Frasi di Immanuel Wallerstein

“Ma è ugualmente vero che i sistemi non riescono mai ad eliminare i loro conflitti interni o ad evitare perfino che assumano forme violente. Questa comprensione è il maggior debito che abbiamo nei confronti del lavoro di Karl Marx.”

“Nel secolo XVI l'Europa era come un cavallo selvaggio impossibile da domare. Il tentativo di alcuni gruppi di stabilire una economia mondiale basata su una particolare divisione del lavoro, di creare stati nazionali nelle aree centrali come garanti politico-economici di questo sistema, di far pagare ai lavoratori non solo i profitti ma anche i costi di mantenimento del sistema, non è stato facile. Va a credito dell'Europa che sia stato fatto, poiché senza la spinta del sedicesimo secolo il mondo moderno non sarebbe nato e, malgrado tutte le sue crudeltà, è meglio che sia nato piuttosto che il contrario.”

“Come dice R. H. Tawney a proposito dei disordini agrari in Inghilterra: "Questi movimenti sono una prova di sangue e muscoli e di uno spirito alto e coraggioso… Felice la nazione il cui popolo non ha dimenticato come ribellarsi.”

“Il marchio del mondo moderno è l'immaginazione dei suoi profittatori e della capacità degli oppressi di farsi valere contro di essi. Lo sfruttamento e il rifiuto di accettare lo sfruttamento sono entrambi inevitabili oppure costituiscono la continua antinomia dell'era moderna, uniti in una dialettica che è ancora lontana dall'aver raggiunto il suo punto culminante nel ventesimo secolo.”

“It is simply not true that capitalism as a historical system has represented progress over the various previous historical systems that it destroyed or transformed. Even as I write this, I feel the tremour that accompanies the sense of blasphemy. I fear the wrath of the gods, for I have been moulded in the same ideological forge as all my compeers and have worshipped at the same shrines.”

“The essential feature of a capitalist world-economy… is 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.”

“[A world-system is] a system that is a world and which can be, most often has been, located in an area less than the entire globe. World-systems analysis argues that the units of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, are for the most part such world-systems (other than the now extinct, small mini-systems that once existed on the earth). World-system analysis argues that there have been thus far only two varieties of world-systems: world-economies and world empires. A world-empire (examples, the Roman Empire, Han China) are large bureaucratic structures with a single political center and an axial division of labor, but multiple cultures. A world-economy is a large axial division of labor with multiple political centers and multiple cultures.”

“The past can be told as it truly is, not was. For recounting the past is a social act of the present done by men of the present and affecting the social system of the present.”

“In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.
It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit… Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.'
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.”