Lee, Richard E.
(2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
Critiques and developments in world-systems
analysis: an introduction to the special
collection[1]
Richard E. Lee
Abstract
Abstract: From its inception, the world-systems perspective was not only
enormously influential in long-term, large-scale social research; it also
attracted a set of serious critiques. These fell into the general areas of the
emergence of the capitalist world-economy; reductionism in the mode of
argument; surplus appropriation and accumulation, including the question
of class; and the general exclusion of an analysis of any role for “culture.” It
is concrete developments in world-systems analysis over the past three decades,
although not to the exclusion of explicit responses to critiques, that have
gone a long way in addressing these concerns. They fall most notably into
the areas of commodity chains, households, world-ecology, and the structures
of knowledge.
Keywords
Keywords: world-systems analysis, critiques of world-systems analysis,
Immanuel Wallerstein, commodity chains, households, world-ecology, structures
of knowledge
World-systems analysis[2] emerged in the 1970’s. As a knowledge movement, it
was related to the decline in the world economic expansion that had been
operative over the preceding quarter century and the end of the period of
hegemony in the interstate system over the same period that had been
characterized by the post-Second World War dominance of the United States.
World-systems analysis was a product of the system that it sought to understand,
but it was also a protest or resistance movement within the structures of
knowledge and owed much to the social movements of 1968.
The Journal of Philosophical Economics IV:1 (Special issue 2010) 5
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
World-systems analysis is premised on the idea that historical social systems
have lives. They come into being as a unique and indivisible set of singular,
long-term, or longue durée, structures, which are reproduced as secular trends
with cyclical rhythms that may be observed over the life of the system (see
Goldstein 1988; Wallerstein 1984). Eventually, however, these processes of
reproduction run up against asymptotes, or limitations, in overcoming the
contradictions of the system and the system ceases to exist. World-systems
analysis specifies its unit of analysis as an entire historical system, holding that
historical social systems are singular entities, and that indeed, the modern
world-system is not only a singular whole (that is, its “parts,” such as the states,
are not independent or autonomous, but only exist in relation to one another
with specific systemic functions) but is also unique in human history as having
expanded to incorporate the entire globe.
The structures of the modern-world system, or capitalist world-economy, emerged
in Europe at the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the period known as the
“transition from feudalism to capitalism.” An axial (hierarchical) division of labor
(the primary world-scale structure in the arena of production and distribution)
developed between a western European core where high-wage, skilled workers
produced low-bulk, high value-added manufactures and, initially, an eastern
European periphery where high-bulk, low value-added necessities were produced
by a lower-cost work force. The long-distance trade in these commodities resulted
in the accumulation of capital in the Western European core.
Fluctuating flows of goods, capital, and labor have moved across semi-permeable
borders throughout the system over the entirety of its lifetime. In practice,
strong states worked to loosen controls during periods of world economic upturn
and tighten controls during periods of downturn to favor accumulation (along
with its concentration and centralization) and contain and defuse class conflict.
Accumulation actually amounted to the “accumulation of accumulation” or
profit making for reinvestment and thus more profit making and the expansion
of the system to incorporate new pools of low-cost labor was fundamental to
turning periods of world economic contraction into periods of renewed growth.
Today, significant pools of labor outside the system to be incorporated at the
bottom of the wage hierarchy to take the place of previously incorporated
workers who have militated and succeeded in negotiating higher remuneration
no longer exist. The result constitutes a challenge to capital in maintaining the
world-scale rate of profit (see Hopkins and Wallerstein 1987).
6 Richard E. Lee
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
The “endless” accumulation resulting from the extraction and appropriation of
surplus produced by labor and its subsequent reinvestment could only take place
within the context of what developed as an interstate system (the primary
world-scale structure in the arena of coercion and decision making) that, at
least partially, controlled flows throughout the system. Like its economic
processes, the geopolitics of this system also underwent periodic fluctuations.
Competition among elites resulted in “world wars,” the outcomes of which were
short-lived states of “hegemony,” a status of the system (not an attribute of a
single state) during which one strong state exercised supremacy, before other
parts of the world-system “caught up” to become once more competitive and the
cycle repeated (see Arrighi 1990 and Wallerstein 1983b).
There was a third set of structures that were just as constitutive of the modern
world-system as those in the arenas of production and distribution and coercion
and decision making, that is, the structures of knowledge, which organize the
arena of cognition and intentionality—at the most basic level, the divorce of
facts from values in knowledge production, epitomized in the division of the
sciences and the humanities. The structures of knowledge govern what actions
may be deemed legitimate and effective, and therefore what actions will actually
be undertaken by social agents; the structures of knowledge are thus
fundamental to accumulation in the way they favor consensual relations over
more costly coercion (see Lee 2007, 2010).
Serious critiques of the world-systems perspective as originally set out by
Immanuel Wallerstein were advanced early on. Among the most important of
those issues were: the way the emergence of the capitalist world-economy was
handled; a perceived reductionism in the mode of argument; the treatment of how
surplus was appropriated and accumulated, including the question of class; and
the general exclusion of an analysis of any role for “culture” with the associated
concern for what seemed to some the Eurocentricism of the project.
Many cited the lack of a theory to account for the triumph of the European
world economy in the sixteenth century as a major shortcoming. Stanley
Aronowitz wrote that “Wallerstein leaves us with the impression that change is
a function not of the internal contradictions of a system but of pure
contingency … [that] challenge[s] the very notion of causality in social and
historical process” (1981: 508). Aristide R. Zolberg deplored the attempt “in vain
to demonstrate causal precedence” of changes in economic or political
The Journal of Philosophical Economics IV:1 (Special issue 2010) 7
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
organization (1981: 275) and Theda Skocpol had misgiving about the degree to
which world-systems analysis was “explanatory” (1977: 1081), musing that
“through his [Wallerstein’s] a posteriori style of argument, deviant historical
cases do not force one to modify or replace one’s theory, while even a very
inappropriate model can be illustrated historically without being put to the
rigorous test of making real sense of actual patterns and causal processes in
history” (1977: 1088). Michael Hechter, although in a positive reference, alluded
to serious students wrestling with “its hypotheses, to operationalize them, to test
them” (1975: 218); but this is exactly the model of nomothetic social science that,
given the premises of the world-systems perspective, would have to be overcome.
In fact, the early charges of reductionism and the criticism of the mode of
inquiry in general have persisted. As Skocpol had asserted,
the model is based on a two-step reduction: first, a reduction of socio-economic
structure to determination by world market opportunities and technological
production possibilities; and second, a reduction of state structures and policies to
determination by dominant class interests … ignoring the basic Marxist insight that
the social relations of production and surplus appropriation are the sociological key
to the functioning and development of any economic system … Wallerstein treats
“labor control” primarily as a market-optimizing strategy of the dominant class alone
(1977: 1078-9).
For Zolberg, the reductionist tendency of the project was evident in “viewing
political processes as epiphenomenal in relation to economic causation” (1981:
255); and as Anthony Giddens wrote: “Wallerstein’s arguments involve an
uncomfortable amalgam of functionalism and economic reductionism” (1985:
167). The issues of class and market reductionism came together in Robert
Brenner’s frontal attack on the lines of argument epitomized in the work of
Paul Sweezy, André Gunder Frank and Wallerstein. Extending the position
taken by Laclau in his critique of Frank, he wrote that “‘production for profit
via exchange’ will have the systematic effect of accumulation and the
development of the productive forces only when it expresses certain specific
social relations of production, namely a system of free wage labour, where
labour power is a commodity” (1977: 32).
In 1992, in “The West, Capitalism, and the Modern World-System,” Wallerstein
explored the combination of issues from the point of view of why the transition
to capitalism (with largely negative consequences, in his view) happened at all;
8 Richard E. Lee
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
was it “intrinsically necessary or historically ‘accidental’” (1992: 563). In a
wide-ranging analysis that includes questions of politics and the production of
knowledge, he stipulates that if we
find that as late as 1300+ there was no reason to expect that the qualitative changes
that would occur 200 years later were built into long-standing historical trajectories,
but rather were “conjunctural,” we are freer to appraise the wisdom of the historical
choices that were made, and are liberated from the self-fulfilling and
self-congratulatory qualities of the “civilizational” explanation[s … that tend to]
assume that the developments were somehow inevitable (1992: 590, 599).
The four elements of an explanation that he investigates, “emphasizing in each
the particular conjunctural ‘exaggeration’ of a long-standing trend” are the
collapse of the seigniors, of the states, of the Church, and of the Mongols.
Brenner had faulted Wallerstein for what he considered the mistaken direction
of causation, interpreting Wallerstein’s argument as contending that “the system
of free wage labor … is derivative from … the emergence of the capitalist world
economy in the sixteenth century” (1977: 33). Wallerstein’s clarification makes
plain his structural understanding of the mechanisms at work in terms of the
coincident combination or fortuitous simultaneity of the lifting of a set of
constraints: the removals of limits on preexisting “capitalist skills and methods”
that up until that time had been “rejected for fear of the long-term consequences
of utilizing them” (1992: 613). Conceptually, this conjunctural argument is one
of determinant conditions, which admits the contingency of historical change,
that is, an alternative framework of understanding to the model of classical
causation which a number of commentators had found lacking.
Analysts have generally asserted the holism of the world-systems project by
alluding to its single unit of analysis as a totality. But substantively, even here
some have argued for a different specification of the unit itself. The interrelated
trade network that Frank discusses as a five thousand year old “world system”
(see Frank 1990 and Frank and Gills 1993), Wallerstein does not believe to have
at any time been based on an axial division of labor. The crucial distinction is
between a geographic trade network in luxury goods versus an integrated
division of labor where, for instance, the social relations of production in one
zone have been realigned to concentrate on the production of necessities for
consumption in another zone, the two thus comprising a relational system “a
system ‘that is a world’.” Nor, argues Wallerstein, has any previous historical
system been “‘capitalist’ in that none of them was based on the structural pressure
The Journal of Philosophical Economics IV:1 (Special issue 2010) 9
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
for the ceaseless accumulation of capital.” The actual thrust of Wallerstein’s
argument combines the observation, which many shared, that “something
distinctive occurred in (western) Europe which was radically new somewhere in
early modern times” with the idea that it was not true that this “‘something’ was
a highly positive or ‘progressive’ happening,” which many did not share (1993b:
294, 292). This then was also an argument against those who faulted
world-systems analysis for some alleged western triumphalism or
Eurocentricism:
Far from Eurocentric, my analysis “exoticizes” Europe. Europe is historically
aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely Europe’s fault.
But in any case, it is nothing about which Europe should boast. Perhaps Europe and
the world will one day be cured of this terrible malady with which Europe (and
through Europe the world) has been afflicted (Wallerstein 1993b: 295).
Two specific conceptual developments and the empirical studies that have put
them into practice have further addressed not only the putative reductionism(s)
of the world-systems approach but the handling of accumulation and the
question of class as well. We may refer to these in shorthand as commodity
chains and households.[3] Reconceptualizing economic models at the macro level
in terms of commodity chains and the axial division of labor counters ideas
about the independent development of national economies and gives a
fundamental role to political actors (in the widest sense, not just “elites”); at the
micro level the move to household units shifts the emphasis away from
individual wage labor as the single locus of surplus production leading to
capital accumulation, indeed, as the defining characteristic of “capitalism,” and
recognizes the function of production and reproduction of value contexts in
shaping the relationship between labor and capital and thus how the struggle
over benefits plays out.
Trade over long distances is not unique to the capitalist world-economy, but this
was trade between one market and another with significant differentials in
prices and information and not governed by common calculations, or even
conceptions of profit and loss. Today markets “are said to be ‘world markets,’ in
the sense that the sellers and buyers take into account alternatives that are
located throughout this ‘world market’—of course, to the extent of their effective
knowledge.” Items meant for direct consumption are “in fact the outcome of a
long series of production processes we shall call a commodity chain”; these are
typically “geographically extensive and contain many kinds of production units
10 Richard E. Lee
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
within them with multiple modes of remunerating labor.” Such trans-state
chains have been an integral part of the historical function of the capitalist
world-economy (Wallerstein 2000b: 2). Commodity chains evidence the actual
process through which the axial division of labor functions and
demystify the overused category of exchange. Exchanges are nothing but the prices
paid for moving items along a chain of production processes, and thereby moving as
well a part of the surplus-value. They are not a separate process. There can be no
production of commodities without moving the inputs along a chain. The prices in
any box are not autonomous; they are conditioned by the prices in the chain as a
whole. Because of the reality of vertical integrations and the reality of the constant
interventions of the states in the axial division of labor, prices in any box are a
function of complex decision-making by a series of actors including, but larger than,
the owners of enterprises within the box (Wallerstein 2000b: 11-12).
Thus capital is accumulated not through an untidy hodgepodge of everything
bought and sold, including labor-power, but rather through specific sets of serial
operations that are accomplished across multiple political borders and cultural
frontiers, at every node of which political and cultural pressures are brought to
bear by all of the concerned parties to maximize their interests—in general, but
not exhaustively, capital seeks to maximize surplus appropriation and labor
attempts to hang on to as much of the surplus as possible. Although contentions
among alternative world views may result in surprising, historically specific and
counterintuitive outcomes in the short or medium term, viewed from the macro
or system level, accumulation remains nonetheless an irreducible amalgam, both
an economic and a politico-cultural process, situated in these chains of
specifically and differentially constrained exchanges.
At the micro level—where the reproduction of the work force cannot be
separated from socialization into particular sets of cultural, religious, moral
and ethical values, political principles, and approaches to racial, ethnic, and
gender roles—”households,” not the individual, are the “appropriate operational
unit for analyzing the way in which people fit into the ‘labor force’.” They are
“defined for these purposes as the social unit that effectively over long periods of
time enables individuals of varying ages of both sexes, to pool income coming
from multiple sources in order to ensure their individual and collective
reproduction and well-being.” The five forms of household income are “wages,
market sales (or profit), rent, transfer and ‘subsistence’ (or direct labor input)”
(Wallerstein and Smith 1992: 13, 7). The particular mix of these activities, then,
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Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
determines to a large degree the price of labor power at a specific time and place
that the household can, or is willing to, accept as a wage and therefore the
relative surplus value that may be produced at any point on a commodity chain
(by altering the composition of capital).
In her “Nonwaged Peasants in the Modern World-System: African Households as
Dialectical Units of Capitalist Exploitation and Indigenous Resistance,
1890-1930,” Wilma A. Dunaway uses the “household” model in her examination
of the mechanisms of labor exploitation of the four major colonizers in Africa
using case studies and oral histories to access colonial land and labor policies.
This study concludes that colonial Africans should be regarded as living in
mixed livelihood households, in which nonwaged labor forms (both free and
unfree) predominate, with very little likelihood of future transition to
household dependency upon wages. Thus, wage earning is not the primary
mechanism through which these households are integrated into the axial
division of labor of the modern world-system. Instead, these households
primarily provide nonwaged labor to capitalist commodity chains through which
surplus is extracted and costs of production are externalized to them.
Jason Moore, too, is concerned with the lower rungs of the commodity chains of
the capitalist world-economy. His “‘This Lofty Mountain of Silver Could
Conquer the Whole World’: Potosí and the Political Ecology of
Underdevelopment, 1545-1800,” shows how by the 1570’s, Potosí, and its silver,
had become the hub of a commodity revolution that reorganized Peru’s peoples
and landscapes to serve capital and empire. This study joins the concept of
“commodity frontiers” with an investigation of, again, how the complex
intermingling of free and unfree labor contribute to maximize surplus
extraction and accumulation—but with varying results only explicable as a
consequence of the articulation of local circumstances and world-scale processes.
Indeed, for Moore, this was a decisive moment in the world ecological revolution
of the long seventeenth century. Historical capitalism has sustained itself on the
basis of exploiting, and thereby undermining, a vast web of socio-ecological
relations. However, as Moore observes in colonial Peru, the commodity frontier
strategy effected both the destruction and creation of premodern socio-ecological
arrangements.
At the opposite end of the commodity chains of the modern world-system, the
commanding heights of capitalist enterprise, Florence Molk examines the
12 Richard E. Lee
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
trajectory of one leading industry. In her “The Rise, Maturity and Geographic
Diffusion of the Cotton Industry, 1760-1900,” she is most interested in the
establishment, maintenance, and eventual decline in the profit rates of a single
sector, the cotton industry, including calico printing, over the period 1760-1900.
From its beginnings in England as a leading industry of the capitalist
world-economy, the industrial production of cotton textiles spread
geographically on a major scale to finally reach the United States and Japan. As
Molk demonstrates, over the long term, as it expanded and competition
increased, profit rates tended to fall, although unevenly. The question opened up
by this research is whether it can be shown that successive leading industries
have declined in average profit rates, and thus whether the long-term rate of
profit in the capitalist world-economy has undergone secular decline.
Beyond the relation between capital and labor, class is also a historically
specific, lived relation that is “made.” As many commentators have suggested, the
production of goods or commodities is intimately associated with the production
of meaning. Extending this line of argument, then, wage labor must no longer
be viewed as an either/or category. Most all workers are semi-proletarians or
part-lifetime proletarians (see, e.g., Dunaway, this collection). They exhibit
varying degrees of proletarianization depending on the household structure of
which they are a part, much as states exhibit a range of degrees of sovereignty in
the interstate system (see, e.g., Wilson, his collection) and it is preferable for
employers to engage persons less rather than more dependent on wage income in
order to maximize surplus production. We should also keep in mind that, as
Wallerstein has written, “constructed ‘peoples’—the races, the nations, the ethnic
groups—correlate … albeit imperfectly, with ‘objective class’ … a very high
proportion of class-based political activity in the modern world has taken the
form of class-based political activity” (1987: 387).
The construction and reproduction, and contestation, of status categories (i.e., in
terms of identities, such as racial/ethnic, gender, or national) inscribing groups
into a hierarchical, axial, world division of labor, the political superstructure of
the interstate system, and the household structures integrating non-wage labor,
according to attributed characteristics and thereby shaping class action, poses
the problem for world-systems analysis of conceptualizing culture or cultural
forms and their legitimation as a long-term process of historical capitalism. The
cultural question has been a recurrent point of contention in critiques of
world-systems analysis—for Morris Janowitz, “[Wallerstein] attributes little or
The Journal of Philosophical Economics IV:1 (Special issue 2010) 13
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
no importance to cultural values or even to institutional structures of Western
Europe” (1977: 1093); and from Aronowitz, a protagonist of cultural studies,
Wallerstein does “not explore the specificity of politics and culture within the
underclasses to find out how and why they acted, or whether their actions
severely modified or constituted an aspect of the determination of the direction
of history” (1981: 516-17).
Here too specific developments within the field have addressed the issues. The
traditional approaches to the problem—culture as either the elitist culture or
not-culture, or the particularistic and relativistic perspective to cultures in the
plural, often with an exclusionary function—have given way to a
conceptualization of the long-term question of how we (whoever “we” are!) know
what we think we know and thus what it is we think we as social agents can
justifiably and efficaciously do. World-systems analysis has shifted the terms in
discussions of culture to one of a structure, and the processes of its reproduction,
that has come to be seen as equally constitutive of the modern world and to be
conceptualized in ways analogous to the axial division of labor and the
interstate system. This structure has come to be known as the structures of
knowledge.
This collection, then, offers two studies that incorporate the structures of
knowledge approach by relating developments in the history of ideas to
contemporary developments in the material structures of the modern
world-system.
Eric Wilson discusses the historical and textual representations of piracy in the
writings of Hugo Grotius, primarily De Indis/De iure praedae (1603-1608) and
the Commentarius in Theses XI (c. 1600). Contrary to popular belief, Grotius, in
contrast to Jean Bodin, was not an advocate of the constitutionally homogenous
nation-state. Rather, his central concept of divisible sovereignty unambiguously
presents the object of the heterogeneous state. In Grotian theory, the state may
be “read” as a composite construction, with a residual degree of inalienable
sovereignty accruing at each unit-level. Even if only unconsciously, Grotius
describes a concurrent para-political sub-division of the state between
institutional government (the “magistrates”) and civil society, one that
constitutes an operational system of governance within the nation-state. Grotius’
theory allows, according to Wilson, for the emergence of a wholly “private,”
albeit lawful, mode of authority. This is most apparent in Grotius’ treatment of
14 Richard E. Lee
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
the mercantile trading company and its privateering operations. The corporatist
theory of sovereignty permits the company’s private agents of violence, the
legally ambivalent privateer/pirate, to be invested with a requisite degree of
sovereignty. The Grotian theory of divisible sovereignty, investing the
seventeenth-century pirate band with legal personality, serves as a vital
historical precursor to the quasi-statist (trans-) national criminal cartels of the
twenty-first century.
Sanem Güvenç-Salgirli argues that the historiographical approaches prevalent
in the Ottoman Empire and then in the Turkish Republic, observable in both
academic and cultural production and implemented in the education system,
were closely related to material life and governance of the two regimes.
Furthermore, they were transformed along with the passage from one regime to
the other. Just the same and consistent with the structures of knowledge
approach, the debates remained surprisingly similar. It is further shown,
however, and again in accordance with the structures of knowledge approach,
that these relations were not of a one-way causality in either direction, but
rather part of a singular whole, in this case part and parcel with (“negotiated”)
incorporation into the capitalist world-economy. Not surprisingly, debates
generally over the construction of the past deployed in the making of the present
and particularly over the modernization project survive today in discussions
arising from Turkey’s possible candidacy for membership in the European
Union.
Endnotes
[1] Some of this material has appeared previously in Lee (2010, ch. 1).
[2] See especially: the three volumes of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The
Modern-World System (1974, 1980, and 1989) and the articles collected in The
Essential Wallerstein (2000a); for an overview, consult Wallerstein (1983a); for
an introduction that includes both the origins and the development of the
world-systems perspective, Wallerstein (2004) is a good start; for some still
relevant thoughts on methods, see the essays in Hopkins, Wallerstein, et al.
(1982). See Wallerstein (1993a) for an explanation of the significance of the
hyphen; for examples of work in which the concept is not hyphenated, see, for
instance, essays in Denemark, Friedman, Gills, and Modelsky (2000).
The Journal of Philosophical Economics IV:1 (Special issue 2010) 15
Lee, Richard E. (2010) ‘Critiques and developments in world-systems analysis: an
introduction to the special collection’, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, IV:1, 5-18
[3] On commodity chains, the special issue of Review, XXIII, 1 (2000) includes
two substantive studies, one on shipbuilding and one on grain flour, besides a
conceptual overview; see also Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994). On
conceptualizing and studying households, see Smith and Wallerstein (1992);
besides an introduction to the approach, it contains eight substantive studies
divided among the United States, Mexico and South Africa.
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Richard E. Lee is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel
Center at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY,
13902-6000, USA. (rlee@binghamton.edu)
18 Richard E. Lee
