Open the Antisystemic Movements: The Book, the Concept, and the Reality

The following article, titled “Open the Antisystemic Movements: The Book, the Concept, and the Reality” and authored by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, was published in 2oo1 in Review (Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations), vol. XXIV, issue 2, pp. 299-336.

Treating the book Antisystemic Movements (Arrighi, Hopkins & Wallerstein, 1989) as an empirical site for conceptual exploration, this article aims to contribute to the debates in world-systems studies on realistic alternatives to historical capitalism.

The article calls for the opening of our prevailing notions of antisystemicity in world-systems studies in favor of othersystemic, cultural, self-reflexive, world-historical, and inductive interpretations and praxes of social change. This can open our visions to the reality and significance of alternative approaches to antisystemicity whose challenges to the social status quo throughout world-history have been effected primarily not through reactive oppositional strategies, but through proactive modes of design and/or construction of alternative inter- and/or intrapersonal social realities. Western utopianism and Eastern mysticism are examples of these movements which have variously challenged in their own ways the world-historical or intrapersonal systemicities of alienating societies.

The fact that these movements, like their modem antisystemic counterparts, have been more or less failing does not necessarily diminish their intellectual or practical value in the search for realistic historical alternatives to capitalism. Drawing upon the legacy of Terence K. Hopkins (1928-97) in the area of sociological pedagogy, this article concludes that the opening of the book and the concept Antisystemic Movements can be fruitfully advanced by further opening the innovative academic channels of humanist utopistics the authors of Antisystemic Movements have themselves been constructing in recent decades.

This paper is dedicated to the living memories of Terence K. Hopkins (1928-1997), Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), Dale Tomich (1946-2024), Anthony D. King (1931-2022), and Jesse Reichek (1916-2005), who were important sources of inspiration and encouragement in the author’s education and research. He also thank (the late) Festus Ngaruka, Ichiyo Muto, and members of the Editorial Board of Review at the time of the article’s publication for kindly providing useful feedbacks on earlier versions of the paper.

Since no one can foretell tomorrow,
Now bring joy to heart’s sorrow.
Drink wine in moonlight, O my moon,
For Moon may no more cast our shadow.

—Omar Khayyam (Tamdgidi translation)

World-systems studies have in recent decades effectively challenged the inherent limitations of the developmentalist “nation-state” and binary “colony-metropole” units of analysis adopted respectively by the “modernization” and “dependency” modes of investigation of the modern world (Amin, 1974, 1997; Amin, et al., 1982; Frank¹, 1967, 1979, 1990, 1998; Frank and Gills, 1993; Arrighi 1983, 1994; Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1982, 1996; Wallerstein, 1974, 1979, 1996). A significant contribution of this perspective has been a stress on the need for historical sociological study of the modern world in a long-term and large-scale spatiotemporal framework. By demonstrating the explanatory strength of relying on holistic methods of research, world-systems analyses have provided us with useful conceptual tools to critically analyze the economic, political, and cultural realities of the modern world in a coherent and integrated fashion. Of course, as it befalls any new perspective in the making, world-systems studies have been criticized on many fronts (Shannon, 1989), and world-systems analysts have in turn attempted to respond to these criticisms.

Of particular concern for world-systems scholars and activists, however, have been the implications of their approach not only for the study but especially for the transformation of the modern world-system. In this respect, debates surrounding realistic historical alternatives to capitalism have increasingly occupied a significant strategic place on the chessboard of scholarship on the modern world-system (Arrighi and Silver, 1984; Amin, et al., 1990; Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1989, 1992; Boswell and Chase-Dunn, 2000; Wallerstein 1989, 1991b, 1998).

The book Antisystemic Movements by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein (1989) (hereafter “authors”) has been an important statement by the founders of world-systems studies on the conceptual and practical dilemmas facing the new social movements emergent from the late twentieth century capitalist world-economy. Few brief reviews of the book have been published to date, however. Sederberg (1991) criticizes Antisystemic Movements mainly on account of its generalizing tendencies, which are said to lead to exaggerated claims about the impact of the 1968 “world revolution” and the Vietnam War on the global balance of power. Zirakzadeh’s criticisms (1991) — he reviews Antisystemic Movements along with Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System III — revolve around the same issue of generalizing tendencies at the expense of understanding the nature of articulation of global with local and indigenous class forces. In particular, Zirakzadeh highlights the problem of “surprisingly thin descriptions of social movements” (Ibid.: 136). Contending that the two books should not be taken as “definitive works on the expansion of capitalism during the 18th century, or on the origins, evolutions, and dilemmas of modern social movements” (Ibid.), Zirakzadeh nevertheless concludes his review by suggesting that “The two books should be read closely and thoughtfully, however. Their historical narratives, political evaluations, and geographically inclusive theory can stimulate our imaginations, complicate our beliefs, and spark new ideas” (Ibid.).

Given the brief nature of their articles, none of the above reviewers attempt to seriously explore the conceptual landscape developed in Antisystemic Movements. The authors of the book, never claiming to be offering a definitive account of social movements, are themselves in fact clearly vocal in their call for more investigations of the subject matter: “We are massively, seriously in urgent need of reconstructing the strategy, perhaps the ideology, perhaps the organizational structure of the family of world antisystemic movements. … Thus we cannot count on the “automaticity” of progress; thus we cannot abandon critical analysis of our real historical alternatives” (Arrighi, et al., 1989: 51).

To respond to the authors’ invitation in Antisystemic Movements for a serious consideration of the issues and questions raised in their book, in this paper the book Antisystemic Movements itself will be used as an empirical site of conceptual exploration in order to critically evaluate, and search for new ways of contributing to, the current state of knowledge in world-systems studies on the problem of realistic alternatives to historical capitalism.

I. Opening the Book

The central argument advanced in Antisystemic Movements is that the world-system of historical capitalism since its inception during the long sixteenth century has generated structural processes that have simultaneously produced certain kinds of antisystemic movements on the one hand, and on the other, formed the constraints within which such movements have operated. A most significant manifestation of this dialectic has been that despite the global nature of underlying structural processes giving rise to these movements, the modes of self-description of the origins, objectives, and organizational boundaries of these antisystemic movements based on the nineteenth century coined key categories of class and status-group have hitherto limited the organizational responses of these movements to the level of the various nation-states. An ironic result of this dialectic has therefore been that the very social or national antisystemic movements which emerged to challenge the class and status-group structures of the modern world-system in fact helped reinforce and renew, sometimes intentionally, but often inadvertently, those very world-systemic structures. Alternatively, anticipating and encouraging the emergence of new social movements searching for new global ways of identifying and organizing themselves, the authors proceed to render a critical assessment of the patterns and degrees of success of the old socialist and nationalist antisystemic movements.

The authors argue (in chapter one) that the traditional notions of class and status-group, based on which many antisystemic movements have previously defined and organized themselves, have mechanically suffered from primordial state-bound conceptualizations. They argue that despite Marx’s theoretical advances over the classical political economy to treat classes as structurally rooted in global production processes, his empirical political writings emphasized the state-centered frameworks of class conflict, precipitating later Marxists, encouraged by the new historical circumstances of acute state and inter-imperialist rivalry, to retreat back theoretically into classical political economic modes of narrow state-bound analysis. In addition, the authors argue, the state-bound conceptions of status-groups in Weber’s rich investigations of social group formation, reinforced by misinterpretations of Weber’s discussions by later sociologists, contributed much to the developmentalist ideology of U.S.-dominated world social science in recent decades. In order to best assess the interpenetrating and fluid class, national, and ethnic-group formation trajectories of antisystemic movements, the authors conclude, it is necessary on the one hand to return to the basics in terms of an analysis of the global socio-economic structural roots of the emergence of antisystemic movements, and on the other hand to a reconceptualization of the world-systemic operational mechanisms of formation, development, and disappearance of social groups.

The authors argue (in chapter two) that the dilemmas of the new antisystemic movements today are partly a result of objective structural transformations of the capitalist world-system during the post WWII period, and partly due to false consciousnesses on the part of the engaged intelligentsia participating in these movements. While the “successes”—from the standpoint of 1848—of state-centered strategy of social and national varieties of classical antisystemic movements were hampered by the inherent constraints imposed by a global interstate system, leading to a sense of unfulfilled revolution, they also made possible the transformations (under the U.S. hegemony) of the operational mechanisms of the capitalist world-economy involving massive centralization of capital on the one hand and further globalization of the axial division of labor on the other, both aided by an increasingly expanded, reinforced, and deepened interstate network. The reality of the new contradiction between an increasingly globalized economy on the one hand and state-centered politics on the other, has not only set new dilemmas for the post-colonial managers of the status quo, but for the antisystemic movements themselves as well. In response, however, the continued inheritance of state-based strategies, ideologies, and forms of political organization has hampered the effectiveness of new antisystemic movements in targeting “unconventional” issues such as education, race, gender, war, environment, etc. The massive advancement in communication technologies has had a mixed effect on the prospects for resolution of the dilemmas of antisystemic movements. For this reason the authors call for a massive and serious effort for reconstructing the strategies, ideologies, and organizational structures of the family of antisystemic movements as part of critical analysis of our real historical alternatives.

Focusing on various conceptions of the relationship between the two major forms of antisystemic movements, the national and the class struggles, the authors essentially argue (in chapter three) that the rise and eventual subsidence in this century of the national struggles as practically “reorganizing” mechanisms of the capitalist world-economy, have increasingly “liberated” the grounds for further deepening and expansion of the class struggle on a global scale — though the state-centered strategies predominant in the latter still remain an obstacle. They distinguish between the ideological, political, and theoretical-historical conceptions of the relation between national and class struggles. The ideological conception, suggesting that national struggles are merely the form of class struggle on a global scale — fulfilling the cause of the proletariat on its behalf — is rejected as being not tenable and confusing the essential distinctions of the two movements, since the national struggles per se have acted not as transforming, but as reorganizing, forces with respect to the class relations. Even when the distinctions of the two struggles are recognized in the political conception, which stresses their commonality of having a state-based political strategy (leading to considerations of their alliance in the national-democratic stage of revolution), such “prerequisite” alliances for national liberation have often been at least indefensible, if not altogether unnecessary. The theoretical-historical conception of national struggles as integral constituents of class struggles, in the form of proletarian struggles against “foreign” bourgeoisie, however, has excessively reinforced a state-centered political strategy as opposed to the global formation of interclass alliances and movements on the part of the working class. The continuing extensions of technical division of labor, the relational formation of interstate organized debtor-creditor networks across the globe as a result of increasing centralization of capital, and also the rapid and massive “electronification” of communication within and across borders, have substantially transformed the terrain in favor of the deepening and expansion of class struggles, “liberating” the latter from the obstacles posed by inherited state-centered strategies in favor of formation of global movements. Especially how the “electronification” will impact this globalization of class-based social movements the authors identify as an important question requiring urgent theoretical attention.

The authors further narrow their focus (in chapter four) on class struggle and especially examine the relations of the so-called “old” to the “new” social movements. They argue that the very objective conditions of capitalist accumulation which gave rise to the “old” social movements in the nineteenth century and beyond, were themselves structurally transformed especially in the post WWII period, giving rise to “new” social movements which have often challenged the very “old” social movements that preceded them — posing new dilemmas for the deepening and spreading of class struggle world-wide. The old social movements were conditioned by objective realities of a less advanced capitalist production in the nineteenth century. This gave rise to a relatively low-educated, predominantly male, wage-labor force which externally relied for its political education and organization on an intelligentsia which was in disagreement over reformist vs. revolutionary attitudes towards the bourgeois state. But these “old” social movements were now confronting new movements rooted in a growing population of skilled professionals, “feminized” service-sector employees, and “ethnicized” unskilled or semi-skilled labor force, who were increasingly becoming spontaneously active on a global scale in three new respective areas of peace/ecology/alternative life-styles, women’s issues, and minority / ‘Third World within’ movements. While the old issues of the labor movement still persist given the relocation of core-industries to semi-peripheral zones, new dilemmas posed by “anti-western” sentiments among the new global labor force and “denationalized” domestic labor force, on the one hand, and demands for gender equality and an end to feminization of poverty, on the other hand, challenge the “primordially” entrenched Eurocentric and male-centered cultural identities of old social movements. Whether and how the old social movements can survive depends on the manner in which they can inventively come to terms with the realities of the new social movements.

The authors further and finally focus their attention (in chapter five) on the nature, historical legacy, and historical trajectory of 1968 as a significant example among many of the new social movements. They draw a parallel between 1968 and 1844, identifying them as the only two world revolutions. Both were unplanned, spontaneous, and failed, but both transformed the world. 1848 became the rehearsal for 1917 in terms of adoption and realization of state-seizure strategy (by reform or insurrection) by the world social movement as a medium-range strategy for the transformation of capitalism. 1968 was not only about challenging the dominant structures imposed after WWII under the U.S. hegemony, but also about challenging the inefficacies and shortcomings of the old Left. Considering it as an early manifestation of new emerging structural trends in capitalist world-system, the authors ask what was 1968 a rehearsal for? They do not have an answer in the book² but, projecting into the near future structural conditions of conflictual realignment of interstate players, sharpened and widened capital-labor conflict, inability of states to contain and control their civil societies, and persistent rise in egalitarian demands by new disadvantaged groups, they suggest that the new social movements are not as clear about their medium-range political and organizational strategies as were the movements emerging from 1848 — warning the new social movements against the prospects, in case of their inaction, of either a reorganized inegalitarian system, or of a nuclear/ecological catastrophe.

II. Opening the Concept

The arguments advanced by the authors in Antisystemic Movements can be explored from four different empirical, theoretical, methodological, and projective vantage points. Using the framework of inductive inquiry proposed by Ramkrishna Mukherji (1978) and used in world-systems analysis, I will try to explore the arguments advanced by the authors in the book by focusing on the ways in which the notion “antisystemic movement” is constructed, developed, and used.

A. Empirical Considerations: What is it?

On suggesting in their work that the old social movements need to self-critically understand the real dilemmas and nature of the “new” social movements, the question can be raised as to whether the authors themselves recognize in their book the full variety and complexity of the new social movements of the late twentieth century. Let us read not only the lines but also between the lines of the authors’ argument.

On three occasions, the authors explicitly or implicitly dismiss three kinds of movements as being not important to their discussions of antisystemic movements.

One occasion appears when the authors discuss the organizational novelty of the nineteenth century antisystemic movements³ In this case, suggesting that a “profound innovation” took place in the ranks of antisystemic movements during the past century when they introduced and developed permanent and cross-generational organizations in their ranks, the authors passingly suggest that such an “innovation” may have existed in the past among various “religious” movements or sects. However, using the argument that the goals of these older movements were basically “other-worldly” compared with the “this-worldly” ambitions of modern movements, the authors quickly dismiss not only the “credit” that may be due to the organizational skills of religious movements, but as well subside the value of including religious movements as possibly a “third” (perhaps “cultural”) category of social movements alongside the “class” (socio-economic) and “status-group” (socio-political) movements. And this is despite the fact that the three-fold class, status, and ethnic group typology for antisystemic movements is implicitly present in the authors’ theoretical framework in the book (Arrighi, et al., 1989: 21).

The second occasion appears when the authors refer to movements which they begin to call the “communities of consciousness.” In this passage,⁴ referring briefly to “many kinds of community — in the sense of communities of believers/practitioners” which have begun to form “worlds” of their own “in relation to, in distinction from, and often in conflict with all others,” and recognizing them as large and encompassing worlds such as world of Islam, African world, Black world, women’s world, workers’ world, etc., the authors proceed to dismiss their significance by arguing that “it is far from evident that such communities of consciousness can even persist, much less grow, within the structurally developing inter- and intrastate framework.” Even though the authors recognize the novelty of these movements compared to the old antisystemic movements in elaborating themselves independently of stateness, they choose to pass over and not to internalize these new movements as possibly an “alternative” model alongside oppositional modalities of antisystemic movements.

The third occasion appears when the authors discuss the varieties of new social movements of the post-WWII period.⁵ Acknowledging that these movements also include those arising from the new skilled professional strata interested in “alternative life-styles”/environment/peace issues, the authors proceed in their book to only concentrate on women and minority-based movements, basically avoiding the “alternative life-style” movements which, as is well known, have encompassed many of the well-known utopian and new religious-mystical movements, especially those emerging since the 1960’s.

It is true that the authors pay close attention to the new phenomena such as the Iranian “Khomeini revolution” (Arrighi, et al., 1989: 104, 105) and consider them as significant for the challenge they have posed to the interstate world-system. But their citation of this case as an example is not done because of these movements’ religious or cultural agenda, but from the standpoint of the political threats they have posed to the smooth running of the interstate diplomacy. The absence of serious attention to the phenomenon of religious revival in the late twentieth century, and at best recognition of this phenomena not on its own terms but as a sub-category of political “national” movements, is most clearly manifested in the binary model of class/national movements set forth in the book (chapters 2 and 3, in particular) — that is, considerations of only the economically and the politically, and not also the culturally, motivated movements of at least the last two centuries. While historical capitalism’s life-time is traced back five centuries, the antisystemic movements worth considering are identified as those emerging only during the last two centuries. The earlier ones which often had religious, scientific/cultural, and utopian or mystical content or colorings, are not incorporated directly into the empirical vocabulary and landscape of the “antisystemic” movements.

The argument that religious or cultural movements have not all been “anti”-systemic, or that they have failed in fulfilling their missions, as reasons for their dismissal from the classification of antisystemic movements cannot really be justifiable, let alone substantiable, on empirical grounds. If national movements, which according to the authors themselves did not target the essential core of capital-labor conflict, can be classified as being “antisystemic,” there is no reason why some religious movements could not be considered as viable candidates, no matter how anti-humanitarian and regressive their suggested alternatives to historical capitalism have been. After all, we must remember that being antisystemic does not necessarily mean being “progressive.”

Questions then arise: Why exclude the religious movements? Why the binary model, instead of a trinity — leaving out the cultural antisystemic movements? Why exclude the “communities of consciousness” and “alternative life-style” movements? To adequately respond to these dilemmas we need to address an even more important aspect of the authors’ argument.

B. Theoretical Considerations: Why is it?

In their joint work, the authors arrive at the conclusion that the state-bound political strategies of antisystemic movements have inadvertently reinforced rather than transformed the fundamental structures of historical capitalism. They suggest that the classical “medium-term” strategy, that of seizure of state power (through peaceful or violent means), succeeded in terms of the goals of 1848, but has failed in terms of the long-term goals of transforming capitalism into an alternative system. So, an urgent call is made to search for new medium-term strategies (the long-term strategy being the radical structural transformation of capitalism into an egalitarian world-system).

The closest the authors come to the identification of the outlines of the new strategy is that the new social movements have to be global, organizationally, politically, and ideologically, focusing more on a horizontal strategy of global movement construction, rather than sporadic, occasional vertical seeking of localized state power. It is only this primary emphasis on global movement-building that begins to suggest positively the authors’ alternative to the past strategies, as the rest of the book focuses on what the antisystemic movements should not do — such as refusal to place hopes on localized seizure of state power as a medium-term strategy, or the need for the “old” social movements to become critical of their own presumptions when confronted with the reality of the new social movements. But the formulation of a new strategy basically stops here, and the authors, themselves yet unable to suggest new avenues, proceed to invite readers to conduct new research.

The question arises here, however, as to why we should call the “antisystemic” movements of the past two centuries “antisystemic” in the first place? If we judge them based on their self-descriptions, there may be some (though still doubtful) merits in the concept “antisystemic,” but if we abandon the subjective self-descriptions of these movements and base our evaluation on more “objective” criteria (which the authors themselves seem to have advocated and advanced in their work), then not only the national, but even the class-based movements of the past two centuries may in fact be identified to have been prosystemic, perhaps often not by intention, but by default.

What has been “antisystemic” in the nationalist movements whose agenda contributed to the integration of social movements into the global interstate system of capitalist world-economy? What has been the antisytemic value, for the same reason, of those “class struggles” which have strategically based themselves, even intentionally, on replacement of one type of class rule with another, under the pretext of the “inevitable” law of class struggle and the necessity of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? What we know for sure, and the authors themselves attest to this, is that the result of the struggles of both these movements has often been the disillusionment of social movements with respect to the possibility of transformation at all of the modern world system. How far does a “class struggle” -based strategy of social change reinforce the materialistic ideologies and existential assumptions of historical capitalism originating from the West? How far can “class” struggles direct our energies and attention to finding solutions which challenge the materialistic assumptions built into the accumulation logic of capital in the first place? Can a transition to an “egalitarian” and “classless” society be made through adoption of strategies which emphasize class differences and antagonisms among those who may otherwise be interested, for other reasons, in transformation of historical capitalism into a more humane and classless world-system? In other words, has the “end justifies the means” logic built into the “class struggle”-based strategies of social change proven, historically, to be a successful path towards a classless society?

The authors derive their understanding of the dilemmas of the antisystemic movements from a theoretical analysis of the concepts of “class” and “status-group” in Marx and Weber respectively (chapter I). Their criticism of the state-bound conceptual frameworks of Marx and Weber seems to be quite justified; in fact their critique constitutes a courageous advance against the prevailing “ideological” status quo of the antisystemic movements during the past two centuries whose strategies centered on the seizure of state power. The question is: Does their critique go far enough?

Implicit in Marx’s acceptance of “class” as being central to the theory and practice of labor movement was the rejection of certain alternative conceptual and political strategies. Marx and Engels’s “scientific socialism” was born not only through polemical attacks against the often religiously and mystically clothed German ideologies, but also against the “failed” utopian socialist alternatives to capitalism. Deeply affected by the anti-religious spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment on the one hand, and the rapid progress of Scientific Revolution especially in the realm of nature on the other hand, Marx and Engels saw themselves involved in a historical mission to rescue social knowledge from the clutches of religion and utopian mentalities and to hand it over to the liberating and illuminating forces of science. Therefore, religion could not and did not play any significant role in their development of the “strategy and tactics of the proletariat.” Likewise, despite the great credits attributed to the utopian socialist ideas and experiments of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen as one of the main historical “sources” of Marxism, Marx and Engels considered only the founders of these “utopian” experiments as playing any “progressive” role in the historical genesis of Marxism, and that only retrospectively — branding the followers of these “alternative” projects as being reactionary at best at the time of the rise of a maturing working-class on the political scene (Marx and Engels, [1848] 1978: 498-99).

A central element built into Marx and Engels’s theory of revolution was the concept of class struggle — suggesting that the way out of the miseries of class society is not the preaching of universal brotherhood of humanity, but actually taking sides in the struggle with one against the other class, seeking political supremacy against it, “inevitably” approving and implementing “necessary” despotic inroads into the rights of the ex-ruling class, and seeking a future classless and stateless society through the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” A class-based strategy, therefore, was fundamentally built into the social revolutionary prescriptions of Marx and Engels. Ending class society through class struggle was thus a historically specific thesis and strategy set forth by Marx and Engels, based on a theoretical assumption that the “objective” conditions of life of the working class, in itself, was going to make this class interested in the abolition of all class distinctions and antagonisms in the long-run. It was for this reason that founders of scientific socialism declared that the necessity of such “ends justifies the means” approach to struggle against capitalism arose not from their own heads, but from the “real” movement of the struggle taking place before our own eyes.⁶

But do we now, after a century and a half of Marxist theory and practice, still believe the thesis of the “dictatorship of the proletariate” as a means of ridding society of class antagonisms to be valid? The experience has proven otherwise. And the justification that the “world revolution” beginning in Europe which Marx and Engels anticipated did not come about is not only insufficient to explain the disproving historical experience, but also such unexpected revolutionary outcomes themselves beg their own explanations given the theoretical expositions Marx and Engels advanced. The fact is that the questioning of the “ending class antagonisms through class struggle” thesis built into the Marxist revolutionary doctrine itself does not seem to be present in the authors’ arguments — definitely not in the way the authors have justly questioned the seizure of state power strategy built into the Marxist doctrine.

The concept “class struggle” is not a historically detached category, but is burdened with and grounded in definite forms of response by dissatisfied movements with respect to the development of historical capitalism. If we question the state-based medium-term strategizing of the classical movements based on the inadequacy of a local political response to an essentially global interstate system, there is no reason why we could at least begin to question the viability of a “class struggle” based strategy which advocates the use of one kind of class-rule solution against another kind of class domination.

Marx and Engels, from their plausibly valid reading of human history (at least the “written history” — as Engels added later) as being the history of class struggle, concluded that the solution resides as well in the conduct of class struggle. The fact that such class struggles have not solved the “social question” but reconstituted it anew within ever newer (allegedly simpler) forms of domination of one class over another, did not indicate to them that perhaps such a strategy itself may have been ineffective at best, but concluded the very opposite from their historical retrospection. Marx and Engels’s “objective” understandings of the laws of motion of society did not of course allow such a “voluntaristic” conception and attitude as to the choices of the tactics of struggle. The failure of the Paris Commune did not become an indication of possible weaknesses in their class-based strategy, but a failure proving the rule, reinforcing their commitments in their prescribed strategy. But when the same kind of “failures” took place, say, in Robert Owen’s experiments — despite the fact that Engels himself repeatedly stressed how successful Owen became in building alternative communal realities (Marx and Engels, [1892] 1978: 691-693) — then Marx and Engels used this failure as a sign of indefensibility of the “utopian” projects altogether. Owen’s “utopia” was more of a “real place” than Marx and Engels’s “no place” ideally projected into the future — despite their ideological stress on the “scienticity” of their socialism. The assumption of “ending class antagonism through class struggle” was more of a “utopian” strategy than the practical measures taken in the communistic colonies of the utopian socialists.

Unfortunately, we see a similar kind of double-standard applied in the authors’ analysis of “antisystemic movements.” The failures of class-based movements are regarded as indicative of the need for lessons to be drawn for an otherwise sound strategy (celebrating the “liberation of class struggle”) whereas the failures (which are themselves quite plausible in light of their relatively more resilient historical nature) of the “otherworldly” and “alternative world” movements are treated as being indicative of their essentially unreliable and transitory doomed-to-fail historical trajectory.

If we take the “system” to be only that of the modern capitalist world-system based on the “free-market”-veiled subjugation of labor by capital, a class-based strategy aiming at the elevation of labor to political power may be considered “antisystemic” only in a very limited sense, i.e., of negating only a definite form of class domination, but not class domination itself. However, if we consider the “system” to be more broadly, in world-historical terms, class society itself, the class-based strategy of the labor movement as defined by Marxism has not been antisystemic, for it is based on the perpetuation of one type of class rule as opposed to another. It is true that such a strategy was elaborated by Marx and Engels on the theoretical assumption that the “objective” class position of the working-class would eventually lead it to eventually transcend all forms of class domination in favor of a classless society; however, we should not forget that such a thesis in practice has not proven to be true.

A class-based strategy of antisystemicity aimed at raising one class to the position of supremacy over another is not really antisystemic as far as the system of class domination is concerned, no matter what the “utopian” projections of a workers’ led path to the classless society may have promised theoretically.

C. Methodological Considerations: How is it?

The point of raising the above empirical and theoretical doubts is to raise the question whether the authors’ conceptual framework is biased, first, against incorporation of cultural (including religious and secular) “antisystemic movements,” and second, against incorporation of “alternative,” “otherworldy” (both in religious and secular senses) of certain other kinds of movements which the authors themselves have not been able to avoid mentioning — even though in passing. Moreover, the application of the very label “antisystemic” to the binary set of movements considered is questionable based on the authors’ convincing evaluation of the historical balance sheet of these movements especially concerning the “state seizure” strategy adopted by national and social movements. The label “antisystemic” is based, in other words, not on the reality of these movements “in themselves,” or even “for themselves,” but on their false consciousnesses about themselves and about the roles they have played in the struggles “against” the system of historical capitalism. The explicit embracing of a taken-for-granted “class” -based strategy, and the implicit dismissal of other forms of opposition to capitalism under the pretext of their “religious” and utopian identities, have arguably influenced the theoretical frameworks of the authors’ analysis in their joint work on antisystemic movements. But to adequately understand why such empirical and theoretical shortcomings have appeared in the midst of the authors’ otherwise penetrating critique of antisystemic strategies of the past, we need to pay attention to the methodological domain. In this regard, three main issues can be raised with respect to the authors’ work.

The first issue concerns the problem of the unit of analysis. Let’s read over this interesting passage in the author’s text:

Permit us to suggest an analogy. If one has a wheel of mottled colors, one that includes the whole range of the color spectrum, and if one spins the wheel, it will appear more and more like a solid white mass as the speed increases. There comes a point of speed where it is impossible to see the wheel as other than pure white. If, however, the wheel slows down, the white will dissolve into its component separate colors. So it is with groups, even (and perhaps especially) those most central of institutional structures of the modern world-system — the states, the classes, the nations, and/or ethnic groups. Seen in long historical time and broad world space, they fade into one another becoming only “groups.” Seen in short historical time and narrow world space, they become clearly defined and so form distinctive “structures” (Arrighi, et al., 1989: 20-21).

The above analogy set forth by the authors can be usefully applied also to the historical assessment of the impact of antisystemic movements itself. Seen in short historical time and narrow space of political struggles, polemics, and rhetorics, the national and social movements appear to have been “antisystemic.” But in the longer historical time and wider space, they were in fact integrative to the processes of the world-system. One can extend such an analogous argument, however, and question whether the two-century period and largely core-based scale — let’s not forget the Eurocentric geographical origins of the Western Marxian and modern nationalist ideologies of social change — of the authors’ analysis of the nature and fate of antisystemic movements is itself an adequate unit of analysis to tackle the problem at hand. The dismissal of organizational credits due to religious and cultural movements and the laying aside of the alternative “communities of consciousness” strategies of social change would not have been as easily possible if a wider spatiotemporal unit of analysis was used in the analysis of antisystemic movements by the authors in their work.

World-systems studies’ contribution to the critique of modernization and development paradigms was the emphasis on the need for adoption of a wider unit of analysis in both space and time. In their study of the processes of the nation-states, world-systems analysts found that it was impossible to understand and explain the “internal” processes of these nation-states apart from the organic whole that constituted them, i.e., the capitalist world-system. Could one use the same justified and useful rationale and suggest that the world-systems analysts’ identification of the world-system itself as a unit of analysis is, temporally, itself unjustifiable given the world-historical context which helped constitute the modern world? Why should the analysis and evaluation of the antisystemic forces be limited to the last two centuries, nay, to the last five centuries? If the colorful wheel of the varieties of “antisystemic” strategies is conceived to be much larger and we decide to watch its turning for much longer (rather than focusing on only a part of the wheel for a very short time), we may be able to gain a much more holistic and richer understanding of the “realistic historical alternatives” available to the forces of social change. Otherwise, we may really end up reinventing the wheels of our past failures.

The problem of the unit of analysis concerns us from another (second) vantage point. How far do we see ourselves, individually, as being part of the wheel’s reality? After all who is turning the wheel, for how long, how fast, and from what vantage point, greatly affects the kind of picture we derive from our wheel-turning experience. How much are we carrying the ideological loads of the old social movements, and how much of our theoretical and practical experience is really new? The very useful arguments the authors develop in order to stress the importance of opening a line of communication and understanding between the old and the new social movements concerns all of us, individually.

Individuals participate in movements based on an understanding of who they are and what constitutes their self-interest. Although individuals’ self-concepts are themselves shaped by social circumstances in which they are born, raised, educated, and engaged, such contextual influences do not take place over and above the unique inner subjective realities of each individual. A fundamental dilemma confronting all those involved in social movements who search for realistic historical alternatives to capitalism is that they perceive the world and act towards it often using histories, theories, and methods which are long ingrained in their individual selves from the past. Those seeking egalitarian and just historical alternatives to capitalism cannot move forward without first recognizing and deconstructing the crystallizations of old ideological biases in their own thinking and being. The modern world-system does not operate over and above the individual lives of those who happen to have realized a need for a new system; it has been internalized in their lives in manifold ways through upbringing, socialization, education, and training.

The holistic methods of social analysis that contributed to the world-systems analysts’ successful challenge to the developmentalist and modernization-oriented theories and methods seem to have come back around to question their own inquiries. As the study of the modern world-system does not prevent us from focusing on one or another nation-state in our studies, the focus on the modern world-system should not come at the expense of our losing sight of the singular world-historical experience of humanity as a whole. Is it really possible to study the modern world-system apart from the course of development of human world-history as a whole? The need for a particular analytical focus on a specific (here the modern) world-system does not necessarily imply that the organic totality within which the modern world-system itself emerged can be ignored. Once the fate of the whole world becomes integrated into a singular process as in the case of the modern world-system, prehistories of all the contributing civilizations become the common prehistory of all.

The third methodological problem concerns the procedure of inquiry adopted by the authors. The research strategy proposed in the book to deal with the dilemmas of the antisystemic movements is two-fold: 1-going back to the basics, to the theoretical analysis of the conflicts emerging from the transformed conditions of global dynamics of capitalist production; and 2-developing new conceptual tools in such a way that facilitates analysis and construction of global social group formation. The most interesting methodological implication of this approach, which is in fact reflected in at least the method of presentation of material on antisystemic movements in the authors’ joint work, is that historical reality is observed, analyzed and interpreted on the basis of categories and conceptual dilemmas derived at the theoretical level. The logico-deductive method of analysis of antisystemic movements in the book, which begins with a critical theoretical analysis of the dual concepts of “class” and “status group” in the first chapter, ending with a concrete analysis of the 1968 movement in the last chapter, is in sharp contrast to the authors’ fruitful historically inductive approach to the understanding of capitalism during the past 500 years.

Of course, the implications of these divergent methods of analysis for the results and conclusions reached in the research process is significant. If we begin with “class” and “status group,” we will see only class and status group in history. But if we begin with an inductive observation of the historical reality of antisystemic movements, encompassing the complexity of various forms of the “new social movements” which have emerged during the past several decades, we may arrive at a different conclusion regarding the economic, political, and cultural identities and agendas of these movements in contrast to the old social movements.

It is ironic that the very successful and consequential inductive approach which the authors applied in the world-systems analysis with respect to the study of capitalist world-economy is transformed into its opposite deductive mode when studying the antisystemic movements generated by that system.

D. Projective Considerations: What will it be?

What are the implications of the foregoing analysis for the conduct of research in the area of realistic historical alternatives to capitalism? One can think of three sets of issues concerning matters of method, theory and historical research.

The first problem is the methodological dilemma of investigating new historical realities, in this case of new social movements, using our old methodological and theoretical frameworks. At the heart of this methodological dilemma is a problem which began to be addressed, but was unfortunately left still unresolved, by Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia (1936). The problem he innovatively posed was that often we recognize the cognitive biases of our adversaries in social and politically charged debates and confrontations, but the socially rooted biases of our own thinking is left outside of conscious intellectual and scholarly concern. We need to develop new methodological procedures and approaches which enable us to subject to research not only the emerging new social movements, but also simultaneously our own collective and individual conceptual frameworks, biases, and attitudes inherited from the past. We need to develop new patterns and procedures of research so that in the ongoing studies on the modern world-system and the social movements generated in it, we can become increasingly self-conscious of the limits posed by the methodological and theoretical conceptual frameworks we have consciously or subconsciously inherited from the old social movements.

Wallerstein has begun work towards the “opening” and “unthinking” of the social sciences, and has for some time proposed a unidisciplinary approach to intellectual inquiry. What is important for us is to also recognize that we are ourselves a product of the old social sciences and academic/political cultures, and that intrapersonal psychologies are as much part of the systemicities we intend to transform as social systems interpersonally conceived. Could our “unidisciplinarities” really be so apart from and at the expense of integration of our psychologies in the vocabulary of our academic and activist praxes? We need to critically revisit the discourses such as those originally introduced (albeit in a self-defeating manner) by Karl Mannheim in the sociology of knowledge in order to directly address this fundamental methodological concern.⁷

Many of our intellectual, physiological, and emotional, habits need to be “opened,” “unthought,” deconstructed, and demystified. We need to unlearn, or at least question, our historically and biographically ingrained assumptions about what “realistic historical alternatives” may be and how they can be brought about, before we can truly appreciate the emerging opportunities for societal change in our everyday lives. Such opening, unthinking, and unlearning, however, cannot truly succeed if it is based solely on interpersonal education. Self-education, learning how to effectively and radically understand and transform our own socially constructed selves, learning how to dialectically integrate our knowledge of the world-system we live in with our knowledge of our own individual selves, are essential requirements for any successful attempt at identification and actualization of realistic historical alternatives to historical capitalism.⁸

Besides, the extension of our unit of analysis to world-history as a whole beyond a narrow preoccupation only with the modern world-system must accompany the development of our self-reflexive habits of social research. The leap from the current structures of world-systemic knowledge to world-historical analyses must not be merely a semantic change, but must involve a methodological break with an analytical procedure that assumes the modern world-system (and its transitions to and from) can really be understood apart from a working knowledge of world-history as a whole. Our global unit of spatial analysis must be accompanied by an approach to world-history that treats it as a singular temporal process. The notion of “antisystemicity” is closely tied to our notion of systemicity — i.e., what is a system, what defines it, where it begins, and how far it extends in space and time. If we take the “system” to be only a particular spatial or temporal part of the whole reality world-historically conceived, our “antisystemic” theories and praxes will most likely be spatiotemporally partial and short-lived as well.

Recent efforts made by world-systems analysts to trace much further back in history the roots of the modern world-system are important steps in the right direction (Abu-Lughod 1989; Chase-Dunn, 1992, 1997; Frank, 1998; Frank and Gills, 1993; Wallerstein, 1991a.⁹ The new agenda set forth by world-systems analysts to study past world-systems, in the context of growing efforts to break away from the narrow horizons of the study of the modern world-system, has increasingly raised questions about the viability of a mode of analysis that insists on the spatial singularity of the modern world-system apart from the temporal singularity of human world history as a whole.

Is it possible that it is the narrow focus on the particular capitalist world-economy that has biased our perspectives and analyses against precapitalist social structures in which religion or politics played chief parts? Is it because of the continued utilization of our “historical materialist” conceptual tools that our interpretations of realistic historical alternatives to capitalism have tended to favor a particular set of “antisystemic” movements in contrast to others? Is it possible that our adoption of the modern world-system as a singular unit of analysis (and not a “focus” in a broader analytical framework, i.e., world-history) have contributed to eurocentric theoretical and socio-political praxes in our efforts to understand and transform our everyday lives? Is our according primacy to economy over polity and culture¹⁰ a historically grounded and socially constructed mode of analytical and political procedure that itself constitutes and reproduces the systemicities we seek to challenge through the agencies of “antisystemic” movements? Is it possible that by assigning universalistic and nomothetic weight to the “historical materialist” method of Marx, we are following his mistake of elevating the particular causal modalities of a specific mode of production (or “world-system”) to the universalistic vocabulary of “antisystemic” forces seeking to build a different world-system based on a different, more dialectical and egalitarian, mode of production of human life? If we use a conceptual tool that does not favor economy over polity or culture in determining the contours of systemicity, a causal modality which has been imposed on us by the reality of the capitalist world-economy, then the map of world-systemic processes and boundaries, as well as its antisystemicities, may perhaps be differently drawn.¹¹

The third important methodological issue concerns the problem of inductive social analysis. World-systems analysis needs to be as much inductive in research on “antisystemic” movements as it has been on the study of the capitalist world-economy. This does not devalue the importance of deductive reasoning, but stresses on the equal importance of inductive approach to the identification and study of the new social movements.

The theoretical construct “antisystemic movement” has been central to the world-systems analysis of realistic historical alternatives to capitalism. Confronted with the new social movements targeting “unconventional” issues such as race, gender, education, environment, consumption, life-style, etc., on the one hand, and on the other, the “alternative” “otherworldly” movements labeled as “communities of consciousness,” the class-based antisystemic movements seem to have met considerable conceptual difficulties in recognizing common interests with these movements. One does not seem to fit the notion of “antisystemic” defined by the capital-labor contradiction, the other does not fit the notion because of its “alternative” orientations rather than immediately challenging and confronting the capitalist world-system. Instead of hiding these alternative forms of resistance under the rug to save the concept “antisystemic” it may be more fruitful to reexamine the usefulness of the concept “antisystemic” in light of historical experience, and assign as much importance to it as it deserves.

Essential to this reevaluation is the reexamination of the historical and intellectual circumstances which forced the Marxist theory and practice of class struggle to the center stage of revolutionary confrontations with capitalism. The point here, of course, is not to deny the reality and reprehensibility of class-based society, it is not to deny the inhuman and regressive nature of many religious dogmas and practices, and it is not to deny the need for transforming this society to create one free of exploitation, domination and repression. The question is: What strategy should we adopt in order to most effectively recognize and build humanist historical alternatives to capitalism? An important case in point is the manner in which Marx and Engels approached the so-called “utopian socialists” or the mystical ideologies and epistemologies (including Hegel’s) from whom Marxism (critically) drew much inspiration. How much of Marx’s and Engles’s knowledge on these “utopian” alternatives was ideological and how much “scientific”? How much of their polemics against mysticism and religion was ideological? Was their lumping together of all religions and dismissing them in one stroke as “opium of the masses” fruitful to the cause of revolutionary transformation of capitalism? Could it be that defining the lines according to class, religious belief, etc., have deprived revolutionary movements from resources which could otherwise be available to them, or have alienated forces which could have joined the movements seeking a humane world?

We at least owe it to ourselves to bring the tension of theory and history to bear on the critique of anti-utopian and anti-religious, class-based strategizing in search of alternatives to capitalism. Our secular orientations should not prevent us from studying religions, as our criticisms of Western ideologies of “human progress” is not preventing us from using the positive contributions of the sciences. Searching for and building realistic historical alternatives to a decaying world-system, we need to remind ourselves that systems do not exist apart from the real living human individuals who collectively design, build, perpetuate, challenge, and revolutionize them. Conduct of research on alternative historical systems is, in other words, intricately dependent upon a strategy which is aware of the role of agencies in historical transformation, a strategy which does not shy away from tracing the historical origins of human knowledge and social systems to the practical lives of definite concrete human individuals and/or groups in everyday life.

In order to distinguish alternative, historically neglected, strategies from the more conventional “antisystemic” movements, it may be fruitful for us to invent new categories, such as “othersystemic movements.” The distinguishing feature of these movements is mainly that in their challenges to the world-system, they concentrate more, as their immediate objective, on creatively building new alternative intra- and/or interpersonal social structures rather than concentrating their energy primarily on politically overthrowing the old system. The point here is not to dismiss the historical reality or strategic viability of “antisystemic” movements, but to accord to these movements only as much credit as they deserve. It would be an interesting research project to question which kinds of movement strategies have historically been most successful: those which from the beginning defined themselves as “antisystemic” and concentrated their theoretical and practical efforts on building an oppositional force, or those which for an extended period of time initially concentrated on creatively building themselves as an alternative movement before becoming proactively “antisystemic” at a later stage in their development?¹² Among such othersystemic challenges to the world-system, the world-historical legacies of utopianism, including both its Western and Eastern varieties, cannot be ignored.¹³

“Utopia” and “utopianism” have in fact in recent years entered the vocabulary of world-systems analysts’ efforts to unthink the social sciences and to advance a future-oriented “utopistic” social science (Wallerstein, 1991a, 1998). Wallerstein has reminded us that “We need to think directly about our utopias,” adding that “Mannheim was absolutely right in his conclusion that if we dispense with utopias, we have dispensed with rational will. Furthermore, he was also right that an inefficacious utopia does not deserve to be called a utopia” (1991: 184). Besides, Wallerstein has also made efforts to distinguish his notion of “utopistics” from that of what he considers to be “inefficacious” utopianisms of the past.¹⁴

Wallerstein’s new concept “utopistics” opens new avenues for the world-systems analysis of the realistic historical alternatives to capitalism. Of course, “utopistics” is both an invented and a borrowed concept. The “nowhere” meaning is still there, as in its original Morean version. What is added is a postfix that is meant to imply a substantively rational and scientific approach to achieving a “nowhere” that is realistically possible. The compound (“utopistics”) literally implies “the science of achieving possible nowheres” as opposed, perhaps, to the illusive paths to unrealistic nowheres previously traversed (utopianism). So the problem really is not that the search is for “nowhere,” for something that does not (yet) exist. How could it be otherwise — why would one seek what is already achieved? Wallerstein then both invents and borrows. And to the degree he borrows, he is acknowledging something useful in the utopian tradition. But what is really the useful legacy of utopianism that has led us to reuse its vocabulary, despite the alleged “terrible wrongs” we associate with it?

A central contribution and identifying feature of the utopian mode of challenging the existing reality has been the concern for building alternative social realities in the historical present, in mind and/or in reality. It is true that some utopian movements project the reality of their idealized societies into a remote future (or past), but what makes utopianism different is that the challenge to the status quo does not remain at the level of exposing the inherent alienating systemicities of existing reality, but moves beyond that, to constructing mental and/or actual models of alternative social life in the here and now. What Wallerstein laments as the illusion-breeding attitude of utopianism can in fact still be true for a movement that projects a “substantively rational” mode of social life into a relatively more immediate future. The practical effect is the same, the present is seen merely as an “antisystemic” phase of the struggle in contrast to a “future” projected into a “near” (or distant) future. The novelty and distinguishing feature of the utopian approach to “antisystemicity” is that it begins to be concerned with constructing the new society in the historical present, even if this is still confined to the fictionalized reality of mental constructions. Despite the ideological polemics of Marx and Engels and — let us not forget — of the guardians of the world-systemic structures, many utopian movements have often gone much further than merely interpreting their alternative worlds and have taken practical steps towards building them. Utopianism has been concerned not only with visualizing and theorizing, but also with experimenting, alternative worlds. This is in sharp contrast to the “real-politick” strategies of the “antisystemic movements” that become so much identified and concerned with overthrowing the existing order that they lose sight of what it is they are fighting for.¹⁵

The fact that utopian movements, like their antisystemic counterparts, have been more or less failing does not necessarily diminish their intellectual or practical value in the search for realistic historical alternatives to capitalism. Recent efforts in world-systems studies to critically reclaim the legacy of utopianism seem to involve an abrupt break from the past historical experiences of this world-historical movement in its secular or religious varieties, as if all that is inherited from its past are “terrible wrongs” (Wallerstein, 1998: 1). When we consider the “failures” of utopianism and mysticism, we should not also forget the failures of the more recent “antisystemic” movements as well. Rather than treating failures of past efforts as reasons for not studying them, it may perhaps be more fruitful to reevaluate the ways in which our definitions and conceptions of utopianism have evolved and to formulate our approaches to utopianism in such a way that can shed some light on both the contributions, as well as the shortcomings, of this world-historical movement. Only by critically keeping alive the memory, and lessons, of the past and current efforts in innovative utopistics can we hope to continue their legacy and contributions in new forms and conditions.

Can we develop new research agenda in world-historical explorations of utopian movements, both Eastern and Western? Can we go beyond ideological rhetorics of “antisystemicity” and develop our notions and criteria of what is really antisystemic or not using historically inductive, rather than merely deductive, methods of reasoning and research? Can we develop new world-historical typologies of utopian movements based on the ways in which they have emerged from various religious, scientific, and humanist paradigms of social change? Is it possible to argue that the rise (and demise) of Marxism as the dominant theory and practice of anti-capitalist antisystemicity during the last century and a half prevented the self-critical maturation of an alternative (utopian) mode of antisystemicity that, through creative exercises of social change by example, may have proven much more effective in transforming our alienating realities? Is it possible that in their ideological debunking of utopianism, Marxists in fact helped silence and discredit alternative creative modes of “antisystemicity” that could have in the long-run proven much more effective in constructing just and egalitarian social realities? Is it possible that the Left’s dismissive attitude towards utopianism as a “failed” exercise in antisytemicity has been itself a cause of that failure, and has thus been an exercise in self-fulfilling prophecy?

Here, Lewis Mumford’s words still rings in our ears:

Where the critics of the utopian method were, I believe, wrong was in holding that the business of projecting prouder worlds was a futile and footling pastime. These anti-utopian critics overlooked the fact that one of the main factors that condition any future are the attitudes and beliefs which people have in relation to that future.” (Mumford, 1922: 298)

III. Opening the Reality

Water was right here,
with me, in the jar!
And I,
thirsty,
searched for it across the desert lands. (A Persian poem)

We may explore centuries of world-historical experience in order to find illustrations of how despite their mistakes, shortcomings, and failures — utopian movements have advanced, or could advance, the cause of radical social change. However, a most instructive and real example in the exercise of utopistics can in fact be found in the intellectual agenda advanced by the authors of Antisystemic Movements themselves — namely the innovative and collaborative sociological pedagogy exercised in the Sociology Department at SUNY-Binghamton beginning in the early 1970’s under the guidance of the late Terence K. Hopkins (1928-1997).

The unique quality of Hopkins’s pedagogy has been extensively reflected upon in the reminiscences of his former students and colleagues in Mentoring, Methods, and Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hopkins(Wallerstein, 1998). What distinguished Hopkins’s “sociology” was his “othersystemic” pedagogy, i.e., his efforts at construction of alternative realities of sociological pedagogy in the midst, and not in retreat from, the everyday life of the system. In this alternative academic space Hopkins uniquely exercised the dialectics of scholarship on long-term, large-scale social change on the one hand, and the personalized dynamics of sociological pedagogy within the “small group”¹⁶ of his students and colleagues, on the other hand. Hopkins’s efforts at building an “odd solidarity”¹⁷ among his students and colleagues was an innovative experiment in humanist utopianism in the realm of academia, a “utopistic” approach to challenging the world-system that was not limited to reactive and merely oppositional modes of antisystemicity, but went beyond it to self-creative and autopoietic constructions of new, and substantively real, academic environments within which new theories and praxes of social change could be developed and exercised.

As the founder of the graduate program in Sociology at SUNY-Binghamton, Hopkins created a new and unique program which offered space and resources to many world activist-scholars to join the program as students and faculty in order to develop the intellectual tools necessary for critical understanding and change of the world. Hopkins had a dynamic grasp of the relationship between ideas and reality: that ideas, especially of the academic and intellectual variety, are not something that spring from thin air, but out of people’s experiences. Refusing to create a traditional and conventional graduate program where students are treated as goods on the assembly line of academic production digesting other scholars’ knowledge or research fields ready-made, Hopkins built a program that encouraged students to creatively design their own areas of scientific inquiry rooted in their own scholarly interests and findings and based on their personal and communal life experiences. Hopkins helped articulate students’ own voices. This was a radically different teaching approach. He guided students while believing in their ability to change themselves and the world.

Hopkins did not accept, and thus transformed, the academic environment as he found it. He was humorously fond of portraying the graduate program as a “guerrilla fighters’ camp” for building cadres in the struggle for “long-term, large-scale social change.” As a co-founder of the world-systems perspective, Hopkins was deeply aware that the modern world-system cannot be transformed in the absence of globally constituted movements whose members are trained to understand the nature of capitalism as a world-system. What was unique about his approach, though, was that he did not separate the struggle to transform the modern world-system into a just and humane system, from the pedagogical dynamics of training his students. Although for him such a pedagogical style could not be borrowed ready-made from the existing academic institutions, he did not advocate abandoning the institution simply because it was a functioning part of the world-system itself. On the contrary, he advocated active engagement to creatively carve out of the academic environment such a “clandestine” camp where new pedagogical approaches and educational systems could be experimented with and formally established, even for a short duration as in a “makeshift barrack.” Hopkins’s ingenuity consisted in the fact that he actually and formally established such a new pedagogical environment in the graduate program. For him, the graduate program represented not just an antisystemic movement in the academic field, but in fact a new social and educational system in its own right.

The essential ingredient of Hopkins’ new approach to building the graduate program was “flexibility.” The flexibility of the graduate program was a direct result, and logical consequence, of its founder’s attempt to build an alternative pedagogical system within the academia. How can one challenge the old rigid academic system which is resistant to change with an equally rigid and inflexible curriculum?! Hopkins built flexibility into the very core dynamics and self-identity of the new graduate program. In this new system, the system did not dominate the individuals, but it was created so as to serve the needs of the individuals. Students were treated by him with personal respect as total human beings, and not just “students.” Hopkins was deeply respectful of students’ integrity as whole persons, never judging them on the basis of the nature and tempo of their academic progress. Implanting guilt feelings among students who could not follow the “normal” content or “spatio-temporal” guidelines of progress in the department for any (and he always emphasized “ANY”) reason was characteristically alien to his pedagogical style. Students were treated as “young scholars” who come to the department to collaborate with the “not so young scholars” (faculty) in carrying out social research. The students were empowered to select their own study committee members (with the consent of the interested faculty), being able to unilaterally drop them for any reasons by handing in a note to the departmental secretary. In Hopkins’ world, the academic “social relations” served the extremely personalized intellectual growth and development of the students’ (and faculty’s) “productive forces,” rather than the opposite characteristics of the “assembly line” and “fast-food” procedures rigidified in the university curricula elsewhere. As a co-founder of the world-systems perspective, Hopkins never imposed his or anyone else’s viewpoints as the “canons” of truth on any student in the name of educating him or her, and as the director of the program never let differences of opinion with the student or other faculty bias his behavior towards and guidance of the student. He was always the advocate of the students’ voices in the program’s relations with the university administration and actively pursued a policy of making the university rules meet the needs of the students’ intellectual and political growth, rather than the opposite. In Hopkins’ world-system, human beings ruled the system, flexibly molding it to foster their intellectual productivity, not vice versa.

The most important and innovative manifestation of the “flexible” nature of Hopkins’s curricular construct was his design of the program’s guidelines and procedures for students’ doctoral demonstrations of competence.

Refusing to follow the “normal” procedures in the academia of requiring students to choose this or that prefabricated field within their host academic disciplines, Hopkins introduced the “odd” procedure of requiring students to creatively carve out and design, and demonstrate competence in, their own personalized “areas” of inquiry based on their own socio-political and intellectual research backgrounds and scholarly interests. This procedural innovation was deeply informed of and consistent with the historical sociological methodology in whose instruction he himself specialized. The definition and conceptions of scholarly concentrations therefore became liberated from abstract theorizing and institutionally rigidified “canons” of scholarship. He helped liberate sociology through a procedural innovation that is yet to be recognized by the academic community at large. Scholarly concentrations were made historically and biographically grounded and rendered theoretically flexible to serve the interest of long-term and long-range interpretation and transformation of an ever changing world-systemic reality operating within the bounds of capitalist enterprise. Inviting various scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, Hopkins encouraged a method of research which was, to use Wallerstein’s term, “unidisciplinary,” not recognizing the rigidified and prefabricated disciplinary boundaries that universities inherited from the past. The spatio-temporally singular world-system required, in other words, a “unidisciplinary” approach to intellectual inquiry which began from the fundamental premise that a holistic approach to understanding the reality of the modern world was not just a matter of preference, but that of necessity.

Hopkins’ innovative approach to the formulation of fields of scholarly inquiry in the department, his personally caring, empowering, and understanding attitude towards students in the graduate program, his holistic approach to disciplinary boundaries in the academia, and his emphasis on the historical sociological method as a fruitful approach to socio-politically concerned research work, could not have been possible in a rigid academic environment. Only a flexible curriculum and organizational structure could sustain a productive and creative tension between students and faculty, between theoretical and historical research, between empirical and theoretical/methodological areas of inquiry, and between the inner departmental affairs and external socio-political pressures and requirements of a rigidified inter-academic system. The dialectical (read, in Hopkins’s words, “relational”) flexibility, and the ability to sustain and productively harness dialectical tensions, was essential for the pedagogical style of scholar-activists whose mission’s success depended on the productive harnessing of the dialectics of theory and practice for the purpose of “long-term, large-scale change in the modern world.” The graduate program was, after all, the progressive realization of Hopkins’ idea of a makeshift camp for training self-conscious, socially concerned, and dedicated activists. And to the building of this new, this “odd” and flexible, academic and social movement Hopkins devoted his life.

Hopkins bequeathed to us a rich methodological vocabulary to study the dialectic of the very large and the very small, and a rich experiential vocabulary, through the reality of his own humanist utopistics, to help us believe in confidence that the exercise of such dialectical utopistics would be a “do-able” project. In the context of concerted efforts by the mainstream academia to increasingly incorporate or “close” the makeshift trenches of academic creativity, flexibility, and resistance, it would be a great loss not to continue deciphering and further building upon Hopkins’s legacy in humanist utopistics, especially in the particular realm of sociological pedagogy and praxis.

The intellectual achievements of world-systems studies can hardly be separated from the flexible organizational realities which made such contributions possible during the past several decades. The opening of the book and the concept Antisystemic Movements can most fruitfully be advanced by keeping open and further expanding upon the real academic channels of humanist utopistics the authors of Antisystemic Movements themselves constructed in recent decades.

Conclusion

The point of the conceptual critique of Antisystemic Movements in this paper has not been to diminish the value of world-systems method of historical analysis. World-systems analysis has not only advanced our historical and theoretical knowledge of, and methodological approaches to, the workings of the modern capitalist world-system, but has as well critically evaluated the balance sheets of the “antisystemic movements” generated by the inner operating logic of historical capitalism itself, persuasively challenging the centuries old state-based strategies taken for granted by these movements in their efforts to transform the system. Because of the inherently critical and oppositional nature of its mode of analysis vis-à-vis the predominant modes of “scientific” investigation in the academia, world-systems analysis has from the beginning been a flexible and open intellectual project, at both the methodological-theoretical and the academic organizational levels, inventing and testing new modes of research conduct and organization rarely found in the past or in other academic institutions.

The issue here, therefore, is not to abandon the world-systems analysis, but to more creatively develop and consistently apply its useful holistic methodological and conceptual tools to the study of realistic historical alternatives to capitalist world-system. The shortcomings of the authors’ book in Antisystemic Movements does not stem from the open-ended and still evolving methods of analysis adopted in world-systems studies, but from an inadequate and inconsistent development and application of them in the particular area of studying historical alternatives to capitalism.

Wallerstein’s work on the structures of knowledge is important. The questioning, historicizing, and “opening” (Gulbenkian Commission, 1996) of the very structures of the academia and of the “scientific knowledge” especially in the social sciences points to the self-critically open and lively dynamics of world-systems analysis. His call for “unidisciplinary” historical social sciences is also important; could it be “opened” to include the psychological sciences as well? Could we study the “psychological processes” of the world-system as well as its social (economic, political, and cultural) processes? Wallerstein’s proposals for “utopistics” is important. Can we also think about “autopias” and “autopistics” while we are working also on “utopistics”? Can we include our selves in our studies of the world — its shortcomings and mistakes, as well as its alternative designs and constructions?

Can we reopen the Antisystemic Movements — the book, the concept, and the reality? I hope this paper will encourage new ways of investigating and building our realistic historical alternatives to the modern world-system — new ways that include our own selves in the world-system we seek to understand and transform:

The struggle for liberty, equality, and fraternity is protracted, comrades, and the locus of the struggle will be ever more inside the worldwide family of anti-systemic forces themselves.” (Wallerstein, 1996: 109).

Endnotes

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