The so-called world system: Local initiative and local response

Abstract

Certain obvious matters having to do with The Modern World-System* need not detain us [ 1 ]. By now, the bare outlines of Wallerstein's argument have become familiar to a large and articulate population which has apparently not had time to read the book ? an unfortunate but rather common problem in contemporary scholarship. Many reviewers suggest that the substantive criticisms of Wallerstein's thesis will come from regional specialists, and specialists in particular historical periods, who will be able to use their detailed knowledge to test and improve ? or disprove ? the sweeping and lucid conceptual devices the author is developing [2]. His now familiar argument is as follows: "In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, there came into existence what we may call a European world-economy" (p. 15). That emergence rested on three prin? cipal developments: European political, military and economic expansion; the differ? entiation of forms of labor for different seg? ments of the whole; and the growth of strong national states in the European heartland. This single worldwide economic system did not rest on one form of labor use or exaction, but precisely on a combination of different forms. Wallerstein posits three forms of labor, each appropriate to one such segment. The core is based on free labor, and is western European; the semiperiphery is based on tenantry and share-farming, and is south European; the periphery is based on forced labor, and is both eastern European and American in locus. These three forms of labor exaction are not contra dictory so much as intimately interdependent; each "zone" is typified by different political structures, different economic functions and different systems of stratification, as well as by its different ways of relating labor to the other factors of production. The world-system, as it developed, never confined capitalism to the political limitations of single states. Its postulation, if accepted, implies that an analysis of capitalism not limited to the study of single states will be more complete and, in certain ways, less static. Moreover, it calls into question attempts to analyze local economic subsystems in terms of their component modes of production, to the extent that such analyses ignore or circum? vent the significance of the overarching world system within which such subsystems must function. By implication, then ? and to some extent quite explicitly ? Wallerstein's inter? pretation challenges certain global and me? chanical Marxist treatments of the nature and rise of capitalism, and of the relationships among developed centers of capitalism and their satellites, colonies, tributary areas and frontiers. Thus, for instance, he writes: