I am sorry I brought this up but I need not to be reminded of the
world-system thinking. It's an old story (when I was in grad school), I
attended two PEWS conference with Immanuel and others present, and Terry
Hopkins had offered me an assistantship in the early 1980s to join the
program. I know a good number of Immanuel's students, including some
leading Turkish scholars. I agree that the "global" aspect was brought in
more forcefully but it does not have the monopoly of talking about
capitalism either in "class" terms or in terms of internationalization of
capital. It was precisely treating "space" (core/semiperiphery/
and the periphery) as "class" processes that became problematic.
Besides, while nation states seems to become less important, as
underscored by world-system, we live with nationalisms, nation-states,
identities, rules, policies, etc.
Yes, it was good starting point against the modernization
perspective (not necessarily the NC school) but got soon exhausted in
explaining lots of details of the world economic dynamics. Where it truly
fails (and here I am talking more like an anthropologist) is in the agency
aspects of human behaviour. Its concern with macro structures shoves a
lot of interesting details under the carpet. Differences are explained
away rather lazily.
Cheers, Anthony
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Anthony P. D'Costa
Associate Professor Ph: (253) 692-4462
Comparative International Development Fax: (253) 692-5718
University of Washington Box Number: 358436
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402, USA
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:
> Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 15:25:08 -0400
> From: Mine Aysen Doyran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:21334] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Crisis of capitalism
>
> Incorrect charecterization. In fact, world system people are ridiculed by closet
> neo-classical economists who, for instance, argue that third world societies have
> remained underdeveloped, and will remain so, not because they were colonized by
> the West, but because they were _inherently_ backward: Tribal, uncivilized,
> culturally ill people. So the same people thought that capitalism would bring
> civilization to those societies and modernize them in ways to catch up the west.
> This was the position defended by, for example, Bernstein (See his support for
> colonialism in Morroco), Rostow type anti-communist manifesto preachers, and
> recently by Harvard/Kennedy school backed CIA advisors Samuel Huntington.
>
> Accordingly, WS theory questioned this one sided modernization perspective,
> applying Marx's analysis of class relations to a global level. First, one needs to
> understand the WS theory before challenging it. Whether you like it or not, its
> BIG contribution to Marxism is that 1) capitalism is not a nation or inter-state
> system; it is a world system 2) economic expansion of the "core" (which is starting
> point of modern world economy, at least according to Wallerstein, if not to Frank)
> first depended on the creation and integration of peripheral areas as agricultural
> exporters through "slavery and coerced cash crop production", before the full
> manifestation of wage labor and industrial revolution in Britain 3) and that this
> expansionism was necessary for primitive accumulation of surplus labor necessary to
> develop capitalism in the core (wage labor system) 4) and that _before_ becoming
> fully integrated into the world system, peripheral areas meant for European
> capitalists sources of cheap labor, *not* unproductive labor force as apologetic
> reifiers of wage labor assume, but the labor force drawn into sugar and cotton
> plantations at low immediate cost by force.
>
> See for this Polish marxist Withold Kula/Wallerstein debate. Whereas Kula argues
> that second serfdom (18th cent) in Poland was the natural result of Poland's
> historical and structural failure to generate capitalism of the kind West had,
> Wallerstein argues that second serfdom was the result of Poland's peripheral status
> in the European world economy-- a position that was precisely the result of its
> integration into capitalism *not* of its isolation. Then he goes on explaining the
> conditions under which different zones of the world economy have specialized in
> different agricultural regimes at different times. He shows how wage and other
> forms of labor stand at the "cornerstone" of capitalism as "dual mode of
> involvement", not as reified oppositions.
>
> Furthermore, _class_ is at the center of world system analysis. Core,
> semi-periphery, and periphery refer to positions in the economic system_:
> International division of labor. World economy is by "definition capitalist in
> form" (The Capitalist World Economy, IW, p. 33). Thus the argument that world
> system people do not take class into account is flat wrong:
>
> "There are two fundamental contradictions, it seems to me, involved in the workings
> of the capitalist world system. In the first place, there is the contradiction to
> which the 19th century Marxian corpus pointed, which i would phrase as follows:
> where as in the short run the maximization of profit requires maximizing the
> withdrawal of surplus from immediate consumption of the majority, in the long run
> the continued production of surplus requires a mass demand which can only be
> created by redistributing the surplus withdrawn. Since these two contradictions
> move in opposite directions (a contradiction), the system has constant crisis which
> in the long run both weaken it and make the game for those with privileges less
> worth playing" (_The Capitalist World Economy_, p.35)"
>
> Mine
>
> Anthony D'Costa wrote:
>
> > >These sweat shop studies (particularly apparel, footwear, and some
> > >electronic assembly) are favorites of world-system type analysts. It is
> > >self-selective since labor-intensive activities are low wage by >definition
> > >and hence these studies seem to support their "theoretical" position. >But
> > >what I am surprised about is Mine Doyran's non-discriminatory >approach to
> > >flooding pen-l with world-system stuff. I thought the world-system >folks
> > >were ridiculed for not accounting for class.
> >
> > >Cheers,
> >
> > xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Anthony P. D'Costa, Associate Professor
> > Comparative International Development
> > University of Washington Campus Box 358436
> > 1900 Commerce Street
> > Tacoma, WA 98402, USA
> >
> > Phone: (253) 692-4462
> > Fax : (253) 692-5718
> > xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> --
>
> Mine Aysen Doyran
> PhD Student
> Department of Political Science
> SUNY at Albany
> Nelson A. Rockefeller College
> 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
> Albany, NY 12222
>
>
>
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