Re: What is world systems theory?

christopher chase-dunn wrote:

>the basics are in Thomas Richard Shannon's _An Introduction to the
>World-Systems Perspective (Westview 1996).


This was a useful recommendation indeed. I picked it up at lunchtime from a
scholarly bookstore near my offices at Columbia University. It is a
textbook with a code 20, so I couldn't even use my officer's discount. I
strongly suspect that any title with "world systems" in it will have a code
20, since the picture is starting to come into focus that this is an
academic discipline plain and simple/

What's confusing, of course, is that it is an academic discipline that came
out of the womb of Marxism. Chapter one "The Origins of World-System
Theory" states, "World-system theory is a continuation of the central
concerns of such early social theorists as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile
Durkheim. They maintained that a fundamentally new kind of society had
emerged in Western Europe after 1500 (the modern era). They sought to
identify the nature of this new society, explain its origins, and explore
the consequences of its emergence." 

This is what I would call the neutering of Karl Marx. Marx, as opposed to
Weber and Durkheim, was a revolutionist. The only purpose of a theory for
Marx and for Marxists is as a guide to action. 

I looked up Lenin in the index to see what this textbook would tell us
about another enemy of the capitalist system. He is discussed briefly in
the introduction, immediately before the "Annales School." I was gratified
to see that there was at least no attempt to speak of a "Lenin school." We
learn here that "World-system theorists do not agree with Lenin that
imperialism and peripheral exploitation were characteristic of a particular
stage of capitalism in the nineteenth century. World-system theorists view
peripheral exploitation as a central feature of capitalism through its
century-long history and nineteenth-century colonization as just one aspect
of a longer term pattern in the modern era."

How can I explain this to our dear world-systems comrades? Lenin was not an
economic historian. He was not interested in abstract discussions about
what had happened centuries before 1914 or what would happen in the rest of
the century. He was confronted by 2 serious political problems. One was the
outbreak of a world war--something that was unprecedented. Two, the
Socialist International supported the war. As Neil Harding points out,
Lenin developed an analysis of imperialism in the midst of feverish
activity around the convening of the Zimmerwald conference. He literally
took time away from the conference to sit down and bulldoze through a
hundred or so books on the nature of capitalism in that period. Lenin was
always writing for a conjunctural situation. The idea that he would have
even considered writing something with a title like A.G. Frank's "The World
system: five hundred years or five thousand?" is laughable.

There seems to be a pronounced tendency in world-systems theory to fail to
see Marxism as an ongoing project. Instead we end up with a snapshot of
Lenin that freezes him in 1914. This would be as much of a mistake as
talking about Lenin's attitude toward oppressed nationalities based on his
early debates with Luxemberg on the Polish question. Lenin evolved away
from this relatively assimilationist position into the one more familiarly
identified with the Comintern: unqualified support for the right of
self-determination by oppressed nationalities. That Lenin failed to write a
follow-up to "Imperialism, latest stage of capitalism" does not allow us to
universalize his views of 1914 as quintessentially "Leninist". Marxism
continued to examine the global economy and the underdeveloped world
throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s until today. Mariategui, founder of the
Peru's Communist Party, developed an analysis of Peruvian semifeudalism,
for example, that was a great advance in Marxism's understanding
"peripheral" societies and required no input from the academy.

I ran into a colleague Bill Tabb in the bookstore and showed him the
textbook. What did he think of world-systems theory? Since Bill Tabb is a
Marxist economist and a frequent contributor to Monthly Review journal,
where Amin occasionally publishes nowadays and where A.G. Frank used to
published many years ago, I thought he might have a handle on this
business. He shrugged his shoulders and said that, as far as he knew, it
was just academic and had very little to do with the left. Not only would
world-systems articles not be published by Monthly Review, he opined, their
authors would not even consider submitting them there. All in all, he
surmised that the evolution of this academic tendency has everything to do
with the general retreat of the radical movement.


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)