World-Systems Theory
Description
0. Zak Stein and Marc Gafni:
"The idea of “world-systems” is essential for any serious thinking about evolutionary futures for the human species (see: Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis.). World-system analysis is a growing transdisciplinary field, encompassing economics, politics, sociology, and history. The modern world-system, which began to emerge during the long 16th century, is the largest functionally integrated unit the human species has ever created. Its existence and continuation has fundamentally changed the very frontiers of human possibility and fundamentally altered the self-regulatory processes of the biosphere. It is the highest order unit of selection and is unprecedentedly close to literally encompassing all of humanity, something never achieved before by any actually existing historical world-system. Wallerstein argues that at this point in geohistory, when there emerges a world-system without peripheries or frontiers, an evolutionary crisis ensues and a fundamentally new world-system must be painfully and violently born, one no longer predicated upon endless accumulation, growth, profit, and exploitation."
1. From the Wikipedia:
"World-systems theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective) is a post-Marxist multidisciplinary approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis.
"World-system" refers to the inter-regional and transnational division of labor, which divides the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries. Core countries focus on higher-skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest of the world focuses on low-skill, labor-intensive production and extraction of raw materials. This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries. Nonetheless, the system has dynamic characteristics, in part as a result of revolutions in transport technology, and individual states can gain or lose their core (semi-periphery, periphery) status over time. This structure is unified by the division of labour. It is a world-economy rooted in a capitalist economy. For a time, certain countries become the world hegemon; during the last few centuries, as the world-system has extended geographically and intensified economically, this status has passed from the Netherlands, to the United Kingdom and (most recently) to the United States.
Components of the world-systems analysis are longue durée by Fernand Braudel, "development of underdevelopment" by Gunder Frank, and the single-society assumption. Longue durée is the concept of the gradual change through the day-to-day activities by which social systems are continually reproduced.[6] "Development of underdevelopment" described that the economic processes in the periphery are the opposite of the development in the core. Poorer countries are impoverished to enable a few countries to get richer. Lastly, the single-society assumption opposes the multiple-society assumption and includes looking at the world as a whole.
World-systems theory has been examined by many political theorists and sociologists to explain the reasons for the rise and fall of states, income inequality, social unrest, and imperialism."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory)
2. JANNIS MOSSMANN:
"Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System theory is a structural approach to analyse social change. In response to the liberal theory, which differentiated three social spheres (the market, the state, and the civil society) operating according to different logics, Modern World-System theory states that politics and economics cannot be viewed as distinct social spheres, they are two interrelated fields of study (Wallerstein, 2004). Wallerstein sees underdevelopment and development, the status of states in our “globalized” world today, not in the responsibility within the countries themselves, but as a consequence of historical capitalism and the interstate system. Thereby, he regards internal and external factors which describe why the world is how it is today."
(https://www.grin.com/document/73251#)
Contextual Quote
"I contend contra widely accepted contentions to the contrary that the world-system has not fundamentally changed in recent decades as regards its basic structural features. Most of the events that are depicted as new departures are in fact continuations of cycles and trends long in operation. In Global Formation (Chase-Dunn 1989: Chapters 3 and 4) I argued that the ‘stages of capitalism’ literature could be analytically specified by the model of world-system constants, cycles and trends without the loss of any structural or processual features of importance. The more recent discourse on flexible specialization and globalization has failed to alter my view that the modern world-system is continuing on a developmental trajectory that is centuries old. But, Giovanni Arrighi's (1994) study of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ (SCAs) adds an important evolutionary dimension to the basic world-system model by teasing out the important organizational differences that distinguished the Genoese, Dutch, British and United States SCAs. The only thing lacking from Arrighi's analysis is an evolutionary focus on the role played by oppositional forces. With this addition the world-system model will be ready for the next task – how to transform the contemporary system into something more desirable from the point of view of the vast majority of the human species."
- Christopher Chase-Dunn [1]
Discussion
Jannis Mossmann:
"Modern World-System theory is a historical approach which describes the last five centuries by a specific single, growing world-system (Shannon). This world-system, separate from a world-empire or a socialist system, represents the structure in which almost every country is integrated today. It is characterized by a capitalist world-economy including a single division of labor but multiple polities and cultures (interstate system). Both, the modern world-economy and the interstate systems follow “one logic”, the ceaseless capital accumulation (Sanderson, 2005). This universal mode of production is not deterministic but it determines the variety of action for political entities. “The interstate system is the political side of capitalism, not an analytically autonomous system, and its survival is dependent on the operation of the institutions which are associated with the capital-accumulation process” (Chase-Dunn). But, the capitalist world-economy needs interstate competition to go on. A single world-empire could destroy the capitalist class because it would not be based on markets in which exchange occurs on the basis of competition. According to Polanyi a world-empire is a redistributive form of organization which overrides the interest of a capitalist class. “The state, and the system of competing states which compose the world policy, constitute the basic structural support for capitalist production relations.” (Chase-Dunn).
Capitalism as a mode of production gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital. A product will be only produced if it brings more money on the market as its production costs have been. The capitalist always wants to get the highest profit out of its product, what is called surplus value. According to Chase-Dunn this “capitalist mode of production exhibits a single logic in which both political-military power and the appropriation of surplus value through production and sale on the world market play an integrated role.” A state in the capitalist world-system can only be successful if it combines effective state power and a competitive advantage in production. It has to respond to the imperative of the endless accumulation of capital which generates a “need for constant technological change, a constant expansion of frontiers – geographical, psychological, intellectual, scientific.” (Wallerstein, 2004) Furthermore, the capitalist nature to exploit labor by the owners of the means of production to gain a high surplus-value leads to a struggle between the working-class and the capitalists which the state has to compensate. So, sovereign states set conditions for the capitalist entrepreneurs when they regulate the relationship between capitalists and workers. Furthermore, states create the rules concerning property rights within their states. They can decide, which parts of the economy are regulated and to what degree. Governments can monopolize economic processes and set conditions of taxation and subsidies within their territory, as they absorb market failures as pollution. With crossing border policies states set restrictions on imports and export to protect national companies from international competition. Moreover, economic powerful states can use their strength to force weaker states to open their markets for the more competitive products. Basically developed countries are setting the rules of the international trade system. Last but not least, the responsibility of states for the extent of, what Lane calls, “protection rents” endorse the central role of states in the world-economy. Protection rents are the difference of costs enterprises have to pay for protection compared to enterprises of other countries. On the one hand, enterprises pay for protection from disruption of violence in the country. On the other hand, states can use its force to establish and secure new markets for the domestic industry. “The use of violence […] is to be considered a productive activity, at least in some cases, and governments would have to be considered producers of a part of the total economic output even if they had no other function than the use and control of violence.” (Lane, 1987) According to Lane, states have been successful when they used force to create protection, as Portuguese did in Brazil, rather than states using force to plunder and to prevent trade of rivals, as the Portuguese did in the pepper trade with India, what lead to diminishing returns in the long-term.
So the role of states within the Modern World-System is the result of the economic policies of states in the interstate system.
The Modern World-System knows three economic zones: the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery. These three economic zones combine the same mode of production and the same division of labor but they differ in their availability. Whereas core countries feature capital-intensive production with high waged labor and its high technology production involves low labor exploitation and coercion, peripheral countries own labor-intensive production and low-waged labor and its low-technology production involves high labor exploitation and coercion. Semi-peripheral countries stand in between; they combine core-like and peripheral-like activities (Shannon, 1989). The status in the Modern World-System limits the countries in their opportunities because of peripheral exploitation. Whereas core-countries are forced to extent the market for their capitalist economy, peripheral-countries suffer from exploitation through the core and the semi-periphery. The Basis of peripheral exploitation is “unequal exchange” (Shannon, 1989). The reason for the “unequal exchange” is located in the process of exchange of low-wage products from the periphery for high-wage products from the core. Whereas the core receives cheap products from the periphery because of low waging the periphery has to pay relatively expensive products because of high wages in the core. This unequal exchange results in a general transfer of surplus to the core. The consequence is that core states even get stronger whereas weak states’ state-machineries decline (Shannon, 1989). Semi-peripheral states, in between, are also limited in their policies. In their attempt to ascend into the core and not slip into the periphery, they have to protect their markets from more competitive foreign products, while “trying to improve the efficiency of the firms inside so as to compete better in the world market” (Wallerstein, 2004)."
(https://www.grin.com/document/73251#)
How World-Systems Analysis differs from Marxism
Joshua Goldstein:
"A second major school to emerge in the current debate is rooted in a neo-Marxist framework. I call this school the world-system school (see fig. 6.1). Neo-Marxist approaches differ from more traditional Marxism in emphasizing core-periphery relations in the world system rather than just the most advanced (core) capitalist countries. Chase-Dunn and Rubinson (1979:295) write: In Marxist terminology the institutional constants of the modern world system are capitalist commodity production with expanded reproduction in the core, and primitive accumulation in the periphery in the context of the core-periphery division of labor and the state system. This is a departure from Marx's own understanding of the fully developed capitalist mode of production which, focusing on the core of the system, defined capitalism as synonymous with the wage system of labor exploitation. Bergesen (1980) refers to "class struggle on a world scale": The core-periphery division of labor and the process of unequal exchange are direct consequences of the class struggle between core and periphery... Since the sixteenth century the vast majority of the world's territory has been brought under colonial control. What we now call the periphery represents social formations and local modes of production that were either destroyed or significantly modified such that their productive activity came to be directed toward generating surplus value that was transferred... to the core (p. 124)."
(http://www.joshuagoldstein.com/jgcyc06.pdf)
History
Encyclopedia.com:
"World-system analysis arose during the 1970s, primarily through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein identifies four intellectual antecedents that emerged between 1945 and 1970 as promulgating the emergence of world-system theory:
(1) the study of Latin American history, contemporary politics, and foreign relations, from which arose the conceptualizations of core/periphery and dependency theory;
(2) the Marxian idea of an "Asiatic mode of production";
(3) the historical debate about the transition from feudalism to capitalism; and
(4) the scholarship of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of historiography."
Status
Christopher Chase-Dunn et al:
"The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994).
- The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of ‘‘advanced’’ economically developed and powerful states
dominating and exploiting ‘‘less developed’’ peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective.
- In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and
smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia.
- Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have
modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison."
(sci dash hub dot ru/ 10.1017/s0145553200012050)
Wallerstein 2.0
Frank Jacob:
"What is Immanuel Wallerstein’s legacy for the 21st century? Following the closure of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations that Wallerstein directed at SUNY Binghampton and the discontinuation in 2016 of Review, the journal he founded in 1976, this is an important question. World-systems theory or world-systems analysis, framed and used not only by Wallerstein, was and still is very much tied to his name. However, as Wallerstein 2.0 intends to show, it could be applied in a much broader sense to problems and questions that determine the 21st century.
After a short introduction to Wallerstein’s biography, his work, and his impact in different fields (pp. 7-32), the chapters in this (open-access) anthology offer different approaches to reading and interpreting Wallerstein’s theoretical ideas and thereby his interdisciplinary adaptability."
More information
* Article: World-System Theory after Andre Gunder Frank. By Albert Bergesen. Journal of World-Systems Research 21(1):147, August 2015
URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282390813_World-System_Theory_after_Andre_Gunder_Frank