Immanuel Wallerstein's World Systems Analysis

first thing I'd like to discuss with you now is the legacy of colonialism now colonialism is defined as how a foreign power maintains political social economic and cultural domination for an extended period of time over a group of people or a country in simple terms colonialism is ruled by outsiders relations oftentimes between the colonial nation and the colonized people are very similar to relationships that are described in class terms between the dominant capitalist class and the proletariat this is very reminiscent of the work of Karl Marx when he talked about the haves and the have-nots now by the 1980s in the world traditional colonisation colonialism had pretty much disappeared most of the nations that had been colonies prior to say World War one had achieved some sort of political independence and had established their own governments and the way that that occurs is the colonizing nation had swooped in and set up a government in these countries and after a period of time when these nations decided that they no longer needed to be in the country for whatever reasons whether that was they no longer needed the labor resource they no longer needed natural resources they largely just sort of left and they left the country to set up its own government and to try and fix many of the problems that had been inherent in the colonial systems of the past colonial domination established some patterns of economic exploitation and a lot of these countries that continued on even after they achieved their own nationhood and part of the reason for that is because some of these nations had never been allowed to develop their own infrastructure develop their own industry and technology and they had become very dependent on the countries that had come in to colonize them what we would refer to as colonial masters basically so when the colonists moved out it caused a continuing dependence and foreign domination which today we refer to as neo colonialism the continued dependence on more industrialized nations for managerial and technical expertise by the former colonies and this is a pretty common occurrence with countries that were once colonized so whether we're actually talking about colonialism or neo colonialism it's important to note that the economic and political consequences are very real sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has done a lot of work in this area and he has what he termed world systems analysis which is a perspective or a theory which says that there are unequal economic and political relationships in which certain industrialized nation among those the United States and their global corporations still continue to dominate at the core of the world system at the semi periphery of this system would be countries that have somewhat marginal economic status they're kind of in the middle they're not a dependent country necessarily however they do depend on the assistance of those core nations at times the countries that fall into this category could be South Korea India Mexico and then there's a third category the peripheral nations the peripheral nations of the world are still in an exploitative relationship to the core nations and the core nations and their corporations often control and exploit the non core nations economies natural resources and labor pools so the division between core and periphery nations is significant and it's a very stable relationship and what I mean by stable relationship is once you find a place in one of these categories it's extremely challenging to move yourself out the core nations have pretty much been the core nations for decades if not a few Charice the semi peripheral Nations however we have had some countries that have lifted themselves from the periphery into that semi peripheral state it will be challenging indeed for those semi peripheral nations however to bump up into the coordination category with the exception of a couple of nations I would have to say that China and India are probably the two that would be most readily poised to move themselves up into a coronation category and the largest reason for this is the development of an infrastructure industrialization and the size of their population they have so many people to contribute to a workforce in those countries that that will very rapidly help them to overcome their semi peripheral status and maybe move into that core nation ranking so Wallerstein kind of speculated that the system that we currently understand it will undergo some changes as the world becomes increasingly urbanized once we do become our urbanized we will actually start to eliminate the large pools of low-cost workers that live today in rural areas and so in the future core nations are going to have to find other ways to reduce labor costs so we're exhausting land or exhausting resources such as water through clear cutting and pollution we're driving up the cost of production and we're also depleting our labor source this has some serious ramifications for quote-unquote business as we know it on the world labor market Wallerstein's world systems analysis is a very widely used theory that falls under the broader spectrum of what we call dependency theories so dependency theories in general talk about developing countries even while making economic advances will remain subservient and weak to core nations and large corporations and I think there is a lot of truth to Wallerstein's assumptions and to dependency theories in general and you really can see that it is a conflict type of theory the interdependency of industrialized nations allows them to continue to exploit developing countries the industrialized nations playing the roles of the bourgeoisie or the haves and the developing countries playing the role of proletariat or the have-nots so what's actually happening here with regard to natural resources in the world a growing share of the human resources and the natural resources of developing countries is actually being shifted it's being redistributed to the core industrialized nations this happens because developing countries go into debt two core nations as a result of foreign aid loans trade deficits etc and when that happens and the developed nations start to call in their markers one of the ways in which they can pay us back is by allowing corporations to exploit the workers and the natural resources of that country so what actually ends up happening in developing nations is for example the currencies may be devalued workers wages might be frozen you'll have an increased privatization of Industry and a reduction in government services and employment because as the government scrambles to try and pay back the debts they owe to core nations they take money away from building their own infrastructure this is problematic for those dependent countries because it puts them in a position of spinning their wheels more or less they don't really ever get to significantly lift themselves out of the status that they're in because they're caught in a cycle of having to pay the man basically all right I hope this helps you to understand these basic concepts we'll talk again soon have a great day take care bye bye you

Channel: Debra Marshall

Views: 135,396

Rating: 4.8355064 out of 5

Keywords: Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Theory, World Systems Analysis, Conflict Theory, Globalization, Neocolonialism

Id: KbS1VkX3CP0

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2013