A historical-materialist political economy of our world system suggests that
its unified historical development in Asia, Africa, and
The world-systems approach has gained acceptance as a major competing paradigm for analyzing modern social change. It has accomplished important historical reinterpretation but has not fully escaped from state-based to zonal analyses. It has reproduced hoary social science controversies: economism, part/whole relations, determinism/voluntarism. Changes in the 1980's confirm its basic validity. Among major challenges for future work are understanding the kinds and degrees of contemporary peripheral immiseration and undermining the idea of (national) development in theory and practice.
The debates of the 1970's focused on what some called precapitalist elements
of the world-economy, mainly in the
World-systems theory was very much influenced by the Cold War context in which the theory developed. The result was that the Cold War polarity between capitalism and socialism is reproduced in the theory. Moreover, since capitalism is defined expansively in world-systems theory, socialism had to be defined in terms of the end of the commodity form. There are, however, serious problems with that way of conceptualizing socialism. The proposed alternative is to recognize that the nineteenth-century categories of capitalism and socialism are no longer adequate and that there are a multitude of different institutional forms for organizing economic activity.
Wallerstein's field-shaking innovations are becoming "normal
science" as scholars add more precise details to the story of the West's
rise to hegemony; furthermore, the term "world system" has become
virtually synonymous with the particular way the world came to be organized
after the sixteenth century. These two tendencies make it difficult to
recognize pre- and post-modern world-systems or to analyze crucial moments of
restructuring. This article describes a preexisting thirteenth-century
world-system, organized according to principles quite different from the
®modern" world-system and contends that a new pattern of world system
organization is already appearing, one in which the Pacific has supplanted the
World-systems analysis in its first phase has made the case for (a) the world-system as the "units of analysis"; (b) the importance of the longue durée; and (c) a particular definition of the set of defining characteristics of the capitalist world-economy. In the second phase, there are new issues to preoccupy us: (a) elaboration of world-systems other than that of the capitalist world-economy; (b) elaboration of definition and measurement of polarization within the capitalist world-economy; (c) the historical choices that are before us in the future; and (d) overcoming the conceptual trinity of economy (market), polity (state), and society (culture) as representing separate arenas of social action.
Starting from the premise that the evolution of social forces is the most
enduring facet of the historical process, the author reconstructs the social
history of the U.S.S.R., eastern Europe, and
Part of ongoing research on the deep structures of racism and nationalism in contemporary politics, the article focuses on the specific sociological and anthropological dimensions of the "Nation Form." Part I indicates the latent prerequisites that have made the national formation both an obsession and a theoretical blind spot of modern historiography. Marxism itself, while inverting the dominant pattern of explanation, has not escaped this shortcoming. Another step has to be taken in the historicization of such concepts as "social formation," "reproduction," and "transition." Part II proposes a framework to this effect. It is centered on three main ideas: (1) nations are neither universal stages of evolution of the state nor creations of an already given "bourgeois class," but structures imposed upon societies by one among several "bourgeois political forms," because of its utility in the class struggle; (2) nationalization of society is a permanent but also an uneven and contradictory process, which achieves a certain stability only insofar as it merges nationalism and social policy within the institutional and imaginary structures of "fictive ethnicity"; (3) nictive ethnicity itself is continuously reproduced (mainly through the operation of the family and the educational system) in two forms--genetic ("racial") identity and linguistic community. This produces an internal tension which becomes especially acute in the present era of transnationalization of the state and the economy.
Gramsci's concept of hegemony is applied to interstate relations to account
for both the invariance and the evolution of the modern world-system from its
beginnings in Late-Medieval Europe to our days. It is argued that what made the
United Provinces, the
The Dutch, British, and
The nature of oil rent--as net income to landlord or as compensation for
depletion of "natural capital"--is reviewed and the ideological bases
of the concept criticized. The concept is then matched against the empirical
reality of how the National Accounts of Venezuela handles oil income, given
that the United Nations accounting system that is used ignores the category of
rent. The article then discusses the measurement of the importance of oil
income and the distribution of oil rents in
Armed violence in post-colonial
After winning its independence from
French economic thought of the eighteenth century did not use the concept of growth or development, it had several other tools of analysis which permit one to see it had views about development: the concept of stability and harmony defining a presumed "natural" economic order; the mechanism of an economic circuit; agricultural productivity; net product; the theory of stages; the debate about the economic utility of luxury. Finally, the debate about liberalism and the normative considerations evoked to favor economic activity are reviewed in this light, with particular reference to the discussions about grain liberalism, fiscal measures, and public works, monetary policy, and the interest rate.
Two causal categories are advanced in the multicausal problem of malnutrition worldwide: the establishing of a world-economy from the sixteenth century onwards, and the commodification of food in capitalism. As for the former, the ecological benefits of a worldwide distribution of the most efficient crops were minor in comparison with the demographic and economic collapses in the peripheral regions subject to European invasion, a situation which lasts to this day in the center-periphery dichotomy of the world-economy. As for the latter, the capitalist need to add value to the commodity, food, causes widespread malnutrition. Two empirical examples are used to describe the "logic of capitalism," which acts against the "logic of the biosphere": a greatly increasing use of mostly non-replaceable fossil fuel energy to produce nutritional energy for human consumption; and an increasing use of grains and fish as fodder, instead of in direct human consumption. The problem of malnutrition worldwide is seen as political, since the production of food in the planet is in excess of the needs of the current world population; and it is these political decisions that prevent this "logic of the biosphere" outcome from taking place.
The postmodernist wave in philosophy and literature has influenced a
reflexive critique of ethnography as text in
In anthropology, data, though gathered mainly in the periphery, is appropriated as knowledge in the metropole, since concept building and theory construction remain metropolitan prerogatives; and this results in the disarticulation of endogenous modes of thought.
Two divergent theories of economic development were evolved by the British
and Indians during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The two had
divergent social perceptions of the nature of economic changes taking place in
colonial
The influence of the
The inability of economic policies to solve the problems raised by the crisis reveals the limits of the economic theories on which they are based. Going beyond them assumes a dialectical approach based on the movement of contradictions, thus introducing history into the very heart of the theory. Applied to long-term fluctuations, this approach makes it possible to reveal the processes which lead to the blockage of the economic system at the end of the prosperity phase. It also leads to understanding the need for structural transformations during the phase of difficulties, thus leading to a new expansion phase.
A recurrent and perplexing theme in the literature on long swings is the debate about exogenous and endogenous sources of long-swing upturns and downturns. This paper first reviews the exogeneity/endogeneity debate, proposing some clarifications, and situates prevailing approaches to the analysis of long swings within that debate. It then elaborates the implications of the social structure of accumulation (SSA) perspective for the exogeneity and/or endogeneity of long swings, comparing it with other available perspectives. Finally, as a substantive contribution to that debate, it presents a variety of econometric evidence suggesting that the relations of institutional power and conflict which the SSA perspective highlights (a) were exogenous to both the upturn and the downturn of the most recent long swing in the United States and (b) were exogenous as well to the process of technological innovation emphasized by the recent neo-Schumpeterian literature.
The long-wave phenomenon is described in terms of development trajectories which are driven by the diffusion of interrelated clusters of technological, organizational, and institutional innovations, and are punctuated by crises that emerge in the transition from an old saturating cluster to a new but yet uncertain development path. The approach is phenomenological, emphasizing in particular the diffusion and subsequent saturation of techno-economic paradigms and development trajectories that have led to previous Kondratieff upswing phases. The analysis identifies discontinuities and cross-enhancing and clustering in the diffusion of pervasive techno-economic systems, although the discontinuities between different clusters are not sharply focused, nor is the clustering phenomenon very rigid. Nevertheless, the beginning of pervasive diffusion processes and the onset of saturation is, to a large degree, correlated with the turning points identified in the long wave literature.
This paper offers a vision of the evolution of the historical world and the interrelation between the various centers of civilization since their early beginnings. It stresses two qualitative breaks, the first around 500-300 BC when the main various centers (China, India, the Hellenistic world) moved into tributary social forms, the second in the sixteenth century AD when capitalism started in Europe. It focusses on the different patterns of core/peripheries relations specific to each of those two kinds of world-systems.
Political geography has been transformed from "moribund backwater" to being one of the major growth areas of geography in the 1980's. In its reconstruction it illustrates the fundamental debate between state-centric and world-systems analysis. Both sides of this debate are rehearsed, and a "creative tension" is sought. It is argued that world-systems analysis could learn from state-centric studies of state apparatuses and that orthodox state theorizing requires a multiple state dimension. Finally, in a "political geography beyond the state," the world-systems approach is employed to generate a taxonomy of fourteen distinctive politics.
This study describes the basic household structures of the popular classes
in the historical context of the Mexican transition from a peripheral zone to
an industrialized semiperiphery. Five basic household types are considered: (1)
marginal, (2) subsistence-centered, (3) wage-centered, (4) campesino, and (5)
market-oriented. These historical types are located within the specific context
of the periodicities of labor force formation in central
The European section of the world-economy is moving its core. The British
economy is following this move; but the British state appears to be going the
other way, seemingly determined to preserve political sovereignty on the basis
of an increasingly centralized state. This is, however, merely a preparatory
centralizing of functions so that they can be all the more effectively
surrendered to the force of the European market.
In the last few decades, the work of Friedrich List was not much referred to within development research and the political debate about development requirements. This is very strange, since Friedrich List conceptualized most succinctly the modern development problematic. Basically every major issue that has been raised within the modern development debate had been formulated already by this classical author during the first half of the nineteenth century. List was no abstract theorist; rather, he related his theorizing to the practical problems of delayed development. Although he is most remembered for his infant industry argument, his understanding of development processes was quite complex and multifaceted. He was a political economist in the broad sense of the term, covering the impact of political structure, social stratification, culture, and motivation on the direction and the speed of development. He had a clear understanding of the interface between the structure of the world-economy and its impact on the development dynamics of individual societies depending on their location within the hierarchy of what came to be called the world-system. Most of his recipes for development programs and projects are still relevant. If there is one classical author in the history of development theory, that title should go to List.
El "proyecto"
que parece subyacer bajo las realizaciones de la historia moderna se encuentra
en crisis. ¿Hay en el posibilidades válidas, aún no exploradas, de organización
de la vida civilizada o es un proyecto que se ha agotado definitivamente? Este
es el marco problemático dentro del que se desevuelve la argumentación del
presente artículo. Su afirmación principal consiste en relativizar
históricamente ese proyecto y en presentarlo como una alternativa en medio de
otras que pudieron también relizarse en el pasado y que tal vez puedan
realizarse en el futuro. El interés de esta relativización reside en el modo
como se define y pone en relación esencial los conceptos de la modernidad, lo
europeo y lo capitalista. Resulta interesante también la aproximación que se
propone a temas como violencia y vida moderna, escritura y modernidad y a la
discusión en torno al premodernismo, modernismo y postmodernismo como fenómenos
culturales. La modernidad no sería "un proyecto inacabado" como lo
juzga Habermas, sino un proyecto que debe ser replanteado desde sus
fundamentos.
This work questions whether the degree to which a country is linked to the
world-economy by the extent of its trade moderates the effects of the
world-system on subsequent social, political, and economic development.
Arguments for and against such a proposition are reviewed.
This essay is an attempt to unveil the global and historical roots of the
contemporary casualization of work in the center states of the capitalist
world-system. Theories of work and labor market transformation are discussed,
and their one-sidedness criticized. In particular, the narrow national focus of
most studies is critiqued. The notion of many feminists that historical
materialism is not sufficient as a method for analyzing gender issues is also
examined. It is argued that it is not the deficiency of the method, but the
application that is generally at fault. The author then proceeds to map the
historical latitude and longitude of proletarianization of labor, arguing that
full-time proletarian labor has always been awash in a sea of non-proletarian
labor, and that capitalists have always resorted to the so-called informal
economy in their drive to accumulate capital. The struggles of workers
themselves have maintained the process of proletarianization. The gains won by
workers in the West in the twentieth century have pushed capital to advance a
recasualization of work and a resuscitation of the informal economy to reduce
labor costs and weaken trade unions. This explanation is used to situate the
post-Second World War increase in part-time work in
The epistemological crisis of modern science, conceived as a final crisis, is discussed in terms of a paradigmatic transition. Though the exact configuration of the emergent paradigm is unknown, the emphasis seems to be shifting towards a prudent knowledge for a decent life. Four topics are discussed: (1) as the distinction between nature and society breaks down, there will be a supercession of the dichotomy between the natural and the social sciences under the aegis of the later; (2) the emergent form of knowledge reconstitutes local cognitive projects and converts them into illustrated total knowledge: knowledge is thus both local and total; (3) because, paraphrasing Clausewitz, the object is the continuation of the subject by other means, all knowledge must be understood as self-knowledge; (4) finally, all scientific knowledge aims at becoming an enlightened common sense, which is the precondition of any emancipatory praxis.
Two forms of post-modernism challenge modern science today and neither offers much improvement in the form of a viable alternative. This is not an argument for the superiority of modern science in any of its various versions. It is, rather, a statement about the inadequacy of all formulations of science, modern and post-modern. Modern science requires so much qualification that broad and far-reaching interpretations are precluded. Skeptical post-modernism deconstructs modern science Without bothering about formulating a substitute. Affirmative post-modernism also undertakes a thoroughgoing criticism of modern science, but it is more optimistic and seeks to construct new forms of post-modern science. The views of these two post-modernisms and those of modern science are compared and critically assessed. At best skeptical post-modernism offers only a dismal negativism and at worst it points to nihilism. Affirmative post-modernism offers an opening up of science to the metaphysical and the mystical, thus facilitating a synthesis of science and theology. Its pluralism permits us to say anything we want; what results may be fascinating, but it can also be absurd and post-modernism provides no criteria to differentiate between the two.
The basic argument is a criticism of the epistemological construct that what is common to the sciences is an identical ideal of rational description. In this view, such an ideal has been fully implemented in sciences such as physics and chemistry while other sciences still find "obstacles" in the way. If there is a message of the "new sciences" to the social sciences, it is that such a construct is a trap. Some of the main elements of what a rational description was said to be are now precisely the targets for a "reconceptualization." In the process, it is becoming clear that both their traditional and their new meaning are restricted to the experimental sciences. The conclusion is that the idea of an identical ideal should be forsaken, and that so-called "obstacles," which define in a negative way the (interesting) difference between laboratory and historical, social beings, should be restated as a challenge, requiring the invention of relevant scientific practices which give a positive meaning to this difference. Those social sciences which are already in this process of invention have nothing in particular to learn from the "new sciences."
In this sampling of the literature--under the rubrics Undecidability, Uncertainty and Complexity; Macrostructures: Systems and the Human Scale (Entropy, Dynamical Systems, Computation); The Very Big and the Very Small: Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology; Time; Culture and Epistemology--the emphasis is on the complexity brought to focus in studies of dynamical systems. The recent flowering of this work, characteristically scornful of traditional disciplinary boundaries, evidences, shift to relation over substance, synthesis over reduction, simulation over analysis.
This article seeks to establish an analytical and critical comparison between some of the central contributions of Fernand Braudel especially his theses on geohistory, the longue durée, and material civilization and the principal theoretical arguments in the work of Karl Marx. Resituating the basis of Braudel's work within the methodological paradigms of the ``first'' Annales (that of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre), the article compares these paradigms with the corresponding paradigms of the materialist conception of history. Finally, in a wider perspective, the article tries to assess the comparative contribution of the Marxist critical project and that of the Annales in general, and Braudel (the greatest historian of the twentieth century) in particular.
1989 is a continuation of 1968 despite the fact that, on the surface, the
ideological representation seems opposite. If there was a parallel between the
In his La Méditerranée, Fernand Braudel introduced the three-level scheme of social time with the concepts ``histoire structurelle (quasi-immobile),'' ``histoire conjoncturelle,'' and ``histoire événementielle'' and ascribed to each its own pace of development. He also emphasized the importance of long-term developments (la longue durée) in historical analysis. Aided by these critical insights the author first tries to prognosticate the possible developments in European agriculture up to the middle of the next century. Then he confronts his findings with those of historians of agriculture (especially Slicher van Bath) who studied secular developments in agriculture in the European past, in order to determine how his prognostication fits in with their findings. The application of historical knowledge to expected developments might contribute to put these in the right perspective and to evaluate the consequences of such developments in more detail.
A characterization of the ``prebendary-corporatist state form'' one in which mechanisms of domination and control combine coercive and semicoercive relations such as militarism and clientelism is offered. After a brief development of the concept, the major historical, political, and economic factors in Bolivian state policies from 1952 71 are analyzed.
This introduction reviews major debates among scholars from several disciplines who are comparing the modern world-system with earlier world-systems. Considered are the problems of conceptualizing world-systems, the spatial bounding of world-systems, and understandings of systemic logic. The articles in this special issue of Review are discussed within the context of these theoretical problems.
The purpose of this paper is to examine and attempt to clarify a set of relations that have often been conflated and confused and certainly undertheorized.
The first concerns the relation between global system and globalization. It has often been assumed that these terms refer to the same phenomena. Globalization in the cultural sense, or perhaps, the ideological sense, is not the same as the emergence of the global or world system. Globalization, a form of consciousness of the extent of globality, of the degree to which the local is globally informed or even formed, is a process that occurs within already existent global systems. It is a process that occurs periodically. It is not a world historical phenomenon characteristic of the past century or the past 25 years as some have contended. The second aspect of globalization is the degree to which it is a product of intellectual consciousness in the center or in all elite groups of the global system, or a more general phenomenon. We argue here that globalization as it is used in contemporary discussions is a product of center intellectuals struggling for a distinctive understanding of culture. A more objective notion of globalization would transport it further back into the history of the global system, pointing out the force of global connections, transfers and local/global articulations from the earliest periods of expansion. Modern globalization ideology concerns Western self-identity and self-consciousness more than objective global cultural and social processes.
The second relation is that between the formation of global systems and the generation of modernity as a cultural form. I argue here that culture is not perhaps a proper term, in spite of the ease of its use. This is because the notion of culture itself a bounded set of attributes associated with a given population, and which may be diffused, is itself a product of the way identity is contituted in the global system. It is argued that ``identity space'' might be more adequate to the task of understanding the way in which global processes, via their effect on the transformation of sociality tend to produce a number of parameters that are associated with what is called modernity. From this point of departure, it is possible to consider the notion of modernity trans-historically and in relation to previously existing global systems. A number of suggestions are made as to how a comparative analysis of modernities might be carried out in such a framework.
Some patterns of geopolitical and market dynamics are suggested which hold across all types of political and economic organization. Stateless societies do not exist in a vacum, but are organized both by military relations with their neighbors and by kinship exchange systems which have many of the dynamics of market tructures. Kinship ``markets,, exchange sexual property and thereby establish trade links and military alliances among culturally distinct groups. Insofar as domestic legitimacy follows geopolitical power-prestige, kinship ``rules'' and their supporting mythologies are ideologies arising in response to geopolitical conditions. The dynamics of social change follows a combination of the geopolitical processes of alliance, conquest, and migration; plus the tendency of the marriage market toward increasing inequality between alliance-rich and alliance-poor kinship groups, culminating in the destruction of this form of market in a ``kinship revolution.'' The result is the rise of state-organized societies which coercively extract surplus from agrarian production. These agrarian-coercive societies are driven onwards in turn by their geopolitical relations and market dynamics with external groups.
Cahokia, near
Prehispanic
The political economy of the late prehispanic period in the Southwest and
Analyses of pre-capitalist world-systems tend to focus on the large-scale analysis of whole systems. Rarely has the empirical evidence for specific historical places and moment been closely examined using the world-systems lens. This paper uses published cuneiform texts and archaeological data in a micro-level analysis of a specific moment in the Ancient Mesopotamian system, showing the mechanisms leading to underdevelopment in the periphery. The nineteenth century BC Assyrian trading colony at Kanesh on the Anatolian plateau has been one of the most intensively studied settings in the ancient world. Scholars have variously characterized it as Assyrian military imperialism, administered trade, and primitive entrepreneurship, though the historical information available to us conforms to none of these models. This article places Kanesh in the broader world-system network of its time. It then examines the hidden structure of trade through an understanding of the role of the Assyrian state and in culturally embedded inequality in trade relations that had existed already for millenia between the two parties. This structure was operationalized through the ``Three C's of Underdevelopment'' which allowed the Assryians to control Anatolian trade-- cooptation of elites, control of credit, and currency manipulation. Examples from other parts of the Mesopotamian world-system, and a comparison with the British ``informal empire,'' show that these same mechanisms have been operating to foster inequality for five millenia.
This paper argues that from around 4000 BC to 1400 AD,
Precolonial West Africa was shaped by two systems of long-distance trade:
the more ancient, the trans-Saharan, based on North Africa and the
Mediterranean, and the nascent capitalist system centered on Europe and the
A central scholarly concern for two centuries now has been something called variously the rise of the West, the birth of the modern world, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The usual starting date assigned is circa 1500. Normally this is discussed as a success story.
The article reviews firts the literature about the differentia specifica of capitalism, and then the various accounts of the historical construction of a capitalist world. It discusses the answers to the ``puzzle'' of the occurrence of a transformation that was extremely unlikely. These answers are grouped in two categories: civilizational and conjunctural explanations.
Finally, a conjunctural explanation is offered, seeing the transformation as the result of a conjuncture of four collapses: the seigniors, the states, the Church, and the Mongols. This extraordinary conjuncture lifted all the constraints, and launched the world on an irrational adventure.
The authors explore the relationship between economic cycles and crises of accumulation and their relation to hegemonic shifts in the world system. Accumulation of surplus or capital accumulation is viewed as the ``driving force'' of the expansion and dynamic of the world system over several thousand years rather than the conventional 500 years of world-system theory. They identify a series of economic A and B phases of approximately 200 years duration going back at least to circa 1700 BC and a series of periodic general world system crises which include the simultaneous decline of inter-linked hegemonies and the rise of new hegemons. An epilogue refers to recent empirical tests/evidence of their phase/cycle datings.
History is replete with the record of women. However, the notion that there is such a category that can be traced across time and space is seriously challenged. Rather, what should be the subject of an historical account is gendered relations and how these are articulated with forms of economic, social, and political institutions. In a review of a new anthology detailing the lives of Irish women this article argues that in the absence of that analysis there is a significant chance that the category ``women'' will be dislodged from its historical expression. As much as the world cannot be understood apart from the gendered relations that constitute it, conversely, gendered relations are meaningless in the absence of an account of their systematic connections to political, social, and economic structures. While there is nothing much new in this prescription of how to study gender and the socially organized ways it is constituted in much of the discourse concerning both gender and social structures, there is the predisposition to take the former as given while explicating the latter.
This article tries to illustrate the process of the expansion of the
frontier of the modern world-economy with the case of the Portuguese
By analyzing socioeconomic processes of transformation in the
nineteenth-century Antwerp Campine (in the center of the core countries
The creation of the Kingdom of Romania in the period 1850 1920 as the result of the interacting pressures of great powers and internal social forces led to a process of political modernization and economic transformation, which in turn gave rise to an intellectual debate about both the appropriate state policies to be pursued and the conceptual understanding of Romania within the world-system.
This paper seeks to test empirically the hypothesis that debt crises erupt in
the periphery of the world-economy every 50 to 60 years in the downswing of a
Kondratieff cycle as a direct result of the strategies adopted by core
capitalists to prolong the profit-making life of production in a technological
cycle. A detailed empirical study of each Kondratieff cycle since 1782 is
conducted in which the factors contributing to growth in the core's economy are
examined. The research reveals a clear pattern of integration of the periphery
into each technological cycle which had as its purpose the prolonging of the
growth phase in the core through exports to the periphery. Such exports were
financed by generous capital flows to the periphery as investment was directed
away from equity investment because of excess industrial capacity and technological
obsolescence in the core. Global economic contraction during the downswing of a
technological cycle, low capital retention in the periphery, as well as the
limited profit-making potential of the debt-incurring projects, deprive the
periphery of the income that would allow debt-servicing, and this led to severe
balance of payments problems, debt-servicing difficulties, and the eruption of
a debt crisis. The effects of global contraction, which led to the eruption of
the current debt crisis, are seen to have occurred prior to each debt crisis
since 1782. It is argued in this article that the current
The most socially conflictual periods of contemporary Spanish history generally coincide with those of other industrialized countries, although their causes cannot be explained solely in terms of the turning phase of the economic cycle; political conditions are also decisive in explaining this increase in social conflict.
This article examines the effects of the Industrial Revolution on textile
weaving in
The paper shows how the destruction and the preservation of the Brazilian
Amazon rain forest are tied to
Traditional socialist trade-union theories or models have not prevented the frequent isolation of labor from other democratic social movements, or the subordination of labor struggles to the ideologies and interests of other categories and classes. Such understandings are today an obstacle to emancipatory strategies. Theory related to the new social movements (1) surpasses the notion of a single class identity and interest, (2) undermines a view of society as dominated by the economic and political spheres, and of social struggle as progressing from the first to the second, (3) suggests positive new relations between class, popular and democratic interests and demands, (4) provides a base for a new relationship with political parties, and (5) proposes a new view of the global and a new kind of internationalism. A ten-point theoretical/strategic definition of "social-movement unionism" is offered which stresses the necessity and possibility for an intimate articulation of unionized with other workers, of labor with other social forces, and of shop-floor democracy with shop-floor internationalism. A test case offered to illustrate the argument is that of the relationship between an Indian feminist strategy for working women and recent South African trade-union experience. The conclusion is that "social-movement unionism" offers a continuously renewable emancipatory strategy surpassing current liberal, populist, and socialist ones.
In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century,
Agave fiber crops, including henequen and sisal, are among the domesticated
plants native to the American Tropics that have been diffused to tropical zones
on other continents. This diffusion has been carried out by entrepreneurial
agents of the core states of the world capitalist system interested in
establishing numerous source areas of fiber crops to maintain cheap, reliable
supplies. One result has been to pit different tropical regions of the
periphery, heavily dependent upon fiber production, against one another,
ensuring low prices and poverty for these regions, while enhancing profits for
the core. This paper traces the role of the globalization of agave fiber crops
in the generation of poverty and the maintenance of dependency in
The article focusses on the economic relations between the developed core
areas of Europe and a periphery,
The article explains why the Agrarian Question in
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries,
This article studies the economy of Patras in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and traces its emergence as one of the principal ports in
With the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774,
Between 1830 and 1912, Salonica, the natural outlet of an extensive Balkan hinterland, experienced tremendous growth and prosperity. Though retail trade was the principal occupation in the city, in later years banking and industry contributed considerably to the creation of an influential local elite and a numerous working class, both consisting of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. As education spread to all social strata, the process of modernization was accelerated. European education, cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, and socialism supported the integration of the multiethnic and multicultural society of Salonica but eventually proved unable to remove the deep roots of mutual mistrust and hatred between the millets.
This paper traces the development of
Port-cities were an important element of the nineteenth-century
world-economy, constituting bridgeheads in the economic, social, and political
transformation of the newly-incorporated areas. Within the
This is a critique of two articles by David Gordon for their reference to national economies. this more limited scope seems a step backward from Gordon's own earlier world-economy, world- system perspective in a debate with Ernest Mandel. Gordon's earlier perspective is preferable not the least because it also facilitates our analysis of endogeneity especially of lower turning points in long economic cycles, as opposed to Mandel's view of their exogeneity.
There is considerable agreement that early modern
Between the 1690's and the 1840's,
Contemporary international politics are viewed and analyzed in light of comparable circumstances in the past. The author surveys 10,000 years of human history and discusses the rise of urban centers and the diffusion of major religions as key to understanding our present situation. While the 21st century brings new challenges to community building, the author is optimistic that humankind, always adaptable, will create new forms of community and political configurations to answer the seemingly intractable problems of global urbanity.
The world-systems perspective is now a well recognized area within the social sciences and, most notably, the discipline of sociology. To many the development of this field is only part of the general trend of intellectual specialization in this case the study of global social structures and change.
This essay rejects this analysis, evaluating the world-systems perspective
as part of an ongoing crisis within sociology and the social and historical
sciences. The world-systems project is accordingly scrutinized from an
alternative position, asking whether and to what extent those working in this
area have been successful in advancing a quite different project: the
construction of world-relational conceptions that escape the limits of
concepts and texts rooted in partial accounts of the development of Europe and
Analysis is targeted at the methodological foundations of the field and, in particular, successive waves of conceptual and theoretical re-formulation surrounding such central terms as ``society,'' ``state,'' ``economy,'' ``labor/family,'' and ``social movements.'' The strength of these efforts is shown to be found not simply in shifting the unit of analysis and the investigation of large-scale constructs over long periods of time; more fundamental has been the displacement of conceptions of modern, Euro-North American ``societies'' as archetypes of social change and development.
This paper looks at the various perspectives and experiences brought together at UNCED. The focus of the analysis is on differences in perceptions between the North and the South, as exhibited in the four ``sites'' of UNCED: inter-governmental negotiations, the NGO mela (or fair), the exercise in adult education through the mass media, and the forum for political leadership. The argument is that while the first three events were successful, the fourth was a total failure. As a result, while the process help identify and consolidate national positions, it did not make progress towards the creation of a global political or moral community, without which global collective action is inconceivable.
As a microcosm of the international struggle for global hegemony in the
early 1700's, Southern Appalachia formed a buffer zone between British
settlements in
This paper critiques behavioral and geographical explanations of new wave
Irish emigration. It suggests that the former traces emigration to the
aspirations and social attributes of Irish youg adults, thereby locating its
causes and consequences in Irish youth enterprise culture. The latter explains
emigration in simple geographical terms, attributing it to locational factors
and
The industrialization of the
Prior studies about Caribbean cities and the city of
The restructuring of the world-economy since the 1970's has been accompanied by major changes in the nature and dynamic of territorial and spatial processes, within and across regions, nations, and cities. As world regions are reconstituted through spatial shifts in investment and massive expansion of the radii of organizational control, a set of ``global cities'' or ``world cities'' have emerged at the intersection of global transaction networks. Within the context of these global trends, Istanbul in the 1990's appears to be at the threshold of such a major redefinition, poised to assume a new role as the nodal point of access and control at the intersection of emergent cross-regional networks. The article explores the prospects and expectations in this historical moment in terms of opportunities in the emergent cross-regional networks and constraints in the process of autonomization from the national arena, after briefly touching upon the city's historical specificity, and then outlining its economic and political transformation in the 1980's.
While ruling groups throughout east-central Europe renounced socialism and
began to chart capitalist futures from the 1989-1990 overthrow of Communist
Party rule and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and
East Asia's momentous, protracted thrust in our times, often interpreted in
``economistic'' terms by Western liberal and Marxist analyses, in rooted in the
realm of philosophy, in the communitarian, group, ethos, the specific product
of the depth of its historical field. As such, East Asia, around its epicenter,
Kasimbazar exists today as a small town in the
This article offers historical evidence on the pattern of nineteenth-century
international migration to the
This special issue of Review explores the links between the dynamics of labor unrest and the capitalist world-economy during the twentieth century. How have waves of labor militancy contributed to the evolution of the modern world-system? What opportunities and constraints are imposed on labor movements by the world-economy and the interstate system?
This special issue also introduces a major new database on world labor unrest based on newspaper reports from 1870 to 1990. The design and construction of the World Labor Research Working Group database are described in detail in Part I. The national and world-level patterns revealed by this important new source are analyzed in Parts II and III.
In this article we delineate three dynamics of class composition, economic restructuring and gendered-class struggle which we argue are reflected in the promotion of debt for nature swaps as a component of the corporate solution to the debt-nature crisis. On the one hand capitalist restructuring of labour relations, the enclosure of natural resources and the debt-imposed assault on state spending, have brought on a `reproduction crisis' for the urban and rural poor. On the other hand, it is in the face of such enclosures, that broad based movements of women and men are struggling to retain or reappropriate popular control over the means of subsistence, and to exert locally defined values, meanings and forms of social relations in defense of the commons. To accept debt for nature swaps and other new enclosures as any sort of solution to the debt-nature crisis is to accept defeat for the popular struggle to restore the commons even as this struggle is finding its strength.
There can be no doubt that there were different policies for land
reclamation and drainage in early modern
Over the same period in
In England, drainage schemes progressed in tandem with the capitalization of the courntyside; in fact, such schemes were of as much importance as the enclosures. Like the enclosures they were opposed by villagers and all those who earnt a living from the marshlands (the same resistence is to be found in other European areas). Yet from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards we can see the same symptoms as elsewhere: a fall in cereal prices with subsequent financial difficulties in the maintenance of drainage canals and a technological impasse about the use of Dutch windmills to power the drainage works. Here as elsewhere, it was the introduction of the modern steam pump which made it possible to overcome this situation of stasis.
This paper has three objectives. First, to use the methodology developed by J. Goldstein in Long Cycles to examine three untested data sets on the purchasing power of gold, one from England and two from the United States, for evidence of long waves between 1790 and 1970. Secondly, to demonstrate the accuracy of these data sets as indicators of long waves by showing a strong correspondence between the long wave patterns revealed in these data sets and the generally accepted datings of long waves after 1790. Thirdly, to test a portion of one of the data sets, the purchasing power of gold in England from 1560 to 1790, for evidence of long waves and compare our results with recent research on long waves prior to 1790.
Les Annales
changent-elles? Pour répondre à cette question l'auteur analyse le contexte
sociointellectuel dans lequel a été élaboré l'éditorial de la revue intitulé
``le tournant critique''. Il suggère ensuite que ce sont les modalités
traditionnelles d'accéder à la totalité sociale qui sont en crise, et qu'il
faut attendre des propositions conjointes de disciplines voisines
(anthropologie, économie, sociologie) plus attentives à l'action située, aux
constructions identitaires, à l'ordonnancement temporel des processus, un
renouvellement du projet fondateur de la revue, l'histoire totale.
Internal peripheries of center-states (Ireland as part of Great Britain, the Midi as part of France) are compared to those of semiperipheral states (Andalucia as part of Spain, Minden as part of Prussia, Tatarstan as part of Russia) using indicators such as changing roles in national and world-markets, property rights, agrarian production, taxation, the role of the elite, and intellectual concepts of the time. The boom of the southern Ukraine in the nineteenth century is correlated to the catastrophe of Ireland in the same century. Differences are noted, which cannot be explained within the world-system for instance that the Russian Orthodox Church acted more tolerantly in Tatarstan than the Roman Catholic Church did in Andalucia, meaning that in Tatarstan today there is an ethno-religious minority, while in Andalucia there is none. The question is raised whether eastern Germany after unification will develop into an internal periphery of western Germany, despite a massive transfer of public means.
This article locates the dynamic of the Scramble for Africa squarely in Eurpoe, but also attempts to pay due regard to changing conditions in the periphery contigent on the manner of capital's penetration of Africa itself. While the African dimension was important, the crucial changes took place because of capitalism's markedly uneven development after c1870. The changing balance of economic power between the advanced industrial nations caused the weakest of them, France, and to a lesser extent, Britain, to embark on programmes of colonial expansion. This suggests that scholars should pay particularly close attention to the political economy of France in the last 30 years or so of the nineteenth century. If the partition of British Africa was less a gigantic footnote to the Indian empire than it was to the City of London, the Scramble as a whole may owe more to French commercial calculations and the Quai d'Orsay than it ever did to the ``official mind of British Imperialism.''
This article argues that the creation and exhaustion of large scale financial innovations have played a key role in the rise of hegemony and in the stimulation of ``logistics,'' very long waves of economic growth in the world-economy. It treats finance as both a ``world-market control investment'' as Wallerstein has put it, and an industry that experiences cycles of innovation, maturity, and overproduction. In the latter phase the financial system produces inflation and financial crisis. This model is assessed with respect to the rise and decline of logistics and hegemons from 1000 AD to the present.
Most analyses of the world-system focus on the distinction between the core and periphery; this paper analyzes the changing relations among core powers. A structural analysis of trade networks in 1938, 1960, and 1990 shows the rise of Japan and the decline of the United Kingdom; the United States and Germany are among the three most important centers of trade at all three points in time. The 1938 and 1990 trade networks are similar in significant ways: both identify core powers with competing spheres of economic influence in geographically localized areas. The 1960 network, at a time of stable U.S. dominance, looks significantly different.
Underlying historical descriptions of the origins and early development of the capitalist world-system is a map of long term structural dynamics, such as 100 200 year logistic economic growth trends, 30 60 year long economic waves (or ``Kondratieffs''), uneven geographic development, and a cycle of hegemony. In this study, we directly examine the structural grid on which the history is mapped. We derive propositions from our theoretical interpretation of long waves and leading sectors, and especially of the logistic, which we develop into a causal theory by connecting it to the cycle of hegemony. To examine the propositions, we have constructed a unique 250 year data set of leading economic sectors that encompasses the Baltic, Asian, and Atlantic commodity trades. Figures chart the rhythm of the world-economy for a combined measure of leading sectors, and for several trades. Inspection and analysis of the data provides clear evidence of a logistic ``A'' phase of high economic growth until 1600/50, and a relatively stagnant ``B'' phase from 1600/50 to 1750; of shorter term long waves; of waves in colonial areas having a mirror opposite pattern to those in the core when hegemony is absent; and of a hegemonic Netherlands being the driving force behind the logistic by having higher growth than the rest of the core during the ``A'' phase and lower during the ``B'' phase. This connection with hegemony, we conclude, renders key support for our causal theory of logistics.
A discussion of the relations of the working class and the state since independence in Algeria. The article traces the shift from a period of social pact to one of the demobilization of the working class to its renewed but limited role in a period of ``democratization.'' This is an analysis of the limits of party- populism, and the prospects of Islamo-populism.
This article contextualizes Samuel P. Huntington's much discussed ``The Clash of Civilizations'' in terms of the literatures and/or arguments about ``civilizations'' that he himself does not cite but which he might be assumed to have been aware of when he wrote his article. Because the idealistic glorification of militarism by Hegel and its criticism by Toynbee are central features of this omitted literature, and because Huntington claims his critics lack alternative hypotheses when the broader literature in question clearly does not, his scholarly disinterestedness is challenged. Moreover, the interpretation of Huntington as a Late-Modern Hegelian allows a productive contrast with the Braudel-Wallerstein conception of material civilization and suggests a richer, post-Hegelian, dialectical conception of civilizational relationships supporting Mary Bateson's recognition that ``civilization connotes the capacity to transcend differences.''
The isolation and severe environment of Baja California Norte and its most notable feature, the Colorado Delta region, impeded its incorporation into the global economy. In the period of vast sys-temic consolidation and expansion of the capitalist world-system in the late 19th and early 20th century via transnational corporations, a large quantity of investment capital primarily in the form of one transnational, linked the Colorado Delta region to the global economy. The result was capital-intensive dependent development and the region's conversion to the role of peripheral producer in the world-economy. It was in this region that the foreign-controlled transnational agribusiness that proliferates in modern Northern Mexico was first introduced.
A longitudinal data set was constructed to assess the extent to which the dependency effect on growth and industrialization is affected by 1) historical phase, 2) world-system factors, and 3) domestic industrial policies. The growth in national income and industry of Brazil and Mexico are analyzed with data from 1901 80. The results demonstrate the payoff 1) of considering historical period; 2) of modelling some version of the global economy and government policy; 3) of resurrecting the notion of trade dependency.
The Latin American left's traditional defense of full national sovereignty has been challenged by the recent restructuring of the world-economy, the collapse of the former socialist bloc, and the rise of neoliberal ideology. on the basis of interviews with some 75 left intellectuals in Cuba and Mexico, this article explores the emerging notion of a relative national autonomy, which would be mediated in the new world order by at least five factors: a strong state, Latin American regional integration, transnational social alliances, scientific and technological capacity, and the reconstitution of national culture.
El artículo plantea una
cuestión del momento: ¿Cómo pensar las luchas particulares de los de abajo
cuando se hallan en un aparente deterioro global? El autor distingue entre las
luchas particularistas, como las racistas y fascistas, y las luchas que siendo
particulares expresan valores universales, como las de las etnias y naciones.
La dominación
capitalista hoy, en su forma de `economía-mundo,' acentúa las diferencias de
los trabajadores mediante estructuras y políticas focalizadas destinadas a
cumplir una doble función: la acumulación y la legitimación del capital. Estos
mechanismos del capitalismo en su etapa de globalización llegan a invalidar
cualquier generalización y restan significación a las luchas que por la
libertad y fraternidad, en contra de la injusticia social y la exclusión
realizan las etnias, los campesinos, los obreros y los sectores populares desde
todas partes.
El desarrollo que estas
luchas particulares puedan asumir y la posibilidad de que confluyan en un
universalismo, es aún impredescible. Sin embargo, a finales del siglo XX,
aparece un movimiento de carácter universal que surge y se expande, desde
América Latina, Africa, el Mundo Arabe, el Sur de Asia y Extremo Oriente, y que
expresa la necesidad de un democracia con poder del pueblo, con pluralismo
ideológico, religioso y justicia social. Constituye un desafio para las ciencias
sociales, al plantear la reestructuración de los valores universales desde las
más variadas situaciones particulares.
"Chaos" is not by definition unpredictable. This leads to a reconceptualization of a "law of nature" to incorporate probability and irreversibility. The central issue dividing the "two cultures" is the problem of time: the absences of the arrow of time in Newtonian science and the centrality of irreversibility in thermodynamics, biology, and the human sciences. By casting the fundamental laws of the universe in terms of unstable dynamical systems, dynamics and thermodynamics can be unified. The instability of chaos is the soul ce both of order and disorder, of both coherence and entropy. Instability/chaos permits the unification of the microscopic and macroscopic descriptions of nature and avoids the dualism of orthodox quantum theory. Today a description of the creativity of nature is within the grasp of science, with time expressing "the alliance between man and the nature he describes."
The nineteenth-century revolution in historiography associated with Ranke, despite its strong idiographic bent, was the child of the scientific passion. Historians shared many premises of natural scientists and joined them in a common struggle against "speculative" philosophy. The science for which these historians searched, however, was that based on Newtonian dynamics. Recent work of natural scientists, which emphasizes non-linear, non-deterministic phenomena, and complex reality fashioned by the arrow of time, reopens a series of distinctions that seemed obvious to nineteenth-century historians, such as nomothetic/idiographic and fact/value, and therefore requires new sets of categories for historical work. Faruk Tabak, "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis? A Geohistorical Perspective on Pax Mongolica" The article argues that pax mongolica was neither a singular period of momentous and explosive change (as portrayed by Abu-Lughod), nor was it a signal moment of hegemonic supremacy (as portrayed by Frank). It maintains that the Mongolian explosion registered a sea change in the relational setting between the economic centers of late medieval Eurasia and its hinterlands. The meteoric rise of the empire of the steppes was more emblematic of the remitting transferral of the topographical and ecological center of the Eurasian landscape onto its highlands and the attendant marginalization/peripheralization of its lowlands than of a time honored and recurrent hegemonial shift. Within this context, "the crisis of feudalism" in Europe was an integral aspect of this ecumenical transformation which refashioned the relational setting among the structural constitution within the economic centers of the medieval world.
A new perspective on an historical transformation of the capitalist world-system by examining its relationship with Asia is presented. In the past several years a literature has emerged which claims the existence of Asian regional networks/zones that predated the capitalist world-system and played a significant role in the creation and transformation of the capitalist world-system. The regional dynamics continued to operate after "incorporation" of Asia by the West, according to this literature, and it is crucial to recognize such regional dynamics in order to understand the history not only of each country in this region but also of the capitalist world-system at large. The first objective of this article is to introduce and examine this literature represented here mainly by Takeshi Hamashita's and Heita Kawakatsu's writings, among numerous others. The second is to represent a response to this literature from the perspective of world-system studies.
The article reflects on the present "transitions" to market economy in countries that, in different ways, were trying to develop different economic systems, taking the central planning economy as a model. After a preliminary discussion of the concepts of market economy and transition, the following topics are considered: Key questions of the economic transition, from an international comparison perspective; a reference to the experience of People's Republic of China; the ideology of the transition, taking into consideration the notion of "economic culture."
The article deals with the interrelation between communism and capitalism. Communism as a social and economic system is possible only in a Capitalist age. Due to the sharp contradiction between social function and the social substance of capital itself, social function and its institutional forms (state, relations of production, science, etc.) can exist autonomously from the substance of capital or even be used against it as the means of its negation. Communism is the result and the process of negation of capital as substance by means of capitalist functional forms (state, party). That is why historical Communism is and can be only Anticapitalism. The connection between Communism and Capitalism is not exhausted by this genetic feature. There are some others; for example, a functional one. Being a negation of Capitalism and another world-system, being substantially out of the Capitalist system, Communism is at the same time in it functionally. During the ``short twentieth century'' (1917-91) it fulfilled for the Capitalist system some important functions, providing it with ``double mass.'' Capitalism could neither swallow and integrate into it a good portion of northern Eurasia, nor let it be unorganized. Communism came into being as a solution for this antinomy. The solution was negative, yet related to capitalism and was universalist in its form. Communism is the result and the process of the closest (in history) interaction between the Russian system and the Capitalist system and at the same time is a compromise between them. The end of Communism is the end of this compromise, which is partly shadowed by the fact that the Third Russian revolution of the XXth century (1991-93) was developing under capitalist (capital-substance) slogans. The end of Communism as a historical compromise between the Russian and the Capitalist systems is one of the signs of the systemic crisis of capitalism, the sign (or the sound) of Bells of History tolling both for Communism and Capitalism.
The Latin American old left intelligentsia is nowadays supporting neoliberalism as a strategy of development for the region. Some sociologists who were sympathetic towards global approaches are now vindicating the recasting of development studies either in terms of a ``sociology of national development'' or in terms of a ``state-centered approach.'' Both approaches propose a retreat to the nation-state as the unit of analysis at a moment when world- systemic processes have made obsolete the illusion of state developmentalist policies, not only in the periphery but also at the core of the world-economy. These conceptual shifts are symptomatic of a retreat to old developmentalist themes. Why are well known left intellectuals of the 1960's defending developmentalist liberal ideas? What are the world-historical processes that account for these conceptual shifts? Why are many of the old cepalistas and dependentistas neo-liberals today? Why are old dependentista intellectuals reviving old developmentalist approaches? Despite their differences, what are the common assumptions and presuppositions of these developmentalist theories? In this paper a world-system approach is used to help understand this transformation.< h3.Richard Tardanico, ``From Crisis to Restructuring: The Nexus of Global and National Change in the Costa Rican Labor Market''
The escalation of Central American strife during the 1980's brought substantial attention to Costa Rica, whose consolidated electoral democracy, lack of a standing army, extensive socioeconomic infrastructure, and relatively high living standards set it strikingly apart from the regional norm. What have been the consequences of the country's economic contraction during the early 1980's and its subsequent neoliberal-oriented recovery for Costa Rican exceptionalism? In particular, what have been the consequences for socioeconomic welfare as mediated by inequalities in the national labor market? This article examines these questions from the perspective of hypotheses on labor-market restructuring that emphasize the comparative impact of contemporary global transformations across the periphery of the world economy.
World-systems analysis has given limited attention to mobility within the semiperiphery and to upward movement from the semiperiphery to the core. Moreover, the role of core state wars in creating opportunities for changes of position in the semiperiphery has been ignored. For much of its history Australia has not enjoyed a secure location in the core, nor has it been condemned to fixed position on the periphery. Combining elements of both core and peripheral nation states, Australia evolved into a semiperipheral state before rising into the core. This article argues that the First World War marked a turning point in this process as core state conflicts enhanced the scope for the development of relatively autonomous institutional practices on the semiperiphery. The isolation of the Australian national market from core industries, Australian state intervention, together with the political mobilization of mining companies and manufacturers resulted in the transfer of core production relations as part of accelerated domestic industrialization. Semiperipheral mining cartels were created and became integrated with manufacturing thus preventing the emergence of an exporters' alliance of mining and agrarian capital subordinated to industrial core states.
This article examines ``feudalism'' as both a historiographical problem, and a problem in the circulation of historical ideas in the twentieth century. While the European idea of feudalism was important in the rewriting of Chinese history from the early twentieth century (and especially in Marxist historiography from the 1930's to the present), Chinese historians have also appropriated feudalism for the concept of fengjian that had a long history in Chinese historical and political thought. The interaction of the two concepts, the article argues, offers an instance of cultural hegemony and the struggle against it, that provides insights into problems of Third World historiography in general. Historiographically, closer attention to concepts such as fengjian from other histories would also contribute to a more complex understanding of historical concepts against the reductionist universalization of concepts derived from European history.
This article examines how the geopolitical imperatives of U.S. hegemony conditioned the institutional underpinnings and substantive content of area studies programs. It argues that the creation of area studies programs marked a shift from colonial control to monopoly control over peripheral raw materials and labor which was reflected in a new geopolitical segmentation of the globe, institutionalized in universities as area studies programs. Though these programs were envisaged to provide holistic studies of macroregions, their mode of insertion within universities has meant that scholarship has tended towards microlevel analyses which have not contributed to widening the theoretical categories of the modern social sciences. The inadequacies of these studies are sharply revealed by the unraveling of the geopolitical arrangements of U.S. hegemony. Finally, it is suggested that these limitations can be overcome only if we reconceptualize our analytical categories in world-relational terms.
The world environmental crisis of our time is a by-product of the predatory nature of capitalism and its political alter ego, nationalism. One of the great errors of socialism in the twentieth century has been its accommodation with nationalism, which has led to the virtual abandonment of the founding cosmopolitan vision of Marx and Engels. In the twenty-first century, it will be the task of socialists to create a transnational party capable of leading humankind out of capitalism and nationalism and rescuing the ecosystem from ruin.
The notion that over the last 25 years the world labor movement has been weakened by a massive relocation of industrial activities from high to low and middle income countries is a myth. Had such a massive relocation actually occurred, the chances are that the world labor movement would have already been revitalized. The main reason why it has not is that in the 1980's the primary destination of the flight of capital has not been low and middle income countries but extraterritorial financial markets. It is still too early to tell what kind of labor movement will eventually develop in response to the restructuring and reorganization of the capitalist world-economy of which the ongoing financial expansion is an expression. But if past experience and present trends are any guide to the future, the chances are that the world labor movement in the twenty-first century will differ in three main respects from its predecessor in the past century: it will be centered on East Asia; it will be more thoroughly and explicitly influenced by race and gender issues; and it will be less statist and nationalist in orientation. Whether it will be more ``internationalist'' rather than ``tribalist'' is a question ultimately in the hands of the workers of the world themselves.
The capitalist world-ecosystem is constructed upon the premise that nature can be rationally subjugated until there are no external natural arenas left open for spontaneous noncapitalist development. Mountain regions have historically been overdeveloped to speed the growth of other capitalist zones. This research examines four stages of entropic degradation through which newly-incorporated mountain ecosystems are articulated with the capitalist world-system. Initially, natural and human resources are expropriated and depopulated. In a second stage, settler capitalists reorganize the mountains into an agroecosystem that is oriented toward cash crops for export. Subsequently, capitalism deepends its hold by restructuring the mountain ecosystem into an extractive enclave with investments in auxiliary travel capitalism. As the mountain ecosystem becomes increasingly articulated with and dominated by the capitalist world-ecosystem, entropic degradation escalates, stimulating changes that do not occur in other ecosystems, including irreversible loss of biodiversity, lability, subsidence, and climate disreuptions.
Within the last decade, the process of gloabalization has become a major research focus among a growing number of social scientists and historians. Recent developments in world events have also drawn attention to the role that religion and religious movements play in this complex process. Among the social scientists, world-system analyst Immanuel Wallerstein holds a prominent place as the author of groundbreaking research on the origins and nature of global change. Wallerstein's method of world-system analysis, however, pays very little attention to the religious factor in this process, other than as an epiphenomenon of the far more foundational economic determinant. For this reason it is quite remarkable that in several recent writings Wallerstein points to the work of the renowned Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, as providing important and crucial insights for the discernment of system crises and major transitions in the world-system. In particular, Wallerstein appeals to Tillich's theological notion of kairos, a term derived from the New Testament, which Tillich used to describe epochal moments of divine impact on history, in which human decisions can seriously affect the course of world affairs. This study examines both the significance as well as the legtimacy of Wallerstein's adaptation of Tillich's theological category to the secular goals of social science research.
A broad sweep of nearly two thousand years of South Asian history reveals a correlation between periods of flourshing long distance international trade and large scale state formation activity. The model outlined in this essay situates the description within a geographical setting. Land revenue appropriation by itself could not support a state structure on a subcontinental scale. This required an expanding frontier of cash revenue earned from trade or plunder. The explanatory power of the model is revealed in an analysis of the political vicissitudes of abortive attempts at large scale state formation in the three centuries prior to the advent of the Mughal Empire. The narrative continues through the early modern and colonial eras. Pushing the logic of the model to the contemporary scene, the essay concludes with a comment on the nature of the developmental state.
The World Bank has established Third World urbanization and urban poverty as primary foci for Development studies in the 1990's. Yet little renewed attention has been paid to the theorization of the issue in the context of overall Third World development/underdevelopment. This article uses the case of Accra, Ghana to demonstrate the contribution a synthetic World Systems/Dependency approach can have in understanding the historical genesis of urban poverty and the spatial exclusion of the poor in areas such as Nima. In particular Marx's notion of the processes involved in the creation of a relative surplus population provides some conceptual insight.
Ce texte tente d'argumenter sur
la question suivante : la reconnaissance des déterminations du contexte socio-
historique d'élaboration de la sociologie condamne-t-il à une position
relativiste? Associant analyse épistémologique et sociologie de la science il
met en évidence un processus historique et argumentatif de décantation
des contenus scientifiques, permettant de penser, sous le niveau immédiat et
bouillonnant des affrontements d'écoles et des enjeux de position, la
réalisation et la construction en longue durée de ce qu'il propose
d'appeler des accords en rationalité. Il s'inscrit ainsi dans la
thématique, inaugurée par Durkheim et l'école française de sociologie de la
production historique du rationnel.
Students of the rise of Europe to a position of world dominance in political and economic power have also assigned a special place to Great Britain as the occupant of the hegemonic position during the period 1815-1914. Great Britain may have slipped from global leadership in industry from the 1870 s, but the London money and capital market remained the hub of global finance. The gold standard which Great Britain initiated was then adopted by the leading capitalist powers. The gold standard was a major support base of British financial hegemony. The international spread of the gold standard, however, did not go uncontested. The fate of the silver standard in India became a major subplot in that contestation. The current paper recaptures that drama and the interests of the major players involved.
Recent developments in the policy of the United States toward the Caribbean exemplify the interfacing of migration and geopolitics. The reversal of the Cold War policies toward the Cuban refugees and United States intervention in Haiti are crucially linked to the emergence of post-Cold War security strategies. However, in order to understand these new events it is important to understand the historical relationship between migration and geopolitics in the Caribbean during the Cold War. Geopolitics has fostered Caribbean mass migration to the metropoles. The United States geopolitical strategies were predominantly symbolic/ideological in the case of Cuba/Puerto Rico, military/security in the case of the Dominican Republic/Haiti, and a combination of both during the United States destabilization policies toward Jamaica s Manley regime in the 1970's. This article concentrates on explaining the importance of the interstate system as a crucial determinant of Caribbean migration, illustrating the relationship between migration and geopolitics in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. The first part provides an alternative theoretical framework. The second part is a discussion of migration and geopolitics during the Cold War with particular emphasis on Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Haiti. The last part is a discussion of the effects of the post-Cold War geopolitical strategies on the migration of each of these Caribbean islands.
Studies of the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian Empires as well as of the numerous nation-states that came into existence around the Black Sea have mostly been pursued separately. This article attempts to offer an alternative framework of analysis for the study of the Black Sea world during the nineteenth century. It starts off from Fernand Braudel's approach to the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world in order to discuss whether and to what extent the Black Sea region could also be conceived as a world. Not only structural similarities but also historically-specific circumstances are emphasized for supporting the parallel drawn between the sixteenth-century Mediterranean and the nineteenth-century Black Sea. A number of further intellectual questions are raised in order to demonstrate that a holistic perspective has much to offer for re-directing academic research into more promising problem areas.
Socialism and environmentalism are compared as antisystemic movements using a model of hegemonies and modernities. The three hegemons have created different political economies Dutch mercantilism, British industrialism, American consumerism and thereby formed different modern worlds. These modernities incorporate distinctive contradictions that are the basis of very different modes of resistance. The paper focuses upon socialism as a particular reaction to the contradictions of the modern world of industrialization created by the British, and environmentalism as the particular reaction to the contradictions of the U.S.'s modern world of consumerism. The various socialisms created in the twentieth century, all industrial socialisms, are therefore seen as products of a nineteenth-century modernity that were increasingly unable to compete in the new modern world created by Americans in the twentieth century. The contradictions of the latter are ultimately ecological in nature and this recognition has spawned deeper green politics as resistance to contemporary modernity. The radical credentials of the environmental movement are assessed and an argument for an environmental socialism is provided.
In the course of the nineteenth century novels were read all over Europe from London to Wolverhampton and Penzance, and from France to Denmark and Hungary. But were they the same novels? Yes and no, answers Franco Moretti on the basis of commercial libraries records and national bibliographies. Yes, because European cultural markets were indeed unified by the extraordinary success of the Anglo-French narrative model. But no, because most of Europe was left with a very narrow range of choices, whereas the larger core markets were morphologically richer and more flexible. The article is an unusual attempt to apply quantitative methods to the history of literature, and to assess how the size and international position of each market acts as a constraint on aesthetic form.
The author considers the deep transformations suffered by Latin American social sciences after changes occurred in the world-economy, which in turn gave way to the establishment of neoliberal regimes; and analyses the crisis of alternative projects of development and social change, which favored the growth of defeatist and conformist views in intellectual and academic groups previously engaged in a radical transformation of Latin American societies. She proposes a critique of neoliberal regimes based on their weaknesses, false promises of growth, and in their failure to acquire a more equitable insertion of Latin American economies in the world-system; and argues in favor of the establishment of some principles that can allow the restructuring of the social sciences through options of democratic change and dignification of collective life in Latin America.
After a critique of van Zanden's understanding of Marx's theory of profit formation, Knotter takes issue with his use of the concept of "articulated modes of production" in the context of Holland's labor market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Van Zanden completely overlooks two developments in the labor market, which in Knotter's view are incompatible with the concept of "articulated modes of production," but essential for understanding the formation of Dutch merchant capitalism: proletarianization and the growth of labor productivity.
Neither the Northern nor the Southern Netherlands experienced economic "miracles" during the early modern period. Both parts of the Low Countries followed various trajectories that were deeply entrenched in the past and driven by different social groups. In the long run, the Southern trajectory proved the most conducive to structural economic change by allowing industrial production to develop its own dynamics not controlled by the logic of circulating capital. It is argued that the explanation lies in the social and political strength of the leading master craftsmen. At any rate, a comparative approach reveals the impossibility of shedding light on the emergence of the capitalist mode of production through concentrating on either the labor supply or the accumulation of capital: such an analysis should address social relations of production.
Van Zanden's thesis that, in merchant capitalism, the remuneration of labor power is less than the reproduction costs of labor is correct. It is correct, however, not just for a period called merchant capitalism but for all of historical capitalism. Indeed, to the extent that this statement ceases to be descriptive of the capitalist world-economy, capitalism as a system will no longer be able to survive. The commentary gives a number of examples of how van Zanden's complex and detailed treatment of the historical data concerning Holland (and its colonial appendages) would have been enriched and changed had he taken into account the patterns of the overall capitalist world-economy. A counter theory to his theory of merchant capitalism is presented, as well as a different account of Dutch history.
In this reply it is argued that the period of merchant capitalism (1500-1800) was a very distinctive phase in the development of capitalism, and that we need special theories to understand its dynamics.
This essay reexamines key debates within the German social and human sciences. The Methodenstreit of 1883, the Werturteilsstreit of 1909-12 and the Positivismusstreit of 1961-63 are studied in turn as ongoing attempts at redefining a middle ground within a continuum of epistemological positions stretching from idiographic to nomothetic convictions. The writings of Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, and Theodor W. Adorno are presented as efforts at constructing such epistemologically coherent middle positions. In its concluding section, the essay probes into the more recent Historikerstreit of 1986-88 to demonstrate to what degree even contemporary and explicitly nontheoretical disputes are still haunted by problems left unsolved in the above debates.
In liberal social science the main protagonists of the nomothetic versus idiographic dilemma were social science and history. In Soviet Marxism, the situation was more complicated. For several reasons, mainly political, a third agent, Orientalism, appeared. The attempts to integrate Orientalism into the structure of historical materialism threatened to ruin the entire Marxist scheme of history, with its five stages, and instead counterpose historical materialism with historical Orientalism. This threatened to reverse the relationship between nature and society, base and superstructure, class and state. The debate over the Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) showed clearly to integrate the history of the West and the history of the East (Orientalism) into historical materialism was impossible. Linear and cyclical social times were unbridgeable with one and the same scientific disciplinary space.
The debates between historical materialism and historical Orientalism, and
the nomothetic versus the idiographic dilemma in liberal social science,
reflect two deep and serious problems.
1) Different social systems have different social times. These demand different
disciplines which are difficult to integrate within one discipline.
2) In addition, there is the time of the historical subject. This subject
creates social systems and not the other way around.
To construct a unidisciplinary socio-historical science is only the first step in unthinking social science and the nineteenth century legacy. La Nouvelle Alliance between social science and history demands something more radical the elaboration of a new system of knowledge about the world: one that is subject-centered, and not system-centered.
Social sciences in the United States have undergone a gradual process of nomothetization. These nomothetic sciences have pursued universal concepts and laws applicable to all of time and space. There have been rigid reactions of idiographic disciplines that ignore time and space in their analysis. The dilemmas of this antinomy, represented by sociology and history respectively, are discussed and critically assessed. Considering the movements for the creation of synthetic social science, there is yet to be a way to solve these dilemmas of the nomothetic versus the idiographic, hence seriously to consider the issue of time and space in an analysis.
Although countless important articles and books have been written about Latin American debates on development from 1945 through 1990, none has addressed these debates in terms of the nomothetic-idiographic metatheoretical dilemma. This dilemma discusses how time and space are being conceptualized implicitly or explicitly within theoretical constructions. In this article, the development debates in Latin America are examined according to the time and space presupposed. This will be done by drawing out the TimeSpace framework presupposed in each position and its relation to how the unit of analysis is constructed (individual, regional, nation-state, world-system). Wallerstein puts forward four types of TimeSpace from Braudel's framework of time: 1) episodic-geopolitical TimeSpace; 2) cyclico-ideological TimeSpace; 3) structural TimeSpace; and 4) eternal TimeSpace. These four TimeSpace notions are used as the theoretical framework for this analysis.
The question of whether there has been only one or several world-systems throughout human social history is viewed in this article through the lens of Ilya Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures. The article first addresses this "continuationist/transformationist debate" by summarizing the major arguments of Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills versus Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall, as representative views of the two respective sides. Immanuel Wallerstein's place on the transformationist side of the argument is also reviewed. In each of these discussions, the nature of change which is implied or explicitly posed is emphasized. Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures is then presented, and the nature of change as defined therein given particular attention. Finally, the question regarding the number of world-systems is recast within the language of the theory of dissipative structures.
Various attempts to bridge approaches in social-cultural anthropology with world-systems analysis have been made. This article reviews some of those combined approaches as well as anthropological critiques of world-systems analysis. The major anthropologist whose works are considered as examples of possible paths toward a world-systems anthropology are Sidney Mintz, Jonathan Friedman, Marshall Sahlins, and Ulf Hannerz. On the other hand, critiques of anthropology are also presented especially with regard to the perception that it is only by adopting a culture concept that world-systems analysis can be made amenable to anthropological contributions. Indeed, "culture" may prove to be one of the more problematic means by which anthropology and world-systems analysis can come together in some fashion. This project outlines at least some key elements to what might be called a "world-systems anthropology," and considers the world of Ulf Hannerz as a recent major advance. Also examined are the tenets and propositions of neighboring approaches that collectively might be termed "globalization anthropology," as practiced by Appadurai and Kearney. Lastly, it is argued that world-systems analysis as known to date, especially in the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, already is an "anthropology" and, more importantly, has provided a "template" for a more global-oriented historical anthropology.
World-systems analysis emerged as a critique of existing social science. Its social origins were located in the geopolitical emergence of the Third World, the world revolution of 1968, and the manifest insufficiencies of modernization theory to account for what was going on. There have been four main thrusts to world-systems analysis: globality, historicity, unidisciplinarity, and holism. Each of these thrusts is to be rigorously distinguished from seemingly similar concepts: respectively, globalization, social science history, multidisciplinarity, and general education. World-systems analysis as a knowledge movement has its contradictions, which are leading it to a bifurcation: either reabsorption (cooption) by mainstream social science; or itself moving to the center of social science, if it can offer answers to a series of fundamental questions which are delienated.
The issue of the origins of the world capitalist system, raised some twenty years ago by Wallerstein's most influential critics, remains unsettled. In order to settle it, we must disentangle the issue from that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. From a world-systems perspective, the most important transition in the making of the modern world is not from feudalism to capitalism but from an interstitial capitalist formation embedded in a system of city-states to a world capitalist formation embedded in a system of nation-states. The article concluded by advancing several hypotheses that may help in reconstructing this transition both theoretically and empirically.
Neither a purely geographical nor a purely historical explanation of Russia's role in the world-system is sufficient. The Eurasian zone from Poland to Mongolia played a key role in articulating the relations between China and western Europe between 1250 and 1500, but lost this role after 1500. The opening of a maritime route remarginalized Eurasia which reacted by assuming a messianic role from the "Third Rome" to the former U.S.S.R. The Russian Revolution was simultaneously a challenge to capitalism and a reassertion of Russia's role. Those were failures but the issue today is the construction of a pluripolar world going beyond capitalism.
Foursov seems to imply that the creation of the Soviet system was almost a deliberate political creation of the capitalist system. This is unreal. Rather I believe that Russian Communism was not Communism but the antisystemic reaction of a peasant nation, the attempt to catch up to the West by a backward great power. Capitalism was the real thing, but Communism was not. Today's capitalists are "state capitalists" because of the absence of a true middle class, unlike in Central Europe. Hence the state is here to stay.
This article differentiates between the concern of scientific theories with the real world and the concern of mathematics with mathematics. Scientific theories may be true or false but mathematical statements must simply be consistent with the rest of mathematics and chaos theory, as a set of mathematical statements, falls into this latter domain. Modelling, the parallel between the evolution of physical systems and the movement of abstract points in abstract space determined by mathematical equations, is at the base of modern science. Chaos theory enlarges the palette of models for representing irregular or random phenomena; however, more profoundly, chaos theory has led to the recognition of the importance of calculation which occupies an intermediate space between mathematical models and physical reality. Now, thanks to numerical simulations made possible by high speed computers, nonlinear models may be used. Thus, chaos theory is a beginning, not an end.
Foursov's Hegelian-Marxist language involves a tendency to reification which beclouds the issue. The Russian command economy collapsed because of its wasteful use of manpower and materials. Marxism as an official faith in Russia is one instance of the espousal by marginal polities of heresies in the hope of catching up. Foursov's emphasis on Russian distinctiveness reflects a Russian intellectual tradition of persistent ambivalence to western Europe since the sixteenth century. It suffers from Eurocentrism, at a time when the world role of western Europe and Russia are receding.
Foursov's and Pivovarov's concepts are shown in a systematic overview. Their intellectual origins are traced back to the Russian Africanist Vladimir Krylov's analysis of precapitalist modes of production centering on different correlations of individual and collective forms of labor. The latter was characterized as the Asiatic mode of production, which did not develop much dynamism. The Christian historical subjects, centered on individualism, were more expansive, but the Russian-Orthodox differed from the Latin-Christian by expanding in space, not time. Following the revolutions of the sixteenth century the historical subject of Russia came to be power, that of the Latin-Christian world capital. The main components of the modern Russian system are power and population a third component "intelligentsia" being the weakest part. This concept is criticized from the point of view that the specific traits of Russian history may better be explained by Russia's place in the semiperiphery of the "European world-system" than by defining it as an own "Russian system."
The concept of "peasant economy" has been used extensively in the post-1945 period, notably by Daniel Thorner inspired by A. V. Chayanov (who wrote in the beginning of the twentieth century about Russia). The article places Chayanov's writings in the historical context of his period. It reviews the distinction between property, unit of production, and labor as well as the relationship of the "peasant economy" to foreign trade. It insists on the differential social analysis of the peasantry. It rejects what are called "Chayanovian temptations" the preference given to peasant realities in the analysis of past societies and the excessive isolation of the peasant reality. It applies the critique of Thorner and Chayanov to the historical cases of France and Mexico.
Emergence of the three disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science, as distinct and unique took place in a number of countries simultaneous to the emergence of a separation between the spheres of economics, society, and politics. In India too modern institutions of learning such as the university and the separated disciplines were brought forth simultaneous to the introduction of the institutions of contemporary politics by an alien ruler. However, it was argued by the contemporary participants that the distinct disciplines and hence the university were not founded on considerations of epistemics and of good of life. Moreover, it was also pointed out that the Indian schema of knowledge division was founded on epistemic departures and on the distinct good of life. Indian participants during this period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries felt that the modern institution did not have the media of discourse and an element of attitude, which therefore they had to pursue in their attempts at translating the modern institutions of learning. The resulting institutions in India could not therefore retain the intent of distinct disciplines. Indian university-media and trans-disciplines in India thus could add a new feature to the contemporary institutions.
Through a retrospection of the historical development of social sciences in China from the 1840's to the 1990's, the following three issues are addressed in this article: 1) why and how "social science" in the modern Western sense came into China; 2) the way and extent Chinese intellectuals accepted and resisted the social sciences; and 3) how to evaluate the development of "social sciences" in China and what conclusions we can draw from this development in world-system perspective.
The author contends it is possible and desirable to construct a theory of history based on the historical materialism of Karl Marx as developed in Capital. This Marxian paradigm has remained relatively unnoticed although not totally forgotten in the 120 years of the development of Marxism. It has been present as a set of hidden assumptions that need to be uncovered so that some old ideas may be reformulated in ways more congruent with the paradigm and that some alternative theoretical solutions may be invented. The author itemizes the ideas of the Marxian paradigm, compares the paradigm with others, discusses why this paradigm has remained hidden, and presents the morals that the history of Marxism offers.
This paper surveys the century-long challenge which various discontented economists of an institutionalist bent have posed against mainstream economics. It starts with the turn-of-the-century American institutionalists who served to institutionalize their approach within the legitimate boundaries of academic economics. To do this, they had insisted that the scope of economic inquiry should be somewhat broader than what the neoclassics preferred yet conceded that economic analysis should subscribe to a "scientific" positivism that did away with value preferences. The paper then surveys post-War institutionalists who had ritualized the academic difference of institutionalism to a sectarian "loyal opposition" within the existing structures of knowledge. In this context I counterpose the achievements of American neo-institutionalists with that of Gunnar Myrdal, who deserves attention as the institutionalist who brought back in the issue of values. Finally the article concludes by noting the post-1968 environment within which various forms of institutionalism gained ground at the expense of a retreating orthodoxy. It remains to be seen if institutionalism could further improve its fortunes. If existing structures of knowledge undergo profound changes in terms of their commitments such as the conception and vocation of science this may well imply an earthquake that could shake the very ground called economics on which the institutional approach has been erected.
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