Wallerstein, Always to the Point, By Atilio Boron on September 2, 2019

Wallerstein, Always to the Point

By Atilio Boron on September 2, 2019

Karl Marx

Immanuel Wallerstein passed away and we are deprived of an outstanding mind and a refined critic of the capitalist society. What makes this loss more lamentable is that it comes at such a critical moment as todays, when the international system is cracking from the combined pressures of the tension caused by the decline of the United State’s imperialism and the systemic crisis of capitalism.

Wallerstein was an academician with a trajectory that extended along more than half a century. He started researching about postcolonial African countries to then starting to build a great theory about capitalism as a historic system. This began during the eighties and finished with the production of a large amount of books, essays for specialized magazines, and articles addressed to international public opinion.

Wallerstein not only fulfilled the ethical principle that demands an intellectual to make his ideas public so as to nourish the debate that any society should have about itself and its future, but he also continued a path rarely common in the university field. His initial theoretical stance inscribed within the controlling paradigm of social science in his country, he then approached Marxism and finished his latest years with an essential agreement with theorists such as Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, Beverly Silver, and Elmar Altvater, among many others, about the nature of the capitalist system and its unsolvable contradictions.

His career path is the opposite to so many colleagues who, despite criticizing capitalism when they were young or in their early college years, ended up as publicists for the right: Daniel Bell and Seymour Lipset, prophets of Ronald Reagan’s neoconservative reaction during the eighties; or Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who completed their intellectual and political decline that had started in the Frankfurt School by abstaining from condemning the Vietnam War. Or writers and intellectuals who started on the left —such as Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and Regis Debray— and became the spokespeople of the empire and reactionary sectors.

Wallerstein was different to all of them not only regarding social and political theory but also in matters of epistemological discussion, as it is revealed in his excellent work “Unthinking Social Science” written in 1998. This text invites the reader to make a radical review of the social science’s dominant methodological paradigm, whose positivist core condemns them to an incurable inability to understand the tangled dialectics and actuality of the social life. Following this approach, he could not have had a more accurate prediction about the course of imperialist domination. In one of his essays in 2011, he warned that “the view that the United States has seriously declined, is a banality. Everyone is saying it, except for a few U.S. politicians who fear they will be blamed for the bad news of the decline if they discuss it.” And he added that although “there are many, many positive aspects for many countries because of U.S. decline, it is not certain that, in the wild rocking of the world boat, other countries will in fact be able to draw the profit they hoped for from this new situation.” The path followed by the Trump Administration and the irreversible decline of the postwar world order with the U.S. at its axis confirms each of these words.

In conclusion, where can we find theoretical nourishment to understand and change the current world, finally overcoming capitalism and leave those painful and savage prehistoric times of humanity behind? He left a transparent message to the youth of today: Read Marx instead of those who write about Marx. “One must read interesting people,” Wallerstein said, “and Marx is the most interesting scholar of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is no question about that. No one is equal to him in terms of the number of things he wrote about, nor for the quality of his analysis.  So, my message to the new generation is that Marx is eminently worth discovering but you must read, and read him. Read Karl Marx!” This was one of his latest bits of advice, to understand the nature and dynamics of a system, capitalism, which in 2009 he already predicted a survival rate of two or three decades at most. Thanks Immanuel for being an enlightenment for so many years!

Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau