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Back Wallerstein Section 92 58 89 72 78 70 Stanford Journal papers |
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Soc. 15 8/1/02 Comparison and Contrast of Marx, Weber, and
Wallerstein ``Corporation, n. An ingenious device for
obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.'' According to Marx the social forces of civilizational change inherent
to social evolution stem from the dynamism of the economic forces of
production. To Max
Weber, social revolution depends on the revolutionary activity of the
state bureaucracy and the functional cult of bureaucratic personality. Both
agree that Capitalism represents an epochal period in the world's
evolutionary experience with modernity in that labor has undergone a process
of commodification. Weber utilized Marxist theories of social analysis
without ever adopting Marxism as a system of politics. Both Weber and Marx
agreed that capitalism was supplanting traditional control and creating a new
culture based on market exchange relationships. Reich's
assessment of Marxist structuralism theory and Weber's characterization of
protestant capitalism, illustrate contemporary themes inherent in
Wallerstein's construction of the binomial dialectic between the 'Core'
industrialized nations and the 'Periphery' third world nations. Capitalism is
warlike and requires that conflict be sustained and supported by a system of
hegemons and client states engendered and dispensed upon society under an
authoritarian mode of compulsory labor production and the substitute benefit
of contractual wage factory labor. The system of production is geared to
towards the interests of an elite minority, who set the profit quotas, and in
essence control society, through the exploitation of market relations and
vicariously as Marx and others would argue existing social relationships as
well. These theorists differ upon the apparent societal modes of production
as either being totally all inclusive in the sense that each questions the
source of hierarchical market relationships that are established before
social relationships and such concepts, such as the will to dissent or revolt
or accept a given system of leveraged inequality are relevant to the system
of antagonisms and competing alliances. For Weber it is that double ethic to
class which is also introduced as normative units of cultural and political
exchange, and hence class contends with status and honor in any power
exchange. Weber argues that capitalism has adopted a revolutionary
bureaucratic system of mass production and a rationale that has become a
routinization or internalization of acceptance for the system of monopolized
social stratification, on the apparent mode of power and control in a society
as coming from a legitimizing mandate of authority to dictate the given
status quo. Inherently, Marxism, Weberian classical sociology, and Wallerstein's
world System's theory, differentiate the modes of production according to the
empirical observable, experience of modernity and existing historical
knowledge, to articulate a discourse that the capitalist market as a
revolutionary force is antithetical to tradition. Reich argues that the economic institutions of capitalism indirectly
or directly affect or support and cause the system of inequality, alienation,
racism, sexism, militarism, environmental degradation, consumerism and
imperialism as all apparent and encompassing the symptomatic organic compound
of natural capitalism in action. Reich further argues that the evolution of
all societies and the formation of all social relationships stems directly
from the system of exchange that a society develops in mode toward various
levels of economic, social infrastructure and technological sophistication
ultimately influences its cultural ethic, beginning with survival, then
subsistence and stable surplus accumulation in relation directly with the ability
for economic production to sustain the system of civilization. Accordingly,
Reich identifies these structural economic components of change and
categorizes them as 1.) The forces of production and 2.) The ability to
accumulate a social surplus. The forces of production consisted of land,
material capital, and technological capital resources available to a given
society. The social surplus was a result of generations of subsistence
farming codifying a method of crop rotation, producing a surplus and ensuing
specialization of labor to divide up capital and that as a result of greater
technological sophistication, while surpluses increased, the hierarchical
system of stratification also increased, parallel to the mode of increased
production. Essentially, society has been constructed upon the foundation of
dialectic between two groups, the producers of the surplus, and the
appropriators of that surplus. Class then is constructed on the basis of
one's relationship to the factors of production and hence the mode of
production quantifies the existing system of social relationships as a set of
class interests or in Weber's terminology, class situations. The historical
development of class stratification in societies first took the form of the
slave economy where labor was compulsory by the force of the master and that
the laborer was denied the right to own property or capital. After the fall
of the Greco-Roman Civilization, and decentralization of political authority,
European feudalism began the process of substituting serf labor for slave
labor and a quota system of surplus tithes where established to guarantee
political and military protection from rival fiefdoms. However, the evolution
of capitalism from feudalism, by route of mercantilism installed the practice
of the separation of labor from the means of production, by means of the wage
benefit of contractual employment, and private elite consolidation of all
capital relevant to the forces and factors of production. Reich further
argues that cultural and economic relations are asymmetrically applied and
cross-internalized and often they show contradiction in modes of expression.
Culture often exists symbiotically with the modes of social production and
ultimately is the first identifiable elementary crux of social change.
Ultimately then technology is and leads to more culture and it is the
ultimate sequester of strata in a society, and through the ensuing division
of labor acts as the re-definer of social relationships as evinced in the
historical transitions of the factory system of labor in replacing the guild
masters and the rising merchant classes that displaced the feudal landed
aristocracy to a lesser extent as well. Reich as a
Marxist historian argues that all human understanding is rooted in material speculation
and not individual moral or other introspective method. For Reich this is the
essence behind the theory of Historical materialism. This theory argued that
man's relationship to the factors of production determines his corresponding
social outlook. For Hegel such a positive bent was dependent upon those
societies capacity to adopt the Rosseauian notion of a civil society,
pluralized and diffuse power relationships. The sum total of this for Reich
is what he calls the economic structure of a society as resting in periods of
calm and stasis, and then inevitable clashes and conflict stemming from the
sources of the system of property relations, and its fetters, the wage labor
capital force that periodically underwent alienation leading to revolt and transformation
of the economic super structure in either ideological or material form. Arguably for
Reich, the debate between freedom of will and material secular enterprise had
been defined by the institutions of feudalism, then later by the deistic idealists
of the European enlightenment. Marxist historical materialism, argues that
all knowledge structures and ethical substructures exist as entities
predicated upon dialectic, conflict between classes that manifests itself as
a cultural drama of societal norm constructs. "Marx's historical
materialism insists, however, that the development of the forces of
production has thus far been the commanding aspect of the historical
process."(54) Reich argues further that these normative constructs reflect
the system of market relations, having subsumed rationally the
commercialization and commodification of all labor and capital under the
control of a plutocracy and society's willing ethical acquiescence to that
system of leveraged inequality based upon the degree of material gain. Hence
the dialectic according to Marxists is stems from the conflicts between the
forces of production (technology and ideas) and the prevailing relations of
production, (the factory, prolitierate) and hence the capitalism introduced
automation as in informal way of supplanting traditionalism when it conflicts
with profit-oriented progress. (Reich, 56) Reich defines
capitalism as an economic system were labor becomes a commodity, substituting
a wage for individual autonomous production and the concentration of the
means of production, (technology) under the control of an elite few. In the
last 500 years Marxist structuralists argue that there has been a transition
from independent labor production to a system of centralized non autonomous production
where labor has been transformed into a system of market producers rendering
labor the status of the property less prolitierate whose sole survival is
deterministically tied to the fortunes of the market. "..The
relationship in which the group as a whole stands to the process of
production and hence to other sections of society…the relationship from which
in one case a common interest in preserving and extending a particular
economic system and in the other case an antagonism of interest on this issue
can alone derive must be a relationship with a particular mode of extracting
and distributing the fruits of surplus labor, over and above the labor which
goes to supply the consumption of the actual producer."(59) According to
Marx, Capitalism evolved from primitive accumulation. This involved the
extirpation of gold and silver from the New World and the enslavement of
blacks and natives to labor in the mines of colonial empires. "The
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the
conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercialized hunting of Blackskins, signalized the rosy dawn of the
era of capitalist production."(64) However, primitive accumulation took
a different form in England. Marx argued that serfdom had albeit disappeared
by the 14th century and that in the 15th century there consisted of a class
of free peasant proprietors. Later as a result of feudal insurrection the
16th century saw an increase of feudal lords 'liberating' their serfs,
essentially expropriating them from their livelihoods, and so began the
transformation of un-free serf into that of free landless wage laborer.
Ostensibly this was brought on by increased agricultural speculation in the
wool markets were grazing sheep proved to more profitable then peasant
farmers. "The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufactures and the
corresponding rise in the price of wool in England gave the direct impulse
for these evictions."(63) Ultimately capitalism abolished feudal tenure.
This also gave rise to the press gangs and coerced forms of labor
exploitation. It was these
institutional seeds that formed free capitalism. Capitalism was not about free
competition rather it had always existed as a system of unequal monopoly
power broker type relationships. The rise of the English Joint Stock
Corporation articulated state sponsorship of economic activity as a ventricle
of imperialism and conquest articulated at the dictates of the market
appropriators. England maintained tea, salt and opium monopolies for the
benefit of its capitalist merchant investing class and investing the latter
for consolidation of the Asian trade under European market methods. For many
the consolidation of global trade was the ultimate expression of civilization
having arrived at a point of definitional modernity, a period
indistinguishable from all historical periods in terms of productive
capacity. Marx defined modernity as involving that artificial double ethic
brought by capitalism the euphemism of freedom at the expense of libertine
livelihood. "Such a task it was to establish the eternal laws of nature
of the capitalist mode of production to complete the process of separation between
laborers and conditions of labor, to transform, at one pole, the social means
of production and subsistence into capital at the opposite pole, the mass of
the population into wage laborers, into free laboring poor, that artificial
product of modern society."(66) Marxist Theory
insists that all history is the history of class struggle, and that the
emerging bourgeoisie of capitalism represented essentially a feudal graft
upon modernity, that substituted a new class and new sets of class
antagonisms among prolitierate wage owners and the aforementioned bourgeoisie
property owners. The capitalist inherently owed his wealth not on the basis
of pure competition rather on the principle of primitive accumulation resting
from a colonial legacy, and the formation and centralization of the European
Nation State that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. According to Marx
it was this capitalist class that affected the creation of social
relationships through market domination, redefined the family in proto-nuclear
form as an economic unit of production. Essentially, Capitalism relied upon
revolutionizing the instruments of production, (increasing technological
advancement in production methods) and allocating the necessary mode of class
antagonisms inherent to the relations of economic production visa via society
as a unit of conspicuous consumption complete with an ideology of a locatable
mode of progress under the subsumed rationality of the dogma of free trade.
In his Manifesto Marx describes the inherent dual nature of Free Trade.
"It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms has set up that single
unconscionable freedom, Free Trade..It has agglomerated population,
centralized the means of production and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political
centralization."(69) For Marx, the
final end result of capitalism was destruction but not before the Alienation
of the prolitierate from the means of production by the system of property
relations, whereby his wage was compulsory with his sacrifice of the right to
enjoy the fruits of his labor for a capitalists profit margin. Inherently
this created the objectification of labor, into a commodity, here it once had
stood as a mode of autonomous subsistence and individually invested surplus,
it now rested as an autonomous mode of social control, separate from the
experience of labor, relegating the worker to the social status of being an
appendage of a machine. "The alienation of the worker in his product
means not only that his labor becomes an object, assumes an external
existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to
him and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power." (108) Marx insisted
that all cultural forces are defined through the forces of economic
production. However, in the commodification of people, gender etc., would
lead into the definition of life as involving either a use value or an
exchange value. To a certain extent this was what Marx termed as 'Fetishism.'
Fetishism involved the objectification of social relations, stimulating a
false consciousness among the classes commensurate with class antagonism
threshold necessary to keep the elite in power. "..The categories of the
capitalist economy-value, rent, wages, profit, interest, etc., have been
treated as though they were part of economic life in general."(113) This
was what Marx termed as a symptomatic of the delineation of social forms, and
precipitous rise of an un-historical sterile taxonomy that Reich terms as an
irrational rationalization as characterizing the market as we know it today. Weber offers a slightly different approach by his delineation of the
economically conditioned power classes, defining them not as communities'
rather just coalitional bases for social action. Weber concurs with Marx on
the notion of monopoly interest ruling the market. Weber defines the mode of
production, as, "The mode of distribution given to the propertied a monopoly
on the possibility of transferring property from the sphere of use as wealth
to the sphere of capital, that is it gives them the entrepreneurial function
and all chances to share directly or indirectly on returns on capital. All
this holds true within the area in which pure market conditions prevail.
Property and lack of property are therefore the basic categories of all class
situations."(Gideons, Held, "Class Power Conflict," [on
Weber], 61) Weber does concur with Marx on the notion that social action flows
from class interest and that property ownership constitutes entrepreneurial
interest. Inherently a society is framed in context of its productive and
consumption mode and in capitalism's case it had evolved into a global
plutocracy. Society had undergone this process through the process of rural
migrations to urban settings creating urbanization and revolutionizing
creditor and debtor relations in the process. Hence every social revolution
that has formed out of this urbanization phenomenon has embodied the
monopolization of power. For Weber This was inherent since social
relationships did stem from economic factors, and hierarchies were created by
what he termed as distances from consumability. Both Weber and Marx concur that the monopolization of trade created
the rise of capitalism and that its exploitative cycle of profit demand
driven economies had, Weber termed, 'the increase of his capital which is
assumed as an end in itself."(Weber, Capitalism, Bureaucracy and
Religion, 113) This had created the inevitable factorial conclusion that
independent or autonomous manufacturing and production would be rendered
irrelevant due to capitalism's over arching mode of consumption for profit as
progress rather than a true accordance of utilitarian measure betraying a
double ethic to capitalism. (115) Weber argues that the sociological
influences of wage labor and labor compulsion by force have a commercializing
effect on the whole of society. "In such circumstances men's commercial
and social interests tend to determine their opinions and
attitudes."(123) Weber defines class, or rather 'class situations' as a probability
for the ability to procure goods, gain a position of status, and overall the
ability to find inner satisfaction. The probability for attainment of these
goals rests from the basis of relative control over the forces of production.
To this extent absent the atheism Weber is synonymous with Marx in his
description of how the capitalist economy manufactures class positions as
counterweights to class resistance. Weber's description of 'class' stipulates
that all are members of a given 'class situation'. First there is the
property class, which is determined by property difference. Second he defines
the middle mode as the commercial class of high-end entrepreneurs and low
yield wage earners the proliterate. Weber then defines social class as
comprising the sum totality of all economic experiences and the system of
ensuing contractual relations to the factors of production. (Class, Power,
And Conflict, 70) Weber defines the
necessary historic economic indicators that defined the rise of capitalism.
First Capitalism required a large labor pool. From this large labor pool
there emerged an economically historical process of rational exploitation
that accrued out of the division, and specialization of factory created newly
automated forms of labor. This factory labor system embodied the causality of
capitalist accumulation by Western Europe of ascertaining a mode of praxis
leading to a stable hierarchical method of bureaucratic enforcement and
finally such a bureaucracy came to have unified control over the means of
production and all raw materials. (74) The rise of capitalism came about in
the early 16th century due to the invention of rational double entry capital
accounting. This method of quantification inherently subsumed that the most
rational views were profitable views. (75) The bankers, businesses and
creditors dominate The Market and influence production by speculative
interests, whose sole initiative is short-term liquidity and not the
long-term interests of individual companies or proprietors. Essentially it is
with 'speculative profits' is where Weber defines capitalism's rationality
meeting an irrational end." The influence exercised by speculative
interests outside the producing organizations themselves on the market
situation, especially that for capital goods and thus on the orientation of
the production of goods is one of the sources of the phenomena known as the
crises of the modern market economy."(76) In essence the market's
highest ideal is a hard bargaining position won by the 'contraction of
advantages in relationship to [fixed] consumption needs."(80) Weber defines
bureaucracy as the most evolved form of power that exists somewhat symbiotically
and asymmetrical to social structure, consisting of a set of open and closed
relations and appropriated advantages which Weber terms as 'rights.' The
factory system of labor involved the concentration of ownership in the
workplace in few hands, the owners of corporate bureaucracies. Weber along
with Marx makes the historical connection between capitalism's structured
factory labor systems with the rise of the commercial power of English wool
factories in 1738. This development was spurred further on by the development
of paper as being the common bureaucratic form of record in the 18th century,
which also paralleled the growth of newspapers. The end result of English
wool was that Cotton manufacturing replaced it. According to Weber however,
the final process of Capitalism as a bureaucracy evolved fully out of the
mining of coal and the rise of iron and steel foundries. With these new
technological mediums capable of rendering the production of large scale
economic infra structural elements of capitalism, the ensuing result was the
mechanization of labor production, capitalism at full hilt into the
industrial revolution. This period was characterized by the contrast between
the standard of living and the sources for profit as requiring the indirect compulsion
of the majority of the wage labor force subordinated under the authority of
the 'workhouse.' Weber goes on to
describe the nature of authority as involving the spectrum between imperative
coordination and voluntary submission. Authority he argues creates a moral
complex of interests and an authoritarian complex that requires a belief in
the legitimacy of its right to dispense with authority. For Weber the types
of authority flow from what is perceived to be legitimate property interests
much in the same way that a wage worker is indentured to a boss is
historically linked in essence like a feudal vassal is bound to a noble in
the same fashion. Authority requires economic power based upon monopolistic
position, material self-interest and obedience to the appearance of
legitimate authority. According to
Weber there are three types of pure authority. 1.) Authority must have
rational grounds, grounded in legal authority and traditionally exercised
through the means of what is most politically expedient. 2.) Authority must
have a traditional base and legacy of accepted norms, and finally, 3.) It
must also have a degree of inherited or actual charisma, or charismatic
grounds for its authoritarian claim to leadership. This according to Weber
creates the cult of leadership and the cult of personality, which lies in the
transformation of pure charisma from one individual by the process of
routinization and the uniform power intent of the bureaucratic legal
authority to conceive of its own rational allotment of status groups, or
power brokering positions attained through non elected means of power
acquisition. Ideally, for
Weber the most socially effective role of authority is the charismatic
president elected through the means of plebiscite vote. In essence Weber
argues that capitalism is an inherent part of modern life. Weber does not
advocate the abolishment of capitalism but he does search for a way to
mitigate between the uneven effects of market competition. Weber's ideal
description of power is one of collegial bodies of governance, the sort of
what he defines used to exist in Prussia before the advent of the monocratic
district governor. Immanuel Wallerstein, a
world systems theorist argues that Marxism is a challenge to the
universalities of universals. Essentially the term 'individual society,'
constitutes the most basic unit of analysis in a world composed of multiple
societies. In each of these societies there also exists a certain ethical
mode that defines progress collectively, according to the value modes
inherent to a particular culture. For the west as it came to dominate the
world through imperialist conquest it came to define paradigmatic formulas
toward material progress. It was these formulistic values that sought to
explain why third world nations lagged so far behind the west in
industrialization and standard of living. In the case of western
civilization, Wallerstein argues that the system of knowledge and power
centers among the lateral sway of the 'universalizers', and the
particulizers.' The universalizers thought of themselves as scientists and
that natural laws could be derived from human behavior leading to predictable
results. On the other side of this spectrum were the particulizers, or more
appropriately what wallerstein termed the 'humanists, whom he suggests are
guilty of biased cross cultural generalizations. These universalizers
dominated the scientific and social disciplines of sociology, economics, and
politics, and the particulizers dominated the fields of history and
anthropology. Wallerstein defines world systems theory according to the
Marxist principle of unity of action. "A world Systems perspective
assumes, by contrast, that social action takes place in an entity in which
there is an ongoing division of labor, and seeks to discover empirically
whether such an entity is or is not unified politically, or culturally,
asking theoretically what are the consequences of the existence or
nonexistence of such unity.'(Wallerstein, "The Capitalist World
Economy,"155) Wallerstein suggests that political cultural units
independent of economic production are few and far in between in the
historical modes of production existing only in the short lived age of the
technologically primitive reciprocal lineage mode of subsistence agriculture.
Wallerstein
divides up the world into a perennial dialectic between the 'world empire'
and the 'world economy.' The 'core' power source is the west, and the
peripheral, 'world economy' is the third world. Wallerstein argues that this
economic system operates an unequal system of trade and capital exchanges
often conducted at the point of 'economic duress' by these peripheral
countries. The west is the world empire and through its process of maximizing
economic surplus and reaping technological advancement it required the forced
appropriation of surplus labor to churn out surplus profits. Wallerstein like
Weber agrees that in order for this power system to function as it has in the
last 500 years through political centralization, has required the west to
maintain a core hegemonic bureaucratic rationality in the dispense of the
administration of empire. Wallerstein defines the 'World Economy' as
synonymous with the world system. This system requires a single division of
labor represented by multiple cultures that lack political centralization.
The result of this lack of specialization is the loss of the means by the
peripheral state to appropriate an economic surplus for domestic consumption
rather wealth and capital is expropriated by the capitalist through local and
cross-national trade exchanges. Inherently, then Wallerstein argues that the
decisions for the world economy, i.e., production and quality are determined
by market profitability. "A capitalist mode is one in which production
is for exchange; that is determined by its profitability on a market…the
individual buyer rewards efficiency and as seller uses his political power to
thwart it."(Wallerstein, Capitalist World economy, 159) Wallerstein argues
that between (1100-1250) the ruling strata suffered an income loss brought on
by natural disasters and intercine political warfare. During this period the
peasants saw a rise in real wages derived from personal production. Beginning
in the 14th and 15th centuries feudal lords centralized and expropriated the
peasant surpluses that had accumulated over the century and half and began
the process of transforming the peasant into a wage laborer, brought on by
the codification of English property law. Wallerstein further argues that
with the rise of capitalism and global markets, in the 16th century, saw also
the institutional formation of the 'world economy' the raw markets of the
third world and the rise of the west's conception of its Occidental mastery over
the Orient. The revolutionary feature to capitalism only involved its mode of
productive, exploitative means of organizing labor, rather according to
wallerstein, capitalism, was a feudal analogy of progress for the seigniorial
land owner was replaced or rather transformed into a capitalist producer.
(161) For Wallerstein
the growing strength of capitalism has further solidified the dichotomy of
class antagonisms between bourgeoisie and proliterate. The rising wealth of
the bourgeoisie and the capitalists in the 18th and 19th centuries had
created a mass proportion of the population transformed into a free laboring,
landless 'poor' class. In this system of antagonisms, wallerstein argues that
all authority flows from a tradition of the hierarchy being constructed on
the basis of one's economic relationship and access to the factors of
production. Unlike Weber, Wallerstein agrees with Reich, and Marx that
economic forces dominate over existing political cultural relational
structures of community cognizance. Wallerstein argues this analysis is
especially relevant to the present, in that the third world were capitalism
is finishing the process of global trade consolidation, all political and
military conflicts and foreign intervention consist of the struggle by the
core industrialized west to maintain the supply of scarce, or commodity mode
of economic resource acquisition, in direct mode of the appropriation of the
labor and commodity generating surplus of the third world. “Far from being a
system of free competition of all sellers, it is a system in which
competition becomes relatively free only when the economic advantage of the
upper strata is so clear cut that the unconstrained operation of the market
serves effectively to reinforce the existing system of stratification.”(66) Inherently,
western technological progress resulted in the inequality of distribution of
goods and resources. Essentially, Wallerstein defines the core periphery
conflict as involving the struggle between highly supervised low skill wageworkers
and unsupervised corporate US industrial management, whose main ethic was
that there should be no limit to ultimate profit. Wallerstein argues that
there are structural limits to capitalism, and that the sources for political
change and the seeds of political repression are based and derived on the
ability and the will of the lower strata to revolt. According to
wallerstein the most repressive forms of capitalism exhibited themselves in
the third world. All the forms of economic surplus were taken out of a
country, under the subsumed rational mode of raw material needing to be
converted into material capital, a routinization to capitalism itself. Hence
the historical vision of labor and historical exploitative economic
manipulations by the west, by route of imperialism, in fixing the supply of
monetized currency exchange hastened the rapid inflationary collapses of
third world state sponsored and market sponsored state regimes. Hence the developmentalists
ponder an extraneous debate, the reasons why third world nations do not
evolve according to their economic theories of production. Rather the system
of political and market price stability was circumvented by the loss of all
rights for local, or regional elites of their individual state sovereign ability’s
capacity to nationalize private industry from the vestiges of former
colonialist control, rather replacing such a legacy with transnational
corporate control. This legacy of
domination existed perpetually in the discourse of the third world intelligentsia
who were installed with the notion that modernity benefited the west because
the west essentially monopolized the means of modernity, control of resources
and that this experience created modernity in iconoclast image that served to
rationally justify the west's legacy of imperialist domination. Third world
economic development was essentially sabotaged by western speculative
corporate interest, state sponsored development was always circumvented by
global core western industrial capitalists, who expropriated the raw material
surplus of the third world, often by coerced routes of forced reliance by
third world economic planners on growing cash crops for international export.
This essentially made third world economies volatile, and dependant on western
aid to further facilitate the supply of commodities to the west resulting in
maximized profits, for the west, and for wallerstein a more modern conception
of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation alive and well in capitalism,
especially when third world nations began to experiment with capital import
substitution. Hence third world developmental success lagged the call behind
the purpose for which it was argued that the third world lacked the material
or intellectual means for economic development in line with the
developmentalist’s empty call for third world self assurance, and lack of
willingness to confront the market’s effect on the aggrandizement of the
global population, and the ensuing accumulation of factors on the degradation
of environmental resources as a necessary means of economic stoicism. Rather
Wallerstein argues that the western Core Nations exist as a collectivist
capitalist firm and through its ensuing hegemonic market manipulations by
military and political force serve to reinforce the economic status quo of
western domination tactics, high wage western products and low wage third
world products resulting in the politicalization of economic decision and a
system of unequal exchange. In Latin America, third world populism according to
Wallerstein constituted the process of economic industrialization, resulted
in a range being constructed between one of: “..Intensified oligarchical
control of agricultural exporting groups, usually taking authoritarian
military forms and poly class rule leading to increased
industrialization.”(75) According to
Wallerstein the options afforded by western imperialist market domination
were few for third world nations in that there were only three strategic
options at their disposal. The first economic scenario involved, seizing the
chance, which wallerstein defines as third world nations attempts to
industrially modernize and attract western investment in the building of
economic and social infrastructure. This often resulted, in “..The
development of an internal market originally projected is abandoned and an external market is
substituted, but one in which the semi peripheral country largely serves as
the purveyor of products it is no longer worth while of the core country to
manufacture.”(79) This first scenario often resulted in balance of payment
problems for third world nations affecting their employment quotas, resulting
in a market induced unemployment brought on by the economic mode of import
substitution such as the relevant historical examples of Mexico and brazil in
the 1970’s. These processes of institutionalized attempts at
institutionalized reform demonstrated to the third world that this option had always been
dependant on the willingness of the west to supply foreign technological
capital due to the West’s desire to restrict the volume of investment solely
on the basis of the balance of payments issue. The second option was
development by invitation. This involved western assistance in the form of
multinational corporate investment, and management of third world economies.
Wallerstein says the inherent failure of this system resulted from the
process of third world nation’s competition to attract foreign investment
often consumed their investment surplus with transnational corporations dictating
the terms of economic exchange. The third option was self-reliance and
wallerstein defines this as a process by which the third world sought the
means of, “Establishing a system of state ownership within a capitalist world
economy. It may or may not mean improving the economic well being of the
majority of the population. It is merely a variant of classical mercantilism.
Ultimately Wallerstein argues that capitalism should be abolished and that
the UN should function as a socialist governmental body, under the notion of
a ‘substantive rationality’ to capitalism.(73) In
conclusion, this paper has attempted to address the historical economic
structural forces present in social relations and the effect of the economy
on long-term social change. Reich’s analysis of capitalism through the veil
of Marx’s Das Capital, illustrates that the market creates a form of economic
determinism to human nature because it is characterized by economic
self-interest. Weber argues that the structural forces of capitalism themselves
exist partially in the economic forces of production but also legitimately
stems from the cultural inheritance, of the doctrine of the protestant ethic
by the western tradition. Weber also argues that this was also a natural
process of power evolving into bureaucracy, and the inconsistencies in the
modes of western material progress stem from the routinization of western
bureaucratic authority. Wallerstein, who was educated by C Wright Mills, a
student of the weberian left school, imagines an innate dialectic brought on
by the technologically and militarily dominant west, in its relations and
requirements of the third world to supply its markets with cheap raw
material, due to the West’s historical process of consolidation of power.
Inherently world systems theory suggests that all forms of production in the
capitalist world economy inherently follow the rules of the capitalist
system. Weber asks us also not to forget the power of charisma, or the notion
of socialist state bureaucracy being far removed from the iron bureaucratic
cage of capitalism. In sum these theories illustrate the discursive themes of
the left and the central liberalists in their constructions of what
constitutes a moral discourse between market equality, and market inequity
and the essential ambivalence it has historically displayed for freedom. |
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