© Immanuel Wallerstein 1997.
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[Keynote address at Annual Meeting of the South African Sociological Association, Durban, South Africa, July 7-11, 1996.]
The African National Congress is one of the oldest national liberation movements in the world-system. It is also the latest movement to have achieved its primary objective, political power. It may well be the last of the national liberation movements to do so. And thus May 10, 1994 may mark not only the end of an era in South Africa but also the end of a world-systemic process that has been continuous since 1789.
"National liberation" as a term is of course recent, but the concept itself is much older. The concept in turn presumes two other concepts, "nation" and "liberation." Neither of these concepts had much acceptance or legitimacy before the French Revolution (although perhaps the political turmoil in British North America after 1765 that led to the American Revolution reflected similar ideas). The French Revolution transformed the geoculture of the modern world-system. It made widespread the belief that political change is "normal" rather than exceptional, and that sovereignty of states (itself a concept that dates at most from the sixteenth century) resides not in a sovereign ruler (whether a monarch or a parliament) but in the "people" as a whole.[1]
[1] For an elaboration of these ideas, see "The French Revolution as a World-Historical Event," in Unthinking Social Science (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 7-22.
Since that time, these ideas have been taken seriously by many, many people too many people as far as those in power are concerned. The principal political issue of the world-system for the past two centuries has been the struggle between those who wished to see these ideas implemented fully and those who resisted such a full implementation. This struggle has been a continuous one, hard-fought, and it has assumed multiple forms in the different regions of the world-system. Early on, there emerged class struggles in Great Britain, France, the United States and elsewhere in the more industrialized zones of the world, which pitted an enlarged urban proletariat against both its bourgeois employers and the aristocracies still in power. There were also numerous nationalist movements which pitted the people of a "nation" against an "outside" invader or against a dominant imperial center, as in Spain and Egypt during the Napoleonic era, or as in the case of the multiple movements in Greece, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and an ever-expanding list during the post-Napoleonic era. And there were still other situations in which the outside dominant force was combined with an internal settler population that made its own separate claims to autonomy, as in Ireland, Peru, and most significantly (though it is an often ignored case) Haiti. The movement in South Africa is basically a variant of this third category.
Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, as we can rapidly note, these movements were not limited to western Europe but included the peripheral zones of the world-system. And of course, as the years went by, more and more movements were to be founded in what we later came to call the Third World, or the South. In the period from circa 1870 to the First World War, a fourth variety emerged, that of movements in formally independent states in which the struggle against the Ancien R‚gime was considered simultaneously to be a struggle for the renaissance of national vitality and therefore against the dominance of outside forces. Such were the movements that came into existence, for example, in Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, China, and Mexico.
What united all these movements was a sense that they knew who the "people" were and what "liberation" meant for the people. They also all shared the view that the people were not currently in power, were not truly free, and that there were concrete groups of persons who were responsible for this unjust, morally indefensible situation. Of course, the incredible variety of actual political situations meant that the detailed analyses made by the various movements were quite distinctive the ones from the others. And, as the internal situations changed over time, quite often the analyses of particular movements changed.
Nonetheless, despite the variety, all these movements shared a second common feature as well, their middle-run strategy. Or at least it was shared by those movements which came to be important politically. The successful movements, the dominant movements, all believed in what we speak of as the two-stage strategy: first attain political power, then transform the world. Their common motto was expressed most pithily by Kwame Nkrumah: "Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you." This was the strategy followed by the socialist movements which centered their rhetoric around the working-class, by the ethnonational movements which centered their rhetoric around those that shared a particular cultural heritage, as well as by those nationalist movements which used common residence and citizenship as the defining feature of their "nation."
It is this last variety to which we have given the name of national liberation movements. The quintessential movement of this kind, and the oldest of them, is the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885 and still existing (at least nominally) today. When the ANC was founded in 1912, it gave itself the name of the South African Native National Congress, adapting that of the Indian movement. Of course, the Indian National Congress had one feature that few other movements shared. It was led throughout its most difficult and important years of its history by Mahatma Gandhi, who had elaborated a worldview and a political tactic of non-violent resistance, satyagraha. He elaborated this tactic first, in fact, in the context of the oppressive situation of South Africa, and later transferred it to India.
Whether the Indian struggle was won because of satyagraha, or despite satyagraha, is something we can long debate. What is clear is that the independence of India in 1947 became a prime symbolic event for the world-system. It symbolized both the triumph of a major liberation movement situated in the world's largest colony and the implicit guarantee that the decolonization of the rest of the world was politically inevitable. But it symbolized also that national liberation, when it came, arrived in a form less than, and other than, that which the movement had sought. India was partitioned. Terrible Hindu- Muslim massacres followed in the wake of independence. And Gandhi was assassinated by a so-called Hindu extremist.
The twenty-five years following the Second World War were extraordinary on many counts. For one thing, they represented the period of clear U.S. hegemony in the world-system: unbeatable in terms of the efficiency of its productive enterprises, leader of a powerful political coalition that effectively contained world politics within a certain geopolitical order, imposing its version of the geoculture upon the rest of the world. This period was also remarkable for being the period of the largest single expansion of world production and accumulation of capital that the capitalist world-economy has known since its inception four centuries ago.
These two aspects of that era U.S. hegemony and the incredible expansion of the world-economy are so salient in our minds that we often fail to notice that this was the era as well of the triumph of the historic antisystemic movements of the world-system. The movements of the Third International, the socalled Communist parties, came to control a third of the world's surface, that of the "East." In the "West," the movements of the Second International were de facto in power everywhere, to some extent literally and usually for the first time, and indirectly the rest of the time insofar as the parties of the right fully acceded to the principles of the "Welfare State." And in the "South," one national liberation movement after another came to power in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America. The only large zone in which this triumph was delayed was southern Africa, and this delay has now come to an end.
We do not discuss clearly enough the impact of this political triumph of the antisystemic movements. Looked at from the point of view of the middle of the nineteenth century, it was an absolutely extraordinary achievement. Compare the post-1945 period with that of the world-system in 1848. In 1848, we had in France the first attempt of a quasi-socialist movement to achieve power. The year 1848 is also called by historians the "Springtime of the Nations." But by 1851, all these quasi-insurrections had been easily suppressed everywhere. It seemed to the powerful people that the menace of the "dangerous classes" had passed. In the process, the quarrels between the old landowning strata and the new more industrial bourgeois strata, which had so dominated the politics of the first half of the nineteenth century, were put aside in the successful, unified effort to contain the "people" and the "peoples."
This restoration of order seemed to work. For some 15-20 years thereafter, no serious popular movements could be discerned anywhere inside or outside of Europe. Furthermore, the upper strata did not merely sit on their laurels as successful suppressors of liberation movements. They pursued a political program not of reaction but of liberalism in order to ensure that the menace of popular revolt would be buried forever. They commenced down the road of slow but steady reformism: extension of the suffrage, protection of the weak in the work place, the beginnings of redistributive welfare, the building of an educational and health infrastructure that continuously extended its reach. They combined this program of reform, still limited during the nineteenth century to the European world, with the propagation and legitimation of a pan-European racism the white man's burden, the civilizing mission, the Yellow Peril, a new anti-Semitism which served to incrustate the European lower strata within the folds of a right-wing, non-liberatory, national identity and identification.
I shall not review here the whole history of the modern world-system from 1870-1945, except to say that it was during this period that the major antisystemic movements were first created as national forces, with an international vocation. The struggle of these antisystemic movements, singly and collectively, against the liberal strategy of an iron hand within a velvet glove was an uphill struggle all the way. We may thus be amazed that, between 1945 and 1970, their struggle succeeded so swiftly and, when all is said and done, so easily. Indeed, we may be suspicious. Historical capitalism as a mode of production, as a world-system, as a civilization has proved itself remarkably ingenious, flexible, and hardy. We should not underestimate its ability to contain opposition.
Let us therefore start by looking at this protracted struggle of the antisystemic movements in general, and the movements of national liberation in particular, from the perspective of the movements. The movements had to organize within a political environment that was hostile to them, one that was quite often ready to suppress or constrain considerably their political activity. The states engaged in such repression both directly on the movement as such as well as on its members (particularly the leaders and the cadres), and indirectly by the intimidation of potential members. They also denied moral legitimacy to the movements, and enlisted quite frequently the non-state cultural structures (the churches, the world of knowledge, the media of communication) in the task of reinforcing this denial.
Against this massive barrage, each movement which initially were almost always the work of small groups sought to mobilize mass support, and to canalize mass discontent and unrest. No doubt the movements were evoking themes and making analyses that resonated well with the mass of the population, but nonetheless effective political mobilization was a long and arduous task. Most people live life day by day, and are reluctant to engage in the dangerous path of defying authority. Many persons are "free riders," ready to applaud quietly the actions of the brave and the bold, but waiting to see whether others among their peers are joining in active support of the movement.
What mobilizes mass support? One cannot say it is the degree of oppression. For one thing, this is often a constant, and does not explain therefore why people who have been mobilized at T(2) were not already mobilized at T(1). Furthermore, quite often acute repression works, keeping the less audacious from being ready to participate actively in the movement. No, it is not oppression that mobilizes masses, but hope and certainty the belief that the end of oppression is near, that a better world is truly possible. And nothing reinforces such hope and certainty than success. The long march of the antisystemic movements has been like a rolling stone. It gathered momentum over time. And the biggest argument that any given movement could use in order to mobilize support was the success of other movements that seemed comparable and reasonably close in geography and culture.
From this perspective, the great internal debate of the movements reform versus revolution was a non-debate. Reformist tactics fed revolutionary tactics, and revolutionary tactics fed reformist tactics, provided only that they worked, in the very simple sense that the outcome of any particular effort was applauded as positive by mass sentiment (as distinguished from the sentiment of leaders and cadres). And this because any success mobilized mass support for further action, as long as the primary objective of state power had not yet been achieved.
The passions that surrounded reform vs. revolution debates were enormous. But they were passions that divided a small group of political tacticians. To be sure, these tacticians themselves believed that the differences in tactics mattered, both in the short run (efficacity) and in the middle run (outcome). It is not sure that history has proven them right in this belief, if one looks at what happened in the long run.
If one looks at this same process of mass mobilization from the point of view of those in power, those against whom the movements were mobilizing, one finds the obverse side of the coin. What those in power most feared was not the moral condemnation of the movements but their potential ability to disrupt the political arena by mass mobilization. The initial reaction to the emergence of an antisystemic movement was always therefore to seek to maintain the leadership in isolation from its potential mass support physical isolation, political isolation, social isolation. The states precisely denied the legitimacy of movement leaders as "spokespersons" for larger groups, alleging that they came in fact from different class and/or cultural backgrounds. This was the well-known and well- used theme of the "outside agitators."
There came however a point where, in a given locality, this theme of the movement as being merely intrusive "agitators" no longer seemed to work. This turning-point was the consequence both of the patient labors of the movement (quite often, once it had turned to a "populist" mode) and of the contagious impact of the "rolling stone" within the world-system. At this turning- point, the defenders of the status quo were confronted with the identical dilemma of the movements, but in obverse form. As opposed to reform versus revolution, the defenders of the status quo debated concessions versus the hard line. This debate, which was constant, was also a non-debate. Hard-line tactics fed concessions, and concessions fed hard-line tactics, provided only that they worked, in the very simple sense that they altered the perspective of the movements on the one hand and of their mass support on the other.
The passions that surrounded hard line versus concession debates were enormous. But they were passions, once again, that divided a small group of political tacticians. These tacticians themselves believed that the differences in tactics mattered, both in the short run (efficacity) and in the middle run (outcome). But here too, it is not sure that history has proven them right in this belief, if one looks at what happened in the long run.
In the long run, what happened is that the movements came to power, just about everywhere, which marked a great symbolic change. Indeed, the moment of coming to power is everywhere well-marked in general perception. It was seen at the time and remembered later as a moment of catharsis, marking the accession at last of the "people" to the exercise of sovereignty. It is also true, however, that the movements came to power almost nowhere on their full terms, and the real change everywhere has been less than they had wanted and expected. This is the story of the movements in power.
The story of the movements in power is parallel in some ways to the story of the movements in mobilization. The theory of the two-stage strategy had been that, once a movement achieved power and controlled the state, it could then transform the world, at least its world. But this was of course not true. Indeed, it was in hindsight extraordinarily naive. It took the theory of sovereignty at its face value, and assumed that sovereign states are autonomous. But of course they are not autonomous and they never have been. Even the most powerful among them, like for example the contemporary United States, are not truly sovereign. And when we come to very weak states, like for example Liberia, to speak of sovereignty is a bad joke. All modern states, without exception, exist within the framework of the interstate system and are constrained by its rules and its politics. The productive activities within all modern states, without exception, occur within the framework of the capitalist world-economy and are constrained by its priorities and its economics. The cultural identities found within all modern states, without exception, exist within a geoculture and are constrained by its models and its intellectual hierarchies. Shouting that one is autonomous is a bit like Canute commanding the tides to recede.
What happened when movements came to power? They found first of all that they had to make concessions to those in power in the world-system as a whole. And not just any concessions, but important concessions. The argument that they all used themselves was that of Lenin in launching the NEP: the concessions are tem- porary; one step backwards and two steps forward. It was a powerful argument, since in those few cases where the movement did not make these concessions, it usually found itself ousted from power altogether soon thereafter. Still the concessions grated, leading to intra-leadership quarrels and puzzlement and questioning by the mass of the population.
If the movement was to remain in power, there seemed to be only one possible policy at this point, the postponement of truly fundamental change, substituting for it the attempt to "catch up" within the world-system. The regimes that the movements established all sought to make the state stronger within the world-economy and its standard of living nearer to that of the leading states. Since what the mass of the population usually really wanted was not "fundamental change" (which was hard to envisage) but rather precisely to "catch up" to the material benefits of the better-off (which was quite concrete), the switch in post-catharsis policies by the leaders of the movements was actually popular provided it worked. There was the rub!
The first thing we need to know in order to determine whether a policy works is the period of time over which we shall measure this. Between instantaneous time and the Greek calends there is a long continuum of possibilities. Naturally, the leadership of movements in power pleaded with its followers for a longer rather than a shorter time-span of measure. But what arguments could they give the mass of the population for permitting them such leeway? There were two main kinds of arguments. One was material: the demonstration that there were some immediate, meaningful, measurable improvements, even if small ones, in the real situation. Some movements found it easier than others to achieve this, since the national situations varied. And it was easier to make such arguments at some moments in time than at others, given the fluctuating realities of the world-economy. There was only a limited degree to which it really was within the control of a movement in power to effectuate such meaningful, even if small, improvements.
There was however a second kind of argument, one about which movements in power found it easier to do something. It was the argument of hope and certainty. The movement could point to the rolling stone of the world's collectivity of liberation movements, and use this to demonstrate that history was (visibly) on their side. They thereby proffered the promise that if not they then their children would live better, and if not their children then their grandchildren. This is a very powerful argument, and it did indeed sustain movements in power for a long time, as we now can see. Faith moves mountains. And faith in the future maintains antisystemic movements in power as long as faith endures.
Faith, as we all know, is subject to doubt. Doubt about the movements has been fed from two sources. One source has been the sins of the Nomenklatura. Movements in power means cadres in power. And cadres are human. They too wish the good life, and are often less patient about achieving it than the mass of the population. Consequently, corruption, arrogance, and petty oppressiveness have been virtually inevitable, especially as the glow of the moment of catharsis recedes. The cadres of the new regime seemed over time to look increasingly like the cadres of the Ancien R‚gime, indeed often worse. This may have happened in five years; it may have taken 25 years; but it did happen repeatedly.
Still what then, a revolution against the revolutionaries? Never right away. The same lethargy that made it a slow process to mobilize the mass of the population against the Ancien R‚gime operated here too. It takes something more than the sins of the Nomenklatura to undo movements in power. It takes a collapse in the immediate economy combined with a collapse in the certainty that the rolling stone is still rolling. When this happened, we have had the end of the "post-revolutionary era," as has recently taken place in Russia and Algeria and many other countries.
Let us turn our look back to the worldwide rolling stone, the process within the world-system as a whole. I have already spoken of the long uphill struggle of the movements from 1870- 1945, and the sudden breakthrough worldwide between 1945-1970. The sudden breakthrough led to considerable triumphalism and was inebriating. It sustained the movements in the most difficult zones, like southern Africa. However, the biggest problem the movements have had to face was their success, not so much their individual successes but their collective worldwide success. When movements in power faced internal grumbling because of less than perfect performance, they could use the argument that their difficulties derived in large part from the hostility of powerful external forces, and in large part this was an absolutely true argument. But as more and more movements were in power in more and more countries, and as the movements themselves were using the argument of their growing collective strength, the attribution of their current difficulties to outside hostility seemed to lose its cogency. At the very least, it seemed in contradiction to the thesis that history was visibly on their side.
The failures of the movements in power was one of the basic underlying factors behind the worldwide revolution of 1968. All of a sudden, one heard voices everywhere wondering whether the limitations of the antisystemic movements in power derived less from the hostility of the forces of the status quo than from the collusion of these movements themselves with the forces of the status quo. The so-called Old Left found itself under attack everywhere. Wherever the national liberation movements were in power, throughout the Third World, they did not escape this criticism. Only those not yet in power remained largely unscathed.
If the revolutions of 1968 shook the popular base of the movements, the stagnation in the world-economy in the following two decades continued the dismantlement of the idols. In the period 1945-1970, the period of the great triumph of the move- ments, the great immediate promise was "national development," which many of the movements called "socialism." Indeed, the movements said that they and they alone could speed up this process and realize it fully in their respective states. And between 1945-1970, this promise seemed to be plausible, because the world-economy was expanding everywhere, and a rising tide was lifting all ships.
But when the tide began to recede, the movements in power in peripheral zones of the world-economy found that they could do little to prevent the very negative impact of world economic stagnation on their states. They were less powerful than they thought, and than their populations thought far less powerful. Disillusionment with the prospects of "catching up" was translated in country after country into disillusionment with the movements themselves. They had sustained themselves in power by selling hope and certainty. They now were paying the price of dashed hopes and the end of certainty.
Into this moral crisis jumped the snake-oil salesmen, otherwise known as the "Chicago boys" who, with the massive support of a reinvigorated hard line on the part of the people in power in the world-system as a whole, offered everyone the magic of the market as a substitute. But the "market" can no more transform the economic prospects of the poorer 75% of the world's populations than taking vitamins can cure leukemia. It is a fake, and we will no doubt soon run the snake-oil salesmen out of town, but only once the damage is done.
In the middle of all this has occurred the miracle of South Africa, providing a glow of bright light in this dismal world scene. It is time out of joint. It is the 1960's triumph of national liberation movements all over again, and it occurred in the place everyone had always said had the worst situation and the most intractable. The transformation happened very fast, and with astonishing smoothness. In a way, it is an extraordinarily unfair burden the world has placed on South Africa and on the ANC. They not only have to succeed for their own sake, but for the sake of all the rest of us. After South Africa comes no other, to serve as the still optimistic mobilizer of popular forces, to be cheered on by the solidarity movements of the world. It is as though the very concept of antisystemic movements in the world were given one last chance, as if we all found ourselves at the decisive moment in Purgatory before history draws its final verdict.
I am not sure what will happen in South Africa in the next 10-15 years. How can anyone be? But I do feel that neither South Africans nor the rest of us should put the burden of the world on their shoulders. The burden of the world belongs on the world. It is enough for South Africans to bear their own burdens, and to take their fair share of the world's burdens. I shall therefore reserve my remaining words to the burden of the world.
Antisystemic movements as a structure, and as a concept, were the natural product of the post-1789 transformation of the geoculture of the world-system. Antisystemic movements were a product of the system; they of course had to be. However critical a balance-sheet we may now draw, and I fear that I have drawn such, I do not see any historic alternative that would have been better in the mid-nineteenth century to going down the path they took. There existed no other force for human liberation. And if the antisystemic movements did not achieve human liberation, they at the very least reduced some human suffering and held the banner high for an alternative vision of the world. What reasonable person does not believe that South Africa is a better place today than it was ten years ago? And whom should we credit other than the national liberation movement?
The basic problem lay in the strategy of the movements. They found themselves historically in a double bind. After 1848, there was only one objective that was politically feasible, and offered some hope of immediate alleviation of the situation. This was the objective of taking power in the state structures, which provided the principal adjustment mechanism of the modern world-system. But taking power in the world-system was the one objective that ensured the eventual emasculation of the antisystemic movements and their incapacity to transform the world. They were in fact between Scylla and Charybdis: either immediate irrelevancy or long-term failure. They chose the latter, hoping it was avoidable. Who would not?
I want to argue that today, paradoxically, the very failure of the antisystemic movements collectively, including the failure of the national liberation movements to be truly and fully liberatory, provides the most hopeful element for positive developments in the coming 25-50 years. To appreciate this curious view, we must come to terms with what it happening is the present. We are living not the final triumph of world capitalism but its first and only true crisis.[2]
[2] The argument in the following paragraphs summarizes an extensive analysis in Terence K. Hopkins & Immanuel Wallerstein, coord., The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025 (forthcoming 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 to pursue the endless accumulation of capital. The first, and the least discussed of these trends, is the deruralization of the world. Only 200 years ago, 80-90% of the world's population, and indeed of each country's population, was rural. Today worldwide, we are below 50% and rapidly going down. Whole areas of the world have rural populations less than 20%, some less than 5%. 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 is 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 which have periodically occurred throughout the history of the capitalist world-economy. Capitalists can only fight workers 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 work force 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, they have consistently located such persons in rural zones and transformed them into urban proletarians who remain, however, 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 are significantly higher than they were 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 trend in state power. For four hundred years, the states have been increasing their power, 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.[3]
[3] See Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Civilization, 15th to 18th Century, 3 vol. (New York: Harper& Row, 1981-84).
But the states can no longer perform their task as adjustment mechanisms. The democratization of the world and the ecological crisis has placed an impossible level of demands on the state structures, who 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 anyone else, who 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 some always 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 non-state "groups" who 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 amidst 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 which 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 for a day or a week nor on the other hand for centuries. It is a task precisely for the next 25-50 years, one whose outcome will be entirely the consequence of the kind of input we are ready and able to put into it.
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