We can sum this up by saying that the three basic costs of production have risen constantly and have now each approached close enough to their asymptotes that the system cannot be brought back to equilibrium via the multiple mechanisms that have been used for 500 years. The possibilities for producers to achieve an endless accumulation of capital seem to be ending.
A Major Geocultural Change
The profit squeeze for capitalist producers has been compounded by a colossal cultural change. This is the end of the dominance of centrist liberalism in the geoculture, which is the meaning and the consequence of the world-revolution of 1968. The story of the world-revolution of 1968 is in large part the story of the antisystemic movements in the modern world-system—their birth, their strategy, their history up to 1968, their importance for the political operation of the modern world-system.
During the nineteenth century, the Old Left, as it came to be called during the world-revolution of 1968, consisted essentially of the two varieties of world social movements, the Communists and the Social Democrats, plus the national liberation movements. These movements grew slowly and with great effort, primarily during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time, they were weak and politically somewhat marginal. And then in the period 1945 to 1968, they became extremely strong rather rapidly, again in almost all parts of the world-system.
It seems somewhat counterintuitive that they should have achieved such strength precisely during the period of both the extraordinary Kondratieff A-phase expansion and the height of US hegemony. I do not think, however, that this was fortuitous. Recall that I argued that capitalists have a strong desire not to experience interruptions of their production processes (strikes, slowdowns, sabotage) when the world-economy is flourishing, especially those capitalists involved in the most profitable processes, the leading industries. Given that the expansion at this time was exceptionally profitable, the producers were ready to make significant wage concessions to their workers, believing that such concessions would cost them less than the profit losses resulting from such interruptions. To be sure, this meant middle-term rising costs of production, which would become a major factor in the decline of the quasi-monopolies in the late 1960s. But most entrepreneurs, then as always, calculated their interests in terms of short-term profits, feeling unable to predict or control what might happen after about three years.
The hegemonic power thought about its interests in somewhat similar ways. Its primary concern was to maintain a relative stability in the geopolitical arena. Repressive activity on the world scene against the antisystemic movements seemed very costly. Where possible—it was not always possible—the United States favored a “decolonization” that was negotiated, resulting in a regime that presumably could be expected to be more “moderate” in its future politics. This had the effect of bringing nationalist/national liberation movements to power in a very large swath of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
In the great internal debates of the movements in the late nineteenth century—Marxists versus anarchists in the social movements in the industrialized countries, political versus cultural nationalism in the anticolonial movements—the Marxists and the political nationalists argued that the only credible program was the so-called two-step strategy: first take state power, then change the world. By 1945, the Marxists and the political nationalists had clearly gained the upper hand in the intra-movement debates and controlled the most powerful organizations.[3]
These relatively permissive attitudes of the megacorporations and the hegemonic power had the consequence that, by the middle of the 1960s, the Old Left movements had achieved their historic goal of state power almost everywhere. Communist parties were in power in one-third of the world, called at the time the socialist bloc. Social Democratic parties were in alternating power in most of another third of the world—the pan-European world.[4] And, by 1968, in almost all of the colonial countries, the nationalist and national liberation movements had come to power.[5]
However “moderate” many of these movements seemed when in power, the world-system was pervaded at the time by a significant triumphalism that all these movements affected. They felt and loudly proclaimed that the future was theirs, that history was on their side. And the powerful in the modern world-system were afraid these proclamations were accurate. They feared the worst. However, those who participated in the world-revolution of 1968 did not agree. They did not see the coming to power of the Old Left movements as a triumph, but rather as a betrayal. They said in essence: You may be in power (step one) but you haven’t changed the world at all (step two).
If one listened carefully to the rhetoric of participants in the world-revolution of 1968, and one ignored the local references (which were of course different from one country to another), there were three themes that seemed to pervade the analyses of those who engaged in these multiple uprisings, whether they were located in the socialist bloc, the pan-European world, or the Third World.
The first theme concerned the hegemonic power. The United States was not seen as the guarantor of world order; it was seen as the imperialist overlord, but one that had overstretched and was now vulnerable. The Vietnam War was then at its height, and the Tet offensive of February 1968 was considered to be the death knell of the US military operation. This was not all. The revolutionaries accused the Soviet Union of being a collusive partner in US hegemony.
The Cold War was, they believed, a phony facade. The Yalta deal of de facto status quo was the major geopolitical reality. This deep suspicion had been growing since 1956. 1956 was the year of Suez and Hungary—in which neither superpower acted in terms of Cold War rhetoric. It was also the year of Khrushchev’s “secret” talk at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a talk that undid Stalinist rhetoric and many of his policies, leading to a widespread “disillusionment” among the erstwhile faithful.
The second theme concerned the Old Left movements, which were attacked everywhere for failing to fulfill their promises (the second step) when they came to power. The militants said in effect that, since you haven’t changed the world, we must rethink a failed strategy and replace you with new movements. For many, it was the Chinese Cultural Revolution that served as a model—with their call to purge the “capitalist roaders” in the very top positions of the party and government.
The third theme concerned what might be called the forgotten peoples—those oppressed because of their race, their gender, their ethnicity, their sexuality, their otherness in all its possible guises. The Old Left movements had all been hierarchical movements, insisting that only one movement in any country could be “the” revolutionary movement, and that this movement had to give priority to a particular type of struggle—the class struggle in the industrialized countries (the North), the national struggle in the rest of the world (the South).
The logic of their position was that any “group” that sought to pursue an autonomous strategy was undermining the priority struggle and therefore was objectively counter-revolutionary. All such groups had to be organized within the hierarchical party structure and be subordinate to its topdown tactical decisions.
The 1968 militants insisted that the demands for equal treatment by all of these groups could no longer be deferred to some putative future time after the main struggle was “won.” These demands were urgent and the oppression they were combating was as important as that of the alleged priority group in the present. The forgotten peoples included prominently women, socially defined minorities (racial, ethnic, religious), persons of multiple sexual tendencies, and persons who gave priority to ecological issues or peace struggles. There is no end to the list of forgotten peoples, which has expanded and become more militant ever since. At the time, the Black Panthers in the United States were a very prominent example of this kind of group.
3
It is true that the “Marxists” divided into two camps as of the Russian Revolution, the Social Democrats (or 2nd International) and the Communists (or 3rd International). However, their differences were not about the two-step strategy, but rather about how to achieve the first step—taking state power. Furthermore, by 1968, the Social Democrats had stopped calling themselves Marxists, while the Communists were now calling themselves Marxist-Leninists. For the young persons who made up the bulk of the participants in the world-revolution of 1968, this debate between the adherents of the two Internationals, so important to the Old Left, seemed almost irrelevant, as these young persons tended to have disparaging opinions about both varieties of Old Left social movements.
4
One has to remember that, at that time, the principal policy of the Social Democratic parties—the welfare state—was accepted by their conservative alternate parties, which merely quibbled about the details. I consider New Deal liberals in the United States to be a variety of Social Democrats who simply declined to utilize the label for reasons peculiar to the political history of the United States.
5
Most Latin American countries had become formally independent in the first half of the nineteenth century. But populist movements there showed analogous strength to national liberation movements in the still formally colonial world.