Download Neomarxism and Inequality

31º Encontro Anual da ANPOCS, de 22 a 26 de outubro de 2007, Caxambu, MG
ST 33: Teoria Social: a atualidade brasileira
Neomarxism and Inequality
Manuela Boatcă, Ph.D.
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (KU) / IUPERJ, Brazil
2
Introduction
From among many Neo-Marxist approaches, several strands of dependency theory
as well as the more recent world-systems analysis have tackled the issue of social
inequality as one to be analyzed on a global level, thus viewing class struggle as a
conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy (rather than
social strata within a state). Consequently, they have been among the first approaches to radically critique classical notions of social inequality, by insisting that the
nation-state was not the appropriate unit of analysis at which inequality relations are
shaped. However, both perspectives have struggled with their marginal position
within mainstream social theory and were thus unable to permanently influence the
theorization of social inequality. Recent strands of postcolonial theory, especially the
so-called Latin American modernity/coloniality perspective, have best incorporated
the correctives formulated by the two neo-Marxist perspectives.
The paper argues that the creative synthesis between postcolonial social theory
on the one hand, and dependency and world-systems analysis on the other represents one of the most promising models for assessing global inequality – both structurally and historically. To this end, I focus on the impact which the replacement of
the standard conceptualization of inequality as social difference – largely premised
on a class structure in a national context, with the one of colonial difference – centered on the reorganization of differentiation criteria along racial and ethnic lines in
European colonies as part of the inequality structure of the modern colonial worldsystem – exerts on the scope of theories of social inequality. It is argued that, by
means of this apparent conceptual twist, both Latin American decolonial thought and
Indian subaltern studies systematically factor race, ethnicity, and regional origin
(alongside the classical dimensions of class, status, or social milieu) in the analysis of
inequality relations and thus manage to account for the global consequences which
the expansion of Western modernity has had for the hierarchization of races and of
systems of economic, political, and religious organization both in the West (across
the historical variability of the term) and in non-Western areas.
3
1. Challenges of the European self-image
In terms of delimiting the starting-point of modern epistemology, both the humanities and the social sciences have long appropriated the 16th century Copernican
revolution in astronomy as indicator of a more general paradigmatic shift, to be repeatedly used both as a metaphor for and as a marker of the modern world view
(Tarnas 1997: 552). To Sigmund Freud, the Copernican turn was the first one of the
three severe blows that “the universal narcissism of men” (Freud 1955: 6f.) had suffered at the hands of the researches of science: the initial cosmological blow dealt to
the human self-love by the realization that the Earth was not the center of the universe had been followed by the biological blow inflicted on humanity’s claim to divine
descent by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, and completed by
the (arguably) most wounding, psychological blow incurred by Freud’s own discovery
of the unconscious, attesting to the fact that “the ego is not master in its own house”
(Freud 1955: 11).
Freud’s insight itself was considered a turning point in the intellectual development of modernity. For philosopher and psychologist Richard Tarnas, it marks the
systematic engagement with processes of alienation that had begun with the Copernican turn as the actual onset of modernity – what he calls, and I quote, “modern humanity's birth out of the ancient-medieval, cosmic-ecclesiastical womb” (Tarnas
1997: 552). The cosmological alienation thus experienced was seconded, in Tarnas’s
view, by the ontological one manifest in Descartes’ schism between the conscious
human subject and the unconscious material universe and, finally, by the epistemological one inherent in Kant’s recognition of the human mind’s subjective structuring
of reality (Tarnas 1997: 525). Such hallmarks of modernity as the isolation of the
modern ego in a disenchanted world, the Cartesian program of domination over nature and the derived notion of science as empiricism are therefore collectively traced
back to the displacement of humanity from the cosmological center and the various
levels of alienation stemming from it.
From the point of view of postcolonial theory, this portrayal of the epistemological trajectory of Western thought fails to account for another severe blow to the
modern self-consciousness: the European “discovery” of America. While, as Walter
Mignolo has pointed out, the limits of known geography had until that time coincided
with the limits of humanity (Mignolo 2000: 283), both the material reality and the con-
4
cept of the New World emerging in the long sixteenth century called for a New
(physical and cognitive) Geography that would extend humanity to the space of the
colonized. As a result, there evolved a vast array of delimitation strategies situating
the Others of the modern Occident on the lower ranks within the hierarchies of race,
ethnicity, systems of belief, socio-economic organization, and methods of labor control that would determine the relationship between the old and the new world and
shape their respective self-definitions for centuries to come (Quijano/Wallerstein
1992, Mignolo 1995, 2000).
2. The Problem. Sociology of Inequality as a Case Study
In labelling this breach in the European self-perception the geopolitical blow to
Occidental narcissism, I contend that it was through its systematic omission from
among the prerequisites of global inequality that the categories of analysis the European social sciences have used for the study of social reality could claim universal
relevance. Accordingly, the main challenge on the way to a social theory that will be
both transcultural and “cosmopolitan” (Randeria 1999, Santos 2005) lies in “unthinking”/“indisciplining” the present theoretical models so as to make them reflect the impact that the geopolitical displacement of the 16th century has had on European
thought categories.
The European modernity’s repertoire of promises is usually drawn from key
moments in Western history and their symbolic role within a linear trajectory that, after the “overcoming of feudalism”, only features positively connoted entries: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution thus embody the attainability of the humanism, rationality, equality,
scientificity and progress. The ideals thus postulated consequently became the criteria by which the gradual reduction of social inequalities – the guiding principle of rational social organization – should be measured. For the theorization of social inequality, this meant fitting Karl Marx’s theory of class antagonism and Max Weber’s
complementary three-layered model of social stratification along the lines of class,
status and party to the entire world. Thus a one-size-fits-all model was posited in
which inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, religious denomination, age, and sexual
orientation represent “new” categories, the theoretical importance of which has only
5
gradually and reluctantly been acknowledged by mainstream social science toward
the end of the twentieth century.
It was however only in the past decade that this classical notion of social inequality, derived from a unilinear understanding of social evolution, has been denounced as “methodological nationalism” (Smith 1995, Beck 2004, Heidenreich
2005). Besides, the criticism was triggered by research in apparently unrelated fields:
On the one hand, ever more studies on gender issues have been arguing for the necessity of factoring race, ethnicity and regional origin in the analysis of gender disparity (Becker-Schmidt 2003, Klinger/Axeli-Knapp 2005), thus pointing to the insufficiency of the standard dimensions of class, status, educational level, and religious
denomination for explaining social inequality. On the other hand, dependency and
world-systems studies that situate inequality on a global level and view class struggle
as a conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy had long
cautioned against positing nation-states as the unit of analysis for inequality relations,
as do current stratification models which attempt to explain inequality in terms of the
class- and status-derived categories of social milieu, life style and everyday life conduct.
2.1. Dependency Theory
Arising in Latin America in the early 1960s in reaction to the failure of the United
Nations’ economic program to promote development, and the modernization school’s
inability to explain the ensuing economic stagnation in the region, it started by taking
a neo-Marxist position in explaining social change in developing countries. As such, it
claimed that modernization theories represented nothing more than a cold war “ideology disguised as science” (Dos Santos 1971: 236) and was used in order to justify
the intervention of the United States in Third World affairs.
Understood by many as a continuation of and/or counterpart of earlier theories of
“imperialism” (Giddens 1989, Portes 1976) as proposed by Lenin and J.A. Hobson,
dependency theory addressed the issue of imperialism from a standpoint usually ignored by orthodox Marxism: that of the subordinate nations or of “the periphery”
(Prebisch 1950). Thus, dependency theorists characterized modern capitalism as a
center-periphery, (i.e. asymmetrical) relationship between the developed, industrialized West and the underdeveloped, agricultural Third World. Understanding this relationship was, in their view, not an issue of mapping the transition from “traditional” to
6
“modern” – a distinction which the dependency school rejected. Rather, the modern
world’s center-periphery structure mirrored an underlying international division of labor, established as early as 1492 with the advent of colonialism, and still maintained
today through mechanisms of economic domination. The economies of the colonized
countries were reorganized according to the needs of the colonial society, and ended
up producing one or two items that served the latter’s interests. Hence, in sharp contrast with modernization theory, the dependency school did not view underdevelopment as a “stage” previous to development, but rather as a “discrete historical process through which economies that have already achieved a high level of development have not necessarily passed” (Furtado 1964:129). It can then be said that, just
as center (or core) and periphery are relational notions, existing only simultaneously,
so development and underdevelopment are only different aspects of the same phenomenon, not different stages in a continuum. Moreover, underdevelopment is not
the natural condition the modernization school liked to presuppose, but an artifact
created by the long history of colonial domination in Third World countries (So 1990:
97) – the “development of underdevelopment”, as Andre Gunder Frank put it (Frank
1966), in what would later become a much celebrated phrase. Accordingly, studying
self-contained societies, as modernization theories did, could not lead to a valid explanation of social change, because all exogenous factors of change – such as the
momentous experience of colonialism – were left out of the analysis. Also, since the
development of the U.S. and Western Europe had been based on the underdevelopment of the Third World, foreign policies from these countries to Latin
America could only result in the latter’s falling further and further behind. The issue of
inequality, therefore, was one to be assessed at the global level as well, i.e., between
centers and peripheries, and not within individual societies.
Dependency theorists saw the only concrete solution to the termination of dependency situations in Third World countries in severing the ties with the core and
choosing a socialist path of autonomous development, on the model of China and
Cuba, which had accomplished a socialist revolution without first experiencing a
bourgeois one. This was in keeping with their view that the Latin American national
bourgeoisie was incapable of liberating the forces of production because it had
emerged as a creation and a tool of imperialism. Thus its complicity with the bourgeoisie in the core actually contributed to the upholding of underdevelopment rather
than in any way containing it.
7
Thanks to Andre Gunder Frank and the American journal Monthly Review, these
views spread fairly quickly to the United States, where discontent with modernization
theory generally and American imperialism more particularly was growing as a result
of racial unrest and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By the time dependency theory became widely known in the U.S., many of the younger American sociologists no longer viewed capitalism as a source of progress, but as the main agent
of poverty in most of the world (cf. Chirot 1981).
Critical voices started making themselves heard almost at the same time. While
the dependency approach was seen as a welcome departure from “uniform” evolutionary and developmentalist perspectives, and as helpful in understanding the historical origins of underdevelopment, critics felt it did too little in terms of providing an
understanding of alternatives to this situation (Portes 1976: 79). Other policy implications, as well as methodological and conceptual issues were also addressed (So
1990: 131ff., Sanderson 1995: 216f., Love 1996: 198f.).
After facing criticism of rigidity and pessimism with respect to the possibilities of
development in dependent contexts, of overgeneralization about underdeveloped
societies, of regarding dependency as a general cause of poverty in the periphery
and as the necessary (and sufficient) condition for development in the core, some
dependency theorists brought forth historically more specific accounts of dependency
situations which also allowed for a wider range of responses and solutions. To that
end, internal factors of change were taken into consideration, instead of the dominance factor being the only determinant, as in previous theories. Critics have labeled
the original theory “classical”, “strong” or “hard” and the subsequent version “new”,
“weak” or “soft” dependency theory (So 1990, Sanderson 1995). The former, associated chiefly with Andre Gunder Frank (1966, 1967, 1969), who advocated the theory
in the (Anglophone) core countries, and with Samir Amin (1976), who championed it
in Francophone areas and especially Africa, considered dependency an insurmountable obstacle to economic development and held that peripheral countries could
never benefit from the influence of core capitalism. The latter version, worked out
mainly by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Cardoso 1973, Cardoso/Faletto 1979), combined the notions of dependency and development, thus yielding ”associateddependent development”, which is conceived as occurring function of the rise of multinational corporations. Since some amount of development is possible with the help
of the industrial capital invested by these corporations in the peripheral country, this
8
could constitute a viable alternative for the states that do not want to take the chance
of a socialist revolution.
With a research focus restricted to the peripheral countries that emerged out of
the decolonization processes following independence movements and World War II
and an exclusive focus on the periphery, dependency theory stops short of analyzing
some of the consequences equally arising from dependency situations, like their impact on the core states, their importance for socialist ones, or the more general implications they have for capitalism. Together with the criticisms briefly listed above,
these shortcomings led to this approach´ marginal status within the sociological
canon, both in terms of its explanatory potential for processes of social change, as
well as for issues of social inequality, for the analysis of which it did not possess a
coherent theoretical framework.
2.2. World-Systems Analysis
Dissidence proved a fruitful locus of enunciation for theories of social change. Not
only was the dependency school increasingly considered the “victor” in the debate
with modernization theorists, but commitment to its world-view spawned concern for
the issues it was too limited to solve itself.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s modern world system, the “best-known historical
model of world capitalism developing the implications of dependency” (Love 1996:
200), has been said to have originated out of “marrying to a sensibility informed by
‘Third World’ radicalism, three major traditions in Western social science, all of them
enunciated in opposition to the dominant strain of Anglo-American liberalism and
positivism. These traditions are German historical economy, the Annales school in
French historiography, and Marxism” (Goldfrank 1988: 216).
Wallerstein defined his own condition of dissidence mainly along methodological lines, themselves of course subject to, and arising from, ideological constraints: ”In the period since 1945, there have been a growing number of scholars
who became unhappy with Establishment social science (including of course history)
on the grounds that its methodological imperatives (whether they were nomothetists
or idiographers) had pushed them de facto into the study of the infinitely small in time
and space, and that thereby the problems, the realities of large-scale, long-term social change had become eliminated from the purview of scholarship” (Wallerstein
9
2000: 151). He listed dependency theory and world-systems analysis in the same line
with civilizational analysis, world history, historical sociology and international political
economy: “Let me call this the family of dissidents, in the sense that they all were
dissenting from the views that had dominated, still largely dominate, the universities”(idem).
Joining both neoevolutionism and the dependency school in their rejection of
modernization theory, Wallerstein considered the developmentalist view of social
change as nothing more than a culmination of the only argument underlying both universalistic and particularistic claims to truth – the assumption that the individual society should be the basic unit of analysis: “Everyone seemed to agree that the world
was composed of multiple ‘societies’. They disagreed about whether it was the case
that all societies pursued similar paths down the road of history (albeit at differing
rates) or that each society went its own historic way. They disagreed whether society
in question took the form of a ‘state’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, but in any case it was
some politico-cultural unit” (Wallerstein 1979a: 153).
But this is an ahistorical view, Wallerstein argued, since “the concept of society
[…] reifies and therefore crystallises social phenomena whose real significance lies
not in their solidity but precisely in their fluidity and malleability” (Wallerstein 2000:
119). Rather than a tangible reality to be postulated, “society” is primarily a rhetorical
construct. This implies, however, that all theories of social change having individual
societies as their basic unit of analysis end up making “comparative measurements
of noncomparable and nonautonomous entities” (Wallerstein 2000: 107).
However, if we do not live in a modernizing, but rather in a capitalist world, then,
according to Wallerstein, it is not the current sovereign states we should be concerned about. “Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world-economy and
not of the nation-states. It is a misreading of the situation to claim that it is only in the
twentieth century that capitalism has become ‘worldwide’, although this claim is frequently made in various writings, particularly by Marxists” (Wallerstein 2000 : 87).
Obviously, then, the unit of analysis should not be such a value-laden, ahistorical
rhetorical construct. World-systems analysis instead suggested replacing the term
“society” with “historical system”, which is both devoid of any connotations that would
link it to states or any politico-cultural units, as well as indicative of the unity of historical social science, by being both systemic and historical. “We take the defining
10
characteristic of a social system to be the existence within it of a division of labor,
such that the various sectors or areas are dependent upon economic exchange with
others for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of the area. Such
economic exchange can clearly exist without a common political structure and even
more obviously without sharing the same culture” (Wallerstein 2000: 74f.).
Consequently, a world-economy is a system whose cultural groupings are not politically unified. The lack of a political structure handling the redistribution of surplus
means that the accumulated surplus can only be redistributed unequally through the
market, mainly in favor of those able to achieve a temporary monopoly. Hence, a
world-economy’s mode of produc-tion is capitalist. Around 1500, the “modern worldsystem” was born out of the consolidation of a world economy, allowing for the first
time the full development and economic predominance of market trade. “This was the
system called capitalism. Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division
of labor but multiple polities and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin. One
does not cause the other. We are merely defining the same indivisible phenomenon
by different characteristics” (Wallerstein 2000 75f.). The emerging world-economy
expanded by its inner logic – unequal distribution of profit in favour of monopolists in
the market networks – and in time came to cover the entire globe.
According to Wallerstein, the fallacy inherent to the unilinear view of evolution,
and which, surprisingly, underlay both Smithian and Marxist conceptions of social
transformations, was to consider the defining feature of capitalism to be the predominance of wage labor in a given society. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx had viewed
capitalism as essentially competitive and involving free producers, free labor, and
free commodities; so both liberals and Marxists tended to judge a state as less capitalist, the more its work situation departed from this model.
But wage labor, Wallerstein argued, does not represent the statistical norm in the
modern world, so we cannot classify states on a degree-of-capitalism scale by the
amount of it they display. On the contrary, the defining feature of capitalism as a system – analyzed not in terms of nation-states, but in terms of a world-economy of
which states are functional parts – is a mixture of wage and non-wage labor, of areas
of commodified and non-commodified goods, and areas of alienable and nonalienable forms of property and capital. “When a deduced ‘norm’ turns out not to be
the statistical norm, that is, when the situation abounds with exceptions (anomalies,
residues), then we ought to wonder whether the definition of the norm serves any
11
useful function. World-system analysis argues that the capitalist world-economy is a
particular historical system. Therefore if we want to ascertain the norms, that is, the
mode of functioning of this concrete system, the optimal way is to look at the historical evolution of the system […] The anomalies now become not exceptions to be explained away but patterns to be analysed” (Wallerstein 2000 [1987]: 143).
On account of his relativization of the importance of free labor, free ownership,
and commodification, Wallerstein’s notion of capitalism has been felt by many as “in
some respects very ‘un-Marxist’” (see Sanderson 1995: 140). Facing criticism both
from the right and from the left side – too Marxist for some, not Marxist enough for
others (cf. Goldfrank 1988), Wallerstein’s ambition has actually been to revise Marxism by reinterpreting it “without the blinders imposed by taking the nation-state as the
basic unit of analysis” (Goldfrank 1988: 221).
Explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as well as the uneven development of capitalism in different countries has been, in Wallerstein’s view, one of
the major problems Marxism could not solve, and which a world-systems approach
could clarify. By equating industrialism with capitalism, Marxists failed to recognize
that what essentially characterizes capitalism is that it is “production for profit in a
market” (Wallerstein 2000 [1974]: 84), but not necessarily industrial production.
Wallerstein therefore refused to see the Industrial Revolution as a significant event in
the development of capitalism, because the main characteristics of this mode of production had been present in Europe for more than two centuries at the time when
England experienced its Industrial Revolution:
“What was happening in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is that
over a large geographical area going from Poland in the northeast westwards and
southwards throughout Europe and including large parts of the Western Hemisphere
as well, there grew up a world-economy with a single division of labor within which
there was a world market, for which men produced largely agricultural products for
sale and profit. I would think the simplest thing to do would be to call this ‘agricultural
capitalism’” (Wallerstein 2000: 85).
Not only does this focus on production render Marx’s own distinction between merchant (involving only exchange of commodities) and industrial capital (focussing on
production) unnecessary, but it also resolves the issue of seeing the predominance of
12
wage labor as essential to capitalism: “[…] in the era of agricultural capitalism, wagelabor is only one of the modes in which labor is recruited and recompensed in the
labor market. Slavery, coerced cash-crop production (my name for the so-called second feudalism), share-cropping, and tenancy are all alternative modes” (idem).
Consequently, the “second serfdom”, slavery, and all other forms of non-wage labor “are not to be regarded as anomalies in a capitalist system” (idem), because they
all involve a relationship between employer and laborer in which labor-power can be
bought and sold. This is quite unlike the situation between serf and lord during the
Middle Ages, where neither the economy was oriented toward a world-market, nor
was labor-power a commodity.
While the capitalist world-economy is, as the name indicates, a global one, the
only political entities possessing the power to affect the market are the nation-states.
Whenever local capitalist classes pursuing their economic interests within this single
world market found that it no longer maximized their profit, they tried to influence it by
the use of non-market devices – that is, by asking the state to impose new restrictions on the global market. At the beginning of the capitalist world-economy, the interests of several different local groups converged in northwest Europe and diverged
sharply in other parts of the continent. This led to strong state machineries in the former region, and very weak in the latter, and thus resulted in the operation of “unequal
exchange” – enforced by strong core states on weak peripheral ones (cf. Wallerstein
2000: 86).
The notion of “unequal exchange” (Emmanuel 1972) had been a defining element
in the Marxist version of dependency theory (cf. Love 1999: 200), in which it had
been taken to mean that the amount of labor needed in the periphery to pay for
goods exchanged with the core greatly extended the amount of core labor involved in
producing those goods. World-systems analysis, in turn, viewed unequal exchange
as a set of mechanisms that continually reproduced the basic core-periphery division
of labor itself (see Hopkins/Wallerstein 1982: 48), but there is disagreement as to the
nature of this set of mechanisms. In addition to the core-periphery hierarchy proposed by the dependency school, Wallerstein introduced the notion of the
semiperiphery, to which are assigned both an economic and a political role, of which
the political one of mediating between the exploiters and the exploited is more important: “[…] a world economy as an economy would function every bit as well without a
semi-periphery. But it would be far less politically stable, for it would mean a polar-
13
ized world-system. The existence of the third category means precisely that the upper stratum is not faced with the unified opposition of all the others because the middle stratum is both exploited and exploiter” (Wallerstein 2000: 91).
There are two modifications of Marxist theory in this approach. First, the class division between capitalists and workers did not occur all over the world, but instead
there emerged an international division of labor involving appropriation of surplusvalue of the whole world-economy by core areas. Second, this was not only true of
industrial capitalism, but for agricultural capitalism as well.
“Accidents” in the history, geography, and ecology of the particular countries are
the ones initially deciding the part these countries will play in the structural hierarchy
described above. Once given, though, the differences between the three positions in
the hierarchy are subsequently accentuated and institutionalized by the workings of
the world-market.
In the sixteenth century, at the time of the emergence of the European worldeconomy, it was Northwest Europe who enjoyed all these privileges of chance. As a
consequence, it became the core of the system, the location of mass-market industries and international and local commerce in the hands of an indigenous bourgeoisie, and specialized in agricultural production of higher skill levels on medium-sized,
yeoman-owned land. Tenancy and wage-labor turned out to be the adequate modes
of labor control for these types of economic activity. Politically, the standing armies of
mercenaries and corrupt administrations were the essential elements in the development of a patrimonial state bureaucracy working primarily for an absolute monarch.
This resulted in relatively strong state systems, later to become a function of the
weakness of state-machineries in the peripheral areas (cf. Wallerstein 1979b, 2000).
Eastern Europe (with the exception of Russia) and Spanish America became the
system’s periphery, the locus of monocultural (grains, bullion, wood, cotton, sugar)
economies producing on large estates under slavery and coerced cash-crop labor. In
contrast to the core countries, the interests of the capitalist landowners in the periphery diverged sharply from those of the local commercial bourgeoisie, which they
sought to eliminate and subsequently replace by a politically uninvolved class of outside merchants. The absence of the strong state was thus a critical feature of the periphery, making it all the more vulnerable for outside intervention.
The Christian Mediterranean area emerged as the new world-system’s
semiperiphery, specializing in high-cost, quality industrial production and international
14
banking. It engaged in little export and used sharecropping as a mode of labor control in agricultural production. Politically, the semi-periphery was in the middle, with
some states, such as Spain and the northern Italian city-states experiencing the decline of state authority, and some others (such as southern France) resisting the expansion of central authority (cf. Wallerstein 1979b: 39).
Since the capitalist world-economy is a historical system, it has a life cycle, meaning that at some point it must cease to function as a consequence of the aggregated
results of these (eventually paralizing) contradictions (cf. Wallerstein 2000). Among
the many structural sources Wallerstein identified for the current crisis of capitalism
are what he called the economic squeeze (the capitalist world-economy now covers
the entire globe, so there are no more areas to be proletarianized and subsequently
used as sources of cheap labor), the political squeeze (the interests of any given entrepreneur as a competitor tend to run counter to their interests as a member of
class), and the ideological squeeze (the costs of sustaining the vastly expanding
middle strata have exploded world-wide, but they cannot be cut back without jeopardizing the significant political support the present system has received from these
strata).
Thus, in the end, Wallerstein’s analysis turns out to be much less “un-Marxist”
than its detractors had tried to present it, and just as evolutionary as Marxism itself.
Wallerstein’s essential message is that – apart from capitalism representing progress
– the major theses of Marxism are still valid today, and, once they are applied to the
capitalist world-economy, rather than to nation-states, there have been no events in
world history for which Marxism is unable to account: “As long as Marx’s ideas are
taken to be theses about processes that occur primarily within state boundaries and
that involve primarily urban wage-earning industrial workers working for private industrial bourgeois, then these ideas will be easily demonstrated to be false, misleading,
and irrelevant – and to lead us down wrong political paths. Once they are taken to be
ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves ‘underdevelopment’, indeed is based on it, they are not only valid, but they are revolutionary
as well” (Wallerstein 1991a: 161).
15
3. Modernity, Coloniality, Subalternity. On the Necessity for Synthesis
Instead of the conventional approach to inequality, which tends to focus
merely on the unequal distribution of resources along vertical lines while neglecting
both international disparities and the power component involved, German sociologist
Reinhard Kreckel (2004) has proposed a “political sociology of social inequality” on
the basis of a core-periphery metaphor. Built upon arguments derived from dependency theory, this model premises the North-South-divide as the main antagonism of
the present world, and accordingly claims the world society as the appropriate unit of
analysis of both distributive and relational inequalities (Kreckel 2004: 45; 50). His,
nevertheless, is a methodological solution to what is regularly perceived as a methodological problem, and therefore not meant to question or transcend the limits of the
Enlightenment tradition on which classical theories of social inequality have been
based. However much it may sensitize for the structural nature of peripheral conditions within asymmetric power relations, Kreckel’s approach thus fails to address disparities stemming from the subaltern position of social actors in the epistemic hierarchy of global power structures as well as the systematic bias between the roles
awarded hegemonic and peripheral languages and cultures in what counts as valid
knowledge production. In other words, it critiques modernity from within modernity
(Mignolo 2000: 96) even as it acknowledges the generation of alterity as constitutive
to it.
3.1. Postcolonial approaches
Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 formulation of the tenets of world-systems analysis was a radical step. His was a dissident position not only because it criticized and
questioned basic assumptions of social science, but mainly because it did not stop at
suggesting that they should be revised. It claimed the necessity of unthinking those
assumptions (Wallerstein 1991f.). It contended that the categories we used in order
to conduct social research were historically formed and ideologically biased, and that,
rather than revise, we should discard most of them. As such, it was not a new theory,
but “a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all
of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century”, not a new paradigm of
16
historical social science, but “a call for a debate about the [existing] paradigm”
(Wallerstein 2000: 129; 148).
Not surprisingly, the merits of this approach have been acknowledged more readily by scholars located in the periphery of the world-system (see Goldfrank 1988: 208)
than by those from the core. Given the major role played by dependency theory – a
“peripheral” approach – in the emergence of world-systems analysis, the latter also
entails a heightened awareness for the significance of structural positions within the
system, indeed it is based on it.
Nevertheless, it was from a periphery-based perspective that Wallerstein’s model
has been denounced as being itself a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism, for the
very reason that it is enunciated from within the core (see Mignolo 2000: 314), as well
as for its incapacity to adequately explain the role played by the cultural dimension in
the capitalist world-economy (Grosfoguel 2000; Grosfoguel, forthcoming). Thus, in a
recent attempt at modifying world-systems analysis from the perspective of postcolonial criticism, Walter Mignolo observed that Wallerstein’s framework does not take
into account the fact that the “planetary rearticulation of the sixteenth century” (Mignolo 2000: 55) which established Western Europe as the core of the modern worldsystem in the first place was, at the same time, a powerful machine for subalternizing
knowledge.
Eurocentrism, Mignolo argued, was the perspective of knowledge which emerged
due to the establishment of Western hegemony as a global model of power. As the
world was partitioned into continents, the consolidation and expansion of the capitalist world-economy was not the only operation at work. Parallel to it, the ongoing colonization of new areas enforced a classification of the planet with respect to its degree
of Occidentalism, whose aim it was “to transform differences into values” (Mignolo
2001: 13). Thus, to the extent that the world-system became modern, it also became
increasingly colonial, articulating “colonial differences” such as racial, ethnic and
class hierarchies as part of its self-definition. Epistemologically, the outcome of this
categorial reshuffling mirrored the new international division of labor between core
and periphery: the former became the location of modernity, from where the world
started being classified, described, and studied, while the latter engendered coloniality, where the modern world’s epistemological power could be wielded.
Postcolonial criticism’s main contribution to a widening of the scope of worldsystem analysis is the insight that Eurocentrism’s long-lasting global hegemony can-
17
not be explained by the workings of capitalism alone, as is the case for the modern
world-system’s economic and political dimensions, and that an experience like that of
coloniality was needed in order to establish and maintain this perspective of knowledge. World-systems analysis, with its acknowledgment of the mixture of different
modes of production making up the capitalist world-economy, does justice only to the
economic aspect of the structural heterogeneity. However, as long as the cultural
component involved in its formation is considered a mere superstructural phenomenon of the underlying material base, world-systems analysis will lack a powerful analytical tool for examining the ways in which the system’s structuring and reproduction
are a function of the reproduction of its ideologies.
For postcolonial theories, therefore, the glossing over of critical disparities of
the modern world in the North Atlantic social scientific discourse is a central concern.
In this vein, the abstract universalism of Enlightenment thought represents a strategy
for dealing with the geopolitical blow that the Occidental self-image suffered as a result of the fundamental experience of alterity posed by the discovery of the New
World. The idea of a universal history subsuming the whole of mankind under one
“project of (Western) modernity” with identical stages and goals provided both the
legitimating rhetoric for the further colonial expansion and the epistemological basis
for subsequent macronarratives, the starting point and yardstick of which was Western Europe. The experience of otherness was thus inverted and transferred to those
(colonized) parts of the world that had been conceived as the reverse of the modern
and as such embodied the particular – that is, the necessary counterpart to the European universal (Kozlarek 2005). By virtue of the growing European claim to power,
the contingent conditions under which the universalizing paradigm of Western modernity had emerged – namely, its “local history” – were obscured, while both its selfdefinition and its outside perception were shaped by a sequence of “global designs”
(Mignolo 2000) – Christianity, the civilizing mission, development, or globalization –
the common denominator of which was being rooted in the Western European experience. Against this backdrop, the methodological nationalism that European theorists indict represents just another form of particularism, which, on account of being
articulated from privileged positions in the global power structure, can be and has
been passed off as universal. Beside the core-periphery metaphor, postcolonial studies therefore often employ the silence or blindness metaphor, which points to the systematic disregard of those marginalized social groups with a colonial background in
18
hegemonic discourses. Through their manifold – economic, social, political, but also
racial and religious – marginalization, these social groups – labeled “subaltern”
(Spivak 1988) in the wake of Gramsci – fall out of recorded history completely
(Prakash 1994: 1482, Trouillot 2005, Mignolo 2000), and are thus unlike both Gramsci’s propertyless workers and Marx’s Lumpenproletariat. As a result, the dimensions
along which they have experienced inequity throughout history are absent from
Western theoretical production, just as the greater part of the periphery is silent in
terms of knowledge production. Instances of consistent neglect captured by the notion of silencing range from the playing down of the expulsion of the Jews and Moors
from Spain in Western accounts of 1492, through the conspicuous absence of the
Haitian revolution from canonical (i.e., North American and European) historiography,
and up to the construction of Africans as “people without history” – but many more
could be added.
In this respect, the main task of a postcolonial re-reading of history would consist in revealing the global consequences which the expansion of Western modernity
has had for the hierarchization of races and of systems of economic, political, and
religious organization, as well as for the subalternization of intellectual production in
non-Western areas. In terms of a transcultural and cosmopolitan theory of social
stratification, this above all requires replacing the conceptualization of inequality as
social difference, largely premised on a class structure, with one capable of explaining the reorganization of differentiation criteria yielding the racial and ethnic structure
of European colonies. The notion of colonial difference has been employed to this
very end both within Indian Subaltern Studies and Latin American postcolonial literature, but given a different scope within each. While Partha Chatterjee (1993) developed the term to apply to an analysis of the racial practices of the colonial state in
India as different from the modern (British) state, Walter Mignolo (1995) advanced it
as the common denominator of the worldwide phenomenon of coloniality that, according to Anibal Quijano, capitalism as a global model of power had installed alongside and in complicity with modernity (Quijano 2000a). For Quijano, the evolutionist
notion that human civilization advanced through a unilinear sequence of stages leading up to the Western model of capitalist modernity and the dualist view that differences between Europeans and non-Europeans could be traced back to insuperable
natural categories such as primitive-civilized, irrational-rational, traditional-modern,
represented the foundational myths behind the propagation of Eurocentrism and the
19
rhetoric legitimating the establishment of Western hegemony. The subsequent consolidation and expansion of the capitalist world-economy had thus gone hand in hand
with a classification of geographical regions with respect to their degree of Europeanness and the setting up of functional hierarchies corresponding to this criterion.
This is to say that, to the extent that the world-system had become modern, it had
also become increasingly colonial, articulating “colonial differences” in the form of
racial, ethnic and class hierarchies as part of its self-definition. The resulting international division of labor between core and periphery therefore mirrored not only economic and political differences, but at the same time asserted cultural and epistemological divides that justified the presence of modernity and at the same time the location of capital accumulation, political control, and scientific study of the rest of the
world in the core, while the coloniality of economic and state power, epistemological
knowledge, and ontological inferiority was confined to the periphery. As the necessary but hidden counterpart of modernity, coloniality is thus seen as having engendered throughout the period of Western colonial rule a threefold process of classification: in relations of exploitation between capital and labor; in relations of domination
between metropolitan and peripheral states, and in the production of subjectivities
and knowledges. Far from being the homogeneous and coherent totality to which
uniform processes of change from traditional to the modern eventually lead, capitalism is thus revealed as a historically and structurally heterogeneous global structure
of power relations, encompassing various peoples, cultural histories, and relations of
production in diachronic or synchronic arrangements (Quijano 2000b: 553). At the
same time, it is this spatial and temporal concurrence of the construction of ethnic
and racial hierarchies on the one hand, and the setting up of the international division
of labor, on the other – i.e., the complicity between modernity and coloniality – that
accounts for the persistence of the latter after the process of administrative decolonization and the continued reproduction of its logic at the political, economic and epistemic level.
This conceptualization of coloniality as modernity’s invisible foil is precisely
what allows for a convergence between postcolonial studies on the one hand and
dependency theory and world-systems analysis on the other. While both have
emerged out of a criticism of Western hegemony and Eurocentrism, their almost mutually exclusive explanations for these phenomena – cultural history in the case of
postcolonial studies, the capitalist world-economy for the world-systems approach –
20
have led them on divergent paths in the analysis of colonial differences. Yet, as many
theorists from both “camps” have pointed out in recent years (Dirlik 1994: 352, Hall
2002: 243, Grosfoguel 2002: 213ff.) the solution for overcoming this false dilemma,
and with it, the equally false division of scholarly labor between the humanities and
the social sciences in the analysis of social relations, is to acknowledge that the
setup and functioning of the global capitalist system required the mobilization of both
ideological and cultural mechanisms justifying the imposition of the new hierarchical
structures and of the economic and political conditions for implementing them. Complementing the focus on culture and epistemology with the one on political economy
helps uncover coloniality as more encompassing and more enduring than colonialism, and both as prerequisites of Western modernity.
Besides its impact on sociology as a discipline that emerged as an institutionalized attempt at understanding precisely this modernity and still defines itself in
these – narcissistic – terms, a postcolonial critique of classical theories of inequality
that consistently takes coloniality into account could accomplish a translation between the claim to universality inherent in its current theoretical canon on the one
hand and the “blind spots” resulting from the particularity of a single epistemological
perspective on the other, i.e., between the overrepresentation of modernity and the
underrepresentation of coloniality. As such, it would be an essential contribution to
the unthinking of dominant social theoretic paradigm and to the indisciplining of institutionalized structures of knowledge on which the larger process of political, economic, social and epistemological decolonization depends.
21
References:
Beck, Ulrich (2004): Der kosmopolitische Blick. Oder: Der Krieg ist Frieden,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/ M.
Becker-Schmidt, Regina (2003), »Umbrüche in Arbeitsbiographien von Frauen: Regionale Konstellationen und globale Entwicklungen«, in: Knapp, GudrunAxeli/Wetterer, Angelika (Hrsg.), Achsen der Differenz. Gesellschaftstheorie
und feministische Kritik II, Münster, S. 101-133
Cardoso,
Fernando
Henrique
(1973):
Associated-Dependent
Development:
Theoretical and Practical Implications, in: Stephen, Alfred (ed.): Authoritarian
Brazil, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp.142-176
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique/Faletto, Enzo (1979): Dependency and Development in
Latin America, Berkeley: University of California Press
Chatterjee, Partha (1993): Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse, Minneapolis
Chirot, Daniel (1981): Social Change in a Peripheral Society. The Creation of a
Balkan Colony, New York: Academic Press
Dirlik, Arif (1994): The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism, in: Critical Inquiry, Winter 1994, S. 328-356
Dos Santos, Theotonio (1971): The Structure of Dependence, in: Kan, K.T./Hodges,
Donald C. (eds): Readings in the U.S. Imperialism, Boston: Extending
Horizons
Frank, Andre Gunder (1966): The Development of Underdevelopment, in: Monthly
Review 18 (4), pp. 17-31
Frank, Andre Gunder (1967): Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America:
Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, New York, Monthly Review Press
Frank, Andre Gunder (1969): Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, New
York: Monthly Review Press
Frank,
Andre
Gunder
(1972):
Lumpenbourgeoisie:
Lumpendevelopment.
Dependence, Class, and Politics in Latin America, New York and London:
Monthly Review Press
Freud, Sigmund (1955): Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse, in: Gesammelte
Werke, Band XII, London, S. 3-12
22
Furtado, Celso (1963): The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to
Modern Times, Berkeley: University of California Press
Furtado, Celso (1964): Development and Underdevelopment, Berkeley: University of
California Press
Goldfrank, Walter (1988): The Intellectual Background of Immanuel Wallerstein and
his World System, in: Modern Praxis, March, pp. 206-222
Gottschall, Karin (2004): Soziale Ungleichheit: Zur Thematisierung von Geschlecht in
der Soziologie, in: Becker, Ruth/ Kortendiek, Beate (Hrsg): Handbuch
Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. Wiesbaden, S. 188-195
Grosfoguel, Ramón (1997): A TimeSpace Perspective on Development. Recasting
Latin American Debates, in: Review XX, 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 465-540
Grosfoguel, Ramón (2000): Developmentalism, Modernity and Dependency Theory
in Latin America, in: Nepantla:Views from South 1.2., pp. 347-372
Grosfoguel, Ramón (2002): Colonial Difference, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Global
Coloniality in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist World-System, in: Review, XXV,
3, Summer/Fall 2002, S. 203-224
Hall, Stuart (2002): Wann gab es ‘das Postkoloniale?’ Denken an der Grenze, in:
Conrad, Sebastian/ Randeria, Shalini (Hrsg.): Jenseits des Eurozentrismus.
Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften,
Frankfurt a.M., S. 219-246
Heidenreich, Martin (2005): The Europeanization of Social Inequalities. Between National Institutions, European Regulations and Global Markets, Vortragsmanuskript,http://web.unibaberg.de/sowi/europastudien/dokumente/europeanization2005_stonybrook.pdf
Hopkins, Terence K.; Wallerstein, Immanuel (eds.) (1982): World-Systems Analysis.
Theory and Methodology, Beverly Hills CA: Sage
Klinger, Cornelia/Axeli-Knapp, Gudrun: Achsen der Ungleichheit – Achsen der
Differenz. Verhältnisbestimmungen von Klasse, Geschlecht, »Rasse« / Ethnizität, Transit - Europäische Revue, Nr. 29/ 2005
Kozlarek, Oliver (2005): Narrative Aneignung des Universalen als Aufgabe der
globalen Moderne, in:
Kreckel, Reinhard (2004): Politische Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit, 3. Auflage,
Frankfurt: Campus
23
Love, Joseph L. (1996) Crafting the Third World. Theorizing Underdevelopment in
Rumania and Brazil, Stanford: Stanford University Press
Mignolo, Walter (1995): The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality,
and Colonization, Ann Arbor
Mignolo, Walter (2000): Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press
polylog.
Forum
für
interkulturelle
Philosophie
6
(2005),
http://them.polylog.org/6/ako-de.htm
Portes, Alejandro (1976): On the Sociology of National Development. Theories and
Issues, in: American Journal of Sociology 82, pp. 55-85
Prakash, Gyan (1994): Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism, in: American Historical Review, December, S. 1475-1490
Prebisch, Raúl (1950): The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal
Problems, New York: United Nations
Quijano, Aníbal (1993): América Latina en la economía mundial, in: Problemas del
desarollo 24, pp. 5-18
Quijano, Aníbal (2000): Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social, in: Journal of
World-Systems Research, VI, 2, Summer/Fall 2000, pp. 342-386
Quijano, Aníbal (2000a): Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social, in: Journal of
World-Systems Research, VI, 2, Summer/Fall 2000, S. 342-386
Quijano, Aníbal (2000b): Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, in:
Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3, S. 533-574
Quijano, Aníbal (2001): Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, in:
Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3, pp. 533-574
Quijano, Aníbal/Wallerstein, Immanuel (1992): Americanity as a Concept, or the
Americas in the Modern World-System, in: International Journal of the Social
Sciences, 134, S. 583-591
Randeria, Shalini (1999): Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie.
Zur Ortsbestimmung der nichtwestlichen Welt in einer zukünftigen
Sozialtheorie, in: Soziale Welt 50 (4), S. 373-382
Sanderson, Stephen K. (1995): Social Transformations, London: Basil Blackwell
So, Alvin Y. (1990): Social Change and Development. Modernization, Dependency,
and World-System Theories, Newbury Park, CA: Sage
24
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974): The Modern World System, Vol. I, Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth
Century, New York: Academic Press
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979a): A World-System Perspective on the Social Sciences,
in: Immanuel Wallerstein: The Capitalist World-Economy, Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 152-164
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979b): Three Paths of National Development in SixteenthCentury Europe, in: Immanuel Wallerstein: The Capitalist World-Economy,
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37-48
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979c): The Present State of the Debate on World Inequality,
in: Immanuel Wallerstein: The Capitalist World-Economy, Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, pp. 49-65
Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000): The Essential Wallerstein, New York: The New Press