Journal of World-Systems Research: Volume 1, Number 19, 1995
                   http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
                      ISSN 1076-156X


     
     The Modern World-System and Evolution
     
     
     Immanuel Wallerstein
     Fernand Braudel Center
     Binghamton University
     iwaller@binghamton.edu
     
     Copyright 1995 by Immanuel Wallerstein
     
     v.12/12/95
     
     
     
      
     
          The concept of "evolution" is ambiguous.
     Sometimes it only means those changes that
     have historically occurred. In other usages, it
     has a more teleological aspect, as in the claim that
     acorns evolve into oaks. In that meaning the end result is the 
     normal outcome of a pattern inscribed in the inner structure
     of the "entity" under discussion. In the former sense,

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     evolution is nothing but an empirical _post facto_
     description. In the latter sense, it is a mode of
     stating lawlike propositions. If one adds "structural"
     as an adjective to "evolution," it suggests that the
     second sense is probably what is intended, although
     still not inevitably.

          Hence, I suppose one cannot even begin to discuss
     a concrete "evolution" without enunciating an
     epistemological stance. Let me therefore do that. I
     believe that what social scientists study is the
     evolution of historical systems. Since these entities
     are both systemic (lawlike) and historical (aleatory),
     it follows that neither of the two meanings of evolution
     is satisfactory for my purposes. Rather, I believe
     that all historical systems do evolve in the second
     sense, that is, that their historical trajectories are
     inscribed in their structures - but only up to a
     point. And this point is in some sense truly a point,
     or almost. That is to say, since all structures have
     inherent contradictions (or rather are contradictory),
     it follows that over time, the *evolution* of the
     structure reaches a *point* where it is no longer
     possible to make necessary adjustments to the
     structures and so the paralyzing effects of the
     contradictions will no longer be contained.

          When such a point is reached, further
     evolution ceases to be explained by the structure;
     it becomes aleatory. The fluctuations are wild
     or at least wilder; the impact of minor inputs 
     become major in consequence, and there is a
     bifurcation, resulting in a new system. But the
     emerging structure of this new system is *not*
     predictable and is in no way inscribed in the
     structure of the historical system out of which it is
     emerging and which has become inviable. It follows
     that there are no general rules about human evolution,

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     or the evolution of human social structures, except
     perhaps at a very abstract and not very meaningful
     level. For example, it might perhaps be argued that
     there is a multimillenial trend towards more complex
     historical systems (though even at this vague level I
     would be cautious), but this tells us little about the
     successive structures of historical systems, and
     nothing at all about future ones. In any case, there
     is no empirical basis for any suggestion of historical
     progress as inevitable or even as an adequate descrip-
     tion of past history.

          This epistemological stance having been asserted,
     but to be sure not argued here,<1>  we can proceed to
     discuss what might be meant by the evolution of the
     modern world-system. I consider it important to
     distinguish three processes in the historical life of
     any system: its genesis; its relatively long period of
     normal functioning; and its demise (the result of
     bifurcation), which can also be thought of as the
     period of transition to a new historical system or
     systems. It is only about the period of normal
     functioning that it seems useful to apply the term
     evolution, and it is to this period that I shall
     restrict the discussion.<2>

          The modern world-system is by no means the only
     historical system that has existed; it is not even the
     only *world*-system. But it has been a very particular
     type of historical system, unlike any other that we
     have heretofore known. It is a world-economy, to be
     sure not the first ever, but the only one that
     survived long enough to institutionalize a capitalist
     mode of production, and as a result the only 
     world-economy (indeed the only world-system) that has ever
     succeeded in expanding its outer boundaries to
     encompass the entire globe. It has transformed itself
     from being much *a* world to becoming the historical

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     system of *the* world.

          It shares two features with every other
     historical system. It has an axial division of labor
     whose effective "stretch" defines its boundaries,
     boundaries which are flexible and can therefore expand
     (and contract). That is to say, the boundaries evolve.
     And it functions by means of a mixture of cyclical
     rhythms (the repetitive fluctuations which allow us to
     call it a system) and secular trends (the transforma-
     tional vectors which allow us to call it historical).
     What defines the specificity of the modern world-system, 
     the element which makes it different from all
     other historical systems, is the primacy of the drive
     for the *endless* accumulation of capital.  Of course,
     most historical systems accumulate capital in some
     way. But only the capitalist world-economy has made
     the accumulation of capital the prime mover. We are
     not talking of a *psychological* drive, although of
     course *some* individuals may have internalized this
     objective as such. The system is constructed such that
     there are structural pressures to accumulate capital
     and to accumulate it endlessly. Its panoply of
     institutions function in ways to significantly reward 
     those who accumulate capital and to punish those who 
     do not. Furthermore, the strength of these pressures has     
     constantly increased over time, which may be termed the 
     steady intensification of the capitalist nature of the 
     modern world-system. However, even in earlier periods, the
     strength of the pressures was already sufficient to
     keep the system on track in the face of internal
     forces which sought to alter its nature or prevent its
     further development.

          The modern world-system consists of an
     intricately constructed and complex set of institutions
     that has functioned remarkably smoothly and

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     efficaciously over the past 500 years, given the ab-
     surdity of the _primum mobile_ and the enormity of the
     resistance to the system both from the understrata (who
     have been mightily oppressed by it) as well as by
     powerful segments of the upper strata who have feared
     loss of power and prestige from the further evolution
     of such a system. A major premise of the structures of
     knowledge that have flourished within the system is
     that it functions in three separate arenas: the
     political, the economic, and the socio-cultural. Or,
     otherwise stated, the states, the markets, and the
     civil societies are said to be ontologically
     autonomous, and to utilize different logics. While
     this is a self-serving description of the system by
     its clerics, and does not stand up to careful
     epistemological or empirical analysis, it has a
     certain surface resemblance to the formal structuring
     of the institutional complex. We shall therefore
     describe these institutional arrangements under three
     main headings: production networks; the state and
     interstate structures; and the geoculture -- insisting on
     their total imbrication one with the other.

          There are five central mechanisms by which the
     network of production structures permit the endless
     accumulation of capital: commodification; the
     multiplicity of modes of labor control; commodity
     chains; unequal exchange between core and periphery;
     and the group of monopolizing non-specialized
     capitalists functioning as the anti-market. Each
     mechanism can be briefly summarized.

          Commodification means that activities that
     involve production, exchange, saving, or borrowing are
     monetized and thus become market operations. It is
     probably the case that virtually no historical system
     for the last 10,000 years has been without

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     commodification of some of its activities. However,
     since engaging in such operations in non-monetized
     forms protects them somewhat (though not perfectly)
     from appropriation for the purposes of capital
     accumulation, it is eminently logical that those who
     operate within the framework of a capitalist system
     seek to commodify ever more operations. And since it
     is also true that the spread and routinization of
     commodified activities tends to diminish their
     profitability, it is logical as well that monopolizing
     capitalists repeatedly encourage the search for new
     niches to commodify. The results we know:  over time
     there has been a thrust towards the commodification of
     everything, a thrust which by the late twentieth
     century had reached levels undreamt of in former
     historical systems. To take only a particularly
     aberrant example, we have entered into the era of the
     commodification of childbirth.

          The modern world-system makes, as everyone
     remarks, more extensive use of wage-labor than did
     previous historical systems. Even so, it is worth
     noting that, after 500 years, wage-labor still is not
     the form of remuneration of the majority of the
     world's productive activities. There is a good reason
     for this. A system that maintains multiple modes of
     labor control (and therefore of labor remuneration)
     creates inbuilt mechanisms by which the demands of
     workers for increased compensation can be restrained.
     It even creates mechanisms by which surpluses created
     in non-commodified production can be appropriated.
     That mechanism is the semiproletarian household, in
     which wage-income represents a minority of the total
     household income from all sources. This structure was
     more or less an invention of the modern world-system,
     and currently is the dominant model worldwide. In such

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     households, the wages paid to those members engaging
     in wage-labor activities can be reduced below the
     level of household reproduction because the household
     supplements this income with its other income-generating
     activities (market-oriented production, so-called
     subsistence production, rents, and transfers),
     the totality of which bring in a greater income per
     hour of work than does wage-labor. Hence,
     employing persons located in such semiproletarian
     households not only reduces the wage bills of the
     wage-employing producers but also transfers part of
     the other surplus accumulated by the household to the
     enterprise via the subsidization of the enterprise's
     below-par wages. The effort to obtain wage-employment
     and then ensure that such wage-employment is
     remunerated minimally at the level of household repro-
     duction (the slogan was the "family wage") has been
     central to the class struggle throughout the history
     of the modern world-system. To the degree that
     proletarianization has been achieved, it is in large
     part the outcome of this class struggle.

          Commodity chains have been the integument of
     capitalist production processes from the outset.
     Productive activities have always been systematically
     linked across the whole division of labor in insti-
     tutionalized channels. It is not hard to demonstrate
     that almost every item that is marketed by
     enterprises is constructed from components (which are
     in turn constructed from components), utilizing
     machinery (constructed in turn from components...) and
     manpower (sustained by food production constructed
     from components...), the totality of which are
     produced in geographically dispersed areas. (The
     so-called internationalization of capital refers to the
     existence of such commodity chains, except that the
     phrase incorrectly suggests that this is a new post-1970
     or at most post-1945 phenomenon.) The existence
     of such chains makes it possible for different units
     of the chain to be structured in different ways one

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     from the other, and differing in themselves from one
     point in time to another. The possible differences
     include the degree of geographic dispersion of the
     producing enterprises in the unit; the degree of
     overall monopolization of production; the modes of
     labor control utilized; the degree to which the
     enterprises in one unit are owned by the same firm
     that owns enterprises in adjoining units (vertical
     integration of production), thus allowing some
     operations to escape from the constraints of the world
     market; and the degree of profitability of each unit
     of the commodity chain compared to other units. Such a
     complex structure allows endless manipulation
     (reorganizing the structures of different units in the
     chain) with the objective of increasing the overall
     accumulation of capital and centralizing this surplus
     in fewer hands.

          The creation of such commodity chains is what
     permits us to describe the axial division of labor as
     a core/periphery phenomenon in which unequal exchange
     is a major mechanism of surplus transfer and
     concentration. Fundamentally, the core/periphery
     antinomy refers to the relation between relatively
     monopolized units versus relatively competitive units,
     which is a high profit/low profit, high wage/low wage
     antinomy. Largely because of the advantages of
     reducing transactions costs, and the need to protect
     the accumulated capital politically, the
     core/periphery antinomy became empirically a spatial
     phenomenon, core-like activities tending to be con-
     centrated in a few countries and peripheral activities
     tending to be concentrated in most of the rest,
     without ever having excluded the possibility that the
     full range of activities could and did exist inside
     the boundaries of any single country that was over a

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     certain size. Spatial distribution reflected the
     process; it did not cause it. Unequal exchange has
     been the result of the political rules of the
     interstate structures that made the mobility of
     capital and merchandise across political frontiers far
     easier than the mobility of labor, and thereby
     guaranteed the transfer of surplus value from one set
     of owners to another (those located in the monopolized
     activities in the core zones).
          Finally, the market is essential to the
     operations of a commodified production system. But
     since the more truly free (and not merely nominally
     free) the market, the greater the competition (and
     therefore the more difficult it is to attain
     significant profit levels), those who are great
     accumulators of capital represent (in Braudel's
     magnificent phrase) the *anti-market*, utilizing their
     political strength to ensure that unrestrained
     competition never becomes the norm. Since however
     monopolies are always under political assault and any
     given quasi-monopoly has a rather short half-life
     (probably circa thirty years), great accumulators of
     capital must remain non-specialized, and engage in all
     kinds of operations simultaneously: production,
     commerce, finance, transport, information. This
     enables them to jump ship (that is, shift the emphasis
     in their investment commitments) repeatedly, in search
     of maintaining high overall levels of profit. Jumping
     ship not only has sectoral implications but
     geographical ones as well.

          The shift of investments has tended to occur
     primarily within the framework of the Kondratiev
     cycles, which are the consequence of the exhaustion of
     the ability to monopolize leading sectors of
     production, and consequently of decline of worldwide

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     profit levels.  The periods of contraction (B-phases)
     see relocations of industrial production, and thus
     opportunities for a few (but only ever a very few)
     semiperipheral states (those with a fairly even
     mixture of core-like and peripheral activities) to
     improve their relative position at the expense of
     other states. They also tend to see shifts of in-
     vestment allocation from industrial to financial
     sectors. They see the search for innovative sources of
     monopolized activities. They have often involved, after
     a while, some reallocation of world income to stimulate
     overall demand, while simultaneously expanding the
     boundaries of the world-system into new zones in
     search of very low-cost labor to compensate for the
     redistribution. In short, they have tended to juggle
     the world's economic geography while reproducing the
     same basic structure.

          The possibility of the endless accumulation of
     capital has depended upon the ability of the great
     accumulators not merely to concentrate the surplus-value,
     but to defend its concentration both against
     predators and against the demands of the workers that
     have produced it. The state and interstate structures
     are at one and the same time a rampart for the great
     accumulators and a continuing danger. The state can be
     the primary predator; no predator was ever as
     efficacious historically as an emperor atop a
     redistributive structure. Anything that would
     reproduce such a political structure with the
     increased technological efficiencies of the modern
     world would be a nemesis to the endless accumulation
     of capital. The great accumulators are thus notably
     wary of stateness (the rhetoric about _laissez-faire_).
     Yet on the other hand, never has workplace bargaining
     power been greater than in the modern world-system,
     and never have monopolies been easier to crack than in

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     modern times, which has meant that the great
     accumulators desperately needed political defense not
     only against the working classes but against their
     competitors (Frederic Lane's "protection rent").
     Balancing such contradictory constraints has been a
     tricky game from the beginning. The optimal mode has
     been found to be that formed by the creation of a
     network of so-called sovereign states (in fact sharply
     graded in political strength) operating within a loose,


     but meaningful, interstate system, in which hegemonic
     powers periodically and temporarily create regimes of
     interstate order that seek to maximize the
     possibilities of the endless accumulation of capital.

          Creating strong states in the core offers
     many advantages to monopolizing capitalists. It
     establishes a strong refuge for their property. It
     creates a political structure capable of advancing
     their interests in the world-system. Its higher level
     of taxation is simply a protection cost, eminently
     reasonable. Eventually, by making the strong state a
     liberal state as well, a high degree of internal order
     is ensured at relatively low cost. Furthermore, strong
     states in the core can work to ensure that states
     in the periphery do not become strong enough to
     interfere with the process of the worldwide
     accumulation of capital.

          To be sure, it is not as simple as this, for two
     reasons. On the one hand, there is not a single
     homogeneous group of monopolizing capitalists, but
     rather a group caught in the contradiction of having
     class interests that unite them and individual
     interests that divide them profoundly. And on the
     other hand, the world's working strata are not simple
     objects of manipulation by dominant forces, but active
     agents of resistance. Both these complications account
     for a considerable part of the political history of
     the modern world-system.
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          Inter-capitalist competition has two 
     immediate impacts on the state and interstate
     structures. First, any kind of political mechanism
     that aids the maintenance of any particular monopoli-
     zing effort represents for its non-beneficiaries an
     obstacle that they will seek to overcome. They
     constantly organize to overcome such obstacles: for
     example, calls for more _laissez-faire_ within states;
     opposition to protectionism in the strongest states,
     and calls for it in the others; geographical transfer
     of production sites, with its consequent impact on the
     financial and social strength of given states. This
     story is usually recounted under the heading of the
     history of macroeconomic structures.

          The second impact is even greater. The
     organization of hegemonies gives distinct advantages
     to certain groups of monopolizing capitalists. But
     hegemonies are self-destructing because of their
     necessarily increasing costs. When hegemonic powers
     decline, others seek to take their place. This is a
     long process, and has historically resulted in their
     long geopolitical struggles, each of which culminated
     in a "thirty years' world war," and an eventual
     strengthening of the interstate structures. This story
     is usually recounted under the heading of
     international relations. We can discern hegemonic
     cycles much longer than the Kondratiev cycles.

          The active oppositional agency of oppressed
     strata is a constant of the modern world-system. From
     the outset, the pressure of urban working strata
     tended to push wage levels slowly upward, which
     periodically led to the need to seek out working
     strata ready to work at lower income levels. This was

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     one of the main factors behind the repeated geographic
     expansion of the modern world-system, as noted
     previously. Nonetheless, such opposition tended to be
     scattered, unorganized, and lacking ideological
     strategy until the nineteenth century. 

          It was the French Revolution that catalyzed an
     important cultural transformation of the modern
     world-system. Although the origins and the trajectory of the
     French Revolution was in very large part the outgrowth
     of the Franco-British struggle for hegemony in the
     world-system,<3> the most important consequence was
     the transformation of mentalities throughout the
     world-system, pointing up the long-existing anomaly
     that there existed no adequate geoculture to
     legitimate the economic and political structures of
     the capitalist world-economy. The anomaly was brought
     to an end by the fact that two themes put forward in
     the French Revolution gained such resonance among such
     large strata of the world-system that there seemed no
     way of "restoring" the antecedent cultural situation.
     These two themes were the normality of political
     change and the belief that sovereignty resides in the
     "people." 

          The nineteenth century was the moment of the
     construction of a coherent geoculture for the modern
     world-system. One of the major factors was the rise of
     organized antisystemic movements in two forms: the
     social movement and the national movement. Although
     serious formal organization did not occur until the
     late nineteenth century, the early stirrings of these
     movements prompted preparatory responses almost
     immediately. The two themes --  normal change and
     popular sovereignty --  were of course exceedingly
     dangerous for the political stability of the world-system,
     legitimating democracy. In response to these themes there
     emerged a trinity of ideologies, which
     were really meta-strategies of political control:

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     conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism/socialism.
     Each represented fundamentally a different mode of
     coping with the normality of change and popular
     sovereignty. By 1848, it became clear that the
     centrist ideology of liberal reformism (an ostensibly
     universalizing doctrine, but one whose application was
     always restricted to "deserving, civilized" persons)
     was the dominant one, the two other ideologies slowly
     turning themselves into modified versions of liberal re-
     formism.

          Liberal reformism had an appealing political
     strategy, which conservatives eventually realized was
     necessary to contain the dangerous classes in ways
     that would preserve the processes of the endless
     accumulation of capital, while radicals/socialists
     eventually realized that this program was the maximum
     their real political strength could obtain for them at
     that stage of the historical development of the modern
     world-system. The package offered by liberal
     reformism, and enacted for Europe/North America during
     the nineteenth century, had three components: the
     gradual according of universal suffrage; the
     beginnings of welfare legislation and welfare
     redistribution; nationalism of the core zone, with its
     essential component of racism/sexism. Historically,
     this formula was extraordinarily successful in the
     core, and in the twentieth century there was an
     attempt to apply it on a world scale. This latter
     attempt, initially successfully, eventually foundered
     on the absence of a group to pay its cost: there was
     no Third World for the Third World. But the mechanism
     was clearly in place, and discussing its foundering
     would bring us into the subject of the crisis of the
     world-system and its demise, a subject we have
     excluded from this analysis of evolutionary processes.

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          The construction of the geoculture involved 
     legitimating the dominant political ideology in the
     structures of knowledge. The universalism of
     liberalism was given an ontological status in the
     moral dominance of modern science as the only rational
     form of analytical discourse. This involved the
     revival of the world university system, the creation
     of the modern structure of "disciplines," the
     application of Newtonian linear analysis and its re-
     jection of the organizing relevance of time/space to
     all arenas of discourse (and specifically the social
     sciences), and of course the secular state and the
     moral neutrality of the scholar.

          What had been left out of the package was
     democratization and equalization of reward and
     resources. Even though the political implications of
     hypothetical universalism were largely nullified by the
     simultaneous enthronement of racism/sexism, the
     logical implications of liberal theory resulted in a
     steady pressure for democratization, a sort of global
     equivalent of Oliver Twist asking for "more, please"
     in the orphanage. 

          It has been argued that the modern world-system has 
     a structure that has been elaborated around the
     primacy of the endless accumulation of capital. This
     structure is coherent, and has operated effectively
     for some 500 years. It has now reached the limits of
     that effectiveness. It is at this point, the point
     where the various contradictions of the structure are
     no longer possible to adjust in any easy way, that we
     end our argument.
     
     

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     NOTES

     <1>  I have tried to do this elsewhere in various
     places, most notably in _Unthinking Social
     Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century
     Paradigms_ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). See
     also "History in Search of Science," forthcoming
     in _Review_.
     
     <2>  On the genesis of the modern world-system,
     see my "The West, Capitalism, and the Modern
     World-System," _Review_, XV, 4, Fall 1992, 561-619
     On the demise/transition, see my "Peace,
     Stability, and Legitimacy, 1990-2025/2050," in G. 
     Lundestad, ed., _The Fall of Great Powers_ (Oslo:
     Scandinavian Univ. Press, 1994), 331-49.
     
     <3>  I argue this extensively in _The Modern
     World-System_, Vol. III: _The Second Era of Great
     Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s_ 
     (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989), ch. 2.