Revisiting Culture and Meaning-Making in World-Systems Analysis: A Proposal for Engaging with the Cultural Political Economy Approach

(Geo)culture and Anti-Systemic Movements in the World-System

WSA typically understands culture as a legitimating framework that enables and reproduces the unequal world order generated by global capitalism. It attributes changes in cultural ideologies, beliefs, and schemas to structural shifts in the world economy, while acknowledging that iterative interactions occur between a material base and cultural superstructure (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Wallerstein, 1990). Accordingly, “culture, or the idea-system, of this capitalist world economy is the outcome of our collective historical attempts to come to terms with the contradictions, the ambiguities, the complexities of the socio-political realities of this particular system” (Wallerstein, 1990: 38).

WSA embeds its discussion of culture within the broader framework of a global geoculture, or “the cultural framework of the world-system as a whole […] a major component of which is the institutionalization of science and knowledge” (Robinson, 2011: 732). According to WSA, this cultural framework provides centrist liberalism as a middle path between more radical reactionary and revolutionary movements. Although the ideological middle-ground of liberalism allows the rights-bearing citizen to experience sovereignty through the channels of electoral democracy, liberalism also permits the reproduction of global capitalism by foreclosing radical, socialist possibilities (Wallerstein, 1994, 2004a). Centrist liberalism promotes a discourse of “slow and steady” progress, allowing states to champion universal freedoms and equality while simultaneously justifying the [alleged] need to deny or tame the demands of subaltern and oppressed classes. Thus, a diversity of cultures can exist in the world-system so long as there is a coherent [geocultural] ideological framework that justifies the vastly unequal world order that capitalism engenders (Wallerstein, 1994, 2004a, 2011). Creating a world order arranged around liberal ideology also promoted the creation of (1) a worldwide market with a credit and banking system that favored core capital; (2) strong states that could build coherent bureaucracies, generate patriotic fervor, and intervene to regulate the economy if needed; (3) a strong inter-state system; and, (4) the creation of academic social sciences to facilitate subjugation of the masses (Wallerstein, 2011: 111–41, 277).

World-systems scholars generally agree that culture merits empirical analysis insofar as it allows for a greater understanding of how global capitalism reproduces itself over time. For instance, in explaining how peripheral regions resisted colonial cultural domination, Wallerstein argues that these areas either opted (1) “to ‘assimilate’, to copy, to the extent that [they] can, the exact forms of culture” emanating from the core (e.g., political, economic, and religious practices), or (2) reject this perspective in favor of a “‘culturally nationalist’” approach (Kumar and Welz, 2001: 224). He ultimately concludes that “neither of these tactics work” for peripheral resistance to core domination (Kumar and Welz, 2001: 225). Others assert that liberal geocultures justify periods of colonial control and extraction through supplementary ideologies like orientalism (Kaps, 2016), an argument also echoed in contemporary anthropological studies of present-day neocolonial forays into the Middle East (see Puar, 2007).

WSA has also used the geocultural framework to analyze the emergence of anti-systemic movements and their organizational behavior. It locates the mid-19th century as a significant historical conjuncture during which protests evolved from sporadic, disorganized rebellions to organized coherent movements with explicit long-term political and economic goals. In the post-1848 world-system, many social movements became ideologically anti-capitalist and began targeting the new bourgeoisie class, while anti-colonial national[ist] liberation movements demanded independence (Arrighi et al., 1989). The emergent systemic crisis of the mid-to-late 20th century and the subsequent decline of centrist liberal hegemony created space for anti-systemic movements to challenge liberalism, presenting them with what Wallerstein identifies as two major dilemmas: “The first is whether or not to recognize the existence of a structural crisis of historical capitalism. The second is about what should be the priorities of their short-term and middle-term activities” (Wallerstein, 2014: 170; see also Arrighi et al., 1989; Wallerstein, 2011). Taken together, the manner in which these issues are addressed will significantly shape the outcome of the ongoing political and discursive battle between those following the ethos made (in)famous by Margaret Thatcher—“there is no alternative,” [to capitalism]—and those who seek alternatives to “capitalist realism” (see Fisher 2009). We return to these important points later. For now, having outlined the basic WSA argument on (geo)culture, we can move to its parallel discussion of knowledge production, or the structures of knowledge that undergird the world-system.

Structures of Knowledge

Fundamentally related to the discussion of geoculture is the structures of knowledge approach within WSA (see, e.g., Lee, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2012; Wallerstein, 1997, 2004b). While much of WSA addresses the geopolitical and economic facets of global capitalism, the structures of knowledge approach analyzes the equally important third realm: culture and knowledge-production in the world-system (Lee, 2007). By examining how these “invisible” structures configure our conception of what constitutes plausible action, it is one of the primary ways in which WSA theorizes semiotics. This makes it an ideal intellectual bridge for integrating semiotics with the realm of political economy; however, this research agenda has been neglected by WSA for decades (Lee, 2012).

Like the two other parts of the tripartite WSA perspective, the structures of knowledge approach offers a longue durée outlook on the history of knowledge production. It documents the emergence of the scholarly ethos of objectivity, factuality, and rationalization encompassed within the broader epistemological shifts occurring since the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Although a positivistic knowledge structure buttressed the liberal geoculture throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, two competing “ways of knowing” gradually manifested. The sciences occupied the realm of empirical truth seeking, while the humanities occupied the realm of values and aesthetics. By the 19th century, the nascent social sciences emerged, occupying an uncomfortable middle ground between the sciences and humanities (Lee, 2000, 2003, 2007; Wallerstein, 2004a).

According to world-systems analysts, the social sciences became complicit in the reproduction of the liberal geoculture within the systemic structures of knowledge, as the false academic compartmentalization between the market, the state, and civil society precludes a holistic understanding of global inequality and legitimates the idea of neutral scientific advancement (Wallerstein, 1990, 1997, 2011). Nonetheless, the emergent systemic crises of the late 1960s shook the assumptions that dominated the social sciences during much of the 20th century, and as centrist liberalism faltered, new anti-systemic movements emerged that “not only structurally but ideologically… [challenged the] presumptions of superiority/inferiority” that prevailed in the domains of race, ethnicity, and gender (Arrighi et al., 1989: 114). In the realm of knowledge production, the systemic crises of the 1960s allowed for two broad trends to emerge, questioning many of the assumptions embedded in the prior two centuries of research. As both are significant to our agenda of commixing CPE and WSA, they must be discussed in detail.

The first major intellectual rupture resulted from developments in complexity studies in natural science disciplines. Scientists began acknowledging the uncertainty of the universe, small events and their path-shaping capabilities, and the importance of initial conditions in causing particular outcomes in systemic processes, introducing an element of uncertainty and chaos to the realm of natural sciences (Lee, 2007; Wallerstein, 1997, 2004b; see also Andersson et al., 2014). The other intellectual rupture was the emergence of cultural studies. Growing out of the broad New Left social currents in the 1950s, cultural studies challenged the underlying assumptions that allegedly differentiated the various branches of knowledge production. Specifically, it called into question the role of interpretation and values in research and knowledge production by interrogating texts, discourse, and the very process of scientific inquiry. The emergence of cultural studies facilitated transdisciplinary theorizing on cultural phenomena, and scholars working in this tradition blurred the lines between the humanities and sciences, shaking the foundations of the modern structures of knowledge (Lee, 2003; see also Grossberg, 1986). Rather than demanding we abandon the task of locating recurrent social trends for the sake of acknowledging an infinitely complex and contingent reality, these advances encourage a reinvigorated agenda to identify and explain “the indissoluble unity of the regularities” occurring within contemporary social relations and structures (Lee, 2007: 18; see also Wallerstein, 1997: 1252).

Appraisal of WSA’s Engagement with Issues of Culture and Semiosis

The WSA perspectives on geoculture and structures of knowledge in the longue durée contribute much to our broad understanding of culture, knowledge production, and the emergence of anti-systemic movements on a global scale. However, given the loss of detail inherent in these approaches, scholars doing conjuncturally-specific case studies and ethnographic work may find them difficult to operationalize in research on anti-systemic movements, further contributing to the under-exploration of socio-cultural phenomena within WSA (see Kennedy, 2012). WSA struggles to explain how changes in the global geoculture or structures of knowledge occur, and Wallerstein’s discussion of culture “coming to terms” with realities of the world-system—along with WSA’s concept of geoculture—may end up treating individuals as “cultural dupes,” seduced into complacency by the dominant ideology (see Adorno, 1991). What’s more, Wallerstein’s argument on peripheral resistance to core cultural domination lurches towards functionalism when he concludes that both solutions failed by offering rationales akin to “the system won’t allow it.”

These issues are directly related to WSA’s discussion of hegemony, which leaves something to be desired for those interested in understanding how ideology and culture relate to domination and resistance. As Wallerstein (2004a: 94) concedes, contra a broad Gramscian conceptualization, “[t]he term has a narrower use in world-systems analysis. It refers to those situations in which one state combines economic, political, and financial superiority over other strong states and therefore has both military and cultural leadership as well.” This approach diminishes issues of cultural and knowledge-production to mere afterthoughts, rather than giving us tangible tools for studying how and why they become hegemonic in a particular region, and during particular eras. WSA has not reached a scholarly consensus regarding the emergence, consolidation of, and potential challenges to hegemony (see Babones, 2015) and only could benefit from more thoroughly considering issues of semiosis—particularly to avert accusations of offering abstract-level structural determinants of social change. As we will discuss in greater detail, studying anti-systemic movements, emergent populism, and race-making offers us a way to engage with cases that challenge the reification of hegemonic discourses that otherwise are taken for granted.

Altogether, WSA insufficiently addresses semiotic practices of social groups that promote new socio-economic imaginaries and lead to tangible political-economic change. To address this issue, we need analytical perspectives that uncover the material and semiotic elements that (re)produce and facilitate change through direct struggles. What mechanisms lead to such shifts within the world-system? We consider this question in the following section by discussing the merits and shortcomings of two alternative theoretical approaches that have amassed large contingents of followers within academia—economic sociology and the related post-structuralist, post-Marxist approach(es)—while trying to grapple with the relationship between meaning-making and material conditions. Altogether, we situate CPE in relation to these other perspectives to better illustrate why CPE is best suited to address WSA’s lacunae on issues of culture and meaning-making, helping it overcome some of the functionalist accusations leveled at it while maintaining the analytical significance of material conditions.

The Value-Added of the Cultural Political Economy Approach (I): Accounting for Semiotic and Material Change

The Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach was pioneered in part by Bob Jessop and Ngai Ling-Sum and draws inspiration from diverse disciplinary and intellectual influences, including the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nicos Poulantzas, the regulation approach, urban geography, and critical discourse analysis (see, e.g., Jessop, 1990; Jessop and Sum, 2000; Jessop et al., 2012; Sum, 2000). Through dialogue with these texts and each other, Jessop and Sum ultimately integrated these ideas to form CPE as a post-disciplinary, self-reflexive approach capable of analyzing structural, conjunctural, and agency-based issues of semiosis and political economy (Jessop and Sum, 2001).

CPE is particularly interested in developing a more comprehensive account of how and why discursive practices emerge, gain resonance, and shape political and material possibilities. It argues that material outcomes are influenced by discursive practices that are concretized through processes of variation, selection, retention, and reinforcement (Jessop, 2010). Because individuals must reduce the complexity of social life, they selectively attend to certain meaning-making schemas over others. This process of assigning meaning to complex social formations and making them comprehensible requires ignoring alternative meaning-making schemas. These discursive practices are critical to the economy’s operation because they can either permit or foreclose alternative futures. Therefore, attending to how, why, and under what conditions certain discourses regarding economic systems, or economic imaginaries, emerge and stick versus others is a central theoretical goal of CPE-oriented analyses.

Although there is natural variation in discourses regarding the economy over time, not all are created equally. As social movements use different discursive practices, they may fail to adequately master existing discourses or inadvertently innovate changes, and new crises may emerge that demand distinct discursive responses. However, which discourses “stick” is a matter of selection, or the elevation of some discourses over others. Chances of selection are influenced by favorable conjunctural institutional settings and the balance of social forces (i.e., the current material arrangements), along with prevailing public narratives and group ideational preferences (i.e., cultural and semiotic factors) (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). In the early stages of discursive variation and selection, the influence of the mass media in structuring, filtering, and elevating particular discourses is also critical. Once a series of discourses is selected, they must be retained, or incorporated into the practice of different social agents. Discourses become more powerful when they are retained within multiple social structures, including individual habitus, organizational regimens, the built environment, and existing technologies (Jessop, 2010). The retention stage of some economic imaginaries versus others is an entry point for further research, as CPE argues that both extra-semiotic and semiotic factors influence a discourse’s broad incorporation into multiple levels of social organization (e.g., the state, the individual, organizations). Absent the presence of a discourse in these multiple levels, it may not be adequately retained.

Finally, a discourse is reinforced and consolidated when it shuts down alternative discourses across multiple domains. Rather than viewing semiotic forces in opposition to the material, CPE looks for material and semiotic reinforcement occurring through the physical practices of particular institutions, organizations, and popular discourses which, due to structurally-inscribed strategic preferences, permit some discourses to flourish while downplaying or discarding others (Jessop, 2004; Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). The privileging and consolidation of discourses in multiple domains also creates the possibility for structural-coupling and co-evolution of material and discursive practices. Altogether, the CPE approach strives to examine the interplay between material and cultural factors that impact social change by carving out an analytical path “between a structuralist Scylla and a constructivist Charybdis” (Jessop, 2010: 340).

Given CPE’s focus on semiotic and material change, along with its interest in exploring the emergence of economic imaginaries, it is well-suited for studies of crisis periods and relatedly, the recent surge of populist movements across the global North and South. Crises often provide expanded discursive room for diagnoses of problems along with their potential solutions, opening room for innovative and heterodox solutions previously considered unrealistic (Jessop, 2010). This perspective has been successfully deployed in recent studies on neoliberal urban governance rationalities across Europe, the Eurozone crisis, and the general post-2008 North Atlantic financial crises (González et al., 2018; Jessop, 2010, 2014, 2015a; Oosterlynck and González, 2013). Given its predominantly European focus, we view this as an opportunity to expand its breadth by placing it in dialogue with WSA scholarship, which is also interested in moments of crises and how they potentially allow otherwise minor and contingent actions to have path-altering effects on the future trajectory of the system (Lee, 2007; Wallerstein, 1997). This can potentially ameliorate WSA’s underexplored agenda on issues of semiosis, while placing CPE in dialogue with an audience it has previously neglected but within which it should find many sympathies.

The Value-Added of the Cultural Political Economy Approach (II): Learning From and Moving Beyond Other Cultural and Discursive Approaches

The cultural political economy approach emerged following the cultural turn in social theorizing, which re-oriented social science towards culture, semiotics, and micro-level processes (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop and Sum, 2001). Although other branches of sociology—among other disciplines—extensively study culture and meaning-making, we argue that CPE offers the strongest analytical approach to understanding these phenomena in terms of a WSA-oriented research agenda.

One subfield that also took the call for infusing culture into theories of political-economic activity seriously is economic sociology. Since the 1980s, economic sociology has shown great interest in analyzing how economic behaviors are embedded within pre-existing networks of social relations (see Smelser and Swedberg, 2005). Economic theories and models are said to be “actively engaged in the constitution of the reality that they describe” (Callon, 2007: 318), and rather than theorizing economic life as analytically separate from social action, states, civil society and the economy are all considered to be co-constituted (Krippner, 2001). By contrasting itself to the rational choice assumptions of many economists, economic sociology offers compelling arguments about how cultural phenomena saturate economic behavior and how some economic practices are established as normatively desirable, versus others (Smelser and Swedberg, 2005). This increased interest in micro- and meso-level social embeddedness represents an intellectual shift from the earlier days of economic sociology, which offered a more encompassing, macro-analytical scope of economic theorizing (Arrighi, 2001).

While valuing these innovative attempts to incorporate cultural experiences into political-economic analysis, CPE laments how “soft” economic sociology often equates the cultural and economic, to the detriment of being able to offer insights on uniquely economic tendencies (see Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). Focusing on the social nature of institutions and market transactions is well-warranted, but overstating the potential causal impact of cultural phenomena may neglect the unique forms and functions of capitalist institutions and their contradictions, along with their particular accumulation strategies (Jessop, 2004, 2010; Jessop and Sum, 2001). What’s more, even those who argue for the analytical co-consideration of state, market, and society still admit that the bulk of economic sociology continues to reify the market as an object to be studied separately from social forces, rather than as a social construct in and of itself (see Krippner, 2001 for a detailed critique). However, rather than understanding this as a shortcoming, this also highlights the analytical leverage provided by considering the specificity of the economic.

CPE has similar reservations regarding the post-structuralist and post-Marxist approaches to discursive formation analysis (see Laclau and Mouffe, 1987, 2001). This approach presupposes “linguistic” and “non-linguistic” acts are joined together in a totalizing enterprise called “discourse…[where] speech and writing are themselves but internal components of discursive totalities” (1987: 82; emphasis in original). Inspired by post-structuralist emphases on deconstruction (see Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xi), this perspective rejects the idea of objective, class-based interests. Instead, Laclau and Mouffe (2001) argue that antagonistic forces constantly fight to define terms that are floating signifiers, perhaps facilitating a hegemonic discourse and practice that “sediments” them as seemingly natural phenomena.

Recall WSA’s potentially “fatal disrespect for culture, or subjectivity, or difference, or agency, or the local” that was supposed to propel cultural analysts to re-engage with world-scale analysis, to the benefit of WSA and culturalists alike (Palumbo-Liu et al., 2011b: 5). If we accept “the plurality and indeterminacy of the social” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 152) and follow the post-structuralist demand that “structural unity and identity are always deconstructed” (Grossberg, 1986: 64), WSA may struggle to develop an agenda that connects issues raised by Palumbo-Liu and colleagues to a more systemic framework of analysis. Agreeing with Mouzelis (1988: 116, 121), we find that this style of discursive analysis often veers towards treating individuals and collective actors as operating within an “institutional vacuum,” thus preventing us from understanding the broader context of the “global institutional orders” that shape continuity and change within the capitalist world economy (see also Jessop, 1990: 297–306). Comparable issues plague a variety of postmodernist approaches that attempt to explain the relationship between culture, semiotics, and materiality in the current era of global capitalism (for discussions see Doyle, 1992; Leonardo, 2003). The structures of knowledge and CPE approaches acknowledge complexity as an integral part of the social world, but their endpoint is not deconstructing social texts or illustrating the great hegemonic battles over floating signifiers, at the expense of acknowledging the structural tendencies of the capitalist world economy.

For these reasons, the CPE framework finds that much of economic sociology and the varied post- approaches neglect the specifically extra-discursive (i.e., material) tendencies and contradictions within a capitalist economy that, although less overtly visible in our everyday lives, bound our real and perceived ability to meaningfully try to change the world in which we live (see Jessop and Sum, 2001: 94; 2018). Approaches that push too far towards discursive and cultural primacy will not adequately meet the imperatives of a WSA agenda, which demand that we consider these issues in relation to the tendencies, cycles, and trends of capitalism as a historical social system (see Arrighi, 2001; see also Mouzelis, 1988: 113–14). ²

CPE also recognizes the need for “hard” political economists to make room for semiotic analysis. As a materialist framework, it values the analysis of capitalism’s tendencies while critiquing how various materialist positions are prone to reify political institutions, markets, and civil society and can reproduce rigid intellectual silos in the social sciences (Jessop and Sum, 2001: 99). Hence, such accounts can easily lose sight of unique social and discursive factors that influence how people make sense of the world around them and their subsequent strategizing on how to combat inequality (Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008; Jessop and Sum, 2001; see also Leonardo, 2003). As we outlined above, these issues are part and parcel of the economic-sociological attempt to transcend the limitations of “hard” political economy. This issue is also important to highlight because, in addition to longstanding critiques of “forgetting about culture,” WSA has received numerous criticisms for allegedly suffering from structural-functionalism, reification of social relations, and teleological accounts of systemic change (see Babones, 2015; Filomeno, 2008; Sanderson, 2005). To avoid treating actors as being duped into constructing the “wrong” reality for themselves, WSA must allot clear space for agency and strategic learning by individuals and social movements. This acknowledges that social actors have the opportunity and ability to interpret the social conditions in a given conjuncture and make meaningful decisions on how to best go about changing the world (see Moulaert et al., 2016).

As discussed earlier, the structures of knowledge approach finds promise in cultural and complexity studies. The CPE approach covers this terrain, exploring how and why people engage in complexity reduction. Individuals are faced with nearly infinite ways to construe (i.e., interpret and make sense of) the emergent social world around us; however, not all construals are created equal. The complex and interrelated socio-cultural, technological, political, and economic spheres mediate our ability to interpret and subsequently change the world around us, influencing how potential construals become concrete constructions of reality (Jessop, 2010). Complexity management and reduction is not only necessary for individuals to make sense of the world, but also for processes of governance on multiple scales, among other issues (Jessop, 1997; see also Andersson et al., 2014). Therefore, the pathway from construal to construction and then subsequent adoption and implementation is where CPE offers a unique opportunity to explore the structuration of knowledge production, governance, and anti-systemic resistance. This CPE-attuned agenda is particularly well-equipped to advance WSA-oriented research on the emergence of populist governments in the post-1967/1973, and post-2008, conjuncture of systemic crises.

To summarize, the WSA agenda and the CPE approach are amenable to dialogue for several reasons. The WSA perspective acknowledges that the capitalist world economy has an intellectual underpinning that (re)creates and changes it over time, that the social sciences served to stabilize the hegemonic intellectual, discursive, and political-economic practices of those who possess power, and that we are currently in a crisis period that has made way for new intellectual and political opportunities. The CPE approach acknowledges that there are unique tendencies and operations in the capitalist world economy that cannot be reduced to ideas and discourse, requiring us to examine the material and discursive as inherently-related phenomena. It offers tools for analyzing how and why people make sense of crises and the broader social system in which they live—tools needed to better understand these heretofore underexplored phenomena within a WSA framework. And, CPE itself has emerged in the precise era of intellectual crises that WSA-structures of knowledge acknowledges, engaging in complexity and cultural analysis in the same domains where WSA-structures of knowledge sees the most promise.

We conclude by pushing our proposed theoretical commixing towards several domains of WSA that are ripe for a CPE-informed analysis: (1) anti-systemic movements, (2) populist politics, and (3) race-making in the world-system. Lived-experiences and collective identities—critical elements to consider in all three aforementioned topics—are inherently semiotically-mediated issues, with ideological and discursive phenomena structuring how we make sense of the world while influencing the chances of collective action for any given individual or group. These structures are the outcome of various and often competing discursive and material practices that occur on multiple scales across the world-system. Thus, while the WSA-structures of knowledge approach offers a longue durée entry point for analysis, the CPE approach offers tools for case-based conjunctural research.

Example 1: Anti-Systemic Movements

Three decades have passed since Arrighi et al. (1989: 1) released their seminal text on anti-systemic mobilization, which aimed to uncover the “system-wide structural processes” that cause such movements. In their concluding remarks, Arrighi et al. declared:

[W]e have no answer to the question: 1968, rehearsal for what? In a sense, the answers depend on the ways in which the worldwide family of antisystemic movements will rethink its middle-run strategy in the ten or twenty years to come. (1989: 115)

Recall Wallerstein’s (2014: 170) outline of the two major dilemmas facing anti-systemic movements. The first was whether they even recognized that the capitalist world economy is in a structural crisis. CPE contributes to WSA by reminding us that crises themselves are not pre-given and purely objective, but rather discursively and materially constructed (Jessop, 2015b; Jessop and Oosterlynck, 2008). This requires us to investigate what conditions facilitate a scenario being constructed as a “crisis in” (i.e., a problem that is likely benign and can be fixed with modest initiative) or a “crisis of” (i.e., a problem that requires significant restructuring or crafting a new strategy altogether), and how such diagnoses affect subsequent strategizing by power blocs, growth coalitions, and social movements in their attempt to shape the trajectory of the (post)crisis period (see González et al., 2018; Jessop, 2010).

Studies on anti-systemic movements must consider how their discursive practices interact with the discursive selectivities of the particular institutions and domains in which movements aim to achieve resonance. This also entails examining the extra-discursive selectivities of institutions, which privilege certain policies or strategies over others in a given conjuncture to produce some degree of structured coherence (Jessop, 2010: 341, 348). If a movement espouses a demand through a framework articulating a crisis of neoliberalism—requiring a different state strategy to ameliorate—but the institutions in which they hope to achieve change are portraying the current era as simply a crisis in neoliberalism—to be ameliorated through patchwork policies—the likelihood of success is reduced. When movements espouse a vocabulary for social change that resonates across many institutional and popular domains, they increases their chances of achieving their goals, giving them potentially long-term influence on prevailing discourses, structures of knowledge, and institutional power configurations. With the intellectual justifications that underpin neoliberalism more fragile than ever, new spaces for challenging the prevailing structures of knowledge and rejecting the “there is no alternative” philosophy will require movements to not only reflect on past Left-oriented successes but also a promote social imaginaries “not necessarily tied to the old language or traditions” of movements of yesteryear (Fisher, 2009: 78).

The second dilemma that Wallerstein (2014: 170) identified for contemporary anti-systemic movements was how they deal with short and medium term strategizing. Recent WSA scholarship on movements explores the potential for economic hardship to generate protest, encouraging attentiveness to short-term (e.g., food prices, household consumption) and long-term (e.g., long-term unemployment, life expectancy) hardships faced by the populace (Shefner et al., 2015). An added, critical element to this agenda would be to consider the discursive arenas present within the cases of interest, and how grievances are constituted as such. Since crisis periods create socio-cultural and politico-economic space for a range of proposed diagnoses and solutions, a CPE-attuned WSA highlights how anti-systemic struggles offer alternative development discourses that counter hegemonic frameworks on development (see Moulaert et al., 2016).

A comparative approach must look for commonality and divergence in discursive and material demands in and across regions, which in turn enhances our understanding of the possibilities for social change that can take place in the aftermath of such crises. This requires an assessment of the discourses on the crises (e.g., is it considered a crisis in or of) espoused by movements and their opponents, and the prevailing selective privileging for these discourses in each locale of interests. This can be accomplished by analyzing key policy proposals, platforms, and initiatives, and other publicly-accessible documentation, from the pertinent supranational, transnational, international, national, regional, or local power blocs, growth coalitions, and groups of interest (see González et al., 2018; Oosterlynck and González, 2013).

The CPE approach can assist those studying anti-systemic movements, environmental policy, and the new geographies of economic hardship generated by flexible accumulation strategies and post-Fordism. For instance, after the 2008 economic crisis, elites in advanced capitalist economies articulated several potential solutions that mixed old discourses with new realities. These crisis-management options included returning to Keynesianism, turning to “BRIC” economies for investment, and promoting a Green New Deal (GND), among other choices (Jessop, 2010: 349–50). How and why a GND platform becomes selected, retained, and incorporated into broader policy initiatives—not to mention its actual content—will surely be contingent on the relationship between anti-systemic environmental movements and the pertinent sectors of capital who promote their own brand of a GND. Since discussions on green policy, sustainability, and related issues predated the financial crises, each locale has institutionally-embedded, pre-existing selective preferences that favor certain discourses, tactics, and solutions over others, meaning that not all anti-systemic demands can be treated as “equal” in all settings, even if they espouse the same imaginaries.

A contemporary case study might examine what conditions have suddenly made a Green New Deal seem reasonable for sectors of the US political establishment and the general population, circa 2018. Once considered a fringe idea of environmentally-conscious left-wing activists, the GND now has widespread popularity and a major social movement dedicated to its implementation. Its supporters espouse ambitious social imaginaries of environmental renewal, job creation, and human flourishing as antidotes to endless stories of precarious employment and environmental catastrophe (see Grandoni, 2018; Gustafson et al., 2018; Sunrise Movement, n.d.). ³ With world-systems scholars increasingly turning their attention towards movements espousing environmentally-conscious political imaginaries (see Smith, 2014; Williford, 2018), this research agenda can be expanded with the tools of CPE to understand why certain anti-systemic imaginaries are privileged, implemented through policy, and reinforced over time.

Example 2: Populism and Crisis

Political pundits and scholars alike are finding renewed interest in analyzing the many “flavors of populism” that are emerging across the world-system (Gates, 2018: 326). Although this attention is well warranted, we agree with Gates, who finds that the very concept of populism is often used by analysts in a way that obscures more than it unveils by forsaking analyses of the concrete historical circumstances from which such movements emerge, instead offering us oversimplified stories on “charismatic leader[s]…with ill-defined, anti-elitist bluster” (2018: 328). Hegemonic social imaginaries that were discursively and materially taken for granted as the ideal ways to govern have come under increased popular scrutiny since the onset of the world-systemic crisis and have only amplified since 2008. A CPE-oriented world-systemic analysis of variegated populism(s) offers researchers numerous entry points to conduct research.

Given the potential for major differences in social bases of support and policy proposals emanating from contemporary left- and right-wing populists (see Gill, 2018, 2019), our task is to unveil the long-term discursive and material terrains that translate social, political, and economic concerns among the populace into concrete achievements of populist politicians and movements (e.g., winning elections, implementing policies, altering popular political consciousness). As we discussed earlier, crises are not just material phenomena; they are discursively construed, constructed, and understood by politicians looking to offer solutions, and by the populace who are seeking solutions. What kind of solutions are proposed, and what kind of popular support they will receive can be understood by analyzing, among other issues, the materially and discursively constituted relationships between prevailing (1) regional social cleavages, (2) material conditions of the region, and (3) intellectual justifications for particular modes of accumulation and regulation in the region.

For example, the enduring North Atlantic and Eurozone crises—not to mention the possibility of a broader, world-systemic crisis—have allowed for a plethora of crisis discourses to emerge, accompanied by a plethora of radical-Left and reactionary-Right movements and politicians offering to ameliorate these crises (Jessop, 2014, 2015a; Wilkin, 2018). Building from WSA and CPE work on crises and populism, a comprehensive research agenda should acknowledge that positional embedding within regional (e.g., core/periphery within the Eurozone) and world-wide (i.e., core/periphery within the capitalist world-system) ecologies of political and ideological power will structure the types of diagnoses and proposals that emerge and are selected, retained, and consolidated. WSA’s dedication to understanding the unique positional power that semi-peripheral regions have to deviate from world-systemic norms, coupled with CPEs interest in crisis construction and management opens up future research agenda to conduct comparative studies on a variety of PIIGS (i.e., Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain) and Latin American economies wracked with popular and intra-elite conflicts, as their governments navigate stratified regional and world economies (Gates, 2018; Jessop, 2014). Thus, we can unveil the differing (inter)national bases of discursive and material support for crisis management policies in Venezuela and Brazil, or Greece and Italy, without painting these variegated phenomena as simple populist politics of the 99% vs. the 1%.

In the ongoing conjunctural crisis of global capitalism, more and more regions are undergoing significant modifications of state form and function, closing down certain avenues while opening new ones for challenging the enduring logics of authoritarian statist-and-neoliberal domination (Bruff, 2014; Jessop, 2015b; Poulantzas, 1978). These transformations are articulated through unique discursive and material packages that attempt to muddle-through, ameliorate, or discard/swap-out prevailing methods for dealing with the ongoing crises. Altogether, a CPE-WSA approach to understanding populism in an era of systemic crisis would keep culture and semiotics front and center, rather than addressing both in an ad hoc manner. This avoids the potential for analytical recidivism that would treat the emergence of new populist politics as mere outcomes of systemic political-economic forces alone.

Example 3: Discourse and Race-Making in the World-System

A CPE approach could also potentially enrich world-systems inflected analyses of race. For instance, Ramón Grosfoguel (2016), following Fanon, writes that race-making projects in the world-system—from colonialism to the present day—locate humans within zones of being or non-being. The zone of being confers racial privilege, while the zone of non-being invokes material, existential, and epistemological oppression. Echoing Mohanty’s (2003) “one-third/two-thirds world,” theorizing race as a human/non-human line helps capture intra-national inequities and how race functions distinctly based on national or regional contexts. However, racial formations are not stable over time. Through its focus on discourse generation, selection, and retention, CPE could also allow world-systems scholars to identify how racialized subjects are discursively “readied” or viewed as appropriate for location within zones of being and non-being, how these discourses interact with local material and institutional contexts, and what factors precipitate changes in when groups are located above or below “the line of the human” (Grosfoguel, 2016: 10).

Similarly, Robinson (2016) has argued that race exists as a social construct to justify colonial exploitation and to meet the needs of a capitalist, colonizing core. From world-systems analysis, we know that the division of labor in the global economy is racialized and also that race-making projects are fundamentally productive. However, CPE-attuned analysis permits us to capture how race-making projects touchdown differently, in distinct contexts. One potentially fruitful line of inquiry might examine how discourses surrounding race become integrated into national economic policies, and what impact this may have on racial formation. For instance, Mexico’s developmentalist economic policy in the mid-20th century emerged alongside the state-sponsored formation of a mestizaje, or mestizo, national identity, which simultaneously celebrated and sought to whiten and “modernize” indigenous Mexico (Tenorio Trillo, 2009). In this case, the production of a racialized mestizaje identity is inextricable from nationalist projects of economic development that shaped Mexican development policy until its debt crisis and forced structural adjustment during the 1980s. CPE-attuned work could also examine how Mexico’s subsequent neoliberal turn has relied upon the discursive construction of an individual liberal, democratic, white, and actively participating subject. Overall, for studies of race in the world-system, CPE attunes WSA to variation and nuance that it otherwise elides, including how discourses about race and the economy both interact with and are shaped by material conditions to generate particular racial formations.