The Global Left: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow 9781138390386, 9781138390393, 9781003167297

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgment
Part I The Global Left: Past, Present, and Future
1 Capitalism and Antisystemic Movements: 1789–1968
2 Structural Crisis of the Modern World-System: Dilemmas of the Left
3 Bifurcation and Collective Choice: Tactics of the Transition
Part II Appreciations/Critiques
4 Bifurcation in the “End” of Capitalism
5 The Left: Its Immediate Future
6 The Global Left: A Comment
7 Immanuel Wallerstein on the Global Left and Right
8 The Global and the Left: Possible Encounters?
9 The Hypothesis of Decline
10 Response to Appreciations/Critiques
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

The Global Left

In The Global Left: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, Immanuel Wallerstein takes stock of the practices of the left, historically in the time of its great ideals and today in the midst of the global crisis of capitalism. He underlines the urgency of seeing the emergence of a global and united left that can pave the way out of the centuries-old domination of capital, considering antisystemic movements, dilemmas of the left in relation to the structural crisis of the modern world-system, and tactics and strategies for political action. The book includes new essays by Étienne Balibar, James K. Galbraith, Johan Galtung, Nilüfer Göle, Pablo González Casanova, and Michel Wieviorka in conversation with Wallerstein’s core ideas. Immanuel Wallerstein was Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019. From 1976 to 1999, he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY), where he was also a founder and director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. From 1975 until his death, he was Senior Research Scholar at the Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris, and intermittently served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He held positions at many universities worldwide throughout his career and was awarded 15 honorary degrees. Wallerstein served as President of the International Sociological Association from 1994 to 1998 and received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association in 2003. In 2014, the International Sociological Association awarded him the first ever Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. During the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, whose object was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years. His books, which have been translated into dozens of languages, include the world-renowned four-volume study, The Modern World-System, and, cowritten with Étienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class. He is considered to this day one of the most influential sociologists of his era.

The Global Left Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Immanuel Wallerstein

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Immanuel Wallerstein to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-39038-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-39039-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16729-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297 Typeset in Garamond by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Foreword by Michel Wieviorka Acknowledgment

vii ix

PART I

The Global Left: Past, Present, and Future 1 Capitalism and Antisystemic Movements: 1789–1968

1 3

I M M A N U E L WA L L E R S T E I N

2 Structural Crisis of the Modern World-System: Dilemmas of the Left

19

I M M A N U E L WA L L E R S T E I N

3 Bifurcation and Collective Choice: Tactics of the Transition

29

I M M A N U E L WA L L E R S T E I N

PART II

Appreciations/Critiques 4 Bifurcation in the “End” of Capitalism

41 43

ÉTIENNE BALIBAR

5 The Left: Its Immediate Future PA B L O G O N Z Á L E Z C A S A N OVA

71

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Contents

6 The Global Left: A Comment

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JAMES K. GALBRAITH

7 Immanuel Wallerstein on the Global Left and Right

80

J O H A N G A LT U N G

8 The Global and the Left: Possible Encounters?

83

N I LÜ F E R G Ö L E

9 The Hypothesis of Decline

91

MICHEL WIEVIORKA

10 Response to Appreciations/Critiques

95

I M M A N U E L WA L L E R S T E I N

Notes on Contributors

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Foreword Michel Wieviorka

In 2013, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme decided to honor those of its friends who had exercised a major intellectual influence at the global level by inviting them to participate in a series of major lectures titled “Thinking Globally” (“Penser Global”). With the agreement of Philippe Boutry, the then-President of Paris I Université, I invited Immanuel Wallerstein to contribute; the lectures were held at the Sorbonne and he chose as his title “The Global Left”—a title that well summarized the project behind them. My reasons for extending this invitation were many and various. The most important, of course, were intellectual in nature and were themselves in many respects part of a shared history. The FMSH was created in 1963 by Fernand Braudel, the historian of the longue durée and the world-economy. Immanuel Wallerstein was always very close to him, so much so, indeed, that today he appears to be his leading successor, someone who continues to promote the ideas that were at the origin of our FMSH. The other reasons are political—but not in any way party political. In these times, when we tend to be focusing on what we would have to refer to as the “Global Right,” and when we are in the context of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, our concerns now extend to sovereignism, nationalism, right-wing extremism, or populism. In these times, also when left-wing ideas have difficulty in making themselves heard, while the forces that could claim to be on the left seem to be losing momentum, the issues raised by Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues can only be salutary. Finally, there are other, institutional reasons. Given his intellectual proximity to and constant companionship with the FMSH, in 2008 Immanuel Wallerstein had no hesitation in mobilizing hundreds of leading figures in the world of research at the international level to protest against a project of relocation of our institution; this mobilization contributed to preventing it. When the Friends of the FMSH was

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created, it was only natural that its members chose to appoint him as president, which also made him one of the members of the Advisory Board (Conseil de Surveillance) of the FMSH. The latter owes him a considerable debt. Immanuel Wallerstein, a man of dialogue and friendship, expressed the wish that some of his friends be enabled to react to his analyses. This is how the publication took its final form: it includes the texts, reworked by him, of the three main lectures that he gave on the subject of the “Global Left,” followed by the comments of the intellectuals who were among his closest friends. Thus, the collaboration between Immanuel Wallerstein and the FMSH, which has lasted for over half a century, is still ongoing.

Acknowledgment

The publishers wish to thank Katharine Wallerstein for reviewing the manuscript and making final edits.

Part I

The Global Left Past, Present, and Future

1

Capitalism and Antisystemic Movements 1789–1968 Immanuel Wallerstein

Left social movements and left-of-center political parties have almost always claimed to be internationalist in their values and their policies. As we know, their practice has been far from the rhetoric. What we shall attempt to do in three chapters is to explore the reality of the practice at three time periods, what we shall call past, present, and future. We hope to demonstrate that there has come to exist today something we can call a Global Left, but it remains contested not only by the Global Right but by movements and parties that call themselves left, or at least left-of-center. There have always been historical systems in which some relatively small group exploited the others. The exploited always fought back as best they could. The modern world-system, which came into existence in the long sixteenth century in the form of a capitalist world-economy, has been extremely effective in extracting surplus-value from the large majority of the populations within it. It did this by adding to the standard systemic features of hierarchy and exploitation the new and important characteristic of polarization. The result has been a degree of exploitation that has been everincreasing. This polarization is currently discussed by the terminology of the growing gap, now scandalously enormous between the 1 percent and the others. Within the modern world-system, resistance by the 99 percent initially took primarily two forms: either spontaneous uprisings or escape into zones in which it was harder for the 1 percent to reach and impose its authority. However, the increasing mechanization and concentration of productive enterprises within the modern world-system led, as we know, to an ever-increasing degree of urbanization. The urbanization of the modern world-system in turn opened new ways for the working classes to challenge the modes of extraction by the dominant forces. The French Revolution further changed the structure of the modern world-system by unleashing two new concepts, whose impact was to transform the modern world-system. One was a concept concerning DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-2

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change. Change of course occurs constantly. Previously, change was thought to be abnormal and exceptional, destined always to be undone by a return to the traditional norms. This is illustrated by the word “revolution” whose original meaning is that of a wheel that turns 360 degrees, ending where it began. Today we associate the word primarily with the opposite meaning. The word revolution is used in social and political terminology to describe a break with the past, not a return to it. We can refer to this usage as a belief in the normality of change. The second has to do with the concept of sovereignty. There are two issues here: what is sovereignty? And who is the sovereign? It is only since the sixteenth century more or less that we have been talking about the sovereignty of states. What we mean by this is double. Externally, it is the assertion by a state that it is not subject to control of its laws or decisions by another state. Internally, it is the assertion by a state that its central laws and decisions are not subject to the veto power of any internal group. This meaning has been largely uncontested from the beginning, although it should be noted that states did not make such assertions until they were juridical structures within an interstate system. The more difficult question is the debate about who exercises the sovereignty of a state. The long sixteenth century is often described by historians as one in which there came to be so-called absolute monarchs in certain states, and notably in England, France, and Spain. Absolute monarchs asserted that they were the sovereign. The word absolute means that they were said to be “absolved” from any review of their authority by anyone else, externally or internally. Of course, this was a claim, not a reality. But it was an important claim. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the absolutism of the monarch was often challenged by powerful persons we call aristocrats or nobles. They tended to claim that the absolute monarch should yield his exclusive claim to a system in which the exercise of sovereignty would be shared between the monarch and a parliamentary body dominated by the aristocracy. The French revolutionaries challenged both notions. They insisted that sovereignty lay with the “people” as opposed to the ruler or the aristocracy. This pair of concepts—the normality of change and the sovereignty of the people—was the basis of something very new, what we may call a geoculture that spread throughout the historical system and legitimated radical “change” of the system by the “people.” It was in response to this danger to the dominant forces that the three modern ideologies— conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism—emerged. Each of the ideologies represented a program of political action. Conservatism was the first and most immediate response, notably in

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the writings of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. The core of the conservative ideology was to deny the prudence, even the possibility, of substantial change. Conservatives reasserted the priority of the judgments of traditional elites, locally situated, and supported by religious institutions. Liberalism arose as an alternative mode of containing the danger. Liberals argued that reactionary conservatism, which inevitably involved suppressive force, was self-defeating in the medium run, pushing the oppressed to open rebellion. Instead, liberals said, elites should embrace the inevitability of some change and defer nominally to the sovereignty of the people, but insist that social transformation was a complicated and dangerous process that could only be done well and prudently by specialists whom all others should allow to make the crucial decisions. Liberals thus envisaged a slow, and limited, process of societal transformation. Radicalism was the last ideology to emerge. It began as a small annex to liberalism. Radicals argued that relying on specialists would lead to no more than a slightly revised social structure. Instead, they said, the lower strata should pursue transformation of the system as rapidly as possible, guided by a democratic ethos and an egalitarian ideal. The world-revolution of 1848 marked a turning point in the relations of the three ideologies—right-wing conservatism, centrist liberalism, and left-wing radicalism. It began with a social uprising in Paris in February, in which the radical left seemed to seize state power, if only momentarily. This uprising was unexpected by most persons—a happy surprise for the working classes, a serious danger from the point of view of the elites. It so frightened both conservatives and liberals that they buried their voluble differences that had loomed so large up to then and formed a political alliance to repress the social revolution. The process of repression in France essentially took three years, culminating in the creation of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. Nor was the social revolution all that was happening in the panEuropean world at this time. The same year, 1848, was the moment of nationalist uprisings in much of Europe—notably in Hungary, Poland, the Italies, and the Germanies. Historians have dubbed these uprisings “the springtime of the nations.” Just like the social revolution in Paris, these various nationalist uprisings were repressed within a few years—at least for the moment, but a long moment. This pair of occurrences in 1848—social revolution in France and nationalist revolutions in many countries—forced a reconsideration of basic strategy by the tenants of each of the three ideologies. The conservatives noticed that the one major country in which nothing seemed to happen in 1848 was Great Britain. On the surface, the absence of

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revolt in Great Britain seemed very curious. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, radical forces had seemed to be the most extensive, active, and well-organized in Great Britain. Yet it was the one major country in which calm reigned amidst the pan-European storm of 1848. What the conservatives then realized, and historians later confirmed, was that the British Tories had discovered a mode of containing radicalism far more effective than forceful repression. For at least two decades, the British Tories had been making constant concessions to the demands for social and institutional change. These concessions actually were relatively minor, but their repeated occurrence seemed to suffice to persuade the more radical forces that change was in fact taking place. After 1848, the British example persuaded conservatives elsewhere, especially in continental Europe, that perhaps they should revise their tactics to follow the British example. This revised analysis brought conservatives nearer to the position of the centrist liberals. The major rhetorical difference was that the conservative version, under the label of “enlightened conservatism,” sought to maintain a major role for local, as opposed to national, institutions. Meanwhile, the radicals were equally unsettled by what happened. The principal tactics radicals had employed up to 1848 had been either spontaneous uprisings or utopian withdrawal. In 1848 radicals observed that their spontaneous uprisings were easily put down. And their utopian withdrawals turned out to be unsustainable. The lesson they drew was the necessity of replacing spontaneity with “organizing” the revolution—a program that involved more temporal patience as well as the creation of a bureaucratic structure. This shift of tactics brought radicals closer to the position of the centrist liberals. The major difference was that, in the radical version, the radical bureaucrats now assumed the role of the specialists who would guide transformation. Finally, the liberals too drew a major lesson from the world-revolution of 1848. They began to emphasize their centrist position, as opposed to their previously primary role of confronting conservatives. They began to see the necessity of tactics that would pull both conservatives and radicals into their orbit, turning them into mere variants of centrist liberalism. In this effort, they turned out to be hugely successful for a very long time—indeed until the much later world-revolution of 1968. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that we see the organizational emergence of what we consider to be antisystemic movements. There were two main varieties—social movements  and nationalist movements—as well as less strong varieties such as women’s movements and ethno/racial/religious movements.

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These movements were all antisystemic in one simple sense: they were struggling against the established power structures in an effort to bring into existence a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system than the existing one. These movements were, however, deeply divided in terms of their analysis of how to define the groups that were most oppressed, and what were the priorities of achieving the objectives of one kind of movement relative to other kinds of movements. These debates between the various movements have persisted right up to today. One fundamental debate was how to think about the role of the states in the achievement of a different kind of historical system. There were those who argued that states were structures established by the elites of the system, mechanisms by which the elites controlled the others. States were therefore an enemy, to be shunned, and against which the movements must ceaselessly struggle. The principal tactic therefore must be to educate and transform the psychology of those who were oppressed, in order to turn them into permanent militants who would embody and transmit to others the values of a democratic, egalitarian world. Against this view were arrayed those who agreed that the state was the instrument of the ruling elites, and for this very reason could not be ignored in the political strategy of the social movements. They argued that unless the movements seized power in the states, the ruling classes would use their strength—military and police strength, economic strength, and cultural strength—to crush the antisystemic movements. Obtaining control of the state machinery was a critical element in their political strategy to transform the historical system. It followed that the first priority of the movements had first to be to take control of the state. Only then could they proceed to transform the world. We came to call this the “two-step” strategy. The second argument was between the social movements and the nationalist movements. The former insisted that the modern worldsystem was a capitalist system and that therefore the basic struggle was a class struggle within each country between the owners of capital (the “bourgeoisie”) and those who had only their own labor power to sell (the “proletariat”). It was between these two groups that the democratic and egalitarian gulf was enormous and ever-increasing. It followed that the natural “historical actor” of transformation was the proletariat. The nationalist movements assessed the world differently. They saw a world in which states were controlled either by an internal dominant ethnic group or by external forces. They argued that the most oppressed persons were the “peoples” who were denied their autonomy and their democratic rights and consequently were living in an ever-increasingly

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inegalitarian historical system. It followed that the natural “historical actors” were the oppressed nations. Only when these oppressed nations came to power in their own state could there be expectations of a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system. These two splits—that between those who abjured state power versus those who sought to obtain it as the first step, and that between those who saw the proletariat versus those who saw the oppressed nations as the natural historical actors—were not the only matters under debate. Both the social movements and the nationalist movements insisted on the importance of “vertical” structures. That is, they both insisted that the road to success in obtaining state power was to have only one antisystemic structure in any state (the existing state for the social movements, the envisaged virtual state for the nationalist movements). They said that unless all other kinds of antisystemic movements subordinated themselves to the single “principal” movement, the objective of the antisystemic movements could not be achieved. For example, take the women’s or feminist movements. These movements insisted on the inegalitarian and undemocratic relationship of men and women throughout history, and particularly in the modern world-system. They argued that the struggle against what was termed “patriarchy” was at least as important as any other struggle and was their primary concern as movements. Against this view, both the social movements and the nationalist movements argued that asserting an independent role for feminist movements weakened their cause, which took priority, and was as a consequence “objectively” counterrevolutionary. The “vertical” movements accepted that there could be women’s auxiliaries of the social or of the nationalist movements. They, however, argued at the same time that the realization of the feminist demands could only occur as a consequence of the realization of the demands of the “principal” historical actor (the proletariat or the oppressed nation). In effect, the vertical movements were counseling deferral of the struggles of the feminist movements to a postrevolutionary era. The same logic would be used against other kinds of movements— such as trade-union movements or movements of so-called minorities as socially defined (whether by race, ethnicity, religion, or language). All these “other” movements had to accept subordination to the principal movement and thereby the deferral of their demands. They could only be adjuncts of the principal movements, or else they were considered to be counterrevolutionary. In the nineteenth century, the social movements and the nationalist movements both grew slowly. They first came to be large enough to be politically noticeable in the last third of the century. There are two

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things one can say about them at that time. The first is that they were perhaps noticeable but in fact organizationally and politically still quite weak. The idea that either kind of movement could actually achieve state power seemed at best a matter of faith, one that was not sustained by a sober assessment of the real rapport de forces in the modern world-system. The second is that their organizations were almost all organizations within a particular state. They professed to be “internationalist” in spirit and practice. But the reality was that both their leaders and their members sought objectives that were realizable within a given state and always gave priority to their state-oriented interests. The most notorious instance of this occurred in the days leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. In the meeting of the Socialist International just prior to the outbreak, the parties all denounced nationalism and reasserted that the class interests of the proletariat required the rejection of the prospects of a war conducted by the bourgeoisie of one country against the bourgeoisie of another. When days later the war actually broke out, the socialist members of the various parliaments nonetheless voted as nationalist patriots to endorse the wars. The one famous dissenter from this nationalist commitment was the Bolshevik party led by Vladimir Lenin. Their nationalism would not be evident until later when they achieved power in a single country. While the political power of the antisystemic movements did continue to increase slowly from then on, they still seemed relatively weak as late as 1945. It is therefore somewhat astonishing that in the period 1945–1970 the vertical antisystemic movements actually did achieve the first of the two steps. They did indeed come to state power, almost everywhere. This sudden shift in the political arena of the modern world-system warrants a careful explanation. The end of the Second World War marked the onset of two important cyclical shifts in the history of the modern world-system. It marked both the beginning of a Kondratieff A-phase and the moment of undisputed hegemony in the world-system of the United States. The sudden worldwide political success of the antisystemic movements cannot be understood without placing it in this context. It is most revealing to start with U.S. hegemony, which can be considered a quasi-monopoly of geopolitical power. Hegemonic cycles are very long occurrences. But their high point, true hegemony, is actually rather brief. There have in fact only been three such high points in the history of the modern world-system—those of the United Provinces in the mid-seventeenth century, the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, and the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Each lasted for at most 50 years or so.

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The phase prior to the achievement of full hegemony has been each time a struggle between a land-based power and a sea/air-based power. The one that took place in the seventeenth century has been given the name by historians of the “Thirty Years’ War.” The major contesting powers were the United Provinces (sea power) and Spain (land power). It was a single war but not a continuous war. It involved all the major powers of the time. There was no simple ideological line that divided the two sides, and therefore there were often shifts of alliances. It was very destructive of people, property, and infrastructure. At the end, there was a clear victor. By analogy, there was a “thirty years’ war” between Great Britain (sea power) and France (land power) from 1792 to 1815. And the most recent “thirty years’ war” was that between the United States (sea/air power) and Germany (land power) from 1914 to 1945, which ended, as we know, in the total defeat of Germany. Hegemony is built on the existence of an enormous economic advantage, combined with political, cultural, and military strength. As of 1945, the United States was able to assemble all this to its advantage. In 1945, the United States was the only important industrial power in the entire world that had escaped major destruction of its industrial plants and major agricultural sites. Indeed, on the contrary, wartime production had made their productive enterprises more extensive and efficient than ever. At this time, U.S. production was so efficient that it could sell its leading products in other countries at prices lower than these countries could produce these products themselves, despite the costs involved in transportation. These U.S.-based quasi-monopolies were guaranteed by the active role of the state in protecting and enhancing their exclusive privileges. The result was by far the largest expansion of the world production of surplus-value in the 500-year-long history of the modern world-system. While the United States was the principal beneficiary—its state, its enterprises, its residents—the worldwide rise in production produced some benefits to most countries, if to a far lesser degree than to the United States. The problem with quasi-monopolies in leading products is that they are self-liquidating over time. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the high rate of capital accumulation enjoyed by these quasi-monopolies in the leading industries makes them a very tempting target for penetration by other producers who seek to enter the world market for these products. These other producers steal or buy the necessary technical knowledge to produce competitive products. And they use their influence in other governments to counter the protectionist policies of the government that is primarily protecting the quasi-monopolies.

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Furthermore, it is obvious that there is no point in having the most efficient products to sell if there are no customers for them. There were in fact too few customers, especially in the countries within the sphere of influence of the United States. Consequently, the U.S. government actively aided west European and Japanese economic reconstruction to provide customers for U.S. production as well as to maintain the political loyalty of these de facto satellite regimes. Furthermore, as long as the quasi-monopolies were in effective operation, the leading enterprises feared most of all any stoppage of production, since stoppages involved irrecoverable losses. Hence, it made short-term economic sense to make wage concessions to their workers rather than risk strikes. Slowly real wages rose. But of course over time, this raised the cost of production and lessened the advantage of the quasi-monopoly vis-à-vis its potential competitors. By the 1960s, the improved economic position of western Europe and Japan could be observed in the dramatic inversion in one key leading industry, automobiles. Circa 1950, U.S. automobile manufacturers could undersell competitors in their home markets and notably in western Europe and Japan. By the mid-1960s, the reverse was true. West European and Japanese automobile producers began to penetrate the U.S. domestic market. For all these reasons, non-U.S. enterprises did in fact succeed in penetrating the world market over time. The result was increased competition in the world market. This no doubt benefited many consumers, as many economic theorists had always argued. At the same time, however, it reduced the level of profitability of the erstwhile quasi-monopolies. U.S. producers had therefore to give thought to how they could minimize the losses they were incurring as a result of their declining rate of capital accumulation. It was not helpful to U.S. capitalists that, as their quasi-monopoly of production was disappearing, so was the quasi-monopoly of U.S. geopolitical strength, which was beginning its inevitable decline. To understand how this happened, we have to see how it was established in the first place circa 1945. We have already mentioned the superiority in productive efficiency and the fact that this advantage underlay its political and cultural dominance. There was, however, one last element in securing full hegemony, which was the military sphere. The fact that prior to 1939 the United States had not invested heavily in military technology and manpower had been one of the key elements in enabling it to achieve productive dominance. Before 1939, the United States instead invested its collective resources primarily in making its industries more efficient. It was not diverting too great a portion of its resources to improving military

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machinery. The Second World War changed that allocation of collective resources. Suddenly, the United States became a major military power. It won the race with Germany for the development of atomic weapons. Indeed, when Germany surrendered in 1945 before the bombs could be used against them, the United States displayed its power by using them against Japan. When Japan in turn surrendered, the United States faced a new problem. Sentiment within the United States was heavily in favor of reducing the size of the armed forces. The war was over, and the call was for the soldiers who were drafted to be discharged and return home. The problem for the United States was that a hegemonic power cannot abstain from military commitment. It comes with the position. And in 1945, there was one other power that had a very strong military, the U.S.S.R. Unlike the United States, it showed no signs of rushing to dismantle its military forces. It was clear that, if the United States was to exercise hegemony, it had to make some deal with the Soviet Union. They did make such a deal, and we have dubbed it rhetorically “Yalta.” “Yalta” does not refer really to the actual decisions of the meeting in Yalta in February 1945 of what were then called the Big Three—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. “Yalta” was rather a set of unsigned tacit arrangements to which the United States and the Soviet Union were committed and which were maintained in place for quite some time. There were in fact three such tacit arrangements that have never been openly acknowledged and indeed quite often denied. The first was that there would be a division of the world in terms of zones of influence and control. The line would be drawn more or less where the two armies ended up in 1945, a division in the middle of Germany going from north to south called the Oder–Neisse line, and the 38th Parallel in Korea. In effect, these lines meant that the United States would have primacy in about two-thirds of the globe and the Soviet Union in the other third. The deal was that neither side would try to change these frontiers by the use of military force. The second part of the deal had to do with economic reconstruction. As we noted, U.S. producers needed customers. The Marshall Plan plus comparable arrangements with Japan provided for the economic assistance that would provide these customers. The tacit U.S.-Soviet agreement was that the United States would provide such economic assistance to countries in its zone but not to any country in the Soviet zone, where the Soviet Union was free to arrange matters as it saw fit. The Soviet Union then created COMECON, an economic arrangement that was strongly beneficial to the Soviet Union at the expense of its satellites.

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Finally, the third part of the deal was the so-called Cold War. The Cold War refers to the mutual denunciation of both sides, each proclaiming its virtues and its inevitable long-term ideological victory as well as the evil machinations of the other side. The deal was that this was not to be taken seriously, or rather that the function of the mutual denunciations was meant in no way to countermand the first part of the deal—the de facto freezing of frontiers indefinitely. The actual objective of Cold War rhetoric was not to transform the other side but to maintain the loyalty of the satellites on each side. Although the first and third parts of the deal largely prevailed until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the second part until at least the 1970s, the cozy arrangement began to be eroded by several factors. The de facto international status quo that Yalta represented was not at all to the liking of a number of countries in what we then called the Third World. The first major dissident was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which straightforwardly rejected Stalin’s advice to come to a power-sharing deal with the Kuomintang. Instead, the CCP’s army entered Shanghai, and it proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. This dissidence was followed by the insistence of the Viet Minh to achieve control over all of Vietnam, the insistence of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale to obtain total independence, and the insistence of the Cubans to arm themselves against U.S. intrusion. In each of these cases, it was the Third World power that was forcing the hand of the Soviet Union and not the other way around. On the other hand, the Soviet Union and the United States successfully sought to ensure that there was no use of nuclear weapons by anyone, which would have violated the pledge of mutual restraint. The Vietnam War, in which the United States committed its troops actively, weakened U.S. hegemony in several ways. The United States paid a high economic price for the war. It forced the United States to go off the gold standard and thereby reduced its economic leverage with the rest of the world. But there was an even bigger problem, political in nature. The U.S. armed forces were at the time using a system of a draft to obtain the needed troops. This meant that middle-class youth, notably university students, were being called to military service—and of course dying or being badly wounded in great numbers. They rebelled in growing numbers, forcing a very public discussion of the merits of U.S. involvement in the war. The debate eventually turned U.S. public opinion against involvement there. Indeed, it turned U.S. public opinion against any similar kinds of military involvement—the so-called Vietnam syndrome. The United States had to abandon a draft system of compulsory

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military service and substitute voluntary enlistment. But this simply changed the focus of the political problem, as later governments were to discover. Worst of all, from the perspective of the United States as a hegemonic power, is that it lost the war and was forced to withdraw its troops ignominiously, leaving its adversary, the Viet Minh, to occupy the entire country and establish a single, unified regime. In the wake of this defeat, Communist regimes came to effective power in Laos and Cambodia as well. The whole world observed the defeat of its hegemonic power, strengthening the belief that U.S. military power was less significant than it had appeared to be. The Maoist concept of the “paper tiger” gained credibility. It is thus reasonable to state that, as of this point, the United States ceased to be an unquestioned hegemonic power and was entering the phase where its problem was how to slow down a decline in real power in the world-system. It is in this context that the world-revolution of 1968 took place. It was a world-revolution in the simple sense that it occurred over most of the world, in each of what were at the time considered three separate “worlds.” And it was a world-revolution in the remarkable repetitions of two main themes almost everywhere, of course garbed in different local languages. The first main theme was the rejection of U.S. hegemony (“imperialism”) by the revolutionaries, with, however, an important twist. These revolutionaries equally condemned the “collusion” of the Soviet Union with U.S. imperialism, which was how they interpreted the tacit Yalta accords. In effect, they were rejecting the ideological themes of the Cold War and minimizing the difference between the two so-called superpowers. The second main theme was the denunciation of the Old Left (that is, Communist and Social-Democratic parties and the national liberation movements) on the grounds that these movements were not in reality antisystemic but were also collusive with the system. They pointed to the historic two-step strategy and said that the Old Left movements had in fact achieved the first step—state power—but had not in any serious way changed the world. Economic inequalities were still enormous and growing, internally and internationally. The states were not more democratic, possibly even less so. And class distinctions had not disappeared, but merely been renamed, the bourgeoisie becoming the Nomenklatura, or some equivalent term. The revolutionaries rejected therefore the Old Left movements as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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While it is true that the revolutionaries were not able to remain in a position of real political strength very long and were repressed as movements, just like those in 1848, their efforts did have one absolutely major consequence. The world-revolution of 1968 transformed the geoculture, in that the dominance of centrist liberalism over the two other ideologies came to an end. Centrist liberalism did not disappear; it was simply reduced to being once again only one of three. The radical left and the conservative right reemerged as fully autonomous actors on the world scene. What happened next to the movements was largely the consequence of the global economic stagnation of the Kondratieff downturn. The attempts to create new movements of the Global Left—the various Maoisms, the so-called New Left Green movements, the neo-insurrectionist movements—all turned out to have fleeting support in the face of the economic difficulties that had suddenly become so central to people’s lives, again almost everywhere. Meanwhile, the United States was undertaking a major shift of strategy to slow down the rate of its decline. To do this, it launched a threefold set of projects. The first had to do with its relation to its erstwhile principal satellites, western Europe and Japan. It offered a new arrangement to the now economically much more powerful and therefore politically more restless regimes. The United States offered to redefine their role, turning them into “partners” in the geopolitical arena. Institutions were created to implement this new relationship, such as the Trilateral Commission, the G-7, and the World Economic Forum at Davos. The United States in effect proposed that it understood that the partners might engage in geopolitical moves of which it disapproved— for example, West Germany’s Ostpolitik, the building of the oil pipeline between the Soviet Union and western Europe, and a different policy toward Cuba. The United States tolerated this political independence, provided it was limited and did not go too far. The second reorientation was the abandonment of the advocacy of developmentalism as a policy. In the 1950s and 1960s, everyone (the West, the Soviet bloc, and the Third World) seemed to endorse the concept of national “development”—by which was meant essentially increased urbanization, the growth of an educated stratum, protection of infant industries, and the construction of state institutions and bureaucracies. Suddenly, the global language of the United States and of its so-called partners radically changed. They now advocated almost opposite practices for what were now being called developing countries. Production for export was to replace protection of infant industries. State enterprises were to be privatized. State expenditures on education

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and health were to be radically reduced. And above all, capital was to be permitted to flow freely across frontiers. This set of prescriptions received the name of the Washington Consensus, about which Mrs. Thatcher famously proclaimed, “There Is No Alternative” or TINA. The mandate was enforced primarily by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which refused to give states the loans they badly needed because of the economic downturn unless they agreed to observe these new rules. The third part of the new strategy was to erect a new world order that ended what is called nuclear proliferation. Essentially, the United States had to accept the reality that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council all had nuclear weapons, but they wished the list to stop there. It made this offer to all other counties. A treaty would provide that the five nuclear powers would seek both to reduce their nuclear weapons and offer aid to the other signatories in obtaining nuclear power for peaceful uses to all the rest of the world, provided the others abandoned all pretention to obtaining nuclear weapons. As we know, four countries refused to sign the treaty and went on to test nuclear weapons. The four were Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. But very many others that were in various stages of developing nuclear weapons acceded and ended their programs. In fact, this threefold redefinition of U.S. strategy, followed essentially by all U.S. presidents from Nixon to Clinton, was partially successful. It did slow down decline without stopping it entirely. The newly regenerated conservative right, now being called neoliberals, found this new geopolitical framework very conducive to the rapid growth of their movements. World discourse moved rightward steadily. Most regimes that didn’t adjust to this new discourse fell from power. Finally, what had been symbolically defined as the symbol of successful Old Left politics and considered (by both partisans and opponents) to be unchangeable—the Soviet Union—collapsed from within. This collapse was hailed in the Western world as its victory in the Cold War. This interpretation forgot that the whole point of the Cold War had not been to “win” it but to maintain it as a pillar of the worldsystem. It turned out in fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union would both accelerate the decline of U.S. hegemony and undermine the movements of the neoliberal right. The crucial geopolitical event was the first Gulf War (1990–1991), which commenced with the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iraq had contested the creation of Kuwait as a separate state by the British for almost a century. However, it had never been in a position to do much about it. During the period in which the Baath Party was

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in power, the Iraqi regime was supported by the Soviet Union. It had, however, also been supported by the United States during the 1980s when the United States encouraged it to engage in the futile war with Iran. As of 1990, the situation from the Iraqi point of view was dismal. They had paid an enormous price for the destructive war and now owed considerable sums to creditors, one of the largest of which was Kuwait. In addition, they believed Kuwait was appropriating Iraqi oil through slant drilling. But most importantly, the collapse of the Soviet Union, then in process, removed the constraints that Iraq would have felt during the Cold War. It seemed a propitious moment to liquidate Iraqi debts and undo the long-resented “loss” of Kuwait to Iraq. We know what happened. The United States, after initial hesitation, mobilized the troops necessary to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait. This very action, however, revealed U.S. geopolitical weakness in two ways. First, the United States was unable to bear the costs of its own participation and was subsidized at a 90 percent level by four other countries— Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Japan. And second, U.S. President George H.W. Bush was faced with the question of whether victorious U.S. troops would proceed to Baghdad or not. He prudently decided that this would be politically and militarily unwise. U.S. action in Iraq thereafter was limited to the imposition of various sanctions. Saddam Hussein remained in power. Meanwhile, the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the possibility for all its ex-satellites to pursue independent policies led to a rapid adoption by all of them of neoliberal policies. However, within a few years, the negative effects of these neoliberal policies on the real standard of living of the lower strata provoked a reaction wherein erstwhile Communist parties (now renamed) returned to power to pursue a mildly social-democratic program. At the same time, rightist nationalist parties began to gain strength as well. The magic realization of a “Western” style of government with a “Western” level of real economic uplift turned out to be very difficult to realize, and many of these governments became quite unstable. It is at that point that the antisystemic movements began to revive. The initial reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union had been an emotional shock and even resulted in depression for left movements everywhere, even those that had been long very critical of the Soviet experience. After, however, a few years of this morose perspective, new light appeared on the horizon for the Global Left. Some movements refused the sense of inevitability of a triumphal right discourse of the now Global Right. There could be a renewed Global Left discourse.

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Thus far, we have been discussing the impact on antisystemic movements of the global stagnation that the Kondratieff B-phase involves. However, there is a further factor, which is the result not of cyclical shifts in the world-economy but of long-term secular trends. In the ongoing life of historical systems, each cyclical downturn returns not to the previous low point but always to a point somewhat higher. Think of it as two steps upward, one step backward on percentage curves that move toward the asymptote of 100 percent. Over the long term, the secular trends must then reach a point where it is difficult to advance further. At this point, the system has moved far from equilibrium. We can call this point the beginning of the structural crisis of the historical system. But that brings us to today and the explanation of why the capitalist system is in terminal crisis. And this will be the theme of our next chapter in this book.

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Structural Crisis of the Modern World-System Dilemmas of the Left Immanuel Wallerstein

To analyze what difference the structural crisis of the world-system made for the Global Left, we have to look at what we established previously. The Global Left rose from a very weak position as of what I called the world-revolution of 1848 to a seemingly very strong position worldwide in the period from circa 1945 to what I called the world-revolution of 1968. They did this by pursuing the so-called two-step strategy, which was the view that the movements had first to obtain state power and then second to transform the world. This strategy enabled them to arrive at state power in most of the world-system in the period 1945–1968. This was, however, the very period of the greatest expansion of surplus-value in the history of the modern world-system via quasi-monopolies of leading products. It was also the period of uncontested world hegemony by the United States, the most extensive and intensive quasi-monopoly of geopolitical power. One might have thought this was the least favorable atmosphere for the assumption of state power by the antisystemic movements. Far from being anomalous, it was the only period in which this could have happened. However, the first step—the assumption of state power by the antisystemic movements—did not at all lead to the second step—the transformation of the world. On the contrary, it marked the quasiabandonment by the antisystemic movements of this second step. This quasi-abandonment in turn explained the world-revolution of 1968, in which the revolutionary forces had as one of their main objectives the dethronement of the so-called Old Left, that is, the antisystemic movements that had come to power. As always, the Kondratieff A-phase was followed by a B-phase of global stagnation, in which in fact we are still living today. In addition, the United States started on its slow decline as a hegemonic power, culminating in a precipitate decline as a result of the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2001 that was intended to restore U.S. hegemony DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-3

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and in fact did the opposite, putting the United States into the paralyzing quagmire in which it presently finds itself. The world-system, like all systems (from the universe as a whole to the tiniest nano-system), was not eternal but had a historical life that could be divided into three moments: creation of the historical system; the functioning of its normal life utilizing the rules of the system; and the structural crisis that marks the impossibility for the system to continue to function, entering into a bifurcation and chaotic turbulence, and culminating in the struggle of all the actors to tilt the system into one prong or the other of the bifurcation. Most people ask why the two major rhythms of the modern worldsystem—the Kondratieff cycles and the hegemonic cycles—could not simply continue indefinitely. The very short answer is that the system as a whole had, because of its secular trends, moved too far from equilibrium and it was no longer possible to bring it back to equilibrium. It is these secular trends that we must now explain in some detail. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in the ongoing life of historical systems each cyclical downturn returns not to the previous low point but always to a point somewhat higher. I suggested to think of it as two steps upward, one step downward on percentage curves that move toward the asymptote of 100 percent. Over the long term, the secular trends reach a point where it is difficult to advance further. At this point the system has moved far from equilibrium. We can call this point the beginning of the structural crisis of the historical system. Historical capitalism reached its structural crisis because of the steady increase over time of the three fundamental costs of production: personnel, inputs, and taxation. In a capitalist system, producers make their profits by keeping the total of these costs as far as possible below  the prices at which they are able to sell their products. However, as these costs rise over time, they also reach levels at which the willingness of prospective buyers to purchase the goods is reached. At this point, it is no longer possible to accumulate capital via production. That is to say, worldwide effective demand begins to go down. This establishes a squeeze between increasing real costs and decreasing effective demand. Each of the three costs is complex, since each is composed of several different sub-costs. Personnel costs have always been the one that is most transparent. And among these costs, that of unskilled labor has been the one most discussed. Historically, the costs of unskilled labor have risen as workers in Kondratieff A-phases found some way to engage in some kind of syndical action. The principal response of producers during Kondratieff B-phases has been the runaway factory, moving production to areas of “historically lower wages.” This curious

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phrase actually refers to the ability of entrepreneurs to attract laborers from rural areas less tied into the world labor market who would work for lower real wages because these lower real wages offered higher real income for these workers than their previous work. In that sense, both employers and the unskilled workforce can feel that they are gaining. This happy confluence of views does not last forever. After a number of years, these workers become more accustomed to their new environments and learn how to engage in syndical action. Once that happens, producers begin to think of fleeing to still other areas. This solution for the entrepreneurs depends of course on the availability of rural workers located elsewhere who are largely uninvolved in the world market. The worldwide supply of such workers has now begun to be exhausted, as can be measured by the considerable deruralization of the world-system today. The costs of unskilled labor are only one part of personnel costs. A second part has been the relentlessly increasing costs of intermediary personnel (sometimes called cadres). Their numbers have been growing since they are needed by the producers for two reasons. Organizationally, they are needed to handle the complexities of larger corporate structures. And politically they serve as a barrier to the rising syndical demands of unskilled labor in two ways. They can assist in repressing the unskilled workforce if they assert syndical rights. But they can also serve as an example to unskilled labor of the rewards of individual mastering of new skills. This example often serves to detach some of the most effective leaders of the unskilled workforce. The regular solution to increasing costs of unskilled labor has been to eliminate them almost totally from the workforce through mechanization. New jobs then emerge, replacing so-called blue-collar workers with white-collar workers. In recent years, however, the elimination of the workforce has also come to affect the white-collar workers whose tasks are also being taken over by mechanization. It is actually in the third personnel cost, that of top managers, that the biggest increase in personnel costs has occurred in recent decades. Those in managerial positions have been able to use their positions as gatekeepers to exact enormous rents, which are extracted from the profits of investors (the shareholders). The bottom line is that today personnel costs are extremely high compared with past costs and are constantly increasing. The story is similar concerning the cost of inputs. Producers have tried to keep these costs low by externalizing three major types of expenditures: getting rid of toxic waste, renewing raw materials, and building and repairing infrastructure. For some 500 years, toxic waste was

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eliminated simply by dumping it into public space, with minimal cost to the producers. But the world has nearly run out of public space, which has led to worldwide environmentalist movement pressure to clean up the toxicity. This could only be done by the states, which inevitably involved the need for higher taxes. It also led the states to seek to force producers to internalize the costs, which has also cut into profitability. The exhaustion of public space as a cause of higher costs for producers is analogous to the exhaustion of rural zones largely uninvolved in the market economy as a cause of higher costs for producers. Similarly, the renewal of raw materials was not a problem at the beginning. But there was the cumulative effect of 500 years of usage during which there was almost no renewal. The nonrenewal was combined with an expanded world population. Less supply and more demand led rather suddenly to worldwide acute shortages of energy, water, forestation, and basic foods (especially fish and meat). The shortages have led in turn to acute political struggles over distribution of all such material needs, both within and between countries. Finally, infrastructure is a crucial element in commercial outlets for production. However, here again historically producers have paid only very partially for their use of the infrastructure, foisting the costs on others, especially the states. Given the ever-rising costs of repairing and extending the infrastructure, the states have found themselves unable to bear the costs, which has led to a serious worldwide deterioration of necessary aids to transport and communications. Finally, taxes have been steadily rising as well, despite what seems to be constant and enormous tax evasion. First of all, there are multiple kinds of governmental taxes—not only the national taxes that are widely noted but all kinds of local and intermediate structure taxes. These are used, when all is said and done, not merely to pay for the bureaucracy but also to meet the ever-increasing demands of the antisystemic movements for educational and health services and the provision of lifetime income guarantees such as pensions and unemployment insurance, which collectively constitute the “welfare state.” Despite all the reductions of welfare state provisions that have been forced upon the states, the reality is that these expenditures continue to be significantly larger worldwide today than they were in the past. Nor does governmental taxation exhaust the story. We are bombarded daily with reports of corruption not only in relatively poor countries but even more in relatively rich ones, where there is more money to steal. From the point of view of the entrepreneur, the costs of corruption are every bit as much a tax as those imposed by governments. Finally, the constantly expanding reality of mafia-type operations resulting from

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the other constraints (especially the shortages) imposes real taxes on the entrepreneur. As the costs of production have steadily risen (in the pattern of two steps forward, one step backward), the ability to raise the prices of products has been seriously limited by the vastly increased polarization of world income and wealth. Effective demand has fallen as persons have been eliminated from the workforce. As the possibilities of capital accumulation diminish, there has been increasing fear about survival and therefore willingness of both individual consumers and entrepreneurial producers to risk expenditures, which further reduces effective demand. Hence, the world-system has arrived at its structural crisis, in which neither the underclasses nor the capitalist entrepreneurs find acceptable returns within the modern world-system. Their attention necessarily has turned to the alternatives available. Once we are into a structural crisis, the system becomes chaotic. That is, the curves begin to fluctuate wildly. The system can no longer function in its traditional manner. It bifurcates, which means two things. One, the system is absolutely certain to go out of existence entirely. But it is intrinsically impossible to know what the successor system or systems will be. One can only outline in general terms the two alternative ways in which the chaotic situation can be resolved into a new systemic order. Two, the bifurcation leads to a great political struggle concerning which of the two alternative possibilities the totality of participants in the system will “choose.” That is to say, while we cannot predict the outcome, we can affect it. It is here that the antisystemic movements have a potential role. The 1970s and 1980s were periods in which the right-wing so-called neoliberal movements seemed to be able to impose their views on governments, even governments that had emerged historically from the coming to power of the Old Left movements. The most dramatic achievement of the neoliberal movements was the collapse of the Soviet Union and its breakup in 1989–1991. Even for those post-1968 movements that had been highly critical of the Soviet Union and its policies, the collapse of Soviet structures seemed a major blow against the Global Left. A pessimistic outlook among left forces prevailed almost everywhere. For the Global Left, the worldwide situation finally began to change, with a renewal of their energy. It seems to me that the turning point occurred on January 1, 1994, when the Zapatistas (the EZLN in its Spanish initials) rose up in Chiapas and proclaimed the autonomy of the indigenous peoples.

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An obvious question, however, was why on January 1, 1994? The Zapatistas chose that date because it was the day on which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into operation. By their choice, the EZLN was sending the following message to Mexico and the world. The dramatic renewal of the 500-year-old demand of the peoples of Chiapas for self-government was in opposition both to imperialism throughout the world and to Mexico’s government for its participation in NAFTA as well as for its oppression of the peoples of Chiapas. The EZLN emphasized that they had no interest in seizing power in the Mexican state. Quite the contrary! They wished to withdraw from the state and both construct and reconstruct the local ways of life. The EZLN was quite realistic. They realized they were not strong enough militarily to wage a war. Therefore, when sympathetic forces within Mexico pushed for a truce between the Mexican government and the EZLN, they fully agreed. To be sure, the Mexican government has never lived up to the truce agreement, but it has been constrained in how far it has been able to go because of the national and international support that the EZLN could muster. This worldwide support was the result of the second major theme the EZLN pursued. It asserted its own support for all movements of every kind everywhere that were in pursuit of greater democracy and equality. The EZLN convened so-called intergalactic encounters in Chiapas to which they invited the entire Global Left. The EZLN also refused sectarian exclusions in these meetings—the pattern of the Old Left. They preached instead inclusiveness and mutual tolerance among the movements of the Global Left. The revival of the Global Left received its second strong reinforcement in 1999. One of the principal objectives of the Global Right had been to institutionalize the Washington Consensus by adopting within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) a treaty that guaranteed what were called intellectual property rights in all signatory countries. Such a treaty would have effectively barred these countries from producing their own less expensive products for their own use and for sale to other countries—for example, in pharmaceuticals. There were two remarkable aspects to the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. First of all, there was a major protest movement demonstrating outside the meeting. The demonstration had three major components that had hitherto never joined forces: the labor movement (and specifically the AFL-CIO, the principal union movement in the United States), environmentalists, and anarchists. In addition, the members of these groups who were present were largely U.S. persons, giving the

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lie to the argument that only in the Global South could one mobilize opposition to neoliberalism. The second remarkable aspect is that the protests succeeded. They enabled some sympathetic delegations within the WTO meeting to hold out against adopting the new treaty. The WTO meeting disbursed without a treaty. It was a failure. And ever since, any attempt to adopt the treaty has been blocked. The WTO has become largely irrelevant. Furthermore, the Seattle protests led to widespread copying of the protest technique at international meetings of all kinds, to the point that conveners of such meetings began to schedule them for remote locations where they had a better possibility of blocking the presence and size of demonstrators from such protest movements. This then brings us to the third major development in the second wind of antisystemic movements. After Chiapas and Seattle came Porto Alegre and the World Social Forum (WSF) of 2001. The initial call for the 2001 meeting was a joint effort of a network of seven Brazilian organizations (many of left Catholic inspiration but also including the principal trade union federation) with the ATTAC movement in France. They chose the name of World Social Forum in specific contrast with the World Economic Forum (WEF) that had been meeting at Davos for some 30 years and was a major locus of mutual discussion and planning of the world’s elites. They decided to meet at the same time as the Davos meetings to emphasize the contrast, and they chose Porto Alegre as the site of the 2001 meeting to underline the political importance of the Global South. The organizers made the crucial decision that the meeting was open to all those who were against imperialism and neoliberalism. They also made the more controversial decision of excluding political parties and insurrectionary movements. Finally, in their most innovative decision, they decided that the WSF would have neither officers nor internal elections nor resolutions. This was in order to frame a “horizontalist” approach to organizing the world’s antisystemic forces, as opposed to the “verticalist” and therefore exclusionary approach of the Old Left movements. To summarize all this, they chose as the motto of the meeting its now famous slogan, “Another world is possible.” Porto Alegre was unexpectedly a major success. The conveners had hoped to attract 5,000 people and they in fact attracted 10,000. To be sure, the initial participants came primarily from Brazil and neighboring countries and from France and Italy. The WSF, at this first meeting, immediately made two major decisions. They decided to continue with the Porto Alegre meetings, seeking to expand the participation geographically. And they created an international council, more or less by co-option, to oversee the organization of future meetings.

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In the years that followed, the WSF met in different parts of the Global South and with an enormous increase of the number of participants. In this sense, it has been a continuing success. However, as the first decade of the twenty-first century went by, the dilemmas of the WSF came to the fore. They can best be understood in the context of the evolution of the world-system itself. There were two major elements in this evolution. The first was the bubble crisis in the U.S. housing market in 2007–2008, which led commentators around the world to recognize the existence of some kind of “crisis” in the world-system. The second was the economic and geopolitical rise of the “emerging” economies—in particular but not only the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Together, the two issues led to a public debate about the enormous wealth gap and about the future of the geopolitical dominance of the Global North—and to great uncertainty among commentators about how to assess these events. Were we to think of it as a fundamental change or as a passing bump on the world economic and geopolitical scene? The antisystemic movements and their partisans have been equally ambivalent about how to assess the debate about inequality and the rise of the “emerging” nations. It has also led to an acute debate within the WSF about its successes and failures. The antisystemic movements now face a number of serious dilemmas. The first is whether to recognize explicitly the existence of a structural crisis of historical capitalism. The second is what the priorities of their short-term and middle-term activities should be. The most noticeable thing about antisystemic movements in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the degree to which the debates that embroiled them in the last third of the twentieth century, presumably exorcised and buried in the world-revolution of 1968, have returned to plague them, virtually unmodified. There were three principal debates, which we outlined earlier. The first concerned the role of the states in the achievement of a different kind of historical system. The second was between social movements and nationalist movements about who was the leading historical actor in the struggle for a more just historical order. The third was between the verticalists who insisted that multiple oppressed groups had to subordinate their demands to the priorities of the principal historical actor and the horizontalists who insisted that the demands of all oppressed groups were equally important and equally urgent and that none of them should be deferred. Well, here we are again! Inside the WSF and in the larger global justice movement, there are those who shun state power in every way and

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those who insist that obtaining state power is an essential prerequisite. There are those who insist on the priority of the class struggle (the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent) and those who insist on the priority of the nationalist struggle (South vs. North). And there are those who are verticalist, insisting on joint political action, whether within the WSF or the wider global justice movement, and those who are horizontalist, insisting on not neglecting the truly forgotten groups, the lowest global strata. These debates have been most visible in Latin America because it has become a prime locus of global developments on all these fronts most vividly. For various reasons, including the decline of U.S. geopolitical power, there came to power in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century a large number of governments in Latin America that were on the left or at least left of center. There has also been a movement, led in different ways both by Venezuela and by Brazil, to create South American and Latin American structures (UNASUR and CELAC) that exclude the United States and Canada. There have furthermore been steps toward creating regional economic zones and structures (Mercosur, Bancosur). At the same time, these governments of the left, center-left, and of course the few on the political right have all pursued developmentalist objectives, which involve extractive policies that violate the traditional zones of indigenous peoples. These latter groups have accused the left governments of being as bad in this respect as their right-wing predecessors. The left governments in turn have accused the indigenous movements of acting objectively and deliberately in accord with right-wing internal groups and the United States geopolitically. The net result is a divided Global Left in the political struggle over the new systemic order it is trying to build by tilting the bifurcation in the direction of a relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian worldsystem (or world-systems). Of course, the Global Right is also engaged in an internal debate about tactics, but that is of little comfort to the Global Left. One way to analyze the options for the Global Left is to put it in a time frame that distinguishes short-term and middle-term priorities. All of us live in the short term. We need to feed ourselves, house ourselves, sustain our health, and just survive. No movement can hope to attract support if it doesn’t recognize this urgent need for everyone. It follows, in my view, that all movements must do everything they can to alleviate immediate distress. I call this action to “minimize the pain.” This requires all sorts of short-term compromises, but it is nonetheless essential.

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At the same time, one must be very clear that minimizing the pain in no way transforms the system. This was the classic social-democratic illusion. It merely minimizes the pain. In the middle-run (that is, the next 20–40 years), the debate between the Global Left and the Global Right is fundamental and total. There is no compromise. One side or the other will win. I call this the battle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre. The spirit of Davos calls for a new noncapitalist system that retains its worst features—hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. They could well install a world-system that is worse than our present one. The spirit of Porto Alegre seeks a system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian. I say “relatively” because a totally flat world will never exist, but we can do much, much better than we have done heretofore. There is, in this sense, possible progress. Progress is possible; it is not and never will be inevitable. We do not know who will win in this struggle. What we do know is that, in a chaotic world, every nano-action at every nano-moment on every nano-issue affects the outcome. That is why I continue to end discussion of these issues with the metaphor of the butterfly. We learned in the last half-century that every fluttering of a butterfly’s wings changes the world climate. It does this because it changes ever so slightly the parameters of the world climate. And over time, a tiny change in the parameters expands and expands until it is becomes substantial. In this transition to a new world order, we are all little butterflies and therefore the chances of tilting the bifurcation in the direction we prefer depends on us. It follows that our efforts as activists are not merely useful; they are the essential element in our struggle for a better world. The odds are fifty-fifty. But fifty-fifty is not little; it is a lot.

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Bifurcation and Collective Choice Tactics of the Transition Immanuel Wallerstein

Up to now, I endeavored to do two things. One was to outline the context within which one can analyze the dilemmas that the Global Left faces in the future. This context for me is the modern world-system, which is a capitalist world-economy based on the endless accumulation of capital. I explained how I thought that system has functioned over the past 500 years. I argued that, like all systems from the very largest (the universe) to the smallest nano-systems, this system was a historical system that had three phases—its initial coming into being, its long period of “normal” functioning according to the rules that govern the system, and its inevitable structural crisis. During what I called its normal period, the modern world-system had discernible cyclical rhythms, of which the two most important were the so-called Kondratieff long waves and the hegemonic cycles. Each of these rhythms was cyclical in a consistent pattern of two steps forward followed by one step back. That is, they did not return all the way to where they had been at the beginning of the previous upturn. To achieve its objectives, each of these rhythms depended on constructing a quasi-monopoly. The quasi-monopolies were necessarily limited in time because they were always self-liquidating. In addition, I analyzed the three basic costs of production—personnel, inputs, and infrastructure—and the ways in which producers sought to minimize each of these costs. These efforts were, however, only partially realizable. The result of how these imperfect cyclical rhythms operated was an upward secular trend over 500 years. These costs rose steadily as a percentage of the possible price that could be obtained (effective demand). They eventually reached a point where the costs were so high and so far from a possible equilibrium that they brought about the structural crisis of the system. The key feature of this structural crisis is that the system bifurcated. That is, there were now two possible and quite different paths along DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-4

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which the system could evolve. In a bifurcation, one is certain that the system cannot survive. However, one is equally sure that it is intrinsically impossible to know which fork of the bifurcation will ultimately prevail and thereby create a new historical system. Within this framework, I outlined certain turning points of the historical evolution of our modern world-system. One was the French Revolution, whose historic importance was not what most historians discuss. The result of the French Revolution was neither the political nor the economic transformation of France. It was rather the cultural transformation of the modern world-system as a whole. The French Revolution bequeathed to the world-system the tacit worldwide acceptance of two cultural concepts: the normality of change and the sovereignty of the people. I call this the construction of a geoculture of the world-system. The combination of the two had potentially very radical consequences. The sovereign people could change the system more or less as they wished. This belief was of course very threatening to the dominant classes. There then emerged three versions of how to handle this new reality. These three versions were the three ideologies—right-wing conservatism, centrist liberalism, and left-wing radicalism. Each of these was a mode of responding politically to these new beliefs that I call the newly constructed geoculture of the modern world-system. I interpreted the world-revolution of 1848 as a moment of critical confrontation of the three ideologies. The confrontation ended with the dominance of centrist liberalism in the geoculture. The other two ideologies were reduced to becoming mere avatars of the dominant one. This dominance of centrist liberalism essentially lasted until the worldrevolution of 1968, whose major consequence was precisely to liberate both the conservatives and the radicals from their subordination to centrist liberalism. After 1968, all three ideologies became once again autonomous ideologies, recreating the original triad. Centrist liberalism did not disappear but was reduced to being, as before 1848, simply one of three competing ideologies. During the period running more or less from 1945 to 1970, the world-system enjoyed the highest historical level of accumulation of capital as well as the most extensive and powerful degree of hegemonic control of the system that had ever been known. It was precisely the fact that the modern world-system worked so well in this period in terms of its objectives that pushed the system too close to the asymptotes and brought on the structural crisis of the world-system. Remember, however, that what I am trying to do in this book is to analyze something that I call the Global Left. I sought therefore first to

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explain why and how the Global Left took a crucial turn in the wake of the severe repressions following the world-revolution of 1848. I considered the key element in this political turn to be one from ending its dependence on spontaneous rebellions toward creating longer-turn organizational and therefore bureaucratic structures. Such structures began to take shape only in the 1870s. The two kinds of movements—the social and the nationalist movements—showed significant parallels in their internal debates on three issues: the relation of movements to their states, the identity of the primary historical actor, and the degree to which the movements should be vertical structures. In both the social and the national movements, the strategy that won out was the so-called two-step strategy— first obtain state power, then transform the world. This strategy failed precisely because it succeeded. The worldrevolution of 1968 was a response to several realities. The first was the imperialist role of the hegemonic power, and what the revolutionaries defined as the collusion of the Soviet Union (the tacit Yalta deal). The second was the failure of the movements, having realized step one of their strategy, to change the world in any significant way. The third was the limitations and misdeeds of a verticalist strategy. Initially, the Global Right was able in the following two decades to take advantage of the post-1968 situation. This was followed by the resumption by the Global Left circa 1994 of its own thrusts for change. There were three successive moments of this reawakening of the Global Left: the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994, the ability of the demonstrators at the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 to scuttle the proposed new world treaty guaranteeing so-called intellectual property rights, and the founding of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2001. What remains to be discussed are the useful and possible strategies of the Global Left during the remaining 20–40 years of the structural crisis of our present system. To do that, I need to remind you of the reasons why the classic two-step strategy failed. The very belief in the inevitability of progress was substantively depoliticizing, and particularly depoliticizing once an antisystemic movement came to state power. After 1968, the Global Left espoused a sort of anti-statism. This popular shift to anti-statism, hailed though it was by the celebrants of the capitalist system, did not really serve the interests of the latter. For in actuality anti-statism served to delegitimize all state structures, not merely those of left regimes. It thus undermined (rather than reinforced) the political stability of the world-system, and thereby has been making its systemic crisis more acute.

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The politics of the transition are different from the politics of the last 500 years. It is the politics of grabbing advantage and position at a moment in time when politically anything is possible and when most actors find it extremely difficult to formulate middle-range strategies. Ideological and analytic confusion becomes a pervasive reality rather than an accidental and momentary variable. The economics of everyday life is subject to wilder swings than those to which the modern worldsystem had been accustomed and for which there were relatively easy explanations. Above all, the social fabric now seems less reliable and the institutions on which people rely to guarantee their immediate security seem to be faltering seriously. Thus, both antisocial crime and so-called terrorism have come to seem to most people more widespread than in the past they think they remember. And this perception, correct or not, creates fear. One widespread reflex has been the expansion of privatized security measures staffed by non-state hired forces. The Global Right today is a complex mix and does not constitute a single organized caucus. It probably, however, can be divided into two main groups. One group favors repressive tactics against the Global Left. The other favors a politics of co-optive concessions. In the past, co-optive concessions seemed to work, in the sense of maximizing short-run calm. In the ever-increasing tumult and uncertainties brought about by the structural crisis, a larger percentage of ordinary people have begun to embrace repressive tactics. They turn on scapegoats and support more repressive leaders. There has always been a group who has argued that repression does not work in the long run, that it provokes rebellion rather than makes it less likely. They are today perhaps a minority among the upper strata, but they are insightful and intelligent. They perceive the fact that the present system is collapsing. They counsel everyone not to panic. Rather, they promote an alternative tactic, one that aims to construct a new system that is noncapitalist but still preserves their privileged position. What this latter group promotes is what we might label as the de Lampedusa strategy—to change everything in order that nothing changes. Both subgroups of the Global Right have firm resolve and a great deal of resources at their command. They can hire cadres—politicians, lawyers, media professionals, university intellectuals—who possess great intelligence and skill. With the money at their disposal, they can hire more or less as many as they wish. They have in fact been doing so for some time now. I do not know what the de Lampedusa faction will come up with, or by what means they will seek to implement the form of transition they favor. I do know that, whatever it is, it will seem attractive to

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many people and be deceptive. Therefore, it is far more dangerous to the Global Left than the policies pursued by the advocates of repression. The most deceptive aspect is that such proposals will be clothed as radical, progressive change. It will require constantly applied analytic criticism to bring to the surface what the real consequences will be, and to distinguish and weigh the positive and negative elements of the measures they propose. The objective of the Global Left is to move in the direction of a relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian system. One major dilemma is that it necessarily acts within the framework of an uncertain outcome. This is not at all easy. There is no bandwagon to climb aboard, no path guaranteed to succeed. There is only a harsh and lengthy struggle, which it may win but which it may lose. The uncertainty of the outcome is disconcerting. The pre-1968 left analysis involved multiple biases that had pushed it toward a state-orientation. The first bias was that homogeneity was somehow better than heterogeneity, and that therefore centralization was somehow better than decentralization. This bias derived from the false assumption that equality means identity. To be sure, many thinkers had pointed out the fallacy of this equation, including Marx, who distinguished equity from equality. But for revolutionaries in a hurry, the centralizing, homogenizing path seemed easiest and fastest. It required no difficult calculation of how to balance complex sets of choices. The argument in effect was that one cannot add apples and oranges. The only problem is that the real world is precisely made up of apples and oranges. If you can’t do such fuzzy arithmetic, you can’t make real political choices. The second bias was virtually the opposite. The preference for unification of effort and result should have pushed logically toward the creation of a single world movement and the advocacy of a world state. But the de facto reality of a multistate system, in which some states were visibly more powerful and privileged than other states, pushed the movements toward seeing the state in which they lived as a mechanism of defense of collective interests within the world-system. They tended to see the states as instruments more useful for the large majority within each state than they were for the privileged few. Once again, many thinkers had pointed to the fallacy of believing that any state within the modern world-system would or could serve collective interests rather than those of the privileged few. However, weak majorities in weak states could see no other weapon at hand in their struggles against marginalization and oppression than a state structure. They thought (or rather they hoped) they might be able to control it for themselves.

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The third bias was the most curious of all. The French Revolution had 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 “equality.” In fact, what the liberals really meant is that “liberty” (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 Global Left fell for it. This was particularly true of the Leninist variant of the Global Left. Leninists 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 one’s choices are constrained by an unequal position. And no one can be “equal” if one 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. Still we do not wish to tell a story about the past. The errors of the Global Left, the failed strategy, were an almost inevitable outcome of the operations of the capitalist system against which the Global Left was struggling. And the widespread recognition of this historic failure of the Global Left is part and parcel of the disarray caused by the general crisis of the capitalist world-system. What is it, however, that the Global Left should push for now and in the decades to come? I think there are three major lines of theory and praxis to emphasize. The first is what I call “forcing liberals to be liberals.” The Achilles heel of centrist liberals is that they don’t want to implement their own rhetoric. One centerpiece of their rhetoric is individual choice. Yet at many elementary levels, liberals oppose individual choice. One of the most obvious and the most important is the right to choose where to live. Immigration controls are antiliberal. Making choices of doctors or of schools dependent on wealth is antiliberal. Patents are antiliberal. One could go on. The list is long. The fact is that the capitalist world-economy has survived precisely on the basis of the nonfulfillment of liberal rhetoric. The Global Left should be systematically, regularly, and continuously calling the bluff of centrist liberals. Of course, calling the rhetorical bluff is only the beginning of reconstruction. The Global Left needs to have a positive program of its own. There has been a veritable sea change in the programs of left parties

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and movements around the world between 1960 and today. In 1960, their programs emphasized economic structures. They advocated one form or another, one degree or another, of the socialization, usually the nationalization, of the means of production. They said little, if anything, about inequalities that were not defined as class-based. Today, almost all of these same parties and movements, or their successors, put forward proposals to deal with inequalities of gender, race, and ethnicity. Many of the programs are extremely inadequate, but at least these parties now feel it necessary to say something. On the other hand, very few parties or movements today that consider themselves on the left include further socialization or nationalization of the means of production as part of their program. Indeed, a large number are actually proposing moving in the other direction. It is a breathtaking turnabout. Some hail it, some denounce it. Most just accept it. In the period since 1968, there has been an enormous amount of testing of alternative strategies by different movements, old and new, and there has been in addition a rather healthy shift in the relations of antisystemic movements to each other. The murderous mutual denunciations and vicious struggles of yesteryear have considerably abated, a positive development that has been insufficiently noticed and appreciated. I would like to suggest some lines along which the Global Left could develop further the idea of an alternative strategy. 1. Promote the spirit of Porto Alegre. What is this spirit? I would define it as follows. It is the coming together in a non-hierarchical fashion of the world family of antisystemic and global justice movements around a common minimal program: (a) seeking greater intellectual clarity, (b) militant actions based on popular mobilization that can be seen as immediately useful in people’s lives, and (c) simultaneously insisting on pursuing longer-run, more fundamental changes. There are three crucial elements to the spirit of Porto Alegre. It is a loose structure that has brought together on a world scale movements from the South and the North, and on more than a merely token basis. Its militancy is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, it is not in search of some global consensus with the spirit of Davos. And politically, it emphasizes the extra-state modes of acting that had been espoused by the movements of 1968. Of course, we shall have to see whether a loosely structured world movement can hold together in any meaningful sense, and by what means it can develop

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the tactics of the struggle. But its very looseness makes it difficult to suppress. As it becomes stronger and more visible, it encourages many centrist forces to become less antagonistic, if hesitantly. 2. Pursue defensive electoral tactics. If the Global Left engages in loosely structured, extra-parliamentary militant tactics, this immediately raises the question of its attitude toward electoral processes. It faces Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, elections are not crucial to long-run change, and therefore cannot be the priority of the Global Left. On the other hand, elections do matter and cannot simply be ignored as irrelevant. Electoral victories cannot transform the world, but they do accomplish something. They are an essential mechanism of protecting the immediate needs of the world’s populations against efforts by the Global Right to reduce or terminate benefits that the Global Left had obtained and on which large numbers of people depend to survive. Elections therefore must be fought to minimize the damage that can be inflicted by the Global Right via control of various governments throughout the world. In that sense, winning elections is a defensive tactic. Consequently, electoral tactics are a purely pragmatic matter. Once the Global Left doesn’t think of obtaining state power as a mode of transforming the world, elections always become a matter of the lesser evil. And the decision of what is the lesser evil can only be made case by case and moment by moment. They depend in part on what is the form of the electoral system. A system with winner-takes-all must be manipulated differently than a system with two rounds or a system with proportional representation. Furthermore, there are many different party and sub-party traditions among the Global Left. Most of these traditions are relics of another era, but many people still vote according to them. Since state elections are a pragmatic matter, it is crucial to create alliances that respect these traditions, aiming for the 51 percent that is the pragmatic objective. But it is very important that in the case of electoral victory, there is no dancing in the streets because “we have won!” Victory is merely a defensive tactic, and electoral victory is a matter of relief that we have minimized the damage, especially for those who are the poorest, most oppressed parts of the population. 3. Democratize, democratize unceasingly. The most popular demand the vast majority of people everywhere have made on the states is “more”—more education, more health, and more guaranteed lifetime income. This is not only popular; it is immediately useful in people’s lives. And furthermore, obtaining the “more” makes still

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more difficult the possibilities of the endless accumulation of capital. These demands should be pushed loudly, continuously, and in all zones of the world-system. There cannot be “too much” in these demands anywhere. To be sure, expanding all these “welfare state” functions always raises reasonable questions about the efficiency of expenditures, the bane of corruption, and the fear of creating over-powerful and unresponsive bureaucracies. These are all questions the Global Left should be ready to address. But they should never drop the basic demand of “more, much more” because of these problems. It is particularly important that popular movements not spare the left-of-center governments they have elected from these demands. Just because a left government is a friendlier government than an outright right-wing government does not mean that the Global Left should end the demand for more, and more now. The effect of pressing friendly governments to the left tends to push right-wing opposition forces to the center, even the center-left, in electoral competition. Conversely, failing to push the center-left governments to the left tends to result in the left-of-center movements moving to the center-right. While there may be occasional special circumstances to obviate these truisms, the general rule on democratization is more, much more. 4. Call upon the liberal center to fulfill its theoretical preferences. This is otherwise known as forcing the pace of liberalism. The liberal center notably seldom means what it says, or practices what it preaches. Take some obvious themes, say, liberty. The liberal center used to denounce the Soviet Union regularly because it didn’t permit free emigration. But of course the other side of free emigration is free immigration. There’s not much value in being allowed to leave a country unless you can get in somewhere else. The Global Left should be pushing for open frontiers. The liberal center regularly calls for freer trade, freer enterprise, keeping the government out of decision-making by entrepreneurs. The other side of that is that entrepreneurs who fail in the market should not be salvaged. They take the profits when they succeed; they should take the losses when they fail. It is often argued that saving the companies is saving jobs. But there are far cheaper ways of saving jobs—paying for unemployment insurance, offering retraining, and even creating job opportunities. None of these actions requires salvaging the debts of the failing entrepreneur. The liberal center regularly insists that monopoly is a bad thing. But the other side of that is abolishing or grossly limiting patents.

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The Global Left should not be asking the government to protect industries against foreign competition. Will this hurt the working classes in the core zones? Well, not if money and energy are spent on trying to achieve greater convergence of world wage rates. The details of these propositions are complex and need to be discussed. The point, however, is not to let the liberal center get away with its rhetoric and reaping the rewards of that, while not paying the costs of its proposals. Furthermore, the true political mode of neutralizing centrist opinion is to appeal to its ideals, not its interests. Demanding the enactment of the liberal rhetoric is a way of appealing to the ideals rather than the interests of the centrist elements. Finally, we should always bear in mind that a good deal of the benefits of democratization are not readily available to the poorest strata, or are not available to the same degree, because of the difficulties they have in navigating the bureaucratic hurdles. Here I return to the 40-year-old proposition of Cloward and Piven that one should “explode the rolls,” that is, mobilize in the poorest communities so that they take full advantage of their legal rights.1 5. Insist that antiracism is the defining measure of democracy. Democracy is about treating all people equally—in terms of power, in terms of distribution, in terms of opportunity for personal fulfillment. Racism is the primary mode of distinguishing between those who have rights (or more rights) and the others who have no rights at all (or fewer rights). Racism defines which group is in which category. And simultaneously it offers a specious justification for the practice. Racism is not a secondary issue, either on a national or a world scale. It is the mode by which the liberal center’s promise of universalistic criteria is systematically, deliberately, and constantly undermined. Racism is pervasive throughout the existing world-system. No corner of the globe is without it. Everywhere it serves as a central feature of local, national, and world politics. In her speech to the Mexican National Assembly on March 29, 2001, Commandant Esther of the EZLN (Zapatistas) said: The Whites (ladinos) and the rich people make fun of us indigenous women for our clothing, for our speech, for our language, for our way of praying and healing, and for our color, which is the color of the earth that we work.2 She went on to plead in favor of the law that would guarantee autonomy to the indigenous peoples, saying:

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When the rights and the culture of the indigenous peoples are recognized, . . . the law will begin to reconcile its position (hora) with the position of the indigenous peoples. . . . And if today we are indigenous women, tomorrow we will be the others, men and women, who are dead, persecuted, or imprisoned because of their difference.3 6. Decommodify. The crucial thing wrong with the capitalist system is not private ownership, which is simply a means, but commodification, which is the essential element in the accumulation of capital. The history of the modern world-system has been one of everexpanding commodification. Still, even today, the capitalist worldsystem is not entirely commodified, although there are efforts to make it so. Nonetheless, if we wanted to, we could in fact move in the other direction. Universities and hospitals (whether state-owned or private) have long been defined as nonprofit institutions. Ever since the 1970s, there has been a massive push to turn them into capitalist structures seeking to accumulate capital. In addition to resisting this shift in the role of universities and hospitals, the Global Left should be thinking of how it can transform steel factories into nonprofit institutions, that is, self-sustaining structures that pay dividends to no one. This is the face of a more hopeful future, and in fact could start now. 7. Remember always that we are living in the era of transition from our existing world-system to something different. This means several things. We should not be taken in by the rhetoric of globalization or the inferences about TINA. Not only do alternatives exist, but the only alternative that does not exist is continuing with our present structures. There will be immense struggle over the successor system, one that will continue for 20–40 years. It is a struggle whose outcome is intrinsically uncertain. History is on no one’s side. It depends on what we all do. On the other hand, this intrinsic uncertainty offers a great opportunity for creative action. During the normal life of an historical system, even great efforts at transformation (so-called revolutions) have limited consequences since the system exercises great pressures to return to its equilibrium. But in the chaotic ambiance of a structural transition, fluctuations become truly wild, and even small pushes can have great consequences in favoring one branch or the other of the bifurcation. If ever agency operates, the structural crisis of a system is its moment.

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The key problem for the Global Left is not its organization, however important that may be. The key problem is lucidity. The forces who wish to change the system so that nothing changes, so that we have a different system that is equally or more hierarchical and polarizing, have money, energy, and intelligence at their disposal. They will dress up the fake changes in attractive clothing. And only careful analysis will keep the Global Left from falling into their many traps. The Global Right will use slogans with which the Global Left may find it very difficult disagree with—say, human rights. But the Global Right will give this slogan content that combines a few elements that are highly desirable with many others that perpetuate the “civilizing mission” of the powerful and privileged over the non-civilized others. The Global Left must carefully dissect these proposals and call the bluffs of centrist liberals. For example, if an international judicial procedure against genocide is desirable, it is only desirable if it is applicable to everyone, not merely the weak. If nuclear armaments, or biological warfare, is dangerous, even barbaric, then there are no safe possessors of such weapons. In the inherent uncertainty of the world, at its moments of historic transformation, the only plausible strategy for the Global Left is one of intelligent, militant pursuit of its basic objective—the achievement of a relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian world. Such a world is possible. It is by no means certain that it will come into being. But then it is by no means impossible. The future of the Global Left depends upon itself, in its ability to push its alternative vision of a world-system against a very powerful opponent in a complicated, confusing, and chaotic situation. Notes 1. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward conclude their book on public welfare with this summation: “In the absence of fundamental economic reforms, therefore, we take the position that the explosion of the rolls is the true relief reform, that it should be defended, and expanded. Even now, hundreds and thousands of impoverished families remain who are eligible for assistance but who receive no aid at all.” Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, New York, Pantheon, 1971, p.  348 (italics in original). 2. http://www.alterinfos.org/archives/DIAL-2462.pdf 3. Ibid.

Part II

Appreciations/Critiques

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Bifurcation in the “End” of Capitalism Étienne Balibar Translated by Lara Vergnaud

This response to Immanuel Wallerstein, prompted by three lectures he gave at the Collège d’Etudes Mondiales in 2016, “The Global Left: Past, Present, and Future,” doesn’t consist of singing the author’s praises or drawing his intellectual portrait. Rather, I intend to raise certain questions, reintroduce others, and grant serious attention to problems of general interest that, admittedly, Wallerstein has by now proven capable of articulating with unrivaled precision thanks to the rigor and breadth of his analysis. Before exploring at least a few of the questions asked by Wallerstein, or which I find myself asking while reading his texts, I’d like to briefly comment on our intellectual relationship and the significance for me of his ideas, which have helped to irrevocably transform my conception of history and politics, as well as the way in which we should today treat the legacy of Marxist theory. This isn’t solely because it will then be easier for me to illustrate those points on which I agree with his perspective and propositions, as well as the points for which I’d like to propose (including to him) diverging formulations, but also because I believe this will allow me to better elucidate the backdrop of the arguments laid out in “The Global Left.”1 I met Immanuel Wallerstein in 1981 (after having read the first, and at the time only, volume of The Modern World-System)2 in New Delhi at an international conference on “social classes and status groups in the capitalist world-economy,” organized by the Maison des sciences de l’homme (MSH) in partnership with the Fernand Braudel Center of Binghamton and the Social Science Research Council of India. The MSH had asked me to join the French delegation as the representative of a certain “structuralist Marxism.” At the time, I hadn’t wanted to miss the opportunity to encounter one of the major interpretative paradigms of historical materialism, which was very different from what I myself employed, being as it was more directly linked to the study of forms of imperialism and what was not yet called the “post-colonial” DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-6

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condition. In 1983, when we met again in Paris, Wallerstein asked me, “What concerns you most right now?” It was the day after the first electoral victories of the Front National—a party descended directly from the colonialist far right behind the military putsch in Algiers in 1961, and more distantly from the French fascism of the 1930s and 40s—which, as we’ve seen, has had considerable success since. I replied “racism,” then explained, “it seems to me that Marxism in its classic form, including the form that we, and notably Althusser, wanted to re-examine from a philosophical perspective, is completely incapable of explaining the origins and transformations of racism. It’s as if there’s an epistemological obstacle present, whose political consequences are disastrous.” When I asked him the same question in turn, he replied, “ethnicity.” Indeed, at that time in the United States, due in particular to the growing scale of Hispanic immigration and resulting movements, the question of race relations was transforming from a “color line” problematic centered on the consequences of slavery to one of varied ethnic relations, along with their economic dimensions (underpaid labor as a way to circumvent union agreements) and cultural ones (“multiculturalism” wasn’t being discussed yet but we were getting there). Wallerstein believed—quite rightly—that these transformations needed to be situated within a global framework and that his world-economy theory could offer an explanation for them. On the basis of that impartial meeting, which could only have occurred by chance, we decided to organize a multidisciplinary seminar, which was held at MSH between 1985 and 1987 and led to our collective work Race, Nation, Classe: Les identités ambiguës (Editions La Découverte, 1988).3 My contribution to the book focused in particular on what I thought (and still think) was the internal correlation between racism and nationalism in the modern period. And Wallerstein’s part of course used the world capitalist system as the framework for the political and ideological formations that regulate the contradictions within said system in a more or less functional manner (insisting in particular on the symmetry of problems caused by racism and sexism as instruments to “hierarchize” and “categorize” populations). I mention these recollections and this collaboration because they lead directly to what strikes me as Wallerstein’s fundamental contribution to revising the idea of capitalism inherited from Marx, allowing us to simultaneously use fundamental concepts and rip them from certain ideological assumptions from which they originally appeared to be inseparable. Among other points, I will discuss three aspects of that contribution.4

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Historical Capitalism The first aspect concerns the historicization of the concept of capitalism constructed by Marx around the salaried form of the exploitation of labor and the laws of accumulation and distribution of merchant surplus (“added-value” or “surplus-value”) that followed. Granted, Marx did refer to history repeatedly (to the extent that his doctrine was named “historical materialism”), both to situate capitalism within a succession of modes of production and social structures characterized by the different forms they imparted to the exploitation of labor and the class struggle, and to analyze the economic and institutional transformations of capitalism itself. But that reference to history has remained yoked to a basic evolutionism built on the idea that trends have necessarily occurred and repeated throughout the history of capitalism, with more or less large variations, everywhere that the capitalist mode of production has been introduced and become dominant. This conception of the necessity of tendential laws is inseparable from the theory according to which capitalism paves the way, by means of the internal “socialization” of the productive forces that it develops, to the transition to socialism and communism, the possibility (and therefore promise) of which it inherently contains. All while conserving the fundamental traits of capitalism as defined as a mode of indefinite accumulation of value and surplus-value, Wallerstein challenges this representation with a radical critique of the notion of trends (which is partially replaced by that of cycles), notably by demonstrating that the “laws” of capitalism are the result of its concrete history, and not the reverse. This is what he calls historical capitalism.5 Historical capitalism is not an “invariant” that can be transported through time and space; it is inseparable from a geographical and geopolitical specificity whose history clearly shows successive configurations. If the space within which capitalism has spread wasn’t differentiated and hierarchized, it wouldn’t have a history in the full sense of the word, which makes deducing it from a preexisting evolutionary framework impossible. That is why the historicization of the notion of capitalism is indissociable—this obviously also has political implications—from a rectification of the “Eurocentric” thesis from which official Marxists have never been able to completely escape (despite their discussions about imperialism, of which Rosa Luxemburg’s contribution clearly comes the closest to Wallerstein’s thinking). Colonization should be considered as a native trait of capitalism, which has continued to occur alongside it throughout its history (and therefore cannot be reduced to “primitive accumulation”).

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And consequently, capitalism must be represented not as a formal system exported throughout the world from a European center, but on the contrary, concretely as a “world-system” that first establishes itself on the planetary scale (via “great discoveries”), and whose possibilities of accumulation flow from the periphery to the center rather than being exported from the center to the periphery (domination and violence being what’s exported from the center to the periphery). In this sense, not only is globalization not a recent phenomenon, but it is also one of the intrinsic (or “systemic”) characteristics of capitalism. The second aspect, which expands on the first, concerns capitalism’s mode of historicity, meaning the interplay of the major factors causing its fluctuations and allowing its periodization, not in evolutionary “stages,” but in “eras” characterized by certain conditions of the process of accumulation and by the identity of certain, collective historical actors, vessels for capitalism, who attempt to orient it to their benefit or, on the contrary, hinder it. Essentially, while simplifying many things for the purposes of this introduction, there are three interwoven factors that shape every era and thereby give capitalism its singular history, which is refracted locally depending on the place occupied by each “world region” in the whole: first, the distribution of different modes of labor exploitation (salaried workers, slavery, different forms of “subordinate employment”) among distinct zones (and notably between a “center” and a “periphery”) specializing in different modes of production, some of which are labor-intensive while others are capital-intensive, resulting in a fundamentally unequal exchange between those zones that redistributes the produced value to the center’s benefit; second, the fluctuation in the balance of power between the center and the periphery, and within each of those zones; third, the emergence and degree of organization, and therefore effectiveness, of “antisystemic movements,” the two main ones in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries being the workers’ movement (with or without socialist ideology) and nationalism (aimed at the self-determination of subjugated populations)—the first primarily situated in the center, and the second (at least as an opposition movement) in the periphery. It’s clear that a fundamental aspect of this problematic is to not dissociate economics and politics (in any case not in the sense of a “base” and “superstructure” model), but to continuously study their reciprocity and independence. This translates in particular to how Wallerstein addresses the question of cycles of accumulation (and therefore phases of growth and crisis) and the question of successive geopolitical hegemonies and the act of challenging or toppling them. Finally, the third aspect concerns whether we can explore, within this framework, a series of problems that determine the forms taken by

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politics throughout the history of capitalism, and for which Wallerstein has substantiated original formulations and concepts. I offer the following non-exhaustive list, based on my own interests and the discussions prompted by Wallerstein’s lectures: 1. Notwithstanding the question of “antisystemic movements,” the idea of a fundamental correlation, characteristic of historical capitalism, between the prevalence of the nation form as the organizational mode for the state-society relationship (first in the center, then in the periphery) and the fact that struggles between dominant and dominated groups take the form of a confrontation between classes; class and nation are the two concurrent and complementary “social structures” or forms of “grouping” within the capitalist world-system (which is a significant departure from the way in which classical Marxism seeks to “reduce” the latter to the former). 2. The insistence placed on the “strategic” function of the semiperiphery, which Wallerstein repeatedly states does not only constitute a statistically defined “middle zone” (for example, based on living standards or dependency relationships) but is also a politically delicate zone. That’s because the semi-periphery, at times, becomes a zone in which revolts are diluted, meaning transformed into economic and social “catch up” efforts, and at others, on the contrary, a zone in which revolutions occur (where “antisystemic movements” converge, or even merge, as seen in Russia in 1917). Revolutions, a concept for which he uses varied meanings, are important moments in the history of capitalism as written by Wallerstein. 3. The problematic of the dispersion or individual reduction of “ideologies” as understood by Wallerstein, meaning the political discourses between which were divided the societies that sprung from the two simultaneous “revolutions” that split modernity in two at the turn of the nineteenth century: the democratic revolution (in particular the French Revolution, whose impact was global) and the Industrial Revolution (which led to England’s imperial supremacy in the nineteenth century). These ideologies are conservatism, liberalism, and socialism, which have a shared foundation, that is, the self-evident nature of social change, but draw opposing conclusions. On that basis, Wallerstein defended an argument both risky and highly edifying—the underlying reduction of these three ideologies to liberal ideology, which is centered on the idea of indefinite social progress based on economic growth, and a “paradoxical” recourse to state power to start a trend intended to be that of society (or “civil society”) itself, in an autonomous fashion. Today, that argument

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has prompted Wallerstein to cite the fact that the extremes are once again empowering and polarizing themselves as a symptom characteristic of the phrase of general or systemic “crisis” (since 1979– 1980, a period marked by the emergence and institutionalization of neoliberalism). It’s important to understand that historical Marxism isn’t external to this dynamic, meaning that it tried to fall back on the dominant liberal ideology (this is one way to interpret its submission to evolutionism). And that also means that, on a more philosophical level, historical capitalism induces a certain conception of history as its “dominant ideology,” which reflects its own historicity. It would of course be contradictory to attempt to interpret the “end” or “crisis” of capitalism as a system by using a conception of history that is internal to historical capitalism. Final Crisis or Mutation of Capitalism This synopsis—which I hope isn’t too unfaithful—should make it clear that I agree with the core of the arguments developed by Wallerstein regarding the characteristics of the capitalist world-system as a historical system of long duration. However, he draws conclusions that are both dramatic and audacious when it comes to the critical phase in which capitalism finds itself today, and the conditions that result in terms of the actions taken by a “Global Left.” One could call this a kind of litmus test—both in terms of the validity and coherence of Wallerstein’s historical framework and of our ability to accept and agree with his diagnosis and propositions. The tricky question is clearly not which “camp” to choose in the confrontation between the two paths he describes as being the branches of a bifurcation created by the crisis of the capitalist world-system—at least this isn’t my problem, as my choice has been made—but rather to know whether to problematize the current situation in these terms, in accordance with the premises we have granted him. It’s worth mentioning a by no means lesser point here, which is that the prognosis (if not to say “prophecy”) that the capitalist worldsystem will enter its final crisis, which will be qualitatively different from previous ones in the sense that it can no longer be resolved by the reorganization of the system on an enlarged scale and in a more complex form, is not a new element of Wallerstein’s thinking. In fact, it was one of the axioms of his theory, as can be observed by rereading a major methodological text in which he systematized his undertaking in 1974.6 However, a change occurred a few years ago, which is reflected in the lectures cited here. Wallerstein was no longer satisfied

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with announcing that said crisis would inevitably occur, though at an indeterminate date: he stated—relying naturally on observable and interpretable symptoms—that the crisis had already begun.7 As a result, the question of collective action intended to “tilt” historical evolution in the direction of one of two outcomes (the replacement of historical capitalism by an even more violent and hierarchical exploitative society or, on the contrary, the emergence of a more egalitarian and united society, which Wallerstein is careful not to call “socialism” or “communism,” but which he describes as an alternative to a logic of accumulation for accumulation’s  sake) is no longer being asked in the future, but in the present. To illustrate the point, he estimates the time necessary to resolve this crisis, whose chaotic and violent character he sets out plainly, at a few decades (“30–40 years,” meaning one or two generations). The crux of his arguments hasn’t changed, but the way in which it’s applied is no longer the same—it’s become more urgent. And since it’s precisely that urgency that calls us, it’s essential to fully explore the reasoning behind his findings as well as his conclusions. For the sake of clarity, I’d like to begin by providing an overview of my positions before I elucidate and defend them. I’m fundamentally in agreement with the idea of a mutation of capitalism linked to the end of the geographical expansion of the world-economy, resulting from decolonization and the end of the Cold War. I also agree with the idea that any “antisystemic” political struggle must now be situated within a global horizon (which is as applicable to the “right” as to the “left,” but doesn’t entail the same constraints for both). Finally, and most importantly, I agree with the idea (which strikes me as fundamental) that the way in which capitalism will be “overtaken” (in other words, its “transition” to another kind of society) will not take the logical and historical form of an extension of a development trend beyond its limits, or the negation of a negation, but rather of a bifurcation, which has in no way the same moral and political implications. In my opinion, we’ll see that this provokes serious consequences, both theoretical and practical. On the other hand, I disagree with—or at least I see therein some major issues to be debated—the idea that the current crisis cannot be surmounted by capitalism, and furthermore that there exists today a “Global Left” to which we can attribute unique interests and shared perspectives (which, and I’ll come back to this, seems to counter the fundamental optimism displayed by Wallerstein, despite his prudence, with radical pessimism). I will try to argue these two points seriously and meticulously to avoid attributing stances to Wallerstein other than his own. And to conclude, I will demonstrate how my objections or disagreements do not cancel out the points of agreement but simply oblige us to begin an in-depth

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discussion on the meaning of Wallerstein’s call to arms, which will also highlight its value. The Depletion of “Hegemonic” Resources Wallerstein writes: Historical capitalism reached its structural crisis because of the steady increase over time of the three fundamental costs of production: personnel, inputs, and taxation. In a capitalist system, producers make their profits by keeping the total of these costs as far as possible below the prices at which they are able to sell their products. However, as these costs rise over time, they also reach levels at which the willingness of prospective buyers to purchase the goods is reached. At this point, it is no longer possible to accumulate capital via production. That is to say, worldwide effective demand begins to go down. This establishes a squeeze between increasing real costs and decreasing effective demand (Lecture 2). He follows this general theory with an analysis of the three basic types of the costs of production of capitalist goods (internal personnel costs, externalized environmental costs, and governmental taxes). Note that this interpretation combines factors that are conventionally referred to as “economic” (the possibilities of proftable investment) and others conventionally referred to as “political” (the balance of power between states, capitalists, and workers in terms of the expansion or dismantling of the “social state”). Te advantage of this is that Wallerstein shines a light on an essential characteristic that has intensifed continually since the early 1970s, if not the wake of the Second World War: the narrow interweaving of economic strategies and political strategies, the result of which is the permanent dependence of the “regulation” of processes of accumulation on the political balance of power (between classes and nations, and possibly other actors). Tat doesn’t prevent a negative feedback efect that correlates the stagnation of investment (or its diminution in favor of speculation) and the drying up of efective demand. Wallerstein thus joins (though it would be more correct to say “precedes”) an increasingly lively current debate on the question of “secular stagnation,” nourished notably by the work of Robert Gordon.8 However, Wallerstein ofers a more radical interpretation that denies the possibility, today, of reviving accumulation, either by the “Keynesian” path (government investments, social policy, and monetary policy)

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or the “Schumpeterian” path (revolutionary technological innovations). Although these points are disputed, it’s worth taking into consideration the “pessimist” theory (from the capitalist point of view) because it alone recognizes the obstinacy of the leaders of global capitalism (meaning those who periodically gather at Davos) in following paths other than policies of social austerity and fnancial regulation, despite the warnings given for some time now by organisms that monitor the global economy.9 At the same time, Wallerstein’s argument debunks the saying that, since being coined by Margaret Tatcher, has become the mantra of neoliberalism: “Tere Is No Alternative!” Most importantly, his theory merges with the other major lesson Wallerstein takes away from his study of the fuctuations through which the capitalist system, over the long term (many centuries), has made its “crisis recoveries,” that is, by linking the discovery of new sources of cheap workforces in the periphery (which also leads to new masses of consumers entering what Marx called “sector II” of the reproduction of capital) with the technological revolution in the center, where manual jobs gradually transform into intellectual jobs. As the process of geographical growth (and expansion) begun from Europe in the sixteenth century came to an end, the division of labor in the world-economy gradually lost its polarized nature (or rather its polarization stopped coinciding for the most part with the major distribution of the global population between two heterogeneous zones). And with the computerization required by all current technological innovations, technical progress stopped “protecting” intellectual workers indefnitely from the impacts of deskilling and unemployment that, until now, were essentially limited to manual workers.10 Tis geoeconomic transformation has been preponderantly infuenced by the decline of the United States as an utterly dominant capitalist power and region in which “top-rate” profts and investments that drive growth are concentrated. Wallerstein maintains that we can’t simply imagine the redistribution of these functions among several mutually “cooperative” centers: there is without a doubt always competition for the dominant position, hence alternating periods of supreme hegemony and periods during which rival powers face of, but fundamentally the “monopoly” is a proft condition in a stratifed world-economy, even and especially if its primary institution is the “market,” and the decline of that function is itself also a factor that perpetuates the crisis.11 It strikes me that these propositions and the analyses behind them present an unavoidable problem, whether we agree to view them as proof that the “moment” announced in Wallerstein’s theory (that of a general or final crisis of capitalism, coinciding with the exhaustion of its capacities to “return to equilibrium”) is actually (meaning empirically) the one in which

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we’re living. Namely because they draw our attention to the fact that a historical threshold was crossed in the history of capitalism during the second half of the twentieth century, the effects of which we are only now beginning to observe in our daily lives and which, in an incredibly uncertain, and probably also violent, fashion signal even more fundamental changes (which we can, like Wallerstein, call “structural”). The most significant indicator, from his perspective, is that the form of cycles of growth and stagnation (Kondratieff’s phases A and B) are at this point permanently unbalanced—and those cycles express precisely the system’s capacity to find a dynamic equilibrium amid the obstacles it generates itself. In this context, it should be clear why I also agree with a theory that appears to be a recurring theme in Wallerstein’s lectures: the idea that any antisystemic policy, or a policy that envisages a rupture with capitalism’s logic of indefinite accumulation, cannot be conceived of and organized as anything but a global struggle, at the scale of the worldeconomy itself and respecting the forms of solidarity and complexity (or diversity) that it prescribes. This is in no way a simple internationalist affirmation in principle (although such an affirmation is not inconsequential, from either a moral point of view or a strategic one). Rather, this entails evaluating what we refer to as leftist policy, starting with its very definition, as well as who “truly” belongs to the left in the current climate—two questions that, as it happens, don’t entirely overlap. The first has to do with the new form in which class power is concentrated, organized, and legitimized in capitalism today. The propagation of a neoliberal discourse (including within official “left-wing” parties) is undeniably one of the manifestations of that new form. By repeatedly referring to what he calls the “spirit of Davos” and, to start with, the institutions and activities that concretize it, Wallerstein gives us another important hint: nation-states aren’t disappearing from the current political stage of course, but their importance and their autonomy have been completely redefined as they have been incorporated into a more complex structure of “governance.”12 They require more, not less, coordination with the new structures in which governments find themselves on equal footing; not only international institutions but also multinational companies that have an economic and political “weight” equal or superior to some of those governments. The result is a contentious centralization, which can evoke what certain Marxists in the past called “ultra-imperialism,” but that involves an entirely original redistribution of decision-making bodies to which we must imperatively respond—if we don’t, nothing will change. That response is what Wallerstein metaphorically calls the “spirit of Porto Alegre.” It’s quite clear in my mind that he doesn’t mean this as a new Komintern, but rather a convergence

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to be found and a problem to be resolved by the very people yoked to globalized capitalism. I agree entirely with this theory, which immediately leads us to the second question. For complex historical reasons (to which I allude earlier when noting that classes and nations are collective subjects pertinent to historical capitalism, whose hierarchy tends to flip when going from center to periphery and vice versa), resistance and alternatives to capitalism (including in the Marxist tradition) have tended to oscillate between two ideological poles or two discourses (at times reformist, at times revolutionary): that of the class struggle and workers’ movement and its alternative strategies, which (in Europe at least) tend to monopolize the “anti-capitalist” label; and that of the anti-imperialist struggle of movements of national liberation and, more generally, resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. We could discuss at great length the extent to which these two discourses are distinct from each other or even incompatible. What concerns us here, however, is first and foremost the fact that the prominent emergence (in the second half of the twentieth century) of anti-imperialist struggles (a true “revolution within a revolution”) radically modified our understanding of the nature and objectives of the struggle against the capitalist system, and therefore of that system itself. In many respects, Wallerstein’s work is a consequence and expression of that change, as the center’s dominance of the periphery could only be clearly observed from the periphery itself, as he himself explains. And that’s why it’s correct to talk about the “spirit of Porto Alegre” and not the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. However, it’s important to immediately note that we are no longer in the era of “Third-Worldism,” even if vastly different agents (including China, en route to becoming the world’s leading capitalist power) continue to claim that label in order to reap the ideological benefits. Neoliberal globalization has redistributed and is increasingly redistributing modes of resistances and forms of collective subjugation; it is moving the battle lines. “Class” and “nation” can no longer polarize the profusion of antisystemic movements as occurred during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not to mention that we are seeing the emergence of an entirely different kind of movement, poorly unified though potentially globalized, such as the environmental movement, indigenous movements and their inextricable defense of land and cultures, and especially the feminist movement—all long rejected by the class and nationalist struggles—whose existence now overdetermines every social or political struggle. Once again, it is therefore correct (and crucial) to define the “public” space in which every struggle that, in one way or another, deals with capitalism and the forms of domination

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it entails as a global space—even if, clearly, spontaneous agreement or convergence is absent within this space, which is more of a platform for differences and divergences that serve to perpetuate the system (and the perpetuation of a system in crisis is a path straight to the abyss). On this point, I again agree entirely with Wallerstein: an alternative (or if preferred, a “Left”) that is not global is not an alternative. From “Historical” Capitalism to “Absolute” Capitalism? At this point, I’d like to express my objections on the basis of my agreement in principle, as previously outlined. I will lay them out in the most comprehensive and concise way possible, not only for reasons of space, but also because I believe it’s necessary to narrow this discussion to a few key points that don’t allow room for prevarication. Regarding the question of the “final” crisis of capitalism as a worldsystem, my objection essentially consists of suggesting that there is a vicious circle (in the logical sense) within Wallerstein’s reasoning. He demonstrates that capitalism cannot continue to accumulate as before, with the same forms of division of labor and organization of power (or hegemony), in particular because those forms have become ineffective in surmounting the crises that are part of the very essence of capitalism. This argument shows that capitalism will inevitably “collapse”— bringing to mind the old Zusammenbruchstheorie, though of course on completely different grounds—if the “rules” aren’t changed. But it can’t prove that the crisis (or grouping of crises heavily influencing one another) will remain unsolvable if the rules have been changed—and in fact, perhaps that is happening, or has already happened, which would mean that what we view as symptoms of decomposition or “chaos” can also be interpreted as a new capitalist system, which is undoubtedly “abnormal” when compared to the former version. This circle, if it indeed exists, underlies what I have already called (unironically) Wallerstein’s “prophetism”—a prophetism related not to the future but to the present (identifying the present as “the end,” in the historical sense, of course). In reality, the idea that it is impossible, or unthinkable, to change the rules can only be the object of a postulate—and as always in history, the ultimate domain of the unpredictable, this postulate risks being refuted by the facts. I am not claiming that to be the case, but I am merely raising the question. Nevertheless, I’d like to better lay out the reasons for my skepticism, of which there are essentially three. The first is epistemological: it stems from Wallerstein’s use of the model of the stability and instability of historical systems borrowed from Prigogine’s theory of “dissipative structures.” At the risk of appearing to

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slide toward idealism (idealism versus naturalism?), I don’t think that we can apply a physical model of this kind to historical structures or systems, except by analogy (analogies can, of course, sometimes bear fruit; one could even say that the “social sciences” wouldn’t exist without physical analogies, as can be attested to by the categories of causality, interaction, equilibrium, regulation, etc.; however, the limits on the use of those analogies should be determined by the study of a singular historical context and not the reverse). Incidentally, it’s particularly striking that to be able to employ his idea of a system and of a systemic crisis (from which he draws enormous implications, in particular identifying historical situations that are “too far from equilibrium” to be brought back to it, thereby opening the door to “bifurcation”),13 Wallerstein is forced to add a new level of discourse, which is not only analogical, but also metaphorical, and which necessitates the “translation” of physical concepts into historical concepts. Here we have the organicist metaphor that consists of positing that all systems go through three phases: coming into being, “normal” functioning, and final crisis or decomposition, mirroring the way in which an individual organism is inevitably born, lives, and dies. Clearly, nothing proves we can’t reason in these terms when dealing with social systems rather than individual living organisms.14 But I think that there’s an even more interesting shift taking place behind this metaphorical play: Wallerstein is forced to designate two entirely different things by the term “capitalist world-system.” On one side is a real object (or if preferred, a material object, in the sense of historical materialism) that is the ensemble of individuals, populations, and institutions, and therefore of the social, economic, and political relationships dominated by historical capitalism: an ensemble that grows and becomes increasingly complex as the world-economy itself expands, to the point of virtually encompassing the planet’s every region and people. On the other is a formal object: the group of rules of operation by means of which capitalism imposes its concept of accumulation on the previous system, or dominates it. Asking that these two levels be carefully distinguished is not an arbitrary or sophistic question, even if we were then to study how they are linked, because the system that becomes “chaotic,” unstable, or uncontrollable, and which for that reason can enter a bifurcation zone, is the real system; whereas the system that becomes contradictory or reaches its operating (management) limits is the formal system, that is, the system of rules. It’s only if the rules themselves had zero flexibility, or if they were the only possibility, for a given social community (namely, humanity itself ), that their obstruction or crisis would lead to an “all or nothing” situation, or the risk of the “death” of the real system.

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In other words, we always end up back where we started: the (convincing) argument that historical capitalism has reached the limits of viability of an accumulation-based system whose foundations were laid 600 years ago by European expansion can only lead to the inevitable conclusion that capitalism as such has become unviable if the only form of capitalism is the “historical” form that we know, and which Wallerstein has studied in detail. That is no longer the case—in any case automatically—if capitalism is likely to take other forms (whose logic must of course be defined and conditions of “stabilization” studied). For that matter, it seems to me that Wallerstein isn’t really saying anything different when, among the two still largely undefined (but incompatible) “paths” opened by the now uncontrollable instability of historical capitalism, he repeatedly stresses “one kind of possible new stable system . . . that retains the basic features of the present system: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization.”15 Because even if we prefer to call it “post-capitalism,” this hypothetical system is clearly just capitalism transformed and will adopt new economic rules and new political institutions to be able to perpetuate or resume the exploitation of human and natural resources through commodification and financialization. The discussion shouldn’t center on a simple question of semantics, but on historical trends and the very nature of social relationships. Even so, I am deeply interested in this epistemological discussion for yet another reason, which has nothing to do with whether it’s possible to prophesy the “end” of capitalism or “read” it within contemporary crises, but with the fact that there is indeed a level of analysis that can and should be applied to a “physical” model in a nonmetaphorical way: that of the concrete and material “system” constituted by the planetary environment immersed within a cosmic milieu with which, as a result of economic and technological human actions that we now term as the Anthropocene, it entered a phase of increasingly uncontrollable imbalance.16 This is truly an “unstable system,” of which humanity itself (and with it, capitalism) is a part. That’s why (all while knowing perfectly well that Wallerstein won’t agree to it!) I gladly make the following suggestion: why not abandon the Prigogine model, when it comes to the capitalist world-system (and the corresponding world-economy), and reserve it, on the contrary, for the fields of ecology and the Anthropocene, the wide extent of whose coming (or possibly existing) impact on the political stability of capitalism Wallerstein himself correctly notes, in particular when discussing the limits and violent constraints that the internalization of the environmental costs of the quest for profit and the modification of the demographic equilibrium impose on historical capitalism? That impact represents an essential component of the current crisis but doesn’t alone determine its

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path or outcome. We thus find ourselves with, on one side, a “system” with a natural outlook, and on the other, a “system” with a historical one, in the two different meanings of the word “system,” but with a zone of increasing overlap, as history (meaning capitalist history) is in the midst of irreversibly transforming nature, even as nature (destabilized by man) backs capitalism into a corner. I will address a second possible objection in less detail, even though it strikes me as equally important. Wallerstein believes that a sign and even major cause of historical capitalism’s waning ability to transform itself (about which he likes to cite the Prince of Salina’s famous line in Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”) is the impossibility of constructing or imagining a new “global hegemony,” on the scale of the world-economy, as was successively instituted by the city of Genoa in the sixteenth century, the Netherlands in the Golden Age, England in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century. I won’t go into the specifics of the descriptions Wallerstein gives of the ways in which those successive hegemonies were created and maintained, meaning the type of political and economic “chaos” they put a temporary end to on each occasion and the forms through which they were challenged, either by rival powers or by antisystemic movements, even though all this is quite relevant at a moment when the question of the “succession” of the American hegemony, now on a self-destructive trajectory, is appearing more and more distinctly. Likewise, I won’t question Wallerstein’s comments about the stabilizing function of a political hegemony, which is indispensable to the continuity of capitalism’s operations (in particular in terms of military and monetary programs). But once again, I’m interested in the logical aspect of the problem and in the “circle” that Wallerstein’s argument seems to contain: imagining that no national-imperial power can eliminate or subordinate the American power to take over its role “balancing” the world-system, not even China (despite its growing hold on entire regions and economic branches), does that mean that capitalism as such has reached its limit? Or rather that the defined historical form of hegemonic capitalism (from the “conquest of America” to the “decline of America”) is currently ceding its place to another type of political construction, in which not only, as Wallerstein explains (this is the difference between a world-empire and a world-economy), there is no single “center” of political power, but also no longer a stable or unequivocal hierarchy between states? This hinges in particular on one of the fundamental aspects of the current financialization of the economy: the growing dependence of states (even the most powerful ones) and their monetary policies on the speculative logic of financial markets. Wallerstein points out that

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periods during which financial speculation intensifies to the detriment of productive investment for consumption regularly coincide with phases of stagnation (Kondratieff B), and that the current phase is no exception.17 But it’s possible that a “regime” change has occurred, in which the relatively autonomous financial capital sphere has taken it upon itself to “regulate” interstate relationships, productive activities, consumer opportunities, etc. Clearly, it needs to be proven that such a regime, whose only hegemonic (or absolute hegemonic) power would come from the “pseudo-sovereignty” of global finance, exercised through monetary and credit institutions that create perpetual competition among territories and businesses, is likely to create an “order” (even if it is contentious or dynamic) in which the global surplus-value is extracted and realized.18 Wallerstein would undoubtedly respond that—given the speculative nature of financial capital operations—the order in question would be fundamentally unstable, or indistinguishable from chaos. But that is precisely the question for which I think it is impossible to provide an answer a priori: at what level do we find chaos, violence, and “dog-eat-dog” warfare (not only in the form of competition, but in the form of military conflicts, including proxy wars between major powers)? And at what level is there the continuity of accumulation in the type of capitalism that began to form as the “old” Pax Americana-based system crumbled (and which contributed, in turn, to its crumbling)? You can see the alternative hypothesis toward which I’m headed, not for the pleasure of refuting Wallerstein, but to get a sense of how necessary his scenario actually is: the “transition” to a new system or new logic that henceforth shouldn’t be called “post-capitalism” (with all the ambiguity that term contains)19 but rather a new capitalism, qualitatively different from all the “stages” of historic capitalism, because it doesn’t constitute a stage, but an unforeseen mutation, is not still to come, or only just beginning, but has already taken place, without us realizing it or being able to immediately assess the radical changes it entails in the distribution of power and the form of “social relationships” engendered by the domination of capital. It is altogether possible and even probable that this new capitalism, following classic capitalism, whose early symptoms we are experiencing and which is rapidly establishing itself as our economy and politics become enmeshed in “crisis,” is neither stable nor even perhaps lasting, not to mention an immediate locus of extremely violent contradictions whose resolution (or not) we cannot know in advance (incidentally, that resolution is not determined, as it depends in large part on the kinds of resistance this new capitalism will come up against). However, our primary discussion doesn’t center

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on that point, but on knowing if we are (“prophetically”) awaiting a transformation, or if, on the contrary (“realistically”), we are already beyond its intervention, in a form to be empirically studied.20 However, Wallerstein could in turn make a formidable objection that, in simple terms, would posit that finance can’t subsist on speculation indefinitely: “validation by the market” must occur at a given moment, meaning a more or less violent conversion of the monetary economy to the “real” economy, that is, to the commodity form inasmuch as it distinguishes itself from the money form. In more complex terms, which echo his argument on the succession of the world-economy’s expansion and contraction phrases, this objection would question how globalized financial capitalism can cope with the exhaustion of new territories to conquer or subjugate to capitalist production (“because the Earth is round,” said Kant, quoted by Rosa Luxemburg), and simultaneously exert pressure to lower real salaries in order to bring up profits (which today includes dismantling social services), all while preserving or even constantly expanding the solvent demand needed to sell its merchandise, and which can’t be quenched solely by the “luxury” consumption of capitalists themselves, as inordinately large as it may be. I don’t have a definitive response, in my mind, to this question, which is particularly apt at a time when income gaps between a tiny minority of the richest and a vast majority of the poorest people in the world and in each country is reaching proportions we haven’t seen in over a century. That said, I’d like to proffer two elements that strike me as likely to keep the discussion going. The first is that globalized and financialized capitalism is a capitalism of widespread mobility of the workforce, in which—at the cost of human tragedies that we’ve all observed—migration (fostered by wars and the ecological and sociological destruction of “peripheral” communities, in combination with demographic growth) and the “sedentary” precarity eroding old industrial regions supply an abundant and omnipresent cheap, exploitable workforce that previously had to be sought out at the edges of the periphery. The second is that capitalism nowadays is a capitalism of “mass consumption” that continually conquers new interior markets by commodifying activities and services that were previously included in a “non-market” and therefore noncapitalist economy (for example, health, education, entertainment and more generally pleasure, etc.) by compensating for (or even increasing) effective demand by the widespread indebting of the poor (either directly through banks or indirectly through states, with tragic consequences such as those observed today in Greece, but which don’t interrupt the process). Naturally, we would

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say that such “demand” (in which capital provides, on one hand, the credit that serves, on the other, to buy what it produces) is even more unstable than all the market mechanisms that preceded it, in the same way that the workforce’s mobility and precarity suffer eventually from greater political violence than the organized class struggles that preceded it. These two aspects are correlates of the complete financialization of the economy, which is not exactly the same thing as a phase of financial speculation but does impose a new capitalist “commandment” on social relationships. Both Wallerstein’s potential objection and our hypothetical response are therefore likely to reinforce the impression that, in any case, as he proposes, the period in which we find ourselves is one of continuous instability and structural violence, in which “political” actions and antagonisms can have significant consequences, even trend reversals, whether we consider them (Wallerstein’s hypothesis) to be the components of a major confrontation still to come between the two “spirits” quarreling over the legacy of historical capitalism (Davis vs. Porto Alegre) or symptoms of the resistance and antagonism inherent to post-historical capitalism (my counterhypothesis). Either way, this demands that we now address, if only summarily, what is in fact the main purpose of Wallerstein’s lectures: the description of the elements that make up the “Global Left,” the analysis of the internal contradictions or differences it must overcome to in fact become the alternative that it is intended to represent in an era during which the social models available have become more universal and more radical, and finally the meaning of the political “tactics” or “strategies” that it must implement to do so, as compared to those that have dominated the experience of the classic “Left” since, precisely, the notion of the left-right opposition was formalized.21 The Global Left and “Contradictions Among the People” Returning to my starting point, I’ll begin by clarifying what I had in mind when I said that I was fundamentally in agreement with the global perspective in which Wallerstein frames the question of the rebuilding of the anticapitalist left. In particular, this means that, without the need to re-enumerate everything, I find the list of immediate objectives proposed by Wallerstein in his third lecture, based on lessons drawn from the history of antisystemic movements and notably their ups and downs over the last century, not only realistic but also pertinent (or adapted): beginning with his intransigent insistence on institutional and social democratization, that is, “forcing” liberals to stick to the principles they claim as their own22—what I would call, given the

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authoritarian “de-democratization” that capitalism currently promotes, the “democratization of democracy”—and going as far as the symmetrical conjunction he makes between active antiracism (the concrete form of fraternity) and decommodification (or the creation of productive activities or services removed from the market, dictated by use and community, rather than by the legal form of property as seen in the old doctrine of the “collectivization of the means of production”).23 One reason that I wholly support this list (even if I would have chosen somewhat different words or another order) is that I see in it an explication and enrichment of the equal liberty principle that I have endorsed elsewhere,24 with the same criticism of the unilateral choices that have been made, either by liberalism or socialism (including Leninism): liberty versus equality, equality versus liberty, both self-destructing. However, my main reason is that this proposition appears, in my mind, to be a decisive breakthrough that goes beyond the opposition between “reform” and “revolution,” terms narrowly tied to the evolutionist conception of capitalism (and by extension, socialism) that reigned in Marxism and over its political applications. What Wallerstein essentially demonstrates is that this opposition ceases to be relevant when, instead of theorizing instances of reform or revolution in advance by evaluating them in terms of their effectiveness or radicalness, anticapitalist policies situate themselves in the now, which force them to confront conservative (or even reactionary) trends, and make a difference in the balance of power and the degree of understanding that citizens (what we used to call the “masses”) have of the historical moment in which they are asserting their own interests by “decomposing” their adversary’s political unity. Here, we touch upon two issues that simultaneously represent powerful, and central, points of Wallerstein’s argument and, in my opinion, thorny problems to resolve, not only on the practical level, but also the theoretical level (for which, incidentally, it remains to be seen if we already have all the conceptual tools needed). The first relates to what Wallerstein calls the “two-step strategy,” about which he states, in this text and others (notably the previously cited essay, Structural Crisis), that it was in fact used, in the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, by both “reformist” (e.g., social-democratic) and “revolutionary” (e.g., Bolshevist) movements, and by both “socialist” and “national liberation” movements, and that in every instance it failed to produce the results it promised or to which it aspired (emancipation of labor, communism, true independence)—that doesn’t mean that it didn’t produce any result, but rather that said result was ultimately not an end to domination, but a way to recreate it, or give it the means to modernize. The two-step strategy consists of setting as its first objective the

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“seizure of power” (essentially state power) by a transformative force, in the aim of, second objective, using that power to modify or eliminate capitalism and more generally, domination. The first objective was reached in a large number of cases, but the second never came about as a result, which proves that there is a fundamental error in this linear representation of the link between the means and the ends. This is what, in particular, the “world-revolution of 1968” so eloquently highlighted, though not without spinning in the other direction to the point of practically rejecting the importance of the question of power in a wave of anarchism and theoretical anti-statism. Which shows that in reality, it’s extremely difficult to go from criticizing ideologies about “seizing power” to theorizing and implementing the transformation of the balance of power. The example of the Mexican Zapatistas led by Subcomandante Marcos (with whom Wallerstein is very close) is here, in my opinion, more metaphorical than demonstrative, because while there is no doubt that the Zapatistas systematically criticized plans to seize power, it remains less certain that their actions, even if admired and idealized, were exactly the “turning point” that Wallerstein describes. The recent series of “square movements,” from the Arab Spring to France’s “Nuit Debout,” and including Occupy Wall Street, Gezi Park, and others, offers examples in the same vein, meaning that they demonstrate—sometimes tragically— that the capacity for civic participation and action made possible by the renunciation of “seizing power” is also what leaves these efforts disarmed before the state and its “monopoly of organized power” when it comes to producing institutional and economic change. The third path between statism and spontaneism or direct democracy has therefore not yet been found. Naturally, one could say that the “program” of the seven-point call to action formulated by Wallerstein is precisely designed to escape that circle, but this assumes—coming back to my earlier point—that these calls to action not only represent a “transition” from the immediate to the middle term, but also that they can’t contradict one another, which is far from certain. The second problem, which is symmetrical to the first, relates to the universality (or the possible universalization) of revolutionary models, or more generally models of transformative strategies. One of the most original and evocative points in Wallerstein’s writing is his reexamination of major examples of the revolutionary processes and events of recent centuries in terms of their effectiveness and actual lasting results, within the context of the global balance of power. Thus, we discover that the “revolution of 1968” was in a way more universal and more transformative than the “socialist revolution” of October 1917, because it criticized a certain ideology of power to which the 1917 revolutionaries

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were prisoner, and therefore enabled the transition from the “Old Left” to the “New Left.” This argument goes hand in hand with the idea that the closer we get to the present moment, the more revolutions can play a role in transforming or “escaping” the system, whereas in the beginning, they were captive to the Hegelian concept of the “Ruse of Reason,” meaning they ultimately produced results that contradicted their objectives and instead achieved those of their adversaries or even of the system itself. This brings me to what is essentially my major concern—I don’t dare say objection, because I’m not sure that Wallerstein isn’t in reality asking himself the same questions under the guise of a plan we merely need to try to implement everywhere as accurately and as courageously as possible, while adapting it to the language and conditions of every society and culture. My stance fundamentally centers on the question of knowing if the “Global Left” exists as such, irrespective of the resolution of a certain number of (serious) internal contradictions that is by no means guaranteed. Borrowing President Mao’s famous expression about the “correct handling of contradictions among the people,” we could say that the “Global Left” is both the presupposed ideal behind the calls to action laid out by Wallerstein and the random result of the process through which those injunctions’ heterogeneity and potential contradictions (or contradictory applications) are reduced. I will illustrate this idea to conclude. Wallerstein knows quite well (since in truth he says so) that if a world-system unified by capitalism has existed for 600 years, and by consequence, so in fact has a “Global Right” that expresses that system’s interests, even if it can at times be divided among multiple states and multiple strategies, then, on the contrary, a “Global Left” has never existed, because the unequal distribution of “antisystemic movements” across distinct regions of the world-system with distinct or even conflicting interests made crystallization impossible or utopian. Hence “national liberation” movements (a progressive variant of nationalism) and the corporative or political “class struggle” were never able to merge, even if at times they accommodated one another (in fact that’s incontestably one of the fundamental merits of communist internationalism post-October 1917, that is, having proposed a theoretical and organizational framework for that accommodation). The question is therefore to determine if the transformation of “antisystemic” material or discourse engendered by the general systemic crisis in the beginning of the twenty-first century (or, according to my hypothesis, its transformation into a new type of capitalism), which also “globalized” movements and struggles,25 steadily resulted in a unity or at least a convergence that had never before existed except as an idea, or else provoked the emergence

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of new contradictions and perhaps the escalation of old ones. Wallerstein seems convinced that the former is the right answer, or at least he works in principle from that perspective.26 Continuing to play the devil’s advocate, which I’ve chosen to incarnate in this discussion in order to “test” the value of Wallerstein’s hypotheses, I’d like to cite three examples that show, in my mind, that we can also support the latter: •

•

The first example relates to the impacts of population migrations, which, as mentioned earlier, have a key function within the reorganization (or attempt at reorganization) of a capitalism that can no longer find the cheap labor force it needs to maintain profit rates, but must have labor brought to production and consumption sites, all while keeping that workforce in a precarious state through violent repression or a deliberate policy of dumping “human surplus.” This example is all the more important in my mind as, on one hand, it occupies an increasingly central place in the ideology of salaried workers in both northern and southern countries, and on the other, it clearly underlies Wallerstein’s insistence on antiracism as the “defining measure of democracy.” The question is therefore whether this “popular” racism is simply a discourse, a prejudice, or an irrational affect, or whether it—as Wallerstein himself maintained in our shared work Race, Nation, Class (1988)—comprises an anchor in the world-economy’s structure, today a structure of migration and population displacement. I think that the second hypothesis is the right one and that maintaining that we should have already transformed the economic and political relationships between the populations of the world-economy, to resolve the more or less violent conflict between migrant and nonmigrant (or “sedentary”) workers, does not equate to adopting the “populist” arguments of European, or American, anti-immigrant racism.27 The second example builds on the first, because it also evokes the question of populations in another form: the conflicts and contradictions induced by global warming, environmental destruction, and ecological disasters in general. This point is crucial and make be taken with utter seriousness. It’s clear that on a very broad level, all human beings are equally affected by “anthropogenic” climate change and the catastrophic impacts that it is starting to have, even if we aren’t all physically threatened in the same way, depending on where we live and the resources available. Likewise, it’s “obvious” (at least that’s the feeling one can get when watching television) that the interests of a citizen of Beijing and a citizen of London coping with smog, or those of a citizen of Bangladesh whose fields

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are constantly inundated and of a resident living along the Channel and forced to retreat before the rising ocean waters, are similar if not identical. But all that can’t mask the fact that working societies and classes in the North and the South whose primary problem is employment can’t have the same interests or the same perception of the urgency of the environmental problem. It’s more likely that, like the states that represent them, they find themselves in violent confrontation. Or more precisely, that they would stop needing to confront one another if there existed a global project of “energetic transition” and the transformation of structures and consumption habits—in other words, if the Global Left had already imposed (and even designed) the revolutionary reforms around which it should rally. Note that I haven’t even addressed the divergence of interests between “indigenous” peoples who seek to preserve their way of life and development projects (which we can clearly see resurface in Bolivia, for example, at the very heart of attempts—granted, “state” attempts—to reconcile them). What then becomes clear is that we can’t always reason in terms of unity or convergence, but we can be prompted to choose a representative of what is universal, among others, which brings us to the neighborhood of the reviled policies of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” To conclude, I’ll put forward the question of the place of feminism and the women’s movement in the construction of a “Global Left.” On this point, it is of course particularly important to avoid demagoguery. But we shouldn’t mask the extent of the issue and the way in which it’s shifted between the last two centuries and the current period. It seems to me that Wallerstein struggles with feminism’s place and political function when describing the relationship between the development of capitalism and that of “antisystemic” movements. Feminism is included at the level of his theoretical enumeration, but it fades into the background or disappears when it comes to discussing strategy and tactics, which can be explained both by the fact that feminism (which is certainly a form of radical democratism) identifies its objectives and its autonomy by invoking domination structures that precede capitalism, and which appear to persist independently of its transformations (even if it’s clear that capitalism uses the subjugation of women to men to lower the cost of the labor force, and to encourage a conservative ideology among its workers). I think that this can also (especially?) be explained by the fact that, in the classic European and North American configuration, serving as examples to the entire world, the problem faced by feminism was gaining recognition as a distinct social movement,

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which wasn’t so different from its demand that women in general be recognized as equal citizens alongside men. But in the current climate (and this is not an insignificant aspect of the “chaos” it entails), the central problem is no longer the generic recognition of feminism but its internal division, which is at times expressed in “post-colonial” terms, and at others in terms of oppositions between secular and religious cultures, but that in any event means that feminists “the world over” don’t (or no longer, or don’t yet) have a shared language about what constitutes their belonging to the left. One could even say that they tend to demand that the “left” define itself in an antithetical way. Once again, I don’t think that we can favor a hypothetical unification process over the intensity of the current conflicts, all the more since the point of the plan laid out by Wallerstein is to create policies for the present day, in the interests of “99 percent” of the global population, as they are expressed in resistance to capitalism, and not with an “idea” of communism or socialism that would be tacked on to the movements themselves.

Bifurcation, Resistance, Alternative I’d like to be very clear here: my objective is in no way to denigrate or undermine the idea of a “Global Left,” with whose construction Wallerstein would like to assist, while simultaneously, in a manner that is both prophetic and performative, addressing it as if it already existed, opposite the new Global Right more or less completely aligned with neoliberalism. But I do want to stress the power and urgency of the idea of “contradictions among the people,” evoked by President Mao when attempting the “transition to socialism.” That idea designates in reality a constant problem for any “leftist” policy, starting from the moment that we renounce the idea of one predestined social bearer of the emancipation movement, be it a class or another collective subject, whose interests are “universal” as such. The resolution to contradictions among the people, the modes of which are never preexisting, lies in the very process by which the left creates itself or gives meaning to its shared future, which is nothing more than determining the alternative to capitalism that it can represent. It therefore seems to me that this notion merits being explicitly introduced (or rather reintroduced) to Wallerstein’s plan, or better yet, his strategic perspective, in the same way as his critique of the two-step strategy. That said, I want to immediately add that Wallerstein’s lecture makes a very important philosophical assertion, in fine, which is in a similar

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vein, when he insists on the intrinsic uncertainty of the “transition” process in which two paths to resolve the structural crisis of capitalism face off against one another: “history is on no one’s side.” We’re not far from what the late Althusser called “random materialism,” to which he linked the idea that historical transformations result from encounters that aren’t predetermined.28 That applies not only to “encounters” (or confrontations) between adversaries, but also to “encounters” (or alliances) between potential partners. This brings me back to the fundamental theme of bifurcation: independent of and beyond its origins or its “physical” models, this is the big idea that, in Wallerstein’s work, seems to me to command both his account of historical capitalism’s trajectory and his understanding of the “conflict between two paths” that are likely to lead us to a diametrically opposed future and social conditions, based on a face-off that is occurring now. In other words, the “system” will only truly bifurcate if the bifurcation to come, which is the complete opposite of “progress” or an unavoidable “dialectical shift,” is taking form right now in practices of resistance and change. However, that idea is relatively independent from the question of whether we are entering into a “final crisis” of capitalism beyond which an indeterminate future is taking shape, or if we are already grappling with a new kind of capitalism, for which we must try—at first in a dispersed fashion, then, if possible, in a unified or convergent way—to find an alternative. Beginning the fight, in practice, for another economy, another kind of politics, another system, is the means to preventing a catastrophic evolution, or else trying to reverse its (first) effects. Either way, it will liberate us from a seeming inevitability and create the conditions for true change. Notes 1. Later in this essay, I will also draw from a parallel text: “Structural Crisis, or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding,” in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. 2. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, by Immanuel Wallerstein, New York, Academic Press, 1974. I received this work, like so many other resources, from Yves Duroux. 3. The English edition was published the following year (Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, New York, Verso, 1991). In 1990–1992, we co-organized another seminar on “The Three Ideologies of Modernity: Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism,” certain proceedings of which were published in no. 9 of the journal Genèses (October 1992). 4. Wallerstein’s efforts, which I will summarize here in very broad strokes while retaining his terminology as often as possible, are clearly inseparable from a more

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5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

Étienne Balibar diverse collective body of work, whose contributors, in its earliest iteration (the study of relationships of “dependency” between center and periphery in the capitalist world-economy), included André Gunder Frank, Terence K. Hopkins, Samir Amin, and Giovanni Arrighi. My aim here is not to trace its genealogy or variations. Likewise, it’s important to note that the Marxian reference is neither exclusive nor even, perhaps, dominant in the system of thought adopted by Wallerstein, who maintained a relationship of fundamental and mutual inspiration with Braudel. However, I’ve chosen to favor that reference for reasons that will appear shortly (and which are evident in the focus of his lectures on “The Global Left”). See Wallerstein’s reflections about the sources of his problematic and the place it should occupy in the history of the “social sciences” in his book Impenser la science sociale. Pour sortir du XIXe siècle, Paris, PUF, 1991. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Le capitalisme historique, Paris, Editions La Découverte, Collection “repères,” 1985. “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis” first appeared in The Capitalist World Economy, Cambridge/ Paris, Cambridge University Press/Editions de la MSH, 1979 and was later republished in The Essential Wallerstein, New York, The New Press, 2000. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century, New York, The New Press, 1998. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2016. See commentary by Paul Krugman and Michel Aglietta, respectively, in the New York Times Book Review, January 25, 2016, and New Left Review, no. 100, July–August 2016. In a recent “commentary,” Wallerstein rightly refers to the symptom represented by the 180-degree shift in the policies recommended by the IMF and the OECD to “emerge” from stagnation: “Declining Demand: Is Reality Creeping In?,” Commentary, Fernand Braudel Center, no. 420, March 1, 2016. Cf. Wallerstein, Commentary no. 420, op. cit. It’s at this specific point that one of the most natural objections to cross the mind of a reader of Wallerstein, in terms of his fundamental logic, emerges: what stops us from imagining that the American hegemony and its dual political and economic function cannot be “handed down,” even at the cost of a potentially violent confrontation, to the “emerging” twenty-first-century Chinese power? Wallerstein doesn’t ignore that possible objection, but he does argue that, on one hand, it’s impossible for China to indefinitely maintain growth rates disproportionate to the rest of the world, and on the other, that the rise of China’s industrial power changes nothing when it comes to the potential exhaustion of new zones “to be exploited” in the world. See “China Is Confident: How Realistic?,” Commentary, Fernand Braudel Center, no. 439, December 15, 2016. I will outline another alternative later in this chapter. Incidentally, this term appeared in the early 1990s, apparently for the first time, in projects by the World Bank. See the “governance” section in Nuova serie di “Problemi del socialism,” in Parolechiave, Rome, Carocci Editore, no. 56, 2017. Note that these implications are quite different from those that Prigogine believed he could illustrate when he himself attempted historical applications in the context of an “homage to Wallerstein”—this clearly shows that the rules of application should stem from historical (and sociological) knowledge and not a physical

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14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

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model. Cf. Ilya Prigogine, “The Networked Society,” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 2000, pp. 892–898, Special Issue: Festchrift for Immanuel Wallerstein—Part II. A belief in the contrary was one of the nineteenth century’s great “scientific ideologies,” narrowly tied to evolutionism, something Wallerstein himself wants to get rid of. See Georges Canguilhem, Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie, Paris, Librairie Vrin, 1977. Does Capitalism Have a Future?, op. cit., p. 33. Among the many publications that address this point, I’ve referred notably to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work, as he explicitly explores the question of the concept of historicity implied here: “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, Winter 2009. See the same observation in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, New York, Verso, 1994. Marx appeared to have glimpsed this type of possibility in the notes incorporated by Engels into the posthumous edition of Capital, Volume III about credit and “fictitious capital,” though he believed he was seeing a kind of foreshadowing of communism within capitalism! This is very apparent in Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. In contrast to the “historical capitalism” as defined and described by Wallerstein, I’m tempted to designate this neo-capitalism as “absolute capitalism,” not in the sense that it would be situated outside of history, in general, but in the sense that, having achieved the “great transformation” of precapitalist economies into capitalist economies in every corner of the world, in the wake of colonization and especially decolonization, and beyond the experiment of “socialist” regimes, it has become “self-referential,” and itself no longer deals with much beside processes of the capitalist forms of production, consumption, and accumulation incorporated into the circulation of financial capital. I also find the category of “disaster capitalism” suggested by Naomi Klein of great interest (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York, Penguin, 2008). The terms “right” and “left” originated, as we all know, in the way in which the political parties represented in the parliamentary assemblies of the French Revolution were grouped and positioned in relation to the assembly president, thereby reflecting in a way the division of the country itself during the revolutionary phase and then during the establishment of modern liberalism. By stretching this designation to the global arena, Wallerstein clearly forces us to redefine it. Including in regard to the social rights won in the struggles of the past century, the defense of which today very clearly serves as a political divider, a function taken into account by Wallerstein, who rightly includes a fervent defense of “welfare states” as one of the “Global Left’s” objectives. Taken together, these values offer, in my opinion, an approximation of the best of what we would today call “communism” (though he doesn’t use that word). It would be interesting to compare this pairing of antiracism and decommodification to the way in which Marx and Engels, at the end of The Communist Manifesto, construct “the idea of communism” by blending internationalism and a critique of private property: continuity at the same time as rectification. Étienne Balibar, La proposition de l’égaliberté: Essais politiques, Paris, Editions La Découverte, 2010.

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25. From this perspective, Wallerstein is entirely justified in defending the World Social Forum’s emblematic signification. See “The World Social Forum Still Matters?,” Commentary, Fernand Braudel Center, no. 436, November 1, 2016. 26. Including by suggesting a kind of “code of good conduct” that antisystemic movements should observe to give shape and reality to this Global Left: “In the period since 1968, there has been an enormous amount of testing of alternative strategies by different movements, old and new, and there has been in addition a rather healthy shift in the relations of antisystemic movements to each other. The murderous mutual denunciations and vicious struggles of yesteryear have considerably abated, a positive development that has been insufficiently noticed and appreciated” (lecture 3). 27. In his book L’homme inutile. Du bon usage de l’économie, Paris, Editions Odile Jacob, 2015, other aspects of which we can discuss, Pierre-Noël Giraud suggests the very instructive category of “aimless struggles.” 28. Louis Althusser, “Entretiens avec Fernanda Navarro,” in Sur la philosophie, Paris, Gallimard, 1994; Louis Althusser, “Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre,” in Écrits philosophiques et politiques, vol. 1, édition de François Matheron, Paris, Stock/IMEC, 1994.

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The Left Its Immediate Future Pablo González Casanova Translated by Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz

Of the many problems posed by the left in our time, two are of the greatest importance: one has to do with the current behavior of the left in the inter-, intra-, and extra-state framework of the capitalist system; and the second one concerns the “structural crisis of the capitalist world-system” and the expected path of the current phase of the long cycle of the economy, as well as of the long-term history of capitalism. The objective of this piece is to identify these problems and outline the type of solutions to be expected in struggles for freedom, democracy, and socialism. Not everyone seems aware of the generalized crisis of the left; even less of its depth and implications for critical theory, and for current emancipation and life struggles. The crisis not only encompasses Marxism in its dogmatic and critical versions, but also various currents of revolutionary nationalism and national liberation with a Marxist influence. The unusual restoration of capitalism in the socialist camp has been joined by several unexpected events: the implantation of capitalism in the whole of the socialist camp, with the exception of Cuba; the beginning—disclosed openly and calmly—of a monopoly capitalism that represents the heights of original accumulation in human history, and of which the main beneficiaries are former members of the “nomenklatura” and the “KGB” (as well as of other secret services) who today assume simultaneously the roles of billionaires and renewed commanders of the armed forces; of owners and directors of mega-companies; of ministers and heads of the governmental political apparatus; and of numerous minor offices in the new states, corporations, and mass organizations. The restoration is not limited to the great powers of Russia, China, and the new republics that achieved independence from the former Soviet Union. It involves also the heroic people of Vietnam and their current government in Saigon, as well as many other countries in Asia and Africa. Having in the past called themselves socialists, or on the road to liberation and socialism, these countries live today between DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-7

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open dictatorships and feigned democracies, with unstructured ideologies, parties, and programs. Those who lead them in electoral and popular movements do so with aims that in fact boil down to advancing the self-interest of themselves and their clienteles, leaders, political cadres, and shock and support groups. In these countries, under the pretense of democratic politics or with open dictatorships, there are simulated virtual wars, by which imperialist countries contribute to an even greater transformation of political-ideological struggles into mere battles between criminal orders. These battles are fought with armies and contingents of terrorists and drug traffickers, with ammunitions and weapons supplied by the great powers. They involve banking networks used to secretly circulate multimillionaire riches, to be shared between criminals (those of the common type, and those who wear flowery or white collars and dominate to a high degree the culture of elegance, respectability, and lordship that is worn by knights, bankers, great politicians, and heads of state). After all, they all comply with the moral principles of Milton Friedman—by which the principal duty of a businessman is to do business—and practice the formulas of power and wealth that von Hayek provided and the International Monetary Fund requires, confident that “life is like this,” and that in it we are all corrupt and murderous—although some are considerably smarter than others. Meanwhile, following Mao’s theory that the revolutionaries are among the people like fish in the water, Americans, Russians, and Turks destroy entire villages with the great precision of drones and “air strikes.” These lethal activities are carried out with the “legitimate” pretext of ending the armies of criminals and fanatics who bear the name of an Egyptian goddess—ISIS—and who they themselves trained, armed, and supplied. To this merciless and unspeakable destruction of entire peoples and nations—such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria—their globalizing policies add the famines demonstrated not only by ghostly elderly men and women and skeletal children in Africa, but also by those made ill by AIDS and other viruses made by scientists at the service of big and famous companies, who patent the necessary remedies and cures. From these and other multitudinous evils, and from the big businesses of which they are a part, one can deduce economic phenomena that represent a new process of original accumulation or “dispossession”—as Harvey calls it—or of plunder (as one would say in more common language). Domination and accumulation by de-possession has a multinational character and follows—among others—the oil lines, whose extraction (like that of many other natural resources and like the exploitation of the subrogated companies) lends itself to the most inhuman exploitation that the labor force has experienced in history. Thus, its current

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members have very short life expectancies, but are easily substitutable and recruitable in a neo-Malthusian policy that shows both the advantages of the globalizing economic policy and a renewed demographic policy that controls in all that is possible the—according to the well-founded opinion of the system—excessive growth of the surplus population. We could name many similar evils, such as how agroindustry and transgenic seeds are leaving large agricultural populations without vital resources, or others that affect mining, fishing, industry, transportation, and the markets of the poor and not so poor. But these are enough examples of the horror that affects a huge part of humanity in the South, the Americas, the Middle East, and the Far East. Let’s focus on the North, the Metropoles, with the Mediterranean exodus of those fleeing homes that have been destroyed or are in the process of destruction; of those that manage not to be part of the drowned and dead of cold, thirst, or curable diseases; of those whose children of all ages are not among the deeply stirring little bodies found dead on the beach, or with their tiny faces wounded or a vague gesture of incomprehension of what is happening that causes “humanitarian” pity, or leads to the most generalized reaction—that some of my readers must feel—that Al Gore referred to with his well-known “uncomfortable Knowledge.” The fact is that this situation, apart from the immense profits and wealth it brings to less than the famous 1 percent of the human population, also creates other advantages that end up serving governments and political parties. These advantages are sometimes the outcome of the “humanitarian” generosity entailed by the politics of open or semi-open doors for refugees who manage to survive in the passage of the Mediterranean, and in other instances the product of how Muslim intruders are used as a pretext to annul and paralyze the struggles of metropolitan workers for the social and trade union rights that neoliberal governments snatch away. The threat of refugees and terrorists allows the rulers of metropolitan countries to invoke national unity and the homeland, or the emotion awakened by “I am Charlie” to the loud clamor of the Marseillaise. These rulers can even call for a “state of exception” and suspend constitutional guarantees, in a climate in which all the political parties increasingly shift to the right, and in which even the old fascist or para-fascist right acquires increasing strength, as well as xenophobia and racism—yesterday anti-Jewish and today anti-Muslim—that are adopted even by a good number of “the subaltern classes” (Gramsci) as in the time of Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, although with different manifestations of the hatred and resentment of “humanitarian” beings who defend human rights and freedom.

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Such is the state and interstate framework in which capitalism lives today, in its peripheral and metropolitan zones. And whereas in the colonial or dependent zones, the left, the center, and the right never managed to be institutional, in today’s metropolitan, colonialist, and imperialist zones, communist parties have ceased to exist; socialist parties have adopted the ideology of efficiency and efficacy in creating jobs with private investments; and the democratic right looks at neoliberal, globalizing conservatives as an enemy, and neo-fascists as less fearsome, making its speech seem progressive at times and “realistic” and “modern” in others, with an acceptable sense of conservatism. The left of the street, informal and democratic, shows promising advances in the struggle for freedom and socialism. We will refer briefly to these shortly. Before that, I want to point out some reflections, based on previous works or in process, that are related to the current state of the long cycle. In regard to this issue, our hypothesis, or our thesis to “disconfirm,” is that the long cycle in which we live has lost its periodic character, and that in its current “state” it has entered a phase of transition to chaos that opens two possibilities (and not one, as Wallerstein argues): that of the growing bifurcations that appear in the formalized models that “determine” chaos, and that of the creation of new systems, represented by the formalized models of fractals. The previous argument not only includes Wallerstein’s thesis that “the capitalist world-system” has entered into a “structural crisis.” It also maintains the thesis that the capitalist system has entered a “terminal” phase. To give an empirical basis to an approach that is necessarily “denied” or “disqualified” (Freud) by scientists from “the hegemonic mainstream,” I refer to a contribution that—among others—I presented at the Luxembourg Institute of European and International Studies. Its title is “Decision Making and the Survival of Humankind.” I choose this contribution because the verification of the hypothesis is not based on elaborate mathematical models, but on the simple, easily verifiable work of accounting, with its additions and subtractions. The general thesis is that capitalism, as a system whose main appeal is the maximization of profits and wealth, is completely incompatible with the survival of humanity. Any attempt to reduce inputs, or to bring consumer society to an end, is necessarily opposed to the logical imperative of capitalism. For the same reason, a Grand Final continues to build, by maintaining and even perfecting—for the sake of increasing productivity, wealth, and profits—the use of complex, self-regulated, adaptable, and creative systems; of first- and second-generation intelligent systems; systems that are all linked to communication, information, messages, and organization sciences, as well as robotics, ballistics,

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mechatronics, nanotechnology, and other sciences and technosciences that cause admiration without shadow of fear. But this Grand Final can only be perceived by recognizing that the mode of domination by primitive accumulation not only is primitive, nor does it occur only in the origins of capitalism, but today. And how is it that capitalism today has come to resurrect in the whole world, even as Wallerstein’s predictions regarding the loss of relative power of the United States have been confirmed, together with the failure of world government by a single state-nation, while the crises of credit, currency, and hatred are sharpening within the large blocs of the East and West, struggling to appropriate the resources of the soil and the subsoil, the sea, the air, and the land, in a growing competition for markets? If one is not impervious, and however uncomfortable this might be, it is necessary to recognize the dangers that threaten to end life on earth, because they are joined by a ruthless struggle of classes and nation-states or business-military-media and political complexes that fight with each other within the framework of a world-system that is—we maintain— not only unjust but ecocidal. Paradoxically, at the same time, the most remarkable emancipatory and vital project in human history appears. In it, morality reappears as a fundamental value for struggle, cooperation, and sharing, a universal democracy organized in networks with nodes and nuclei of decision-action that, with freedom and socialism, cultivate and practice the rights of persons, workers, and peoples. Beyond state socialism and anarchism, this new approach emerged since 1959 in Cuba, since 1968 in Berkeley and Paris, since 1984 in Kurdistan—around the Euphrates, where the first human civilization was born—and since 1994 in La Lacandona with the Zapatista Indians of the Mexican southeast. Far from all voluntarism or the false illusions of Régis Debray when he affirmed that 20 brave men can change history, this new movement is weaving a new history with power in networks of a democracy in which the peoples reach agreements that can be something much closer to the power of decision, of social and individual justice, and freedom that redefines freedom, socialism, democracy, “the organization of work and life” in the facts. To portray this project as illusive would be proof of ignorance and of little understanding. In the investigations of the new sciences of the complexity, it has been discovered that in the course of the transition to deterministic chaos, the flight of a butterfly, or of some butterflies, can have disproportionate effects where they fly and at the other end of the world of where they fly. While we cannot have too much confidence in metaphors, it is worthwhile to continue fighting for truth and for life.

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The Global Left A Comment James K. Galbraith

It is impossible not to admire Immanuel Wallerstein for the sweep of his vision, the power of his words, and for the lifelong commitment to world-systems analysis and to radical democracy that marks his work. Equally I cannot fully accept the particular terms of reference in these essays. I offer these comments in a joint spirit of deep respect and critical engagement. To begin, what is the use of the math-metaphorical framework offered here, of cycles and trends, Kondratieff phases, butterfly effects, and bifurcations leading to chaos? There is in the real world no such thing as a butterfly effect; the mathematical formula that proposes it does not take account of dissipation, a fundamental physical force.1 The climate issue we face is not deterministic chaos but greenhouse gases, and these are not toxic wastes but the inevitable by-products of combustion. This is a matter for which the underlying mechanism has been known since the late nineteenth century. Long-term survival—perhaps not so long term—depends on coming to grips with the challenge of climate change in a realistic way, if there is a realistic way to be had. The global struggle between left and right needs to turn on this question, first and foremost. The right’s strategy is denial, and then recourse to half-measures, deceptions, and smokescreens, while emissions mount and there is money to be made. Or to put it another way: burn, baby, burn, and pull up the ladder when the waters rise. What then is the left’s strategy? Climate militancy is clearly necessary on a broad scale. But there is also still a great deal of technical work ahead on both the social-political and the engineering aspects of this problem, and on the economic aspects, to withstand the onslaught of hucksterism and profiteering that is inevitable in such matters. And on the mundane work of public education, so that what must be done can be done by democratic means. DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-8

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Turning to modern history, Wallerstein gives us an astute précis of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. stalemate, but there are issues and facts whose mention would enrich the analysis. Initially perhaps, the United States advanced European recovery through the Marshall Plan, because it needed customers. It also needed to defuse communism in France and Italy and, later, it fostered the rapid industrial reconstruction of Japan and Germany because they were front-line states. In both cases, the front-line states got special ideological dispensation, permitting them a large measure of planning and, in Japan’s case especially, access to the American market. Germany returned to dominance in Europe, and then came Korea and finally China along the same path as Japan, each using the Western (and especially American) export market as a pathway to world power.2 Thus, the emergence of a plurinational global order, or plurinational disorder, which is perhaps a better term since American elites are clearly uncomfortable with the discovery that their superpower hegemony in the post-Cold War era has stiff and insurmountable limits. Second, unquestionably the leadership in both the United States and the U.S.S.R. wanted the nuclear threat contained. But this was not entirely true of certain powerful forces inside the United States, and the case was narrowly decided at certain dark moments.3 So long as these weapons exist, it will never be fully resolved, and today we face a new round of nuclear dangers and of nuclear crackpots in high positions, angling for conditions that would permit the possibility of their use. Here then is a second mobilizing issue for the Global Left. I was 16 in 1968 and present that year at the World Revolution in Prague, Chicago, and Paris. A few facts bear stating. First, the single greatest upheaval of that time, definitely opposed to U.S.-Soviet collusion as Wallerstein states (and already underway since 1966), was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. It was a savage, destructive affair with which no civilized political movement should want association. Second, word needs to be given to the brightest hope of that dramatic year, which was Czechoslovakia. The Czech spirit gave, for a brief moment, hope to those who saw the possibility of “socialism with a human face” as an alternative between state capitalism and the market Stalinism that we have come to know in more recent times. Third, it is true that in the U.S., opposition to Vietnam came heavily from university students, but not because they were actually exposed in great numbers to the draft. Deferments meant that for most—not all—personal participation in that war was a navigable threat and the brunt was borne by others. For many, including most of those I knew

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in the antiwar movement, there were larger political and social motives to their opposition, including the pacific and constructive stance that many had been inspired to take toward the world in the Kennedy years, and even more so, the moral example of the civil rights movement. Finally, in 1968 the World Revolution ended everywhere in defeat and repression, although it did force the turning point in Vietnam, and not for military but for U.S. political reasons. Lyndon Johnson went to the negotiating table, and afterward Richard Nixon dragged out that war, but he never tried to win it, thank God. The counterrevolution that followed—neoliberal globalization—is as Wallerstein describes and can be seen as the triumph of Ricardian classical political economy—free trade and free markets—over the replication in other countries of the historical “American system” of protection, internal improvements, high wages,4 and the social welfare systems that were added on in the New Deal and in Europe during the Popular Front and after the Second World War. Neoliberal globalization became the dominant worldview in all the wealthy countries and on both sides of the traditional political mainstream, New Labour and New Democrats as well as Thatcher, Reagan, and their continental counterparts in Europe. The casual brutalities and self-serving cant of the “Davoisie” and the mantra of “TINA” had to breed, eventually, a new round of ideological development and the belief that a better world is possible. Wallerstein roots this in the Chiapas uprising of 1994, the Seattle protests of 1999, and the “spirit of Porto Alegre.” I would have pointed to more practical developments: the massive economic success of the world’s greatest developmental state, which is the pragmatic China of the postMao years; the restoration of a quasi-coherent economic order in Russia following the Yeltsin debacles; and especially the remarkable rise of democratic radicalism and poverty reduction in twenty-first-century South America, from Argentina and Brazil to Ecuador and (at its best moments) in the difficult case of Venezuela. Most recently, there has been the rebellion against the post-crisis “austerity” crackdown in southern Europe: in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and above all during the 2015 Athens Spring in Greece.5 During this time, the calamities of U.S. policy in the Middle East— now extending to post-coup Turkey—show that creating stable democratic states (if that were ever the goal) is much harder than merely sowing chaos and destruction and generating refugees. No doubt the reckless use of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fomenting of disaster in Syria, go far to sweep away the notion that the economic nostrums issuing from the leaders of such a power have merit.

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And what is happening now? Plainly, we see the onset of yet another counterrevolution. This is not one of ideas, but the raw exercise of power. All over South America, radical governments have fallen—in Brazil’s case to a parliamentary coup d’état, in Honduras to a military one, in Argentina by election. Commodity prices and exchange rates have plunged, and inequalities have risen. Repression greets protests, purges move through the ranks of civil servants, judges are cowed— even as the Olympics were being broadcast from Rio. As this happens, confrontations also slowly escalate against China and Russia. Both of these countries are routinely portrayed as classic aggressors in the Western press, led by monomaniacal despots (especially in the case of Russia) who can scarcely be distinguished from Hitler. Meanwhile, they maintain they are defending long-recognized treaty rights—as in Russian access to its naval base at Sebastopol, and in the case of China sea boundaries, to which the claims predate the Revolution of 1949. The merits of these disputes aside, they will either be settled, one way or another, in a climate of mutual restraint, or they will lead toward the precipice of a final war. As they do, the overriding priority of energy and environmental transformation goes unmet. And the earth warms. Notes 1. I thank my coauthor, the physicist-economist Jing Chen, for this observation. 2. “The Generalized ‘Minsky Moment’,” in Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray, The Elgar Companion to Hyman Minsky, chapter 14, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010. 3. “Did The U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?” by James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell, The American Prospect, no. 19, Fall 1994, 88–96. 4. “America’s Protectionist Takeoff, 1815–1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy” by Michael Hudson, Islet, 2010. 5. “Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe” by James K. Galbraith, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2016.

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Immanuel Wallerstein on the Global Left and Right Johan Galtung

Wallerstein is unique. Nobody else has presented such a coherent theory of what he calls the modern world-system, from “the long sixteenth century” up till today; essentially capitalist. There are ups and downs during those four centuries. He is very much at home in the economic Kondratieff cycles—A for up, B for down, but not that much down— and in the political-military hegemonic cycles of the would-be hegemons in the same period. Read Wallerstein and become wiser. He warns against the Global Right “Lampedusa tactic” of “changing things so that they remain the same” and insists on liberty, equality, and fraternity for the Global Left—but sees the French Revolution more as normalizing change than as people’s sovereignty. Like faith in the middle classes, they are actually helping the Global Right—when in minority, they are enlarged by the majority working classes; when in majority, they neglect the working-class minority left behind. Right now, Wallerstein sees capitalism in crisis with no remedy—of which I am not so sure—and the U.S. hegemony also in a crisis with no remedy—a view I share, as the fall of an empire with local elites killing and ruling for them, and now having to do most killing themselves. The Global Right, in power for a long time, is now faltering. Time for the Global Left? Or does Zizek’s brilliant formula “the left never misses a chance to miss a chance” apply? Wallerstein: yes! And he offers six Global Left proposals: • • • • • •

Use and promote the Spirit of Porto Alegre, the World Social Forum; Use electoral tactics at least to defend what has been achieved; Demand ever more welfare state—free education and health care, life income; Make liberals liberal: open borders, have companies pay for failure; Fight racism (and we might add sexism, middle-agism, centrism, etc.); and Decommodify, education/health as human rights, not buying-selling.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-9

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I have no problem agreeing with these general principles. But concrete cases of the left progressing may be more problematic: the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas on January 1, 1994 (the day NAFTA came into force), and the first Porto Alegre meeting in 2001. I was active in both. Chiapas: the “Zapatista Revolt” was marketed by a clever outside professor; the “revolt” imported high culture from central Mexico. There was no Maya revolt in Chiapas-Yucatan-GuatemalaBelice-Honduras for equality. Porto Alegre: an impressive parade of the diversity in “another world is possible” message; many worlds in search of unifying themes and action, like the theme of inequality and the action of boycotting companies with unacceptable CEO/worker income ratios. However, more basic: Wallerstein’s breathtaking overview is limited and limiting, to the West, and to one period, “modernity.” It is not global; and right versus left—pro-contra capitalism—is modern. Modernity fostered state, capital, and people: capital produced more capital and met material demands from people who could pay; state cooperated with capital, and was bought, also protecting people— people fighting for basic needs, such as survival, wellness, freedom, and identity. I see Western history as expansion/contraction—also before Greco-Roman expansion—now contracting, in a world with Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, and Japanese civilizations, to mention some, neglected by Western universalistic arrogance and ignorance. Next door is Islam, suffering from the same universalism (the only true faith for all at all times), and countercyclical to the West: when one contracts, the other expands. Right now, Islam expands and the West contracts. “Right” stands for capital growth for material, body, demands; “left” for state-people cooperation against capital, for distribution. But, for distribution of what? Of the same? Of more things that lead to more empty lives marred by egocentric loneliness? With Islam expanding, offering we-centric togetherness sharing for basic needs? Crisis, indeed. The way out is a new discourse, less material, more spiritual; something to live for, not only from. It could be causes beyond egocentric satisfaction; religions offer answers, and so do causes like peace, development, environment—the UN Three. It could be the incredible creativity of the human spirit, beyond God’s creation, by consuming arts and sciences produced by others, or by becoming creative producers. Or simply the search, the wandering and wondering monks not letting the material stand in the way.

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This is the new Middle Ages. But all ages are “middle,” between one and the next. A new contraction phase, into inner, more spiritual lives, into smaller units, is more indicative. Maybe Europe and the United States will have 500 rather than 50 autonomous units, all woven together, cooperating for mutual and equal benefit; wanting less, hence struggling less? And the economy? In “land, labor, capital” or “nature, humans, capital,” nature and humans are indispensable, and not only as means— inputs in an economy for growth, distribution, or both—but as absolute ends in themselves. The economy must balance naturism, humanism, and capitalism; so must economics. Today’s “economics” focuses on capital and growth. Throw it out, and produce a human-nature-focused economics. Modernity with its dominant state-capital-people discourse and reality is now fading. What comes next? “Post-modernity” is a sloppy expression, only after “modernity.” The hypothesis offered here is contraction, in an oscillating history; brought about in both phases in the West by less sense of balance than in other civilizations. The bigger the exaggeration, the bigger the power, but the fall is also bigger—Germany, Russia, Turkey, Spain, France, England, the United States. Let what will happen happen, but let’s add to Wallerstein’s six suggestions for the Western left six humanist-naturist suggestions for more balance in the coming contraction: • • • • • •

Lift up suffering humanity at the bottom, for full participation; Lift up suffering nature at the bottom, for full participation; Promote a Western we-culture of togetherness and sharing; Promote a materially simpler, spiritually richer, creative life; Promote equivalents of monasteries, with freedom to join and leave; and Promote an exit from this rhythm in favor of a balanced both/and rather than an and/or.

What would you say to applying the term “global” to other civilizations? Except for Islam, they are much older than “modernity” and have survived, perhaps through more diversity, symbiosis, and balance. Maybe the West can learn from that.

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The Global and the Left Possible Encounters? Nilüfer Göle

The rise of neo-populist movements, the constitution of ethno-religious identities, the increasing popularity of “strong leaders,” the resentment against migrants and minorities, and the propagation of illiberal democracies are among the common features spreading both in Western and non-Western countries. In the light of these developments, the call of Immanuel Wallerstein to engage a debate on the Global Left is timely, if not urgent. Nevertheless, we need to situate these political developments within the longue durée transformations of the world-system. He notices “we are living in the era of transition from our existing worldsystem to something different.” What are the distinctive features of this new era? In which way can they shape the Global Left agendas? The political agendas based upon the distinctions between left and right agendas, liberal versus nationalist, were mainly derived from the experiences of industrial societies and Western nation-states. Labor as the epicenter in society-making, the ideal of equality fueling social imaginaries, faith in progress, and defense of liberties by social movements, can be enumerated as the main parameters of the progressive left. The French Revolution, as Wallerstein argues, was at the heart of the cultural transformation of the world-system as a whole. “It meant the tacit worldwide acceptance of two cultural concepts: the normality of change and the sovereignty of the people.” In the present era of transition, it is difficult to suggest that the two notions, faith in progress and the notion of people as the collective historical actor, constitute the pillars on which the agendas of the left can be defined. The normality of change in the sense of progress, advanced modernity is more and more questioned and loosening its grip on social imaginaries. The unwanted and overwhelming consequences of development are believed to threaten humankind and the globe. Scenarios of catastrophes, environmental issues, sources of energy, climate warming, and epidemics are determining scientific research and capturing public DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-10

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opinion. Hence, antisystemic thinking is fueled by scenarios of catastrophes and not driven by utopias. The demise of utopia in modern societies signals a change in the way the temporalities between the past, present, and future were articulated in a specific way. Modern temporality implied a rupture from the past (in all domains, getting rid of feudal, traditional, and religious life worlds), magnification of the consciousness of the present, and yet held to the transcendental belief in a better future, in the transformative force of utopias. In the present era, the future seems bleak, past cumbersome. The utopias are not activating present-day politics. And the creative potentials of “presentism” are lost and give way to pathologies of consumerist citizens, a culture of narcissism, and politics of supremacy. It is a major stake for the critical left movement to rethink changing space and time dimensions in the new age. A sense of responsibility for future generations and a pact of solidarity with people across the globe are part of the contemporary political agendas, such as environmental issues, wars, and refugee crises. The politics of the left can only have a transformative potential and bear a utopian dimension if the parameters of change are defined across cultures and generations. Second, the notion of sovereignty of people and its emancipatory potential for democracy has been closely related with the nation-statemaking process. As Wallerstein asserts, the movements, whether nationalist or socialist, have had vertical relations with the state. In today’s globalized societies, with technologies of communication, flows of migration, and circulation of goods, images, and ideas, transversal relations among individuals are becoming widespread and intensified. The historical actor of democracy is emerging under different conditions, with different semantics. Europe is an illustrative example; it bears the old paradigm of national sovereignty and the new project of union that attempts to surpass nationalism. Europe: The Secular Left and Islam We are witnessing a crucial moment in the European history of democracy. The future of Europe risks being very different from the one that has been imagined by those who believed in its unification for the sustainability of peace and democracy. Euroskeptic feelings are gaining ground across Europe; politics for national sovereignty are becoming popular independent of the left and the right divide; and the referendum for Brexit in Great Britain risks setting an example for replication. Second, the issues around migration and Islam become decisive in erasing the differences between left and right and challenging the pluralistic

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democracies of European countries. A cluster of different problems in nature, namely, the refugee crises, jihadist terrorism, and Muslim migrant minorities, are amalgamated together. Security politics to prevent terrorism, humanitarian aid for the refugee crisis, and neo-populism against the “Islamic invasion of Europe” are becoming decisive. Let’s say a few words on Muslim migrant citizens of Europe. Muslim migrants’ historical and personal trajectories are different from those of refugees. The migrants are situated within European countries, their integration is under way, and the second and third generation youth do not want to be defined by their migration “background” (“issue de l’immigration”), nor by the national origins of their parents (such as Algerians, Turks, and Moroccans). The Muslim claim for visibility in public life is a post-migration phenomenon. They feel they belong to the countries in which they were raised, and—different from global jihadists—they aspire to participate in the societies in which they live by means of education, professional life, and politics. Many follow an itinerary of successful integration and achieve social ascension, becoming a part of the new middle classes. Not all fit the depictions of “failures of Muslim integration” and living in “problem zones” in suburban areas. They aspire for social intermingling and look for ways of combining their religious faith with their desire to participate. They are “ordinary Muslims” to the extent that they want to be part of daily life in different cities of Europe, going to school, praying, eating halal, etc. However, their religious norms and their visibility as Muslims create an obstruction for their recognition as ordinary citizens. They are not considered acceptable citizens to the extent that their religious practices are not in conformity with majoritarian public norms. In the post-migration period, namely, in the process of the integration of migrants of the second and third generations, Islam becomes the common denominator among Muslims of different national backgrounds and ethnic origins and signifies the end of ethno-religious identities of migrants. To the extent that migrants define themselves as “Muslims,” it implies distancing themselves from the national cultures of their parents and encompassing a more universal sense of Islam in the European cultural landscape. We observe the visibility of Islam in public life and the emergence of cultural controversies around the headscarf issue, prayer in public, mosque constructions, halal eating, and visual representations of Islam. There is a convergence of national responses in framing the Islamic question, the reiteration of rights discourse regarding gender equality, sexual minorities, and freedom of expression. In spite of the national differences concerning politics of integration and history of migration, French republicanism, and British

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multiculturalism, we see different countries of Europe converge in their ways of framing the Islamic question. They also learn from each other’s responses. The headscarf and burka ban in France becomes, for instance, a reference for discussion in other national contexts. The minaret referendum in Switzerland and the cartoon controversy in Denmark enter as yardsticks in European debates. The controversies around Islam also change our mental map of Europe, dominated by countries of immigration: France, Germany, and Great Britain. European liberal democracies have defined pluralism by means of politics of multiculturalism (from the left) and recognition of minority religious rights (from the right). However, we witness during the last three decades that both frames are falling short in addressing Muslim difference in Europe. The invalidation of multiculturalism and its inadaptability to the question of Islam became a widely accepted conviction. It meant for many cultural relativism and letting the patriarchal, traditional elements of oppression within the communities remain intact. For critiques of multiculturalism, the lack of interaction between different communities not only led to cultural clashes but is also a potential enclave for radicalization and terrorism. On the other hand, the discourse on minority religious rights seems neither to provide a satisfactory answer nor to facilitate the recognition of Muslims’ claims. The Islamic covering of women and halal food illustrate the ways in which these debates join “rights discourses,” but not religious rights. Islamic veiling is not framed as a minority religious freedom but rather considered to be in contradiction with women’s rights. Similarly, halal eating and ritual slaughtering do not qualify as a right for a minority religion (as it has been in the case of kosher) but are combated as an archaic ritual of animal suffering. Consequently, each controversy around Islam is framed within a discourse of incompatibility of European values with Islamic norms, the manifestation of a “clash of cultures.” The pillars of European culture are defined around the secular values of Europe: gender equality, rights for sexual minorities, and freedom of expression. The neo-populist movements feed on this common ground of cultural clashes. They differentiate themselves from the earlier xenophobic movements of the far right. They endorse the politics of fear and enmity with Islam, defend ethno-nationalism and nativism against flows of migration and globalization, and gain popularity. While neopopulist movements are no longer ostracized and are becoming audible as part of a mainstream politics, liberal democratic parties loosen their grip on issues of religion and migration. The political and intellectual traditions of the left are strong in dealing with social discrimination and economic inequalities, but they fall short in framing the religious

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question. One should remember that the secular left remains marked by the legacy of the 1968 countercultural movements that were driven by anti-religious sentiments and the desire for sexual liberation. Some of the spokespersons of secular libertarian values are contesting Islamic norms in present-day Europe and are combating Muslims, who are bringing religion back to public life, defending sexual modesty, and holding on to a prophetic tradition. In other words, the premises of a secular society basically define the leftist tradition of thought, and the question of religion is either condemned, or, at best, remains a blind spot. Consequently, the presence of Muslim migrants in Europe, their claims for visibility, and their participation in everyday life encounter cultural resistance and hostility, not only from right-wing, xenophobic politics but also from the secular left. These are some of the unexpected turns and developments emanating from the global flows of migration, challenging the prevalent conceptions and identities of national communities and their unification in Europe. In the face of the rise of nationalist tides, claims of nationalist sovereignty, and protectionism of all sorts, economic and cultural, the left in general remains reticent in adopting a liberal stance. The Global Left should push for, now and in the decades to come, writes Wallerstein, “forcing liberals to be liberals, to fulfill their rhetoric.” New Forms of Public Protest Let me turn now to the extension of the domain of politics to new forms of protest movements, to what Wallerstein calls the promotion of the spirit of Porto Alegre. Are these movements providing an alternative strategy for the Global Left? He believes that politically these movements emphasize the “extra-state modes of acting that had been espoused by the movements of 1968” and that protesters “are coming together in a non-hierarchical fashion.” He writes that they are antisystemic and global justice movements around a common minimal program: (a) seeking greater intellectual clarity, (b) militant actions based on popular mobilization that can be seen as immediately useful in people’s lives, and (c) simultaneously insisting on pursuing longer-run, more fundamental changes. We are indeed witnessing a new type of worldwide protest: Tahrir Square in Egypt, Occupy Wall Street in the United States, the “indignados” in European cities, Gezi Park in Istanbul, and the protest movements in Brazil. The West ceases to be the sole source of inspiration

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for protesters. The democratic imaginaries that are released and staged as a result of these protest movements circulate globally among citizens of different language communities and are not confined within the boundaries of national politics. For many, they illustrate the importance of global civil society and new political ideals. Do they provide a new utopian turn? I do not think that we can qualify them as “utopian” to the extent that these movements formulate claims “here and now.” They are present-oriented, that is, related to everyday life politics, and not future-oriented as in the case of revolutionary leftist movements. “Utopia” (literally “no place,” from the Greek ou, meaning “not,” and topos, meaning “place”) refers to an ideal that is not yet realized in a given place, whereas these movements are grounded, located in physical places. They are named according to the places occupied—Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Wall Street, Maidan— where protesters make their presence felt, oppose decisions imposed from above, and stage their protests. These places—public squares, parks, streets—provide a stage on which different actors manifest their presence in society, display their ideals, and perform and rehearse collectively. They are also different from civil society movements that are (pre)organized around common interests, issues, or identities. The protesters attending the new protest movements might be members of such civil society movements—such as the feminist, green, gay, religious, leftist, or trade-union movements—but they come to “maidan,” to the public square, as individuals, not as representatives of their particular movements. They demonstrate personally, stage their “personal” malaise in public, and become part of a collective protest movement. It is the public space that enables and reveals the gathering of people with different social origins and divergent cultural orientations. The public protest movements connect the personal to public agency and differ from organized civil society movements or identity movements. These movements have their origins in unexpected events and sometimes seemingly trivial issues. In each case, there is a tipping point, a single event that triggers collective protest. There is an expression of “enough is enough,” thus drawing a clear line between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. However, these movements cannot be qualified as an outburst of the masses, an upheaval of the unprivileged, a display of anger on the part of the oppressed. These new protest movements are different from the organized political movements of the past with a core ideology. They are also different from the identity movements of the 1980s, yet they generate a sense of cohesion, a collective force that enables them to mobilize civic resistance and converge around claims for pluralism, dignity, and justice. They defy political

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authoritarianism and reject neo-capitalism. They open up a new space, a public space for democratic imaginaries, bringing the micropolitics of everyday life into the realm of democracy. The public square (maidan) provides a stage for interaction and performativity. In contrast to traditional political movements, the park is open to improvisation, creativity, and humor. The protesters organize forums and use a new language of communication, rehearsing collectively, as was seen in Occupy Wall Street and repeated in other contexts. They stage forms of occupation, with music and performance, at times reminiscent of Woodstock or the communal life of the 1968 countercultural movements. The movement has created its own language and repertoire of action. In the absence of core ideologies and argumentative frameworks, its participants seek to give it meaning through artistic forms of expression— visual arts, or graphic design. The protesters are both militants and artists. They are also mediators of their own movement; they share instantly via social media with the rest of the world the course of events, personal expressions, and police violence. The significance of these worldwide protest movements is shaped according to their local context. For instance, the plan to construct a shopping mall on Gezi Park in Istanbul was a tipping point that led to the occupation of the park and the protest movements that spread out in every city. These movements link environmental criticism with that of global capitalism. In general, capitalism tends to manifest itself through abstract forces, like globalization, financial markets, and neoliberalism—and escapes the grip of politics. However, capitalism as materially incarnated in the shopping mall became a new and concrete symbol of global financial capitalism in the Turkish context. The shopping mall stood for the material manifestation of commercial greed and consumerism ruining the urban fabric. Among the protesters, there were young people involved in movements for the defense of the environment, critiques of globalism, but also “anti-capitalist Muslims.” For the inhabitants of Istanbul, the project of constructing a shopping mall in the middle of Gezi Park meant the confiscation of a park open to all by private capital, the confiscation of the public sphere. The new protest movements seek to defend public space against commercialization and the transformation of urban life into a mere generator of rents. They turn our attention on the public space as a site for enhancing and staging democracy through the everyday practices of ordinary citizens. It has revealed the public sphere as a vital sphere of democracy that should be open to all, not obstructed by state authorities or handed over to capitalist ventures.

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The park represents the public sphere. The park incarnates the physicality of the public sphere. It is the concrete, open space in which citizens can give voice to their opinions and gather together. The connection between the physicality of a public space and the more abstract, immaterial sense of the public sphere is paramount to understand the emancipatory potential of these movements in democracy making. Many observers, including intellectuals of the left, have alluded to the limited capacity of such protests to translate into durable, organized political opposition. However, one should not underestimate the transformative effects of these movements. The protesters might not be organized into a political force; they might only be on the stage for a brief moment, offering only a “snapshot,” but they give a glimpse onto a horizon of possibility, shake up agendas, and introduce new repertoires of action. Their political significance and effectiveness is rooted in their public performativity and the extension of the domain of the political into everyday life issues. The “Global Left” needs to follow up and update its ideological framework in tune with these new forms of enacting citizenship. The public space is both the heart and the vulnerable vein of democracies. The stakes are high for democracy if one considers the increasing rhetoric around public order and therefore the endangered autonomy of the public sphere. The movements that have opened up democratic potentials for citizenship were followed in many places, from Tahrir Square to Gezi Park and Maidan in Ukraine, by severe forms of state repression. Police violence and penalization of the protesters have undermined the margin of freedom for future such demonstrations. We are at a new threshold in terms of democracy between the need for public spaces and an authoritarianism in which public life is increasingly regulated, individuals are under surveillance, and the media risks becoming a medium for propaganda. The politics of enmity, fear, intolerance, hate, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and the like are fueling the emerging nationalist and neo-populist movements as defenders of national unity. In the name of majority values, they are adopting antiliberal and antielite stances, turning against migrants, intellectuals, writers, artists, and journalists, against all those who have multiple affiliations and are linked to the global world but whose local existence depends on freedom in the public sphere. There is indeed an urgency for the Global Left to protect the current vulnerable citizens of the glocal and restore public place democracy.

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The Hypothesis of Decline Michel Wieviorka Translated by Kristin Couper

Immanuel Wallerstein has invited us to consider the past and the present of the left, of what he referred to as “the Global Left,” but also its future. But are we sure that there is a future for the left—at least for the next few years? The hypothesis of a relatively long-lasting decline of the left does, alas, deserve to be considered. This is what I intend to do here, specifying, beforehand, that the left I am referring to is specifically the political left, not to be confused with the social or cultural movements that may express it, there where, it seems to me, Immanuel Wallerstein proposes a conceptualization that includes, in one single whole, the movement and the specifically political action. As we shall see, this does not really change the analysis. In my opinion, there will be no renewal of the political left unless there is an emergence and deployment of “global” social and cultural movements. At the outset, we have the collapse of communism in the East, symbolized at the time by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but also in the West, whether it be the almost total disappearance of the major communist parties in the West (in Italy or in France in particular) or the exhaustion of the extremism (to parody Lenin’s words, “the senile disorders”) which had led from radicalism to terrorism: leftism in all its variants and political violence claiming to be Marxist or Leninist. The last guerrilla of any importance to have claimed this type of ideology, while in fact living mainly on narco-trafficking, was that of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC): this movement finally signed an agreement with the government in Colombia that meant the end of the armed struggle, but we know little about how they have fared since a referendum rejected this agreement (October 2, 2016). Then there was the decline of social democracy in its strongholds, less marked and not as severe—in Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries in particular. The electoral results bear witness: as an illustration, during the Austrian presidential election in May 2016, the SPO DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-11

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(Social Democratic Party of Austria) candidate was relegated to fourth place in the first round, with 11.28 percent of the votes; the two leading candidates, the only ones to go forward to the second round, belonged to the political ecology party, and the other to the extreme right. This election was canceled; in the final vote, the Green candidate became head of state in Austria. In some cases, the collapse goes along with destructuring. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party painfully went from Tony Blair perceived at the outset as a modernizer with the “third way,” then as distancing himself from the fundamentals of the Labour Party because he was open to the market and to finance, not to mention his support for the United States in the Iraq War adventure, to Jeremy Corbyn, perceived as being to the left of the left. Radicalized under this leader and divided, today the Labour Party faces a major crisis and has never been lower in the opinion polls. In the United States, the confrontation of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic Party primary revealed a profound division between the electors of this party, and it is not certain that the traces of this opposition have really been eliminated since the victory of Hillary Clinton in the primary, then her defeat in the presidential election. Throughout Latin America, the hopes of the 1990s and even the 2000s are far distant. The Brazil of Lula and then of Dilma Rousseff is today struggling with a profound crisis, and it is not leftist ideas, rejected thanks to a corrupt workers’ party, which is likely to remobilize the population. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet is at the bottom of the polls; in Bolivia, Evo Morales, who had succeeded in getting the Indian population to participate in the civic and political life of the country, lost a constitutional referendum. In France, we witness the Socialist Party that is now living through a process almost the reverse of the inauguration of the Congress of Epinay (1971). This Congress represented the start of a dynamic process that included the unification of the socialists, then their alliance with the communists (with the Programme commun), which enabled the election of François Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election. In February 2016, the Prime Minister, Manuel Valls (and he is not alone), declared that there were two lefts that were irreconcilable. Then commentators spoke of three lefts: an extreme populist left, both anti-German and anti-Euro, if not anti-Europe, represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon; a left of left, within the Parti Socialiste, represented by those who have been referred to as “les frondeurs” (the Recalcitrants); and a left of the right, liberal, with two versions: one is military and security conscious (Manuel

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Valls) and the other seems less authoritarian (Emmanuel Macron). Following President François Hollande’s decision not to stand, the primary of the Socialist Party finally decided in favor of Benoit Hamon, a candidate described as very left-wing, who won against Manuel Valls, who represented instead the right of the left. In France, the political sphere of the left continues to be characterized by a total vacuum between these two extremes. There does not seem to be any political personality capable of representing a central position between these two poles. The classical left seems to be destructured with, on one side, the left of the left, which is radicalized or utopian, and, on the other, a right of the left, with considerable difficulty in existing within the Socialist Party and threatened with dissolution in a centrism that claims to be as much on the left as on the right. This is personified by Emmanuel Macron. The result is that everywhere, the political left is breaking up; the rationales of fragmentation are stronger than the centripetal forces that could impel a rearticulation of its components. These rationales convey much more than the weaknesses of the political actors in office—actors who nevertheless should not be exempted from blame, with their lethal games and their lack of vision for the future, etc. One also has to consider the “ordinary working people,” as they are sometimes described. These “people” in the postwar years, in the period of real communism in the East, and of social democracy in several countries in the West, or the welfare state, became accustomed to expecting a lot from the state and its institutions. At the same time, they are an integral part of the wholesale trend toward individualism. They can be sensitive to major humanitarian causes, but they are not highly mobilized when it comes to changing society itself. The attempts to organize civic discussions are often limited, or one-off occasions, and in many countries, the biggest mobilizations on the left are more defensive, if not corporative, than concerned with a vision of the future or a project for society. But let’s consider one of the rare experiences that demonstrate that the left can be revived: that of Spain. The classical left in this country is, like elsewhere, weakened and exhausted, as was demonstrated by the results for the PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party) in Spain during the recent general elections (only 77 members elected out of a total of 350 candidates in June 2016). But with Podemos, a new lease of life has been expressed since 2014, which is evidence of a degree of renewal on the left. We should, however, immediately point out that nothing indicates that the electoral success at the outset is likely to be repeated. For the more Podemos participates in classical political and institutional interplay, the more the group seems to lose momentum and even get bogged down, as seen in its rather disappointing score in the June 2016 election

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(71 elected members and 21.1 percent of the votes, as compared with 24.3 percent in December 2015). However, there may be a lesson to learn from this experience, short as it is: when a political force adopts new social and cultural aspirations, as was the case at the origin of Podemos, when its founding manifesto spoke of “converting political indignation into political change,” and when it was a question of prolonging at the political level the action of the movement of the Indignados, then this force echoed the most active segments of society and found therein a source of dynamism, and then an electoral base. The political renewal of the left will come, not from the present specifically political interplay, which rapidly becomes pathetic or ridiculous, but from the endeavor to transcribe the expectations into new or renewed challenges and to help them assert themselves. Today, these expectations and these challenges are weak or barely audible, barely capable of generating large-scale movements, but they do, nevertheless, exist. But it is not by using the same threadbare categories as in the past, the same words, and the old ways of conducting politics that the left will be able to kick-start itself. The next left will require concepts and therefore links with the world of ideas and knowledge, beginning with the social sciences. It will have to put an end to the arrogance of the politicians and invent other relationships with the media than those implied by the “com,” or communication—this is what the “global” movements that Immanuel Wallerstein discusses do. And the left will only be able to reconstruct itself if society regains confidence in itself and invents discussions and conflicts outlining another future than the one promised us by those obsessed by identity or the promoters of closure and intolerance. If not, it could well be that the left will gradually decline, and at best undergo a long period of fragmentation and impotence.

10 Response to Appreciations/ Critiques Immanuel Wallerstein

In deciding to publish a revised version of my three talks on The Global Left: Past, Present, and Future, Michel Wieviorka and I thought it would interesting to have a series of appreciations/critiques of the text by several well-known and distinguished analysts of the present state of the world. We drew up a list bearing in mind several considerations. They should be persons with whom I have been in intellectual and personal contact for many years. They could therefore be expected to be familiar with my general outlook on the modern world-system. In addition, the list of analysts should be geographically diverse, have multiple disciplinary affiliations, write in multiple languages, and represent different primary intellectual concerns. We came up with a list of six persons whom we asked to write an appreciation/critique of my text. We did indeed obtain the consent of all those we invited to write such an appreciation/critique. As the reader can see, the result is a series of reactions to my text that are both quite different one from the other and appreciate/critique my text from very different intellectual standpoints, or what might be called a very different priority of intellectual concerns. I thank them all. As I read them, I find three kinds of critiques. There are some that I believe result from a misreading of what I have written. I shall seek to clarify such misunderstandings. There are others that reflect real differences and to which I shall respond. Finally, there are the critiques that were not made. Seemingly, there were parts of my argument of which none of the appreciators took notice and that seem crucial to me. I will try to signal what I think of as strange absences. I shall respond to each person in alphabetical order. The longest critique is the first, by Étienne Balibar. Étienne recounts our long intellectual interaction. He and I coauthored Race, Nation, Class, which each of us considers one of our major writings. His text in this book is very detailed and very nuanced. I cannot possibly in this DOI: 10.4324/9781003167297-12

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short response deal with the enormous number of different particular analyses that he makes, with most of which in any case I agree. I believe nonetheless that there exists one crucial and one less crucial critique to which I feel it necessary to respond. The heart of the severest critique comes down to his epistemological point. He and I agree that capitalism is not functioning today in the manner in which it did throughout some 500 years. I take this as a sign that capitalism has no future, for all the many reasons that I spelled out. Balibar wants to frame this issue differently. He says that the rules of capitalism have changed, and that therefore there is no strong case that can be made that capitalism itself is at an end. To me, this is playing with a distinction that makes no sense. What is this thing called capitalism such that its rules may be changed? I define capitalism as the system that has been functioning up to now. What do we gain by renaming this issue in this way? What greater clarity do we have as to what is occurring today and therefore tomorrow? I do not see any benefit in this shift in language, since both say the same thing in terms of analyzing what is going on. It seems to me confusing to do it. The second important difference, but less important in my view, is the discussion of financialization. For Balibar, its principal consequence is the vastly increased physical mobility of labor. This is surely true. But does this make capitalism in the long run more viable? I do not think so. It changes the geographical location of various economic activities, but it does not increase their profitability per se. I shall return to this objection when I discuss what I am calling strange absences. James Galbraith approaches my text from two very different angles. The first is his insistence that my discussion of Kondratieff waves, butterfly effects, and bifurcations are merely metaphors and do not exist in the real world. I think that they are not metaphors but shorthand for real phenomena, and that they do take account of dissipation. In this matter, we simply disagree. The second assertion is that the so-called crises in capitalism pale before the more urgent and more devastating problem of climate change. He seems to think that I do not take into account the reality of climate change. In fact, I agree that climate change is a central reality of the current state of the world. I list it as one of three phenomena exogenous to the functioning of capitalism as a system that may tilt what I consider the great political struggle during the structural crisis of capitalism in one direction or the other. (The other two are endemic epidemics and the rogue use of nuclear weapons.) However, I am less sure than he that irreversible events will occur before what I think of the institution of a successor system (or systems)

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to the modern world-system. Once the succession is completed, climate change may become our collective fate or may rather be reversed. It follows that our priority in militancy should be focused on the central political struggle about the succession. For the rest, he and I are largely in agreement about the historical events of the post-1945 period. Johan Galtung differs from me (and the other respondents) first of all in the time framework of his analysis. Johan looks at several thousands of years of human history. He locates there a back and forth between Western expansion and contraction vis-a-vis the collectivity of civilizational realities in what we sometimes call the non-Western world, something he suggests I neglect. Actually, I think this way of formulating the issue gives too much importance to the Western world before 1500. When Johan comes to discussing what I list as tactics in the current struggle, he doesn’t disagree but adds some others, with which I do not disagree. Most of all, I agree that what is essential for the Global Left (Johan of course does not want to call it the left) is to repudiate their universalistic arrogances. I am on the same side as he in this issue, which I think is central to our strategy of transformation. Nilüfer Göle approaches a somewhat similar question within the time framework of the modern world-system. Unlike Johan, however, she does not see an unbridgeable conflict between the Global Left and those pursuing identity politics in one form or another. She sees rather what she calls “possible encounters.” In my view, she is trying to unify the Global Left by widening its horizon. She centers her text by discussing what is perhaps the most visible issue with which the pan-European world is presently concerned, which is that of Islam. She insists that neither multiculturalism (associated with the left) nor minority religious rights (associated with the right) is what the third-generation (or more) Muslim citizens of western Europe and North America are seeking, but rather their participation in everyday life politics. I find her text refreshing in its sensitivity to the issues as seen by these Muslim citizens and its search for the optimum way of achieving a positive resolution of the conflicts. Pablo González Casanova’s comments introduce another issue: the impact of the rightward push of recent events on communist parties (few surviving) and social-democratic parties (which are pursuing a transformed ideology) on the general antisystemic struggle. This is important and I concur in what he has argued. Pablo raises one difference with me. He says that I see formal structures determining entry into chaos whereas he sees that we have already

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entered into this chaotic situation. I think this is merely a misunderstanding of my position. I agree we have already entered into the chaotic state of the modern world-system. And I agree that it indicates that humanity cannot survive the continuation of the capitalist system. Finally, I am grateful that he has spelled out the behavior of formerly antisystemic movements and renewed our understanding of the class struggle inherent in the present world situation. Finally, Michel Wieviorka’s text places still another priority. Michel is concerned that the historic role of the social-democratic left seems to have broken down, and he deplores this. So, he wonders if the issue of the geopolitical decline of the United States and the Western world more generally is not really what is behind this disintegration of the left. He sees a major role for the social sciences in coming up with new concepts that would reinvigorate this social-democratic left. I am perhaps less sanguine than he about the likelihood of the social sciences playing such a role. But I agree that it is incumbent on the social sciences to try to aid in explaining current reality. Only then can we hope to win the battle in what I see as the underlying political struggle of this chaotic phase of transition. Let me now come to the strange absences. In my effort to explain the evolution of the Global Left, I offered an explanation of why it was impossible for the capitalist system to survive. I said that the crucial factor is the exhaustion (for reasons I elaborated) of effective demand. I said that capitalists cannot create new value and therefore earn more profits without a customer base for their production. That is why, I said, not only the vast underclasses but the capitalists themselves are no longer interested in the survival of capitalism as a system. None of my commentators spoke to this argument. I can only wonder why. Does it seem to them too outrageous that the 1 percent, no matter how much they are earning in the short run, are worried about the future and look therefore for a new kind of system to sustain their wealth? Do they perhaps see some other source of income for the 99 percent that would allow them to be part of a sustaining effective demand? If so, let them present their case. For my part, I do not see any possibility of doing this. I consider this argument the most important part of the whole text. In this sense, I believe capitalism has had its day. A century from now, it will be written about as an interesting historical moment of the past.

Contributors

Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X—Nanterre and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is renowned for his publications in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy. James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/ Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and a professorship in government at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Galbraith was Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress in the early 1980s. He chaired the board of Economists for Peace and Security (1996–2016) and directs the University of Texas Inequality Project. He is a managing editor of the journal, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. Johan Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist, is the principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies. He was a principle founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, where he served as its first director. He also established the Journal of Peace Research. In 1969, he was appointed to the world’s first chair in peace and conflict studies at the University of Oslo. Among many positions, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at the University of Hawaii. Nilüfer Göle is Professor of Sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). She works on Islamic visibility in European public spaces and the debates it engenders on religious and cultural difference. Her sociological approach aims to open up a new reading of modernity from a non-western perspective and a broader critique of Eurocentrism in the definitions of secular modernity. She is the author of Islam in Europe: The Lure of Fundamentalism and The Allure of Cosmopolitanism (2010).

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Pablo González Casanova is a lawyer, sociologist, and a critic who was awarded by UNESCO in 2003 the International José Martí Prize for his defense of the identity of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. He is an honorary member of the Mexican Academy of Language and has served as the Rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Michel Wieviorka, Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), is a prominent sociologist known for books, articles, and lectures on violence, terrorism, racism, social movements, and theories of social change.