Immanuel Wallerstein on the Crisis of Capitalism

[John McCreery]

I just stumbled on the following YouTube,an interview with Immanuel Wallerstein. Perhaps because I, too, am a man of the twentieth century and a scholar with a long and disillusioned view of human nature, I found what Wallerstein says, if not absolutely persuasive, well worth thinking about. I wonder how others here will respond to his thought that we live at a moment of systemic bifurcation in which capitalism is on the verge of collapse, but we don't yet know which way it will go, toward something fairer and more egalitarian or something more overtly hierarchical an exploitative. Also, his proposition that it is at moments of uncertainty like these that free will has the greatest role to play.

[Keith Hart]

Wallerstein is an interesting figure and worth paying attention to. I would just point to what seems to me the hardest part of his narrative to swallow. First, his key concept is system and with it the idea of the world as a closed unified system. The antecedents for this are Aristotle and the Medieval Scholastics, amplified by the sequence from world war 2 linking operations research, cybernetics, game theory and ultimately systems theory itself. Second the system has a name, in this instance capitalism; and one of the key points of a human economy approach is that people live by a number of modes of economic organization which together vary less than notions like capitalism and socialism suggest. Third, he believes that the capitalist world system was inaugurated by Columbus and is in structural crisis now. This places the birth of modern capitalism much earlier than Marx and Weber would and, as has been pointed out many times, his analysis favours distribution (who gets what) over production (eg the industrial revolution). Fourth, the idea that the present crisis began around 1970 is a good one, but what happened in between? Fifth, he talks about bifurcation as a way of describing our moment and of the eventual outcome being another system, whether nice or nasty, relatively egalitarian or hierarchical. This rules out a plural future of several or even many possibilities living side by side, as the world was in the 12th century. Sixth, systems are deterministic and so is W's thinking of the longue duree. It is intriguing to suggest that the effects of what we choose to do may be amplified by system collapse, but it is not encouraging to suggest that this chance comes round once every 500 years. Was the world really hardly changed at all by the French and Russian revoltuons, even if those countries eventually settled into a version of their long-established pattern?

As with any theoretical approach or its concrete expression, Wallerstein's provides food for thought, if not the all-embracing power he claims for it. I am willing to debate any or all of the above points. I suspect that my opposition to many of his arguments comes from a romantic disposition. Incidentally he and I stood up at the same Caribbean conference in the late 80s to give keynotes on the future of the world economy. I recall him as being very dismissive of what I had to say ("Blacks in the world economy" following CLR James).

[John McCreery]

Let me say immediately that I am in no position to debate the merits of Wallerstein's ideas. My most memorable previous contact with them was at a talk by Marshall Sahlins at Academia Sinica in Taipei more than a decade ago. Sahlins spoke on the transpacific textile trade that involved selling unique examples of European fancy dress to fashion-conscious Hawaiian royalty on the one hand and blankets of a uniform size and material to Northwest Native Americans on the other, this being a prime illustration of the role of culture in shaping economic behavior. Sahlins noted that in both cases the textiles in question played a central role in the status games of sharply ranked hierarchical societies—but the products desired were different and also used quite differently, showing off by being a trendsetter on the one hand and through quantitatively calculated condescension on the other. A young man rose to mention Wallerstein's world system theory, and I was moved to reply that, "Anyone who believes that economic forces are directly translated into cultural products has plainly never worked for an advertising agency."

In any case, claiming no authoritative ground whatsoever, I find three points in what you write particularly interesting.

 

The first is your third point, placing the origin of capitalism around the time of Columbus and emphasizing distribution instead of production. Your invoking the sacred names of Marx and Weber reminds me of how thoroughly modern social theory was focused on the relations of production. I wonder, however, if, in the longue durée, distribution isn't the more fundamental issue after all. One might point out that, historically speaking, agricultural empires and socialist and capitalist nation states have all foundered at the same point, when elites have become too piggy and politics too corrupt, leading to collapse of legitimacy. This pattern seems to hold across a wide variety of different ways of organizing the relations of production. 

 

The second is your approval of the notion that the present crisis began around 1970. I am sentimentally attracted to that idea—I, too, was coming of age during the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements—but for that very reason I feel compelled to stop and ask what is the case for this conclusion. I do wish you would say a bit more.

 

The third concerns the notion that systems are inherently deterministic. Perhaps I have supped too deeply in the recent literature on chaotic and complex systems, but this now seems to be a rather passé way to look at systems. What all sorts of evidence now appears to show is that systems appear deterministic during transient stable periods, but fly apart in all sorts of unpredictable ways when critical tipping points are reached. 

 

I do, however very much like your point about omitting a scenario in which several possibilities continue to exist side-by-side. How that would work is an interesting puzzle.

 

These, anyway, are a few scattered thoughts evoked by your most interesting reply. I wonder what our younger colleagues are thinking.