Immanuel Wallerstein is director of the Fernand Braudel Centre
and president of the International
Sociological Association.
He is a world leader in "world systems" theory. The
Braudel Centre, named after the great French historian and founder
of the Annales School, is a leading centre for research
into historically evolving socioeconomic systems.
Wallerstein' three Auckland lectures (the 1997 Robb
Lectures): were titled "The Failure of the Dreams or Paradise
Lost?" (16 October), "The Difficult Transition
or Hell on Earth?" (21 October), and "A Substantially
Rational World or Can Paradise be Regained?" (22 October).
(In introducing the second lecture university chancellor
Dr. Kit Carson drew a parallel between Wallerstein's title for
that lecture and the September Tertiary Education Review Green
Paper A Future Tertiary Education Policy for New Zealand.
The least unkind word used by Carson to describe the green paper
was "tedious", and he urged as many people as possible
to make submissions on the future of tertiary education in New
Zealand before the December closing date.)
In my comments on Wallerstein's first lecture (
World Revolutions: 1848, 1968 and sometime next century?),
I drew an interpretation of the future from his insights that
I suspected would be quite different to Wallerstein's own interpretation.
This turned out to be so.
In his second and third lectures Wallerstein shifted
from a century perspective to a millennial perspective. The message
from the first lecture was that we could expect world revolutions
every 120 years or so, and I can make sense of that notion, whether
taking it forward to next century, or taking it to the early centuries
of the modern world system (late 15th to mid 18th centuries).
Wallerstein however sees the post1968 phase
as being an unstable transition in millennial time, rather than
a stable phase in century time such as the liberaltechnocratic
state system of the 19th and 20th centuries. The previous revolution
on this millennial time scale was the evolution of the world system
itself in the 15th century, marking a transition from feudalism
to capitalism; from the medieval system to the modern system.
Support for such a millennial transition came in
an interesting BBC documentary "The New Middle Ages"
in BBC World's The Late Show series (screened 24/9/95,
6:25 am NZ time, first screened in Britain in 1994). Drawing on
a French book called The New Middle Age, and other sources,
the programme depicted a coming world of insecurity, disease,
and Malthusian tragedies. But it also portrayed the idea of a
genuinely international intellectual community (thanks to the
Internet), a return to a better balance between market and nonmarket
work and a return to an emphasis on craftsmanship in work. This
millennial future is a singlescenario mixture of good and
bad.
In contrast, Wallerstein sees the current millennial
transition as being a period of historical "bifurcation",
a fork in history, a period in which revolutionary political action
can make a huge difference to macrohistorical outcomes, and in
which there are two basic scenarios to emerge from the collapse
of the capitalist world system: a "black" scenario,
and a good scenario.
The good scenario, Wallerstein emphasised, would
not be utopia; rather it would be something "better"
than what we have today (perhaps an "agathotopia" to
use a term favoured by the late James Meade, Nobel laureate in
economics, and author in 1995 of Full Employment Regained?
an Agathotopian Dream). While the correct actions on the part
of the nonprivileged could not guarantee the coming of the
better society following the imminent collapse of the "states
system", a failure of the people to act would ensure the
arrival of the "black" scenario; a dystopia characterised
by the effective rule of global mafiosa. Wallerstein used the
metaphor of persons caught at sea in a whirlpool; if they can
see the shore then they will head in the correct direction. Swimming
towards the shore does not guarantee that all or even any will
make it. But swimming without any sense of direction inevitably
leads to failure.
I remain suspicious, however, of the claim that we
live in the midst of a very special period of history, a millennial
transition. Christians in the year 1000 AD believed the same kinds
of things about their world. But, today, the period around the
year 1000 seems to be of little historical significance. (Europeans
may be mistaken on this however, because the Sung dynasty in China,
which began at around that date, can be seen with hindsight as
the world's first liberal technocratic capitalist society, and
whose inventions were indispensable to the later industrialisation
of Europe.)
I believe that we cannot simply divide the world's
people into the "privileged" and the "nonprivileged"
as Wallerstein does. And I believe that we are coming into an
era in which economic class and social class are diverging (meaning
that most of us will have more diverse sources of income than
in the past - see Class: Economic, Social, Political),
and that such divergence will in itself take the heat out of the
class struggle which Wallerstein sees as intensifying. Furthermore,
a divergence between economic and social class creates new counterintuitive
possibilities in the formation of political classes. I think that
we are coming to see more capitalists who, like Jim Anderton,
a successful businessman, do not identify with capitalism as an
ideology.
For Wallerstein, there are no democratic nations
in the world, just "liberal states"; democracies which
only exist in the rich corners of today's world. His better society
certainly does embrace the ideal of democracy - government of
the people for the people by the people. Of interest here is that
the conceptual idea of the "sovereign" - especially
that of the people as sovereign - is a quite distinct concept
from that of the "state". States are polities, political
machines, set of political institutions that play a central role
in the capitalist world system. While Wallerstein didn't make
this distinction between sovereignty and statehood, his analysis
would have lost nothing if he had.
Why does Wallerstein believe that the liberal world
"states system" of global capitalism is collapsing?
He identified three key contradictions that apply in particular
to a world system that uses state structures as key props.
Wallerstein's contradictions relate to diminishing
returns ("asymptotes") in key areas of the global economy
that have nourished world capitalism in the 20th century. The
first asymptote relates to the labour market. Global capitalism
seeks ever cheaper labour from wherever it can be found. China
is the present flavour of the month, with labour in places like
Malaysia now being too expensive. With most labour already integrated
into the world system, there is a limit to ongoing supplies of
traditional cheap labour. Here nation states are important in
propping up the world system by using legislation (like the NZ
Employment Contracts Act) to place downward pressure on wages
in each integrated country. Nevertheless, despite national governments
beggaring their neighbours through low wage policies, Wallerstein
sees the supplies of cheap labour as coming to an end.
The second asymptote relates to taxation. Taxfunded
public goods have nourished world capitalism. There are limits
to how far states can lower their tax rates as a means of attracting
global capital, without destroying the publiclyfunded resource
base.
The third asymptote relates to the natural environment.
There are limits to the extent that global businesses can "externalise
their costs" by using natural resources and public goods
as if they were free when really it is someone else who is paying,
through environmental degradation and infrastructural depreciation
on a global scale. In Wallerstein's better society, all business
costs will be "internalised", meaning that businesses
will be required to pay for all the resources that they use. My
idea of treating income tax as a production tax - a royalty for
the use of the people's resources - certainly fits well into Wallerstein's
vision of the possible.
For the people to reach the shore next century, and
not to drown at sea, they will have to be very alert to the deceptive
strategies of the privileged (see Conflict, Damned Lies, and
mere Deception). Indeed, in her summing up of the final
lecture, Ivanica Vodanovich (Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University
of Auckland), said that it looks like the people "will have
to be devious in order to regain paradise". Merely resisting
the deception of the ruling capitalist class might not be enough,
given Wallerstein's analysis of the present state of the world
system.
In particular, Wallerstein believes that the ruling
capitalist elite will play a "wolf in sheep's clothing"
strategy, where, when confronted with the contradictions of the
present system, will themselves seek to promote radical institutional
change. But the purpose of the radical changes promoted by the
privileged will be to create a particular kind of new system that
preserves their privilege. "They will seek to change everything
in order to change nothing"!
Wallerstein sees the transition from feudalism to
capitalism as having been such a change in history, whereby the
feudal barons maintained their place at the top of the hierarchy
by becoming capitalists in the new order. Wallerstein does not
see this as a conspiracy of the privileged, however. He freely
acknowledges that many of the privileged will oppose such change,
in that they will not understand its true purpose.
While ordinary people should not be naive about the
deceptions of the privileged classes, and their coming to terms
with a major historical transition, there are dangers in that
it is easy for a proletariat conditioned to deception to see deception
where there is none. (There is also the possibility of seeing
through a bluff, when the real deception is a doublebluff.)
If we take Wallerstein too literally, then many good people with
good ideas and sound analysis will be seen, by the selfappointed
leaders of the unprivileged, as dupes of the capitalists when
in reality they are good people with good ideas.
I must therefore conclude that political action motivated
by grand historical visions is likely to prove unhelpful to the
evolution of a better human society. Rather, we might seek to
contribute to the world by doing the things we each do best, be
it music, research, teaching, manufacturing, or simply treading
lightly. And we should be awake to what is going on around us
by participating in existing democratic institutions, and seeking
to improve them when opportunities arise to so do. By being awake,
we recognise that other people have different interests which
may conflict with our own; and we recognise that interest is much
more complex than a polarisation of humanity into haves and havenots.
While there are many feature's of Wallerstein's analysis
that I find attractive and insightful, I must reject his view
that the future will be either dystopia or agathotopia. As he
says, "utopistics" is "the serious assessment of
historical alternatives and their constraints", "the
study of historically possible futures", and a "mixture
of science, morality and politics". In spite of his own words
of caution, he paints a dangerously simplistic picture.
The future has always been uncertain, and fraught
with fears of impending crisis. Today, as in the past, there is
enough science, morality and political nous in the modern world
for us to believe that the problems arising from the current phase
of globalisation can be resolved without resorting to political
struggle on a grand revolutionary scale. We need not fear a substantially
rational world; after all global 'economic rationalism' is really
delusion. Wallerstein showed how capitalist rationalisation is
contradictory, which means irrational.
We will not recreate the paradises that the French
and Russian revolutionaries sought. As Wallerstein noted, "utopias
bread illusions and, eventually, disillusion". Paradise on
earth is not even desirable.
Our world - the real world - is a mixture of rationality
and perverseness. Likewise, the good society is a mixture of rationality
and paradox. Can we bring about the convergence of the real with
the ideal, given that the ideal we seek is not a utopia? Let's
do what each of us can to ensure a better mix, or at least to
avoid contributing to an explosive mix. To do this, we need to
reject complacent shortterm views of selfinterest
that lead us to incur costs with the expectation that others will
pay.
As Wallerstein notes, democracy means internalising social cost. The owners of private capital should be required to pay for the public capital that they consume. And the owners of public capital should get a return. That's the way out of the whirlpool.
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( viewings since 28 Dec.'97: )