_Journal of World-Systems Research_ Volume 1, Number 8, 1995
                     http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
                        ISSN 1076-156X


                 BEYOND CYCLES OF HEGEMONY: 
           ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND MILITARY FACTORS



                      W. L. Goldfrank
                        Sociology
             University of California-Santa Cruz
                   Santa Cruz, CA. 95064
                    wally@cats.ucsc.edu
              Copyright (c) 1995 Walter Goldfrank



As we survey the changing world on the eve of the
21st century, scholars confront empirical puzzles and
interpretive uncertainties. Those of us who identify with worldwide
social and political movements seeking more democracy, more
equality, more justice, and more rationality find ourselves at once
free and daunted.  We are free, finally, from the albatross of
repressive party-states calling themselves "socialist," from the
illusion that social-democratic welfare states are trending toward
perfection, from the myth that national development in the Third
World is closing the gap.  And we are daunted by the double task of
(1) reconstructing a strategy of global transformation and (2)
making a viable movement out of the multiple oppositional fragments
scattered about the global landscape.

This paper attempts to confront some puzzles and
interpret some uncertainties about the future.
If it thereby contributes to understanding our
responsibilities and political opportunities,
so much the better.  Using familiiar world-system concepts
and findings, I sketch visions of the
short-run, the medium-run, and the long-run,
after first rehearsing the basic premises from which
this interpretation follows.

The modern world-system is a capitalist
world-economy today encompassing virtually the entire

                     -1-

globe, although as a system its 16th-century original
scope was limited territorially
to parts of Europe and the Americas.  
Historically changing, it is nonetheless a system, 
a structured totality whose parts both complement
and affect one another.  We call it a world-economy
because its commodity chains link disparate peoples
and cultures via the market, unlike a world-empire,
which links cultures via a
political/administrative apparatus.  We call it
capitalist because accumulation is its
driving force, because labor is thereby commodified,
and because competition and class struggle are its
hallmarks, competition and struggle that occur
across as well as within state boundaries.
We understand this division into classes
to cross-cut a division into zones, some with great

                  -2-

wealth, sophisticated and diversified production, and 
strong states (the core), some with little wealth, low-wage
production, and weak states (the periphery), and
some in between on these dimensions (the
semi-periphery).  Via unequal exchange, plunder, capital
flight, and labor migration, surplus moves from
periphery to core as it does in the production
process from labor to capital. Over historical time the site of
producing particular commodities may shift from one to another zone
(as, say, iron and steel have recently been shifting from the core
to the semi-periphery, or textiles from the semi-periphery to the
periphery). And particular states may move from one zone to
another (as South Korea and Taiwan have recently advanced from
periphery to semi-periphery, or Finland, since World War II, from
semi-periphery to the core).  But the massive fact about the modern
                      -3-
world-system to date is its reproduced stability, as
capitalist commodification has penetrated more and more of the
globe and proletarianized more and more of its
inhabitants, and as the interstate mix of diplomacy and
war has contained and reprogrammed rebellious
oppositional movements.

Further, we understand this modern world-system to       
move at once cyclically and via secular trends.
The cycles are economic and political. 
Economically, the world economy undergoes 50- to 60-year-long waves
of expansion and contraction, growth and crisis (or A and B
phases), increasingly yet still imperfectly synchronized in their
various national manifestations.  The global polity 
experiences much longer hegemonic cycles with four phases, which

                      -4-

we may call ascent through conflict, supremacy, decline,
and condominium.  The secular trends are familiar to
students of modernity: commodification (including
labor), mechanization, bureaucratization,
geographical expansion.  But we understand these
trends to be constitutive of--rather than external
to -- the system, and we understand their limits -- which some
scholars think are very close to being reached -- to presage a
crisis from which a new politico-economic mode of global social
organization will emerge. 

Geographic expansion provides cheaper resources and
new proletarians to the world-economy.  It is reaching its limits
in the present with intensifying exploitation of the
                     -5-
Arctic, the tropics, and the temperate woodlands.  The last
remaining areas of hunting/gathering and subsistence cultivation
now find themselves incorporated into national
development programs and/or opened to exploitation by
multinational enterprises.  We should not be
surprised by the burgeoning resistance movements of
indigenous peoples, sometimes called the fourth
world, for they are classic Polanyi-ish responses to the intrusion
of the market.  Seabed mining offers perhaps another direction for
expansion, but costs are high and returns, to this
date anyway, are negligible.  Outer space remains a
fantasy.  Hence we should not be surprised by the
growing emphases on recycling materials and on
renewable energy sources, precisely because the
territorial limits of capitalist expansion are so
clearly on the short- to medium-term horizon.

                    -6-


Proletarianization is the second crisis-relieving
process, and its limits are clearly further off.
High birth rates combined with declining death rates
in much of the Third World mean that millions of new
potential proletarians are entering the world
each year--and will for a long time to come even as
birth rates decline, given the age structure of the current global
population, which will reach six billion before the
end of this century.  Much of this population
continues to have substantial access to
household-controlled land to meet part of its basic needs,
though often precariously, to be sure.  In so advanced a
semi-peripheral country as Russia it is striking
how important private plots of land are to the
food supply of urban families.  Commodification of

                    -7-

household production itself--so-called "women's
work"--has begun in earnest only in the core zones,
so we may expect large increases in the spread of 
packaged and convenience foods, commodified child
care, and other household technologies.

Redistribution of global income and hence purchasing
power is another mechanism of recovery.  It may be
currently occurring through the democratizing (or
redemocratizing) movements that have gripped our
imaginations over the past decade, in Mexico and the
Southern Cone of South America, in South Africa, in
Israel/Palestine, in East-Central Europe and Russia, in South Korea
and Taiwan. There seems to have been a recent recognition on the
part of the bankers and economic policy-makers at the summit of the

                      -8-
world economy that debt renegotiations were necessary, that the
northward capital transfers of the 1980s
were part of the problem rather than part of
the solution.  Many once ensnared in the debt trap
have become "emerging markets," sites of increasing
investment.  But if via restiveness or alliances some
of the larger semi-peripheral countries and/or the peripheral
giants China and India achieve significant global redistribution,
say during the B-phase of the next long cycle, this will
mean a substantial shift in the world balance of
forces.  Such a shift, in turn, would alter the
conditions under which subsequent long waves would
unfold. 

Mechanization, the continued application of science
to revolutionizing the production process, is

                       -9-

theoretically limitless.  It cheapens the cost of
production, and it may soon be liberated from the
constraints of non-renewable resources.  It presents
the potentiality, however, of liberating so many
humans from drudgery that entertainment and
consumerism may well fail to dull their political
aspirations.

Given this angle of vision, one can characterize the
present moment as a baseline for projecting the
future.  Leaving to the side some of the
controversial and borderline cases, the contemporary
core includes the U.S.A. and Canada, most of Western Europe,
and Japan.  These countries are relatively wealthy and relatively
democratic, specializing in high-technology
products such as computers, aerospace, and machine
tools, producing abundant food, experiencing

                     -10-

shrinkage in industrial employment and growth of the
so-called service sector (much of which is, of course,
part of the production process).  Attendant class
recomposition has weakened the political base of the
long-standing social-democratic left in most of this
zone.  The contemporary semiperiphery includes most of Eastern
Europe and Russia, at least the more industrial countries of
Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil,
Argentina, Chile), South Africa, Turkey, parts of
the Middle East, and the East Asian NICs.  These countries feature
heavy intermediate industrial production (iron and steel,

petrochemicals, auto), diminishing state control
of the economy, large debt burdens, and most of the democratization
wave of the last decade.  Their working classes are
increasing in social power, but where statist protectionism

                       -11-

has been dominant they face especially difficult
policy dilemmas.  The contemporary periphery
includes the poorer countries of Latin America and
the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and
China.  Most of the world's two billion peasants
live in the periphery, and with their compatriots
who are no longer peasants they produce an array of raw materials
and simple manufactures (textiles, assembly).  They live for
the most part under authoritarian regimes and face
the stark alternatives of exclusion from the world
economy (as rulers in Myanmar and Kampuchea chose for a
time) or superexploitation within it.

In the contemporary period, under the auspices of
transnational corporations and international

                        -12-

agencies, the formal organization of the world is
catching up with its long-term structure.  
Almost half of all international trade now takes place within
corporations rather than between legally autonomous enterprises,
and it is not unusual for corporations to design goods
and produce the machine tools to make them in
the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery,
and sell and service them everywhere, including the
periphery.  The much ballyhooed "internationalization
of capital" is more an internationalization of
organization than of capital itself.  On the other
hand, transnational sub-contracting has grown
rapidly as well.  As for regulation and management, the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations
are taking on increasing responsibility for regulating the system,
and with Amnesty International we even have a sort
of global civil liberties union to go along with 

                     -13-

countless IGOs and NGOs in every institutional area.

In terms of the cycles and trends outlined above,
where do we stand?  Economically, the world is
approaching the end of a long wave that included the
great post-war boom of the 1950s and 60s and the
slowdown of the 1970s and 80s.  As with previous
booms, the post-war rising tide had floated many boats, giving rise
to now-nostalgic beliefs: that the core countries
had solved the problem of crises by fiscal and
monetary fine tuning, that the so-called socialist
countries would catch up (remember Khrushchev's  
"We will bury you?" or the once-fashionable idea that
the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. would soon "converge"?), that the
periphery should be called "developing nations" in "the springtime
of freedom."  The downturn of the 1970s and 80s has
been quite another story, however.  Too much

                       -14-

emphasis has been given to the exceptional successes
during this B-phase, for example, of Japan and the East Asian NICs,
which greatly resemble the advances in Germany and some of its
eastern neighbors during the depressed last quarter of the
nineteenth century.  The other side of this coin during
the past twenty years is elsewhere and opposite: twelve consecutive
years of African impoverishment, the Sahelian and
Sudanese famines, massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia, the collapse of
living standards in Eastern Europe and most of Latin
America--leading to the recent reappearance of cholera, desperation
in the Philippines, disaster in Bangladesh; nor should we
neglect the slowing or cessation of real wage increments in parts
of the core, accompanied in the U.S. by a regressive redistribution
of income via inflation, mergers and acquisitions, junk
bonds, tax policies, benefit cuts, and savings and
loan scams.
                      -15-

Further, as is characteristic of B-phases, new
product lines have been prepared for widespread
marketing when the world-economy turns the corner
toward accelerated growth.  The most important of
these appear to be microprocessing, genetic
engineering, robotics, and alternative energy
technologies.  Over the cries of environmentalists,
geographic expansion into the last underexploited territories is
well underway, in the Amazon and other tropical woodlands, in the
Arctic, and if only the Japanese would help, in Siberia.  
In terms of the political cycle, we approach the end
of U.S. hegemony and witness its transmutation into
trilateral condominium.  The political maneuvering

                       -16-

that surrounded the Gulf massacre speaks volumes,
with its confused mix of old-time U.S. unilateralism plus
hat-in-hand begging and UN resolutions and authorizations
(Maki & Goldfrank, 1995).
The State Department inclined toward the new
multilateralism, the Defense Department toward the
old unilateralism.  The president wavered, one foot
in each era.  Unilateralism predominated, but with a
heavy ideological emphasis on the coalition, the
alliance, the UN.  So if for the moment the U.S. has a
near-monopoly on tactical military might, this seems less the
expression of a robust hegemony than a
specialized function within a condominium of core
powers, the 9-1-1 of the world-system ("9-1-1" is

                     -17-

the telephone code for police emergencies in the
U.S.).  Perhaps because of memories of German and Japanese
expansionist and racist militarism in World War II, this
possibly lucrative specialization will likely persist for some 
time.  But with the possible exception of the Caribbean
basin, unilateralism is finished as hegemony wanes.

Many speak of the end of the Cold War, as if the
basic geopolitical frame of the entire
postwar period had been the so-called superpower
conflict.  The Cold War, an "imaginary war" in Mary
Kaldor's phrase (1981), had many consequences,
including the build-up of huge military industrial
sectors in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and the somewhat
halting and reluctant Soviet support for oppositional
movements and regimes around the globe.  But as the

                    -18-

Chinese saw perhaps the earliest and most clearly,
the Cold War was rather more collusive than
competitive, serving to enable the vastly unequal
superpowers to control for a time their respective
allies and clients.  Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) goes so
far as to describe the U.S.S.R. from Yalta to Malta as a
sub-imperial partner of the United States, with
considerable logic and evidence.  Not pseudo-strengthening by
Reagan, but the continued relative weakening of the
U.S. vis-a-vis Western Europe and Japan convinced
Gorbachev that the only chance for Russia to avoid
falling further behind was to disinvest in
militarism and empire and to redeploy resources toward
the more advanced sectors of the world-economy.
Though at present his successors' prospects look iffy,
the raw materials, workers, and customers of Russia are
too important to the world-economy, and the threat

                     -19-

of destabilizing disruption in that zone too great
to world politics for the core powers to allow a
collapse into total chaos.  In any case, the Cold War was
part of the stable framework of U.S. hegemony;
Saddam Hussein would never have dared to invade
Kuwait under its rules.

Implicit in this synopsis of the present is my
vision of the short-run, the next decade or so.
After one or two more recessionary dips in
the next few years, the accumulation process will accelerate as the
world-economy enters a new long wave.  The leading
sectors, which will return outsize profits to
investors in Japan, Western Europe, and the U.S.,
will be the high-technology processes mentioned above.
Semi-peripheral competition for 

                    -20-

intermediate industrial production will intensify,
and rebellious labor movements in democratized
settings may well chase some
of it to the periphery.  The trend toward
multinational corporate decomposition of production
processes will gather momentum, making "national"
development or "national" industrialization even more
chimerical than they are today--except, perhaps, in
a much longer time frame, for very large countries
like Brazil, India, and China.  Those semi-peripheral
countries with a firm grasp on particular export
niches--I think here of Taiwan and Chile--will fare
better than others.  Much of the periphery will
suffer new exploitation, much a disdainful exclusion
punctuated by binges of charity.  

In world politics, the transition to condominium will go forward,
with West European unification, a strengthening of OECD
coordination, and a thickening of other international institutions.

                      -21-
With the formation of free trade zones, the apparent tendency will
be toward three vertical geographic blocs, one led by
Japan, one by Western Europe, one by the U.S.  In the U.S. it would
not be a surprise to see the beginnings of a party
realignment, with more conservative Democrats
defecting to the Republicans (who will continue to
win most presidential elections and now control
Congress), and a social democratization of the Democratic Party
itself.  

This would mean progressive losses in the short term, but the
possibility of significant gains in the medium term.
One can understand this period in U.S. politics as quite
clearly analogous to that of Great Britain's hegemonic
decline, during which time the Liberal Party faded

                    -22-

and the Labor Party replaced it as the principal
opponent of enduring Conservatism (Goldfrank 1983).
Meanwhile, the educational system will continue to bifurcate,
with the gulf between professional/technical
specialists (Robert Reich's [1991] "symbolic analysts") and
production or service workers growing wider.  These
changes increase the likelihood of xenophobic
right-wing populism's recrudescence.   


If we shift our attention further ahead, to the
middle-run 50-60 years of the new long wave,
prediction becomes more difficult.  Most probably,
before much of the 21st century has elapsed, the three
current core zones of the world-system will have formed two
competing blocs.The U.S. and Japan will together dominate the
first, including in their orbit the Americas and the

                   -23-

Pacific.  A politically unified Europe--just how
unified and how inclusive remain to be seen--will dominate the
other, reaching out to the east and south.  India would
appear to be the surest candidate for contestation
between the two blocs, perhaps also southern Africa.  But this
tendency toward bipolar bloc formation and rivalry will be dampened
by a continuing trend toward a high level of organizational
integration among at least the core states at the
corporate, the governmental, and the associational levels
(quite likely including labor).   

Meanwhile, significant new proletarianization in the
semi-periphery and periphery will lead to the
reinvigoration of oppositional movements, as will
the further degradation of nature (still the direct
source of much peasant and semi-proletarian livelihood) and 

                     -24-

increased exploitation of women.  New challenges to
Enlightenment rationality and utilitarian
philosophies of progress--neither of which has
realized its promises of "development"--may make Khomeini's Iran
look like a Sunday school picnic, while regional
wars among ambitious semi-peripheral states armed
with 21st-century weapons (nuclear trickle-down?)
could make the last decade in the Persian Gulf seem
a mere curtain-raiser.  

But the continuation of the historical system's
pattern of hegemonic cycles is called into question
by the irreversible trend toward larger-scale
organization.  Pressures toward
world state formation will come from core
middle strata fearing disruption or environmental
disaster, from semi-peripheral syndicalism after

                   -25-

the OPEC model, and from Third World workers
demanding global redistribution.  In the absence of
such redistribution, we are highly likely to see
massive migratory movements toward the core, another
source of increasing potential for reactionary movements of
ethnic and racial chauvinism.

What of the longer run, beyond the horizons of the
long wave that will take us to the middle of the
next century?  Since capitalism is an historical
system, it will eventually, some day, come to an end
(for an earlier version of this view, see Goldfrank
(1987).  The secular trends that have nourished it will reach
their limits.  In the past, many opponents of capitalism
have seen its impending end in one or another of the
crises that we now understand to be part of its normal
cyclical operation.  So it behooves us to look at the limits

                       -26-

of the crisis-relieving processes.  While it is
conceivable to me that those limits will be reached
during the next long wave, it is more likely that
two or even three such cycles will occur.  So by the
year 2100, or 2150, commodification will lack new
targets.  The middle strata of the world-economy will have acceded,
via bureaucratization, to greater power vis-a-vis the capitalist
class, by then concentrated in a finite number of giant global
corporations. The rising costs of redistribution to, and the
policing of the workers of the world will help persuade the
far-sighted among the elites that a change of system is in the
cards.

Let me suggest four possible long-run futures:

                    -27-

destruction, fascism, social democracy, and
socialism.  Number one, destruction, could come about quickly, via 
nuclear incineration, or slowly, via irreversible damage to
the biosphere.  In spite of occasional scares (Cuba,
Berlin), nuclear war between major powers was less
likely during the Cold War arrangement than it will
be for some time into the future, perhaps until a
hegemonic succession after the next few decades,
if there is one. The gravest window of danger will occur when
condominium gives way to active rivalry.
Previous hegemonic successions have in fact occurred
in part through system-wide wars, first in the 17th
century (the 30 Years War), then at the turn of the
19th century (the Napoleonic Wars), and then in the
first half of this century (World Wars I & II).

Although regional conflicts could certainly escalate
into global war, five factors militate against repetition of this

                        -28-

aspect of world-system cycles.  First, the example
of pre-WWI Sarajevo is much on the minds of foreign and
military policy makers in the core: they may talk
Munich, but they think Sarajevo.  Humans do learn
from history, sometimes.  Second, the
knowledge that nuclear first use will most probably lead to
a holocaust must have a sobering effect on
would-be aggressors; it is one thing to risk losing
a war and quite another to commit virtual suicide in
the process.  Third, the increased interpenetration of the various
core zones by transnational corporations and banks based in
each of them has extended the peace interest within
the world capitalist class.  Fourth, the political
influence of middle and working classes has grown,
further contributing to the peace interest, as the
European resistance to the Reagan build-up
foreshadows.  And, finally, the increasing density

                        -29-

of international organization makes it more likely
that global proto-state-formation will soften the rough
edges of inter-core rivalry.  On the other hand,
those who see a rosy future on the basis of the
growth of international civil society would do well
to recognize that the majority of transnational
connections among individuals involve citizens of
the core countries and the most advanced
semi-peripheries.  Hence core wars become less
likely, but the likelihood of challenges from below are not
diminished. 

Destruction of the biosphere would be slower than
a holocaust but no less deadly to the human
prospect.  For centuries, capitalists--and one must 
emphatically not exclude the self-proclaimed former
state-socialist elites from this characterization--have ravaged

                       -30-

particular environments in the pursuit of profit and
power.  Often, they have pushed peasants to do the
same via increasingly desperate searches for arable land.
Particular localized environments can be abandoned,
perhaps cleaned up or regenerated, although too much
cumulation here could spell disaster.  More
threatening, however, is that in recent years
capitalist growth on a global scale has begun to
have clearly discernible effects on the ozone layer
and the climate, effects which may or may not be
checked in time to prevent irreversible, perhaps
fatal damage.

Scientific ignorance and the possibility of passing
quantity-into-quality thresholds make this prospect even more
frightening than that of any but the most general nuclear 

                     -31-

war.  Capitalists and policy makers are belatedly
becoming conscious of this danger to the goose that
lays their golden eggs, and popular movements (generically,
the Greens) are reinforcing the point.  It is not accidental that
transnational environmental activism has provided
considerable inspiration to the proponents of the
"global civil society" thesis (e.g., Lipschutz 1992). 
International regulation, of pollution as well as armaments, is
thus on the agenda and can only increase the pressure toward global
state formation.

As a second alternative long-run future, global fascism
would seem as much a caricatured exaggeration of
the capitalist world-system as its transformation
into a new kind of politico-economic totality.  Or,
perhaps, it might be understood as a regression to

                       -32-

world-empire, with a central administrative
caste -- males, no doubt, but probably not all white --
redistributing world surplus to its specialists in violence,
circuses, and disinformation.  The core/periphery division of
labor would resemble internal colonialism on a world
scale.  Confiscation and expropriation for reasons
of state would attenuate property relations.  Labor
would be controlled through corporatist inclusion,
police repression, perhaps even eugenics and/or
extermination.  Two scenarios, not mutually
exclusive, suggest themselves as leading to this outcome: the
aftermath of a devastating but not life-extinguishing global war,
or the reaction to a failed insurgency originating
among peripheral and semi-peripheral states or
movements.  In this light, the Gulf massacre makes for eerie
projections; if the USA had

                       -33-

nothing against the Iraqi people, only its rulers, why did it
kill tens of thousands of them and expose
still more to the miseries of epidemic disease,
poverty, and homelessness while leaving the upper
echelons of the military caste in place?  In a global
fascist system, preserving "Western," "Christian," or "scientific"
"civilization" could serve as the rallying cry
uniting elite and mass.   

Global social democracy or welfare state (future
number three) and global socialism (number four) are greatly to be
preferred. Achieving the former would make the latter more
likely, though there will always be some who would take
the classic line, "the worse the better," i.e., the more
unsatisfactory the present becomes, the greater the chances
that left-wing insurgency will gather adherents and

                     -34-

carry the day.  Redistribution downward in both
class and zonal terms would be the hallmark of both
such systems.  In a global social democratic future, merit-based
technocracy with progressive
taxes and transfer payments would soften the hard
edges of the core/periphery chasm, and world
citizenship rights would gradually erode some
advantages of the privileged.  The political base of
this global order would be along the lines of 
Nicaragua's Sandinista revolutionary coalition and its
international supporters: progressive capitalists,
petty producer populists, workers, and social
democrats in the core, nationalists in the
semi-periphery.  This alignment would be vulnerable
to a militarist and racist right-wing unless it
broadened its base by incorporating more
semi-peripheral and peripheral workers in an

                  -35-

effective reallocation of power and wealth.
Not impossibly, a tipping point might occur in that
reallocation process, such that a socialist world
government appears on the horizon.  Such a formation
would entail democratically accountable investment
planning, democratically controlled enterprises,
local democracy, and gender equality as well.
Headquarters functions would be redistributed
geographically.  Utopian visions of reducing or even
eliminating mental/manual and town/country divisions
would at least become conceivable.  The global
social base for such a politics is primarily among
the largest, the youngest, and today the weakest
strata in the world-system, the proletarians,
semi-proletarians, and peasantry of the Third World.

                       -36-

Even to imply that these strata might become politically
proactive on a global scale is to recognize how far we are
from such a future.  For if once upon a time the strategic
visions of Lenin or Mao looked toward 
uniting them, along with the workers of the core
and the national bourgeoisie of the periphery in a
grand revolutionary anti-imperialist alliance, the
reality of the 20th century has been more nearly the
opposite.  The capitalists of the core, alarmed by
the Russian revolution and other upheavals of that
time, and while settling their differences through the
bloody travail of depression and war, constructed a
quite opposite alliance indeed.  Citizenship for
a substantial portion of core workers was translated
into the benefits of the (partly racialized) welfare state, a 
share in the gains from productivity increases, pension fund
capitalism, opportunity for higher education,
perhaps some share in at least the psychic income of

                        -37-

world superiority.  Political independence and
contingent membership in the global bourgeoisie constituted 
the deal for the bourgeois nationalists of the periphery,
including, finally, those who came to power as
socialists; this deal includes the right to own
property in Miami, London, Zurich, Tokyo; the right
to send one's children to Oxbridge, the Sorbonne,
the Ivy League; the right to vacation in Rome, Monaco,
and Gstaad; the right, as a Chilean professional told me proudly,
to enjoy all the appurtenances of a world-class life
style with the bonus of abundant and deferential
household servants.  This alliance of core and
peripheral capitalists, plus a sizable if shrinking
segment of the core working class, was the U.S. answer
to Bolshevism, contesting which was the alliiance's primary
rationale.  No longer does the seizure of state
power in the separate countries seem a viable strategy for the 

                       -38-

now-fragmented left.  Bolshevism is finished, but for desperate
remnants claiming a Marxist-Leninist-(Maoist)
heritage in Peru, Kampuchea, perhaps the Philippines.  However, it
would be a grave error to suppose with the "end of
history" school that because Leninism is spent as a political
force, new, redefined, oppositional social movements,
in part inspired by Marxism's enduring legacy,
will not arise and join together under new
ideological banners, with new strategies and tactics
for reducing the inequalities and injustices that
inhere in world capitalism as it reproduces and
transforms itself.   


REFERENCES

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__________.  1987.  "Socialism or Barbarism? The
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