Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Acknowledgments ix
Index 287
This volume has its origins in the 2 4 t h Annual Conference of the Political
E c o n o m y of the World-System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological
Association, held at Boston College on March 24 and 2 5 , 2 0 0 0 . The con-
tributors to the volume have engaged in serious thinking about processes,
relations, and trends that are at the core of world-systems analysis, or those
that should gain greater centrality in the perspective. They have done so
through rigorous and committed analyses of the issues explored and
through cooperation and camaraderie throughout the entire process, from
the organization of every detail for the conference in Boston, to the pains-
taking editorial process leading to the publication of the volume. Their
criticism of conservative lines of thought as distorters of history, their ef-
forts to improve world-system analysis through conceptual refinement, and
the erasure of borders with other perspectives with which it shares impor-
tant commonalities constitute the Confucian thread of this volume. Other
than that, this w o r k is far from reflecting uncritical linearity in the course
of thought. Rather, intellectual cooperation and overlapping have gone
hand in hand with the elaboration of divergent points of view on issues
pertaining to antisystemic movements, the w a y s through which world-
systems analysis should incorporate alternative perspectives, and the use-
fulness of such combination for advancing our knowledge on the most
general processes and the subprocesses of the world-system. We hope that
this volume will represent an important building bloc for further advancing
our understanding of these processes. We also hope that our graduate stu-
dents, seasoned scholars and intellectuals all, in the Gramscian sense, will
find the insightful chapters presented here useful for their respective aca-
demic endeavors and emancipatory projects.
X Acknowledgments
T H E M Y T H O F OBJECTTVTST A N D UNIVERSALIST
KNOWLEDGES
It also s h o w s that there have been very powerful 'localizing' forces in the
ways things African have been classified and ranked."
The process of "Othering" peoples has operated through a set of op-
positions such as the West and the Rest, civilized and savage, intelligent
and stupid, hardworking and lazy, superior and inferior, masculine and
feminine, pure and impure, clean and dirty, and so o n . There are world-
systemic historical/structural processes that constitute these narratives,
which are schematically designated as the relationship between European
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xvii
THE M Y T H OF DECOLONIZATION
conceptual route for the analysis of these issues without falling for the
seductive "postcolonial" myth (Quijano 1 9 9 1 , 1 9 9 3 , 1 9 9 8 ) . Since its for-
mation in the sixteenth century, that is, for over 4 5 0 years ( 1 4 9 2 - 1 9 4 5 ) ,
the modern/colonial capitalist world-system enacted colonialism as the
dominant form of core-periphery relationships (Wallerstein 1 9 7 4 ; M i g n o l o
1 9 9 5 ) . Colonialism w a s central to the formation of an international divi-
sion of labor and an inter-state system structured into core, peripheries,
and semi-peripheries. It w a s also central for the formation of a hegemonic
Eurocentric global culture that shaped values, knowledge production,
status, concept of beauty, education, art, politics, and so on. The formation
of an international division of labor, as mentioned before, w a s contem-
poraneous with the formation of global racial/ethnic hierarchies but also
gender and sexual hierarchies (Grosfoguel 2 0 0 2 ) . Thus, the European c o -
lonial expansion not only formed a capitalist world-system, where capitalist
accumulation became the driving force of the system, but it also embodied
the simultaneous formation of a global hierarchy of European/non-
European, male/female, and heterosexual/homosexual with its respective
geoculture of racism, sexism, and h o m o p h o b i a (ibid.). To be sure, the con-
temporary dilemma of w h i c h comes first, capitalist accumulation or gender/
sexual/racial oppression, is a false dilemma. Historically, these hierarchies
have gone hand in hand with their corresponding systems of dominance.
These forms of oppression, under the scope of Occidentalism, are not
merely instrumental to, but constitutive of capitalist accumulation processes
on a world scale. Sexual, gender, and racial hierarchies are intertwined with
capitalist accumulation hierarchies in the world-system. The European c o -
lonial expansion w a s predominantly a European-capitalist-heterosexual-
male expansion. Wherever Europeans colonized, they imposed the values,
hierarchical order, and privileges corresponding to their particular sexual,
gender, class, and racial/ethnic loci. The particular values of European-
capitalist-heterosexual-males were made the "universal truth," "world
rationality," and "global c o m m o n sense" of the modern/colonial world-
system through colonialism.
Core-periphery inequalities and asymmetries inherent to the interna-
tional division of labor; the inter-state system; the racial/ethnic, gender, and
sexual hierarchies; and Eurocentric culture/knowledge production have not
1
been significantly altered following the end of colonial administrations .
This does not mean, however, that systems of hegemonies and power re-
gimes informed by such continuity manifest exclusively between the core
and the periphery, nor that coloniality of power is the only logic shaping
power relations. W h a t we are trying to emphasize, and emphasis implies
simplification for the purpose of argumentation, is the subjacent continuity
that characterizes capitalist, cultural, and geopolitical relations on a global
scale after the collapse of "global colonialism" in the p o s t - 1 9 4 5 era. Anibal
Quijano (2000) captures such continuity in his concept of "global coloni-
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxi
ality." The notion points out that core states in the international division
of labor continue to be located primarily in Western Europe and/or coun-
tries with predominantly European-descendant populations, while the pe-
ripheral zones are mainly populated by non-European people. The only
exception to the rule is Japan, which is the only non-European country in
the core of the capitalist world-economy. However, as is widely acknowl-
edged in world-systems analysis, Japan w a s never colonized or peripher-
alized by the West and participated in the West's colonial expansion by
building its o w n modern/colonial empire.
The historical precondition for the emergence of "global coloniality" is
"global colonialism." Without 4 5 0 years of "global colonialism" there
would be no "global coloniality" today. The point is that global inequal-
ities and asymmetries are still informed by the strongholds of the Eurocen-
tric imaginary, and shaped by the continuities of colonial relations on a
world scale without the existence of colonial administrations. Production
has reached unprecedented decentralization levels, and global financial
flows, ignited by n e w technological paradigms, play a fundamental role in
the transfer of wealth. H o w e v e r , these processes have also gone hand in
hand with the hyper-concentration and centralization of capital and wealth
in core states, and within them in global cities (Sassen 1 9 9 1 ) , and with the
pervasive role of labor in the process of value making (Castells 2 0 0 0 ) . The
transfer of surplus value from periphery to core, from non-Europe to Eu-
rope/Euro-America, has been instrumental in these dynamics. The subor-
dination and exploitation of the periphery continues to be a central axis of
the capitalist world-economy. Important changes have occurred, however.
On the one hand, new disciplinary institutions of global capitalism, such
as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade
Organization, have replaced colonial administrations in the deployment of
direct economic intervention in the periphery. The global media also play
an important role in the diffusion of values, consumption habits, and sys-
tems of beliefs that reinforce the racial/ethnic/gender/sexual global hierar-
chies. Moreover, core-controlled military organizations such as the N o r t h
Atlantic Treaty Organization ( N A T O ) and "virtual wars" are increasingly
employed as mechanisms of punishment and control of subordinated p o p -
ulations.
T h o m a s Reifer's contribution (Chapter 1) is crucial for the understanding
of the historical connections between the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Prot-
estant) establishment, U.S. hegemony, and the resurgence of high finance
and heavy industry in the late twentieth century. Reifer s h o w s h o w capi-
talist accumulation has been entangled with militarism and White suprem-
acy. Reifer argues that the concept of "the geopolitical e c o n o m y " "provides
the real missing link between state and capital, capital accumulation, social
classes, and geopolitics, as well as structure and agency, that has haunted
historical sociology. Corporate lawyers, investment bankers and allied in-
xxii Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies
dustrialists played key roles in America's wars, from World War I to the
present, through groups like the N S L and the Cold War Committee on the
Present Danger." In his view, these corporate groups constitute the bour-
geoisie's "organic intellectuals" of the capitalist world-system.
The imbrications of gender inequality with racial/ethnic hierarchies also
play an important role in shaping the n e w forms adopted by the interna-
tional division of labor. Recruitment practices, and externally induced p o -
litical turmoil have given w a y to the "free" mobility of labor to the core,
sometimes under extreme xenophobic situations that have led to attempts
at blocking immigrants' access to social services and citizenship rights.
Non-European w o m e n constitute the main source of cheap labor for mul-
tinational corporations. The rapid expansion of the Export Processing
Z o n e s in Northern M e x i c o , the Dominican Republic, southern China, M a -
laysia, India, and Central America is part of this trend. From a subaltern
perspective, contemporary academic debates in terms of w h a t determines
in the last instance the "economy" or the "geoculture" are also c h i c k e n -
egg dilemmas. The unprecedented use of "Third World" labor in core so-
cieties is another important feature of the world-economy.
The postwar processes of nation building in the vast majority of the
periphery of the capitalist world-economy are still informed by the colonial
legacies and by the colonial/racial culture built during centuries of Euro-
pean colonial expansion. The Eurocentric colonial culture as an ideology
is not geographically limited to Europe, but rather constitutes the geocul-
ture and imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system. Hence, modernity
is always constituted by coloniality. H o w e v e r appealing the notion "post-
colonial" may be, it proves to be empirically inadequate. Colonial relations
are not merely an institutional phenomenon. Current evidence on forms of
political and cultural domination and economic exploitation suggest that
the coloniality of power is not historically limited to the period of colonial
rule. Despite the rhetoric of their power brokers, the n e w institutions of
global dominance that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century
are not meant to promote a "postcolonial" order based on democracy,
development, and "self-determination" in the periphery, but have rather
functioned as strongholds of the long-lasting colonial imaginaries, identi-
ties, and symbols upon which global capitalism has erected its system of
domination and exploitation since the sixteenth century. The myth that we,
live in a decolonized world needs to be challenged since it has crucial p o -
litical implications in terms of h o w we conceive social change, struggles
against inequality, scientific disciplines, knowledge production, Utopian
thinking, democracy, and decolonization itself.
THE M Y T H OF DEVELOPMENT
the periphery in national state policies with the objective of achieving de-
velopment by means of overlooking the global political-economic relations
of inequality and the global racial-ethnic hierarchy linked to the former
that stand in the w a y of "national development." Ultimately, the fallacy of
"national development" w a s crucial to concealing the persistence of global
colonial relations in the "postcolonial" world-system. W h e n antisystemic
movements were channeled through the path of taking over the nation-
state, they reproduced the old colonial hierarchies disguised as "postcolo-
nial" under the assumptions that the elimination of a colonial
administration w a s enough to eradicate colonial relations, and that the
country in question could "nationally develop" without foreign interven-
tion. The idea about the possibility of "national development" without
global structural changes is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth cen-
tury. In Chapter 3, Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz, Angela Stach, David
Consiglio, and Timothy Patrick M o r a n tear d o w n the developmentalist il-
lusion with an analysis of inequality trends throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. Their w o r k relied on a painstaking methodological procedure with
which they question the accuracy of adjusting income data for purchasing
power parities, which gives the false impression that the levels of inequality
have declined in recent decades. They conclude that income inequality has
grown in recent decades to the point that "by the m i d - 1 9 9 0 s world in-
equalities were at their highest recorded level over the past t w o centuries."
Their w o r k confirms that none of the three variants (Communist move-
ments, social-democratic movements, and national liberation movements)
through which the "Old Left" seized p o w e r throughout the twentieth cen-
tury (Wallerstein 1 9 9 5 ) altered the fundamental dynamics of world income
inequality. The global income inequality trend, the authors sustain, will be
reduced only by the implementation of t w o sets of reform: (1) a massive
transfer of resources from wealthy to poor countries and (2) the elimination
of restrictions to labor mobility "designed to enhance the bargaining power
of the poor by opening up markets that w o u l d truly make a difference in
the lives of the poor." They do not place so much hope, however, in actual
implementation of such reforms.
The developmentalist fallacy affected the scope of antisystemic move-
ments. Instead of fighting the systems of oppression at all levels, within and
beyond the structures of the nation-state, major progressive groups ex-
hausted political efforts in the administration of the nation-state following
a developmentalist illusion. Neither socialist and social-democratic devel-
opmental attempts nor national liberation movements could escape its bi-
zarre results (Wallerstein 1 9 9 5 ) . Enchanted by the developmentalist
promise, "Third World" leaders believed that by taking over the nation-
state, they could achieve "real" sovereignty and development and reduce
the inequality gap between their economies and the economies of the center.
Radical social movements became bureaucratized and metamorphosed into
xxvi Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies
conservative forces once they took over the state apparatus and focused on
the goal of "development." In the name of "national development" both
"socialist" and "capitalist" regimes justified oppression, including flagrant
repression of labor movements and violations of labor rights. They evoked
endless sacrifices and harsh austerity measures toward the working classes
and paved the w a y for their submission to global capitalism while there
w a s a process of elite reaccommodation, which under socialist regimes
adopted the form of "the n e w class." It is increasingly acknowledged that
the "socialist" regimes based their structure in state capitalist forms of pro-
duction and consequently tended to maximize state power, while the "cap-
italist" regimes tried to imitate mechanisms employed in the center for the
maximization of profits. They were different forms of productive organi-
zation within a capitalist world-system organized around a single interna-
tional division of labor (Wallerstein 1 9 7 9 ) . However, the promised land of
development remained an illusion. Paradoxically, despite the revolutionary
jargon and developmentalist rhetoric of socialist movements in the periph-
ery, they did not lead to significant changes in the peripheral locations in
the international division of labor. Cuba, which has experienced one of the
most radical revolutions of all "Third World" revolutions, constitutes per-
haps one of the saddest cases because of the dramatic detachment that the
radical "sovereignty" and "developmentalist" discourses have had with the
needs and changing expectations of the population on the one hand, and
world-systemic forces, on the other. The island's growing dependence on
U.S. labor markets through the escalating dependence of thousands of Cu-
ban households on the migradollars sent by relatives residing in the United
States, the de facto dollarization of the Cuban e c o n o m y after the collapse
of the Soviet bloc, and unfulfilled labor, w o m e n ' s , and ethnic minority
expectations or the steady reversal of some of the previous achievements
in these directions indicate that taking over the state apparatus combined
with a developmentalist agenda has represented, at best, an unpaved route
toward emancipation.
The recent Zapatista armed struggle in Chiapas represents an effort to
provide an alternative response to the failure of national liberation and
socialist movements in the twentieth century. The Zapatistas are usually
portrayed as the first post-developmentalist, post-national, and postcolonial
guerrilla movement, critical of the traditional guerrilla movements in the
region as a w a y out of oppression. They have challenged global capitalism
and global coloniality. They decentered the struggle from the goal of ad-
ministration of the nation-state and refocused the struggle toward a global
strategy through transnational forms of agency, including the use of the
Internet, against modern/colonial capitalist forms of exploitation. We do
not k n o w the results of this struggle yet, but so far they have been quite
successful in challenging the old coloniality of power of the M e x i c a n state
without falling into the temptation of administrating the nation-state. In
Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies xxvii
(IN)CONCLUSION
NOTE
1. Bode (1979), cited and further analyzed in van der Pijl, Transnational Classes
and International Relations. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
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The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?
Immanuel Wallerstein
In the middle of the twentieth century, Arthur Koestler wrote a novel about
the Soviet regime and its s h o w trials, which he entitled Darkness at Noon.
I w o u l d like to take this as my metaphor for the entire twentieth century,
not just the Soviet regime. But at the same time, the century w a s in many
ways also "Bright Sun at Midnight." Indeed, the w a y that we think about
this century, so difficult to assess, has depended very much on the place
from which and the m o m e n t at which we observe it. We have been on
something of a roller-coaster ride. We should remember that roller-coaster
rides end in one of t w o ways. Usually, they return to their starting point,
more or less, although the riders may have been either exhilarated or very
frightened. But sometimes they derail.
Henry Luce called the twentieth century "the American century." He was
unquestionably right, although this is only part of the story. The rise of the
United States to hegemony in the world-system started circa 1 8 7 0 in the
w a k e of the beginning of the decline of the United Kingdom from its erst-
while heights. The United States and Germany competed with each other
as contenders for the succession to the United Kingdom. W h a t happened
is well k n o w n and straightforward. Both the United States and Germany
greatly expanded their industrial base between 1 8 7 0 and 1 9 1 4 , both sur-
passing Great Britain. One, however, w a s a sea/air power, and the other a
land power. Their lines of economic expansion were correspondingly dif-
ferent, as w a s the nature of their military investment. The United States
was allied economically and politically with the declining erstwhile hege-
monic power, Great Britain. Eventually, there were the t w o world wars,
which one can best think of as a single "thirty years' war," essentially be-
xxxii The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?
tween the United States and Germany to determine hegemony in the world-
system.
Germany tried the path of transforming the world-system into a world-
empire, what they called a tausendjahriges Reich. The path of imperial
conquest has never w o r k e d as a viable path to dominance within the frame-
w o r k of the capitalist world-economy, as N a p o l e o n had previously learned.
The world-imperial thrust has the short-term advantage of its military vigor
and precipitateness. It has the middle-term disadvantage of being very ex-
pensive and uniting all the opposition forces. As the constitutional and
quasi-liberal monarchy of Great Britain had rallied autocratic, tsarist
Russia against N a p o l e o n , so the quasi-liberal representative republic of the
United States rallied the Stalinist Soviet U n i o n against Hitler, or, rather,
both N a p o l e o n and Hitler did g o o d jobs in uniting the t w o ends of the
European land mass against the voracious power structure located between
them.
H o w shall we assess the consequences of this struggle? Let us start with
the material outcome. In 1 9 4 5 , after incredibly destructive warfare every-
where on the European continent and similarly destructive warfare in East
Asiadestructive in terms both of lives and of infrastructurethe United
States w a s the only major industrial power to emerge unscathed e c o n o m -
ically, even strengthened as the result of wartime buildup. For several years
after 1 9 4 5 , there w a s actual hunger in all the other previously economically
advanced regions, and in any case there w a s a difficult process of basic
reconstruction of these zones.
It w a s quite easy in such a situation for U.S. industries to dominate the
world market. Their major problem initially w a s not t o o many competitive
sellers but t o o little effective demand, t w o few buyers worldwide because
of the decline of purchasing power in Western Europe and East Asia. This
required more than relief; it required reconstruction. H o w e v e r profitable
such reconstruction w o u l d be for U.S. industry, it w a s costly from the point
of view of U.S. taxpayers. Meeting the short-run costs posed an internal
political problem for the U.S. government.
Meanwhile, there seemed to be a political-military problem as well. The
U.S.S.R., despite the destruction, l o o m e d large as a military power, occu-
pying half of Europe. It proclaimed itself a socialist state with a theoretical
mission to lead the w h o l e world to socialism (and then, in theory again, to
Communism). Between 1 9 4 5 and 1 9 4 8 , so-called popular democracies, un-
der the aegis of the Communist Party, were put into place, one by one, in
the zones where the Red Army w a s to be found at the end of World War
II. By 1 9 4 6 , Winston Churchill spoke of an "Iron Curtain" that had fallen
on Europe from Stettin to Trieste.
In addition, in the immediate p o s t - 1 9 4 5 years, Communist parties
s h o w e d themselves to be extremely strong in a large number of European
countries. We tend to forget today that Communist parties w o n 2 5 - 4 0 %
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon? xxxiii
of the vote in the early postwar elections in France, Italy, Belgium, Finland,
and Czechoslovakiathe result both of their previous strength in the in-
terwar years and of their wartime role in animating a g o o d part of the
resistance against Nazism/fascism. The same w a s true in Asia. In China,
the Communist Party w a s marching on Shanghai against a Nationalist gov-
ernment that had lost its legitimacy. Communist parties and/or guerrillas
were remarkably strong as well in Japan, the Philippines, Indochina, and
the D u t c h East Indies and not negligible elsewhere.
Communist movements had, as the French say, le vent en poupe. They
claimed that history w a s on their side, and they acted as though they be-
lieved it. So did a lot of others believe it, ranging from conservative move-
ments to center-left movements, most particularly, the majority of the social
democrats. These others were afraid that, in a few years, their countries,
too, w o u l d become popular democracies. And they didn't wish this to hap-
pen. M o r e emphatically, they were ready to resist actively w h a t n o w w a s
rhetorically called a Communist menace to the free world.
In the last 30 years, there has been a large amount of revisionist histo-
riography, coming from both the left and the right. The left revisionists
have tended to claim that the so-called Communist menace w a s a bogey-
man, erected by the U.S. government and world right forces, both to ensure
U.S. hegemony in the world-system and to put d o w n (or at least limit) the
strength of left and workers' movements in the Western liberal states. The
right-wing revisionists have tended to claim, especially since the availability
of Soviet documents after 1 9 8 9 , that there w a s indeed a worldwide network
of spies for the Soviet Union, which did indeed have every intention of
subverting non-Communist states and transforming them into popular de-
mocracies.
The fact is that both the left and the right historiographical revisionists
are probably largely right in their empirical assertions and fundamentally
wrong in their historical interpretation. No doubt, both sides asserted both
publicly and even more in private w h a t the revisionists said they had as-
serted. Probably, most individuals in the key agencies of each side believed
the rhetoric, or at least believed much of it. No doubt, t o o , both sides
engaged in actions that went in the direction of carrying out the rhetoric,
and no doubt finally, both sides w o u l d have been delighted to see the other
side collapse and were for the most part even hoping for it.
Still we need a little sangfroid and a little realpolitik in our appreciation
of what really w e n t on. It seems clear, in retrospect, that the Cold War
was a highly restrained, carefully constructed and monitored exercise that
never got out of hand and never led to the world war of which everyone
was afraid. I have called it a minuet. Furthermore, in retrospect, nothing
much happened, in the sense that the boundary lines as of 1 9 8 9 were pretty
much the boundary lines as of 1 9 4 5 , and there w a s in the end neither Soviet
aggression in Western Europe nor U.S. "rollback" in Eastern Europe. Fur-
xxxiv The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?
thermore, there were many points at which each side showed restraint
above and beyond the call of rhetoric. Of course, we can say that none of
this was the intent, merely the result of a stalemate, and to some extent
that may be true. Still, stalemates are abetted by lassitudes that result from
tacit intents.
Such a historical scenario calls for caution in assessing the motives and
the priorities of each side. Let us look at t w o code words: Yalta and con-
tainment. Yalta w a s the name of a meeting of the heads of state of the
United States, the U.S.S.R., and Great Britain in February 1 9 4 5 . Yalta os-
tensibly fixed the boundaries of the prospective postwar garrisoning of
troops and therefore of geopolitical influence, as well as the modalities of
constituting governments in liberated countries. Containment w a s a doc-
trine invented by George Kennan a few years later. Kennan, speaking for
himself but indirectly for the United States establishment, advocated just
that, containment by the United States of the Soviet U n i o n n o t , however,
containment in place of w e l c o m e but containment in place of rollback, a
cold war that w o u l d not and should not become a hot one. Before John
Foster Dulles became secretary of state under Eisenhower in 1 9 5 3 , he had
advocated, against Kennan, rollback. But, once in power, Dulles in fact
practiced containment (most notably in 1 9 5 6 in relation to the Hungarian
Revolution), and rollback w a s relegated to the discourse of marginal pol-
iticians.
W h a t Yalta/containment achieved ( w h o will ever k n o w the inner motives
of all the actors?) is quite clear. T h e Soviet Union had a zone under its
absolute control (most of w h a t we call East and Central Europe). The
United States claimed all the rest of the world. The United States never
interfered in the Soviet zone (except by propaganda). See U.S. actions (or
rather inaction) in 1 9 5 3 , 1 9 5 6 , 1 9 6 8 , and 1 9 8 1 in response to various
versions of what later came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrinethe right
claimed by the U.S.S.R. to maintain forcibly within its bloc any state that
w a s part of it. On the other hand, the U.S.S.R. never really interfered in
any zone outside its sphere with more than political propaganda and a little
money, with the sole serious exception of Afghanistan (a big mistake, as
they were to learn). To be sure, some countries ignored this nice bilateral
U.S.-Soviet arrangement, and we will come to that.
What had Yalta to do with the issue of U.S. world-economic priorities
in the immediate postwar period? As we have said, the United States needed
to create world effective demand; however, the United States did not have
unlimited m o n e y with which to do that. In the allocation of its resources,
the United States gave priority to Western Europe for both economic and
political reasons. The result w a s the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, let
us nonetheless remember, w a s offered by Marshall to all the allies. Did the
United States really w a n t the Soviet Union to accept? I doubt it very much,
The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon? xxxv
antisystemic movements, all politically weak, evolved their strategy for so-
cial transformation, the famous two-step plan: first, mobilize to achieve
state power in each state; then use state power to transform society. This
was the strategy adopted by the Marxists in the name of the workers'
movement. This w a s the strategy adopted by the political nationalists. This
was even the strategy adopted by the w o m e n ' s movements as well as move-
ments of so-called minorities insofar as they concentrated on suffrage and
other political rights. In 1 9 0 0 , this strategy seemed the only plausible road
for these movements, and probably it was. It certainly seemed to be a
difficult road. By the 1 9 6 0 s , the mobilizations had achieved step one all
over the world. The antisystemic movements were in power, or at least
partial power, almost everywhere. Step t w o , transforming society, could
n o w be undertaken, and its results could be assessed. The militants and the
masses ultimately found the results to be so far b e l o w their expectations
that they came to vent their disillusionment u p o n the movements them-
selves and their leaders, first in the 1 9 6 8 world revolution and then in the
follow-up of the next three decades.
The t w o twentieth-century trends became conjoined in the last decades
of the century. The collapse of the Communisms in 1 9 8 9 - 1 9 9 1 w a s the
climax of the process of disillusionment that had surfaced in 1 9 6 8 . It w a s ,
however, also and simultaneously the knell of U.S. global power, removing
its political underpinnings in t w o w a y s . On the one hand, it ended the
political justification for a continuing subordination to U.S. leadership of
its t w o main economic rivals, a n o w revitalized Western Europe and Japan.
On the other hand, it ended the constraints that the antisystemic move-
ments had placed on mass political activity, which they had been chan-
neling and in reality largely depoliticizing. So, we can say that, in 2 0 0 0 by
comparison with 1 9 0 0 , the Pan-European world w a s actually much weaker
geopolitically and culturally, but the rest of the world had spent the am-
munition that it had mobilized and w a s wallowing in economic and polit-
ical distress without the certainty that it had once had, that history w a s on
its side. Hence, darkness at n o o n for both the Pan-European world and the
rest of the world, after a long period (especially 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 7 0 ) of bright sun
at midnight.
In this story that I am telling, I have not mentioned the Nazi/fascist
onslaught in the interwar years or the so-called ethnic purifications that we
have been undergoing of late or the Gulag horrors of the Communist re-
gimes (but, of course, also of many other regimes). Are they not important?
Yes, of course, in the sense that horrendous suffering is always important
and always morally repugnant. But h o w do we assess, first, the causes of
these horrors and, second, the trajectory? The dominant centrist myth is
that these horrors were caused by ideological presumption and collective
social deviance from the moderate, steady path laid out for the world-
system by those w h o had the most power in it. Auschwitz is said to have
xxxviii The Twentieth Century: Darkness at Noon?
NOTES
1. See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., The Age of Tran-
sition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025 (London: Zed Books, 1996).
See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-
first Century (New York: New Press, 1998).
2. "Wie Lasalle sagte, ist und bleibt die revolutionarste Tat, immer das laut zu
sagen, was ist."
Parti
NOTES
1. See Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, coords., The Age of Tran-
sition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945-2025 (London: Zed Books, 1996).
See also Immanuel Wallerstein, Utopistics, or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-
first Century (New York: New Press, 1998).
2. "Wie Lasalle sagte, ist und bleibt die revolutionarste Tat, immer das laut zu
sagen, was ist."
Parti
INTRODUCTION
POLANYI'S D O U B L E M O V E M E N T : A GEOPOLITICAL
ECONOMY
Karl Polanyi's (1944) enduring achievement was his rooting of the col-
lapse of nineteenth-century civilization in the double movement of the ex-
pansion of the self-regulating market and countermovements for the
self-protection of society. The hallmark of economic liberalismthen as
todaywas the belief in the self-regulating market mechanism. The leaders
of the countermovement, in contrast, embraced various forms of social
imperialism, restrictive associations, cartels, and/or state intervention as
mechanisms of self-protection against the unregulated market mechanism.
4 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
financial market are not comparable to those of any other country" (Stein-
herr 1998: 21).
American alliance of World War I, not to mention the House's role as the
key intermediary between U.S. war production, finance, and the allies (see
kynaston 1995: 2 7 0 - 2 7 1 ; see also Tansill 1938). This was the second ma-
ior act in this ongoing transfer of world money and power from England
to the United States.
Moreover, the military setbacks and humiliations that Britain endured in
us ultimately victorious war, the English equivalent of the U.S. Civil or
''ietnam War, played a major role in launching the war preparedness move-
ment in England and the dominions, led by disciples of Rhodes and Milner
who went on to form the Round Table movement (Reifer 2000). Here,
\nglo-Saxon elites, through their quasi-Cobdenite peace societies, the in-
-srnational arbitration movement that emanated from them, and the war
preparedness movement into which they flowed, redoubled their efforts to
create a Peace of the Anglo-Saxons, as one social imperialist war prepar-
.dness tract was titled.
This Anglo-American liberal civilian militarism, led by the Wall Street-
city of London, Oxbridge-Ivy League establishment, allied industrialists,
ind warrior-statesmen, was part and parcel of the globalization of Anglo-
Vmerican business and military power coming with the turn toward over-
seas imperialism in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, upper
classes led the way in these efforts, forming the Plattsburg national pre-
paredness movementin which businessmen's camps trained tens of
thousands of the corporate upper class and employees for warand the
National Security League (NSL) in 1 9 1 3 - 1 9 1 4 . As with the House of Mor-
gan-sponsored Navy League, Plattsburg and the National Security League
were modeled after and coordinated with their counterparts in England and
the British dominions. The war preparedness movement, which helped suc-
cessfully pressure the United States into entering the war, was a true awak-
ening for the country's emerging corporate power elite.
This movement was led by the WASP establishment, both old money
and corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and allied industrialists from
the new multinationals. These men brought the corporate consolidation of
finance and industry at century's turn, replete with repression of workers
at home and the expansion of American military power and business en-
terprises abroad. The movement was run in part out of America's private
clubs, notably the Harvard, Yale, and Bankers' Clubs of N e w York City,
as was the war preparedness drive before World War II. The effort was,
above all, a House of Morgan operation, allied with Teddy Roosevelt Re-
publicans, former steel/naval producer Andrew Carnegie, and men from his
sndowment, including those U.S. legalists w h o laid the foundations for U.S.
hegemony after World War II (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) .
Leading members of the Anglo-American establishment, such as corpo-
rate counsels Richard Olney and Philander Knox, famous for their repres-
sion of the Debs and Homestead/Carnegie Steel rebellions and the dollar
8 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
200 to 300 individuals, of whom the 74 richest called the tune. As usual, there was
a small group at the top. These people were all interrelated or connected in various
ways, by marriage or business association, to each othereffectively forming lob-
bies. .. . like a mighty clan, with a network of marriages and old or new blood ties.
To my mind, this is simply one more example of the iron law of minority control,
that structural concentration of capitalist activity, (emphasis added)
Leading men of the NSL, Plattsburg, and a related Yale Naval Aviation
unit financed by Morgan partners, some never before revealed, include tow-
ering figures of the U.S. Stimsonian establishment. Among the most famous
were Elihu Root; Henry Stimson; Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the East
Coast Ivy League Wall Street-dominated Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and future Stimson aides Robert
Lovett, John J. McCloythe latter once nicknamed chairman of the U.S.
establishmentand Harvey Bundy, father of William and McGeorge,
prominent Cold War statesmen and key architects of the Vietnam War.
These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Wash-
ington, worthy foundations, and proper clubs. "The New York financial and legal
community," former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1965, "was the heart
of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and
Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front
organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 9
Foreign Relations." (Isaacson and Thomas 1986: 28-29, 47-48; see also Domhoff
1990)
One could also add the National Security League, as the war prepared-
ness movement and war effort helped consolidate the embryonic U.S.
-nilitary-industrial multinational corporate complex that became the
foundation of American world hegemony. In fact, along with representa-
tives of old money, America's vertically integrated multinational firms and
che corporate lawyers and bankers representing them provided the m e n
notably, officersfor the war preparedness movement (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . This
story thus ties together the making of U.S. financial and corporate capital-
ism with the long reign of the Open Shop in American industry inaugurated
by the epochal defeat of American labor at Homestead in 1 8 9 2 and the
Debs rebellion of 1 8 9 4 - 1 8 9 5 , to U.S. naval-led overseas imperialism and
the full-blown emergence of the Eastern establishment.
This process of class, state, and business enterprise formation culminat-
ing in World War I adumbrated the full-blown National Security State
Corporate Complex (NSSCC)denoting the fusion of private corporate
power with public state bureaucracywhich was reborn during World
War II and consolidated during the Cold War (cf. Brinkley 1995). In this
period, from the late nineteenth century to World War I, power elites pi-
oneered a model of capitalist self-protection from the market system
through state-corporate militarization and overseas expansion. The great
leap forward in inter-state political-economic-military cooperation of this
period also helped create an international upper-class network.
In the 1920s, there was no vast expansion of the NSSCC based on mas-
sive public spending and overseas aid. Instead, the privatized foreign policy
of Anglo-American high finance based on Wall Street and the city of Lon-
don prevailed. Anglo-American elites funneled liquidity into the rationali-
zation of German industry and to varying extents the militarized material
expansions of the future Axis powers, Italy, Japan, and Germany. Along
with related industrial investment and cartel agreements, this helped lay the
foundations for the world armament race in the wake of the Great De-
pression. All this eventually provided the stimulus for a new material ex-
pansion of the world-economy (Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . In the United States,
military-led industrial rationalization and inter-state warfare laid the ma-
terial basis for the democratization of both citizen-soldiers and shop-floor
citizens: "Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the
community wished and was compelled to secure the co-operation of the
non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms, political
10 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
power into their hands. In addition, the money power plays its role" (We-
ber 1 9 6 1 : 2 3 0 - 2 3 2 ) .
The rationalization of industry and recomposition of labor during the
wartime and interwar periods, including the campaign to Americanize the
immigrant led by groups such as the National Security League, helped pave
the way for the rise of the tens of millions of second-generation ethnic
immigrants w h o composed the mass of the Congress of Industrial Organ-
izations (CIO) (see Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) . The fortunes of these ethnic groups grew
as the speculative excesses of the "WASP ascendancy" helped usher in its
relative decline during the early years of the N e w Deal (though it would
make a massive comeback when called back to service during World War
II) (Alsop 1992). In conjunction with mass protest and the rise of non-
WASP elites allied with WASP establishment sectors close to productive
capital, this provided the social base of the N e w Deal coalition (cf. Fraser
1991). What is especially interesting here is the overlap between ethnic
power networks and sectors of the economy. Also revealing is the WASP
establishment split between the old power structure and those forces seek-
ing a new dominant social bloc based on the rise of industrially based
corporate capitalism, with increased state regulation, that incorporated the
new immigrant workers as well (Baltzell 1964; Jenkins and Brents 1989).
During the 1920s the WASP establishment grouped around Wall Street,
notably, the House of Morgan investment bank, dominated the capital
markets, infrastructural investments, and heavy industry. Non-WASP eth-
nic groupsGerman-Jews and Catholic groups, such as the Irish and Ital-
ianswere left to invest in the newer, riskier, albeit more dynamic sectors
of the economy such as consumer goods, retail/wholesale trade, entertain-
ment, and communications, as well as the new industries of the rapidly
industrializing Sun Belt. All these sectors would benefit from the distribu-
tion of income in favor of workers and consumers (Baltzell 1964: 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 ,
2 5 2 - 2 5 9 ; Fraser 1991: ch. 10). These groups allied with tens of millions
of second-generation immigrants w h o formed the CIO, versus the old-stock
immigrants w h o made up the more conservative American Federation of
Labor (AFL).
Over time, these non-WASP unions and elite groupsincluding future
Jewish Supreme Court justices like Brandeis and Frankfurter (the latter a
Stimson associate), as well as a host of influential engineerswould ally
more or less openly with newly independent capital groups in industry that
had escaped Morgan control, notably, the Rockefellers, w h o later became
the standard-bearers of liberal Republicanism. These groups coalesced dur-
ing the N e w Deal period and broke the stranglehold of the old WASP
establishment on the commanding heights of the corporate economy. A
host of N e w Deal reforms and congressional investigations provided for
the dismantling of investment banking control over the capital markets,
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 11
I HE RESURGENCE OF A N G L O - A M E R I C A N FINANCE,
HE RISE OF T H E N E W RIGHT, A N D T H E DEMISE OF
THE N E W DEAL W O R L D ORDER
U.S. policy culminated in the fiscal crisis of its warfare-welfare state, first
detonated by the policy of guns and butter during the Vietnam War. The
most forceful expression of this was the increasing contradiction between
the short-term profit interests of U.S. multinationals and the power pursuits
of the U.S. state. President Nixon's grand design aimed to lessen these
contradictions. N i x o n moved to an offshore naval-air strategy, propped up
by the U.S. exchange of protection for petrodollars through Middle Eastern
alliances and support for increased oil prices. This struck a blow at the
hurodollar market by sucking up hundreds of billions of petrodollars
including in Europe and Japanand funneling them to Western oil, arms,
-ind banking firms, as well as U.S. Treasury securities. The United States
also released itself from its balance of payment obligations through the
abandonment of fixed exchange rates. While this strategy, including seign-
iorage privilegesthe right to mint the coin of the realmlowered the
costs of and propped up U.S. power, it vastly increased the financialization
oi the world-economy, the globalization of its organizational structures,
and the militarization of the United States. This further undermined the
material base of the N e w Deal world order (see Arrighi 1994: 2 9 8 - 3 2 4 ;
Nitzan and Bichler 1995; Bichler and Nitzan, 1996; Spiro 1999). Particu-
larly important here were oil price increases and militarization providing
windfalls for the energy-rich Sunbelt, which provided much of the money
and shock troops for the N e w Right (see Davis 1986: 1 5 7 - 2 5 5 ) .
This exchange of U.S. protection for petrodollars cast the Middle East
region in a role similar to India's in Britain's Free Trade Imperialism. This
allayed the contradictions of U.S. hegemony in both the military and the
monetary realms, albeit at a cost of deepening its militarization and fin-
14 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
ancialization. The new freedom of the realm coined by the United States
was short-lived. The U.S. regional surrogate strategy fell apart with the
Iranian revolution, the Afghanistan invasion, and the second oil shock, as
gold prices rose wildly while the dollar plummeted. Facing this, U.S. power
elites in the Eastern establishment and Sunbelt-based N e w Right changed
strategy (see Davis 1986: part two).
Just as the old, exclusive WASP establishment reaped the fruits of the
inflated capital values of a bygone era in the 1920s, so, too, did the rise of
a broad-based N e w Right aim to valorize the accumulated gains of cor-
porate capital and the broad propertied strata. This coalition included the
more privileged segments of the White ethnic working classes and middle
strata, arrayed against workers of color, labor, and the poor (see Davis
1986: 1 5 7 - 2 5 5 , 302). Crucial in the strategy of this new dominant social
bloc were Reagan's military Keynesianism and the opportunities for finan-
cial accumulation that its regressive financing allowed.
Once again, as in the late nineteenth century, the accumulation of excess
liquidity on the money market beyond the bounds of profitable investment
in trade and production was mobilized by the great financial houses to fund
state loans and inter-state militarization (cf. Hobson 1905). As the power
of money capital waxed while U.S. military power waned, Anglo-American
elites gravitated toward this new strategy (see Reifer 2 0 0 0 ) , for what better
than to mobilize this power in offshore financial marketsvia the city of
London, Wall Street, Japan-led East Asia, and the Gulf statesto pay for
military Keynesianism regressively, increasing capital gains and shoring up
Anglo-American global military, corporate, and financial power? Here, so-
cioeconomic changes ensured that militarization, rather than expanding the
N e w Deal's social base through taxation on corporate profits and the rich,
would now usher in its global demise.
As the leveraged buyout and downsizing movement led by investment
bankers and corporate lawyers got under way in Wall Street, the Reagan
administration, to pay for U.S. remilitarization, initiated a "leveraged buy-
out of the country . . . financed" through borrowing, threatening to bank-
rupt the citizenry unless N e w Deal social programs and policies were
sacrificed to fund the NSSCC (Smith 1993: 19). The vast expansion of
money capital was greatly fueled by Reagan's deregulation, tax cuts, and
regressive financing of the U.S. deficit, especially from the issuance and
rollover of some $13.5 trillion in marketable securities by the federal gov-
ernment from 1981 to 1 9 9 0 (Smith 1993: 87). The result was that the
foreign exchange and international bond markets, notably in U.S. Treasury
securities, blossomed to become the largest and most integrated part of
global capital markets, with equity markets close behind (cf. Sassen 1996:
4 0 - 4 4 ) . "US institutions . . . benefited from the fact that the US government
securities marketdominated by US housesis the only truly global mar-
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex IS
ket, in which the trading book can remain open for 24 hours by being
passed around the globe" (Steinherr 1998: 61).
Here, N e w Deal reformssuch as the n o w repealed Glass-Steagall Act
that dealt blows to financial concentration increased the competitiveness
and institutional innovation in U.S. finance, from the rise of multitriliion-
dollar investors such as the insurance, pension, and mutual fund industries,
to the growth of derivatives. These innovations, coming with the decline
in relationship-based finance and the growing commoditization of finance
especially through disintermediation from the banking systemplayed ma-
jor roles in the ongoing financial expansion and resurgence of U.S. high
finance (Steinherr 1998: 3 7 - 6 8 , 2 1 6 - 2 2 3 ) . Glass-Steagall's separation of
commercial and investment banking increased the crisis facing N e w York's
money-center commercial banks, with their closer ties to industrial firms
through lending, enhancing the competitiveness of the U.S. investment
banks as a countervailing force to their power (Steinherr 1998: 40).
In fact, it was the rise in interest rates to finance the Vietnam War that
ushered in the "money-market mutual fund revolution" and commoditi-
zation of finance by driving savers from banks to the money market (Stein-
herr 1998: 4 0 , 383). This, in turn, stimulated competitive innovation in the
U.S. financial sector as a whole, notably with risk management through
derivatives, whose notional or face value n o w tops $ 9 2 trillion (Schlesinger
2000: A l ) . Critical to this financial revolution are money-center banks
seeking new market shares in the face of disintermediation from the bank-
ing system, the commoditization of finance, and the rise of institutional
investors, whose over $ 2 0 trillion in assets makes them major players in
global stock markets, the worldwide capitalization of which stood at $ 2 2
trillion in 1997 (Steinherr 1998: 5 3 - 5 7 , 70 n. 16, 2 1 6 - 2 2 3 , 340).
The rise of institutional investors and decline in relationship-based bank-
ing also increased support among power elites for an aggressive foreign
policy that would simultaneously restore U.S. military and financial power,
upholding the dollar's value and the profitable exchange of petrodollar
payments for protection so important for the community of interests be-
tween the state, finance, oil, aerospace, and related firms at the center of
the NSSCC (cf. Hulbert 1982). As Wall Street Journal economics editor
Alfred Malabre noted, "The one great strength of the dollar is, that unlike
the yen, unlike the d-mark, it is backed by thermonuclear weapons"
Kwitny Report, n.d.; see Spiro 1999).
The growth of U.S. interests in the Middle East was reflected in the
-
composition and policies of the U.S. executive. Reagan's treasury secretary
and chief of staff D o n Regan formerly headed Merrill Lynch, which led the
rise of the mutual funds industry and had close ties to the Shah's Iran (Bill
1988: 360). Merrill Lynch also owned White Weld, a global investment
firm helping the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) manage its $ 1 0 0
billion portfolio and inflow of 4 5 0 million petrodollars a day (Bichler and
16 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
Nitzan 1996: 631). The firm's SAMA portfolio was managed by David C.
Mulford, who became the Treasury's assistant secretary and undersecretary
of international affairs in the Reagan and Bush administrations (see Spiro
1999: ch. 5). Former representatives of oil, finance and arms firmstied
via interlocking directorates and institutional shareholdings with U.S.
banks holding an average of 1 8 . 0 1 % stock in six of the major aerospace
producers, four times more than their average Fortune 5 0 0 holdingswere
well represented in these administrations (Hulbert 1982: 8 9 - 9 2 ; Bichler and
Nitzan 1996: 6 2 2 - 6 3 2 ) . N o t e the similarities here to German bank-
industry relations (cf. Steinherr 1998).
Falling oil prices in 1 9 9 0 and threats to U.S. client states in the Middle
East thus endangered the state-corporate alliance constituting the NSSCC,
including U.S. banks like Chase Manhattan (now J. P. Morgan Chase) and
Citicorp (cf. Spiro 1999). These firms, then on the brink of insolvency, were
rescued only by rising oil prices during the war, injections of Gulf capital
to purchase large chunks of these firms thereafter, and the Fed's lowering
of interest rates (Seib and Waldman 1992: A l ; Barron's April 13, 1998,
A 3 - A 4 ) . When Iraq invaded Kuwait, as the United States had spent trillions
of borrowed dollars on the military, which helped usher in the Soviet
Empire's collapse without an actual war, thus depriving the NSSCC of a
1
much-needed enemy, President Bush's predisposition was to put this ca-
pability to good use in war.
In embracing the warrior-statesman ethic, Bush was compared with his
own and indeed Henry Stimson's hero, Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, Bush
had followed Stimson into the same exclusive prep schoolacceptance into
which, as C. Wright Mills (1956: 6 1 - 7 0 ) correctly noted, determined en-
trance into the exclusive private clubs and societies of Ivy League univer-
sities and hence the nation. Here, in June 1940, the very month that
Stimson became secretary of war, the 16-year-old future president re-
sponded to the call of the elder soldier-statesman as Stimson led the effort
for U.S. involvement. In fact, Stimson was on hand to school the young
man into the ways of power as Bush enteredas did his son, President
George W. Bush, w h o followed him into Andover and Yalethe Yale se-
cret society for sons of (and new entrants into) the ruling class, Skull and
Bones. As Evan Thomas noted in "The Code of the WASP Warrior" (1990:
33):
If President Bush has seemed willing, even eager to confront Saddam Hussein, he
is doing no more than Colonel Stimson would expect of him. . . . There is a warrior
ethic that runs deep in the values of the old WASP establishment.... Henry Stim-
son was George Bush's hero. "Bush had this special kind of respect for Stimson
because he was a combination of all the things his family stood for," says a close
friend. "You are self-reliant and you fight wars for your country." The President's
role model was especially avid about fighting wars.. . . During the Cuban missile
Ghtbalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 17
Skadden's role in the celebration of U.S. power was in line with the
usions of George Bush, Henry Stimson, and Elihu Root. In fact, Skadden's
lim age went back to the original law firm of Elihu Root Jr., son of the
godfather of the U.S. establishment and his law partner Grenville Clark,
t\\ o of the most important leaders of the World War I war preparedness
movement. Skadden's t w o original founding partners had both been mem-
bers of the Root and Clark firm, and it was from this firm that Skadden
giit its original corporate clients (Caplan 1993: 15). These densely woven
power networks reflect the class formation of the U.S. establishment and
the structural imperatives of the NSSCC that they constructed to secure
I .s world power, including through U.S.-dominated supranational insti-
tutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the
\\ i'rid Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
\ VTO), the United Nations (UN), and Bretton W o o d s .
CONCLUSIONS
their public and private capacities. Their role in serving and arbitrating
between the broad needs of capital, the state, and the citizenry facilitates
the taking into account of diverse interests. This corporate group is thus
perfectly suited to serve as the bourgeoisie's "organic intellectuals," rep-
resenting the general interests of capital, reflective of its changing social
base and power relations, while helping to provide for the relative auton-
omy of the state as well (Tocqueville 1945, vol. 1: 2 8 2 - 2 9 7 ; see Mills 1956:
288).
The geopolitical economy presented here provides the real missing link
between state and capital, capital accumulation, social classes, and geo-
politics, as well as structure and agency, that has haunted historical soci-
ology. Corporate lawyers, investment bankers, and allied industrialists
played key roles in America's wars, from World War I to the present,
through groups like the NSL and the Cold War Committee on the Present
Danger (Sanders 1983; Boies 1994). At the close of each century, inter-
state and inter-enterprise competition for mobile capital and ensuing mili-
tarized financial expansions ensured the resurgence of high finance and the
power of Anglo-American investment bankers and corporate lawyers in
entwined processes of war making, state making, and capital accumulation.
At the heart of this was what became the Wall Street-Federal Reserve-
Treasury-Bretton W o o d s nexus, which alternately during various phases of
systemic cycles of accumulation provided for the subordination of money
capital to productive expansion or for the vast growth of money capital
combined with supply-side economics or the end of expansionary fiscal
policies. In the 1980s, the hegemony of U.S.-dominated global financial
markets and military power was ushered in through this nexus and the
larger NSSCC of which it was a part (cf. Gowan 1999).
Trillions of dollars that could have gone for social investment and a
down payment on a global N e w Deal were instead spent on regressively
financed militarization, which has driven budget cuts to education, health,
and human services across the world. Projections of an endless U.S. hegem-
ony, bereft of growing contradictions and instability, are thus shortsighted,
for the social foundations of U.S. hegemony were based on the promissory
note of a social pact between capital and labor in the core and Third World
development that constituted the social foundations of the U.S.-led world-
system, which after the militarized financial expansion of the 1980s, is n o w
revealed as a broken promise.
NOTES
1. Thanks to Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Tom Dobrzeniecki, Suzzanne Ochoa,
and Jesse Reifer for helpful suggestions on this chapter. For additional evidence on
the themes presented here, see Reifer (2000).
2. Industrially based, German-led Continental Europe and trade- and industry-
Globalization and the National Security State Corporate Complex 19
based, Japan-led East Asia exemplified the universal banking model (albeit with
quasi-state control and administered prices in the latter) (Zysman 1983).
3. These groups included the National Civic Federation, the Round Table, Chat-
ham House, and the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter two being funded by
England's wealthiest men and firms and the House of Morgan, as well as the Car-
negie and Rockefeller Foundations.
4. Bacon's name is chiseled in stone along with Theodore Roosevelt's on the
wall of Harvard University, both of them friends from the class of 1880a stone's
throw away, incidentally, from the Lamont Library, sponsored by and named after
one of J. P. Morgan's chief partners, Thomas Lamont, typical of the close relation-
ship between Ivy League East Coast universities and Wall Street.
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Alsop, Joseph W. 1992. I've Seen the Best of It: Memoirs. New York: W. W. Nor-
ton.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1983. The Geometry of Imperialism. London: Verso.
.1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our
Times. New York: Verso.
Baltzell, E. Digby. 1964. The Protestant Establishment. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Bichler, Shimshon, and Jonathan Nitzan. 1996. "Putting the State Back in Its
Place." Review of International Political Economy 3(4) (Winter): 608-661.
Bill, James A. 1988. The Eagle and the Lion. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Boies, John. 1994. Buying for Armageddon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press.
Borden, William S. 1984. The Pacific Alliance. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Braudel, Fernand. 1982. The Wheels of Commerce. New York: Harper and Row.
Brinkley, Alan. 1995. The End of Reform. New York: Vintage Books.
Campbell, Alec. 1997. The Invisible Welfare State. Ph.D. diss., UCLA. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Caplan, Lincoln. 1993. Skadden. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
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vard University Press.
Davis, Mike. 1986. Prisoners of the American Dream. New York: Verso.
Dehio, Ludwig. 1962. The Precarious Balance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Fraser, Steven. 1991. Labor Will Rule. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gordon, Linda. 1994. "Welfare Reform." Dissent (Summer): 323-328.
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Hobson, John A. 1965. Imperialism: A Study. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
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Hulbert, Mark. 1982. Interlock. New York: Richardson and Snyder.
20 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
Isaacson, Walter, and Evan Thomas. 1986. The Wise Men. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Jenkins, J. Craig, and Barbara G. Brents. 1989. "Social Protest, Hegemonic Com-
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University Press.
Chapter 2
INTRODUCTION
the arena in which social action takes place and social change occurs is . . . a definite
"world," a spatio-temporal whole, whose spatial scope is coextensive with the el-
ementary division of labor among its constituent regions or parts and whose tem-
poral scope extends for as long as the elementary division of labor continually
reproduces the "world" as a social whole. (Hopkins, Wallerstein, et al. 1982: 42)
22 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
Why elaborate the system model into an intersystem model? Cannot we get the
~'me effect by talking about "subsystems" of a larger system? [One reason is so
that] the external change-agent, or the change-agent built into an organization, as
a helper with planned change does not completely become a part of the client-
system .. . the intersystem model leads us to examine the interdependent dynamics
sof interaction both within and between the units. We object to the premature and
unnecessary assumption that the units always form a single system. (Chin 1966
[1961]: 13)
BUCKING T H E SYSTEM
aal relations. The TimeSpace, then, is that of the structures of the modern
world-system, the duration of which is the long term, the past 5 0 0 years.*
One strategy of early resistance was the concerted effort to maintain
customary forms of remuneration. In the core, this equated with resistance
to proletarianization. For instance, the "right of the worker to appropriate
certain amount" of timber from English shipyards, which was then sold
or used as fuel or in housing and furniture, had been a prescriptive right
since 1634 and thereafter a source of constant bargaining and interven-
tion. In 1 7 7 1 , "chip women" rioted when denied access to the yards in
Portsmouth. This appropriation amounted to an enormous loss to capital
(perhaps only a sixth of the lumber that entered the yards left afloat),
but workers consistently opposed the abolishment of the perquisite in ex-
change for higher wages (Linebaugh 1992: 3 7 8 - 3 8 2 ) . In the periphery,
resistance could take the form of maintaining informal and likewise anti-
proletarianization arrangements. For example, each new and particularly
rich silver strike in the Spanish Empire "inspired mining enterpreneurs to
attempt to monopolize benefits for themselves by eliminating established
forms of mine laborers' direct appropriation." In Potosi, although the in-
troduction of the amalgam process reduced the skilled miners, yanaconas,
to the status of salaried workers, an underground economy of kajchas,
' men w h o took advantage of the interruption of the work routine to grab
for themselves any ore they could find in the mines," and trapiches, "small,
rudimentary installations for refining ore by hand," that exploited tailings
or even the mines themselves at night or on weekends, formed a substantial
sector of the local economy. Indeed, besides the lack of an effective militia,
the fact that kajcha production contributed so greatly to total output goes
r
it in explaining their survival, and it was only in the 1880s that "it became
possible to speak of a proletarianization in the mining industry" (Tandeter
1993: 85, 9 8 - 1 1 4 ) .
Besides efforts to hold on to surplus and large-scale insurrections (it took
fc0,000 troops to put down the Tupac Amaru revolt, which, nonetheless
spelled the end of the reparto de mercanciascoerced distribution of
There are five kinds of TimeSpace as conceptualized by Immanuel Wallerstein (1988,1993).
Each TimeSpace associates the substantive objects that are being described with Fernand Brau-
del's conception of multiple social times. Episodic-geopolitical TimeSpace refers to the short
term of events. Cyclico-ideological TimeSpace refers to the alternating rhythms of cyclical
: me and ideological space. Structural TimeSpace encompasses the whole of the past five cen-
turies, from the "Transition from Eeudalism to Capitalism" through the late twentieth century.
TTie substantive objects of structural TimeSpace are those fundamental relational constituents
of human reality that can be recognized over the entire period, but not before. Eternal
TimeSpace corresponds to what Braudel called the time of the sages. It is associated with the
eneralizations of nomothetic social science, which are said to be true "across time and space."
!
' o: these, Immanuel Wallerstein adds the TimeSpace of transformation, the period through
1
;hieh we are presently living, when even small-scale, value-driven human agency or moral
. hoice may have transformative consequences for human social relations.
28 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
suring the development of the multiple and separate foci of decision making
and coercion that guaranteed the survival of the axial division of labor and
the resistance to exploitation that it engendered produced a new set of
phenomenal forms that these processes would take.
The invention of the nation-state on the heels of the French Revolution
addressed the problem of the cost of maintaining the division of labor in
response to widespread resistance. The construction of (particularist)
nations/peoples on which it was based responded to the costly and poten-
tially lethal (to capital) agitation for freedom and equality ratified and
institutionalized in the (universalist) declarations of the French Revolution.
The newly redefined unit excluded from participation large groups based
on socially constructed categories of race, ethnicity, and gender, whose
biological and cultural attributes, it was argued, disqualified them, and
installed the nation-state (and its limited criteria for full citizenship) as the
preferred locus of struggle.
As Robert Paquette notes, although Eugene Genovese's assertion that the
1791 slave revolt in Saint Domingue "marked the integration of slave re-
volts into the Age of Democratic Revolution, a decisive shift away from
restorationist revolts directed at withdrawal from the prevailing social ar-
rangements, to revolts directed at a fundamental liberal-democratic restruc-
turing of society" has been controversial (1988: 26), by the time of La
Escalera in Cuba the transformation in the focus, implications, and deri-
vations of slave revolts was clear. Significantly, in "1843 and 1 8 4 4 colored
rebels were sounding different from the past; they were acting different.
Normally antagonistic ethnic groups had n o w suppressed their differences.
Talk of natural rights, citizenship, and liberty came from their lips," and
the whole was played out in a thoroughly international context (264).
Here the TimeSpace is that of the ideologies and the duration, the me-
dium term of the past two centuries. From this perspective it makes little
sense to differentiate between a nineteenth or a twentieth century; the social
duration of the period that came to an end with 1968 and 1989 began
symbolically with Saint Domingue and the Vendee. Although the struggle
for control over the production and appropriation of surplus continued
through passive resistance, work slowdowns, strikes, and so on, what we
now call the labor movement increasingly organized vis-a-vis the state to
agitate for its intervention, in terms of minimum wages, the establishment
of the length of the working day, unemployment and retirement insurance,
Jiild labor practices, and the regulation of working conditions. Such agi-
tation again took place in articulation with the unfolding of the processes
i ' J accumulationin Britain, from the "hungry 'forties," the declining well-
being of working people caused a real concern for the reproduction of labor
power.
In the core, excluded groups fought for the political rights that could be
translated into influence over the direction that state intervention would
30 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
take, as well as direct access to goods and services. Class struggle was more
and more redirected and reformulated as citizenship movements. Such was
the goal of w o m e n but also of the unfranchised commercial and working
classes in quest of the vote. In the periphery, full citizenship in the inter-
state system was sought by nationalist movements. To be antisystemic in-
creasingly meant resisting the exclusions of liberal universalism: from
Seneca Falls and the Chartists to Selma, Bandung, and the year of Africa.
In the wake of 1968, a shift in the strategic orientation of social move-
ments has taken place. Over the long term, movements have organized
locally to resist exploitation; over the nineteenth century and most of the
twentieth century, organization and action took a new form, an explicitly
political form, based on adhesion to a group excluded from full citizenship
rights agitating for a voice in the affairs of an interventionist state. The
decline of the "old," state-oriented nationalist and class-based movements
was a result of the realization of their failure to deliver on promises of
progress and paralleled the collapse of the East-West confrontation and
the renewed awareness of the North-South split. The perception of an em-
pirically disappearing "working class" gave rise to a corollary search for
new agents of social transformation. The result has been a retargeting of
action away from the nation-state and the emergence and intensification of
the activities of "new" movements, for instance, those founded in ecology/
environmental concerns or those originating in issues of race and ethnicity
or gender that challenged reductionism and externalist objectivity and con-
tested essentialist, non-relational thinking.
If, on the one hand, we consider that much of the program of the First
N e w Left in the mid-1950s seemed to have little lasting impact and that
many of what appeared to be the successes of the movements of the late
1960s have to a large extent been rolled back, we are in the ephemeral
event-world of post-1945, geopolitical TimeSpace. If, on the other hand,
we survey contemporary movements in the context of systemic crisis and
transition, (i.e., the timespace of transformation), we may, analytically, dis-
tinguish among resistance to expropriation associated with the processes of
accumulation of the world-economy, pressures for inclusion brought to
bear at the level of the nation-states associated with the politics of liber-
alism, and those challenges to the premises of inequality associated with
the structures of knowledge that began to emerge in the 1950s and 1960s.
This means not asking what we should dopresupposing a linear,
nineteenth-century modelbut rather looking for those changes that struc-
tural pressures are already bringing about that we need to recognize and
take into consideration in interpreting future possibilities.
CONCLUSIONS
was only partially reproduced in the social sciences until the political cli-
mate of the 1960s created the circumstances for the development of the
world-systems approach. GST advocated one form of teleological thinking:
Finality can be spoken of also in the sense -of dependence on the future. . ..
[H]appenings can, in fact, be considered and described as being determined not by
actual conditions, but also by the final state to be reached. . .. [T]he directness of
the process towards a final state is not a process differing from causality, but an-
other expression of it. (von Bertalanffy 1968: 76-77)
REFERENCES
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Anti-
systemic Movements. London: Verso.
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ment, Applications. New York: George Braziller.
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Models." In Jason L. Flnkle and Richard W. Gable, eds., Political Devel-
opment and Social Change. New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 7-19.
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Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah. 1973. "Varieties of Political Development: The Theoret-
ical Challenge." In Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Building
32 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
States and Nations: Models and Data Resources. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage,
pp. 41-72.
Hopkins, Terence K., Immanuel Wallerstein, et al. 1982. "Patterns of Development
of the Modern World-System." In Terence K. Hopkins, Immanuel Waller-
stein, et al., World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 41-82.
Lee, Richard E. 1999. "The 'Cultural Aspect' of the Modern World-System: Social
Movements and the Structures of Knowledge." Paper presented at the Polit-
ical Economy of the World-System (PEWS) 23rd Annual Conference, "Ine-
quality and Social Movements," University of Maryland, 26-27 March.
. 2001. "After History? The Last Frontier of Historical Capitalism." Pro-
tosoziologie 15: 87-104 (special issue, edited by Gerhard Preyer and Mathias
Bos: "On a Sociology of BorderlinesSocial Process in Time of Globaliza-
tion").
Linebaugh, Peter. 1992. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eigh-
teenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 1990. "The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,
Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century." journal
of Historical Sociology 3(3) (September): 225-252.
Paquette, Robert L. 1988. Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Es-
calera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Rapoport, Anatol. 1998. "The Organismic Direction in General System Theory."
Paper delivered at the 5th European School of Systems Science, Centre in-
terfacultaire d'etudes systemiques, Universite de Neuchatel, Switzerland, Sep-
tember 7-11.
Shibutani, Tamotsu. 1968. "A Cybernetic Approach to Motivation." In Walter
Buckley, ed., Modem Systems Research for the Behaviorial Scientist. Chi-
cago: Aldine, pp. 330-336.
Snell, Marilyn Berlin, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. 1992. "Beyond Being and Becom-
ing." New Perspectives Quarterly 9(2) (Spring): 22-28.
Tandeter, Enrique. 1993. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosi.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1976. The Vendee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. "The Inventions of TimeSpace Realities: Towards an
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289-297.
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Historical Geography 23(1 & 2): 5-22.
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York: New Press.
Weaver, Warren. 1948. "Science and Complexity." American Scientist 36(4): 536-
544.
Chapter 3
TRENDS IN INEQUALITY
ino and Amsden 1994; and the more recent work of Maddison 1 9 9 4 , 1 9 9 5 ;
1
and Pritchett 1 9 9 7 ) .
A precise evaluation of the trends in question is difficult: there are strong
disagreements over what kinds of data are more appropriate to the task at
hand, and the relevant data are scarce. Each of these issues merits more
discussion.
PPPs or GNPPCs?
data are used as benchmark values for historical series on income levels,
the relative weight of the PPP adjustment becomes considerably larger as
we move back in time. Thus, in the case of China discussed above, the
"surplus" added to China's income through the PPP adjustment amounted
to 1 0 . 1 % of the per capita income in current dollars of the United States
in 1990, but by 1820, when combined with the indices of national pro-
duction levels, this surplus grows to 3 7 . 7 % . Thus, the per capita GDP of
the United States in 1 8 2 0 was 23.1 times greater than China's without the
PPP adjustment, but the introduction of the latter correction reduces the
ratio to 2.5, so the t w o incomes have been brought considerably closer to
parity.
The significant impact of the PPP adjustment can be highlighted further
by focusing on patterns of change in the distribution of world income.
Extending our discussion in the paragraph above, the PPP adjustment can
be portrayed as a surplus that is added to total world production. Thus,
in 1990, the PPP adjustment adds 8.2% to the total income per capita
produced in the world. Given differential rates of growth between poor
and wealthy nations, however, the combination of contemporary income
data adjusted by PPPs with historical series on national income results in
the addition of an ever-growing surplus to world production. Thus, while
the PPP adjustment increases world income production by 8.2% in 1 9 9 0 ,
by 1820 it increases such production by the considerably higher figure of
42.2%.
Of course, we might find reasons to expect that such an increase in the
relative importance of nontradable economic activities (as captured by PPPs
or their equivalent) might indeed have taken place through the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. If this were indeed the case, however, we would
surely need to adjust the relative presence of such activities in poor and
wealthy regions of the world-economy (e.g., in the United States or much
of Europe, nontradable activities can be expected to have played a much
greater role in 1 8 2 0 than in 1990). Regardless of the potential of intro-
ducing such adjustments, however, the point is that the bias introduced by
the PPPs adjustment has been untheorized.
Beyond these debates, data are scarce. For example, the systematic col-
lection of data on gross national product (GNP) or GDP (themselves limited
indicators of the type of information that would be required for an ade-
quate assessment of world income distribution) began only in the 1950s,
and while observers have calculated historical data for the vast majority of
today's core countries, most peripheral and semi-peripheral countries gen-
erally lack such historical estimates.
However, Maddison (1995) provides data on population and GDP for
Inequality in the 'World-Economy 37
24 countries between 1 8 2 0 and 1990, and these data can be used to con-
struct Gini coefficients as a measure of world income inequalities (for more
details on the methodological procedure, see Korzeniewicz and Moran
1997). While the sample is relatively small in terms of the number of coun-
tries, it does include a vast proportion of the world's population (65.7%
in 1990), as the countries in question include China, India, some of the
countries that for much of the twentieth century came to compose the
Soviet Union, and several of today's wealthier countries (including Japan).
Furthermore, Gini coefficients calculated for broader sets of nations as their
relevant data become available over time are virtually identical to the re-
sults obtained with this particular sample (and even the magnitude of over-
all inequality is not drastically altered by the particular sample chosen for
the evaluation).
We analyze Maddison's data using t w o alternative benchmarks: GNPPC
and GNPPC adjusted by PPPs. Additionally, we provide adjusted PPP es-
timates. The formula used to generate these adjusted PPP estimates is the
result of a regression equation that predicts the natural logarithm of PPP
per capita with the natural log of GNP per capita (Atlas method) and the
square of the natural log of GNP per capita (Atlas method). It is based on
data provided by the World Bank in 1 9 8 5 . The data are restricted to the
54 countries in which original PPP data were collected in that year. The
values used in the regression models were scaled to constant 1992 dollars.
Several models were tested for predictive power. The model finally selected
predicted approximately 9 7 % of the variance in the dependent variable. It
should be noted that this model has stronger predictive powers than the
regression model used by the World Bank to extrapolate to countries not
sampled for PPPs. Using the equation as a formula, PPP estimates (in 1 9 9 2
dollars) were generated for all years.
The twentieth-century trends revealed by such an exercise are interesting.
Income inequalities between poor and wealthy nations appear highly pro-
nounced from the very beginning of the period under consideration. Indeed,
the overall trend of world income inequalities is characterized by consid-
erable stability in its overall magnitude. Such stability is not surprising from
a world-systems perspective,- indeed, as indicated earlier, others have made
the empirical observation before, and in fact such an argument has been
an underlying premise of such a perspective from its very origins.
At the same time, the data indicate interesting fluctuations over time.
Most salient among these fluctuations is a slight decline in inequality be-
tween nations during the expansion of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. Other studies have called attention to this apparent
convergence, albeit focusing on a more narrow set of nations. For example,
Baumol (1994: 64) indicates that most industrialized nations experienced
considerable convergence between 1870 and 1 9 2 9 (although the United
States continued to move considerably ahead of the pack). According to
38 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
T h e China Question
dong and Shanghai). The PPP estimates of income in China have been
5
challenged in academic studies and in the popular media.
China has had a changing impact on world income distribution. Up until
the 1980s, it tended to reduce world income inequalities through popula-
tion growth. Since the 1980s, it does so through growth in income.
During the period between the 1930s and the late 1960s, the key feature
explaining trends in inequality involves the adoption of new models of
development centered around the state. Such models varied in their precise
featuresas these changed over time and among different zones of the
world-economy. In general, the main characteristics of these models of de-
velopment were a more active role for the state in regulating market
activities so as to ensure effective demand and/or industrialization; greater
intervention of the state in securing welfare for populations; and a growing
consensus around the need to adopt democratic procedures for the organ-
ization of political rule. Each of these characteristics was central to what
other authors have called a "developmentalist illusion," whereby national
development through industrialization held the promise of progress
6
through international mobility.
This is clear in regard to the very size and reach of the state. The state
formation literature establishes that there was an immense growth of Eur-
opean states in the nineteenth century, as manifested in rapidly increasing
state size, state scope, and bureaucratization (Ardant 1975; Flora 1983;
7
Mann 1993; Skocpol 1 9 7 9 ) . However, comparing state size across time
and space reveals an immense divergence in state growth between core,
semi-peripheral, and peripheral countries from around 1900.
Based on historical state expenditure data provided by Mitchell (1993)
and historical GDP data made available by Maddison (1995), it is possible
to reconstruct per capita state expenditure in constant 1 9 9 2 U.S. dollars
8
across time and space for a significant number of countries. In 1913, per
:apita state expenditure in the semi-periphery was 1 9 . 1 % of that in core
countries. In 1929 this share declined to 1 7 . 9 % , and in 1 9 5 0 to 1 3 . 2 % .
Then it increased again to 1 6 . 3 % in 1 9 6 0 , only to decline again to a low
of 13.9% in 1 9 8 5 . The overall trend thus was one of divergence between
:ore and semi-peripheral state size. For the periphery, we cannot trace the
trend back as far. Yet, we see a similar pattern, at a much lower level, since
1950. In 1950, per capita state expenditure in the periphery was 1.6% of
that in core countries. This share increased to 1.8% in 1 9 6 0 and even to
9
2.1% in 1965 and declined again to 1.5% in 1 9 8 5 . Thus, there is a trend
of divergence between core and periphery since 1950 as well.
World-economic information on social expenditures are less forthcom-
ing, as comprehensive World Bank data on social expenditure are available
40 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
10
going back only to the 1 9 7 0 s . Nevertheless, it is possible to show the
same patterns of divergence. Whereas in 1 9 7 2 , social expenditure in the
semi-periphery was at a level of 7.6% of social expenditure in the core,
this share declined to 6.7% in 1 9 9 5 . In the periphery, social expenditure
in 1 9 7 2 amounted to . 9 3 % of social expenditure in the core, and it declined
even more, to . 8 3 % in 1995. Hence, even though expenditure in per capita
terms was on the rise everywhere, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries
were not able to narrow the gap that existed between these countries and
the corequite the opposite.
Beyond the quantitative information, a large secondary literature deals
with the relative weakness of the reach of the state in peripheral areas.
Munro (1996: 132), for example, notes that in Africa "states have found
their capacity as claimants limited by the strategic negotiating strength of
social groups which have remained substantially outside of the authorita-
tive reach of the state." Likewise, Boone (1994) argues in her analysis of
postcolonial Africa that rulers in the region have often used state power in
ways that compromise, rather than promote, economic growth and locates
this weakening of state capacity with respect to economic agency in the
limited autonomy of the state from societally based forms of power (see
also Cooper 1996).
Beyond state size, a similar observation can be made regarding the un-
even development of democracy. Indeed, democracy was contested relent-
lessly throughout this period, particularly, but not only, in peripheral and
semi-peripheral areas of the world-economy. In some cases, particularly in
the core, challenges to the liberal-democratic state (e.g., fascism, Nazism)
were eliminated early in the period under consideration. In other cases,
particularly in peripheral and semi-peripheral areas, other challenges (e.g.,
Communism, military rule) continued to prevail throughout the period and
indeed appeared to have become the norm by the late 1960s (Korzeniewicz
and Awbrey 1992). By the early 1970s, with very few exceptions, democ-
racy appeared to be restricted to core areas in the world-economy.
Finally, we should note that there was a very uneven capacity of states
13
in generating strategies of development resulting in high rates of g r o w t h .
The 1950s was a significant exception, explaining the relative stability of
between-country inequalities observed during these years. Indeed, these
years were characterized by the greatest degree of convergence in rates of
economic growth (as indicated by the l o w coefficients of variation), virtu-
ally every strategy of development (including those deployed in Eastern
Europe and Latin America) appeared to generate some degree of success,
and the growth experienced by Southern Europe helped sustain the promise
of international mobility. Gradually, however, most peripheral and semi-
peripheral areas (particularly Africa and Latin America) began to drift to-
ward the pattern of economic stagnation that would eventually prevail
during the next period.
Inequality in the World-Economy 41
CONCLUSIONS
The actors that came to constitute the basis of state-centered strategies
of growth (e.g., labor movements, nationalists) originally sought to trans-
form the very basis of inequality. As indicated by Wallerstein (1995: 2 6 1 ) ,
by 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 6 8 , "The so-called Old Left in its three historic variantsCom-
munists, Social-Democrats, 'and national liberation movementsachieved
state power, each variant in different geographical zones," but were unable
to alter the fundamental dynamics of world income inequalities.
What would constitute a promising set of reforms aimed at reducing
world income inequalities? Along the lines of the argument in this chapter,
two areas of reform would substantially reduce world income inequalities:
42 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
NOTES
1. This latter position on patterns of world inequality has been facilitated by
the relative ease with which alternative theoretical perspectives can explain such
findings by emphasizing the uneven effect of the Industrial Revolution (Bairoch
1981; Bates 1988; Bornschier 1980; Chase-Dunn 1975; Dos Santos 1970; Frank
1998; Maddison 1983, 1995; North 1990; Olson 1982; Weede 1986).
2. We should note that PPP-based income data do not provide an indicator of
welfare. Gilbert and Kravis (1954: 74) themselves observed that in making PPP
adjustments, "if one country has more government employees per capita than an-
other, this ratio will affect the real product comparison in favor of the former
country. It does not tell us, however, whether the higher level of government em-
ployees results in more services rendered to the population, or simply in a more
wasteful use of manpower," and also, "real product comparisons are not concerned
with the relative state of happiness of the populations of two countries, or their
relative welfare in some quasi-philosophical sense. It is only concerned with the
relative quantities of goods and services flowing to the two populations" (76). In
a recent article, Heston and Summers (1980) suggest that an indicator of welfare
can be constructed by dropping investment from their Real Gross Domestic Product
(RGDP) calculations.
3. Many PPP studies illustrate the relevance of such adjustments by calling
attention to the inordinate growth of Japan's GDP (relative to that of the United
States) in the 1980s suggested by FX-based data but corrected by PPP adjustments
(see, e.g., Ahmad 1997; United Nations 1992).
4. Periods of economic contraction in the world-economy are not necessarily
characterized by a reduction of inequalities in the distribution of wealth between
countries. As indicated later, indicators of convergence are most pronounced during
the periods of greatest economic growth.
5. For example, see "Survey China" (Supplement) The Economist, March 18,
1995, p. 4.
6. These hopes were of importance. As indicated by Tawney (1952: 29), "in-
justices survive, not merely because the rich exploit the poor, but because, in their
hearts, too many of the poor admire the rich."
Inequality in the World-Economy 43
REFERENCES
Abramovitz, Moses. 1994. "Catch-up and Convergence in the Postwar Growth
Boom and After." In William J. Baumol, Richard R. Nelson, and Edward
N. Wolff, eds., Convergence of Productivity: Cross-National Studies and
Historical Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 86-125.
Ahmad, Sultan. 1997. "International Comparison of Incomes: Why Should One
Bother Using PPP Conversion?" Unpublished paper.
Ardant, G. 1975. "Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructures of Modern States
and Nations." In Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in
Western Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 115-149.
Bairoch, Paul. 1977. "Estimations du revenu national dans les societes occidentales
pre-industrielles et au XIXe siecle." Revue Economique 28(2) (March): 177-
208.
. 1979. "Escarts internationaux des niveaux de vie avant la revolution in-
dustrielle." Annates, ESC 34(1) (January-February): 145-171.
. 1981. "The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the In-
dustrial Revolution." In Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer, eds., Dis-
parities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution. New
York: St. Martin's Press, pp. 3-25.
. 1993. Economics and World History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bates, Robert. 1988. Towards a Political Economy of Development. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Baumol, William J. 1994. "Mutivariate Growth Patterns: Contagion and Common
Forces as Possible Sources of Convergence." In William J. Baumol, Richard
R. Nelson, and Edward N. Wolff, eds., Convergence of Productivity: Cross-
National Studies and Historical Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 62-85.
Boone, Catherine. 1994. "States and Ruling Classes in Postcolonial Africa: The
Enduring Contradictions of Power." In Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vi-
vienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Trans-
formation in the Third World. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
108-140.
Bornschier, Volker. 1980. "Multinational Corporations and Economic Growth: A
Cross-National Test of the Decapitalization Thesis." Journal of Develop-
ment Economics 7 (June): 191-210.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1975. "The Effect of International Economic Depen-
dence on Development and Inequality: A Cross-National Study." American
Sociological Review 40(6): 720-738.
Cooper, Frederic. 1996. Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question
in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dos Santos, Theotonio. 1970. "The Structure of Dependence." The American Eco-
nomic Review 60 (May): 231-236.
Flora, Paul. 1983. State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe, 1815-1870.
Chicago: St. James Press.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
Gilbert, Milton, and Irving B. Kravis. 1954. An International Comparison ofNa-
Inequality in the World-Economy 45
INTRODUCTION
This chapter shows that at least three interrelated research lines within the
world-systems perspective are ready for the incorporation of insights on
the imbrications between transnationalism and power stemming from other
approaches and decant their o w n insights on the issue. They are the study
of antisystemic movements, global commodity chains, and households.
Drawing from different perspectives reviewed in this chapter, transna-
tionalism is regarded here as an intermediate subprocess of the world-
system characterized by the unprecedented development of social networks,
regular transactions, social positioning strategies, and relations of domi-
nation that span borders. One of the most salient characteristics of this
process is that it includes an array of actors (governmental and nongov-
ernmental) with multiple involvements in more than one society and em-
bodies critical vehicles (e.g., production networks, social movements, class
interaction, household and entrepreneurial strategies, advocacy networks,
and even state designs) through which power relations and hegemonic prac-
tices are realized and contested beyond the confines of the nation-state. In
this respect, transnationalism represents a critical world-system process and
the study of transnational relations an avenue to explore at close range the
interface among certain processes shaping power relations and hegemonic
practices that otherwise would appear as remotely or mechanically articu-
lated.
HISTORICAL C O N T E X T OF T R A N S N A T I O N A L STUDIES
Authors concerned with this type of networking and its overall impact
on transnationalism tend to focus on issues such as the new modalities of
he relationships between states and multinationals, and the articulation
jetween strategic and non-strategic networks under conditions of globali-
;ation and how they shape state/multinationals, capital/labor, and inter-
>tate relations. Consequently, when either theorizing or implicitly dealing
vith relations of domination and subordination, they bring to the forefront
he dialectics between power/property and sovereignty/power. Saskia Sas-
;en's (1996) notion of "economic citizenship," which refers to the state's
ncreasing dependability on and accountability to multinational enterprises,
iupranational economic entities, and transnational legal regimes that em-
>ower global firms vis-a-vis nation-states, represents a theoretical high
point in this tradition. Castells (2000: 152), w h o is more limited than Sas-
;en in his articulation of the phenomenon of transnationalism, yet more
systematic in his approach to relations of domination, builds upon Nicole
Biggart to argue that the new forms of organizational arrangements
wrought about by the changes in production processes, technological par-
idigms, and the forms and extension of the (transnational) networks as-
iociated with them have created "new ideational bases for institutionalized
mthority relations." Yet instead of focusing on agency, Castells' contagious
:
ascination is with the changing "social morphology" that lies at the foun-
dations of such bases, which helps explain his (sometimes explicit) reluc-
:ance to elaborate on the issue of transnationalism:
While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and
spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for
rs pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure. Furthermore, I would
argue that this networking logic induces a social determination of a higher level
ban that of the specific social interests expressed through the networks: the power
ii flows takes precedence over the flows of power. Presence or absence in the net-
work and the dynamics of each network vis-a-vis others are critical sources of
lamination and change in our society: a society that, therefore, we may properly
all the network society, characterized by the preeminence of social morphology
sver social action. (Castells 2000: 469)
these perspectives through the high road of theory (cf. Mignolo 2 0 0 0 ; Ong
1999; Spivak 1999) have enriched the analyses of the imbrications between
transnationalism and the configuration of power regimes and hegemonic
practices that are embedded in racial/cultural/sexist constructions informed
by the colonial experience. Transnationalism, according to these authors,
rither reinforces or challenges power relations through the mobility of peo-
ple, images, symbols, and ideologies between "North" and "South" and
across the imaginary borders of "the West" and "the Rest." Despite their
differences in approaches and methodologies, these works shed light on the
role of transnational practices in shaping what Ong (1999: 280) summa-
rizes as the "conjunctures of labor relations and cultural systems, high-tech
operations and indigenous values"; what Mignolo, following Silvia Rivera
2
Cusicanqui, views as "diachronic contradictions between modernity and
coloniality"; and what Spivak rationalizes as "the cultural self-
3
representation of the 'First World.' "
Transnational studies' peak has also emerged in a time of "turbulence in
world politics," understood as the increasing complexity, dynamism, and
uncertainty of the parameters of world politics as manifested in power re-
4
lations (Rosenau 1 9 9 0 ) , or more narrowly, in what Giovanni Arrighi
5
\1994) calls "systemic chaos." Current changes in the parameters of world
politics include the organization of action around transnational clusters that
'Seek to resist labor exploitation, commodification, racism, and sexism,
among other strongholds of hegemonic practices. Such changes include prac-
tices of different degrees of radicalization, from advocacy networks to social
^movements, and tend to rely on "groupism" or "the construction of defen-
sive groups, each of which asserts an identity around which it builds soli-
darity and struggles to survive alongside and against other such groups"
'.Wallerstein 1995: 6, 7). This has been a time also of a new "conservative
revolution" that attempts to neutralize organized resistance while it "tries
to write off progressive thought and action as archaic" (Bourdieu 1998: 35).
In this vein it should be noted that renewed conservatism relies on the con-
ceptual apparatuses of mainstream paradigms (such as realism, moderniza-
tion, and neo-classical economics) while it also incorporates notions from
challenging perspectives that are used to reinforce what van der Pijl (1998),
following Bode, calls "comprehensive concepts of control," such as the neo-
liberal dogma. To be sure, the first signals pointing to the widespread use of
the notions of transnationalism and transnational relations can be traced to
a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream paradigms, a trend noticeable in
International Relations (IR) since the late 1960s. However, equally impor-
ts'it has been the manipulation of these notions by mainstream approaches
that evoke transnationalism with the purpose of legitimating renewed forms
, adopted by the relationship between the corporate elites and the state and
t(- bolster ideas, such as that labor is increasingly irrelevant for the creation
52 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
6
of wealth. Thus, the notions of "transnationalism" and "transnational re-
lations" have become contested terrains themselves while gradually moving
to a prominent position in the episteme of power.
Theorization on transnationalism has also been affected by the p( isoii
transnational experiences of intellectuals exploring this topic. In this case,
these intellectuals become exceptional participant-observers. It has been ex-
tensively documented that the migration experiences of an important num
ber of intellectuals engaged in such studiesmore specifically, their*
prolonged binational experienceshave significantly influenced the con
ceptual apparatuses that we use for making sense of transnational ism
Such a knowledge-praxis symbiosis shapes the complexity of transnational
practices, namely, intellectual and political ones, by further facilitating "tli.
spatial confrontation between different concepts of history" (Mignolo
2 0 0 0 : 67). Their practices belong to an era in which "electronic mediation
and mass migration" have put "both viewers and images . . . in sinuiln
neous circulation," and, consequently, "[njeither images nor viewers (in-
cluding intellectuals dealing with transnationalism] fit into circuits or
audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional s
(Appadurai 1996: 4). For others, "border thinking" (Mignolo, 2000) is
generated in a borderland; a "literal, figurative, material, and militarized'
borderland in the case of the Chicano/a production (Saldivar, 1997).
B E Y O N D REALISM: T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M A N D POWER
I N I N T E R N A T I O N A L RELATIONS
the same criticism that has been applied to political realists in terms of ho\
they envision the future applies in this case. Eventually, from this perspec
tive, transnationalism will lead to a world in which the economic, political
technological, and cultural realms of social life will be unproblematic.
CRITICAL I N T E R N A T I O N A L RELATIONS T H E O R Y ,
POLITICAL E C O N O M Y , A N D ALTERNATIVE
INSTITUTIONALIST PERSPECTIVES
Indeed, in the neorealist discourse, the term "hegemony" is reduced to the singl
dimension of dominance, e.g., a physical capabilities relationship among states. Tb
Gramscian meaning of hegemony . . . joins the ideological and intersubjective ele
ment to the brute power relationship. In a hegemonic order, the dominant powe
makes certain concessions or compromises to secure the acquiescence of lesser pow
ers to an order that can be expressed in terms of a general interest. It is important
in appraising a hegemonic order, to know both (a) that it functions mainly b;
consent in accordance with universalistic principles, and (b) that it rests upon i
certain structure of power to maintain that structure. The consensual element dis
tinguishes hegemonic from nonhegemonic world orders. It also tends to mystify th<
power relations upon which the order ultimately rests. (Cox 1986: 246-247)
1
58 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
[T]hose who run the TCS'[transnational corporations] cannot achieve their ends
alone. They require help from other groups, notably globalizing bureaucrats, pol-;
iticians and professionals, consumerist elites and institutions in which they operate,
to carry out their work effectively. Together, all these people constitute a transna-
tional capitalist class. They are a class in that they are defined in terms of their
relationship to the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and they are*
a capitalist class in that they own and/or control, individually or collectively, the
major forms of capital. (296)
from its ability to connect consumers in rich nations with workers forced
tu accept a definition of subsistence that is unimaginably miserable from
the point of view of those w h o enjoy their products. Yet this same con-
nection creates possibilities for counter-hegemonic globalization" (233).
\\ ith regard to transnational movements advancing the cause of labor stan-
dards, he argues: "There is no logical reason why the absence of 'core labor
standards'the right to organize, prohibitions on child laborin a partic-
ular country should not be considered a trade-related basis for unfair com-
petition in the same way that absence of intellectual property rights is
considered a trade-related violation of the rules of fair competition." (236).
Building upon Gramsci, he argues that the potential success of transna-
tu al projects to produce counter-hegemonic effects is based precisely on
13
institutional needs to create consensus. An alternative, albeit still nation-
bound approach to this issue is found in Erick O. Wright's conceptuali-
zation of "real Utopian models" or "models that address questions of in-
stitutional coherence and workability, yet also embody genuinely
emancipatory values and visions" (Wright 2 0 0 0 : 144). Although Wright
focuses on the issue of egalitarianism while some institutionalists have more
broad agendas in mind, they both share the idea that Utopian thinking and
political intervention are not opposite realms: "Given the deep uncertainty
.'.'.out the future, keeping alive in our radical egalitarian imagination an
artay of normatively attractive, coherent proposals is of immense impor-
tance" (155). From this perspective, the success of counter-hegemonic ef-
forts and emancipatory attempts requires becoming aware of both the
relations of the state with domestic and supranational organizations con-
trolled by capital as well as the complexity of the state apparatus "domes-
14
tically."
MIGRATION A N D T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M
[p]ower comes from below: that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing op-
position between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a
general matrixnot such duality extending from the top down and reacting on
rre and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must
suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come
into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institu-
ttans, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social
20
redy as a whole.
It should also be noted that the use of the transnationalism "from below"
and "from above" in migration studies might lead to reinforcement of the
false impression that international migration is a form of transnationalism
"from below" by definition, which ultimately relies on an essentialized cat-
egory of migrant. Such illusion completely vanishes when we examine
transnationalism and systems of hegemonies that are directly traceable to
the migration experience in light of transnational class formation and dy-
namics and modes of incorporation. Drawing from the global-city per-
spective, the world-systems perspective, and works on the symbolic value
of migrations for the state, Ramon Grosfoguel (1995) assertively argues
that the migration process and migrants' symbolic value can be successfully
used for geopolitical ends on the part of the dominant state. If we shift the
focus from the "global" to the "translocal" and incorporate the issue of
transnational class formation, the symbolic and political functions of some
groups of migrants emerge as an important dimension of the power schema
as well, but from another rationale (I refer to this point in more detail
later). However, studies that approach transnationalism through migration
as a mediating instance have demonstrated great sensibility to the analysis
Transnationalism, Power, and Hegemony 63
[t]he spatial dispersal of cultural production and reception throughput such mech-
anisms such as transnational migrant networks, globalization of the media of mass
communication, and the forging of transnational political connections, has opened
up a new social space for conducting urban research. This new space is a translocal,
multi-sited, spatially reconfigured world of cross-cutting social networks "from be-
iow" as well as "in between," formed by social actors engaged in reterritorialized
politics of place making. (Smith 2001: 17)
T R A N S N A T I O N A L I S M A N D POWER: N E W RESEARCH
AVENUES FOR WORLD-SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
Antisystemic Movements
Commodity Chains
escape from both the "global" and the "local" without abandoning them;
but rather trying to capture their mutual conditioning: "The paradigm that
(rCCs embody is a network-centered and historical approach that probes
above and below the level of the nation state to better analyze structure
and change in the world-economy" (2).
However, the GCCs conceptualization has not yet problematized the is-
sue of the social embeddedness of production and distribution systems in
alt its complexity, nor has it targeted, systematically, the relationship be-
tween systems of production and power relations beyond the nation-state
>\ stem frontier. This may be due to the fact that while the GCCs concep-
tualization sets the grounds for the analysis of complex power regimes that
shape the organizational foundations of production processes, the concep-
tual apparatus that it uses to capture power relations is still inadequate. A
better understanding of the social embeddedness of production processes
nd networks of production and, ultimately, the understanding of h o w
power regimes framed by gender, class, and ethnic relations shape the
mechanisms through which wealth is accumulated and distributed through-
out the nodes of the chains requires a theorization of the link between
power regimes and production systems on a more complex ground. It re-
quires transcending the state-centered approach to hegemony and power,
which still permeates the GCCs paradigm, and prevents a more complex
incorporation of different transnational actors. Such inquiry is theoretically
compatible with world-systems analysis: "When one is dealing with a com-
plex, continuously evolving, large-scale historical system, concepts that are
used as shorthand descriptions for structural patterns are useful only to the
degree that one clearly lays out their purpose, circumscribes their applica-
bility, and specifies the theoretical framework they purpose and advance"
Wallerstein 1 9 9 1 : 37). The concept of hegemony, for example, is meant
to capture the dynamics of the rivalry among "great powers" but does not
say much about, for example, h o w relations of dominance and subordi-
nation shape the formation of "backward and forward linkages" corre-
sponding to production processes of the chains and the different instances
(households, firms, formal and informal arrangements) through which such
relations manifest. A critical incorporation of some insights stemming from
works dealing with transnational entrepreneurship and strategies of accu-
mulation and social repositioning would help refine the concept of hegem-
ony and the understanding of relations of domination for a better
applicability by the GCCs approach.
Householding
NfOTES
I am grateful to Karen McGovern for her editorial reading of an earlier version
f this chapter.
1. Such dynamics, Castells points out, have nor led to a new mode of production
mtinstead have produced a shift in capitalism's "mode of development," from indus-
tialism to informationalism. Castells defines the mode of development as the tech-
lological arrangements through which labor transforms matter, and therefore, it
ilays a decisive role in shaping "the quality and the level of the surplus." While, in
he industrial mode of development, energy sources functioned as the pivotal source
o increase productivity, the informational economy is based on "knowledge-based
ffoductivity": "the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge gen-
ration, information processing, and symbol communication" (Castells 2000: 17).
2. Rivera Cusicanqui, "Sendas y Senderos de la Ciencia Social Andina," Au-
odeterminacion: Analisis historico politico y teoria social 10 (1992): 83-108 (cited
n Mignolo 2000: 50).
3. For an analysis of Spivak's methodological approach to the study of trans-
national relations, see Kaplan and Grewal (1999).
4. The notion of parameter is a key one in Rosenau's schema. They "constitute
he basic rules and arrangements whereby social systems function, they are bound
o be the focus of turbulence when the continuities they represent are subjected to
severe strain" (Rosenau 1990: 81).
5. "Rosenau's 'turbulence' broadly corresponds to the systemic chaos which in
our interpretative scheme constitutes a recurrent condition of the modern inter-state
ystem" (Arrighi 1999: 79).
6. In reality, labor's centrality in the process of value making has been enlarged
issder current conditions of accumulation. Castells reminds us that "never before
was labor so central to the process of value-making." For a more detailed analysis,
ee Castells (2000).
7. For references to this link, see Appadurai (1996); Szanton Blanc et al. (1995);
Mignolo (2000); Spivak (1999).
8. Ethnicity, a central theme in sociology and anthropology, yet one that was
neglected in IR during the "Soviet studies" era, has acquired a high profile during
he post-Cold War era as the idea of nation-states as made up of a predominant
thnicity is being further challenged: "The conventional concept of nation-state fits
inly one-fourth of the members of the global system" (Nielsson (no date), cited in
Rosenau 1990: 407).
9. For a detailed analysis, see Krasner (1995).
10. The transition toward post-international politics, he argues, is turbulent due
o the presence of important parametric changes that manifest themselves along the
72 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements!:
REFERENCES
Uarcon, Norma, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallen. 1999. "Introduction: New-
teen Woman and Nation." In Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallen, eds.,
Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and
the State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1-16.
^ppadurai, Arju. 1990. "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Econ-
74 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
I
'i
i
i
Chapter 5
Although the quest for ever more ceaseless capitalist accumulation will
continue to demand a certain influx of immigrants in the core if re-
allocation of production does not occur despite the relative high cost of
regulated labor there (cf. Burgers and Engbersen 1995: 2 3 1 ) , which ex-
plains why some (illegal) immigration to the core will always be favored
by some entrepreneurs in certain sectors (Jahn and Straubhaar 1999: 37),
most citizens of core countries will force their governments to decrease
constant and increasing immigration in what they perceive as "their" ter-
ritory. However, the desired policy to diminish mass migration from the
M 9S: Migration in the World-System 83
increase the potentiality of more migration to the core as the total migra
population constitutes today only circa 2% of the entire world populatic
14
(Faist 1997: 1 8 7 ) .
As "exclusive territoriality" is being destabilized by economic globa
zation and mass migration (Sassen 1996), the legitimacy of the nation-sta
is undermined in the long run. This, in turn, can provoke the upsurge
ls
the far r i g h t , which as a movement may create instability in the inte
state system. Again, following the logic of capitalist accumulation in ti
world-economy, some entrepreneurs in the core (e.g., in agribusiness)
favor continuing to exploit (illegal) immigrants since they offer them ti
16
possibility to make more profit and weaken the welfare state. Howev<
although migration remains essential for capital in the form of the consta
re-creation of a surplus labor pool and the constitution of a policy that ci
foster divisions in the working class in the core, mass migration itself, <
a global scale, is "posing an increasing threat to the stability of the gloh
capitalist system" (Standing 1 9 8 1 : 202) in the long run.
This does not imply that mass migration itself is per se economical
detrimental to a specific "receiving" country in the core at a specific tir
17
(Salt 1 9 9 3 ) . Indeed, experts of the United Nations Population Divisi<
estimated in 1999 that by the year 2 0 2 5 Europe may need 135 million new
immigrants to maintain its active population. But what is important to no
is that highly educated people will be especially welcomed by core coun-
tries, not relatively poorly educated family members, asylum seeke
ugees, and illegal immigrants (Salt 1992). If the policy of attracting high
educated people from the periphery is implemented by the core as a pi
manent strategy, this will result not only in an even more prominent for
of brain drainexposing yet again the myth of Third World dru-lo
menteuphemized as "enhanced skilled labor transfers" (White 1993: 6.
18 1
of the "best and the brightest" (Moore 1994: 1 4 3 ) , but also in gro'
political tensions due to the existent practices of racialization in core con
tries (Wallerstein 1995c: 2 6 - 2 7 ) as more "foreign workers" are gradual
transforming themselves into "minority workers" (Gimenez 1988: 40)
In 1993 approximately 3 million illegal immigrants resided in Weste.
Europe, "with new immigrants entering the region at the rate of 1-2 millic
a year" (Altamirano 1999: 4 5 4 ) . This is most likely only the beginning sine,
the polarizing logic of the world-economy will induce ever-increasing nm
bers of (illegal) immigrants to move from the periphery to the semi-pei iphe
19
and from the semi-periphery to the c o r e , thus challenging the existen
of the inter-state system as more and more immigrants within the core u
the arguments of liberalism to make their o w n justified claim to equal righ
(which diminishes the rate of profit for capitalists). As immigrants keep <
moving in the highly stratified world-economy, using ingenious strategi
of relying on various affiliations and networks to overcome the barrii.
created by core states to prevent them from coming (cf. Massey and Espi-
Mass Migration in the World-System 85
nnsa 1997), their fight to get "legalized" and get the same (political, eco-
nomical, and social) rights as other citizens in the core implies a double
squeeze on the sovereignty and financial burden of various core states. This
is especially challenging to the democratic institutions that are maintained
b\ core countries, as those w h o favor the protection of popular sovereignty
for various reasons (e.g., to bring about a redistribution of wealth within
a nation-state) are increasingly confronted with "global egalitarians" (Wei-
ner 1996: 176), that is, those w h o are concerned by global inequalities and
the' exploitation of (illegal) immigrants within core countries (cf. Van Parijs
20
1 9 9 2 : 1 6 3 - 1 6 4 ) . After having lured immigrants directly to the core in the
uoi Id-economic upturn of 1 9 4 5 - 1 9 7 3 , while hoping that they would be
nothing more than a reserve labor army that would return to the periphery
whenever the economic upturn would end (King 1996: 48; Obdeijn 1998:
130), capitalist firms from core countries have been indirectly inducing
more immigrants to move from the periphery and semi-periphery to the
cote in the Kondratieff B-period (from 1973 onward). This indirect lure
: ITI sught about by the fact that multinationals increasingly re-allocate
themselves outside the core, where (labor) costs are (temporarily) cheaper,
and exploit young laborers there only to dismiss them after a few years
.when they become "too expensive" after unionization sets in. This "eco-
r.onnc redundancy" converts these (uprooted) laborers thereafter into "a
:ead\ pool for future migration" (Portes 1996: 165; Graham 2 0 0 0 : 188).
leral countries have become slowly "remolded by the twin processes
-of corporate globalization and immigrant transnationalization" (Portes
19%: 164). Thus, the exploitation of young laborers in the periphery in-
Jiu.es them to migrate to the core, while, once arrived there, the
abo\ e-mentioned (chain) migration networks are likely to facilitate ever-
ncire immigration in the near future (Boyd 1989: 641). Indeed, existent
immigrant networks, despite all the pressures enacted by the core states to
curb immigration, are crucial to explain continuing migration processes to
21
various core z o n e s .
Despite the attempts of core states to clamp d o w n on mass immigration
, during the process of decolonization and downturn in the capitalist world-
economy (c. 1973), it seems that due to the above-mentioned networks
migration to the core has "developed a momentum that allows it to func-
t i o n independently of originating forces and policies aimed at controlling
it" (Gurak and Caces 1992: 159; cf. Simmons and Guengant 1992: 113).
Essentially, mass migration in the late twentieth century has to be inter-
preted in the context of a structural framework that reflects the interde-
pendency (power) relations between core, semi-periphery, and periphery as
they constitute an essential background of why (and how) families in the
|semi-) periphery decide to attempt to migrate to the core. An indication
of the enormous pressures brought on core nation-states by the phenome-
non of mass migration from the periphery and semi-periphery is indicated
86 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements:
22
by the general tightening of immigration laws and control (Vandepitte,
et al. 1994: 137; Burgers and Engbersen 1995: 225), the experimentation
23
with various re-migration policies, and the increasing problems of core
24
states to transform themselves in genuine multi-cultural societies.
Only the proposition to push through the transferability of social rights*
between states for immigrants (Baubock 1993: 45), resulting in universal-
izing entitlements and a "globalization of the welfare system" (Halfmann
1998: 528), would be an alternative strategy by core countries to deal withs
massive out-migration from the periphery, but by doing so, one would push
liberalism and its notions of progress and universal rights into practice and
change the very nature of the capitalist world-system. Last but not least,
from a liberal ideological point of view, it is difficult to construct more
barriers against immigrants; individual human rights, including the freedom
of movementas in the freedom of movement for capital, goods, technol-
ogy, and knowledge (Lim 1992: 139; Vernez 1996: 6) and the right for the
pursuit of happinesscan hardly be claimed for the capitalist entrepreneur
alone (Emmer and Obdeijn 1998: 12). The "very different regimes for the
circulation of capital and the circulation of people" (Sassen 1998: 66).
with the exception of wealthy entrepreneurs and tourists (Bauman 1998:
89)may very well not be defensible in the long run. A continuing policy
of exclusion and protectionism, which may "save" the core by maintaining
a world order of "global apartheid" (Richmond 1994; Alexander 1996).
is, after all, completely the opposite of liberal ideology, which is still de-
fended by most parties in power, whether they are mainstream Christian
democrats or social democrats.
The principle of the nation-state that claims that the world is divided in
sovereign states and that only those w h o are citizens are entitled to certain
rights (politically as well asthough less overtlysocioeconomically) im-
plies that "foreign citizens, permanently residing in a state are excluded
from democratic participation and processes" (Sorensen 1996: 61). It fol-
lows that the political realm of a nation-state in the world-economy is
constructed in favor of its o w n electorate and not in favor of people from
the "outside" w h o seem to threaten its institutions. Immigrants' demands
for suffrage or legalization will continue an uphill battle in core countries,
as they most likely will attempt to restrict more migrants from coming and
impose more draconian measures to implement their immigration policies
(e.g., Mitchell 1994), but again, any success will be only minimal at best
25 ;
(e.g., Singer and Massey 1998: 5 8 5 ) .
CONCLUSION
\OTES
1. Welfare regimes are, after all, "built upon the foundation of nation-states
which then] develop internal distributions of political power" (Baubock 1993: 44).
2. There is no agreement among scholars to what extent mass migration of
4
88 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements-}
(unskilled) workers affects "native" workers or (on an aggregate level) the "receiv- ;
ing" country in a negative way. For the argument that mass migration does exactly^
this, cf. Borjas (1998: 121-144) and Beck (1998: 156-158). For a refutation of'
these claims, cf. the discussion in DeFreitas (1998: 341-349). However, what isj
important in my argument here is not so much the impact of the current number!
of immigrants on a specific receiving welfare state at present but the potential im->
pact of mass migration from the periphery to the core on a much larger scale kl
the near future.
1
3. Not only will the number of socioeconomically deprived people increase
quite rapidly in the periphery (Mansouri-Guilani 1998: 9; Obdeijn 1998: 136), but
the fact that an ever-increasing percentage of the population will be very young in;
the first half of the twenty-first century only increases the possibility of migration,'?
as young people are more likely to be willing to migrate than older ones (Plane'
1992).
4. It is quite clear that the decolonization movements of the periphery hoped -
to copy the prosperity of the core to their own nation-state by way of reformism-?
embedded in either a Marxist or liberal state-reformist ideology. Now that this ^
alternative has ceased to exist, mass migration becomes worldwide one of the most^j
significant hopes to improve one's socioeconomic situation. The fact that the re-1
maining colonial islands in the Caribbean refused to become independent (from t i t ;
core) during the 1990s when urged to construct their own nation-state is quite
symbolic of the disbelief in the possibility of socioeconomic development in the'
periphery (cf. Grosfoguel 1997). A good example to illustrate this is the Indiaa -
Ocean Republic of the Comoros. This country of 600,000 people, composed of the *
islands of Grand Comore, Moheli, and Anjouan, located north of Madagascar,
voted overwhelmingly for independence (95%) from France in 1975. The sole ex-
ception was the neighboring island Mayotte, which voted to remain a colony. By
1997 living conditions had become so bad on the Comoros that on the islands of
Anjouan and Moheli revolts broke out (against the government on Grand Comore)
with the explicit purpose of returning under French sovereignty. After all, since
independence the standard of living on Mayotte had improved, whereas in the|
Comoros it had declined (Aldrich and Connell 1998: 228-232). When the govern-
ment sent in troops in September 1997 to suppress the revolt with the aid of Ga-,
bonese and Senegalese mercenaries, the troops were repulsed from the island of'
Anjouan, where French flags were raised as July 14 was proposed to be once
the "fete nationale." The French government, however, politely refused to ci
a re-annexation of the islands. This impasse led the population of Anjouan to con- -
sider independence from the Comoros, which resulted in even more civil warfare ^
on the island since pro-French groups refused to accept this option.
5. "The control of frontier transit is among the greatest powers the state* , K -
tually exercise in the inter-state system" (Wallerstein 1991: 79). This app
course, for both products in a commodity chain that sustains core-periphery rela-,
tions as well as human beings. Since mass migration can only be discouraged at
best, the credibility of the nation-state itself is now painfully at stake (Vernez 1996:"
7-8).
6. Some examples are Switzerland, Austria, France, Belgium, and Italy, but also '
Sweden. The absence of a successful racist party in national elections does, of
M.j-j Migration in the 'World-System 89
sparse, not imply that no racism or racist attacks against immigrants exist in a
souctv (e.g., England, the Netherlands, or Spain).
j 7. Especially world-cities may become the main magnets of South-North mi-
gration;; "The big cities in the West are apparently destined to be 'host cities' for
l | e people of the developing world. Immigration is turning the big cities in the West
into . economic bridge to the Third World" (Lipshitz 1998: 195-196).
S Indeed, refugees attempting to flee to the United States have beenif not
.isrurned to their country of originincreasingly "relocated" somewhere in the pe-
r%)herv; itself (such as in Guantanamo on Cuba) or to other islands and bases,
jfjiecording to Stoett (1999: 76) it is very likely that "the South could well be left
|bunch to its own devices to deal with the coming environmental crisis. It is fairly
iJiife to predict that the North will offer only minimal assistance."
lor the implications of limited ecological space related to migration and
* onomic development, see Amankwaa (1995), Hugo (1996), and Hermele
f!9v- 155-158).
1 0 . Since core countries have started to impose heavy fines on any business that
> insible for bringing illegal immigrants into their territory (Rasmussen 1997:
<cp6), anincreasing number of stowaways on ships sailing to the core are now being
metviL'-sly dumped in the ocean by crews who do not want to risk getting a pay
Mil because of these fines (Reuters 1996). The ship McRuby is only one recent and
a-How 'kid example (Vidal and Corthouts 1999). Equally dangerous are the practices
"tij :i'.!"jc smugglers who just dump their human cargo in the Mediterranean the
-moment the coast guard comes in sight (Salt and Stein 1997: 82).
'. 11 The presence of more illegal immigrants became a hot issue in the 1990s all
O v e i m c core (Spencer 1992; Cornelius et al. 1994; Morita and Sassen 1994; Gro-
CBii ik and Bocker 1995). The majority of scholars are exceedingly pessimistic
<huut i oe efficiency of "yet more authoritarian tools to enforce ever more restrictive
1
-tnir ".! ition policies to halt immigration from the South" (Findlay 1996: 50). Van-
dep'tri et al. (1994: 139) and Rogers (1992: 1122) estimate that of all asylum
M who are denied legal residence in Europe, on average 70% of all asylum
<ppik.rEions in Europe are not recognized (Rogers 1992: 1122), 5 to 10% are
Rp..r ted, 10 to 15% voluntarily return, and 75 to 80% disappear into illegality
in tn. :ore. Not surprisingly, this increases the "criminalization of migration" (den
< & . e r 1^95: 102-104; Engbersen and van der Leun 1998: 216-217) in most core
< o u n r i i c s . An indication of this process is the fact that "the great growth area of
nuc on studies in Europe and the U.S. is about how to control, reduce, and
ehn " ite immigration in developed countries" (Sutcliffe 1998: 331). As a result
flttci national migration becomes for most politicians and academics a security con-
cern rather than a humanitarian issue (Waever et al. 1993; Vernez 1996; Abiri
7
20 ' 2 ; Tsardanidis and Guerra 2000).
i i . Of course, most of the jobs that illegal immigrants are prepared to do are
j&bs that citizens of core countries would not want to do in the first place (e.g.,
C smpani 1999). Unemployment figures in receiving countries are only marginally
i Jetted by current immigration levels (e.g., Friedberg and Hunt 1995; Stalker 2000:
'>. \\ oter-Ebmer and Zweimuller 2000). There exists no zero-sum game of who
gets the job. Nevertheless, the presence of large groups of immigrants is likely to
* shaken the bargaining power of labor as a whole by preserving a specially un-
derprivileged class of workers who can easily be super-exploited" (Sutcliffe 1998:
90 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Moveme;
334). But my main point is that the costs of the welfare state in the core are gr<
ually driven up by (1) having to patrol the borders more frequently, (2) increasi
investments in very expensive repatriation procedures, and (3) increasingly missi
out on income taxes from legal jobs. This negative spiral of increasing border ]
trols, repatriations, less state income, and more violent processes of racializati
and discrimination seems unavoidable in the centers of global capital accumulate
In addition, one should not forget that there has never been a political or soc
consensus in core countries that immigrant laborers, welcomedor rather tol
atedunder the more benign auspices of an economic upturn (1947-1973), woi
be entitled to become de facto or de jure permanent residents, let alone citizf
during the succeeding economic downturn (Freeman 1995). Not only was the p
manent settlement of "guest workers" (as the term itself indicated) from periphe
countries (Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, etc.) a highly controversial issue, but the f;
that they not only remained after the 1973 economic downturn set in but sent!
their wives, children, and other (to-be) family members (Layton-Henry 1990: 16
created an enormous political backlash in the form of a surge in far-right an
immigrant groups and parties in the post-1980 core countries (cf. Betz 1994: 1(
Betz and Immerfall 1998), which suggests that mass migration from the peripht
to the core may beat least in the short run"more a social and political than
economic problem for the countries concerned" (Collinson 2000: 307). Nevertl
less, despite a proliferation of discriminatory practices and xenophobic outbur
against immigrants, "even unemployment and a marginal existence in Western I
rope will be viewed as preferable to conditions of economic and personal insecur
and helplessness that are increasingly evident in many parts of the Third Worl
(Waever et al. 1993: 152).
13. Because of these contingencies, rooted in power relations manifested witl
the world-economy, it follows that people who decide to migrate from, for examp
Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles are more likely to migrate toward the Net
erlands than to another core country. As this example illustrates, it is clear tl
international mass migration is thus not so much a question of geographical d
tance or the desire of an ideal-typical "homo ecohomicus" to migrate from a
region in the periphery to any wealthy region in the core. Ultimately, the migrati
process itself has to be analyzed in the historical context of the postcolonial worl
system, on one hand and the existing immigrant networks within it, on the ott
hand, since these are the crucially important variables in denning the parameti
of the framework in which most households have to make decisions regarding th<
strategies of international mobility (Cammaert 1986; Garson 1988; Rex 1999:15
155).
14. This often-quoted figure does, of course, not include various kinds of rei
gees who are displaced within a specific nation-state (cf. Martin, Lowell, and Tayl
2000:155). Nor does it take into account the fact that some regions in the periphe
export many more people than others. Caribbean states such as St. Kitts and Nev
Grenada, and Belize, for example, "send 1 to 2 percent of their citizens to the U
each year, transferring all of their population growth in North American citie
(Mittelman 2000: 60).
15. So far there is no consensus among world-system scholars about to wt
extent far-right fascist and neo-fascist movements have been "pro-systemic" or "a
tisystemic." In my opinion they were and are antisystemic. Antisystemic does,
Mass Migration in the World-System 91
course, not necessarily imply that they are ethically "sound" movements, just that
tky oppose the system and its logic. In a sense racist ideology can be so important
that fascists may relegate capitalist accumulation to a secondary position and at
seme point even obstruct it in order to maintain their racial hierarchical position
in a society.
16. Permanent forms of discrimination and racism within the core are (contrary
to <\ lat modernization theorists argue) structurally preventing immigrants from
"catching up" and integrating, since the incorporation of (illegal) immigrants within
lie flexible, informal (service) economy of core countries is a structural need. In
other words, immigrants can fulfill their socioeconomic function in the core only
if they are discriminated against (Vandepitte et al. 1994: 148) and are trapped in
"a situation in which [they] are incorporated into certain areas of society (above
all the labor market) but denied access to others (such as welfare systems, citizen-
snip and political participation)" (Castles 1995: 295). This discrimination of im-
migrants also promotes growing awareness in (and polarization around) ethnic
, identities while (legal and illegal) immigration increases, which, in turn, feeds upon
already existing racism in the core. The inter-state system, based on territorial
boundaries of nation-states (and, ipso facto, the inclusion of some and exclusion
of certain rights to others) and its ideological legitimacy (nationalism), is in itself a
condition for the perpetuation of racism and discrimination as long as it continues
i.\ist (Balibar 1991: 37-67). Even when immigrants have become "citizens" on
' paper, they are, because of their color of skin or perceived static cultural differences,
' still considered "foreigners" by the majority of the public opinion within a nation-
, state (e.g., Baud 1992: 318) and used as scapegoats (Leitner 1995: 268-269). For
an interesting conceptual differentiation between legally resident immigrants ("den-
k'tis") and illegal and more marginalized immigrants (margizens), cf. Martiniello
,<1994).
17. Especially in the United States it is likely that the current number of immi-
grants is not detrimental to the well-being of its economy at least at the federal
level (DeFreitas 1998: 355). But this is probably due to the fact that access to what
- ii left of the welfare state is becoming more difficult for (even legal) immigrants. In
countries where the welfare state is much more institutionalized (as in Western
'' 'Europe), it is logical that a massive increase of immigrants in a short period of time
* would challenge the existing societal structures in a much more profound way.
18. The assumed negative effects of brain drain on "developing" countries are
'even for the left in the core) often used as an excuse to restrict immigration to the
core to unprecedented levels. This argument unfortunately "blames the failures of
^'attderdevelopment for emigration of skilled people rather than the other way
* around" (Sutcliffe 1998: 332). For a study of brain drain in a world-system per-
spective, cf. Cheng and Yang 1998.
19. "International migration is thus a collective phenomenon which arises as
I part of the social relations between the less developed and more developed parts
f of the economy" (Waever et al. 1993: 150). Most potential immigrants in the pe-
riphery simply do not have the means to migrate to the core. It is therefore likely
irthat they can obtain easier access to the semi-periphery than to the core (e.g., guest
. workers in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries),
while it is logical that most people moving to the core do so from the semi-
j? periphery. In Poland, for example, about 2.5% to 5% of the population was al-
92 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements
ready working illegally in Germany during the year 1989, whereas soon after at:
least circa 50,000 illegal workers (from Russia, China, and even Vietnam) migrated
to Poland, "attracted by $100 monthly wages that are convertible in hard currency.'
.. . Poles [in turn] refuse these jobs because they pay what the Polish unemployment:
insurance system provides in benefits and, if Poles want to do these jobs, they can
migrate freely to most of Western Europe" (Martin 1992: 1007-1008).
20. On the specific challenges that this creates for existing strategies of labor
unions in the core, cf. Martens (1999). The question remains, as Martens admits
(1999: 226), to what extent unions and their political affiliations in core countries:
will show solidarity with (potential) immigrants from the periphery since most peo-
ple in the core are, after all, (indirect) benefactors of "transfer value" (Kohler
1999b). The dilemma can be summarized in the question: If mass migration can
imperil the right to economic security of people in the receiving (core) country,
whose (human) rights have priority? The rights of those already residing in the core
or the (human) rights of (potential) immigrants? The answer to this question is:
likely to depend on whether one takes "our own country" or "our planet" as the
unit of analysis (Sutcliffe 1998: 335).
21. The continuing trend of declining transportation costs should also not be
underestimated (Lakeman 1999: 141).
22. As Sutcliffe (1998: 330) points out: "All European states now tighten their
immigration laws and worsen their treatment of immigrants more or less continu-
ously in a process of competitive devaluation [as] all wish to avoid the perception
among potential asylum seekers that their regime is 'softer' than that of any other
country." This is quite blatant in Britain (Lyall 2000), but one recent example of
the introduction of more control mechanisms to prevent immigration to the core
in a "softer" welfare state is the introduction of a compulsory identification card
in the Netherlands (Albeda et al. 1989: 92-93), while immigration on the basis of
family-reunification has been made more difficult (Sprangers 1995: 30).
23. This is also the case in the Netherlands, which is generally considered one
of the most tolerant core states vis-a-vis immigration. Already from 1985 onward,
the Dutch government financially stimulated the return of unemployed elderly im-
migrants to the periphery (Aksoycan-de Bever 1987: 44-47). Several educational,
job-related projects organized by the Dutch government within major emigration
countries such as Morocco, Turkey, and even the Dutch Antilles in order to lure
immigrants back to their place of origin (Sociaal Economische Raad 1991: 69-70)
have also been launched but obtained only extremely limited success (Molle and
Zandvliet 1994: 89).
24. The irritation that immigrants bring about is well illustrated by the policies
recommended by a former state secretary in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Orstram M0ller (2000: 98): "[immigrants] cannot demand special rules instituted
for them. Nor should their behavior challenge the cultural identity of the country
they themselves have chosen as their new home . .. cultural minorities must show
that they want to be members of societynot to disrupt society or behave contrary
to its existing rules . . . experience also shows it is not a good idea to provide too
much cushion for immigrants/refugees. It may sound harsh, but apparently they
integrate faster and with better results by having access to only limited help and
assistance. They must feel that they will solve their problems largely by themselves,
Mass Migration in the World-System 93
and in this way build self-confidence [which will improve] the probability of achiev-
ing a homogenous society."
25. Soft measures, propagated by more liberal states such as the Netherlands,
advocate the usage of negative "infomercials" in the colonial territories. As migra-
tion from the Dutch Caribbean to the Netherlands has become the most pressing
issue of the Dutch presence on the islands (Posthumus 1990: 209; Mantel 1998),
the Dutch have spent in the last years over $1 million in the tiny Dutch Antilles
alone, not for investments or "developmental aid" but merely on information cam-
paigns with the explicit purpose to dissuade Antilleans from migrating to the Neth-
erlands (van Hulst 1995: 109). The fear of increasing immigration from its
remaining colonial possessions in the Caribbean is not unwarranted: thousands of
illegal immigrants from the periphery manage to move toward the colonial Carib-
bean semi-periphery (Oostindie 1996: 207), and it is quite likely that from there
many are able to move on to the core (Delaet 2000: 113), as a move from the
periphery to the colonial semi-periphery often just "represents the first stage of
migration to the metropole" (Connell and Aldrich 1991: 199).
26. According to the UN's latest Human Development Report, "the total wealth
of the top 358 'global billionaires' equals the combined incomes of the 2.3 billion
poorest people (45% of the world's population)" (Bauman 1998: 70).
27. It is estimated that in countries such as the Philippines, Morocco, Turkey,
11 Salvador, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, Honduras, or Mexico the remittances of for-
eign workers are very important to their economies (Choucri 1986; Hamilton and
Chinchilla 1996: 216; Vandaele 1999: 93; Stalker 2000: 80-82), as in some cases
they surpass by far the flow of direct foreign investment (Patnaik and Chandrasek-
har 1998: 361) or even their national budgets (Menjivar et al. 1998: 99). Martin
(1997: 23) estimates that worldwide remittances of immigrants residing in industrial
countries to their countries of origin were at least $75 billion per year, which
outweighs the amount of official development assistance to "developing" countries.
It is therefore logical that they will become increasingly involved in the treatment
of their subjects abroad, defend their rights, and even increasingly promote migra-
tion to the core as a policy (van Hulst 1995: 86).
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102 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movement
Twentieth-Century Antisystemic
Historical Processes and U.S.
Hegemony: Free Trade Imperialism,
National Economic Development,
and Free Enterprise Imperialism
Satoshi Ikeda
INTRODUCTION
twentieth century. After intracore rivalry was settled through two world
wars, successful socialist and independence movements forced the United
States to accept national economic development both in the core and pe-
riphery, postponing the earlier design of free enterprise imperialism ex-
pressed by the Open Door policy and Wilson's Fourteen Points statement.
Successful national economic development in Western Europe and Japan,
however, undermined U.S. hegemony. The measures taken by the United
States to counter this trend put an end to national economic development,
and free enterprise imperialism was established in the form of neoliberal
globalization under U.S. hegemony in the 1990s.
"Antisystemic movement" is a concept used by world-system researchers
to express movements of the oppressed to counter the oppressor (Arrighi,
Hopkins, and Wallerstein 1989; Silver, Arrighi, and Dubofsky 1995; Tay-
lor 1997). This concept bridges the notions of structure, agency, and pro-
cess. In this chapter, I use "antisystemic historical process" (or antisystemic
process) as a concept that expands and complements the concept of anti-
systemic movement. The working definition proposed here is a historical
process that is in contradiction with the reproduction of the existing ac-
cumulation mechanism and political, economic, and ideological power re-
lations in the capitalist world-system. This modified concept allows us to
discuss contradictory processes that may not involve clear movement of the
oppressed. Also employed in this chapter is the concept of prosystemic
historical processes that are concordant with the reproduction of the exist-
ing accumulation mechanism and power relations in the system.
In addition to the interplay of prosystemic and antisystemic historical
processes, the following exploration employs a conceptual dichotomy of
transformative process vis-a-vis reproductive process. A "structure" is a
collection of reproductive processes involving those agencies promoting the
existing power relations and those agencies opposing them, as well as social
relations of exploitation/accumulation and subordination/subjugation. A
transformative process emerges as a result of contradiction in reproductive
process (or structure). For example, antisystemic processes emerge when
prosystemic reproductive processes undermine the very condition that al-
lows systemic reproduction. I expect that this dialectical interpretation is
useful not only for historical examination but also for the exploration of
emerging processes.
N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y S T R U C T U R E OF
A C C U M U L A T I O N U N D E R BRITISH FREE T R A D E
IMPERIALISM
has been understood as the indicator of British strength, but as the follow-
ing examination of available statistics suggests, British accumulation was
heavily dependent on exports of cotton products to the periphery.
Total production of cotton yarn and piece goods (cloth) markedly in-
creased in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. Raw cotton con-
sumption measured in weight, which is a good measure of output assuming
that material loss is negligible, increased by 27.5 times, from 5 9 4 million
pounds in the first decade of the nineteenth century ( 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 0 9 ) to 16,357
million pounds in the last decade ( 1 8 9 0 - 1 8 9 9 ) . Such an increase in pro-
duction was accompanied by a yet larger increase in exports. Total U K
export of cotton yarn and piece goods measured in weight increased 4 1 -
times, from 2 7 4 million pounds in the first decade to 11,348 million pounds
in the last decade. Dependence on exports measured by the ratio of cotton
goods exported to raw cotton consumption gradually increased for the Brit-
:
ish cotton industry from 4 6 . 1 % in the first decade to 7 5 . 7 % in the 1 8 8 0 s .
For the entire nineteenth century, more than two-thirds (68.8%) of B r m ^
cotton products were exported. As the scale of the British cotton industry
expanded, the British Empire expanded "free trading" markets in Asia
through formal and informal colonization. The process of the development
of British cotton industries, therefore, accompanied colonization/peripher-
alization of Asian peoples and countries through forced "open trade" and
through the destruction of local cotton manufacturing.
By drawing lessons from the cotton industry's example, it may be pos-
sible to generalize about the nineteenth-century structure of accumulatior
as follows. It depended on cheap raw materials from the periphery, low
waged workers in the core, and markets in the periphery. Raw material
(e.g., raw cotton) was produced by slave/semi-salve workers in periphery
plantation/mining areas and processed into industrial products (e.g., cotton
yarn and cloth) by low-paid workers in the core under harsh working and
living conditions.
were incorporated in the second half of the nineteenth century, the foun
dation of the nineteenth-century accumulation structure (i.e., colonial sub-
jugation, core worker exploitation, and the rise of rivals to the British)!
pushed forth the three antisystemic historical processes of the twentieth
century.
As the world-economic crisis deepened toward the end of the nineteenth,
century, U.S. political leaders designed its diplomatic policy along the line,
of anticolonial imperialism. McCormick summarizes Brooks Adams' heg-,'
emonic design as follows:
By 1900, American leaders were moving away from the nationalistic ideology
tariff protectionism and overseas imperialism. The ruling Republican Party moved'
to embrace a different ideology of tariff reciprocity and the Open Door policy. Its
the Dingley tariff of 1897 and the Open Door notes of 1899-1900, Adams v \
the glimmer of a transformation from defensive nationalism to expansive internals,
tionalism, to the ebullient notion that American economic supremacy was bes
served by an unlimited global market rather than a restricted national and coloruail
market. (McCormick 1989: 19)
Wilson's classic Fourteen Points statement of early 1918 was perhaps the quintes-
sential expression of the newly dominant American world view. Renouncing bal-
ance of power politics, that handmaiden of autarkic nationalism, Wilson called for
freedom of the seas, free trade ("the removal, so far as possible, of all economic
barriers"), a global open door ("an equality of trade conditions among all the
nations"), arms reductions, political self-determination, and a gradual end to co-
lonialism. (McCormick 1989: 22)
Antisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 109
V>iien we look back at the Fourteen Points statement after more than 80
\ears, it is clear that the U.S. Open Door policy provided an early version
ot what Arrighi called the system of free enterprise (Arrighi 1994: 5 8 - 7 4 ) .
Ideologically, it is called the Washington Consensus (Stiglitz 1998) of the
J
1 9 0 s that serves as the basis of a neoliberal globalization process imposed
hy the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), and the
\\ iirld Trade Organization (WTO). But the world-system went through an
e\entful century before establishing the U.S. hegemonic design of the early
decades of the twentieth century. With this in mind, the next section ex-
amines the interplay of antisystemic historical processes and a prosystemic
resoonse of U.S. hegemony.
but socialist development from the viewpoint of the U.S. ruling class wa
as dreadful as older imperialist empires since it meant the end of investmer
and trade opportunities for American business. U.S. foreign policy again!
socialist states and socialist-independence movements involved overt an
covert intervention to lead independence movements toward a liberal pat
and to "contain" Communist expansion (Reifer and Sudler 1996). How
ever, the policy of Communist containment was a reaction to successfi
antisystemic processes, and such a policy was not enough to contain sc
cialist aspiration of the workers in the core. Thus, the core states initiate
measures to "co-opt" workers in the core, and these measures partly solve
the contradiction of the nineteenth-century structure of accumulation
Co-optation of American workers involved changes in corporate labc
practices and government policies. After radical labor movements ths
sought proletarian revolution were violently suppressed around the turn c
the twentieth century, American labor unions took the probusiness strateg
to secure employment, improve working conditions, and raise wages (Fui
feld 1966). Also, the federal government expanded its involvement in mat
roeconomic management, leading to the formation of a "welfare" stat
(Ashford 1986; Teeple 2 0 0 0 ) . These developments were aptly analyzed b
the French Regulationists using the term "Fordist regime of accumulation
(Boyer 1990). While this "co-optation" policy was abandoned later in th
process of neoliberal globalization, this policy worked to alleviate the cor
tradiction of the nineteenth-century structure of accumulation in the post-
World War II period. ,
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, inter-imperialist competitio
intensified, business fluctuation was amplified, and recession was pn
longed, and the workers and the colonized people became increasingK ui
ruly. Twentieth-century worker "co-optation" offered a solution to two c
the three fundamental "dependencies" of the nineteenth-century structui
of accumulation (i.e., worker exploitation in the core and reliance on mai
kets in the periphery). With increasing wages paid to American worker:
the working class was integrated into the capitalist system as the source c
4
effective demand. Counter-business cyclical policy expanded the role c
the government as the source of effective demand and the regulator of cred
supply. Therefore, the Fordist regime, Keynesian intervention, and welfai
state formation emancipated to a significant degree the core states fror
their dependency on markets in the periphery while replacing the socialis
dream of radical workers with the American dream of middle-class lifestyk
The third form of "dependency" of the nineteenth-century structure c
accumulation entailed a reliance on humans, natural resources, and indus
trial raw materials in the periphery. Mobilization of peripheral resources i
a constant feature of the capitalist world-system from its beginning, an
the U.S. government engaged in various policies to secure American acces
to natural resource and raw materials in the independent peripheral coun-
" ntisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 111
tries. This task, however, proved difficult to achieve due to successful so-
i Wist and independence movements, as well as the re-emergence of regional
historical processes previously suppressed under European imperialism. The
I I.S. approach to the resource-rich peripheral countries included direct mil-
itary engagement (Guatemala), covert operation (Chile), and bribery
through development and military financing (Iran and Indonesia). If mili-
tary engagement was a "stick," national economic development was used
as a "carrot" by the United States to keep peripheral countries open to U.S.
business.
The idea of national economic development was not necessarily in con-
tradiction with the system of free enterprise as long as U.S. enterprise could
operate freely within a given national border. State intervention in eco-
nomic management, however, was used to promote "national" enterprises
that challenged U.S. corporations, especially in Western Europe and Japan.
Resource nationalism of the petroleum-producing countries ended up
threatening access to resources for U.S. enterprises. Even though the project
A "national" economic development was somewhat contradictory to the
earlier design of world-economy, the United States accepted this strategy
as a countermeasure against Communist expansion.
National economic development was successful in Western Europe and
Japan, and the limits and contradictions of the nineteenth-century structure
of accumulation were overcome in these core states along the line of Ford-
>m, Keynesianism, and welfare state policy in the United States. While
revolutionary movements were effectively suppressed, the workers of these
^ore states were also "co-opted" to absorb products mass-produced by the
1 aylorist plants. Capitalist enterprises in these countries re-emerged as
powerful accumulators under the auspices of state protection and promo-
tion, taking advantage of the supply of peripheral natural resources needed
for economic growth secured by the neocolonial U.S. hegemony. Success
on the part of the West European countries and Japan, however, brought
i relative decline of the U.S. economy as an unintended consequence. In-
deed, the emergence of powerful enterprises elsewhere had the effect of
eroding the U.S. corporate advantage (Ikeda 1996).
Such challenges to U.S. hegemony also emerged in peripheral countries.
The failure of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and its high finan-
cial cost gave the impression to leaders of the "Second and Third World"
countries that U.S. hegemony was in decline. Third World countries at-
tempted to negotiate "terms of trade" improvements through the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the 1970s.
In the process of post-independence national economic development, these
countries deepened their structural dependence on the First World through
the policy of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). In the 1960s, the
.-nee of their traditional exports, mainly agricultural products and miner-
jK. dropped as the world supply of these commodities increased. Demand
112 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements J
4
for an improvement in terms of trade was expressed through UNCTAD $
and other forums; however, it was successful only in the case of petroleum
Middle Eastern petroleum-producing countries used the oil embargo as i
a weapon to change the core countries' support for Israel in 1973 and J
eventually managed to increase their control over world oil prices. The *
success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sig-
naled a victory against the United States over the control of the world
petroleum supply. In the environment of global stagflation (stagnation and $
inflation existing simultaneously), many developing countries attempted to i
pursue further national economic development by taking in oil dollars at '
l o w interest rates in the form of short-term syndicated loans. These loans /
were provided by the core banks operating in a Eurodollar market based
on the agreement to roll over the loans so that they work just like long- j
term loans, provided the borrower keeps paying the interest. While many J
countries used the money for the further pursuit of the ISI policy, the so- ?
called newly industrializing countries emulated the successful Taiwanese
policy of export oriented industrialization (EOI).
Even though the project of national economic development was in full
swing in the 1970s in the periphery, contradictions and different develop- j
ment experiences plagued the project. First, the scope and degree of de- *
pendency on the part of the periphery widened and deepened. Under 1
ISI policy, the peripheral state became dependent on the core countries in
terms of finance (unilateral and multilateral aid and loans), technology,
capital goods, and intermediate goods. As private loans were introduced, ;
financial dependency deepened, and the EOI policy created a dependency ?
on markets in the industrialized North. Also, the Third World countries i
became polarized into oil producers, newly industrializing countries (NICs),
and those seriously affected by global stagflation and uncontrolled popu
lation expansion. Despite divergent trajectories within the periphery, thi
dream of national economic development still gleamed in the 1970s.
At the opposite end of such rosy prospects for national economic devel
opment and the promising future of 1970s Communism lay a weakenet
U.S. hegemony. Its industrial superiority was eroded, for instance, by th<
rising imports of Japanese automobiles. The weakened U.S. financial po
sition resulted in dollar-gold non-convertibility and substantial devaluation
of the U.S. dollar once the fixed exchange w a s abandoned. U.S. political
leadership in the inter-state system was also compromised by U.S. defea
in Vietnam, the OPEC oil embargo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and the Iranian revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. In the process
the stage was set for a U.S. hegemonic rollback that prepared an end tc
the state-socialist experiment, national economic development, and the ris<
of Japan, Germany, and other core and semi-peripheral states.
Antisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 113
The U.S. response to the erosion of its hegemonic position can be divided
into two stages (i.e., a passive response in the 1970s and an active one in
the 1980s). These responses led to the establishment of the world-economic
order envisioned by U.S. leaders in the early twentieth century. Instead of
being a result of sound analysis and rational policy choice, however, this
U.S. hegemonic reassertion appears to be a consequence of misconceived
theoretical understanding of economy and often irrational policy selection.
The superior position that the United States enjoyed in international
trade and finance started to erode in the 1960s as U.S. engagement in the
Vietnam War deepened (leading to rising trade deficits) and the European
Economic Community and Japan achieved economic development under
U.S. auspices. The foundation of postwar international economic order (the
Bretton W o o d s system) was the convertibility of the U.S. dollar with gold,
commitment to fixed exchange rates, the control of short-term international
liquidity by the IMF, and long-term development funds by the World Bank.
As the U.S. balance of trade turned to deep red, the U.S. government was
pressured by European governments to pay gold in the exchange of the
I S. dollar. The U.S. response was to abandon the commitment of dollar-
gold convertibility (Nixon declaration in 1971). Mounting downward pres-
sure on the value of the U.S. dollar made it impossible to maintain a fixed
exchange rate among major currencies, and another pillar of the Bretton
Woods system was abandoned in 1 9 7 3 .
These measures were the first round of global financial liberalization, and
thiv were followed by subsequent rounds of banking deregulation, lifting
of foreign exchange control, elimination of the boundaries among financial
strvice industries, and so on. These measures were gradually introduced in
the 1970s as a response to growing Eurodollar markets such that the U.S.
dollar would come back to the United States to ease the U.S. balance-of-
r.nments problem. These financial deregulation measures were a "passive"
response in the sense that they were directed toward the U.S. economy. But
these financial liberalization measures prepared the way for the emergence
or what Susan Strange (1986) called "casino capitalism," where an econ-
omy is driven by unregulated financial speculation.
As the slogan of a "strong America" indicates, the policy of the admin-
istration of Presidents Reagan and Bush between 1981 and 1 9 9 2 can be
considered an "active" response to a decline in U.S. hegemony. However,
rhetoric and actual policy were often in contradiction. For example, a
strong dollar was one of the policy goals, but this invited a flood of Jap-
anese and European products into the U.S. market, undermining American
"strength" in various industries. Also, smaller government was advocated
114 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movements'.
to restore fiscal health of the U.S. economy, but tax cuts for the rich and
increased military expenditure inflated the government's budget deficit.
American corporations that were competing with foreign companies de-*
manded protection, and this came in the form of trade restriction in spite
of the rhetoric of free trade. Despite the discrepancy between the rhetoric
and actual policy, the Reagan-Bush governments put an end toeven if
largely unintendedthe erosion of U.S. economic hegemony vis-a-vis Japan
and West European countries.
The major challenger of U.S. economic hegemony in the 1980s was Ja-
pan, as indicated by the number of scholastic and popular publications
warning the Americans of the current and future threat of Japanese power
(their harbinger was Vogel 1979). Those American corporations that were
adversely affected by the Japanese exports managed to erect protectionist
walls such as the "voluntary" export restraint in automobiles. However,
such a measure simply gave the Japanese corporations a windfall profit
from higher unit prices, and Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the
United States eroded the share of American corporations in the meantime.
The U.S. government imposed yen appreciation onto Japan in the Plaza
Accord of 1985, expecting that a stronger yen would deter Japanese in-
dustrial exports to the United States. Although Japanese trade surplus kept
increasing despite yen appreciation, this policy put an end to "the rise of
Japan" through unintended consequences. This yen appreciation took place
when global financial deregulation was proceeding with the emergence of
computer-electronics networks. A stronger yen under such a condition
translated into rapid appreciation of Japanese assets, and the bubble econ-
omy ensued. The lack of understanding of the Japanese economy in the
global context led to lax monetary policy by the Japanese government in
the late 1980s until the discount rate was suddenly raised in 1989 for fear
of inflation (Miyazaki 1992).
Post-bubble-burst recession still plagues the Japanese economy, and there
does not exist any idea among the leading Japanese economists about why
expansionary policy has no effect at all. In a sense, this sorry situation of
the Japanese economy was an unintended consequence of the Reagan-Bush
policy. What happened as a result of yen appreciation and Japanese bilat-
eral trade surplus was the deep entrapment of the Japanese economy by
the U.S. economy. This occurred as a result of the Japanese purchase of
U.S. government bonds and corporate stocks. The Japanese economy heav- >
ily depended upon export, especially to the United States, and in order to
keep exporting, the Americans had to have purchasing power. The Japanese
provided Americans much-needed purchasing power by running capital ac- ;
count deficits. The accumulated Japanese holding of U.S. dollar-
denominated assets depreciated substantially in terms of the Japanese yen
after the Plaza Accord in 1985. In the post-bubble-burst era of the 1990s,
intisystemic Historical Processes and U.S. Hegemony 115
C O N C L U S I O N , O R N O T YET C O N C L U D E D ?
NOTES
1. For this and other aspects of the debate on British imperialism, see Turner
il976).
I. These were calculated from figures in Robson (1957: 331-333, table A.l).
3. For world-system studies on worker movements, see Silver (1995a, 1995b).
4. Note that only the male white workers earned the "family" wages.
REFERENCES
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the
Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Vrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Anti-
systemic Movements. London: Verso.
\4iford, Douglas. 1986. The Emergence of Welfare States. Oxford: Blackwell.
Beyer, Robert. 1990. The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction. Translated
by Craig Charney. New York: Columbia University Press.
Braun, Denny. 1998. The Rich Get Richer. Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Bulked, Nicola, Walden Bello, and Kamal Malhotra. 1998. "Taming the Tigers:
The IMF and the Asian Crisis." In Kwame Sudaram Jomo, ed., Tigers in
Trouble: Financial Governance, Liberalisation and Crisis in East Asia. Lon-
don: Zed Books, pp. 85-136.
Chossudovsky, Michel. 1998. The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and
122 Global Processes, Power Relations, and Antisystemic Movemt
ENGENDERING T H E C O N C E P T OF H O U S E H O L D S
.timers. They are also units of reproduction; they are decision-making and
resource-allocating units; they are sometimes economic enterprises that pro-
duce market commodities; they are arenas that transmit culture and ethnic
heritage; and they are units that support and/or organize antisystemic re-
sistance (Ulshofer 1983: 192; Dunaway 1995, 1997, 2001). Furthermore,
households pool many resources that are not material. For example, the
first resource that a woman brings to her household is her o w n body, which
naturally reproduces human life, feeds infants, and is the object of sexual
gratification. N o r does the notion of income pooling call attention to the
non-material resources brought to households by women, such as caregiv-
2
ingor specialized eco-medical knowledge (Mies et al. 1 9 8 8 ) .
The third conceptual weakness is that the world-systems approach masks
the power struggles and inequities within households. Indeed, the tendency
of world-systems analysts has been to beg off this issue. After laying con-
siderable groundwork about the external processes that shape households,
Wallerstein and Martin (1979: 202) apologetically commented: "What re-
main much less known are the actual dimensions of the reorganization of
internal household dynamics." In the early 1990s, after several radical stud-
ies of household inequities had appeared (e.g., Beneria and Roldan 1987),
writers of the second world-systems monograph on households (Smith and
Wallerstein 1992: 12) were still excusing their failure to address "the in-
ternal structure of the households, and h o w power and goods are distrib-
uted internally." In short, the perspective admits that resource allocation is
.nequitable (McGuire, Smith, and Martin 1986: 7 6 - 7 7 ) , but we have not
prioritized that household reality in our theory or our research. Because it
ignores such inequities, the perspective has transformed w o m e n into ap-
pendages of households, thereby effectively erasing them from the world-
system (Vellenga 1985: 316). We need to stop depicting households as
though they are ungendered monoliths. To do that, we must assess the true
extent to which capitalism exploits the nonwaged labor of women. We
cannot make such an inquiry unless we decompose household pooling strat-
egies and recognize internal inequities (Beneria and Roldan 1987: 1 3 5 -
L36).
ENGENDERING T H E C O N C E P T O F C O M M O D I T Y
CHAINS
1. How does the commodity chain transform and reshape households through sur-
plus extraction and unequal exchange?
2. To what degree do households and women subsidize the production process
through nonwage inputs?
3. To what degree does the commodity chain externalize material, political, social
and ecological costs to households and to women?
4. To what degree do households and women at lower nodes of the commodity
chain subsidize households, laborers, or consumers at higher nodes?
5. To what degree does the commodity chain structure gender inequality within
and among the households that constitute its entire labor force?
women are paid by task completion, thereby cutting the costs incurred by
employers for wages and employee benefits (Hayashi 1998). In peripheral
regions, w o m e n engage in industrial homework and make other types of
household-based inputs into commodity chains, including the collection ol
ecological resources and the retrieval of recyclable items from the garbage.
In the late twentieth century, textile commodity chains were increasingly
decentralized into putting-out systems in which household-based women
finished commodities on a piece-rate basis (Mies 1982).
In addition to their direct wage and nonwage inputs, w o m e n and h o u s e
holds subsidize the commodity chain through several forms of invisible
labor and hardship. Destruction of precapitalist modes of production leads
to a new sexual division of labor organized into semiproletarianized h o u s i
holds (Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers 1984). In order to keep the waged
labor force
at a relatively low level of pay (by the existing standards of the world-economy),
they had to be located in household structures in which the work on this new
"export-oriented activity" formed only a small part of the lifetime revenues...
this case, other household activities which brought in revenues in multiple forms
could "subsidize" the remuneration for the "export-oriented activity," thereby
keeping the labor costs very low. (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987: 777)
What the housewife produces in the family are not simply use-values but the com
modify "labor-power" which the husband then can sell as a "free" wage laborer
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 137
m the market.. . the productivity of the housewife is the condition for the pro-
ductivity of the (male) wage laborer. The nuclear family, organized and protected
by the state, is the social factory where this commodity "labor-power" is produced.
Hence, the housewife and her labour are not outside of surplus value production,
but constitute the very foundation upon which this process can get started. The
housewife and her labour are, in other words, the basis of the process of capital
accumulation. (Mies 1986: 31)
W O M E N A N D T H E EXTERNALIZED COSTS O F
C O M M O D I T Y CHAINS
families whose members (most often adult males) were removed by labi
migrations (Boss 1 9 9 3 ; Dunaway 2 0 0 1 ) . Capitalist commodity chains con
pete with households for limited ecological resources; and females contrii
ute much more unpaid labor to those commodity chains than men (B< nci t
and Roldan 1987: 1 0 2 - 1 0 3 ; Wallerstein 1995: 5 - 6 ) .
Because it accumulates greater profits off the backs of women, the worli
system does not seek to transform females into wage laborers. The sysi.
profits at maximal levels by semi-proletarianizing w o m e n and by shiftir.
to w o m e n and households most of the costs of commodity productioi
(Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987; Shiva 1988). While w o m e n are semipn
letarianized, they are also semi-domesticatednot able, then, to functic
predominantly within or outside their households. On the one hand, th<
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 141
are identified socially as housewives. On the other hand, they are "fully
integrated in a world market oriented production system." According to
Mies (1981: 4 9 3 ) , "the social definition of w o m e n as housewives serves
mainly the purpose of obscuring the true production relations and to con-
solidate their exploitation, ideologically and politically."
^*-inen are not simply "left behind" while men monopolize the new and more
productive areas of the economy; they are in fact deliberately "defined back" into
the role of housewives. Only if women remain outside the formal sector and are
socially defined as housewives can the double exploitation of their labor go on.
Not only the big exporters, but also the husbands . . . are benefiting as non-
producers from [women's] ongoing subsistence production. The integration of
women .. . into a world system of capital accumulation has not and will not trans-
f.M ni them into free wage-labourers. It is precisely this facttheir not being free
wage-labourers, but housewiveswhich makes capital accumulation possible.
(Mies 1981: 500)
CONCLUSIONS
is not just another variable to be thrown into analyses, but is an integral component
of the world-systems evolution. Focusing on gender points to new theoretical in-
sights into the factors that shape group consciousness, into subtle forms of resis-
tance to oppression, into the ways capital exploits extant cultural values, and into
ways micro and macro social processes are linked. (Day and Hall 1991: 4)
NOTES
I would like to thank Donald Clelland for his critical comments and biblioj^r lph
ical assistance on several drafts of this chapter.
1. I analyzed the content of Review, volumes 1 through 20, the Journal of
World-System Research, volumes 1 through 5 (nos. 1-3), and the monograp
have been published as PEWS annuals. For a complete list of the PEWS annuals
see this site on-line: http://csf.colorado.edu/wsn/jwsr.htm.
2. While not viewed as "politically correct" by many U.S. feminists, this argu
ment reflects the real, everyday roles of the vast majority of the world's v.onitn
Globally, most women are indeed mothers and housewives who expect to bear and
to raise children as their primary role in households. In addition, most of t\
world's women still provide non-material resources to households, such as emo-
tional support, spiritual resilience, and caregiving to household members.
3. American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFl-
CIO) study released 9 March 2000; see www.workingfamilies.com.
Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation 143
4. Using Acrobat Reader, you can access this information on-line at http://
fbox.vt.edu/W/wdunaway/figures.pdf.
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City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boss, Pauline G. 1993. "The Experience of Immigration for the Mother Left Be-
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Bulbeck, Chilla. 1992. "Third World Women: Dialogues with Western Feminism."
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Day, Catherine, and Thomas D. Hall. 1991. "Are There Women in the World
Economy?" PEWS News (Winter): 3-5.
Dunaway, Wilma A. 1995. " 'The Disremembered' of the Antebellum South: A
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89-106.
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Capitalism. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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Mies, Maria, Veronika Bennhold-Thomsen, and Claudia von Werlhof. 1988.
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Chapter 8
I\ PRODUCTION
' lile the study of long-term, large-scale social change appears at odds with
tinist analysis, analysis that tries to capture women's lived experience,
apparent difficulties between them are not inevitable; rather, they stem
m how we conceive women, on the one hand, and long-term, large-scale
:ial change, on the other. To produce knowledge about long-term, large-
le social change that corresponds to the prescriptions of women's
vements for research respecting embodiment and multiplicity requires
it we examine preconceptions about the status of both the knower and
known in the research process. This project benefits from the integra-
n of feminist analysis and world-systems analysis. Both feminist analysis
i world-systems analysis have, to varying extents, attempted to rethink
se two parts of the process of producing knowledge, though each has
gely specialized in one. For feminist analysis, the focus has been pri-
rily on the knower and has taken the form of various permutations of
: idea of standpoint. For example, both women's standpoint (Hartsock
33) and the black feminist standpoint (Collins 1991) refer to a position
m which to perceive the world in ways different from those of dominant
:ial science, as well as from one another. For world-systems analysis, the
us has been primarily on the known, on interrogating assumptions about
particular and the contextual, defined in opposition to the long term
i the large scale, as ways to meet the intellectual demands of embodi-
nt and multiplicity. The arguments that I make in favor of the study of
ig-term, large-scale social change are not made in opposition to feminist
dysis. On the contrary, in what follows here I suggest that the world-
148 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Anafy
W H A T D O W E M E A N W H E N W E SAY "SEX/GENDER
SYSTEM"?
But the paradox of gender is not inevitable, that is, it is not a condition
of gender difference in the "real world"; it arises because, in the cases of
ISO Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Ai.ah
A
Revisioning Social Change 151
dynamic of gender and its practices and another dynamic of class and its
oracticeseach modeled (theorized) separately and ahistorically such that
when and where "women" begins and other social differences take over in
demarcating women's experience are murky. The impetus behind the study
of women's differences was generated in the insight that w o m e n do not
ive gender here and race there and class there but experience all simulta-
neously; yet the analysis of that intersectionality depends on a methodology
.n which discrete social dynamics are conceived as generalizations from
many cases, and cases are then interpreted as the embodiment of many
(discrete) models of social dynamics. The very overgeneralization that fem-
inist analysis seeks to avoid in the analysis of "women," it reproduces in
the analysis of race, class, gender, and so on.
As long as gender difference is conceived as a social dynamic as inde-
pendentconceptually, spatially and temporallyof the other forms of
social difference that produce cases of w o m a n , the paradox persists. The
paradox is the result of defining w o m a n separate from those things that
generate women's differences; in this case, w o m a n is both separate from
other forms of social difference and not separate. This is contradictory,
paradoxical. However, the root of the paradox lies not in the real world
hut in the analysis of "women"; it is a problem not of ontology but of the
methodology that governs analysis of the relationship of the "women" to
the teal world (or to women's experience). Are "women" a transhistorical
category, shaped by things other than gender? Is the only alternative to
dissolve the meaningfulness of the term altogether into women's differ-
ences? Is there a middle way?
The dilemma posed by the tension between these t w o readings of
"women" has consumed feminist analysis in the debate over essentialism
or difference in the last decade; the various ways in which each meaning
yields some important data about women's lives have been considered, and
scholars have sought reason to choose one or the other as the better rep-
resentation of women's lived experience. Following in the tradition of re-
jecting biologically defined essentialist readings of w o m a n , most feminist
scholars have turned to the study of intersectionality in "the local" or in
"context." This does not, however, displace the universal term; it simply
sidesteps the issue of what we mean when we say "women" by apparently
qualifying the term with differences spelled out by other forms of social
differentiation.
The assumption that women's experience is better represented in analysis
of difference, of "the local" and "context," too often fails to think through
what is meant by the local and context. In fact, these terms become sub-
stitutes for the analysis of other forms of social differentiationfor race,
:lass, world-economic position, and so on. The difficulty with creating gen-
eralizations is found less in the size of the unit of analysis (the modern
world-system, Buenos Aires, March 1957) than in the modeling of distinct
152 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis-
units of analysis (race, class, etc.) such that the relationship between the
units is incidental to understanding the unit itself; the relationship between
the units is added after the fact; the units are related in cases, or contexts.
For example, "the local" is often meant to imply differences among women
by world-economic position: "textile-producing indigenous w o m e n in Gua-
temala in 1 9 9 9 " indicates a locality within which to understand these
women, a locality in which their real lived experience is supposedly better
represented than in analyses with larger time and space dimensions. Cer-
tainly, in the age of globalization, we understand that addressing the time
and space of that locality means bringing to bear on the analysis processes
:
that transcend the locality itself. But, does "women" transcend the l o c a l i n
Or are those processes and relations situating the local in time and space
different from the process of gender differentiation? Typically, in the mil
ysis of gender difference, what distinguishes sex from gender or woman
from women's differences are things other than gender, to which women
is added after the fact; w o m e n simply are, and are on the basis of a mean-;
ingful (universal, non-differentiated) category, "women"; the category is
then differentiated, or made social and historical, by processes of social
change distinct from women, that is, world-economic position, year, race/
ethnicity, labor force participation in the case illustrated here. The context
or the local is modeled separately from whatever we mean when we use
the term "women"; the construction of those concepts designating the local
is too often left vague; and analysis of gender is added as a set of obser-
vations about w o m e n in the context.
Does this analysis represent the real experience of these women, in con-
trast to categorizations such as "women in 1 9 9 9 " or "women in the United
States" or "women in developing countries"? I think not; I argue instead
that "woman" itself and the process of gender differentiation of which it
is an indicator are historical, such that they transcend the local and are
formative of the world-systemic processes shaping "textile-producing
w o m e n in Guatemala in 1999." But analyzing "women" as world-systemic
requires giving up many of our assumptions about what w o m e n are and
h o w to analyze social change from the perspective enabled by the category.
All readings of w o m e n or gender difference, even those that purport to
relate to a "context" or a "community," are actually abstractions from
experience and therefore partialities (Hopkins 1982a), not giving us a pic-
ture of women's lived experience but situated knowledge about it; a par-;
ticular analysis of the experience of a community of women, no matter
h o w small, is nothing more than a choice of which parts (conceptual, tem-
poral, spatial) of the story to tell. The analysis is always partial. In avoiding
overgeneralizations metanarratives, and stereotypessize doesn't nnttei
we get no closer to knowing what w o m e n really are by narrowing the
spatial and temporal dimensions of our study; what matters is why the
spatial and temporal dimensions are chosen, which, in turn, must be spec--
visiomng Social Change 1S3
of the body to social status that women's movements contest but a paj
ular, historical bounding of the relationship of the body to social sta
That particular, historical bounding of the relationship contested
women's movements includes, on the one hand, the designation of the bun
1
as a site of scientifically codified and institutionalized truths about the i -
tinction between the biological and the social and, on the other han<.
clearly delineated complex of social statuses, namely, race, class, gen
nation, and sexuality. In other words, women's movements have speci
their unit of analysis as that in which the body, world-systemic social s
uses, and science come together. This has several revolutionary implicati
for the study of social change.
First of all, the contestation initiated through feminist focus on the b
challenged political economy, the analysis of social change in which be
kinship were not interesting or significant moments in the process. In c
trast, recent developments in feminist thinking have offered the possib:
of "woman" and "man" being formative of social structure, society, ir
tutional arrangements, and so on; they form "the social" in the sense I
change in the social is defined through their transformation. Woman
this case, is not a universal or a given shaped by the social, but instea
is a historical object through which the social is known. Rather than
ontological condition, "woman" is a heuristic and political tool.
Second, this tool makes possible inquiry into the historical variability o
the relationality between the body and social status. Like w o m a n , that
relationality is made historical through this insight; that is, the relatiniul.
of body to social status is negotiated in socially, spatially, and temporaliv
located sites and practices. Political economy is one of those sites; its reru \
to acknowledge the body and kinship as formative moments in the J~>I in-
duction of what was intended by "the social" can be accounted for b\ tk
process of gender differentiation; in other words, gender difference
significant in the production of what was meant by the social in politica
economy and h o w social change was analyzed in the field. However, po
litical economy was shaped on the basis of preexisting contestations ou
the meaning and practice of gender difference; for example, "the social'
or, for Adam Smith, "the economic," was an elaboration of a structuii? i
knowledge (Wallerstein 1996) initiated in the transition from lineage-based
strategies of fixing status and wealth to those of the modern world-s> S U T
Finally, we are led to ask, When and where did the relationality contested
by women's movements take shape? If the terms are granted hist<uji.-it..
,n
then asking when and where becomes an integral moment in the f o r n u t u
of the terms. While I do not go into this in much depth here, I suggest
the historical relationality of the body to social status that women's rami-
ments contest today is that which begins to take shape in European niii
icine and natural philosophy around the twelfth to fourteenth cenl LH IL-.
it is a relationality that forms and conforms to the structure of knov. led-.*
Revisioning Social Change 155
METHODOLOGY
But, of course, the modern world-system is, for all intents and purposes,
afkite in its relationalities and therefore difficult to study, and world-
ystems analysts had made the point that the very "materiality" of the
ration-state, which had sustained belief in, and development of, the social
sciences for t w o centuries, was in question. H o w would you go about pro-
ducing knowledge under such conditions? Wallerstein, interested as he was
in. the world-economic position, undertook the study of the relations among
ration-states in the world-economy, his interested unit of analysis, begin-
ning the heady task of ordering the parts of a world-economy; the first task
was to discern the spatial and temporal boundaries of the relations ordering
the parts and examining their patterning (cycles and trends). Hopkins de-
veloped the methodology that clarified the process of producing knowledge
ibout social change under such circumstances, when the typical and nor-
mative unit of analysis was unsatisfactory, when, in turn, unit of analysis
itself became a contested term, and your choice of what to study (which
relations?, which parts?) as well as the spatial and temporal boundaries of
your interested unit of analysis were perceived as an intervention in ongoing
relations of power.
For Hopkins and Wallerstein, knowledge production responsive to these
*laims revolved around t w o assertions: on the one hand, that all knowledge
claims were abstractions from a complex, holistic world of relationalities
md were therefore partial (the corollary of this was that knowledge pro-
duction was a collective endeavor) and, on the other hand, that all knowl-
edge claims were historically and socially situated such that knowledge
production itself required a "sociology of social inquiry" as an integral
3
moment in its production (1982: 3 3 ) .
Hopkins used the term "abstraction" to differentiate the knowledge
laims of world-systems analysis from the process of concept formation
typical of the covering law paradigm (1982b: 1 5 4 - 1 5 5 ) which gives us
'generalizations" from "cases." An abstraction, for Hopkins (1982b), is
he result of recognizing the partiality of all knowledge claims, selecting a
Sece of the story to tell (relationalities), designating the unit of analysis
the space-time-conceptual dimensions) appropriate to its analysis, and
making yourself accountable for the selections in terms of situated knowl-
edge. Though the space-time dimensions may be extensive, as in the case
jf claims about long-term, large-scale social change, nevertheless, the claim
s partial; it is contrasted with the more complex, holistic concrete, though
:
or Hopkins (1982b: 146), "[c]oncrete here is a level of conceptualization,
t is not the 'real world.' " Neither abstract nor concrete refers to the "real
Korld" (more on this below); rather, their interdependence is relative, tak-
sg the form of more and less partial/holistic. Abstractions, in the Hopkins'
sense, are the best we can hope for in terms of truth or certainty; however,
whatever they cause us to lose in terms of faith in materiality and progress,
hey compensate for with multiplicity in both knowers and known. In other
160 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analyse
words, it is not only the unit of analysis which must be specified as part
of the research project itself, but the researcher creates, or positions, herself
as part of the process as she clarifies h o w her (partial) analysis stands is
the relationality between abstract and concrete, between part and whole.
Which part of the story she tells and h o w it "fits" in relationship to other
possible parts are critical moments in terms of reproducing or challenging
the power inherent in knowledge production.
Taking the virtually infinite mass of social practices that constitute the
modern world-system and organizing them for the purposes of producing
knowledge about social change and thus intervening in the reproduction
or transformation of power relations require that you fix boundaries, tem-
porally, spatially, and conceptually. That process of fixing boundariesof
knowing what question to askis for Hopkins (1982b: 1 5 3 - 1 5 4 ) by far
the most difficult moment in the process of producing knowledge; the em-
pirical, quantitative, or qualitative study of those things (people, processes,
relations) indicated by your choice of question and unit of analysis is the
easier part; and the political work is virtually done by the time the question
is formed, the unit of analysis chosen, and the "sociology of social inquiry"
acknowledged. Debate over methodology, for Hopkins, was less about the
relative strengths and weaknesses of qualitative or quantitative research
strategies than about contestations over the rules governing the relations
between researcher and researched. In his analysis, those rules clearly im-
plicated the researcher in the formation of the subject matter of social
change, its conceptual boundaries, its space-time dimensions, and its place
in ongoing relations of power.
Minply about community, social location, or subject position but about the
..nii w.e of unit of analysis as a set of conceptual, spatial, and temporal
daries. It is, in Hopkins' terms, an abstraction; it follows on the des-
ion of a community, which will always be, to feminist thinking, mul-
and overlapping, stabilized for the purposes of strategic politics but
ately bounded not by its status in the "real" world but by scholars or
sts bent on political intervention. "Feminist embodiment" itself is an
action and is a partial reading of women, of feminist or women's
lunity. The fact of the matter is not simply that feminist embodiment
ices partial knowledge but that any statement from the perspective of
hrnr.i list embodiment is itself only partial knowledge of feminist embodi-
, For feminists, situated knowledge includes analysis of the relation-
among body, social status, and science as integral components of the
:ss of social change.
1 Lira way wants to k n o w "how to have simultaneously an account of
il historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing sub-
. - a critical practice for recognizing our o w n 'semiotic technologies' for
m.iMtig meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of
iP world" (1988: 579). In this desire, she finds good company in
f-systems analysis.
e active agency that Haraway seeks is, I suggest, the result of the
onality between the knower and the known, of the knownthe "real"
1locating the knower, w h o creates knowledge of the known in the
of a partial, situated inquiry into a heuristically chosen, temporally
ipatially specified unit of analysis (no temporal or logical priority is
ded in that formulation). Both the knower and the known are created/
-formed in the process (Haraway 1988: 593). This interaction between
nalyst and the real world suggests to me the agency that Haraway
imends. But it depends on- the active production of both the analyst
md that which she analyzes, on situated knowledge about a socially and
listorically located unit of analysis. For feminists, the unit of analysis ap-
propriate to the study of social change has at its center the body, and the
sistorical body must be located spatially and temporally, in particular prac-
ices; but that unit of analysis is less "the truth" about social change than
262 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis
the movement in a relation of logical inclusion, from abstract concept via successive
additions of specifics or attributes to the concrete, the "real indicators"; from the
concrete via the dropping of these attributes, to the abstract. That is one sense of
the movement.
There is a very different form of the movement which is analogous not to
inclusion-relations but to part-whole relations.. . .
In this case, the part (a theoretical process) is the abstract, the whole is the
concrete. Concrete here is a level of conceptualization, it is not the "real world."
. . . [transformations of social relations . . . seem to me very abstract "parts" (the-
oretical processes) which have to be brought into successive relations with other
"parts" (other theoretical processes) in order to move toward the concrete. That is
still a conceptualization (or an interpretation-sketch); but, then, in the fullness of
the whole so formed, one "interprets" observational statements; or, alternately, one
"measures" selected and partial "outcomes" of the complex of processes. (1982b:
147)
which strategic purposes this would produce useful knowledge. In the cur-
rent context, where the biological is still largely considered a unit of anal-
ysis distinct from "the social" and is still largely held to refer to a distinct
set of processes and "laws," biological interpretations of gender difference
tend to reinforce gender inequality and to name those w h o would fit into
neither (male nor female) set of genetic-anatomical relationalities as "de-
viant." On the other side of the debate, the current context is witness to
preferences for analysis of w o m e n in TimeSpaces smaller than that of the
modern world-system, but the argument is the same: neither is the true and
real expression of women's lived experience. One cannot dismiss world-
systems analysis because it is not faithful to women's experience; one can
dismiss it only because it is not useful.
The relevant parts of analysis, the relationality among which it is then
useful to understand, are those attributable to women's movements, better
put (if clinical-sounding), to my abstraction of women's movements in the
post-1968 period. Women's movements challenge both the relationality of
the body and social status in which women's bodily difference from men
is elided with social status, and its practice in science and in the institutional
arrangements of the modern world-system; this relationality of body-social
status as well as science and institutional arrangements are historical ob-
jects, as is their conjuncture, and the origins of this conjuncture can be
located in the TimeSpace of the modern world-system. In fact, it is as the
TimeSpace of the conjuncture of transformations in body, social status (in-
tersectionality), and science, natural and social, that the modern world-
system makes sense to me and makes sense to me as the unit of analysis
relevant to the study of social change from the perspective of women's
movements. My concern is to comprehend the impact of women's move-
ments on social change. In this formulation of situated knowledge, I find
the basis for developing assessments of social change from the perspective
of women's movements.
Nonetheless, to speak of the world-systemic experience of w o m e n in the
abstract, as a feature of the world-system as a whole, does give only a
partial reading of the experience of "woman," as well as of any of the
particular intersectionalities that constitute that world-systemic experience.
In the first case, the relationality between the world-systemic reading and
that of "woman" at the level of the species is useful in that it imparts a
historicity to the category that is not obvious in its reading as biologically
defined. In the second case, the relationality between the abstracted world-
systemic reading and that of intersectionalities is useful in that it imparts
spatiality and temporality and hence conceptual clarity to the study of in-
tersectionality.
The abstracted world-systemic reading of "women" does not tell us
much at all about the life of any w o m a n , and it does not tell us everything
about any particular group/community of women. It does tell us about
166 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis
NOTES
1. Lorber's (1994) interpretation of "gender as an institution" is, in many ways,
a source of inspiration for my interpretation of gender difference. Lorber's argument
that gender is a social technology for meeting human needs, however, refers to too
long a time span to be of strategic use in understanding what women's movements
Revisioning Social Change 167
are interested in today. (This contrasts, of course, with the too-short span of time
indicated by the analysis of most feminists in their preference for "the local" and
"context." This is considered below.) In fact, Lorber's institutional perspective
on gender reproduces the universality of the term "sex," if not its directly biological
reading, insofar as it suggests that gender is shaped by other circumstances, for
example, the development of states and markets/capitalist production. Gender is
simply there and then is shaped by historical circumstance. Although intended as
such, this is not a satisfactory response to the political economy exclusion of women
and gender from the analysis of the institutional arrangements of capitalism.
2. Of course, the formation of these as sites of knowledge production about the
body and social status owed much to the influence of Arabic-speaking scholars who
had indigenous texts on the body as well as classic texts of Aristotle, Galen, and
so on, both of which they shared with European physicians and natural philoso-
as. See Dussel (1995); Forsythe (1999). Of course, the relations forming the
modern world-system were not one-way; as Stoler (1989, 1995) has ably demon-
s' Jted, these relations were mutually constitutive of both core and periphery, of
se economic," "the social," and "the biological" simultaneously.
i. "[A] 'sociology' of social inquiry is needed in the empirical study of modern
social change. It is needed, however, not as still another subfield of study (whose
'boundaries' would merely legitimate ignorance of what is beyond them), but as an
integral part of the method informing our research and, as far as possible, being
consciously developed and used in the conduct of our studies and in our commen-
taries on each other's work. Thus, the whole of the usual discussion of reliability
aether predicated of observers, instruments or their products) has to be recast
and from the outset firmly grounded in understandings of the relational settings in
which (really through which) observations are made" (Hopkins 1982b: 33).
4. But using world-systems analysis for the purposes of women's movements
entails that we consider why world-systems analysis has not generated more atten-
tion to the study of gender difference. In my estimation, this reluctance stems not
from a lack of interest in gender and women but from the limitations of a materialist
or institutionalist analysis, from the limitations of not extending far enough its
critique of political economy in making new ground to stand on. The assumption
that there are distinct aspects of experience and of analysis, one material/objective
and one ideological/subjective, is integral to the historical social sciences; at the
" ae time, undermining this distinction is a crucial step in thinking from the per-
spective of women's movements. World-systems analysis has confined its scope to
the economic and the political"the material" in social scienceeven as it has
studied these in innovative ways. Gender issues are simply not central to telling
iat version of the story of social change; they simply don't matter.
i. On objectivity, Haraway writes: "At root, objectivity is about crafting com-
parative knowledge: How may a community name things to be stable and to be
like each other?" (1988: 597 n. 5.) and "Here is the promise of objectivity: a sci-
entific knower seeks the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is,
partial connection" (1988: 586). In the Gulbenkian Commission Report (Wal-
lerstein 1996): "We feel that to insist the social sciences move in the direction of
mclusiveness (in terms of recruitment of personnel, an openness to multiple cultural
experiences, the scope of legitimate matters of study) is to further the possibility of
more objective knowledge" (93).
168 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis
REFERENCES
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the
Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness
and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Dussel, Enrique. 1995. The Invention of the Americas. New York: Continuum.
. 1996. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor and the
Philosophy of Liberation. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Forsythe, Nancy. 1999. "Making Ground to Stand On: Gender Difference in the
Formation of Science." Unpublished manuscript.
Godelier, Maurice, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat, eds. 1998.
Transformations of Kinship. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.
. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse.
New York: Routledge.
Hartsock, Nancy. 1983. "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a
Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism." In Sandra Harding and Merrill
Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology,
Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 283-310.
Hopkins, Terence K. 1982a. "The Study of the Capitalist World-Economy: Some
Introductory Considerations." In Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wal-
lerstein, eds., World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly
Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 9-38.
. 1982b. "World-Systems Analysis: Methodological Issues." In Terence K.
Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., World-Systems Analysis: Theory
and Methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 145-158.
Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds. 1982. World-Systems Anal-
ysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lorber, Judith. 1994. The Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. "The Traffic in Women: The 'Political Economy' of Sex." In
Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York:
Monthly Review, pp. 157-210.
Scott, Joan. 1992. "Experience." In Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists
Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, pp. 22-40.
. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminism and the Rights of Man.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stoler, Ann. 1989. "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual
Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures." American Anthropologist 16:
634-659.
Revisioning Social Change 169
INTRODUCTION
T H E WORLD-SYSTEMS FRAME
consists of singular processes that form and reform the relations that e\
press its systemic patterns or structures. While dependent occurrences may
be identified, nothing can be understood outside of the world-systemic
whole. Or, as Wallerstein states so clearly in a 1993 contribution: "\K
'world-system' is not a system 'in the world' or 'of the world.' It is a i -
'that is the world.' Hence the hyphen, since 'world' is not an attribute of
the system. Rather the t w o words together constitute a single concept.''
and this single concept frames the unit of analysis, the world-system I'
lerstein 1993: 2 9 4 - 2 9 5 ) .
This focus on the whole has important consequences for the elcminw
assumed to constitute its component parts and for understandin
2
nations and/or states are incorporated into a global network of exc liana.
For example, the hierarchical organization of nation-states is assui
be a function of the dynamism of capitalism, of unequal wage levels across
place, and of the need for a mediatory space, a regulatory role, for a -
periphery that signals potential mobility among states (Wallerstein 19~4,
1979). Given this functionalist impulse, the three distinct and autonomous"
categories of core, semi-periphery, and periphery provide a concrete man-
ifestation of capitalist processes of accumulation within as well as i. -
specific sites.
By way of signaling my critique, I point to a number of problems that
attend to this functionalist impulse. First, given both the singularity ot ac-
cumulation processes and the determinacy of "sequential reality,
rather self-evident that the incorporation of nation-states is neither random
nor flexible. Rather, processes of incorporation correspond to a reification
of the categories constituting the world system, processes that lend them-
selves to a number of secondary consequences, including the tendency to
3 :
homogenize places similarly situated within the world-system. Such ho-
mogenization underestimates the diverse and diversely articulated relationss
within and among the core, semi-periphery, and periphery and is embler-
atic of research that includes a focus on commodity chains and emergent
U
contradictions and conflicts in the world-economy (Chase-Dunn 19S .
1996; Gereffi 1989; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). Second, since powei
differences are animated through the needs of core countries, the i
peripheral and peripheral countries are shaped only tangentially by regional
and locally constituted political, cultural, and military factors. This <
phasis on the needs of core countries shapes interpretations of the glob:',
division of labor and tends toward what Folker Froebel, Jurgen Heinnch-.
and Otto Kreye (1980) offer as a new international division of labor w he e
transnational companies seek cheap, often female labor in search of cor-
porate profit.
Complementing the claim for holism and its import for an understanding:
of the unit of analysis, as well as for interpreting relations among the coie,
periphery, and semi-periphery, is Wallerstein's argument for the detcrnr-
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 175
POST-INTERVENTIONS A N D T H O U G H T S
however, is not invoked from the point of view of a struggle for sameiie^.
which is the position of the developmentalist project where the West serves
as the mark and direction of a linear path to progress. N o r is difl erence
invoked to express the move from the pre-political to the liberal duno
cratic. Rather, difference in the post-tradition represents plurality, nor-
homogeneity, complementarity, and contradiction that do not depend 01
a presumption of radical relativism. The postcolonial critique thus shares
few of the assumptions of world-systems theory even as it recognizes that:
world-systems theory poses a significant challenge to structural function-
alism and modernization theory, helps to reframe the discourse of depen-
dency and unequal exchange, and provides an important context for
rethinking processes of globalization. Said differently, even as world
systems theory directs our attention to the "role" of the "other" as nei.
essary for processes of accumulation, it remains embedded in a "West and
the rest" syndrome, concretized not only in its reification of the categories
core, semi-periphery, and periphery but in the lens that it employs to in-
terpret social processes.
Framed in this way, while being attentive to the importance of local,
historically nuanced studies in place and time, the world-systems approach
has done so through the lens of an Enlightenment paradigm centered on
the West and on the dominance of and domination by capitalist processes
of accumulation. Mapping the dynamic asymmetries of the global capitalist
economy, world-systems analysts locate "the rest" as a consequence of the
West that leads to an occlusion of the practices and decisions of their pop
ular classes. Such a critique parallels feminist theorists w h o challenge claim-
that derive from unfixed, unlocatable neutral people and places. Perhaps
an opportunity is offered by Wallerstein, w h o , in a recent contribution,
made explicit the decentering of Europe within contemporary processes of
capitalist accumulation and identified processes of remapping through a
notion of geoculture (1991b). But even decentering Europe does not au-
tomatically lead to a recognition of power or particular location-specihi.
struggles as determinant of change, nor does it readily leave unchallenged
the critique of determinacy raised by postcolonial theory.
The lack of serious engagement with the post-traditions also recalls Wa!
lerstein's emphasis on "governing 'logics' which 'determine' the largest pan
of a sequential reality" (Wallerstein 1991: 2 4 4 ; emphasis added). From a
postcolonial perspective the epistemic grounding of the terms logics, deter-
minate, and sequential can only refer to what Butler (1992) argues are
contingent foundations that are interpreted within a context of partiality
and multiplicity. Similarly, Prakash replaces the idea of a determinate and
sequential logic by a reading of place from its o w n positioning and histoi
ical specificity rather than through its relationship to and determinacy by
capitalism, the West, and the world capitalist system.
From a world-systems perspective, however, the only way to read the
ostcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 179
utler 1992: 9). Let me amplify. First, the postcolonial point of departure
n be useful in questioning the social binarisms/categories that shape both
orld-systems theory and practice. Second, postcolonial theory can help us
read against the grain of the hegemonic story in order to complicate that
ading as well as to offer alternative interpretations. Third, it directs our
tention to power relations and, while implying a passage, emphasizes "a
petition with difference, a regeneration of colonialism through other
eans . . . [designating] broad relations of geo-economic hegemony" (Sho-
rt 1992: 107). In this articulation there is no call for the erasure of cap-
ilist accumulation as a critical force of change or for the inversion of
lations between "the rest and the West." Rather, it is a call to understand
aw processes of accumulation are enabled, and work through, geopoliti-
il, hegemonic relations that cannot be ignored or considered subsidiary
understanding their operations and sustainability. It is a call for a re-
vive, embedded, constructivist understanding of state forms and institu-
Dnal relations.
As is perhaps self-evident, I employ the term "postcolonial" in two ways.
One way is as a vehicle for social mobilization and as a call for attention
the significance of multiplicity, subjectivity, and culture as tools of ex-
anation. This challenges the "monism of capital." A second way is as an
terpretation of a particular kind of periodization, a contingent foundation
at is circumscribed, situated, and locatable. This latter emphasis can, in
ime ways, be said to parallel the conjunctural moments of world-systems
leory, which, as Wallerstein notes, include both the cyclical rhythms of
e system, which can be described conceptually, and the patterns of inter-
1 transformation, the secular trends of the system, which will eventually
ing about the demise of the system that we describe sequentially (Wal-
rstein 1991c: 2 4 4 - 2 4 6 ) .
I also am reminded here of Dirlik's claim that the contemporary junc-
rean increasingly globalizing capitalism that makes boundaries more
3rous and people more mobilehas made possible the intervention of-
red by postcolonial critics. But a number of important points are at stake
ne as we read world-systems theory against the grain of postcolonial
sights. First, Hopkins imagined the fetishization of categories early on,
it his concern seems to have been buried, if not removed, from many uses
:
the terms "core" and "periphery" as commonly deployed in research
day. It is suggestive to remind ourselves of Hopkins' early insight:
ijnfortunately, the end-terms "core" and "periphery" all too often become them-
kes respective foci of attention, categories in their own right, as it were. And the
lation which joined the terms slips into the background, sometimes out of sight
itirely... hence the relational categories also drop from sight, and we are left
ith only the categories, which, as a result, are now mere classificatory terms,
:ither grounded theoretically nor productive analytically. (Hopkins 1978: 207)
382 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analyst^
World-systems analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of i^
It is a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured f
all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century.... It is on the
basis of scientific claims, that is, on the basis of claims related to the possibilities
of systematic knowledge about social reality, that world-systems analyses challenges
the prevailing mode of inquiry. (Wallerstein 1991c: 237)
These claims have been critical for encouraging the imaginary of glob
alization in its contemporary guise, but they have left relatively untouched
the claims of informed political practice. By political practice I refer spe-
cifically to the process of political engagement as "determined by. .
[one's] collective relationship to the world economy . . . [whereby] class
analysis is perfectly capable of accounting for the political position o f . . i
workers [and] . . . their structural position and interests in the world econ
omy" (Wallerstein 1979: 24). Such an understanding gives inadequate at-
tention to questions of agency, subjectivity, and identity and offers insight
into why Forsythe ends her discussion about w o m e n and gender whcie N . \
does, by posing, but not theorizing, empowerment. However, before tuin
ing to the issue of political empowerment, it is important to further elaf>
orate the issue of political practice.
Surely one cannot credit postcolonial theory with providing an adequate
challenge to the absence of political agency in world-systems theory. In fact;
a common argument is that postcolonial theory and its adherents carry
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 183
WOMEN/GENDER/FEMINISM: I N T E R R O G A T I N G
FORSYTHE A N D W A R D
displace difference within time and space with difference across time, con-
flating a theorization of difference with patterns of gender differentiation.
Postcolonial insights and their challenge to structuralism help us move
beyond the discreteness of patriarchy and capitalism and of dual systems
theory generally by directing our attention to context-specific relations of
difference as mutually constitutive social processes. This need not challenge
the claim that patriarchies are entangled with various modes of social or-
dering but suggests that they need to be differently explained in their in-
terrelatedness. To borrow a notion from Butler (1992: 5), we must
challenge the foundational status of a class or gender and question h o w
the paradigms that we employ may actually "serve to subordinate and erase
that which they seek to explain." This point differs from one that gives any
category a transhistorical significance. Surely, Wallerstein has made it pat-
ently clear that the world-system refers to a specific time and differs in
important ways from other economic networks or world-economies, and
Forsythe is clearly attentive to this specificity. Nevertheless, she leaves un-
questioned the epistemic framing of the relationship between patriarchy
and modes of accumulation. The latter is a project that differs from de-
scribing the historical and spatial specificities of gender and capitalist re-
lations and h o w these articulate or disarticulate within states, nations, and
regions or as a phenomenon of an international division of labor. It re-
quires, instead, questioning the particular circumstances under which labor
and processes of accumulation are the foundation of interpretation.
Forsythe also takes issue with the use of the term "context," a concept
often used by writers in the post-traditions to emphasize the particular and
the "local." As she argues, the emphasis on "context becomes a substitute
for analyzing theoretically and historically the complex organizations of
social differences" (Forsythe 1998: 115). Emblematic of this position, she
argues, is Linda Nicholson's (1990: 5) appreciation of postmodernism as a
perspective that "offers feminism some useful ideas about method, partic-
ularly wariness toward generalizations which transcend the boundaries of
culture and region" (Forsythe 1998: 116). For Forsythe, however, Nich-
olson's contribution is woefully inadequate for it leaves unanswered the
question of the boundaries of culture and region. What seems evident from
Forsythe's critique is her resistance to grant similar closure to the world-
system as a bounded, fixed, structured totality, a particular historical con-
text.
Finally, the absence of a sustained engagement between world-systems
and feminist theory has occluded a reading of feminist theory as a concern
sot solely with gender differentiation or gender inequality but as a theo-
retical intervention that begins from women's lives and offers one a social
theory. Or, as Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford argue, "[fjeminist
epistemology consists . . . in attention to epistemological concerns arising
188 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis
in other words, fails to query the epistemic status of such concepts as pro-
ductive or reproductive work. It also leaves unattended the assertion that
wage labor (relations of capitalist accumulation) is the primary determinant
of processes of change.
For Ward, then, the focus is on the hidden contributions of w o m e n to
processes of capitalist change and h o w recognizing their exclusion calls into
question the mode of inquiry offered by world-systems theory. However,
for Ward, the empirical concern of better accounting for women's work in
the household and in the informal sector sufficiently modifies the world-
systems approach to allow for more robust analyses that enable the mar-
riage between feminist concerns and world-systems theory. Such a
conclusion, starkly stated, fails to recognize how women's hidden and un-
paid labor is actually constituted by the very epistemic foundations that
animate the world-system approach. Said differently, Ward's analysis illus-
trates the disjuncture between those engaged in theory building and those
who seek a comprehensive recognition of the various types of work and of
people embodied in processes of global accumulation.
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter I have drawn attention to the need for a more direct and
likely more fruitful exchange between world-systems and postcolonial the-
ory. My purpose was to stimulate an appreciation of the early epistemic
contributions of a world-systems approach, particularly their intersections
w ith other challenges to the developmentalist paradigm, including postco-
lonial and feminist theory. I was initially motivated by Forsythe's conclud-
18
ing comments on empowerment, which directs our focus to notions of
agency and context specificity, t w o central themes in postcolonial and fem-
inist theory. As Tania Modleski (1986: 136) argued more than a decade
ago, "[T]he ultimate goal of feminist criticism and theory is female em-
powerment." This echoes Wallerstein's point noted earlier: "[WJorld
systems-analysis is not a theory about the social world, or about part of it
. . . [but] a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was
structured for all of us at its inception"(Wallerstein 1991c: 2 3 7 ) .
19
Ironically, while the concept of empowerment remains woefully under-
theorized in world-systems analyses, perhaps because social agency is gen-
erally viewed as responsive rather than proactive, development practitioners
have quickly appropriated it. Incorporated into the developmentalist
model, empowerment has become a call for w o m e n to be more indepen-
dent, as entrepreneurs and responsible childbearers. As entrepreneurs,
women are encouraged to be creditworthy and, through the market, take
individual responsibility for their subsistence. As childbearers they are to
be responsible, individual decision makers regarding their fertility. This call
for individual responsibility in the service of subsistence clearly signals
190 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analys,
VOTES
1. I am indebted to Nancy Forsythe, whose provocative piece encouraged me
to revisit the early contributions of Hopkins and Wallerstein. Notable in this section
is the absence of a robust exchange among feminists and world-systems theorists.
2. I am consciously ignoring the burgeoning literature on the place of the
nation-state in the discussion of globalization in light of changing articulations of
contemporary capitalism.
3. Criticizing world-systems theorists for reifying the concepts of core, semi-
periphery, and periphery should not be conflated with my appreciation for Wall-
erstein's (1979: 4) important critique of Rostow's reading of British history into a
set of universal "stages."
4. One could readily argue that the emphasis on holism, unit of analysis, and
the ceaseless accumulation of capital embodies both a determinism and a call for
historical specificity. I hesitate to underestimate the crucial import of specificity in
the Wallersteinian argument. However, it also is important to disentangle the com-
mitment to historical specificity from the determinacy of accumulation, especially
*hen theorized as a determinant of all aspects of the social world that enable its
realization.
5. I use the term "criticism" to focus on an intellectual position rather than on
those critics who constitute the movement. To be sure, a large body of literature
already indicates the limitations of the postcolonial intervention or suggests cau-
tionary engagement with it (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995; McClintock 1992;
Shohat 1992). Some see it as the self-congratulatory voice of well-placed Third
World intellectuals in the U.S. academy whose claims are assumed to build on
already existing critiques of structuralist and positivist science. For others, the chal-
lenge to late capitalist forms of production is grounded in their location in contem-
porary global capitalism that has "much to do with their resonance with the
i mceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships due to
changes within the capitalist world economy" (Dirlik 1997: 502-503). Also, see
Buote 5.
6. Relationships among the post-theories might more appropriately be seen as
controversial, especially with regard to the notion of determinacy and materiality.
However understood, it is crucial for analysts to be attentive to the intimate con-
nections between the postmodernist and poststructuralist project, even if these con-
nections are neither straightforward nor direct.
7. See his Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography (1989) for an
(elaboration of this position.
8. For a critical reading and commentary of subaltern studies, particularly its
essentializing qualities and links to Western academic circles, see Sarkar (1997). See
also Spivak (1985), Chakrabarty. (1992), and Das (1989) for an internal critique
of the subaltern project.
9. See, in particular, the problematic work of Chatterjee (1993).
10. Caution also focuses on the fear of either romanticizing the precolonial past
or recognizing that it could not be recovered or re-presented by postcolonial schol-
ars since it has already been reworked by the colonial encounter (Appiah 1991;
Spivak 1988). I agree with Hutcheon (1995: 135), who argues that "the entire post-
192 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis-
colonial project usually posits precisely the impossibility of. .. [the past] . . . being
uncontaminated."
11. See, for example, Shohat 1992; Prakash 1990, 1996; Scott 1996.
12. While it is clear that in the world-systems framework the system as a whole'
is the point of departure, the assumption remains that the core and the unequal
distribution of power that resides within the core as the source and direction of
change define the prospects for change. Thus, although struggle can redefine rela-
tions of power, power as a relation that is potently driven outside the core remains
sadly undertheorized within the world-system paradigm.
13. It is worth noting that it is difficult for some to imagine a specialist of the-
British Empire whose point of departure is South Asia, a position that is boths
obvious and possible if one were starting from the assumptions offered by Prakash
(1990, 1992). See, as well, Said (1978) and the debate that followed in response
his seminal contribution.
14. This generally leads to particular cases being a site of the differential effects'
of capitalist relations. For an important commentary on "cases," see McMichaef
(1990). Here, too, one ought to resist a reading of Hopkins that interprets the "a
priori elimination of each case's distinctiveness" as a rejection of particular histo-
ries. ?
15. Against debates between world-system analysts and their critics over the past
two decades, Forsythe's contribution reveals how far discussion about world-
systems or, today, about globalization has shifted since the late 1970s, when the.
epistemic concerns of the emergent approach were outlined, contested, and clarified.
16. I make this claim to distinguish between scholarship by world-system theo-
rists about world-systems theory and their contributions to the broader field of:
sociology. The latter has drawn attention to the epistemic questions raised by fern-;
inist and postmodern theory, while the former seems more equivocal on the role
of rethinking epistemic claims (Wallerstein 1991a, 2000). I want to thank Immanuel
Wallerstein for reminding me of his contribution Open the Social Sciences and far j
alerting me to his The Heritage of Sociology: The Promise of Social Science, both;;
of which signal the contributions of contemporary theory to a rethinking of soci-
ology as culture and discipline. My appreciation of Walllerstein's attention to epi-
stemic concerns within the broad field of sociology is especially significant given;
;
the response of, for example, Joan Huber, who, as president of the American So- '
ciological Association, viewed the intellectual claims of feminists, postmodernists,
and poststructuralists as the cause for the decline in the significance of sociology
as an academic discipline worthy of administrative support. Surely, Huber was*
speaking narrowly of sociology as a discipline and the institutional consequences
of challenges to the authority of university and college admininistrators. Nonethe-
less, her unwillingness to recognize the efforts of scholars both inside and outside
the discipline, particularly in response to the post-1968 period, has contributed to-
keeping the discipline more provincial than most, crippling the efforts and impor-
tance of research kept on the margins of the field (see also Mouzelis 1995).
17. This claim is not to ignore those who argue for a world-system but to dif-
ferentiate these from research that begins within the framework of world-systems
theory, such as that of Ward (1984) or the extensive work by Moghadam , 1 W .
1991, 1993).
18. Forsythe concludes that mobilizing for women's empowerment may
Postcolonial, Feminist, and World-Systems Theories 193
the end of male domination. This conclusion elides the questions raised by Ward
or presumes their resolution. However, such a conclusion fails to attend to the
meanings of empowerment as either an indicator of the end of male domination or
capitalist exploitation. Identifying the varied meanings of empowerment can suggest
potential sources of epistemic engagement across theoretical divides and signal new
nodes of contingent determinacy.
19. Here I want to distinguish between antisystemic movements that are critical
for forms of change and emancipation and analyses that focus on subjectivities and
identities in the process of empowerment, whereby the latter become a contributing
force for the realization of movements of opposition.
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Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 1997. "Introduction: Ge-
nealogies, Legacies, Movements, Democratic Futures." In Jacqui Alexander
and Chandra Talpade, eds., Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Dem-
ocratic Futures. New York: Routledge, pp. ix-xlii.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1991. "Is the 'Post-' in 'Postcolonial' the 'Post' in 'Post-
modern'?" Critical Inquiry 17: 336-357.
<Vsad, < Talal. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca
Press.
Asheroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1995. The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader. London: Routledge.
Bach, Robert L. 1980. "On the Holism of a World-Systems Perspective." In T. K.
Hopkins and I. Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World-System, vol. 3.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, pp. 289-310.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
London: Routledge.
. 1992. "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmod-
ernism.' " In Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the
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Caraway, Nancie. 1991. Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of Ameri-
can Feminism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. "The Death of History: Historical Consciousness and
the Culture of Late Capitalism." Public Culture 4: 47-54.
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Chase-Dunn, Christopher K. 1989. Global Formation: Structures of the World-
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tion." Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 22: 85-96.
Chattcrjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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dith A. Cook, eds., Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived
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Hopkins, Terence. 1978. "World-System Analysis: Methodological Issues." In Bar-
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196 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analysis
INTRODUCTION
Neither post-1968 feminist theory nor women's history has been adequate
to explain the position of inequality of w o m e n in the world today. Indeed,
it might even be said that women's studies has suffered from a variety of
problems that have not only failed to clarify the causes of female subor-
dination in the world today but served to obfuscate these causes and,
therefore, made the cause of female equality vulnerable to political attack
from the new right, allowed the reproduction of inequality to continue with
relatively minor shifts, and made the whole problem seemingly incapable
of real solution. From the start, second-wave feminist theory has rooted
itself in various forms of partial analysis deriving either from the biological
with a subset in psychology) or from the economistic. This was partially
in reaction to the liberal agendafull employment for achieving equality
(Elson and Pearson 1984: 18)and partially in reaction to conflicts be-
tween Marxists and feminists, expressed as street confrontations in Lon-
don, Paris, parts of the United States (Mitchell 1971: 8 4 - 9 0 ; Marks and
de Courtivron 1981), and elsewhere. In addition, various feminist writings
had shown that whatever else they may have done, actual existing social-
isms had not liberated women (Rowbotham 1973; Scott 1974). Therefore,
historical or political economic answers were shunned. Yet since the dis-
idvantaging of w o m e n was pervasive throughout society, universalist
causes were sought. Psycho-biotogical answers became the order of the day.
Biological approaches have perforce emphasized ahistoricity. Female sub-
ordination was attributed variously to the generational reproductive ca-
pacity of w o m e n (Firestone 1970); an ahistorical notion of patriarchy"a
200 Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, and World-Systems Analy-.*
birthright priority whereby males rule females" (Millet 1970: 25); a notion
of a "sex-gender" system (Rubin 1975), which, although based on studies
of present-day Amazonians and N e w Guineans, was said to derive from
prehistoric times. Primordiality became a dominant theme. Juliet Mitchell's
Women's Estate (1971), located the source of patriarchy and women's sub-
ordination in the "family" and the home, which were presumed to be pri-
mordial. The theme was refined by Choderow (1978), w h o assumed that
the fact that w o m e n were primarily child-care providers accounted for
"male need to assert authority." Again, social divisions of labor v u u
sumed to be ahistorical. During the 1980s the radical feminists focused on
sexuality as the cause of women's subordination (Dworkin 1 9 8 1 ; Mc
Kinnon 1982) or essentialisma notion that women were innately and
inherently different from men (Gilligan 1982). But essentialism did nothing
more than consolidateand provide a rationale forthe status quo.
The concept of patriarchy was given wider scope by Marxist-feminists
such as Heidi Hartmann (1979) and Michele Barrett (1980) in attempting
to reconcile intellectual clashes between feminists and orthodox Marxists.
The result was a "dual-systems" theory, according to which capitalism e\
ploited w o m e n in the workplace, but patriarchy exploited (oppressed;
w o m e n in the home. The Marxist/feminists did not specifically attribute
patriarchy to biological causes, but they did insist that it was ages-old,
existed parallel to other social formations, and "changed itself in order to
preserve itself" from society to society and historically over time (Eisenstein
1981). This conceptualization ignored the fact that it is peopleu-uilh
eliteswho change social systems, usually to preserve some advantage for
themselves. The concept of patriarchy became pervasive in women's studies
and acquired the status of a metaphysic in terms of which the causes of
women's subordination, the means by which it has been historicalh
brought about, and the effects of such subordination are collapsed into the
same thing.
Feminist historians have tried to synthesize themselves implicitly or ex-
plicitly with feminist theory. Some women's historians have tended to look
at the very distant past (in Braudel's [1972] terms, the "time of the s u ^
in a search for origins of female subordination, for example, Rosalind Miles
(1989) and Gerda Lerner (1986). Others have tended to look at much ninn
recent trends such as the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth i
tury as the cataclysmic change that triggered women's secondary status
(Pinchbeck 1930). Other women's histories (too numerous to mention)
have constituted case studies of w o m e n in particular times and/or places
These paralleled conventional social history but failed to relate the history
of w o m e n to larger social processes (Scott 1996). Their particularism in
space, time, and subject matter deprives women's history of a sense of
movement. Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith Bennett (1989) are examples
of this genre. After the mid-1980s the women's studies theoretical canon
Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 201
exploded and collapsed around quarrels of race, identity, and class. Si-
multaneously, the incorporation of women's studies into universities di-
vorced the women's movement from real politics. This happened in a
number of places, for example, the West (Whelehan 1995: 1 2 8 - 1 3 0 ) and
India and Pakistan (Khan 1999).
Thus, until the mid-1980s the women's studies canon consisted of a num-
ber of contradictory writings that failed to provide any convincing expla-
nation of female subordination. Their fundamental organizing ideas
reproduction, patriarchy, and sexualitysuggested a timeless universality
to female subordination. Where did that leave us? If it is necessary to k n o w
the nature of the beast in order to defeat it, this was inadequate. Timeless-
ness implies an impossibility ofor futility inattempting to eradicate
women's subordination. Yet to ascribe the origins of women's secondary
status to a too recent past, for example, the nineteenth century, is to un-
derestimate the depths of the problem, the nature of the beast, and the
degree of difficulty in affecting change. Therefore, to fight women's sub-
ordinate social standing effectively, it is necessary to locate its temporal
boundaries correctly. Furthermore, the unit of analysis needs to be cor-
rected. Feminist theories have seemed to attribute the main locus of female
subordination to the home, the workplace, or individual psyches, even to
communities or nation-states. But women's subordination is not limited to
any of these. Rather, it is today found throughout the entire world; it per-
meates all social domains and institutions. H o w did this situation arise,
and how could it best be explained intellectually as a basis for dealing with
it politically?
intellectually as well. They, together with children, the elderly, poor people,
people of the periphery, non-Whites, animals, and nature in general, have
been genderedthat is to say, sortedas unreliable, incompetent, weak,
fearful, inadequate, in need of control, and, therefore, legitimately exploit-
able and unworthy of reward. Conversely, (White) men have generally been
gendered as the opposite of these characteristicssmart, strong, capable
and they and the work that they do have been generally deemed worthy
of reward, albeit in varying degrees. Thus, gendering means, hypothetically
in the first instance, the subordination of all w o m e n to all men. This has
had a number of implications for the political economy of capitalism. But
by extension gendering means the epistemological subordination of all the
ather groups to (White) men. The question is, W h o did this type of sorting,
when did it start, and why?
EMPIRICAL D A T A
authority to keep order were invented, circulated, and reinforced. The episte-
mological aspects of gender were reproduced by all social actors (intellectuals,
elites at all levels, and, above all, the state, the judiciary, and, of course, men)
and through all social domains (the economic, religious, political, intellectual,
juridical, artistic, etc.).
GENDERING A N D T H E POLITICAL E C O N O M Y O F
CAPITALISM
METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
CONCLUSIONS
By studying gender in world-systems perspective, world-systems analysis
gained a new structure that explains a lot about ways that eliteswhether
the state and its agents, local elites, or capitalistskeep social control and
why households as we k n o w them were formed in the first place. (Histor-
ically, they were not the first choice of urban workers or peasants.) Political
economy could have gained more complete insights into the relationship
between state, capital, and labor. Even the orthodox Marxists would have
gained new insight into the class struggle. By focusing onand thus in a
sense privilegingthe male worker's role in the class struggle, the Marxists
continued a version of a systemic tradition begun in the sixteenth century.
Finally, feminists could have seen that patriarchy has been part of a struc-
tural component of capitalism, not a holdover from a remote past. Yet by
paying more attention to the history of ideas, they could have seen where
the notion of an "age-old" patriarchy came from. Most importantly, the
oppression of w o m e n was not something handed d o w n from time imme-
morial but a socially created reality. That means it can be socially disman-
tled, too.
Meanwhile, feminists keep trying to invent a new canon, even a series
of new canons, while attacking the old ones. This is because women's stud-
ies keeps trying to invent itself as a new social science discipline. In this it
will probably succeed, because such a line of action supports the current
university structure. By contrast, world-systems analysis attacks the old
canons while not attempting to set up new ones, because its practitioners
make no claim to being a separate discipline. Rather world-systems advo-
cates the collapsing of discipline boundaries. Politically and intellectually,
this makes sense, but it scares proponents of the status quo.
NOTE
1. For a cataloging of this process for German cities, see Merry Weisner, Work-
ing Women in Renaissance Germany (1986). There is no single source for describ-
ing this process in the rest of Western Europe, but such sources as Natalie Zemon
Davis' "Women in the Crafts hi Sixteenth Century Lyon" (1982) are useful.
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Writing on Gender in World-Systems Perspective 211
Fouad Makki
Of all the notions that conjure up the Third World, none are more per-
vasive and yet more elusive than "development". Everyone has some sense
of its meaning, but few have contemplated its overall significance or made
a serious effort to historicize and decipher it. An evocation of the concept
is likely to bring to mind odd snatches and memories of collective endeavor
to overcome hunger, disease, poverty, and inequality. The captivating desire
of its widely diffused meaning was "human liberation from poverty and
want, from oppression, from violence, from the drudgery of monotonous
and stultifying work" (Bienefeld 1 9 9 1 : 3).
In the new historical epoch that we n o w appear to have entered, in which
a whole set of conventional beliefs about the Third World and development
have been put into doubt, a critical examination of the historical, political,
and intellectual premises of development has become a necessity. There are,
of course, countless studies of development, and if this topic merits new
attention, it is certainly not because it has previously been ignored but
rather because the ways in which it has been considered important have
generally taken the development framework itself for granted. This familiar
terrain of scholarship does not begin to explain where the development
framework came from. H o w did it end up taking the form that it did? Why
did development assume great importance in some periods, little or none
in others? What are the dynamics through which it is changing? If answers
to these questions are to be proposed, and if we are to grasp the present
significance of the development framework, it is necessary to look back at
the context in which it was originally conceived.
The concept of development was hardly new in the postwar period, and
governments have long intervened to enhance state power and to foster
216 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
economic and social change (Cowen and Shenton 1996; Esteva 1992). But
developmentalism was more than just state intervention in the economy. It
represented a historically specific power-knowledge nexus that emerged at
a particular conjuncture and within a delimited constellation. In what fol-
lows I illustrate that this nexuswhat I call the "development frame-
work"acquired its particular epochal salience following the interwar
period of profound crisis in the world-system and that it represented a
dramatic alteration in the nature of the relationship between metropole and
colony. It was articulated and consolidated at the crossroads of three
world-historical processes. The first was the formation of "national econ-
omies" following the Great Depression and the swift collapse of the notion
of a "self-regulating market," on the one hand, and the nationalist upsurge
attending the disintegration of the Central and East European dynastic em-
pires on the other. The second was the crisis of European overseas colonial
empires under challenge from anticolonial movements, and the complex
process of decolonization that ensued. Finally, there was the consolidation
of U.S. hegemony following the t w o world wars and the parallel ideological
polarization of the world-system around the United States and the Soviet
Union. Each process has its o w n history and dynamic, and the temporal
simultaneity of these interconnected but separate trajectories does not pre-:
suppose any necessary functional compatibility. Their convergence in the
postwar period was rather a matter of historical contingency. But trai ersiiie,
all three temporal strata was a fundamental shift in global power relations
Examining the development framework along these lines requires an un-
derstanding of the spatially uneven and temporally distinct rhythms ot i n -
tersecting historical processes, as well as a more contextualized attention
to the myriad contests over political and social issues within particular
regions or colonies. Such an approach provides one plausible vantage point
from which to survey the wider socio-historical dynamics of developmtiii
making it possible to envisage a more searching reassessment of the as-
sumptions that shape current approaches to the global dynamics between
1
power and plenty.
T H E E N D O F LAISSEZ-FAIRE A N D T H E F O R M A T I O N O F
" N A T I O N A L ECONOMIES"
The period from 1815 to 1 9 3 0 has retroactively been dubbed the age of
British hegemony. Within Britain, it was born of a pragmatic recognition
that England could no longer be agriculturally self-sufficient. It represented
a move away from the protectionist position embodied in the 1815 Corn
Laws, toward an acceptance of an economic and foreign policy based upon
manufactures and free trade. Within Europe, it was underscored by the
Settlement of Vienna (1815) following the Napoleonic Wars and the defeat
'he Genesis of the Development Framework 217
f Britain's main rival, France. The War of the Spanish Succession, allying
.ngland and Holland against the threat of French hegemony, transformed
le relationship of forces between the three, and Britain emerged from it
2
s the world's premier commercial and naval power. From a global per-
pective, Britain's overseas expansion and plunder sealed this supremacy of
r>ritish industry and navy over its continental European as well as extra-
3
.uropean rivals.
Britain's status as the "workshop of the world" and the premier naval
ower inaugurated the era of free-trade imperialism, allowing Britain to
ose as a laissez-faire state for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The
nposition of the gold standard as the pivot of a liberalized world trade
ubordinated mercantilist policy to currency stability, forcing states to in-
;rnalize the exigencies of world commerce through budgetary priorities,
aissez-faire remained hegemonic for the better part of a century and found
itellectual prop in the work of classical economists such as Adam Smith,
smith maintained that the pursuit of rational self-interest would lead to a
eneral division of labor as individual producers seek to try to make use
f the specialized productive capacities of other producers. In the aggregate,
ais rational self-pursuit would lead to specialized production for exchange,
dnch would, in turn, bring about lower-cost production through the gains
rom trade and stimulate a generalized increase in productivity. All of this
rould augment the wealth of nations and lead them through a progression
f stages from agriculture to industry to commerce.
The subsequent insulation of economic thought from political theory
onceived by Alfred Marshall at the end of the nineteenth century and the
dvent of Marginalism marked the birth of an economic science seemingly
:ee from political or sociological variables. Conventional equilibrium tile-
ry professed to represent a pure logic of the market, and it was clear that
lis classical paradigm and its optimism of economic growth were formu-
lted as a critique of mercantilism and any system of a "national" economy:
[E]conomic theory was thus elaborated uniquely on the basis of individual
nits of enterprisepersons or firmsrationally maximizing their gains
nd minimizing their losses in a market which had no specific spatial ex-
:nsion. At the limit it was, and could not but be, the world market" (Hobs-
awm 1990: 26).
Laissez-faire was only one, albeit dominant, doctrine. Alternative pro-
:ctionist conceptions were also present, particularly in the countries of so-
alled late-industrializers. In the United States, the federalist Alexander
lamilton advocated protectionism and a strong national government. The
imerican debates, in turn, inspired Friedrich List, for w h o m protectionism
fas not a goal in itself but a temporary policy that would allow a country
) build a strong economy through industrialization and "prepare its entry
lto the universal society of the future" (Hobsbawm 1990: 30). But for
mch of the nineteenth century these ideas remained in a subordinate po-
218 The Aftermath of the Colonial Systi :
sition, gaining a broader audience only during the interwar years with the
collapse of both the self-regulating market and the polyglot dynastic em-
pires (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 1 1 6 - 1 7 2 ) .
The late nineteenth century marked the high point of Britain's unparal-
leled dominance in the world market. Thereafter, transformations in the
relative strength of the United States, Germany, and Japan in the
economy deepened the competitive pressures on British free-trade police*,
eventually precipitating a crisis that manifested itself politically in World
War I and economically in the Great Depression. The most immediate
causes of the Great Depression were located in the United States. Under
pressure from the farm lobby, the U.S. Congress tightened its commercial
policy and passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which brought in one of
the largest duty increases in international trade history. This provoked
widespread retaliation and a wave of protectionism that led to a massh e
contraction of international trade. By the third quarter of 1932 the trade
of European countries had fallen to below 4 0 % of its 1929 level (Van de'
Wee and Buyst 1989: 2 3 9 - 2 5 9 ) .
The crisis revealed that there was no lender of last resort, and in 1931,
amid competitive devaluations, both Britain and the United States i b m
doned the gold standard. The world-economy fractured into rival currency
blocs, and a whole battery of restrictions on trade was initiated to shield
domestic economies from external influences. Any prospect of gene
operation to revive the world-economy ended at the 1933 World Economy
Conference, when the United States announced that it was going to ensure
the restoration of equilibrium in its domestic economy before w o n urn:
about stability in the international order. The "snapping of the golden
thread," as Polanyi called it, decisively buried the unified, British led
nineteenth-century world-system (Polanyi 1944: 23). Protectionism became:
rampant, the pursuit of stable currencies was abandoned, and "world < ap
italism retreated into the igloos of its nation-state economies and their as-
sociated empires" (Hobsbawm 1990: 132).
The ensuing depression decisively changed the political and economic
context, convincing many politicians and their economic advisers that the
pure logic of the market could no longer be relied on to ensure stabilin
L
and growth. It was a "canyon which henceforth made a return to I > 11
not merely impossible, but unthinkable. Old-fashioned liberalism was dead
or doomed" (Hobsbawm 1994: 107). Unprecedented levels of debt, n u t
production, and a rapid rise in unemployment followed the abandoning of
the gold standard, which was the linchpin of the self-regulating market
The economic crises, together with the intensification of nationalisms fol-
lowing the dissolution of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Hohonzollern, and Ro
manov empires, created a new context within which to re-imagine the
relationship between state and economy.
The world crisis likewise brought about shifts in the political alliances
The Genesis of the Development Framework 219
that ruled states in parts of Latin America and the Middle East. The severe
shrinkage of world trade to one-third of its pre-crisis level impelled a social
recomposition of the ruling elites, as neither merchants nor exporting ag-
riculturists could continue to occupy the privileged status that they had
previously enjoyed. The depression and the war cleared the ground for an
alliance between nationalist elites and local industrialists around policies
designed to promote "national economies." Once freed from the sanction
of the world market, these elites were able to subsume foreign trade under
national political priorities. In Latin America in particular, various populist
regimes promoted a strategy of import-substitution through the production
of consumer goods for the domestic market. This strategy led to "rapid
industrialization, and infant industries demanded protection against pri-
marily Yankee competition" (Kolko 1988: 36; see also Keyder 1995).
Conceptually, too, as the system of monetary representation fell apart,
and the social orders that it underpinned lost their coherence, the notion
of the economy as a self-contained and internally dynamic totality, separate
from other economies and subject to state intervention, started to crystal-
.ize. Keynes realized that in these post-laissez-faire conditions, neo-classical
categories needed to be recast. In his General Theory (1973) the abstraction
of the market, which was the normative construct of pre-Keynesian eco-
nomics, was replaced with the "economic system as a whole," a system
whose limits corresponded to specific geopolitical boundaries. These con-
ceptual shifts found their anchor in a new role for the state, as the parallel
development of state planning in its Leninist, fascist, and Keynesian forms
all represented novel attempts to delimit specifically national spheres of the
economy.
As part of their enhanced role in the economy, states were also critical
in devising various instruments and controls for measuring and representing
economic processes. A series of aggregates (production, employment, in-
vestment, and consumption) and averages (interest rate, price level, and
real wages) gave the idea of the economy an expressive totality whose un-
specified referent was the nation-state. Around the same time, Simon Kuz-
nets systematized a method for estimating the national income, while
econometrics attempted to create mathematical representations of the "na-
tional economy." The subsequent elaboration and generalization of what
came to be called the gross national product (GNP) of each economy made
it possible to represent the size, structure, and growth of this new, self-
enclosed entity "(Mitchell 1995). These developments provided the concep-
tual apparatus through which the economy was envisioned as a spatially
bounded structure subject to national "regulation" and "management."
Whereas laissez-faire had been a mechanism for taking the state cognitively
out of the economy, twentieth-century nationalisms were constituting the
nation-state as its prime mover.
The next step was the emergence of growth theory outside the old equi-
220 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
The initial systematic push for the expansion of colonial economies was
proposed in the context of a crisis of empire and had as its aim the alle-
viation of the metropole's war debts and the creation of a stable political
and ideological framework for continued imperial rule. The European
world had entered the 1930s depression only a decade after relative peace.
More than 60 million men were involved in the armed conflict of World
War I, and when the armistice was signed in November 1918, Europe had
to deal with severe population losses, extensive devastation, financial and
political disorganization, and a serious reduction in civilian output. This
new situation altered the terms within which economic transformations in
the colonies were framed, and France and Britain tried to make the idea of
social and economic development the key to a renewal of the imperial
mission.
Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have convincingly argued that in
this new geopolitical configuration, hegemonic knowledge was recast so as
to make "sense" of the new global order. The opposition between "civi-
lized" and "primitive," which had been intrinsic to justifying colonization
at the height of imperial incorporation, was no longer viable. The formerly
colonized had to be brought out of the dialectics of difference of colonial
rule, into a universalizing discourse. "Development" was in this respect
crucial in reconfiguring the global identity of ex-colonies in a way that was
incorporative and universalistic yet still hierarchical. It not only defined the
terms in which colonial exploitation and relative inequality were under-
stood but also provided the promise of a future beyond colonialism. Unlike
the ideology of the "civilizing mission," development appealed to and was
seized by nationalist leaders w h o saw in it a project that only a government
that had rid itself of colonialism could accomplish (Cooper and Packard
1997: 1-44).
Analogous circumstances in Britain and France were leading to more or
less similar proposals and commitments of metropolitan public funds, cul-
minating in the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940 and
the French Fonds d'Investissement et Developpement Econotnique et Social
des Territoires d'Outre-Mer of 1946. Large-scale investments in raw ma-
terials production were made in the context of an extension of capitalist
production and the role of the colonial state in the economy. Colonial
administrations were urged to enlarge commodity production and tie co-
lonial output and trade more directly to metropolitan interests. As Lord
Hailey pointed out, this represented "the translation into the Colonial
sphere o f . . . a new concept which had come to be increasingly accepted
in domestic politics, the doctrine, namely, that active state intervention was
a necessary lever to the amelioration of social conditions" (Wilson 1994:
6
149).
But the project of development in a colonial context proved to be un-
realizable. Sapped by grandiose and costly plans and social conflicts that
222 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
The need to find a new political and material basis for continued colonial
rule, which had served as an impetus for the turn to economic development
and the changing role of the colonial state that it signified, helped to focus
social conflicts directly on the state itself. After a slight recovery following
the depression years, there was an upsurge of labor mobilization in the
colonies, particularly in the urban centers. In Africa alone there were gen-
eral strikes in Mombassa in 1 9 3 9 and 1947, mine strikes in the copper Kit
in 1938 and 1940, a general strike in Nigeria in 1945, riots in the Gold
Coast in 1948, strike waves in Dakar in 1 9 3 6 - 1 9 3 7 and again in 1 9 4 5 -
1 9 4 6 , and the French West African railway strike of 1 9 4 7 - 1 9 4 8 . These
strikes were reverberations of a movement that began in the Caribbean
when a series of riots hit the oil fields of Trinidad and the plantations J I V
urban areas of Jamaica. The struggles in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and
Malaysia further accentuated the overall crisis of empire.
The wave of strikes and political revolts came as a shock to imperial
officials, w h o saw it as a threat to the wartime empire. Deepening civil
conflict and serious challenges to colonial rule forced them to recognize the
need to increase living standards in order to mollify labor and improve
productivity. Organized urban and rural workers were well positioned n>
take advantage of imperial interests in a stable environment for accumu-
lation to push for their o w n demands. They did so in terms of the concep-
tual scheme that officials were themselves trying to expound: if workers in
the colonies were supposed to behave like industrial workers in the mi tin
poles, they should be paid as such. Such demands successfully turned the
universalizing discourse back against the colonial state itself, making enti-
tlement claims for better wages and social benefits that were commensurate
with those in the metropole. In the case of the French Empire, the attempt
to re-imagine empire by promoting a policy of "assimilation" and welcom-
ing the colonies into the Union Francaise witnessed a similar dialectic ol
The Genesis of the Development Framework 223
Just as the decline of Europe's global hegemony opened the way for the emergence
of the United States as the premier world power, the Europeans' doubts about then
civilizing mission strengthened the Americans' growing conviction that they knevs
best how to reform "backward" societies that were racked by poverty, natural
calamities, and social unrest. (Adas 1989: 402)
DEVELOPMENTALISM A N D T H E POSTWAR B O O M
equipment goods, and food. The result was a rapid surge in accumulated
Third World debt, and Mexico's declaration in 1 9 8 0 that it could no longer
make its debt payments signaled that developmentalism had entered a pe-
riod of abrupt and terminal decline. It marked the end of the "development
regime" and the establishment, via the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-
16
imposed structural adjustment programs, of the "debt regime."
The landslide since the 1970s was clearly not uniform. The vibrancy of
the East Asian economies during the long downturn should caution against
too generic an image of decline. Although there is much debate over the
reasons for the exceptional performance of the East Asian states, both the
Cold War on whose front lines they were positioned, as well as the trans-
formations initiated by Japanese colonialism and sustained by the dirigiste
postcolonial states, all have their place in any balanced account. Deliberate
policies aimed at fostering pragmatic distortions of the market and the
imposition of high but flexible tariffs make it clear, however, that their
success had very little to do with neoliberalism and with prescriptions for
1 7
unregulated markets (Amsden 1990: 5 - 3 1 ) .
The early 1970s marked a watershed between the golden age of sustained
growth and the stagnation that followed, altering many of the coordinates
within which development was conceived but outside which it could not
survive. The vanquishing of the Soviet Union put an end to the Cold War,
and with itat least for nowother alternatives to the purism of the mar-
ket. While decolonization remains a permanent gain, its meaning is increas-
ingly constricted by the power of transnational institutions that place
national sovereignty under an ever-tightening grip. For over t w o decades
n o w the developing world has been subjected to a global tributary regime
and draconian austerity measures that have resulted in the slashing of pro-
grams once viewed as emblematic of development. The resultant social dis-
location and widespread misery have done much to erode the legitimacy of
national states that had made the promise of development a constitutive
element of their legitimacy.
Even in the most optimistic view, this picture leaves little or no room for
development theory as it used to be conceived. The seemingly unbridgeable
gulf between rich and poor nations has undermined inherited narratives
about progress and modernity at a global level. The sharp increase in global
inequality has belied the presupposition of converging paths in a single
modernizing process of societal change. Over the debris of developmental-
ism, neoliberalism masquerading as "globalization" has become dominant.
Born in the aftermath of World War II, neoliberalism was a reaction to the
The Genesis of the Development Framework 229
NOTES
1. This chapter places the emergence of the institutional complex of "devel-
opment" at the intersection of these world-historical processes. Their imbrication
and actualization within any region or nation-state were, it ought to be emphasized,
highly variable. For two exemplifying but contrasting instances, see Cooper (1997b:
64-92); Ludden (1992: 27-87).
2. Perry Anderson maintains, "The combination of the Industrial Revolution
at home and the destruction after Waterloo of any barrier or competition to English
global hegemony overseas brought into being a quite new form of world economy,
in which British manufacturers possessed overwhelming preponderance amid gen-
eralized international free trade" (Anderson 1992: 137).
3. As Marx was to put it, "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the
extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population
of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the
conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are
all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production" (Marx
1976: 915). For a detailed discussion of the place of New World slavery in Britain's
rise to hegemony, see (Blackburn 1997: 510-580).
4. A sense of the expansion of "development economics" in the United States
is provided by David Landes, who notes, "I compared the volume of publication
of articles on growth and development theory in the Index of Economic Journals
of the American Economic Association: for the period 1925-1939, a little over one
page of citations; of 1940-49, a little over two pages; for 1950-54, over seven
pages; and the next quinquennium, sixteen p a g e s . . . . A new sub discipline had been
born" (Landes 1991: 23).
5. Michael Adas (1989) provides a careful consideration of this shift in imperial
ideology. Nevertheless, he locates the rise of scientific rationality as the legitimating
ethos of empire earlier than I do here. It is doubtful that racism and cultural es-
sentialism were effectively marginalized until the horrors of fascism brought their
consequences into the heart of Europe itself.
6. For British colonial policies with regard to "development" see Constantine
(1984) and Havinden and Meredith (1993); and for French policy see Canale (1982:
445-482).
7. The dynamics of colonial racism always worked against claims to a wider
and inclusive citizenship. For a magisterial discussion of these dynamics in the con-
text of the British and French Empires in Africa, one to which the above summary
discussion is indebted, see Cooper (1996).
8. African labor movements were also caught in an ideological trap, in this case
by the logic of nationalism. It became more difficult for them to assert that the
metropolitan standard for wages and benefits should apply to all workers. On the
ironies of this contrasting logic (framed in context of Africa), see Cooper (1997a:
406-435).
9. The Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva, commenting on Truman's new
doctrine, noted: "Underdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On that
day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on,
they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified
232 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
into an inverted mirror of others' reality . . . a mirror that defines their identity . . .
simply in terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority" (Esteva 1992: 7).
10. The term "Third World" came into popular usage in the early 1950s. It was
coined by Georges Balandier and Alfred Sauvy to referin an analogy with the
Tiers-Etat of revolutionary Franceto the poor and populous areas of the world.
Its formulation partly expressed Western anxiety about the emergence of a "second
world" of Communist nations in Eastern Europe (Pletsch 1981: 565-590).
11. In his important study on the making of an Atlantic ruling class, Kees van
der Pilj has carefully documented that the American corporate and financial estab-
lishment exerted manifold pressure to redirect European economic development
away from cartelism and colonialism to auto-centered growth based on consumer-
durable consumption (van der Pijl 1985).
12. The European Recovery Programor Marshall Planwas a key element of
the strategic thinking of the United States. Between 1948 and 1952 the United States
had transferred $13 billionan estimated 4.5% of its gross national productto
Western Europe. Marshall aid was viewed as critical to the project of constructing
"a prosperous and stable European community secure against the dangers of Com-
munist subversion and able to join the United States in a multilateral system of
world trade" (Hogan 1987: 427).
13. There was also a Soviet version of modernization theory not surprisingly
privileging the Soviet Union itself as the alternative paradigm for "development"
and modernization. For some perceptive reflections in the context of the Soviet
Union's own periphery, see Kandiyoti (1996: 529-542). For the articulation of the
theory of "a non-capitalist road" to development, see Bellis (1988: 258-281).
14. Immanuel Wallerstein points out that "the absolute expansion of the world-
economyin population, in value produced, in accumulated wealthhas probably
been as great as in the entire period of 1500-1945" (Wallerstein 1991: 113).
15. Especially dramatic cases of urbanization are Colombia, where between
1951 and 1973 the rural population fell from 64% to 36.4% while the metropol-
itan population rose from 6.2% to 27.6%, and Paraguay, where the corresponding
figures for 1950-1972 were 65% and 22.9%, and 0% and 24%, respectively. Com-
menting on the bewildering pace of social transformation during this period, Eric
Hobsbawm notes, "Never before in history has ordinary human life, and the so-
cieties in which it takes place, been so radically transformed in so short a time: not
merely within a single life time, but within part of a lifetime" (Hobsbawm 1992:
55-64).
16. Numerous studies from different theoretical perspectives try to explain the
end of the postwar expansion and the subsequent downturn. For a few represen-
tative approaches see Arrighi (1994); Brenner (1998); Harvey (1989); Mandel
(1975); and Marglin and Schor (1990).
17. For an interesting discussion of the Japanese government's attempt to get the
World Bank to consider Japan's and, by extension, East Asia's actually existing
economic models and for the way in which the World Bank diluted the study that
was done in order to make it compatible with reigning neoliberal orthodoxies, see
the revealing essay by Robert Wade (1996: 3-37). For an argument on the long-
term, deep-seated structural causes of East Asian ascendancy, see Arrighi, Ikeda,
and Irwan (1993: 41-65).
18. Phil McMichael notes: "The world is on the threshold of a major transition
The Genesis of the Development Framework 233
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Chapter 12
n
We follow Walter Mignolo's insight that a privileged way to understand
the persistence of colonial discourses and managerial apparatuses is to focus
on the power and functionality of literacy as both sign and vehicle of "civ-
ilization."
In doing so, we contend that literacy is central to the attempt to code
(material and cultural) space at the macropolitical level insofar as it allows
or disallows for categories of subjectivity: "civilized," "literate," "mod-
ern," or else, "barbarian," "savage," "backwards." The introduction of
Western patterns of law and knowledge constitutes entire populations into
a "subjected group" that receives its determination from other groups
"and is never opened to the finitude of its [own] existence" (Howard
1998: 114).
Put in another way, the question dealt with here is that of the notion of
"property" considered from a global perspective. Taken beyond its nar-
rower meaning as a principle for judiciary claims, "property" refers here
to the use and ownership of space as a power mechanism. We refer to
"property" in the latter sense, that is, as the power mechanism of the world
order. Thus, we are concerned with the question of the appropriation of
labor power, the conformation of citizenship as the key to insertion in the
world market, and the appropriation of land and resources. This consid-
eration leads us to explore the construction (through ideology) of several
interrelated subject positions and, via this operation of collective subjecti-
fication, to the consolidation of the nation-state system and the cosmopol-
itical system that we term the global state-market or state-form.
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 239
m
What follows from the latter is a consideration of the conformation of
the nation-state system and nation-state subjects as the main product and
agent of globalization, that is, the constitution of an abstract political
1
space through which capital can actualize its ever-expanding tendency, for
it is no more constrained by politically constituted communities or parceled
2
sovereignty. This implies the conversion, overcoming, or eradication of
constituted communities and the wholesale modification of existing con-
cepts of social action and change.
This is the problem referred to by Marx with the term "primitive accu-
mulation" (in which the concentrated force of the nation-state plays a cen-
tral role): the destruction of pre- or paracapitalist forms of rule and
production. In the contemporary world we keep witnessing violent pro-
cesses of primitive accumulation, but we also observe new social move-
ments becoming agents of such processes by falling prey to a mistake that
is also generalized in the vast majority of actual analyses of globalization
within critical social sciences, mainly, the supposition that the global and
the national (or any other analogically "localized," specific communities
such as "ethnic peoples," "women," or "inclusive communities") are in
conflict.
As Simon Bromley argues (1999: 2 8 4 ) , "this way of thinking has been
reinforced by the somewhat paradoxical fact that, while the major social
and political theories originating in the enlightenment were (implicitly at
least) of universal scope and applicability, most actual analysis assumed
that societies were nationally bounded."
Contrary to Simon Bromley, we believe that there is no paradox. Pe-
ripheral nationalism, performatively generated by ideological apparatuses
and imposed upon its agents, can be seen as yet another ideological effect
of the uses of literacy in a (post)colonial setting. Once ideology erases its
links with economic and political structures, it conveys a sense of tran-
scendence, so "the literate's individual life derives its meaning and signifi-
cance from intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual participation in the
accumulated creations and knowledge of humankind, made available
through the written word" (Scribner 1986: 32).
The point here is that there is no contradiction between "global" and
"specific" but overdetermination. This means that the specific is made to
work for the global in the sense that concrete processes of specification and
subjectification (social, economic, legal, territorial) achieved through dif-
3
ferent uses of literacy (described as "literacy as adaptation" and "literacy
4
as power" ) are transcended in and subsumed by "literacy as state-of-
grace." The latter is an ideological construct that nowadays has been
greatly enhanced by the pervasiveness of the mass media.
While being interpellated by the ideological apparatus of literacy, indi-
240 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
n
The first alternative arises from the politicization (both in theory and in
practice) of a series of specific struggles related to issues of gender, race,
migration, and decolonization that have taken place from the end of the
1960s onward. For many critics, this is the privileged site for political rein-
vention in our times. Gayatri Spivak argues in this spirit:
One of the theaters of that agon [between capitalism and socialism] is global resis-
tance spelled out "as responses to local micro-problems . .. [that] gradually . . . be-
gan to relate . . . to macro-policies of economic development and the market
economy led linear development agencies and international financial institutions
like the World Bank." This is the theater where today's "native informants" col-
lectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense
of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them
silent and invisible. (Spivak 1999: 85)
The thrust of Spivak's argument comes, in part, from the side of the
"patriarchally defined subaltern woman." She argues that her labor has
242 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
IS THERE A N Y B O D Y O U T THERE?
n
Three consequences follow from the previous analysis:
1. Although the insight of postcolonialism points in the right direction (i.e., that
behind the neutrality of multi-cultural universalism lurks a Eurocentric subject),
it must be corrected in the following way: today's capitalism holds to a cultural
heritage that hides forms of exclusion according not only to race, gender, or
culture but mainly to the anonymity of capital. This suggests that the task for
a postcolonial enlightened "critical theory" is to account for the ways in which
society has been subsumed by the state-form. That is, we must understand the
way in which capital has become an anonymous global machine with no par-
ticular content before trying to unveil any particular content hidden behind the
universalistic claims of the center.
2. One must remain attentive to the possibility that, via "discursive theory," "post-
modernism," or "cultural studies," theory produced in the "centers" and cir-
culated toward the "peripheries" of the world-system might be operating today
in favor of the ideological effort to make capitalism invisible. This effort be-
comes patent in the renewed interest of certain critical discourses in the social
sciences in relocating the resistance of antisystemic movements within the nor-
246 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
m
As Zizek (1999) argued recently, however, there are at least t w o forms
of suspending the law: one is characterized by the replacement of law by
socialized war-state or surveillance-state, under the assumption that dia-
logue, translation, and interpretation are absent or impossible. The other
opposes to such assumptions the openness and indeterminacy of the social,
the latter being non-coextensive with the empire of normativity.
This paves the way toward an examination of the ever-expanding char-
acter of social claims, which is opposed to the attempt of providing the
social signified (the social actors) with controlled signifiers, that is, a civil
identity and its analogues: fixed logos, a limited capacity to act, and non-
plastic structures.
In order to avoid normativism (as it reintroduces the cosmopolitanism
that Derrida and we seek to criticize), however, we should relocate (Der-
rida's) "undecidability" (the unlimited character of the claims and the
claimants to justice). The objective of this move is to be able to open up
the possibility of constructing a non-normative critique of the relationship
between capitalism, justice, and the law/literacy pair. This might be
achieved if we start from a realization that follows from our (postcolonial
analysis of the uses of law and literacy: that capitalism depends on reter-
ritorializing deterritorialized agency (labor-power) and deterritorialized
(speculative) wealth.
As we have seen, apparatuses such as law and literacy (as power and
as state-of-grace) elaborate locally uncoded agency, coding it (by giving to
it a meaning, an end, and a proper name) by referring (uncoded) agencv
to a "developmental" (mode of spatializing time). While doing so (while
subjectifying agents), these apparatuses determine (or code) the m i d a i r
mined life-activity (the life-producing activity) of such agents. Through tin-
process, value is produced. Capital grows as a resultant of appropiutins;
such value. What apparatuses like law and literacy do is actualize capital-
ism by actually connecting time and wealth in the form of organized life-
producing, value-producing activity (qualified agency, appropriated 1 lbot
power). To put it otherwise: time and agency are decoded flows, mi'
apparatuses of colonization such as those we have referred to throughou"
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 247
this chapter code and transfer such flows. In the process "the local" is made
to work for "the global."
Neither the local nor the global, however, is ever completely finalized
and determined. The process that we are describing here takes place in time,
and thus it is always bifurcating in new, unexpected ways. This movement
of continuous colonization and decolonization gives capitalism its critical
nature.
In its modern, world-systemic (postcolonial or imperial) form (that of
global law and literacy as state-of-grace), this movement takes the form of
a massive process of collective subjectification that occurs at every point of
the social field. Social subjection at a global scale means that there are
(global) subjects of capital (capitalists), and there are those subjected to
(global) capital (proletarians). We become subjects of and subjected to cap-
ital, but never at the same time and never at the same point of the social
field.
Importantly, processes of actualization of capital through subjectification
do not exhaust the flows of capital. This means that new flows emerge
outside the apparatuses of capture. Therefore, as Mackenzie (1999) sug-
gests, we can talk of the "ambiguous" nature of such apparatuses (law,
literacy) with respect to the general, global fluidity of capital. If so, then
we are allowed to criticize these models of realization/expression of capital,
or apparatuses, as trapped by the particularities of the present. The point
is that these apparatuses are the primary means of creating capitalist sub-
jects, and without these forms of actualizing capital the latter could not
function.
More importantly, law and literacy are only a partial approximation to
the bifurcating flows of capital. This is the "ambiguity" that accounts for
the impossibility of global law and literacy as state-of-grace ever to realize
their cosmopolitan drive toward a Kantian "perpetual peace" in the world-
system. Thus, our critiques are allowed to stress the inability of capitalism's
apparatuses to transcend undecidability.
While following Mackenzie's arguments, we have refrained from con-
ceiving undecidability as a moment of judgment in the name of normative
justice. Instead, we located it in the immanent bifurcation of capitalism.
The point is that global law and literacy as state-of-grace, being instruments
of self-colonization, are always subjected to criticism from the vantage
point of capital as an indeterminate series of flows, and capital (in its global
operation) is always under fire from the vantage point of law (power) and
literacy (knowledge). The possibility of critique arises in the strategic play
of one against the other. Social criticism does not require the celebration
of capitalism or the celebration of actual claims to be recognized (in the
language of rights) coming from particularistic social movements.
Social criticism comes from the creation of new possibilities via the stra-
tegic, bifurcating movement between capitalism and the demands of justice.
248 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
NOTES
1. Which Marx saw as a new form of territoriality coterminous with the estab-
lishment of a civil society of independent individuals, in fact, the dissolution of civil
society into independent individuals, whose relationships depend on the law.
2. See Hardt and Negri (2000).
3. That is, the (individual) level of proficiency effectively necessary for effective
performance in a range of settings and customary activities.
4. That is the point where a community becomes aware of its needs and the
blockades that act against their efforts to satisfy them. Important here is the con-
cept's accent on group or community advancement.
5. See Derrida (1994).
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 249
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Verso, pp. 100-139.
Bromley, Simon. 1999. "Marxism and Globalisation." In Marxism and the Social
Sciences. London: Macmillan, pp. 280-301.
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Castro-Gomez, Santiago, ed. 2000. La Reestructuracion de las Ciencias Sociales en
America Latina: Memorias del Primer Simposio sobre las Ciencias Sociales
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turales).
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourn-
ing and the New International. New York: Routledge.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Howard, John S. 1998. "Subjectivity and Space: Deleuze 5c Guattari's BwO in the
New World Order." In Elanor Kauffman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds., Deleuze
and Guattari: New Mappings in Philosophy, Politics and Culture. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mackenzie, Iain. 1999. "Capitalism, Justice and the Law." Angelaki. Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities (9): 73-80.
Mignolo, Walter. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality
and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Scribner, Sylvia. 1986. "Literacy in Three Metaphors." Journal of American Edu-
cation 93: 6-21.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology.
London: Verso.
Chapter 13
In Brazil, and Latin America more generally, "Africa" has been part and
parcel not only of the making of Black cultures, popular culture, and new
syncretic religious systems but also of the imagery associated with the mod-
ern nation and, in general, modernity and modernism (Rowe and Schelling
1991). Images, evocations, and (ab)uses of "Africa" have, therefore, re-
sulted from the interplay and struggle between White intellectuals and
Black leadership, popular and elite culture, political ideas developed in
Western Europe and the United States and their reinterpretation in Latin
America. In this tense field, with conflicting agents and agendas, "Africa"
has been endlessly re-created, deconstructed, and turned into a contested
icon, an icon used and abused by traditional as well as modern versions of
Black culture, popular or elite discourses on the nation and the people to
be created by melting in the N e w World, and, last but not least, progressive
and conservative politics. No wonder that both conformism and protest
have related to and created their o w n "Africa." Unfortunately, generally
speaking, in Brazil and perhaps throughout Latin America, elite/intellectual
and popular discourses on the African origin of society and culture have
rarely been compared. Most accounts are, in fact, based exclusively on the
former.
This chapter explores tentatively the uses of "Africa" across the last cen-
tury in highbrow culture and official discourse on the nationhood, as well
as popular versions thereof. After sketching out the historical developments
of such process from the eve of the abolition of slavery in 1888 to the
present, the chapter focuses on the period starting in the late 1 9 7 0 s
known as the period of the redemocratization of Brazil. Then, it analyzes
the role and discourses of a set of agents and agencies, the intellectuals, the
252 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
the Black condition has resulted from the move toward the globalization
of cultures and ethnicities. International similarities also concern the sub-
jective sphere. So, a specific binding force of Black culture, which brings
together people from different regions and nation-states, is the feeling of a
common past as slaves and underprivileged. Africa is used as a symbol bank
from which symbols are drawn in a creative way (Mintz and Price 1977).
Africa is important for another reason. The racialization of social rela-
tions and particular groups has been based on categories created through-
out a triangular exchange between Europe, the N e w World, and Africa.
This happened in t w o forms. First, notions such as tribe and ethnic group,
which were created within the colonial experience in the Americas, traveled
to Africa (Wallerstein 1991), informing the making of the Other, and later
bounced back on the Americas (Quijano 1992). Second, in the N e w World
the transformation of the African into a Negro/Black person went hand in
hand with a constant process of categorization, classification, and ranking
of things and peoples African in Europe and Africa itself. For example,
ideas of Negritude, Blackness, and Pan-Africanism that have been created
in the N e w World have always been inspired either by African intellectuals
and the struggle for independence in Africa or by images of what African
societies were prior to European colonization. These ideas, however, have
also drawn inspiration from scientific as well as not-so-scientific "White"
production on Africa. So, anti-racist and Black nationalist discourses also
drew upon heliocentric notions (by which ancient Egyptian civilization was
the absolute center from which other civilizations developed) and mono-
diffusionist notions of world-history as much as they are, nowadays, draw-
ing from the theorizing about the politics of identities in the social sciences
(see, among others, Gilroy 1 9 9 3 , 2 0 0 0 ) . Nonetheless, most historical ac-
counts of the nation building of single countries in the N e w and Old World
have been inclined to de-emphasize these international connections, flows,
and similarities.
In sum, Black cultures and identities are created and redefined through
a triangular exchange of symbols and ideas between Africa, the N e w
World, and the Black diaspora to Europe. This process of the making of
Black cultures has been creating the contours of a transnational, multilin-
gual, and multireligious culture area, the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). This
is one more evidence that the globalization of racial ideas as well as anti-
racist thinking can be processes with a long history and that they have also
concerned peoples w h o , from a Eurocentric perspective, were often consid-
ered as being "without history" (Wolf 1983).
T H E SPECIFICITY OF BRAZIL
Brazil is the country that received the most slaves from Africa. Estimates
range from 3 to 15 million Africans deported to the Brazilian shores. The
254 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
slave trade started early and terminated later than in any other country in
the " N e w World." High mortality rates, the relatively low costs of slaves
at certain times in history, and the relative proximity to Africa are three
key reasons that Africa and Brazil have had many more exchanges than is
the case for the other largest slave societythe United States. All this soon
made Brazil the greatest concentration of descendants of Africans outside
Africa. The origin of the slaves in Brazil was and still is controversial. It is
commonly accepted that they came, mostly, from the Gulf of Guinea and
the region around the delta of the Congo River (Cortes de Oliveira 1997;
Miller 1997). The slaves were put to work in a variety of activities, first
on sugar plantations, later in mines, coffee plantations, and cattle raising.
Some slaves worked in domestic service, while others carried out a variety
of activities from fishing to peddling. A few managed to develop their o w n
economic activities and earn money in their spare time. That money was
often used for buying manumission, which, though tough to achieve, was
usually more easily obtained than in the United States.
I focus on the state of Bahia due to its singular importance in the making
of Black cultures and "Africa" in Brazil. The city of Salvador da Bahia and
its region are perhaps the largest urban concentration of Black population
in the N e w World. The region has known specific, "local" versions of Black
culture. The language spoken is, of course, Portuguese, which determines
a specific, relatively secondary position in the global flows of Black culture
within which the English-speaking world is hegemonic. In the past this state
and the region around its capital, Salvador (Reconcavo), if only for the
sheer size of the Black population, attracted the attention of travelers, who
depicted it in their accounts as the "Black Rome"the largest conglom-
erate of what were considered African cultural traits and traditions outside
of Africa. Later, starting from the turn of the century, Bahia took a central
place in the prehistory of ethnography of Afro-Brazilian culture through
the work of Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, and Manuel
Bomfim. From the 1930s it also took a pivotal position in the formation
of modern Afro-American anthropology (cf. Frazier 1942; Herskovits
1 9 4 1 , 1943; Ramos 1939). Inspired by the pursuit of "Africanisms" in the
N e w World, several anthropologists and sociologists (Bastide 1967; Her-
skovits 1 9 4 1 ; Pierson 1 9 4 2 ; Verger 1957, 1968) held Brazil, in particular
the coastal region of the state of Bahia, as one of the areas in which Black
culture had maintained African traits to a larger degree than elsewhere.
N o t for nothing, it was on the Bahian soil that the debate among sociol-
ogists and anthropologists about the origin of Black culture was started in
the 1930sis contemporary Black culture an African survival or a creative
adaptation to hardship and racism? In fact, Bahia has been historically
central not only in highbrow discourses but also in popular constructions
as regards "Africa" and Africanisms in Brazil.
Between the end of slavery in 1888 and the 1920s, industrial employment
was minimal, and, also because of mass immigration from Europe that, in
fact, came to substitute for the former slaves, generally speaking, the labor
market allowed for little social mobility for Blacks. Race relations were
determined by a society that was highly hierarchic, in terms of both color
and class (Bacelar 2 0 0 0 ) . Black people, w h o were the overwhelming ma-
jority of the lower class, "knew their o w n place," and the elite, which was
almost entirely White, could keep its ranks easily closed without feeling
threatened (Azevedo 1966).
The second period spans from the populist dictatorship of Getulio Vargas
in the 1930s to the end of the right-wing military regime in the late 1970s.
In the 1930s, for the first time on a large scale, opportunities were opened
for the Black population in the formal section of the labor market, mostly
in the public sector. The authoritarian and populist regime of Vargas lim-
ited immigration and favored the "national" labor force as part of its mod-
ernization project. A second important thrust to the integration of the Black
population came in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, a
period characterized by populist government and later, from the military
coup of 1964, an authoritarian regime that promoted state-sponsored eco-
nomic growth within an import-substitution economy. N o w also industrial
jobs were open to Blacks. More Blacks than ever managed to get formal
jobs with chances of social mobility. From 1 9 6 4 to 1983 Brazil was run
by a military junta that repressed civil rights and discouraged Black organ-
ization. Nevertheless, the decade from the early 1970s to the early 1980s,
which corresponded to a slackening in military control, was a period of
growth and creativity for Black organizations and Black culture. The new
Black workers showed interest in Black pride and in Black organizations
(Agier 1990, 1992). There are t w o reasons for this. On the one hand,
through ascending social mobility a new generation of Black workers met
with color bars that had not been perceived thus far. On the other hand,
these Black workers had more money and time to spend for organized
community and leisure activities. N e w Black movements and all-Black car-
nival associations were formed. Black culture and religion acquired more
official recognition. N e w , powerful forms of Black culture were created.
The mass media labeled this process the "re-Africanization" of Bahia (Agier
1990, 1992; Bacelar 1989; Sansone 1993).
The third period spans from the redemocratization in the early 1980s to
the present. Over this period of time recession combined with democrati-
zation and fast "modernization" have led to a combination of new dreams
256 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
and frustrations. Many of the channels of social mobility that had been
very important for the former generation are not relevant anymore for the
younger generation. For example, the opportunities in old manual crafts
but also in heavy industry and even in some sections of public employment
have decreased, and the value of salaries has collapsed, contributing to
lower the formerly relatively high status of these jobs. In addition, new
forms of segregationusually subtler and never explicitly based on color
emerged in some of the burgeoning sectors of the labor market, such as
the luxury shopping malls, where the requirements of "good appearance"
and "good manners" in job applications tend to discriminate against the
darkest candidates (da Silva 1999; Guimaraes 1997). In the meantime,
other changes led to an increase of expectations as to living standard. In
Brazil as in many other Third World countries, mass school education to-
gether with mass media has contributed to a revolution of rising expecta-
tions. Another important factor is the opening up of the country to
commodities, ideas, sounds, and cultures from abroad. After centuries in
which only a small elite had access to international goods, Brazil is passing
from isolation to participation by gearing into the world-economy as an
important "emerging market," as this large Third World economy is now
often fashionably called. Once, because of the faulty import-substitution
policies, many commodities were not available; n o w imported commodities
are indeed for sale but are very exclusive and expensive for the over-
whelming majority of Black Brazilians.
N e w dreams also result from the increased acceptance of Black cultural
expressions from the side of the state and official culture. Also, the leisure
industry is more interested in Black culture than ever. More than ever be-
fore, Black culture is predominant in the images and discourses of official
and commercial Brazilianness (brasilidade) and, in Bahia, Bahianness
(baianidade).
The structure of the system of race relations and racial terminology as
well as the type of racism and Black ethnicity change throughout these
periods. Each period corresponds with a different strategy of the state and
other agencies, such as mass media, toward Afro-Brazilians, as well as with
different emphases in the national and intellectual discourses on the racial
texture of the nation. Each of these three periods corresponds to different
uses of "Africa."
A N E W STAGE
Starting from the early 1960s contacts with Africa increased a lot. On
the verge of decolonization, the Brazilian governmenteven the military
dictatorship, which began in 1964started to develop a policy of presence
in Africa. Even though Brazil did not take part in the movement of the
nonallied countries, it wanted to develop south-to-south exchanges, if only
as a way of gaining more international acceptance as a great nation. It was
in that context that t w o research institutes received support from the gov-
ernment, be it somewhat unsteadily: first, the Centre of African and Orien-
tal Studies of the Federal University of Bahia, which, also through its
journal Afro-Asia, had already been an important institutional reference in
the scientific reconstruction of "Africa" in Bahia and Brazil, and, later, in
1 9 7 4 , the Centre of Afro-Asian Studies of the private Candido Mendes
University, which also publishes a journal, Estudos Afro-Asidticos, and has
been fostering exchange with Africa, mostly in the field of economic and
social-anthropological research and training, especially with the former
Portuguese colonies.
The redemocratization of Brazil starting in the early 1980s brought a
Making "Africa" in Brazil 261
new ethnic wave and paved the way for the development of politics of
identity within a society that, thus far, had known a powerful universal
tradition, a tradition organized and defended by the state apparatuses but
also celebrated in art and popular culture through countless reinterpreta-
tions of the "myth of the three races."
N o w the agents in the process are different. The federal government,
affected by cuts in public spending and by the negative memories of its
centralized and censoring cultural policies, is losing ground. Local govern-
ments, on the other hand, gain more space, strengthened by decentraliza-
tion of power and new legislation. The state of Bahia includes in its 1988
constitution the teaching of African history in secondary education and
policies for promoting a multiethnic image in the advertising of govern-
mental agencies. Such new multi-culturalist measures create new demands
for information and symbols African, often in a prepackaged fashion con-
sisting of essentialized bits and pieces of African cultures and sweeping
generalizations on the nature of the "African people." These shortcomings
are common in multi-culturalist experiences but become more acute in a
country where public education has collapsed (Sansone 2002). Mass media
and tourism become more important in the making of a modern Black
culture. The role of social sciences changes. On the one hand, social sci-
entists are much more numerous than in the second period, and there start
to be a number of (mostly junior) Black researchers, on the other hand, as
individuals and professionals are less politically influential on account of
the popularization of the social sciences.
The cultural situation has changed, too. On the one hand, it is certainly
easier and more rewarding to "behave Black" and to show one's interest
in "Africa" than 30 years ago, if only because the acceptance of alternative
youth styles has increased (Araujo Pinho 1998)I was told that only one
generation ago dreadlocks would have been almost considered as a sign of
lunacy. Mass media have alsoat long laststarted to accept that Brazil
has a huge Black and brown population. In certain sections of society one
comes across even a sort of new Negrophilia, which creates a new space
for certain forms of estheticized Blackness. This time, however, this attitude
is not confined to the artistic vanguards and the intellectuals, as in p r e -
World War II Paris (Gendron 1990) but is rather the expression of a pop-
ular yearning for the exotic and the sensual associated with Black people.
It seems a contradiction because such yearning is produced within a society
on the periphery of the West that wants to be increasingly rational but was,
and in many aspects still is, seen as "exotic" and "tropical" by outsiders.
On the other hand, this period has seen the emergence of new Black polit-
ical movements that see it as a major task to disassemble the idea that
Brazil is a racial democracy. To these activists, Brazil, which knows a racial
system based on a color continuum, ought to be reinterpreted along a sharp
divide along color lines (negros vs. brancos, that is, Afro-Brazilians vs.
262 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
CONCLUSIONS
A first conclusion is that "Africa" in Brazil has been more the result of
the system of race relations than of the capacity of the Brazilian of African
Making "Africa" in Brazil 263
NOTES
1. I refer to "Black culture" as a basic taxonomic concept that refers to a number
of common traits in the cultural production of Black populations in different con-
texts. "Black cultures" in plural refers instead to the local or subgroup variants of
the basic Black culture.
2. Recent historical research has made me aware that "Black cultures" started
to be formed in Africa prior to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade,
throughout the early encounters with Catholic missionaries, or anyway along the
African coast, where the deportees often had to wait for years for their passage.
This process of the making of a Black culture in Africa itself has been documented
as to the invention of a Yoruba nation around the turn of the last century, which
soon inspired the offspring of Africans in Cuba and Brazil (Matory 1999), and to
South Equatorial Africa, where it certainly benefited from the proximity among
Bantu languages (Slenes 1995; Thornton 1998).
3. This is still a highly controversial point among historians; for an overview of
the debate, see Chor Maio and Santos (1996).
4. Candomble is the umbrella term that has over the last decades been used to
describe the Brazilian syncretic religious system of African origin.
5. I am grateful to the historian Carlos Eugenio Soares for this information.
6. Also in Haiti Black culture and the pantheon of voodoo deities have used a
polarity Guinepure and dignifiedversus Congoimpure and unworthy (Mon-
tilus 1993), which recalls the polarity "Yoruba"-"Bantu" in Brazil and Cuba.
7. In Salvador these photo-books are in such demand among tourists that they
are more expensive than in Rio or Sao Paulo.
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Making "Africa" in Brazil 265
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Reis, Joao. 1986. Rebeliao escrava no Brasil: A historia dos levantes dos males
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Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. 1991. Memory and Modernity: Popular Cul-
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Sansone, Livio. 1993. "Pai preto, filho negro. Trabalho, cor e diferencas geracion-
ais." Estudos Afro-Asidticos 25: 73-98.
. 2002. "Multiculturalism, the State and Modernity: The Subtleties in Some
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Slenes, Robert. 1995. " 'Malungu, Ngoma vem!' Africa encoberta e descoberta no
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Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World:
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. 1968. Flux et reflux de la traite de les negres entre le golfe du Benin et
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Vogt, Carlos, and Peter Fry. 1996. A Africa no Brasil. Cafundo. Sao Paulo: Com-
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Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. "Social Conflict in Post-Independence Black Africa:
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Wolf, Eric. 1983. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Chapter 14
above share in the desire to dismantle the long-held and persistent notions
of the social sciences over the past t w o centuries: each society, nation, and
civilization is a unit to itself, "uncontaminated by the border matter he or
she describes." Moreover, the production of such subaltern knowledge, as
I show below, is a direct challenge to the formal comparative method and
is highly critical of any attempt to place social units side by side and rele-
gate them to an analysis of "compare and contrast." In all these cases we
are collectively "arguing from another logic," a location that "the canonical
thinkers of the Western Canon can no longer provide a starting point for
the epistemology that the colonial difference requires" (Mignolo 2000:
313).
THE ARGUMENT
What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail,
as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the
(to him) indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but the pro-
foundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very
wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that Lane's Manners
and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and anthropological
observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not
because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying
2
here. (15)
More interesting and problematic is the approach that the social sciences
developed to explain social phenomena, one which I believe has helped to
foster the type of ideas that we find in Huntington and others. It is neither
Huntington's poor understanding of other civilizations nor his reductionist
view of Islam, Confucianism, or any of the seven civilizations that he listed
that I am interested in here. Rather, it is the methodology that he chose to
explain that phenomenon, a" methodology that to this day continues to
influence much of the social sciences: the classical comparative method.
It is a method that by its very structure channels thought into "us" and
"them" compartments. This is clearly the case with Samuel Huntington,
where his notions of civilizations, nations, cultures, and Islam are based on
constructing clear and definite markers between "ours" and "theirs," "their
way of life" and "our way of life." The sociologist is forced by the logic
270 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
T H E CLASSICAL COMPARATIVE M E T H O D
trajectory for the two units. Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and his
scattered references to Islam were all devised as typologies in an effort to
demonstrate the uniqueness of the Western case. In other words, the re-
searcher is in the position to provide valid causal explanations as well as
the occasion to explain why something happened "here" and failed to oc-
cur "there."
The significance of this comparative method for a causal explanation of
a historical fact leads him to the following question: "In the event of the
exclusion of that fact from the complex of factors . . . , or in the event of
its modification in a certain direction, could the course of events . . . have
taken a direction in any way different in any features which would be
decisive for our interest?" (Weber 1949a: 56). Given his concern with dem-
onstrating the uniqueness of the West by comparing it with the Orient in
order to illustrate why capitalism prevailed only in the former, the answer
to this question most definitely is in the affirmative. He wanted to examine
not only how the economic ethics of the world religions differed from each
other but why in one case we see the production of a capitalist trajectory
and in all the others we see its hindrance. Since the economic ethic found
in the West was not to be seen anywhere else, we could be quite confident
that we have reached a causal explanation to the problem at hand. Thus,
the comparative method "enables us to make a clearer genetic comparison
of the historical uniqueness of European cultural development" (1949a:
156). It also "arouses our i n t e r e s t . . . as instances of cultural products, i.e.,
as means of forming concepts or as 'causes' " (1949a: 157).
By claiming that Westerners possessed a whole array of social and po-
litical practices that made them not only different from the rest of the world
but ultimately superior, this comparative method became significant in the
ideological struggles between East and West. From this point on, disciplines
like sociology would help to create an intellectual list of characteristics
perceived to be the sole possession of the West. A Westerner came to be
understood as the supreme perfection of everything progressive and modern
that all others need to emulate and make their own. In this way sociology
not only constructed an image of the non-Western population as "other,"
far removed from the West in all its makeup, but also, and perhaps more
significant, attempted to demonstrate to the West itself that "we" possess
features that justify why we hold power over the rest of humanity. In the
same way that an economist can show the West that "our" standard of
living is far greater than that of the rest of the world, the sociologist can
demonstrate that this is so because of the distinctive qualities that "we"
possess.
American sociology provided an important response to the Third World's
decisive entry into statehood. It was no longer possible to describe the
"other" as primitive, backward, or underdeveloped and leave it at that
(Said 1979). One could use such terminology only in moments of absolute
The Convergence of 'World-Historical Social Science 273
power, when empire meant that "they" were a people to be ruled over. But
this does not mean that in the American case the ontological construct was
made useless. On the contrary, it had to be an exaggerated version of it.
The concept of modernity had to be inflated, an idea pushed to its very
extreme. The sociologist in mid-twentieth-century America n o w had to in-
clude an additional step in the modern/nonmodern dichotomy: the "other"
was not inherently born to remain underdeveloped or primitive. He or she
could be made to become modern only by following the criteria established
by the West. Success could be his or hers if he or she followed the step-by-
step guide to modernity, and w h o is in the best position to provide this
self-help manual but those academics w h o have been studying the
uniqueness of the Occident?
In a time in which the West's ability to rule over the periphery was under
question, such an idea proved effective in dealing with a restless native
population, one that seemed to the West distant and hostile. By prescribing
ways that the natives could become like "us," the idea proposed a remedy
for overcoming this feeling of distance. It demanded a change in the char-
acter of the natives that would make the native less distant or alien (Said
1979). The native in the process would be remade from a hostile and exotic
Other to one w h o is familiar and non-threatening. In short, it was an idea
that promised to make what was distant and unfamiliar into something
that resembled "our own." Such an idea was sociology's greatest challenge
in a fragile political context in which the southern inhabitants of the world
were hostile to the Western powers' efforts to maintain distance through
colonization.
Thus, a new project emerged in the mid-twentieth century, especially for
sociology and modernization theory. What is required for the sociologist
is no longer simply the task of classifying and identifying the modern from
the n o n m o d e m or the uniqueness of the Occident per se. Rather, the so-
ciologist had to do something very different and become an activist w h o
attempted to make the nonmodern perform to the capacity achieved by his
or her Western counterparts. What the sociologist needed to demonstrate
to the non-European world is the power of Western civilization, its capacity
to evolve and change. Providing this information to the people of the new
nations, it is held, may help "them" find a way out of poverty, a way into
a new era in which their static and unchanging traditions could finally come
to an end. Such a project would have been ludicrous a half century earlier.
The question of making "them" in "our" image was subdued by the reality
of direct colonialism. The spreading of liberal ideals to include non-Western
peoples could have become a reality only with the success of national lib-
eration movements in taking state power.
With the help of Talcott Parsons, American sociology reintroduced the
works of Durkheim and Weber in the search for new ways to reclaim
authority over the Other. Parsons' n o w famous pattern variables played a
274 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
ALTERNATIVES T O T H E CLASSICAL M E T H O D
It was a false perspective to take a unit like a "tribe" and seek to analyze its
operations without reference to the fact that, in a colonial situation, the governing
institutions of a "tribe," far from being "sovereign," were closely circumscribed by
the laws (and customs) of a larger entity of which they were an indissociable part,
the colony. (1974b: 5)
Initially, this perspective was concerned with describing the impact of the
capitalist world-economy on various domains of indigenous agrarian struc-
5
ture, household economy, and state making. A second wave of writers are
n o w turning their attention toward explaining h o w unique cultural config-
urations of everything from food, dress, and education to hygiene, archi-
tecture, and urbanism were given new meanings in the context of this
modern world-system. Partha Chatterjee (1986) provides an excellent ex-
ample of h o w the study of nationalism in the periphery can benefit greatly
from this kind of investigation. In his book he makes the argument that
the acceptance of an essential cultural difference between East and West
marks the formative stage of nationalist thinking in colonial situations. This
acceptance likewise underpins the inherent contradictions of such nation-
alist thought. That is, elite nationalist discourse perpetuates the presuppo-
sitions of colonial domination in the very act of challenging that
domination, for colonial domination rests on the Orientalist association of
the "West" with modernity and progress and the "East" with tradition and
"spirituality."
Nationalist texts were addressed both to the "people" who were said to constitute
the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule nationalism questioned.
278 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
To both, nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that
the backward peoples were culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the condi-
tions of the modern world. Nationalism denied the alleged inferiority of the colo-
nized people; it also asserted that a backward nation could "modernize" itself while
retaining its cultural identity. It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it
challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very in-
tellectual premises of "modernity" on which colonial domination was based. (1986:
30)
and are finding similar tendencies occurring in the core. Ann Laura Stoler,
for instance, argues that our effort to rethink European cultural genealogies
has led us "to question whether the key symbols of modern western soci-
etiesliberalism, nationalism, state welfare, citizenship, culture, and 'Eu-
ropeanness' itselfwere not clarified among Europe's colonial exiles and
by those colonized classes caught in their pedagogic net in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, and only then brought 'home' " (1995: 16). These dis-
courses, Stoler continues, "do more than prescribe suitable behavior; they
locate h o w fundamentally bourgeois identity has been tied to notions of
being 'European' and being 'white' " (11).
Chatterjee, Nader, and others provide the social sciences with a needed
illustration of h o w these gender representations do not simply generate and
define the difference between "societies." Such representations serve to con-
struct a "national society" in which the identity of the community is itself
produced from the colonial and postcolonial encounter. Here, the notion
of society and "national culture" is itself a social construct. It is not an
essentialized category that is peculiar to a given society but one created out
of the power relations between core and periphery. Such authors, more-
over, explicitly critique what twentieth-century social science has been built
upon, namely, the idea that particular peoples have natures that may be
mainly racial, cultural, or social but, most importantly, are distinctive to
them.
The underlying assumption that unites Wallerstein, Wolf, Chatterjee, and
the authors w h o m we reviewed above is that they all share in common the
belief that populations are not formed in isolation, that their connections
with other populations and with the larger currents of world-history re-
quire attention. To ignore these connections is to treat societies and cultures
like "billiard balls"(Wolf 1982). They also share in the desire to undermine
the basic assumption of the social sciences, which since the nineteenth cen-
tury have assumed the existence of societies, civilizations, and nations as
possessing strict and rigid boundaries in which each unit is formally com-
parable. The canonical formulation that views the radical demarcation be-
tween modern and traditional cultures, Occidental and Oriental
civilizations, developed and underdeveloped societies becomes less precise.
The demarcation itself becomes significant only as a way of demonstrating
that these polarities were produced and constructed by a social system that
existed above and beyond any single unit.
It was in this context that Said's notion of Orientalism became the major
text that redefined many of the methodological underpinnings of the his-
torical social science as well as literary criticism in which a storm of works
with similar themes penetrated the intellectual scene. For Said, Orientalism
is a tendency to dichotomize the human continuum into we-they contrasts
and to essentialize the resultant "other"to speak of the Oriental mind,
6
for example, or even to generalize about "Islam" or "the Arabs." The
280 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
How does one represent another culture? What is "another" culture? Is the notion
of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it
always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or
hostility and aggression (when one discusses the "other")? . . . How do ideas ac-
quire authority, "normality," and even the status of "natural" truth? (1979: 325)
In short, what is now before us nationally, and in the full imperial panorama, is
the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing question of our relationship to
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 281
In such studies, as Said points out, "little time is spent not so much in
'learning about other cultures'the phrase has an inane vagueness to it
but in studying the map of interactions, the actual and often productive
traffic occurring on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute basis among
states, societies, groups, identities" (1993: 20). In the end, we need to take
Said (1993: 1 4 - 1 5 ) up on his objective and make it our own:
My principal aim is not to separate but to connect, and I am interested in this for
the main philosophical and ideological reason that cultural forms are hybrid, mixed,
and impure, and the time has come in cultural analysis to reconnect their analysis
with their actuality... . Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous
things, cultures actually assume more "foreign" elements, alterities, differences,
than they consciously exclude. Who in India or Algeria today can confidently sep-
arate out the British or French component of the past from present actualities, and
who in Britain or France can draw a clear circle around British London or French
Paris that would exclude the impact of India and Algeria upon these two imperial
cities?
CONCLUSIONS
These new approaches are promising for the simple fact that they high-
light the connections between cultures and civilizations. The significance of
this type of approach to the future of social theory is fundamental if we
are to move away from the classical method in that it brings our attention
to the interdependence and continual reaction occurring between various
populations that we have tended to separate into watertight compartments.
In this way it can have a strong influence on the orientation of the mind.
It demonstrates that isolated or discrete cultures and civilizations in the
7
modern world, or earlier, are nowhere to be found. But its greatest utility
is that it also demonstrates the hmits of the comparative method. The latter
places a burden on research because by its very nature it creates the image
of neatly bounded, discrete cultures with clearly defined traditions. It limits
our ability to imagine an intertwined and overlapping view of cultures. The
very notion of cultural boundaries as simply self-referential, apparently
marking natural boundary lines, is one of the central premises that the
comparative approach is based on. It assumes by its very nature an onto-
282 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
mate and erase the histories of colonial conquest. The disruptive forces
unleashed by the colonial experience and the consequence that it had on
the colonized are thus left unexplored. They are left unexplored not by
accident but by virtue of a type of analysis that divides histories into sep-
arate, self-enclosed individualities. As Charles Horton Cooley recognized a
long time ago, "Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any
real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the
8
process" (1964: x x i ) .
But as Walter Mignolo argued recently, "the good news is that we have
other choices" (Mignolo 2 0 0 0 : 8). We are beginning to see the emergence
of an alternative approach that breaks radically from this presentation.
Writers like Said and Wallerstein have made their greatest contributions by
demonstrating that what has been posited as separate units have, in fact,
been closely interconnected historically by power relations. They have ex-
plored the systematic connections between social units, demonstrating that
a particular way of life in one region of the globe is intricately tied in
complex ways to other regions and that we find in region after region
examples of intercultural exchanges. But most of all, these recent theorists
are valuable because they get beyond the violent polarities that sociologists
have continuously incorporated into their writings and in powerful ways
attempted to understand cultural and social forms for what they are: every-
thing but monolithic, clearly differentiated and precise, neatly bounded
units. In this way units like society, nation, and civilizations cannot be
understood as autonomous entities, conceivable independently from other
units. They also cannot be understood as externally "interacting" on one
another. As Derek Sayer reminds us in his discussion of Marx's categories
of wage labor and capital, "Each is what it is only by virtue of its relation
to the other, and must be conceptualized accordingly" (1987: 19).
Throughout it all is the belief that these radically different civilizations,
nations, and cultures have a common history, so their stories are best told
together. "It is obliging us to re-read," as Stuart Hall claims, "the very
binary form in which the colonial encounter has for so long itself been
represented. It obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of transcultura-
tion, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the here/there cultural bi-
naries for ever" (1996: 26). I believe that this may offer us the opportunity
to "decolonize" knowledge itself.
NOTES
1. "Coloniality of difference" is a term that Mignolo appropriates from Qui-
jano's notion of "coloniality of power." See Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power
and Democracy in Latin America," in Ana Maria Merlo (1993).
2. "The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices,
historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its
fidelity to some great original" (Said 1979: 21) (emphasis added).
284 The Aftermath of the Colonial System
3. I'd like to thank the late Terence K. Hopkins for his lively discussions with
me on this theme.
4. Quoted in Buell (1994: 129).
5. Ann Laura Stoler (1992) makes a similar point.
6. See Clifford (1988) for this argument. I have relied heavily on Clifford's re-
view of Said in this section of the chapter.
7. This may also hold true for earlier periods as well. Janet Abu-Lughod, in her
book Before European Hegemony (1989), makes a convincing argument that there
was a world-system in the thirteenth century that linked the major civilizations of
the time into a common network of production and exchange.
8. I am attracted to Cooley's idea of the "Looking Glass Self" and would like
to borrow some of his terminology for my own project. Look at his Social Organ-
ization (1964), especially pp. 5, 36-37, 182, 184. "Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects the other that doth pass."
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1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press.
Buell, Frederick. 1994. National Culture and the New Global System. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnogra-
phy, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1964. Social Organization. New York: Schocken Books.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. "When Was 'the Post-Colonial'? Thinking at the Limit." In Ian
Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common
Skies, Divided Horizons. London: Routledge, pp. 242-260.
Hall, Stuart, et al. (1996). Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Lon-
don: Blackwell Press.
Hirsch, Eric. 1990. "From Bones to Betelnuts: Processes of Ritual Transformation
and the Development of 'National Culture' in Papua New Guinea." Man
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Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72(3).
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. 2000. The Clash of Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kasler, Dirk. 1979. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Merlo, Ana Maria. 1993. "Allez enfants, paria di Francia." II Manifesto 14.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local Histories? Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
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Roseberry, William. 1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, His-
tory, and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
. 1992: "The Challenge of Anthropology." Social Research 59(4) (Winter):
841-858.
The Convergence of World-Historical Social Science 285
and Weber, 271, 272; world, 33-42, European Economic Community, 113
130; and world-system, 25-26 European Union, 115
Education, 84, 139, 261 Evangelista, Mathew, 54
Efficiency, 108 Evans, Peter, 58
Egalitarianism, 59 Evers, Hans Dieter, 184
Elite, 26, 66, 209 Everyday life, 132. See also Experi-
Embodiment, 147, 148, 153, 161. See ence, lived
also Body Evolution: historical, 176; and world-
Empire. See Hegemony; Imperialism system, 26
Empowerment, 148, 149, 189 Exchange rate, 34, 113
Enlightenment, 176, 178, 220 Expenditure: per capita, 39; social, 3 9 -
Entitlement, 86 40
Entrepreneur: and income-pooling, 70; Experience, lived, 147, 148, 152, 164,
and migration, 84; and transnation- 165, 185
alism, 50, 54, 66; and women, 189- Export, and Great Britain, 105-6. See
90 also Trade
Environment, 81-82, 87, 121, 128, Export oriented industrialization, 112
139
EOI. See Export oriented industrializa- Feminism: and causality, 183; and dif-
tion ference, 176, 177; and embodiment,
Epistemology: and classical compara- 161; and epistemology, 187-88; and
tive method, 275; and feminism, 187- inequality, 199-200; and intersec-
88; and gender, 204-5; positivist, tionality, 183; and labor, 185; and
155-56; and Said, 280; and unit of Marxism, 200; and multiplicity, 163;
analysis, 157; and women, 190; and and postcolonialism, 178, 183-89;
world-systems analysis, 162, 184. and power, 163; and race, 177; and
See also Knowledge relationality, 161, 165; and science,
Equilibrium theory, 217 161; and transnationalism, 64; and
Essentialism, 184, 200 unit of analysis, 161-62; and world-
Ethnic cleansing, xxxvii, xxxviii systems analysis, 147-48, 153, 156-
Ethnicity, 53, 263. See also Race 57, 162, 171, 184, 202
Ethnic minority, 81 Feudalism, 203
Eurocentrism, xi, xii, xv; and classical Fiji, 278
comparative method, 275; and First World, 177
postcolonialism, 176, 180, 245; and Fordism, 110, 111, 116, 226, 227
sociology, 282 Forsythe, Nancy, 172, 182, 183, 184,
Europe, xiv; and Africa, 253; and 186, 187, 189
Black culture, 252; and Brazil, 257; Forum, supranational, 57
and Communism, xxxii-xxxiii; and Foucault, Michel, 60, 61, 62
comparative method, 282; decenter- Foundationalism, 175, 177
ing of, 178; and development, 40, Fourteen Points, 104, 108-9
104, 111; dominance of,"xxxv-xxxvi; France, 217, 221, 222
and Great Britain, 217; and internal Frankfurter, Felix, 10
colonialism, xiv; and labor, xxi; and Free enterprise, 109
migration, 84; and Stoler, 279; and Free trade. See Trade
transnationalism, 54; and U.S. he- French Regulationists, 110
gemony, 104, 114, 115; and Waller- French Revolution, 28, 29
stein, 276 French West Africa, 222
292 Index
Institution: and power relations, 49; partiality of, 159; and power, 160,
study of, 24 161, 163, 216; production of, 153,
Interconnectedness, 275-76, 277, 282, 156, 159, 160; and relationality,
283 159, 162, 163, 164; and Said, 280;
International Monetary Fund, xxxvi; situated, 152, 156, 159, 163; sociol-
and liquidity, 113; and neoliberal- ogy of, 160; subaltern, xv-xvi; sub-
ism, 229; and periphery, 118, 119; jugated, xv; and transnationalism,
and regulation, 224-25; and sover- 51; and unit of analysis, 157, 161;
eignty, 116, 117; and structural ad- and women, 147, 150, 152, 153,
justment program, 115, 228; and 154-55, 160-63, 166, 184, 190,
Washington Consensus, 109 204-5. See also Ideology; Science
International Relations, 51, 52-59, 64 Knox, Philander, 7
Internet, 53 Koestler, Arthur, xxxi
Intersectionality, 149, 151, 158, 163, Korean War, xxxv, 12, 227
164, 183. See also Relationality Kowaleski, Maryanne, 200
Inter-state system, 79, 80, 81, 83, 105 Kravis, Irving B., 38
Interventionism, 4 Kuznets, Simon, 219
IR. See International Relations
Iran, 112 Labor: and accumulation, 108; and Af-
Irish, xiv, 10 rica, 222; and agitation, 29; and ag-
Israel, 112 riculture, 225; and Blacks, 255-56;
Italians, 10 and children, 105; and colonialism,
Italy, 9 xii, xx, 222; and commodity chains,
131, 132, 133, 134; and Commu-
Jamaica, 222 nism, xxxiii; and co-optation, 110,
Japan: and colonialism, 228; and de- 116; and core, 174; democratization
velopment, 111; and Great Britain, of, 9, 10; division of, 48, 64, 136,
218; and Korean War, xxxv; and 185, 225; domestic, 184; and Eu-
military, 9; and United States, 104, rope, xxi; exploitation of, 110; and
112, 113, 114-15, 117 feminism, 185; and free enterprise
Japanese Security Pact, 224 imperialism, 120; and globalism,
Jews, xii, xiii 238; and Great Britain, 105-6, 107;
Justice, 242, 243, 247 and households, 129, 135, 202; and
industry, 225; and migration, 10,
Kai, Chen, 38 66, 79, 80, 82, 85, 86-87; mobility
Kant, Immanuel, 55-56, 242, 243 of, 42; nonwage, 130, 132, 137; and
Kaplan, Caren, 177 oppression, 26-29; productive versus
Kasler, Dirk, 270-71 unproductive, 184; sexual division
Kearney, Michael, 59 of, 48, 64, 136, 185; and transna-
Keckec, Margaret, 54 tionalism, 48, 49, 51-52, 53, 59;
Kennan, George, xxxiv and United States, 110, 225; unpaid,
Keohane, Robert, 53 130, 188; and wage, 135; and
Keynes, John Maynard, 219 WASP establishment, 7; and women,
Keynesianism, 14, 110, 111, 116, 229 105, 127-28, 131, 135-41, 188-89,
Kinship, 154, 176 200, 202, 204, 206, 207, 2 4 1 ^ 2 ;
Knowledge, xi-xix; and classical com- and world-economy, 12; and world-
parative method, 275; and colonial- system, 26
ism, 238; and multiplicity, 162; Labor movement, 58
Index 295
tance to, 28; and Saint Domingue, Plan, xxxiv-xxxv; and socialism,
29; and women, 137-38 109; and transnationalism, 54; and
Smith, Adam, 217 United States, 225; and Yalta, xxxiv.
Smith, Jackie, 54 See also Russia
Smith, Joan, 130, 184, 188 Space, 156, 162
Snow, C. P., 23 Spain, xii, 6, 27
Social embeddedness, 68, 69, 70 Spivak, Gayatri, 51, 241^12
Socialism, xxvi; as antisystemic pro- Stability: and currency, 217; and he-
cess, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109-12; gemony, 55
and dictatorships, 119; failure of, Stagflation, 226
118; and migration, 79-80; potential State: and Africa, 40; and commodity
of, 120; and Soviet Union, xxxii; chains, 69; and development, 39-41;
and United States, 110; and women, and households, 130; and ideology,
199 243; and International Relations, 52;
Social mobilization, 181, 183 and migration, 80; regulatory role
Social movement, 30, 58, 63. See also of, 48; and society, 24; and transna-
Antisystemic movement; Women's tionalism, 53, 55, 57-58, 63, 64; as
movement unproblematic unity, 56; warfare-
Social research, 24 welfare, 13
Social science, 267-83; and Brazil, 2 5 9 - Statistics, 22
60, 261; and quantification, 23; and Stead, W. T., 6
structural-functionalism, 24; tradi- Stimson, Henry, 8, 11, 16
tional, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273; Stoler, Ann Laura, 279
and transnationalism, 59; and world- Strange, Susan, 113
systems analysis, 31, 189, 279, 282 Structural adjustment program, 115,
Society: and biology, 165; and change, 116, 117, 118, 119
25, 147, 155, 159, 161-62, 163, Structural-functionalism, 24
165, 208; and economy, 133; and Subalternity, xv, 63, 176, 179
knowledge production, 159; and Subaltern Studies Group, 175, 176
market, 230; multi-cultural, 86; and Subjectification, 238, 239, 247, 248
state, 24; and status, 148, 149, 153, Subject position, 156
154, 155, 161, 165; and transna- Sun Belt, 10
tionalism, 48, 49, 57; as wholes, 25 Systemic framework, 173
Sociology, 272, 273, 282. See also So-
cial science Taiwan, 112
South, American, 12 Technology, 48, 220
South Africa, 6 Teleology, 31
South America, xiii Territoriality, 84, 176
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, Textiles, 136
224 Third World: and Cold War, 225; and
South Korea, 117 Communism, 225; and debt, 228;
Sovereignty: and migration, 83, 85, 86; and development, 112, 115, 224-25;
and Ong, 61; and peripheral and economy, 215-16; and migra-
nations, 116; and U.S. hegemony, tion, 84; and modernity, 272-73;
225 and poverty, 227; and trade, 111-12;
Soviet Empire, 16 and women, 140, 177
Soviet Union, xxxii; and Communism, Thomas, Nicholas, 269, 278
xxxiii; fall of, 228; and Marshall Time, 24-25, 156, 162
300 Index
TimeSpace, 27, 29, 31, 148, 165 110, 225; and Middle East, 13-14,
Tonnies, Ferdinand, 268 15-16; and military, 3, 7-8, 9, 108,
Trade: and Africa, 258; and Brazil, 111, 115; and modernization, 225,
258; free, 103, 104-6, 107, 109, 226; and oil, 112; and peripheral
216, 217; and Great Britain, 103, nations, 116; and Philippine Islands,
104-6, 107; and Great Depression, 108, 121; and protectionism, 217;
219; and modernization, 226-27; and resources, 116; and Revolution-
and price, 34; and Third World, 111 ary War, 107; and socialism, 110;
12; and United States, 111, 114; and and trade, 111, 114; and unions,
World Trade Organization, 119. See 110; and Vietnam, 117; and war
also Economy; Protectionism preparedness movement, 7; and wel-
Transnationalism, 47-71, 176; and ac- fare state, 110, 111; and World War
cumulation, 243; and Black culture, II, 109; and Yalta, xxxiv
252; and decolonization, 228; Universalism: and colonialism, 221;
defined, 53; and migration, 85; spec- and Eurocentrism, 245; and For-
tral, 244 sythe, 186; and women, 201; and
Truman, Harry S., 224 world-systems analysis, 21, 190. See
Tupac Amaru revolt, 27-28 also Knowledge
Urban area, 81
Union: and migration, 79-80, 85; and Urbanization, 227, 263
United States, 110 Utopia, 59
Union Francaise, 222
Unit, of analysis: and feminism, 156, Value, 246
160, 161-62; and knowledge, 161; Van der Fiji, Kees, 51
and Said, 280; and Wallerstein, 276; Vargas, Getulio, 255
and women's studies, 201; and Vendee, 28, 29
world-economy, 275; and world- Verger, Pierre, 262
system, 277; and world-systems Vietnam, xxxvi, 117, 222
analysis, 173 Vietnam War, 13, 14, 15, 111, 112,
United Nations, 82, 224-25 113, 227
United Nations Conference on Trade Violence, domestic, 139
and Development, 111, 112
United States: and anticolonial imperi- Wage: and colonialism, 222; and com-
alism, 107, 108; and antisystemic modity chains, 132, 133; and house-
movements, 103-21; and Civil War, holds, 129, 130; and labor, 135; and
107; and class, 110; and Commu- women, 131, 135, 136-37, 206
nism, 110, 111; and development, Wallerstein, Immanuel: and accumula-
111, 224-25; and economy, xxxii, 3- tion, 175; and Africa, 276; and clas-
18, 103-21; and Germany, xxxi- sical comparative method, 276; and
xxxii; and globalization, 109; and colonialism, 276; and commodity
Great Britain, xxxi-xxxii, 4, 6-7, 8, chains, 131, 132, 133, 134; and
107, 218, 223; and gross domestic connectedness, 279; and determinacy
product per capita, 35-36; and he- of capital, 174-75; and Europe, 276;
gemony, xxxi-xxxv, 3, 5-9, 104, and exploitation, 142; and feminism,
106-9, 112, 113-15, 117, 120, 2 2 3 - 148; and Forsythe, 187; and future,
26; and imperialism, xiii-xiv, 107, 31; and gender, 184; and history,
108, 109; and industrialism, 112; 162; and holism, 173, 174; and
and Japan, 104, 114-15; and labor, households, 188; and immigrants, 65;
Index 301
and income inequality, 41; and inter- Wilson, Woodrow, 104, 108, 224
state system, 80; and knowledge Witch-hunting, 205
production, 159, 160; "Moderniza- Wolf, Eric, 275, 279; Europe and the
tion: Requiescat in Pace," 276; and People without History, 277
periodization, 181; and postcolonial- Women, 171-90, 199-209; and agri-
ism, 178, 179; and social sciences, culture, 127-28, 135; and capital-
189; and transnationalism, 244; and ism, 140-41, 201; category of, 150,
unit of analysis, 157-58, 276; and 184; and citizenship, 30; and class,
women, 129-30, 131, 132; and 151, 154; and colonialism, 202; and
world-economy, 275; and world- commodity chains, 128, 133, 134,
system, 276; and world-systems 135-41, 142; in development, 184-
analysis, 142, 182 85; and difference, 150-51, 152,
Wall Street, 11 177, 185-86, 190; and differentia-
Ward, Kathryn B., 172, 183-84, 188- tion, 190; and embodiment, 147,
89 148, 153; and empowerment, 1 8 9 -
War of the Spanish Succession, 217 90; and entrepreneurs, 189-90; and
War preparedness movement, 7-8, 9, epistemology, 155-56, 190, 204-5;
17 and essentialism, 151; and external-
Warsaw Pact, xxxv ized costs, 138, 139; and gender,
Washbrook, David, 180 188; and globalization, 185; and
Washington Consensus, 109 Great Britain, 105; and history, 152,
WASP establishment, 6 153, 154, 165-66, 199, 200; and
Weaver, Warren, 22 households, 130, 131, 135, 136-39,
Weber, Max, 268, 270-72, 273, 274 140, 141, 202; and inequality, 199-
Welfare, 18, 86 200; and knowledge, 147, 150, 152,
Welfare state: and migration, 79-80, 153, 154-55, 160-63, 166, 184,
81, 83, 84; and neoliberalism, 229; 190, 204-5; and labor, 105, 127-
and United States, 110, 111, 116 28, 131, 135-41, 188-89, 200, 202,
West: and Brazil, 261, 263; and Chat- 204, 206, 207, 241-42; and multi-
terjee, 277, 278; and developmental- plicity, 147, 148, 153; and National
ism, 178; domination of, 179; and Security State Corporate Complex,
Huntington, 268, 269; and modern- 12; and politics, 148, 149, 153, 154;
ity, 272, 273; and Other, 177; and and poverty, 128, 138-39; and
sociology, 272; and Weber, 271 power, 156, 190; and race, 150, 151;
Western Europe: and development, and relationality, 148, 153, 154,
111; and migration, 84; and trans- 155; and reproduction, 136, 141;
nationalism, 54; and U.S. hegemony, and resources, 137; and science,
104, 114, 115. See also Europe 148, 149, 153, 154; semiproletarian,
White, Hayden, 183 140; and sex, 136, 139; and social
Whiteness, xiii-xiv change, 147-66; and socialism, 199;
Whites: and Brazil, 251, 252, 255, and Third World, 140; and Time-
257, 258, 262; and National Secu- Space, 148, 165; as tool, 154; and
rity State Corporate Complex, 12 transnationalism, 64; and universal-
White supremacy, 6 ism, 201; and universal terms, 150,
Whitford, Margaret, 187-88 153, 164; and wage, 131, 137, 206;
Whole. See Holism and world-system, 165; and world-
Williams, W. A., 107 systems analysis, 127, 188-89. See
Wilson, H. S., 222 also Feminism; Gender
302 Index
Women's movement, 165, 166, 201, and gender, 184, 201-3; and house-
208. See also Antisystemic move- holds, 130, 188-89; and income, 70;
ment; Social movement and modernization theory, 25, 244;
Women's studies, 201, 202, 207, 209 and postcolonialism, 171, 177-83,
World, real, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164 189, 190; and transnationalism, 4 7 -
World Bank, xxxvi; and development, 71; and unit of analysis, 157-58,
113; and neoliberalism, 229; and 277; and Wallerstein, 182; and
regulation, 224-25; and sovereignty, women, 127, 128, 188-89
117; and Washington Consensus, World Trade Organization, 109, 119,
109 121, 229, 230
World-city, 81 World War I, 6, 7, 9, 17, 218, 221
World Economic Conference, 218 World War II, xxxii, 9, 11, 38, 109,
World-system: character of, 25-26; 223
and Cold War, 11; denned, 173-74; Wright, Erick O., 59
and Great Britain, 4-5; and military,
Xenophobia, 81
11; and relationality, 158; and Wal-
lerstein, 276; and women, 165 Yalta, xxxiv
World-systems analysis, 31; and classi- Yen, 114
cal comparative method, 275-77; Yoruba people, 258, 259, 262
criticism of, 21; ethics of, 162; fea-
tures of, 171-75; and feminism, 147- Zapatistas, xxvi-xxvii
48, 153, 156-57, 162, 184, 202; Zizek, Slavoj, 246
About the Contributors
about the African-American slave family. Her work has appeared in the
Journal of World-System Research and Review.