Response: LAP Critical Issues-July 2026

The historical, empirical and theoretical matters raised in this commentary are developed in my Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (Robinson, 2026).This is important because the commentary is not intended to be theoretically or historically satisfying to an academic audience.LAP founding editor Ron Chilcote asked me after the 2025 talk to write up my notes into a commentary for a new section of the journal that this essay would inaugurate.I am not concerned with revisiting here debate on my theory of global capitalism that has been going on for three decades.For that, readers can reference numerous exchanges and symposia.The presentation in question was an análisis de coyuntura.As Leiva notes, the aim is to present the "big picture" in a few pages.It would have been interesting for the commentaries to engage more with the coyuntura that I discussed and the case examples from around Latin America that I identified.Boito says that my thesis on a transnational capitalist class "denies the existence of national factions of the bourgeoisie in conflict with one another," asks how we can explain the aggravation of conflicts between nation-states if not by the conflict among national capitalist classes, and calls for abandoning the concept of a transnational capitalist class.I have responded at great length to the notion that world capitalism is still organized along the lines of national capitalist classes in conflict with one another.I am not interested in revisiting that debate here.What is important now is the relationship of transnational capital to the national state and whether or not my theory of global capitalism can explain the current escalation of interstate and geopolitical conflict.A major portion of the book on which the first part of the essay is based, Epochal Crisis, shows precisely that the theory can convincingly explain this conflict.I show how, as the crisis deepens, politics is coming to overdetermine economics, or to say this another way, the political interests of states are coming to trump the economic interests of transnational capitalists.