I am forwarding a feedback of Dr.Georgi Derluguian who has been working for
more than 5 years with I.Wallerstein and is an expert in rather wide range
of ws-theory and history issues.
Mostly I agree with Georgi, just one note on misunderstanding my position
(see below).
Nobody more (besides Gunder Frank and Georgi) wishes to discuss the current
and expected trajectory of the Modern Capitalist World System?
Nikolai Rozov
rozov@cnit.nsu.ru
From: Georgi Derluguian <gmderl@umich.edu>:
1. So, everything is clear with Mr. Fukuyama-sensei, eh? I recall vividly
Larry Diamond from the Hoover Inst., and a crowd at Berkeley (sic!)
seriously nodding to his words: "The ideas of Wallerstein and Gunder
Frank were irrelevant back in the 1970s, but today it is actually
incredible to find someone talking in that lefty jargon. Tell me, if you
know, what is a better program for any people in the world than
democracy, what is better for any government than free market economy?"
Last May I heard the same pronounced very strongly by the top folks from
the SSRC and the MacArthur Foundation. Will you, please, supply some
arguments aside from anti-imperialist rethoric?
2. As to Nikolai Rozov's words -- I suggest to read Wallerstein's essays from
the latest collection, After Liberalism. The problem with IW style is that he
increasingly disregards detailed argumentation and makes almost prophetic
statements. He also, as usual, disregards his critics (don't tell me he
once scoulded Chase Dunn, that's an exception that proves the rule -- IW
never attacked Fukuyama, who incidentally did a good job of summarizing
After Liberalism in several reviews, then dismissing the whole argument
instead of attacking it, just like we often do with the liberal mainstream)
Yet, this doesn't mean IW's recent writing has no value. Personally, I
have near mystic experiences with IW predictive powers. I know him long
enough to recall some of the predictions. Of course, he is no
crystall-ball gazer. he is a scholar with superb intuition which means
his mind captures connections and makes generalizations at some deeper level
that is difficult to substantiate in a normal scientific morose way. This
is what in the history of science is called almost religiously
"revelations" (light bulbs suddenly going ablaze in someone's head) that
remains a marginal and suspicious territory.
It is certainly worth trying to see what kind of arguments and prediction
IW makes, bearing in mind that IW himself is a deeply historical
personality with his personal and his circle of old friends' whims
playing an interfering role (that's where we often get some of his most
embarrassing political recepies -- to a large extent IW still lives in the
New York left-liberal intelligentsia of Central European origins of the
1930-1940s, and in the African and Tiers Mondiste liberation euphoria of
the late 1950s-1960s. To IW Polanyi and Marcuse, Myrdal and Margaret
Mead, Schumpeter and Arendt,Castro and Che Guevara, Nyerere and Cabral are
contemporaries and most important voices, an internal filter of ideas.
Please, treat this with respect -- IW was formed in a far more
fascinating intellectual world that ours, he saw truly great
transformations, he apparently had great hopes and moments of triumph as
well as experienced greatest disullisionments and political failures. he
squarely belongs to the last great generation of the "sixtiers", after
that -- only postmodernist pygmiization in arts, sciences, and the politics)
This diatribe goes primarily to Nikolai Rozov, the militant Siberianist who
lives in the underground with retro-Stalinists reigning over Akademgorodok,
as the last week's New York Times beautifully described, citing the very
philosophy dean and his iron hand.
Now, back to IW vision. Lately he was giving basically the following picture:
The modern world-system is still in its normal mode and will remain
within its historical asymptotes for another decade or so. We shall
expect a kondratieff A-phase with further expansion of production based
on new technologies and further wealth generated. The question of another
hegemony is unclear -- Japan is evidently short of making it, and IW
recognizes the problem when he says "Japan is really the old American Dream
recycled". Bruce Cumings has intriguing argument for another cycle of the
US hegemony, this time truly uni-polar, Wilsonian-Rooseveltian. Arrighi
tends to agree saying that institutional "fat" was growing with every new
hegemony, making it difficult for an ascending hegemon to break through
(see Japan imitating America, not creating a separate
cultural-ideological appeal). The latter actually means trouble -- the
Schumpeterian mechanism of cleansing the system through periodical
destruction seems to have stopped working at the level of interstate
competition (but not the inter-firm level).
Liberal ideology scored total political victory. Indeed, there is no
other hope left. At some point everyone would like to live under
capitalism, but core capitalism, bien sur! Either the educated masses
from the peripheries will move to the core (recall the tremendous expansion of
higher education after 1945) or they will try to imitate the core
conditions in their states. We now observe both tendencies -- I am
enjoying the tenure-track privileges in a highly-paid US university and
watch with awe my children growing American, while my classmates in the
Russian parliament and the yuppie-to-be newspapers Segodnia and
Kommersant-Daily promote Gen. Lebed and fight against "economic idiotism"
of the "lumpenized loosers" who don't share the neo-liberal vision of the
Heritage Foundations. They are winning so far over the "econoidiots".
This is when the trouble really begins. Russia (not to mention China)
will emerge in ten years as major locus of production withing the
world-economy. No more isolationism and delinking (but, surely, very
strong protectionism of Russia's internal market -- it's too big and
vital an inherited asset to be shared with TNCs thoughtlessly -- and
Lebed knows that well, or was told by the supply-side whiz-kid Naishul from
the heritage found. and the commentators of segodnia). Once the new
Kondratieff-A arrives at earnest, we shall competition increased, not
decreased. because now we have many more producers and a really more
integrated world market. The liberal promise is that everyone will have
enough investment and share for their products, if their governments and
societies attract enough capital by being capital-friendly. IW has
doubts. Vast territories of the world will be unemployed, kept on some UN
or other form of aid-dole. They will try to be nasty then, and there is
no more orderly communism to channel this anger. Their protests will be
truly appalling, Khomeini or Saddam like, unless new humanistic
antisystemic movements arise -- but this remains IW's distant hope. What
Nikolai Rozov suggests is a world-scale welfare state and liberal reform.
Nikolai Rozov:
Sic! I suggested a radically different things. I think WSN
members remember my postings on: World Law versus World State
Georgi continues:
IW thinks that this is way too much for the capitalist world-economy to
sustain. The previously unwashed masses and then the classes dangereaux
could be successfully tamed because that was just 10 to 15% of the world
population. What about 50 or 75%?
In a condensed form, IW argues that the MWS was successfull in deflecting
the crises mentioned by Nikolai and many other threats (primarily from
the disgruntled and eventually organized masses). The seminal success of the
demise of communism brings two kinds of trouble -- no more orderly
counterpart, sort of responsible bad guys who play by the rules even when
they try to cheat a little -- but, as George Kennan said in 1946,
"Soviets know that they have a lot to loose and every possibility to
enjoy their acquisitions if they do not behave recklessly so they are not
desperate". No more such relaxed opponents with still enormous though
misleading popular appeal in the Third World.
Secondly, huge, densely populated China and Russia with educated
cheap workforce and industrial potential enter the world markets. Who
needs Sierra Leone then? The loop of capital accumulation will function
well without much of the Third World.
Once the anticapitalism lure is gone, many middle classes (state-produced
cadres especially) will try to live like the core. This will overburden
the system, for no system can consist of core alone. least of all such a
historical system as the capitalist one. There are two alternatives --
either peripheries become equal to the core and this finishes the MWS
peacefully transforming it into a social-democratic global success, or
the system crumbles down under the weight of growing demands. Democracy
is actually a very subversive thing in this perspective -- Liberalism was
about the rule of the competent and meritorious, not the "demagogues"
from the streets. Democracy allows social groups to organize and struggle
politically pressing their demands upon governments. This might not
necessarily be what we like -- Nikolai should look around himself. I
presume, it was Comrade Zyuganov, the Russian fundamentalist, who won in
Novosibirsk, in a fairly democratic manner, n'est-ce pas?
Democracy makes governing institutions more open to popular influences.
The problem then is political -- what and who those influences will be?