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To read the first Wallerstein excerpt for the May 4, 2014 show, please visit: First Excerpt from Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter in Does Capitalism Have A Future?, “Structural Crisis, Or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding”
Second Excerpt from Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter in Does Capitalism Have A Future?, “Structural Crisis, Or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding”
(Discussed during the WUR of May 18th, 2014… Miklos Nyiszli's Lessons on Class [temporary page])
[Note: Wallerstein uses the term ‘world right’ in some ways as I use the word (in quotes) ‘power’.]
During the WUR of May 11th, 2014 we asked: “if we can see how our training (in what gets ‘seen’… recognized… given attention… rewarded…) gets translated into ‘reality’ – the belief that “only ‘mind’ matters” – would that not help us to become more conscious authors of our own lives?
To help illustrate the question we once again drew on Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter in Does Capitalism Have A Future Does Capitalism Have A Future?
On May 18th, 2014 we continue this discussion.
[Below was begun on 05.09.14 and cannot at this time be posted to the “PILOT” page of the website as I’ve not yet replaced the software to do so.]
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* [Conclusion of:] “Capitalism During Its Phase of “Normal” Operation…”
Thirdly, other states, which had fallen behind the hegemonic power in terms of geopolitical strength at the beginning of the period of hegemonic dominance, begin to recover their strength and begin to insist on a larger geopolitical role. The world-system begins to move away from a situation of undisputed hegemony to a situation of balance of powers. Since the process is cyclical, there begin to be efforts by others to seek the role of successor hegemonic power. But this is a complicated and arduous process, which explains why hegemonic cycles are so much longer than Kondratieff cycles. Because of all this, the hegemonic power begins to experience a slow decline.
There is one last element to stress in this description of the ongoing processes of the modern world-system. Both Kondratieff cycles and hegemonic cycles are cycles. But they are never perfect cycles, in the sense of returning in the end to the starting point. This is because the A-phases of these two cycles involve growth – in real value, in geographic scope, in depth of commodification.
[…and did the thought ever strike… that the result… is the point?… – P.S.]
It is never possible in the B-phase to eradicate all this growth. Rather, the return to equilibrium represented by the B-phase is at best a partial regression of the system, what might be better described as a “stagnation” of the system rather than a full regression to the system’s previous positions in whatever criteria we measure…. (p. 16 – 17)
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* “The Modern World-System, 1945 to Circa 1970…”
The last great struggle for hegemony was that between Germany and the United States, a struggle that can be considered to have begun more or less in 1873 and which culminated in a “thirty years’ war” that ran from 1914 to 1945. With Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in 1945, the United States was the clear and acknowledged victor in this struggle.
The United States emerged from what we refer to as the Second World War endowed with incredible economic strength. Its economic capacity and competitiveness had already been very strong before the war began. The war enlarged this strength in two ways. On the one hand, all the other industrial powers in the world-system – from Great Britain across Europe to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) to Japan – suffered grievous damage to their material plant. In addition, because of wartime destruction of their agricultural production, most of them were also suffering from serious food shortages in the immediate postwar period. In great contrast on the other hand, the United States, sheltered as it had been from physical damage, was able to develop still further its industrial and agricultural base throughout the war. Not only the defeated Axis powers but even the wartime allies of the United States sought immediate relief and reconstruction aid from the United States.
We can measure the degree of initial advantage in a very simple way. In any major sector of production in the first 10 – 15 years after 1945, the United States was able to sell products in all the other industrialized countries at lower levels of cost (including transport) than the local producers.
As a result, if the United States were going to play the role of hegemonic power, it would have to come to some kind of terms with the Soviet Union and neutralize its military strength. This was particularly true since internal political pressure in the United States led to a relatively rapid demobilization of its land forces worldwide.
It is my contention that what ensued was a tacit “deal” between the United States and the Soviet Union, to which we have given the metaphorical name of Yalta. It seems to me that this deal had three components. The first was a de facto division of the globe into two spheres of influence, more or less along the lines of the location of the armed forces of each of the two countries at the end of the war. There was a Soviet bloc, which would come to be defined as running from the Oder-Neisse line in central Europe to the 38th Parallel in Korea (and including mainland China, after the definitive defeat of the Kuomintang by the Chinese Communist Party forces in 1949).
What the United States and the Soviet Union in effect agreed to observe was the primary (virtually exclusive) right of each to decide matters within its sphere. A crucial element of this de facto agreement was there would be no attempt to change these boundaries by military (or even political) means. After 1949, this accord was reinforced by the concept of “mutually assured destruction” based on the fact that both sides had sufficient nuclear strength to respond to any attack and destroy the other.
The second part of the tacit agreement was the de facto economic disjuncture of the two zones. The United States would offer no assistance in the reconstruction of the Soviet bloc. Its aid would be limited to its zone – the Marshall Plan in western Europe, comparable aid to Japan and later to South Korea and Taiwan in east Asia. U.S. aid to its allies was not simply altruistic philanthropy. It needed customers for its flourishing industries, and reconstructing the economy of these allies made them good customers, as well as faithful political satellites. The Soviet Union in turn developed its own regional economic structures, ones that reinforced the autarkic character of the Soviet zone.
The third part of the “deal” was to deny that there was any deal. Each side proclaimed very loudly in its particular language that it was in a total ideological struggle with the other. We came to call this the “Cold War.” Note however that it was and remained to the end a “cold” war. The purpose of the very loud rhetoric was not in reality to transform the other, at least not before some very distant moment when the other side would somehow crumble. In this sense neither side was trying in any immediate time span to “win” the war. Each sought rather to oblige its satellites (euphemistically called allies) to toe a very strict political line, as dictated by the two superpowers. Neither side would ever support in any meaningful sense rebellious forces within the other camp, since this might lead to the undoing of the primary agreement of a military status quo between the two superpowers.
Once the military status quo was achieved, the United States could proceed to realize its overall political and cultural dominance in the world-system – with its automatic majorities in the United Nations and multiple other transnational institutions. The sole exception was in the one agency that controlled military matters – the U.N. Security Council, where the veto power of each side ensured the military status quo.
This arrangement worked very well in the beginning. And then the self-liquidating character of a geopolitical quasi-monopoly began to take its toll. The two most significant geopolitical changes in the two decades following 1945 were revolts in the Third World and the economic recovery of western Europe and Japan.
What were labeled then as Third World countries (and which we tended later to call the South) had very little to gain in the geopolitical status quo that the two superpowers were attempting to impose on the world. Some of them began to defy the arrangements. The Chinese Communist Party refused to make a deal with the Kuomintang, as the Soviet Union wanted them to do. Instead they defeated the Kuomintang and came to state power. The Viet Minh and the Viet Cong proceeded on their own path, defeating both the French and the Americans. Fidel Castro and his guerrillas came to power, and almost upset the world apple cart in 1962. The Algerians went forward to independence to the chagrin (at least initially) of the French Communist Party. And Nasser successfully took control of the Suez Canal
Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was in fact happy with this turmoil. Each adjusted to this reality in similar ways. Initially, each side insisted on a forced choice of loyalties in the Cold War, believing, as the then U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, famously said, that “there are no neutrals.” But later, both sides felt it necessary to soften their stance and try instead to woo those who sought to be neutral. In the process, the Soviet Union “lost” China. And the United States paid a very heavy economic and political price for its Vietnam War.
The other change – one that affected the United States more than the Soviet Union – may be seen in the political consequences of economic recovery in the midst of the incredibly expansive Kondratieff A-phase that prevailed. By the early 1960s, it was no longer true that the United States could sell automobiles (for example) more cheaply in Germany or Japan than local producers. Indeed, the contrary was beginning to occur. German and Japanese automobiles were successfully entering the U.S. market.
The new economic strength of the erstwhile satellites of the United States turned them into genuine competitors on the world market. By the late 1960s, the United no longer held a significant economic edge over the major allies in the sphere of world production, or even in transnational commerce. The basis of geopolitical hegemony was beginning to fray
After 1945, the world-system enjoyed the largest (by far) expansion in capital accumulation that it had ever known since the launching of the modern world-system in the long sixteenth century. After 1945, the world-system also enjoyed the largest (by far) expansion of geopolitical power in the period of U.S. hegemony that it had ever known since the launching of the modern-world system. These two cycles were simultaneous and reached the point of self-liquidation more or less simultaneously. The biggest upturns would be followed by the biggest downturns. The world-system had in the process moved very far from equilibrium as an historical system. Its restorative mechanisms seemed to have been stretched beyond repair. It was now entering into structural crisis.
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* “The Structural Crisis, Circa 1970 to ?…”
There were two crucial developments that contributed to this structural crisis. The first had to do with the long-term secular trends of the world-economy, which would now make it extremely difficult for capitalists to accumulate capital endlessly. And the second had to do with the conjunctural end of the dominance by centrist liberals of the geoculture, which would undermine the political stability of the world-system. Let me treat each in turn.
Long-Term Structural Trends
How does one accumulate capital endlessly in a capitalist system? The basic method, albeit not the only one, is via production, in which the entrepreneur-producer retains the differential between what it costs to produce the commodity and the price at which the producer can sell it. The lower the costs and the higher the sales price, the more profit is realized and can then be reinvested.
But how can the differential between costs and sales price be maximized? There are two necessary elements in this exercise. To maximize sales price, there must be a quasi-monopoly, a subject we have already treated. It is how one in addition minimizes costs that we must now discuss. We start with the reality that there are always three generic costs in any production process. These are personnel costs, the costs of inputs, and taxation.
There are three different levels of personnel for whom the producer / owner has to pay: the unskilled and semiskilled workforce, the skilled workers and supervisory cadres, and the top managers. The costs of the least skilled workforce tend to go up in A-phases, as they collectively make demands on the employer in one form or other of syndical action. Employers during the A-phases may make concessions to the least skilled personnel because avoiding shutdowns or slowdowns may be less costly than wage increases. However, eventually these costs become too high for the employers, particularly for those in the leading industries.
The solution for employers has historically been the runaway factory, that is, relocation to “historically” lower-wage areas during the B-period. There the workers are recruited from loci (usually rural) in which their real income is even lower than that offered by the newly installed (usually urban) production site. It seems to be a win-win situation for the worker and the employer. After some time, however, the transplanted workers feel more knowledgeable about their new situation and more aware of the low level of their wages in worldwide terms. They begin to engage in some syndical action. And sooner or later the employer finds that, as a result, the costs have again become too high. The solution is still another move.
The moves are costly but effective. Worldwide there is, however, a ratchet effect. The reductions never eliminate totally the increases. Over 500 years, this repeated process has virtually exhausted the loci into which to move. This can be measured by the degree of deruralization of the world-system, which has risen spectacularly in the last fifty years and seems to be proceeding apace.
The increase in the costs of cadres is the result of two different considerations. One, the constantly increased scale of productive units requires more intermediate personnel to coordinate it. And two, the political dangers that result from the repeated syndical organization of the relatively low-skilled personnel are countered by the creation of a larger intermediate stratum who can be both political allies for the ruling stratum and models of a possible upward mobility for the unskilled majority, thereby blunting its political mobilization. Their salaries significantly increase the overall personnel bill.
[That this pattern that Wallerstein is noting is obviously true is borne out by our bodies… by our own experience… the experience of our families and neighbors… our ancestors… – P.S.]
The increase in the costs of top managers is the direct result of the increased complexity of entrepreneurial structures – the famous separation of ownership and control. This makes it possible for these top managers to appropriate ever larger portions of the firm’s receipts as rent, thereby reducing what goes to the “owners” (shareholders) as profit or to the firm for reinvestment. This last increase was quite spectacular in size during the last few decades.
The costs of inputs have been going up for analogous reasons. Capitalists seek to externalize as many costs as they can. This is an elegant way of saying that they are not paying the full bill for the inputs they use. The three main costs they are able to externalize are the disposal of toxic waste, the renewal of raw materials, and the construction of the necessary infrastructure for transport and communications. Over most of the history of the modern world-system, it was considered normal practice to externalize such costs. It was seldom a concern for political authorities.
In the last few decades, however, the political atmosphere has changed radically. Climate change is a very widely debated issue, as a result of which there has been much demand for “green” and “organic” products. The past “normality” of externalization is a distant memory. The explanation for the new political debate about toxic disposal is rather simple. The world has largely run out of vacant public domains into which to dump waste. This is equivalent in effect to that of the deruralization of the world’s work force, the running-out of new groups of potential low-wage workers. The impact on public health has become high and obvious. The result has been the growth of social movements making demands for environmental cleanup and control.
Secondly, public concern about the renewal of resources – another new political reality – is in large part the consequence of the sharp increase in world population. Suddenly, the world has discovered asset shortages of many kinds, already existing or soon to be felt: energy sources, water, forests, fish, and meat. There is debate about who owns what, who uses what, for what purposes the resources are used, and who pays the bill.
Thirdly, capitalism as a system requires considerable infrastructure. Products produced for sale on the world market must be transported. Communication is a crucial element in commerce. Transport and communication are today far more efficient and much, much faster. But this has also meant that the costs have risen considerably. Who pays for this? In the past, the producers who have made the most use of the infrastructure have paid only a small part of the bill. The general public has paid the rest.
Today there is strong political demand that governments assume a new direct role in ensuring detoxification, resource renewal, and further infrastructure expansion. This would require that governments increase taxes significantly. In addition, there is no point in doing this if the causes of the negative realities go untouched. This means that governments would need to insist on more internalization of costs by entrepreneurs. Both increased taxes and, even more, requirements for internalization of these costs would cut sharply into the margins of profit of enterprises – a point that is constantly made by the producers.
Finally, taxation in all its forms has been going up over the historical life of the modern world-system. All the multiple political levels of government require taxation, both to pay the personnel and to pay for the expanding services these governments are expected to offer. There is also the expansion of what might be called private taxation – both the corruption of government officials and the predatory demands of organized mafias. Private taxation is a cost to the entrepreneur, just as much as is state taxation. As the size of governmental structures has vastly increased, particularly in the last fifty years, there have been more people to bribe. And as world economic activity has grown, there is ever more room for mafiosi operations.
Still, the biggest source of increased taxation has resulted from the political struggles of the world’s antisystemic movements. Their demands over the past two centuries have brought about the democratization of world politics. The program of popular movements has fundamentally been to obtain from the states three basic guarantees for the citizenry – education, health services, and lifelong revenue flows. The demands for each have steadily expanded in two ways over the past 200 years: the levels of services demanded, and therefore the costs; and the geographical locales in which the demands have been made. These expenditures are what we refer to was the “welfare state” – a form of which is now part of the normal political life of virtually every government in the world, even if the level of what is offered varies, in large part according to the wealth level of the country.
We can sum this up by saying that the three basic costs of production have risen constantly and have now each approached close enough to their asymptotes [“a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance – from the Greek asumptotos ‘not falling together’…”] that the system cannot be brought back to equilibrium via the multiple mechanisms that have been used for 500 years. The possibilities for producers to achieve an endless accumulation of capital seem to be ending.
[The Waking Up Radio program of May 18, 2014 will consider the challenges of Michael Mann (in his chapter of Does Capitalism Have A Future?) to the above. His is a critique of the entire Wallerstein approach… so we’ll refer as well to the First Excerpt from Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter, “Structural Crisis, Or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding” (which is the concluding section of Immanuel Wallerstein’s chapter) – and then ask: “…how distinguish ‘truth’ from ‘con’ from ‘being mistaken’… in political analysis?]
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* “Original Plan For June 1, 2014 Show… On Michael Mann”
[What follows was the original plan for the June 1, 2014 show… the focus of which shifted to ‘inclusive capitalism’… – P.S.]
Michael Mann’s article in Does Capitalism Have A Future? is entitled “The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom?” and from its outset we are confronted with our lexicon problem. In direct contrast to Wallerstein… who insists on making certain that we know his definition of ‘capitalism’… Mann (and this is almost always the case in duplicitous social analysis…) uses lots of terms without defining them… often inter-changeably (so he’ll use terms like ‘societies’… ‘capitalism’… ‘systems’… ‘institutions’… ‘structures’ – and as we don’t know what he means he’s given himself numerous loopholes out of which to squeeze…) often in a tone that suggests the definition is common and obvious.
Historical sociologists like myself are good at predicting the past, but the future is another matter. It is especially difficult to predict the future of major social institutions like the nation-state or capitalism. It becomes easier if one believes that the institution in question is a “system” with its own internal logic of development, its own cycles, its own contradictions. Then we could identify the current logic of development and project a likely future. (p. 71)
[As we shall see this critique of Wallerstein is actually much more applicable to himself. Using the concept of a ‘cycle’ is hardly mechanistic in and of itself… particularly if it’s shorthand for capturing ‘real-data-trends’… data that captures actual changes in the real world. It is Mann who invents ‘systems’ composed of abstractions… each with their own internal ‘movement’… that intersect with other abstractions… that birth still more… – P.S]
I do not conceive of societies as systems but as multiple, overlapping networks of interaction, of which four networks – ideological, economic, military and political power relations – are the most important. Geopolitical relations can be added to the four as a distinctive mix of military and political power, the mix varying between what are conventionally called “hard” and “soft” geopolitics. Each of these four or five sources of power may have an internal logic or tendency of development, so that it might be possible, for example, to identify tendencies toward equilibrium, cycles, or contradictions within capitalism, just as one might identify comparable tendencies within the other sources of social power. Take, for example, the cycles of attack versus defense, or mobility versus solidity, or the continuous escalation of firepower, all of which are internal tendencies of military power relations; or the long-term growth of the modern state, or the replacement of empires by nation-states, which are predominantly tendencies internal to political power relations. Ideologies, however, have distinct cycles of development, according to whether a dominant ideology seems to “work” or not, and which of the alternative ideologies currently on offer as a solution to crisis is adopted. (Michael Mann, “The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom?”, Does Capitalism Have A Future?, p. 72)
A review that I read of Mann’s article (from the London School of Economics) praised Mann’s analysis for being ‘multi-causal’… and… truly… he sees many many ‘causes’… and many many ‘outcomes’… and many many ‘structures’… and numerous ‘systems’… and no one’s responsible… things jostle and bump… it’s just the wild-diverse-tumble… of unruly life… running at all angles… and all simultaneously. So while Wallerstein… and other honest brokers… want us to see that there is… in fact… an overall global system… with identified structural underpinnings (because these are what they are… period… and no amount of finessing will turn a footing into a roof…) and clear resulting accumulation and inequality patterns… and define their terms…
…Mann has an opposite plan: to plant uncertainty…
I find this model of an earth reaching the limits of economic markets difficult to understand. If there is no cheap labor left, capitalists can no longer reap superprofits from this source, but the higher productivity of labor and increased consumer demand in newly developed countries might compensate for this and produce a reformed capitalism on a global scale, with more equality and social citizenship rights for all. This would not mean the end of capitalism but rather a better capitalism in which the whole planet would enjoy the kinds of rights enjoyed by workers in the post-World War II West. After all, in that period the vast bulk of the wealth of the advanced countries was created through trade and production among themselves, not with the rest of the world (oil excluded). The boom of the postwar period came mainly as a result of a high productivity / high consumer demand economy of the advanced countries themselves. It did not depend on highly exploited Southern labor. Why should this not be so in the future, but for the whole world? (p. 87)
[Perhaps we should add to our list of distinguishing characteristics… so that we can recognize honest scholarship: “Is duplicitousness the obvious fall-back plan?” In Savage Continent Keith Lowe notes:
It is difficult to convey in meaningful terms the scale of the wreckage caused by the Second World War. Warsaw was just one example of a city destroyed – there were dozens more within Poland alone. In Europe as a whole hundreds of cities had been entirely or partially devastated…. In some countries – especially Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and Ukraine – a millennium of culture and architecture had been crushed in the space of just a few short years. The violence that brought about such total devastation has been likened by more than one historian to Armageddon…. The further east one traveled after the war, the worse the devastation became. In Budapest 84 per cent of the buildings were damaged, and 30 per cent of them so badly that they were entirely uninhabitable. About 80 per cent of the city of Minsk in Belarus was destroyed: only 19 of 332 major factories in the city survived, and only then because mines set by the retreating Germans were defused by the Red Army sappers just in time. Most of the public buildings in Kiev were mined when the Soviets retreated in 1941 – the rest were destroyed when they returned in 1944. Kharkov in eastern Ukraine was fought over so many times that eventually there was little left to dispute…. Greece lost a third of its forests during the German occupation, and over a thousand villages were burned and left uninhabited…. Farms and villages were burned down for the merest hint of resistance. Vast swathes of forest along the sides of roads were cut down to minimize the risk of ambush…. (p. 5, 9)
And compare Mann with Wallerstein’s straightforwardness:
The United States emerged from what we refer to as the Second World War endowed with incredible economic strength. Its economic capacity and competitiveness had already been very strong before the war began. The war enlarged this strength in two ways. On the one hand, all the other industrial powers in the world-system – from Great Britain across Europe to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) to Japan – suffered grievous damage to their material plant. In addition, because of wartime destruction of their agricultural production, most of them were also suffering from serious food shortages in the immediate postwar period. In great contrast on the other hand, the United States, sheltered as it had been from physical damage, was able to develop still further its industrial and agricultural base throughout the war. Not only the defeated Axis powers but even the wartime allies of the United States sought immediate relief and reconstruction aid from the United States. (p. 17 – 18)
In our May 26, 2013 show, in which we discussed James Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability we noted that forces are (quoting Galbraith) “affecting the global economy in common and systematic ways…” that they are financial in nature… that they hit the lower-income countries and people hard… and that they are the consequence of willed policies. He writes:
…the dominant forces affecting the distribution of pay (and therefore incomes) worldwide are systematic and macroeconomic. They are the product of forces affecting the global economy in common and systematic ways, forces impinging on individual countries and perhaps modified by the institutions those countries have and the policies they apply – but nevertheless forces that originate beyond their control.
Second, these forces are largely financial in character. They have to do first and foremost with interest rates, the flow of financial investments, and the flow of payments on debts, internal and international. At the global level, the data give no support to the vast outpouring in the professional literature arguing that changes in inequality are based on so-called real factors – such as a “race between technology and education” (Goldin and Katz 2008). There is also little comfort here for the view that rising international trade and competition from low-wage countries played the dominant role – or even an important one – in the inequality statistics. On the contrary, common and financial factors explain a very large share (practically everything) that can be explained….
…The panoramic views provided on these pages should serve to demystify the study of economic inequality. In point of fact, even though there are many interesting developments to study, there are very few actual puzzles in the record. Similar patterns appear again and again.
The financial crisis (and the world economic crisis it engendered) thus represented not so much the natural outgrowth of rising inequality as a further phase; it was the consequence of a deliberate effort to sustain a model of economic growth based on inequality that had, in the year 2000, already ended. By pressing this model past all legal and ethical limits, the United States succeeded in prolonging an “era of good feeling,” and in ensuring that when the collapse came, it would utterly destroy the financial sector. (p. 289 – 293)
It is only from the vantage of the whole… that the truth may be known – a comment frequently made on this show.
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Further:
The vital question here is whether the present recession will continue, worsen, and even perhaps set in motion forces which might bring down capitalism. However, let me first briefly analyze its causes, We also find a cascade pattern here. The recession began as primarily an American crisis with several causal chains coming together. First, American hegemony and consequent global imbalances enabled the government and ordinary Americans to borrow vast sums of money from abroad at negligible interest rates, building up debts that eventually proved unsustainable….
Again, however, the Great Recession spread very unevenly around the world. From World Bank data on GDP growth we can see that almost every country had a difficult 2008 or 2009. In this brief phase the crisis was indeed global. It then deepened in the United States, and across Europe as far east as Russia and its eastern neighbors, and in some poor indebted countries. But by 2010 numerous countries had bounced back to achieve their highest GDP growth rates of the 21st century – including important countries like… (Michael Mann, “The End May Be Nigh, But For Whom?”, Does Capitalism Have A Future?, p. 81)
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Further:
When talking about the Chinese economy, GDP growth is not a very meaningful indicator now because the figure can be manipulated by all levels of government.
Confidence can, to some extent, attract hot money, but cannot support a country’s long-term development. Moreover, the public’s confidence in a country’s economic situation is not decided by propaganda, but is based on the real factors underlying the economy. In other words, people’s judgment is based on whether the real economy and the fictitious economy (the financial systems) are healthy or not. (He Qinglian, “Problems of China’s Economy Pop Up Everywhere,” The Epoch Times, April 10 – 16, 2014)
Surely he would know that… our eminent historical sociologist? Is it remotely plausible that he doesn’t? What purpose could be served by obfuscation?… if not the state interest in snowing the people?
Is not the root of all intellectual dishonesty in some sense ‘service to the state’? It’s always at the behest of the state (ultimately) that we betray each other…
…that we work…
…that we struggle…
…that we serve…
…other than our souls and the earth.
And when we love each other… when we stand up for each other… look what happens to us… in Russia… in China… in Egypt: we receive the harshest totalitarian regimes.
So ‘social analysts’ write for the state… or they write for the people….
Simplifies things wonderfully doesn’t it? And… again… no judgment… just useful information… knowledge… for planning the future we want…
…no judgment because we’ve all done it… what else is there, after all?… but the state… till we create its opposite?
But there are some… who know the difference… or who are in transition… whose eyes strain to see… the outline of our future that’s free… whose minds strive to find… the words to describe it. These are the words we need. We write for the state with ‘necessity’ clawing our backs. We write for each other… for we-the-global-people… so our children will be free of all that… free from the realm of ‘necessity’… materially… and spiritually.
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[Return to: Miklos Nyiszli's Lessons on Class (temporary page)] for audio files and transcripts of the Waking Up Radio shows focusing on the Wallerstein excerpts.
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