Historical Capitalism

112 Pages·1983·1.797 MB·English

by  Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel W allerstein
4
Verso
/H istorical Capitalism
© Immanuel Wallerstein 1983
Verso Editions
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ISBN 0 86091 761 4 Pbk
0 86091 061 X
Contents
Introduction 7
The Commodification of Everything:
Production of Capital 13
The Politics of Accumulation:
Struggle for Benefits 47
Truth as Opiate:
Rationality and Rationalization 75
Conclusion:
On Progress and Transitions 97

Introduction

. This book had its immediate origin in two successive requests.
| In the autumn of 1980, Thierry Paquot invited me to write a
' > short book for a series he was editing in Paris. He suggested as
my topic ‘Capitalism’. I replied that I was, in principle, will-
I
ing to do it, but that I wished my topic to be ‘Historical
■ Capitalism’.
, I felt that much had been written about capitalism by Marx-
■, ists and others on the political left, but that most of these
books suffered from one of two faults. One variety were basic-
r
ally logico-deductive analyses, starting from definitions of
what capitalism was thought to be in essence, and then seeing
“ how far it had developed in various places and times. A second
variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of
the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which
the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil
I
.f against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.
What seemed urgent to me, a task to which in a sense the
whole corpus of my recent work has been addressed, was to
• see capitalism as a historical system, over the whole of its
history and in concrete unique reality. I, therefore, set myself
the task of describing this reality, of delineating precisely what
was always changing and what had not changed at all (such
that we could denote the entire reality under one name).
8
I believe, like many others, that this reality is an integrated
whole. But many who assert this view argue it in the form of
an attack on others for their alleged ‘economism’ or their
cultural ‘idealism’ or their over-emphasis on political, ‘volun-
taristic’ factors. Such critiques, almost by their nature, tend to
fall by rebound into the sin opposite to the one they are at­
tacking. I have therefore tried to present quite straight­
forwardly the overall integrated reality, treating successively
its expression in the economic, political, and cultural-ideo-
logical arenas.
Shortly after I agreed in principle to do this book, I received
an invitation from the Department of Political Science at the
University of Hawaii to give a series of lectures. I seized the
opportunity to write this book as those lectures, given in the
spring of 1982. The first version of the first three chapters was
presented in Hawaii, and I am grateful to my lively audience
for their many comments and criticisms which enabled me to
improve the presentation considerably.
One improvement I made was to add the fourth chapter. I
realized in the course of the lectures that one problem of
exposition persisted: the enormous subterranean strength of
the faith in inevitable progress. I realized too that this faith
vitiated our understanding of the real historical alter­
natives before us. I, therefore, decided to address the question
directly.
Finally, let me say a word about Karl Marx. He was a
monumental figure in modern intellectual and political
history. He has bequeathed us a great legacy which is concep­
tually rich and morally inspiring. When he said, however,
that he was not a Marxist, we should take him seriously and
not shrug this aside as a
bon mot.
Introduction 9
He knew, as many of his self-proclaimed disciples often do
not, that he was a man of the nineteenth century, whose vi­
sion was inevitably circumscribed by that social reality. He
knew, as many do not, that a theoretical formulation is only
understandable and usable in relation to the alternative for­
mulation it is explicitly or implicitly attacking; and that it is
entirely irrelevant vis-a-vis formulations about other problems
based on other premisses. He knew, as many do not, that
there was a tension in the presentation of his work between
the exposition of capitalism as a perfected system (which had
never in fact existed historically) and the analysis of the con­
crete day-to-day reality of the capitalist world.
Let us, therefore, use his writings in the only sensible
way—that of a comrade in the struggle who knew as much as
he knew.