As labor in the capitalist system practically tripled to some three billion workers, solidary organizations of labor simultaneously dwindled in relative size and power. This is true globally but also for the historical core countries. While this is a paradox, it is not a contradiction. Capital is a (spatialized) social relationship. The globalization of capital since the 1970s has shifted the power relations with localized labor fundamentally in favor of capital, as Charles Tilly noted in this journal almost thirty years ago. Over time, power balances within capitalist states, and between capitalist states and transnationalizing capital, have reflected that basic class-relational shift. This article explains why the globalizing cycle of weakened labor may now be reversing.

Looking for new ways to interpret the failings of the neo-liberal economy, this article argues that financialised capitalism at the eve of the 2008 financial crisis showed striking analogies with the characteristic combination of oligopoly and informality of the Soviet economy at the eve of its collapse. State capture by oligopolists, a large "virtual economy", the inability of agencies to obtain insight into economic and financial operations, the short term orientations of managers not coinciding with enterprise viability, and a "mystification of risk" by high science are some of the analogies to be discussed. It is argued that not only the origins but also the aftermath of the crisis may show significant analogies.

Geoff Eley and Keith Nield embrace an institutional perspective à la Ira Katznelson, but they do so with a much stronger emphasis on popular alliance formation and social movements than Katznelson. Social history's role, in their vision, would consist of capturing the dynamics of stability and change in densely and intensively studied local contexts. It is the injustices embedded in such contexts that apparently feed these movements and alliances. Class is thus reduced to a microheuristic of hidden injuries and subaltern identities. However, the concept of social class can only help to articulate a position beyond formal institutionalism and the class language of bipolarity when it is wedded to a nonreductionist, nonessentialist, and nonfinalist theory of capitalism. Seen from this perspective, capitalism is a worldwide and world- embedded process of combined and uneven development that constantly assembles and disassembles the materials from which human communities are made. In short, if we want to rethink class in place, we need to rethink capitalism in space.

Class is certainly a key concept of social history just as civilization is for the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias and his followers. Each of these traditions needs to come to terms with the other. Notwithstanding fundamentally divergent assumptions, interests, and styles, both traditions would gain from a closer examination of each other's concepts, subjects, and methods.