ABSTRACT
Charles Lemert has argued that the increasing disequilibrium and bifurcation of the world-system calls for a more robust understanding of the complexity, arbitrariness and fluidity of the changing relations of time and space, or what Lemert calls "uncertain worlds". In the core and peripheries of the world-system during the past two decades the response has been an increased pluralization of varieties of liberalism connected to a variety of retreats to the nation and the community; an interplay that actively seeks new political solutions between the two, often described as the two faces of globalization. This chapter argues that in the post-peripheries this interplay fails to create alternatives or new configurations, new attempts at a social compact. The socialist project in its twentieth century incarnation was founded on seeking acknowledgement for an alternative form of knowledge divorced from its competing dominant bourgeois manifestation.
