Re: questions

I know Doug Lummis personally, having lived in Tokyo for a number of years.
I can offer my reading of his point:  In conventional social science,
countries are treated as independent economies that have their own
independent paths or possibilities of development.  Thus, the poverty of
Third World countries (the peripheral states) is seen as a failure of state
policy, or culture, weak national capitalists, etc.  In this view, the
wealthy states (the core) is modern in contrast to the poor countries which
are "traditional" and "backwards" societies, and certainly not modern.
Liberals, like Barrington Moore, are included as holders of this view.

Lummis is stressing the world-systems perspective; that wealth and poverty
are not unrelated, but in fact part of the very same social process or
social system.  The poverty and "backwardness" that characterizes the
periphery is an integral part of the modern world-system.  It is as every
bit modern as poverty is.

In my view, I don't think this list is suitable for explaining the basics of
the world-systems perspective.  But Wallerstein's work is a good place to
begin for a cogent explanation of how the system functions and creates core,
semi-peripheral, and peripheral areas.  I think his collection of essays in
the Politics of the World-Economy is very readable.

----- Original Message -----
From: Fernando Ivan Petrella <petrell@fas.harvard.edu>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 24, 1999 2:57 PM
Subject: questions


> Can somebody please explain the following quotation to me:
>
> "When we think of modernization and development, we tend to think of the
> International Style of the Bauhaus, hig steel buildings, quiet running
> engines and so on. We must recognize this image as self deception if we
> are truly to look at things scientifically and in a world systems
> perspective. If development is a world scale phenomena, then everything it
> has produced, and not just those parts that are pleasing to the eye or to
> the moral sense, must equally be called modern and developed. "Modern
> architecture" must be seen as precisely what every major city in the third
> world actually has today: steel and glass high rise buildings plus slums
> built by squatters. FOr the slums are just as new as the high rises or
> newer...From a world systems perspective we should never fall into the
> sentimental error of talking about "poverty versus modernization" or
> "slums versus development" because this langage takes our attention away
> from the very things that need to be studied, namely, the modernization of
> poverty and the development of slums."  from C. Douglas Lummis Radical
> democracy p.66-67
>
> I don't get how the connection between development and poverty is made on
> this local scale. How is it exactly that the rise of modern cities in the
> third world is paralleled with the rise of slums (it can't just be through
> poor govt spending by which money is placed in grandiose projects rather
> than improving the living condition of the majority - world systems seeks,
> I think, a more systemic explanation).
>
> How would you explain the idea of the modernization of poverty?
>
> Finally, I understand, in theory, the claim that the affluence of the rich
> countries is based on the poverty of the rest. But there are several
> versions of this claim. I subscribe to a weak version: in that the
> consumption patterns of the rich nations is only ecologically sustainable
> by the lack of adequate patterns of consumption in the third world. What
> are the stronger versions of this claim (for example, that their is a
> direct appropriation of surplus value by the core from the periphery) and
> are they defensible?
>
> Anyway, I know these questions betray my ignorance, but I hope someone can
> help.
>
> Ivan
>
>