4 Mar 98 13:05:30 -600 4 Mar 98 13:05:04 -600 Date: Wed, 4 Mar 98 13:07:07 From: "Manjur Karim" Reply-To: To: psn-seminars@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Let's be Frank about Marx? Andre Gunder Frank's article is indeed quite impressive in its scope and ambition. While the manifesto is not the central organizational focus of his article, its has meaningful theoretical and empirical relevance for the way we read the manifesto as part of the totality of Marx's understanding of capitalism. Frank made his rather spectacular entrance in the social scientific analysis of development/ underdevelopment in the sixties not only by challenging the dominant modernization paradigm of that time, but also, relatively lesser known to the North American audience, by challenging the "dualist" thesis (coexistence of capitalist/modern and feudal/traditional modes of production in Latin American societies) of the offical Communist Parties of Latin America. Initally fascinated with Frank's point of view, I later on became more interested in the Mode of Production critics of the Frank-inspired dependency approach. But that is a different story, which I will not address now. It is extremely difficult to keep track with a prolific writer like Frank (I don't remember the exact figure, but is it not something like 36 books, a few hundred articles, being more cited than some Nobel Laureate economists etc. etc. ?). However, in last few weeks I tried to read about the latest turns in Frank's analysis of the world system (note that while Wallerestein writes world-system with a hyphen, Frank writes it without one; and there is apparently a theoretical justification for that, something that Frank might focus on). I will use a rather long citation from "Let's be Frank about World History" by Albert Beresen in *Civilizational and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change*, edited by Stephen K. Sanderson, Altamira Press, 1995 to summarize Frank's position as it relates to the present article. I hope Frank endorses this interpretation of his work. " Frank does not have the new model; no one does. But he began to open some new avenues of thinking about how the world might work that may point toward a new model of world-historical develpment....... ....First, and most generally, Frank is beginning "post-world system theory." What Frank did to Modernization theory he is now doding to world-sysetm theory. It is an amazing feat, hardly realized by many world system practitioners. From saying developing countries did not get that way through their own internal development but as being part of a larger system of world economic relations, Frank has now placed that Europe-based world-system in a larger world-historical context, saying that the development of the Wallerestein/Braudelian world-system is conditioned by, is part of, develops in accord with, its global position within a still larger world-historical system that has had Asia as its center for a long period of time... ....A corrolary of the first point is the contention that the world-system does not bubble up out of the feudal west because of an endogeneeous "Eurocrisis" of feudalism and then go on to incorporate th rest of the world, but is part of the larger world web from the very start.... ...The Asian hegemony idea also prompts very macro materialist versions of human history- the most people, production, and wealth over most of the world's history are in the East. This makes the rise of the West a short interlude of perhaps a few hundred years from AD 1750/1850 to 2000, as productive advantage is again returning to Asia. So, a new model of world centers and peripheries; up to 1750/1850 an Asia-dominate dworld system, then until 2000 a Euro-North American-dominated system, and then from the year 2000 onward the action swings back to where it has been most of the time- Asia. Speak of decentering. The rise of the West is now a hegemonic blip in world history... ...Marx fits the "Eoroideology" model; in theorizing that capitalism rises out of "Eurofeudalism" he gives no acknowledgement of relations between the semiperipheral West and the Asian core as having anything to do with producing the West's upward mobility in world production after 1750/1850. Marx has always been the most radical of thinkers, but from this perpsective Marxism is a form of "Euroapologetics" providing a rationale for "Euroexceptioalism....." I am particularly curious how Kevin Anderson or David Smith (David, are you on this list?) respond to this stage of Frank's theory. I personally have some question for Frank. But I have to take care of some other business now. I will write again either this evening or tomorrow morning. Manjur Karim