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The political economy of world capitalism: theory and practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Bruce Andrews
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Type
Review Essays
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International Organization , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Winter 1982 , pp. 135 - 163
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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1982

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References

1 Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974)Google Scholar, is the major historical statement. Beyond the three works noted at the head of this essay, recent anthologies include the first three volumes of the Political Economy of the World-System annuals (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978, 1979, 1980): Kaplan, Barbara Hockey, ed., Social Change in the Capitalist World EconomyGoogle Scholar; Goldfrank, Walter, ed., The World-System of Capitalism: Past and PresentGoogle Scholar; and Hopkins, Terence K. and Wailerstein, Immanuel, eds., Processes of the World SystemGoogle Scholar. Also, see Hollist, W. Ladd and Rosenau, James N., eds., World Systems Debates, a special issue of International Studies Quarterly 25 (March 1981).Google Scholar

2 For very helpful summary statements, see Chase-Dunn, Christopher and Rubinson, Richard, “Toward a Structural Perspective on the World System,” Politics and Society 7 (1977): 453–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hopkins, Terence K. and Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. , “Patterns of World-System Development: A Research Proposal,” Review 1 (1977): 111–45.Google Scholar

3 The term is Peter Worsley's. See his excellent recent essay, “One World or Three? A Critique of the World-System Theory of Immanuel Wallerstein,” Socialist Register 1980, ed. by Miliband, Ralph and Saville, John (London: Merlin Press, 1980).Google Scholar

4 Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , “Patterns of World-System Development,” p. 113.Google Scholar

5 Wallerstein, , The Capitalist World-Economy, p. 129.Google Scholar

6 See, especially, studies collected in Kaplan, , Social ChangeGoogle Scholar; Goldfrank, , World-System of CapitalismGoogle Scholar; Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , “Patterns of World-System Development”Google Scholar; and those appearing since 1977 in the journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, Review.

7 ”Preface,” Meyer, and Hannan, , National Development, p. viii.Google Scholar

8 Is a 20-year period, for example, enough to make panel analysis and structural equation methods significantly more explanatory and less descriptive than the misleading cross-sectional correlations?

9 Christopher, Chase-Dunn, “The Effects of International Economic Dependence on Development and Inequality,”Google Scholar and Delacroix, Jacques, “The Permeability of Information Boundaries and Economic Growth,”Google Scholar both in Meyer, and Hannan, , National Development.Google Scholar

10 Jacques Delacroix, “The Export of Raw Material's and Economic Growth,” in ibid. As we see a different international division constructed in the current period—based on productive processes rather than differentiated by product—this will become more obvious. The categories used, grounded in international exchange relationships, may be diverting our attention from the (significantly internationalized) relations of production that underlie the international division of labor. Here, in accounting for underdevelopment, a Marxist stress on modes of production and national social formations may have a greater explanatory yield. See, for example, Jonas, Susanne and Dixon, Marlene, “Proletarianization and Class Alliances in the Americas,”Google Scholar in Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , Processes of the World-SystemGoogle Scholar; Taylor, John G., From Modernization to Modes of Production (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Roxborough, Ian, Theories of Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Meyer, John W. et al. , “National Economic Development, 1950–70: Social and Political Factors,”Google Scholar in Meyer, and Hannan, , National Development.Google Scholar

12 John W. Meyer et al., “The World Educational Revolution, 1950–70,” in ibid.

13 Wuthnow, Robert, “World Order and Religious Movements,”Google Scholar in Bergesen, , Studies.Google Scholar

14 Robert Wuthnow, “The World-Economy and the Institutionalization of Science in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in ibid.

15 Albert Bergesen and Ronald Schoenberg, “Long Waves of Colonial Expansion and Contraction,” in ibid., p. 239.

16 George M. Thomas and John W. Meyer, “Regime Changes and States Power in an Intensifying World-State-System,” in ibid.

17 See the discussion of semiotics and structuralism in Andrews, Bruce, “The Language of State Action,” International Interactions 6 (1979): 267–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On this broad topic, several days could well be spent in the company of the brilliant dialogue between Thompson's, E. P.The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 1978)Google Scholar and Anderson's, PerryArguments within English Marxism (London: NLB, 1980).Google Scholar

18 Bergesen, Albert, “From Utilitarianism to Globology: The Shift from the Individual to the World as a Whole as the Primordial Unit of Analysis,”Google Scholar in Bergesen, , Studies.Google Scholar

19 ”The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review no. 104 (1977): 25–92Google Scholar. This remains an indispensable discussion.

20 McGowan, Patrick, for one instance, homogenizes the definition of exploitation as “the process of creating surplus value from unequal exchange”Google Scholar (“Imperialism in World-System Perspective,” in Hollist, and Rosenau, , World System Debates, p. 46, fn. 2)Google Scholar. Taylor, , From Modernization to Modes of Production, chap. 3Google Scholar, attributes this conceptual slippage on the part of dependency theory to the use of an imprecise notion of “surplus” (derived from Baran and Sweezy) that precludes any adequate theorizing of the specificity of capitalist production based on wage-labor. This makes it difficult to grasp the uneven, contested history of world capitalism.

21 On the conceptual status of the interstate system in these conceptualizations, see Christopher, Chase-Dunn's excellent recent piece, “Interstate System and Capitalist World-Economy: One Logic or Two,”Google Scholar in Hoilist, and Rosenau, , World System Debates, pp. 19–42Google Scholar. There he answers the criticism of Zolberg, Aristide R., “Origins of the Modern World System: A Missing Link,” World Politics 33 (01 1981): 253–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A comprehensive treatment of the perspective will have to come to terms with this issue; for now, this interchange between Chase-Dunn and Zolbert will have to suffice.

22 Meyer, John W., “The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State,”Google Scholar in Bergesen, , Studies, p. 135Google Scholar. Or compare Wallerstein, (Modern World System. p. 157)Google Scholar: “The different roles in the world division of labor led to different class structures which led to different politics.”

23 Gordon, David, “Stages of Accumulation and Long Economic Cycles,”Google Scholar in Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , Processes of the World-System, p. 17Google Scholar. Compare Weisskopf, Thomas, “The Current Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective,” Socialist Review no. 57 (05–06 1981), p. 13.Google Scholar

24 We also need to stress that this approach is sustained by certain domestic political and class configurations, which cannot be deductively derived from the global structure.

25 Meyer, et al., “National Economic Development,” and Rubinson, Richard, “Dependence, Government Revenue, and Economic Growth, 1955–1970,” in Meyer, and Hannan, , National Development.Google Scholar

26 Meyer, et al., “National Economic Development,” p. 90.Google Scholar

27 This has made the world-system perspective vulnerable to exponents of a more conventional emphasis on the determinative pressures of the interstate political system. See Zolberg's interchange with Chase-Dunn, mentioned earlier. One alternative possibility for social-theory formation, as a way to get beyond the idiographic emphasis of the world-system perspective, is to take a comparative look at social class and state formation in the Third World. For two recent British attempts, see Taylor, , From Modernization to Modes of ProductionGoogle Scholar, and Roxborough, , Theories of Underdevelopment.Google Scholar

28 See Meyer, , “World Polity”Google Scholar; Thomas, and Meyer, , “Regime Changes”Google Scholar; and John, Boll-Bennett, “The Ideology of Expanding State Authority in National Constitutions, 1870–1970,”Google Scholar in Meyer, and Hannan, , National DevelopmentGoogle Scholar, for this line of argument.

29 Meyer, , “World Polity,” p. 113.Google Scholar

30 Compare Chase-Dunn, “Interstate System.”

31 The term is Michel Foucault's, from a lecture given in November 1980, where he adds this set of techniques to his former emphasis on social control and the domination of the self by an external apparatus.

32 Chase-Dunn, , “Interstate System,” p. 38.Google Scholar

33 Worsley, , “One World or Three?” pp. 312 and 302–3.Google Scholar

34 Bergesen, and Schoenberg, , “Long Waves,” pp. 268–69Google Scholar, and Bergesen, Albert, “Cycles of Formal Colonial Rule,”Google Scholar in Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , Processes of the World-System, p. 123Google Scholar, comprise the quotation.

35 Worsley, , “One World or Three?” p. 303Google Scholar. Worsley continues: “Yet political force is still needed because the dichotomy between the capitalism of the centre and the capitalism of the periphery creates new contradictions. The first of these is that the world was not simply integrated by imperialism. It was divided at the same time, between several major imperialist powers. The second was the resistance and counterattack provoked in the colonised countries. And the third was the decisive breach in a capitalist world-system that had only very recently become established: the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.”

36 Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings (New York: Pantheon, 1980)Google Scholar, is now the best introduction to Foucault's important work of the 1970s.

37 ibid., pp. 73–74, 97, 98.

38 Realist or statist theorizing about state policies has a similarly difficult time accounting for the specificity of domestic motivation. For a discussion, see Andrews, , “Language of State Action.”Google Scholar

39 Rubinson, Richard, “Political Transformation in Germany and the United States,”Google Scholar in Kaplan, , Social ChangeGoogle Scholar; and Christopher, Chase-Dunn, “The Development of Core Capitalism in the Antebellum United States: Tariff Policies and Class Struggle in an Upwardly Mobile Semiperiphery,”Google Scholar in Bergesen, , Studies.Google Scholar

40 Delacroix, , “Permeability of Information Boundaries,” p. 183.Google Scholar

41 As one reviewer of the first draft of this review essay noted: “This lapse into someone else's utopianism may suggest another flaw in the world systems approach, namely its attachment to the ‘system’ concept. ‘System’ has teleological connotations which tend to undermine a sense of historical dialectic. I prefer ‘structure,’ which can be used to refer to the conditions shaping actions which persist over a certain period of time. These conditions are subject to transformation as components of a structure are challenged. Every structure generates its own contradictions, which lead to change, whereas ‘systems’ are thought of as restoring their own equilibrium, or else as ending (with a ‘big bang’).”

42 See Kraus, Richard Curt, “Withdrawing from the World-System: Self-Reliance and Class Structure in China,”Google Scholar in Goldfrank, , World-System of CapitalismGoogle Scholar; and Friedman, Edward, “Maoist Conceptualizations of the Capitalist World-System,”Google Scholar in Hopkins, and Wallerstein, , Process of the World-SystemGoogle Scholar. Wallerstein's general neglect of the split between the First and Second Worlds often creates problems for inferences about appropriate praxis. On this point, see Worsley, , “One World or Three?”Google Scholar

43 Meyer, , “World Polity,” p. 128.Google Scholar

44 Wallerstein, , The Capitalist World-Economy, chap. 5.Google Scholar

45 Christopher, Chase-Dunn, “Core-Periphery Relations: The Effects of Core Competition,”Google Scholar in Kaplan, , Social ChangeGoogle Scholar; Bergesen, , “Cycles of Formal Colonial Rule”Google Scholar; Bergesen, and Schoenberg, , “Long Waves.”Google Scholar

46 John, Boli-Bennett, “Global Integration and the Universal Increase of State Dominance, 1910–1970,”Google Scholar in Bergesen, , Studies, p. 104.Google Scholar

47 Christopher, Chase-Dunn and Rubinson, Richard, “Cycles, Trends, and New Departures in World-System Development,”Google Scholar in Meyer, and Hannan, , National Development, p. 294.Google Scholar

48 There is, finally, a danger in the prescription itself (not to mention the dangers that will arise as the core caretakers of the patient attempt to forestall the prescription by military means). A world state apparatus, even if attainable, could be an Orwellian nightmare, centralizing the operation of a vast capillary network of power into an administrative apparatus, distancing itself from the possibility of popular control and accountability, reducing the incentives toward modernization, and finally coming to represent the dominance of a technocratic rationality at the expense of the various ways in which social reality is constructed through discourse and resistance at all levels. The last sentence in the Meyer and Hannan volume gives one pause: “A more highly organized world political system may do less to accomplish the ends that justify it than to weaken the legitimacy of demands for these ends.”

49 Aronowitz, Stanley, “The End of Political Economy,” Social Text no. 2 (Summer 1979), p. 51.Google Scholar

50 See Foucault, , Power/KnowledgeGoogle Scholar, and Andrews, Bruce, “Constitution/Writing, Poetry, Language, The Body,” Open Letter (Toronto, 1981)Google Scholar, special joint issue with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (New York).