The World-Systems Perspective
An alternative, incomplete in its formulation and implementation
In my commentary of September 5, 2023, I reviewed the traditional and modern paradigms that humanity has known. I maintained that they all shared the belief that truth and right could be ascertained, either through divine revelation, human reasoning based in empirical observation, or both. I also noted that postmodernism, which entered the U.S. academic world in the 1980s, has emerged to disseminate an epistemology claiming that truth is not revealed or discovered, but constructed on the basis of personal preferences or interests, creating a postmodern political praxis consisting of the manipulation of language in power maneuvers. This phenomenon is illustrated by transgender ideology as well as a new ideology of the black middle class. I also noted that a small number of sociologists, lacking in influence, had tried to create an alternative epistemology based in “personal authenticity” in the context of a commitment to seeking truth.
Today I would like to discuss an important alternative that emerged during the period 1974 to 2011, namely, the world-systems perspective of Immanual Wallerstein. Wallerstein achieved an interdisciplinary formulation that described the development of the structures of the modern world-system from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. It is a significant and important contribution to the human legacy of knowledge, making clear the fundamental historical facts that ought to be central to human consciousness today. He led an effort to reorganize the social sciences, but his efforts here were unable to overcome the bureaucratization of knowledge that rule the academic world. He wrestled with epistemological questions, but he did not achieve breakthrough, looking as he was to French and European scholarship, rather than toward the Third World.
Wallerstein’s personal encounter with African nationalism
Wallerstein’s first breakthrough came during his experiences in Africa during the process of “decolonization,” where he became aware that young militants in Africa possessed a conceptual framework that was entirely at odds with that of Europeans resident in Africa, a framework in which the African militants defined their reality as a “colonial situation.” This awareness led Wallerstein to appreciate that a correct understanding must be based in a grasping of the colonial relation between Europe and Africa, which required moving beyond the assumption that society is the correct unit of analysis and moving toward the establishment of the world-system as the unit of analysis. I have written of Wallerstein’s personal encounter with African nationalists and its implications in a previous commentary (“We must overcome the colonial denial: Wallerstein versus the woke,” May 14, 2021).
The impact of Wallerstein’s experience in Africa on his understanding can be seen in Wallerstein’s Africa: The Politics of Independence, originally published in 1961. The first chapter is devoted to what Wallerstein describes as the impressive achievements in African history before the Europeans came. In the second chapter, he turns to the arrival of the Europeans, and he notes that the European powers had a variety of motives in expanding and in establishing “permanent colonial rule,” and first is the “search for markets and resources.” He proceeds to discuss the importance of the colonial situation:
“Once a colonial administration was established, something very important happened. For now all the things that men and groups did in Africa, they did within the context of the colonial situation. By the term colonial situation we simply mean that someone imposes in a given area a new institution, the colonial administration, governed by outsiders who establish new rules which they enforce with a reasonable degree of success. It means that all those who act in the colony must take some account of these rules, and that indeed an increasing amount of each individual’s action is oriented to this set of rules rather than to any other set, for example, the tribal set, to which he formerly paid full heed.” (Italics in original).
Wallerstein proceeds to describe the multiple dimensions of the colonial situation. Of primary importance was the economic dimension, involving the importation of manufactured goods and the exportation of raw materials on a base of forced labor, using methods such as the imposition of quotas on village chiefs or the head tax. This was accompanied by an educational dimension, which created a Western educated elite among the colonized, an educated elite that ultimately would form a nationalist movement that rejected both the traditional authority of the chiefs as well as European colonial authority. And a transportation infrastructure was developed that linked Africa to the outside world rather than connecting towns and cities within Africa, thus serving colonial interests rather than promoting the development of Africa.
Wallerstein was aware in 1961 that political independence did not change the economic relation involving the exportation of raw materials on a basis of cheap labor and the importation of manufactured goods. Political independence thus established neocolonialism. He developed this further in his second book, Africa: The Politics of Unity, originally published in 1967, where he describes not only the preservation of the colonial economic relation but also the declining terms of trade. He writes:
“The basic economic situation of Africa is that today African economies are a mixture of subsistence farming and the production of certain raw-material products (coffee, cocoa, cotton, minerals) for export, principally to Western Europe and the United States, whence the Africans in turn import most of their manufactured goods. The state of the world economy is such that the primary products are sold at relatively low rates (in terms of reward for labor-power) and the manufactured goods are bought at relatively high rates, which is far less favorable for primary producers than the pattern of internal trade that has evolved in most industrialized countries. . . . Moreover, this classic pattern of trade, the colonial pact, has not disappeared with the independence of former colonial states. On the contrary, since the Second World War, the so-called gap between the industrialized and nonindustrialized countries has in fact grown. That is, given amounts of primary products have bought fewer manufactured goods.”
Wallerstein noted in the 1961 book the efforts of newly independent governments to overcome the neocolonial situation through African unity and by seeking a diversity of trading partners. The quest for unity, from Pan-Africanism to the Organization of African Unity, became the central theme of the 1967 book.
Wallerstein discussed in 1961 the emergence of African socialism, a perspective that views socialism in Africa as different from socialism in Europe or Asia. Especially important is the fact that African socialism rejects the concept of the class struggle, since the great majority of the population are peasants, and inasmuch as the small percentage of property owners, merchants and professionals in the towns had not acquired bourgeois or petit bourgeois consciousness and continued to maintain relations and obligations with extended families in the countryside. In 1967, Wallerstein observes that the term “African socialism” was originally formulated by the most radical and revolutionary of the African nationalists, who wanted to distinguish socialism in Africa from scientific socialism, in accordance with their orientation toward the attainment of African intellectual and cultural autonomy. However, “African socialism” began to be used by leaders and governments that were adapting to neocolonialism and were not revolutionary, so that its meaning became vague. As a result, revolutionary African nationalists began to reject the term and to speak of scientific socialism applied to the conditions of Africa.
In the 1961 book, Wallerstein also discerns that Africa is developing an alternative theory and practice of democracy. He maintains that the African form of democracy is not characterized by liberal freedoms in regard to opposition groups, because in the African context opposition parties tend to undermine national integration, which has not yet been accomplished. Opposition parties tend to exploit divisions in the newly independent African nations among the various traditional African nations and identities, the so-called “tribes.” Nonetheless, the African political process, Wallerstein maintains, is characterized by popular participation and free discussion.
Thus, by the 1960s, Wallerstein’s personal encounter with the African nationalist movement stimulated an intellectual conversion, which provided a foundation for his analysis of the history and development of the modern world-system.
Wallerstein’s formulation of the world-systems perspective
Wallerstein identified four stages in the development of the modern world-system: (1) the origin of the system on the foundation of the Iberian conquest of vast regions of the American continents, establishing a world-economy, with Western Europe as its core and Latin America and Eastern Europe as its periphery (1492-1640); (2) a stage of stagnation, characterized by competition among core powers, during which the basic structures of the system were preserved and reinforced (1640-1815); (3) the expansion of the system from 1815-1917, made possible by the conquest of vast regions of Africa and Asia by European powers; and (4) 1917 to the present, characterized by the development of imperialism and neocolonialism as new forms of core domination and by the emergence of anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements in the Third World.
Wallerstein maintains that the world-economy has been characterized by continuous structures as it has evolved through the four stages. The colonized regions constitute the periphery of the world-economy, which functions to provide markets, raw materials, and cheap forced labor. The colonizing powers form the core of the world-economy, which functions as the manufacturing, commercial, and financial center. Thus, there is a global geographical division of labor between core and periphery, in which the periphery exports raw materials and low-wage manufacturing goods; and in which the core produces high-wage manufacturing and high-tech goods. These structures of the world-economy generate a fundamental inequality between core and periphery, in which the core has diversity in manufacturing, high levels of technology, and high wage levels, and in which the periphery is characterized by underdevelopment and poverty. It is a structured inequality historically rooted in conquest and colonialism.
I have written in previous commentaries of the historical development of the capitalist world-economy, drawing primarily upon Wallerstein’s work. See “The capitalist world-economy and its contradictions: Post-Marx, but not post-Marxist,” May 18, 2021; “The Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas, 16th century: The origins of the modernization of Northwestern Europe,” May 25, 2021; and “The European conquest of Africa and Asia, 1750-1914: History must be understood, not ignored,” May 28, 2021.
In his formulation of the history and development of the modern world-system, Wallerstein did not turn to Marx or to Marxism-Leninism. This may have been the result of the influence on his thinking of Frantz Fanon and African Socialism, which rejected Marxism, because of the inapplicability of the concept of the class struggle to Africa, and because of the atheism of Marxism. It should be noted that Wallerstein in no sense dismisses Marx as Eurocentric; he maintains that Marx was prudent in addressing the global and universal implications of his analysis, unlike subsequent Marxists.
The direction in which Wallerstein went was inspired by the French historian Fernand Braudel, who had spent ten years in Algeria and several years in Brazil, and the Polish economic historian Marian Malowisth, who concentrated on eastern Europe but also wrote about colonial expansion. Reading their work simultaneously in the late 1960s, Wallerstein arrived at the understanding that there had emerged a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth century, which included an Eastern European periphery that was producing for distant markets rather than for local consumption, a phenomenon that previously had been designated misleadingly as a “second feudalism.” Wallerstein began to realize that, understood as a world-economy, capitalism had various forms of labor, including wage labor and various forms of coerced labor, with the former more common in the core and the latter more common in the periphery.
Wallerstein also drew from Karl Polanyi’s classic work, The Great Transformation, to formulate a distinction between two types of world-systems, namely, world-empires and world-economies. He used the hyphen to capture Braudel’s meaning, not of a world economy that is an “economy of the world,” but of a world-economy that is an “economy that is a world.” Furthermore, he believed with Braudel that world-economies were “organic structures that had lives—beginnings and ends,” and he thus considered Braudel’s concept of the “long term” to be important, implying the study of the development of world-systems in the long term. Wallerstein also arrived at the view that there have been many world-systems in human history, and that therefore we should speak of “world-systems analysis” and not world-system analysis.
We therefore can characterize Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis as an advanced form of Western thought that takes into account the basic insights of African nationalism with respect to colonial and neocolonial domination. This appropriation of African nationalist insights gives world-systems analysis a nearly universal character, able to explain many aspects of the neocolonial situation that are enlightening even for the neocolonized of the world, and for this reason Wallerstein is respected as a scholar with important insights by the movements formed by the neocolonized.
What Wallerstein did not see
Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, however, has serious limitations. It does not fully explore the development of Marxism by Lenin, and the subsequent development of Marxism-Leninism in the Third World, a development that occurred outside the West and beyond the universities, in a form integrally tied with people’s movements. It thus does not appreciate that Third World Marxism-Leninism, with concepts rooted in the colonial situation, arrived to a fundamental break with the prevailing liberal ideology of the neocolonial world-system, which European Marxism ultimately failed to do (as Wallerstein correctly argues in various essays published in After Liberalism in 1995). Wallerstein did not see that Third World Marxism-Leninism arrived to formulate in theory and implement in practice a fundamental reconstruction of the neocolonial world-system.
As a result of his limited engagement with revolutionary Third World national liberation movements, Wallerstein, first, is not able to maintain a consistent distinction between moderate and radical Third World governments and movements. This is a distinction that is indispensable for understanding the dynamics of neocolonialism and the dynamics of the movements.
And Wallerstein, secondly, misreads the tendency of the Third World revolutionary movements to synthesize Western concepts. He believes that their adoption of Wilson’s principle of self-determination and Roosevelt’s concept of economic development for the Third World implied an acceptance of Western values. He did not see that these progressive Western concepts were being appropriated and transformed through synthesis with revolutionary concepts emerging from the context of the neocolonial situation and anti-colonial movement. Wallerstein does not see that the revolutionary Third World movement was forging in theory and practice an alternative political, intellectual and moral project, which was fundamentally opposed to the imperialist (but progressive) project of Wilson and Roosevelt.
In the same vein, Wallerstein criticizes the revolutionary national liberation project for accepting the Enlightenment principle of gradually improving the human condition through the development and application of scientific knowledge. Here, leftist idealism comes to the fore. The application of scientific knowledge to step-by-step progress in human societies, especially after the revolutionary taking of political power, has been a constant principle of Marxism in practice, because it is indispensable for the construction of socialism.
Moreover, Wallerstein does not take seriously as worthy of detailed examination the important examples of long-surviving revolutions in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These socialist revolutions were being led by exceptional leaders who forged a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism with the petit bourgeois concepts of national liberation; who formulated, in other words, an adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to colonial and neocolonial conditions. Wallerstein mentions these countries only occasionally, seeing them as expressions of the liberal project, which no longer has viability. He does not engage in serious reflection on the lessons to be learned from these cases.
I do not wish to criticize a great intellectual like Immanuel Wallerstein for the manner in which he lived his life. But I am unable to avoid the view that the above-mentioned limitations in Wallerstein’s analysis are a consequence of the fact that he did not engage in a personal encounter with the Third World movements in a persistent manner during the course of his career. To be sure, early in his career he encountered the African national liberation movement, and he took seriously Frantz Fanon and was influenced by his thinking. But as Wallerstein’s thought developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and as he turned to philosophical questions, he was increasingly influenced by French currents of thought, which stressed the uncertainty of knowledge, and which were moving toward an abandonment of the Enlightenment project and toward a post-modern age. Wallerstein hoped that these new tendencies would ultimately lead to a unification of the social sciences. He did not appreciate that post-modernism has little saliency, even among intellectuals, in the Third World; and that these new tendencies were likely to lead to an intensification of the bifurcation between the social sciences of the global North and the global South. These new tendencies indeed could be understood as reflecting the decadence of the West as the Western-centered neocolonial world-system falls into a spiral of decline.
The epistemological dilemmas of academia
Wallerstein recognized that world-systems analysis confronted a major obstacle in the form of the bureaucratic structures of the modern university, which is dysfunctional for addressing the important issues that humanity confronts. Most problematic, Wallerstein maintained, is the division between science and philosophy, which divides the quest for the truth from the quest for the good, a division unique to the modern West. In addition, the various disciplinary boundaries separating history, economics, political science and anthropology divide areas that are interconnected. They emerged because they were integral to a microscopic approach in the three nomothetic social sciences (economics, sociology, and political science) and to ideographic particularism in history and anthropology. Both microscopic positivism and particularism were functional for the world-system, inasmuch as they leave unchallenged its fundamental assumptions and structures. Facing political demands from workers, artisans, peasants, and migrants, the fragmentation of the social scientific disciplines functioned to enable representatives of the intellectual class to manage change in accordance with the middle pace of change that was the liberal road, thus forging a link between social science and the dominant liberal ideology of the world system, according to Wallerstein. Some social scientists were radicals, but they tended to accept the epistemological premises of the bureaucratized university.
The revolution of the 1960s critiqued the epistemological assumptions of science and social science, stimulating many historians, social scientists, and philosophers to move beyond the disciplinary boundaries and to search for the true and the good through alternative epistemological assumptions. But they have done so, Wallerstein observes, in a context in which the dysfunctional organization of the fields of knowledge remains institutionally strong, thus preventing the emergence of a new epistemological consensus.
Wallerstein warned of the possibility that the fields of knowledge of the universities would be organized from above by ministries of education and university administrators, as cost-cutting measures in accordance with a neoliberal agenda. As a preemptive strategy, Wallerstein called for a reorganization from below by social scientists and historians, establishing structures that would permit significant intellectual advances in “historical social science,” based on the epistemological premise that useful knowledge explains the long-term historical and structural sources of current social phenomena.
Wallerstein wrestled with the implications of postmodernism. He was disturbed by the casting of doubt on the human capacity to understand the true and the good, and especially by a radical relativism that reduced all truth claims to personal expression. Not having encountered the revolutionary Third World movements from the 1970s to the present, Wallerstein did not discern that the Third World revolutions were constructing the resolution to the epistemological crisis. He did not see that the Third World revolutions have been creating consensus with respect to the true and the good on a foundation of (1) commitment to truth as the highest priority and (2) a continuous dialogue of civilizations.
In the final analysis, because of the intransigence of the university bureaucracy, and because of its own internal limitations, the world-systems perspective was unable to emancipate social scientists and historians, freeing them to struggle for the necessary reorganization of the universities and the construction of an integrated historical social science, which perhaps ought to be understood as philosophical-historical-social science.
Sources
Hopkins, Terence K., and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1996. The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945-2025. New Jersey: Zed Books.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System, Vol. I. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 1979. The Capitalist World Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
__________. 1980. The Modern World System, Vol. II. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 1982. “Crisis as Transition” in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press.
__________. 1989. The Modern World System, Vol. III. New York: Academic Press.
__________. 1990. "Antisystemic Movements: History and Dilemmas" in Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System. New York: Monthly Review Press.
__________. 1995. After Liberalism. New York: The New Press.
__________. 2000. “Long Waves as Capitalist Process” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 207-19. [Originally published in Review VII:4 (Spring 1984), Pp. 559-75.]
__________. 2000. “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press), Pp. 253-63. [Originally published in International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV:1-2 (January-April 1983), Pp. 100-8).
__________. 2003. The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World. New York: The New Press.
__________. 2005. Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. [Combines into one edition Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967)].
__________. 2011. The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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