Historical Capitalism by Immanuel Wallerstein

Author:Immanuel Wallerstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

4.

Conclusion:

On Progress and Transitions

If there is one idea which is associated with the modern world, is indeed its centrepiece, it is that of progress. That is not to say that everyone has believed in progress. In the great public ideological debate between conservatives and liberals, which partly preceded, but more especially followed, the French Revolution, the essence of the conservative position lay in doubt that the changes that Europe and the world were undergoing could be considered progress, or indeed that progress was a relevant and meaningful concept. Nevertheless, as we know, it was the liberals who heralded the age and incarnated what would become in the nineteenth century the dominant ideology of the long-existing capitalist world-economy.

It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that liberals believed in progress.

What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists—the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes—believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals. No doubt, this belief served an important ideological purpose for them in turn. It justified the activities of the world socialist movement on the grounds that it incarnated the inevitable trend of historical development. Furthermore, it seemed very clever to propound this ideology, in that it purported to use the very ideas of bourgeois liberals to confound them.

There were unfortunately two minor shortcomings with the seemingly astute and certainly enthusiastic embrace of this secular faith in progress. While the idea of progress justified socialism, it justified capitalism too. One could hardly sing hosannas to the proletariat without offering prior praise to the bourgeoisie. Marx’s famous writings on India offered ample evidence of this, but so indeed did the Communist Manifesto. Furthermore, the measure of progress being materialist (and could Marxists not assent to this?), the idea of progress could be turned, and has been turned in the past fifty years, against all the ‘experiments in socialism’. Who has not heard the condemnations of the USSR on the grounds that its standard of living is below that of the USA? Furthermore, despite Krushchev’s boasts, there is little reason to believe that this disparity will cease to exist fifty years from now.

The Marxist embrace of an evolutionary model of progress has been an enormous trap, which socialists have begun to suspect only recently, as one element in the ideological crisis that has been part of the overall structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy.

It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed. Even as I write this, I feel the tremour that accompanies the sense of blasphemy. I fear the wrath of the gods, for

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