Immanuel Wallerstein's "The Capitalist World-Economy" (Book Note)

 

The contemporary American academic landscape often celebrates Immanuel Wallerstein as a prominent radical or Marxist figure, particularly in the realm of 'world-system analysis.' However, upon examining the collection of essays and articles in this book, Wallerstein seems more like an enthusiastic yet perplexed observer in a timeless, otherworldly cocktail party where influential figures engage in diverse conversations.

 

In the academic discussions, there's an underlying assumption that intellectuals play a central role in shaping history, which can be seen as a somewhat tiresome and conservative perspective on understanding society. In his address to the American Sociological Association titled "Modernisation: requiescat in pace," Wallerstein dismisses the history of American sociologists' views on the Third World as an internal process, detached from concrete historical forces or their relationship to these forces.

 

Wallerstein positions himself as a paternalistic and self-satisfied observer, framing the ethical question of how intellectuals should view their role in the world-system. He uses an analogy of a strong swimmer at a beach witnessing a drowning person and contemplates different approaches to address the situation, drawing parallels to how societies respond to crises like food shortages.

 

He presents a dilemma involving various courses of action, from immediate rescue efforts to addressing root causes through social and political change. Wallerstein's preference is to initially focus on immediate interventions, such as stopping specific problematic activities, before moving on to more long-term efforts aimed at changing laws and attitudes within the community.

Wallerstein is often considered a writer who combines a radical façade with an idealist perspective, along with a heavily abstracted and dehumanized structuralism. While he claims to present a dialectical understanding of capitalist development in contrast to bourgeois social scientists, his use of Hegelian terms and his mechanical description raise questions about the depth of his dialectical analysis.

 

Drawing on Marxist ideas, Wallerstein's world-system perspective omits the labor theory of value and the central role of human production and reproduction in social relationships, focusing instead on relations of exchange. In his view, the world-system is determined primarily by economic exchange, resembling pre-Ricardian political economy with historical insights added.

 

Wallerstein posits two basic contradictions within the capitalist world system: class conflict and periphery-core state relations. Regarding class conflict, he attributes the development of classes mainly to market relationships, depicting conflicts within core countries as struggles among groups vying for control of the state.

 

The innovative aspect Wallerstein claims lies in his international division of labor, incorporating ideas from dependency theorists like Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin. However, he strips their analyses of revolutionary content, emphasizing the weaknesses in radical development theory, particularly its overemphasis on exchange relations and unequal exchange.

 

Wallerstein's distinction from political theorists like Amin, Frank, and Furtado becomes apparent, especially in his view that struggles in Third World countries aim at turning them into semi-peripheries. He questions the impact of wars of national liberation, suggesting that despite weakening the internal supports of dominant regimes, they may inadvertently integrate these countries further into the capitalist world-economy.

 

While Wallerstein criticizes liberal mainstream thought for lacking historical depth in understanding economic development, his own notions of historical development are criticized for being overly simplistic. He categorizes human history into only three stages - mini-systems, world empires, and world economies - a narrower framework than even Joe Stalin's. His classification places capitalism as a sub-variant of the sub-category world economy, leaving the definition of other 'world-economies' unclear.

 

Wallerstein's approach to understanding capitalism in the fifteenth century onwards is critiqued for oversimplification. He categorizes countries into cores, peripheries, and semi-peripheries, with the latter being those in the middle in terms of world surplus. This grouping includes diverse countries like Canada, South Africa, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Chile, Cuba, and China, raising questions about the meaningfulness of such comparisons.

 

Through a limited framework of three types of entities and a few moves, Wallerstein attempts to explain major historical events like the American Civil War or the Russian Revolution. He reduces these complex events to simplistic notions, characterizing the Russian Revolution as a mercantilist semiwithdrawal and Fascism as Germany's effort to regain lost ground.

 

Wallerstein engages in reductionism, asserting that social democrats in core countries and populist-nationalists in peripheral countries essentially represent the same interests and worldview. He also indulges in speculative futurology, suggesting scenarios like an anti-American alliance or using Central Asians as a Soviet Union workforce.

 

Despite advocating for discarding traditional notions of the nation-state, Wallerstein relies heavily on the state as the fundamental unit in his world-system approach. His analysis lacks depth in class analysis, reducing class struggle to local politics, and complicates matters by transforming race into an "international status group category."

 

Wallerstein's language and categorizations are criticized as bewildering and occasionally unintentionally amusing. His work is seen as a package of assertions rather than real analysis, with arbitrary definitions and a lack of conceptual clarity. While acknowledging Wallerstein's impressive learning, the review suggests that his attempt to understand capitalism globally, without sufficient political and historical context, may frustrate and anger readers rather than stimulate them.