It is a long way from Santa Cruz to Novosibirsk, but we seem
to be part of the same world-economy. Our views however differ
considerably:
Prof. Rozov's post on the collapse of Communism raises questions
that would take untold gigabytes to respond to in
full. I see three main issues in his challenge to
what he calls "dogma."
(1) Was Russian communism's collapse
caused "endogenously" or by world-systemic
forces? He implies the former, since most of the
posts on this issue have cited ideology, geopolitics,
economics. He mentions A G Frank's post as an
exception.
At the least, it is necessary to get beyond a
simple-minded endogenous/exogenous view of change in
any particular locale. If, as many of us believe,
the USSR was a part of the whole capitalist world-economy,
it was at once subject to the cyclical dynamics of
that whole and (especially as a major military power
and guardian of a great reserve of natural resources)
an important piece of that whole. It was a
semi-peripheral state controlling both
semi-peripheral and peripheral zones. One might
want to separate its devolution into separate
sovereign states (loss of some of its historically
continuous "empire" aspects) from the partial
undoing of its "communist" aspects, but both
of those processes are at the least contemporaneous
with and congruent with the waves (1) of regional
reorganization (supra and subnational) in many parts
of the world, (2) of democratization in most of the
semiperiphery (E Europe, S Korea, Taiwan, Southern
Cone, S Africa--see here among others the work of A
Bergesen and R P Korzeniewicz), and (3) of
denationalization of state enterprises and
the embrace of "neo-liberalism" in many of these
same places. Explaining all this by "contagion"
or imitation or miraculous simultaneity seems foolish
to me; the B-phase invoked by Frank and others,
the decline of US hegemony, and the new time/space-
compressing technologies seem like much better
places to start. In treating the Soviet case
specifically, the consequences of cold war
militarization loom particularly large, but this can
hardly be counted as an "endogenous" matter.
(2) Does the Soviet experience of agonized
and costly industrialization during the
1930s and after the victory over Nazi Germany cast
doubt on world-system interpretations
of its trajectory, since during B-phases the core
supposedly "pressures" the semiperiphery and
presumably all semiperipheries suffer?
Not in my view. As Wallerstein has pointed out on
many occasions, B-phases bring opportunities for a
few semiperipheral states to advance through
"mercantilist" partial withdrawal from
world-economic involvement (largely forced on the
USSR by the collapse of international trade),
the use of borrowed technology (soviets plus
electrification, let a hundred Pittsburghs bloom),
and military aggrandizement (often in alliance with
one or more core powers--here the WW2 coalition).
[B-phases also bring opportunities for some to advance
in the "development by invitation" mode, viz the
70s/80s boom in E Asia, as analyzed by Arrighi
and his collaborators among many others.]
(3) Did the world-economy become fully global
around the end of the 19th century or is it only just
now (or very soon) becoming global with the
integration of the laggard world-empires of
Russia/USSR and China/PRC? As implied in (2), my short response to
this question is to emphasize the former. The story
of Russia's initial incorporation (mostly 18th c.) into the capitalist
world-economy is told in Vol. 3 of MODERN
WORLD-SYSTEM, that of China (19th c.) in works by F Moulder,
A So, and many others. Throughout modern history,
especially during B-phases, commodifying activities
tend to intensify in many locations where previous
incorporation had resulted in claims to sovereignty,
or superficial resource extraction, or "mere"
peasantization, in the "hybrid" societal types
emphasized by the "articulation of modes of
production" school, or in the "hybrid" political
type of mobilized "catch-up" absolutism self-styled
as "communism." These waves of intense
commodifying are indeed experienced by many as a "shock,"
as it is their land that is expropriated, and their labor that
is proletarianized, their "roots" that are torn up,
their landscapes altered, their communities
transformed, their livelihoods jeopardized--Chiapas
might serve as the best but by no means the only
example today. But should social scientists be
"shocked" by this current wave of capitalist
intensification and mistake it for (finally)
globalization? Not if we've been paying close
attention to twenty years of theoretical and
empirical work.
An electronic bear hug to Prof Rozov and other participants in
this discussion!