Immanuel Wallerstein -- The Contemporary Relevance of Marx

question I would like you to reflect upon is why are we here I have heard people make give talks in which they insist that Marx said X usually something that they like they bring other people who are not having noticed it and I've heard other people speak here and say Marx forgot something usually something that they like and then somewhat revised to include that and we could continue these discussions ad infinitum they're very interesting and they're they're never-ending but I don't really think that's why people are here I think what what what throw us people here and why people want to discuss these things is they want to know what to do now about the bad state of the world let me try to address that question which is not an easy question people noted the number of people in their papers noted the well-known phenomenon that Marx goes through popularity cycles and he goes up he goes down there's a palpable statement that you throw us out the front door and he comes in by the back why do we do that though well if times are relatively good if people perceive time times as relatively good then they don't really ask questions about Marx because they would like it to go on forever they see no reason why it won't continue forever in it isn't a question but when times are not so good when when people feel that they are suffering especially if they're suffering in comparison with earlier times that they remember then they want to find out how they can get back to that good era and then at that point they suddenly rediscover Marx and the interesting thing is you have to ask yourself what is which Marx of a discovery and the point is it's irrelevant what you say I'm interested in what they say that is the people who are concerned with this what do what's there one sentence one word definition of Marx and Marxism well it is in my view class struggle that's what they see Marx and that's what outrages then the people who are the defenders of the status quo because that frightens them it frightens them that people are talking in terms of the class troubles and they want to deny its legitimacy how do we know what's happening now well I have a a basic method of giant line in all circumstances I say in order to know what what one ought to do one first has to figure out what is going on it's an intellectual test yes we have to analyze somehow and come up with an explanation of what is occurring now in which case we can then make a moral option we can say if if X is occurring and we wanted to move in this direction or we wanted to move in that direction that's a moral decision and once we make the moral decision then we have the tactical question what political activity of what kind of political activity will indeed move the thing in the direction we think it ought to move now what I would like to do the way I would like to handle this is to take start with the intellectual task and I'm going to do this in two parts first I'm going to talk about what is true of any what I call historical system okay what is true many of them and then I want to get to what is true of a particular one in Ligeti live okay first of all historical system the very term is a contradiction when we use the term system we're talking of something that is stable that has continuous meaning otherwise it's not systemic and if we talk of something that's historical we talk of something that is changing at every mini second instantly constantly so how can something to be stable and stable and at the same time changing immediately and constantly well that's a contradiction right that's a contradiction that's what we mean by a contradiction and that's the first basic contradiction within which we live secondly all systems all systems and when I say all systems the word historical system applies to the very largest one we know there may be a larger one but the very largest one we know is our universe and the very smallest one we know what we're discovering smaller and smaller ones all the time they all have lives they are not eternal none of them so they come into existence that's phase one and you have to explain that how come at this point in time in this place and a star the system was able to emerge and then they have what I call their normal life in quotation marks that is to say they operate under certain rules which they have established for themselves which keep keep them in relative equilibrium and then at a certain point for a series of reasons which I'll try to explicate they go into systemic crisis and when there is systemic crisis it's they they know that the sister is coming to an end so they are born they live they die all systems our system of the universe and that supermini system that you can't begin to imagine all systems all systems fluctuate that's that's that's normal think of think of a human being he breathes in and out it's it's absolutely normal they therefore have rhythms cyclical what I call cyclical rhythms right but they also have something which I call secular trends and why do they have both of those take this and this is time and this is a percentage but anything that's a percentage but a percentage as a maximum 100% that's an asymptote the way system operate is they go they start here they go up but they don't come down like that the reason they don't come down like that is there's too much resistance from people who have advantage there so there was the pressure to come down is one thing and the resistance is another thing and they end up like that and then there comes a point where they're very close to the asymptote and what happens is they can't go any further because they're approaching the asymptote and you can't be more than a hundred percent of whatever it is you're measuring here talk about what we we do measure zealous somebody estimated that this is sort of about the 80% point but it gets to oscillate enormously and then see we have a bifurcation and a bifurcation is a technical term of the natural scientist it means there are two possible solutions to the same equation that is theoretically impossible but exists in other words it violates the very basic rule of the physical sign of the natural scientist that equation should have only one solution possible solutions know that again that model will not show you is true of any system and with the bifurcation we have you know two alternative paths which are quite opposite one from the other and eventually eventually this can't go on forever the system tilts enough in one direction rather than the other so that the thing resolves into the new system which is where the tilt is and it proceeds like previous systems now let's talk about our system our system is a capitalist system and I use the term capitalist in a very holistic sense right everything is part is is capitalist they're not they are not capitalist X and capitalist why we have a capitalist right it is a world system well a world system simply means it's not necessarily a global system it simply means something larger than any unit within it right the start usage most social scientists has been to assume that the that the states the nation state whatever that is is is the basic unit of analysis and it's simply not true it's it's it's it's it every every producer within the capitalist system is producing for the world market whether he knows it or not and is affected in his choices and decisions by that from the very beginning every every every attempted that has a cultural definition is for the entire system now let me start they you start the story with the French Revolution the French Revolution was not about establishing a capitalist system in France France was already and had been for two or three centuries already part and parcel of the existing world capitalist system didn't wasn't established in 1789 nor was at the end of listen marc bloch brother a brilliant art for a long time ago demonstrate that is Layton's I think 1911 few laws govern large parts of the legal system of France so what what happened that we call it a French Revolution well the French Revolution was a was revolutionary not in France as a nation-state not month because it established capitalist and not because it's ended feudalism but because it created NGO culture and by a Geo culture I mean a set of assumptions about the world system which are widely shared and what was this geo culture that was established well it was based on two things one what the French Revolution demonstrated right was that change is a normal phenomenon change of course that always occurred in the history of the world but why do we use the word revolution to describe it revolution is exactly a circle that returns to where it is it's no change whatsoever right and it was assumed historically in in our world and it worlds before that whatever change occurred was cyclical in the sense that it wasn't the real change and they suddenly discovered right that change was real that it actually occurred and who discovered this first well conservatives too conservative who were the Conservatives we have two books written within one year of the French Revolution sorry and they say there is this change it's a terrible thing but it's there and we have to push it back in every possible way and there was another group who emerged after them who were quote liberals and they were engaged in a struggle and they say the Conservatives are crazy if you could push it back hard enough and constantly enough people who will rebelled so you have to endorse change but control them limit it put it in the hands of experts who can handle it and make sure that the change is small and continuous and controlled and then within that group emerged a group with who will call the radicals who who said yes we agree with the Liberals except we want to accelerate the change slow it down okay we emerged with three ideologies an ideology is not a set of ideas about the world it's a program it's a program of active action about the real world and we emerged with a trio of ideologies which is we can call right-wing conservatism left-wing radicalism and centrist liberalism so that's the first thing we have to notice and the second thing we have to notice about the French Revolution the second thing the interesting thing occurred in 1848 in 1848 was by my definition a world revolution that is to say it took place and it occurred in one form or another in all the parts of the world that were in the capitalist world system at that time but purely away and now let's look at that the first thing that happened first thing that happened there was not rising in France right and there was a social revolution that is to say momentarily a group came to power in the state who were rivals and they attempted to do X Y & Z and they were hope they were oppressed they were overthrown quite quickly that just and they were at the same time right there was something which the men are the people who defined the class struggle as a struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and at the same time there was a series of uprisings which the historians have called the springtime of the nations in a series of countries in Hungary and Poland in the employees of the Germany's there were uprisings of people who who defined the the class struggle in a different way they said we are peoples that have been repressed we have been either colonized by others or kept from unifying ourselves in our natural boundaries and we are rising up against it so you had two sets of a rise rise rise ups at the same time and everybody learns a lesson from this what was the lesson that they learned well the lesson first of all for the radicals was that previously previously the small group of radicals had been dominated by groups who thought that they should physically rise up and overthrow the government and obviously they didn't have the power to do that and they failed miserably and they learnt from that that they could not just spontaneously rebelled they had to organize organize in order to be able to rebel they had to create structures which would turn out to be bureaucratic structures that would allow them to organize and we'll come back to that and what did the Conservatives learn from that well there was a very peculiar thing if you look at the history of Western Europe in the years from 1850 to 1848 the one place where the radicals seem to be having success relative success was in England they they form unions they various times when they rose up and they made the governments retreat they retreated on ballot they retreated on they they they achieved changes but they were all very small changes not very important changes in the long run nonetheless it was very peculiar that they were the only country in which there was no uprising in eighteen it was all quiet in 1848 and the Conservatives suddenly realized that maybe the idea of bashing them over the head and repression didn't work that well that maybe they want to learn from the English experience that they had to have a version policy which made which took into account the demands of people and made small changes and this is Louie Napoleon coming to power and eventually becoming performace and what do the Liberals learn from that the Liberals learned that they could not make as their primary goal a struggle with the Conservatives because that allowed space for the radicals they had to in fact set establish themselves as centrist a centrist who would always try to to control and balance everything the Conservatives on the right and the liberals on the radicals on the Left so we we've got a very interesting system after 1848 and especially after 1851 we had centrist liberalism group governing the Geo culture and the two wings were no longer independent that became avatars subordinate to centrist with so the Conservatives now simply wanted to slow down the rate of change the radicals wanted to speed up the rate of change but neither of them were outside the control of centrist liberalism that takes us the triumph of centrist liberal listen takes us to 1873 now though happens then and now I have to bring in I have to bring in the the two kinds rhythms that were there are an infinite number of cyclical rhythms within any historical system because some that are more important than others that affect more things than others and in the case of the capitalist world system these two get names the names are unimportant but they have two names so I might as well use them water quotes and radium cycles and one are quote real political cycles let me talk about indrani of cycles a minute a contrarian cycle is a situation in which produces produced to the market some product of which they have a quasi monopoly how do they get a quasi monopoly they get a crossing monopoly in the only way you can get it buzzing enough they get it with the help of an individual state or sometimes more than one state but usually one state who can and what does this state do well the state does many things the state penalizes other people who want to come into the market it penalizes other countries who attempt to work outside the market that's controlling they they they they sell an exaggerated prices they buy excuse me from they buy an exaggerated prices products of these things these are all ways in which they make money they couldn't possibly make money out of a free market if you have a free market a hypothetically free market as defined theoretically by neoliberal or any other standard capitalist stickers with a free flow of Labor a free flow a free flow of goods of tackle amount of labor if you had that then if I produce something which I try to sell at X price you as the buyer knowing with perfect knowledge of everything would go from seller to sell it to seller until he found the seller who would sell at anything over the cost or even a penny below the course right so a free market is is the worst thing in which intactness can live he means a controlled market he needs a quasi monopoly but crossing monopolies like all quasi monopolies are self liquidating their self liquidating because a it's so profitable to be there other people want to get in and if they can't get in directly they can steal the sequence or buy the secrets from people who will sell them from the inside or they will go to another government and ask them to intervene or they will they will organize within their own country and they will organize from other people who want to go into that market and begin to put pressure on the same government so with all that after about 25 30 years all of a sudden the price at which the quasi monopolist can sell his product goes down and down and down it is no longer significantly profitable and at that point what does he do well there are a number of things he does when he levels out one of the things he does is he goes into so-called financialization as though we talked about today came in 20 years ago five years ago work or some nonsense from the beginning what is financialization it says that the alternative to created new surplus-value which we believe which you were doing in during the up period getting it a ripoff basically of immense well we will now settle for redistributing existing surplus value in other words if i'm in country a and i can undercut country B then I can shift their pro that already accumulated surplus value to me it creates no new surplus value right but it may make me rich at your expense or your rich at my expense for example one of the most obvious things is unemployment well unemployment goes up obviously as in this period but doesn't go up evenly across the world and we try to what I call export unemployment to each other so we have policies in which we attempt in country exported to country B the other thing we can do is we can move the locus of production from where it is to some other area with historically in quotes lower rates of payment Why should there be historically lower wages well it's very simple it's really very simple if I moved from here where there are high wages to there and the other end of the world or any way far from where I am now and I say I establish a unit of production in this other area I need what do I need I need people that work in it I need people to to feed the people who work in it and so forth so where do I get such people well there are people who are not involved or less involved in the money economy tend to live in rural areas and we attract them to the town by offering them wages it turns out they can be offered wages that are higher than the real income that they presently have while those same wages are lower for the producer than they regularly have to pay so it's a sort of win-win situation right the the worker is getting more the owner is paying less and it's marvelous smartly on Saturday it can't last white had to glass it can't last because no animal it's not only that you move some into this area to produce you have to move some people into this area to produce the food that we'll be feeding this area with the same business of they're getting more pay and less pay here in this area but again this can't last because after about 25-30 years several things happen first of all the people who move from the rural area to this town urban area which is kind of new factory of some time initially they they're confused they don't know how life operates in these areas they're relatively helpless well they learn and they figure things out and eventually it occur they learn that they are not getting paid as much as people are getting paid somewhere else at which point they begin to ask for more in order to maintain constant production because that's very important you lose the production you lose the the profit from it in order to make it maintain constant production concessions are made so concessions are made and they say in and then they demand more concessions until the concessions become too much right at which point the whole business is not very useful which what what do you do if you're a producer you move to still another area of places where can be fired for both pay now there's a third thing you can do way back in the country where you used to be on top of the heat you can you can try to retain certain kinds of production which are more difficult to transfer the skills but we could save those people look if you don't accept a reduction in your pay we will move you or the activity to the other end of the world and so they in fact accept reductions in their pay right so we're getting a situation in which it is worse and worse and worse and we start over again no if you think about that you think about that all depends on the availability of areas in the world which are have not been fully or even at all involved in the money economy okay now let's talk about the quasi monopoly of geopolitical power the reason you have countries operating and seek geopolitical power is again very simple for one thing they get advantage only think what whatever happens in the rest of the world they get it they the states the enterprises and the residents of the state all get some cut of the money that's flowing in to the geopolitically strong state the way it maintains its quasi monopoly is that it controls new production and it controls the use of Armed Forces right so this is a it turns out to be a much longer process well analyzed by Jean Baker but there have in fact been only three moments in which you had a geopolitical quasi monopoly they all strangely enough after they United in them sell quality night in provinces which is located where we today locate the Plus Belgium perhaps they were the few political quasi monopolist in the middle of the 17th century and then there was the United Kingdom Great Britain and Northern Ireland they became the quasi monopolist in the middle of the 19th century and then there was the United States which became the quasi monopolist in the middle of the 20th century in each case the quasi monopoly doesn't last all that long but while it lasts it works very very well now that brings me to the story of Ellis death and that of course is also self liquidating itself liquidating because once again the quasi monopolist has the quasi monopoly because he has the variety of quasi monopoly and he's losing that and he has the quasi monopoly because he did not spend his money in the in the simple thirty years war between the two contestants for this quasi monopoly position which in this realistic case was the United States and Germany but thirty years war which the United States won completely quasi monopolist the contestants state they were never there attended to be at that point in time three long saya power and what happens is the former quasi monopolies state links up with the new incoming quasi monopoly city and overcomes the challenge from the land-based and it turns out that the trick of the game is that the winner is his sea and hair based and the loser is land based because again there's the whole problem of the cost of moving troops and moving goods etc so the quasi monopoly exhausts itself and then we start up a follow process of decline of the quasi monopolist so in 1945 at the end of the Second World War the only the only serious industrial power in the world which had not had its industry destroyed the only one was the United States Great Britain all of Europe Japan all of them had their infrastructure destroyed it was such an overwhelming situation for the United States that the United States was capable in the 1950s of selling its cars produced in the United States in Germany or Japan at prices lower than the produces in Germany and Japan could produce for their own markets even though the u.s. had to pay the cost of transport fare that's that's how much of an advantage they had that was an enormous advantage right and what happens of course is so they have to party they have to and then the quasi monopoly of geopolitical power they one of the ways in which they have achieved their victory over Germany is that they had not invested their money in in building armies but had invested their money in building a industrial competence and so in 1945 when the US was overwhelmingly strong economically and remember you really have to remember in 1946 employee said there was starvation starvation in Western Europe that's incredible when we think about it now but that's how badly off they were they the US had invested during the war it had to because invest in the military but still they were under enormous pressure in 1945 to bring the troops home and the political pressure was immense and they bring the troops home which leaves the Soviet Union as the only significant political military power they have facing and in order to have a quasi monopoly of geopolitical power they had to make a deal with the Soviet Union this deal is metaphorically called Yalta wasn't what they literally just discussed at the petioles of that's such a point and but it's a metaphorical concept of yoga and what was the deal the deal had three parts it's crucial to see that the first part is they were going to split the world two thirds of the world belong to the US and one third of the world belong to Soviet Union and the line was where the troops had met more or less in Central Europe the Oh Denise alliance they pledged not to do anything to change those borders and not to use their military strength in any way to make any attempt to change those borders that's part number one of the deal part number two of the deal was each one is their own master economically the US was not going to give any money for the reconstruction of this rubbish in any way whatsoever and it's very clear when you look at the arguments that general Marshall our Secretary of State made to Congress about passing the what he called the the Act which permitted this ascending of money to our allies one of the arguments he used was it was necessary to stop the Soviet Union so it was very clear he was not going to give any money there he so the US organized him why did they organize this because what's the point of having the most powerful set set production system in the world if you don't have customers so you have to create customers and that was why the money went out in the Marshall Plan Soviet Union created their rough equivalent which was there which was a much more appropriating mechanism which they imposed upon their third of the world and the third part of the deal the third part of the deal was the most important part of the deal the third part of the deal is to deny that there is a deal there's a cold war to say that we are eternally against the other side that we will do anything to change the other side and they don't mean it now how do we know they don't mean it because it's very simple if you look at every self called crisis in the Soviet sphere in 1953 in East Germany in 1956 in Poland and Hungary in 1970 blanking a little which years every time of 68 very important every time they scented the Soviet Union sending troops to put down a uprising the United States sat on its hands it denounced it verbally but did nothing did absolutely nothing right that is true up to 1978 1989 will come to 1989 ok so if we look at how well this deal worked the first part of the deal worked perfectly the second part of the deal began to break down somewhat in the nineteen seventies right the third part of the deal worked perfectly so but from about 1970 the quasi monopoly of geopolitical power begins to be undone not by the Soviet Union not by this but by whom well first of all by all those who wanted to or dissatisfied with the small part of the world that they were able to control who wanted to change things and the interesting thing is we talk of the Soviet Union supporting China supporting Vietnam supporting Cuba it said it's the other way around it's absolutely the other way around it's the Chinese right after 45 what we know now that what what what Stalin asked Mao they told to do is to make a deal come to some kind of compromise with the with the Kuomintang Chinese said we're not interested by we are marching on Shanghai and they watched on Shanghai so they defy the Soviet Union and then when we come to Vietnam the Chinese and the Russians are saying you know make some view and they're saying no we will make a deal and if you make it you know will denounce you and so forth and so they didn't make a deal and we get the Tet Offensive again the Tet Offensive isn't all that effective militarily but it's effective politically because it affects the United States States is all happy to send troops if they win easy victories but not they begin to lose lives and what we have is was a draft system in the United States middle class the kids were being drafted and so forth and so on and so there was this goal of Apache war atmosphere of the United States which put enormous pressure in the u.s. so they begin to they they a ludus thing and Cuba the same thing happens in Cuba if you follow the what we now have exact records of what people said and did the one Weber thing pushed threatened to send his ships in and the one clever thing that the u.s. did was they said accept his offer of yesterday and they accepted the offer of yesterday and he had to withdraw and there was no military activity in Cuba so there's another thing that happened in 68 so I'm sorry 68 was there for you had in the Kondratiev cycle of of 45 to 68 enough you had the biggest Kondratiev cycle that had occurred in the history of the modern world system it was absolutely immense if there was any period of time in that very that you'd call an industrial revolution that period was for 1945 to 1960 or 68 the previous ones and chimp later shows it quite well for very minor events bumps small bumps that was available the quasi monopoly of geopolitical power was the same thing the u.s. expanded to control the entire world much more than the British had and the British much more than the the Dutch back so we had the biggest expansion of geopolitical power but there was no place to expand further they had reached the edge of the world they have incorporated it all into the modern world system so in 68 we reach the limits of what can be done with some radius cycles and the limits of what can be done with geopolitical cycles right and then a third thing happened to bring that in when I said the left organize slowly but difficult that took them a while to even get to the point where they had small organizations it didn't they didn't get these small organizations in Western Europe and North America can European word which is Western Europe North America Australasia they didn't even get the small organizations going until the 1970s right they weren't taken too seriously but the organized attempted to create a stronger position now as of 1945 Noah really took seriously the possibility that these weak anti-systemic movements I call the massive systemic because they wanted to change the system in specific significant ways and then no one took seriously the possibility that they could come to power yet the curious thing now you have to think about that the curious thing is that the anti-systemic movements which existed which came forward in debt in a global revolution that is it took place in what were then called three worlds the first world the second world of the Soviet sphere and the third world of the rest of the world right in all three worlds right anti-systemic movements came to power now think about that they came to power at the time that they quasi monopoly of kondratyev cycles was at its peak the geopolitical power of the United States was at its peak one would have thought this is the most difficult time for them to come to power but it's exactly the opposite it was the only time at which they could come to our why was it the only time that they could come to power because once again right the way you handle uprisings is you make concessions so the u.s. made concessions and they impose concessions on their allies rather than France and then the Soviet Union had to make concessions because no one wanted to lose them so they made concessions here and they make concessions there until they make so many concessions that they are running out of any significant power and then then what happens is the collapse of the domination of the centrist liberals because at that point what happens is that the right-wing conservatives in the left wing radicals reclaim their autonomy they don't doesn't mean that sentence liberalism disappears it means we return to the pre 1848 situation of three powerful geopolitical low-low Saye our struggling with each other and that then takes - what happens after that why do I say that there is a structural crisis as of circa 1970 as a van Bob Isaac later not as of 2008 as of circa 1970 and the very simple reason is that you have exhausted the possibility one of the contradictions of capitalism one of the interesting contradictions of capitalism is that the lower the less you pay for your workers the larger profit you make but if but it's also true that if you don't pay enough to the workers they can't buy the product so you're pushed in opposite directions you want to give them you want to revoke or reduce their income and you want to increase their income that's what you mean by a contradiction two things both of what you want to do and have to do that will push you in opposite directions then what what has happened is we have exhausted the possibility of effective demand within the entire world system why because in the past in the past whenever there was a crisis some people were thrown out of jobs right they complained about it and it was it was always argued that of course these people are being thrown out of job but it's creative destruction new jobs are creating what are the new jobs will basically they're white-collar jobs as opposed to blue our jobs so we move we constantly create more and more we eliminate more and more blue-collar jobs create more more white-collar jobs the assumption had always been that you couldn't do anything about white-collar job because it required mental activity it required the intrusion of human beings you couldn't just have machines as you do with blue-collar jobs the trouble is they didn't they didn't anticipate what has happened which is real customization and rope authorization that's already eliminated the bottom chunk white-collar jobs and it's moving up and up and up and it will eventually reduce the well there's a wonderful cartoon an owner and his chief assistant and the chief assistant says to the owner wonderful we've now managed to eliminate all workers from our plants and the chief says we the fact is that there is no limit to artificial intelligence that we can see without ending up with one person on everything at which point of course he owns nothing because there will be and what was predicted the inevitable revolt but now notice something notice something when I say there we're in a structural crisis people say oh that's been predicted how many times and they always came out of it yes they always did come out of it there's one difference the assumption that they always came out of it was the assumption of a permanent opposition from the oppressed 80% of the population right but what we add to it is that now we have capitalist opposed to capitalism because they can no longer make a profit out of a capitalist system so we have a combination for the first time of opposition's from the bottom 80% and from the top 1% these are abstract figures of course and a struggle for both of them to get the 19 percent on their side so we have a bifurcation at this point sorry we have a bind division at this point now what is the what happens after night seventy well another thing that people no longer remember is that in the pack in the 1960s somewhere around 1965 I forget the exact year the United Nations passed a resolution thinking that honestly but maybe they were one or two dissenting votes in which they proclaimed the 1970s the era of development no production was ever so wrong it was precisely the era of counter development developmental ISM was the ideology that everybody adopted from 1950 to about 1970 in various versions they had different languages for it but the idea was you protected the home market you built a welfare state you expanded education and education health and lifetime income that was developmental ISM everybody did it the time European world did it the Soviet where I'll get it in using different language and the third world didn't using language and keen to develop mentalism was no no barriers to the movement the factors of production no bodies whatsoever an open world and what happened after the seventy was exactly the opposite the first people who took advantage advantage was you know I went overnight from being a joke it became the Guru it was a total tone switch around right he became a guru his development was bad production perfect export was good for production protectionism was bad open frontiers was good reduce the size of your bureaucracy cut the welfare state provisions bubble there is no alternative send me mrs. Thatcher right Tina tima there's no alternative meaning if you want a loan and you all need loans because you're in a bad situation economically as a result of the Don kleine downturn of the world economy as a result of that you need well if you want to get a loan this is the condition the condition is the water the consensus you have to agree to do all those things and who enforces that the only people who get loans the International Monetary Fund of the United States Treasury lesser degree the German government so everybody in all everybody almost everybody virtually everybody no nobody could hold out against it in fact the interesting thing is again it's a piquant detail the Soviet bloc countries of course took out loans to from the same source and in the 1980s the Romanian government Ceausescu were the most terrible government and so forth and so on and so you know Iranian Romanian government but squeezing its own people immensely and incredibly paid back its loans and it was slightly by the International Monetary Fund as the model country the mama country for the world was drunk was chest goose remember okay well okay they all give in including last but not least the Soviet Union the form of the Soviet Union took what was you know to change people in power so it was perestroika and ACTA perestroika that one particular profit this was the victory of the West I say like the contrary it was the defeat of the West that Soviet Union collapsed because the West lost two things Krugman one up to then they could count on the Soviet Union as a sub Walton power carrying out their needs so that in any country in their relatives own threatened the sega's quo ante of waters they would say stop it because that violates rule number one no J frontiers now the Soviet Union could be defined and the first person to defy will get to that in the second is of course Iraq now the second thing the u.s. lost when in the Soviet Union collapsed is an enemy you can't have a cold war without somebody on the other side they had no one on the other side they have been looking ever since okay now let's talk about mister terrible things okay the one thing he did not do is what they've been claiming since the 1920s they he did not try to reincorporate direct so now why did he do it down well first of all the collapse of the Soviet Union permitted him to do it they weren't putting they weren't able to put the pressure on him that's a B right he had borrowed money enormous money from the United States to United States gave him in order to fight Iran which the United States thought was important to do for whatever the United States reason and of course they lost immense numbers of lives they they they they did not succeed in changing the frontiers in any significant way with Iran and they sort of had to give up at which point they owed money they owed a lot of money to the United States not only to German banks that's a foot and they said we can't pay it and you lent it to us and you've got to forgive us and they weren't forgiving and he said well tell me what they're also Kuwait is if stealing our oil because they've set up a a pipeline that goes diagonally into our territory and the draining it so I have all these reasons to do it and nobody is stopping me so I go in at which point the US has to decide what are they going to do and they hesitate they hesitate very long very long in geopolitical terms it was very long and mrs. Thatcher calls George HW Bush and says don't don't weaken now George don't weaken you've got to send in troops so he says ok but I can't afford it you can't afford it no I can't afford it I don't have money so four countries have to pay the bill Kuwait Saudi Arabia Japan who's the fourth Japan Germany Saudi Arabia they have to pay the bill ok so they pay the bill but how do you how can you be a geopolitical quasi monopolist power if you can't even afford to pay your own troops and so he reaches the frontier and then he has to decide do i march on back then and he's being urged to march on Baghdad by people who want to have war with this with the Soviet Union there in his cabinet he's smart he says no I'm gonna stop at the frontier I said I would keep them from expanding into Kuwait that's all I promised to do I will the rest will be done by you know UN resolution seven one and he did that now that then brings us to 1989 because that's very interesting again the same thing happens we get this absolute horrible man named ulti named or whatever is named anybody else and so forth so people said we have to go in the u.s. said well we can't go in but we'll we'll support the idea that you send in troops and some other people send in troops and they overthrew him and then of course they haven't been able to put the pieces together again and it's you know once you go other anecdotes is you you know [Music] Colin Powell said once you go in you own the country and it's not so easy to get out so you've got to make sure you have a way to get out of meteor and then there's the wonderful story wonderful story of the cabinet meeting of the United States where all the the president and the Secretary of State sorry having these memory blanks she turns to colin powell's and she says to him tell me Colin what is the point of having the most powerful country army in the world if we can't use it and the point is we didn't have the most cut power for coming army in the world we still do nobody could dream of matching the US military power but we can't use it why can't we use it because our own people won't let us use it because if you use it you you undermine yourself still further because you can never achieve as much as you said at the threat the threat is the real thing and once you use the threat you've undermined your friend so we have this impossible situation which our current president they get himself into again he is smart enough to know that you shouldn't go in shouldn't send in troops but he wants to strengthen the army and he and there's pressure to use the army from other people who want to use it to strengthen themselves and what can happen well many things can happen but now let me talk about who gets advantage out of the post 70 situation so we start with the the right the conservative right but who are the conservative right well it turns out there two of them it's not just one there too it's a business service right they want to make money that's their object in life capitalist right and they want money to flow back to them and so they install all these rules which is there is no alternative and they they cross the flow of money into the Washington Consensus and so forth at which point what are they promised they have promised that if you if you take these lobbies on these conditions within a few years your standard of living will go back up and he probably improved beyond that and what happened is that didn't happen in fact got worse everywhere got worse everywhere and all the sudden there was a reaction to the business there is no alternative and people said there is an alternative and the alternative is in fact to do quite the opposite right and of what you're saying it is to say close down the free flow of capital we redistribute income internally to our people and in fact so where did that occur it occurs really in three successive steps very interesting the first is Chiapas now Chapas is a very interesting case it's a country which was invented 500 years ago and has been struggling for 500 years to regain its autonomy that's a very weak country so never did but he always was struggling and emerged within checklist something called the zapatistas and who were the Zapatistas well they were self organized [Music] quasi governmental quasi military units rose up in an official uprising on January 1 2014 15 and 14 in 1934 what yes yes sorry not 2014 1990 exactly now why did they choose January 1 1994 for two reasons for two reasons one it was the day that the doctor was to come into operation and they wanted to give a message was a double message a double message we don't want you to come in to our territory and and we are appealing to people everywhere in the world to support us in this because we are on the side of everybody who is against safe control we are horizontal Asst we are friends with all people who reject the powers that be so they rose up but of course rising up they were going to be suppressed terribly so after three months with the intervention of a progressive Catholic bishop of Chiapas they entered into a truce with the government of Mexico which is sort ever since to violate the truce but never quite succeeded so it's a constant but the point is the zapatistas showed that you could rebound and then came Seattle now in Seattle we were going to found the World Trade Organization and we're going to pass a measure which which we call [Music] it was going to make it illegal for anyone to establish barriers to the flow of capital right in other words they were going to force people to sign away their ability to ever stop the flows going to the powerful countries at which point there was three groups of people who surrounded the place of the meeting place of Seattle three groups of people who have never collaborated before it's important to notice that first there was the trade unions meeting the afl-cio officially boycotted this meeting or Commons the wrong word surrounding this movement and they cooperated with the people they have always fought with worthy the greens greens and the trade unions have been in opposition but the Greens joined them on this and then the third group were the anarchists and they de facto join them so these three groups which are never cooperating for surrounded this thing and they won they won because they forced what allowed the people on the inside who were opposed to the sale to fight and they had to dissolve the meeting and they have never been able to reconvene in a way that would allow them to pass this legislation they they actually get succeeded immensely succeeded to the point that all subsequent meeting at this time our health and very obscure difficult to reach places so that they can't be surrounded by but it's it's it's irrelevant at this point so WTO is a dead organization it has no significance whatsoever today then the third one was the world Social Forum now then one of the key structures of the in the in the seventies and eighties of maintaining tell you about that are slowing down the whole process losing geopolitical power one of the team processes only one of them was to have something called the World Economic Forum where the elites of the world met her spoke to each other and basically planned their common policies so the world Social Forum decided to meet at the same time as the World Economic Forum in opposition to it and to give the opposite message which is another world as possible and I always another world possible by in fact rejecting the whole idea of the Washington Consensus and they turned out to be a remarkable success and have been meeting ever since then so the conservative thrust number one didn't work they they made their thrust they made their days with a little pushback so then comes in the other forms of services in which I call the socio-cultural conservatives these are the people who are worried about abortion who are worried about sexuality or worried about gay rights who are worried about trying to remember the name he spoke about it before people were Native Americans it's in the second segment all these people right were wrong they were all requests first by the various kinds of legislation what happened they begin to repel and they begin to repel and all of a sudden you see this whole situation of the last few years where with remarkable speed incredibly almost breathtaking speed all these things which were illegitimate have suddenly been legitimating and there are few that haven't yet been but they will be that's going on fast and furious there in all of this all of this where is the left where is the global left how come it is not suddenly the powerful voice and here we are basically in the middle of this and the answer really is quite simple where the road west is the global left has still not learned right because it too is split right the global right is split between a businessman writing and the socio-cultural or the global left is split between the what might be called a an economic an economics first left and a cultural left and what they are they're not yet willing to use that word left global left they're not getting what's going to lose the word socialism or anything like that because they're afraid alienating their own camp and what they have to realize is the bottom any percent of the global of the economic limit than the bottom 80% of the socio-cultural them are virtually the same bottom left the overlap is incredible the minute they realize that and the minute they work to bring these two groups together and to work together then they're the 80% and they can struggle against the 1% but now they come to the issue of how we get things to tilt and that ends the story because what happens is there is a struggle a political struggle going on it is going on between what I call below the left and what I call the global right or I call the global left the spirit of Davos the spirit of not the detail not the actual structure the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre and one of the two spirits the spirit of Davos says we don't need capitalism because we there's no way we can stop and capitalism is coming to an end but it should be replaced by another system which is equally or even more oppressive that is equally all the worst features of capitalism that it's exploitative that it's hierarchical and that it is polarizing and the global left sense what we want is a new system that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian I say relative because no system ever is or ever will be perfectly but it's also true that such a system has never in the history of the world existed but theoretically could so we have these two systems the global left and the global right well the spirit of Douglas versus the spirit of or more Legree struggling with each other for dominance and because they're not two but actually four that's extremely confusing and people are confused and they're not sure what to do right and so part of the problem is clarifying and now we get therefore to the end of the story right so the important thing is to tilt the thing in one direction or the other we have now isolated in my view what is the existing system situation the existing situation who are in the structural crisis of a of a modern of the modern world system which is a cat that is the that determines what is possible and back that gives us the possibility of making a moral choice well we're either on one side or the other right we have to make it at which point we come to where we wanted to be in the whole time what are the tactics that will work what tactics will actually work well we don't know for sure that's one of the things we have to discuss that's one of the things presumably we're discussing right here but we should be discussing what everywhere in the world all the time and in trying Outfitters I don't have time for that that's another speech of what we might try out and see if they work and if not try another thing and so forth but we come then to the end of the metaphor of the butterfly you know that a man named Lawrence I was an engineer figure down I guess now 50 or 60 years ago he said if a butterfly flaps its wings at one end of the world another butterfly at the other end of the world will react to that and will change its direction ever miniscule way the menisci way and what they discover is that however you change however small the different initial conditions they go out and out and out and out until their immense right so the trick of the game is for everybody to be a little butterfly and to do their small little bit to push the thing in one direction rather than in another direction I have to give you one additional reason why you can do this when the thing is in its normal state when the system is in its normal state no matter how much change you bring about by your energy and by your your effort you're pressed back forced back to equilibrium I only give the example both of the French Revolution out of the running revolution of enormous energy and pushed back over the years to them equally when you get to any structural crisis it's exactly the opposite instead of a little a little change making big change making a little change a little change makes big change Thanks so it's I am actually I say historicizing the audition something versus free will we are determinist we are determinist when we are in our normal state historical system and we have freewill when when we're in structural crisis at which point you can be a little butterfly push in one direction if enough people push constantly in every every every moment of every news every place of every moment of every degree you push in that direction and the other people are pushing in the other direction if you push enough at one point it tells and when it tells it goes in your direction into a new system so I say to everybody and people don't say to me is that pessimistic or optimistic and I always say it's 50/50 but now only catabolism cannot survive fact that's the only sure thing but we cannot predict no one can predict no one will ever be within what will succeed in so we don't know but they're made and so 50/50 is not a little it's a lot I think

Channel: Marx Collegium

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Length: 96min 56sec (5816 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2017