Immanuel Wallerstein was a creative thinker who believed that conventional social science represented the interests of the powerful. Born in New York City in 1930, the place he would later identify as the capital of the world economy, Wallerstein spent his life challenging dominant social-scientific and cultural views of global capitalism.

By the time he died in 2019, Wallerstein thought that the capitalist system was in structural crisis, guaranteed to collapse. Yet for him the end of capitalism did not necessarily mean the rise of socialism.

Wallerstein saw the contemporary struggle as one between regressive forces pushing for another highly unequal system and progressive forces fighting for some form of egalitarianism. He dubbed these contesting forces the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre, respectively. In his opinion, each force had a roughly equal chance of success.