Dear Professor Lemert,
The invitation you extended to Immanuel Wallerstein to share his hopes and dreams of the coming demise of capitalism took me back to the rollicking spring of ’68. For many a day the name of the man you labeled “one of the greatest social theorists of our time” made headlines in the Columbia Daily Spectator’s tumbrel-hailing issues.
Unless I misremember, the unretiring fellow, all suited-up, ran interference for Robespierrist SDS (elastically-labeled Students for a Democratic Society). By calling for the creation of one and then another and then another committee “to study the critical issues” the Jacobins kept raising, one after another, while holding hostage one and then another and then another campus building, the trash-talking blocker kept “the forces of repression” (the cops) off campus until a small-bore affair, a ho-hum neighborhood photo shoot, was blown up into a shot seen round the world: Columbia’s Alma Mater waving the banners of Revolution and Anarchy. SDS’s agit-prop came up with the caption: “participatory democracy.” (The Sixties could be captioned “The Decade of Euphemism.”)
Ah, the Sixties! The era when all the smart money in social theory was riding on Marx’s unstoppable Locomotive of History. Alas, along came Reagan, Thatcher, John Paul, et al., and even the ears of the social theorists on High, wrapped up in their hidebound books on “theory,” were struck by the stuck-pig squeal of brakes. Talk about climate change!
But that is something we must not have, so what is to be done? (That question was raised, as you know, by a Petrograd social theorist who sported a cute stiletto goatee and a dominant dome, a star who played for the crowd and toured with heavy metal: “Have bomb, will travel.”) These days it won’t be an easy endeavor to resurrect the cadaver of Marx, along with his drive to immanentize the eschaton (try selling THAT to the ignorant masses!), given the fact that his locomotive (“Big Mo”) now huffs and puffs along on the scale of a toy store choo-choo train. But children must have their toys. (Enter Michael “Choo-Choo” Roth, to rev up, tout, and rave about his cool, late-model, brave new worldly engine for social change. I hear it’s on a roll, with a toot-toot here and a toot-toot there.)
Professor, I must confess that trying to jam the capitalist genie back into the bottle calls to mind the fabled King Canute, who stood on the shore of his realm (up Norse it was) and commanded the incoming tide to recede. Of course, as Marx adjured, one must try: Back to the drawing board went social theorist Wallerstein and drew up a shiny new social theory. I fear it’s a very lonely theory, the facts having nothing whatever to do with it.
Professor Lemert, it was kind of you to provide a stage on which the game old has-been was able to reprise his old applause line (“Exploitation!”), spiffed up with a new one (“core and periphery”). What if it IS the backward-looking reactionary’s lame old shtick? Exploitation sells when, thanks to High Street’s faculty hucksters, who book appearances by their unaberrantly left-winged birds of a feather, tarted-up turkeys like Wallerstein, who greedily gobble up the students’ bread, are the only game in town.
It’s a wonder none dare call it exploitation.
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