—The Modern World— System has operated extremely efficiently and successfully in terms of its guiding objective for some four to fi ve hundred years. It has been able to achieve an absolutely extraordinary expansion of technology and wealth, but it has been able to do this only at the cost of an ever increasing polarization of the world-system between an upper 20 percent and a bottom 80 percent—a polarization that has been at one and the same time economic, political, social, and cultural.