The most fluid arena in the modern world-system, which is in structural crisis, is arguably the geopolitical arena. No country comes even near to dominating this arena. The last hegemonic power, the United States, has long acted like a helpless giant. It is able to destroy but not to control the situation. It still proclaims rules that others are expected to follow, but it can be and is ignored.

There is now a long list of countries that act as they deem fit despite pressures from other countries to perform in specified ways. A look around the globe will readily confirm the inability of the United States to get its way.

The two countries other than the United States that have the strongest military power are Russia and China. Once, they had to move carefully to avoid the reprimand of the United States. The cold-war rhetoric described two competing geopolitical camps. Reality was different. The rhetoric simply masked the relative effectiveness of U.S. hegemony.

Now it is virtually the other way around. The United States has to move carefully vis-à-vis Russia and China to avoid losing all ability to obtain their co-operation on the geopolitical priorities of the United States.

Look next at the so-called strongest allies of the United States. We can quibble about which one is the “closest” ally, or had been for a long while. Take your pick between Great Britain and Israel or even, some would say, Saudi Arabia. Or make a list of erstwhile reliable partners of the United States, such as Japan and South Korea, Canada, Brazil, and Germany. Call them “number two’s.”

Now look at the behavior of all these countries in the last twenty years. I say “twenty” because the new reality predates the regime of Donald Trump, although he has undoubtedly worsened the ability of the United States to get its way.

Take the situation on the Korean peninsula. The United States wants North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons. This is a regularly repeated objective of the United States. This was true when Bush and Obama were president. It has continued to be true with Trump. The difference is the mode of seeking to achieve this objective. Previously, U.S. actions utilized a degree of diplomacy in addition to sanctions. This reflected the understanding that too many U.S. public threats were self-defeating. Trump believes the opposite. He sees the public threats as the basic weapon in his armory.

However, Trump has different days. On day one he menaces North Korea with devastation. But on day two he makes his primary target Japan and South Korea. Trump says they are providing insufficient financial support for the costs deriving from a continuing armed U.S. presence there. So, in the to and fro between the two U.S. positions, neither Japan nor South Korea have the sense that they are sure to be protected.

Japan and South Korea have dealt with their fears and uncertainty in opposite ways. The current Japanese regime seeks to secure U.S. guarantees by offering total public support of the (shifting) U.S. tactics. It hopes thereby to please the United States sufficiently that Japan will receive the guarantees it wants to have.

The current South Korean regime is using a quite different tactic. It is pursuing very openly closer diplomatic relations with North Korea, very much against U.S. wishes. It hopes thereby to please the North Korean regime sufficiently that North Korea will respond by agreeing not to escalate the conflict.

Whether either of these tactical approaches will stabilize the U.S. position is totally unsure. What is sure is that the United States is not in command. Both Japan and South Korea are quietly pursuing nuclear armaments to strengthen their position since they cannot know what the next day will bring on the U.S. front. The fluidity of the U.S. position weakens further U.S. power because of the reactions it generates.

Or take the even more knotty situation in the so-called Islamic world going from the Maghreb to Indonesia, and particularly in Syria. Each major power in the region (or dealing with the region) has a different prime “enemy” (or enemies). For Saudi Arabia and Israel, it is at the moment Iran. For Iran it is the United States. For Egypt it is the Muslim Brotherhood. For Turkey it is the Kurds. For the Iraqi regime, it is the Sunnis. For Italy, it is Al Qaeda, which is making it impossible to control the flow of migrants. And so on.

How about for the United States? Who knows? That is the nub of fear for everyone else. The United States seems at the moment to have two quite different priorities. On day one, it is North Korean acquiescence with U.S. imperatives. On day two it is ending U.S. involvement in the East Asian region, or at least reducing its financial outlays. As a result, it is increasingly ignored.

We could draw similar pictures for other regions or sub-regions of the world. The key lesson to draw is that the decline of the United States has not been followed by another hegemon. It has simply folded into the overall chaotic zigzagging, the fluidity of which we spoke.

This of course is the great danger. Nuclear accidents, or mistakes, or folly suddenly become what is on top of everyone’s mind, and especially that of the world’s armed forces. How to deal with this danger is the most meaningful short-term geopolitical debate.

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 ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 February 2018
Word Count: 907
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[REVISED: The following is the revised and corrected Feb 1, 2018 commentary.]

Politicians everywhere have hidden parts of their political and personal itinerary. Sometimes the exposing of such “secrets” causes disillusionment and/or reduced support of voters who had supported this person. What varies is the extent to which the politicians can keep such secrets obscure.

The recently elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has managed maintaining the obscurity better than most. It is therefore useful to try to answer the question of who he (really) is. For one thing, there is a lot of disagreement about the answer. This difference is not only one between supporters and antagonists but also within each of the two.

What do we know about his background? He studied at two of France’s elite institutions — Sciences Po and the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) — where he performed brilliantly.

Upon graduation, he served the government as an Inspecteur Générale des Finances. He then moved to the private sphere, obtaining a post as a banker at Rothschild & Cie. At the time, he was a member of the Socialist Party, about to govern France with François Hollande in 2009. This was the very moment that he changed his party affiliation to Independent.

When Manuel Valls, the leader of the most “centrist” faction of the Socialist Party, formed in 2016 his second, more conservative cabinet, he recruited Macron to be his Minister of Economy. Macron’s task was to implement a neoclassical turn in France’s governmental policies. Macron (and Valls) were only partially successful.

The presidential elections of 2017 were approaching. Valls sought the candidacy of the Socialist Party. Macron did not support him but instead created his own party structure. He named it En Marche!, which means “going forward” but also replicated Macron’s initials (EM).

Support for the Socialist Party had by then diminished severely, largely because of the acute unpopularity of François Hollande. The candidate of the other mainstream party, the center-right Les Républicains was François Fillon, who had surprisingly won his party’s nomination, using as his main argument his comparative moral rectitude.

The candidate of the far right National Front party, Marine LePen, had succeeded in making the party adopt more “respectable” positions at the cost of breaking publicly with Jean-Marie LePen, the founder of the party and her father.

It seemed at first that the two candidates who would survive the multi-candidacy first round were Fillon and LePen, which would turn the second dual-candidate round into a contest between the center-right and the far right. Such a choice was for many voters very unpalatable and unacceptable.

Suddenly all changed. Fillon himself became embroiled in a scandal, but refused to pull out in order to allow his party to name another candidate. This subsequent decline of support for Fillon allowed Macron to assert himself as the only candidate who could defeat Marine LePen in the second round.

Macron presented his party as neither left nor right, breaking with the left-right pattern that had prevailed for a century in both elections and governing. It worked. On the first round, Macron obtained 24% of the vote and LePen 21 percent. On the second round with only two candidates, Macron won with 65% of the vote.

In his campaign, Macron used one other major argument derived from the traditions of the Socialist Party. The socialists had always been the prime defender of laicité (somewhat equivalent to secularism) against the traditions of the Right parties, whose base was strongly constituted by Catholic voters. Macron attacked first Fillon and then LePen as seeking to enact socially conservative positions on questions such as abortion, gay rights, et cetera.

As soon as he assumed office however, Macron sought to attract major politicians from the two mainstream parties as well as ecologists and self-defined centrists. He clearly hoped this would destroy the future prospects of the two mainstream parties and consolidate his own and his party’s dominance of French politics for decades to come.

Now that he is entering the second year of his regime, what can we say about who he is? He is undoubtedly a person of the Right on all economic matters. He has been the first politician able to enact major revisions to France’s welfare state structures. When Hollande tried a much milder version of such reforms, half of France was in the street, and the proposals were partially withdrawn. When Macron did it, no such reaction occurred. In particular, the trade unions were unable to mobilize their members against Macron as they had against Hollande.

Macron has shown that he is extremely ambitious on a world scale as well. While Hollande was unable to maintain France’s position as an equal ally of the France-Germany controlling duo of European politics, Macron has moved into the void created by Germany’s now much weaker position. Nor has he stopped there. He has challenged the hegemonic pretensions of the United States without embracing an openly anti-American stance.

Nonetheless, he has sought to make France a significant actor in the Pacific arena, in Africa and the Middle East, and even in Latin America. It seems that what he is offering is a more palatable version of U.S. world policies rather than offering something more progressive.

As for social issues, Macron has shown himself to be quite prudent. Yes, he supports the causes favored by the Left but he is careful not to go too far too fast. He does not wish to arouse Catholic voters to engage in massive street protests.

The bottom line for me is that France now has the shrewdest, most efficacious Right politician in power in modern history. One can think of others who wanted to create a similar package of policies but they were not able to put together the coalition that permitted it. No doubt, Macron was helped by the chaotic state of the world-system. But it should be recognized how effectively he has implemented his conservative objectives.

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 ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 February 2018
Word Count: 977
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The New York Times has been suggesting that major bondholders — both national and private banks — are discreetly reducing their bond holdings, out of a fear of nominal inflation. How discreet can it be if it is discussed in The New York Times?

Everyone is hoping that no one panics and sells too rapidly. And if someone does that they do it one mega-instant after my discreet withdrawals. Of course, no one wants to withdraw too soon — and not too late. So, when one arrives at a pre-panic moment, no one can be sure, which more or less guarantees the sudden collapse of the bond market.

We know we’re in a pre-panic moment when we are discussing it. But why now and not before? Because so much paper money has been earned in runaway market profits based on no real increase in surplus-value that the market has caught up with the bond market, and therefore one discreetly withdraws from the bond market.

In addition, the paid workers seek higher wages, everywhere. So many workers have been forced out of the labor market that there is now a labor-available shortage. And this makes bonds still a safe haven. Confusion, confusion!

Everyone becomes more protective — of self, of country. And it is self-reinforcing. Even countries using strong anti-protectionist rhetoric like Canada practice it nonetheless or suffer internal political loss.

All this is what happens in a structural crisis of he world-system, in which wild swings of everything is the reality. Pre-panics are one of these wild swings.

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 ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 January 2018
Word Count: 290
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I was going to write either about the elections in Catalonia, or about debates in Australia on what they should do as a result of U.S.-Chinese rivalries in southeast Asia. I consider both topics of compelling importance for the immediate future of our capitalist world-system. But what everyone wants to discuss, it seems, is Mr. Trump — what will he say next, and does it matter?

The question people are asking, friends and foes, is “Can he last?” I didn’t used to think so, but now I do, and here’s why. What is it we know about the present situation? Trump is vastly unpopular and his poll ratings, already extremely low, may well go even lower soon.

Trump claims that the low poll ratings are fake news. And he even seems to believe this himself. Trump acts to satisfy his ego. He measures his success by his ability to stay in office now, win re-election in 2020, and stay in office until 2024.

This is what I think are his tactics. First, he wants to stay in the news constantly, even if the news is negative news. Notice that this commentary shows that he has accomplished that with me. One of the few perceptive things Trump has said is that many newspaper outlets themselves survive because they speak of him. Otherwise, Trump says, many of them would go bankrupt.

Staying in the news is however not enough. Trump must continue to polarize ever more the U.S. and world public opinion arenas. The more polarized U.S. residents and voters are the safer he is. He is threatened by a possible finding by a grand jury that he solicited and received Russian assistance in his election in 2016. He denies this of course. But his minions also attack viciously whoever purports to give evidence that he has done something illegal. Never admit even the least little thing is their motto. Do anything one needs to do in order to deny the credibility of critics.

Could Trump be impeached? As time goes on, it seems more and more unlikely. And even if the House of Representatives were to vote by majority for impeachment, this merely sends the issue to the U.S. Senate . There it requires a two-thirds vote to convict. Could he be denied a Republican candidacy in 2020? This seems even more implausible, as Trump would run as an independent and this would almost certainly guarantee a Democratic victory.

The voting outcome of an anti-Trump move would be the result of two factors. His so-called core of superloyalists would refuse to support any politicians who would try to oust Trump. At the same time, his “soft” supporters might also abstain from voting pro-Trump because of their discomfort with his “extreme” positions. The gainers would obviously be the Democrats. Some analysts therefore foresee a so-called wave election — Democratic victories across the board.

The threat of a Democratic sweep tends to reunite the Republicans and somewhat to divide the Democrats who are debating their own tactics. The crucial thing to remember is that Trump would never go quietly — Trump Thump! He will fight like a wounded tiger to the end. He will do anything however outrageous it be if it will aid his cause. This then is his personal strength. I myself do not think a Trump re-election would be so disastrous. I believe, as do many, that a President Pence would be even worse for progressive causes than a President Trump — just less thump.

In the rest of the world, Trump is powerless. However, this very fact makes him highly dangerous. As he moves from total ignorance of the world to understanding a little, he makes more and more mistakes. He thus loses more and more his ability — and consequently, that of any future U.S. president — to win any diplomatic advantage. But he is dangerous because he controls the launching of U.S. nuclear weapons with an irrepressible penchant to utter provocative threats, while not being ready really to carry them out.

We are, I’m afraid, stuck with Trump Thump. But that doesn’t at all mean that we are not able to win some victories for progressive causes. It is on what we can do and not on what Trump can do that we should be concentrating.

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 ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 January 2018
Word Count: 712
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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The central difficulty for left social movements is determining electoral tactics that will enable them to win both in the short run and in the middle run. On the surface, it seems that winning in the short run conflicts with winning in the middle run.

In the short run, the primary objective of a left movement must be to defend the urgent needs for survival of all the so-called 99% of the population, but especially those of the poorest strata. In order to do this, they have to control state institutions at all levels. This means participating in elections.

In all those places where electoral institutions permit some transfer of power from one set of elected officials to an opposing one, the obvious need of left movements is to win such elections. Winning such elections can, however, disable the ability of left movements to win the middle-run battle concerning the fundamental choice of which kind of system (or systems) will win out in the structural crisis of our existing capitalist world-system. The way to avoid this is never to engage in electoral politics.

Engaging in elections has two negative effects on left social movements. It distracts them from organizing for the battle to win the middle run. And it disillusions members who see it as selling out because they are being called upon to vote for persons who are not committed to transforming the world-system.

Is there any set of electoral tactics that makes it possible to escape these consequences? I think there may be. The first and in a sense the easiest thing to do is to discuss at length within the left movement the difference between the short-run and middle-run temporality and the place of electoral tactics in the struggle.

Just discussing this issue within the left social movement would help holding the left movement together and restoring mutual confidence. The discussion should be about the two greatest dangers. In the short run, winning elections requires the votes of many who have no interest whatsoever in transforming the world. These persons will demand a price for their support.

How big a price will vary. How minimal a payment can be made by the left social movement will vary as well. Each electoral battle is different.

The other danger is that of disillusionment. Again, each situation varies. But the way to combat disillusionment is always to avoid illusions. National or local victories should of course be celebrated. But they should never be treated as more than stopgap victories aimed at protecting the poorest strata.

I believe it is possible for left social movements to be successful at navigating the dangerous shoals of electoral politics. By neither embracing nor refusing definitively electoral politics, they may find that winning in the short run actually can train members for the middle-run battle.

In that way, left social movements might actually do both at the same time — win the short-run and the middle-run battles. Indeed, far from conflicting with each other, this is the only way the left social movement can succeed in either battle.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 December 2017
Word Count: 512
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Elections in the United States have one feature that almost no other country shares. They largely occur on mandatory fixed dates. Presidential elections are every four years. Senatorial elections are staggered. One-third of them occur every two years. Both of these elections occur in years ending in an even numeral. Gubernatorial elections tend to occur in the same even years. Local elections are more varied but very many also occur in the even years.

As a result, the so-called off-year elections (that is, years ending in an odd numeral) tend to be considered less important by the national parties. And voters participate at a far lower rate than in the even-year elections

The year 2017 was unusual in two respects. Because of the extremely strong feelings, pro and con, about President Donald Trump, even very local elections seemed to be, at least in part, a referendum on him and what he has achieved in his first year in office. And, secondly, probably because of this, the rate of voter participation was exceptionally high.

The results are straightforward. The Democrats swept the elections. The word sweep is not an exaggeration. They won the two gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and by very large margins. They won special elections for vacant seats in the House of Representatives in what had been considered “safe” seats for the Republicans. They considerably strengthened their position in state-level legislatures and mayoralty elections. If the 2018 elections were held today, the Democrats would have a good chance of getting a majority in both houses of the U.S. Congress.

So, what does this mean? Everyone seems to be writing about this. And the explanations offered vary widely. But most pundits and politicians are arguing that prospects look very good for the Democrats in the congressional elections of 2018 and even the presidential election of 2020. It is clear that Republican leaders are very worried and Democratic leaders very encouraged. Should they be?

The first caution is that the 2018 elections are not being held today but a year from now. In the very volatile situation in the United States and worldwide, a lot can happen in a year. There are a number of obvious uncertainties. The most important: Will the U.S. Congress pass a tax reform bill? Will there be any deaths (or far less likely, any resignations) in the U.S. Supreme Court? Will there be a regional war in Afghanistan between Saudi Arabia (or its proxies) and Iran (or its proxies)? Will Trump sabotage the agreement with Iran? Will one side or the other trigger the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsula.

These uncertainties certainly don’t seem minor, at least for me. Given this caution, how should we interpret what happened in the U.S. 2017 elections? I agree with the majority of analysts that the elections showed an anti-Trumpist mood, such that candidates seen as supporting Trump were at a distinct disadvantage.

Trump was doubtless the big loser of the 2017 elections. I think even Trump realizes that. He just thinks he can reverse this mood by the time of the 2018 elections. He thinks he can do this by passing some tax reform bill, almost any reform bill, by the end of this calendar year. Doing this would demonstrate that he accomplished something promised and important. In addition, he thinks he can improve radically the geopolitical position of the United States by a combination of bluster about actions and inaction in reality.

I doubt myself that a tax reform bill will in fact be passed because of the deep divisions among three (not two) groups of Republican congressional legislators: the business-oriented faction, the small government and reduced debt faction, and the nationalist protectionist xenophobes. Of course, whatever the outcome of these divisions, should they manage to pass a compromise bill, that bill will be terrible. But I am only discussing here the likelihood of their passing any kind of bill.

The geopolitical issues are more worrisome. Trump is fundamentally unable to accept the reality of the decline of U.S. power and the harsh limits this puts on his personal attempts to control the situation. Therefore, so-called accidents are a real possibility, a terrifying one.

The tactics of both mainstream U.S. parties facing this situation are at the moment unsure. In 2016, the Republicans had the wind behind their sails and the Democrats were simply inept. Now it’s the other way around. The Democrats have the wind behind them and the Republicans don’t seem to know what to do about it.

The big question, I think, is whether the Democrats can remain as united as they are at the moment. They have been moving leftward for several months now. But there are limits to how far the centrist faction, long dominant, is ready to go. And members of the “leftward” faction (that Bernie Sanders incarnated in 2016) are organizing to seize their chance and press further their control of the party.

The biggest hope for the Democrats is that the Republicans will fail to pass a tax reform bill. This will not only shatter further the spirits of all factions of the Republican Party but at the same time maintain the unity of the Democrats. Voters will see the Democrats as having stopped the very destructive path of the Republicans. They will have “minimized the pain” (as I like to say), responding to the needs of all the many factions of the Democrats that made the 2017 elections such a success.

Doing this will allow the left forces in the United States to organize for the real battle, the middle-run struggle about the nature of our future post-capitalist world-system. What then shall we conclude about the meaning of the 2017 elections? It is in fact too early to tell. We’ll see this more clearly in two to three months from now.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 November 2017
Word Count: 978
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Very often, when I write about the structural crisis of the modern world-system, and therefore of capitalism as an historical system, I receive objections saying that I have neglected the strength of Chinese economic growth and its ability to serve as an economic replacement for the clearly waning strength of the United States plus western Europe, the so-called North.

This is a perfectly reasonable argument, but one that misses the fundamental difficulties of the existing historical system. In addition, it paints a far rosier picture of China’s realities than is justified by a closer look. Let me address this question then in two parts — one, the historical development of the world-system as a whole, and two, the empirical situation of China at the present time.

The analysis of what I call the structural crisis of the modern world-system is one that I have made many times, in these commentaries and in my other writings. It is nonetheless worth repeating in condensed form. This is all the more necessary in that even persons who say that they are very sympathetic to the concept of structural crisis nonetheless seem in practice resistant to accept the idea of a demise of capitalism, however strong the case.

There are a number of elements of the argument to put together. One is the assertion that all systems (whatever their scope and without exception) have lives and cannot be eternal. The explanation of this eventual demise of any system is that systems operate with both cyclical rhythms and secular trends.

Cyclical rhythms refer to the constant swings away from and back to moving equilibria, a perfectly normal reality. When however various phenomena expand according to their systemic rules and then contract, they do not return after contracting exactly to where they were before the upward cyclical shift. They return instead to a somewhat higher point. This is the result of resistance to the loss of gains achieved in the upward phase.

It follows that their curve over the long run is upward. This is what we mean by a secular trend. If one measures this activity on the ordinate, or y-axis of the graph, one sees that over time they approach an asymptote of 100 percent, which cannot be crossed. It seems that when important factors reach an earlier point of about 80% on the ordinate, they begin to waver erratically.

When cyclical curves arrive at this point, they cease utilizing the so-called normal means of resolving the constant strains in the functioning of the system and enter, therefore, into a structural crisis of the system.

A structural crisis is chaotic. This means that instead of the normal standard set of combinations or alliances that were previously used to maintain the stability of the system, they constantly shift these alliances in search of short-term gains. This only makes the situation worse. We notice here a paradox — the certainty of the end of the existing system and the intrinsic uncertainty of what will eventually replace it and create thereby a new system (or new systems) to stabilize realities.

During the longish period of structural crisis, we observe a bifurcation between two alternative modes of resolving the crisis — one by replacing it with a different system that somehow preserves the essential elements of the dying system and one that transforms it radically.

Concretely, in our present capitalist system, there are those who seek to found a non-capitalist system that nonetheless maintains capitalism’s worst features: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. And there are those who wish to establish a system that is relatively democratic and egalitarian, a type of historical system that has never existed before. We are in the midst of this political battle.

Now, let us look at China’s role in what is going on. In terms of the present system, China seems to be gaining much advantage. To argue that this means the continuing functioning of capitalism as a system is basically to (re)assert the invalid point that systems are eternal and that China is replacing the United States in the same way as the United States replaced Great Britain as the hegemonic power. Were this true, in another 20-30 years China (or perhaps northeast Asia) would be able to set its rules for the capitalist world-system.

But is this really happening? First of all, China’s economic edge, while still greater than that of the North, has been declining significantly. And this decline may well amplify soon, as political resistance to China’s attempts to control neighboring countries and entice (that is, buy) the support of faraway countries grows, which seems to be occurring.

Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.

The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge of China.

In addition, there have been, and will continue to be, wild swings in geopolitical alliances. In a sense, the key zones are not in the North, but in areas such as Russia, India, Iran, Turkey, and southeastern Europe, all of them pursuing their own roles by a game of swiftly and repeatedly changing sides. The bottom line is that, though China plays a very big role in the short run, it is not as big a role as China would wish and that some in the rest of the world-system fear. It is not possible for China to stop the disintegration of the capitalist system. It can only try to secure its place in a future world-system.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 November 2017
Word Count: 966
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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According to neoclassical economic theorizing, the relation between wages and jobs is a simple one. When there’s not enough demand for work, wages suffer. Workers compete against each other to get a job. But when there’s high demand for work, wages go up. Employers compete against each other to get the now scarce work force. This shifting cycle is said to maintain the smooth functioning of the free market system, guaranteeing a constant swing back to a moving equilibrium.

What has happened is that this cyclical process isn’t working that way anymore, and for pundits and academics this is seen as a big puzzle to explain. The explanations are varied and multiple. What seems to be at their heart is to suggest that there is a new normal. But why, and how does it work? In the October 8 issue of the New York Times, the lead article in the Sunday Business section had the following headline: “Plenty of Work, Not Enough Pay: Even as job markets tighten in major economies, low unemployment is failing to spur robust salary gains.”

We are offered the explanation of an increase in temporary or part-time workers, plus robots. This makes the employer, it is argued, less dependent on full-time workers. Unions are weaker, and workers find it more difficult to fight employers. All of this is of course true. But why now and not before?

One relatively new argument is that of the vanishing worker. But how can workers vanish? What can this possibly mean? It seems that more and more workers are dropping out of seeking employment entirely. Perhaps they have run out of a safety net or accumulated savings. They have become homeless, or druggies, or both. But they didn’t just drop out, as though this were their choice. They were pushed out, which has a double advantage for producers. They do not need to invest (via taxes or otherwise) in social protection. And they instill fear in those workers still looking for employment that they too could be pushed out.

Again, why now and not before? Before, whenever that is, was during the normal functioning of the modern world-system. Capitalists needed these cycles to work properly with maximum long-term increase in surplus-value. But suppose the employers know, cognitively or intuitively, that capitalism is in a structural crisis, and therefore is moribund. What might they then do?

If they don’t need to worry about effective demand to sustain the system, then they might as well get what they can for as long as they can. They would become entirely oriented to the very short-run. They would seek simply to increase returns on the stock market, without a thought for the morrow. Is this not what is happening now throughout the richer nations and even among weaker ones?

Of course this cannot last. That is why the fluctuations are so great, the chaos so deep. And a few of them, the shrewdest capitalists no doubt, are concentrating on winning the battle of the middle-run to determine the nature of the future world-system (or systems) that we shall construct. We are not seeing a new normal. We are witnessing a transitory reality.

So, what is the lesson for those of us who worry about the “vanishing” workers? Quite clearly we must struggle to defend whatever protection they still have. We must, as I like to say, work to minimize the pain. But at the same time we must also struggle to win the intellectual, moral, and political battle of the middle-run. Only a strategy that combines the struggle of the short-run with the struggle of the middle-run has a chance of preserving the possibility of that better world that is really possible, but not at all inevitable.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 October 2017

Word Count: 624

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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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Donald Trump spent much of his speech to the United Nations asserting that he was elected to defend U.S. sovereignty. He said that every other member state was also seeking to defend its sovereignty. What did he mean by this?

There is probably no other word in the public vocabulary of both political leaders and scholarly analysts that have as many conflicting meanings and usages as “sovereignty.” The only other one that comes close in confusion is “liberalism.” It is therefore useful to trace a little of the history of the term.

One doesn’t find the term used before the creation of the modern world-system in the long sixteenth century. This was the time when heads of certain states (notably England, France, and Spain) proclaimed the doctrine of absolute monarchies. They insisted that the monarch was “absolved” of challenge by any person or institution. This was of course a claim, not a description of reality.

What these monarchs were trying to establish was the sovereignty of their states. Sovereignty for them meant that no power outside their state had the right to interfere in their state’s decisions. It also meant that no power within the state could fail to carry out the decisions of the state. The double orientation (external and internal) was crucial to the concept.

Simply asserting sovereignty was obviously not enough. The state had to implement these claims. No state was then or has ever been fully sovereign, not even the most powerful. But stronger states did and do better than less powerful ones.

When we call some states hegemonic in the modern world-system, we mean in reality that they can indeed interfere in the internal affairs of other states. And they can indeed maintain internal unity. They do not face significant institutional resistances, much less secessionist movements.

The United States was a hegemonic power more or less between 1945 and 1970. It got its way in the world-system 95% of the time on 95% of the issues. Another term to describe this is to say the United States was “imperialist.” Imperialism is a negative term and a hegemonic power can succeed in largely banning its use.

As hegemony declines, imperialism as a term comes into larger use. So does sovereignty. Less powerful countries assert their rights as sovereign powers to fight against imperial powers. So Trump was right in the sense that many, perhaps most, of the members of the United Nations today defend publicly their sovereignty.

When Trump asserts U.S. sovereignty, it is a sign of weakness. It is precisely because the U.S. is a hegemon in acute decline that he has to resort to using the myth of sovereignty and rejecting the idea that supra-national institutions can have any say in U.S. policies. When a Baltic state asserts its sovereignty, it is demanding support against what it sees as Russia’s reassertion of its authority. And when China asserts its sovereignty, it is seeking to expand its decision-making power into new areas.

Secessionist movements force us all to confront our usage. Catalonia is holding a referendum on its right to sovereign independence. Spain says that such a referendum violates Spanish sovereignty. In the situation of directly opposed claims, everyone has to decide which claim is more legitimate. Sometimes this can be settled without violence. This was the case, for example, when Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia. And sometimes there is civil war. But since no secession ever eliminates all subcategory differences within a state, the right to secession must stop somewhere.

The point I am trying to make is that sovereignty is a myth, one that we all can use, and one that has very different consequences in different moments of the world-system. Our moral judgment depends on the totality of consequences and not on the myth of sovereignty. When Trump uses the term, it has reactionary implications. When others use it, it may have progressive implications. The term itself tells us nothing.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 October 2017
Word Count: 657
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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Are you confused about what is going on in the world? So am I. So is everyone. This is the underlying and continuing reality of a chaotic world-system.

What we mean by chaos is a situation in which there are constant wild swings in the priorities of all the actors. One day, from the point of view of a given actor, things seem to be going in a way favorable to that actor. The next day the outlook looks very unfavorable.

Furthermore, there seems to be no way in which we can predict what position given actors will take on the next day. We are repeatedly surprised when actors behave in ways that we thought impossible, or at the very least unlikely. But the actors are simply trying to maximize their advantage by changing their stance on an important issue and thereby changing the alliances they will make in order to achieve that advantage.

The world-system has not always been in chaos. Quite the contrary! The modern world-system, like any system, has its rules of operation. These rules enable both outsiders and participants to assess the likely behavior of different actors. We think of this adherence to the rules of behavior as the “normal” operation of the system.

It is only when the system reaches a point in which it cannot return to a (moving) equilibrium that renews its normal operations that it enters into a structural crisis. A central feature of such a structural crisis is chaotic uncertainty.

In early September 2017, there have been three such dramatic swings in priorities and alliances. The one that has attracted most attention has been the announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump that he had reached an agreement with the Democratic leaders in Congress — Senator Chuck Schumer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi — to enact a measure for (1) emergency relief for the disaster in Texas and neighboring states without attaching any conditions, combined with (2) raising the debt ceiling for three months.

This agreement was significant for two reasons. First, Trump had been committed not ever to deal with the Democrats. Worse, this deal was seemingly on terms the Democrats had laid down. More important still, Trump made this agreement without informing until the very last minute the Republican leadership in Congress — Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Mitch McConnell — who understandably felt blindsided by this move. Secondly, and still worse, he suspended for six months implementing the end to the DACA program that had been proclaimed by previous Pres. Barack Obama. DACA was designed by Obama to permit the so-called Dreamers to remain in the United States and Trump had promised to cancel the program on day one of his taking office.

How long this agreement will last remains to be seen. But the mere announcement of it has upset, and probably for a very long time, all confidence between Trump and the Republicans in Congress. It was certainly a wild swing.

Less noticed but very important was a proclamation by the government of Indonesia that it had changed the name of the waters immediately to its north to the North Natuna Sea. This seemingly innocuous act can be understood in terms of the history of maritime claims in the waters of east and southeast Asia. China has been asserting for some time now claims over most of these seas and building bases on islands or even rocks located in them.

Chinese claims have been contested by the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, and also by the United States. Until now, Indonesia has tried to remain neutral in these disputes and even offered itself as a mediator. The act of renaming the waters north of Indonesia is however a proclamation of Indonesian rights to waters claimed by China. Not only is this a claim against China but also Indonesia taking a very “tough” stance by arguing this dispute in public. It may foreshadow an end to neutrality on the other disputes in the region. China immediately indicated her displeasure with this renaming. Indonesia is not backing down.

The third shift in alliances is less dramatic because it has been coming for some time. Nonetheless, it has now taken a dramatic form. Turkey seems to have renounced its obligations as a NATO member by arranging to purchase a Russian surface-to-air military system, one that is not “interoperable” with those of NATO allies.

This act is considered a major pivot away from long-standing Turkish relations with western Europe and the United States. From Turkey’s point of view, it is simply a response to acts by NATO members hostile to her. Still, it has implications not only for geopolitical alliances but for major economic arrangements. It is a way of relegating to the forgettable past Turkish grievances with Russia about Syria and Iran. Here too, how long this will last remains to be seen.

Wild swings are the daily bread and butter of a structural crisis. This means that we shall live in chaotic uncertainty until the structural crisis is resolved in favor of one of the two prongs of the bifurcation. If we concentrate on the presumed “meaning” of the wild and often momentary swings, we are doomed to act irrelevantly. We need to concentrate our analyses and our actions on what makes it more likely that the progressive side of the bifurcation outweighs the reactionary side in the middle-term resolution of the struggle.

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 ©2017 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 September 2017
Word Count: 898
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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