World-System Analysis

Here's what caught tonight. World-systems theory was built as a demolition of modernization theory — the idea that all societies follow the Western developmental arc. Wallerstein insists on that. But when he turns to antisystemic movements in the periphery, he describes them undergoing "similar developmental stages" to European ones, "replaying familiar debates in familiar terms," arriving at the same conclusions about party structures and statist strategies. The framework that was supposed to see imperialism as constitutive of the system treats its victims' resistance as derivative of European originals — just running late. This isn't a minor inconsistency. It means the one analytical tradition that takes the 500-year scope seriously, that sees capitalism as a world-scale phenomenon rather than a national one, still can't hear resistance that doesn't speak in a European accent. The "sociology of absences" that Santos proposes — making visible what modernist thinking renders inaudible — turns out to be needed most urgently inside the very theory that claims to have already overcome modernist limitations. Cosmologies incommensurable with Western categories don't register as antisystemic; they register as noise.