The World-systems approach is a post-Marxist view of world affairs, one of several historical and current applications of Marxism to international relations.
One of the basics of the approach is its view of imperialism, which for many Marxists during the 20th century represented "the highest stage of capitalism", a term coined by Vladimir Lenin, who also used the terms periphery and core as a means to analyze world politics and economy.
Immanuel Wallerstein, a leading advocate of the approach, uses the same terminology. He characterizes the world system as a set of mechanisms which redistributes resources from the periphery to the core. In his terminology, the core is the developed, industrialized, democratic part of the world, and the periphery is the underdeveloped, raw materials-exporting, poor part of the world; the market being the means by which the core exploits the periphery.
Wallerstein traces the origin of today's world-system to the 16th century in Western Europe, and defines it as:
- "...a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning."[1]
Apart of these, Wallerstein defines four temporal features of that. Cyclical rhythms represent the short-term fluctuation of economy, while secular trends mean deeper long run tendencies, such as general economic growth or decline. In the theory the term contradiction means a general controversy in the system, usually concerning some short-run vs. long run trade-offs. For example the problem of underconsumption, wherein the drive-down of wages increases the profit for the capitalists on the short-run, but considering the long run, the decreasing of wages may have a crucially harmful effect by reducing the demand for the product. The last temporal feature is the crisis: a crisis occurs, if a constellation of circumstances brings about the losing of the system's structure, which also means the end of the system.
Technically speaking, World-systems analysis is not a theory, but an approach to social analysis and social change. It is based in part on the works of Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein with major contributions by Christopher Chase-Dunn, Volker Bornschier, Peter Turchin, Andrey Korotayev, Janet Abu Lughod, Thomas D. Hall, Kunibert Raffer, David Wilkinson, and others.
It should be noted that World-systems analysis is not only derived from the neo-Marxist literature on development but also from the French Annales School tradition(especially Fernand Braudel).
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