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Immanuel Wallerstein was convinced that the capitalist system would end within the next few decades and would either be replaced by a more regressive world-system or a more democratic and egalitarian one. In his view, the odds were 50-50 each way.

When Immanuel Wallerstein died in 2019, he was one of the most influential thinkers about the crisis-ridden development of global capitalism. People who might never have read one of his books will still find themselves referring to the “core” and the “periphery” of the capitalist world-system.

Wallerstein was convinced that capitalism would end within the next few decades. But he thought that it could either be replaced by a more regressive system or a more egalitarian one, depending on the outcome of popular struggles for democracy.

Gregory Williams is a professor of political science and international relations at Simmons University in Boston, and the author of Contesting the Global Order: The Radical Political Economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein. This is an edited transcript from Jacobin Radio’s Long Reads podcast. You can listen to the interview here.

Daniel Finn

To begin with, could you tell us something about Immanuel Wallerstein’s background and his pathway toward becoming an academic?

Gregory P. Williams

As Wallerstein himself later said, he was a complete “New Yorker by taste and by temperament.” He was outgoing and opinionated. He could be very charming, even when he disagreed with people. In many ways, he embodied the city where he was born in 1930.

He also loved languages and the cultural diversity of the city. His family wasn’t from New York originally — they came from various places in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents had met in Berlin, where they had a son in the early 1920s. They then moved to New York, which is where Immanuel was born.

He came to think of this New York childhood as having been essential for his development. He would later travel the world, but, as a youth, the world really came to him. He was educated in New York, too.

He went to Columbia University and eventually joined its faculty for the first part of his career. In the 1950s, as a young graduate student there, he was part of an emerging discipline called political sociology. Today it’s a very common academic field, but it was cutting-edge at the time.

Like C. Wright Mills, who was also there at the time, Wallerstein didn’t worry too much about the uniqueness of academic disciplines. Sociology was his home, and I think sociology may have affected him even more than he realized. But he always thought of himself as being much more of a social scientist than a sociologist.

His MA thesis from 1954, which is not very well known, was on McCarthyism. It corresponded with the peak of Joseph McCarthy’s power and several other Columbia writings on the subject such as those by Mills or Richard Hofstadter, who later cited Wallerstein’s thesis.

This was long before the age of the internet, so in order to obtain copies of McCarthy’s speeches, Wallerstein wrote to the senator, pretending to be a follower who wanted to help McCarthy “expose the mess in Washington.” I don’t know if McCarthy’s office ever got back to Wallerstein, but it was Daniel Bell who ultimately provided him with the information he needed. To me, that story illustrated Wallerstein’s devotion to understanding what was happening, but also his sense of humor.

He worried about McCarthyism at the time and at a later stage, because he saw it as one part of the struggle over what was then an emerging world scene: a fight between regressive forces that wanted to suppress the nationalist, anti-colonial movements versus the socialists who wanted to create a better world. In many ways, those are the divisions that are still with us today.

Wallerstein did not emphasize the Cold War Washington–Moscow rivalry. He would wait several decades before writing a piece that described what he saw as the fundamentally symbiotic nature of that relationship in the postwar years. Wallerstein thought the fundamental divide was that between what we would today call the Global North versus the Global South; at the time, it was the colonizers versus the nationalist movements.

He saw that as the most significant issue in the world, and so he would move on from studying McCarthyism. But he never moved on from trying to understand how political beliefs could be mobilized, whether by a leader or by ordinary people.

Daniel Finn

How did Wallerstein relate to the approach known as modernization theory that was very prevalent in the social sciences at the time?

Gregory P. Williams

He related to modernization theory with great difficulty. Modernization theory became fashionable in the 1950s. It’s a diverse body of thought with different contributions and offshoots, so I don’t want to overgeneralize. But by and large, those who adhere to modernization theory share at least three beliefs.

The first is a belief in development, a term for the growing political and economic sophistication that emerges at the level of the nation-state. The second is the idea that development goes through stages — unidirectional phases that cannot be reversed or skipped. The third is a view of development as a homogenizing, Westernizing process, in the sense that nations adopt American values and traditions through capitalist growth. These studies often concluded that newly independent or decolonizing nations should forge closer ties with their former colonizers to attract foreign investment and open themselves up to trade — in short, to become modern.

By this point, in the late 1950s, Wallerstein had become an Africa specialist, and he couldn’t escape modernization theory. He never accepted the implication of European superiority, or the small-mindedness of modernization theory, limiting our notion of social progress to technocratic or minimalistic ideas about growth. He preferred thinking in terms of equality: political equality, economic equality, cultural equality.

He rejected the notion that domestic leaders were to blame for a nation’s success or failure. This idea in and of itself was dangerous, because it called into question the entire relationship of the great powers to their former colonizers. But Wallerstein was willing to accept at the time the ideas that development happened at the level of the nation-state and that development was an irreversible process, going through stages.

He wouldn’t always hold these views, but in the 1950s and ’60s, he did. By the late 1960s, however, he found the whole tradition unworkable. In the interim, he spent quite a bit of time revising European ideas about political development in divided societies. He drew on Karl Polanyi, Fernand Braudel, Amílcar Cabral, and Frantz Fanon. Fanon was especially helpful, Wallerstein thought, at translating those ideas for the colonial context.

Ultimately, those ideas and his experiences in the region taught him that he needed a new way of thinking altogether. In a nutshell, the problem was that development did not happen at the level of the nation-state, as he eventually came to realize. There were various critical terms of trade between what were then the newly independent nations and their former colonizers: we can’t pretend that everything is happening internally.

Wallerstein had initially planned a study of the so-called old nations of Europe in an attempt to draw lessons for the so-called new nations of Africa. But he eventually thought that it was the relationship between “old” and “new” nations that was so important, and thus he shifted his attention to describing and articulating the nature of that relationship.

Daniel Finn

What did Wallerstein have in mind when he spoke about “anti-systemic movements”?

Gregory P. Williams

This is another crucial piece of the puzzle, because the subject of international relations is about states or countries, but it’s also about the people living in those countries. The term “anti-systemic movement” is one he came up with much later, after some reflection on what happened in the 1960s. But the idea is that people from all over the world occasionally engage in separate social and national struggles. On the surface, those struggles seem to be rather different, but at a deeper level, they’re interconnected. They constitute rejections of the established order throughout the world-system.

In his writings, such as the book Anti-Systemic Movements, the movements are symbolized by years, but they always constitute a phase with a few years on either side: 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968, 1989, for example. Many scholars have added the Arab Spring of 2011 as a contemporary reference.

For Wallerstein, the year 1968 was crucially important. It was at that point that he helped negotiate a standoff between students and administration officials at Columbia University. He proposed several solutions, working, as one person put it at the time, to the verge of near exhaustion. The whole experience of 1968, which was a movement of global left protest against the Western or US international order, helped Wallerstein crystallize many of his views on world politics.

In fact, he later even said that it was the most important historical event of the twentieth century — more so than the Russian Revolution. Politically, Wallerstein became convinced that the writings of left intellectuals could encourage the shift to socialism and that activists could be armed with the right tools for revolution. He thought of his work and that of others as being essential in this broader struggle.

Daniel Finn

Wallerstein is associated with the idea of world-systems analysis (with a hyphen, it’s important to note). What particular meaning did the term “world-system” have for him, and what different kinds of world-system did he identify?

Gregory P. Williams

Yes, the all-important hyphen! The notion of the world-system was Wallerstein’s way of rethinking world politics beyond the perspectives of modernization theory. He had already rejected the assumption of European superiority. He then chose to reject the assumption of national development.

If the nations aren’t developing in isolation, what is developing? It’s the entire system: what Wallerstein called the world-system, with the hyphen between “world” and “system.” This system is comprised of the relationship between the old nations and the new ones. Interestingly enough, Washington continued at this point to accept the idea of stages or phases that could not be skipped, albeit with some major limitations.

But after 1968, he thought that it was the entire system that went through stages, not the individual nation-states. In my view, that shift was perhaps the most essential change in Wallerstein’s thinking over the course of his professional life. By the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Wallerstein started thinking in terms of systems — that relationship between societies, in dyadic terms, or among nations.

Systems themselves have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, as he would say, systems have lives. The world-system is the idea that there is a system that is itself also a world. It’s not “the world’s system.” It does not have to be global, although today it is. Rather, the concept of the world is the idea that this (or any) social system is self-contained.

Wallerstein conceived of several kinds of world-system. The two most important of these were the world-empire and the world-economy. The world-empires were the large-scale civilizations with a single governing institution and a single economic system, such as ancient Rome. The governing entity conquered and occupied vast stretches of territory and received tribute from various constituent parts of the world-empire. This has been, historically speaking, a very common kind of world-system.

A world-economy is very different and also very unusual from a historical perspective. A world-economy consists of several distinct governing institutions within an overarching economic system. In the case of our modern world-system, what Wallerstein called the capitalist world-economy, the states were bound together by a capitalist economic system. This is familiar to us today, because it’s what we know and what we expect, but it’s actually an unusual relationship.

Furthermore, Wallerstein did not define capitalism in terms of private ownership or wage labor. On the question of private ownership, he saw governments promoting and propping up industry. On the question of wage labor, he saw many instances of forced labor, including slavery, within an overarching capitalist economy. Therefore, he defined capitalism according to its processes. Capitalism for him is a system based on the endless accumulation of capital, by which he meant stored value.

For Wallerstein, capitalism formed in Western Europe and parts of the Americas over the course of what historians like to call the long sixteenth century, roughly spanning the years from 1450 to 1640. This was a period of fragility. Over the centuries, however, the system became quite strong, and no single power could push the system under its control, although a few have tried.

But no system can last forever. The central element of world-systems analysis is the idea that all systems are impermanent. Wallerstein became even more convinced of this point of view when he met the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine in 1980. He realized that they were talking about similar things. Prigogine taught Wallerstein that the same conclusion holds for natural systems: sooner or later, the routine operations of a system become impossible to sustain, whether that’s a hurricane or the capitalist world-economy. Even the universe has a lifespan.

Daniel Finn

Wallerstein spoke about the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery of the world-system. Those are terms that people may well have seen in journalism and economic analysis. But when Wallerstein himself used those terms, what distinctions was he trying to make in the geography of global capitalism?

Gregory P. Williams

For Wallerstein, those terms refer to the division of labor within the world-system. The distinctions between core, semi-periphery, and periphery more or less mirror the class divisions within a society on a world scale. For some time, dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank had thought in terms of a well-off core zone that profited off the poor periphery.

The core refers to those great powers that have wealth and formidable militaries. They are the nations at the top, and there are relatively few of them. The periphery, by contrast, is comprised of those nations that become integrated into the world-economy by force, usually via imperialism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although it certainly didn’t end in the twentieth century. The periphery has been kept in its reduced position after the end of formal empire through the politics of debt and trade.

Wallerstein did not think these categories were enough, so he devised a third category, which he called the semi-periphery. He thought that the semi-periphery served as a guarantor of the capitalist world-economy. It is a conveyor belt of trade and can innovate in many ways in terms of the evolution of the system. However, the semi-periphery member states are middle-tier, partially exploited and partially benefiting from the uneven terms of trade.

Politically, they help to block revolutionary activity in the periphery, whose members might feel that they have, shall we say, nothing to lose but their chains. Thus, the semi-periphery in a political sense also serves as a brake on transformative political action. In short, those terms helped Wallerstein to make sense of the very different experiences among states in the world-system.

Daniel Finn

What long-term trends or tendencies did Wallerstein identify as being at work in the capitalist system?

Gregory P. Williams

Given the imagery of a world-system having a lifespan, it also stands to reason that there are patterns of behavior within the system. As with other living things, there are enduring trends. Just as humans develop certain tendencies as they grow older, so do world-systems. Wallerstein referred to the repeated behavior of the system as its cyclical rhythms.

One example of those rhythms was the phenomenon he called an economic long-wave. These were long-term periods of faster or slower growth. Some lasted for several decades, while others could last centuries. These economic long-waves are like a world-system taking in breath and then letting it out. That was the image that Wallerstein used to describe it.

He never understood why the idea of long-waves — especially the Kondratiev wave of approximately forty-five to sixty years — should be met with such resistance among Western social scientists. If people were willing to accept the idea of short-term trends, such as voter preferences or the price of milk, why not longer-term trends? The answer, of course, is political. It’s just not academic.

There’s another cyclical rhythm that is very important: the rise and fall of the hegemonic powers. By hegemony, Wallerstein meant the very brief period of unrivaled dominance of a great power — we’re talking about the space of a generation. You had the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century, and the Americans in the twentieth century. That’s it, so far as Wallerstein was concerned — it’s a very exclusive club.

Each hegemonic power essentially gets to write the rules for the age — rules that even extend beyond its twenty-five years or so of hegemony. We are now living in a period of US hegemonic decline, but we are still in a time of America’s liberal order, with the institutions created at Bretton Woods and San Francisco at the end of World War II, such as the United Nations and major international lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund.

Of course, the hegemonic power is riding a wave of forces that it cannot fully determine. It always describes its own rise as being due to its individual efforts and talents. But the reason hegemony is so rare is the fact that some rather unusual things have to line up in terms of the nature of the economic long-waves.

One way in which Wallerstein innovated was showing how there was a sort of normal path — a normal line of behavior — for the capitalist world-economy that he called a line of equilibrium. These cyclical rhythms depart from that line and then come back. But with the passage of time, as a system ages, these cyclical rhythms also cause secular trends that increase over the life of the system. By definition, they cannot be undone.

Some of capitalism’s secular trends include the system’s tendency for political revolts, the proletarianization of the labor forces, broadly defined, and the geographic expansion of the world-system. The final one of these trends is perhaps the most useful for understanding what Wallerstein was talking about.

For much of capitalism’s history, the system has relied on expansion to survive. The capitalist world-economy initially took up only a small part of the actual world as it used up environmental resources such as timber. As workers started to demand better treatment, the system would incorporate external areas.

Slowly, the world-system grew. It really grew in two major phases, but it was a slow process overall. By the end of the nineteenth century, the world-system became a truly global system. Today, unless we conquer Mars or some other strange thing of that nature, the system has no more room to give, and we’re seeing the effects of a capitalist system that cannot release its internal pressures. Those are some of the major trends within capitalism according to Wallerstein.

Daniel Finn

How would you say the ideas of Wallerstein can help us make sense of the various problems and crises that are afflicting global capitalism today?

Gregory P. Williams

Wallerstein himself was neither pessimistic nor optimistic about the world scene. He was convinced that the capitalist system would end within the next few decades. But the real issue for him was, what happens next? Today the system is very chaotic, moving abruptly from one position to the next. It cannot, as he would put it, maintain equilibrium.

Wallerstein saw the increased political protests and geopolitical turmoil as indicative of the system being in crisis. We have volatility in stocks, currencies, oil, and mineral supplies, all in addition to what we might say is the very predictable volatility of complex financial instruments invented by the traditional banks, as well as the cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, conflicts in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, which have the real potential of widening considerably, show the decline of the American-led order.

All in all, Wallerstein’s ideas tell us that people no longer believe in the traditional liberal promise, a promise that said there would be slow but steady rewards to be realized over the course of generations. Instead, the turmoil of capitalism has led to restless classes, armed with dangerous ideas (at least from the perspective of the establishment) about democratizing political power.

Wallerstein thought the system could go in either direction: you could create a new, more regressive post-capitalist world-system, or you could create a new, more egalitarian post-capitalist world-system. Wallerstein thought each of these options was roughly equal in its chances of success, but he always sought to rouse the troops, so to speak — to give people the moral fortitude to keep fighting. In my view, with his ideas, we’re rather well armed for the current struggle.