Historical Capitalism

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Verso·

© · Immanuel Wallerstein 1983 Verso Editions 15 Greek Street London W1 Filmset in Compugraphic Bembo by Comset Graphic Designs Printed by The Thetford Press Limited Thetford, Norfolk ISBN 0 86091 761 4 Pbk

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Contents

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;··mtroduction ... The CoJDntodification of Everything: :-,Production of Capital ··.The Politics of Accutnulation:

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:>Struggle for Benefits

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!:,·Truth as Opiate: .·Rationality and Rationalization

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···Conclusion: �·, On Progress and Transitions

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Introduction

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This book had its immediate origin in two successive requests . -.11) the autumn of 1980, Thierry Paquot invited me to write a ��j �:short book for a series he was editing in Paris. He suggested as .. . my topic 'Capitalism' . I replied that I was, in principle, will.: ._ing to do it, but that I wished my topic to be 'Historical .Capitalism' . . I felt that much had been written about capitalism by Marx­ : · ists and others on the political left, but that most of these �books suffered from one of two faults. One variety were basic­ :. ally logico-deductive analyses, starting from definitions of · ��hat capitalism was thought to be in essence, and then seeing : · how far it had developed in various places and times . A second variety . concentrated on presumed major transformations of ·_;_ · the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil . against which to treat the empirical reality of the present . What seemed urgent to me, a task to which in a sense the whole corpus of my recent work has been addressed, was to �: see capitalism as a historical system, over the whole of its history and in concrete unique reality. I, therefore, set myself .·. the task of describing this reality, of delineating precisely what : was always changing and what had not changed at all (such that we could denote the entire reality under one name). �. .. .

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