from Immanuel Wallerstein The End of the World As We Know It: social science for the twenty-first century (University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
Liberalism essentially promised that gradual reform would ameliorate tyhe inequalities of the world-system and reduce the acute polarization. The illusion gthat this was possible... has in fact been a great stabilizing element, in that it legitimated the states in the eyes of their populations and promised them a heaven on earth in the foreseeable future. (1)

...three elements together --political participation via the ballot, the intervention of the state to reduce the polarizing consequences of ungoverned market relations, and a transclass unifgying national loyalty-- comprise the underpinnings, and indeed in actuality the definition, of the liberal state, which by 1914 had become the pan-European norm and partial practice. (9)

the United States no longer has three elements that ensured itrs military strength previously: the money, the popular willingness within the United States to bear the losses of military action, and political control over western Europe and Japan. (16)

[in respect of migration as a force] What will happen? It seems clear in the short run. In the wealthy states, we shall see the growth of right-wing movements that focus their rhetoric around keeping migrants out. We shall see the erection of more and more legal and physical barriers to migration. We shall nonetheless see a rise in the real rate of migration, legal and illegal --in part becasue the cost of real barriers is too high, in part because of the extensive collusion of employers who wish to utilize such migrant labor. The middle-run consequences are also clear. There will come to be a statistically significant group of migrant families... who will be poorly paid, not socially integrated, and almost certainly without political rights. These persons will constitute essentially the bottom stratum of the working class in each country... (17)

...democratization translates primarily as the demand for three things as equal rights: a reasonable income (a job and later a pension), access to education for one's children, and adequate medical facilities. To the extent there is democratization, people insist not merely on having these three, but on regularly raising the minimal acceptable threshold for each. But having these three, at the level that people are demanding each day, is incredibly expensive, even for the wealthy countries... The only way everyone can really have more of these is to have a radically different system of distribution of the world's resources than we have today. (18)

[of Kondratieff B-phases] profits from production are down, and large capitalists tend to shift their profit-seeking activities to the financial realm, which is the realm of speculation... The squeeze on production profits leads to a significant relocation of production activity, the priority of low transactions costs yielding to the priority of reduced wage levels and more effcicient management. The squeeze on employment leads to acute competition between the states that are centers of accumulation, which seek to export the unemployment to each other to the degree they can. This leads in turn to fluctuating exchange rates. It is not difficult to show that all this has been occurring in the period from about 1967-73 to today. (36)

The world revolution of 1968 struck everywhere --in the United States and France, in Germany and Italy, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, in Mexico and Senegal, in Tunisia and India, in China and Japan. The specific griefs and demands were particular to each place, but the two repeated themes were these: a denunciation of the world-system dominated by the United States, in colusion with its rhetorical opponent the USSR; and, two, a critique of the Old Left for its failures... (42)

...the liberal doctrine of reform as managed by specialist/experts (42)

The immediate dramatic effects of 1968 were suppressed or were frittered away in the two or three following years. But the world revolution of 1968 had one lasting immediate effect, and one effect that came to be felt in the succeeding two decades. The immediate lasting effect was the destruction of the liberal consensus and the liberation of both conservatives and radicals from the siren of liberalism... Conservatism has been resurgent, often under the false name of neoliberalism. It has proved itself so strong that, far from presenting itself as an avatar of liberalism today, it is liberalism that is beginning to present itself as an avatar of conservatism... The second post-1968 change, the one that took two decades to be fully realized, was the loss of popular faith in incrementalism... (43)

The game of capitalists jumping from one activity to another in search of relatively monopolizable, highly profitable sectors has not ended. Meanwhile, the overall economic and social polarization has not only not diminished; it has been rapidly intensifying... (44)

This is what has been happening over the past thirty years. Global production of all sorts (automobiles, steel, electronics, among others, and more recently computer software) has been relocating from North America, western Europe, and Japan to other areas. This has led to considerable unemployment in the core zones... In the meantime, investors everywhere have been engaged in all kinds of financial speculations. the OPEC oil price rises of the 1970s led to global accumulations that were recycled as loans to Third World countries. These loans eventually impoverished the borrowers, but, for a decade or so, they did maintain core zone incomes globally, until the Ponzi game finally gave out with the so-called debt crisis of the early 1980s. This manipulation was followed by a second game, the combination in the 1980s of borrowing by the US government (the military Keynesianism of Reagan) and by private capitalists (junk bonds), until that Ponzi game also gave out with the so-called crisis of the US deficit. The Ponzi game of the 1990s has been the inflows of global capital via "short-term borrowing" to East and Southeast Asia... In all of this, of course, some people have made a lot of money... (51-52)

A system is capitalist if the primary dynamic of social activity is the endless accumulation of capital... (57)
Not everyone, of course, is necessarily motivated to engage in such endless accumulation, and indceed only a few are able to do so successfully. But a system is capitalist if those who do engage in such activity tend to prevail over the middle run over those who follow other dynamics. The endless accumulation of capital requires in turn the ever-increasing commodification of everything, and a capitalist world-economy should show a continuous trend in this direction, which the modern world-system surely does. (58)

This then leads to the second requirement, that the commodities be linked in so-called commodity chains, not only because such chains are "efficient" (meaning that they constitute a method that minimizes costs in terms of output), but also because they are opaque... The opacity of the distribution of surplus-value in a long commodity chain is the most effective way to minimize political opposition, because it obscures the reality and the causes of the acute polarization of distribution that is the consequence of the endless accumulation of capital, a polarization that is more acute than in any previous historical system. (58)