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Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10 14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира Крупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современностиКрупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современности
Immanuel Wallerstein

For the other end of the spec...

For the other end of the spectrum, the 50 to 85 percent of the world's population who are not the recipients of privilege, the world they know is almost certainly worse than any their earlier counterparts knew. It is likely they are worse off materially, despite the technological changes. In substantive as opposed to formal terms, they are more, not less, subject to arbitrary constraints, since the central mechanisms are more pervasive and more efficient. And they bear the brunt of the various kinds of psychic malaise, as well as of the destructiveness of civil wars.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

When Time magazine conducted ...

When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

People resist exploitation. T...

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

Truth as a cultural ideal has...

Truth as a cultural ideal has functioned as an opiate, perhaps the only serious opiate of the modern world. Karl Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. Raymond Aron retorted that Marxist ideas were in turn the opiate of the intellectuals. There is perspicacity in both these polemical thrusts. But is perspicacity truth? I wish to suggest that perhaps truth has been the real opiate, of both the masses and the intellectuals.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

Capitalism is first and forem...

Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

Finally, states have monopoli...

Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

It is, let me say, at the ver...

It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

When systems come to be far f...

When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

But even in the absence of di...

But even in the absence of direct interference by those who had the power to interfere, the process was usually aborted by the non-availability of one of more elements of the process - the accumulated stock in a money form, the labor-power to be utilized by the producer, the network of distributors, the consumers who were purchasers. One or more elements were missing because, in previous historical social systems, one or more of these elements was not commodified or was insufficiently commodified.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

It is this third consequence ...

It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

Production for sale in a mark...

Production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

So much were employers of wag...

So much were employers of wage-labor unenthusiastic about proletarianization that, in addition to fostering the gender age division of labor, they also encouraged, in their employment patters and through their influence in the political arena, recognition of defined ethnic groups, seeking to link them to specific allocated roles in the labor-force, with different levels of real remuneration for their work. Ethnicity created a cultural crust which consolidated the patterns of semi-proletarian household structures.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

What is surprising is that th...

What is surprising is that their ideological opponents, the Marxists - the anti-liberals, the representatives of the oppressed working classes - believed in progress with at least as much passion as the liberals.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

The language of intrinsic hum...

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

As a matter of law the states...

As a matter of law the states recognized no constraints on their legislative scope other than those that were self-imposed. Even where particular state constitutions paid ideological lip service to constraints deriving from religious or natural law doctrines, they reserved to some constitutionally-defined body or person the right to interpret these doctrines.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

The employment rates are in v...

The employment rates are in very bad shape. We vastly underestimate the unemployment

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

To be sure, the use of force ...

To be sure, the use of force by one party in a market transaction in order to improve his price was no invention of capitalism. Unequal exchange is an ancient practice. What was remarkable about capitalism as a historical system was the way in which this unequal exchange could be hidden; indeed, hidden so well that it is only after five hundred years of the operation of this mechanism that even the avowed opponents of the system have begun to unveil it systematically.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

The mark of the modern world ...

The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

What is different in capitali...

What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes
Immanuel Wallerstein

One by one, these governments...

One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.

Immanuel Wallerstein 58 quotes

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