30 Quotes by Immanuel Wallerstein

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.

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.

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.

Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.

This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.

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.

When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.

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.