[D66] Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019)

[A.OUT]

Unrepentant Proyect:

September 2, 2019
Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019): an appreciation
Filed under: obituary — louisproyect @ 9:00 pm

Twenty-five years ago, the Marxist left discussed and debated their
ideas on an antiquated Internet medium called listserv’s, which are
automated mailing lists. About 10 years later the same people began to
defend their ideas on blogs, a new technology, with the drawback that
they tended to be unidirectional. Those making comments were subordinate
to the blogger who had the right to block someone or even block comments
altogether. The pendulum swung the other direction when social media
kicked in. First there was Facebook that began in 2004 and then Twitter
which began two years later. I generally try to avoid debates on social
media since it lacks the elementary tool that listservs or blogs
provide, namely a search mechanism. Trying to find someone’s comments in
a thread from a month or two ago is an exercise in futility.

One of the listserv’s I subscribed to in the mid-90s was called the
World Systems Network (WSN). Like PEN-L, another listserv I joined even
earlier and that is now pretty much moribund, it was based at the
University of Colorado. WSN lasted from 1995 to 2004, the year that
Facebook was born. A coincidence? You can read the archives here.

I subscribed to WSN because it was a place for discussion of the origins
of capitalism, a topic I had become deeply interested in after getting
to know Jim Blaut who had shown up on the Marxism listserv that preceded
Marxmail. Jim was on WSN as was Andre Gunder Frank. Neither was shy
about making their views known. Neither was I, even though I wasn’t in
their league.

Among the top-flight Marxist academics subbed to WSN was Immanuel
Wallerstein who had the distinction of founding the World Systems
methodology that the list was named after. Within a few months,
Wallerstein sent me a note complimenting me for my posts there, which
were part of an ongoing polemic against Robert Brenner who had wrote an
attack on Paul Sweezy, Andre Gunder Frank and Wallerstein as
“neo-Smithians” (that’s Adam, of course) in the 1977 New Left Review.

For Brenner, Wallerstein fails to make the Marxist grade because he has
no way of explaining the emergence of “relative surplus value”, the term
that Marx used to describe the replacement of human labor by machinery
like in the industrial revolution. For Brenner and his acolytes,
“absolute surplus value” does not constitute genuine capitalism because
it relies on the extension of the work-day and political repression to
produce surplus value.

In other words, it is the kind of class relation that existed in most of
Latin American and Africa until the 20th century where plantations and
mines owned by colonial powers relied on slavery, peonage and other
“pre-capitalist” forms of exploitation. So, when, for example, King
Leopold’s henchmen cut off the hands of men and women in the Belgian
Congo who refused to tap rubber used to make automobile tires in
Belgium, they were not really involved with capitalist production
because they used a machete instead of a drill press. For me, all of
this is capitalism. It is a world system, as Wallerstein maintained.

I am not exactly sure when the correspondence began but for about a year
I exchanged emails with Immanuel Wallerstein who struck me as one the
most generous, knowledgeable and down-to-earth people I had ever run
into on the net with his kind of qualifications. Mostly, we discussed
the Brenner thesis and why it irked the both of us, and Jim Blaut.

At one point, he invited me to write an analysis of the Brenner thesis
for the journal he edited out of the U. of Binghamton. After turning it
in, his assistant suggested some changes—something I decided was not
worth my time and energy. It was only after my wife became a
tenure-track professor and had to deal with multiple and exhausting
changes to her articles that I understood how correct my decision was,
especially with my hair-trigger temper.

For what it’s worth, here’s the article:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/origins/testing_the_brenner_thesis.htm

Unfortunately, my refusal to work on the article undermined the
friendship with Wallerstein and we stopped communicating. Years later, I
did drop him a line about something he had written from time to time but
nothing that suggested that we reconnect.

With his passing, I decided to have a look at the Wikipedia entry for
him to help me write this post. I now understand why he made such an
impact on me. He was not the typical academic. He had much more in
common with the rough-and-tumble Jim Blaut than I realized at the time

On his website, Wallerstein wrote about his role in the SDS-led strike
of 1968, when he was a sociology professor there.

After seven days or so, the Columbia administration decided to call the
police. [Dean] David Truman came to the meeting of the AHFG [Ad Hoc
Faculty Group] to tell us that they were going to do that. He simply
reported this; he didn’t discuss it. Various professors made different
personal decisions. There were many who decided to surround the entrance
to the occupied buildings. Most of them surrounded Fayerweather, the
building occupied by the graduate students. A smaller group, of which I
was one, decided to surround Hamilton Hall.

As for 1968 as a whole, I have written on this many times and have no
space here to repeat the argument. In one sentence, what happened was
the ending of the geocultural dominance of centrist liberalism and the
reopening of a three-way ideological struggle between the Global Left
and the Global Right with centrist liberalism struggling to maintain
some support as a real alternative.

Does that term centrist liberalism ring a bell? It should given Joe
Biden’s pathetic candidacy.

In the Wiki, we learn about Wallerstein’s political influences that, of
course, starts with Karl Marx. I was struck by his inclusion of Frantz
Fanon who he described as “the expression of the insistence by those
disenfranchised by the modern world‑system that they have a voice, a
vision, and a claim not merely to justice but to intellectual
valuation.” Like fellow Columbia professor Edward Said, Wallerstein
identified strongly with the people of the global South who hardly
figure in Political Marxism’s ambit.

Let me conclude with a recommendation to visit Wallerstein’s website
(https://www.iwallerstein.com/) that includes free access to a number of
his scholarly articles. You will find a page titled “Intellectual
Itinerary” that concludes with this statement, not that different from
what Jim Blaut believed in himself.

I have argued that world‑systems analysis is not a theory but a protest
against neglected issues and deceptive epistemologies. It is a call for
intellectual change, indeed for “unthinking” the premises of
nineteenth‑century social science, as I say in the title of one of my
books. It is an intellectual task that is and has to be a political task
as well, because – I insist – the search for the true and the search for
the good is but a single quest. If we are to move forward to a world
that is substantively rational, in Max Weber’s usage of this term, we
cannot neglect either the intellectual or the political challenge. And
we cannot segment them into two hermetically‑sealed containers. We can
only struggle uneasily with pushing forward simultaneously to coming
closer to each of them.


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