======================================================================== 139 Date: Thu, 21 Jan 93 02:14:16 EST From: "Daniel A. Foss" Subject: [Re:] the end of world-systems theory? [cont'd] To: WORLD-L@UBVM Yesterday, it's tomorrow already, so day-before-yesterday, Chris Chase-Dunn said: "The only thing I disagree with in Dan's post is the idea at the end that world-systems theory is now obsolete because the US has unified the core." [I'd like to assure Chris Chase-Dunn at this point that I thought a whole lot about that, which may have been a big mistake, it is egregiously late, 'I feel so breakup/I wanna go home', as the song says, and my cataracts are doing funny things to the character data on the screen while the cortex does out and out infantile things to any word randomly selected by itself.] This sentence requires a two-part answer (or appel to a higher court). 1. What I said was not that world-systems theory is now obsolete because of the unification of the core. What I said was, the non-unification of the core was a condition of existence of world-systems theory. Suppose there had been a unification of the core.... Hereat I caveatted myself by writing on the blackboard: "The great thing about history is, you get the benefit of hindsight." To which I added the hostile gloss: ["With historical sociology, you don't even have to know all that history.'] This is noted because having hisorical perspective, or seeing matters therein, may be every bit as stupid as the eschewing historical perspective. This paragraph is unnecessary. I must however go on lest I forget. With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes Perfectly Obvious that the maximum possible sense was made, by the rules of "astro-logic," that the two facts, having held for five hundred years simultaneously, whereby, (a) there was a capitalist world economy which, since 1450, the inception of the "long sixteenth century," extended itself, humungous-fungus-like, to cover, take in, absorb, all societies everywhere, literally the world; and (b) no unification of the capitalist core occurred. This is to denigrate "astro-logic," I use it myself. The hypothesis of the differential impact of the Bubonic Plague on subsequent capitalist development due to preexisting differences in macrosocial conditions (pardon the clumsy verbiage), which I expounded in another post, was in its inception "astro- logic": Two civilizations' having decisive course-changes in the 1340s or thereabouts *must mean something*. Just as my having been born a Leo with an Aries moon, as every hippie in Syracuse NY told me many,amy years ago, *must* have meant something at one time. (But my Destiny has already come and gone.) The connection between pkague and capitalist development was of interest to me precisely because of certain *assumptions* made by I. Wallerstein in 1974. In a laserprinted draft dated "6/14/91," a fact of no importance whatever, as is the title, "Catastrophe and Capitalism: The Plague in Europe and China," I have cited on p. 3: "Thus Wallerstein writes (1974, p. 17), "Europe alone embarked on the path of capitalist development which enabled it to outstrip" other world- economies of the sixteenth century." Unless this alludes to Europe and East Asia copetitively dancing naked on a mahogany bar in a Cairo fleshpot (Muslims say such things did not exist), then Europe was the beneficiary, in nosing out East Asia, of the latter's having "blown" a 200-year lead. And, I added, "[T]he assumption of the uniqueness of capitalism to the West is associated with the the assumption of the uniqueness of the matrix of feudalism...out of which Western capitalism emerged. The [assumed] conclusion...is that in 'normal' social evolution 'feudalism', however defined, was a necessary... [pre]condition for 'capitalism', however defined, allowing that the latter could only appear once." Where by the latter was meant, paraphrasing Lenin, "*Who Discovers Whom*?" The East Asian state system had been unified in the Yuan-Song war of 1260- 1279, but decided at the siege of Xiangyang, the Song having counted mistakenly on the Yuan failure to match their shipbuilding technology; and subsequently on the Yuan inability to reduce the impregnable fortress with heavy artillery. The latter was successfully accomplished using Arabs who studied Chinese artillery engineering and gunpowder manufacturing. (Just another bit of historical name dropping to give an idea of Chinese technical advantage.) All this was meant to show was that a world-empire is not necessarily at a disadvantage as against a pile of political garbage at the outset of "state- building" which it was not clear to kings of the thirteenth centrury was what they are doing as a matrix for protocapitalist technical and commercial development. Yet this remains to this day a commonplace assumption. Marxists of every Eurocentric persuasion did it. Weberians did it. The anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his comic-book version of the development of Civilization did it. Should the evidence confirm that, if we posted the conterfactual and asked who'd outstrip or Discover whom were China not too advanced for its own good when the plague struck, we should be reading, in Chinese, that "China alone embarked...." This is what is at stake. With the benefit of hindsight, we can assess the failure of Marxism to develop an analysis of the shift of capitalist domestic economic activity, that is, within the economies of the core, from massive concentration on the objects, articles, things which Marx was willing to define as commodities to the abstractions, software, communications, "symbolic analysis services," and whatnot that it concentrates on selling to itself today. But it did not. The reason it did not is that it is required that there be a central contradiction of capitalism which is *not* the class struggle. In the 1970s the United States became the world center of creative Marxist scholarship. Provided one neglected capitalist development after or 1850 or 1860 or 1883 (the year Marx died), it was possible to accomplish great things with the past. There was a great hunger for explanations of why the past had to be the past it was. Even though it wasn't. This is what Wallerstein and other theorists supplied. (Not only wasn't, it didn't have to be that way even if it was.) With the benefit of hindsight, we know that sociological theories cannot be falsified. I have said so previously. (I'm sorry, that was more likely than not on ANTHRO-L, all screens are looking alike to me.) Should there be a commitment to a theoretical position which states that the capitalist core was never unified, it follows that the unification of the core will not be detected. We have such hindsight on the unification of state systems that, for example, when we say that the marcher state, Rome, unified the Hellinistic state system, we may date this at the battles of Zama (202 BC), Cynoscephalae (196), Magnesia (197)...Actium (31). Unification is not synonymous with annexation, though it is something stronger than mere hegemony. There was never an absolute halt to Roman expansion, nor any time that Rome had no enemies. States, like Paranoids, always have enemies. I suggest the following test. There is at this time a horrific threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan because God has told them to do it. Pakistan will not wage war against India, nuclear or otherwise, without prior promise of support from a third power to whom the destruction of Pakistan by India is impermissible. If that third power should turn out to be China, then I am wrong, whether nuclear weapons are used or not. If the third power is the US, which rudely elbows China out of the way, forbidding anyone to use nuclear weapons, oh, maybe one or two, then I'm on the right track, possibly. While waiting for this horror to transpire or otherwise, I advise all people of the better sort to stomp their feet, scream, and make funny faces demanding something be done about what's going on in India. Annoy members of Congress. Warn of Impending Doom, but do it logically, plausibly, professionally, and rationally. Don't worry about me, I won't be around disgracing a good cause. God is Large! Daniel A. Foss