In another world, when the spectre of global revolution loomed, a brilliant Bolshevik leader produced two under-appreciated classics. Nikolai Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, written in 1915, and The Economics of the Transition Period, penned five years later, both begin by making the case for a single principle: if there is such a thing as ‘the economy’, it is a global thing. All ‘national economies’ are entangled in processes that span borders. In the early years of the 20th century, such transnational thinking was important to the Left flank of European socialism. Rosa Luxemburg criticized Marx for his failure to practise it sufficiently. This was a world of empires, where transnational links were the norm. Those links were blood-soaked, born of domineering violence, but, in that interconnected world, revolutionaries could envision common fights against common enemies from Dundee to Delhi, replacing empires with a new world order. It was a vision of the future now consigned to the past.
In the event, empires gave way instead to a world of nation-states. Today we all tend to think in little bordered boxes, talking freely of the, say, ‘British economy’ against the better advice of Bukharin and Luxemburg. Politics has been transformed too, since people usually think of it taking place within nations rather than being enacted by global movements. Electoral politics has a structural tendency towards nationalism – to win, parties have to persuade voters in one nation that they will represent their interests – and so a tension arises for those whose constituency ought to be the exploited and oppressed of the whole world.
