Two leading actors in the modern world-system — Donald Trump and Theresa May of England — sound like broken records. They say the same thing each time they talk, knowing full well that their case is extremely weak.

Why have they done this? They have no better choice if they wish to remain leading actors. They are cheating, asserting that they are proposing something possible. In fact, it is the opposite. They are asserting as possible their ability to alter a situation, one that is virtually impossible to change.

More and more people come to understand what is happening. They see that they no longer participate in decisions. They react by withdrawing from participation at all. This withdrawal in turn alters the situation in a way that is not friendly to leading actors.

Why do the leading actors do this? They do this because there is no better alternative.

So, what is the bottom line for all of us? We can at most guess the possibilities, but there is no way we can be absolutely certain of knowing what will happen.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 June 2019

Word Count: 179

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We all want to know what the future portends for us about anything important. We all tend to believe the future will be what the present is. If the polls show we shall make a certain decision, deciding if something looks good now, it will continue to look good as the future goes on. At the same time, it is a well-tested phenomenon we can’t remember decisions more than six months ago. What is a result of combining these two seeming facts? Let me try to explain how a combination works.

An example would be a decision most people are most concerned with — the election of the United States President in 2020. While we think the present is a favorable outlook for Donald Trump, it seems to me that it is more complicated.

Every day and every morning new elements enter the picture and by a small amount the present prediction is less valid. This continues over time. Think of it as a slow train pulling away from the accuracy of our prediction. By the time six months have passed, accuracy is reduced to almost zero.

So, it might be most sensible to start where we were six months ago and emphasize new things! And say that this predicts what will happen next. We are, therefore, urged to learn what it was six months ago. How can we do that?

There is first our memory of it, and second public evidence of it taken six months ago. If things favored Trump six months ago, he will be reelected. If things were less good six months ago, he will not be reelected.

How good are our assessments of whatever we felt six months ago? Six months for whom? Voting in the state of Oregon is completed and nothing that has happened since then can affect those votes.

There are other states with different rules about when a vote is taken in their state or at a local level. So, to know what people felt six months ago we have to combine an estimate of six months ago for different groups of people. This is, of course, a very difficult mathematical exercise and it is not likely people will do it well.

In addition, in the United States the vote is taken in a body called the Electoral College. This Electoral College is not in the computer but something that actually meets. When it meets, most electors have made promises how they would vote. They are not legally required to keep those promises. Some have violated them in the past and others may do so in the future. Now we realize what a hard time it is to predict today the vote in the Electoral College tomorrow. Some will then say the whole thing is not worth trying to see what will happen.

How do they then predict? Some do it by guesswork; some give up entirely. How can we know what will happen? Is there any way? It seems doubtful.

We may then enter a world totally cynical in which everyone does what they feel like doing.

So, decisive moment! But also decisive moment? There may not be a decisive moment.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 May 2019
Word Count: 530
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For a worldwide struggle to capture the surplus-value there is always a choice.

One can give priority to short-term gains. Or one can give priority to middle turn gains. One cannot do both.

Whoever seeks short-term gains will always win out in the short-run. It is the road of apparent selfishness. Pursue one’s own gains, no matter what happens to the others.

However, after a few years, the short-turn gains are exhausted. Preferences shift. Suddenly, it is middle term gains as a result of class struggle that matters.

Now, the selfish are the losers, the sacrifices rewarded.

Because we are in the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy, there are constant fluctuations. We go back and forth between the short-term and the middle-run as the only thing that matters.

At the moment, a major actor, President Trump, has opted for a short-run priority. It looks good for him.

But he and others will soon have to shift for a middle-run emphasis.

It will soon look bad for him.

Since what he cares about is re-election in 2020, the timing of the shifts is crucial, but also unpredictable.

Those interested in winning the class struggle should concentrate on that struggle as the only sensible option.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 April 2019

Word Count: 204

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Two of my regular readers sent me indications that I was not clear in my explanation of what I was talking about when I spoke of unacceptable compromises.

I shall attempt to answer their queries and objections. Let me start by reproducing what they sent me.

The first was a query from Alan Maki who had one concern which was the word: “compromise“. I reproduce it here: “What are you talking about compromising on?”

The second email was from Mike Miller whose query was much longer.

Let me respond to each of them. I know that the author of this query was an activist in the Ontario Labour Party and devoted much energy to obtaining the victory of the Labour Party, which he saw as a rejection of the parties of no change. They rotated between the Center Left and a Center Right version of changeless policies. Analytically my correspondent interpreted the electoral victory of the Labour Party as a demand for significant change.

Mike Miller said that the successful creation of a strong union called The International longshore and Warehouse Union ( ILWU) over the past twenty or fifty years, despite all the attempts to crush it, is evidence that change is possible.

The victory of the Ontario Labour Party and the ability of the ILWU to beat back all attempts to crush it are evidence that change is possible and cannot be called unacceptable.

Both objections miss the point. I do not deny that the electoral victory of the Labour Party was a great achievement. I salute it and do so publicly as a wonderful achievement. I do not deny that the ability of the ILWU to resist all the many attempts to crush it is a great achievement. I salute it.

This is precisely the point why these  compromises are unacceptable. Not everybody who lives in Ontario, Canada, will benefit by the achievement of the electoral victory of the Labour Party. There will be losers. There are those who are outside this party’s structure in Ontario or outside any party structure whatsoever. They gain nothing and may lose something by the victory of the Ontario Labour Party.

I do not deny that the ability of the ILWU to beat back all the many attempts to crush it was a great achievement. Nonetheless it is unacceptable because persons who are not members of the ILWU are excluded from its benefits and therefore are not included in the favorable results of the ILWU.

So, I repeat, every achievement involves militancy, but also short-run compromises as can be seen by reading the history of the ILWU (see in the network for the item entitled The ILWU Story).

The achievements in both cases were enormous. The benefits were and will be enormous. But precisely for this reason benefits have to be assessed against the balance of the exclusions that the benefits brought.

Following the situation in each case shows that to achieve what they did achieve involved compromises. This may be the benefits of the struggle, but the necessary compromises were part of the achievement and those necessary compromises made possible the achievements that are unacceptable because they exclude others.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 March 2019
Word Count: 529
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Every compromise has losers.

Every compromise has dissenters.

Every compromise includes a betrayal. Yet no political struggle can end without a compromise. Compromises do not last forever and often only briefly. Yet there exists no alternative to making them in the short run.

In the short run we are all seeking to minimize the pain. Minimizing the pain requires a compromise so that assistance to those who need it can be given. But the compromise does not solve any problem in the long run. So, in the middle run (more than three years) we have to pursue a solution without compromise. It is all a matter of timing – the very short run versus the middle run.

If we don’t compromise in the short run, we hurt the people who are weakest. If we do compromise in the middle run, we hurt the people who are weakest. It’s an impossible game which we all have to play.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 March 2019
Word Count: 156
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Class struggles are eternal, but how they are fought depends on the ongoing state of the world-system in which they are located.

World-systems have three temporalities. They come into existence and this needs to be explained. Secondly, they are stabilized structures and operate according to the rules on which they are founded. And thirdly, the rules by which they maintain their relative stability cease to work effectively and they enter a structural crisis.

We have been living in the modern world-system, which is a capitalist world-system. We are presently in the third stage of its existence, which is that of structural crisis.

During the previous phase, that of stabilized structures or normality, there was a grand debate within the left about how one could achieve the objective of destroying capitalism as a system. This debate occurred both within movements created by the working class or proletariat (such as trade-unions or social-democratic parties) and within nationalist parties or national-liberation movements.

Each side of this grand debate believed that its strategy and its alone could succeed. In fact, while each side created zones in which it seemed to succeed, neither did. The most dramatic examples of presumed success stories that turned out to be unable to avoid the pull to a return to normality was the collapse of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the collapse of the Maoist cultural revolution on the other.

The turning point was the world-revolution of 1968, which was marked by three features: It was a world-revolution in that analogous events occurred throughout the world-system. They all rejected both the state-oriented strategy and the transformative cultural strategy. It was a matter they said that was not either/or but rather both/and.

Finally, the world-revolution of 1968 also failed. It did however bring to an end the hegemony of centrist liberalism and its power to tame both the left and the right, which were liberated to return to the struggle as independent actors.

At first, the resurrected right seemed to prevail. It instituted the Washington Consensus and launched the slogan of TINA (or there is no alternative). But income and social inequality became so extreme that the left rebounded and constrained the ability of the United States to maintain or restore its dominance.

The return of the left to a premier role also came to a swift end. And thus began a process of wild swings, a defining feature of a structural crisis. In a structural crisis, the left needs to pursue a policy of seeking in the very short run both state power in order to minimize the pain for the lower 99 percent of the population AND in the middle run to pursue a cultural transformation of everyone.

These seemingly contradictory pursuits are very disconcerting. They are however the only way to pursue the class struggle in the remaining years of the structural crisis. If we can do it, we can win. If not, we shall lose.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2019
Word Count: 492
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When the United Nations proclaimed its Charter in 1945, it included therein a special privilege for five member states:  the power of the veto in its Security Council. Why these five states? There was a different reason for each of the five. No matter. The Big Five – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the U.S.S.R. (now Russia), and China – still have this privilege today, and are unlikely to lose it in the foreseeable future.

But some things have changed fundamentally since 1945. Then the United States was unquestionably the strongest of the five, and largely dominated world political decision-making. This is no longer true. The United States has been in continual geopolitical decline since at least 1970. China, so relatively weak in 1945, has been in significant ascension. In particular, the leaders of the United States (and both the United Kingdom and France) are personally obliged to struggle to stay in power, whereas the leaders of China and Russia seem to worry less about their control of internal political decision-making.

This turnabout in internal stability has one major consequence. Precisely because the leaders of the three are under so much pressure, they concentrate their energies on working hard to reverse their weakness. They begin a largely futile game of unpredictable shifts in policy. And this leads most political leaders and analysts to ask the question: What will they do next?

The eyes of the world are especially focused on Donald Trump – a person without principle, extremely volatile, and personally mean and indifferent to the suffering he causes. What will he do next? No one really knows. The only thing about which we can be sure is that he will not give up or admit in any way that he was wrong in what he did at one point or another. This makes him simultaneously very weak and very dangerous. He is so arrogant that he believes his defeats are victories because they keep him on top of the media space.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 February 2019
Word Count: 331
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It was I believe Colin Powell who said that sending in troops in a dispute was easy, but extracting them almost impossible.

The present situation in the Middle East illustrates this axiom perfectly.  President Trump, like his predecessors, promised to withdraw U.S troops from Syria. And he renewed this promise just recently. Then he found, again like his predecessors, that fulfilling his promise aroused so much opposition, from all political quarters, that he had to renege on the promise.  He did this by redefining how long it might be before he actually withdraws the troops.

If one asks someone whether or not troops should be withdrawn from Syria, the answer depends on how far back they define the onset of the current situation.

For some it is a very short time, and for others an extremely long time. For me the origin of the situation in which we are all embroiled at present is at least several centuries ago. The United States is in the Middle East as part of a general imperialist policy – everywhere in the world including the Middle East.

One cannot understand the position of various states and multiple non-state actors otherwise than seeing that they represent different ways of trying to fight against imperialist intrusions into their affairs.

The only way the United States can extract itself is to renounce imperialist policies. Doing this will be extremely painful not only for the United States but for almost everyone living in the region. There is no way to avoid this. The pain will be severe and immediate. But this is the least painful thing to do. Unless we bite the bullet and do this, the pain will never end. The choices will always be bad.

Is it conceivable that imperialists cease being imperialist? Probably not. Is it possible that the multiple victims welcome the withdrawal of imperialist powers even if their immediate situation becomes worse as a result? Possibly.

There is no good choice, no non-painful choice, only a long-run adjustment to a more equitable situation.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2019 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 January 2019
Word Count: 339
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