Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 16:53:51 -0500
From: "INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC" <iserch@caribsurf.com>
Organization: UWI
To: listmgr@csf.Colorado.EDU
Subject: A Reinforcing Orthodoxy
THIS IS INTENDED FOR THE WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK DISCUSSION
LIST!! PLEASE ENTER MY MESSAGE. THIS IS MY 9th EFFORT:
HELP
suscribe wsn iserch@caribsurf.com
A little while ago Andre Gunder Frank sought answers on the interface of
social movements with B-phases through orthodox cycles-theory. I have
pondered on his request and have only found the time since the holidays
to jot down my impressions of where this list is going. Frank (& Gills
1993) lays claim to a longer historical unfolding of the world system,
but seeks to find answers on various crisis-symptons in modern
capitalism by taking up data that starts VERY LATE (circa 1500 AD) in
the historical unfolding of the world system. There is a tale in this.
As a young academic in the Caribbean, I have found the continuity
argument of Frank & Gills, David Wilkinson, Chase-Dunn, Thomas Hall and
a very few others, to be one of the more important breakthroughs in
social science and broad development theory. But what remains unsettling
is the tendency on this list to slip back into the overarching discourse
of a 500-year "world-system". Perhaps this has something to do with
intellectual hegemony and a sort of mild censorship function that an
orthodox world-systems list inheres. The message seems to be that we
engage in a monologue about the "world-system", the occasional querying
of the hyphen notwithstanding. Do not confuse my concern here with
academic choice on the side of the debate. There are many who accept the
orthodox Wallersteinian position; and a few who do not. But the latent
Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism associated with notions of a post-1500
leap into modernity jars against the normative emancipatory goals of
most structuralists. The persistent cling to "the hyphen" does very
little to rescue adherents from the charge of succumbing to
civilisation/barbarism meta-narratives of modernist schools of thought.
Funny how the historical rise of western Europe presaged the supposed
birth of capitalism, of idustrialisation, of `relevant' K-waves,
Kitchin, Juglar, and Kuznet cycles, of core-hegemony, of Arrighian
de/regulatory cycles - in short of international political economy
proper. Shouldn't we self-consciously take stock of the canvass of
processes we confidently claim as recent and specific to Euro-bequeathed
capitalism? Can we not find similar processes in antiquity?
Rather than a competing set of voices on this list with no voices having
a particular claim to priority over others, the orthodoxy prevails, a
situation akin to an expression of autonomous power.
Gotta go.
Don D. Marshall
Research Fellow
Institute of Social and Economic Research
University of the West Indies
Cave Hill Campus
BARBADOS