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It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.

Immanuel Wallerstein

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Immanuel Wallerstein
Age: 88 †
Born: 1930
Born: September 28
Died: 2019
Died: August 31
Economic Historian
Economist
Geopolitician
Historian
Political Scientist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
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Seems
Privileged
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Better
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More quotes by Immanuel Wallerstein

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A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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We can tentatively credit capitalist civilization with a positive, if very geographically uneven, record in the struggle against disease.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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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
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The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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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
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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
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It is historically the case that virtually every new zone incorporated into the world-economy established levels of real remuneration which were at the bottom of the world-system's hierarchy of wage-levels.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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Finally, states have monopolized, or sought to monopolize, armed force.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an extraordinarily skewed distribution system, substituting medium-run threats for short-term threats for the majority of the world's population, particularly the 50 to 80 percent at the bottom.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.
Immanuel Wallerstein
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This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
Immanuel Wallerstein