World-Systems Analysis

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1. limistSep 2010
   Very interesting points, thank you for the references. Maybe I'm not so much convinced by Wallerstein as appreciative of the expanded perspective (and willingness to question) he provides. In taking a longer view (centuries), he's at least more interesting to me than the weak attempts at forecasting that are all too common, that try to paint an inevitable future based on one narrow domain, whether economics (e.g. The World is Flat) or technology (singularity worship).

   I liked the World-Systems Analysis book - compared to most social science, it was at least readable and truly interesting in many parts. He's not so cagey, hedged, and recalcitrant a writer that one can't filter out his opinions, like the "burnt-out-hippie wishful thinking" parts. :)

   Thanks again for the references. The future will be interesting.

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2. PercevalSep 2010
   I took a graduate seminar in World-System Theory with one of Wallerstein's peers, Giovanni Arrighi, about a year before he passed away. We read a broad selection of WST literature, from Arrighi, Wallerstein, Braudel, Abu-Lughod, A.G. Frank, Wolf, Harvey, and so on. It is fascinating stuff if you ever get the chance to read it. The history alone makes it worth spending the time, regardless of what you think of the post-Leninist gloss placed atop it.

   That said, I don't find Wallerstein's work to be particularly convincing. A good deal of his theoretical position is predicated upon Braudel's Annales school historical work and Andre Gunder Frank's dependency theory (a kind of warmed over Leninism applied to Latin America). As it turns out, dependency theory is more or less wrong on the facts — it was a plausible sounding theory, but didn't have much of an empirical basis.

   Wallerstein's work is an expansion of Braudel's work on the Mediterranean-as-an-economic/geographical-system and on A.G. Frank's dependency theory. Wallerstein posits that the entire global economy grew out of the European/Mediterranean system, and that there's a dependent relationship between the core states (First World industrialized countries) and periphery states (Third World raw materials suppliers). This is basically an updating of Lenin's essay "Capitalism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism", buttressed with a great deal of historical narrative.

   If you read Wallerstein's short introduction to WST, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, you'll get an idea of what a theoretical spaghetti his thought is when pressed to put it down simply and briefly on the page. And the last third of the book is devoted to a kind of 1960s-counter-culture burnt-out-hippie wishful-thinking about the potential of anti-globalization movements.

   If you're really interested in Marxist International Political Economy, I would skip Wallerstein and try Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey instead. For the more historical stuff, Braudel, Abu-Lughod, and Frank are awesome.

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