Immanuel Wallerstein and World Systems Theory

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The Decline of American Power Immanuel
Wallerstein and World Systems Theory

• Bernardo Aguilar-Gonzalez

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The Decline of American Power

• decline of the 'modern world system. The decline
  of American power is just a context.
• The US is not the sole superpower-the Soviet
  Union actually propped up American power during
  its heyday, its 'hegemony' (1945-1970).
• Vietnam, the revolutions of 1968 and the
  economic advances of Germany and Japan mark the
  begin of the decline in the 1970s.

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The Decline of American Power

• Events that mark the decline
• Soviet breakdown
• Facilitated challenges to American power
• September 11
• Hawks take control
• Invasion of Iraq is not about oil but about power
• Alliance France, Germany, Russia
• Japan builds the worlds fastest computer
• The successor concentrates on the economy
• Capital (corporations) in the US is so much in
  the hands of foreign investors

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The Decline of American Power

• World Capitalist Decline
• Three extremely long term trends are squeezing
  the ability of capitalists to accumulate profits.
  
• First, wages have been drifting upward. Capital's
  traditional recourse is to pull workers from the
  rural world. As unions form, wages rise. But now
  the deruralization of the world is almost
  complete.
• Secondly, taxes have moved upward, squeezing
  profits.
• Third, capital's traditional practice of
  externalizing costs-by simply dumping its garbage
  into every stream and strip-mining every
  mountain-is encountering ecological limits.
• the crisis of the state basically, people no
  longer believe the claim that things are slowly
  getting better through political initiatives
  oriented towards the state.

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Haven't we been experiencing a period of thorough
reaction, in which wages and taxes have been
driven down, and environmental regulation
weakened?

• Although the last couple of decades have been
  ones in which reactionary forces have seized on
  the crisis of the left and the collapse of the
  center, they have not been able to push wages,
  taxes, or environmental regulation back to
  anything like what they were a century ago.
• When the left regains its footing, it will begin
  from a higher point than where it was, say,
  ninety years ago.

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• the current structures of the capitalist world
  system, can no longer function adequately. Thus
  there will be an intense struggle over what new
  sort of world will emerge. The new world may be
  substantially better in important respects than
  the one we live in now or it may not.
• Agency-what we do or don't do-becomes exceedingly
  important at such times.

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Other interesting points

• political Islam is the product of the demise of
  the nation-state as a compelling locus of change,
  and the neoliberal weakening of state-based forms
  of social integration.
• noting the exacerbation of tensions between the
  Arab Islamic world and the West as a result of
  Israel and oil.
• Another element that adds to choosing Islam as
  the demon is the fact that most of the core of
  the Islamic world was never truly colonized

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Other interesting points

• posing the middle east issue as one of secularism
  versus fundamentalism is distracting us in a very
  major way from clarity of vision.

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The east-west tension
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Questions to think about

• First, there is a tension between Wallerstein's
  confidence that US decline is inevitable and his
  argument that we are entering a phase in which
  the old rules are suspended. If the old rules are
  suspended, why would the US decline in the same
  way as earlier capitalist powers?
• Secondly, there is a certain unwillingness to
  unmoor his analysis from the world of states,
  bureaucratic organizations, and conventional
  politics, despite his own declarations that this
  world is coming undone. Transnational and
  diasporic communities, direct action and
  localized knowledge all play only a small role in
  his analysis

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Who is Immanuel Wallerstein?

• Emeritus Professor of Sociology at
• Yale University, PhD. Columbia
• University, 1959
• President of the International
• Sociological Association (1994-1998)
• writes in three domains of world-systems
  analysis
• the historical development of the modern
  world-system
• the contemporary crisis of the capitalist
  world-economy
• the structures of knowledge.

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World Systems Theory

• All Social Sciences need to be systemic and
  historical
• We seek plausible interpretations of social
  reality in ways that are more useful for all of
  us in making political and moral decisions.
• distinguish between what are long-lasting
  structures and those momentary expressions of
  reality that we so regularly reify into
  fashionable theories about what is novel.

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World Systems Theory

• description of the historical functioning and
  development of the modern world system, a
  capitalist world-economy. Describe its
  institutional pillars, its historical origin, and
  the reasons why it has entered into a period of
  systemic crisis and therefore of chaotic
  transition to some new order.
• capitalism was an international project from its
  outset at the beginning of the sixteenth century,
  one defined by a 'core' (of wealthy states), a
  'periphery' (of impoverished states), and a
  'semi-periphery' (wealthier than the periphery
  but subservient to the core). Most of what has
  changed in the last five hundred years is a
  result of the expansion of the system to include
  the entire world.

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World Systems Theory
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World Systems Theory

• the most interesting thing about systems is how
  they all have deep cleavages, which they seek to
  limit by institutionalizing them.
• systems never succeed in eliminating their
  internal conflicts, or even of keeping them from
  taking violent forms.
• five major cleavages of our modern world race,
  nation, class, ethnicity, and gender
• "resistance, hope, and deception." These three
  words describe the story of the antisystemic
  movements of the modern world-system.

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World Systems Theory
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World Systems Theory

• the world has continuing structures and it is
  constantly changing
• We have indeed to work with temporarily useful
  structures/categories that bear within them the
  processes by which they get transformed into
  other structures/categories.

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Criticisms

• Marxists said that Wallerstein's theorization of
  class struggle was inadequate
• Others said he lacked clarity about the dynamics
  of states.
• His schema failed to capture the various nuances
  that characterized the entrance of different
  parts of the world into the capitalist world
  system and their resistance to it.
• Little room for agency

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The winning main points

• world-systems analysis is not a theory but a
  protest against neglected issues and deceptive
  epistemologies.
• the world system, having expanded to include the
  entire globe, is now at its terminus Chaos
  theory-we are at a bifurcation point, where
  individual actions can have considerable impact.
  We may produce a world better or worse than the
  waning modern world system, but we will surely
  produce something different.

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• the duty of the scholar is to be politically and
  intellectually subversive of received truths, but
  the only way this subversion can be socially
  useful is if it reflects a serious attempt to
  engage with and understand the real world as best
  we can.

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• Even in a world in which certainties do not
  exist, knowledge still does
• Ilya Prigogine (U. of Texas)

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Ilya Prigogine

• Born in Moscow on Jan. 25, 1917, undergraduate
  and graduate degrees in chemistry at the
  Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels,
  Belgium. Came to The University of Texas at
  Austin in 1967 as a professor of physics and
  chemical engineering.
• One of the main contributors to complex systems
  analysis
• He also developed the concept of dissipative
  structures to describe open systems, in which an
  exchange of matter and energy occurs between a
  system and its environment. Prigogine received
  the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his
  dissipative structure research and for his
  contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

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Systems View Complex Adaptive Systems
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T. Creeses View of Globalization from a CAS
Perspective
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Sources

• A Summary of Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern
  World System Capitalist Agriculture and the
  Origins of the European World Economy in the
  Sixteenth Century (New York Academic Press,
  1974) http//www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerste
  in.html
• Creese, Ted. Globalization as a Complex Adaptive
  System. Unpublished paper.
• http//www.faculty.rsu.edu/felwell/Theorists/Wall
  erstein/
• http//order.ph.utexas.edu/people/Prigogine.htm
• Sherman, Steven .A Heroic Refusal to Succomb to
  Pessism. On Wallerstein's The Decline of American
  Power. http//www.counterpunch.org/sherman01032004
  .html
• Wallerstein, Immanuel (2003) The Decline of
  American Power. The New Press, New York.