Conceptualizing Capitalism: Conversations with Henning Trüper 

Find all four Blogs with Henning Trüper here!

BS: We want to draw some conclusions from our three previous discussions. We set out with the question of what capitalism is and what it means for today’s world. We found that attempts to define capitalism as a closed system, a self-propelling market with its own logic and inherent rules, don’t fit with what we see worldwide today. Arguments that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand and reinforce each other are ideological, and to the extent that one hears them today, they are remnants from another time and are nostalgic. The classical homeland of capitalism was, in the twentieth century, the US, and its counterpart was socialist state regimes in the Soviet Union and its annexes and China, both without a market economy, which was seen as the core of the concept of capitalism. Today, one talks about state capitalism in China. And what is Russia? War imperialism? For quite some time, the US seemed to represent laissez-faire capitalism, but that is hardly an apt description anymore. What is happening in the US right now seems to be a move towards mercantilism. However, at the same time, there are frenetic attacks on state structures, the “deep state,” which is at odds with our understanding of mercantilism historically. We are experiencing a conceptual cacophony.

In our conversations, we came up with thoughts and answers which I had never had in mind. For me, two points, which you brought up, are, in retrospect, particularly surprising and, at the same time, convincing. The first is the rejection of capitalism as a separate system, the economy as a self-propelling market separated from politics, culture and history, a separate system following its own laws as I just mentioned, and that empire and imperialism is the historical larger order in which capitalism thrives. Imperialism didn’t end with the end of formal decolonization but continued under transformation through and after the Cold War. Imperialism and state-building went hand in hand with the industrial revolution and various phases and faces of capitalism. The latter was just one dimension of a wider political-economic-social-cultural tangle. Thinking of capitalism as separate from this tangle doesn’t make much sense. Ideology has been a powerful factor underpinning the idea of capitalism as a self-propelling system in contrast to statehood.

The second point deals with the monetization of the world economy. You brought Simmel’s money theory from the turn of the century, 1900, into our conversation, which still has something to say [1]. Simmel described the market society that emerged with the industrial revolution, replacing the barter trade. He talked about the role of money in monetary order rather than capitalism. Money was the key to set a value, a price on a broad stream of ever-new things, and then made all these values commensurable on new kinds of markets, where sellers and buyers met and negotiated the price, making the initial absolute values relative. When governments radically liberalized financial markets after 1990, the monetization process that Simmel described accelerated exponentially. The markets that traded things expanded to new markets that traded money fully free from governmental monitoring. Money invested to make more money became the motor of growth and capitalist speculation. Money became commensurable, the absolute became relative when money itself got a price subject to market negotiation and speculation. This relativization of values opened the door to the nihilism we see spreading today, as we discussed in Blog 2. I think that imperialism, connected to exponentially growing monetization beyond political control, promoting nihilism, gives a new, extraordinary dimension to our understanding of capitalism and its tangle with the state and the empire.

HT: Nihilism – understood as the untenability of all values – is an interesting diagnosis, for it pops up again and again. For me, one of the exciting aspects of Simmel’s take on monetary value is that he conceives of monetization as potentially infinite, since it creates new incommensurable values on its outside constantly. So, one would never end up with total monetization, although one would not obtain permanently incommensurable values, eternal, unshakeable values, either. If his analysis is correct the only variant of nihilism that is conceivable is actually one where this system of expanding value commensurabilization that keeps pushing a frontier of incommensurate values forward itself comes to an end. I can imagine two arguments that would speak in favor of analyzing the present moment in such a vein. 

The first is an argument internal to economic history that would have to identify certain components of economic life as crucial to capitalism and then show how these components are under threat of disintegration. This might be something like property insurance losing its viability under climate change conditions. Insurance is a crucial feature of translating material givens into relatively stable, but commensurate, monetizable values. It is an infrastructure that sustains the market in real estate. If the market collapses, maybe capitalism is not sustainable. And then, possibly, we would have to start thinking of capitalism as a rather fragile system.

The second argument would be external to economic history, in the sense of drawing on aspects of social life that are not reducible to the economic sphere. But this argument, too, would be about the infrastructure of the mobile frontier of commensurate/incommensurate value. This would be about the public that is necessary to sustain any wider social agreement on values. This matter also speaks, if somewhat obliquely, to the question of the link of capitalism and democracy. For the media in which the public has been lodged, as it were, have been “free,” to the extent that they were, because they were self-sustaining businesses. It is somewhat awkward for liberal political theory, but ultimately, the news have, for a long time, functioned merely as the carrier for advertising. The news have been the content that allowed print advertisers to have their message delivered. The news media were able to ask a price for their service that sustained them, and did so rather well, for a period of maybe a century, from the late 19th century onward. As we all know, this business model has been destroyed by technological change. TV did not manage to fully break it but rather seems to have expanded it for a couple of decades, adding audiovisual advertising and functioning in a rather similar vein. But since the late 1990s, first of all the internet search algorithm (Google), and second the social networks of the 2000s, have pushed a new business model for personalized rather than generalized advertising. And the public as we knew it and as it served the needs, not only of democratic statehood, but of the entirety of the mobile value system, has been dwindling. The current US government is the most obvious product of this dysfunction of the public; and a through-line runs from this dysfunction to the sense of dysfunction that, in my understanding, could be seen as a contemporary variant of nihilism. 

BS: You say that the digital platform giants, and the tech oligarchs who own them and have become billionaires through them, are the drivers of nihilism.

HT: Well, if you press me like that… The tech entrepreneurs of today are probably the most recent example of a public-private Beutegemeinschaft whose target of exploitation is the individual consumers’ lives, with the public being destroyed as the older model of monetizing these lives. “Capitalism” increasingly seems to coincide with the accrual of such communal models, with the financial industries and the traditional industries of production and extraction also all still in place. What the financial industries, from their deregulation in the 1990s onward, did to the history of monetary value is probably also still interesting. But again one can see that the tech industries are also infringing on their business through the issuing of digital currencies, another bonanza that appears to replace essential services and prerogatives of the state. Then again, one should not be too fast to accept the ideas that even some of the entrepreneurs and ideologues of these new businesses pander. There is a lot of nonsense being spouted about, say, artificial cities on the open seas where libertarian tech entrepreneurship will live out their wildest fantasies of being free of irksome restrictions and laws. But even if these were more than updated versions of colonial utopias, such as the El Dorado myth, as soon as someone were to dispatch naval forces against such establishments, they would have a major problem. So they will need the state as long as there is no non-state war machine to match it – and that’s nowhere to be seen on the horizon. What happens in the meantime is basically a story of the conflicts of interest of different imperial Beutegemeinschaften. It is fascinating that such a development, however, is able to produce a novel version of nihilism. This might even be a vantage point for historicizing nihilism, for relating historical diagnoses of such phenomena to similar conflicts of economic and state elites in imperial settings.

BS: We are not talking about stable arrangements but of continuously evolving processes where the state is instrumentalizing economic life and economic life is instrumentalizing the state. The double instrumentalisation means a less dichotomic and more entangled view on relationships, highlighting the political and the economic dimensions of the state (and empire) as deeply connected dimensions and with the delivery of domestic social and external military protection as a key issue. 

HT: This mutual instrumentalization might also be only partly purposeful, and partly more random, informed by institutional memory and forgetting simultaneously. This would be one étatiste variant of an argument that would explain the seesawing developments between the state and the capitalist economy that we discussed in our first conversation on the level of welfare. 

BS: The ends of the seesaw board, the state and capitalism, merge at the hub of the board.

HT: There would have been, arguably, a specific state-sponsored market for welfare as a business model, with specific rules and goals set from the side of the state, and then, the market emancipating itself from this set of constraints as the values vested in the rules and goals become themselves monetized. But this does not mean that the state cannot cope. On the contrary, it may profit in terms of increasing power, along with the economic sphere. There is that quip, from somewhere in US politics, about the US federal government being “an insurance company with an army,” referring to the two largest portions of the US federal budget, I believe. The quip appears to refer to the oddity of this juxtaposition. One could, of course, say that it makes a point about security as the main value supplied by politics. Or one could add that it marks simply a certain historical episode that armed power is, historically speaking, by far the dominant, even constitutive value of the political sphere and that the insurance business can be divested when no longer opportune. In fact, the dominant discourse on political rights nowadays seems to suggest as much. Some of those who have been responsible for policy in Western democracies in recent years seem increasingly willing even to get rid of democracy and (part of) the rule of law if it allows them to liquidate the insurance company side of the state. However, we must try to understand this as something consistent with statehood rather than just a “neoliberal” takeover on the part of capital unleashed.

BS: During our reflection, we found that empire and imperialism are the framework, the point of reference for understanding capitalism, not only today but also historically, and it is not difficult to see historical continuities in that respect when we look at the world today. The ideas and practices of imperialism are highly visible. However, this doesn’t mean that capitalism and imperialism are identical. Imperialism is rather a framework or a tangle of different economic, social, political, and cultural processes. A “system” you called it. Is it at all possible to discern something called capitalism in that tangle or system? If so, would it make sense? Are the tech oligarchs who are backing Trump about to redefine liberal capitalism driven by competition to authoritarian capitalism taking over crucial state functions? Or are they destroying them? Yes, empire and imperialism are the overarching framework but what do we see when we look into it?

HT: I am indeed skeptical that there is an easily available stable and well-defined concept of “capitalism.” To me, it seems that all the options are steeped too deeply into historical situations of theorizing, and of everyday discourse, one piled on top of the other, if somewhat unified by the “materialist” readiness to prioritize the economical over the political. As for the meaning of “capitalism” today, there is a popular critique of the US as being currently divvied up by “oligarchs” of all kinds at the expense of the people, for mere profit, and driven by that lust for destruction you mention, yes. And in some sense, this is what is understood by “capitalism” in a lot of current political discourse. And yet this critique has a tendency to overlook the far-reaching programs, or pipedreams, of the far right for changing the entirety of the social order, for undoing everything regarded as “progressive,” by means of governmental intervention. The aspirations in this regard, the rollback on civil rights, are akin to totalitarian statehood, and their target appears to be, ultimately, a return to social disciplining. This is not issuing from the capitalist oligarchs, I suppose, but rather from a different set of more ideologically driven functionaries who rely on religious backgrounds and careers within some kind of state service. Social discipline is, one should keep in mind, a category of militarization, of the weaponization of the population against other states or empires or peoples. Once again, not so much Elias’s process of civilization, then, but rather the process of militarization. Only that, if what we discussed about the Cold War and its heritage is even vaguely correct, it means that the current holders of political power have a tendency to ignore the historical transformation of the conditions of the state as a war machine created by the Cold War. And I think this is one of the reasons that things feel so insecure now: The entire system of security, and its cultural interpretation, as related to the military-industrial complex and the insurance company with an army, respectively, are eroding. The constellation seems deeply ironical, because the technological-economic-military system has created the strange discipline of de-disciplining, where only those small portions of the population used for manning the machine, as it were, still had to display old-style social discipline. The self-reproduction of these groups has meanwhile failed because the de-disciplining of capitalism has dried up the supply. Highly educated people were lured into the “free economy” for reasons of profit. And these de-disciplined elites are now taking over the war machine, with potentially rather disastrous consequences. I think this would be my take on the precise role of “neoliberal” capitalism from the perspective of contemporary statehood.

BS: Let’s try to understand the recent development in the USA. Disruption and fighting the deep state are key catchwords there. What is the deep state? Disruption is a euphemism for destruction, but what should be destroyed, and are there any ideas about what should come after destruction? Are we witnessing a classical apocalyptic scenario paving the way to paradise? Is Trump representing the state or capitalism? Is the distinction possible? What about Elon Musk and the tech oligarchs? Is Musk a state leader, without being democratically legitimized, of course, but with a presidential commission? Another relevant question here is whether the disruption thought is a vanguard or a recurring historical pattern. What is new in what we see? And what is recurring? It is difficult to avoid thinking of the futurist movement paving the way for fascism, but, of course, there are apparent differences. Empire and imperialism, yes, but they remain across the Cold War period and after rather than recurring after having been absent, and what do they mean more precisely today?

HT: Rather a lot of good questions. The “deep state” moniker was taken over from Turkey, I believe, where the authoritarian AKP government used the phrase to dismantle the political clout of the army in the name of democracy. But it was a typical propagandistic use of countersense: accusing the opponent of what one is aiming for oneself, taking over, or indeed creating, a set of undemocratic institutions within the hollowed out democratic order. The term then expresses a direct aggression against some aspects of the state as war machine – but it is also about the propaganda-fed illusions that people have about that, and about covering up a mere conflict of interests among different elite groups. Ultimately, the political power of the Turkish military leadership was not so difficult to dismantle. And in the USA the bureaucracy has proved rather helpless against the aggressions of the current government, although it is still too inert and too entrenched, probably, to be altered dramatically by some months of “disruption.” In the end, people are made to suffer for some mild realignments of power. I do not think that power conflicts of elite groups are particularly new, within imperial frameworks. I do suspect that the way that disciplining and de-disciplining play out as markers of distinction among these groups might be new, however. This is the inheritance of the Cold War, turning in on itself.

BS: China, Russia, and the USA seem unified in imperialism, which does not mean unified in other respects, even if a Washington-Moscow axis might emerge, although it is unclear how China would react. Are the US and Russia defending the gas and oil economy against China, the leading promoter and forerunner of green energy? However, China’s goal is possibly less to become the leader of a green Bretton Woods than to challenge the dollar hegemony. The relations between the empires are filled with tensions. We experience a geopolitical turn, which is also geoeconomic. 

HT: When the Ukraine War started, I thought one of its functions was deflection from the fact that Russia, as basically a mere petrostate, was going to be economically marginalized if technological shifts toward a greener economy really took off. To a certain extent, I even think that geopolitics as such is a deflection from the accelerating ecological crisis – the entire return of empire, the rebellion – from all sides – against the rules-based international order would then serve to postpone ecological adaptation. This could be argued from the critique of capitalism point of view, as ultimately driven by petro-capitalist economic interests – the actual deep state, if you will. But I think this is all way too neat. Adaptations are happening anyway, and the exploitation of the reserves of fossil fuels will continue to follow the logic of exhaustion until unprofitability is reached. I think the situation is ultimately so unfortunate that petro-capitalists do not need to rely on empire as a deflection. The only conclusion then is that in this regard, too, there is no deep state and that empire is just empire.

BS: This is a provocative thesis. Whatever plans for decarbonization and the stop of climate change there might be, they will in the end lose out to some state-capital constellation as long as the extraction of carbon is profitable. Imperialism moves on in some new constellation under the cloak we call geopolitics. 

HT: Yes, though I meant rather that the development of the new “green” (or more successfully greenwashed) economy will take place next to the continuation of the old fossil-based economy. It would take some truly hard regulation to change that, I would guess, and I am not certain there is a precedent for it. I think that is why “war economy” has come up as a label for what might be needed. But the forgetting of war is rather cavalier in this line of argument, as we noted earlier.

BS: Europe doesn’t seem to fit in this development, doesn’t have the same clear profile as the other powers. How would you describe Europe against the backdrop of this development? There are cases of authoritarianism, with Hungary as a case in point, but not the only one. Several other EU member states have strong trends in the same direction of authoritarian paternalism with the mix up of the ruler’s private property and state property. But still, the EU’s internal market, with its detailed rules supervised by the Commission, is rather an example of rule-based authority than patrimonial. More than twenty years ago, a neoconservative US American thinker referred Europe to Venus and the USA to Mars [2]. Are these labels still valid? Europe was once the core of imperialism. How much is left of those experiences? And the place and role of Europe today? Is Europe post-empire? If not, should it become, and can it?

HT: There is the argument that the European Union is founded in the post-imperial condition of Europe after 1945, the loss of imperial power, which left only small states (and those that had not yet understood they were small, to paraphrase Paul-Henri Spaak) who were forced to give up some of their sovereignty to create a structure that could shield them from the new geopolitical powers to some extent. Before 1990, of course, this only applies to Western Europe. And there is still some belief in Europe’s ability to work as a model for other small states to emulate. The most obvious recent support for this position would perhaps be the African Union. But there is something altogether too idyllic about this picture.

I suppose one thing that is interesting about EU-Europe is that it is a system of blockades. It is also disorder, not just order. It shares a lot of traits with the political development of the US, in particular. I would say, in terms of empire it is a subsidiary space that’s serviceable to imperial interests by pursuing some secondary imperial interests of its own. It was never just a bulwark against imperial meddling from elsewhere. The “west,” as a system of profiteering, was quite ingeniously constructed, and/or had evolved in such a way. But the European system was created much more in the mold of international rule-based order than those imperial constructs that base themselves in older nation states. And Europe cannot shed its internationalist principles of construction, not least because its own secondary imperial functions rely on these principles. Some people hope that this will force Europe to uphold, re-impose, and expand the rule-based order. There is that vision of the European Union as an international pioneer of regulation, as an arbiter of those conflicts of different Beutegemeinschaften that we are witnessing. I am skeptical that these visions are realistic. I do think regulation, an affirmation of the rule of law, will be needed. But I doubt it is actually going to come from Europe. 

BS: So, from where could it come? Could the ongoing climate crisis bring us to a point which imposes the kind of social discipline that existed during the first one or two decades of the Cold War? And would that discipline bring the rule of law back?

HT: I am not sure that I should like to sing the praises of discipline at all. I rather think that we need to realize that the things that we tend to consider as social liberalization, emancipation, progress, have to be understood in a more dialectic vein. The “authoritarian” projects of global rightist politics nowadays all tend to be just as un-dialectic about these matters as the “liberal” side of the political spectrum. The notion that one could just turn those processes around amounts to a collective will to ignore the ongoing reality of the Cold War. The question of how legal regulation relates to discipline is, however, a very good one. The law is not dialectic at all, it is tied to its own literalism. It might be the same with the climate. So yes, the intensification of the climate crisis might eventually create sufficient pressure to break up that political-economic compound of contemporary empire etc. Yet, somehow this feels almost like yet another version of apocalypticism. And I would like to stress that my own pessimistic bent is not apocalyptic. There is not going to be so easy a way out, I suspect. That is why all those dystopias of the end times that abound in contemporary popular culture make for such cozy entertainment, after all, all those zombie apocalypses and so on: escapism.

BS: Escapism, yes, there is this fantasy that technology somehow will solve our problems, a kind of technological determinism, but for the good. Are we at a new stage of unprecedented expansion of technology? During the Cold War, it was, after all, possible to keep the expansion under some political control. Are we with the breakthrough of AI about to lose control?

HT: I think AI will not be regulated, as many seem to be hoping, because, as we said before, it is another arms race. One can already see some of the contours of this development in some of the active battlefields of today, in Ukraine, in Gaza. Then again, technology spinning out of control: that is nothing new, it is precisely what happened with nuclear fission, and even with poison gas earlier, and perhaps gunpowder much earlier. There is quite a lot to be said for looking at history from the technological point of view, as the applications that technologies create for themselves. I do not like the reductionism of this perspective; but I like it as a corrective. 

BS: That is a good point. To emphasize the role of the arms race in technological development is not reductionism but a correction of mainstream views that leave out that role. What you say about correction instead of reductionism leads to a final question about choice and alternatives. How do we avoid interpretations of the world around the experiences of empire and imperialism that make them into the same self-propelling machines as capitalism and the market, with the arms race as a prime mover? How can we write a history of alternatives and choices, made or not made, where the future is open and shaped by human agency in competition about different options? Where the future is about peace instead of war?

What about the normative level as a guide to action? International law is obviously eroding. What alternatives are there to value nihilism and the “law of the jungle”? Can we recreate values which have ceased to guide our actions? The “West” as a normative point of reference is obviously not very relevant anymore, but could, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s claim for provincializing Europe serve as such a reference not only in but also beyond Europe? The continuous questioning critique as a value? With respect for the different meanings that follow. Critique against remaining flaws and shortcomings. The Kantian way?

HT: Not sure I’d have more than question marks to offer. It pains me that I can only see the across-the-board insufficiency of the history of political thought in even describing what we are looking at, the unfunny ironies of it all. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s point, of course, was always that the positive potentials of European thought needed to be recognized alongside the process of provincialization, on which he was much more ambivalent than the use of his book title as a slogan suggested. But to my mind, those positive potentials are also insufficient, they do not offer workable solutions. Kant’s league of nations? – Ignored the realities of empire. Human rights, international law? – Falling prey to those same realities, and for the umpteenth time, no less. Regulatory governance at least? – Easily undermined if there is no public. Communism? – Forgot about the state, which undid it over and over again. The nihilism problem could be tackled by regulation, at least, if one takes it to be about the infrastructure of the political public – taking steps in that direction would appear to be the most urgent task. Individual projects of some of those elite groups might be canceled by resistance, even by their inbuilt flaws – do people really want to live in some kind of evangelical horror of patriarchy and theocracy? There are prospects of mitigation and correction. But the overall structural features are not likely to change unless through large-scale catastrophe, which I do not find that much of an attractive prospect, either. There is nothing new in this rather pessimistic stance, of course. It is a convention to tweak the pessimism to sound more hopeful in the end. There will be some unprecedented change, we can all rely on our eschatological reflexes, and so on. The clerical heritage of academia, perhaps? I’m not sure I’m good at such tweaking, I seem to lack the priestly calling. 

BS: Quite obviously, the facts underpin your argument. There is little ground for optimism. As you say, hope may remain, but rather as an instrument of self-therapy. As to the clerical heritage of academia, it was Marx who argued that the philosophers had so far only explored and described the world as it was, but that their task was to change it. We know how astray that thought led. However, who should think of alternative worlds if not those who investigate the imperfections and distortions of the world we live in? Perhaps Marx’s and his followers’ biggest mistake was to believe that the world develops according to social laws. We know that the future is unpredictable, but that insight should make it easier to think about alternatives, about the capacity to translate experiences of disappointment into new expectations, to use the vocabulary of Koselleck. On the other side, Koselleck also said that the accumulation of disappointments one day might be so big that it would not be possible to to develop viable horizons of expectation anymore. Are we at such a point of history? That would mean a very different end of history than Fukuyama thought of. History as a learning process? Personally, I think that it is urgent to confront the present nihilism with a value-based order. I think that Adorno and Horkheimer, with their thesis about the dialectic of enlightenment, save the enlightenment values by emphasizing that there is a contradiction between values as ideals and as practices [3]. But they are there, as a continuous source of correction. 

Our different views on the prospects of the future might be a difference between our personalities; some people are more pessimistic, others are more optimistic, although I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as an optimist. It might be a generational difference. However, in the end, I have not much more than hope to come with. Hope that maintains a fighting spirit, preventing giving up the thoughts of and struggle for an alternative world. The situation is dangerous and extremely difficult. Thank you very much for these brainstorming sessions, which I have enjoyed and learned from a lot. 

HT: My thanks to you to for inviting me to these conversations, I have also learned a lot, it has been really stimulating!

[1] Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge 1978. [German original Philosophie des Geldes 1900].

[2] Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. New York: Knopf 2003

[3] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder 1972 [German original Dialektik der Aufklärung 1944/1947]

Find all four Blogs with Henning Trüper here!

How to quote:
Cit. Bo Stråth, “Conceptualizing Capitalism: Conversations with Henning Trüper. Blog 4. The Zeitgeist of Empire and Nihilism in Historical Perspective. And Capitalism?” Blog. https://www.bostrath.com/planetary-perspectives/conceptualizing-capitalism/blog-4-the-zeitgeist-of-empire-and-nihilism-in-historical-perspective-and-capitalism/ Published 30.05.2025

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