Jim Blaut on world systems analysis

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(From the late Jim Blaut's regrettably out-of-print "The National
Question". Sharp readers will notice a strong affinity between
Wallerstein's world systems perspective and the one put forward by
Hardt-Negri in "Empire")

A second national-states-are-out-of-date position is associated with
metaphysical neo-Marxists like Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein,
and their associates at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of
Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, of the State
University of New York. This position or family of related positions,
mystifies, or re-mystifies, capitalism, so that it be something
different from and greater in scale than all the merely em processes
taking place on the earth's surface.

Wallerstein's group employs what it calls 'world system analysis'. This
is a form of neo-Marxism distinguished --I employ caricature here, but
not unfairly so-- by its insistence that the capitalist world system, at
the global scale, determines all processes, such as politics, and all
part-regions, such as states. This is very close to pure Hegelian
holism. The capitalist world-system is not defined by its parts and
their interrelations. Rather, this system is something greater than
parts and relations, and it determines their nature, behaviour, and
historical evolution. 'It' is not empirically identified, and thus
closely resembles Hegel's undefinable 'world spirit' (and other
undiscoverable entities of romantic philosophy, like the 'life force').
Marx's critique of Hegel's mystical and holistic theory of the state as
might serve also as a critique of the metaphysics of 'world-system analysis'

In any event, the 'world-system' school puts forward some empirical
propositions which supposedly derive from the higher 'world-system'
processes and which have concrete and troublesome meaning in the real
world, not least for national liberation struggles. First, since the
capitalist world system maintains in some mysterious way a hegemonic
control of political processes throughout the world, no state exists
outside its sphere of control, and no state in the entire therefore, is
really socialist. Second, sovereignty is an illusion, since the
overarching world system controls all states. Third, decolonization did
no result from liberation movements, nor these from the peculiarities of
colonial oppression and superexploitation; rather, decolonization
occurred simply when the capitalist world-system had entered a cyclic
phase -- Wallerstein believes firmly in repetitive historical cycles -
in which 'informal empire' seemed more desirable than colonies. Fourth,
and by the same token, all anticolonial revolutions, without exception,
have failed to achieve fundamental social change. And finally, as of
summing-up of all of the foregoing, the state is not of fundamental
importance and struggles for state-sovereignty are somewhat frivolous.

A related position is Giovanni Arrighi's peculiar 'geometry' of world
processes under capitalism. Arrighi is an admitted Kantian, and he
believes that the basic forces determining the historical trajectory of
the modern world are ultimately spatial, in an absolutist, Newtonian or
Kantian sense. Thus he deduces what he calls the 'crisis of the
nation-state', the latter seen as a mere spatial cell in the geometry of
the world. In this geometry, scalar forces like imperialism -- Hobson's
concept, not Lenin's, which Arrighi dismisses - are seen as acting
independently of other scalar forces like capitalism. The 'crisis of the
nation-state' derives from these worldscale absolute-spatial forces,
which seem likely soon to erase states from the geometrician's
blackboard. In sum, these are two forms of neo-Marxism which postulate
not empirically observable processes, but world-embracing metaphysical
forces, as the explanation for what one theorist (Arrighi) believes to
be the decline of the national state and the other (Wallerstein) the
insignificance of the state and of struggles to control it.

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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