Quotes from The Decline of American Power, by Immanuel Wallerstein

- ‘September 11, 2001, was a dramatic and shocking moment in American history. It was not, however, a defining moment. It was merely on important event within a trajectory that began much earlier, and will go on for several more decades, a long period which we may call that of the decline of US hegemony in a chaotic world. Stated in this fashion, September 11 constituted a shock into awareness, to which too many have responded with denial and with anger.’ (1)

- ‘The United States – everyone says, and correctly – is the strongest military power in the world today, and by far! Yet the fact is that a miscellaneous band of fanatic believers, with rather little money and even less military hardware, was able to launch a serious attack on the homeland of the United States, kill several thousand people, and destroy and damage major buildings.’ (3)

- ‘The world-economy has been in a long relative economic stagnation since the 1970s. One of the things that happened in this period, as in any such period, is that the three areas with powerful economic loci – the United States, Western Europe, and Japan – tried to shift the losses to each other. In the 1970s, Europe did relatively well. In the 1980s, Japan did well, and in the 1990s, the United States did well. But the world-economy as a whole did not do well in any of these periods.’ (4-5)

- ‘The United States in decline? Few people today would believe this assertion. The only ones who do are the US hawks, who argue vociferously for policies to reverse the decline. This belief that the end of US hegemony has already begun does not follow from the vulnerability that became apparent to all on September 11, 2001. In fact, the United States has been fading as a global power since the 1970s, and the US response to the terrorist attacks has merely accelerated this decline.’ (13)

- ‘The economic, political, and military factors that contributed to US hegemony are the same factors that will inexorably produce the coming US decline.’ (13)
- ‘The rise of the United States to global hegemony was a long process that began in earnest with the world recession of 1873. At that time, the United States and Germany began to acquire an increasing share of global markets, mainly at the expense of the steadily receding British economy.’ (13-14)

- ‘The United States’ success as a hegemonic power in the postwar period created the conditions of the nation’s hegemonic demise. This process is captured in four symbols: the war in Vietnam, the revolutions of 1968, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Each symbol built upon the prior one, culminating in the situation in which the United States currently finds itself – a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.’ (17)

- ‘Vietnam was not merely a military defeat or a blight on US prestige. The war dealt a major blow to the United States’ ability to remain the world’s dominant economic power. The conflict was extremely expensive and more or less used up the US gold reserves that had been so plentiful since 1945. Moreover, the United States incurred these costs just as western Europe and Japan experienced major economic upswings. These conditions ended US preeminence in the global economy.’ (18)
- ‘The direct political consequences of the world revolutions of 1968 were minimal, but the geopolitical and intellectual repercussions were enormous and irrevocable.’ (19)

- ‘Domestically, conservatives tried to enact policies that would reduce the cost of labor, minimize environmental constraints on producers, and cut back on state welfare benefits. Actual successes were modest, so conservatives then moved vigorously into the international arena.’ (20)

- ‘Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ and had used the rhetorical bombast of calling for the destruction of the Berlin Wall, but the United States didn’t really mean it and certainly was not responsible for the Soviet Union’s downfall. In truth, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European imperial zone collapsed because of popular disillusionment with the Old left in combination with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to save his regime by liquidating Yalta and instituting internal liberalization.’ (20-21)

- ‘Despite the CIA’s focus on Al Qaeda and the agency’s intelligence expertise, it could not foresee (and therefore prevent) the execution of the terrorist strikes. Or so CIA Director George Tenet argued. This testimony can hardly comfort the US government or the American people.’ (22)

- ‘Over the two hundred years, the United States acquired a considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s.’ (26)

- ‘The United States faces two possibilities during the next ten years: it can follow the hawks’ path, with negative consequences for all, but especially for itself, or it can realize that the negatives are too great.’ (26)

- ‘If the United States still invades Iraq and is then forced to withdraw, it will look even more ineffectual.’ (27)

- ‘President Bush’s options appear extremely limited, and there is little doubt that the United States will continue to decline as a decisive force in world affairs over the next decade. The real question is not whether US hegemony is waning but whether the United States can devise a way to descend gracefully, with minimum damage to the world, and to itself.’ (27) [pp. 13-27 from essay “The Eagle has Crash Landed”]

- ‘The path imperial conquest has never worked as a viable path to dominance within the framework of the capitalist world-economy, as Napoleon had previously learned. The world-imperial thrust has the short-term advantage of military vigor and precipitateness. It has the middle-term disadvantage of being very expensive and of uniting all the opposition forces.’ (32)

- ‘In the immediate post-1945 years, Communist parties showed themselves to be extremely strong in a large number of European countries. Communist parties won 25 to 40 percent of the vote in the early postwar elections in France, Italy, Belgium, Finland, and Czechoslovakia – the result both of their previous strength in the interwar years and of their wartime role in animating a good part of the resistance against Nazism and fascism.’ (33)

- ‘The Marshall plan, let us nonetheless remember, was offered by Marshall to all the allies. Did the US really want the Soviet Union to accept? I doubt it very much, and remember hearing a State Department spokesman admit as much publicly at the time. In any case, the Soviet Union decline to be part of the proposal, and made sure none of the countries in its zone responded favorably.’ (36)

- ‘The American century was a geopolitical reality, one in which the other so-called superpower, the USSR, had a role, a voice, but not really in the power to do anything but strut around in its cage; and then, in 1989, the cage imploded. With this implosion, however, the underlying political justification for US hegemony disappeared as well, and the geopolitics of the world-system would now change.’ (37-38)

- ‘Let us turn to the second great happening of the twentieth century, the exact opposite of United States hegemony: the slow but steady pushback by the non-Western world of pan-European dominance. The height of the ‘expansion of Europe’ was actually circa 1900, a full century ago. It was then that WEB Du Bois was proclaiming that ‘the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line.’ No one believed him at the time, but he was absolutely right. Even before the First World War, there were a number of so-caleld revolutions that should have made analysts take notice: Mexico, Afghanistan, Persia, China, and, not least, the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. By then there was already a pan-extra-Western world mutual cheering society such that these events were noticed far and wide and served to encourage further action against pan-European dominance.’ (38)

- ‘The two twentieth-century trends become conjoined in the last decades of this century. The collapse of the Communisms in 1989-1991 was the climax of the process of disillusionment that had surfaced in 1968. Also and simultaneously, however, it sounded the knell of US global power, removing its political underpinnings in two easy. On the one hand, it ended the political justification for a continuing subordination to US leadership of its two main economic rivals, a now revitalized western Europe and Japan. And on the other hand, it ended the constraints that the antisystemic movements had placed on mass political activity, which they had been channeling and in reality largely depoliticizing. So we can say that in 2000, by comparison with 1900, the pan-European world was actually much weaker geopolitically and culturally, but the rest of the world had spent the ammunition it had mobilized and was wallowing in economic and political distress without the certainty that these movements had once had: that history was on their side.’ (40)

- ‘The period 1945 to today is that of a typical Kondratieff cycle of the capitalist world-economy, which has had, as always, two parts: an A-phase, or upward swing or economic expansion, which in this case went fro 1945 to 1967/1973, and a B-phase, or downward swing or economic contraction, which has been going from 1967/1973 to today and probably will continue on for several more years. The period 1450 to today, by contrast, marks the life cycle of the capitalist world-economy, which had its period of genesis, its period of normal development, and now has entered into its period of terminal crisis.’ (46)

- ‘Both sides were free, indeed encouraged, to engage in vigorous, reciprocally hostile rhetoric, whose chief function seemed to be to consolidate the political control of the United States and the USSR over their respective zones.’ (48)

- ‘The biggest blow to the United States, the hardest to absorb, was the economic recovery and then flourishing of western Europe and Japan. By the 1960s the productivity gap between these countries and the United States had been more or less eliminated. The western European countries and Japan recovered control over their national markets and began to compete effectively with US products in the markets of third countries. They even began to be competitive within the US home market. The automaticity of US economic advantage had thus largely disappeared by the late 1960s. The increase in world production resulting from the recovery and expansion of western European and Japanese production led to a glut on the world market and a sharp decline in the profitability of many of the principal industrial sectors, such as steel, automobiles, and electronics. The consequent downturn in the world-economy was marked by two major events: the necessity from the United States to go off the gold standard, and the world revolution of 1968. The first was caused by the fact that the politico-military expenses of enforcing US hegemony plus the lessened competitivity in world markets turned out to be quite expensive and thus drained the US financial surplus. The United States had to begin to work hard politically to maintain the economic advantages it had had so easily in the A-phase, and began by pulling in its monetary belt somewhat.’ (49)

- ‘The crucial measure of a stagnation in the world-economy is that profits from production drop considerably from their levels at which they were in the preceding period, the A-phase. This has a series of clear consequences. First, persons with capital shift their primary locus of seeking profit and the productive sphere to the financial sphere. Second, there is significantly increased unemployment worldwide. Third, there occur significant shifts of loci of production from higher-wage areas to lower-wage areas (what used to be called the phenomenon of ‘runaway factories.’) This trio of consequences can be seen to have occurred worldwide since circa 1970.’ (50-51)

- ‘Another part [of 1970s oil profits] went into bank accounts, largely in the United States and Germany. The increased funds in the banks had to be lent to someone. These banks aggressively peddled loans to the finance ministers of poorer countries suffering from balance-of-payment difficulties, acute unemployment, and consequent internal unrest. These countries borrowed extensively, but then found it difficult to repay the loans, on which interest compounded until debt payments rose to intolerable levels by 1980.’ (52)

- ‘Saddam Hussein decided to take advantage of the post-Yalta reality, directly challenging the United States militarily by invading Kuwait. He was able to do this because the USSR was no longer in a position to restrain him. He did this because, in the short run, it promised to solve the problems of Iraq’s heavy debts to Kuwait and to increase its oil income. And he did this because he hoped to use this invasion in the middle run as the basis for a military unification of the Arab world under his aegis, a unification he saw as a necessary step in a direct military challenge to the North in general, and to the United States in particular.’ (55-56)

- ‘The Gulf War demonstrated that the US could not afford financially to conduct such operations. The entire military bill of the US was borne by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, and Germany. And the war demonstrated that the US could not remove Saddam inside Iraq because it was unwilling to send troops into the interior of Iraq.’ (56)
- ‘Once the world-system is deruralized, the only option for capitalists is to pursue the class struggles where they are presently located. And here the odds are against them.’ (60)

- ‘The object of racism is not to exclude people, much less to exterminate them. The object of racism is to keep people within the system, but as inferiors.’ (78)

- ‘When the world-economy entered its long Kondratieff B-phase in the 1970s, and unemployment grew for the first time since 1945, the immigrants became a convenient scapegoat. The far-right forces, which had been absolutely illegitimate and marginal since 1945, suddenly began to reemerge, sometimes within the mainline conservative parties.’ (80)

- ‘These arguments seem incredibly contemporary. All we have to do is substitute the term democracy for the term Christianity.’ (84)

- ‘The capitalist world-economy is a historical system that has combined an axial division of labor integrated through a less than perfectly autonomous world-market combined with an interstate system composed of allegedly sovereign states, a geo-culture that has legitimated a scientific ethos as the underpinnings of economic transformations and profit making, and liberal reformism as a mode of containing popular discontent with the steadily increasing socioeconomic polarization that capitalist development has entailed. This system originated in western Europe and over the centuries expanded to incorporate the entire globe.’ (107)

- ‘The world revolution of 1968 constituted the world reaction to this double reality: the worldwide hegemony of the United States and the establishment of its world order on the one hand; and the worldwide realization by the antisystemic movements of stage one, the coming to power of the various movements often grouped together under the label of the Old Left, on the other hand. The revolutionaries condemned the first actor, the United States, for its oppressiveness, and they condemned the second actor, the Old Left movements, for their inadequacy as opposition movements to, if not their collusion with, the hegemonic project.’ (109)

- ‘The Zionist movement came into existence more or less at the same time, the turn of the twentieth century, as Arab nationalist movements. It shared much of the same rhetoric – the need to create an independence state, the sense of oppression by the powerful of the world-system, the sense that there should be an internal transformation of the psychology of the Jewish people, the ambiguous (and reticent) relationship with Judaism as a religion. In the Zionist imaginary, the Arabs did not play a real role before 1948. The enemy was the Christian world, and of course, after 1918, Great Britain in particular. But this imaginary changed radically with the creation of the state of Israel. The military resistance of the Arab states to the creation of Israel meant that for Zionists the primary opponent because the Arab world, and this was largely an Islamic world. This attitude was all the more reinforced by the Israeli victory in the 1967 wars, which brought a large Arab population under Israeli rule.’ (113)

- ‘They take not of the continuing role of the United States in the region, and of the powerful presence of Israel, which is regarded as primarily an outpost of the West, a settler state akin to the Crusader states of the Middle Ages. And they say, second, that this situation is abetted and indeed made possible by the very regimes that assert they are opposing this – not only the secularist regimes, be it noted, presumably religiously based regimes such as that of Saudi Arabia. Hence, what Islamists say is that if one wishes to overthrow outside oppression and foster internal renewal, one had to get rid of these modernist Arab regimes, and they include in this category the Wahhabites. Of course, this is the same thing that Ayatollah Khomeini said about the Shah’s regime in Iran, and the Taliban have said about the pseudo-Communist regime in Afghanistan, as well as about its various successors. Thus far, in the Arab world no Islamic regime has come to power, except in the Sudan.’ (115-116)

- ‘If one looks at the ways these Islamist groups have mobilized politically, one can see that they have not merely put forth an alternative rhetoric, and hence an alternative analysis of the mode of functioning of the modern world-system to that of modernist movements they have been opposing, but that they are also saying that these modernist regimes have failed in the primary task of modern states: providing for the minimal on-going welfare and security of the citizens. It is well known that the Islamic organizations provide extensive social service to those in need and frequently fill serious voids in state functions.’ (116)

- ‘The historic anti-Semitism of the Christian world, which was pervasive virtually from the beginning of Christianity, reached a morally repulsive acme in Nazism and the Holocaust, and this caused a very deep reaction of guilt. It would be a mistake to underestimate the role this sense of Christian guilt plays in the current situation. It has led to dramatic changes in the rhetoric of a range of major social groups in the West – secular intellectuals, the Catholic church, and fundamentalist Protestant sects, some of whom are now talking a language of the necessity of the existence of the state of Israel as a prerequisite for the second coming of Christ.’ (119)

- ‘It was of course in revolt against the dominance of religions that Enlightenment humanism-scientism staked its claim to a truly universal universalism, one to which all persons had equal access via their rational insight and understanding of eternal verities, via their verification of these truths in ways that all could replicate. The problem here, as we know, is that when all persons exercised their insight and understanding they came up with different lists of truths. Of course one could (and did) argue that this situation was temporary, to be resolved by rational debate. But in practice, this solution did not seem to eliminate the problem. And Enlightenment humanism-scientism was thereby forced to create a hierarchy of human beings, according to their degree of rationality.’ (134)
- ‘In the last twenty years we have seen how the culture of protest can be commodified as well. One doesn’t assert one’s identity, one pays to assert it, and one pays to observe others asserting theirs, and some people even sell us our identity.’ (141)

- ‘Is the culture that we pay to display the expression of our heritage or our souls or even our political demands or is it the internalization of values imposed on us for the profit of those who gain rent from the transmission of these displays?’ (141)

- ‘In a socially constructed world, it is we who construct the world.’ (147)

- ‘Democracy has become everyone’s slogan today. Who does not claim that democracy is a good thing, and which politician does not assert that the government of which he is a part practices it and the party that he represents wishes to maintain and extend it? It is hard to remember that not so very long ago, in the period from the French Revolution up to 1848 at least, ‘democracy’ was a word used only by dangerous radicals. ‘Democrat’ was the label of multiple extreme-left organizations in the 1830s and 1840s.’ (149)

- ‘The principal debate among those who controlled the political machinery whenever such a widening of suffrage was discussed was always one between the fearful (who paraded as the tough-minded) and the sophisticated. The fearful were those who argued that allowing wider access to suffrage would result in significantly negative changes in the control of the state machinery, putting political power in the hands of persons who would undo the existing social system. This was the theme of the ‘unwashed masses’ threatening to displace persons of social substance. The sophisticated were those who argued that, on the contrary, once they were accorded suffrage, the ‘dangerous classes’ would become, by the very fact of their nominal inclusion in the political process, less dangerous, and the dreaded political changes would not occur or would turn out to be minor.’ (154)

- ‘Middle strata are not, it is important to note, evenly distributed across the world-system. In a Third World country, at most 5 percent of the population might fall within such a category, whereas in the wealthiest states, perhaps 40 to 60 percent of the population would fall within such a category.’ (156)

- ‘Two-thirds of the world’s people do not have liberal states because of the structure of the capitalist world-economy, which makes it impossible for them to have such political regimes.’ (164)

- ‘The exact definition of value-neutrality is subject to much debate, but the fundamental idea is that the task of gathering and interpreting their meaning should be pursued regardless of whether or not the results validate or counterpoise themselves to values espoused by the researcher, by the larger community, or by the state…A further subargument is that is thereupon becomes the moral duty of the scholar to present fairly to the public the results of this research, whatever the implications this may have for public affairs.’ (174)

- ‘The social sciences, which are strictly empirical sciences, are the least fitted to presume to save the difficulty of making a choice, and they should therefore not create the impression that they can do so.’ Weber (175)

- ‘The second possible stance concerning intellectual repression is quite different, since it rejects the concept of value-neutrality. This view has come historically from both the political left and the right and constitutes a claim that value-neutrality is a figleaf for the domination of centrist liberalism within the sphere of ideas.’ (178)

- ‘Every social class, coming into existence of the original basis of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates within itself, organically, one or more groups of intellectuals who give it homogeneity and consciousness of its function not only in the economic field but in the social and political field as well.’ Gramsci (178)

- ‘Every working capitalist knows that if a market is truly as free as Adam Smith defined such freedom – a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and total transparence of operations, including full knowledge by all buyers and sellers of the true state of the market – it would be absolutely impossible for anyone to make any profit whatsoever.’ (180-181)

- ‘What is necessary in  order to make a profit is some kind of at least partial restriction of the market, some degree of monopolization. The greater the restriction of monopolization, the greater the potential profit available to sellers.’ (181)

- ‘The role of the states is central to everyone’s maneuvers, states as guarantors or begetters of monopolies as well as ‘neutral’ legitimators of monopolistic practices, but also states as disrupters of monopolies. Having the state on one’s side is the royal road to large-scale profit. And if the state is not on your side but on someone else’s side, then one’s primary need as an entrepreneur is to change the politics of the states. Capitalists require states in order to make serious profits, but states that are on their side and not someone else’s side.’ (181)

- ‘The hardest thing is to distinguish between what is simply the continuation of cyclical patterns that are part of the old system and what is truly new. It is made harder by the fact that one of the characteristics of our existing world-system is its ideology of newness, one of whose expressions is the inclination of scholars and scientists and indeed of publicists to celebrate every twist in the real world as ‘new’ and therefore either ‘wonderful’ or ‘terrible.’ We need a certain coolness in our appreciation.’ (186-187)

- ‘Our choices determine what is formally rational, the inner domain of the scholar/scientist. What it means is that we have to open outward the number of factors we have to take into account in our analyses, as well as in our prescriptions.’ (187)

- ‘We cannot escape the necessity of creating a worldwide family of antisystemic movements that can have no, or anyway, little, hierarchical structure.’ (190)

- ‘Here again there is a role for the intellectual. To the degree that the intellectuals can pull themselves back from the passions of the moment, they may be able to serve as the interpreters between the multiple movements, the ones who translate the priorities of each into the language of the other and into the mutual language that will enable all of them to understand the intellectual, the moral, and then the political issues they confront.’ (191)

- ‘The emulation of American ways by others is considered a big plus when Americans assess what is going on in other countries. Daniel Boone plus the Peace Corps comprise the bases of an evaluation of comparative political economy.’ (196)
- ‘Until [9/11], Americans could afford to ignore the verbal attacks so rampant in the world as the babblings of fools. But fools had now become villains. Furthermore, the villains had been initially successful, and this was the second great shock. We were supposed to be in a position to be able to ignore such criticisms because we were essentially invulnerable, and we have now discovered that we are not.’ (199)

- ‘Success is a poor guide to wise policy. Failure at least often leads to reflection; success seldom does.’ (204)

- ‘Fifty years ago, US hegemony in the world-system was based on a combination of productive efficiency that outstripped by far that of any rivals, a world-political agenda that was warmly endorsed by its allies in Europe and Asia, and military superiority. Today, the productive efficiency of US enterprises faces very extensive competition, principally from the enterprises of its closest allies. As a result, the world-political agenda of the United States is no longer so warmly endorsed and is often clearly contested, even by its allies, especially given the disappearance of the Soviet Union. What remains for the moment is military superiority.’ (204)

- ‘What had caused this change was the end of US economic dominance of the world-economy, combined with the military defeat of the United States in Vietnam. Geopolitical reality had changed. The US government could no longer concentrate on maintaining, even less on expanding, its power; instead its prime goal became preventing a too-rapid erosion of its power – both in the world-economy and in the military arena.’ (206)

- ‘Globally, a counterthrust was launched. It involved the aggressive assertion of neoliberalism and the so-called Washington Consensus, the transformation of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) into the World Trade Organization, the Davos meetings, and the spreading of the concept of globalization with its corollary, TINA (there is no alternative). Essentially, all these efforts combined amounted to a dismantlement of the ‘developmentalist’ policies throughout the world, and particularly in the peripheral zones of the world-economy. In the short run, that is, in the 1980s and 1990s, this counteroffensive led by the US government seemed to succeed.’ (206-207)

- ‘These policies on the front of the world-economy were matched by a persistent world-military policy that might be summarized as the ‘antiproliferation’ policy…The United States has had a simple straightforward policy. By hook or by crook, by force or by bribery, it wishes to deny everybody else access to these weapons. It has obviously not been successful, but its efforts over the past years have at least slowed down the process of proliferation.’ (207)

- ‘I do not believe that America and Americans are the cause of all the world’s miseries and injustices. I do believe they are their prime beneficiaries. And this is the fundamental problem of the United States as a nation located in a world of nations.’ (209)

- ‘We have spent the last thirty years insisting very loudly that we are still hegemonic and that everyone needs to continue to acknowledge it. If one is truly hegemonic, one does not need to make such a request. We have wasted the past thirty years. What the United States needs to do now is to learn how to live with the new reality – that it no longer has the power to decide unilaterally what is good for everyone. It may not even be in a position to decide unilaterally what is good for itself. It has to come to terms with the world.’ (213)

- ‘There is no single American tradition nor single American set of values. There are, and always have been, many Americans. We each of us remember and appeal to the Americans we prefer.’ (214)
- ‘The actual profit depends upon three costs: the cost of labor, the cost of inputs and infrastructure, and the cost of taxation. Now suppose we were to measure these costs globally as percentages of total sales prices and arrive hypothetically at average levels. This is an operation no one has ever done, and it is perhaps not doable. But it is possible to conceive of it, and to approximate the results. I would suggest to you that over five hundred years and across the capitalist world-economy as a whole, the three costs have all been steadily rising as a percentage of total value produced. And the net results is that we are in, and ever more coming into, a global profit squeeze that is threatening the ability of capitalists to accumulate capital.’ (226)

- ‘One can regard the entire neoliberal offensive of the last two decades as one gigantic attempt to slow down the increasing costs of production – primarily by lowering the cost of wages and taxation ad secondarily by lowering the costs of inputs via technological advance.’ (226)

- ‘Wages rise because workers organize. This is an ancient truism, but it is nonetheless accurate. The modes of organizing are multiple. Whenever workers’ syndical action becomes too expensive for capitalists, and particularly in Kondratieff B-phases, when global competition is more acute, capitalists have sought to ‘run away’ – from the city to the countryside, from loci where workers have been well organized to other loci where they have been less well organized. If one regards the process over five hundred years, one sees that it has taken the form of transferring productive processes regularly (but not at all continuously) to zones newly incorporated into the capitalist world-economy.’ (227)

- ‘Once these now displaced workers have been in the new work zone (usually an urban one) for some time (say twenty-five to fifty years), they shift their standards of comparison, learn the ways of the new work world, and begin in turn to organize and demand higher wage levels.’ (228)

- ‘Taxes have been going up, as we are constantly reminded by all and sundry. It matteres not that taxes are unevenly distributed. They have been going up for just about everyone, and this includes all producers. They have been going up for one simple reason, which political scientists refer to as the democratization of the world and whose consequence has been the expansion of the welfare state. People have been demanding higher state outputs on education, health, and guarantees of lifetime income. Furthermore, the threshold of demands has been steadily rising and spreading geographically to include more and more parts of the world. This has been the price of relative political instability, and there is no indication that the pressure from the bottom is letting up in any way.’ (229)

- ‘The French Revolution has proclaimed as its slogan the trinity ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’ What has in practice happened ever since is that most people have tacitly dropped the ‘fraternity’ part of the slogan, on the grounds that it was mere sentimentality. And the liberal center has insisted that ‘liberty’ had to take priority over (defined in purely political terms) was the only thing that mattered and that ‘equality’ represented a danger for ‘liberty’ and had to be downplayed or dropped altogether. There was flimflam in this analysis, and the world left fell for it. The world left, and in particular its Leninist variant, responded to this centrist liberal discourse by inverting it, and insisting that (economic) equality had to take precedence over (political) liberty. This was entirely the wrong answer. The correct answer is that there is no way whatsoever to separate liberty from equality. No one can be ‘free’ to choose, if his or her choices are constrained by an unequal position. And no one can be ‘equal’ if he or she does not have the degree of freedom that others have, that is, does not enjoy the same political rights and the same degree of participation in real decisions.’ (236-237)

- ‘I suggest there may be another route, one that has in fact been tried partially and is rather promising. I think one might be able to get most of the advantages of private ownership yet eliminate most of the negatives by ensconcing productive activities within medium-sized, decentralized, competitive nonprofit structures. The key is that they would be nonprofit, that is, no one would receive ‘dividends’ or ‘profit distributions’ and any surplus either would go back to the organization or would be taxed by the collectivity for reinvestment elsewhere. How might such structures work? Well, actually we know how, in the sense that there are parallels. Most major universities and hospitals in the United States have worked on such principles for two centuries now.’ (243)

- ‘Capitalism has been a program for the commodification of everything. The capitalists have not yet fulfilled it entirely, but they have gone a long way in that direction, with all the negative consequences we know. Socialism ought to be a program for the decommodification of everything.’ (244)

- ‘1. After five hundred years of existence, the world capitalist system is, for the first time, in true systemic crisis, and we find ourselves in an age of transition. 2. The outcome is intrinsically uncertain, but nonetheless, and also for the first time in these five hundred years, there is a real perspective of fundamental change, which might be progressive but will not necessarily be so. 3. The principal problem for the world left at this juncture is that the strategy for the transformation of the world which it had evolved in the nineteenth century is in tatters, and it is consequently acting thus far with uncertainty and weakness, and in a generalized mild state of depression.’ (249)

- ‘Popular movements should not spare the left-of-center governments they have elected from these demands. Just because it is a friendlier government than an outright right government does not mean that we should pull our punches. Pressing friendly governments pushes right-wing opposition forces to the center-left. Not pushing them pushes center-left governments to the center-right.’ (254)

- ‘Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century both types of movement went through a parallel series of great debates over strategy that ranged those whose perspectives were ‘state-oriented’ against those who saw the state as an intrinsic enemy and pushed instead for an emphasis on individual transformation. For the social movements, this was the debate between the Marxists and the anarchists; for the national movements, that between political and cultural nationalists. What happened historically in these debates – and this is the fourth similarity – was that those holding the ‘state-oriented’ position won out. The decisive argument in each case was that the immediate source of real power was located in the state apparatus and that any attempt to ignore its political centrality was doomed to failure, since the state would successfully suppress any thrust toward anarchism or cultural nationalism. In the late nineteenth century, these groups enunciated a so-called two-step strategy; first gain power within the state structure; then transform the world. This was as true for the social as for the national movements.’ (260-261)

- ‘These three cleavages are: 1. The struggle among the so-called Triad – the United States, the European Union, and Japan – in their search to be the primary locus of capital accumulation in the coming decades; 2. the struggle between North and South, or between core zones and other zones of the world-economy, given the continuing polarization – economic, social, and demographic – of the world-system; 3. the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre about the kind of world-system we collectively intend to build.’ (273)

- ‘What we have therefore is a geopolitical Triadic cleavage in which the United States is likely to do least well over the next twenty or thirty years. American military clout will be less and less useful in reversing this underlying economic shift. In such a situation, the real competition will be between western Europe and Japan, and each will seek to have the United States on its side. I continue to believe that a US-Japan economic alliance is more probable than a US-Europe alliance. But in either case, the US is not likely to be the leading partner, hard as it may be for Americans (and perhaps others) to envisage such a scenario today.’ (280)

- ‘The North maintains this structure by its monopolization of advanced productive processes, its control of world financial institutions, its dominance of world scholarship and world media, and, most important, by its military strength.’ (281)

- ‘We must ask why the US-led forces did not march on Baghdad in 1991. There was a series of reasons that seemed to persuade the US government that this would not be a wise option. 1. It would be costly, in military terms, and probably lead to considerable loss of life, which in turn would be unacceptable to the American public, and would revive the so-called Vietnam syndrome. 2. It might be impossible to install a replacement regime in power that could stabilize the situation and hold the country together. And neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia wanted Iraq to fall apart because of the consequences each would suffer were there a Kurdish state in the north and a Shiite state in the south. 2. A prolonged war would probably be immediately destabilizing for a large number of regimes in the whole Middle East. 4. A replacement regime might only be able to survive with an interim occupation army of US-led troops, which might cause insignificant internal US problems.’ (286)

- ‘The analysis of the hawks that has driven US world policy since September 11 and perhaps will do so for several years to come is that all these considerations were essentially invalid, and that acting on the basis of them permitted a political victory for Saddam Hussein. That is why the United States is now engaged in marching on Baghdad. We shall soon see whose predictions are most valid. Should things turn out as both Saddam Hussein and the first Bush administration expected they would, the march on Baghdad will lead to a major political defeat for the United States. It will then encourage other states in the South to follow the example of Saddam Hussein in his cautiously bold Bismarckian strategy. In any case, we may be sure that the drive to acquire nuclear weapons is fundamental to the tactics of the stronger states in the South.’ (286-287)

- ‘The drive toward Korean unification is as strong as was the drive for German unification. The two situations are not identical, and the Korean case is informed by the Koreans’ observations of what happened in Germany. But new generations are arriving in power, and Korean unification is definitely on the agenda, in one form or another. A reunited Korea would be a powerful actor in East Asia, and might make more possible an East Asian trinity of China-Korea-Japan, if one because the presence of Korea would cushion the inevitable tensions between China and Japan.’ (292)

- ‘What about the alternative view, that it’s all about oil? No doubt oil is a crucial element in the operation of the world-economy. And no doubt the United States, like all the other major powers, would like to control the oil situation as much as it can. And no doubt, were Saddam Hussein to be overthrown, there might be some reshuffling of the world’s oil cards. But is the game worth the candle? There are three things about oil that are important: participating in the profits of the oil industry; regulating the world price of oil (which has such a great impact on all other kinds of production); and access of supply (and potential denial of access to others). In all three matters, the United Statse is doing quite well right now. American oil firms have the lion’s share of the world profits at the present time. The price of oil has been regulated to US preferences for most of the period since 1945, via the efforts of the government of Saudi Arabia. And the United States has a fairly good hold on the strategic control of world oil supply. In each of these three domains, perhaps the US position could be improved. But can this slight improvement possibly be worth the financial, economic, and political cost of the war? Precisely because Bush and Cheney have been in the oil business, they must surely be aware of how small the advantage to be gained would be. Oil can be at most a collateral benefit of an enterprise undertaken for other motives.’ (297-298)

- ‘So why, then? We start with the reasoning of the hawks. They believe that the world position of the United States has been steadily declining since at least the Vietnam War. They believe that the basic explanation for this decline is the fact that US governments have been weak and vacillating in their world policies. (They believe this is true even of the Reagam administration, although they do not dare to say this aloud.) They see a remedy, a simple remedy. The United States must assert itself forcefully, to demonstrate its iron will and its overwhelming military superiority. Once that is done, the rest of the world will recognize. The Europeans will fall into line. The potential nuclear powers will abandon their projects. The US dollar will once again rise supreme. The Islamic fundamentalists will fade away or be crushed. And we shall enter into a new era of prosperity and high profits. We need to understand that the hawks really believe all of this, and with a great sense of certitude and determination. That is why all the public debate worldwide about the wisdom of launching a war has been falling on deaf ears. They are deaf because they are absolutely sure that everyone else is wrong and, furthermore, that shortly everyone else will realize that they have been wrong.’ (299)

- ‘The full-speed-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes attitude of the Bush administration has already had found major negative effects on the world position of the United States. Anyone with the most elementary knowledge of geopolitics would know that, after 1945, the one coalition the United States had to fear was that of France, Germany, and Russia…George Bush has overcome the obstacles and achieved the realization of this nightmare for the United States. For the first time since 1945, these three powers have lined up publicly against the US on a major issue…The logical riposte to a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis would be for the United States to enter into a geopolitical alliance with China, Korea, and Japan. The US hawks are making sure that such a coalition will not be easily achieved, however. They have goaded North Korea into displaying its teeth of steel, offended South Korea by not taking its concerns seriously, made China more suspicious than before, and led Japan to think about becoming a nuclear power. Bravo! Then there’s oil. Controlling the world price of oil is the most important of the three oil issues mentioned earlier. Saudi Arabia has been the key. Saudi Arabia has done the work for the US for fifty years for a simple reason: The dynasty needed the military protection of the Americans. The US rush to war, its obvious ricochet effect on the Muslim world, the open disdain of the US hawks for the Saudis, and the Bush administration’s overwhelming support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have led the Saudis to wonder, out loud, whether US support is not an albatross rather than a mode of sustaining them. For the first time, the faction in the royal house that favors loosening its links with the US seems to be gaining the upper hand…Finally, American administrations have been valiantly trying to stop nuclear proliferation for fifty years. The Bush administration has managed in two short years to get North Korea, and now Iran, to speed up their programs, and not to be afraid to indicate this publicly.’ (300-301)

- ‘When George Bush leaves office, he will be leaving the United States significantly weaker than when he assumed office. He will have turned a slow decline into a much speedier one.’ (302)

- ‘Priority number two is the home front. The hawks want to shape the US government budget so that it has no room for anything but military expenditures. And they will move on all fronts to cut other expenses – by reducing federal taxes and privatizing as much of Social Security and Medicare as they can. They also want to limit the expression of opposition at home – to give themselves a freer hand to deal with the rest of the world, and to ensure their perpetual hold on power.’ (305)
- ‘The structural decline has two essential components. One is economic, and one is political-cultural. The economic component is really quite simple. In terms of basic capabilities – available capital, human skills, research and development capacity – western Europe and Japan/East Asia are at a competitive level with the United States. The US monetary advantage – resting on the dollar’s use as a reserve currency – is receding and will probably disappear entirely soon. The US advantage in the military sphere translates into a long-term disadvantage in the economic sphere, since it diverts capital and innovation away from productive enterprises.’ (306)

- ‘For thirty years, the US has slowed down this creeping economic decline relative to its major competitors by political-cultural means. It based its claims to do this on residual legitimacy (as the leader of the free world) and the continuing existence of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined these claims severely and unleashed the growing anarchy of the world system.’ (306-307)

- ‘On legitimacy, note two things. In March, the United States had to withdraw a resolution from the UN Security Council, which it introduced in hopes of getting a vote in support for the attack on Iraq. This was an issue that was really important to the US, one in which it invested all its efforts, including repeated telephone calls by George Bush to leaders around the world. It was the first time in 50 years that the United States was unable to get a simple nine-vote majority on the Security Council. It was a humiliation.’ (307)

- ‘In the history of the world, military power never has been sufficient to maintain supremacy. Legitimacy is essential, at least legitimacy recognized by a significant part of the world. With their preemptive war, the American hawks have undermined very fundamentally the US claim to legitimacy. And thus they have weakened the United States irremediably in the geopolitical arena.’ (308)