The Collapse of the Global System: 1975-1992

The third phase of the postwar cycle saw the collapse of the three pillars on which internal and world order rested. The crisis began in the capitalist West and called into question the myth of unlimited growth, with 1968 as the decisive turning point.

In turn a hardening of North-South relations accompanying the crisis of cap­italist accumulation hastened the disillusionment with developmentalism in the third world. Radical regimes collapsed one after the other and surrendered to reactionary structural adjustment policies imposed by the West during the 1980s. The collapse was the result not of external aggression but of a combination of the internal contradictions of the Bandung project and a new external crisis accom­panying the overthrow of the existing world system.

The failure of the Bandung project also revealed the weakness of Soviet sup­port. Sovietism, the third pillar of the postwar system, had the most shattering collapse. The edifice seemed so solid that conservative ideologues described it as “irreversible totalitarianism.” But it was gnawed away from within and collapsed in the space of a few months, leaving behind nothing but chaos. Here too, of course, collapse resulted from a dramatic acceleration in the Soviet Union’s ‘conventional’ capitalism, as well as from external factors, namely, Washington’s victory in the arms race.

History never stops. The completed postwar cycle can also be seen as a tran­sition between what came before and what follows.

The historically constructed national bourgeois states formed the political and social framework for national capitalist economies, with national productive systems broadly controlled and directed by national capital; these states were in strong competition with each other and together constituted the centers of the world system. After the centers had their successive industrial revolutions during the nineteenth century, there was a near total distinction between industrialization at the center and absence of industry at the periphery.

Since World War II both characteristics have gradually changed. After regaining their political independence, the peripheries embarked on industriali­zation, although on unequal terms, to the point that apparent homogeneity previ­ously induced by a shared lack of industry gave way to increasing differentiation between a semi-industrialized third world and a fourth world that had not begun to industrialize. Capitalist globalization throughout the centers broke through the boundaries of national productive systems and began to reshape them as segments of a worldwide productive system.

The postwar cycle may now be regarded as a period of transition between the old system and the new. The essential characteristics of the new system need to be described, and its contradictions and trends identified. The uneven development at the periphery and the globalization of capital are the main challenges facing theoretical analysis and social and political practice.

Is third world industrialization the start of a geographical spread of capitalism that will gradually obliterate the center-periphery polarization? Or will the polarization be replicated in new forms? If so, what forms?

Is the lack of industrialization in the ‘‘fourth world” a mere delay in the homogenizing expansion of capitalism on a world scale? Is the delay attributable to internal factors specific to the societies in question or to profound laws whereby polarization differentiates among the peripheral countries and marginalizes some of them? Does the decline of efficiency in the nation-states require an alternative system of political management of the capitalist system on national and world scales? Are we on the road to building such a system? If so, what will its char­acteristics be and what laws will operate?

To answer these questions we must take into account both the laws governing capital accumulation and the political and ideological responses of different social sectors to the expansion of capitalism.

I shall summarize the answer I have given in recent years. Third world industrialization will not end the polarization that I believe is inherent in world capitalism. It will shift the mechanisms and forms to other levels determined by the financial, technological, cultural, and military monopolies enjoyed by the centers, but it will not replicate the developed countries’ social evolution. Western society was first transformed by the Industrial Revolution and the ongoing agri­cultural revolution. The vast lands of the Americas served as an escape valve for the pressure brought by European population growth, while colonial conquest assured an abundance of cheap raw materials. Fordism came along to alleviate the historic tension between capital and labor, facilitated by the reduction of the reserve army of labor in the centers. By contrast, the industrializing third world has none of these favorable factors to soften the savage effects of expanding capital­ism. Here the coexistence of a rapidly increasing active labor army and an ever plentiful reserve labor army leads to acute and potentially revolutionary social conflict. This characteristic situation of modern peripheral capitalism creates political and ideological circumstances conducive to the formation of popular alliances between the active working class, the peasants, and the impoverished marginalized masses in the reserve army of labor.

In the fourth world the social system becomes grotesque. The overwhelming majority are the marginalized poor and peasant masses excluded from any agri­cultural revolution. The minority ruling class can make no claim to historical legitimacy. Struggles in the workplace are weak because of the marginalization, so the conflict shifts to the cultural plane. This is symptomatic of the crisis but offers no genuine response to its challenge.

In the developed West the conflict between the globalization of capital pene­tration eroding the historic role of the nation-state as the management framework for historic social compromises and the permanence of political and ideological systems based on national realities will not be easily resolved.

During the postwar cycle political and ideological conflicts and the expression of progressive alternative projects have been constrained by the historical short­comings of the three prevailing ideologies: Western social democracy, Eastern Sovietism, and Southern national liberation ideology. The left on a world scale has shown signs in the recent past of going beyond these visions.

The unexpected crisis in Europe in the mid-1970s gave hopes of a leftist revival and a redefinition of the socialist outlook free of the dogma of the old social democracy, whose success was closely linked to postwar modernization and the dogma of Sovietism. These hopes were speedily dashed, and the retreat of social democracy has so far redounded to the benefit of the old right.

In third world countries there was constant debate and often violent conflict between moderates favoring state power in the Bandung mold and others who argued that radicalization was the only possible response to the decline of non- democratic populism and its inevitable cooptation by world capitalism. These debates form a background to the discussion in this book.

The debate revolved around a central issue: What is actually existing capital­ism? Had it achieved its historic role? What was the struggle for socialism? This debate led naturally to questioning Sovietism. From the mid-1950s—and more precisely after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956—Stalinism became subject to criticism. While the prevailing cri­tique made in the Soviet Union—from Khrushchev to Gorbachev—came from the right, in the 1960 and 1970s Maoism offered a critique from the left.

These issues must be picked up again today. The rapid collapse of the myths of the postwar period enables us to go much further than before. World War I ended the first cycle of the development of socialist thought and action. The second cycle, initiated by the Russian Revolution, is also closed. In response to the challenge of capitalism, which has itself embarked on a new cycle of operations, the third cycle of socialism remains to be built.

If a new socialist alternative is not developed, and if progressive social and ideological forces do not struggle for that alternative, the contradictions within capitalism will not generate a ‘‘new order” (as the neoliberals in power every­where like to call it), but merely catastrophic chaos.

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