For Immanuel Wallerstein Remy Herrera

It was in 1992, when I was still a student, that I had the honor of meeting for the very first time Immanuel Wallerstein who was then giving a series of conferences within an interdisciplinary seminar taking place physically in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales (boulevard Rapail in Paris), especially frequented by progressive historians, philosophers or economists. For several years, I had already read – and deeply admired – the entirety of his work and even devoted to his masterpiece, The Capitalist World-Economy, one of my academic works. Happy to finally be able to listen to and see this giant of thought, I followed his Parisian lectures as regularly as possible, always dazzling with culture, knowledge and intellectual power. I remember him as a calm, reserved, elegant man. When it sometimes happened that certain listeners made criticisms of his theses – Immanuel Wallestein’s theses being often courageous and even risky, because they were also forward-looking –, he received these words without the slightest contempt, but with calm, modesty and, it seemed, a hint of disappointment at not having been fully understood as he wished. Subsequently, I had the chance to be able to count on his collaboration for a collective book that I coordinated (L’Empire en guerre, published in French just after the events of September 11, 2001) and to see him again on various occasions, in particular during the fourth edition of the Mumbai World Social Forum in 2004.

Immanuel Wallerstein sought to understand the reality of this historical system that is capitalism so as to conceptualise it globally, as a whole. Whereas Amin’s approach was explicitly an interpretation of the world-system in terms of historical materialism, Wallerstein’s ambition was seemingly the reverse: elements of Marxist analysis were to be integrated into a systems approach. In reality, as Wallerstein made clear, “[o]nce they are taken to be ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves ‘underdevelopment,’ indeed is based on it, [Marx’s theses] are not only valid, but they are revolutionary as well.”

In Immanuel Wallerstein’s works, the world-system perspective is explained by three main principles. The first is spatial – “the space of a world”: the unit of analysis to be adopted in order to study social behaviour is the worldsystem. The second is temporal – “the time of the long time”: world-systems are historical, in the form of integrated, autonomous networks of internal economic and political processes, whose sum total ensures unity and whose structures, while continuing to develop, basically remain the same. The third and final principle is analytical, in the framework of a coherent, articulated vision: “a way of describing the capitalist world-economy”, a singular world-system, as a systemic economic entity organising a division of labour, but without any overarching single political structure.

This is the system that Immanuel Wallerstein intended to explain not only in order to provide a structural analysis of it, but also in order to anticipate its transformation. Its whole force consists in its capacity to conceive the overall structure of the system as one of generalized economy and to conceive the processes of state formation and the policies of hegemony and class alliances as forming the texture of that economy.

For Immanuel Wallerstein, the capitalist world-economy displays certain distinctive features. The first peculiarity of this social system, based on generalised value, is its incessant, self-maintained dynamic of capital accumulation on an ever greater scale, propelled by those who possess the means of production. Contrary to Fernand Braudel, for whom the world since antiquity has been divided into several co-existing world-economies, “worlds for themselves” and “matrices of European and then global capitalism”, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, the European is the only world-economy, constructed from the sixteenth century onwards: around 1500, a particular world-economy, which at that time occupied a large part of Europe, could provide a framework for the full development of the capitalist mode of production, which requires the form of a world-economy in order to be established. Once consolidated, and according to its own internal logic, this world-economy extended in space, integrating the surrounding world-empires as well as the neighbouring mini-systems. At the end of the nineteenth century, the capitalist world-economy ended up extending over the whole planet. Thus, for the very first time in history, there was one single historical system.

Explaining the division of labour within the capitalist world-system between centre and periphery makes it possible to account for the mechanisms of surplus appropriation on a world scale by the bourgeois class, through unequal exchange realised by multiple market chains ensuring control of workers and monopolisation of production. In this framework, the existence of a semiperiphery is inherent in the system, whose economic-political hierarchy is constantly being altered.

The inter-state system that duplicates the capitalist world-economy is, however, always led by a hegemonic state, whose domination, temporary and contested, has historically been imposed by means of “thirty-year wars”. Like those that it succeeded (the United Provinces in the seventeenth century and England in the nineteenth century), the U.S. hegemony established since 1945 will come to an end.

Immanuel Wallerstein paid minute attention both to the cyclical rhythms (the “microstructure”) and the secular trends (the “macrostructure”) operative in historical capitalism, which stamp it with alternating periods of expansion and stagnation and, above all, to recurrent major crises: historically, capitalism entered a structural crisis in the first years of the twentieth century, and will probably experience its end as a historical system during the twenty-first century.