Introduction

Only at the end of the nineteenth century did a worldwide civilization begin to take shape. During the first seventy years of the twentieth century, however, which. have been marked by a speeding up of the historical process, the division of the world into “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries has not become less pronounced; on the contrary, the gap between them continues to grow larger and has brought about the first crises of a capital­ist system that had only just begun to be a world system.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution that took place between 1930 and 1950, the revolutions in Vietnam and Cuba are all so many stages in a process of development beyond capitalism, in the name of socialism. The fears that Marx ex­pressed in the middle of the last century, to the effect that a socialist Europe might find itself up against a capitalism still on the upgrade in Asia, have not proved justified. The opposite, indeed, has occurred. At the very center of the system, however, in the advanced capitalist countries, an all-round challenging of this system has begun, through a thousand indirect and unex­pected channels.

This challenge to the foundation of the system of values upon which the world capitalist system is based brings into question in turn the conventional social science of the “establishment” and the universities. Conventional sociology, whether functionalist or ∖ structuralist, having developed as a reply to historical material- j ism, has the same ideological foundation and seeks to justify the j established order by demonstrating “universal harmonies.” Polit­ical science wavers between journalism and formalism. As for social psychology, this continues to evade its real problem — how to build the bridge linking the individual to the social — with WilheIm Reich constituting the exception, a pioneer whom few have followed. The weakness of the so-called “fundamental dis­ciplines,” conceived in mutual isolation, results in the weakness of their multidisciplinary combination, as geography and history.

It was criticism of development economics that led me to put forward the following thesis, according to which, when a system is outgrown and superseded, this process takes place not, in the first place, starting from its center, but from its periphery. Two ex­amples are given to illustrate this thesis — the birth of capitalism in the periphery of the great precapitalist systems, and the present crisis of capitalism.

The first chapter deals with the genesis of capitalism, and the remaining four with that of socialism. Chapter 2 sets forth the laws of the central capitalist system and Chapter 3 those of peripheral capitalism. Armed with this twofold analysis, I show in Chapter 4 the mechanisms of dependence and illuminate the process of the “development of underdevelopment,” before draw­ing up, in Chapter 5, the balance sheet of the peripheral social formations of the capitalist world.