Re: pie

On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Ahmet Cakmak wrote:

>sorry andy..you play with words..

Isn't it true, Ahmet, that if the world-system is a single economy that
there can only be endogenous growth? It isn't playing with words; it is
being accurate with words and following basic logic. Accuracy and logic, I
have found, are precious commodities these days. Remember, one of the
criticisms of world-system theory is that everything is explained in terms
of itself. I am not agreeing with the criticism, but it follows when one
adopts a certain perspective (a Humean as opposed to a Hegelian logic of
explanation).

The point of the discussion has to do with core-periphery relations and
what constitutes the growth dynamic. From the perspective of the core,
endogenous sources of growth come from exploiting domestic labor-power
and accumulating capital; exogenous sources of growth come from surplus
extraction in the periphery. Theoretically, it might be imaginable that
all core growth comes from endogenous sources, however historically the
core has relied on both "internal" and "external" sources of growth.

Another way to conceptualize this is if we imagine that colonialism is not
only a complex of external relations, but of internal relations, as well,
such that the core has an internal periphery. Conceived this way, growth
is exogenous to the capitalist class since that class produces no surplus.
Here we return to class analysis, with the class structure abstracted at
the world-system level. 

With the globalization of production, the analytical distinctions of
"internal-external" and "endogenous-exogenous" are increasingly
problematic, and, ontologically, always have been, since the world-system
has always been a differentiated totality. This, I think, is probably the
most important insight of world-system theory.

Andy