The Rankin File: #18



World Revolutions: 1848, 1968 and sometime next century?

Tuesday, 21 October 1997

Immanuel Wallerstein is the Robb Lecturer at the University of Auckland this year. A sociology professor and an economic historian, he is probably the world's most eminent "world system" theorist. World systems theory is a kind of globalised neo­Marxian Weltanshauung. States are not autonomous, but intrinsic parts of a global economic order subject to a form of historical determinism; a form in which revolutionary thought plays an important if counter­intuitive role.

The topic of the lecture series is "Utopistics", and the first lecture (on 16 October) was a historical review with specific reference to the impact of the French and Russian revolutions, not on French and Russian history, but on world history. These national revolutions failed to achieve their narrow political aims, but ended up achieving far more, by creating the momentum needed to achieve subsequent world revolutions.

The following is my interpretation of Wallerstein's representations of world revolution in the history of the world system so far, and how I see the logic applying to the 21st century.

Pan-European globalisation dates back to the conquest of the world's oceans by the Portuguese in the late 15th century. (As an aside, Christopher Columbus' contribution to the history of globalisation was a sidelight in history. In 1500, Pedro Cabral, following Vasco da Gama's route to southern Africa, discovered Brazil by accident. Had Columbus not sailed, the Americas would still have been discovered within 10 years of Columbus's voyage.)

It was not until the mid-20th century that all the world's peoples had been integrated into the world economic system. Once in the world system, the logic of the system dictated that withdrawal would not be possible except at a heavy price. And real revolutions could only happen to the world system as a whole.

In the late pre­industrial world there were just two main political classes, representing conservative and the progressive worldviews: the Tories and the Whigs, la Droite et la Gauche. On the right margin was the remnants of the guild system, representing the medieval working class. The French Revolution of the 1790s represented the pursuit of a new social order based around the progressive liberal concept of citizenship. The ideas behind it ushered in the belief of human progress as economic growth; that the growth of the wealth of nations was both possible and desirable. The ideas energised the whole pan­European economy. By the middle of the 19th century, industrial capitalism had been born, and with it a new social class and a new ideology; socialism.

1848 represented a set of European revolutions that were all defeated in narrow political terms, but nevertheless created a seismic shift in the ideological balance of global power. While creating a new force on the left margin of the European polity - the labouring class - the fallout from the year of revolutions pushed the industrial progressives into the centre of social and economic gravity. Socialism had given liberalism its opportunity by pushing conservatism onto the "right-wing" margin. And it was industrialisation that enabled a conflation of the ideals of the 18th century liberals with those of the new technocrats and those of the old guild system; a conflation that gave pride of place to belief in the virtue of human intervention to make a better world. The liberal heirs of the Enlightenment were much more interventionist than were the likes of Voltaire or Adam Smith.

In the seventy years or so following 1848, liberalism combined with nationalism through an evolution of the notion of citizenship. Originally conceived as a term of inclusion, citizenship became a basis for exclusion. By conferring certain statutory rights on new groups of ethnically European males, citizenship accentuated the lack of rights of those who remained outside: essentially non­Europeans and, through the invention of the housewife role, women. The downside of progressive liberalism turned out to be imperialism: European economic and political hegemony reached into all regions of the globe, and the breadwinner ruled over the newly sanctified home.

The lack of property, characteristic of the new working class, the proletariat, also acted as a form of exclusion. The Russian Revolution of 1917 marked the first national attempt to replace a liberal European polity with a socialist system in which the labouring class could play a central role. It was expected at the time that the Russian Revolution would be a sideshow to the real socialist revolution, which would take place in Germany, where there was a large labouring class. Russia, a newly industrialising agrarian country, had few socialists and few liberals. It was not the ideal flag­bearer of a pandemic socialist revolution.

Nevertheless, in the following decades, many socialist ideas took hold in an essentially liberal Europe; ideas pushed towards the political centre by the new force on the left. Wallerstein believes that, for example, the Keynesian revolution of liberal economics could not have taken place without the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. So also, was decolonisation made possible by the socialist denationalisation of 19th century thought.

The uprisings associated with the year 1968 are seen by Wallerstein as ushering to the fore a new force on the left, a force reacting to both socialism as represented by the Soviet economic model, and liberalism as represented by the economic growth of western capitalism.

A new left disillusioned with the old left and a new socially liberal establishment vacating the centre for the right created an opportunity for a new conservatism to win the political centre. The new conservatism re­emphasised the individual over the social, the quasi­religious virtues of self­reliance, and a deepening suspicion about the contribution of political intervention and public goods provision to making nations into better places to live. Robert Muldoon, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were all able to tap into that new centre of world politics; the politics of discontent, suspicion and reaction.

Wallerstein's basic model, it seems to me, is that each world revolution brings a new force into the global economic polity, and brings the previously radical force into the centre, losing its radicalism as it does so. Each revolutionary new force becomes the new left. The previously dominant force becomes marginalised on the right. The newly dominant force - the new centre - becomes a coalition of the de­energised old left with a re­energised old right; in the 1970s, a coalition of the proletariat and the neo­conservatives. The newly emergent force in the 1970s was, euphemistically, the "welfare community"; seen otherwise as the underclass, beneficiary class or "dependent" class

At present, we can see the consolidation of the new coalition of the centre, as the social contract underpinning the mid­century welfare state is disavowed. New second tier benefits such as "independent family tax credits" are targeted to people in fulltime work, and away from people not in work; targeted to people who do not conceive of themselves as beneficiaries, and who feel increasingly hostile towards beneficiaries. It is the new proletariat, the non­unionised working class of the deregulated labour market, who see themselves as paying too much tax from their meagre earnings. They have accepted pay cuts. They do not want tax increases. The private work ethic is now firmly entrenched in the new centre.

New Zealand is very much a part of the world system. Thus its economic polity reflects that of the capitalist world as a whole. So political developments here can be taken as proxies for global shifts. The Alliance therefore represents the welfare community, including the Greens who see the future in a world working less rather than more. The welfare community, as the present left, represents the main threat to the private work ethic that holds the new centre together. National has positioned itself to represent the new centre, whereas Labour now represents the new new right - the socially liberal right that is in the present epoch on the political sideline. It is a liberal party. Labour represents the overworked but relatively secure salaried professionals - academics, managers, bankers, technocrats. Tony Blair's government in Great Britain is a coalition of the new centre and the new new right. It is like National and Labour in one.

What of the 21st century? The key dynamic tension will be the clash between the welfare community on the left and the workfare advocates in the centre. The social liberals will bide their time, playing little role in public life as, in their private lives, they are snowed under from overwork.

Thinking across centuries of history - past and future - I believe that there is a stable structure of three political classes: a proprietorial class, an entrepreneurial class, and a labouring class. I see the years from the late 1960s to the early 1990s as representing the transition from one order to the next. Thus, the stable configuration which will dominate the first half of the 21st century is already in place. It is creating a potentially radical proprietorial class on the left (the welfare community, which will come to draw much of its energy from retired baby­boomers, and will emphasise economic sovereignty and the social wage), a conservative labouring class in the centre, and a liberal technocratic class on the right.

Perhaps, within the current epoch, there will be a national revolution somewhere, leading to the creation, for a few years, of a welfare nation or group of nations in which economic sovereignty takes precedence over the drive for low taxes and tightly targeted income support. But it will take a new world revolution to bring the welfare society into the political centre. The next world revolution - probably late in the 21st century - should, given my interpretation of the Wallerstein model, see the emergence of a new force on the left, a coalition in the centre between the welfare community and the technocrats, and the marginalisation on the right of the remnants of the neo­conservative proletariat.

Each world revolution sees each political class shift to the right, and the birth of a new class which has some themes in common with the former class on the right margin. At the time of the next world revolution, I believe that the class to emerge on the left will be a liberal entrepreneurial grouping, as was the class that created the French and American Revolutions of the 18th century. The liberal class of 1789 is now marginalised on the right, waiting to reinvent itself some time next century.

© 1997 Keith Rankin


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