Di Lampedusa Principle

= "everything must change in order that nothing change."

- Di Lampedusa

Immanuel Wallerstein at http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm :

The basic reason for concessions by persons of privilege to demands for democratization is to defuse the anger, to incorporate the rebellious, but always in order to save the basic framework of the system. This strategy incarnates the di Lampedusa principle that "everything must change in order that nothing change."

The di Lampedusa principle is a very efficacious one, up to a tipping point. Demands for further democratization, for further redistribution of the political, economic, and social pie, far from having exhausted themselves, are endless, even if only in increments. And the democratization of the past 200 years, even if it has benefited only my hypothetical 19% of the world population, has been costly to the 1%, and has consumed a noticeable portion of the pie. If the 19% were to become 29%, not to speak of their becoming 89%, there would be nothing left for the privileged. To be quite concrete, one could no longer have the ceaseless accumulation of capital, which is after all the raison d'être of the capitalist world-economy. So either a halt must be called to the democratization process, and this is politically difficult, or one has to move to some other kind of system in order to maintain the hierarchical, inegalitarian realities.

It is towards this kind of transformation that I believe we are heading today. I shall not repeat here my detailed analysis of all the factors that have led to what I think of as the structural crisis of the capitalist world-system. Democratization as a process is only one of the factors that have brought the system to its current chaotic state, and immanent bifurcation. What I see, as a result, is an intense political struggle over the next 25-50 years about the successor structure to a capitalist world-economy. In my view this is a struggle between those who want it to be a basically democratic system and those who do not want that. I therefore somewhat unhappy about the suggestion of the organizers that democracy may be "an essentially unfinishable project." Such a formulation evokes the image of the tragic condition of humanity, its imperfections, its eternal improvability. And of course, who can argue with such an imagery? But the formulation leaves out of account the possibility that there are moments of historic choice that can make an enormous difference. Eras of transition from one historical social system to another are just such moments of historic choice." (http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm)