and within countries—statistically China has brought about a reduction in total global inequality. We should not exaggerate this—the world pattern is still one of huge gaps, which are being reduced in small ways. However, it’s important because it changes relationships of power between countries. If it continues, it may even change the global distribution of income from one that is still very polarized to a more normal, Pareto-type distribution.

In ‘Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis’ you describe a deep structural conflict within capitalism, in which you differentiate between crises that are caused by too high a rate of exploitation, which lead to a realization crisis because of insufficient effective demand, and those caused by too low a rate of exploitation, which cuts into demand for means of production. Now, do you still hold to this general distinction, and if so would you say that we are now in an underlying realization crisis, masked by expanding personal indebtedness and financialization, due to the wage repressions that have characterized capitalism over the last thirty years?

Yes. I think that over the last thirty years there has been a change in the nature of the crisis. Up to the early 1980s, the crisis was typically one of falling rate of profits due to intensifying competition among capitalist agencies, and due to circumstances in which labour was much better equipped to protect itself than in the previous depressions—both in the late nineteenth century and in the 1930s. So that was the situation through the 1970s. The Reagan–Thatcher monetary counter revolution was actually aimed at undermining this power, this capacity of the working classes to protect themselves—it was not the only objective, but it was one of the main objectives. I think that you quote some adviser of Thatcher, saying that what they did was …

… to create an industrial reserve army; exactly …

… what Marx says they should do! That changed the nature of the crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s, and now, in the 2000s, we are indeed facing an underlying overproduction crisis, with all its typical characteristics. Incomes have been redistributed in favour of groups and classes that have high liquidity and speculative dispositions; so incomes don’t go back into circulation in the form of effective demand, but they go into speculation, creating bubbles that burst regularly. So, yes, the crisis has been transformed from one of falling rate of profit, due to intensified competition among capitals, to one of overproduction due to a systemic shortage of effective demand, created by the tendencies of capitalist development.

There are two different questions here: one concerns an appreciation of the flexibility of capitalist development and the other is the recurrence of patterns, and the extent to which these are determined by contingency or necessity. On the first, the adaptability of capitalism: this is partly related to my personal experience in business, as a young man. Initially I tried to run my father’s business, which was relatively small; then I did a dissertation on my grandfather’s business, which was bigger—a medium-sized company. Then I quarrelled with my grandfather and went into Unilever, which in terms of employees was the second-largest multinational at the time. So I had the luck—from the point of view of analysing the capitalist business enterprise—of going into successively larger firms, which helped me understand that you cannot talk about capitalist enterprises in general, because the differences between my father’s business, my grandfather’s business and Unilever were incredible. For example, my father spent all his time going to visit customers in the textile districts, and studying the technical problems that they had with their machines. Then he would go back to the factory and discuss the problems with his engineer; they would customize the machine for the client. When I tried to run this business, I was totally lost; the whole thing was based on skills and knowledge that were part of my father’s practice and experience. I could go around and see the customers, but I couldn’t solve their problems—I couldn’t even really understand them. So it was hopeless. In fact, in my youth, when I used to say to my father, ‘If the Communists come, you are going to be in trouble’, he said, ‘No, I’m not going to be in trouble, I’ll continue to do what I’m doing. They need people who do this.’

When I closed my father’s business, and went into my grandfather’s, it was already more of a Fordist organization. They were not studying the customers’ problems, they were producing standardized machines; either the customers wanted them or they didn’t. Their engineers were designing machines on the basis of what they thought there would be a market for, and telling the customers: this is what we have. It was embryonic mass production, with embryonic assembly lines. When I went to Unilever, I barely saw the production side. There were many different factories—one was making margarine, another soap, another perfumes. There were dozens of different products, but the main site of activity was neither the marketing organization nor the place of production, but finance and advertising. So, that taught me that it’s very hard to identify one specific form as ‘typically’ capitalist. Later, studying Braudel, I saw that this idea of the eminently adaptable nature of capitalism was something that you could observe historically.

One point is that there is a very clear geographical dimension to the recurrent cycles of material and financial expansion, but you can see this aspect only if you do not stay focused on one particular country—because then you see a totally different process. This is what most historians have been doing—they focus on a particular country, and trace developments there. Whereas in Braudel, the idea is precisely that the accumulation of capital jumps; and if you don’t jump with it, if you don’t follow it from place to place, you don’t see it. If you stay focused on England, or on France, you miss what matters most in the development of capitalism world-historically. You have to move with it to understand that the process of capitalist development is essentially this process of jumping from one condition, where what you’ve termed the ‘spatial fix’ has become too constraining, and competition is intensifying, to another one, where a new spatial fix of greater scale and scope enables the system to experience another period of material expansion. And then of course, at a certain point the cycle repeats itself.

One of the major problems on the Left, but also on the Right, is to think that there is only one kind of capitalism that reproduces itself historically; whereas capitalism has transformed itself substantively—particularly on a global basis—in unexpected ways. For several centuries capitalism relied on slavery, and seemed so embedded in slavery from all points of view that it could not survive without it; whereas slavery was abolished, and capitalism not only survived but prospered more than ever, now developing on the basis of colonialism and imperialism. At this point it seemed that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalism’s operation—but again, after the Second World War, capitalism managed to discard them, and to survive and prosper. World-historically, capitalism has been continually transforming itself, and this is one of its main characteristics; it would be very short-sighted to try to pin down what capitalism is without looking at these crucial transformations. What remains constant through all these adaptations, and defines the essence of capitalism, is best captured by Marx’s formula of capital M–C–M’, to which I refer repeatedly in identifying the alternation of material and financial expansions. Looking at present-day China, one can say, maybe it’s capitalism, maybe not—I think it’s still an open question. But assuming that it is capitalism, it’s not the same as that of previous periods; it’s thoroughly transformed. The issue is to identify its specificities, how it differs from previous capitalisms, whether we call it capitalism or something else.