(the Kondratieff A-period of which we have been speaking), they were put to the test. And worldwide they have been found wanting. The record of post-’revolutionary’ regimes has been that they have not been able to reduce worldwide or even internal polarization to any significant degree, nor have they been able to institute serious internal political equality. They have, no doubt, accomplished many reforms, but they promised far more than reforms. And because the world system has remained a capitalist world economy, the regimes outside the core zone have been structurally unable to ‘catch up’ with the wealthy countries. This is not merely a matter of academic analysis. The result of these realities has been a monumental disillusionment with the anti-systemic movements. To the extent that they retain support, it is at most as a pis aller, as a reformist group better, perhaps, than a more right-wing alternative but certainly not as a harbinger of the new society. The major result has been a massive disinvestment in state structures. The masses of the world, having turned toward the states as agents of transformation, have now returned to a more fundamental skepticism about the ability of the states to promote transformation or even to maintain social order. This worldwide upsurge of anti-statism has two immediate consequences. One is that social fears have escalated, and people everywhere are taking back from the states the role of providing for their own security. But of course this institutes a negative spiral. The more they do so the more there is chaotic violence, and the more there is chaotic violence, the more the states find themselves unable to handle the situation, and therefore the more people disinvest the state, which further weakens the ability of the states to limit the spiral. We have entered into this kind of spiral at varying paces in the various countries of the world system but at a growing pace virtually everywhere. The second consequence is one for the capitalists. States that are delegitimated find it far more difficult to perform their function of guaranteeing the quasi-monopolies that capitalists need, not to speak of their ability to tame the ‘dangerous classes’. Thus, at the very moment that capitalists are faced with three structural squeezes on the global rates of profit, and hence on their ability to accumulate capital, they find that the states are less able than before to help them resolve these dilemmas. Thus it is that we can say that the capitalist world economy has now entered its terminal crisis – a crisis that may last up to 50 years. The real question before us is what will happen during this crisis, this transition from the present world system to some other kind of historical system or systems. Analytically, the key question is the relation between the Kondratieff cycles I first described and the systemic crisis of which I have been talking now. Politically, there is the question of what kind of social action is possible and desirable during a systemic transition.