"A Left Politics for the 21st Century? or, Theory and Praxis Once Again"*

[Mine Aysen Doyran]

http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwleftpol.htm

"A Left Politics for the 21st Century? or, Theory and Praxis Once
Again"*

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.

2. Systemic Transition

What does it mean to say that a system enters into systemic crisis? It
means that the secular trends are reaching asymptotes that
they cannot cross. It means that the mechanisms that have been used up
to that point to return the system to relative equilibria
no longer can function because they require moving the system too near
to the asymptote. It means, in Hegelian language, that
the contradictions of the system can no longer be contained. It means,
in the language of the sciences of complexity, that the
system has moved far from equilibrium, that it is entering into a period
of chaos, that its vectors will bifurcate, and eventually a
new system or systems will be created. It means that the "noise" in the
system, far from being an element that can be ignored,
will come to the forefront. It means that the outcome is intrinsically
uncertain, and is creative.

This description of crises in systems applies to any and all systems,
from that of the entire universe to that of subatomic worlds,
from physical to biological to historical social systems. It applies
most fully and with greatest complexity to historical social
systems, since they are the most complex of all systems other than that
of the cosmos itself. Using such a model is not reducing
social phenomena to physical phenomena. It is exactly the reverse. It is
interpreting physical phenomena as though they were
social phenomena, with agents, imagination, self-organization, and
creative activity.

I have always found it curious that this description has been thought to
be mechanistic and, even more strange, pessimistic. It is
a form of analysis that directly denies the validity of what we have
termed "mechanical" in the social thought of the last few
centuries. And it is not at all pessimistic because it is necessarily
neutral in its prediction of outcome. Neither good nor bad
outcomes are predicted. No outcomes can be predicted, since alternative
outcomes depend on an infinity of unknown and
unknowable choices.

The way we might think about a chaotic period of systemic transition is
that it is one in which "free will" more or less reigns
supreme, unfettered (as it normally is) by the straightjacket of custom
and structural constraints. The French Revolution and the
Russian Revolution were both incredible efforts to transform the world,
engaging the mobilized energies of many, many people
in many parts of the world, and over a long period of time, and yet they
changed so much less than they were intended to
change. And to the extent that they thought they were implementing
changes, many of these changes were later reversed or
subverted. By the yardstick of their hopes and their proclamations, they
cannot be said to have been notable successes, despite
the fact that they left indelible marks on everything that has occurred
since their time.

The politics of the transition are different. It is the politics of
grabbing advantage and position at a moment in time when
politically anything is possible and when most actors find it extremely
difficult to formulate middle-range strategies. Ideological
and analytic confusion becomes a structural reality rather than an
accidental variable. The economics of everyday life is subject
to wilder swings than those to which we have been accustomed and for
which we have easy explanations. Above all, the social
fabric seems less reliable and the institutions on which we rely to
guarantee our immediate security seem to be faltering. Thus
antisocial crime seems widespread and this perception creates fear and
the reflex of the expansion of privatized security
measures and forces. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is
happening, and in varying degrees throughout the world-system.

One has to ask what are the likely reactions of different political
forces in such a situation. The easiest to predict is the reaction
of the upper strata of the world-system. They are of course a complex
mix and do not constitute an organized caucus. But they
probably can be divided into two main groups. The majority will share in
the general confusion and will resort to their traditional
short-run politics, perhaps with a higher dose of repressiveness insofar
as the politics of concessions will not be seen as
achieving the short-run calm it is supposed to produce.

And then there is the small minority among the upper strata who are
sufficiently insightful and intelligent to perceive the fact that
the present system is collapsing and who wish to ensure that any new
system be one which preserves their privileged position.
The only strategy for such a group is the Lampedusa strategy - to change
everything in order that nothing change. This group
will have firm resolve and a great deal of resources at their command.
They can hire intelligence and skill, more or less as they
wish. They will do so. They may have already been doing so.

I do not know what this group will come up with, or by what means they
will seek to implement the form of transition they will
favor. I do know that, whatever it is, it will seem attractive and be
deceptive. The most deceptive aspect is that such proposals
may be clothed as radical, progressive change. It will require
constantly applied analytic criticism to bring to the surface what the
real consequences would be, and to distinguish and weigh the positive
and negative elements. This has already been happening
for a long list of relatively minor proposals concerning various
specific types of problems, such as ecology or genetic
engineering, and the list could go on.

On the other side of the virtual battlefield will be all those who would
seek to reconstruct the world such that it would be more
democratic and more egalitarian. I use these two criteria as a minimal
but in fact crucial definition of the world left. Were the
disparate groups who share this objective to get their act together,
this is a moment of great possibility to achieve a significant
transformation in the direction of their hopes. But, as I have said
previously, their present state is that they are acting with
uncertainty, weakness, and in a generalized state of depression.
Uncertainty I can understand, though it is possible to overcome
this. But there is no inherent need for the world left to be either weak
or depressed, even if I can appreciate how the shocks of
the last 30 years have induced such reactions.

We do not know who will prevail in this struggle to resolve the systemic
bifurcation between those who wish to move in the
direction of a new historical social system which shares with the
present one the crucial characteristic of hierarchical privilege
and those who wish to move in the direction of a relatively democratic,
relatively egalitarian system. We do not know and
cannot know it. If we act, we must act within the framework of an
uncertain outcome. There is no bandwagon to climb aboard.
There is only a harsh struggle in which we must try to make prevail the
primacy of substantive rationality. It is to the possible
routes of action that I now turn.

3. A Strategy for the World Left

What is wrong with the strategy the world left evolved in the course of
the nineteenth century? There must be many things, since
the strategy has not been successful. The centerpiece of the overall
strategy was the concept of "two steps": first obtain state
power, then transform the world. This sequence made sense insofar as
control of the state machinery seemed the only way to
overcome the accumulated economic and cultural power of the privileged
strata and the only way to ensure that new kinds of
institutions could be constructed - and maintained against
counterattack. Any other route to social transformation seemed
utopian (in the pejorative sense of being a pipedream), and this view
seemed to be confirmed by the fact that various other
routes to transformation, whenever tried, met with aggressive
counterattack and ultimately suppression.

So the two-step strategy seemed to be the only one that would work. And
yet it failed. We know in retrospect what happened.
The two-step strategy failed because, once the first step was achieved -
and it was indeed achieved in a very large number of
countries - the new regimes did not seem to be able to achieve the
second step. This is precisely the source of disillusionment
with the Old Left. But why did the movements falter at the second step?
For a long time it was argued that, if a given regime did
not transform the world as it had promised, it was because the
leadership had in some sense "betrayed" the cause and had "sold
out." The idea that leaders sell out, just like the idea that the masses
are falsely conscious, seems to me analytically sterile and
politically disabling. To be sure, some leaders do place personal
ambition above their proclaimed principles, just as some
ordinary people do seem not to believe in the same principles that many
(even most) of their fellows do. The question however
is why do such people prevail.

The basic problem is not ethical or psychological but structural. The
states within a capitalist world-system have a lot of power,
but they simply are not all-powerful. Those in power cannot do just
anything they wish to do and still remain in power. Those in
power are in fact rather severely constrained by all kinds of
institutions, and in particular by the interstate system. This is a
structural reality which one after the other of these movements that
have come to power have confronted. Like trees in a storm,
such regimes have either bent or been broken. None has ever stayed
straight, or could have stayed straight. And in many ways,
it was dangerously naive to have expected them to do so.

It is not that no one on the left had ever warned about the dangers of
the two-step strategy. It is that those who argued its
dangers could never convince the majority that there was any efficacious
alternative route. The fact that the powerful of the
world controlled the weapons (via state armies and state police forces)
seemed to make it impossible that any truly fundamental
changes could be made before the movements obtained state power. And the
majority on the left was probably right about this.
There was indeed no alternative way, as long as they were operating
within the ambit of the capitalist world-system that was still
basically stable.

But there is more to it than this. The left analysis involved multiple
biases which pushed it towards this state-orientation. The first
bias was that homogeneity was somehow better than heterogeneity, and
that therefore centralization was somehow better than
decentralization. This derived from the false assumption that equality
means identity. To be sure, many thinkers had pointed out
the fallacy of this equation, including Marx, who distinguished equity
from equality. But for revolutionaries in a hurry, the
centralizing, homogenizing path seemed easiest and fastest. It required
no difficult calculation of how to balance complex sets of
choices. They were arguing in effect that one cannot add apples and
oranges. The only problem is that the real world is
precisely made up of apples and oranges. If you can't do such fuzzy
arithmetic, you can't make real political choices.

The second bias was virtually the opposite. Whereas the preference for
unification of effort and result should have pushed
logically towards the creation of a single world movement and the
advocacy of a world state, the de facto reality of a multi-state
system, in which some states were visibly more powerful and privileged
than other states, pushed the movements towards
seeing the state as a mechanism of defense of collective interests
within the world-system, an instrument more relevant for the
large majority within each state than for the privileged few. Once
again, many thinkers had pointed to the fallacy of believing that
any state within the modern world-system would or could serve collective
interests rather than those of the privileged few, but
weak majorities in weak states could see no other weapon at hand in
their struggles against marginalization and oppression than
a state structure they thought (or rather they hoped) they might be able
to control themselves.

The third bias was the most curious of all. The French Revolution had
proclaimed as its slogan the trinity: "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity." What has in practice happened ever since is that most
people have tacitly dropped the "fraternity" part of the slogan,
on the grounds that it was mere sentimentality. And the liberal center
has insisted that "liberty" had to take priority over
"equality." In fact, what the liberals really meant is that "liberty"
(defined in purely political terms) was the only thing that mattered
and that "equality" represented a danger for "liberty" and had to be
downplayed or dropped altogether.

There was flimflam in this analysis, and the world left fell for it. The
world left, and in particular its Leninist variant, responded to
this centrist liberal discourse by inverting it, and insisting that
(economic) equality had to take precedence over (political) liberty.
This was entirely the wrong answer. The correct answer is that there is
no way whatsoever to separate liberty from equality. No
one can be "free" to choose, if his/her choices are constrained by an
unequal position. And no one can be "equal" if he/she does
not have the degree of freedom that others have, that is, does not enjoy
the same political rights and the same degree of
participation in real decisions.

Still this is all water under the bridge. The left made its case, and it
has had to live with it. Today, as a result and as we are very
well aware, the world left is in great difficulty. I am arguing however
that this should not be seen in isolation. The errors of the
left, the failed strategy, were an almost inevitable outcome of the
operations of the capitalist system against which the left was
struggling. And the widespread recognition of this historic failure of
the left is part and parcel of the disarray caused by the
general crisis of the capitalist world-system.

The failure of the left yesterday and its recognition today is precisely
what will make it possible for the world left tomorrow to
achieve its objectives. Possible, but not at all certain! A new kind of
historical system will be constructed in the next half
century. The worldwide battle has already begun over what it will look
like. So what is it that we can do?

I think the first thing we can do is analyze. I say this not because I
am addressing a group of social scientists, that is, persons
who presumably engage in social analysis as their life work, but because
one of the problems of the world, and in particular of
the world left, is that our previous analyses have not been all that
good and seem to have been part of the cause of why we are
in the dilemmas we are in today. Here I can only repeat a number of
themes I have been plugging for a while now. The first is
the importance of the choice of the unit of analysis. I think the
relevant unit of analysis is the modern world-system, which is a
capitalist world-economy. The second is to analyze this system in the
longue durée, which is however distinctly not eternal.
What this does mean is that for any given historical system, such as for
example the capitalist world-economy, we need to
distinguish cyclical rhythms and secular trends, and use that to
distinguish the periods of genesis, of quasi-normal operation, and
of structural crisis of the system as a whole.

The third is to understand systemic processes in terms of their
complexity, that is, their long-run tendency to move far from
equilibrium, arriving at moments of bifurcation with indeterminate
outcome. The fourth is to place particular emphasis on the
institutional role within the capitalist world-economy of (a) the
antisystemic movements and (b) the structures of knowledge.
And the fifth is to place all this analysis within the context of
unthinking (which is different from rethinking) the categories
bequeathed to us largely in the nineteenth century to meet the needs and
reflect the geoculture of the present world-system.

Analysis is of course always a necessary component of praxis. But it is
particularly urgent and central when we are confronting a
structural crisis because it is just then that accepted categories of
thought provide the greatest hindrance to useful action.
However analysis by itself is never action. Action requires
organization. The world left has believed for the last 200 years that
this meant highly coordinated action, preferably within a single
hierarchical structure, believing it to be the most, perhaps the
only, efficacious form of action.

I think that this assumption has been proven wrong. The social
components that potentially make up the world left are too
diverse, face too many different immediate problems, originate in too
many diverse cultural loci for a system of democratic
centralism, even one that were genuinely democratic, to work. This has
been recognized in recent years by the emergence of
two slogans that point in another direction. One is the U.S. slogan of
the "rainbow coalition," a phrase that has been copied in
other parts of the world. It was generated by the sense that, for very
many people, their politics are rooted in, or deeply
affected by, their social position and their identities. The other
phrase is the one launched in the last few years in France, that of
the "plural left." This phrase too is being copied. It refers less to
the reality of different identities than to that of the multiplicity of
political traditions and priorities.

However we appreciate the actual attempts heretofore to create a new
style of left coalition, the core of the idea seems to me to
be absolutely correct, and indeed essential if we are to make any
significant political progress. We are strengthened collectively,
not weakened, insofar as people organize in forms and structures
meaningful to them, provided only the groups they form are
ready to talk to each other, and to operate meaningful coalitions. This
is far more than a matter of parliamentary politics. It can
and should operate at all levels from the global to the local. But most
of all, it cannot be merely a matter of political logrolling but
one rather of constant debate and collegial analysis by these movements
in concert one with the other. It is a question of creating
and reinforcing a particular culture of collegial as opposed to
hierarchical political action. It will not be easy.

What is it however that such coalitions should push? I think there are
three major lines of theory and praxis to emphasize. The
first is what I call "forcing liberals to be liberals." The Achilles
heel of centrist liberals is that they don't want to implement their
own rhetoric. One centerpiece of their rhetoric is individual choice.
Yet at many elementary levels, liberals oppose individual
choice. One of the most obvious and the most important is the right to
choose where to live. Immigration controls are
anti-liberal. Making choice - say choice of doctor or school - dependent
on wealth is anti-liberal. Patents are anti-liberal. One
could go on. The fact is that the capitalist world-economy survives on
the basis of the non-fulfillment of liberal rhetoric. The
world left should be systematically, regularly, and continuously calling
the bluff.

But of course, calling the rhetorical bluff is only the beginning of
reconstruction. We need to have a positive program of our
own. There has been a veritable sea-change in the programs of left
parties and movements around the world between 1960 and
1999. In 1960, their programs emphasized economic structures. They
advocated one form or another, one degree or another,
of the socialization, usually the nationalization, of the means of
production. They said little, if anything, about inequalities that
were not defined as class-based. Today, almost all of these same parties
and movements, or their successors, put forward
proposals to deal with inequalities of gender, race, and ethnicity. Many
of the programs are terribly inadequate, but at least they
feel it necessary to say something. On the other hand, there is
virtually no party or movement today that considers itself on the
left which advocates further socialization or nationalization of the
means of production, and a number which are actually
proposing moving in the other direction. It is a breathtaking turnabout.
Some hail it, some denounce it. Most just accept it.

There is one enormous plus in this cataclysmic shift of emphasis. The
world left had never addressed with sufficient seriousness
the biggest problem of all for almost everyone, which is the day-by-day
reality of worldwide multiple inequalities. Equality
means very little if it is equality only amongst the wealthy. The
capitalist world-system has resulted in the greatest geographic
polarization of wealth and privilege the planet has ever known. And the
top priority of the world left must be to decrease the
gap radically and as rapidly as possible. But this is not the only gap
that needs to be addressed. There are all the ones we have
talked about for a long, long time: class, race, ethnicity, gender,
generation. In short, we have to take the issue of equality as one
about which something can indeed be done.

But what? Decreeing equality as an objective is not achieving it. For,
even with good will all around - and this of course cannot
be assumed; indeed quite the contrary - it is not easy to find equitable
solutions. Here is where I think we need to reintroduce,
indeed revive, Weber's concept of substantive rationality. We should
note here incidentally a problem of translation. The term
Weber used in German was "Rationalität materiel" - "material" as opposed
to "formal." The accepted English translation,
"substantive," only conveys "materiel" if we associate it with
"substance" and not with "substantial" in our minds. What Weber
was talking about was that which is rational in terms of collective
widely-applicable value systems as opposed to that which is
rational in terms of particular, narrowly described sets of objectives
an individual or an organization might set itself. Weber
himself was ambivalent about the attitude to take vis-a-vis "substantive
rationality." He sometimes described it in ways that made
it seem his priority and sometimes in ways that underlined his fears
that ideological organizations (read, the German
Social-Democratic Party) might impose their views on everyone else.4
Most of Weber's post-1945 acolytes have only noticed
the latter sentiments and ignored the former. But we can make our own
use of this important concept and the insights it gives us.

What it seems to me that Weber was pointing to is that, in a world of
multiple actors and multiple sets of values, there can be
resolutions of the debates that are more than the result of simple
arithmetic (counting the votes) and more than a free-for-all in
which everyone pursues his own fancy. There can exist substantively
rational ways of making social decisions. To know what
they are requires a long period of clear, active, and open debate and a
collective effort to balance priorities over the short run
and the long run.

Take a very obvious issue, the problem of generational priorities. There
is at any given time a given social surplus, which can be
divided among four generational groups: children, working-age adults,
the elderly, and the as yet unborn. What is the right
proportion to allocate in terms of collective expenditures? There surely
is no easy or self-evident answer. But it is a question that
needs some measured decisions, arrived at democratically (that is,
involving the real participation of everyone, at least everyone
living, in some meaningful way). At the present time, in the present
system, we have no real process by which this can be done,
not even within a single state, not to be speak of doing it globally.
Can we construct such a process? We must. If we cannot, we
renounce forever the traditional objective of the world left, a
relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian world. I am not ready to
renounce this objective. Thus, I am in principle optimistic that
humanity can construct such procedures. But remember, not only
is it difficult, but there are many, many powerful persons who do not
wish to see such procedures established.

What we can say about these issues of multiple inequalities and the ways
in which they might be overcome is that at least, and at
last, they are the subject of serious debate today. They are on the
agenda of the world left. And if we have not come up with
very good answers up to now, we do seem to be working at it, and with
far less internal backbiting than one might have feared
and seemed to be happening 20-30 years ago.

But the great plus on the issue of the multiple inequalities has gone
along with a great minus on the side of reconstructing our
basic economic institutions. If capitalism collapses, do we still have
an alternative that fulfils the traditional socialist objective - a
socially-rational system that maximizes collective utility and fair
distribution? If the world left is putting forth today such
proposals, I haven't heard of them. Between those at one end of the left
spectrum who are proclaiming "new" ideas that are
simply watered-down versions of centrist administration of the
capitalist system and those at the other end who are nostalgic for
the nostrums of yesterday, there seems a real poverty of serious ideas.

The world left needs to face up to the most systematic and effective
critique of historical socialist rhetoric, the suggestion that
non-private ownership of the means of production leads to waste,
disinterest in technological efficiency, and corruption. This
critique has not been untrue of what we today call "real-existing
socialism." This has been recognized by such of these regimes
as still survive (or at least most of them), but their response has been
to create a large place for private ownership within their
regimes and label this "market socialism." While this may seem to solve
some short-run economic difficulties, it fails utterly to
address the underlying issues which the world socialist movement sought
to address in the first place - gross inequality and gross
social waste.

I suggest there may be another route, one that has in fact been tried
partially and which is rather promising. I think one might be
able to get most of the advantages of private ownership yet eliminate
most of the negatives by ensconcing productive activities
within medium-size, decentralized, competitive non-profit structures.
The key is that they would be non-profit, that is, that no
one would receive "dividends" or "profit distributions" and that any
surplus either went back to the organization or was taxed by
the collectivity for reinvestment elsewhere.

How might such structures work? Well, actually we know how, in the sense
that there are parallels. Most major universities and
hospitals in the United States have worked on such principles for two
centuries now. Whatever we can say of their functioning,
it is not the case that they have been "inefficient" or "technologically
backward" by comparison with the few for-profit institutions
that have existed. Quite the contrary. I'm aware that there is currently
a move to try to transform such structures into for-profit
institutions, but insofar as this has occurred in hospital structures
the results have not been very good and the move to
profit-oriented institutions has not yet been seriously tried in
universities. Of course, in most countries, hospital and university
structures are state-financed but traditionally they have usually been
allowed enough autonomy for us to consider them examples
of decentralization. These state-financed non-profit structures have not
in any case been notably less efficient than the private
non-profit ones.

So why wouldn't this work for steel firms, for computer technology
giants, for manufacturers of aircraft and biotechnology? No
doubt there would be a lot of details to argue about, especially the
degree to which such non-profit corporations should be
taxed, but per se it seems to me viable, and promising, and an
alternative road that would not be out of sync with the
commitment to a worldwide higher standard of living for everyone. At the
very least, it would seem to me to something we
should be seriously discussing and an idea we should be elaborating.

What I think we should keep in the forefront of our minds is that the
basic issue is not ownership or even control of economic
resources. The basic issue is the decommodification of the world's
economic processes. Decommodification, it should be
underlined, does not mean demonetization, but the elimination of the
category of profit. Capitalism has been a program for the
commodification of everything. The capitalists have not yet fulfilled it
entirely, but they have gone a long way in that direction,
with all the negative consequences we know. Socialism ought to be a
program for the decommodification of everything. Five
hundred years from now, if we start down that path, we may not have
fulfilled it entirely, but we can have gone a long way in
that direction.

In any case, we need to be debating the possible structures of the
historical social system we want to construct as the present
system collapses. And we ought to be trying to construct the alternative
structures now, and in the next half-century, during the
period of transition. We need to pursue this issue forcefully, if not
dogmatically. We need to try out alternatives, as mental
experiments and as real experiments. What we cannot do is ignore this
issue. For if we do, the world right will come up itself
with new non-capitalist alternatives that will involve us in a new,
hierarchical, inegalitarian world order. And then it will be too
late, for a long while thereafter, to change things.

Allow me to say one last word that is obvious, but needs to be said.
Social scientists are specialists. Of course, we are not the
only brand of specialists. In a sense, the world is constituted by an
endless series of specialists, some of whom have had longer
periods of training than others. How do specialists relate to
non-specialists? How should they? The world left has tended to
define this as the issue of how middle-class left-oriented intellectuals
should relate to the working classes. And we have tended
to favor the theory that they must be "organic intellectuals," by which
we have meant that they must be involved in social
movements, working with them, for them, and ultimately under them. The
collapse of the movements has left a bad taste in the
minds of erstwhile and putative organic intellectuals about the whole
idea.

There is however another way to look at the issue. Consider how a client
relates to a lawyer or a physician. As we know, it is
basically a matter of class. The working-class client may feel ignorant
and helpless vis-a-vis the professional, and accept the
judgment of the professional, sometimes gratefully, sometimes with great
resentment, but usually accepting it nonetheless. A
wealthy or otherwise powerful person may treat the lawyer or the
physician as a subordinate, whose primary function it is to
give technical advice to a superior.

Is there some way in which the specialist can relate to the
non-specialist as an equal? Obviously, the specialist has some
specialized knowledge. That is the whole point of multiple, differential
training programs. And obviously again, the specialist
knows many things that are relevant to solving particular kinds of
problems of which the non-specialist is unaware. That is why
the non-specialist consults the specialist, to get the benefit of the
expertise the specialist has. But it is also obvious that the
non-specialist knows many other things - about his needs and
preferences, about other problems he/she is facing - of which the
specialist is unaware, or if aware, on which the specialist has no
specialized knowledge.

Somewhere along the line, a total judgment has to be made, as to whether
or not a particular line of action the specialist
recommends is substantively rational. I am of course assuming that it is
formally rational, that is, that it will achieve the
narrowly-defined objective the specialist has taken into consideration.
But who will make this decision? And how? If one
transposes this issue from the realm of an individual encountering a
specialist to resolve a personal problem to that of a
collectivity encountering a group of specialists to resolve a collective
problem, we see immediately that once again there is no
simple answer. But I think once again this is a conundrum not impossible
to overcome, merely difficult. Neither of two extremes
is acceptable: that the specialists impose their solution on the
collectivity; that the political decision-making bodies ignore the
knowledge and the recommendations of the specialists. We need somehow
systematically to intrude public debate on the issues,
and the balancing of multiple needs and interests. We are thus back to
the issue of substantive rationality.

This whole program for the left would be hard enough were we to face it
amongst only ourselves and in all tranquillity. But we
face these issues while under constant attack by those who wish to
prevent our basic objectives from being achieved, and who
have powerful resources at their command. Furthermore, we shall not be
doing it in times of tranquillity but in times of chaos. It
is the transitional chaos that offers us our opportunity, but at the
same time this chaotic ambiance confuses us and presses us to
turn away from the long-run reconstruction of a historical social system
to the short-turn solution of urgent problems.

Finally, those of us in the United States find ourselves before one
further obstacle, which C. Wright Mills saw clearly in 1959,
and which has not fundamentally changed since then:

          [I]ntellectuals of [our] sort, living in America and in
Britain, face some disheartening problems. As socialists of one
          sort or another, we are a very small minority in an
intellectual community that is itself a minority. The most
          immediate problem we face is the nationalist smugness and
political complacency among the dominant intellectual
          circles of our own countries. We confront a truly deep apathy
about politics in general and about the larger
          problems of the world today.5

In short, and I say this for the last time, it will not be easy. But the
game is surely worth the candle.

________________
--

Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222