Explaination of 1967 to now in Wallersteinian terms with a critique - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

test8888 · 07-26-2003, 09:04 AM

Part 1: Description of 1967-73 as a historical turning-point
Wallerstein’s discussion of the historical transition years of 1967-73 (dates are approx.) is centered around six “distinguishable but not separable vectors: the inter-state system, the structure of world production, the structure of the world labor force, patterns of world human welfare, social cohesion of the state, and the structures of knowledge” (2 Hopkins). According to Wallerstein, these vectors are non-separable because they form “the minimum ... array of interrelated facets of a single, imperfect, organic whole, each vector quite dependent on the others”. This means that the changes in each vector during 67-73 are not isolated changes and are connected to systematic trends. These years’ trends are so significant, in Wallerstein’s estimation, because they are not part of a regular cyclic trend that will eventually come into balance with a new configuration of the system, but rather the phenomena possibly constitute the beginning of the end of, in Noam Chomsky’s words, “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel). Also asserted by Wallerstein in the medium-term is the initial decline of the United State’s hegemonic dominance and end of the expansive period of the Kondratieff cycle. (6-10 Hopkins)
These two assertions are of extreme significance. The dominance of the United State’s has organized the balance-of-power configuration of the inter-state system for the last 50 years. This configuration of state powers, as explained by Neorealism, has structured and defined the political possibilities for states and their populations (70-97 Waltz). Replacing the United State’s hegemony, with another hegemony state or with a different balance-of-power configuration would change the range of tenable international activities. The crest of the Kondratieff cycle may have even farther-reaching effects, because the present forms of polity and state cohesion and coercion were erected with the taxable surplus found during the cycle’s economical favorable period (156-159 Derlugian). In Giovanni Arrighi’s analysis, USA’s dominance and the Kondratieff cycle are connected, since with the shifts in political-economic hegemony (such as the last shift from Great Britain to the USA) indicts a new organization of the capitalism’s axioms (27-36 Arrighi 1994). A bounded region (in most models: a state) positioned properly can become the new hegemony, if it can employ and discarded various techniques to fit the world-system’s state. Examples of techniques are: new forms of the factory discipline, exporting operational protection costs to the state, or the discard of the gold standard. Thus, the shift of hegemony to the USA from Great Britain and the Kondratieff cycle are part of a similar organizational shift in the capitalist system. This shift, as analyzed here, shows the integration between the inter-state system and the structure of world production (47-60 Arrighi 1994).
Similarly, it is possible to informally show the connection and integration between the vectors. I will not connect every vector, but will point out some noted connections to illustrate the connect-ability and integrate-ability of the vectors. The commodity chains that structure production depend on the locations and conditions of the labor force. Welfare conditions partially determine how much a person can or will work “biologically and socially” (78 Wolf) and furthermore, the state often legitimizes itself and builds cohesion through the promise of welfare. Finally, the structures of knowledge connect with the other vectors as the “facts” (specifically “social facts”) or inter-subjective meanings that we commonly consider to compose reality. How these “facts” function and affect each other is crucial to both change and reification of the world-system. For instance, if the citizens of one state stop believing the “facts” concerning the state’s legitimation, the state could suffer problem’s ranging from tax evasion to political crises, which in turn could undermine inter-state system, world production, cohesion of the state, etc.
Now that the significance and integration of the vectors has been explained, I will examine the crucial 67/73 period. Leading up to 67/73, beginning in the 1870s, the US’s position in the world-system had been increasing. However, it was not until ca 1945, that political-economic hegemony had been established. The decline of the Great Britain’s hegemony and the world-system B-phase gave away to a competition between Germany and US. The two World Wars established the “the unconditional triumph” of the US and second place of the Soviet Union and began the ascendancy of the US, the bipolar inter-state system, and the current Kondratieff A-phase. However, the consolidation and maintenance of this arrangement of the interstate system during the early stages of the A-phase required the establishment of new strategic political, economic, and ideological measures. (8-10 Hopkins, 13-18 Reifer)
The immediate and reoccurring problem for the US hegemony was the flow of US capital or dollars, in the form of trade surpluses and deficits, in and out of the economy. Both surpluses and deficits threatened the circulation of capital, because large deficits (and surpluses, which often indicate a deficit somewhere else) solidify the capital-liquidity that capitalism requires for circulation, organization, and re-organization. Concretely, the colonial powers and Japan were forced to liquidate capital-producing ventures in the colonies and other imperial domains to pay for reconstruction. This brought the triangular trading between the Europe and Japan, the colonial and imperial holdings, and the US out of the balance-threatening the ability of Europe and Japan to cycle dollars back to the US. The short-term solution was the Marshall plan and reconstruction assistance. The long-term solution, which was in the end self-destructing, was “international military Keynesianism” (18 Reifer), which allowed USA dollars to be strategically cycled into various economies (i.e. Western Europe economies through NATO armament) and for strategic US interventions world political affairs (i.e. supporting decolonization only to facilitate the installation of brutal, but US friendly, regimes). This “solution” was swallowed by people under auspices of “security” and the promises of improved welfare and freedom (anti-imperialism) for all. (14-27 Reifer)
The continual security threats that warranted military spending and action were dependent on the threat of the Soviet bloc and therefore the bipolar split-the threat of communism to freedom to the West and the Soviet’s promise of actually communism. Underpinning these bipolar ideologies and the state’s legitimation was state’s ability to capture and then redistribute capital flows. These capital flows were contingent on expanding involvement in the formal economy and Taylorist production under the hegemony of the institutionally strong US firms with their technological advantages. The expanding involvement in the formal economy was facilitated by the state supported emptying of rural areas into the industrial and economized social spaces of the cities. In the core and semi-periphery the state was able to successfully regulate aggregate economic activities via “monetary and fiscal policies.” This macroeconomic success contributed to improved human welfare in the core and semi-periphery through the increased wages and state redistribution. This improved human welfare was bound together with certain knowledge (such as the realization of “progress” or development through scientific development) that coincided with the state and was the basis for the general increased cohesion of states before 67/73. It should be noted that these improvements in human wealth and the strengthening state cohesion were most prevalent in core states, then semi-periphery states, and finally to a much less degree in periphery states. (14-27 Reifer; 88-89 Tabak; 148 -159 Derlugian; 194-195 Lee)
The 67/73 dissolution of this bipolar and US hegemonic statist/welfarstatist world-system composed of strong regulatory and redistributory states was rooted in the dissolution of the bipolar balance of power, the failing of redistribution, economic and production problems, the declining legitimation of states, and the continuing and earlier tends of economic integration and deregulation/liberalization. Clearly, this list of factors is not complete and is highly entangled, however connecting these factors sketches the B-phase’s beginning in the 67/73 years.
Internationally and domestically, the dependency of “military Keynesianism” was increasingly difficult to legitimize, since it was inconsistent with “anti-imperialism”, state sovereignty, and development. Legitimizing military action increased the cost of “military Keynesianism”, because the legitimate military techniques and the legitimate sites became increasingly limited. The Vietnam War, starting 1968, epitomized this problematic situation. The cost of the war brought US’s balance payments to a deficit causing the US to print more dollars to cover the War’s costs, which eventually undermined the US’s world economic control, a global money supply based on the fixed gold-dollar exchange rate. The Vietnam War along with other state failures led to de-legitimatising of the Establishment and the structures of knowledge they endorsed. (27-29 Reifer, 178-193 Lee)
Central to the rest of the world was the economic changes implemented by the US and the weakening of both the US and the Soviet bloc. The weakening of the US caused the US to reestablish links with China on economic grounds. The weakening of the Soviets lead to the Sino-Soviet split and a loosing of the Soviet’s grip on Eastern Europe, which enabled an increased of the Soviet satellite states’ economic ties with the West. Furthermore, other core states had surpassed both the US’s technological supremacy and the US’s corporate efficacy in certain fields. Also, in the early 70s, the increasing powerful the OPEC nations raised the cost of oil several times and thus increasing the cost of world production and absorbing the dollars the Europeans and Japanese had accumulated. The absorption of dollars damaged trade balances and upheld the growing “US reliance on subimperial power to help police the world-system, by allowing the exchange of US arms for petrodollars” (28 Reifer). These hierarchical changes that effected the flows of capital and trade balances and effected the legitimation of the US’s hegemony. The world-system was quickly losing its bipolar character and giving away to multi-polar order or a mono-polar order with a weakened hegemony. (27-29 Reifer; 40-68 Ikeda)
During the same time, the economic acceleration of Taylorism began to level off, cost of production increased (i.e. from environmental degradation) and numbers recruited into the formal economy became stagnate leading to the decelerating world demand and production and thus slowing the economic system. Continual deregulation/liberalization (i.e. the increasing independence of Japanese and Western European firms from the state) and integration of production and commodity circulation, which was accelerated by the East-West integration, made flows of capital more difficult for states to tax and redistribute. Corresponding to the economic decline and consistent with B-phase phenomena and deregulation/liberalization, the sites production were shifted away from the core and semi-periphery towards to semi-periphery and the periphery in order to capitalize on lower production costs. This has negative systemic effect of depriving the core consumer markets of the wages needed to purchase the commodities. The difficulty for states to collect capital in re-organizing world economy limited capital redistribution and thus caused a general stagnate or declining status of world human welfare. The cohesion state also began to decline (i.e. uncontrolled crime increases and anti-systemic movements) as the state’s ability to deliver welfare services and wealth redistribution declined. (38-40 Ikeda; 103-116 Tabak; 132-145 Pelizzon)
Finally, the declining power and legitimization of the state weakened the state’s hegemonic and institutional power to maintain and defend, and called in to question its ideological and epistemological underpinnings. The truths of the Establishment such as instrumental science leads to real knowledge and progress, that universal propositions of truth exist, and that there exists a hierarchy and an order of knowledge among divisions of academic knowledge-the basic tenants of the Enlightenment project-were questioned and challenged under the rubrics of post-modernism and post-structuralism. The dependency school of development and the environmental movement challenged the purported progressive value of the economic system and “big” science. Post-colonial studies and other social sciences challenged the foundations and primacy of nation-state as a form for progressive human political organization. Among others against the US hegemony, France denounced the proliferation of US cultural forms as imperialist and bourgeoisie. These value and epistemological challenges contested the “facts” or inter-subjective meanings which underlie the US hegemony and capitalist world-system and enlightenment project. (178-193 Lee)

Part 2: Appraisal of Analysis and Future Scenarios
I will present three critiques of The Age Transition. The first criticizes the lack of social depth and the level of analysis. The second focuses on the structurally deterministic nature of Wallerstein’s world-system model. The third focuses on the treatment of the environment or the ecological foundations of the world-system, asserting that Wallerstein does not situate ecological systems deep enough into his model. Each of these critiques has implications for the world-system’s trajectory.
Hopkin’s and Wallerstein’s book is a fine example of the advantages and the disadvantages of a well-executed systematic analysis. It shows a system’s trajectory in terms of the large sociopolitical indicators or macro-politics, but does not and cannot examine or explain the changes in micro-politics (the politics of the everyday life and of small groupings) that relate crucially to macro-politics. An examination of the production of both sociality and juridical legitimization is needed for an understanding that stretches between the macro and micro levels.
As societies change, different and new characteristics can be the decisive or meaningful during transitions or in the formation of new system-features that are not yet measured or even not measurable. How these new characteristics (or old characteristics) combine together can drastically change the meaningfulness of the measures used. This effectively undermines analysis that does not take into consideration these finer and more abstract changes-the micro and the social production- in sociality. This is not to say that an analysis focused on economic, political, and physical systems are always erroneous or not useful; they are just limited to periods that assumptions of the measures used coincide. Wallerstein’s analysis discusses changes in the structures in knowledge as challenges to an epistemological hegemony and the Enlightenment tradition, but it does not examine the social production of these changes and, more crucially, how these could affect geopolitical constitution at the social level.
A theoretical route that could strengthen a chiefly empirical and macro analysis is to connect the micro-politics, epistemology, and ontology of given period to a macro-political analysis (in Wallerstein’s language: world-system analysis) in order to reveal the changing value of certain measures. A disputed example of a changing measure is the meaning of union membership: Earlier, union membership was believed to indicate a strong organized resistance of the working classes against capitalistic exploitation. However more recently, as union themselves have become more like businesses and more representative in nature, union membership may more accurately indicate institutionalization of controlled of capital over workers. Wallerstein’s analysis does take into account many finer details (including labor conditions, macroeconomics, changes in university organization, etc), but fails to bind them firmly with each other and to the critical changes in the production of both sociality and juridical legitimization.
Wallerstein skillfully differentiates between core, periphery, and semi-periphery in capitalist world-system and their specialized assemblages of “social, political, and bureaucratic forms, different productive process, and different forms of accumulation” (Hardt 334). Wallerstein has insightfully applied a Marxist analysis to the relationships between states, but the people that living in these states and their relationship with states is missing-how are these peoples’ lives and societies produced and reproduced in relation to the large geopolitical structures? I believe Wallerstein’s analysis, while in many ways evolutionary, does not penetrate social production, because he is still a student of the Enlightenment project. He does not connect the discipline of the factory worker, the epistemological expansion of property rights, the production of “alterity” and the 3rd world, and the role of media in consumptive practices, which are all crucial to the trajectory capitalist world-system. The analysis of the cohesion of states testifies to some of these changes, but does explain how they were produced or how crucial they are. Wallerstein knows that something radical is changing in the world-system, but cannot conceptualize it in the modern state-centered geopolitical framework and, at best, asserts that perhaps the state “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel) is coming to an end.
Incorporating social production in an analysis is often hindered by the problem of how to connect individuals’ and micro-groups’ actions and configurations to the larger economic and political aggregates in time and space. How can geopolitics be related to actual human segments and circuits of society? But this difficulty should not justify negligence, since small alternations of sociality can quickly explode into the political space, radically changing the order. Avoiding the question and sticking to the accepted units of analysis-perhaps just rearranging them-denies the possibility ontological change projects the past on the future minds.
One way to build an analysis grounded in the social production is to follow the developed of the “biopolitical power” by post-structuralist and constructivist thinkers, such as Foucault, Hardt and Negri, and Deleuze and Gauttari. These thinkers trace the production of the circuits of power and thought that modern state system depends on. Foucault describes how a sociality of disciplined populations was produced from with a society of controlled populations, he connects patterns lived by people to conditions of modern and late capitalism (Burchell 1991; Foucault 1988, 1995 ,1996, 1996); Hardt and Negri follow the development juridical legitimation from transcendental legitimation of political sovereignty through to the production of immanent legitimation of imperial sovereignty; they relate changes in thought from absolute judgments and values to values and judgments that are only grounded by differential relations (Hardt 2001). Deleuze and Guattari align particular types of thought, science, politics, war, and epistemological representation with the formation of the state and sedentary life and other types with the nomadic and the ambulant, illustrating the among other things, the political properties of human populated smooth and striated socio-political spaces; they connect the ontology and epistemology to the political and social forms (Deleuze 1988; Deleuze 1984). All of these analyses fill the aggregates, systems, and structures with substance, often showing that they are constructed of contingent and modulating categories, and have to some extent integrated the macro and micro of sociopolitical analysis.
In summary of this critique, it’s not that I find Wallerstein’s analysis incorrect in itself. But rather, what it excludes is crucial to understanding the reality “behind” the current state-capitalist system. Examining the production of sociality shows that possibilities of world-system’s trajectory could be far more varied than it is presented in Wallerstein’s scenarios. However, the scenarios are part of Wallerstein’s first hypothesis, which is his second choice, and his silence about what comes after the “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel) implies that any critique first-choice scenarios, in fact, confirms his hypothesis-that world-system capitalist system is headed for “systemic crisis or bifurcation” (Wallerstein 226). Therefore, his implausible suggestions, among other economic and state biased suggestions, of China and Russia’s alignment possibilities in the final chapter only support the hypothesis of “systemic crisis or bifurcation.” Developments such as the Paper Tigers, terrorism, the Japanese Banking Crises, the acceleration of lifestyle anachronism, the race riots in Los Angeles, the labor riots in Korea, and the recent labor party victories in South America since the The Age of Transition’s research confirm the systemic crises. However, I think, if Wallerstein had constructed his analysis socially deeper, he would have been in a position to articulate further the content of his barren first hypothesis.

My second critique is not original, but it resonated with me and I recognized it immediately. After, reading the Age of Transition for the second time, I followed-up the research and found that the same grant that financed Wallerstein’s book also financed a sister book, Chaos and the Governance in the Modern World System by Silver and Arrighi (the authored The Long 19th Century). In the introduction of Silver and Arrighi’s book, there is a critique of Wallerstien’s model that was originally leveled at Neorealism’s prominent Kenneth N. Waltz by John Gerard Ruggie. Although, The Age of Transition does not explicitly discuss the world-system model, the model is used and thus, its examination is warranted.
The criticism is that Wallerstein’s theory, when it concerns world-system trajectory, is “all product and are not at all productive” (131-157 Ruggie; 23 Arrighi 1999 citation). According Arrighi and Silver, Wallerstein’s world-system “exogenizes the ultimate source of systemic change. Particular complexes of governmental and business agencies become hegemonic in the course of competitive expansions by virtue of the efficiency of their actions relative to those of all other competing complexes. But which actions are relatively efficient is a mere reflection of structural properties of the world capitalist system on which they (the actions) have no impact whatsoever” (24 Arrighi 1999, text in parentheses added).
This means that Wallerstein’s world-system unit level processes are limited by structural or “systemic level properties” that determine what is going to happen or how the script of world politics will play out (22-31 Arrighi 1999). Wallerstein describes the world-system terms of hegemonies’ rise, declines, consolidation, and competition. The result of the competitions between political and economic “complexes” competing for hegemony is determined by relative efficiencies. These efficiencies are already determined by position in the world-system. But since complexes’ actions, as conceived in the model, do not change system’s structure or properties (the systemic measures of efficiency) the winners of these future efficiency competitions are set my the model’s past. A model with this sort of deterministic casual totality has no room for human choice or structural change. Clearly, structural change occurs in history, we experience choice, and no model can represent the totality of the geopolitical future in terms of the past. Wallerstein probably did not mean to imply all of this in model, but that does not change that the model itself lacks true transformational logic.
The remedy proposed in Chaos and the Governance in the Modern World System is simple: allowed for “systemic chaos” which can lead to “systemic reorganization”. “Systemic reorganization” is crucial, because it allows the measures of efficiency to be redefined. Furthermore, both “systemic chaos” and “systemic reorganization” give the conceptualization of the world-system a productive and transformational behavior. But “systemic chaos” does not yield much for analysis and is perhaps why Wallerstein’s chosen model is far more structurally deterministic. Here, my earlier critique of the lack of social production, applies to some extent to Arrighi and Silver, meaning that an analysis of social production could give more form to their “systemic chaos”.

The depth and direct effect of ecology is not considered with enough primacy in The Age of Transition. Wallerstein has written more authoritatively about the significance of environmental factors in later works such his contribution to Ecology and the World-System by Goldfrank. However, in The Age of Transition ecological consequences that significantly affect the world-system appear as a very serious after thought, and certainly not as basic criterion for the world-system’s trajectory.
In The Age of Transition environmental crises are credited with dismantling the romanticized “technological society” and that the crises are serious and will not be solved by a new hegemonic A-phase. However, the resource depletion and the health implications are not considered in integrative fashion integrated with the world-system. Again, this is perhaps because the people are missing from Wallerstein’s analysis and thus how the environment effects and is entangled with people’s (everyday) sociality and polity cannot be considered excepted though economic costs and competition over structures of knowledge.

Dragonlich · 07-26-2003, 09:32 AM

...and your point is?

Pennington · 07-26-2003, 11:10 AM

Why do I have the fealing alot of ctrl-c/ctrl-v just occured?

The_Dude · 07-26-2003, 01:29 PM

too much reading...help!

Pennington · 07-26-2003, 01:31 PM

Posting term papers will not magically open the titty board back up.

Kadath · 07-26-2003, 05:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Pennington
Posting term papers will not magically open the titty board back up.

Nicely played.

07-26-2003, 09:04 AM	#1 (permalink)
test8888 Upright	Explaination of 1967 to now in Wallersteinian terms with a critique Part 1: Description of 1967-73 as a historical turning-point Wallerstein’s discussion of the historical transition years of 1967-73 (dates are approx.) is centered around six “distinguishable but not separable vectors: the inter-state system, the structure of world production, the structure of the world labor force, patterns of world human welfare, social cohesion of the state, and the structures of knowledge” (2 Hopkins). According to Wallerstein, these vectors are non-separable because they form “the minimum ... array of interrelated facets of a single, imperfect, organic whole, each vector quite dependent on the others”. This means that the changes in each vector during 67-73 are not isolated changes and are connected to systematic trends. These years’ trends are so significant, in Wallerstein’s estimation, because they are not part of a regular cyclic trend that will eventually come into balance with a new configuration of the system, but rather the phenomena possibly constitute the beginning of the end of, in Noam Chomsky’s words, “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel). Also asserted by Wallerstein in the medium-term is the initial decline of the United State’s hegemonic dominance and end of the expansive period of the Kondratieff cycle. (6-10 Hopkins) These two assertions are of extreme significance. The dominance of the United State’s has organized the balance-of-power configuration of the inter-state system for the last 50 years. This configuration of state powers, as explained by Neorealism, has structured and defined the political possibilities for states and their populations (70-97 Waltz). Replacing the United State’s hegemony, with another hegemony state or with a different balance-of-power configuration would change the range of tenable international activities. The crest of the Kondratieff cycle may have even farther-reaching effects, because the present forms of polity and state cohesion and coercion were erected with the taxable surplus found during the cycle’s economical favorable period (156-159 Derlugian). In Giovanni Arrighi’s analysis, USA’s dominance and the Kondratieff cycle are connected, since with the shifts in political-economic hegemony (such as the last shift from Great Britain to the USA) indicts a new organization of the capitalism’s axioms (27-36 Arrighi 1994). A bounded region (in most models: a state) positioned properly can become the new hegemony, if it can employ and discarded various techniques to fit the world-system’s state. Examples of techniques are: new forms of the factory discipline, exporting operational protection costs to the state, or the discard of the gold standard. Thus, the shift of hegemony to the USA from Great Britain and the Kondratieff cycle are part of a similar organizational shift in the capitalist system. This shift, as analyzed here, shows the integration between the inter-state system and the structure of world production (47-60 Arrighi 1994). Similarly, it is possible to informally show the connection and integration between the vectors. I will not connect every vector, but will point out some noted connections to illustrate the connect-ability and integrate-ability of the vectors. The commodity chains that structure production depend on the locations and conditions of the labor force. Welfare conditions partially determine how much a person can or will work “biologically and socially” (78 Wolf) and furthermore, the state often legitimizes itself and builds cohesion through the promise of welfare. Finally, the structures of knowledge connect with the other vectors as the “facts” (specifically “social facts”) or inter-subjective meanings that we commonly consider to compose reality. How these “facts” function and affect each other is crucial to both change and reification of the world-system. For instance, if the citizens of one state stop believing the “facts” concerning the state’s legitimation, the state could suffer problem’s ranging from tax evasion to political crises, which in turn could undermine inter-state system, world production, cohesion of the state, etc. Now that the significance and integration of the vectors has been explained, I will examine the crucial 67/73 period. Leading up to 67/73, beginning in the 1870s, the US’s position in the world-system had been increasing. However, it was not until ca 1945, that political-economic hegemony had been established. The decline of the Great Britain’s hegemony and the world-system B-phase gave away to a competition between Germany and US. The two World Wars established the “the unconditional triumph” of the US and second place of the Soviet Union and began the ascendancy of the US, the bipolar inter-state system, and the current Kondratieff A-phase. However, the consolidation and maintenance of this arrangement of the interstate system during the early stages of the A-phase required the establishment of new strategic political, economic, and ideological measures. (8-10 Hopkins, 13-18 Reifer) The immediate and reoccurring problem for the US hegemony was the flow of US capital or dollars, in the form of trade surpluses and deficits, in and out of the economy. Both surpluses and deficits threatened the circulation of capital, because large deficits (and surpluses, which often indicate a deficit somewhere else) solidify the capital-liquidity that capitalism requires for circulation, organization, and re-organization. Concretely, the colonial powers and Japan were forced to liquidate capital-producing ventures in the colonies and other imperial domains to pay for reconstruction. This brought the triangular trading between the Europe and Japan, the colonial and imperial holdings, and the US out of the balance-threatening the ability of Europe and Japan to cycle dollars back to the US. The short-term solution was the Marshall plan and reconstruction assistance. The long-term solution, which was in the end self-destructing, was “international military Keynesianism” (18 Reifer), which allowed USA dollars to be strategically cycled into various economies (i.e. Western Europe economies through NATO armament) and for strategic US interventions world political affairs (i.e. supporting decolonization only to facilitate the installation of brutal, but US friendly, regimes). This “solution” was swallowed by people under auspices of “security” and the promises of improved welfare and freedom (anti-imperialism) for all. (14-27 Reifer) The continual security threats that warranted military spending and action were dependent on the threat of the Soviet bloc and therefore the bipolar split-the threat of communism to freedom to the West and the Soviet’s promise of actually communism. Underpinning these bipolar ideologies and the state’s legitimation was state’s ability to capture and then redistribute capital flows. These capital flows were contingent on expanding involvement in the formal economy and Taylorist production under the hegemony of the institutionally strong US firms with their technological advantages. The expanding involvement in the formal economy was facilitated by the state supported emptying of rural areas into the industrial and economized social spaces of the cities. In the core and semi-periphery the state was able to successfully regulate aggregate economic activities via “monetary and fiscal policies.” This macroeconomic success contributed to improved human welfare in the core and semi-periphery through the increased wages and state redistribution. This improved human welfare was bound together with certain knowledge (such as the realization of “progress” or development through scientific development) that coincided with the state and was the basis for the general increased cohesion of states before 67/73. It should be noted that these improvements in human wealth and the strengthening state cohesion were most prevalent in core states, then semi-periphery states, and finally to a much less degree in periphery states. (14-27 Reifer; 88-89 Tabak; 148 -159 Derlugian; 194-195 Lee) The 67/73 dissolution of this bipolar and US hegemonic statist/welfarstatist world-system composed of strong regulatory and redistributory states was rooted in the dissolution of the bipolar balance of power, the failing of redistribution, economic and production problems, the declining legitimation of states, and the continuing and earlier tends of economic integration and deregulation/liberalization. Clearly, this list of factors is not complete and is highly entangled, however connecting these factors sketches the B-phase’s beginning in the 67/73 years. Internationally and domestically, the dependency of “military Keynesianism” was increasingly difficult to legitimize, since it was inconsistent with “anti-imperialism”, state sovereignty, and development. Legitimizing military action increased the cost of “military Keynesianism”, because the legitimate military techniques and the legitimate sites became increasingly limited. The Vietnam War, starting 1968, epitomized this problematic situation. The cost of the war brought US’s balance payments to a deficit causing the US to print more dollars to cover the War’s costs, which eventually undermined the US’s world economic control, a global money supply based on the fixed gold-dollar exchange rate. The Vietnam War along with other state failures led to de-legitimatising of the Establishment and the structures of knowledge they endorsed. (27-29 Reifer, 178-193 Lee) Central to the rest of the world was the economic changes implemented by the US and the weakening of both the US and the Soviet bloc. The weakening of the US caused the US to reestablish links with China on economic grounds. The weakening of the Soviets lead to the Sino-Soviet split and a loosing of the Soviet’s grip on Eastern Europe, which enabled an increased of the Soviet satellite states’ economic ties with the West. Furthermore, other core states had surpassed both the US’s technological supremacy and the US’s corporate efficacy in certain fields. Also, in the early 70s, the increasing powerful the OPEC nations raised the cost of oil several times and thus increasing the cost of world production and absorbing the dollars the Europeans and Japanese had accumulated. The absorption of dollars damaged trade balances and upheld the growing “US reliance on subimperial power to help police the world-system, by allowing the exchange of US arms for petrodollars” (28 Reifer). These hierarchical changes that effected the flows of capital and trade balances and effected the legitimation of the US’s hegemony. The world-system was quickly losing its bipolar character and giving away to multi-polar order or a mono-polar order with a weakened hegemony. (27-29 Reifer; 40-68 Ikeda) During the same time, the economic acceleration of Taylorism began to level off, cost of production increased (i.e. from environmental degradation) and numbers recruited into the formal economy became stagnate leading to the decelerating world demand and production and thus slowing the economic system. Continual deregulation/liberalization (i.e. the increasing independence of Japanese and Western European firms from the state) and integration of production and commodity circulation, which was accelerated by the East-West integration, made flows of capital more difficult for states to tax and redistribute. Corresponding to the economic decline and consistent with B-phase phenomena and deregulation/liberalization, the sites production were shifted away from the core and semi-periphery towards to semi-periphery and the periphery in order to capitalize on lower production costs. This has negative systemic effect of depriving the core consumer markets of the wages needed to purchase the commodities. The difficulty for states to collect capital in re-organizing world economy limited capital redistribution and thus caused a general stagnate or declining status of world human welfare. The cohesion state also began to decline (i.e. uncontrolled crime increases and anti-systemic movements) as the state’s ability to deliver welfare services and wealth redistribution declined. (38-40 Ikeda; 103-116 Tabak; 132-145 Pelizzon) Finally, the declining power and legitimization of the state weakened the state’s hegemonic and institutional power to maintain and defend, and called in to question its ideological and epistemological underpinnings. The truths of the Establishment such as instrumental science leads to real knowledge and progress, that universal propositions of truth exist, and that there exists a hierarchy and an order of knowledge among divisions of academic knowledge-the basic tenants of the Enlightenment project-were questioned and challenged under the rubrics of post-modernism and post-structuralism. The dependency school of development and the environmental movement challenged the purported progressive value of the economic system and “big” science. Post-colonial studies and other social sciences challenged the foundations and primacy of nation-state as a form for progressive human political organization. Among others against the US hegemony, France denounced the proliferation of US cultural forms as imperialist and bourgeoisie. These value and epistemological challenges contested the “facts” or inter-subjective meanings which underlie the US hegemony and capitalist world-system and enlightenment project. (178-193 Lee) Part 2: Appraisal of Analysis and Future Scenarios I will present three critiques of The Age Transition. The first criticizes the lack of social depth and the level of analysis. The second focuses on the structurally deterministic nature of Wallerstein’s world-system model. The third focuses on the treatment of the environment or the ecological foundations of the world-system, asserting that Wallerstein does not situate ecological systems deep enough into his model. Each of these critiques has implications for the world-system’s trajectory. Hopkin’s and Wallerstein’s book is a fine example of the advantages and the disadvantages of a well-executed systematic analysis. It shows a system’s trajectory in terms of the large sociopolitical indicators or macro-politics, but does not and cannot examine or explain the changes in micro-politics (the politics of the everyday life and of small groupings) that relate crucially to macro-politics. An examination of the production of both sociality and juridical legitimization is needed for an understanding that stretches between the macro and micro levels. As societies change, different and new characteristics can be the decisive or meaningful during transitions or in the formation of new system-features that are not yet measured or even not measurable. How these new characteristics (or old characteristics) combine together can drastically change the meaningfulness of the measures used. This effectively undermines analysis that does not take into consideration these finer and more abstract changes-the micro and the social production- in sociality. This is not to say that an analysis focused on economic, political, and physical systems are always erroneous or not useful; they are just limited to periods that assumptions of the measures used coincide. Wallerstein’s analysis discusses changes in the structures in knowledge as challenges to an epistemological hegemony and the Enlightenment tradition, but it does not examine the social production of these changes and, more crucially, how these could affect geopolitical constitution at the social level. A theoretical route that could strengthen a chiefly empirical and macro analysis is to connect the micro-politics, epistemology, and ontology of given period to a macro-political analysis (in Wallerstein’s language: world-system analysis) in order to reveal the changing value of certain measures. A disputed example of a changing measure is the meaning of union membership: Earlier, union membership was believed to indicate a strong organized resistance of the working classes against capitalistic exploitation. However more recently, as union themselves have become more like businesses and more representative in nature, union membership may more accurately indicate institutionalization of controlled of capital over workers. Wallerstein’s analysis does take into account many finer details (including labor conditions, macroeconomics, changes in university organization, etc), but fails to bind them firmly with each other and to the critical changes in the production of both sociality and juridical legitimization. Wallerstein skillfully differentiates between core, periphery, and semi-periphery in capitalist world-system and their specialized assemblages of “social, political, and bureaucratic forms, different productive process, and different forms of accumulation” (Hardt 334). Wallerstein has insightfully applied a Marxist analysis to the relationships between states, but the people that living in these states and their relationship with states is missing-how are these peoples’ lives and societies produced and reproduced in relation to the large geopolitical structures? I believe Wallerstein’s analysis, while in many ways evolutionary, does not penetrate social production, because he is still a student of the Enlightenment project. He does not connect the discipline of the factory worker, the epistemological expansion of property rights, the production of “alterity” and the 3rd world, and the role of media in consumptive practices, which are all crucial to the trajectory capitalist world-system. The analysis of the cohesion of states testifies to some of these changes, but does explain how they were produced or how crucial they are. Wallerstein knows that something radical is changing in the world-system, but cannot conceptualize it in the modern state-centered geopolitical framework and, at best, asserts that perhaps the state “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel) is coming to an end. Incorporating social production in an analysis is often hindered by the problem of how to connect individuals’ and micro-groups’ actions and configurations to the larger economic and political aggregates in time and space. How can geopolitics be related to actual human segments and circuits of society? But this difficulty should not justify negligence, since small alternations of sociality can quickly explode into the political space, radically changing the order. Avoiding the question and sticking to the accepted units of analysis-perhaps just rearranging them-denies the possibility ontological change projects the past on the future minds. One way to build an analysis grounded in the social production is to follow the developed of the “biopolitical power” by post-structuralist and constructivist thinkers, such as Foucault, Hardt and Negri, and Deleuze and Gauttari. These thinkers trace the production of the circuits of power and thought that modern state system depends on. Foucault describes how a sociality of disciplined populations was produced from with a society of controlled populations, he connects patterns lived by people to conditions of modern and late capitalism (Burchell 1991; Foucault 1988, 1995 ,1996, 1996); Hardt and Negri follow the development juridical legitimation from transcendental legitimation of political sovereignty through to the production of immanent legitimation of imperial sovereignty; they relate changes in thought from absolute judgments and values to values and judgments that are only grounded by differential relations (Hardt 2001). Deleuze and Guattari align particular types of thought, science, politics, war, and epistemological representation with the formation of the state and sedentary life and other types with the nomadic and the ambulant, illustrating the among other things, the political properties of human populated smooth and striated socio-political spaces; they connect the ontology and epistemology to the political and social forms (Deleuze 1988; Deleuze 1984). All of these analyses fill the aggregates, systems, and structures with substance, often showing that they are constructed of contingent and modulating categories, and have to some extent integrated the macro and micro of sociopolitical analysis. In summary of this critique, it’s not that I find Wallerstein’s analysis incorrect in itself. But rather, what it excludes is crucial to understanding the reality “behind” the current state-capitalist system. Examining the production of sociality shows that possibilities of world-system’s trajectory could be far more varied than it is presented in Wallerstein’s scenarios. However, the scenarios are part of Wallerstein’s first hypothesis, which is his second choice, and his silence about what comes after the “system of 500 years” (19 Dussel) implies that any critique first-choice scenarios, in fact, confirms his hypothesis-that world-system capitalist system is headed for “systemic crisis or bifurcation” (Wallerstein 226). Therefore, his implausible suggestions, among other economic and state biased suggestions, of China and Russia’s alignment possibilities in the final chapter only support the hypothesis of “systemic crisis or bifurcation.” Developments such as the Paper Tigers, terrorism, the Japanese Banking Crises, the acceleration of lifestyle anachronism, the race riots in Los Angeles, the labor riots in Korea, and the recent labor party victories in South America since the The Age of Transition’s research confirm the systemic crises. However, I think, if Wallerstein had constructed his analysis socially deeper, he would have been in a position to articulate further the content of his barren first hypothesis. My second critique is not original, but it resonated with me and I recognized it immediately. After, reading the Age of Transition for the second time, I followed-up the research and found that the same grant that financed Wallerstein’s book also financed a sister book, Chaos and the Governance in the Modern World System by Silver and Arrighi (the authored The Long 19th Century). In the introduction of Silver and Arrighi’s book, there is a critique of Wallerstien’s model that was originally leveled at Neorealism’s prominent Kenneth N. Waltz by John Gerard Ruggie. Although, The Age of Transition does not explicitly discuss the world-system model, the model is used and thus, its examination is warranted. The criticism is that Wallerstein’s theory, when it concerns world-system trajectory, is “all product and are not at all productive” (131-157 Ruggie; 23 Arrighi 1999 citation). According Arrighi and Silver, Wallerstein’s world-system “exogenizes the ultimate source of systemic change. Particular complexes of governmental and business agencies become hegemonic in the course of competitive expansions by virtue of the efficiency of their actions relative to those of all other competing complexes. But which actions are relatively efficient is a mere reflection of structural properties of the world capitalist system on which they (the actions) have no impact whatsoever” (24 Arrighi 1999, text in parentheses added). This means that Wallerstein’s world-system unit level processes are limited by structural or “systemic level properties” that determine what is going to happen or how the script of world politics will play out (22-31 Arrighi 1999). Wallerstein describes the world-system terms of hegemonies’ rise, declines, consolidation, and competition. The result of the competitions between political and economic “complexes” competing for hegemony is determined by relative efficiencies. These efficiencies are already determined by position in the world-system. But since complexes’ actions, as conceived in the model, do not change system’s structure or properties (the systemic measures of efficiency) the winners of these future efficiency competitions are set my the model’s past. A model with this sort of deterministic casual totality has no room for human choice or structural change. Clearly, structural change occurs in history, we experience choice, and no model can represent the totality of the geopolitical future in terms of the past. Wallerstein probably did not mean to imply all of this in model, but that does not change that the model itself lacks true transformational logic. The remedy proposed in Chaos and the Governance in the Modern World System is simple: allowed for “systemic chaos” which can lead to “systemic reorganization”. “Systemic reorganization” is crucial, because it allows the measures of efficiency to be redefined. Furthermore, both “systemic chaos” and “systemic reorganization” give the conceptualization of the world-system a productive and transformational behavior. But “systemic chaos” does not yield much for analysis and is perhaps why Wallerstein’s chosen model is far more structurally deterministic. Here, my earlier critique of the lack of social production, applies to some extent to Arrighi and Silver, meaning that an analysis of social production could give more form to their “systemic chaos”. The depth and direct effect of ecology is not considered with enough primacy in The Age of Transition. Wallerstein has written more authoritatively about the significance of environmental factors in later works such his contribution to Ecology and the World-System by Goldfrank. However, in The Age of Transition ecological consequences that significantly affect the world-system appear as a very serious after thought, and certainly not as basic criterion for the world-system’s trajectory. In The Age of Transition environmental crises are credited with dismantling the romanticized “technological society” and that the crises are serious and will not be solved by a new hegemonic A-phase. However, the resource depletion and the health implications are not considered in integrative fashion integrated with the world-system. Again, this is perhaps because the people are missing from Wallerstein’s analysis and thus how the environment effects and is entangled with people’s (everyday) sociality and polity cannot be considered excepted though economic costs and competition over structures of knowledge.

07-26-2003, 01:29 PM	#4 (permalink)
The_Dude The GrandDaddy of them all! Location: Austin, TX	too much reading...help! __________________ "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrel K Royal

07-26-2003, 09:32 AM	#2 (permalink)
Dragonlich 42, baby! Location: The Netherlands	...and your point is?

07-26-2003, 11:10 AM	#3 (permalink)
Pennington Banned Location: Autonomous Zone	Why do I have the fealing alot of ctrl-c/ctrl-v just occured?

07-26-2003, 01:31 PM	#5 (permalink)
Pennington Banned Location: Autonomous Zone	Posting term papers will not magically open the titty board back up.