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Exerpt from the Fernand Braudel Centre. by Adam Starr 13 March 2002 22:30 UTC |
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Hello WSN World, I found the following from the Fernand Braudel Centre. It is one of ten points that the centre (headed by Wallerstein) has chosen to research with regards to World-System analysis. I found it interesting and feel it is relevant to my position. For those of you that are curious to see more, check out: www.fbc.binghampton.edu/index.htm . Adam 6) Antisystemic movements. We mean by antisystemic movements all those movements organized by persons who seek to transform the world-system in a more democratic, more egalitarian direction. This has included movements of the working classes, nationalist and/or ethnic movements, womens' movements, and a variety of other kinds of movements. The concept is an inclusive one in terms of the social composition of the movements and their primary locus of concern, but it is an exclusive one as well, seeking to omit movements narrowly focussed on the ascending of the stratification ladder by some particular group. For a number of years, the Center has been producing papers, written jointly by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, which aim at a theoretical rethinking of this field. Most of these papers have been presented at various meetings of the ICWE, and then published in Review. These papers have been collected and were published in 1989 by Verso Press under the title Antisystemic Movements. Translations of the book are in progress into Italian, Japanese, and Turkish. The principal research focus has been to explain the variation of intensity of labor unrest in different regions of the world-system and at different moments of its cyclical rhythms. The initial problem of the World Labor group, which is working on this question, was how to obtain reliable and comparable measures of labor unrest on a worldwide basis and over a 100-year period. An initial survey of the existing quantitative data (principally strike data) indicated that they were not very useful for this purpose since they were inevitably incomplete (and in a biased way), both geographically and temporally. Furthermore, strikes were in fact only one manifestation of labor unrest, and quite often not even the most significant one. The group invented an alternative data source based on a content analysis of newspaper reports of labor unrest anywhere in the world that were published in The New York Times and The Times (London) from 1870 on. The two newspapers were chosen on the grounds that they were the principal organs of the successive hegemonic powers and were likely to be reasonably comprehensive in coverage. A data base of over 75,000 entries has been compiled. The reliability (and degree of bias) of these data have been tested by comparisons with strike statistics for countries that have official statistics, and by comparisons with secondary literature concerning various other countries and regions of the world. We are concerned to relate the incidence of labor unrest to cyclical rhythms of the world-economy, particularly to cycles of hegemony and rivalry. We believe the pattern is that upswings of labor unrest in core regions have led, over time, to similar up swings in peripheral regions (even when those in the core regions have died down). We further argue that the extent and effective ness of labor unrest have been determined primarily by structural/positional conditions more than by organizational capacities or ideologies. The role of labor unions and working-class parties in initiating and organizing acts of protest is postulated in most cases either to have reflected structural/positional circumstances or to have served as an "intervening mechanism" connecting such circumstances to demonstrations of labor unrest. This research has been presented over the years at many conferences, including a series of bilateral conferences between 1980 and 1987 with the Institute of International Labour Studies of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, as well as at the successive International Forums on the History of the Labor Movement and the Working Class (1985, 1991). Two volumes of papers have been produced: Immanuel Wallerstein, ed., Labor in the World Social Structure (Sage, 1983), and Melvyn Dubofsky, ed., Technological Change and Workers' Movements (Sage, 1985). The preliminary findings of the labor unrest project will be presented in a forthcoming special issue of Review. ===== Adam T. Starr Undergraduate of Political Science, UVic 3009 Quadra Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8T 4G2 Canada (011) (250) 472-1223 adam@hornbyisland.com or reunitedhornby@yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/
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