From Mills To World-Systems: Tracing Wallerstein’s Path with Sam Chian

What if the most consequential “Marxist” of a generation refused to call himself one—and was more consistent for it? We dive into Immanuel Wallerstein’s intellectual journey, from C. Wright Mills’s classrooms to African political movements and a close reading of Fanon, to the long durée horizons inspired by Fernand Braudel. Along the way, we unpack how world‑systems analysis took shape against modernization theory, challenged neat stages of growth, and rejected methodological nationalism without abandoning struggles for national liberation.

We trace Wallerstein’s friendships and frictions with the thinkers often grouped as the world‑systems “gang of four”—Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank—and the Maoist currents that pulled many left intellectuals in the 1960s and 70s. Then we explore where they parted: Frank’s ancient world system, Arrighi’s China‑as‑hegemon thesis, and Wallerstein’s claim that capitalism entered structural crisis in the 1970s, foreclosing any stable successor hegemon. We also revisit Monthly Review’s influence (underdevelopment, unequal exchange) and what Wallerstein rejected (monopoly capital as a “stage,” stagist history, and nation‑bound strategies).

If you’ve heard core, periphery, and semi‑periphery tossed around like a simple map, this conversation resets the frame: these are world‑systemic relations that cut within and across states. We highlight why Wallerstein’s absolute immiseration thesis matters now, how his optimism lived in the transition—50 percent chance for a better system, 50 percent for worse—and why internationalism is the missing key when national victories stall out. From techno‑feudalism chatter to BRICS and the Belt and Road, we ask whether we’re seeing a new phase or an old system failing, and what agency looks like on the far side of decay.

Listen for a clear, historically grounded tour through Wallerstein’s ideas, the debates they shaped, and the stakes they raise for today’s left. If the road ahead isn’t automatic progress, it’s strategy and solidarity. Subscribe, share with a friend, and tell us: is socialism or barbarism more likely where you live?

About Sam Chian
Sam Chian is an educator based in Oslo, Norway, where he teaches Economics and Social Studies at the upper secondary level. He holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). As a researcher, he has contributed to the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), specifically investigating the career and intellectual development of Immanuel Wallerstein.

Relevant Links & Resources:
doi.org/10.62191/ROAPE-2025-0001 
doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2025.1304 
doi.org/10.1007/s12108-025-09671-5

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Up The Wallerstein Debate
• 3:32 Mills As Mentor And Early Influences
• 8:47 Fanon, Africa, And Turning Toward Marxism
• 16:17 The Gang Of Four And Maoist Currents
• 23:47 Structuralism, France, And Convergent Ideas
• 31:17 Core, Periphery, And Rejecting Stages
• 38:47 Sino‑Soviet Split And Strategy
• 46:17 China, Hegemony, And Diverging Paths
• 53:47 Immiseration, Decay, And Possible Futures
• 1:00:47 Monthly Review, Brenner, And Annales
• 1:08:47 Braudel’s Long Durée And Method
• 1:16:47 German Historical School And Developmentalism
• 1:24:47 National Liberation, Internationalism, And Limits
• 1:31:47 Misreadings, Legacy, And Who Continues It
• 1:39:47 Closing Reflections And Next Steps

Transcript

Setting Up The Wallerstein Debate

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, welcome to Varmblog. And I'm here with Sam Chien. Yeah, Chian. Alright, Chian. All right. I should have treated it like it was Chinese. And we are who is an independent scholar, and you've written at least three now peer-reviewed articles on Emmanuel Wallerstein. And I really enjoyed them because I got into some of the ambiguities that I've been trying to parse out myself and dealing with the long dura of Emmanuel Wallerstein's life. Like I think you and I had a discussion that started us off, where I was reading early Wallerstein in light of later Wallerstein and misunderstanding some things. But I've also approached Wallerstein in the context of initially defending things like the Brenner thesis, uh the two of them, the one about agrarian capitalism that he had with the Annal school in France, and the other one that he had kind of tangentially related with Wallerstein and World Systems people about Western development. And then I kind of flipped sides to be honest with you. It was one of those things where I read the debate and I was like, I don't like all the implications of the Brenner argument. Now I'm gonna give a little bit of a background to why I wanted to have you on because all of a sudden these debates are back in you know, like let's say public Marxists are debating about this. One as a proxy between, I guess, analytical Marxism and Maoism, roughly, although I don't think that's actually I don't think Wallerstein or even Brenner are necessarily good examples of either thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

No, no, I don't think so.

C. Derick Varn 2:47

But that seems to be part of what they're used for, is like ventuiloquist dummies for this in Maoist, not Maoist fight, and then conversely, the debates about techno-feudalism seem to be based off of Brenner's readings too, and Eugenie Morazov pointed that out. That actually Brenner might have a weaker and less rooted in Marx understanding of what capitalism is than Wallerstein, at least on some questions, but this gets into some debates because in later Wallerstein, it is unclear that Wallerstein has a clear relationship to Marx. I read his like his last introductory text to world systems theory, and it was ambiguous about its relationship to Marxism. And your work specifically seems to focus on early Wallerstein, particularly in the 60s and 70s. And so I wanted to get you know that to maybe pivot in a way of getting a finer understanding of what is going on with world systems theories and how Marxist it is or not. And how does Wallerstein relate to the other people we associate with world systems theory, like Giovanni Arigi, Arigi Emanuel, and Samir Amin, and stuff like that? So one of the things that you I think your most recent and maybe not published yet article was on is the relationship okay, it's not published yet. Is the relationship between C. Wright Mills and Wallerstein, which is not a relationship I knew anything about. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Yeah, so Munkine, in a sense, presents Mills as being Wallerstein's first mentor. So Wallerstein started studying sociology at Columbia University in the late 1940s. At that time, at that point in time, Mills taught the undergraduate department at Columbia. So he was one point in time Wallerstein's professor. Wallerstein then went off to fight in the Korean War. And when he returned, he based his master's thesis at Colombia on Wall on Mills' book, The New Men of Power. And then after after that, he was hired. No, when he wrote his he wrote his doctoral thesis also for uh Colombia, and then he was hired as a faculty member, where he at which point he was a colleague of MILS's. And I also read that he was one of the few people at Colombia at that point in time, which Mills had a had a like a friendly relationship with. Because Mills had at that point sort of alienated him, alienated himself almost entirely from the the rest of the faculty over there. But yeah, so at that point in time in the 1950s, you could see Mills as being sort of Wallerstein's main mentor. Although they weren't like they their positions, of course, differed on a lot of different topics, especially when it came to politics, although they were generally aligned when it came to their political uh perspective. They could both be described as some sort of left-wing social democrats at that point in time.

C. Derick Varn 5:58

Hmm. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've done a little bit of history on Mills's role in the new left and how weirdly it was the Midwestern universities that didn't get hit as hard by the Red Scare that allowed for these, let's say Marxian, because they weren't properly speaking Marxist social democrats to kind of make it into the 50s and 60s and still have a career without leaving the United States. And it's interesting to me that Wallerstein does have a direct direct connection to that because I never put that together. What do you think the early effects of Wallerstein's relationship to Mills were? I mean, one thing that you seem to indicate is there's an attempt to put sociology and historical analysis back into conversation with each other. But if you know the history of sociology, that's kind of funny because it started, you know, economic sociology and history weren't separated until the late 19th, early 20th century. So what what do you think led to the project and how did Mills contribute to that? So to get to the situation here, I there is a kind of irony of the historical relationship between sociology and and history and economics. And it does seem like there's a natural relation between what Mills is doing and what Wallerstein is doing that tries to kind of undo the separation of the early 20th century in those fields. How does Mills respond to this? And is this, you know, does he receive it positively? And how do you think that affects Wallerstein's later development?

Fanon, Africa, And Turning Toward Marxism

SPEAKER_00 7:47

I'm sorry, do you mean how Mills received Wallerstein's work? Yeah. Well, Mills died in in 1962, so he basically just died way too early to see any of uh Wallerstein's actual developments towards world systems analysis. At the point at which uh Mills died, Wallerstein had, I believe he had just published his first book, which was uh a short historical study of Africa and it's yeah, basically just a short historical study of uh African political movements. But I don't think we have any uh published records of Mills ever commenting on any of Wallerstein's works, or at least his published works.

C. Derick Varn 8:26

So let's reverse that question then because I don't when I read a lot of Wallerstein, I did not get the hint of Mills there. I mean, like, yeah, there's this vague sense of like the power elites that you can, but you would get that from Marx too, and actually in a more articulated way. What did what did Mills give Wallerstein that he picked up on?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Well, he he for the most part, he it looks like he actually abandoned most of Mills' theorizing. And he never really actually referenced Mills' works ever again after the 1960s. The last reference we have to uh by Wallerstein to the name of Mills' works is in an encyclopedia article he wrote in 1967, where he seemed like respectful of them, but he also had some clear criticisms of the of his limitations. Actually, the funny thing is that in that that same encyclopedia edition, he also wrote an article on Phanon, which was much more blowing. And it actually, like one of the conditions for him even writing the MILS article was that the encyclopedia also allowed him to write that Phanon article. But back to your question, basically the the one couldn't see Ballerstein as sort of continuing on the trajectory that Mills had already started to move, basically moving further in the direction that Mills already had started moving in by the early 1960s, becoming more internationalist, sort of flirting more with Marxist analysis and befriending a lot of Marxist uh intellectuals, and again bringing history back into sociological analysis, which Mills advocated for in the sociological imagination quite famously, but never really went on to do himself.

C. Derick Varn 10:24

Yeah, uh one of the things that your article made clear, I mean, even in the in the undergraduate path of Wallerstein, was that a lot of these figures we associate with the early quote new left IF Stone were important, but I mean what you seem to lay out is like I. Stone's break with Henry with Henry Wallace actually does demarcate that a lot of these new left figures were going in a direction that did kind of rhyme with what was going on in say French academia around post-colonial studies, are you know, although France Fernone is a little bit more Marxist than that, but but that this was developing in that direction, and that Wallerstein's actually pushing it further in a way similar in a way that someone like If Stone is pushing further the commitments of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, which themselves were popular frontists and you know asset supporters anyway of communists in the 40s. And so I find it I find that element interesting because it implies that rather than world systems theory being like some radical break to kind of I don't I don't know who would call world systems theory orthodox Marxism, but maybe somebody does, that it actually is a development of a strain of thought that was already emergent in the new left, but not picked up by a lot of its luminaries that we more associate with it. Would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Yeah, absolutely. So so back to the the the Wallace campaign, which you mentioned. Basically, the entire staff of the the of monthly review came out of the Wallace campaign. Sweezy Magdoff was even an advisor to to Wallace, Huberman, all those guys were connected to the Wallace campaign. And when that campaign ended, they started monthly review, which you could see what Wallace's project as being an extension of of the Marxism that was advocated for and or or that monthly review could create a platform for.

C. Derick Varn 13:42

So, how did Fanon get into to Wallerstein's hands? Because I don't think Fanon was super well read in America in the early 60s. I've just, you know.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

No, Wallerstein has to have had to have been one of the first American intellectuals to actually have engaged seriously with Fanon's work. It was actually he who tried for the first time to get the Wretched of the Earth translated to English in 1961, right after Fanon died. It wasn't translated until two years later. And he was actually quite dissatisfied with the first uh translation of that work. But I think that the way in which he became acquainted with Fanon, because they had sort of a personal relationship, I think. Because uh Walshin actually went and visited him in the hospital when he was on his deathbed with leukemia. But he he for the first time met Fanon, I believe, through uh something called the Young Adult Council or something that he wasn't part of. It was sort of a a group of young scholars who who connected to different intellectuals through the UN because he was in New York. So they had a lot of both intellectuals and government officials from mainly uh West West Africa, who he became acquainted with there. And that was actually the reason he decided to write us his doctoral dissertation on West Africa and continue on becoming an Africanist.

The Gang Of Four And Maoist Currents

C. Derick Varn 15:08

So, I mean, this actually brings us nice and neatly into your into one of the other articles that I read by you, which I do believe is published in the in the review of African Political Economy. And that is thinking of Wallerstein as an Africanist in his journey to Marxism, as opposed to you know, some kind of student sectarian or just some kind of new leftist, or even as he's often described later, because I used to think of him as like, oh, he's a disciple of the Marxification of the Annal school, you know, that's how I thought of him. Um and this is before that happens. So and it does explain some things like how Arigi Emanuel and Sime Amin are associated with world systems theory, because uh at first it was not obvious to me why that would be the case. I was like, okay, so what are these what are these third worldists basically scholars? Why are you know they're not I mean Samir Amin literally called himself a third worldist? I will I will also put the caveat than we'd say about third worldism, most political third worldists actually don't have the same theory as world systems theorists, but they're associated together. So was it reading Fanon that got him interested in becoming an Africanist? Do you think? Was it is there a direct line there? Was it was it just a concurrent development and he was became more and more interested in Africa, and you had to kind of deal with Fanon and and you know French colonality. You you really do have to deal with French colonality to deal with Africa. So, are are uh what was the order of operations, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

I don't know. For me, it just seems like more of a coincidence, honestly, that he that he had met Fanon and then became went on to become an Africanist because he actually didn't start really engaging with Fanon's work like really deeply until the late 1960s. You don't find any references to Fanon in his work until I think the first reference to Fanon I found in one of his articles was from 1965 or 1964, so three years after Fanana died. Um then you of course saw more of that from the late 60s onwards when he sort of became a Marxist. Because uh for him, the the the the most the the most important contribution of Fanon was his perspective on uh world class dynamics. That he sort of as Fanon put it himself in the opening chapter to The Russian of the Earth, that he sort of stretched the Marxist class analysis, the the orthodox Marxist Marxist class analysis to more adequately be able to explain colonial class relations as being an integral part of capitalism rather than being part of a non-capitalist exogenous system.

C. Derick Varn 17:55

So, you know, so this is kind of concurrent to him meeting the the coteria of people, which he mostly met in Africa, are around studies in Africa, around studies of Africa, who would become the core of world system thinkers. So you got Andre uh Gunder Frank, who is the what is it, dependent the Marxist dependency theorist? Yeah, um I will admit he's of these names, he's the one that I have not read. You have Samir Meen, who was associated with the IDEP and once he moved to Senegal in the late 60s. Uh, you have Giovanni Rigi, who is uh, you know, probably the least associated with Africa, but uh of the first book was actually on Africa, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

So Giovanni Rigi's first book was uh was uh called something like the political economy of Romanesia. So he also started out as sort of an Africa scholar, so all of them were folks in Africa, actually, with the exception of Frank, who wrote on Latin America.

C. Derick Varn 19:08

Okay, and then there's obviously Emmanuel Rigi. Don't get them confused because I often do. There have been times when I've attributed Emmanuel Zwigi's work to Giovanni Origi, or even just made them into one hybrid person.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah, well, Arri Emanuel's name is sort of a hybrid on uh now. I'm confusing uh Giovanni Rigi and Emmanuel Wallerskey.

C. Derick Varn 19:30

Yeah, whatever it's it's very confusing. Like, like for a while I was like, it's Giovanni Emmanuel Origi or something. Um okay, so and one thing that you you pointed out that they also became acquainted with Walter with Walter Wodney, you know, and other and the underdevelopment thesis is around it, and that sort of like almost classical, you know, mostly Marxist-Leninist, you know, African debates, Rodney and you know, Rodney, a lot of these key luminaries die in the 60s, and the world systems people really become become you know key theorists here outside of like the theorist of you know, in like official Chinese, like official communist parties, particularly in China or in Latin America. So I find that interesting. Now this does lead them to like more fully articulate. I mean, you know, Samir Amin, who's you know, some of whose later in life political positions would confuse. Use people, I think, but writes the book, literally writes the book on Eurocentrism, and this becomes crucial to world systems theory. How does this really like what is the relationship to both Maoism and Marxism proper? And I and I don't say this to imply that Maoists aren't Marxists, but Marxism is a broader phenomenon with with a variety of theorists where Mao, where Maoism is also a broad phenomenon with a variety of theories, but does have like particular theses on development and colonialism that that uh come with it that are not necessarily in all forms of Marxism. So, what what is the relationship here? How how how does Emmanuel Wallerstein get more and more meshed in Marxism in the mid-60s?

Structuralism, France, And Convergent Ideas

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah, the the Maoist connection here is, of course, super interesting because one couldn't say that Fanon, Fanon, as far as we know, didn't read any Mao, but his his thinking was definitely more aligned with Maoist sort of thinking. And every one of those figures that you mentioned leaned definitely more towards China and when it came to the Sino-Soviet question. Most of them were Marxist at the at that point in time when the Sino-Soviet split happened, Wallerstein actually being the exception. Because neither Hungary in 1956 nor the Sino-Soviet split, which officially happened in 1961 or something, really affected him very directly because he wasn't in any of these Marxist groupings or parties or anything. So he was very much an outsider at that point. But it definitely did affect Amin and Frank and Arigi. I think all of them, Amin and Frank at least, would perhaps even Arigi would have defined themselves as as Maoists in the 1960s and at least part of the 1970s. Amin continued calling himself a Maoist basically up until his death, I think. While Wallerstein actually he never directly identified with Maoism, although you can clearly see some Maoist influences on it on his thinking from the 1960s going forward. And he actually never even called himself a ma uh Marxist. You won't find any piece of writing or or an interview or whatever where he directly categorizes himself as a Marxist. He always spoke of Marxism and Marxists in the third person, which I I always interpreted more as a rhetorical strategy, like giving himself some leeway, not being like pigeonholed as a particular kind of thinker, trying to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. But he was very clearly influenced by Marxism and historical materialism. So the the genesis of this of the this world systems group, the gang of four as as they were called, and the term which they the reason they were called that was because of their closeness to Maoism. Which yeah. I don't know that much about Origi's later life, but I think both of them Frank definitely abandoned Marxism by the time he had died.

C. Derick Varn 24:13

By Arigi, we are referring to Giovanni Rigi. I don't know. Adam Smith and Beijing seems like a fairly heterodox Marxist book, but it is not classical Marxism, even of the like world systems, you know, Marxist hybrid stuff. I guess this leads me to the question of well, when you're dealing with Africa, you have to deal with France, and when you deal with France, you you get other things that come along with that. And one of the interesting things about world systems people is despite the early inference of Fanon, they do not get pulled into the French psychological theory complex. I don't know if they thought it was illegitimate or anything, it just it's not. I you know, I don't have to worry about Freudian battles and when I'm reading Wallerstein the way I have to do with other people, including Fanon.

SPEAKER_00 25:08

Um Wallerstein was always super explicit about the fact that uh psychology should be looked at as a separate discipline from the other social sciences, basically that social scientists shouldn't engage in psychological analysis. So yeah.

C. Derick Varn 25:24

Now you do point out that Wallerstein by the 70s starts reading like he's at least convergently developing towards similar structural theories as other post-Mooists, like Balabar and Altissaire, but again, since Wallerstein's not working in philosophy as explicitly, and again, as I said, he's not part of this Lacanian psychoanalytic complex, like he doesn't read like Balabar, Balabar, Altisair, Rencier, or any of those guys. So, why do you think do you think it's just a like convergent thinking uh you know coming out of the of what they saw in Africa in the 60s? Is it was he actually influenced by them? What do you think is going on there?

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Again, are you talking about the the Fanon connection here?

C. Derick Varn 26:17

Or yeah, talking about the the the the from Fanon through this period where he meets with the Gang of Four. You you you point out in the 70s he starts developing theories that are structural in a way that resemble what's going on in France, but may not be the same as, like, because like I said, there's not as much ties into like both Fanon and Altusir share ties in Freudian psychoanalysis, that's not in Wallerstein. Balabar and Al Tuser are much more concerned about philosophy and epistemology. I'm not saying that's not in Wallerstein, but it's not nearly as important. But I was going to ask you, did you think that this just happened because of concurrent, like they're working from the same kinds of theorists or both have ties to Maoism, and they're developing concurrently, or was there actual direct influence there?

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Yeah, I haven't seen any sort of evidence for any direct influence. He he one thing actually said said somewhere that he read during his doctoral studies, he actually read some French structuralism and like Levi Levi Strauss and Sauceur and so forth, but just wasn't very interested in it. So he didn't see any of that as being very important to what he was doing. I think the reason why this sort of odd confluence happened was just they were both reacting to the same historical developments and independently arrived at a similar-ish sort of analysis. So both Wallerstein and Amen sort of directly rejected altitarianism. While you also have other schools of thought within world systems that tried to like merge altitarian structuralism with world systems a bit more, uh, such as Christopher Chase Dunn's work, I believe, tried to marry those two perspectives to a certain degree.

Core, Periphery, And Rejecting Stages

C. Derick Varn 28:10

So to tie this back in also to what you were saying about Wallersey never calling himself a Marxist, which I've also noted that he doesn't. Yeah. I I read that initially, like you, as well, he's an he's an American academic and he's playing it safe rhetorically. So you can mention Marx, you can talk glowingly about Marx, but you can't say you are a Marxist, even in the 60s. But I do wonder if that if that rhetorical move was you know broader than that, it was maybe for broad appeal. And I've also wondered one of the things that you have to deal with with Wallerstein in particular, is there's more and more influence of non-Marxist thinkers in his later period, too. So I guess we need to talk about the late 60s, you know, and a lot of these figures, when they get brought up, people don't mention, you know, Samian dies a mouse. Although I will say that reading his last the outlines of his last book, his theories on development are so off of historical Marxism that like I see how he's a Marxist in methodology, but basically no one would agree with his framework in in like orthodox Marxism or Marxist-Leninism or even Maoism. So what do you think what do you think prompts this? I mean, like you talk a lot about the response to sociology, particularly if people have listened to my show, particularly my Patreon channels, you will you will notice that it seems like everybody hates Talcart Parsons and no one today even remembers who he was. But this kind of like weird, abstracted, structuralistic empirical sociology that they are responding to. They also get responded to by like the British Marxists are responding to Talcott Parsons and stuff, too. And so there's all these influences that you can read. You know, I gotta keep asking you, do you think it's direct or do you think it's just material conditions leading people to come up to similar but not quite the same analysis a lot of the time? Because you know, Hobbsbaum rides sometimes with Wallerstein and the World Systems people. Perry Anderson sometimes does and sometimes doesn't. I mean, you know, but what really does happen, I mean, one of the things that like I talk about a lot is Wallerstein proposes a way of talking about the world which seems to mirror a third three-world theory, but isn't three world theory? I want to be very clear on that, and all Marxists today kind of use it. Like, I don't even people who are not world systems people talk about the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery. Like, so you know, why do you think this intervention comes at this time? How much do you see this is tied into their political development, or is it coming from someplace else? What what is what is causing that insight? Because that reconceptualization is kind of it has ripples throughout Marxist academia and are Marxist academia.

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Well, again, I think the Sinus Movie split actually plays a very major role here because it sort of presented like these anti-systemic movements as not necessarily being completely aligned when it came to strategy and having different, like fundamentally different interests when it came to the development of the world, which was made clear by the fact that the USSR the USSR's interests were definitely not aligned with China's by by the 90s. I think one of the reference made reference to the fact that that the most valuable thing that that the Chinese that the like the Chinese revolution and Mouse writings pointed to was the fact that the class struggle would continue and that the the road to socialism would be a very like long and contradictory one, and not necessarily like the sort of clean break that that the USSR would present it as and that the USSR would find it in their interest to sort of find this sort of uh peaceful arrangement with with the the core powers rather than actually challenging them.

C. Derick Varn 32:37

Right. You you mention how this gets manifested particularly in like Rostow and the Stages of Economic Growth. Uh it's explicit in like almost all the Soviet textbooks of even the late Stalin period, but definitely into the Khrushchev period. And that this rigidity of stages is also, I mean, to be completely honest, not something like Marx has a you know a historical materialist, you know, dialectical materialist, although he didn't call it that but view of history. But the stages aren't clearly linear, and nor are they so clearly broken apart from each other, pretty explicitly in Marx. And and this in a weird way, and I know this is gonna make a lot of people uncomfortable, but does mean that Maoism in the 60s was kind of arriving at similar political positions to Trotskyism, which is often noted by people who studied it from outside, that like Maoism, at least in the 60s and 70s, was as much responding to you know, not just the stuff in the Sino-Soviet split, but also the stagnations of the communist parties in Europe, the the fact that they were even getting outflanked by socialist parties sometimes, that all this stuff was really informing them, and that's why Trotskyism and Maoism both kind of came up with different stories, and and really the difference the the difference between Trotskyism and Maoism is profound, but they both have. I mean, there's as I've argued, there actually is something like a third worldist Trotskyism and Pabloism.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

And uh Ernest Mandel could even start to call it third worldist.

C. Derick Varn 34:33

Yeah, he can actually. In the American context, I think that's kind of obscured though, because you know, the the depth of the red scare and the unwillingness of people to be formally associated with Marxism at once they got into their professional life, anyway. I mean, you people would forgive you if you were in the party in your in your 20s in college, but you better not be when you actually go to get a job. And I think that that's very interesting. In fact, you know, you talk about like the super deterministic frameworks as as that develop in the Soviet Union is actually mirroring the deterministic frameworks of uh Plakanoff and Kotsky. I think late Kotsky here, early Kotsky is not quite as rigid in his determinism. But one of the things that I would say that hasn't happened yet is going to happen though to Maoism in the 80s, though, is that it's gonna come back with the dungest reforms and this kind of stages view in Maoism. So you have a Maoism that develops now that just seems a lot more like not only you know middle period Bolshevism, but also but also like second international Marxism, except that the developmentalism is controlled by the party as opposed to controlled by capitalism. I mean, that's that is a pretty big distinction, but that's the distinction. Uh how how does that play into this? I know that's in '82, really, when this re between 78 and 82, where this really becomes prominent, but it does seem like this is like this causes a major crisis in faith for a lot of these people later on, because not only do you have a fragmented Marxism between Trotskyism and Marxism-Leninism and and Maoism, and then by 82 you have Maoism really fragmenting into like five or six different theories. And I do find it interesting that world systems theory, by and large, just kind of opts out of the inter-Mooist debates. So what do you think's going on there? Go ahead.

Sino‑Soviet Split And Strategy

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Yeah, and then the 1980s and the turn in China and China's strategy definitely had a huge impact on the Gang of War, as in the World Systems Gang of War, because that was actually the roots of their later divergences, actually. So every single one of them went in sort of different directions from the 1980s going forward, and all of it again had its basis in the developments in China and Maoism. So the first one to kind of break with orthodox world systems was Frank, who then started proposing uh some 5,000-year-old all-encompassing world system with China as its like as its permanent core, which has temporarily been displaced or something. He basically ended up rejecting capitalism altogether as a as a framework. And then you had Arigi, who ended up proposing that China would end up being the next hegemonic. So China was now in the position to take over the US, the US's hegemonic prior hegemonic position, just the same way the US took over Britain's position, and just the same way that Britain had taken over the Dutch position. Wallerstein was actually the one who was the least affected by all of this. So he actually remained remarkably consistent in terms of his argumentation from the 1970s going forward, because he believed that capitalism had entered a structural crisis from the 1970s, and that everything would just over time, over the next couple of decades, just break down, and you wouldn't really have room for another hegemonic power to to ascend to the to the throne because the system would be so decayed at that point.

C. Derick Varn 38:40

And then you had Amin who had a more ambiguous sort of actually, um Yeah, I I thought I understood Amin until I read the the prefixes to his book on decadence at the end of his life, and then I was like, has he combined what you're saying the Frank theory is? Is like there's except it except it's not specific to China, there's just a universal tributary form that that's gonna always be there unless you use capitalism to transition to to Marxism, which you can't do because capitalism kind of an accident of an underveloped tributary form. And then I was like, okay, but what do you think? Do you think socialism is even possible? And the the problem that I had is he died before he finished the book, so I have no idea what what he thought the solution to it was. So I'm like, and also tributary modes of government becoming like almost a human trans uh universal constant is to me like veering too far off the I mean like it just like I'm like I don't know what that means really. Like if you just think like like that's that's so broad that that also we end up back in a world where all societies look the same, and historical development is kind of just like, well, there's just one accident because Europe basically because Europe was undeveloped and sucked and like tried to form a tributary thing and it didn't, and it became colonialism and capitalism because of that, but then like its decadent form is just gonna turn into tributary stuff anyway. And I don't think people I think people often read Wallerstein wrong that he actually the people read Wallerstein is having the same theory as Giovanni Rigi that China is gonna become the core. And I only recently realized myself that no, he's uh he's like a full capital decadence theorist, and he's not sure that anything replaces you know, capitalism in this in this current phase, this terminal crisis. And he may have been very pessimistic towards the end of his life.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Well, he always insisted that he was actually optimistic because he proposed that the the world or the current world system is decay and decay, it's in crisis, it will be replaced no matter what we do, no matter what we think, it's inevitable. But the the successor system, that's that's up to us. That's that's where our agency comes in. So we have the possibility to develop whatever system we we want to push in the direction of. So he proposed it as being sort of like a 50-50. There's a 50% chance we'll get a better system, there's a 50% chance we'll get a worse system.

C. Derick Varn 41:23

And honestly, if if if you were to ask me, that's actually probably my position today is like like we're back in the socialism or barbarism, and they're both almost equally likely, although maybe tens are things are tending slightly more towards barbarism at the moment. Yeah. And I I I think that's that's I mean, that's interesting to think about. One of the things I always think about G Giovanni Rigi is like people read Adam Smith and Beijing as if he's celebrating China as a hegemon, but it's also unclear that he thinks that China's not gonna be a capitalist hegemon. Like it's like I'm just like what it's not clear to me, you know, when he was writing this. And and thus it's also not clear to me if he just thinks like replacing the hegemon is good, it'd just be better to have you know a non-European hegemon, or if there's some larger emancipatory goal. And in this way, he kind of again when we talk about like convergent developments amongst Italians. I can't tell, I actually can't tell if Giovanni Riggis arrived at something like Dominico Lacerdo, like socialism is just undoing the uh undoing the development of the of the core because you always need this utopian element, but the utopian element will never come to be, and then you become a realist. And socialism for Lasserdo is like everything that currently exists in capitalism just run better by a party in China, you know. So, and I can't tell if like Giovanni Riggi is at that point when he's writing Adam Smith and Beijing. I know this is not we're not talking about Giovanni Rigi, but it is a contrast to Wallerstein, who does seem to think that things are just a lot more. I mean, in some ways, he sounds like someone like Mandel, you know, late capitalist theory, are even like communization people who just think like this is gonna fall and the future's the future, we don't know what it's gonna be, but you gotta make it. And and that's very different from you know, I don't know, 50 uh even definitely than dungism, but even like 50s Marxist-Leninism, which is like communism is inevitable, we're gonna develop towards that, which I've always found interesting because it just even though they're the anti-revisionists, they sound like Bernstein to me when they talk that way.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah, and Wallington would probably contend that the the the root issue of of that worldview is uh methodological nationalism. They they believe socialism to be a national project, which will individually triumph in individual nation states one by one, rather than being a new international or non-national system.

China, Hegemony, And Diverging Paths

C. Derick Varn 44:19

That's a key point because another misreading I had of Wallerstein way back when I first read him is I read him through Giovanni Rigi, and I thought that he was a methodological nationalist because when we talked about cores and peripheries, we talked about in terms of nations, and it was actually one of his late books, his like intro text to world systems analysis, where he explicitly makes that clear that no, a there's peripheries and cores even within the core, so it's not actually nationalist, and two, where where you can criticize him for maybe not being as attuned to individual class conflict, that he does think that methodological nationalism is a big problem amongst everybody, like and in some ways that actually freed me to take him more seriously because I also realized that the Brenner people who supposedly opposed him and were internationalists, not so much Brenner himself, but definitely Mirkins Wood, and we definitely see it in Vivek Chiber, they are methodological nationalists too. And so, where where does that leave you? I mean, because I talk about this, I think about this maybe too much, and it's maybe beyond the scope of our conversation, but I was thinking about Adam Spezwarski's Capitalism and Social Democracy, where he does a game theoretic thing about like the why socialist parties end up being capitalist game theoretically, and he just doesn't deal with an international response. But I do actually think he's right that if you're you that if your development is totally a national response, that eventually the the impetus towards socialism starts to wane down. You there's there's no way to do it, both in terms of policy and and in terms of development, but also in terms of like politically, it's just not it, it doesn't make sense for socialist politicians to go that way if you are limiting yourself to one country's development. And that's really uh set with me. And there's an insight in your your article for the German uh for the journal of World Systems Research that I actually thought was interesting because you talk about uh it gets to me thinking about prior concurrent developments, and I didn't warn you about this one, so so if you don't have an answer for me, it's okay. But I was thinking about how this led to some some problems with Prebitch, who really seemed to pull his theory of industrialization from Werner Sumbart. And what's weird about Werner Sumbart, if you read a text like why Americans are socialist, you realize that he has like he's on to like settler colonial analysis, he doesn't call it that, he's not using that language, and he doesn't even necessarily see it as bad, which we should talk about. But he's on to like settler colonial analysis and like proto-world systems theory and developmentism way before anybody else, but we know where he takes it, he takes it explicitly eventually into like straight up Nazism, like he becomes a Nazi, it's part of why we don't talk about him anymore. And it's interesting to me because these critiques of developmentalism that you see in in Wallerstein seem to be aimed at you know Privich and by proxy Werner Sumbart, but also apply later on, like so, like in a way, I'm I'm saying like this has kind of happened in a slightly different context in a slightly different way before, in a way that should probably disturb us, and that Wallerstein is kind of onto it. Um you would you agree with me on that, or am I overreading the evidence? Like, what do you think there?

SPEAKER_00 48:02

I think I lost you for a second there, but are you saying are you asking if Wallerstein, like how Wallerstein thought relates to Werner Sombart's thesis?

C. Derick Varn 48:09

Or no, no, uh well, I I think that Wallerstein like is critiquing Privich, who is pulling from Warner Sombart's thesis, and it's particularly on methodological nationalism and developmentalism. And weirdly, if you just look at the trajectory, not so much of Privitch, but of Werner Sombart, you have like a cautionary tale of where that can go, like into like basically straight-up fascism. But and you think about this, like I Wallerstein never talks about this, but I always think about this in like the history of like early Chinese Marxism. You have Chindushu, and I can't remember, I can't remember the other guy's name, but the other guy concurrently develops the idea of proletarian nationalism around the same time as Mussolini does, and Mao Mao doesn't adopt proletarian nationalism, but he doesn't totally reject it. It's a kind of a an interesting ambiguity in mouth thought. But that there's these ways in which these questions have developed from ideas of Marxism and hit cul-de-sacks over and over again, and it seems like Wallerstein's like aware of it in multiple times in multiple places. Is that a fair analysis?

SPEAKER_00 49:24

Like, yeah, definitely. So the the thing about methodological nationalism is that well, you end up being stuck in this sort of developmentalist strategy inevitably. And he was quite critical of both modernization theory and developmentalism, which was basically the just the the economic theory of modernization. And I I think this mostly comes from the fact that he he understands development in a sense to be just as uh Frank's thesis points out, and and Rodney's that development can often be sort of zero-sum game. You develop at the at the at the cost of someone else's underdevelopment. So that it's it's impossible for for all countries to unilinearly develop the same way. So when a country trying to develop quite quickly, quickly might be enticed into some sort of imperialist arrangement, or they do that at the cost of someone else suffering at the other end.

Immiseration, Decay, And Possible Futures

C. Derick Varn 50:29

I do think that's incredibly important that because what that does, not to get into the Maoist questions of the primary and secondary contradiction, which can be very abstract, like the primary contradiction is colonialism, the secondary competition is capitalism, which for those of you who've been following Jacobman lately, is the the underlying not stated debate between Vivek Chiber and the rest of reality, is you know, whether or not colonialism is it develops from capitalism, which means that it's that the primary contradiction is capitalism, or colonialism develops before capitalism, means the primary contradiction is colonialism, then imperialism, which is a form of colonialism. I'm gonna tell you, I take a middle position of this, and I think they develop concurrently. So the you know, like I'm like, there are elements of colonialism going all the way back forever, but modern colonialism begins with the instantiation of capitalism. You see it with first the Dutch and then explicitly with the English, and like you can see it in I think Marx's writings on Ireland make it clear, although Marx's writings on other places are a little bit more muddled on this topic, particularly on the Americas. But I think that I think that there is a way in which at least there's a threat in Marx, and I and I'm always very hesitant to say that we have a clear answer in Marx for everything, because I don't think Marx is all that consistent, nor I think it's a matter of a simple you know, epistemic break or whatever. I think that that he's a he's an active thinker who didn't publish a lot of the stuff that he thought, and probably for various reasons. But and like Marx's conceptions of race, for example, are just all over the damn place. He's not a racialist, but he could have been a eugenicist, and definitely the second international, at least it's right and center, took it that way, blah blah blah blah blah. But this is this is to say that like these questions that Wallerstein are on to do show up in Marx, they definitely show up in in in turn of the century Marxism, but they because of this issue about national development goes into different ways. You can't all develop equally. And also, if you actually think through some some, and I'm not saying that Wallerstein does this because Wallerstein doesn't get into the nitty-gritty of Marx like this, he he doesn't. But if you think through the implications of like the organic composition of capital, eventually you can't do developmentalism in the same way because the the reduction of socially necessary labor time means that you're just gonna have a lot more immiseration from capital development than you are gonna have a socialization and spreading of uh uh of skills and and even the meager pittance that the working class would get as wealth, that that becomes reformalized. And I I've even picked up people from stuff like the Brazilian Mark Marxian. I don't know what I call him Marxist, I don't know what he says he is either, Alex Hokili. That what we're seeing is stronger peripherizations in the core, which of course you need Wallerstein's conception to talk about, and also kind of undoes this methodological nationalism, which really does make Wallerstein interesting in the annals of people associated with third worldism because most third worldists are nationalists, like national liberation is considered their primary way of growing. And I'm not even sure Wallerstein would reject that. I think actually he would support national liberation in most contexts, right? But it's not gonna ever be sufficient, and that's the important thing. Like, all these nations are gonna get into cul-de-sacs if there's not an international movement for them to join up to. And I guess that does bring me to a couple of questions that I want to ask you about China, because one of the things that uh one of the critiques I've always made of China is like you might have things like BRICS, but there's nothing like a common turn emerging out of the out of the the Chinese communist movement. And that seems to have been a real limitation. Like, I guess the non-aligned movement was kind of sort of that, but that doesn't really exist now either. The Belt and Road Initiative is not really that, that's more like super Keynesianism, but for an alternate developed system to the West, and is not really on the table anymore. And BRICS is not ideological or socialist in that way, although it is an alternate, again, a kind of alternate capital development system to the West, sorta. So it does seem like today, in the absence, ironically, of the Soviet Union who promoted all these national self-development schemes and all that, like they're they're the people who pushed it, that we don't really have anything like an internationalist vision. And I I just want to talk to you on that before I get into some other thinkers and influence on Wallerstein. But what do you like? If Wallerstein was still alive, what would we say about the what do you think he'd say about the lack of internationalism today? Because it does seem to be weirdly, on one hand, people are more aware and concerned with the world. Like there's more Palestinian solidarity than ever before. There's solidarity even with some other things, although not as much as I would like. On the other hand, I think methodological nationalism has more or less won the debate on the left. I really do. I see it everywhere, not just in like Mark Slyn and his circles or social democratic socials. It seems to be across the board the way people think we have to organize. And when you critique methodological nationalism, people say like that you like don't support national liberation. And I'm like, I do, but I also don't think you can export models of like national liberation of subordinated countries to the core. That makes no damn sense. So, you know, what do you think Wallerstein would say about today? Because I do remember Late Wallerstein just basically arguing that capitalism so decayed that maybe it would have been better if we never had it, which I know pissed off a lot of orthodox Marxists.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

So yeah, well, he he was actually a very strong proponent of the immiseration thesis. I don't know of any other thinker that's ever defended the immiseration as in this strong version of the immiseration thesis to the extent that we've seen it as in the theory of absolute immiseration, not relative immiseration. But but because of this, like for him, social democratic strategies or national liberation strategies, all of these were uh uh things that that would just hasten the the decay of the system, which he saw as something positive, of course. But he also saw them as being being necessary for just uh uh minimizing harm or just minimizing suffering. He he saw it as important to to defend uh social democratic governments in the West just because of the the harm reduction. And he would probably say the same thing about the national liberation movements today, I believe, because he supported almost all of the national liberation movements active during his time, at least in the 1970s, with the Portuguese uh anti-colonial movement or the the the and the Portuguese colonies and almost everything else I can think of. He he was he was on the side of the national liberation uh movements but uh he he commented a bit about Brits and the development of China and so forth, but he just didn't see it as anything very important. He didn't see these as being like structurally determined in the long term. He saw these have just been short-term projects that would fizzle out and not really bring about anything substantial when it comes when it came to like the development of an actually egalitarian, whatever post-capital system.

Monthly Review, Brenner, And Annales

C. Derick Varn 58:22

Yeah. I mean, this is kind of where I tend to take a halfway point between Giovanni Rigi and Wallerstein, where I was like, Yeah, I think China will be one of many relative hegemons in this decayed system. It's probably gonna be the most responsible one, but I don't see how it deals with its own internal contradictions in capitalism right now easily. I really don't, and I feel like a lot of people are just like waving that away, like high youth unemployment, weird structural development. I mean, basically, you know, China would have had a bigger economic recession if the US hadn't, you know, decided to shoot itself in the foot with whatever Trump is doing, but you know, and which actually does kind of make for an interesting, like, well, maybe if you let the imperial imperialism breeds stupidity, and if you let the stupidity take over, it'll take care of itself. But I don't I don't want to be that I actually don't want to be that like lazily deterministic. I just I have been like, man, you know, you know what's gonna kill the US? The US. Like, but I've been thinking about that, but I've also been thinking about the the integration of you know, because in some ways I see Wallerstein as weirdly both the most and least Marxist of the gang of four world systems theorists. The most in that he's relatively consistent and doesn't have wild pivots in the theories that don't seem to have anything to do with Marxism, the least in that he never claims to be a Marxist anywhere, and he he also is somewhat I would say, if like you got into the Hegelian methodologies and Marxism, he seems pretty skeptical of that. Um he just doesn't talk about it that much.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:07

No, he just doesn't talk about it. He he he does reference Hegel at a couple times, so it's mostly positive. And he he refers to his method as being dialectical, and he refers to dialectical materialism at several points in time. He just never uses the term Marxism. Or but he he was definitely uh an adherent of some sort of dialectical yeah, dialectical materialism as an undialectical approach to how reality develops.

C. Derick Varn 1:00:38

Like again, France. Thank you, France, always being the weird generator of productive failure that you are. But like there are If you were to read like EndNotes Volume 4, Wallerstein doesn't sound that I mean, he does, you know, well, since Wallerstein doesn't talk about the working class as a universal subject in the same way, anyway. Um, Wallerstein doesn't sound that different from them. Also, he doesn't sound that different from certain kinds of like classical Maoists, except that he's really distrustful of national development as a way out, which is sort of like the Maoist answer. It's the one thing almost all the various schools of Maoism share.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

I'm sorry, I lost you for a second there. You said he was very distrustful of who?

C. Derick Varn 1:01:28

No, I said he doesn't see he I said he seems to be have very distrustful of national developmentalism and like national pathways to socialism, which I think not all, but almost all the post-82 Maoists share. And it doesn't matter if you're on the dungest side or I don't know, the the shining math side. Like I laugh, but you know, the that's generally a shared framework. And Maoism is like I've said many times, Maoism after 1982 is just a Stracture Strotskyism. So like you can found Maoist who argue almost any side of any debate, it's no longer as telling, other than this debate about the greater and lesser contradiction, where any of these people are gonna fall anymore. Like, like, even in the odds, if I met a Maoist, I would probably know that they actually post China, etc. etc. etc. And after particularly after 2012, um after Wallerstein's death, that's not as true. The the other the other person that he reminds me of a little bit in Marxist circles is like Mike Davis and the like like, yeah, there's still a chance, but things are getting really decayed now, which is where he was at right before he died, after he wrote New Enigmas, but also that kind of uh infamous that I really like piece of Thanos uh resplendent about the lack of belief in collective action amongst nations and and that being you almost universal now, blah blah blah blah blah. And I guess that makes Wallerstein very sound like a lot of people who came to this through very different pathways who are you know skeptical of methodological nationalism as a way to deal with understanding the world and also getting to socialism. But let's backtrack a bit because that does lead me to two intellectual influences that we haven't mentioned that you've mentioned briefly, but the monthly review, like Sweezy and Baron's influence on Wallerstein, because I will say that I tend to be pro-world systems theorists, but a lot more skeptical of Sweezy and Baron. And and also where did the Annal school come in? Because it does seem to really come in. So I just wanted to talk about that before we got too into contemporary stuff and into the discussion. Sorry. Yeah, but yeah, taking a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

I just I just quickly want to go back to the the point you mentioned about Wallersheading being uh the the least Marxist while at the same time being the most Marxist of the game for uh systems people. It's actually I wholly agree with that because he while not claiming to be a Marxist any at any point in time, he definitely agrees with all of the core theses of Marxism, with the exception of one, and that's that's uh what he calls the Whig interpretation of this the pro the progressive nature of Marxist worldview as in capitalism bringing progress. So that he rejects, and that he rejects quite vociferously at several points in time, and people take that as him in rejecting Marxism as a whole, but in fact, he accepts all basically everything else, uh even the stuff that most other Marxists reject, like the miseration thesis, like the like dialectics, like uh yeah, yeah, basically basically all the other components. While the the uh the other members of the Gang of Four were definitely a bit more eclectic when it came when it came to their uh approach to Marxism. Yeah, anyway, you were asking me something else.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:08

Oh, yeah, no, I think that's that's an important point. I just wanted to ask you, like, there's there's two screens of influences that I that seemed really important on Wallerstein's part vision of world systems thesis and school. Some of the one of them is seen as you know, uh very Marxist, uh although they're highly debated within Marxism, that's the Baron and Sweezy political development and monopoly capital and all that stuff. I mean, because you know, when I came into the Marxist world, I was associated with people who hated them and like used their names as swear words, so like because you know, blah blah blah. There we don't have to take the transformation problem seriously, it's not a thing. Also, you don't understand what monopoly capital is, it's not a new phase. Um, so I wanted to ask you about their influence, and then I wanted to go into the you know, and thus the Marxist influence, but since we're talking about Marxism and non-Marxism, I also want to talk about the Anner school, who are generally seen as opposing Marxists, even though a lot of Marxists today like them. Um so uh so I let's start with the Barano Sweezy in the monthly review. And uh how what is what is Wallerson's relationship to them? What theories does he take and what does he abandon?

Braudel’s Long Durée And Method

SPEAKER_00 1:06:24

Uh so when he when he wrote the the first volume of the modern model system, he uh he described himself as taking have having taken Sweezy's side and the Sweezy Dobb debate on the origins of capitalism, which Sweezy took a much more like world systemic approach to the development of capitalism, not seeing it as having developed endogenously within like some part of Britain and that then having spread out as it being having been uh international from the outset. So that was what he saw as being valuable in Sweezy. And when it came to Baran, it was of course his his book, uh the whatever, what was it called again? Something about the the political economy of growth, where he argued for uh for the active underdevelopment of different countries. He was basically the first guy to really spell out that argument, which Frank later picked up on. So that's mainly what he got from the monthly review school, as well as Amin being sort of connected to them and and Frank, of course, also being published through monthly review. He did, however, reject the monopoly capital thesis. He never adhered to that. He didn't believe capitalism to have these neatly defined stages the way they did. He didn't see imperialism as a state, he didn't see monopoly capital as a stage, he didn't see uh even the industrial revolution as being a state in capitalism. And he also didn't reject, because the monthly review school, of course, rejected the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He didn't. He never spelled it out directly, but he of course adhered to that if you like read the subtext of his arguments when it came to the increasing costs of capitalism and so forth. And that was actually brought out directly and and argued more directly for by Minchy Lee, uh who sort of picked up on Wallerstein's capitalist crisis theory. Anyways, uh he also asked about the Anal School. So he was actually introduced to the Annal School through reading some other historians. So I I believe he he mentioned that he was first introduced to Fernand Brudel through reading Marian Milawitz, who was a Polish uh economic historian who had written about Poland's development in the 16th century, which is where it was introduced to the fact that both Poland was actively underdeveloped by Western Europe and after the like middle Middle Ages, which then reintroduced serfdom to Poland. And he mentioned that in in uh Malawos' uh work, he through Malaw's work, he was introduced to Fernando Birdell and started reading him and was really inspired by this his approach to to viewing history through different timescales, basically dividing historical analysis into the short term, the middle term, and and the long durée.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:03

And I've taken a lot from that personally, like long durée timescales, and looking at you know, I find there are thinkers and who came out of different frameworks. You try like I think about people who tried to apply Kondrev cycles to history that kind of rhymes because you have you know business cycles, long cycles, technological cycles, and like epochal cycles, like but you know, I I think the long duray stuff actually probably is it interesting because I you know, I would say Marx is a long duray theorist in a lot of ways, but most Marxists aren't. Like like you know, like you know, when when we talk about the the Sweezy Dodds debate or the or the the Brenner debates one and two, and until very recently, most people have seen those as entirely irrelevant academic arguments, like and I've been like, no, they they're important because they're kind of about what you think how you think you develop the forces to get out of capitalism and whether or not you think you know miseration or whatever. I mean, I'm not a fool of miserationist, I think I but I I do think it's interesting how much you know one of the things I found interesting when you you take what he pulls from the monthly review people that he rejects a lot of the same things I do. I think Monopoly Capital doesn't make sense, that it tries to come up with a new stage when you're not in a new stage, these developments aren't clearly stagist. This seems to be confusing historiography with historical development, and that there is, yes, Virginia, there is a tendency to the rate of profit the fall, it's just not absolute. No one ever claimed it was. Like, so but like, do you not see that profits are going down and we're getting sketchier and sketchier in how you recoup revenue? And do you not realize that profits and revenue aren't the same thing? You know, that sort of thing. And I get really animated about this because I'm like, I've been arguing this on the left forever, like even before, like my my initial rejection of leftists was that like like they thought production was manageable, and I'm like, no, it's not, like, not in capitalist forms anyway. I'm not saying that other forms of production aren't, and I thought this as a conservative. I was just like, no, you can't do that, it's not gonna work. And you know, that's something that stayed with me because I'm just like, like, okay, why have so many people from Adam Smith to Ibn Kandun to Aristotle talk about merchants' profits falling if it's not a thing? Like, they just made it up, you know, like it shows up all over the place historically, like before capitalism, even. So, you know, so there's that. The Annal School stuff is really interesting because the Anner School's relationship to Marxism is to me a little weird. I mean, because on one hand, like Brundel was kind of a French patriot, and I don't actually totally get that from his from his own historical work. Like, um, I don't know if it was like atomized or whatever, but I like I you know, I have his the identity of France books and then the economic structure of ordinary life and the stuff in the Mediterranean, and I'm just like, I don't know how you how your politics derives from your history at all. Um maybe he was one of those people where the the meaning is only kind of related, it was hard for me to tell. But I did remember reading other annal school debates with Brenner and not being convinced by them until I read Brundel, and I was like, Oh no, this is really good. But why are these other Annal School people taking positions that I think are dumb? Um, so I I've never been able to completely reconcile that. Is it just really Brundel that influences Wallerstein and not the other animal school thinkers are like, is it really like you know one person, or is it more than that? I mean, you know, there's also people I've I've had people who have said that like the end of Wallerstein's Marxism is the influence of Brundel. And I'm like, well, just because somebody pulls from a non I mean, like Marx didn't pull from Marxist at all because there weren't any around. Um doesn't mean that, like, oh, there's some corrupting thing, and like you know, Wallerstein's no longer a Marxist anymore, particularly when we're accepting people like Swan and like Baron and Sweezy who reject half of Marxists like outright. So uh I just wanted to wanted you to like kind of maybe I know this is not so much a question as a long time. You've watched me enough, hopefully, that you know who is but because I'm thinking out loud. Is there a way in which like do you think that Wallerstein maybe gets to implications of Brunel that Brunel didn't get to himself? Or is that overreading or making Wallerstein too much of a prophetic figure or whatever?

German Historical School And Developmentalism

SPEAKER_00 1:14:28

Uh no, I don't think it is because uh what Braudell himself said as much. He okay. Well, he basically admitted that he didn't know that he was doing world systems analysis until Wallerstein came along and told him that that was what he was doing. And he also made some comment about him having learned more from Wallerstein than Wallerstein learned from him or whatever. So he was he was this he definitely learned something from Wallerstein and sort of looked up to him. When it comes to the rest of the analysis school, I'm not super familiar with the analysis school. I've read Bloch and some for uh Bradell, but not much else. Wallerstein was actually first introduced to the Annal School in the late 50s, I think, because he did part of his doctoral dissertation work in France and there through some French Africanists, which I can't yeah, Georges Ballandier, uh the French Africanist guy, he was introduced to the to Bloch and Fevers, Lucien Fevers' works. But uh he didn't really get back to it until he was reintroduced to to the Annell School with Berdell in the late 1960s. And that's actually really odd that you mentioned that people have argued that he the the moment he was introduced to Berdell, he started started abandoning Marxism because how was he he wasn't even uh completely Marxist at that point. He was introduced to Berdell in the late 1960s. That was basically when he started to engage more directly with Marxism. So those two two things happened sort of uh simultaneously, uh actually. But I I haven't really seen so so when it comes to the analysis, it was basically just Bradell. It looks uh looks that way at least. He mentions in the first issue of review, which was his uh journal of the Fernand Bradell Center, that the three major influences on world systems analysis have been Marxism, the Anals School, and the German, I think he calls it something like this Thatswissenschaften school or something, the German historical school, I think it is. Yeah, that those three were the three major influences on on world systems analysis. But again, he called his research institute the Fernand Berdell Center, not the Anals Center. So Berdell was fantastic here.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:36

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the the the German historical school, and I always call them that because it's easier to say in English than the I guess the German stop. I mean it would be the German state building school, if I translated it literally. Yeah, um I I I find them fascinating because they're sort of an underunderstood part of left and right wing history, and like you don't get modern monetary theory without them, they have ties to the espay day. Marx hated a lot of the early ones' guts, like um, but yeah, oh yeah, but like when Marx is deriding socialism, he's either talking about the what we call the early German historical school, some some utopian socialists are Louis Blanc's Louis Blanc's people in Flance. And as a European, you must forgive my mispronunciation of everything, you don't have to, but but but so you have like those are who he's kind of deriding, and then you have the perdonists and the blanquiist and all that, who usually get more explicitly called out individually, and I find that the but the German historical school, like Knapp is where we get a chartalism from. There are major, I mean, Weber, both the Webers and Werner Sumbach cut out of them. There's this weird tie they have to Austrian economics because a relationship to them too, and like actually took some of the Marxist stuff from them. He's like the the the the he didn't think it was good, but he was like one of the the the you know the key people. They also Austrians got their theory of the business cycle by trying to recapitulate parts of Marxism into this pro-capitalist formation, and so the German historical school's there, and it's like very understudied. I think part of it is that like its key luminaries are considered key figures in sociology, even though they thought they were doing economics. And then there's this relationship with the Italian elite school that you get through them in the late period, and what we like like call the youngest German historical school or whatever, the way that it gets categorized, and then you have Werner Sumbart, which no one really wants to talk about because like no one wants to mention the the the German historical school Marxist hybrid person who ended up a Nazi, even though he coined things like late capitalism and like was on to. I mean, he really, if you read uh why why the US isn't socialist, he's on to settler colonial thesis, like very early on.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:29

Yeah, didn't he also have like an early theory of unequal exchange? Or am I? Yes, he did, yeah, yeah.

National Liberation, Internationalism, And Limits

C. Derick Varn 1:19:35

Later on, he gets obsessed with the Jews and finance capital as ending the entrepreneurial spirit of of industrial of industrial and entrepreneurial capital, and thus he becomes a Nazi. But before like 1914, he doesn't have a lot of those ideas yet. Part of it is his debate with Max Weber, where Weber brands you know Protestantism for capitalism, and and you know, it's neither totally good or bad in Weber's eyes, but some bar blames the Jews and banking, so you know that's yeah, but that's where it comes out of. And again, I think if you look at one of the issues of the German historical school, is it's even in their name in German, they're hyper state focused. They are. I mean, they're brilliant in a lot of ways, but they're very concerned with like the individual histories of nations and bringing them together and holding them together, and it shows up in chartalism and like like the weird nationalist, like autarchic views of like early MMT, where like you know, yeah, this works if you have a closed system, but the moment you introduce international trade, this doesn't work anymore etc etc i i think i think it's interesting that wallerstein like took from them but also you know only took the good parts yeah um and we we can kind of see this across the the board because i i i think for me and i i guess to turn this back over to you and my last question will i'm just gonna let you think about it as i peroxicate is that who do you think is picking up wallerstein's legacy today but what you know so we'll give you time to think about that i i have been like fascinated with this debate around the whiggish view of history because it's one of those areas where i think marx is inconsistent and both marxist and non-Marxist have picked it up like Gramsci wrote the capital versus Lenin little piece way back and you know where I think he's actually right that like capital is not nearly as optimistic as like the manifesto and there's an inconsistency in Marx like between like 1850s Marx where he thinks that like the capitalism's about to fall and like 18 like that decade and it's gonna miserate everybody then there's gonna be a revolution to like the kind of political marks of the 1860s and the other people pointed this out is like Alvin Gouldner the sociologist who you know tried to do two Marxisms and some of that book is nuts but one of the things he does talk about is Marx's own thought is inconsistent on this topic. Like you can pick up trains that sound miserationist very dark the common ruin is a real potentiality and then you can pick up theories that has this completely Whiggish view of history that like Marxism's gonna happen because everything progresses and it sounds like GA cohen and gosh darn it it's gonna be okay and I think if anyone has any sense I mean I really like like I don't know how you can take the like super optimistic vaguely Steven Pinker esque view of Marxism this even some of my friends do and like I have friends in in the Marxist unity group who are like well you know monopoly capital through Amazon will you know and and Netflix will and will increase the socialization of labor and I'm like what are you on like you know like like haven't we made this mistake a bunch of times before just go on I can list them like every decade for the last hundred and I I kind of I kind of in a similar place to Wallerstein where I accept most everything in Marx except the optimistic part. And it's not because I'm a pessimist I don't think you know that I don't think that necessarily like oh the humans are going to buy or we just need an iron fist to fix this or anything like that. But I I just I don't think it's settled at all what happens in the future like and yet I can tell you that this is not maintainable when you can't continue to do this forever. There's no way so in that sense I'm very sympathetic to Wallerstein and I just find it very funny that the person who won't call himself a Marxist is the most Marxist of the people who called themselves Marxist and it's very frustrating. But that irony aside I wanted to give you a chance to like you know who's gonna pick this up now I mean because I mean Eugenie Morozov is obviously doing some stuff with it but he can't be the only person I see Wallerstein mentioned all the time but I also see a lot of Wallerstein readings and people prognosticating on Wallerstein even myself in early periods like reading him in light of other things or other time periods are are other people in the world systems and getting him wrong. Like so you know this is kind of my way of asking you who other than yourself should people go to for trying to understand this and develop this out that's actually a really difficult question to answer.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

So the the reason I started reading writing about the Wall Street to begin with was just the fact that I was a bit dissatisfied with the work that had been done on him up to this point. And I just wanted a clearer intellectual biography on him which I ended up just researching myself. But other than that you're completely right that we've seen like this this dissemination of his thought his thinking his concepts that have reached like far beyond what where they used to be a couple decades ago but without like some of the time they don't acknowledge the the roots of the the concept they're using like core and periphery and so forth. But sometimes they do and and because Wallerstein's work is so big and so expansive and so complex and intricate and is built on like five decades of writing it's it's really easy especially if you pick up his later writings to sort of misinterpret what he's saying because towards the later decades of his life he really tried to simplify much of his or many of his his arguments and well the the problem with that can be exactly that people can end up just misunderstanding you or misapplying your concepts but anyways I think today I I can't really name any one particular person who's really furthering his as in Wallerstein specific project because world systems analysis has sort of fragmented into a lot of different schools of thought the Gang of four became more distant over time although I'd say a min and Wallerstein always stayed like the closest to each other in terms of their thinking but yeah to and Wallerston didn't really have any proteges. He didn't really have any group of students or any one student who really like furthered his specific project. The most Wallerstinian scholar I know of today who's still active is Min Chi Lee who's an economist at the University of Utah who wrote this book back in 2008 called The Rise of China and the demise of the capitalist world economy that basically takes like analyzes China from a almost completely Wallerstinian point of view. Just taking his analysis of the the end of capitalism and applying it to to China and looking at the the empirical data we have on on different world world economic trends.

Misreadings, Legacy, And Who Continues It

C. Derick Varn 1:27:25

So I'd say yeah that's basically the only name I can I can recommend as like being a a scholar who's wholly in line with with Waller Sane's thinking but other than that you can you can see that his his thought has spread quite far and wide yeah for those of you who don't know and the weird history of this is actually kind of funny because the Mormons and I do mean the Mormons here not just Utahans when establishing the University of Utah as a separate institution from the Mormon institutions and a secular one reached out to anyone they could get to start their sociology and economic departments which were a lot of people who were blacklisted during the Word scare so there's this strange history of University of Utah having like monthly review people and world systems people and all kinds of other stuff just up the street from me which is bizarre when you think about the larger context of the state and the university and everything else but I just bring that up because Michili's a person that I could literally go meet like right now like I well probably not right now it's a Sunday but like you know in a couple like in a couple in a couple of days and not the only person you know um one of John Bellamy Foster's co-authors is has taught many people that I know locally so that's you know and there's lots of MMT people and stuff in this department too and it's very strange because this is a very conservative state that has also gone after the liberal institutions and is trying to go after these more conservative economists I mean that's excuse me excuse me trying to replace these these more heterodox economists with more conservative ones that's my aphasia speaking I flip things and it's gonna be very interesting where that goes I just find that very funny because I'm like Min Chi Lee I know Minchie Lee I think like I I've never had a conversation with them I probably should so it's Utah's weird but it is interesting because one of the things I think about when with your papers is like how much these strange institutional alliances and the way they overlap and where you where they you don't think they're gonna come from because it's not always obvious where they are happen. And I realized this when doing a lot of research on the history of the new left for a book that I abandoned but was because it was going to be like 4000 pages. But where I realized that like oh the you know the the University of Utah these Minnesota these universities in the upper Midwest they just weren't hit by the red scare or they had oddly weird reasons for why they weren't like Mormons um who are not known to be the most socialist friendly people in the world today but nonetheless were like open to them in the 30s and 40s and that plays out today in very strange ways and it leads to like weird interconnections with with France and with and China today and stuff like that. And I do think socialists should probably look at these intellectual histories not in like ideological genealogical ways that we tend to do like one of the things that I get super annoyed with is like well the Chiber versus Maoist debates are like about genealogy and are is analytical Marxism good or you know and or is you know Maoism good and I'm just like that's not always helpful like those things split amongst themselves and there's hidden debates that these scholars aren't stating and then there's other debates where you're actually reading a debate into them that's not there and like and the history of Wallerstein seems plagued with this actually and it was really Eugenie Morosoff's article on Brenner's temporary turn to techno feud techno neo techno neofeudalism or whatever we're calling it this week which weirdly reminds me of monopoly capitalism debates almost verbatim where I realized that like oh no there's more implied here more like orthodox Marxism even implied here in in Wallerstein than is even obvious because there's stuff about like how prior forms get recapitulated for different usages and and stuff like that which other Marxists just don't deal with and are kind of crucial to understanding Marxism and I also don't think you can completely reconcile Marx just like it you know people like oh just read Marx and you'll you'll come to these conclusions and I'm like I don't think you will if you like you might if you just read a piece like Capital volume one or maybe even just us capital but if you start reading everything that you can get your hands on you're gonna realize no there you can't make it all just perfectly coherent to a nice clean ideological ideology or even like oh there's early Marx and there's late marks and you know and that and there's an ep epistemic break or whatever and that explains everything. None of that holds like I mean Marx believes some I mean Marx believes some flat out weird shit at times like soil conditions affecting the nature of humanity so he's obsessed with the soil and the way that Kohe Seto said obsessed with but he's also obsessed with it in terms of eugenics which is pointed out by Eric Van Rie's scholarship on Marx's writings on race which are not very much and he for the 19th century was relatively not racist but would definitely hold views today that we would consider weird and I think it is obvious when like like when he talks about center colonialism and how he see like it's obvious in his writings on the Irish for example but then you read him on like the Mexican American War and he sounds like an imperialist and then you read him later on in the ethnological notebooks and he absolutely does not sound like an imperialist at all. So it's like those kinds of things which seem very important to Marxism Marx is not on one side of at different periods of his life it gets very much like the Bible and I think I we haven't seen that with Wallerstein yet but I think we are beginning to see it with Wallerstein because I just think he gets read decontextualized a lot and a lot of secondary sources on him aren't great. I'm just gonna be honest with you because I made a lot of mistakes when I approached Wallerstein because I read like two of the later books you know I I I read two of later books in some of his papers and then tried to deduce all of his thought from that and then what I knew of other world systems thinkers like Samir Amin and uh Giovanni Rigi I've only recently gotten into Emanuel Rigi and I don't know Frank very well at all as I admit it to you. And then realized that like I don't really know where these people are coming from and the the other ones sound less Marxist than Wallerstein.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:32

Samir Amin's the only one I know that really does maintain like a fidelity to Marxism but it's pretty clear by the end of his life that his fidelity to Marxism is a fidelity to like what he sees as a methodology and a liberatory point of view but it's not to like most Marxist conceptions of history yeah I really go ahead I'm sorry I'm sorry I mean actually reviewed Wallerstein's fourth volume The Modern World System and in that review I I haven't seen him state this any other place but he came up with this novel theory of where capitalism began and he said that capitalism originated in Song dynasty China so around the year 1000 and then moved to the Abbasid Caliphate and then moved to the Italian city states and then England or something and that's the first and only place I've ever read him like present this argument. It's super weird.

C. Derick Varn 1:35:25

His unfinished decadence book does not hold to that he says that capitalism is basically an accident of the tributary mode of development because you know Europe was the dangly bits off Asia and was very underdeveloped and just couldn't for both geographic and economic reasons form a tributary society. So capitalism and colonialism is what happened instead that now is an argument in Eurocentrism his book from 1980 something so it goes back to that okay yeah so I mean Samiram's all over the place but I've also David Graber seemed to think that capitalism was semi-emergent in the in the song dynasty but then David Graeber's definition of capitalism is when we're competitive with each other in any environment and he sees it as like a human constant fighting against another human constant and you know I so I guess you know people are very confused on Wallerstein and this is you know me talking to you about it was a way of like me Mia culpaying because I also was very confused in Wallstein I think I've misrepresented himself on a few on a few things I used to talk about the ambiguity of national development in him like he's not a methodological nationalist but that he's still tarred with it because World Systems theory stuck with it and that's not fair to Wallstein that was neither true for him it is true for Giovanni Rigi and maybe Emmanuel Rigi and definitely Samir Amin but like and it leads him to make weird I mean you want to talk about weird conclusions read samir Amin on the Egyptian revolution and who he sides with yeah he said didn't it yeah he sided with CC and he he actually sided with Mabarak at first and then like and then he sided with the liberals in the election against the Brotherhood who were like the descendants of the Mabarak campaign and then he sided with L CC and he never took it back even when I you know and this like I was I was a Samir Amin respecter I really liked the Eurocentrism book you know and even though I disagreed with his theory of how capitalism came up with I thought his stuff about you know the Eurocentric worldview even rhymed with stuff I got from Jairus Banery about how like like Asiatic despotism has been the hereby dragons of Marxism and we don't understand most of the world um and you know I think that's fair but I couldn't understand his positions other than like I then went back and read Samir Amin's debates with Talil Assad and how he views Islamism and and whatnot and I was like okay I kind of get it but you really don't have faith that like secular like secularization is imminent in Islamic society the way it is in European society in a way that doesn't really make sense to me even as a Marxist and so there's just all kinds of weirdnesses that I don't see like Emmanuel Wallerstein didn't do that um and yeah I don't know so last is about your stuff where can people find your work Sam and are you gonna continue working on Wallerstein or do you have any other projects or both you know I I'm I'm trying to continue my work in Wallerstein.

Closing Reflections And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 1:38:45

I I think I'll continue writing the next chapter of his intellectual biography this this time moving into the 1980s I don't know when I'll be done with that but I also have some other article ideas that I want to move forward with but I have a full-time job so I'll I don't know how much time I have to actually complete these projects I don't know when they'll come out but when and or if they do I'll uh probably post about it on my uh ex account so that's where people can find my work yeah I would say people should look up your articles on Wallerstein if they're publicly available I I have told people do not be afraid of peer review just because you don't have a degree in the field I have now been peer reviewed and gotten accepted to conferences on stuff I have absolutely very little training on um formally because I pay attention to methodologies you can teach yourself this stuff.

C. Derick Varn 1:39:35

And unfortunately the the the way that humanities departments are going in universities anyway we're gonna have to be doing this as kind of independent scholars anyhow but as you get to the downside of that I as an Australian who's like contracted to write intellectual books and doesn't ever finish them because I also have a full-time job and a podcast which eat up a lot of time I work about 60 to 70 hours a week. So like you know I write with my spare time too and unfortunately due to the decline of the rate of prophets fall and the general decadence of our institutions I think a lot more of us are going to have to be doing that if any of this is going to be maintained at all. Because I no longer have a lot of hope that the universities are going to do it. And it's not like we have enclaves of Marxist monastics maintaining the sacred books for us. So despite what people would like to exist on Twitter or X excuse me I won't dead name it so thank you for your work I I I found it intellectually illuminating. It helped me understand Wallisted a lot I really do think people should look up these articles. I will at least put a bibliography to them so people can try to find Them and uh people should follow you on X and because you stopped me from being a total moron a couple of times, and apparently have followed my work for a while, and that's cool. So people should follow you, and uh thank you for what you've done here. I I do think I if you if you get this done and never get a chance to turn this into a book, you should try because uh this I think this does need to be out there. There needs to be a better representation of Wallerstein's work as a like a full life, and I am a believer in in intellectual uh biography being helpful to understand context and development for for people's academic thought. And so hopefully you continue this work. So thank you so much, Sam.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:33

Yeah, thank you so much.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:35

All right.