Chapter Eleven Theories of the Capitalist World-System Rémy Herrera

The national structures of capitalism operate and are reproduced locally in the rst instance, through a combination of a domestic market, where com- modities, capital and labour are mobile, and a corre- sponding set of state apparatuses. By contrast, what de nes the capitalist world-system is the dichotomy between the existence of a world market, integrated in all aspects except for labour (which is forced into an international quasi-immobility), and the absence of a single political order at a global level that is more than a multiplicity of state bodies governed by public international law and/or the violence of the balance of forces. It is the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of this asymmetry at work in the accu- mulation of capital, in terms of unequal relations of domination between nations and of exploitation between classes in particular, that the theoreticians of this capitalist world-system endeavour to con- ceptualise. The latter have in fact produced a com- prehensive theory whose object and concept is the modern world as a concrete socio-historical entity forming a system – that is to say, an assemblage (Greek systema), structured by complex relations of interdependence, of several elements of reality into a coherent, autonomous totality that situates them and gives them meaning.

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Among the representatives of this intellectual current, I shall (to restrict myself to the essentials) select four major authors: Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and André Gunder Frank. There seems to be no point in trying to extract a unitary position from their works, so vast are their elds of investigation and distinct their sources of inspiration – even if the impetus given by the Monthly Review team had a very marked in uence on all of them. It should nevertheless be noted that their scienti c approaches intersect, without ever fully coinciding, in their recourse to a common stock of theoretical references (basic Marxist concepts, but also the Braudelian one of world-economy, or the structural-CEPALian or “ECLACian”1 one of centre/ periphery, etc.); methodological premises (a holist explanatory model, a struc- tural analysis, a combination of history and theory, and so on); intellectual ambitions (a comprehensive representation of phenomena, an attempt to combine the economic, the social, and the political, etc.); and political aims (a radical critique of the planetary ravages of capitalism and US hegemony, a ‘worldist’ bias, the perspective of a postcapitalist society, etc.). In these conditions, situating these theoreticians, who are unclassi able in as much as each seems to constitute a sui generis category, vis-à-vis Marxism is far from easy. Amin has always said that he is a Marxist; and still does. But his œuvre, which has not uncritically drawn upon theories of imperialism and pioneering works on under-development like those of Raúl Prebisch or, more marginally, François Perroux, distances itself very clearly from the ‘orthodox corpus’ of Marxism. For his part, Wallerstein, who is in the tradition of Fer- nand Braudel and the Annales school, while also drawing some of his resources from Ilya Prigogine’s theory of so-called ‘dissipative structures’, proposes a free reading of Marxism which is so heretical that he seems to leave it behind. Accordingly, he may appropriately be regarded instead as a ‘systemsist’. As for Giovanni Arrighi, he belongs to the Marxist school of historical sociology of the world system. Meanwhile, André Gunder Frank – close to the writings of Paul Baran on the political economy of growth and certain Latin-American structuralists – is often ranged among radical ‘dependency theorists’, while the trajectory of his research, strongly but not exclusively in uenced by Marx- ism, soon led him to analyses of the world-system.

1 “ECLACian”, from ECLAC, or the Commission for Latin America and the Carib- bean (CEPAL in Spanish).

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