The Impossible Stabilization of the Liberal Center in the Peripheries of the Capitalist/Imperialist World System
The triumph of the liberal center involved only Europe and the United States and, perhaps, but much later, Japan. In the peripheries of the system, the capitalist order could never be stabilized on the basis of any consensus able to carry the conviction of its legitimacy.
From the beginning, i.e., from the middle of the nineteenth century, the states, nations, and peoples of the peripheries began their struggles against this system. I will be content here to point to three of the great movements that, beginning in the nineteenth century, herald the twentieth century and the decline of the capitalist imperialist world system.China had been integrated into this system only from the opium wars (1840s). Yet barely a decade later—from 1850 to 1865—its people were involved in the Taiping Revolution (which is not a “revolt” as the dominant historiography continues to describe it), a surprisingly modern attempt to deal with the new challenge. Consequently, it is not equivalent to one of the millenarian movements of earlier tributary eras. The Taiping Revolution combines a radical critique of the Chinese imperial-tributary system with a critique of the new imperialist order that has just begun to be organized. It paves the way for Maoism in the twentieth century.
In Russia—a semi-periphery, it could be said—the debate between Slavophiles and Occidentalists poses, in similar, even if rather confused, terms, the same question: how to reject the new world order? Should this rejection take the form of a return to the past or the adoption of Western values? The conflict is transformed into another debate concerning the means of rejecting both the past and the new order, in which the Narodniks are opposed to those who will give rise to Bolshevism.
In the Arab world, the Nahda, on the other hand, offers a completely different perception of the new imperialist challenge and puts forward a backward-looking response calling for the reestablishment of Islam in its original greatness.
The Nahda, which initiates the twentieth century Arab revolutions, traps the peoples concerned in an impasse.One could examine the diversity of examples and analyze them more closely. This is an indispensable task for understanding how the decline of capitalism (‘the autumn of capitalism’) could become, or not become, synonymous with the ‘springtime of peoples’ and what conditions could begin a movement ‘beyond capitalism’ and the world system within which it develops.
The triumph of the liberal center itself has turned out to be more fragile than it seemed to be in the eyes of Europe and the United States. The liberal center had, moreover, only advanced slowly in the major centers, even more slowly in most parts of Europe. It had been challenged by the Paris Commune (1871) which demonstrated in theory and in practice that another social order was necessary and possible: socialism, or communism, understood as a higher stage in the development of human civilization. However, it will be argued that since the Commune was defeated, the order of the liberal center seems to have gained a decisive legitimacy. The reality, which will unfold through the convulsions of the twentieth century, is more nuanced. The clash of anti-liberal reaction (fascism) and projects more radical than those of the liberal center (popular fronts) will occupy the foreground in the interwar period. Yet, it will be argued again, this is now past; the order of the liberal center finally seems to enjoy a solid consensus in Europe and the United States. Certainly, but this observation is not sufficient. The deepening of the systemic crisis (‘the crisis of civilization’) that goes along with the move from monopoly capitalism (1880-1960) to the generalized monopoly capitalism in place today entails, in turn, the decline of the order of the liberal center, a deviation from the democratic perspective and practice on which its legitimacy rested.
The triumph of the liberal center, once again exclusively in Europe and the United States, could only be imperfect, unstable, vulnerable, and incapable of responding to the challenge that I define as the confrontation between the heretofore conservative forces, which defend the preservation of the established imperialist order, and the ambitions of the peoples of the peripheries, openly antiimperialist and potentially anti-capitalist.
The twentieth century sees the start of an initial wave of advances by the liberation movements of the peripheries: 1905 in Russia (which prepares the way for 1917), 1911 in China (which prepares the way for 1949), 1910-1920 in Mexico, and other events of the same kind.
Europeans, who had benefitted from having exclusive control over the initiative of constructing the modern world since 1492, give way to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This reversal is the major event in my interpretation of the decline of historical capitalism. I analyze it as the concrete historical demonstration of the central propositions of Maoism: (1) that the peripheries are the ‘zone des tempetes’ where the capitalist/imperialist order (these two dimensions of the reality are inseparable) enjoy no stable legitimacy; (2) that the challenge to this order takes place simultaneously on the plurality of levels in which social reality appears—states (ruling classes), nations and peoples (working classes)—and that, consequently, class struggles and international conflicts are intertwined in complex and changing relations of complementarity and conflict; (3) that the movement carries in itself the potential capacity to go beyond national liberation and development in and by capitalism in the direction of challenging the social order of capitalism.I thus interpret the nineteenth century as the brief moment of apogee in the long history of capitalism. Since the path to capitalism was paved over a long gestational period lasting hundreds of years in successive waves, I view the decline of capitalism as linked to successive waves of possible advances in the direction of a future socialism. It is precisely here that the focus of my question is located: will the autumn of capitalism and the springtime of peoples coincide?
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