"Uncertainty and Historical Progress"
by Immanuel Wallerstein (iwaller@binghamton.edu)
© Immanuel Wallerstein, 1999
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The central legacy of Enlightenment thought was the concept of inevitable progress. The Christian concept of salvation had implied that a beneficent endpoint to the moral life existed for some but not for all. The concept of inevitable progress constituted a universalization of salvation by the Enlightenment, not merely making salvation something this-worldly but suggesting that the beneficent endpoint would eventually occur for everyone, and not merely for some. In the nineteenth century, the concept of progress became the indispensable pillar of liberal ideology. It enabled liberals to explain away all existing inequalities and injustices on the grounds that they were historically transitory. Liberals argued the Whig interpretation of history, which postulated a rigorously linear view of historical existence. Today was better than yesterday, and tomorrow would be better still. The future was a function of patient grinding away in the direction of the good society, and intelligent intervention by experts who could, by judicious reforms, ensure that the process went as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
The concept of progress was thus a very social doctrine. It was therefore quite logical for the most explicitly social of nineteenth-century ideologies, socialism, to have built into its theoretical analyses the inevitability of progress. The disagreement of socialists with liberal ideologues was only over the three things: the pace of change; the role of the experts; and the smoothness of the transitions. Socialists thought the pace of change was a function of political struggle. Socialists doubted the disinteressedness of so-called experts, and in theory insisted upon the primary role of the mass of the population. And socialists did not think the process, however linera, was smooth. Rather, they saw it as more step-like, with drastic shifts upward as a result of social revolutions.
Today, in the wake of the disillusionment with real existing socialism, not only in its Communist version but even in its various Social-Democratic versions, it is not surprising that many have turned against the concept of progress. It is guilty, if in no other way, by association. But what shall we put in its place? There are many who would return to the theological version. We are all sinners but some may be saved, in some extra-worldly arena. Others have moved in the direction of the equal validation of all ideas, all movements, all identities, all value-systems, in the name of the sacrosanctness of difference. Neither of these arguments, whatever their attractiveness as emotional balm, seem to me very useful as signposts for political and moral choice.
Why have so many turned against progress, which only a short while ago, was receiving the plaudits of all and seemed the unquestioned underpinning of our intellectual life. To be sure, one element in this mood shift has been the historic political failure of the antisystemic movements. It is easy today to talk of failure. But we should recognize what remarkable successes these movements were. When the various antisystemic movements first began to organize seriously in the second half of the nineteenth century (in their two historic versions - as socialist movements and as national liberation movements) they were extraordinarily weak and easy to repress. But they persisted and mobilized popular opinion behind them. And in the period from 1945 to 1970, they managed to come to power in virtually every part of the world - as Communist movements, as Social-Democratic parties, as national liberation movements.
Their success was their failure. For all these movements had put forward, in the late nineteenth century, a two-step political strategy: first, mobilize to take state power; second, transform the world (or at least the country). Until there was a real existing socialism, the movements were only judged on their abilities to mobilize to take state power. This was the heart of the Bernstein-Lenin debates as it was of the Stalin-Trotsky debates. But once in power, the issues were different.
Once in power, all these movements put into place some social welfare reforms - more education, more health services, more guarantees of lifetime income. But that was essentially all. None of them ended a sharp polarization of real income within the country (although a few reduced it), and none of them was able to slow down the increasing world-scale polarization of real income and life chance. None of them ended a privileged life access for a small percentage of the national population, although many changed the segment of the population who had this privilege (the rise of the Nomenklatura). None of them created genuinely democratic societies, and some of them reduced human freedom. In short, none of them transformed the world in any sense, or even transformed their countries in the direction they had promised.
Their failures led to disillusionment, not merely with their past practice but with their future promise. The movements lost credibility, precisely because they were in power. I accuse no one of betraying the ideals of the movements. But collectively they had all underestimated the capacities of states located within a continuing capitalist world-economy to transform anything. And of course, the sense that all the party bureaucracies had of the primary importance of their staying in state power led them to make many inevitable compromises with powerful forces in the world-system.
The mistake had not been to try. The mistake had been not to analyze the world as it really functioned and therefore to foresee the consequences of their own actions. By their very ideology of inevitable progress, the antisystemic movements served as a conservatizing force on the world's oppressed strata. For what they preached, once in power, was "trust us" and eventually everything will be perfect. The other side of the coin of the now massive disillusionment with the movements is that this conservatizing force has disappeared from the world scene, and thereby the capitalist world-economy has been immensely weakened, not strengthened.
I shall not repeat here the analysis of the structural profits crisis of world capitalism which will bring it down in my view in the next half-century (see Utopistics, 1998). I will simply say that this structural crisis leads us into a dark period of struggle over what kind of system will succeed the existing one. We can think of this as a bifurcation, and therefore of the beginning of a chaotic period, within which no one can predict the outcome, which is inherently indeterminate. There will be a new structure, a new order, but it may be either better or worse than the existing one. It depends on what we all do in the period of acute struggle and how clearly we understand the forces at work.
Hence progress is possible, but certainly not inevitable.
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