Re: [Marxism] We all agree the world is round: Immanuel Wallerstein on the WSF in the YaleGlobal writeup

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Immanuel Wallerstein wrote:
> When the Forum moved from Brazil to India, the Indian organizing committee
> dropped the provision about parties. Still, the proscription against
> violence led to a split among the Indians. A small Maoist movement organized
> a counter-Forum, called Mumbai Resistance-2004, on grounds across the road
> from the WSF. And they denounced the WSF as a combination of Trotskyites,
> Social-Democrats, reformist mass organizations, NGO's financed by
> transnationals - in short, a stalking-horse for quietism and
> counter-revolution. They specifically attacked the concept of the open forum
> (merely a talk show, they said), the slogan (not "another world," but
> socialism as the objective, they said), and the financing of the WSF (the
> fact that some money came from the Ford Foundation).

It really amazes me to see Wallerstein setting himself up as some kind 
of arbiter on these questions.

Logos 1.1 - Winter 2002, 61

Immanuel Wallerstein's Planet
by Robert Fitch

Just a couple of blocks south from where the legendary literary cafes of 
the Boulevard St. Germaine de Pres intersect the ornate embassies that 
line the Boulevard Raspail, stands a squat, dark gray, steel and glass 
structure, with dozens of bicycles tethered at crazy angles across the 
front entrance. It’s the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, built in 1970 
by Fernand Braudel, France’s most revered modern historian, who led the 
celebrated Annales School during its years of greatest influence. Enter 
through the American-style revolving doors, take the elevator to the 
fourth floor, and you are in the offices of Braudel’s most influential 
disciple, the wildly controversial inventor of World Systems Theory, the 
former Africanist turned global historian, Immanuel Wallerstein.

It’s a fresh spring day in March. The wild chamomile is already blooming 
in the nearby Luxembourg gardens. And Wallerstein seems equally distant 
from the Grand Concourse in the Bronx where he grew up; from the 
semi-arctic winds still sweeping through his home base, the SUNY 
Binghamton campus in upstate New York. And from the innumerable 
controversies he’s stirred up by his efforts to replace the principal 
actors of conventional historiography—nations, states, peoples, ethnic 
groups, classes, cultures, civilizations—with a total concentration on 
the “dynamics of the world system.”

Wallerstein has recently taken on a new job: President of the 
International Sociological Association, having succeeded Enrique 
Cardoso, who has since moved on to become the President of Brazil. After 
being twice defeated for the Presidency of the American Sociological 
Association, Wallerstein won the top position in the world organization 
by canvassing the votes of third world sociologists. It’s from his Paris 
office, now, that Wallerstein takes care of his new Presidential 
responsibilities. As well as his nearly nonexistent duties at the 
Maison. “The Maison is really a teaching institution. But I can do what 
I want, I write the bill. If I want to do something I’ll lecture or hold 
a seminar. If I don’t, I won’t. It’s basically relaxed.” Essentially, 
the Maison provides an office and office support. And SUNY makes it all 
possible by paying Wallerstein over $145,000 to teach one class a year 
on two continents.

Nowadays, of course, the most highly prized scholars don’t exchange 
lecturing labor for monthly wages; they loan academic institutions their 
cultural capital and get back interest in the form of cash, perquisites 
and freedom from lecturing. One way to estimate the market value of 
Wallerstein’s cultural capital is to check the tables provided by the 
most recent five year SSCI Citation Index – which serves as a kind of 
S&P 500 for professorial stock. The more you’re cited, the higher your 
value. At roughly 200 citations a column Michel Foucault leads all the 
Cited with 22 columns; Jürgen Habermas follows with 20; and then Talcott 
Parsons with 18. Among the living English-speaking social scientists, 
anthropologist Clifford Geertz and Oxford’s Anthony Giddens both 
happened to have 13. And so does Wallerstein. But no other living 
American sociologist can match his total.

On the afternoon of my visit to the Maison, Wallerstein scans the 
morning mail which happens to bring letters from France’s most famous 
sociologists—Alain Touraine and Pierre Bourdieu—who invented the concept 
of cultural capital. Touraine, it turns out, will be participating in a 
twoday international conference in April, devoted to exploring the 
themes of Wallerstein’s work. It’s being sponsored jointly by Le Monde, 
L’Expansion, Le Nouvel Observateur and the Paribas Foundation (created 
by France’s most powerful investment bank formerly known as the Banque 
de Paris et des Pays bas). The sponsors bill him as Braudel’s successor. 
“With his resolutely interdisciplinary scientific approach,” the 
conference brochure reads, “we have invited him to interrogate the 
recent past to be able to understand the present and the future.” 
Speakers and commentators form an intellectual bouillabaisse of academic 
disciplines, countries, and ideologies: from the Dakar-based Maoist, 
Samir Amin, the author of Eurocentrism to the Wall Street based 
billionaire currency speculator George Soros. It was The Modern World 
System that catapulted him to a pre-eminent status among American 
sociologists. At the time, in 1974, Andre Gunder Frank, the dean of 
Latin American dependistas, briskly lifted aside the velvet ropes to 
permit Wallerstein’s fast-track entry into the pantheon of modern 
historiography, declaring The Modern World System an “instant classic.” 
The next year, The Modern World System won sociology’s highest award, 
the Pitriam Sorokin Prize. The review in Contemporary Sociology, written 
by a former student, Michael Hechter, proclaimed it “the most important 
theoretical statement about development since the time of Max Weber.”

full: http://www.logosjournal.com/winter_2002.pdf



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