“The first is a belief in development, a term for the growing political and economic sophistication that emerges at the level of the nation-state. The second is the idea that development goes through stages — unidirectional phases that cannot be reversed or skipped. The third is a view of development as a homogenizing, Westernizing process, in the sense that nations adopt American values and traditions through capitalist growth. These studies often concluded that newly independent or decolonizing nations should forge closer ties with their former colonizers to attract foreign investment and open themselves up to trade — in short, to become modern.
“He never accepted the implication of European superiority, or the small-mindedness of modernization theory, limiting our notion of social progress to technocratic or minimalistic ideas about growth. He preferred thinking in terms of equality: political equality, economic equality, cultural equality.
“His experiences in Africa and the ideas of the colonial context “taught him that he needed a new way of thinking altogether. In a nutshell, the problem was that development did not happen at the level of the nation-state, as he eventually came to realize. There were various critical terms of trade between what were then the newly independent nations and their former colonizers: we can’t pretend that everything is happening internally.
“The notion of the world-system was Wallerstein’s way of rethinking world politics beyond the perspectives of modernization theory. He had already rejected the assumption of European superiority. He then chose to reject the assumption of national development.
“By the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Wallerstein started thinking in terms of systems — that relationship between societies, in dyadic terms, or among nations.
“Wallerstein did not define capitalism in terms of private ownership or wage labor. On the question of private ownership, he saw governments promoting and propping up industry… He defined capitalism according to its processes. Capitalism for him is a system based on the endless accumulation of capital, by which he meant stored value.
“He referred “to the division of labor within the world-system. The distinctions between core, semi-periphery, and periphery more or less mirror the class divisions within a society on a world scale.
“He thought that the semi-periphery served as a guarantor of the capitalist world-economy. It is a conveyor belt of trade and can innovate in many ways in terms of the evolution of the system. However, the semi-periphery member states are middle-tier, partially exploited and partially benefiting from the uneven terms of trade.
“He never understood why the idea of long-waves — especially the Kondratiev wave of approximately forty-five to sixty years — should be met with such resistance among Western social scientists. If people were willing to accept the idea of short-term trends, such as voter preferences or the price of milk, why not longer-term trends? The answer, of course, is political. It’s just not academic.
“Wallerstein’s ideas tell us that people no longer believe in the traditional liberal promise [I don't think so], a promise that said there would be slow but steady rewards to be realized over the course of generations. Instead, the turmoil of capitalism has led to restless classes, armed with dangerous ideas (at least from the perspective of the establishment) about democratizing political power.”
Related
Comments