Utopistics
by Immanuel Wallerstein

What is to be done? Immanuel Wallerstein's Utopistics is the latest offering in the (in)famous lineage of Marx-inspired historical analysis and prognostication. Addressed to the next generation of revolutionaries, Wallerstein's brief (90 pages) and lucidly written assessment of how-we-got-here and where-we're-going is a useful lefty chapbook. Utopistics attempts to rally the troops and lead them onward and upward.

His targets for criticism are historical capitalism and the political ideologies which have suffered it. The story he tells is one where 18^th century revolutionary goals mellowed into a 19^th century devil's pact of liberalism and nationalism. The devil's challenger--socialism--was unable to compete against advancing liberal-capitalism's modus operandi, hierarchy and inequality. Finally in the 20^th century, universal suffrage and the partial welfare state were achieved in the advanced states, but at the price of cooled insurrectionary energies and short of a truly just economic and political order. Disappointingly, the world's many colonial and civil so-called revolutions all had been forced in time to kowtow to the logic of the world market. Hierarchy and inequality wormed their way into even the noblest of hearts and minds. In retrospect, 20^th century revolutions were less revolutionary than we had thought; they are best seen, rather, as events internal to the expanding world market. A truly global revolution had been impossible.

Until now, if we are to believe Wallerstein.

With the contemporary breakdown of liberalism and the widespread disenchantment with the commodification of all that holds meaning, Wallerstein argues that we sit today before a future with great promise. What he calls 'the free-will factor' can enter in at certain special times of systemic crisis. We live, apparently, in a time latent with renewed revolutionary and moral energies. Wallerstein dearly wishes for a more democratic and egalitarian political and economic life, and the year 2050 is his target date.

Utopistics is a book for the young and hopeful. It assumes what needs to be proved--that the world-system is in a great period of transition, and that individuals' decisions and their moral fiber are finally empowered to jump the rails and steer a bold course toward democracy and egalité. Nevertheless, though unlikely to win any converts from the ranks of capitalism's free-marketeers, for the non-specialist, Wallerstein's clear, birds-eye accounting and historical analysis of our current ideological and economic landscape should prove to be engaging and illuminating.