At 01/08/02 18:56 -0400, you wrote:
(From the late Jim Blaut's regrettably out-of-print "The National Question". Sharp readers will notice a strong affinity between Wallerstein's world systems perspective and the one put forward by Hardt-Negri in "Empire")
Wallerstein's group employs what it calls 'world system analysis'. This is a form of neo-Marxism distinguished --I employ caricature here, but not unfairly so-- by its insistence that the capitalist world system, at the global scale, determines all processes, such as politics, and all part-regions, such as states. This is very close to pure Hegelian holism. The capitalist world-system is not defined by its parts and their interrelations. Rather, this system is something greater than parts and relations, and it determines their nature, behaviour, and historical evolution. 'It' is not empirically identified, and thus closely resembles Hegel's undefinable 'world spirit' (and other undiscoverable entities of romantic philosophy, like the 'life force'). Marx's critique of Hegel's mystical and holistic theory of the state as might serve also as a critique of the metaphysics of 'world-system analysis'
What I immediately notice is absent in Blaut's summary of world system analysis, and his criticism, is that no one is talking about the world capitalist system being united by the marxian law of value.
This IMO is a indication of the weakness of the application of marxism to the current situation. The debates in the 70's and 80's about the uneven exchange of value were never definitively resolved.
Certainly Marx did not write centrally about how the law of value operates on the largest scale in conditions where there are great discrepancies in the level of the means of production. But it should not be impossible to do so.
The other weakness of the application of marxism which this critique may signal, is that marxism presumes a whole realm of socially reproductive activities that are not mediated by commodity exchange, but it often does not bother to discuss this.
Hence my first impression that the vagueness of the world system described by those whom Blaut criticises is the result of the weakness of linking theory with current practice. However it does not mean that in the era of advanced finance capital (also not highlighted in Blaut's crtitique here) there is not an objective basis for thinking that the power of individual nation states is being undermined. The advances of finance capital are the material base for the fuzzy and apparently idealized image of a world system. Theory needs to catch up with practice.
Chris Burford
London
