Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.
{"title":"Reading Hunger and Exhaustion in Clarice Lispector’s A Hora de Estrela","authors":"Hannah Gillman","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1238","url":null,"abstract":"Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140691406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empire, Marxism, and Nationalism","authors":"José Neves","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140691269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.
{"title":"Ibn Khaldun’s Labor Theory of Value and the Question of Race","authors":"Ş. S. Karataşlı, Derek Clark","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1195","url":null,"abstract":"In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140693962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Palestine and Global Crisis","authors":"William I. Robinson","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1264","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140692050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyzes spatial hierarchies and geopolitical conflicts during the COVID-19 pandemic from a world-systems perspective. Drawing on data on global vaccine production and distribution, we argue that the trimodal structure of the capitalist world-system—core, semi-periphery, and periphery—has been reproduced through unequal access to vaccines, constituting hierarchically structured “vaccine worlds”. These vaccine worlds are geopolitically contested, as Chinese companies compete with American and European corporations for influence and markets. Against this background, we outline the Chinese state-led vaccine internationalization strategy with its focus on the global South, and discuss its achievements and contradictions.
{"title":"World-System of Vaccine Distribution","authors":"Philipp Köncke, Stefan Schmalz","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1173","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes spatial hierarchies and geopolitical conflicts during the COVID-19 pandemic from a world-systems perspective. Drawing on data on global vaccine production and distribution, we argue that the trimodal structure of the capitalist world-system—core, semi-periphery, and periphery—has been reproduced through unequal access to vaccines, constituting hierarchically structured “vaccine worlds”. These vaccine worlds are geopolitically contested, as Chinese companies compete with American and European corporations for influence and markets. Against this background, we outline the Chinese state-led vaccine internationalization strategy with its focus on the global South, and discuss its achievements and contradictions.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140690814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Studies have noted a dependency on sex work to “make do” in economies ravaged by foreign debt (Harrison 1991; Obregón 2018), necessitating a framing of the dynamics of sex work through a globalized system of enforced debt. This paper explores sex workers’ rights in post-quake Haiti and contemporary Jamaica, through an examination of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (2020) and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2017). Like global debt systems, the exploitation of sex workers relies on a politics of dependency and constructed narratives of victimhood. This results in the refusal to recognize sex work as autonomous labor, meaning sex workers do not possess the protections of labor rights (Mgbako 2019). A literary examination of these debates exposes global debt’s modes of subject creation and the powerful resistance inherent in resubjectifying sex workers as conditionally agential rights claimants. This therefore reflects the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) suggestion that world-literature registers the “single but radically uneven world-system” in its form and content (2015). By exposing the tensions in subject-making at the heart of both debt economies and sex workers’ rights debates, Orcel and Dennis-Benn create feminized spaces to narrate sex workers’ negotiations of patriarchal-capitalist structures that peripheralize them.
{"title":"“What Will Set Yuh Free is Money”","authors":"Charlotte Spear","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1233","url":null,"abstract":"Studies have noted a dependency on sex work to “make do” in economies ravaged by foreign debt (Harrison 1991; Obregón 2018), necessitating a framing of the dynamics of sex work through a globalized system of enforced debt. This paper explores sex workers’ rights in post-quake Haiti and contemporary Jamaica, through an examination of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (2020) and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2017). Like global debt systems, the exploitation of sex workers relies on a politics of dependency and constructed narratives of victimhood. This results in the refusal to recognize sex work as autonomous labor, meaning sex workers do not possess the protections of labor rights (Mgbako 2019). A literary examination of these debates exposes global debt’s modes of subject creation and the powerful resistance inherent in resubjectifying sex workers as conditionally agential rights claimants. This therefore reflects the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) suggestion that world-literature registers the “single but radically uneven world-system” in its form and content (2015). By exposing the tensions in subject-making at the heart of both debt economies and sex workers’ rights debates, Orcel and Dennis-Benn create feminized spaces to narrate sex workers’ negotiations of patriarchal-capitalist structures that peripheralize them.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140692597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.
{"title":"Compassion as Commodity","authors":"Hendrikje Kaube","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1234","url":null,"abstract":"While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140693586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This concluding coda to the “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” Special Issue focuses on themes of exhaustion and alienation in women’s work. This coda builds on the Introduction and papers in the issue to examine how women’s labor often negotiates between and beyond the world-systemic wage relation, yet, women of course still operate within the capitalist world-system. Here I bring together the papers in this Special Issue to consider how, if “a woman’s work is never done” at the same time as there being “no such thing as an easy job” in our current world-system, this system of exhaustion and alienation can be mapped onto the gendered enmeshment of work with non-work, especially around care, pleasure, and emotional investment, which alienates us from those very same things in our current capitalist formations. I demonstrate how this enmeshment is thought through in literature by comparing the lyrics from c. 1629’s “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” with Kikuko Tsumura’s recent bestseller, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (2021), to frame the key themes that have emerged in this Special Issue, using Audre Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as a form of unalienating activity and energy.
{"title":"Woman’s Work is Never Done: Exhaustion and Alienation","authors":"Roxanne Douglas","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1239","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding coda to the “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” Special Issue focuses on themes of exhaustion and alienation in women’s work. This coda builds on the Introduction and papers in the issue to examine how women’s labor often negotiates between and beyond the world-systemic wage relation, yet, women of course still operate within the capitalist world-system. Here I bring together the papers in this Special Issue to consider how, if “a woman’s work is never done” at the same time as there being “no such thing as an easy job” in our current world-system, this system of exhaustion and alienation can be mapped onto the gendered enmeshment of work with non-work, especially around care, pleasure, and emotional investment, which alienates us from those very same things in our current capitalist formations. I demonstrate how this enmeshment is thought through in literature by comparing the lyrics from c. 1629’s “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” with Kikuko Tsumura’s recent bestseller, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (2021), to frame the key themes that have emerged in this Special Issue, using Audre Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as a form of unalienating activity and energy.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140691213","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, world-systems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system’s deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century.
{"title":"Carceral Power in World Historical Context","authors":"Zhandarka Kurti, Zeynep Gönen","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1214","url":null,"abstract":"This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, world-systems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system’s deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140692870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The world-system has been in a crisis for a while. The decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of China, and Russia’s assertive foreign policy are the most important issues regarding the course of the world-system. On the one hand, the United States and its allies (in Samir Amin’s words, “the triad”) have desperately tried to protect the status quo. On the other hand, China and Russia have tried to create an alternative to sustain the capitalist world-system instead of U.S. hegemony. For this reason, to analyze the world-system, I argue that core-periphery relations should be reevaluated regarding China and Russia with the concept of semi-core. This study aims to evaluate the possible outcomes and prospects in the world-system in light of the rivalry between core and semi-core, and asserts that the world-system is in the phase of interregnum that consists of instabilities and disorders. This phase of interregnum has stemmed from the existence of semi-core and the structural crisis of the system.
{"title":"Anarchy in the World-System","authors":"E. Demirel","doi":"10.5195/jwsr.2024.1209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1209","url":null,"abstract":"The world-system has been in a crisis for a while. The decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of China, and Russia’s assertive foreign policy are the most important issues regarding the course of the world-system. On the one hand, the United States and its allies (in Samir Amin’s words, “the triad”) have desperately tried to protect the status quo. On the other hand, China and Russia have tried to create an alternative to sustain the capitalist world-system instead of U.S. hegemony. For this reason, to analyze the world-system, I argue that core-periphery relations should be reevaluated regarding China and Russia with the concept of semi-core. This study aims to evaluate the possible outcomes and prospects in the world-system in light of the rivalry between core and semi-core, and asserts that the world-system is in the phase of interregnum that consists of instabilities and disorders. This phase of interregnum has stemmed from the existence of semi-core and the structural crisis of the system.","PeriodicalId":36882,"journal":{"name":"Journal of World-Systems Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140692293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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