World Systems

Some of the things that are learned in a modern world system class is what are world system and globalization. Because it is hard to write down the definition in my own word I am going to use the words of Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein wrote that a world system is “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” (Wallerstein p; 239). What he is basically saying is that the world system. This is pretty much the same thing the Karl Marx and Lenin said with a modern a day appear. Wallerstein claims the world-system of today is a world-economy, implying the exploitation relationship between abstractions of countries. Globalization is the process, completed in the twentieth century, by which the capitalist world-system spreads across the actual globe. Since that world-system has maintained some of its main features over several centuries, globalization does not constitute a new phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the capitalist world economy is in crisis; therefore, according to the theory's leading proponent, the current "ideological celebration of so-called globalization is in reality the swan song of our historical system" (I. Wallerstein, Utopistics, 1998: 32).

According to my notes and the globalization website “the modern world-system originated around 1500. In parts of Western Europe, a long-term crisis of feudalism gave way to technological innovation and the rise of market institutions. Advances in production and incentives for long-distance trade stimulated Europeans to reach other parts of the globe. Superior military strength and means of transportation enabled them to establish economic ties with other regions that favored the accumulation of wealth in the European core”. During the "long sixteenth century," Europeans thus established an occupational and geographic division of labor in which capital-intensive production w...

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...t is to say that it has structures that define it as a system. At the same time the system is evolving second by second. That is to say the system is historical and has a history. It starts out as an incredible period of economic expansion, which then slows down. It starts out as the period of unquestioned US global hegemony and then this hegemony begins its decline in a relative sense. Periods of global economic expansion are referred to as Kondratieff cycles. These cycles typically last 45-60 years and are characterized by an A phase and a B phase. The A phase is a period of economic expansion such as the period of 1945-90The B phase is a period of economic contraction if not depression. Hegemonic cycles such as the US enjoys are typically much longer phases than Kondratieff cycles. It is the nature of the capitalist world economy that hegemonic states make efforts to prolong their power while undermining the very elements that created their hegemony in the first place leading to a relative decline. Previously the UK began its decline in the 1870’s while the US and Germany began their long competition that led to two world wars with the US becoming the hegemonic power by 1945.