(From the late Jim Blaut's regrettably out-of-print "The National Question". Sharp readers will notice a strong affinity between Wallerstein's world systems perspective and the one put forward by Hardt-Negri in "Empire")
A second national-states-are-out-of-date position is associated with metaphysical neo-Marxists like Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, and their associates at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, of the State University of New York. This position or family of related positions, mystifies, or re-mystifies, capitalism, so that it be something different from and greater in scale than all the merely em processes taking place on the earth's surface. Wallerstein's group employs what it calls 'world system analysis'. This is a form of neo-Marxism distinguished --I employ caricature here, but not unfairly so-- by its insistence that the capitalist world system, at the global scale, determines all processes, such as politics, and all part-regions, such as states. This is very close to pure Hegelian holism. The capitalist world-system is not defined by its parts and their interrelations. Rather, this system is something greater than parts and relations, and it determines their nature, behaviour, and historical evolution. 'It' is not empirically identified, and thus closely resembles Hegel's undefinable 'world spirit' (and other undiscoverable entities of romantic philosophy, like the 'life force'). Marx's critique of Hegel's mystical and holistic theory of the state as might serve also as a critique of the metaphysics of 'world-system analysis' In any event, the 'world-system' school puts forward some empirical propositions which supposedly derive from the higher 'world-system' processes and which have concrete and troublesome meaning in the real world, not least for national liberation struggles. First, since the capitalist world system maintains in some mysterious way a hegemonic control of political processes throughout the world, no state exists outside its sphere of control, and no state in the entire therefore, is really socialist. Second, sovereignty is an illusion, since the overarching world system controls all states. Third, decolonization did no result from liberation movements, nor these from the peculiarities of colonial oppression and superexploitation; rather, decolonization occurred simply when the capitalist world-system had entered a cyclic phase -- Wallerstein believes firmly in repetitive historical cycles - in which 'informal empire' seemed more desirable than colonies. Fourth, and by the same token, all anticolonial revolutions, without exception, have failed to achieve fundamental social change. And finally, as of summing-up of all of the foregoing, the state is not of fundamental importance and struggles for state-sovereignty are somewhat frivolous. A related position is Giovanni Arrighi's peculiar 'geometry' of world processes under capitalism. Arrighi is an admitted Kantian, and he believes that the basic forces determining the historical trajectory of the modern world are ultimately spatial, in an absolutist, Newtonian or Kantian sense. Thus he deduces what he calls the 'crisis of the nation-state', the latter seen as a mere spatial cell in the geometry of the world. In this geometry, scalar forces like imperialism -- Hobson's concept, not Lenin's, which Arrighi dismisses - are seen as acting independently of other scalar forces like capitalism. The 'crisis of the nation-state' derives from these worldscale absolute-spatial forces, which seem likely soon to erase states from the geometrician's blackboard. In sum, these are two forms of neo-Marxism which postulate not empirically observable processes, but world-embracing metaphysical forces, as the explanation for what one theorist (Arrighi) believes to be the decline of the national state and the other (Wallerstein) the insignificance of the state and of struggles to control it. -- Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
