Wallerstein is probably my favorite living intellectual and he seems like a genuinely warm, good-hearted person, who puts his theory in easily understandable terms.
"The most unstable country in the entire world is the US." That was said in late 2013! The PRC has "re-unified" what we call "China". Historically the idea of "China" as one "state' (e.g., "empire") has frequently not been accepted by all who live in the geographic region of East Asia. The PRC does not want to upset the global system altogether. But the government of the PRC does tinker at the edge (e.g., Taiwan-Formosa). "In 20 to 40 years the system will change". Yes! In 2023 the world system will indeed change significantly. "We do not even know if there will be nation-states in the new system".
Prof. Wallerstein is incorrect in his characterization (approx 39:00) in which he says China "shot down" a U.S. plane early in the George W. Bush presidency. In fact, the EP-3 surveillance plane was forced into an emergency landing on the Chinese island of Hainan after a collision with a Chinese fighter that was escorting the plane. The Chinese pilot died; the U.S. crew landed safely and were temporarily detained. (Wallerstein says their bodies were returned.) Over all, this is a very interesting talk, but the related argument that George W. Bush backed away from a confrontation is significantly weakened by the inaccurate account of this incident, which was an accident that arguably occurred due to pilot error and an aggressive Chinese stance regarding surveillance flights the United States would not cease, not because of an intentional shoot-down.
Interesting aspect, yes. But the greater picture of us-China relations and their, as far as Wallerstein goes, continuous approximation significantly changed since trump. I'd argue that, in Wallerstein's theory, trump is the first president since that which Wallerstein understands the commencement of fake us-China antagonism, who does not understand the playbook and thus precipitates a true us-China antagonism, only temporarily halted by minor policy withdrawals. These, however, never seem to recapture wholly the afore happened antagonism. This would fit in with Wallerstein's perception of capitalism's "two steps towards decline, one step back"-trajectory.
He is a SWINDLER by saying that there was NO SUCH A DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM AS HE SUGGESTS FOR THE FUTURE!! THERE WAS ONLY ONE : IT WAS THE USSR WHO REPLICATED THE SYSTEM OF TURKIC IMPIORS AS THE TURKIC KAGANAT CHINGIZKGAN IMPIOR TIMUR IMPIOR GOLDEN HORDES who ruled the system as a FAMILY FAIRLY AND DEMOCRATICALY taking cared of their own and "brother"- Volks! Be careful the Rulers of our WORLD ZYONISTS PREPARING A NEW SURPRISE! HEP US TO RESTORE THE USSR AND YOU WILL SURVIVE!
@@hansfrankfurter2903 I think He is correct. But remember things are never black and white. History shows Mao Zedong hated Kruschev because of this. He noticed USSR did not want a world revolution and was just satisfied with the status quo. Notice that Soviet Union was actually a bunch of privileged bureaucrats. Besides USA did not interfere in Soviet Satellites. Soviet Union was a little bit more defiant with Brejnev because He personally believed capitalism was contained and in decline, but Soviet Union was also in decline. The arms race was , in my view, mostly a way the USA had to prop up its military industrial complex and Soviet Union followed to keep the parity.
@@tolethom I obviously agree that the upper nomenklatura had privilege but this is the case everywhere, and their privilege were not nearly as much as in capitalist countries. I read somewhere it was around 5 times the avg soviet citizen, compare to 100s of times in other countries. Anyhow I'm still not understanding, why the USSR bought into the arms race if they really trusted each other with not fighting? If you're saying to keep parity, this means the agreement wasn't really trusted. And what was the nuclear race all about? All theater? US definitely interfered in Soviet satellites. Ukraine and and Hungary come to mind. Ukraine was within the USSR actually.
I think there was no complete trust. USSR tried to defend its influence in a vast territory and in the end it was clear that USSR had internal issues to keep that giant country plus satellites in line with Moscow. However, cold war retoric provided USA a powerful justification to interfere in every country in the world. In Brazil, for example, where I live, the president brought down by US influence was no socialist AT All, just want a just agrarian reform. The cold war was convenient to exaggerate the threat of communism and reafirm capitalist power everywhere. What he means I think is that Soviet Union had little capacity to spread a world revolution and was more a convenient threat to reaffirm capitalist power.
40:00 this was proven absolutely wrong by time. The United States and China have continued economic interests, but have diverged as Xi Jinping have become more authoritarian and moved in alliance with Russia and other anti us states. But that's okay cause big claims about the future are hard to get right, and he was either hopeful of Xi moving back towards the Washington Consensus (he didnt) or this lecture came before his takeover of the party, (in 2011-2012).
You are saying the United States have somehow reduce economic relations with China (to its own detriment) based on higher moral grounds (democratic principles)? Allow me to doubt you.
A well presented lecture but the factual content is pretty well known and the interpretations are not well substantiated. He claims that the global surplus value is being spread too widely so the 'game is not worth the candle' for most producers. But most data shows increasing polarization of global wealth. He says the Cold War was a pretense but ignores the Vietnam War. There are several other disputable claims. He offers no criterion for change within and of a system.
His position is one of an academic. His role isn't necessarily to provide prescriptions for policy. Wallerstein is a theorist so while he can offer suggestion it doesn't mean his analysis requires suggestions for actionable change.
+Larry Jacobson You've really missed the point: "global surplus value" is a category of capital that must be restricted to a special class -- the capitalists. Restricted to this class, the claim is exactly right: as the available surplus value is in structural decline (see Harvey for the problem, or rather the technical 'contradiction' faced by the immanent structural goal of maintaining global, compound growth), there is increasingly less available for accumulation -- yet, there is a greater pressure for capital accumulation. In this condition, it is exactly true that "global surplus value is being spread too widely"-- that is, spread widely *among the capitalist class*, under the structural and systemic pressures to accumulate wealth (i.e., capital). Now, considering the distribution of wealth restricted to the category of *income* (not surplus value/capital -- we must be careful to precisely distinguish here between income and surplus value/capital, for they aren't the same), the data, as you rightly point out, show "increasing polarization of global wealth" that is: that the global share *of a particular category of 'wealth'*, namely, 'income', is polarized between an increasingly smaller percentage of the world's population who takes home the lion's share of it, and the far larger percentage of the world taking home increasingly less. So that we can say that the haves grow, but are increasingly pressured to compete amongst themselves for the (increasingly less available) *surplus value* that generally spells higher incomes for them (this is Wallerstein's point) vs. the havenots whose situation becomes increasingly more precarious as they face the specter of unemployment, perpetual under-employment and what David Harvey calls in general "universal alienation". That is, as the havenots' share of income dwindles, their situation is one of increasing and total immiseration, which Wallerstein once argued (in his fantastically succinct "Historical Capitalism") is *absolute* and not merely historically relative. Remember, capital or rather, surplus value, implies at any given time a certain *liquid* quantity of (cash) money that the capitalist class takes as "income" and spends for itself (remember, they pay taxes -- though as we all know this class goes out of its way to concoct all sorts of schemes, both legal and illegal, to evade paying them). But their income, while derived from the surplus value they appropriate from the labor/working class (and increasingly more from pure financial speculation), is not equivalent to the surplus value (the capital) from which it is derived. Furthermore, nobody who is not plugged into ownership in some way has no income derived from surplus value and hence they are to be accounted as an entirely separate category of person within the System as a whole. And so it is from this large category of person (whom we could simply call the non-capitalist laborer or worker -- and here I include everyone from a janitor to the vast hordes of corporate managers, though it gets tricky when you factor in remuneration from stocks or stock options, for this is tied into the extraction of surplus value) that the capitalists as a class extract the aforementioned "surplus value" which ultimately determines a quantity of cash money they take as *income*. It follows that Wallerstein's statements are entirely self-consistent, and, moreover, consistent with the existing data on the distribution of *wealth*, once we are careful to separate 'wealth' into the relevant categories of analysis. And there are two which have been put forward here: (1) surplus value/capital (which is the relevant category of wealth; for the capitalist class); and (2) income (which is the relevant category of wealth for the laborer or worker, i.e., for one who is *not* an owner (shareholder, etc.) of the means of producing the things which are sold for a profit). Dividing, which is to say specifying, 'global wealth' in this way resolves the supposed problem you raise, which is the apparent conflict with the data about the "increasing polarization of global wealth".
He is a SWINDLER by saying that there was NO SUCH A DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM AS HE SUGGESTS FOR THE FUTURE!! THERE WAS ONLY ONE : IT WAS THE USSR WHO REPLICATED THE SYSTEM OF TURKIC IMPIORS AS THE TURKIC KAGANAT CHINGIZKGAN IMPIOR TIMUR IMPIOR GOLDEN HORDES who ruled the system as a FAMILY FAIRLY AND DEMOCRATICALY taking cared of their own and "brother"- Volks! Be careful the Rulers of our WORLD ZYONISTS PREPARING A NEW SURPRISE! HEP US TO RESTORE THE USSR AND YOU WILL SURVIVE!
@@NoReprensentationWithoutTax seems to me that either he knows very little about China, or he is in line with the colonialist forces. He and Chomsky are deeply anticommunist for reasons that are not founded in sound historical analysis.
@masterantre Chomsky is an anarchist. Given the warnings of Bakunin about centralization of power, seems he was vindicated in the case of USSR at least.
To summarize 1. China is going to win everything and the US is going to fall apart 2. Learn Chinese and how to manipulate a communist system of government 3. Please invest in bitcoin or some other (soon to be) world currency
I'm only at 20:16 and so far too much of this lecture doesn't make any sense, and others are factually incorrect. I don't know why people listen to this guy.
