When the Forum moved from Brazil to India, the Indian organizing committee dropped the provision about parties. Still, the proscription against violence led to a split among the Indians. A small Maoist movement organized a counter-Forum, called Mumbai Resistance-2004, on grounds across the road from the WSF. And they denounced the WSF as a combination of Trotskyites, Social-Democrats, reformist mass organizations, NGO's financed by transnationals - in short, a stalking-horse for quietism and counter-revolution. They specifically attacked the concept of the open forum (merely a talk show, they said), the slogan (not "another world," but socialism as the objective, they said), and the financing of the WSF (the fact that some money came from the Ford Foundation).
It really amazes me to see Wallerstein setting himself up as some kind of arbiter on these questions.
Logos 1.1 - Winter 2002, 61
Immanuel Wallerstein's Planet by Robert Fitch
Just a couple of blocks south from where the legendary literary cafes of the Boulevard St. Germaine de Pres intersect the ornate embassies that line the Boulevard Raspail, stands a squat, dark gray, steel and glass structure, with dozens of bicycles tethered at crazy angles across the front entrance. It’s the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, built in 1970 by Fernand Braudel, France’s most revered modern historian, who led the celebrated Annales School during its years of greatest influence. Enter through the American-style revolving doors, take the elevator to the fourth floor, and you are in the offices of Braudel’s most influential disciple, the wildly controversial inventor of World Systems Theory, the former Africanist turned global historian, Immanuel Wallerstein.
It’s a fresh spring day in March. The wild chamomile is already blooming in the nearby Luxembourg gardens. And Wallerstein seems equally distant from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx where he grew up; from the semi-arctic winds still sweeping through his home base, the SUNY Binghamton campus in upstate New York. And from the innumerable controversies he’s stirred up by his efforts to replace the principal actors of conventional historiography—nations, states, peoples, ethnic groups, classes, cultures, civilizations—with a total concentration on the “dynamics of the world system.”
Wallerstein has recently taken on a new job: President of the International Sociological Association, having succeeded Enrique Cardoso, who has since moved on to become the President of Brazil. After being twice defeated for the Presidency of the American Sociological Association, Wallerstein won the top position in the world organization by canvassing the votes of third world sociologists. It’s from his Paris office, now, that Wallerstein takes care of his new Presidential responsibilities. As well as his nearly nonexistent duties at the Maison. “The Maison is really a teaching institution. But I can do what I want, I write the bill. If I want to do something I’ll lecture or hold a seminar. If I don’t, I won’t. It’s basically relaxed.” Essentially, the Maison provides an office and office support. And SUNY makes it all possible by paying Wallerstein over $145,000 to teach one class a year on two continents.
Nowadays, of course, the most highly prized scholars don’t exchange lecturing labor for monthly wages; they loan academic institutions their cultural capital and get back interest in the form of cash, perquisites and freedom from lecturing. One way to estimate the market value of Wallerstein’s cultural capital is to check the tables provided by the most recent five year SSCI Citation Index – which serves as a kind of S&P 500 for professorial stock. The more you’re cited, the higher your value. At roughly 200 citations a column Michel Foucault leads all the Cited with 22 columns; Jürgen Habermas follows with 20; and then Talcott Parsons with 18. Among the living English-speaking social scientists, anthropologist Clifford Geertz and Oxford’s Anthony Giddens both happened to have 13. And so does Wallerstein. But no other living American sociologist can match his total.
On the afternoon of my visit to the Maison, Wallerstein scans the morning mail which happens to bring letters from France’s most famous sociologists—Alain Touraine and Pierre Bourdieu—who invented the concept of cultural capital. Touraine, it turns out, will be participating in a twoday international conference in April, devoted to exploring the themes of Wallerstein’s work. It’s being sponsored jointly by Le Monde, L’Expansion, Le Nouvel Observateur and the Paribas Foundation (created by France’s most powerful investment bank formerly known as the Banque de Paris et des Pays bas). The sponsors bill him as Braudel’s successor. “With his resolutely interdisciplinary scientific approach,” the conference brochure reads, “we have invited him to interrogate the recent past to be able to understand the present and the future.” Speakers and commentators form an intellectual bouillabaisse of academic disciplines, countries, and ideologies: from the Dakar-based Maoist, Samir Amin, the author of Eurocentrism to the Wall Street based billionaire currency speculator George Soros. It was The Modern World System that catapulted him to a pre-eminent status among American sociologists. At the time, in 1974, Andre Gunder Frank, the dean of Latin American dependistas, briskly lifted aside the velvet ropes to permit Wallerstein’s fast-track entry into the pantheon of modern historiography, declaring The Modern World System an “instant classic.” The next year, The Modern World System won sociology’s highest award, the Pitriam Sorokin Prize. The review in Contemporary Sociology, written by a former student, Michael Hechter, proclaimed it “the most important theoretical statement about development since the time of Max Weber.”
full: http://www.logosjournal.com/winter_2002.pdf
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