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Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
2. The ANC and South Africa: The Past and Future of Liberation Movements in the World-System
Keynote address at the annual meeting of the South African Sociological Association, Durban, South Africa, July 7-11, 1996.
Excerpts from the point of note 2: "The argument in the following paragraphs summarizes an extensive analysis in Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System 1945-2025 (London: Zed Press, 1996)."
I want to point to four long-term trends, each of which is moving near to its asymptote and each of which is devastating from the point of view of capitalists pursuing the endless accumulation of capital. The first, and the least discussed of these trends, is the deruralization of the world. Only two hundred years ago, 80 to 90 percent of the world's population, and indeed of each country's population, was rural. Today worldwide, we are below 50 percent and rapidly going down. Whole areas of the world have rural populations less than 20 percent, some less than 5 percent. Well, so what, you may say? Are not urbanization and modernity virtually synonymous? Is this not what we hoped would happen with the so-called industrial revolution? Yes, that is indeed the commonplace sociological generalization we all have learned.
This is, however, to misunderstand how capitalism works. Surplus-value is always divided between those who have the capital and those who perform the labor. The terms of this division are in the final analysis political, the strength of the bargaining power of each side. Capitalists live with a basic contradiction. If worldwide the terms of remuneration of labor are too low, it limits the market, and, as Adam Smith already told us, the extent of the division of labor is a function of the extent of the market. But if the terms are too high, it limits the profits. Workers, for their part, naturally always want to increase their share and struggle politically to achieve this. Over time, wherever labor is concentrated, workers are able to make their syndical weight felt, and this leads eventually to one of the profit squeezes that have periodically occurred throughout the history of the capitalist world-economy. Capitalists can fight workers only up to a point, because after this point too much reduction of real wages threatens to cut into effective world demand for their products. The recurrent solution has been to allow the better paid workers to supply the market and to draw into the world workforce new strata of persons who are politically weak and are willing for many reasons to accept very low wages, thereby reducing overall production costs. Over five centuries, capitalists have consistently located such persons in rural zones and transformed them into urban proletarians; however, these people remain low-cost workers only for a while, at which point others must be drawn into the labor supply. The deruralization of the world threatens this essential process and thereby threatens the ability of capitalists to maintain the level of their global profits.
The second long-term trend is what is called the ecological crisis. From the point of view of capitalists, this should be called the threat of ending the externalization of costs. Here again we have a critical process. A crucial element in the level of profits has always been that capitalists do not pay the totality of costs of their products. Some costs are "externalized," that is, spread pro rata over the whole of larger populations, eventually over the whole of the world population. When a river is polluted by a chemical plant, the clean-up (if there is one) is normally assumed by taxpayers. What the ecologists have been noticing is the exhaustion of zones to pollute, of trees to be cut down, and so forth. The world faces the choice of ecological disaster or of forcing the internalization of costs. But forcing the internalization of costs threatens seriously the ability to accumulate capital.
The third negative trend for capitalists is the democratization of the world. We have mentioned previously the program of concessions begun in the European zone in the nineteenth century, which we have these days labeled generically the welfare state. These involve expenditures on a social wage: money for children and the aged, education, health facilities. This could work for a long time for two reasons: the recipients had modest demands at first, and only the European workers were receiving this social wage. Today, workers everywhere expect it, and the level of their demands is significantly higher than it was even fifty years ago. Ultimately, these moneys can only come at the cost of accumulating capital. Democratization is not and has never been in the interest of capitalists.
The fourth factor is the reversal of the trend in state power. For four hundred years, the states have been increasing their powers, both internally and externally, as the adjustment mechanisms of the world-system. This has been absolutely crucial for capital despite its anti-state rhetoric. States have guaranteed order, but just as importantly they have guaranteed monopolies, which are the one and only path to serious accumulation of capital.
But the states can no longer perform their task as adjustment mechanisms. The democratization of the world and the ecological crisis have placed an impossible level of demands on the state structures, which are all suffering a "fiscal crisis." But if they reduce expenditures in order to meet the fiscal crises, they also reduce their ability to adjust the system. It is a vicious circle, in which each failure of the state leads to less willingness to entrust it with tasks, and therefore to a generic tax revolt. But as the state becomes less solvent, it can perform existing tasks even less well. We have entered into this vortex already.
It is here that the failure of the movements enters in. It has been the movements, more than anything else, that have in fact sustained the states politically, especially once they came to power. They served as the moral guarantor of the state structures. Insofar as the movements are losing their claims to support, because they can no longer offer hope and certainty, the mass of the population is becoming profoundly anti-state. But states are needed most of all not by reformers and not by movements but by capitalists. The capitalist world-system cannot function well without strong states (of course, always some stronger than others) within the framework of a strong interstate system. But capitalists have never been able to put forward this claim ideologically because their legitimacy derives from economic productivity and expansion of general welfare and not from either order or the guarantee of profits. In the last century, capitalists have relied ever increasingly on the movements to perform on their behalf the function of legitimating the state structures.
Today the movements are no longer able to do this. And, were they to try, they could not pull their populations along with them. Thus we see springing forth everywhere nonstate "groups" that are assuming the role of protecting themselves and even of providing for their welfare. This is the path of global disorder down which we have been heading. It is the sign of disintegration of the modern world-system, of capitalism as a civilization.
You can rest assured that those who have privilege will not sit back and watch this privilege go under without trying to rescue it. But you can rest equally assured that they cannot rescue it merely by adjusting the system once again, for all the reasons I have adduced. The world is in transition. Out of chaos will come a new order, different from the one we now know. Different, but not necessarily better.
That is where the movements come in once again. Those who have privilege will try to construct a new kind of historical system that will be unequal, hierarchical and stable. They have the advantage of power, money and the service of much intelligence. They will assuredly come up with something clever and workable. Can the movements, reinvigorated, match them? We are amid a bifurcation of our system. The fluctuations are enormous, and little pushes will determine which way the process moves. The task of the liberation movements, no longer necessarily national liberation movements, is to take serious stock of the crisis of the system, the impasse of their past strategy, and the force of the genie of world popular discontent that has been unleashed precisely by the collapse of the old movements. It is a moment for utopistics, for intensive, rigorous analysis of historical alternatives. It is a moment when social scientists have something important to contribute, assuming they wish to do so. But it requires for social scientists as well an unthinking of their past concepts, derived from the same nineteenth-century situation that resulted in the strategies adopted by the antisystemic movements.
Above all, it is a task neither on the one hand for a day or a week nor on the other hand for centuries. It is a task precisely for the next twenty-five to fifty years, one whose outcome will be entirely the consequence of the kind of input we are ready and able to put into it. (30-33) [First published in Economic and Political Weekly 31:39 (Sept. 28, 1996).]
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