G' day Thaxists, A contentious piece but well worth a quiet half-hour in the pub with a thoughtful pint. Shan't chance my own half-arsed response yet, but think it well worth having a solid chat about. Please have a peek, comrades! Plenty here for us to chew on, I reckon. Best to all, Rob. "A Left Politics for the 21st Century? or, Theory and Praxis Once Again"* http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwleftpol.htm by Immanuel Wallerstein Fernand Braudel Center 1999 There is said to be a Yugoslav aphorism that goes like this: "The only absolutely certain thing is the future, since the past is constantly changing."1 The world left is living today with two pasts that have almost totally disappeared, and rather suddenly at that. This is very unsettling. The first past that has disappeared is the trajectory of the French Revolution. The second past that has disappeared is the trajectory of the Russian Revolution. They both disappeared more or less simultaneously and jointly, in the 1980s. Let me carefully explain what I mean by this. The French Revolution is of course a symbol. It symbolizes a theory of history that has been very widely shared for two centuries, and shared far beyond the confines of the world left. Most of the world's liberal center also shared this theory of history, and today even part of the world's right. It could be said to have been the dominant view within the world-system throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its premise was the belief in progress and the essential rationality of humanity. The theory was that history could be seen as a linear upward process. The world was en route to the good society, and the French Revolution constituted and symbolized a major leap forward in this process. There were many variants on this theory. Some persons, especially in the United States, wished to substitute the American for the French Revolution in this story. Others, especially in Great Britain, were in favor of substituting the English Revolution. Some persons wished to eliminate all political revolutions from the story, and make this theory of history the story of the steady commercialization of the world's economic processes, or the steady expansion of its electoral processes, or the fulfillment of a purported historic mission of the State (with a capital S). But whatever the details, all these variants shared the sense of the inevitability and the irreversibility of the historical process. This was a hopeful theory of history since it offered a happy ending. No matter how terrible the present (as for example when the fortunes of Nazi Germany seemed to be riding high, or when racist colonialism seemed at its most oppressive), believers (and most of us were believers) took solace in the knowledge we claimed to have, that "history was on our side." It was an encouraging theory even for those who were privileged in the present, since it offered the expectation that eventually everyone else would share the privileges (without the present beneficiaries losing any) and that therefore the oppressed would cease annoying the oppressors with their complaints. The only problem with this theory of history is that it did not seem to survive the test of empirical experience very well. This is where the Russian Revolution came in. It was a sort of codicil to the French Revolution. Its message was that the theory of history symbolized by the French Revolution was incomplete because it held true only insofar as the proletariat (or the popular masses) were energized under the aegis of a dedicated group of cadres organized as a party or party/state. This codicil we came to call Leninism. Leninism was a theory of history espoused only by the world left, and in fact by only a part of it at most. Still, it would be fatuous to deny that Leninism came to have a hold on a significant portion of the world's populations, especially in the years 1945-1970. The Leninist version of history was, if anything, more resolutely optimistic than the standard French Revolution model. This was because Leninism insisted that there was a simple piece of material evidence one could locate if one wanted to verify that history was evolving as planned. Leninists insisted that wherever a Leninist party was in undisputed power in a state, that state was self-evidently on the road to historical progress, and furthermore could never turn back. The problem is that Leninist parties tended to be in power only in economically less well-off zones of the world, and conditions were not always brilliant in such countries. Still, the belief in Leninism was a powerful antidote to any anxieties caused by the fact that immediate conditions or events within a country governed by a Leninist party were dismaying. I do not need to rehearse for you the degree to which all theories of progress have become suspect in the last two decades, and the Leninist variant in particular. I do not say that there are no believers left, since that would be untrue, but they no longer represent a substantial percentage of the world's populations. This constitutes a geocultural shift of no small proportion and, as I have said, has been particularly unsettling for the world left, which had placed most of its chips (if not all of them) on the correctness of at least the French Revolution version of this theory of history. Why did this shift occur? There are many explanations that we are hearing today. From the world's center and right, the explanation comes that the world left misread this theory of history, and that it is still somehow true, but only if we define the good society as the predominance of an unfettered free flow of the factors of production, all in non-governmental hands, and most especially the free flow of capital. This utopia is called "neo-liberalism," and is quite popular today with politicians and so-called public intellectuals. It is however a mirage as well as a deliberate delusion, one whose acme of influence is already past, and one that is worth a lot less discussion than it has been getting. By 2010, I warrant, we will scarcely remember this momentary mad fantasy. A second explanation, coming from parts of the world left, is that the original theory remains correct, but that the world left has suffered some temporary setbacks, which will soon be reversed. All we have to do is to reiterate forcefully the theory (and the praxis). Given the degree to which such a massive "temporary setback" was nowhere predicted in the theory, and failing a more detailed explanation, this explanation seems to me to be a case of wishful thinking by some ostriches. I cannot see how Leninism, as an ideological stance and an organizational reality, can be resurrected, even should one want to do so. And the French Revolution arouses passion today only among a restricted group of scholars. A third explanation for the collapse of this theory of history is that the collapse is in fact both a cause and a consequence of the crisis of the capitalist world-system. This is an explanation I have myself been expounding in various recent works.2 I argue that the very theory of history widely espoused by the world left - that is, by what I call the antisystemic movements in their three historic variants: Communism, Social-Democracy, and the national liberation movements - was itself a product of the capitalist world-system. As a result, although these movements did of course mobilize large masses of people to struggle against the system, they also paradoxically served historically as cultural undergirding for the system's relative political stability. The very belief in the inevitability of progress was substantively depoliticizing, and particularly depoliticizing once an antisystemic movement came to state power. I believe further that the discrepancy between what was promised by these movements and what was realizable within the framework of the existing world-system once they were in state power inevitably became too great. As a consequence, the popular base eventually became disillusioned with the movements, which led to their ejection from power in a large number of states. The decisive moment was the world revolution of 1968, during which the so-called Old Left (that is, the historic antisystemic movements) became an object of challenge by the participants in the various local expressions of this world revolution. One of the principal lasting results of 1968 was the rejection of the theory of inevitable and irreversible progress that had been preached by the movements. Thereupon, the world's populations began to turn away from the historic antisystemic movements themselves, and then began to delegitimize the state structures which the movements had been sustaining as essential mechanisms of progressive change. But this popular shift to anti-statism, hailed though it was by the celebrants of the capitalist system, did not really serve the interests of the latter. For in actuality the anti-statism has been delegitimizing all state structures, not merely particular regimes. It has thus undermined (rather than reinforced) the political stability of the world-system, and thereby has been making more acute its systemic crisis, which has had of course many other contributing causes as well. In my view, the situation of the world left at present is the following: (1) After 500 years of existence, the world capitalist system is, for the first time, in true systemic crisis, and we find ourselves in an age of transition. (2) The outcome is intrinsically uncertain, but nonetheless, and also for the first time in these 500 years, there is a real perspective of fundamental change, which might be progressive but will not necessarily be so. (3) The principal problem for the world left at this juncture is that the strategy for the transformation of the world which it had evolved in the nineteenth century is in tatters, and it is consequently acting thus far with uncertainty, weakness, and in a generalized mild state of depression. Allow me to elaborate on each of these three points. 1. Systemic crisis One of the unhappy results of the disarray of the world left is the suspicion that today surrounds any argument concerning a crisis of capitalism. Once burned, twice shy - and we have been burned so many, many times. The basic problem, if I may say so, is that most of the major figures of the world left of the past two centuries had not read Braudel on the multiplicity of social times, and were constantly confounding cyclical ups and downs with structural crises. This is easy to do, and especially within a geoculture like that of the modern world-system, one that gives pride of place to "newness" because of its total faith in the upward linearity of history. The left was particularly reluctant to embrace any argument that invoked cyclical processes because it incorrectly identified all such arguments with the subset that asserted what I would call the "eternal cyclicity of history." The latter theory had indeed been pervasively utilized by conservative thinkers as an argument against any and all transformational movements. But the concept of cycles within structures (to which I am referring) is not only different from the concept of eternal cyclicity; it is virtually its opposite, since structures are not at all eternal, only long-lasting, and the cycles within the structures are what guarantees that a structure can never be eternal. There are thus no eternal cycles, for there really is an arrow of time, even if it is not linear. What seems to me therefore methodologically essential in the analysis of any historical social system (and the capitalist world-economy is a historical social system) is to distinguish carefully between, on the one hand, the cyclical rhythms that define its systemic character and which enable it to maintain certain equilibria, at least for the duration of the system and, on the other hand, the secular trends that grow out of these cyclical rhythms defining its historical character and which mean that, sooner or later, a given system will no longer be able to contain its internal contradictions and that thus this system will enter into systemic crisis. In such a methodology, any historical system can be said to have three moments in time: its genesis (which needs to be explained, but which normally occurs as the result of the collapse of some other historical system), the relatively long period of what might be called the "quasi-normal" functioning of a historical system (the rules and constraints of which need to be described and analyzed), and its period of terminal crisis (which needs to be seen as a moment of historic choice whose outcome is always undetermined). I believe that a number of trends have today at last reached points where they threaten the basic functioning of the system. I shall summarize briefly here what I have expounded at length elsewhere.3 Capitalism as a historical system is defined by the fact that it makes structurally central and primary the endless accumulation of capital. This means that the institutions which constitute its framework reward those who pursue the endless accumulation of capital and penalize those who don't. But how does one accumulate capital? The crucial prerequisite is obtaining profit from economic operations, the more the better. And profit is a function of the differential between real costs and possible prices. I say possible prices because of course no seller can infinitely increase the price demanded for a commodity and expect to sell it. There are always limits. Economists call this the elasticity of demand. Within the limits of the rate of elasticity, the actual profit depends upon three costs: the cost of labor, the cost of inputs and infrastructure, the cost of taxation. Now suppose we were to measure these costs globally as percentages of total sales prices and arrive hypothetically at average levels. Of course, this is an operation no one has ever done, and is perhaps not doable. But it is possible to conceive of it, and to approximate the results. I would suggest to you that, over 500 years and across the capitalist world-economy as a whole, the three costs have all been steadily rising as a percentage of total value produced. And the net result is that we are in, and ever more coming into, a global profit squeeze that is threatening the ability of capitalists to accumulate capital. This is actually something capitalists discuss all the time. They use however other terminology. They discuss "efficiency of production," by which they mean essentially lowering costs as a percentage of total value. In effect, they are talking about using fewer people to produce the same amount of goods, or of obtaining cheaper inputs (which often includes fewer people to produce the input). It is of course the case that in inter-capitalist competition, the producer who is more efficient is likely to gain more profit than his competitor. But my question is different: is production, considered globally and in all sectors taken together, more "efficient" today than 100, 200, 300 years ago? Not only am I skeptical that global production is more "efficient" from the point of view of the producer, but I am contending that the curve has been steadily downward. All the so-called triumphs of efficient production are simply attempts to slow down the pace of the downward curve. One can regard the entire neoliberal offensive of the last two decades as one gigantic attempt to slow down the increasing costs of production - primarily by lowering the cost of wages and taxation and secondarily by lowering the costs of inputs via technological advance. I believe further that the overall degree of success has been quite limited, however painful it has been for those who have borne the brunt of the attack, and that even the limited gains are about to be reversed. What else is the issue in all the constant screaming about the threat of inflation, so often invoked by Alan Greenspan and his cronies in Germany and Great Britain? If you read what they say, the potential cause of this terrible monster called inflation is that workers might actually get higher wages or that governments might spend even more (and therefore tax even more). They at least seem to have no illusion about the source of the threat to capital accumulation. Mild inflation after all is the normal condition of the capitalist world-economy when it is functioning smoothly, and has been going on for a long, long time. But normal inflation is indeed the consequence of rising wage and taxation levels, and therefore is precisely the phenomenon to which I am pointing. Why are these three prices steadily if slowly rising over time, despite the best efforts of capitalists to attempt to slow them down? Let me briefly outline the reasons for each of the rising costs. Wages rise because workers organize. This is an ancient truism, but it is nonetheless accurate. The modes of organizing are multiple. Whenever workers' syndical action becomes too expensive for capitalists, and particularly in Kondratieff B-phases when global competition is more acute, capitalists have sought to "run away" - from the city to the countryside, from loci where workers have been well organized to other loci where they have been less well organized. If one regards the process over 500 years, one sees that this process has taken the form of transferring productive processes regularly (but not at all continuously) to zones newly-incorporated into the capitalist world-economy. The reason has been simple. In such zones one can locate a work force in rural areas that are less well commercialized who can be persuaded to engage in wage work at wage levels below the world standard. They can be so persuaded because, for them at that moment, such wages represent a real increase in total income. The hitch is that, once these now displaced workers have been in the new work zone (usually an urban one) for some time (say 25-50 years), they shift their standards of comparison, learn the ways of the new work world, and begin in turn to organize and demand higher wage levels. The poor capitalist is reduced to running away once again. The problem today is that, after 500 years, there are few places left to which to run. The process of rising wages has become extremely difficult to slow down. Today, even in the miserable barrios of the large urban centers of the countries of the South, the real alternatives for income of a potential wage-worker is far higher than that of his rural grandparent and therefore, if one wants his/her services in the so-called formal economy, one has to pay for it at higher levels. The same process of exhaustion of low-cost zones has been occurring in the cost of inputs. The main mechanism that capitalists have used to keep down the cost of inputs has been not to pay for some of them, but instead to obtain them at the expense of the collectivity. This is called externalization of costs. A producer externalizes costs primarily in three ways: he disposes of unprocessed waste outside of his property without paying anyone to process it; he purchases inputs at the cost of their being made available to him but without paying for the cost of their being replenished; he utilizes infrastructure built at collective expense. These three usages are no small part of reducing the cost of production and thereby increasing the rate of profit. The first two of these three ways have depended on finding new areas to dump waste and new sources of raw materials whose previous sources are being exhausted. With the steady expansion of the areas included within the capitalist world-economy and the steady increase of the rate of their utilization, the globe is running out of replacement locales. This is the problem addressed by the ecology movement, who have pointed as well to the fact that inexpensive modes of disposal (by producers and by the collectivity) have wreaked major damage to the ecosystem, which is in urgent need of expensive repair. The third form of externalizing costs requires a steady increase in taxation, to which issue we are coming. The only real long-term solution to these problems is the internalization of costs which, given the limits of the elasticity of demand, means a long-term profit squeeze. Finally, taxes have been going up, as we are constantly reminded by all and sundry. It matters not that taxes are unevenly distributed. They have been going up for just about everyone, and this includes all producers. They have been going up for one simple reason, which political scientists refer to as the democratization of the world whose consequence has been the expansion of the welfare state. People have been demanding higher state outputs on education, health, and guarantees of lifetime income. Furthermore, the threshold of demands has been steadily rising and spreading geographically to include more and more parts of the world. This has been the price of relative political stability, and there is no indication that the pressure from the bottom is letting up in any way. One final point. It is not as though all these rising pressures on the rate of profit were only the result of the demands of persons other than the producers. Capitalists have been themselves partially responsible for this rise in costs. They (or at least some of them) have favored some rise in wage levels as a means of creating effective demand. They (or at least some of them) have favored internalization of some costs, as a mode of guaranteeing future production possibilities. They (or at least some of them) have wanted the welfare state as a way of appeasing the working classes. And they have favored other kinds of state expenditures (and therefore of taxation) as a way of repressing the working classes. And finally they (or at least some of them) have favored all of these measures as a way of creating financial pressures on their weaker competitors. The net result of all of this however has been a massive rise in costs which is leading to a worldwide squeeze on profits. The very madness of our current speculative mania, most acute in the stronghold of the system, the United States, is not disproof of this hypothesis but further evidence for it. I cannot however argue this thesis further here if I am to discuss the prospects for fundamental change and the strategy of the world left. --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---