Capitalist World System Research Articles

Ecological transformation of capitalism

The UN Conference COP 28 (2023) showed the failure of the global strategy contained in the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. This encourages us to return to the problem of additional measures to protect natural habitats through a transition to moderate rates of economic growth, population growth and anthropogenic pressure on the environment. The article analyzes the ecological limits of growth of the world capitalist system, its economy and the global population. In order to preserve the natural habitat, capitalism inevitably faces transformation into a new post-capitalist formation capable of providing a moderate anthropogenic load on the environment accompanied by an increase in welfare and the preservation of the natural habitat for future generations. In dangerous proximity to the ecological limits of growth, it is necessary to abandon the prevailing goals of maximizing the scale of global economy and population, to reorient the population of the developing countries towards moderate fertility due to an increase in human development and quality-of-life indices, especially in the countries with low levels of above-mentioned indices accompanied by high population growth rates. A three-dimensional system of measuring economic growth is proposed. The conditions for economic growth balanced with the state of the environment are formulated.

Humanising The 'Naire' in Money: A Scoping Review

As the world progresses into the critical Year 2030, the magic Year for attaining the Sustainable Development Goals, doubts about the certainty of success are high. Amid COVID-19, the climate crisis, the Russia-Ukraine war, among many other wars, and the high cost of living pushing most of the people into poverty and hardship, it is time to reconsider what is being done to make the world a better place for most of the people. In doing this, this paper attempts to interrogate the influence of money in the consistent world economic crises. It argues that the 'inevitability of money', attendant on changing technology, pervading the World Capitalist System needs to be reoriented to homos sociologicus. In a way, it recommends the need to 'humanise' money and technology, such that humans construct it socially instead of vice versa.

Care as pluriversal strategy? Caring in counter-hegemonic struggles in the degrowth and environmental justice movements

ABSTRACT Overcoming the destructive power of the capitalist world system requires bringing relevant alternatives together in a way that respects their diversity. In this article, we investigate the significance of care – in its ethical, practical, and affective dimensions – in the task of uniting the pluriverse alternatives at moments and sites of counter-hegemonic struggle. Our analysis focuses on the degrowth movement and environmental justice movements. Adopting a post-Marxist discourse theory lens, we argue that care can mobilize and coalesce these pluriverse alternatives into temporarily united counter-hegemonic coalitions. For effectively disrupting the hegemony of the capitalist world system, we suggest that the pluriverse should meet the following three conditions: (1) the symbolic construction of the world system as an enemy to mobilize against, (2) a vision recognizing the foundational nature of care-based relations for pluriversal futures, and (3) practices of care fitting together with the parallel understandings and visions of the pluriverse.

Mobility and Public Transport in Post-independence Mozambican Fiction (1992-2022)

ABSTRACT This article analyzes representations of mobility and public transport in the following Mozambican novels: Terra Sonâmbula [Sleepwalking Land] (1992), O Outro Pé da Sereia [The Mermaid’s Other Foot] (2006) by Mia Couto, O Comboio de Sal e Açúcar [The Train of Salt and Sugar] (1999) by Licínio Azevedo, and Museu da Revolução [Museum of the Revolution] (2022) by João Paulo Borges Coelho. Despite the importance of mobility and public transport in these works, existing scholarship has not considered these themes but has opted for more traditional categories such as ‘travel’, ‘diaspora’, and ‘migration’. Focusing on the literary portrayals of public transport and infrastructure of mobility – i.e. buses, ships, and railway stations (Couto), a slow-moving train (Azevedo), and a Toyota Hiace car (Borges Coelho) – this article aims to demonstrate the central role that the mobility/immobility binomial plays in the representation of post-independent Mozambique. The main argument of this article is that the images of the railway, the road, automobility, and maritime travel are the literal driving force of the narratives and contribute to the (un)building of the national space. I use literary perspectives on mobility studies and world-system approaches developed within the framework of world-literature (Warwick Research Collective) to demonstrate that the tropes of mobility and the representations of public transport in the four novels register and encode the social, political, and economic transitions in Mozambique’s colonial and post-colonial history and its incorporation into the capitalist world-system.

How the Special Century Shaped the World Political Landscape

How much of an impact will technology and innovations have on human society? In order to access the influence Gordon proposed a concept of "Special Century". The century more than 150 years ago, a number of unsurpassed Great Inventions emerged, and it was these inventions that made the production and life of human beings change drastically, leading mankind from a backward age to a bright future, and also laying the academic foundation for the future development of science and technology. What followed was the rapid progress of the economy and the initial formation of the world's political landscape. This paper summarizes the impact of science, technology, and innovations on human society during the period 1870-1970, analyzes how the economy was reshaped using the C-D production function, and then interprets the establishment of the capitalist world system, the development of hegemony and the formation of colonialism from the perspective of economics.

Socialist Settlers on a Capitalist Frontier: The Contradictions of New Australia, Paraguay

This article assesses the socialist colony of New Australia, founded in Paraguay in 1893, in its wider historical and environmental context. Drawing on archival research, the article contends that New Australia was founded as part of a broader settler colonial deforestation frontier in the southern Atlantic Rainforest. Despite the utopian socialist ideology of its founders, New Australia’s establishment was made possible by Paraguay’s violent integration into the capitalist world-system in the late nineteenth century. This integration had previously been obstructed by centuries of resistance by Indigenous Guaraní and Guaraní-descendant peoples to colonisation. Nevertheless, New Australia’s subsequent failure as a settler colony also ensured that its impact on the Atlantic Rainforest was relatively minimal, with the colony’s inhabitants themselves becoming integrated into Paraguay’s rural Guaraní-speaking population.

Extractivism and capitalism in the era of neoliberal globalisation: development and resistance dynamics in Latin America

This article explores the development and resistance dynamics of capital in the neoliberal era of capitalist development. The context for this exploration is Latin America, the region that has been most severely impacted by the globalising dynamics of the world capitalist system, which is in the throes of a multidimensional crisis that has assumed global proportions. The region has also seen the most powerful forces of resistance to this development, a resistance led by the Indigenous and farming communities on the extractive frontier. It is argued that each advance of capital in the development process, that is, each phase in the capitalist development of the forces of production – from the colonial era of mercantilism and extractive imperialism to the era of neoliberal globalisation – has generated corresponding forces of resistance, leading to a succession of development–resistance cycles in the evolution of capitalism as a world system.

Systemic cycles of accumulation and chaos in the world capitalist system: a missing link

Abstract We re-examine the systemic cycles of accumulation (SCA) of Arrighi (2010) and Arrighi and Silver (1999) which provide a framework for the analysis of the cyclical patterns of geographical expansion of trade and production and the related shifts of hegemonic power within the world capitalist system. Within the SCA framework, the last stage of a hegemonic cycle is characterized by what is called ‘systemic chaos’. However, the drivers of these dynamics have not been explicitly analyzed. This article fills this gap by providing a link between the accumulation process and systemic chaos. Introducing the logistic map into the SCA analysis, our approach provides the missing detailed understanding of how systemic chaos is an outcome of the contradictory socioeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation itself while being based on the key insights of the SCA framework of hegemonic cycles.

Reframing the Indian Middle Class as a Labour Aristocracy

Abstract Taking from, and critiquing, both the scholarship on the Indian “middle class” as well as the scholarship on the ‘labour aristocracy’, this paper argues for the reformulation of the Indian “middle class” as a labour aristocracy or worker elite. We define the distinctive characteristics that set the Indian worker elite apart from the broader working class and highlight, through the case studies of international migration, patterns in urban living spaces and domestic service employment, the stark differences between the worker elite and the poor working masses in India, and the exploitative relationship that exists between the two. The analysis points to the semi-periphery being the locus of the largest inequalities in the capitalist world-system today, where the bourgeoisie and the worker elite both gain tremendously from the exploitation inherent to capitalism. Resultingly, the task at hand in India and the semi-periphery broadly remains to organize the poor, marginalised working masses.

The Political Economy of Class Formation and Class Structure in the Southern Kurdistan: 1991-2021

This article examines the dynamics of class formation from a historical sociology perspective after the formation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), roughly from 1991 to 2021. It then reviews the KRG period (1991-2021) to trace the process of class formation in the newly-born government. After that, the researchers explore the pattern and nature of class structure and the state in the Southern Kurdistan from 1991 to 2021. This article presents the role of the world economy and the Southern Kurdistan political parties in class formation. For example, the government relied on the selling of natural resources such as crude oil, and a small proportion of people received a tremendous amount of wealth from the government by utilizing political power, and their class position changed to a new one, which is a bourgeois class. As this is a historical sociology study, the following theories will be used: Dependency theory and the world-systems theory are essential in this article because they will evaluate the relationship between classes and compare the Southern Kurdistan with other countries in the capitalist world system. The qualitative methods which have been used in this article include critical analysis of written sources and secondary data, including official statistics of the KRG.

Ending the Global Kleptocracy: Financial Innovation for the 21st Century

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive and workable answer for addressing the socio-ecological crises that result from the severely flawed socio-economic system that is the capitalist world system to date. It presents a fundamental first step towards correcting this system, by addressing and correcting the monetary system whereupon a global kleptocracy has been constructed. At this point, there are no more excuses for social scientists, politicians, and regulatory agencies to hide in ivory towers. Conclusively, the feasible possibility for a pro-social, pro-ecological, and pro-economical financial system is presented here

The Law of Uneven Development and the Transition to a New World System: On the Spatial Political Economy of Socialism

ABSTRACT In the early 21st century global capitalism has gradually been falling into a huge structural crisis, prompting people to rethink the issue of establishing a new world system. The spatial political economy of socialism seeks precisely to explore how to break out of the capitalist world system, to transform the old space of world history, and correspondingly, to create a new space. The spatial political economy of socialism shows that space is an intrinsically important proposition of communism and socialism. Communism logically must inherit the global space of capitalism, while socialism in practice is the product of the uneven spatial development of the capitalist world system. The capitalist world system constitutes the starting point of socialism in practice, while the new world system (communism) is the destination of socialism in practice. Both revolution and construction reflect the law of uneven development of the transition to the world communist system. In the dialectical movement of history, socialism creates the Socialist Regional Economic Union as its instrument of spatial production and expansion, as well as the intermediary to the new world system. The Socialist Regional Economic Union will become an important element in the study of the spatial political economy of socialism.

Planetary Health: Capitalism, Ecology and Eco-Socialism

ABSTRACT Adopting a critical anthropology of health perspective, informed by political ecology, we examine planetary health in the era of late capitalism or neoliberalism. The shift to a planetary health thinking was driven by the growing awareness that not only are all human communities now multiply linked together by flows of commodities, ideas, people, and health-related influences from vectors to medicines, but that the health of human communities is multiply linked to the environment including other species within us (e.g. gut flora) and around us. Within the planetary health framework, we focus specifically on both emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing impact of anthropogenic climate change on health. While poorer regions of the world need economic development, that is, access to basic resources and health care, much of the developed world and parts of the developing world are, in a sense, overdeveloped. Perhaps more than any other issue, the ecological crisis, which includes catastrophic climate change allows critical scholars to contemplate the contradictions of the capitalist world system, including its implications for health, and to ponder the creation of an alternative world system, namely eco-socialism.

Supercomplex systems and constitutional (dis)order: The consequences of the Anthropocene in the law1

Modern law is based in the existence of a constitutional order, guaranteeing the predictability of law. Since we are entering in new geological era, according to the contributions of Earth System Science, defined mostly by complexity and uncertainty, this hegemonic idea of order in law is challenged. This contribution explores how constitutional order was linked to the process of colonization of nature within the capitalist world system and how this process results into a planetary transformation. Discussing the Faustic expectations embedded in the some Anthropocene narratives, associated with the human manipulation of Earth System, the paper considers the profound consequences of the complexity of the intertwined ecosocial global system, and explores how supercomplexity gives way to a legal disorder which resolves itself into conflict and dialog.

Capitalist catastrophism and eco-apartheid

In September 2020 Deutsche Bank published a report entitled “The Age of Disorder.” Fronted dramatically by the image of a volcano and volley of lightning across a brooding sky, the report warned that the global economy was on the precipice of a phase shift from neo-liberal quasi-stability to an era characterized by dramatic social, economic, and ecological upheavals. Deutsche Bank’s researchers call this new period “the age of disorder”. This paper proposes Deutsche Bank’s appraisal is part of a broader condition that it calls capitalist catastrophism and an emerging regime of eco-apartheid. Taking as its point of departure Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s call for geographers to construct concepts that might help navigate a hotter planet, the paper introduces capitalist catastrophism as a concept that names and theorizes the effects of a dramatic and asymmetrically catastrophic reconfiguration of the capitalist world-system. Capitalist catastrophism has three characteristics. First, a newfound ability for social movements and theorists to imagine post-capitalist futures combined with an inability to realize them. Second, cascading and mutually amplifying social and ecological crises that outrun the capacities of states and capital to contain them. Third, an unevenly distributed cancellation of human and non-human futures. Drawing on Marxist political economy and Nyasha Mboti’s theorization of apartheid, the paper concludes that capitalist catastrophism is resolving itself into a global system of eco-apartheid in which a green transition for some is secured by putting the exploited and oppressed majority in harm’s way.

Циклічність геоекономічних процесів

The economy is the basis for political processes, while the contradictions arising in the system of socio-economic relations determine the cyclical nature of social development, in particular, cyclical economic and political processes that have become global under the conditions of the capitalist world-system. The cyclic nature of geo-economic and geo-political processes is manifested primarily in the cyclical nature of the change of the world hegemon, whose presence indicates the existence of a global political and economic system. The prerequisites for the formation of the world political and economic system, which develops cyclically, arose already in the most ancient times. The historical prototypes of world hegemony were the Roman and Chinese empires, as well as the Mongolian empire, after whose fall the Western European civilization from the beginning of the "long" XVI century became a source of contradictions, giving rise to a cyclical process of struggle for world leadership, which is reflected in the main provisions of the theory of long cycles of world politics by J. Modelski and U. Thompson, theories of cycles of hegemony by I. Wallerstein, etc. The unfolding of long cycles of world politics and cycles of hegemony is coordinated with the unfolding of Kondratiev cycles, whose beginning and end are marked by wars, generated by political and economic contradictions and serving as a way of their partial resolution. The competition of the leading actors of geopolitics gives rise to global military-economic cycles, whose rhythm is set by world wars, and global geo-economic and geopolitical cycles create the basis for the deployment of cycles derived from them on a regional scale. The rhythm of cyclical geo-economic and geopolitical processes on a regional scale is determined by the dynamics of global cycles. Today, the increasing instability in the capitalist world-system indicates the beginning of crisis-militaristic phases of global cycles, whose unfolding leads to a cyclical change of the leader in the capitalist world-system, and the reformatting of the world geopolitical system, and creates the basis for the development of deep geo-economic and geopolitical contradictions, which are the internal driving force of the cyclicality of global political and economic processes.

The Haitian Revolution: An Insignificant Revolution?

This work argues that the usurpation of the Haitian Revolution by the Affranchis, petit-bourgeois black (creole) landowners and mulatto elites, from the Africans on the island seeking total freedom from the mercantilism and liberalism of the capitalist world-system under European hegemony, rendered it (The Haitian Revolution) an insignificant black bourgeois revolution focused on racial vindicationism and equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites within the denouement of the aforementioned systemicity. The latter move placed the Revolution on par with the American one, which was a counterrevolution to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade under mercantilism and liberalism. The work concludes, had the Revolution remained under either the directorship of the African leadership seeking to implement their (communal) lakou system throughout the island, or the Kojèveian synthesis of Dessalines, it would become a significant revolution offering a counter systemicity to the Protestant/Catholic Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under European and American hegemony.

Assessing Core-Monopolization and the Possibilities for the Semi-Periphery in the World-System Today

Drawing upon both classic and more contemporary world-systems analysis, along with oft-forgotten sections of Arghiri Emmanuel’s work on technology, this paper studies, through a quantitative and qualitative comparative method, the history and development of the global semiconductors industry, its selective spatial re-organization/peripheralization over time, and the logic of technology transfers within the context of core-monopolization of high profit industries. The paper then draws comparisons between semiconductors and prior core-monopolized industries like the automobile industry, and analyzes attempts at entry into core-like production by the large semi-peripheries such as China and India and the difficulties faced by them not only by the structural limitations of the world-system but also due to opposition from the core nations (like the U.S.-China Trade War). Resultingly, the analysis concludes that significant upward mobility for the large semi-peripheries through entry into core industries is, within the current capitalist world-system, largely unfeasible.

Political Economy of the Carnation Revolution (1974–75)

Following the military coup of April 25th, 1974, Portugal experienced a revolutionary period characterized by unprecedented levels of labor unrest and political radicalization. As the social landscape suffered a profound transformation, key-sectors of the economy were nationalized, many firms went into self-management, and large areas of the south were swept by land occupation. When the country’s democratic Constitution was brought to vote on April 2, 1976, it contained numerous references to “socialism,” “self-management,” “planning,” and “agrarian reform,” bearing witness to a widespread commitment to build a “classless society.” What eventually took shape, however, was a mixed economy under a parliamentary regime, very similar to that of countries like Greece and Spain, both of which experienced far less dramatic democratic transitions. Drawing on the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this article analyzes the plans and strategies devised to ensure a socialist transition in the semiperiphery of the capitalist world-system during the 1970s.

Exiting the Whirlpool? Pan-Africanism Caught in the Crossfire of Identity and Globalization

Africa’s peoples and cultures have been subject to dramatic external interventions and influences enmeshing them firmly within the world capitalist system. The successive population decapitalizations, conquests, colonizations, and associated cultural imperialisms of Arab and European, Islam and Christianity, the slave trade, and more recently the rapid ‘modernization’ and spread of capitalist consumerism have all transformed and internationalized cultures, conceptualizations, and commodities. This increasingly powerful process of convergence has captured the African popular imagination to the extent that ‘globalization’ is as much a subject of media interest as of academic enquiry.Yet convergence and globalization are not all-embracing, unidirectional, and homogenizing processes. Rather, their impact varies greatly in extent and intensity over time, across space, and within and between cultures and social classes. Moreover, counter-movements, both conscious and unpremeditated, are occurring simultaneously. Pan-Africanism has been one such counter-movement. How can a renascent Pan-Africanism assert its identity within these global networks of interconnections?The overall aim of this study is therefore to examine the ways global forces impact upon African societies; the ways in which African societies have an impact upon the globalization process; and the comparative, cross national and cross cultural comparison of global processes as they relate to Africa. Will the Pan-African ideal help the continent to exit the whirlpool of decapitalization and deterritorialization by the ravaging forces of globalization? If so, how? These are the challenging questions facing Pan-African intellectuals and which this paper attempts to grapple with.