The capitalist world-economy Essays by IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN Director, Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York at Binghamton CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS * & Editions de la Maison des Sciences de ' Homme ParisPUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA. 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de I'Homme 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75270 Paris Cedex 06 © Maison des Sciences de I'Homme and Cambridge University Press 1979 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without, the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1979 Reprinted 1979, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997 ‘Typeset in Baskerville A catalogue record for this book is available jrom the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 0-521-29358-8 paperback Transferred to digital printing 2002Contents Some reflections on history, the social sciences, and politics Acknowledgments I, The inequalities of core and periphery The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis Three paths of national development in sixteenth- century Europe The present state of the debate on world inequality Dependence in an interdependent world: the limited possil ‘ies of transformation within the capitalist world-economy Semiperipheral countries and the contemporary world crisis The rural economy in modern world society Modernization: requiescat in pace From feudalism to capitalism: transition or transitions? A world-system perspective on the social sciences The inequalities of class, race and ethnicity Social conflict in post-independence Black Africa: the concepts of race and status group reconsidered The two modes of ethnic consciousness: Soviet Central Asia in transition Class and class conflict in contemporary Africa American slavery and the capitalist world-economy Class formation in the capitalist world-economy page vii xiii 37 49 95 119 132 138 152 184 193 202 222vi Contents Ill. Political strategies 231 15 Old problems and new syntheses: the relation of revo- lutionary ideas and practices 231 16 Fanon and the revolutionary class 250 17. An historical perspective on the emergence of the new international order: economic, political, cultural aspects 269 Concluding essay 18 Class conflict in the capitalist world-economy 283 Index 295Part I The inequalities of core and periphery 1» The rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of production, the so-called ‘industrial revolution’, was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which defined this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. There were those who considered these economic developments and the concomitant changes in social organization to be some penultimate stage of world development whose final working out was but a matter of time. These included such diverse thinkers as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Weber, Durkheim. And then there were the critics, most notably Marx, who argued, if you will, that the nineteenth-century present was only an antepenultimate stage of development, that the capitalist world was to know a cataclysmic political revolution which would then lead in the fullness of time to a final societal form, in this case the classless society. One of the great strengths of Marxism was that, being an oppositional and hence critical doctrine, it called attention not merely to the contradictions of the system but to those of its ideologists, by appealing to the empirical evidence of historical reality which unmasked the irrelevancy of the models proposed for the explanation of the social world. The Marxist critics saw in abstracted models concrete rationalization, and they argued their case fundamentally by pointing to the failure of their 12 Inequalities of core and periphery opponents to analyze the social whole. As Lukacs put it, ‘it is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality’.! In the mid twentieth century, the dominant theory of develop- ment in the core countries of the capitalist world-economy has added little to the theorizing of the nineteenth-century progenitors of this mode of analysis, except to quantify the models and to abstract them still further, by adding on epicyclical codas to the models in order to account for ever further deviations from empirical expectations. What is wrong with such models has been shown many times over, and from many standpoints. I cite only one critic, a non-Marxist, Robert Nisbet, whose very cogent reflections on what he calls the ‘Western theory of development’ concludes with this summary: [We] turn to history and only to history if what we are seeking are the actual causes, sources, and conditions of overt changes of patterns and structures in society. Conventional wisdom to the contrary in modern sorial theory, we shall not find the explanation of change in those studies which are abstracted from history; whether these be studies of small groups in the social laboratory, group dynamics generally, staged experiments in social interaction, or mathematical analyses of so-called social systems. Nor will we find the sources of change in contemporary revivals of the comparative method with its ascending staircase of cultural similarities and differences plucked from all space and time.? Shall we then turn to the critical schools, in particular Marxism, to give us a better account of social reality? In principle yes; in practice there are many different, often contradictory, versions extant of ‘Marxism’. But what is more fundamental is the fact that in many countries Marxism is now the official state doctrine. Marxism is no longer exclusively an oppositional doctrine as it was in the nineteenth century. The social fate of official doctrines is that they suffer a constant social pressure towards dogmatism and apologia, difficult although by no means impossible to counteract, and that they thereby often fall into the same intellectual dead end of ahistorical model building. Here the critique of Fernand Braudel is most pertinent: 1. George Lukacs, ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg’, in History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1968), p. 27. 2. Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 302-3. I myself would exempt from this criticism the economic history literature.Rise and future demise of capitalism 3 Marxism is a whole collection of models. . .I shall protest..., more or less, not against the model, but rather against the use to which people have thought themselves entitled to put it. The genius of Marx, the secret of his enduring power, lies in his having been the first to construct true social models, starting out from the long term (la longue durée). These models have been fixed permanently in their simplicity; they have been given the force of law and they have been treated as ready-made, automatic explanations, applicable in all places to all societies. . .In this way has the creative power of the most powerful social analysis of the last century been shackled. It will be able to regain its strength and vitality only in the long term? Nothing illustrates the distortions of ahistorical models of social change better than the dilemmas to which the concept of stages gives rise. If we are to deal with social transformations over long historical time (Braudel’s ‘the long term’), and if we are to give an explanation of both continuity and transformation, then we must logically divide the long term into segments in order to observe the structural changes from time A to time B. These segments are however not discrete but continuous in reality; ergo they are ‘stages’ in the ‘development’ of a social structure, a development which we determine however not a priori but a posteriori. That is, we cannot predict the future concretely, but we can predict the past. The crucial issue when comparing ‘stages’ is to determine the units of which the ‘stages’ are synchronic portraits (or ‘ideal types’, if you will). And the fundamental error of ahistorical social science (including ahistorical versions of Marxism) is to reify parts of the totality into such units and then to compare these reified structures. For example, we may take modes of disposition of agricultural production, and term them subsistence cropping and cash crop- ping. We may then see these as entities which are ‘stages’ of a development. We may talk about decisions of groups of peasants to shift from one to the other. We may describe other partial entities, such as states, as having within them two separate ‘economies’, each based on a different mode of disposition of agricultural production. If we take each of these successive steps, all of which are false steps, we will end up with the misleading concept of the ‘dual economy’ as have many liberal economists dealing with the so-called underdeveloped countries of the world. 3. Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’, in Peter Burke (ed.), Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 38-9.