Guillermo Castro H., contributor to Prensa Latina
Twenty-seven years ago, in 1995, Emmanuel Wallerstein agreed that although the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union could be celebrated as the downfall of communism and the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as an ideological force in the modern age. world, they did not constitute the ultimate victory of liberalism as an ideology. He said that was a “completely wrong perception of reality”, because those events meant “the collapse of liberalism” and entry into a world afterwards.
He added that 1989 marked the end of a political-cultural era of astonishing technological achievement, in which most people believed that the slogans of the French Revolution – freedom, equality and fraternity – reflected an inescapable historical fact, which they would do in the near future. At the same time, Wallerstein also noted that liberalism has always been the “essential dogma of the center,” self-identifying both “against the ancient past of unwarranted privilege (which they saw as represented by conservative ideology) and unbridled compromise that does not consider virtue or merit (which It was represented by socialist/radical ideology).
Liberals, he said, “have always tried to define the rest of the political scene as consisting of two extremes, sandwiched between them,” asserting that the liberal state – reformist, legal and to some extent liberal – was the only one capable of securing freedom.’ However, he added, while “perhaps it was This is true for the relatively small group that has secured its freedom,” that group “never went from being a minority to always being on its way to becoming the whole.”
In any case, although liberalism’s origins lie in the “political catastrophes unleashed by the French Revolution,” its culmination occurred “in the period after 1945 (until 1968), the era of US hegemony in the world of order…” since then and, up until the present, the bankruptcy of liberalism gave way to what Wallerstein then considered “a period of great political struggles, of greater importance than any other period in the past five hundred years.”
In these struggles, he said, “the forces of privilege who know so well that ‘everything must change so that nothing changes’ and work very cleverly and skillfully to do so” and the “forces of liberation” that have yet to overcome the fact that the “transformation enterprise” is no longer Society by seizing state power in all the states, one by one” is viable, and “they have no certainty whether or not there is an alternative project.”
For Wallerstein, the current transition exacerbates “the traditional evils of old liberalism, such as resorting to violence in relation to the peripheral societies of the world order, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of privileged minorities.” This is taking place in a context where frustration, despair and a sense of “political urgency” are combined all over the world. […]despite the equally strong feeling that political activity of the ‘traditional’ kind might be useless.
He noted that by 1995 this circumstance required confronting “the physical, social, cultural, moral, and spiritual problems that affect the real lives of real people” and “working on a long-term strategy to change the system (or the-order) that generates those problems”. The point, he added, is that both matters should be addressed “simultaneously, albeit in a different way”.
This difference indicated, among other things, the role of the (liberal) state in this process, which could undoubtedly “choose between helping ordinary people to live better and helping the upper classes to prosper more”, but it was not. Able to change the current order of things. In this regard, on the other hand, he added, the call to build a “civil society” was “equally absurd”, since it could exist only to the extent that states have the capacity to perpetuate it and assume it as their interlocutor to “carry out legitimate activities” by These states are engaging in “indirect (ie non-partisan) policies” against them.
With this, and with the decline of states, civil society necessarily disintegrates. Indeed, this disintegration is exactly what modern liberals regret and secretly celebrate with conservatives. We live in an age of “community”, building defensive groups, each asserting an identity around which to build solidarity and struggling to survive with and against other similar groups.
In view of the foregoing, Wallerstein argued that the ongoing transformation of the global system made it possible to operate effectively at both the “local and global levels.” However, working at the nation-state level had only “limited utility” for short-term or long-term goals, but it does not cover the medium-term, because it is assumed to be an “existing, functioning, and functioning historical system”. We will.” Such a strategy is not easy to implement, because the tactics of such a strategy are necessarily ad hoc and contingent, which is why the immediate future is so muddled.
It must be remembered that Wallerstein was part of a generation of Western intellectuals and academics who had the advantage of extending into the social and human sciences for what Friedrich Engels referred to in the natural sciences by saying that each phenomenon they identified “affects another”. He, in turn, is affected by it; In general, it is the forgetfulness of this movement and this universal interaction that prevents naturalists from perceiving the simplest things clearly.[2]
Until then, the geographical culture of the international system had operated from the idea of national markets negotiating with each other under the tutelage of their states, even if they were in an “unequal” interdependent relationship. This generation had the advantage of examining the world market in its historical development, including the transformations that took place in the organization of the world order that gave them the necessary political and cultural support for their work.[3]
This development has known at least three stages. The first corresponds to the regulation of the world market under the colonial regime, the crisis of which led to the outbreak of the Great War of 1914-1945. This opened the way for the second, in which an international system was created (between states, in fact), the crises of which the article to which we are attached refers. By the mid-1990s, the transition to the third stage of global market regulation was already underway, although the language to express it in all its intricacies was still – and still is – being developed.
This includes, for example, global/glocal pair formation as a simplified – not simplified – alternative to the international/national/local group characteristic of liberal geo-culture. From this process of forming a new geographical culture, the usefulness of re-reading what Wallerstein suggested to us at the conclusion of the 1995 Reflections undoubtedly re-reads:
“Now it is up to all those who have been excluded from the current world order to move forward on all fronts. Their focus is no longer on the easy goal of capturing state power. What they need to do is more complex: ensuring the creation of a new historical order by working together and in same time in a very local and global way. It is difficult but not impossible.”
[1] Emmanuel Wallerstein: “After liberalism?” Excerpts from the book After Liberalism. Twenty-first Century Publishers, Mexico, 1996. [2] “The Role of Labor in the Transformation of Monkey into Man” (1876).https://webs.ucm.es/info/bas/es/marx-eng/oe3/mrxoe308.htm#fn0
[3] In this regard, for example: Braudel, Fernand: The Dynamics of Capitalism (1985). Publisher Alliance. Madrid.rmh / gch
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