Historical capitalism is a materialist civilization.
Interpretation
The quote highlights capitalism as a system grounded in material wealth and economic factors.
Immanuel Wallerstein's quote emphasizes that historical capitalism is fundamentally a materialist civilization, indicating that its development and functions are deeply rooted in the pursuit and accumulation of material goods and economic power. This perspective invites consideration of how capitalism shapes societies and drives historical progress, often prioritizing material wealth over spiritual or ethical values.
In practice
In a discussion on economic policies, one might reference Wallerstein's quote to highlight the materialistic nature of societal development.
If we return to the two faces of individualism - individualism as the spur of energy, initiative, and imagination; and individualism as the limitless struggle of all against all - it can be seen how the two practices emerge from and limit the extend of the disequilibrating impact of the contradiction involved in the geocultural agenda.
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
The break from the supposedly culturally-narrow religious bases of knowledge in favor of supposedly trans-cultural scientific bases of knowledge served as the self-justification of a particularly pernicious form of cultural imperialism.
This is a steady, ceaseless process, impossible to contain as long as the economy driven by the endless accumulation of capital. The system may prolong its life by slowing down some of the activities which are wearing it out, but death always looms somewhere on the horizon.
What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
It is this third consequence that has been elaborated in greatest detail and has formed one of the most significant pillars of historical capitalism, institutional racism.
The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
Faith is not a blind, irrational conviction. In order to believe, we must know what we believe, and the grounds on which our faith rests.
When we grasp that we are unworthy sinners saved by an infinitely costly grace, it destroys both our self-righteousn ess and our need to ridicule others.
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.
For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.
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