- ‘A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present. ‘ (7)
- ‘Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.’ (13)
- ‘What distinguishes the historical social system we are calling historical capitalism is that in this historical system capital came to be used (invested) in a very special way. It came to be used with the primary objective or intent of self-expansion. In this system, past accumulations were ‘capital’ only to the extend [sic] they were used to accumulate more of the same.’ (13-14)
- ‘An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.’ (14)
- ‘But even in the absence of direct interference by those who had the power to interfere, the process was usually aborted by the non-availability of one of more elements of the process – the accumulated stock in a money form, the labor-power to be utilized by the producer, the network of distributors, the consumers who were purchasers. One or more elements were missing because, in previous historical social systems, one or more of these elements was not ‘commodified’ or was insufficiently ‘commodified.’ ’ (15)
- ‘That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.’ (16)
- ‘It is in the context of such a household structure that a social distinction between productive and unproductive work began to be imposed on the working classes. De facto, productive work came to be defined as money-earning work (primarily wage-earning work), and non-productive work as work that, albeit very necessary, was merely ‘subsistence’ activity and therefore was said to produce no ‘surplus’ which anyone else could possibly appropriate. This work was either totally non-commodified or involved petty (but then truly petty) commodity production. The differentiation between kinds of work was anchored by creating specific roles attached to them. Productive (wage) labor became the task primarily of the adult male/father and secondarily of other (younger) adult males in the household. Non-productive (subsistence) labor became the task primarily of the adult female/mother and secondarily of other females, plus the children and the elderly. Productive labor was done outside the household in the ‘work place.’ Non-productive labor was done inside the household. The lines of division were not absolute, to be sure, but they became under historical capitalism quite clear and compelling. A division of real labor by gender and age was not of course an invention of historical capitalism. It has probably always existed, if only because for some tasks there are biological prerequisites and limitations (of gender, but also of age). Nor was a hierarchical family and/or household structure an invention of capitalism. That too had long existed. What was new under historical capitalism was the correlation of division of labor and valuation of work. Men may often have done different work from women (and adults different work from children and the elderly), but under historical capitalism there has been a steady devaluation of the work of women (and of the young and old), and a corresponding emphasis on the value of the adult male’s work. Whereas in other systems men and women did specified (but normally equal) tasks, under historical capitalism the adult male wage-home-worker as the ‘housewife.’ Thus when national statistics began to be compiled, itself a product of a capitalist system, all breadwinners were considered members of the economically active labor-force, but no housewives were. Thus was sexism institutionalized. The legal and paralegal apparatus of gender distinction and discrimination followed quite logically in the wage of this basic differential valuation of labor. We may not here that the concepts of extended childhood/adolescence and of a ‘retirement’ from the work-force not linked to illness or frailty have been also specific concomitants of the emerging household structures of historical capitalism. They have often been viewed as ‘progressive’ exemptions from work. They may however be more accurately viewed as redefinitions of work as non-work. Insult has been added to injury by labeling children’s training activities and the miscellaneous task of retired adults as somehow ‘fun,’ and the devaluation of their work contributions as the reasonable counterpart of their release from the ‘drudgery’ of ‘real’ work.’ (25-26)
- ‘…surpluses which lowered the minimum-acceptable-wage threshold. In this way, non-wage work permitted some producers to remunerate their work-force at lower rates, thereby reducing their cost of production and increasing their profit margins. No wonder then, as a general rule, that any employer of wage-labor would prefer to have his wage-workers located in semi-proletarian rather than in proletarian households. If we now look at global empirical reality throughout the time-space of historical capitalism, we suddenly discover that the location of wage-workers in semi-proletarian households has been the statistical norm.’ (27)
- ‘So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender/age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.’ (28)
- ‘We must rid ourselves of the simplistic image that the ‘market’ is a place where initial producer and ultimate consumer meet. No doubt there are and always have been such market-places. But in historical capitalism, such market-place transactions have constituted a small percentage of the whole. Most transactions have involved exchange between two intermediate producers located on a long commodity chain. The purchaser was purchasing an ‘input’ for his production process. The seller was selling a ‘semi-finished product,’ semi-finished that is in terms of its ultimate use in direct individual consumption. The struggle over price in these ‘intermediate markets’ represented an effort by the buyer to wrest from the seller a proportion of the profit realized from all prior labor processes throughout the commodity chain. This struggle to be sure was determined at particular space-time nexuses by supply and demand, but never uniquely. In the first place, of course, supply and demand can be manipulated through monopolistic constraints, which have been commonplace rather than exceptional.’ (28-29)
- ‘To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically.’ (30-31)
- ‘The enormous apparatus of latent force (openly used sporadically in wars and colonization) has not had to be invoked in each separate transaction to ensure that the exchange was unequal. Rather, the apparatus of force came into play only when there were significant challenges to an existing level of unequal exchange. Once the acute political conflict was past, the world’s entrepreneurial classes could pretend that the economy was operating solely by considerations of supply and demand, without acknowledging how the world-economy had historically arrived at a particular point of supply and demand, and what structures of force were sustaining at that very moment the ‘customary’ differentials in levels of wage and of the real quality of life of the world’s work-forces.’ (32-33)
- ‘It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system’s hierarchy of wage-levels.’ (39)
- ‘On the face of it, far from being a ‘natural’ system, as some apologists have tried to argue, historical capitalism is a patently absurd one. One accumulates capital in order to accumulate more capital. Capitalists are like white mice on a treadmill, running ever faster in order to run still faster. In the process, no doubt, some people live well, but others live miserably; and how well, and for how long, do those who live well live? The more I have reflected upon it the absurd it has seemed to me. Not only do I believe that the vast majority of less well-off materially than in previous historical systems but, as we shall see, I think it can be argued that they have been politically less well off also. So imbued are we all by the self-justifying ideology of progress which this historical system has fashioned, that we find it difficult even to recognize the vast historical negatives of this system. Even so stalwart a denouncer of historical capitalism as Karl Marx laid great emphasis on its historically progressive role.’ (40)
- ‘What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?’ (41)
- ‘Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.’ (47)
- ‘The concept that one ought to restrict one’s political involvement to one’s own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.’ (50)
- ‘As a matter of law the states recognized no constraints on their legislative scope other than those that were self-imposed. Even where particular state constitutions paid ideological lip service to constraints deriving from religious or natural law doctrines, they reserved to some constitutionally-defined body or person the right to interpret these doctrines.’ (51)
- ‘Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.’ (54)
- ‘Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.’ (55)
- ‘That the balance of power was maintained by more than political ideology can be seen if we look at the three instances in which one of the strong states achieved temporarily a period of relative dominance over the others – a relative dominance that we may call hegemony. The three instances are the hegemony of the United Provinces (Netherlands) in the mid-seventeenth century, that of Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth, and that of the United States in the mid-twentieth. In each case, hegemony came after the defeat of a military pretender to conquest (the Hapsburgs, France, Germany). Each hegemony was sealed by a ‘world war’ – a massive, land-centered, highly destructive, thirty-year-long intermittent struggle involving all the major military powers of the time. These were respectively the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48, the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), and the twentieth-century conflicts between 1914 and 1945 which should properly be conceived as a single long ‘world war.’ It is also noted that, in each case, the victor had been primarily a maritime power prior to ‘world war,’ but had transformed itself into a land power in order to win this way against a historically strong land power which seemed to be trying to transform the world-economy into a world-empire. The basis of the victory was not however military. The primary reality was economic: the ability of accumulators of capital located in the particular states to outcompete all others in all three major economic spheres – agro-industrial production, commerce, and finance.’ (58-59)
- ‘We must begin by looking at what we might mean by an anti-systemic movement. The word movement implies some collective thrust of a more than momentary nature. In fact, of course, somewhat spontaneous protests or uprisings of workforces have occurred in all known historical systems. They have served as safety-values [sic] for pent-up anger; or sometimes, somewhat more effectively, as mechanisms that have set minor limits to exploitative process.’ (65-66)
- ‘It is only in the nineteenth century that we begin to see the creation of continuing, bureaucratized structures in their two great historical variants: labor-socialist movements, and nationalist movements.’ (66-67)
- ‘As the two varieties of anti-systemic movements have spread (the labor socialist movements from a few strong states to all others, the nationalist movements from a few peripheral zones to everywhere else), the distinction between the two kinds of movement has become increasingly blurred. Labor-socialist movements have found that nationalist themes were central to their mobilization efforts and their exercise of state power. But nationalist movements have discovered the inverse. In order to mobilize effectively and govern, they had to canalize the concerns of the work-force for egalitarian restructuring. As the themes began to overlap heavily and the distinctive organizational formats tended to disappear or coalesce into a single structure, the strength of anti-systemic movements, especially as a worldwide collective whole, was dramatically increased.’ (71)
- ‘I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism.’ (77)
- ‘It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.’ (78)
- ‘The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism.’ (80)
- ‘Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.’ (81)
- ‘The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.’ (83)
- ‘Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.’ (85)
- ‘We have tried thus far to describe how capitalism has in fact operated as a historical system. Historical systems however are just that – historical. They come into existence and eventually go out of existence, the consequence of internal processes in which the exacerbation of the internal contradictions lead to a structural crisis. Structural crises are massive, not momentary. They take time to play themselves out. Historical capitalism entered into its structural crisis in the early twentieth century and will probably see its demise as a historical system sometime in the next century. What will follow is hazardous to predict.’ (90)
- ‘The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was ‘natural’ to man but which has never historically existed. The ‘propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.’ (90-91)
- ‘This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.’ (91)
- ‘It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.’ (97)
- ‘What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists – the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes – believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.’ (97)
- ‘It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression.’ (100)
- ‘I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.’ (100
- ‘I hear the friendly whispers. Surely you can’t be serious; surely you mean relative immiseration? Is not the industrial worker strikingly better off today than in 1800? The industrial worker, yes, or at least many industrial workers. But industrial workers still comprise a relatively small part of the world’s population. The overwhelming proportion of the world’s work-forces, who live in rural zones or move between them and urban slums, are worse off than their ancestors five hundred years ago. They eat less well, and certainly have a less balanced diet. Although they are more likely to survive the first year of life (because of the effect of social hygiene undertaken to protect the privileged), I doubt that the life prospects of the majority of the world’s population as of age one are greater than previously; I suspect the opposite is true. They unquestionably work harder – more hours per day, per year, per lifetime. And since they do this for less total reward, the rate of exploitation has escalated very sharply.’ (101)
- ‘I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.’ (100
- ‘I hear the friendly whispers. Surely you can’t be serious; surely you mean relative immiseration? Is not the industrial worker strikingly better off today than in 1800? The industrial worker, yes, or at least many industrial workers. But industrial workers still comprise a relatively small part of the world’s population. The overwhelming proportion of the world’s work-forces, who live in rural zones or move between them and urban slums, are worse off than their ancestors five hundred years ago. They eat less well, and certainly have a less balanced diet. Although they are more likely to survive the first year of life (because of the effect of social hygiene undertaken to protect the privileged), I doubt that the life prospects of the majority of the world’s population as of age one are greater than previously; I suspect the opposite is true. They unquestionably work harder – more hours per day, per year, per lifetime. And since they do this for less total reward, the rate of exploitation has escalated very sharply.’ (101)
- ‘Historical capitalism developed an ideological framework of oppressive humiliation which had never previously existed, and which today we called sexism and racism. Let me be clear. Both the dominant position of men over women and generalized xenophobia were widespread, virtually universal, in prior historical systems, as we have already noted. But sexism was more than the dominant position of men over women, and racism more than generalized xenophobia. Sexism was the relegation of women to the realm of non-productive labor, doubly humiliating in that the actual labor required of them was if anything intensified, and in that productive labor became in the capitalist world-economy, for the first time in human history, the basis of the legitimation of privilege. This set up a double bind which has been intractable within the system. Racism was not hatred or oppression of a stranger, of someone outside the historical system. Quite the contrary, racism was the stratification of the work-force inside the historical system, whose object was to keep the oppressed groups inside the system, not expel them. It created the justification of low reward for productive labor, despite its primacy in the definition of the right to reward. It did this by defining work with the lowest remuneration as remuneration for the lowest-quality work. Since this was done ex definitio, no change in the quality of work could ever do more than change the form of the accusation, yet the ideology proclaimed the offer of a reward of individual mobility for individual effort. This double bind was equally intractable. Both sexism and racism were social processes in which ‘biology’ defined position. Since biology was in any immediate sense unchangeable socially, we had seemingly a structure that was socially-created but was not amenable to social dismantling. This was of course not really so. What is true is that the structuring of sexism and racism could not and cannot be dismantled without dismantling the entire historical system which created them and which has been maintained in critical ways by their operation. Hence, in both material and psychic terms (sexism and racism), there was absolute immiseration.’ (103-104)
- ‘The second reason why we haven’t observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the ‘middle classes’ – that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly ‘middle’ segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).’ (104)
- ‘We have already argued that the image of historical capitalism having arisen via the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoisie is wrong. Instead, the correct basic image is that historical capitalism was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating. Rather than let the disintegration continue to uncertain ends, they engaged in radical structural surgery themselves in order to maintain and significantly expand their ability to exploit the direct producers. If this new image is correct, however, it radically amends our perception of the present transition from capitalism to socialism, from a capitalist world-economy to a social world-order.’ (105-106)
- ‘We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it.’ (106)
- ‘The first and most important thing to remember in any such assessment is that the world socialist movement, indeed all forms of anti-systemic movements, as well as all revolutionary and/or socialist states, have themselves been integral products of historical capitalism. They were not structures external to the historical system but the excretion of processes internal to it. Hence they have reflected all the contradictions and constraints of the system. They could not and cannot do otherwise. Their faults, their limitations, their negative effects are part of the balance-sheet of historical capitalism, not of a hypothetical historical system, of a socialist world-order, that does not yet exist. The intensity of the exploitation of labor in revolutionary and/or socialist states, the denial of political freedoms, the persistence of sexism and racism all have to do far more with the fact that these states continue to be located in peripheral and semi-peripheral zones of the capitalist world-economy than with the properties peculiar to a new social system.’ (107-108)
- ‘Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world.’ (109)
- ‘To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.’ (116)
- ‘It is clear that infant mortality has declined significantly in the more industrialized states of the world-system. It seems to have declined in the South as well in the twentieth century, although whether this is true in periods of stagnation in the world-economy or only true of the periods of expansion is less clear. We know that, in the industrialized countries, those aged sixty or older have a greater ability to survive ailments than previously because of advances in medical technology. These two changes – decline of infant mortality and extension of life for those who have reached sixty years – account for a large part, even perhaps all, of the increased average longevity.’ (120)
- ‘We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.’ (120)
- ‘On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an extraordinarily skewed distribution system, substituting medium-run threats for short-term threats for the majority of the world’s population, particularly the 50 to 80 percent at the bottom.’ (121)
- ‘Wars between states and/or people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.’ (123)
- ‘We must take into full account the material polarization of the world-system. The total material wealth has grown immensely, if we mean by material wealth all commodified and commodifiable objects, even if this economic ‘growth’ has been at the cost of largely exhausting some primary natural materials. And this surplus-value has been distributed amongst a far larger percentage of the population than in any previous historical system. Before 1500, in the various historical systems that existed, there was almost always a rich or richer stratum. But, before 1500, this stratum was extremely small in size. Symbolically we may refer to one percent of the population, though in some cases the percentage may have been larger. In capitalist civilization, the number of persons who have shared in the surplus-value has been much larger. This is the group referred to as the middle classes. They are a significant stratum. But it would be quite in error to exaggerate their size. This group, worldwide, has probably never exceeded one-seventh of the world’s population. To be sure, many of these ‘middle strata’ are concentrated in certain geographical zones, and thus, on the core countries of the capitalist world-economy, they may be a majority of the citizenry.’ (123)
- ‘The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.’ (126)
- ‘The basic question that the ‘new science’ raises for our balance sheet is the issue of what scientific questions have not been asked for 500 years, which scientific risks have not been pursued. It raises the question of who has decided what scientific risks were worth taking, and what have been the consequences in terms of the power structures of the world.’ (130)
- ‘If not truth, then at least freedom? Has not capitalist civilization offered the world the first flourishing of a universalizing model of freedom? Is not the very concept of the legal and moral priority or human rights an invention of the modern world? No doubt it is. The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language or world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thisworldliness. Capitalist civilization may well be credited with legitimating such language and of furthering its spread. And yet we know that human rights are sorely lacking in the real practices of the world. It is true that in previous historical systems there was very little pretense to human rights.’ (131)
- ‘Even if we acknowledge that we can show a range of observance of human rights such that there are better and worse locales, what does this then prove? For it is easy to see there exists a correlation between richer and more powerful states and fewer (or less obvious) violations, and of poorer and weaker states and grosser violations. One can use this correlation in two opposite ways. For some it proves that the more ‘capitalist’ the state, the more the acceptance of human rights, and of course then vice versa. But to others it proves in one more way the concentration of advantages in one zone of the world-system, and the concentration of negative effects in the other, itself seen as the outcome of historical capitalism, in which human rights are precisely not a universal value but a reward of privilege.’ (131-132)
- ‘What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world’s population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.’ (132)
- ‘It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.’ (136)
- ‘For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world’s population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of ‘civil wars.’ ’ (136-137)
- ‘It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.’ (148)
- ‘The mode of reconciling the promise of ever-increasing reward for the cadres and the demands of the working classes for a quid pro quo for their loyalty to the state was to offer the latter a small piece of the pie.’ (149)
- ‘If we return to the two faces of individualism – individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all – it can be seen how the two practices (universalism and racism-sexism) emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.’ (153)
- ‘This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.’ (154)
- The way in which these two practices contain each other is that it has always been possible to use the one against the other: to use racism-sexism to prevent universalism from moving too far in the direction of egalitarianism; to use universalism to prevent racism-sexism from moving too far in the direction of a caste system that would inhibit the work force mobility so necessary for the capitalist accumulation process.’ (154)
- ‘When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.’ (155-156)
- ‘We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and including the so-called collapse of the communisms in 1989, the social bifurcation.’ (156-157)
- ‘One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.’ (158)
- ‘In the twenty-five to fifty years to come, we are likely to see different forms of disorder in the South and in the North. In the South, there will probably be no more of the national liberation movements that have dominated the landscape throughout the twentieth century. They have played the historical role, for good or ill. Few believe they have a further role to play. Instead we will see the three options that have come to prominence in the last two decades. I shall call them the Khomeini option, the Saddam Hussein option, and the ‘boat people’ option. In terms of the equilibrium of capitalist civilization, each is equally unsettling. The Khomeini option is the option of radial alterity, of total collective refusal to play by the rules of the world-system. When engaged in by a large enough group with enough collective resources, it can provides a formidable challenge to systemic equilibrium. A single instance of it may perhaps be tamed, if only with great difficulty. But multiple simultaneous explosions would wreak havoc. The Saddam Hussein option is quite different but equally difficult to handle. It is the path of investment in the creation of larger states that are heavily militarized with the intent of engaging in actual warfare with the North. It is not an easy option to pursue and it may seem possible, after the Gulf war, for the North to stand up to it comfortably. Let us not be deceived by appearances. As the option becomes the policy of more and more states, it will be increasingly difficult to counter it easily. As it is, let us not fail to notice that total military defeat was insufficient to end permanently a Saddam Hussein option even in Iraq. Finally there is the ‘boat people’ option, the massive, relentless drive of households to migrate illegally to wealthier climes, to escape from the South to the North.’ (160-161)
- ‘What then will happen in the economically still buoyant North? Recall that we are predicting a decline in the efficiency of state structures, even in the North. The phenomenon of the ‘Third World within’ in the core zones of the capitalist world-economy will become massive as the demographic balance shifts. North America has the largest south contingent today. Western Europe is catching up. The phenomenon is beginning even in Japan, which has erected the strongest legal and cultural barriers of any state in the North. The demographic transformation, caused by weakening state structures, will in turn weaken them further. Social disorder will once again become normal in the core zones. In the last twenty years there has been much discussion on this under the false label of increased crime. What we shall be seeing is increased civil warfare. This is the face of the time of troubles. The scramble for protection has already begun. The states cannot provide it. For one thing they do not have the money; for another they do not have the legitimation. We shall see instead the expansion of private protection armies and police structures – by the multiple cultural groups, by the corporate production structures, by local communities, by religious bodies, and of course by crime syndicates.’ (161-162)
- ‘Three types of social formulae seem plausible in the light of the history of the world-system. One is a sort of neo-feudalism that would reproduce in a far more equilibrated form the developments of the time of troubles – a world of parcellized sovereignties, or considerably more autarkic regions, of local hierarchies. This might be made compatible with maintaining (but probably not furthering) the current relatively high level of technology. Endless accumulation of capital could no longer function as the mainspring of such a system, but it would certainly be an inegalitarian system. What would legitimate it? Perhaps a return to a belief in natural hierarchies. A second formula might be a sort of democratic fascism. Such a formula would involve a caste-like division of the world into two strata, the top one incorporating perhaps a fifth of the world’s population. Within this stratum, there could be a high degree of egalitarian distribution. On the basis of such a community of interests within such a large group, they might have the strength to keep the other 80 percent in the position of a totally disarmed working proletariat. Hitler’s new world order had such a vision in mind, but then it defined itself in terms of too narrow a top stratum. A third formula might be a still more radical worldwide highly decentralized, highly egalitarian world order. This seems the most utopian of the three but it is scarcely to be ruled out.’ (162-163)
- ‘Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think?’ (163)
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