Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University

Review abstracts, vol. XXX, 2007

 

Review XXX, 1, 2007

 

Immanuel Wallerstein, “Naming Groups: The Politics of Categorizing and Identities”

 

We are faced today with a cornucopia of types of groups that lay claim to priority analytically and politically—race, gen­der, class, religion, nationality, among others. Such categories are socially constructed and can be reconstructed, always depend­ing on a minimal level of reciprocity of perception between any group and others. We are confronted with two questions about such groups: which ones are the important ones? and, given the fact that their names often change with remarkable rapidity, what is the importance of the specific names used to denote a particular group? We explore how the importance of types of groups depends regularly on the specific context of the world-system at any given time. And we explore the fact that terminology matters, but also is a slippery slope. Politically and analytically, in the current era of transition, it is important to take great care in categorizing groups and in asserting priorities. For we need always to keep our eye on the ball, noting how doing these things affects real power relations.

 

Franco Barchiesi, “Labor and Social Citizenship in Colonial and Postcolonial Modernity: South African Perspectives in a Continental Context”

 

A major topic of interest in African studies is the role of wage labor in relation to shift­ing state policies from colonialism to independence. Early colonial policies, which were aimed at avoiding the formation of an urbanized African proletariat, were re­placed in the late colonial and postcolonial state with strategies of labor stabilization and co-option. Wage labor underpinned, in particular, developmental ideologies and forms of discipline that perpetuated the lack of democracy and political rights. Using Aníbal Quijano’s notion of “coloniality of power” this article situates South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy in the long duration of the continental trajectory from colonial to postcolonial modernity. It reveals that the social policies of the post-1994 South African democracy reflected a hierarchical view of social citizen­ship, with waged employment at its center, which resembled colonial patterns of govern­ance that influ­enced Africa’s independent nation-states. The ideological central­ity of wage labor in post-apartheid policy discourse is also expressed in its moral vocabu­lary opposed to welfare dependency, which obscures the material decline of waged work in a context of deepening unemployment and casualization. In the final analysis, the work-centered policy discourse of South Africa’s postcolonial transition raises important questions concerning state legitimacy, and new forms of social movements and social conflicts.

 

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges”

 

Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It operates through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line.” The division is such that “the other side of the line” vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line. The other side of the abyssal line is the realm of beyond legality and illegality (lawlessness), of beyond truth and falsehood (incomprehensible beliefs, idolatry, magic). These forms of radical negation together result in a radical absence, the absence of humanity, modern subhumanity.

            This article argues that although colonialism provided the model for modern radical negation and exclusion, this is as true today as in the colonial period. Modern Western thinking goes on operating through abyssal lines that divide the human from the subhuman in such a way that human principles don’t get compromised by inhuman practices. First, the tension between regulation and emancipation (on this side of the line) continues to coexist with the tension between appropriation and violence (on the other side of the line) in such a way that the universality of the first tension is not contradicted by the existence of the second one. Secondly, abyssal lines continue to structure modern knowledge and modern law. Thirdly, these two abyssal lines are constitutive of Western-based political and cultural relations and interactions in the modern world-system. The struggle for global social justice must, therefore, be a struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking, a postabyssal thinking.

 

 

Review XXX, 2, 2007

 

Kolya Abramsky, “The Underground Challenge—Raw Materials, Energy,
the World-Economy, and Anticapitalist Struggle: Reflections on Globalization and the Race for Resources by Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell”

 

Globalization and the Race for Resources seeks to understand the present from a world-historical perspective in order to help strategize collective intervention and resistance aimed at shaping the future, for example, to lessen the social inequalities and ecological destruction inherent in the production, trade, and consumption of global extractive industries, such as iron ore, wherever they may occur. Major questions are posed to those readers who believe that the world around us is constructed through conscious human action, choice, and above all struggle, as opposed to fate. The authors’ ”new materialist” approach provides the tools, concepts, and historical background to grapple with the issue of world raw materials politics and its past, present, and likely future struggles. This book is of the utmost relevance for contemporary anticapitalist struggles and their global networks, such as World Social Forum, Peoples Global Action, and Via Campesina.

 

 

Jonathan Leitner, “An Incorporated Comparison: Fernand Braudel's Account of Dutch Hegemony in a World-Ecological Perspective”

 

In a section near the end of the chapter on Amsterdam’s hegemonic era in his The Perspective of the World, Braudel discusses Amsterdam’s relations with its various peripheries, making a brief sketch of the Dutch hegemonic system. Methodologically resembling McMichael’s incorporated comparison, Braudel eschews a top-down approach and historically reconstructs Dutch hegemony by examining each periphery (the Baltic, France, England, and the East Indies) and its core-periphery relationship with Amsterdam.  While an apt piece of framing, he neglects the methodological emphasis on human-environmental embeddedness in his other works, which others have attempted to draw out in more explicit terms. This article fleshes out the historical-ecological underpinnings of the extractive/productive systems involved in each of the three Dutch peripheries Braudel examines, but starts with a look at the agroecological roots of Dutch ascent up the European world-economic hierarchy. The ecological constraints dealt with by Dutch agriculture evolved into an internal pattern of ecologically “coherent” inter-regional trade within the northern Netherlands that in turn prefigured the later patterns that marked seventeenth-century Dutch hegemony. This comparison is also expanded spatially to the Americas (Brazil and New Netherland). Though less important to Amsterdam’s hegemonic edifice overall, these two lost Dutch colonies provide exceptions that help prove some of the ecological rules of Dutch hegemonic praxis.

 

Dennis O’Hearn, “Bringing the Human Back into the Material: Embodied Perception in Stephen Bunker’s Political Economy”

 

Stephen Bunker’s late work improved our understanding of the nature and causes of cycles of capitalist accumulation and hegemony and, especially, how they are driven by the technologies and economics of extracting key raw materials that are necessary for the expansion of capitalism. In posthumously published work, he added an impressive critique of Marx’s labor theory of value and attempted to develop a theory of natural production of values. In these works, however, Bunker failed to address how hegemonic projects organized labor, including the ways in which indigenous people and their forms of knowledge and perception interacted with, were displaced by, resisted, and in some cases superseded hegemonic projects and technologies that have successively attempted conquest since the arrival of Europeans to the Americas in the fifteenth century. His last work on ancient Peruvian ditch building and maintenance, The Snake with Golden Braids, is perhaps his most important because it examines ancient technologies, cosmologies, and sensations and, in the process, begins to lay the basis of how we may solve the problem of devising human technologies in ways compatible with the material forms in which nature transforms and stores energy.

 

 

Dale Tomich, “Stephen Bunker: Material Process and the World-System”

 

This article is a remembrance of Stephen G. Bunker and an appreciation of his environmental and resource approach to world-systems scholarship.

 

 

 

 

Return to Review

 

Go to Fernand Braudel Center home page