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.
 Back to: Rankin File Archive |
 Go to Keith Rankin's page |
( viewings since 28 Dec.'97: )