Immanuel Wallerstein – Africa In A Capitalist World Notes

Immanuel Wallerstein – Africa in a Capitalist World

• A capitalist world economy is based on a division of labour between its core, semiperiphery and its periphery

  • Exchange between the sectors is unequal but each is dependent on the others, economically and politically

  • Peripheral state structures are weakened by exchange and core states are strengthened

  • Each sector develops different modes of labour control, because highest relative wages are paid in the core sectors and lowest relative wages in the periphery

• Plantation slavery is a form of capitalist wage-labour (labour offered for sale as a commodity on a market) in which the state intervenes to guarantee a low current wage (the cost of subsistence)

  • But the purchase of the slave is an additional cost

    • This means that if the slave is produced within the world-economy, the real cost is not just the slave price but the opportunity cost of failing to use his labour under other wage conditions at presumably a higher level of productivity

      • Under these conditions, slaves are too expensive i.e. they don’t produce enough surplus to compensate for their real cost

  • Given this, the only way to make plantation slavery viable in a capitalist system is to...

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