ABSTRACT
There have always been historical systems in which some relatively small group exploited the others. The exploited always fought back as best they could. The modern world-system, which came into existence in the long sixteenth century in the form of a capitalist world-economy, has been extremely effective in extracting surplus-value from the large majority of the populations within it. It did this by adding to the standard systemic features of hierarchy and exploitation the new characteristic of polarization. … The French Revolution further changed the structure of the modern world-
system by unleashing two new concepts, whose impact was to transform the modern world-system. These concepts were the “normality of change” as opposed to its exceptional and limited reality, and the “sovereignty of the people” as opposed to that of the ruler or the aristocracy. … It was in response to this danger to the dominant forces that the three modern ideologies – conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism – emerged. Each of the ideologies represented a program of political action. Conservatism
was the first and most immediate response, notably in the writings of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre. The core of the conservative ideology was to deny the prudence, even the possibility, of substantial change. Conservatives reasserted the priority of the judgments of traditional elites, locally situated, and supported by religious institutions. Liberalism arose as an alternative mode of containing the danger. Liberals
argued that reactionary conservatism, which inevitably involved suppressive force, was self-defeating in the medium run, pushing the oppressed to rebel openly. Instead, liberals said, elites should embrace the inevitability of some change and defer nominally to the sovereignty of the people, but insist that social transformation was a complicated and dangerous process that could only be done well and
prudently by specialists whom all others should allow to make the crucial decisions. Liberals thus envisaged a slow, and limited, process of societal transformation. Radicalism was the last ideology to emerge. It began as a small annex to lib-
eralism. Radicals argued that relying on specialists would lead to no more than a slightly revised social structure. Instead, they said, the lower strata should pursue transformation of the system as rapidly as possible, guided by a democratic ethos and an egalitarian ideal. The world-revolution of 1848 marked a turning-point in the relations of the
three ideologies – right-wing conservatism, centrist liberalism, and left-wing radicalism. It began with a social uprising in Paris in February, in which the radical left seemed momentarily to seize state power. This uprising was unexpected by most persons – a happy surprise for the working classes, a serious danger from the point of view of the elites. It so frightened both conservatives and liberals that they buried their voluble differences that had loomed so large up to then and formed a political alliance to suppress the social revolution. … This pair of happenings in 1848 – social revolution in France and nationalist
revolutions in many countries – forced a reconsideration of basic strategy by the tenants of each of the three ideologies. The conservatives noticed that the one major country in which nothing seemed to happen in 1848 was Great Britain. That seemed very curious since throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, radical forces had seemed to be the most extensive, active, and well-organized in Great Britain. … What the conservatives then realized, and historians later confirmed, was that
the British Tories had discovered a mode of containing radicalism far more effective than forceful suppression. The British Tories had been making constant concessions to the demands for social and institutional change. These concessions actually were relatively minor, but their repeated occurrence seemed to suffice to persuade the more radical forces that change was in fact taking place. After 1848, the British example persuaded conservatives elsewhere, especially in continental Europe, that perhaps they should revise their tactics. This revised analysis brought conservatives nearer to the position of the centrist liberals, and took the label of “enlightened conservatism.” Meanwhile, the radicals were equally unsettled by what happened. The principal
tactics radicals had employed up to 1848 had been either spontaneous uprisings or utopian withdrawal. In 1848 radicals observed that their spontaneous uprisings were easily put down. And their utopian withdrawals turned out to be unsustainable. The lesson they drew was the necessity of replacing spontaneity with “organizing” the revolution – a program that involved more temporal patience as well as the creation of a bureaucratic structure. This shift of tactics brought radicals closer to the position of the centrist liberals, the radical bureaucrats now assuming the role of the specialists who would guide transformation. Finally, the liberals too drew a major lesson from the world-revolution of
1848. They began to emphasize their centrist position, as opposed to their
previously primary role of confronting conservatives. They began to see the necessity of tactics that would pull both conservatives and radicals into their orbit, turning them into mere variants of centrist liberalism. In this effort, they turned out to be hugely successful for a very long time – indeed until the much later world-revolution of 1968. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that we see the organiza-
tional emergence of what we consider to be antisystemic movements. There were two main varieties – social movements and nationalist movements – as well as less strong varieties such as women’s movements and ethno/racial/religious movements. These movements were all antisystemic in one simple sense: They were struggling against the established power structures in an effort to bring into existence a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system than the existing one. These movements were, however, deeply divided in terms of their analysis of
how to define the groups that were most oppressed, and what were the priorities of achieving the objectives of one kind of movement relative to other kinds of movements. These debates between the various movements have persisted right up to today. One fundamental debate was how to think about the role of the states in the
achievement of a different kind of historical system. There were those who argued that states were structures established by the elites of the system, mechanisms by which the elites controlled the others. States were therefore an enemy, to be shunned, and against which the movements must ceaselessly struggle. … Against this view were arrayed those who agreed that the state was the instrument
of the ruling elites, and for this very reason could not be ignored. Unless the movements seized power in the states, the ruling classes would use their strength – military and police strength, economic strength, and cultural strength – to crush the antisystemic movements. This group insisted that, precisely in order to transform the historical system, movements had first to achieve control of the state. … The second argument was between the social movements and the nationalist
movements. The former insisted that the modern world-system was a capitalist system and that therefore the basic struggle was a class struggle within each country between the owners of capital (the “bourgeoisie”) and those who had only their own labor power to sell (the “proletariat”). … The nationalist movements assessed the world differently. They saw a world in
which states were controlled either by an internal dominant ethnic group or by external forces. They argued that the most oppressed persons were the “peoples” who were denied their democratic rights and consequently were living in an ever-increasingly inegalitarian historical system. It followed that the natural “historical actors” were the oppressed nations. Only when these oppressed nations came to power in their own state could there be expectations of a more democratic, more egalitarian historical system. … Both the social movements and the nationalist movements [also] insisted on the
importance of “vertical” structures. That is, they both insisted that the road to
success in obtaining state power was to have only one antisystemic structure in any state (actual state for the social movements, virtual state for the nationalist movements). They said that unless all other kind of antisystemic movements subordinated themselves to the single “principal” movement, the objective could not be achieved. For example, take the women’s or feminist movements. … They argued that
the struggle against what was termed “patriarchy” was at least as important as any other struggle and was their primary concern as movements. … The “vertical” movements insisted that there could be women’s auxiliaries of
the social or of the nationalist movements, but that the realization of the feminist demands could only occur as a consequence of the realization of the demands of the “principal” historical actor (the proletariat or the oppressed nation). In effect, the vertical movements counseled deferral of the struggles of the feminist movements. The same logic would be used against other kinds of movements – such as
trade-union movements or movements of so-called “minorities” as socially defined (whether by race, ethnicity, religion, or language). … They could only be adjuncts of the principal movements, or else they were considered to be counter-revolutionary. When these various movements first came to be large enough to be politically
noticeable (circa the 1870s), the most important reality about all of them was that they were perhaps noticeable but in fact organizationally and politically quite weak. The idea that they could actually achieve state power seemed a matter of faith, unsustained by a sober assessment of the real rapport de forces in the modern world-system.
