John, This took an unexpected direction. It's probably better for it, I think.
When I read Harris,
The concept of fantasy as a political category assumed its central place in Marxist thought in The Communist Manifesto , where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used it as the distinguishing mark of their own brand of socialism: It was this that condemned all previous forms of socialism to the realm of vague dreams and good intentions, and which gave Marxism the claim to be a ?scientific? form of socialism.
I heard the voice of Professor X, and I said to myself, "Ah yes, that's my boy." And from the black depths of memory came the words,
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I looked behind me just in case there was a ghost. And there was.
I like a good line.
Well what about Harris? He's clearly read the the thing and sees Marx casting the utopianists in the satiric characters of writers such as ETA Hoffman which you've seen, I'm sure, on stage and in the individualist character of Young Werther who committed suicide on the unfulfillment of his private phantasy?. This is ordinary stuff and I don't see why you should ask him to fill it out any further than I have. See Chapters 3 &4. Twenty five years later Marx is swinging the same axe in his critique of the Gotha program.
About immiseration. Harris says,
Schematically the scenario went something like this:
? The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
? The workers would therefore be ?immiserized?; they would become poorer as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
? The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist system ? their poverty, not their ideals.
This is pretty tout court. But isn't very exceptional. Marx argues in Capital -which Prof X made us read- the capitalist mode of production necessarily leads to a falling rate of profit yada yada.
It can be derived from Marx that capitalist form of production leads to immiseration of the proletariat and lots of folk have done it - as you can see with a google search - it would appear half the poly sci, econ and soc profs in the world have..
Whether Marx really said it without qualification or whether it's true isn't Harris's point. His point is that through the work of Baran (I thought I recognized the name, Baran&Sweezy, econ textbook) and Wallerstein the concept of proletarian immiseration has been internationalized.:
...in essence, what Baran has done is to globalize the traditional doctrine of immiserization so that, instead of applying to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, it now came to apply to the entire population of those countries that have not achieved advanced capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.
Wallerstein's work is definitely an elaboration of the idea, no question. He is a practitioner of world systems history which can be summarized, too simply, as 'over time hegemony shifts from location to location' and there are quite a number of folk who have undertaken such efforts. (The one I'm faintly familiar with is Braudel).
As you mention, there has been discussion of Wallerstein's work. Here is an example in a larger discussion of Cardozo. It's too long but rather interesting:
Though he is not typically considered a dependentista, Immanuel Wallerstein's ?world systems theory? provided a formulation common among many practitioners of dependency theory (Gilpin 1987, 282; Brewer 1980, 159-60; Randall and Theobald 1985, 123). For Wallerstein, there is one world capitalist system. This system has steadily expanded, so that its reach now extends to every corner of the globe, bringing essentially everyone into contact with international markets. As all societies are part of this world system, all are also capitalist. ?Feudal? and other pre-capitalist systems of class relations therefore become irrelevant. Economic relations within this world capitalist system are characterized by the transfer of resources from the non-industrial ?periphery? (and ?semi-periphery?, though Brazil fits more readily into this latter category, for simplicity I will refer to both as periphery in this paper) to the industrialized ?core?. Class relations within the societies of the periphery can be understood in terms of conflict between the majority of the population, a sort of international proletariat, and the dominant local bourgeoisie, which acts as the core's agent in the periphery (Wallerstein 1974; Gilpin 1987, 67-72).
Mainstream 'dependency theory' was a logical extension of Wallerstein's world system. Andre Gunder Frank, the most prominent of the early dependency theorists, echoed Wallerstein in asserting that Latin America, the focus of his analysis, was conquered by the European powers in the sixteenth century as part of the capitalist expansion of Europe, and was therefore capitalist from that time. A colonial bourgeoisie soon developed which acted to channel economic surplus from the periphery to the core. Dependency, then, might be modeled hierarchically with the industrialized ?core? at the top. At the bottom lies the exploited, underdeveloped periphery. Between the two, and facilitating the transfer of wealth from the periphery to the core, lay the ?colonial bourgeoisie?, or ?comprador? class. As a result, contemporary Latin America's economic geography is one of underdevelopment, with national and provincial capitals acting as ?tentacles? to ?suck? capital and economic surplus to the world metropolis. The stream of dependency theory represented by Frank differed from earlier work by Prebisch et al in that Frank argued that the import substituting industrialization (ISI) advocated by Prebisch was impractical, as the structure of this relationship not only ?underdeveloped? Latin America, but was such that Latin American countries could not achieve economic development within the capitalist world system (Frank 1972a, 5-6; 1972b, 21-3; Gilpin 1987, 273-4). The policy implications of this view are fairly clear: as underdevelopment is based on systems of relationships between the periphery and the core, development may best be achieved by severing these relationships. Import-substitution based on large, state-owned firms becomes the optimal policy for the peripheral state to ?maneuver? itself for sustained growth (Evans 1979, 277-8, 285, 315). As well, revolution may be required to replace the ?comprador? by a truly nationalist elite dedicated to pursuing a development policy based on autonomous development (Gilpin 1987, 283-7). Of special relevance to this paper, note how the economic debate in Brazil revolved around two competing visions of state-led 'developmentism'. On the 'right', the economic nationalist tradition of the Estado Novo was reinforced by the economic populism of the Kubitschek years. This called for state-led development behind tariff walls, with the economy open to foreign investment. On the other side lay the leftist alternative, which called for state-led development behind tariff walls, with the economy closed to foreign investment. Liberalism was of minor importance (Delgado 1996, 85-91)
216.239.53.100
More such discussion:
. hku.hk
If you do a google search terms 'immiseration' and 'Wallerstein' you will find he and the term have been put together by lots of folk..
Now, what about Wallerstein? What's he actually say about this stuff himself? He's of the left, he seems to use some Marxist structures. Here's a recent talk he gave which I think you might find quite interesting:
A Left Politics for the 21st Century? or, Theory and Praxis Once Again"
transformaties.org
(By the way, it's very much apposite to FADG discussions. I might post it here but I'll try to find something shorter).
An interview with him:
zmk.uni-freiburg.de
However, I'm getting away from Harris. Is the concept of immiseration something that's been picked up as a vehicle for 'anti-americanism' as in, 'US is the root and branch of all that's evil in the world', getting rich at the expense of the world's poorest.
It certainly has by the islamists, no question. What about the rest of the world? It has, I think, in the context of globalization which actually has become the focus of most world wide objection to status quo. The US being the largest figure in the world right now is therefore the target of huge amount of the objection. It's also the case that most objectors work from a perspective very much in captivity of marxist critical apparatus, which I think is grossly inadequate. It's out of date. It was out of date when Marx wrote the Manifesto and it's profoundly unscientific.
Remember, I said at the start of this I'd seen a ghost. Memories. When I was at university I didn't get along with Marxists. We didn't have a friendly relation because I thought then, and do now, that Marx's work was mostly junk. A Hegelian systems way of approaching economics or social problems is archaic. Marx had a theory/insight and spent the rest of his life trying to prove it and his descriptive efforts were focused on that and the service of his revolutionary program. If you're a physicist you can get away with apriori theorizing - it might even be useful - but you got experimental feedback. Not the case in the social sciences, especially in the economic sphere. You have to do an awful lot of describing first. Its more like being a naturalist or biologist - once you've got a large collection of descriptions, then you can formalize and theorize - say things about origin of species, ecology or the immune system. I'm exaggerating of course, but the theoretical or abstract entities, especially if they're premises, need to be modest and serious examination of them is a required part of the descriptive activity, otherwise you're just handwaving, and because when you run an economic experiment you're not working on a subject but a whole society - there's a big ethical bomb there. (The same kind of criticism can be laid on some non-marxian economists, as well)
Marx's intellectual heirs in the social sciences, such as Wallerstein, are system builders like Marx and Hegel, and right now are in the vanguard of the criticism of the status quo and their tools either have a utopian edge or are too dull. This is dangerous because status quo defenders have an awful lot of power and also very dull tools.. |
