DOES CAPITALISM HAVE A FUTURE? by IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

Author:IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

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WHAT COMMUNISM WAS

Georgi Derluguian

There are obvious reasons for discussing communist states in a book debating the possible demise of capitalist markets. Communism still comes to many minds as the prime alternative to capitalism, along with its dreadful images of endless smokestacks, shortages, personality cults, and purges. There are less obvious reasons, too. The collapse of the Soviet bloc was taken for granted after the fact because communism now seemed to almost everyone patently inefficient and oppressive. Yet in the fifties and sixties prevalent opinions admired/dreaded the extraordinary military and scientific prowess of the U.S.S.R. and even many experts considered its nationality questions solved. During the heady years of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the 1980s, many people also, both in the East and West, seemed ready to embrace the humanistic goodness dawning from Moscow. Today the Chinese market miracle is hailed as capitalism’s biggest success and hope for the future, disregarding the oddity of many Chinese entrepreneurs still carrying their Party cards. This fact questions the common cliché that communism has ended in collapse.

The Soviet Union, however, did collapse. Toward the end, it became an advanced industrial society ruled by essentially a corporate oligarchy. Perhaps this allows us to posit on more empirical grounds the question of what the collapse of advanced Western capitalism might look like. Specifically, could a hypothetical anticapitalist revolution follow the classic pattern of 1917, or might it rather resemble the civic mobilizations of 1989? Which brings us to the special reason for considering the Soviet Union in this book. Two of its authors, the same Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins who now predict the end of capitalism, are on record as having predicted, still back in the 1970s and from different theories, the passing of communism in Russia.

Hence my confession: in 1987 I had no authorization from the KGB residentura at our embassy in the People’s Republic of Mozambique to meet the US citizen Immanuel Wallerstein. Waiting under the old jacaranda outside Maputo’s Hotel Polana felt like stepping into a Graham Greene spy novel: a young Soviet officer secretly meeting with a famous Western academic in an African country torn by Cold War proxy conflict. The intellectual curiosity driving me into this mad risk could be fully appreciated perhaps only by those who knew the excitement of touching a banned book. The Soviet censors regarded Wallerstein’s Neo-Marxian theory as, of course, heresy. Sensing my unease, Wallerstein graciously predicted: Relax, your generation of Soviets will be soon freely traveling around the world, though I am less sure this will make you much happier. At my incredulous look, he added with a smile: What makes you expect that there will be a military parade on Moscow’s Red Square, let us say safely, on the 7 of November 2017, the hundredth anniversary of an event which by then you might not even know what to call? The word crossing my mind at that prophetic moment was admittedly a cruder Russian equivalent of Preposterous!

Preposterous was also the main reaction of the

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