Modern World-System in the Longue Duree

Immanuel Wallerstein

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317255987
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Sociology

In this book prominent scholars from around the world debate two major themes: the past and future of the capitalist world-economy, and the ways in which a capitalist economy shapes Western research, the academy, and broader knowledge structures. Putting the two themes together, they also analyze the relationship between scholarship and the rest of the world. The book is published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Fernand Braudel Center. Contributors Samir Amin, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Bart Tromp,. Claudia von Werlhof, Giovanni Arrighi, Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova, Marcel van der Linden, Randall Collins, Mahm ood Mamdani, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Janet Abu-Lughod, Maurice Aymard, and Immanuel Wallerstein.

PART I

The Capitalist World-Economy: From Past to Future

1

Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?

Samir Amin

The confusion created in the dominant discourse between the concept of free market economy and that of capitalism is the root cause of a dangerous relaxation of the criticism leveled against the policies implemented. The market, which naturally refers to competition, is not capitalism. The content of capitalism is specifically defined by the limit to the competition implicit in the monopoly of private property, including the oligopolistic control by certain groups, to the exclusion of others. Market and capitalism are two distinct concepts; the really existing capitalism being the very opposite of what the imaginary market constitutes.

On the other hand, capitalism, abstractly viewed as a mode of production, is based on a market integrated into its three dimensions (market for products of social work, financial market, and labor market). However, the notion of capitalism as a really existing global system is based on the universal expansion of the market in its first two dimensions alone, since the creation of a real-world labor market is obscured by the perpetual existence of national political boundaries, despite economic globalization, which is therefore always truncated. Hence, the really existing capitalism is necessarily polarizing on the global scale, and the unequal development it engenders becomes the most violent and increasing contradiction that cannot be surmounted through its own logic.

The centers are the product of history, which permitted, in certain regions of the capitalist system, the establishment of a national bourgeois hegemony and a state that can equally be referred to as national capitalist. The bourgeoisie and bourgeois states are inseparable in this context and it is only the so-called liberal ideology that can speak of a capitalistic economy—setting the state aside, contrary to all expectations. The bourgeois state assumes national dimensions when it controls the accumulation process, certainly within the limits of external constraints, but that is when such constraints are highly relativized by its own capacity to respond to their action, or even to take part in formulating them.

For their part, the peripheries are defined in negative terms: They constitute regions that are not established as centers in the global capitalist system. They represent countries and regions that do not control the accumulation process locally, which is consequently influenced mainly by external constraints. The peripheries are not stagnant, although their development is similar to the development of the centers in the successive stages of the global expansion of capitalism. The bourgeoisie and local capital are not absent from the local sociopolitical scene and the peripheries are not synonymous with precapitalist societies. But the state’s formal existence is not synonymous with the national capitalist state even if the local bourgeoisie amply controls this machinery inasmuch as it does not control the accumulation process.

The coexistence of centers and peripheries in the world capitalist system at each stage of global development is obvious. The question does not lie in this recognition; it consists in knowing whether the peripheries are moving toward the crystallization of new centers. More precisely, it is a question of knowing whether the forces operating in the global system are advancing in this direction or are moving in the opposite direction, beyond the changes affecting such forces in between the development stages of the entire system.

In its globalized expansion, the really existing capitalism has always fostered inequality among peoples. Such inequality is not the outcome of circumstances peculiar to any given country or time; it is the product of the immanent logic of capital accumulation. Racism is the inevitable outcome of this system. In the discourse on the dominant vulgar ideology, the free-market economy naturally ignored the disparity between individuals and between peoples, thereby promoting democracy. In practice, the really existing capitalism is another thing altogether, creating inequality between peoples and breeding fundamental racism.

In the current era of neoliberal globalization, this notion claims that the page of inequality between peoples is being turned. It is purported that the new globalization offers a “chance” to those countries that accept the inherent challenge to learn how to become integrated into the system. These countries can then “catch up with” the former centers. However, the reality is nothing of the sort. The new forms of monopolistic domination of the centers in the whole system account for further polarization and increasing inequality between peoples. The logic of this globalization consists of organizing apartheid on a global scale.

Globalization Is Imperialism

Imperialism is not a stage—not even the highest stage—of capitalism: It has always been inherent in capitalism’s expansion. The imperialist conquest of the planet by the Europeans and their North American children was carried out in two phases and is, perhaps, entering a third phase.

Phase I

The first phase of this devastating enterprise was organized around the conquest of the Americas, in the framework of the mercantilist system of Atlantic Europe. The net result was the destruction of the Indian civilizations and their Hispanicization-Christianization: the total genocide on which the United States was built. The fundamental racism of the Anglo-Saxon colonists explains why this model was reproduced elsewhere: in Australia, Tasmania (the most complete genocide in history), and New Zealand. While Catholic Spaniards acted in the name of the religion that was imposed on conquered peoples, the Anglo-Protestants took from their reading of the Bible the right to wipe out the “infidels.” The infamous slavery of the Blacks, made necessary by the extermination of the Indians—or their resistance—briskly took over to ensure that the useful parts of the continent were “turned to account.” No one today can have any doubt as to the real motives for all of these horrors unless they are ignorant of their intimate relation to the expansion of mercantile capital. Nevertheless, contemporary Europeans accepted the ideological discourse that justified their actions, and the voices of protest—that of Las Casas, for example—did not find sympathetic listeners.

The disastrous results of this first chapter of world capitalist expansion produced, some time later, the forces of liberation that challenged the logic that produced them. The first revolution of the Western hemisphere was that of the slaves of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) at the end of the eighteenth century, followed over one century later by the Mexican revolution of 1910, and fifty years after that by the Cuban revolution. I do not cite either the famous American Revolution or that of the Spanish colonies that soon followed because these revolutions only transferred the power of decision from the metropolis to the colonists so that they could pursue the same project with even greater brutality, but without having to share the profits with the “mother country.”

Phase II

The second phase of imperialist devastation was based on the Industrial Revolution and manifested itself in the colonial subjection of Asia and Africa. To open the markets—like the market for opium forced on the Chinese by the English—and seize the natural resources of the globe were the real motives. But again, European opinion, including the workers’ movement of the Second International, did not see these realities and accepted the new legitimizing discourse of capitalism. This time, it was the famous “civilizing mission.” The voices that expressed the clearest thinking at the time were those of the cynical bourgeois like Cecil Rhodes, who encouraged colonial conquest in order to avoid social revolution in England. Again, the voices of protest—from the Paris Commune to the Bolsheviks—had little resonance. This second phase of imperialism is the origin of the greatest problem that has ever confronted mankind: the overwhelming polarization that has increased the inequality between peoples from a maximum ratio of two to one around 1800, to sixty to one today, with only 20 percent of the earth’s population being included in the centers that benefit from the system. At the same time, these prodigious achievements of capitalist civilization gave rise to the most violent confrontations between the imperialist powers that the world has ever seen. Imperialist aggression again produced the forces that resisted its project: The socialist revolutions that took place in Russia and China (not accidentally in the peripheries that were victims of the polarizing expansion of really existing capitalism) and the revolutions of national liberation. Their victories brought about a half-century of respite, the period after World War II, which nourished the illusion that capitalism, compelled to adjust to the new situation, had at last managed to become civilized.

The question of imperialism (and the question of its opposites—liberation and development) has continued to weigh on the history of capitalism up to the present. Just after World War II, the victory of the liberation movements won the political independence of the Asian and African nations, not only putting an end to the system of colonialism but also, in a way, bringing to a close the era of European expansion that had opened in 1492. For four-and-a-half centuries, from 1500 to 1950, that expansion had been the form taken by the development of historical capitalism, to the point where these two aspects of the same reality had become inseparable. To be sure, the world-system of 1492 had already been breached at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century by the independence of the Americas. But the breach was only apparent, because the independence in question had been won not by the indigenous peoples and the slaves imported by the colonists (except in Haiti) but by the colonists themselves, who thereby transformed America into a second Europe. The independence reconquered by the peoples of Asia and Africa took on a different meaning.

The ruling classes of the colonialist countries of Europe understood that a new page of history had been turned. They realized that they had to give up the traditional view that the growth of their domestic capitalist economy was tied to the success of their imperial expansion. This view was held not only by the old colonial powers (primarily England, France, and Holland) but also by the new capitalist centers formed in the nineteenth century (Germany, the United States, and Japan). Accordingly, the intra-European and international conflicts were primarily struggles over the colonies in the imperialist system of 1492. It was understood that the United States reserved for itself exclusive rights to the whole new continent.

The construction of a great European space—developed, rich, having first-class technological and scientific potential and strong military traditions—seemed to constitute a solid alternative on which to found a new resurgence of capitalist accumulation, without “colonies,” that is, on the basis of a new type of globalization that was different from the system of 1492. The questions remained of how this new world-system could differ from the old, if it would still be polarizing like the old one, if on a new basis, or if it would cease to be so.

No doubt this construction, which is far from finished and is going through a crisis that could call into question its long-term significance, will remain a difficult task. No formulas have yet been found that would make it possible to reconcile the historical realities of each nation, which weigh so heavily, with the formation of a politically united Europe. In addition, the vision of how this European economic and political space would fit into the new global system, which is also not yet constructed, has so far remained ambiguous, if not foggy. Is this economic space to be the rival of the other great space, the one created in the second Europe by the United States? If so, how will this rivalry affect the relations of Europe and the United States with the rest of the world? Will the rivals confront each other like the imperialist powers of the earlier period or will they act in concert? In the latter case, will the Europeans choose to participate by proxy in this new version of the imperialist system of 1492, keeping their political choice in conformity with those of Washington? On what conditions could the construction of Europe become part of a globalization that would put a definitive end to the system of 1492?

Phase III

Today we see the beginning of a third wave of world devastation by imperialist expansion, encouraged by the collapse of the Soviet system and of the regimes of populist nationalism in the Third World. The objectives of dominant capital are still the same—control of market expansion, looting of the earth’s natural resources, the superexploitation of the periphery labor reserves—although they are being pursued in conditions that are new and, in some respects, very different from those that characterized the preceding phase of imperialism. The ideological discourse designed to secure the assent of the peoples of the central triad (United States–Canada, the European Union, Japan) has been refurbished and is now founded on a “duty to intervene” that is supposedly justified by the defense of “democracy,” the “rights of peoples,” and “humanitarianism.” The examples of the double standard are so flagrant that it seems obvious to Asians and Africans how cynically this language is used. Western opinion, however, has responded to it with as much enthusiasm as it did to the justifications of earlier phases of imperialism.

Furthermore, the United States is carrying out a systematic strategy designed to ensure its absolute hegemony by a show of military might that will consolidate all the other partners in the triad. From this point of view, the war in Kosovo fulfilled a crucial function; note the total capitulation of the European states, which supported the American position on the “new strategic concept” adopted by NATO immediately after the “victory” in Yugoslavia on April 23–25, 1999. According to this new concept (referred to more bluntly on the other side of the Atlantic as the “Clinton Doctrine”), NATO’s mission is, for practical purposes, extended to all of Asia and Africa. The United States, ever since the Monroe Doctrine, has reserved the sole right to intervene in the Americas; an admission that NATO is not a defensive alliance but an offensive weapon of the United States. At the same time, this mission is redefined in vague terms that include new “threats” (international crime, “terrorism,” the “dangerous” arming of countries outside NATO, etc.), which plainly make it possible to justify almost any aggression useful to the United States. Moreover, President Clinton made no bones about speaking of rogue states that might be necessary to attack preventively, without further specifying what he meant by the roguery in question. In addition, NATO is freed from the obligation of acting only on a mandate from the United Nations, which is treated with a contempt equal to that which the fascist powers showed for the League of Nations (there is a striking similarity in the terms used).

American ideology is careful to package its merchandise, the imperialist pr...