Summary
Theorist of historical capitalism whose “anti-systemic movements” Edward Said takes up in Chapter Four of Culture and Imperialism, and whose argument on the irrationality of capital accumulation frames the book’s closing pages (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.338 / printed p.311; PDF p.361-362 / printed p.334-335).
Details
- Said names Wallerstein’s anti-systemic movements — democracy movements, the Palestinian intifada, social, ecological and cultural movements, the women’s movement — as what resists the border wars of essentialization held over from classic imperialism (PDF p.338 / printed p.311).
- Wallerstein’s argument, as Said presents it at the book’s close, is that at bottom capital accumulation is irrational, its gains continuing unchecked even though its costs — in maintaining the process, in paying for wars to protect it, in “buying off” and co-opting “intermediate cadres,” in living in an atmosphere of permanent crisis — are exorbitant, not worth the gains (PDF p.361-362 / printed p.334-335).
- Wallerstein, quoted by Said: “the very superstructure [of state power and the national cultures that support the idea of state power] that was put in place to maximize the free flow of the factors of production in the world-economy is the nursery of national movements that mobilize against the inequalities inherent in the world system.” (PDF p.362 / printed p.335)
- The book’s Notes cite Wallerstein’s Historical Capitalism (Verso, 1983) and Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (Verso, 1989) (PDF p.387 / printed p.360, note 33), and Wallerstein, “Crisis as Transition,” in Amin, Arrighi, Frank and Wallerstein, Dynamics of Global Crisis (1982), p.30 (PDF p.388 / printed p.361, note 65).