15th century AD

If I were required to pick a date to mark the birth of the modern world, I should choose 1492, the year in which the Europeans began their conquest of the planet--military, economic, political, ideological, cultural, and even, in a certain sense, ethnic. But the world in question is also the world of capitalism, a new social and economic system, qualitatively different from all previous systems in Europe and elsewhere. These two traits are inseparable, and this fact calls into question all analyses of and responses to the crisis of modernity that fail to recognize their simultaniety. From this perspective, the dominant "social science" can be seen to be handicapped by its Eurocentrism, which in my opinion prevents it from correctly relating these two aspects of the modern world and its contradictions.

1. The modernity that began in 1492 put an end to 2000 years of prior history for the majority of humanity. Until then the great regions of civilization had remained quite alike, marked by fundamental traits which I have called "tributary," by analogy to their modes of production.

This mode of production arose in the fifth century B.C., when Zoroaster in Iran, Buddha in India, and Confucius in China almost simultaneously formulated ideologies adequate for the tributary system in question. It was a matter, as I have tried to show elsewhere, of a metaphysics that could legitimate power and inequality in states that exceeded the scale of the village and tribal communities of earlier times, and with that end to reconcile supernatural belief and rationality. In the region in which Europe was to arise, this tributary ideology took the forms of Hellenism and then Christianity, while on its mideastern flank it took the form of Islam.

But if the majority of humanity inhabiting Eurasia and Africa partook of a common form of civilization during the 2000 years before 1492, it was fragmented into relatively autonomous cultural worlds. The forces of production of the tributary mode, while superior to those of earlier epochs, were vastly inferior to those of industrial capitalism and therefore imposed a limit on exchange among the various regions of the world. Such exchange existed and had a certain importance, but I believe it was more significant on the level of transfer of knowledge, technology, and ideas than on the economic level in the narrow sense. There was no world division of labor in essential products as there is in the world of today. The tributary mode was defined by the dominance of its ideology and politics, which served to legitimize social reproduction; the regions that made up the ancient world effectively understood themselves in relationship to its main cultural currents: Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity.

The event of 1492 put into motion the erosion of this cultural diversity, whose import would be considerably reduced by the progressive subjection of all regions of the planet to the expansion of capitalism through European conquest.

2. If the crossing of the Atlantic would always be regarded as a singular and accidental event, the transformations of the world that came after 1492 could not. What followed the discovery of the New World was, in effect, the acceleration of the construction of capitalism, and the conquest of the globe which began with the Americas was entirely subject to its logic. In the face of a variety of problems of interpretation, various social thinkers have adopted one or another of three positions:

(i) One group attributes the novelties that arose in European society (the philosophy of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the extension of trade relations, the bourgeois revolutions and democracy, etc. ) to antecedents specific and peculiar to Europe, minimizing the conquests of America and the rest of the world, considering them to be at most contributors to the acceleration of the irresistible ascension of Europe.

(ii) A second attributes to the luck of the discovery and conquest of America, and to several other fortuitous events of the same nature, a decisive role in the construction of the modern capitalist world, unified by European conquest.

(iii) A third considers that capitalism was gestating throughout the ensemble of tributary worlds and that its appearance responded therefore to a general law of evolution of human societies. This position on the question situates the specificities of medieval Europe and "the event of 1492" in a general context.

The first of these is the dominant position on the subject, not merely among bourgeois thinkers, but in large measure among socialists as well (including some who claim to be Marxist). The Eurocentrism that I attribute to this attitude is clearly a means to legitimate simultaneously capitalism--by putting the emphasis on its incontestable progress relative to its predecessors--and the European exceptionalism that it had produced, and that it alone, from this perspective, could have produced. Under such conditions the price paid by the peoples conquered by European expansion can be regarded as acceptable. I shall not recount at length here the "scientific" arguments advanced to explain the birth of capitalism on the basis of European exceptionalism, having traced elsewhere the main outlines of this thesis in bringing out the culturalist hypothesis on which it is based. According to this thesis cultures are the bearers of transhistorical invariants that are responsible for the diversity of paths taken by various societies: the blockage of some of them, and the innovative development of others. These invariants are invoked to explain modern Europe, to trace it to "ancient Greece," whose rationality is contrasted to the mysticism of "the Orient," or to Christianity (its Protestant version in particular), or even to the genes of the "race."

In fact, this culturalist argument draws on the ideologies of the tributary epochs that preceded capitalism, projecting them onto a society that defines itself by its very break with such ideologies. The emphasis that this position places on cultural specificities, though true and important enough for earlier epochs, is emphatically false for the era of economistic alienation. Yet it permits precisely the displacement of the issue and the evisceration of the critique of this alienation. That is to say, it forestalls the critique of capitalism.

Simultaneously, the culturalist method permits one to legitimate the polarization observed in the world expansion of capitalism. It draws a sharp contrast between the regions that benefit fully from the new development and those that appear unable to adapt themselves to it, accusing the latter of "backwardness" or "underdevelopment." In effect the contrast is attributed, in the spirit of the method in question, to cultural specificities proper to the different societies, while the scientific analysis of the capitalist mechanisms proper that are responsible for this polarization is neglected. For the study of really existing capitalism as a polarizing world system it substitutes an ideological discourse on "pure capitalism."

The second of these positions proceeds from the position that the evolutions of societies are not subject to any general laws. This method therefore carries the culturalist argument to its extreme, abandoning any hope of making sense of history.

I take the third position and base my position on an analysis which, in my opinion, demonstrates that capitalism was gestating throughout the advanced tributary societies and not exclusively in late feudal Europe. I emphasize the similarities among contradictions that were operating in all these societies, despite the diversity of cultural forms in which the tributary mode expressed itself. Everywhere the development of the productive forces came into conflict with the immanent logic of the tributary mode, giving rise to the extension of mercantile relationships, the accumulation of financial wealth, the expansion of free wage labor. By this very fact it called into question the power-wealth relationship, inverting its terms by proposing wealth as the source of power in place of power as the source of wealth. In doing this it also called into question the metaphysical alienation of the tributary ideologies and proposed in its stead the new economistic alienation. I gather together therefore the theses of historians who point to the importance of tendencies toward capitalism operating in China under the Ming dynasty, in India before the English conquest, in the Arab-Islamic world in the years of its first grandeur. Far from having introduced capitalism to the peripheries of global capitalism, the Western expansion sometimes delayed its ripening and always deformed its development so as to create an impasse.

This third position, which is my interpretation of historical materialism, does not evade the question of Europe, of why the qualitative leap to capitalism was realized first in Europe and not in the regions that had long been more advanced. But it redefines the terms and substitutes a question framed in terms of the specific historical setting. I here refer in passing to a thesis that I have proposed at length elsewhere, according to which the feudal system of Europe, because it was a peripheral form of the tributary mode of production, possessed the advantage of greater flexibility.

3. The year 1492, therefore, inaugurated both capitalism and the global expansion of Europe, which together comprise what I have called "really existing capitalism."

We understand from this that the Conquest of America was from the first put in the service of the expansion of capitalism, to the point even of becoming a decisive element hastening this expansion. During the whole mercantilist period, from 1492 to the end of the eighteenth century (the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution), America had fulfilled a multitude of decisive functions in the expansion of capitalism. Simultaneously, the conquest of America meant three gigantic destructions: (i) that of the Amerindian civilizations, whose populations were reduced to a small fraction of what they once were; (ii) that of the African societies subdued for two centuries in which theyperformed the odious functions of the slave trade; (iii) those of the civilized societies of the Orient (the Near East, India, China) that lost control of their economic enterprise and foreign trade.

Without 1492 one can hardly imagine the rapid explosion of the Industrial Revolution barely three centuries later, which in its turn led to a new spurt of European expansion. It furnished unprecedented military means for the conquest of India (after the crushing of the Sepoy revolt in 1857), the opening of China and the Ottoman Empire (beginning in 1840), then the conquest of the entire African continent by the end of the century. Here again the expansion of capitalism brought in its train a series of gigantic destructions on the ruins of which was erected the unequal international division of labor of really existing capitalism. The opening to European industry ruined a local capitalism based on artisanry and small-scale manufactures, and imposed the rigid contrast between industrial countries and suppliers of raw materials that structured the world system up until the Second World War.

4. A realistic audit of the world beginning from 1492 will therefore recognize the negative aspects as well as the positive aspects emphasized by the dominant Eurocentric ideology.

Certainly the cultural revolution of capitalism is no less important than 1492 and the conquest of America. Beginning with the Renaissance the dominant metaphysical ideology was challenged, and the century of the Enlightenment progressively displaced it with concepts that inaugurated modern democratic politics first bourgeois and then later socialist. But bourgeois ideology remains imprisoned in the bonds of a new alienation that reduces the human subject to a "factor of production." It is only socialism, especially in its Marxist form, that enables humanity to break these bonds.

It goes without saying that capitalism has extended the productive forces in proportions and tempos that are beyond comparison with those of earlier times. But it has degraded and continues to degrade the natural basis of wealth to the point of bringing the survival of the planet into question, as we are beginning to understand. The economistic alienation and totalitarianism of short-term economic calculation implied by "the market" make this pillage of the planet unstoppable within the the framework and the logic of capital accumulation.

Finally, capitalism as a really existing world system has always been, and remains, polarizing. This polarization is not the product of particular cultural factors, some of which are favorable to "development," some of which are not. It is the inevitable product of capitalist expansion according to the rules of a world market that is integrated only along the axes of the exchange of products and the flow of capital, while along the axis of the employment of labor power it remains fragmented. This polarization puts the lie to all pretense that capitalism is truly universal. Yet it substitutes for ideologies that were necessarily regional in earlier epochs one that proclaims the absolute universality of the market. It is in this sense that I have said that the culture of our contemporary world ought not to be called "Western culture," although it was born in the West and other peoples view it as Western, so much as it should be called "capitalist culture."

Despite its claim to universality, really existing capitalism is incapable of creating the material conditions to realize its calling. It belongs precisely to socialism to formulate the planetary social project and the strategies that can bring it into being, although up to the present it has done so quite imperfectly. World polarization constitutes the true historical limit that real capitalism cannot transcend. It is the expression par excellence of the world whose construction began in 1492 and which will remain our world for the foreseeable future.

Polarization is not only created by the truncation of the world market of capitalism. It expresses itself equally in an asymmetry in the structure of the political system of states that develops around the world expansion of capitalism. In this system only the central capitalist states are truly sovereign. The countries of the periphery, while they are not reduced to colonial status, are not really treated as autonomous. They are regarded as spaces open to the expansion of central capitals. The construction of this world political system has passed through stages marked out by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which put a definite end to medieval Christianity, and by the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which were rounded on the concept of European equilibrium. In America, the United States as the regional capitalist center constructed an analogous structure from which the Europeans were excluded, spelled out in the Monroe Doctrine reserving the Latin American periphery for its exclusive use.

Of course polarization has manifested itself as well on the level of culture, and continues to do so through confusions between the values that capitalism imposes throughout the globe and the distinctly Western form in which they are expressed. This confusion brings in its turn ambiguous reactions of rejection, in which it is difficult to make a distinction between expressions of protest against capitalism and evocations of nostalgia for cultures whose era has passed.

The European expansion was also expressed on the demographic level in an enormous expansion of the populations of the European continent, which entered a century or two early into the demographic revolution of modern times, marked first by a drop in the death rate and only later by a drop in fertility. Moreover, while this revolution was going on, Europe had at its disposal all of America (and Australia) into which it could pour its surplus population. This facilitated its agrarian revolution and industrialization, creating for the European proletariat conditions favorable both to social integration and to rising wages. Between 1700 and 1900 the European and American continents had population growth rates well above those of Asia and Africa, and the numbers of people of European origin rose over this period from 20 to 36 percent of the world's population.

When the Asiatic and African peripheries entered in turn into the demographic revolution, beginning in 1900 and accelerating in 1950, they could no longer relieve their population pressure through massive emigration. But have they not managed to arrive at their historic slowing down, since in 1990 they were 71 percent of the population of the globe compared to 80 percent in 1700, an alarmist and racist discourse on the subject of their menacing fecundity notwithstanding?

5. The contemporary world is therefore indelibly marked by a characteristic of the epoch that began in 1492'polarization. Certainly, in the course of the five centuries that followed, the world system itself evolved, and in this framework the peripheries did not stand still, either in terms of population and social and political development, or in the functions which they have performed in the global system.

Beginning with the Second World War, national liberation movements brought independence to the nations of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, Latin America having been conquered by the Creoles of that continent in the nineteenth century. The creation of the UN formally universalized the system of nations until then limited to Europe and America. In addition, the beneficiaries of the East-West conflict in the third world often succeeded in making their independence respected, engaged themselves in transformations that were sometimes radical, modernized themselves, and initiated their industrialization. These achievements were, after 1980 and particularly after 1990, menaced on all levels. The Gulf War demonstrated the arrogance of the United States, the exclusive superpower. Now that Europe and Japan stay in line and Russia has rejoined is camp, the West will henceforward be united against the third world and arrogate to itself the right of unlimited intervention. The economic achievements of the third world are, in this framework, to be reintegrated into a world system in new forms consistent with the asymmetry of really existing capitalism. The industrialization of the third world has practically become a new form of their peripheralization, while the monopolies that assure to the centers their hegemonic positions are shifted toward new fields of operation: the control of the world financial system, the scientific and technical monopoly, the administration of the natural riches of the globe, the formulation of new modes of life and consumption and their popularization through control over the means of information, the manipulation by these means of opinion on a world scale, the monopoly of armaments of massive destruction.

The world that was put in place beginning with 1492 remains therefore what it has been for five centuries, a system based on capitalist exploitation and the inequality of nations. The recognition that these two dimensions are inseparable, and have been since 1492, constitutes the essential analytical precondition without which all the efforts toward a universal liberation of humanity will be in vain.

REFERENCES

Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).

Samir Amin, "The Ancient World-Systems versus the Modern World-Systems,'

Review 14, no. 3 (Summer 1991).

J.M. Blaut, "Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism,' Science & Society, vol. 53 no. 3.

The demographic estimates are taken from:Jean Noel Biraben, LePeuplement de la Terre (Liege: UIESP, 1977).

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