31º Encontro Anual da ANPOCS, de 22 a 26 de outubro de 2007, Caxambu, MG

ST 33: Teoria Social: a atualidade brasileira

Neomarxism and Inequality

Manuela Boatcă, Ph.D.

Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (KU) / IUPERJ, Brazil

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Introduction

From among many Neo-Marxist approaches, several strands of dependency theory

as well as the more recent world-systems analysis have tackled the issue of social

inequality as one to be analyzed on a global level, thus viewing class struggle as a

conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy (rather than

social strata within a state). Consequently, they have been among the first ap-

proaches to radically critique classical notions of social inequality, by insisting that the

nation-state was not the appropriate unit of analysis at which inequality relations are

shaped. However, both perspectives have struggled with their marginal position

within mainstream social theory and were thus unable to permanently influence the

theorization of social inequality. Recent strands of postcolonial theory, especially the

so-called Latin American modernity/coloniality perspective, have best incorporated

the correctives formulated by the two neo-Marxist perspectives.

The paper argues that the creative synthesis between postcolonial social theory

on the one hand, and dependency and world-systems analysis on the other repre-

sents one of the most promising models for assessing global inequality – both struc-

turally and historically. To this end, I focus on the impact which the replacement of

the standard conceptualization of inequality as social difference – largely premised

on a class structure in a national context, with the one of colonial difference – cen-

tered on the reorganization of differentiation criteria along racial and ethnic lines in

European colonies as part of the inequality structure of the modern colonial world-

system – exerts on the scope of theories of social inequality. It is argued that, by

means of this apparent conceptual twist, both Latin American decolonial thought and

Indian subaltern studies systematically factor race, ethnicity, and regional origin

(alongside the classical dimensions of class, status, or social milieu) in the analysis of

inequality relations and thus manage to account for the global consequences which

the expansion of Western modernity has had for the hierarchization of races and of

systems of economic, political, and religious organization both in the West (across

the historical variability of the term) and in non-Western areas.

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1. Challenges of the European self-image

In terms of delimiting the starting-point of modern epistemology, both the hu-

manities and the social sciences have long appropriated the 16th century Copernican

revolution in astronomy as indicator of a more general paradigmatic shift, to be re-

peatedly used both as a metaphor for and as a marker of the modern world view

(Tarnas 1997: 552). To Sigmund Freud, the Copernican turn was the first one of the

three severe blows that “the universal narcissism of men” (Freud 1955: 6f.) had suf-

fered at the hands of the researches of science: the initial cosmological blow dealt to

the human self-love by the realization that the Earth was not the center of the uni-

verse had been followed by the biological blow inflicted on humanity’s claim to divine

descent by Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, and completed by

the (arguably) most wounding, psychological blow incurred by Freud’s own discovery

of the unconscious, attesting to the fact that “the ego is not master in its own house”

(Freud 1955: 11).

Freud’s insight itself was considered a turning point in the intellectual devel-

opment of modernity. For philosopher and psychologist Richard Tarnas, it marks the

systematic engagement with processes of alienation that had begun with the Coper-

nican turn as the actual onset of modernity – what he calls, and I quote, “modern hu-

manity's birth out of the ancient-medieval, cosmic-ecclesiastical womb” (Tarnas

1997: 552). The cosmological alienation thus experienced was seconded, in Tarnas’s

view, by the ontological one manifest in Descartes’ schism between the conscious

human subject and the unconscious material universe and, finally, by the epistemo-

logical one inherent in Kant’s recognition of the human mind’s subjective structuring

of reality (Tarnas 1997: 525). Such hallmarks of modernity as the isolation of the

modern ego in a disenchanted world, the Cartesian program of domination over na-

ture and the derived notion of science as empiricism are therefore collectively traced

back to the displacement of humanity from the cosmological center and the various

levels of alienation stemming from it.

From the point of view of postcolonial theory, this portrayal of the epistemo-

logical trajectory of Western thought fails to account for another severe blow to the

modern self-consciousness: the European “discovery” of America. While, as Walter

Mignolo has pointed out, the limits of known geography had until that time coincided

with the limits of humanity (Mignolo 2000: 283), both the material reality and the con-

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cept of the New World emerging in the long sixteenth century called for a New

(physical and cognitive) Geography that would extend humanity to the space of the

colonized. As a result, there evolved a vast array of delimitation strategies situating

the Others of the modern Occident on the lower ranks within the hierarchies of race,

ethnicity, systems of belief, socio-economic organization, and methods of labor con-

trol that would determine the relationship between the old and the new world and

shape their respective self-definitions for centuries to come (Quijano/Wallerstein

1992, Mignolo 1995, 2000).

2. The Problem. Sociology of Inequality as a Case Study

In labelling this breach in the European self-perception the geopolitical blow to

Occidental narcissism, I contend that it was through its systematic omission from

among the prerequisites of global inequality that the categories of analysis the Euro-

pean social sciences have used for the study of social reality could claim universal

relevance. Accordingly, the main challenge on the way to a social theory that will be

both transcultural and “cosmopolitan” (Randeria 1999, Santos 2005) lies in “unthink-

ing”/“indisciplining” the present theoretical models so as to make them reflect the im-

pact that the geopolitical displacement of the 16th century has had on European

thought categories.

The European modernity’s repertoire of promises is usually drawn from key

moments in Western history and their symbolic role within a linear trajectory that, af-

ter the “overcoming of feudalism”, only features positively connoted entries: the Ren-

aissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Indus-

trial Revolution thus embody the attainability of the humanism, rationality, equality,

scientificity and progress. The ideals thus postulated consequently became the crite-

ria by which the gradual reduction of social inequalities – the guiding principle of ra-

tional social organization – should be measured. For the theorization of social ine-

quality, this meant fitting Karl Marx’s theory of class antagonism and Max Weber’s

complementary three-layered model of social stratification along the lines of class,

status and party to the entire world. Thus a one-size-fits-all model was posited in

which inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, religious denomination, age, and sexual

orientation represent “new” categories, the theoretical importance of which has only

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gradually and reluctantly been acknowledged by mainstream social science toward

the end of the twentieth century.

It was however only in the past decade that this classical notion of social ine-

quality, derived from a unilinear understanding of social evolution, has been de-

nounced as “methodological nationalism” (Smith 1995, Beck 2004, Heidenreich

2005). Besides, the criticism was triggered by research in apparently unrelated fields:

On the one hand, ever more studies on gender issues have been arguing for the ne-

cessity of factoring race, ethnicity and regional origin in the analysis of gender dispar-

ity (Becker-Schmidt 2003, Klinger/Axeli-Knapp 2005), thus pointing to the insuffi-

ciency of the standard dimensions of class, status, educational level, and religious

denomination for explaining social inequality. On the other hand, dependency and

world-systems studies that situate inequality on a global level and view class struggle

as a conflict between bourgeois and proletarian areas in the world-economy had long

cautioned against positing nation-states as the unit of analysis for inequality relations,

as do current stratification models which attempt to explain inequality in terms of the

class- and status-derived categories of social milieu, life style and everyday life con-

duct.

2.1. Dependency Theory

Arising in Latin America in the early 1960s in reaction to the failure of the United

Nations’ economic program to promote development, and the modernization school’s

inability to explain the ensuing economic stagnation in the region, it started by taking

a neo-Marxist position in explaining social change in developing countries. As such, it

claimed that modernization theories represented nothing more than a cold war “ide-

ology disguised as science” (Dos Santos 1971: 236) and was used in order to justify

the intervention of the United States in Third World affairs.

Understood by many as a continuation of and/or counterpart of earlier theories of

“imperialism” (Giddens 1989, Portes 1976) as proposed by Lenin and J.A. Hobson,

dependency theory addressed the issue of imperialism from a standpoint usually ig-

nored by orthodox Marxism: that of the subordinate nations or of “the periphery”

(Prebisch 1950). Thus, dependency theorists characterized modern capitalism as a

center-periphery, (i.e. asymmetrical) relationship between the developed, industrial-

ized West and the underdeveloped, agricultural Third World. Understanding this rela-

tionship was, in their view, not an issue of mapping the transition from “traditional” to

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“modern” – a distinction which the dependency school rejected. Rather, the modern

world’s center-periphery structure mirrored an underlying international division of la-

bor, established as early as 1492 with the advent of colonialism, and still maintained

today through mechanisms of economic domination. The economies of the colonized

countries were reorganized according to the needs of the colonial society, and ended

up producing one or two items that served the latter’s interests. Hence, in sharp con-

trast with modernization theory, the dependency school did not view underdevelop-

ment as a “stage” previous to development, but rather as a “discrete historical proc-

ess through which economies that have already achieved a high level of develop-

ment have not necessarily passed” (Furtado 1964:129). It can then be said that, just

as center (or core) and periphery are relational notions, existing only simultaneously,

so development and underdevelopment are only different aspects of the same phe-

nomenon, not different stages in a continuum. Moreover, underdevelopment is not

the natural condition the modernization school liked to presuppose, but an artifact

created by the long history of colonial domination in Third World countries (So 1990:

97) – the “development of underdevelopment”, as Andre Gunder Frank put it (Frank

1966), in what would later become a much celebrated phrase. Accordingly, studying

self-contained societies, as modernization theories did, could not lead to a valid ex-

planation of social change, because all exogenous factors of change – such as the

momentous experience of colonialism – were left out of the analysis. Also, since the

development of the U.S. and Western Europe had been based on the un-

derdevelopment of the Third World, foreign policies from these countries to Latin

America could only result in the latter’s falling further and further behind. The issue of

inequality, therefore, was one to be assessed at the global level as well, i.e., between

centers and peripheries, and not within individual societies.

Dependency theorists saw the only concrete solution to the termination of de-

pendency situations in Third World countries in severing the ties with the core and

choosing a socialist path of autonomous development, on the model of China and

Cuba, which had accomplished a socialist revolution without first experiencing a

bourgeois one. This was in keeping with their view that the Latin American national

bourgeoisie was incapable of liberating the forces of production because it had

emerged as a creation and a tool of imperialism. Thus its complicity with the bour-

geoisie in the core actually contributed to the upholding of underdevelopment rather

than in any way containing it.

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Thanks to Andre Gunder Frank and the American journal Monthly Review, these

views spread fairly quickly to the United States, where discontent with modernization

theory generally and American imperialism more particularly was growing as a result

of racial unrest and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By the time depend-

ency theory became widely known in the U.S., many of the younger American soci-

ologists no longer viewed capitalism as a source of progress, but as the main agent

of poverty in most of the world (cf. Chirot 1981).

Critical voices started making themselves heard almost at the same time. While

the dependency approach was seen as a welcome departure from “uniform” evolu-

tionary and developmentalist perspectives, and as helpful in understanding the his-

torical origins of underdevelopment, critics felt it did too little in terms of providing an

understanding of alternatives to this situation (Portes 1976: 79). Other policy implica-

tions, as well as methodological and conceptual issues were also addressed (So

1990: 131ff., Sanderson 1995: 216f., Love 1996: 198f.).

After facing criticism of rigidity and pessimism with respect to the possibilities of

development in dependent contexts, of overgeneralization about underdeveloped

societies, of regarding dependency as a general cause of poverty in the periphery

and as the necessary (and sufficient) condition for development in the core, some

dependency theorists brought forth historically more specific accounts of dependency

situations which also allowed for a wider range of responses and solutions. To that

end, internal factors of change were taken into consideration, instead of the domi-

nance factor being the only determinant, as in previous theories. Critics have labeled

the original theory “classical”, “strong” or “hard” and the subsequent version “new”,

“weak” or “soft” dependency theory (So 1990, Sanderson 1995). The former, associ-

ated chiefly with Andre Gunder Frank (1966, 1967, 1969), who advocated the theory

in the (Anglophone) core countries, and with Samir Amin (1976), who championed it

in Francophone areas and especially Africa, considered dependency an insurmount-

able obstacle to economic development and held that peripheral countries could

never benefit from the influence of core capitalism. The latter version, worked out

mainly by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Cardoso 1973, Cardoso/Faletto 1979), com-

bined the notions of dependency and development, thus yielding ”associated-

dependent development”, which is conceived as occurring function of the rise of mul-

tinational corporations. Since some amount of development is possible with the help

of the industrial capital invested by these corporations in the peripheral country, this

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could constitute a viable alternative for the states that do not want to take the chance

of a socialist revolution.

With a research focus restricted to the peripheral countries that emerged out of

the decolonization processes following independence movements and World War II

and an exclusive focus on the periphery, dependency theory stops short of analyzing

some of the consequences equally arising from dependency situations, like their im-

pact on the core states, their importance for socialist ones, or the more general impli-

cations they have for capitalism. Together with the criticisms briefly listed above,

these shortcomings led to this approach´ marginal status within the sociological

canon, both in terms of its explanatory potential for processes of social change, as

well as for issues of social inequality, for the analysis of which it did not possess a

coherent theoretical framework.

2.2. World-Systems Analysis

Dissidence proved a fruitful locus of enunciation for theories of social change. Not

only was the dependency school increasingly considered the “victor” in the debate

with modernization theorists, but commitment to its world-view spawned concern for

the issues it was too limited to solve itself.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s modern world system, the “best-known historical

model of world capitalism developing the implications of dependency” (Love 1996:

200), has been said to have originated out of “marrying to a sensibility informed by

‘Third World’ radicalism, three major traditions in Western social science, all of them

enunciated in opposition to the dominant strain of Anglo-American liberalism and

positivism. These traditions are German historical economy, the Annales school in

French historiography, and Marxism” (Goldfrank 1988: 216).

Wallerstein defined his own condition of dissidence mainly along meth-

odological lines, themselves of course subject to, and arising from, ideological con-

straints: ”In the period since 1945, there have been a growing number of scholars

who became unhappy with Establishment social science (including of course history)

on the grounds that its methodological imperatives (whether they were nomothetists

or idiographers) had pushed them de facto into the study of the infinitely small in time

and space, and that thereby the problems, the realities of large-scale, long-term so-

cial change had become eliminated from the purview of scholarship” (Wallerstein

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2000: 151). He listed dependency theory and world-systems analysis in the same line

with civilizational analysis, world history, historical sociology and international political

economy: “Let me call this the family of dissidents, in the sense that they all were

dissenting from the views that had dominated, still largely dominate, the universi-

ties”(idem).

Joining both neoevolutionism and the dependency school in their rejection of

modernization theory, Wallerstein considered the developmentalist view of social

change as nothing more than a culmination of the only argument underlying both uni-

versalistic and particularistic claims to truth – the assumption that the individual soci-

ety should be the basic unit of analysis: “Everyone seemed to agree that the world

was composed of multiple ‘societies’. They disagreed about whether it was the case

that all societies pursued similar paths down the road of history (albeit at differing

rates) or that each society went its own historic way. They disagreed whether society

in question took the form of a ‘state’ or a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, but in any case it was

some politico-cultural unit” (Wallerstein 1979a: 153).

But this is an ahistorical view, Wallerstein argued, since “the concept of society

[…] reifies and therefore crystallises social phenomena whose real significance lies

not in their solidity but precisely in their fluidity and malleability” (Wallerstein 2000:

119). Rather than a tangible reality to be postulated, “society” is primarily a rhetorical

construct. This implies, however, that all theories of social change having individual

societies as their basic unit of analysis end up making “comparative measurements

of noncomparable and nonautonomous entities” (Wallerstein 2000: 107).

However, if we do not live in a modernizing, but rather in a capitalist world, then,

according to Wallerstein, it is not the current sovereign states we should be con-

cerned about. “Capitalism was from the beginning an affair of the world-economy and

not of the nation-states. It is a misreading of the situation to claim that it is only in the

twentieth century that capitalism has become ‘worldwide’, although this claim is fre-

quently made in various writings, particularly by Marxists” (Wallerstein 2000 : 87).

Obviously, then, the unit of analysis should not be such a value-laden, ahistorical

rhetorical construct. World-systems analysis instead suggested replacing the term

“society” with “historical system”, which is both devoid of any connotations that would

link it to states or any politico-cultural units, as well as indicative of the unity of his-

torical social science, by being both systemic and historical. “We take the defining

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characteristic of a social system to be the existence within it of a division of labor,

such that the various sectors or areas are dependent upon economic exchange with

others for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of the area. Such

economic exchange can clearly exist without a common political structure and even

more obviously without sharing the same culture” (Wallerstein 2000: 74f.).

Consequently, a world-economy is a system whose cultural groupings are not po-

litically unified. The lack of a political structure handling the redistribution of surplus

means that the accumulated surplus can only be redistributed unequally through the

market, mainly in favor of those able to achieve a temporary monopoly. Hence, a

world-economy’s mode of produc-tion is capitalist. Around 1500, the “modern world-

system” was born out of the consolidation of a world economy, allowing for the first

time the full development and economic predominance of market trade. “This was the

system called capitalism. Capitalism and a world-economy (that is, a single division

of labor but multiple polities and cultures) are obverse sides of the same coin. One

does not cause the other. We are merely defining the same indivisible phenomenon

by different characteristics” (Wallerstein 2000 75f.). The emerging world-economy

expanded by its inner logic – unequal distribution of profit in favour of monopolists in

the market networks – and in time came to cover the entire globe.

According to Wallerstein, the fallacy inherent to the unilinear view of evolution,

and which, surprisingly, underlay both Smithian and Marxist conceptions of social

transformations, was to consider the defining feature of capitalism to be the predomi-

nance of wage labor in a given society. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx had viewed

capitalism as essentially competitive and involving free producers, free labor, and

free commodities; so both liberals and Marxists tended to judge a state as less capi-

talist, the more its work situation departed from this model.

But wage labor, Wallerstein argued, does not represent the statistical norm in the

modern world, so we cannot classify states on a degree-of-capitalism scale by the

amount of it they display. On the contrary, the defining feature of capitalism as a sys-

tem – analyzed not in terms of nation-states, but in terms of a world-economy of

which states are functional parts – is a mixture of wage and non-wage labor, of areas

of commodified and non-commodified goods, and areas of alienable and non-

alienable forms of property and capital. “When a deduced ‘norm’ turns out not to be

the statistical norm, that is, when the situation abounds with exceptions (anomalies,

residues), then we ought to wonder whether the definition of the norm serves any

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useful function. World-system analysis argues that the capitalist world-economy is a

particular historical system. Therefore if we want to ascertain the norms, that is, the

mode of functioning of this concrete system, the optimal way is to look at the histori-

cal evolution of the system […] The anomalies now become not exceptions to be ex-

plained away but patterns to be analysed” (Wallerstein 2000 [1987]: 143).

On account of his relativization of the importance of free labor, free ownership,

and commodification, Wallerstein’s notion of capitalism has been felt by many as “in

some respects very ‘un-Marxist’” (see Sanderson 1995: 140). Facing criticism both

from the right and from the left side – too Marxist for some, not Marxist enough for

others (cf. Goldfrank 1988), Wallerstein’s ambition has actually been to revise Marx-

ism by reinterpreting it “without the blinders imposed by taking the nation-state as the

basic unit of analysis” (Goldfrank 1988: 221).

Explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as well as the uneven de-

velopment of capitalism in different countries has been, in Wallerstein’s view, one of

the major problems Marxism could not solve, and which a world-systems approach

could clarify. By equating industrialism with capitalism, Marxists failed to recognize

that what essentially characterizes capitalism is that it is “production for profit in a

market” (Wallerstein 2000 [1974]: 84), but not necessarily industrial production.

Wallerstein therefore refused to see the Industrial Revolution as a significant event in

the development of capitalism, because the main characteristics of this mode of pro-

duction had been present in Europe for more than two centuries at the time when

England experienced its Industrial Revolution:

“What was happening in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries is that

over a large geographical area going from Poland in the northeast westwards and

southwards throughout Europe and including large parts of the Western Hemisphere

as well, there grew up a world-economy with a single division of labor within which

there was a world market, for which men produced largely agricultural products for

sale and profit. I would think the simplest thing to do would be to call this ‘agricultural

capitalism’” (Wallerstein 2000: 85).

Not only does this focus on production render Marx’s own distinction between mer-

chant (involving only exchange of commodities) and industrial capital (focussing on

production) unnecessary, but it also resolves the issue of seeing the predominance of

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wage labor as essential to capitalism: “[…] in the era of agricultural capitalism, wage-

labor is only one of the modes in which labor is recruited and recompensed in the

labor market. Slavery, coerced cash-crop production (my name for the so-called sec-

ond feudalism), share-cropping, and tenancy are all alternative modes” (idem).

Consequently, the “second serfdom”, slavery, and all other forms of non-wage la-

bor “are not to be regarded as anomalies in a capitalist system” (idem), because they

all involve a relationship between employer and laborer in which labor-power can be

bought and sold. This is quite unlike the situation between serf and lord during the

Middle Ages, where neither the economy was oriented toward a world-market, nor

was labor-power a commodity.

While the capitalist world-economy is, as the name indicates, a global one, the

only political entities possessing the power to affect the market are the nation-states.

Whenever local capitalist classes pursuing their economic interests within this single

world market found that it no longer maximized their profit, they tried to influence it by

the use of non-market devices – that is, by asking the state to impose new restric-

tions on the global market. At the beginning of the capitalist world-economy, the in-

terests of several different local groups converged in northwest Europe and diverged

sharply in other parts of the continent. This led to strong state machineries in the for-

mer region, and very weak in the latter, and thus resulted in the operation of “unequal

exchange” – enforced by strong core states on weak peripheral ones (cf. Wallerstein

2000: 86).

The notion of “unequal exchange” (Emmanuel 1972) had been a defining element

in the Marxist version of dependency theory (cf. Love 1999: 200), in which it had

been taken to mean that the amount of labor needed in the periphery to pay for

goods exchanged with the core greatly extended the amount of core labor involved in

producing those goods. World-systems analysis, in turn, viewed unequal exchange

as a set of mechanisms that continually reproduced the basic core-periphery division

of labor itself (see Hopkins/Wallerstein 1982: 48), but there is disagreement as to the

nature of this set of mechanisms. In addition to the core-periphery hierarchy pro-

posed by the dependency school, Wallerstein introduced the notion of the

semiperiphery, to which are assigned both an economic and a political role, of which

the political one of mediating between the exploiters and the exploited is more impor-

tant: “[…] a world economy as an economy would function every bit as well without a

semi-periphery. But it would be far less politically stable, for it would mean a polar-

13

ized world-system. The existence of the third category means precisely that the up-

per stratum is not faced with the unified opposition of all the others because the mid-

dle stratum is both exploited and exploiter” (Wallerstein 2000: 91).

There are two modifications of Marxist theory in this approach. First, the class di-

vision between capitalists and workers did not occur all over the world, but instead

there emerged an international division of labor involving appropriation of surplus-

value of the whole world-economy by core areas. Second, this was not only true of

industrial capitalism, but for agricultural capitalism as well.

“Accidents” in the history, geography, and ecology of the particular countries are

the ones initially deciding the part these countries will play in the structural hierarchy

described above. Once given, though, the differences between the three positions in

the hierarchy are subsequently accentuated and institutionalized by the workings of

the world-market.

In the sixteenth century, at the time of the emergence of the European world-

economy, it was Northwest Europe who enjoyed all these privileges of chance. As a

consequence, it became the core of the system, the location of mass-market indus-

tries and international and local commerce in the hands of an indigenous bourgeoi-

sie, and specialized in agricultural production of higher skill levels on medium-sized,

yeoman-owned land. Tenancy and wage-labor turned out to be the adequate modes

of labor control for these types of economic activity. Politically, the standing armies of

mercenaries and corrupt administrations were the essential elements in the devel-

opment of a patrimonial state bureaucracy working primarily for an absolute monarch.

This resulted in relatively strong state systems, later to become a function of the

weakness of state-machineries in the peripheral areas (cf. Wallerstein 1979b, 2000).

Eastern Europe (with the exception of Russia) and Spanish America became the

system’s periphery, the locus of monocultural (grains, bullion, wood, cotton, sugar)

economies producing on large estates under slavery and coerced cash-crop labor. In

contrast to the core countries, the interests of the capitalist landowners in the periph-

ery diverged sharply from those of the local commercial bourgeoisie, which they

sought to eliminate and subsequently replace by a politically uninvolved class of out-

side merchants. The absence of the strong state was thus a critical feature of the pe-

riphery, making it all the more vulnerable for outside intervention.

The Christian Mediterranean area emerged as the new world-system’s

semiperiphery, specializing in high-cost, quality industrial production and international

14

banking. It engaged in little export and used sharecropping as a mode of labor con-

trol in agricultural production. Politically, the semi-periphery was in the middle, with

some states, such as Spain and the northern Italian city-states experiencing the de-

cline of state authority, and some others (such as southern France) resisting the ex-

pansion of central authority (cf. Wallerstein 1979b: 39).

Since the capitalist world-economy is a historical system, it has a life cycle, mean-

ing that at some point it must cease to function as a consequence of the aggregated

results of these (eventually paralizing) contradictions (cf. Wallerstein 2000). Among

the many structural sources Wallerstein identified for the current crisis of capitalism

are what he called the economic squeeze (the capitalist world-economy now covers

the entire globe, so there are no more areas to be proletarianized and subsequently

used as sources of cheap labor), the political squeeze (the interests of any given en-

trepreneur as a competitor tend to run counter to their interests as a member of

class), and the ideological squeeze (the costs of sustaining the vastly expanding

middle strata have exploded world-wide, but they cannot be cut back without jeop-

ardizing the significant political support the present system has received from these

strata).

Thus, in the end, Wallerstein’s analysis turns out to be much less “un-Marxist”

than its detractors had tried to present it, and just as evolutionary as Marxism itself.

Wallerstein’s essential message is that – apart from capitalism representing progress

– the major theses of Marxism are still valid today, and, once they are applied to the

capitalist world-economy, rather than to nation-states, there have been no events in

world history for which Marxism is unable to account: “As long as Marx’s ideas are

taken to be theses about processes that occur primarily within state boundaries and

that involve primarily urban wage-earning industrial workers working for private indus-

trial bourgeois, then these ideas will be easily demonstrated to be false, misleading,

and irrelevant – and to lead us down wrong political paths. Once they are taken to be

ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves ‘underde-

velopment’, indeed is based on it, they are not only valid, but they are revolutionary

as well” (Wallerstein 1991a: 161).

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3. Modernity, Coloniality, Subalternity. On the Necessity for Synthesis

Instead of the conventional approach to inequality, which tends to focus

merely on the unequal distribution of resources along vertical lines while neglecting

both international disparities and the power component involved, German sociologist

Reinhard Kreckel (2004) has proposed a “political sociology of social inequality” on

the basis of a core-periphery metaphor. Built upon arguments derived from depend-

ency theory, this model premises the North-South-divide as the main antagonism of

the present world, and accordingly claims the world society as the appropriate unit of

analysis of both distributive and relational inequalities (Kreckel 2004: 45; 50). His,

nevertheless, is a methodological solution to what is regularly perceived as a meth-

odological problem, and therefore not meant to question or transcend the limits of the

Enlightenment tradition on which classical theories of social inequality have been

based. However much it may sensitize for the structural nature of peripheral condi-

tions within asymmetric power relations, Kreckel’s approach thus fails to address dis-

parities stemming from the subaltern position of social actors in the epistemic hierar-

chy of global power structures as well as the systematic bias between the roles

awarded hegemonic and peripheral languages and cultures in what counts as valid

knowledge production. In other words, it critiques modernity from within modernity

(Mignolo 2000: 96) even as it acknowledges the generation of alterity as constitutive

to it.

3.1. Postcolonial approaches

Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 formulation of the tenets of world-systems analy-

sis was a radical step. His was a dissident position not only because it criticized and

questioned basic assumptions of social science, but mainly because it did not stop at

suggesting that they should be revised. It claimed the necessity of unthinking those

assumptions (Wallerstein 1991f.). It contended that the categories we used in order

to conduct social research were historically formed and ideologically biased, and that,

rather than revise, we should discard most of them. As such, it was not a new theory,

but “a protest against the ways in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all

of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century”, not a new paradigm of

16

historical social science, but “a call for a debate about the [existing] paradigm”

(Wallerstein 2000: 129; 148).

Not surprisingly, the merits of this approach have been acknowledged more read-

ily by scholars located in the periphery of the world-system (see Goldfrank 1988: 208)

than by those from the core. Given the major role played by dependency theory – a

“peripheral” approach – in the emergence of world-systems analysis, the latter also

entails a heightened awareness for the significance of structural positions within the

system, indeed it is based on it.

Nevertheless, it was from a periphery-based perspective that Wallerstein’s model

has been denounced as being itself a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism, for the

very reason that it is enunciated from within the core (see Mignolo 2000: 314), as well

as for its incapacity to adequately explain the role played by the cultural dimension in

the capitalist world-economy (Grosfoguel 2000; Grosfoguel, forthcoming). Thus, in a

recent attempt at modifying world-systems analysis from the perspective of postcolo-

nial criticism, Walter Mignolo observed that Wallerstein’s framework does not take

into account the fact that the “planetary rearticulation of the sixteenth century” (Mi-

gnolo 2000: 55) which established Western Europe as the core of the modern world-

system in the first place was, at the same time, a powerful machine for subalternizing

knowledge.

Eurocentrism, Mignolo argued, was the perspective of knowledge which emerged

due to the establishment of Western hegemony as a global model of power. As the

world was partitioned into continents, the consolidation and expansion of the capital-

ist world-economy was not the only operation at work. Parallel to it, the ongoing colo-

nization of new areas enforced a classification of the planet with respect to its degree

of Occidentalism, whose aim it was “to transform differences into values” (Mignolo

2001: 13). Thus, to the extent that the world-system became modern, it also became

increasingly colonial, articulating “colonial differences” such as racial, ethnic and

class hierarchies as part of its self-definition. Epistemologically, the outcome of this

categorial reshuffling mirrored the new international division of labor between core

and periphery: the former became the location of modernity, from where the world

started being classified, described, and studied, while the latter engendered colonial-

ity, where the modern world’s epistemological power could be wielded.

Postcolonial criticism’s main contribution to a widening of the scope of world-

system analysis is the insight that Eurocentrism’s long-lasting global hegemony can-

17

not be explained by the workings of capitalism alone, as is the case for the modern

world-system’s economic and political dimensions, and that an experience like that of

coloniality was needed in order to establish and maintain this perspective of knowl-

edge. World-systems analysis, with its acknowledgment of the mixture of different

modes of production making up the capitalist world-economy, does justice only to the

economic aspect of the structural heterogeneity. However, as long as the cultural

component involved in its formation is considered a mere superstructural phenome-

non of the underlying material base, world-systems analysis will lack a powerful ana-

lytical tool for examining the ways in which the system’s structuring and reproduction

are a function of the reproduction of its ideologies.

For postcolonial theories, therefore, the glossing over of critical disparities of

the modern world in the North Atlantic social scientific discourse is a central concern.

In this vein, the abstract universalism of Enlightenment thought represents a strategy

for dealing with the geopolitical blow that the Occidental self-image suffered as a re-

sult of the fundamental experience of alterity posed by the discovery of the New

World. The idea of a universal history subsuming the whole of mankind under one

“project of (Western) modernity” with identical stages and goals provided both the

legitimating rhetoric for the further colonial expansion and the epistemological basis

for subsequent macronarratives, the starting point and yardstick of which was West-

ern Europe. The experience of otherness was thus inverted and transferred to those

(colonized) parts of the world that had been conceived as the reverse of the modern

and as such embodied the particular – that is, the necessary counterpart to the Euro-

pean universal (Kozlarek 2005). By virtue of the growing European claim to power,

the contingent conditions under which the universalizing paradigm of Western mod-

ernity had emerged – namely, its “local history” – were obscured, while both its self-

definition and its outside perception were shaped by a sequence of “global designs”

(Mignolo 2000) – Christianity, the civilizing mission, development, or globalization –

the common denominator of which was being rooted in the Western European ex-

perience. Against this backdrop, the methodological nationalism that European theo-

rists indict represents just another form of particularism, which, on account of being

articulated from privileged positions in the global power structure, can be and has

been passed off as universal. Beside the core-periphery metaphor, postcolonial stud-

ies therefore often employ the silence or blindness metaphor, which points to the sys-

tematic disregard of those marginalized social groups with a colonial background in

18

hegemonic discourses. Through their manifold – economic, social, political, but also

racial and religious – marginalization, these social groups – labeled “subaltern”

(Spivak 1988) in the wake of Gramsci – fall out of recorded history completely

(Prakash 1994: 1482, Trouillot 2005, Mignolo 2000), and are thus unlike both Gram-

sci’s propertyless workers and Marx’s Lumpenproletariat. As a result, the dimensions

along which they have experienced inequity throughout history are absent from

Western theoretical production, just as the greater part of the periphery is silent in

terms of knowledge production. Instances of consistent neglect captured by the no-

tion of silencing range from the playing down of the expulsion of the Jews and Moors

from Spain in Western accounts of 1492, through the conspicuous absence of the

Haitian revolution from canonical (i.e., North American and European) historiography,

and up to the construction of Africans as “people without history” – but many more

could be added.

In this respect, the main task of a postcolonial re-reading of history would con-

sist in revealing the global consequences which the expansion of Western modernity

has had for the hierarchization of races and of systems of economic, political, and

religious organization, as well as for the subalternization of intellectual production in

non-Western areas. In terms of a transcultural and cosmopolitan theory of social

stratification, this above all requires replacing the conceptualization of inequality as

social difference, largely premised on a class structure, with one capable of explain-

ing the reorganization of differentiation criteria yielding the racial and ethnic structure

of European colonies. The notion of colonial difference has been employed to this

very end both within Indian Subaltern Studies and Latin American postcolonial litera-

ture, but given a different scope within each. While Partha Chatterjee (1993) devel-

oped the term to apply to an analysis of the racial practices of the colonial state in

India as different from the modern (British) state, Walter Mignolo (1995) advanced it

as the common denominator of the worldwide phenomenon of coloniality that, ac-

cording to Anibal Quijano, capitalism as a global model of power had installed along-

side and in complicity with modernity (Quijano 2000a). For Quijano, the evolutionist

notion that human civilization advanced through a unilinear sequence of stages lead-

ing up to the Western model of capitalist modernity and the dualist view that differ-

ences between Europeans and non-Europeans could be traced back to insuperable

natural categories such as primitive-civilized, irrational-rational, traditional-modern,

represented the foundational myths behind the propagation of Eurocentrism and the

19

rhetoric legitimating the establishment of Western hegemony. The subsequent con-

solidation and expansion of the capitalist world-economy had thus gone hand in hand

with a classification of geographical regions with respect to their degree of Euro-

peanness and the setting up of functional hierarchies corresponding to this criterion.

This is to say that, to the extent that the world-system had become modern, it had

also become increasingly colonial, articulating “colonial differences” in the form of

racial, ethnic and class hierarchies as part of its self-definition. The resulting interna-

tional division of labor between core and periphery therefore mirrored not only eco-

nomic and political differences, but at the same time asserted cultural and epistemo-

logical divides that justified the presence of modernity and at the same time the loca-

tion of capital accumulation, political control, and scientific study of the rest of the

world in the core, while the coloniality of economic and state power, epistemological

knowledge, and ontological inferiority was confined to the periphery. As the neces-

sary but hidden counterpart of modernity, coloniality is thus seen as having engen-

dered throughout the period of Western colonial rule a threefold process of classifica-

tion: in relations of exploitation between capital and labor; in relations of domination

between metropolitan and peripheral states, and in the production of subjectivities

and knowledges. Far from being the homogeneous and coherent totality to which

uniform processes of change from traditional to the modern eventually lead, capital-

ism is thus revealed as a historically and structurally heterogeneous global structure

of power relations, encompassing various peoples, cultural histories, and relations of

production in diachronic or synchronic arrangements (Quijano 2000b: 553). At the

same time, it is this spatial and temporal concurrence of the construction of ethnic

and racial hierarchies on the one hand, and the setting up of the international division

of labor, on the other – i.e., the complicity between modernity and coloniality – that

accounts for the persistence of the latter after the process of administrative decoloni-

zation and the continued reproduction of its logic at the political, economic and epis-

temic level.

This conceptualization of coloniality as modernity’s invisible foil is precisely

what allows for a convergence between postcolonial studies on the one hand and

dependency theory and world-systems analysis on the other. While both have

emerged out of a criticism of Western hegemony and Eurocentrism, their almost mu-

tually exclusive explanations for these phenomena – cultural history in the case of

postcolonial studies, the capitalist world-economy for the world-systems approach –

20

have led them on divergent paths in the analysis of colonial differences. Yet, as many

theorists from both “camps” have pointed out in recent years (Dirlik 1994: 352, Hall

2002: 243, Grosfoguel 2002: 213ff.) the solution for overcoming this false dilemma,

and with it, the equally false division of scholarly labor between the humanities and

the social sciences in the analysis of social relations, is to acknowledge that the

setup and functioning of the global capitalist system required the mobilization of both

ideological and cultural mechanisms justifying the imposition of the new hierarchical

structures and of the economic and political conditions for implementing them. Com-

plementing the focus on culture and epistemology with the one on political economy

helps uncover coloniality as more encompassing and more enduring than colonial-

ism, and both as prerequisites of Western modernity.

Besides its impact on sociology as a discipline that emerged as an institution-

alized attempt at understanding precisely this modernity and still defines itself in

these – narcissistic – terms, a postcolonial critique of classical theories of inequality

that consistently takes coloniality into account could accomplish a translation be-

tween the claim to universality inherent in its current theoretical canon on the one

hand and the “blind spots” resulting from the particularity of a single epistemological

perspective on the other, i.e., between the overrepresentation of modernity and the

underrepresentation of coloniality. As such, it would be an essential contribution to

the unthinking of dominant social theoretic paradigm and to the indisciplining of insti-

tutionalized structures of knowledge on which the larger process of political, eco-

nomic, social and epistemological decolonization depends.

21

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