Clusters
I saw a tweet that says “a bit tough being a marxist in kuwait because nothing here makes f*cking sense and marxism is a science” and wanted to share some thoughts about these matters. Stratification of the World-Economy Subsection headline indeed refers to the Arrighi & Drangel (1986) piece (AD 1 from now on). They came up with a theoretical and empirical investigation of the semi-periphery: Wallerstein brings up the concept, with some ambiguities while the modernization theory would see what could be thought as semi-periphery as a transitional state and the dependency theory would see it as residual. I’m no expert in this literature, so I will follow the AD explanation: Wallerstein’s world is structured in core-periphery relations, yet, unlike the dependency theory where national and regional economies are connected, these relations connect economic activities structured in commodity chains that cut across state boundaries. “All states enclose within their boundaries both co...