>From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: [PEN-L:29024] Jim Blaut on world systems analysis
>Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 18:56:12 -0400
>
>(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A second national-states-are-out-of-date position is associated with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
I´m no expert (there´s that word again) in WS analysis, my knowledge of it
stemming entirely from reading some of the papers on the FBC site
and numerous articles in the Journal of World Systems Research. From what I
have read though, some of the above misrepresents the claims being made by
WS theorists, but it is difficult to properly respond to the interpretations
without having any citations or extracts from Wallerstein´s and Arrighi´s
works to back them up.
Basically, I thought that WS scholars do claim that the global economy
should be understood as an interdependent system, and that nation-state
level _analysis_ is insufficient for understanding even the events that
occur in nation-states. In particular, Wallerstein wanted to a) eliminate
the tyranny of the nation-state as the unit of analysis in sociology,
political-economy, etc. and b) make the world the unit of analysis. But it
does not follow that we must then take an ultra-holisitic approach and
assign total causality of all events within the system to the ghostly
"world-system" as a whole. Much as we do not try to understand every event
in California´s political economy as being caused in its entirety by "the
American national system" in some mysterious, fantasmal sense (All of this
touches on difficult questions of causality in social systems). Wallerstein
also believes that there is a hierarchy of countries within the world system
(core-semiperiphery-periphery), so presumably those states on top have
more autonomy than those on the bottom and are more significant in the
shaping of the world system (but WS analysis also emphasizes the effects of
the periphery on the core and not just vice-versa). What he does claim is
NOT AFAIK that struggles for state power are insignificant, or that states
are "outdated" (whatever that is) only that state power is necessarily
constrained and shaped by its position in the world-system and especially
its rank in the global hierarchy. Wallerstein criticizes the idea (and this
is explicit in the interview posted 2 days ago) that (capitalist)
development is a horizontal process that any country can attain through the
correct policies independent of its relations with the rest of the world. A
country may also need luck, exploitation of others, strategic alliances etc.
to climb the ladder. I see no basis for Blaut´s claim that WS scholars
believe the capitalist system maintains hegemonic political control in a
mysterious way and thus there were no really socialist countries.
Wallerstein et. al. have explicity spoken of the use of imperial agression
and the "incorporation" of previously unincorporated regions. This is
compatible with there _really_ having been socialists countries who
disconnected themselves (though they did not in their entirety) from the
world system and are now/are being reintegrated. That state sovereignty is
an illusion is something I agree with and don´t even see as terribly
controversial- nearly all states are constrained (again, some more than
others) internally by external conditions. Obviously sovereignty is an
illusion for many peripheral countries, and the struggle for it is virtually
unwinnable at an acceptable price without changes in the policies of the
core (i.e. committment to non-interference). So again, Blaut is unfounded
IMO in claiming that World Systemists don´t think nat. lib. movements were
not responsible for decolonization, achieved no social progress, and that
struggles for state power are frivolous. Backing up such assertions really
does need specific textual references. In fact alot of the WS stuff I´ve
read just seems like radical international political economy without that
much of a difference from other traditions. Lastly I´ll just throw in that
Blaut is correct in Wallerstein and Arrighi believing in certain historical
cycles, and I do not.
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