Immanuel Wallerstein Quotes

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  • Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.

    Immanuel Wallerstein (1979). “The Capitalist World-Economy”, p.15, Cambridge University Press
  • To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically.

  • People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

  • An individual or a group of individuals might of course decide at any time that they would like to invest capital with the objective of acquiring still more capital. But, before a certain moment in historical time, it had never been easy for such individuals to do this successfully.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.14, Verso
  • Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1999). “The End of the World as We Know it: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century”, p.4, U of Minnesota Press
  • Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world.

  • This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.154, Verso
  • The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).

  • I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.100, Verso
  • What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.

  • When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.

  • It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.136, Verso
  • Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.

  • We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and including the so-called collapse of the communisms in 1989, the social bifurcation.

  • We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.120, Verso
  • Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.81, Verso
  • So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.

  • What can be done? Well, the governments of the world can undertake what amounts to a vast clean-up campaign and a vast campaign of organic renewal. The problem is the cost of an effective operation, which is enormous, and thus must be paid by someone via some form of taxes.

    Immanuel Wallerstein (2011). “The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World”, p.62, New Press, The
  • Are there still other possibilities? Of course there are. What is important to recognize is that all three historical options are really there, and the choice will depend on our collective world behavior over the next fifty years. Whichever option is chosen, it will not be the end of history, but in a real sense its beginning. The human social world is still very young in cosmological time. In 2050 or 2100, when we look back at capitalist civilization, what will we think?

  • The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.

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  • We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.106, Verso
  • The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was 'natural' to man but which has never historically existed. The 'propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another' has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.

  • The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment

  • Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.54, Verso
  • Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.55, Verso
  • It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.148, Verso
  • That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.16, Verso
  • The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

  • It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system's hierarchy of wage-levels.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.39, Verso
  • Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.

    Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1995). “Capistalist Civilisation”, p.13, Verso
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    Immanuel Wallerstein quotes about: Capitalism Economy Exploitation Labor Meritocracy Progress Racism Reality