Immanuel Wallerstein

But we can also think of decline as happening in the world systems sense.

This is the sense that I really mean it, which is that, um, like scholars like Immanuel Wallerstein told us, they've written about this for decades, that the first sign of hegemonic decline is the use of force to enforce your hegemony.

We are actually no longer hegemons when f- military force becomes like the f- the preferred tool in our toolkit because hegemony implies a consensualism.

It implies consent.

I mean, they believe that too, but they're kinda, they're, they're kinda like a dialectical offshoot of what was the Marxist-Leninist perspective.

I think that they, uh, I think they're big on guys like Immanuel Wallerstein and, and like they, they s- they subscribe to like global systems theory, which is serious stuff, but, but they are like Stalinists.

Like they don't...

You know, they're-- They, they tolerate religious people these days.

It's like goofy as fuck.

But, um, but no, I think, um, you know, and today, uh, I realize I'm going kind of outside the scope, so forgive me for that if it's, um, boring people.

But guys like Immanuel Wallerstein, um, guys who, uh, these kinds of post-Marxist types who, who do like talk about, you know, social justice within globalism.

I mean, yeah, obviously I don't like have common cause with those guys.

in scope, but they had this, this view that the Industrial Revolution was built on the backs of the colonized people, right?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that there's such a robust sociological theory in the new history of capitalism to really point to a, a lineage that goes to a, a Braudel and a Wallerstein.

I tend to think of them, this is actually a, a line from Brad DeLong, who's also an economic historian here at Berkeley, where I've heard him say that the new history of capitalism is work that would have come from Harvard Business School in the '50s, but with the moral polarity flipped.

And so everybody who would have been a good guy in the '50s is now a villain-

but also in the work of people like Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood and the School of Political Marxism, which I usually, when I think of Western Marxism, that's actually more what I'm thinking about, not so much.

And I know Lukács and Adorno and Horkheimer, and that's more what people would normally think about, but I'm thinking more in those lands, right? So then you'll have a response by people like Wallerstein or...

Or as Samir Amin, who will say, actually, you know, that pool of capital doesn't come only through Western enclosures.

It comes through a world systemic transformation.

And this is widely recognized in literature.

This provisions an important quantum of wealth.

So like Wallerstein will recognize this quantum of wealth.

But for Wallerstein, it becomes an important fund to stabilize the capital labor relation in the core.

...

it developed in its own way, and most of them didn't end up dying Marxist anyway, and Wallerstein was always cagey about whether or not he'd consider himself a Marxist in the first place.

That's a form of Third Worldism.

Mm-hmm.