 I'm Salvatore Bobona, and today's lecture is what is world systems analysis, distinguishing theory from perspective. This lecture is based on an article I recently published in the Social Theory Journal, Thesis 11. The article is available online, and of course the ideas presented in this lecture are developed in greater depth in the written version. So what is world systems analysis? World systems analysis is a heterodox Marxian approach to understanding global patterns of power and domination. It's Marxian in the sense that it's basic terminology and way of looking at the world or derived from the work of Karl Marx, but it's heterodox in the sense that it goes far beyond anything Karl Marx himself actually wrote, and is in fact at odds with most contemporary orthodox Marxian thought today. For example, world systems analysts locate the origin of the market economy in what Emmanuel Wallerstein called the long 16th century, or the period from the voyages of discovery in the late 1400s through to the consolidation of a global market in the early 1600s. This is opposed to orthodox Marxian accounts that capitalism emerged in the enclosure movements of the 18th century in England and spread from England to the rest of Europe and then to the world. World systems analysts are much more likely to locate the origins of capitalism in the sugar plantations of Brazil or in the markets of Manila in the Philippines than to find them in Europe itself. Put in a positive, in positive language, world systems analysis is a framework for interpreting and understanding the modern world of the last 500 years as a social system driven by market exchange. Like classical Marxian approaches, world systems analysts recognize that market exchange is strongly shaped by power differentials, for example, between capitalists and their workers. It focuses on the material basis of long-term social change rather than on the personalities and talents of individual leaders, and it assumes, or at least every world systems analyst I've ever met assumes that social justice is a major goal of the social sciences. World systems analysis is popular, even thriving, but it is also poorly formalized and poorly institutionalized. There's a tendency towards what the philosopher Auguste Comte called a theological approach to understanding. Something ever said by Immanuel Wallerstein and his close associates is considered canonical, and problems or debates can be resolved by reference to this canonical literature without the need to subject propositions to proper empirical analysis. The result is that no distinction is made between world systems analysis as a perspective and particular theories that have been promulgated by the founders of that perspective. Now Immanuel Wallerstein himself has always insisted that world systems analysis is a perspective and epistemological approach or what he calls a knowledge movement, but even he has perhaps been unable to distinguish his own theories from that perspective, from that way of looking at the world. As a result, world systems analysis is in desperate need of a stripped down and overhaul if it is to survive as a distinct perspective into the future. We have to take away all the layers of theory that have accreted around the perspective and start afresh with the perspective itself as a tool for developing theories into the future. We can't be stuck with the late 20th century's theories forever. We need new theories for a new century and we can only get those if we understand world systems analysis as an epistemology, not as a theory. World systems analysis has its origins in the social systems theories of the 1950s and 1960s and the three major systems as understood by sociologists at that time were cultural systems, political systems and economic systems, which together would form an entire social system. The key breakthrough of world systems analysis was to understand that those systems were not society-wide or country-wide, those systems were worldwide. Now a world in world systems analysis does not necessarily mean the entire globe. A world in world systems analysis is a system of people and societies that are interacting with each other in a way that is relatively bounded. So for example, the classic example is the Mediterranean world of Fernand Braudel, but we might also look to the East Asian world system focused around China before its contact with European sea traders and the most obvious example of a world system that is not itself global is the Mesoamerican world system of the pre-Columbian era. But before 1492, obviously there were social worlds in the Americas that were entirely distinct from the social worlds of Afro-Eurasia. A world system is usually larger than a single society and today there is only one global world system, but for most of history individual world systems have been smaller than the world as a whole. The big distinction between world systems analysis as a systems theory and other systems theories is the realization that class analysis is not limited within each particular society. Class relations span the entire world system. I ask my own students, where are your poor people? In Sydney, Australia, the local poor people are not in Australia. The poor people who do the manufacturing, who do the dirty industrial work, who do the recycling work that support life in Sydney, Australia, they live in China and in Southeast Asia and in South Asia. The class relations in which people are embedded in any particular country span international borders so that the ruling and subordinate classes of a system may not live in the same country or society. They do, however, live within the same overarching system. In 1960s systems theory, Wallerstein implicitly identified three possible dominant systems, cultural, political, and economic. A world system dominated by its cultural system would be characterized by the distribution of material benefits in society according to cultural norms. A world system governed by its political system would be one in which political forms of control, you know, imperial decision making or political rule determined who got what. You might think of a feudal system as a political type of world system. And world systems in which the dominant system was economic are characterized by market exchange. Well, if we think these are the three possible types of dominant system in a world system, we then have three different types of world system, culturally dominated world systems which Wallerstein called many systems, politically dominated world systems which Wallerstein called world empires and economic dominated world systems which Wallerstein called world economies. The first suggestion I would have for stripping down and improving this vocabulary would be to get rid of the theories implicit in these names. Call a cultural system simply a world culture. Wallerstein reasoned that a world culture could only be small scale, that only small scale units could primarily apportion economic surplus according to shared cultural norms. But other world systems analysts like my own PhD supervisor Christopher Chase Dunn say that we might in the future have a global socialist world system. Well, what is a socialist world system other than a system of normative allocation rather than economic or political allocation? The norm being from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. So we might imagine a global socialist system as being a very large form of world culture. Why assume that a world culture must be a mini system? Similarly, why assume that a world system dominated by its political system has to be an empire? We could imagine a democratic world polity in which people voted for who would get what in society. So we could imagine a political system in which surplus was apportioned through political means, but those means might be representative or might even be forms of direct participatory democracy. The fact that we've never seen world cultures and world polities that were not in fact mini systems and world empires doesn't mean that these aren't theoretically possible. So I think it makes sense to strip away the implicit theory and just say there are three possible types of world system, a world culture, a world polity, and a world economy. In reality, there might be other possible types, but an aspect of the perspective is to classify world systems into these three types of dominant system. In each of these systems, there are different ways in which surplus is apportioned. A world culture, we could say, is one in which the apportion of surplus is through reciprocity and norms. In a world polity, we might say that the apportion of surplus is through redistribution or rents, and in a world economy, we might say the apportionment of surplus is via exchange and profit. Now that's a theory, three separate theories, but those theories are maybe theorems that are very close to the axiomatic starting point. If a system is a cultural system, the theory that it will apportion surplus via norms is very directly drawn from that original proposition. And similarly with political and economic systems. A second feature of world systems analysis is that these social systems are understood to be hierarchical. And world systems analysis developed a language for understanding hierarchy in world systems using terms like core periphery and semi periphery. In the 1960s, there were lots of terminological systems, core periphery, but also center periphery and metropole periphery. Sociologists have also usually identified as semi periphery in between core and periphery. Others outside sociology have not usually used the term semi periphery. Whether or not there is a semi periphery is hotly debated. There are certain countries today that seem to be in the middle, Brazil, China and Russia, but there's not a consensus on the concept of the semi periphery. Theories of core periphery hierarchy are really just theories. We always know that some have more and some have less. But is that a core periphery structure? And is there a semi periphery between the core and periphery? Well, that's something open to empirical testing. Giovanni Auregi, for example, said that there were core and periphery determined by nodes and commodity chains and that semi periphery was just a mix of core and periphery nodes and commodity chains. Christopher Chaffes-Dunn and others have said there's just a continuum of low to high status with no identifiable positions in between. Empirical approaches based on social network analysis have identified four, five or seven or more levels of countries in the world system based on economic, political and military characteristics. So the proposition that there are three basic positions in the world system, a core semi periphery and periphery, and that all world systems have these three basic positions, this seems to be a theoretical proposition rather than a core epistemological approach of the perspective. Wallerstein implicitly used political criteria to distinguish core semi periphery and periphery. He said core states exhibit strong state machinery coupled with a national culture. He also said there was a semi-peripheral state in which the direct and immediate interest of the state in the control of the market is greater and he identified peripheral areas where the indigenous state is weak. We might think of archetypical examples like the United States or Germany as core states. There's a very strong state machinery and a national culture, a sense of citizenship and identity connected with it. We can see a classic semi-peripheral state as Russia or China or Brazil, places where elites use the political machinery to directly influence the economy and then are highly corrupt in doing so. So all three of those countries have, for example, state oil monopolies that are closely connected to politics and then peripheral countries where the state is very weak or non-existent. There are a whole range of countries especially in sub-Saharan Africa but also in South Asia and Central America where states are so weak that states themselves are unable to take autonomous action. I think a sensible consensus theory can be formulated out of Wallerstein's propositions. I would say that as a theory, a core state has a state machinery that is strong enough to maintain the citizen's dominant positions in the world. A semi-peripheral country has a state machinery that's strong enough to be used by local elites but is used by local elites to exploit internally, is not very useful to exploit the rest of the world and peripheral countries have state machineries that are not strong enough to exclude external elites from their countries. It's consistent with Immanuel Wallerstein but it also provides an analytical basis for these three categories. Another feature of world systems analysis is a large literature on cycles, trends and constants in global history. Wallerstein has endorsed many different cycles. There's a list of them in Christopher Chase Dunn's global formation. There are hegemonic cycles, long cycles, war cycles, trade cycles, colonial cycles, urban cycles, regulation cycles, terms of trade cycles, capital export cycles, financial cycles. There are so many cycles going on that I think it starts to become ridiculous. And there are also lots of trends that are happening. So, Hopkins and Wallerstein early on identified five dimensions of trend growth in the world, increasing mechanization, increasing contractualization, increasing commodification, increasing interdependence, and this is long before globalization became a keyword, and more controversially, increasing proletarianization. And they noted that this was the problematic of these five trends. But Chase Dunn adds a whole series of additional trends to this list. And then there are four systemic constants in the work of Christopher Chase Dunn, an interstate system, corporatory hierarchy, continuum of labor relations running from course to protected labor and commodity production. Well, that's a whole lot of cycles, trends, and constants. There are really too many to keep track of. One in particular that we might examine is hegemony, because hegemony has been the focus of theories, both of trends, hegemonic stability theory, and of cycles of hegemony. Wallerstein himself identified three periods of hegemony, so rise and fall of hegemony, such hegemony in the 1600s, British hegemony in the 1800s, and American hegemony in the 1900s. Auregi and some others add a Genoese hegemony over the world in the 1500s. But there's a high bar for this term hegemony. I'll just go over one of the definitions. Emanuel Wallstein defined hegemony as that situation in which the ongoing rivalry between the so-called great powers is so unbalanced that one power can largely impose its rules and wishes in the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas. Well, by that test, there was certainly no global hegemony of Genoa over the world. And even the other hegemonies are really quite questionable as hegemony. And Wallerstein gives some very narrow dates for hegemony. So 12 to 20 years for the Dutch, 30 years for British hegemony, American hegemony, and Wallerstein's telling lasts only about 25 years. And I think even these are questionable. Even United States in the post-World War II era was only able to impose its rules and wishes on about one third of the world, maybe one half. China and the Soviet Union were clearly outside the sphere in which the United States could impose its rules and wishes. And this is not some selective quotation of Wallerstein. Wallerstein defines hegemony as situations in which the edge is so significant that allied major powers are de facto client states. Well, that's a very high bar for hegemony. I think it's very obvious that world systems analysis needs a better theory of hegemony. By Wallerstein's definitions, only today are we finally seeing a global hegemony of one country. And Wallerstein emphatically rules that out. He says that contemporary America is not a hegemon. The theory is that hegemony is tied to other cycles, so that Kondratiev, A, and B waves are associated with hegemony. In Wallerstein, each cycle of hegemony is equivalent to two Kondratiev cycles with a timing of first A phase, first B phase, second A phase, second B phase. They're just so stories that read history into the theory. It's very difficult to imagine that we can see hegemony working in such a way. It's probably better to understand hegemony as a concept from international relations theory that can be accommodated within world systems analysis, rather than to stick with the existing theories of hegemony in world systems analysis itself. So what are we left with? Well, I think we have five possible axioms that we could draw as the defining elements of world systems analysis. First, there's the logic that the incorporation of societies into macro-level world systems has important implications. The idea that the society is not the only level of analysis for sociology, but that we have to move beyond the society to larger world systems in which societies are embedded. Second, the axiom that the world system in which we live, and the world systems in which people have lived in the past, can productively be described in terms of their economic, political, and cultural systems. This is not to say that other systems are not possible, but it's just to say that, you know, these three types of social systems have historically been very important and continue to be very important today, and thus we can do sociology from the perspective of these three systems. Third, that the modern world system that arose in the long 16th century has been a world economy in which the economic system predominated because of its subsumption of multiple political and cultural systems within it. It seems very clear that, you know, from 1500 to 2000, there was a world market that was larger than any particular political or cultural system. People, you know, even people from the Soviet Union and the United States traded within a common world economy. So even though they had very different cultural and political systems that were completely distinct, they were still inside this larger world economy. And while that may be a theory, that's such a strong theory that I think we can call it an axiom, a basic epistemological orientation for understanding the entire modern world. Fourth, the modern world economy is characterized by core periphery structures that are defined by the political and cultural aspects of the societies that are incorporated into them. And this is a kind of very neat bit of epistemology. If the system itself is economic in nature, then presumably we can use political and cultural factors to understand countries, societies, peoples, positions within this larger world economy. Again, it's not a specific theory about core semi-periphery, but rather an assertion that if we want to identify core periphery and semi-periphery, we should identify them in political and cultural terms. And those political or cultural statuses may determine their levels of income, but it's not the level of income that makes a country a core country. It's cornice that gives a country a certain level of income. And finally, other types of world systems are possible, and it seems like world polity and world culture are the obvious terms to use to describe systems that are not world economies. Such systems have existed in the past and can be studied, have been studied, and such systems may exist in the future. In addition to these five axioms, I'd also like to present a conjecture. A conjecture that in the 21st century, in the third millennium, the modern world economy has transitioned into a world polity. I say this because I think since 1991, one country has come to have the ability to endogenize the entire world economy within a single political system. And we can see aspects like not just the World Trade Organization, but especially the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, we can see the TPP and the TTIP as manifestations of the American endogenization of the economy under its own ages. In the 1990s, many people were talking about the United States creating a world culture, that the United States was leading a movement towards expanding principles of world society based on human rights, democracy, and free markets, and that this cultural system, what I would call a world culture, was becoming a global cultural system. But I think it's clear by now that there's not a world society based on broadly accepted world society principles that are promoted by the United States. Then instead the United States is actually exercising political power over the world, is coercing countries and people into joining a single system organized from Washington, New York, and its allies London and Sydney. I point out the U.S. and its closest allies effectively set the terms of global governance. Or I go further to Max Weber's definition of a state and say that the United States successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in the world. Many other countries use force, but their use of force is by definition illegitimate, Russia invading Crimea or China seizing areas of the South China Sea. When the U.S. uses force, it's legitimated by the fact that it is the U.S. and by extension the global community that is applying force. If this use of force is global in scope, then by Weber's definition we could call the U.S. a world state or in world systems terms a world polity. And I think that this is a very productive proposition because it changes how we understand the logic of accumulation. I mean we've lived in a world economy so long that we take Marxian terms like exploitation for granted. We think we know what they are, but when you teach Marxist capital and you're talking about capitalists extracting values from factory workers, it's increasingly difficult to fit this into the contemporary world that we see around us. None of my students are factory workers, and for that matter an ordinary professional in the Anglo-American West would never give up that lifestyle to become a factory owner in Guangdong or in Bangladesh. The life of the ordinary Western professional is incredibly better than the life of the third world peripheral factory owner. I really think we need to understand that the world economy that existed in the modern world system is no longer the dominant system in the world system today. Instead we live in a world polity and this changes the answers to the two master questions of political economy. In a world economy if we ask who exploits, it's those with money, the capitalists. And how do they exploit through unequal exchange in politically structured markets? They make it so that their workers get less than the true value of their product, classical Marxism. But today who exploits, those of political power? And how do they exploit through unequal influence in economically structured polities? They're able to get laws that effectively give them sinicures, that give them money. In effect it's the consumer who is exploited. Anyone who has ever used the internet or computer software from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, you name it, their monopolies are protected by an American centered world government that is a system of protections behind them. And who are they taking advantage of? Not factory workers, they're taking advantage of us and not just them, pharmaceutical companies, defense contractors. The places where real money is made are no longer the factories of the peripheral world, the places real money is made are in consumer oriented companies. In other words global surplus is no longer apportioned through profits extracted from workers, global surplus is apportioned through rents extracted from consumers. If I'm right, that American power is not about to fade from the scene. If I'm right what we're seeing is a new world system, a very stable social system that could last for centuries. After all other world polities lasted for centuries because as a system everybody has an incentive to keep the system going. Outsiders don't want to overthrow the world polity, outsiders want to get their slice of the pie inside it. Now lately I've come to call this the American Tiansha. Tiansha is a Chinese concept, that means all under heaven or a world essentially. We could think of Tiansha as a world system. With the United States as the Zhongguo, the central state in that system. Now the interesting fact is that the Chinese word for China is capital Z, Zhongguo, that is China is the central state or as we often translate it the middle kingdom of an East Asian world system. China still has that name attached to it even though it's no longer the middle kingdom of anything. I think today the United States is a little zi, Zhongguo, of a larger Tiansha that is the entire world today. This American Tiansha is primarily a political system but it also has an ideological component. If the Chinese Tiansha was based on Confucianism, the American Tiansha is based on the concept of individual liberty. Those principles of human rights democracy and rule of law that I mentioned as part of the global society approach or the world society approach are really just tools of American domination in this new American centered world policy that I call the American Tiansha. But that's just a theory. World systems analysis as a perspective could be used to develop theories like that or could be used to disprove them. Either way I hope to see world systems analysis flourishing throughout the next world system the next 500 years and I hope you'll flourish along with it. Again I'm Salvatur Babonis, thank you for listening. You can find out more about me at salvaturbabonis.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.