Misgivings about world-systems theory
I want to write down a few misgivings I have about world-systems theory/analysis (WST), some of them analytical and some about its (usual) political consequences.
While I read some of the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (in fact translated his textbook on world-systems analysis into Hungarian) and Samir Amin, my knowledge of WST is more based on the works and political attitudes of its followers.
These are more a set of impressions to organize my own thoughts and (maybe) help to elaborate them in more detail later on, than an attempt to engage WST on the level of academic debates: I am not involved in this field professionally, nor do I plan to be in the future. In this form some of these remarks might not do justice to the original and most refined texts of WST. But in my experience this is how the theory functions in the hands of many of its followers, especially when it is politically instrumentalized - and that happens more often than not to social theories. Also, many interesting historical and empirical works have been written in the WST framework that have a lot of value, despite some conceptual problems. After these caveats, here we go.
The first problem in my view - from which perhaps all others flow - is the excessive focus on states and geopolitical ‘blocs’. WI Robinson refers to this as the ‘Reification of the State and the Methodology of State Centrism’ in this paper. In WST and related/descendant theories states are discussed as agents, and international relations are described as antagonistic relations between these states. There are several assumptions made here that all seem dubious. By using the language of countries as unified entities battling each other for influence and resources a structure is already imposed on world events that tends to lead to certain conclusions.
WI Robinson brings up the examples of NAFTA, conflicts over agricultural subsidies between Brazil and the US, and in general how the ‘BRICS’ phenomenon is often analyzed on much of the traditional ‘anti-imperialist’ left.
NAFTA would sometimes be described as ‘the US’ exploiting or oppressing ‘Mexico’, but this is very misleading: some of the most intense lobbying for NAFTA came from Mexican corporations eager to form connections with American ones and to have access to US financial and product markets. No doubt, many large American companies stood to gain from the free trade agreement as well, but it was not at all a one-sided affair.
Large parts of American society - think of industrial workers or smaller farms in the US - arguably suffered from the effects of the agreement, and so did small scale Mexican agriculture. Mexican workers - many of them former peasants probably - drawn into the sweatshop system building up by the inflow of American (and other) capital lost in many ways (uprooting of their previous environment, harshly exploitative new working conditions), although within some years probably saw rising incomes too. Some of the urban middle classes probably gained again as they could fill new IT/administrative positions due to the growing internationalization of the Mexican economy, while small business owners often lost out. The point is, trying to understand the process as the ‘core’ exploiting the ‘semi-periphery’ doesn’t really help. There are complex shifts going on within both the ‘core’ and the semi-peripheral country with some groups gaining in the latter and losing out in the former and vice versa. As there is excessive focus on states and the (real, expected or imagined) conflicts between them, the internal relationships within these states are neglected.
Which brings me to the second point, and that is the dividing up of the world economy into ‘core’, ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’. This classification has some merits as it points to some typical differences in the industrial and class structures of the countries assigned to these subgroups. My problem is how this classification then becomes an ontology and eventually the basis of a political credo.
The modern world system developed with industrializing Europe and North America pillaging and thereby ‘peripheralizing’ much of the rest of the world, no doubt. But capital accumulation enforced by market competition is a universal ‘algorithm’ that has no nationality. While a hundred (and even fifty) years ago most international investment was within the capitalist core (Europe-North America, later joined by Japan), today we see a very different picture. Large parts of East Asia have become thoroughly industrialized. Some Chinese, Indian, South Korean or Brazilian companies are among the world’s largest, and capital is flowing in all directions: within the ‘core’, from the ‘core’ to ‘(semi)periphery’, but also from the former ‘periphery’ to the ‘core’.
In absolute size the Chinese economy is now bigger than the American if we use ‘GDP (PPP)’ and around 2/3 of the American by nominal GDP. Per capita income level is obviously much lower, but there are growing urban areas in Asia where it is nearing Western levels. Meanwhile incomes for the lower 70-80-90% in ‘core’ countries in the last 30-40 years have, on average, grown much less than in the preceding decades, due to the slowdown of growth (it’s less clear on a closer look to what extent distributional changes have contributed). These two facts were related by the famous ‘Elephant chart’ of M. Brankovic.
Much of Guangzhou or Shanghai is less ‘peripheral’ in terms of its infrastructure by now than Detroit, and income differences between coastal California and the depressed former mining towns of West Virginia are probably larger than between the American and Chinese average.
Surely global capitalism is a hierarchical system historically as well as today, but these hierarchies are constantly shifting and rearranging and the status of a region as ‘core’ or ‘(semi)peripheral’ is not carved into stone. This should be trivial, but for much of the left by now the hierarchic nature of global capitalism seems to be their main argument against ‘the system’, along with the claim that ‘the (semi)periphery can never catch up to the core’.
But this is not always true: South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan did catch up (in most ways) and major regions of China are arguably on their way there. One can point to ‘special geopolitical circumstances’, but historical circumstances are always ‘special’ in one way or another.
More generally, if opposition to capitalism is opposition to underdevelopment, ie. the lack of capitalist development (along the lines of: the (semi)periphery does not get its ‘rightful lot’), this seems a very incoherent position, at least coming from socialists, which WST followers typically are. First, it idealizes capitalist development in the core, that is far more precarious than implied by this picture (cf. the fate of deindustrialized regions in Europe and North America) and second it seems to forget that its fabric is the same: wage labour in the service and as a function of profit-making.
That brings me to the political ramifications of WST typical on the (tiny) Eastern European academic/intellectual left, and in general the anti-imperialist left (in its more academic variants) that heavily leans on WST.
As international developments are mostly read as conflicts between states belonging to either the core or the (semi)periphery, and globalization is seen to be dominated by the US or the core in general, then the growth of non-core national economies is automatically read as a challenge to American (Euro-American) hegemony. It is already doubtful to me if this is the best way to describe a process where the major development is the growing integration of markets by transnational corporations. But even worse, another step is often taken and the growth of non-core national economies, eg. the ‘BRICS’ is now seen as an ‘alternative’ to ‘American globalization’. What is essentially global competition for market share between transnational companies, some of them headquartered in the BRICS (and other non-Western countries), is regarded as a replay of anti-imperial struggle. In fact, what is happening is the growing integration of these countries within one world market and the formation of global corporations, ie. the crystallization of a truly global capitalist system, not its challenging by some sort of alternative.
But as the rigid classification of the world from WST (into core and periphery) and its state-centric view of globalization comes together with older anti-imperialist sympathies and - in Eastern Europe - nostalgia for the Soviet Union, this leads to a projection of political desires of the left onto states - typically Russia (or sometimes China) - that are often conservative, nationalist and highly oligarchic. A rather bizarre combination.
political-economy world-systems-theory globalization