Jan 13 2009
working within the system wallerstein
. Everybody and everything is affected by the System and the systems within the System. The System is an overlapping system of systems, each highly complex, highly bureaucratic, all working within, not just the framework of every other system, but within the overarching umbrella of the capitalist system. Immanuel Wallerstein has referred to this as the capitalist world-economy. Wallerstein states that by 1557 “the capitalist world-economy was an established system that became almost impossible to unbalance.”[1] For over 400 years capitalism has been bending, shaping, destroying and consolidating other world systems into its self: Historical capitalism, is, thus, that concrete, time-bounded, space-bounded integrated locus of productive activities within which the endless accumulation of capital has been the economic activity. It is that social system in which those who have operated by such rules have had such great impact on the whole as to create conditions wherein the others have been forced to conform to the patterns or to suffer the consequences. It is that social system in which the scope of these rules (the law of value) has grown ever wider, the enforcers of these rules ever more intransigent, the penetration of these rules into the social fabric ever greater, even while social opposition to these rules has grown ever louder and more organized [italics added].[2]
[1] Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 19.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, (London: Vereson Editions, 1983), 18-19.
