Explaining the world as a system: can it be done?

Abstract

The first volume of Immanuel Wallerstein's magnum opus, The Modern World System (1974a), hit the bookstalls in 1974, alongside a summarizing journal article in Comparative Studies in Society and History (1974b). His BJS article of 1976 sketched the theory on a still broader canvas, which he reworked in later essays collected together in his book Unthinking Social Science (1991). In these works, he explained how a ‘capitalist world-system’ or ‘world-economy’ had replaced earlier ‘world empires’. He declared it to be . . . a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that is has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. Life within it is largely self-contained, and the dynamics of its development are largely internal. (1974a: 347, 390) It was integrated through market rather than political processes, as world empires had been. It was a single division of labour containing multiple cultural and political units (1974a: 347, 390; 1976: 345). Wallerstein divided his world-system into core, semi-periphery and periphery (though he has not written much about the semi-periphery). The core is capital-intensive, high-skill and technologically advanced, and it exploits through ‘unequal exchange’ (though he is hesitant about this term) the low-skill, labour-intensive periphery in order to appropriate the surplus of the entire world-economy (1974b: 401; 2010 [1976]: 175 [351]). Peripheral countries are structurally constrained into a form of development which only reproduces their subordinate status. The system is also divided into nation-states whose position in the system is determined by class struggle which is both internal to them and also part of the system as a whole. The core has militarily strong states, the peripheral states are weak, reinforcing the hierarchy. Imperialism is the (conventional) label he gave to the exploitation by the core over the periphery. In the BJS article the only major element of his theory that was missing was the notion of successive ‘hegemonies’, whereby a single dominant power regulated capitalism for an era, greatly aiding its stability and its expansion. The three major successive hegemons were the Dutch, the British and the Americans. But his characteristic rejection of academic disciplinary boundaries did characterize the BJS article. Much later he coined the term ‘unidisciplinarity’ for his approach. This embodied ‘a lack of deference to the traditional boundaries of the social sciences’, which he has long considered to be arbitrary, artificial and historically contingent (2004: 19). I agree. The expansion of the capitalist world-system, he said, was both geographic and internal, extensive and intensive. The latter was the commodification of everything as goods on markets. In the twentieth century, he explained, the world-system reached its geographic limit as capitalist markets reached the entire planet. In 1976, the BJS article stated, we were halfway through the internal process of commodification. When this is complete, capitalism will be in terminal crisis and after a period of chaos will be replaced by a socialist world-government (2010 [1976]: 175–6 [351–2]). Macro-sociologists of my generation (and others) must acknowledge a substantial debt. It is just as he claims in his BJS article: he helped us to advance beyond a sociological theory based narrowly on our own nation-state, or on comparisons between national units in generating understanding of ‘industrial’ or ‘advanced capitalist societies’ as a whole. Now we could confront and theorize the world. I remember my initial encounter with his The Modern World System as a breath of fresh air as I surveyed the vistas he had opened up. Though he was clearly influenced by Marx, by the French annales school of Braudel, and by ‘dependency theory’, he developed beyond them. In turn he has influenced talented scholars like Christopher Chase-Dunn (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997), Beverly Silver (2003) and Giovanni Arrighi (1994, 1999) who are generally seen as World Systems Theorists (WST). But they have done him the honour of striking out from his ideas onto their own paths, sometimes disagreeing with him. The three published volumes of the Modern World System have drawn many accolades. In fact, the main disappointment among scholars is an increasing sense that he will not produce a further volume. Of course, there were always sceptics. Historians chipped away at factual errors (as they always do), more orthodox Marxists kept asserting that production not the market is what matters. Given the enormous range of the BJS article, some particular parts of it are inevitably odd. The sudden jump in scale between the ‘reciprocal-lineage’ and the ‘world-empire’ modes of production seems much too big for these to constitute two-thirds of an adequate pan-historical typology. Few would agree with him that the world empires were technologically stagnant – especially sinologists. There was indeed a period in which redistribution to the intermediate classes was occurring, as he asserted in the BJS. He said this would have revolutionary implications, sapping the will of the upper strata to fight, while encouraging the will of the lower strata. But this trend is long gone. In the USA only the top 5 per cent have got richer in the last three decades – and the top 1 per cent have done even better. Their will to better themselves seems even greater than in the past, while the lower strata are getting poorer and less organized. He also still considers what he calls the ‘world revolution of 1968’ as having ended a long period of centrist liberal supremacy, though most of us think he romanticizes the events of that year. But in his 2004 book he has sought to rescue that idea by linking it to the arrival of neo-liberalism. Since the late 1960s, he says, the costs of production for capitalists have been steadily rising, so a coalition of forces from the centre and right have attempted to combat them by the repression involved in neoliberalism. He remains clear that we are in for a period of chaos, and that we can expect to see more extreme ideologies emerging from both the left and the right. He still hopes we can arrive at a world socialist government. Some of the period-specific biases evident in the BJS article have since been modified – as for example, its Eurocentrism and its pessimism about the economic development of poorer countries. For most of his career he emphasized the exclusively European origins of the capitalist world system – to the extent of arguing, for example, that the notion of ‘India’ was created by the world capitalist system (Wallerstein 1991: 130–4). Recent WST theory has toned down or abandoned the Eurocentrism, and some see a Chinese or East Asian hegemony as possibly looming after the American decline. The development of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies – understandably not perceived in 1976 – can be seen as social mobility in the ‘semi-periphery’, which Wallerstein always saw as a possibility. My own major criticism has always been directed against his economic determinism. His capitalist economy is seen as the ‘system’, the ‘unit’, the ‘organism’ of human society. Thus he has replaced the multiple ‘societies’ formerly assumed to be nation-states with a single ‘society’, capitalism. Though states and military power do play a role in world systems theory – both for him and for Arrighi and Chase-Dunn – they play a secondary, supportive one, essentially reproducing the economic system. Social life is defined by the economy, its markets, its technology, its class struggle. It is a functionalist systems theory, though of a hybrid Marxian type. As such it shares the usual problems of such approaches (see Pieterse's 1988 critique). When I read The Modern World System, I was developing a macro-sociology in which four sources of social power, ideological, economic, military and political, were given equivalent status in overall social causation – later published as Mann 1986 and 1993, with a third volume in preparation. I remain skeptical about a theory which gives primacy to a single source of power. In explaining the expansion of the (European) core across the globe, Wallerstein says the ‘imperative of the endless accumulation of capital had generated a need for constant technological change, a constant expansion of frontiers – geographical, psychological, intellectual, scientific’ (2004: 2; cf 1976: 349). Yet Europe's expansion into the world was more multi-faceted than this. The first empire, of Spain, was not at all capitalist. Though imperial expansion did increasingly involve capitalist accumulation, the multiple rival empires which expanded also depended heavily on the elevated role of militarism within Europe, on land-hunger, especially by younger sons, on states grabbing territories for strategic reasons and to pre-empt rival states from grabbing them, on the desire to save souls, and on ideologies like racism – none of which was determined by (as opposed to being influenced by) capitalist accumulation. Wallerstein disagrees. For example, he has argued that ethnic and racial stratification arose because they were functional for the capitalist world system (Wallerstein 1991: 80–103). But those empires also had the effect of partially segmenting capitalism. For example, colonies traded more with the mother country than with their neighbors, and the empires made repeated war on each other, hoping to steal rather than trade. Then those empires collapsed, precipitated by their defeat or exhaustion in the two world wars. Now came the global export of the nation-state model, which along with the American Empire produces the current political segmentation of capital. There is considerable ‘redistribution’ within each state in the contemporary global economy, though in the BJS article Wallerstein wants to limit ‘redistribution’ to the earlier phase of ‘world-empires’. For example, American, British, Belgian, and Australian unskilled workers (indeed their whole national populations), all benefit considerably from a national system of redistribution which makes them infinitely better off than any worker in China or Bangladesh. Their relation to the means of production and exchange is mediated by their national citizenship. In order to explain the contours of capitalism one must also introduce non-economic structures. However, it would make my own task much easier if someone had already given the kind of rigorous treatment (both theoretical and empirical) of ideological, military and political power that Wallerstein has given to the capitalist economy. His remains a very considerable achievement. Wallerstein has also tried to use his model to predict the future, an even more ambitious enterprise. He was always ahead of his time in predicting the decline of American hegemony. This might alternatively be seen as a premature prediction. After all, the USA has maintained about the same proportion of world GDP (20–22 per cent) ever since about 1970. It still has the world's reserve currency, and China and Japan are too invested in the dollar to think of leaving it yet. US military dominance has increased so that it accounts for 48 per cent of the military spending of the entire world. Its recent failures in war do not indicate decline but rather over-ambitious, ideology-driven ventures on a scale that the USA had never attempted before – invading foreign countries with no significant local allies, and invading Afghanistan at all (Mann 2003). Of course, we might well ask if this enormous military has any rational purpose or serves any major power interests. But these are not Wallersteinian questions, since he thinks major power structures are functionally related to each other. But is the US military really defending American or capitalist interests? Or is it an institutional and ideological hangover from victory in Superpower rivalry, now maintained by the interests of the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Congress had figured in earlier drafts of Eisenhower's famous valedictory speech but his advisors took it out)? We should also bear in mind that American militarism is cheap since it is mostly paid for by foreigners holding US Treasury bonds. On balance, I prefer the latter interpretation. America continues to be the world hegemon (in my view the only one ever). It will soon begin to decline economically in relative terms, and the BRICs will continue to rise relatively. But I would give American hegemony another twenty years or so. In 1941 Henry Luce, the publisher of Time Magazine, famously declared that the twentieth century would be the American century. He was in a strict sense wrong because the USA had not dominated the world up to the moment of his declaration. But US domination from about a year later until say 2030 would have lasted close to one hundred years We might also ask when the ‘true crisis of the system’, the ‘social chaos’ and the ‘extremist movements’ will arrive, as Wallerstein has predicted for over thirty years. We currently face the biggest economic recession since 1929–1933. Governments, bankers and economists are tearing their hair out, but the public barely stirs. Unions are less powerful than formerly, and the only states that count are the big ones. Neither class struggle nor chaos is very visible. It seems as if we approach another turn of Polanyi's cycle, this time to more regulated markets. But just as with the last turn, the neo-liberal one in the opposite direction, it is not accompanied by mass social movements – unlike the Great Depression, and even that only produced massive disturbance in those political systems which were not stably institutionalized as democracies (Mann 2004: 70–8). Capitalism and democracy seem today largely unchallenged. And why cannot capitalism keep expanding by finding new ‘needs’ to commodify? Did we ‘need’ cell-phones or $200 training shoes or resort hotels or Blu-ray Discs rather than DVDs? What ‘needs’ will capitalism find next – a massive range of environmentally-friendly goods? Democracy also seems well-institutionalized in the core countries: slightly right of centre governments are replaced through elections by slightly left of centre ones, and vice-versa. The major crisis we or our children will face is likely to be the environmental one. If we/they find a good solution to it, this will probably involve governance of a more globally-egalitarian kind, even if it were not a socialist world government. It is, of course, impossible to adequately conceptualize all of human society, still less to predict the future, yet Wallerstein has done as well as anyone.