World-System Theory was built to make a particular political error impossible: the error of mistaking rivalry between powers and blocs within global capitalism for a clash between alternative systems. That this error should be committed by those who claim to use that tradition as an analytical tool is the contradiction on which this essay focuses. Alongside explicit campism — which identifies Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China as an objective bulwark against Western imperialism — there exists a more widespread and more insidious variant: that of those who do not recognise themselves as campists, deny the label when it is applied to them, yet continue to produce analyses in which conflicts between powers and blocs are read through categories that the end of the Cold War should have rendered unusable. This is not a conscious choice: it is a form of conditioning, a background noise that the left has been unable to rid itself of since bipolarity collapsed without leaving behind a new conceptual framework capable of replacing it. World-System Theory already offered that framework, with a rigour that should have made certain errors impossible. The problem is that it is too often used only in part.
In Italy this problem takes a particular form worth noting at the outset. The reception of World-System Theory in that country has historically been weak and fragmented, despite an irony of intellectual history that should have made it more familiar: Giovanni Arrighi, the principal continuator and refiner of the tradition, was Italian, having taught at the University of Calabria in the early 1970s before moving to the United States at the invitation of Wallerstein and Hopkins. One indicator of how superficial that reception was is an apparently minor detail: the first Italian translation of Wallerstein’s work rendered “The Modern World-System” as Il sistema mondiale dell’economia moderna, refusing the neologism “sistema-mondo” which is the theory’s foundational term, the one that signals its ambition to construct a new unit of analysis. As those who have studied this episode have noted, resistance to that neologism persists among many Italian scholars today. When a theoretical tradition struggles to establish itself even in its basic terminology, its roots in academic and intellectual debate remain inevitably shallow. The result is that large sections of the Italian left have formed their political culture using different tools — often derived from Third Worldism or classical Leninism — which keep intact the category of opposing “camps” and offer none of the theoretical antibodies that WST would have provided against contemporary campism. The paradox is that the tradition best equipped to make certain analytical errors impossible is also the one that has had the least diffusion in Italy, precisely in those milieus where those errors are committed most frequently.
The Epistemological Break of Braudel and Its Political Consequences
To understand why, we need to go back some distance. The tradition that goes by the name of World-System Theory did not arise from an isolated intuition but from a profound epistemological break with the dominant mode of doing history and social analysis. Fernand Braudel, with the Annales school, had already shown that short events — governments, battles, treaties — explain nothing on their own: they are the surface of deeper structures, what he called the longue durée, the long cycles of economies, climates, and human geographies that condition every contingent moment without the protagonists of those moments necessarily being aware of it. Political history recounted the decisions of the powerful; Braudel asked us to look beneath them, at the structural conditions that made certain decisions possible or impossible, independently of the will of those who took them.
This break has political consequences that go well beyond historiography. Those who reason in terms of short events — who read a conflict through the contingent moves of the actors involved, the declaration of this leader, the military move of that army, this week’s alliance — commit an epistemological error that Braudel had already identified: they mistake surface for structure, symptom for cause. Campism, in this light, is not only a political error: it is first of all a methodological error. It operates precisely in the register of short events, reading every conflict as the contingent clash of geopolitical actors whose systemic position is never analysed in its full historical depth. Russia invades Ukraine: the campist looks at the event, the move, the pretext, and places it within a short-term narrative — NATO expansion, Western provocations, the Maidan crisis — without ever asking what Russia’s structural position in the capitalist world-system actually is on a secular scale, what long-term trajectory it is following, and what that trajectory truly reveals about the nature of the aggression.
Braudel was not a determinist: he did not think that the longue durée cancelled actors’ freedom or rendered their decisions irrelevant. He thought those decisions could not be understood without the structural context in which they were embedded. Applying this lesson to the Ukrainian conflict means asking not only what Russia is doing but what Russia is in the contemporary world-system — what position it occupies, what resources it controls, with what structural logic it operates. The answer to that question, pursued with the tools the tradition developed after Braudel, is difficult to reconcile with the campist narrative.
Wallerstein, the World-System, and the Impossibility of an “Outside”
From Braudel, Wallerstein borrowed the idea that the minimum unit of analysis could not be the nation-state but had to be the system as a whole: a capitalist world-economy that had extended from its European origins to cover the entire planet over five centuries, within which states were not autonomous actors but dependent variables of a structure that preceded and conditioned them. The system had a core, where surplus value was concentrated and capital accumulated through the most advanced productive techniques; a periphery that produced raw materials and low-cost labour under conditions of chronically unequal exchange; and a semi-periphery that mediated between the two poles, performing functions of exploitation towards the periphery and subordination towards the core. This architecture was not the product of anyone’s failings, cultural lag, or intrinsic inferiority: it was the structure of historical capitalism itself, the necessary condition for its reproduction over time.
It is worth dwelling on the empirical origins of this theoretical construction, because they are relevant to a distinction that will recur later. Wallerstein had worked in West Africa before elaborating his world-system theory, and that direct experience contributed decisively to his understanding of unequal exchange: seeing from the inside how underdevelopment was a structural product of the system, not a lag to be overcome, was an empirical lesson the theory then generalised at a planetary scale. Arrighi, for his part, had taught in Rhodesia and Tanzania before arriving at the University of Calabria and then at the Fernand Braudel Center, and his analysis of proletarianisation in African peripheries directly nourished his work on systemic cycles of accumulation. This African and peripheral root of WST is not a biographical detail: it is a constitutive part of the theory, and it is what gives it the capacity to make visible the subjects that analyses constructed exclusively from the perspective of the core tend to erase.
That said, a precise distinction must be drawn between two very different uses of peripheral experience in left political thought. WST elaborates that Third Worldist root in structural and analytical terms: the experience of the periphery becomes a tool for understanding how the system as a whole functions, not a source of automatic legitimation for any non-Western actor. Vulgar political Third Worldism, which produces campism, does something structurally different: it substitutes for structural analysis a geographical identity as an evaluative criterion, attributing progressive valence to an actor for the sole fact of being non-Western or anti-American, independently of its real position in the world-system and its actual function in ongoing conflicts. The material crudeness of this operation becomes clear when one looks at concrete reality. The idea that a “Global South” exists with its own political coherence and antisystemic function presupposes that powers such as Russia, China, India, and Iran share something structurally significant beyond their geographic distance from the West. But Russia is a declining fossil-rent economy, China is the world’s manufacturing hub integrated into global value chains, India is a competitive democracy with interests often in contradiction with those of Moscow and Beijing, and Iran is a theocracy that oppresses its own minorities and women while presenting itself as an outpost of anti-imperialist resistance. Treating them as a unified category for the sole reason that they oppose American hegemony, in different ways and to different degrees, is an abstraction without foundation in the material reality of the world-system. It is the point at which the analytical Third Worldism of the WST founders transforms into its opposite: from a critical tool that illuminates structures of oppression to an ideological screen that conceals them.
The most radical aspect of Wallerstein’s construction — and the one with the most direct consequences for our subject — is the absolute negation of an “outside” the system. In the Wallersteinian framework there is no point external to the capitalist world-economy from which an actor, a state, an economy, or a political formation could operate on alternative logics. All actors who participate in the world-economy do so within its rules, even when their political language proclaims a desire to subvert them. The Soviet Union was not an external alternative to the capitalist world-economy: it was a particular form of participation in it, one that had chosen the path of accelerated state development to advance itself in the system’s hierarchy, ending up occupying the position of a core power in competition with other core powers, not that of an antisystemic subject. When Wallerstein wrote this, in the middle of the Cold War, it was an intellectual provocation of the first order. In retrospect, the collapse of the USSR confirmed it with a brutality that no other interpretive framework could have predicted with equal precision.
Andre Gunder Frank contributed to this theoretical construction with an equally disruptive thesis: the underdevelopment of the Global South was a structural product of the capitalist world-system, not a lag to be overcome through modernisation. Terence Hopkins, working in close collaboration with Wallerstein at the Fernand Braudel Center, gave this intuition an empirical translation through the analysis of global value chains: the concrete mechanisms through which the international division of labour reproduces the system’s hierarchy, distributing surplus value along production chains that cross national borders while leaving the largest share in the hands of those who control the most profitable phases — typically design, finance, and distribution — while manufacturing phases remain in the periphery.
Arrighi’s Hegemonic Cycles, Russia’s Trajectory, and Historical Forks
Giovanni Arrighi brought the tradition to a further level of historical synthesis that is particularly relevant to this essay. His analysis of systemic cycles of accumulation showed how each hegemonic phase within the world-system followed a recognisable trajectory: a material expansion, in which capital was invested in production and trade, followed by a phase of financialisation, in which capital abandoned production to seek higher returns in the financial sphere. This financialisation was not an anomaly: it was the sign of hegemonic decline, the moment when the dominant power could no longer find sufficient productive outlets for accumulated capital and sought in financial rent a compensation for lost productive competitiveness. From Genoese hegemony to Dutch, from British to American, each cycle had repeated this pattern, with an emerging power exploiting the decline of the previous one to assert its own hegemonic position within the same capitalist system.
Crucial to our argument is the fact that every hegemonic transition occurred within the system and perpetuated its fundamental logic. The challenger did not abolish the rules of the game: it replaced the previous holder in the dominant position, imposing its own particular rules within the same general logic of accumulation. England had not transformed the system it inherited from Holland; the United States had not transformed the one it inherited from England. They had simply occupied the apex position, managing it with partially different instruments but within the same structure.
Against this backdrop, a text produced within the WST tradition has acquired extraordinary relevance with time: The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025, written by Hopkins and Wallerstein together with colleagues at the Fernand Braudel Center and published in 1996. The book analysed the period 1945–1990 through six principal vectors — the interstate system, world production, global labour, human welfare, state cohesion, and knowledge structures — and concluded with an assessment of possible trajectories to 2025. The projections converged on three phenomena: in the short term, the end of the economic expansion of the fifty-year Kondratiev cycle; in the medium term, the beginning of the decline of US dominance; and in the long term, signals of possible systemic disintegration of the capitalist world-economy. Re-reading that book today requires resisting the temptation to treat it as fulfilled prophecy: Wallerstein and Hopkins were not prophets; they were analysts applying a theory of long-period structures. The fact that their analyses describe with precision the landscape of the present — American hegemonic decline, convulsions in the global financial system, growing instability of the interstate order — is a measure of the solidity of their theoretical tools, not a fortunate coincidence.
But the most relevant point for our subject is a different one. Wallerstein and Hopkins did not predict a predetermined outcome: they described a structural crisis that opened historical forks. They explicitly used the language of bifurcation: the system enters a phase in which political and social choices can direct it toward different outcomes, not predictable in advance. They painted a picture of dark days, but ones in which genuine historical choices exist. This element is crucial because it demolishes one of the implicit premises of campism: the idea that American decline has a predetermined outcome favourable to the left, as if the crisis of the system automatically produced its progressive alternative. For Wallerstein and Hopkins, it was exactly the opposite: the structural crisis of the system automatically favours no one, and can produce outcomes as regressive as they are progressive, depending on how historical subjects traverse it. Campism that merely waits and supports the system’s presumed antagonists is not helping the process toward a better outcome: it is choosing its own fork in the worst possible way, confusing the crisis of the system with its emancipatory transformation.
Applying this analysis to contemporary Russia produces conclusions that render campism theoretically untenable. Russia is not a rising hegemonic power challenging the system: it is a semi-periphery in accelerated decline, attempting to recover its position through military force in the absence of the productive and technological base that would allow it to compete with core countries on any terrain other than fossil rent and military projection. Within the Arrighian framework, this type of behaviour has already been classified: a semi-periphery unable to advance in the system’s hierarchy through productive innovation may attempt to do so through territorial expansion, seeking to acquire resources and strategic positions that compensate for structural weakness. The invasion of Ukraine is precisely this: not an antisystemic move by a power alternative to global capitalism, but the typical behaviour of a declining semi-periphery reacting to its own marginalisation with military instruments because it lacks sufficient productive ones.
There is no antisystemic dimension whatsoever in this strategy: fossil rent is one of the pillars of global capitalism, not its alternative, and the Russian ruling class manages that rent through offshore financial structures, Swiss bank accounts, and property holdings in London and Dubai, all perfectly integrated in the global financial system it claims to be fighting. Attributing an antisystemic function to this configuration requires a level of abstraction from material reality that no analytical tool of WST can justify.
Geoculture and the Impossible Symmetry
The tradition had developed the concept of geoculture to analyse something that economic analysis alone could not capture: the system of narratives through which the world-system organises its internal conflicts, distributing identities and roles among competing powers. This is not propaganda in the pejorative sense — something external to reality that seeks to mystify it: it is a cultural production that emerges organically from the system’s conflicts and recounts them in terms that make them comprehensible and morally acceptable to those who live them from the inside. The Western narrative of “freedom” that justifies American military interventions and the Russian narrative of “anti-imperialism” that justifies Moscow’s aggressions are both geocultural productions internal to the system, not external viewpoints capable of evaluating it objectively.
Explicit campism is the limiting case of those who take one of these narratives for objective reality. Soft campism commits a different and in some ways more sophisticated error: it does not uncritically accept the anti-imperialist geoculture, but introduces by stealth another interpretive frame — that of “symmetrical responsibilities between great powers.” It is worth explaining what this frame means and why it is incompatible with WST.
Mearsheimer and Kissinger represent the realist tradition in international relations, which reads conflicts as the inevitable product of competition among great powers for security and influence: in this view, every great power has its own logic, its own reasons, its own security margins to defend, and wars arise from power vacuums and imbalances, not from the malevolence of any specific actor. Applied to the Ukrainian conflict, this logic produces the thesis that the real cause of the war is NATO expansion, which violated Russia’s legitimate security requirements and pushed it toward military reaction. But this narrative omits an elementary historical fact: it was the countries of Eastern Europe, after decades of Soviet occupation, that actively sought to join NATO — not NATO that pushed them. Their fear of Russia was founded on a concrete and deep historical experience. In the early years of his presidency, Putin himself showed no structural hostility toward European and Atlantic integration: the “encirclement” narrative is a post-hoc construction, elaborated when Russia’s regional power ambitions met the resistance of neighbouring countries that had no intention of returning to Moscow’s sphere of influence.
In the Wallersteinian framework there are no symmetrical great powers: there are powers in different positions within a structural hierarchy, with different resources, different trajectories, and different responsibilities toward the subjects that hierarchy oppresses. Treating Russia and the United States as comparable actors with equivalent responsibilities means ignoring the structural difference between a declining hegemonic power and a semi-periphery in accelerated decline reacting to its own marginalisation with military instruments.
The Erasure of Peoples: The Crime Campism Cannot See
There is an effect of campism that must be named, because it is perhaps the gravest on both political and human grounds: the systematic erasure of peoples who do not fit the logic of the camps. This erasure is not accidental: it is structural to campism itself, and reveals its most authentic nature.
The mechanism works as follows: a people acquires political visibility only to the extent that its oppression can be attributed to the enemy camp. The Palestinian genocide is denounced with force, and the denunciation is entirely legitimate: Israel is perceived as an outpost of American imperialism, so its victims fit within the campist narrative. Ukrainian civilians massacred daily by Russian aviation remain at the margins, or disappear altogether from the field of vision: Russia belongs to the camp that campism claims to defend, or at least to the one that must not be attacked, and so its victims become invisible — or worse, are redefined as collateral effects of a war that is in reality the West’s fault.
The Uyghurs are the most revealing case of all, and not by chance the most systematically suppressed — in the most aggressive campism, actively denied — by those who refer to China as an antisystemic power. Denied with the same arguments Beijing deploys in response to international accusations: Western propaganda, interference in internal affairs, geopolitical fabrication. The mass internment system in Xinjiang — affecting over a million people according to UN estimates — has evolved since 2021 into an organised system of deportation to factories across the rest of China, documented by a joint investigation by the New York Times, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Der Spiegel published in May 2025. Amnesty International has continued to document ongoing violations: arbitrary detention, forced labour, systematic erasure of cultural and religious identity, separation of families. The European Parliament has called for the establishment of an independent international investigative mechanism. The response of the most consistent campism has been to align, in effect, with Beijing’s version: a silence that in the worst cases becomes active denial.
The same applies to Sudan, where a civil war of catastrophic proportions — with estimates of around 150,000 dead, though human rights organisations consider the real toll likely much higher, and 25 million people in conditions of acute food insecurity — cannot mobilise the campist left with the same intensity as other conflicts. Neither the Sudanese government nor the RSF militias belong clearly to any recognisable geopolitical camp, and so their victims remain invisible. The RSF’s capture and massacre of El Fasher began on 26 October 2025, killing thousands of civilians in what humanitarian experts have described as the worst war crime of the Sudanese civil war. A UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission subsequently concluded that the RSF’s systematic campaign of violence — mass killings, gang rape, and deliberate starvation — bore “hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur communities, findings confirmed and extended in a July 2026 report.
In Myanmar, the military junta has killed over 7,000 people since the 2021 coup, the majority of them civilians. 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians since the coup, with airstrikes increasing by more than 50% compared to 2024 according to OHCHR. The Rohingya continue to face persecutions that the UN has defined as crimes against humanity, and China actively supports the military regime while protecting its infrastructural investments. The campist silence here is particularly eloquent: denouncing Myanmar’s atrocities would mean denouncing China’s behaviour, and China belongs to the wrong camp.
The Iranian case is perhaps the most instructive regarding internal contradiction. The critique of American aggression toward Iran is well founded, and the denunciation of Israeli imperialism is legitimate. But campism transforms these correct positions into systematic indifference to the cruelties of the Tehran regime toward its own population: women who protest at the risk of their lives against mandatory veiling, ethnic and religious minorities persecuted, political opponents executed. Iran is experienced as antisystemic for the sole fact of resisting American and Israeli pressure, and this perception produces a selective solidarity that extends to the state but not to its citizens. It is the same logic that produced, in the Communist tradition of the twentieth century, silence over the Stalinist purges in the name of defending the USSR as an outpost of world socialism.
World-System Theory offers a precise analytical tool for dismantling this logic: the subjects that deserve solidarity are not states as actors in the world-system, but the peoples who bear the consequences of those states’ positions in the system’s hierarchy. An oppressed or aggressed people is a political subject independently of the geopolitical alignment of its oppressor or aggressor. Refusing this universality means reducing internationalism to geopolitical partisanship, and peoples to pawns in a game that does not concern them.
Political Subjectivity in the WST Framework
At this point an answer is required to what is probably the most sophisticated objection a campist interlocutor could raise against the theoretical framework described above. WST, with its emphasis on long-period structures, system hierarchy, and the structural position of actors, risks appearing as a theory that dissolves political subjectivity into the objectivity of structures: if everything is conditioned by position in the world-system, what remains of actors’ responsibility, their capacity to choose, and above all their freedom to resist?
This objection rests on a misunderstanding worth dissolving, because it has important political consequences. Wallerstein was not a structural determinist: he did not think that position in the world-system mechanically determined actors’ behaviour or rendered resistance impossible. He thought that position conditioned available resources, the room for manœuvre, the historical possibilities open or closed at any given moment. The difference between conditioning and determination is crucial: conditioning leaves space for actors to make choices within the margins the structure opens — including the choice to fight against the structure itself — while knowing that such a fight is asymmetric.
The Ukrainian resistance is, from this perspective, exactly the type of political subjectivity that WST does not cancel but illuminates: a people occupying a contested semi-peripheral position, subjected to aggression by a declining power seeking to incorporate it within its sphere of influence, and choosing to resist within the margins its structural position allows. That choice is not determined by the structure: it is made by concrete historical subjects who pay with their lives for their freedom. It can be understood in its full significance only by analysing the structural context in which it is situated; otherwise it risks being reduced to a pawn in the great powers’ game, which is exactly what soft campism does. Beverly Silver had shown, in her work on Arrighi’s legacy, how phases of hegemonic transition produce both new possibilities of organisation for social movements and new and more sophisticated forms of repression. The ongoing transition is no exception. Dissolving the resistance of a people under attack into the campist category of “proxy war between great powers” is not more sophisticated analysis: it is poorer analysis, one that sacrifices the subjectivity of the peoples involved on the altar of cardboard geopolitics.
It is worth pausing on this point, because it touches the core of what WST can offer to politics, not only to analysis. The historical forks that Wallerstein and Hopkins identified are not equally open to all: they are open to the subjects who actively traverse them, who choose in which direction to push instead of waiting for the structure to decide for them. The question “who can exploit a historical fork in a progressive direction?” has a precise answer within the WST tradition: the subjects who, even within the system and conditioned by their structural position, choose to resist oppression, build horizontal solidarities, and refuse the logic of the camp as a definition of their political identity. The Ukrainian resistance, the Kurdish resistance, that of Iranian women, that of Uyghurs documenting their own persecution from exile — these are precisely those subjects: not antisystemic actors by structural definition, but peoples who within the structure choose to oppose the violence that structure produces. Depriving them of solidarity in the name of the geopolitics of camps is not only a moral error: it is surrendering the only subjects who can actually traverse a historical fork in an emancipatory direction.
Amin’s Drift and the Mechanisms of Error
Samir Amin is the case that illustrates most clearly how it is possible to slide from the rigour of WST toward theoretically incoherent positions — all the more telling because he was one of the tradition’s founders. His theory of delinking had impressive internal coherence: if the countries of the periphery could not emancipate themselves within the rules of the unequal exchange imposed by the system, the only path was to break with those rules — to delink from the capitalist world-system in order to build forms of autonomous development not dependent on the core for their conditions of reproduction. It was a radical thesis, debatable in its practical aspects, but coherent with the Wallersteinian premises: it recognised the totality of the system and sought a structural way out, not an internal redistribution of positions.
Amin had lived and worked in Africa, and that African root nourished his theory with an empirical concreteness that is an integral part of its value. The direct experience of the periphery — of underdevelopment as structural product, of unequal exchange as a lived rather than merely described mechanism — is exactly the kind of material anchorage that distinguishes WST from many other critical theories of capitalism constructed exclusively from the perspective of the core. This Third Worldist dimension of WST, in the analytical sense, is a theoretical resource, not a limitation.
The problem arises when this analytical root slides toward something structurally different: vulgar political Third Worldism, which substitutes for structural analysis a geographical identity as an evaluative criterion. Being “of the Global South,” being “non-Western,” becomes a free pass that authorises attributions of progressive valence independently of any real analysis. The material crudeness of this operation is evident: it places in the same category China — the world’s manufacturing hub with a GDP that has surpassed the United States in purchasing power parity — and Mali, one of the poorest countries on the planet. It brackets Iran, a theocratic regional power that oppresses its own minorities, with Bangladesh, a fragile democracy with a per capita income one tenth of China’s. This classification describes nothing structurally significant about the world-system: it describes only geographic and cultural distance from the West, a variable entirely insufficient for coherent political analysis.
In his later analyses, Amin made this slide: seeing in China and certain actors of the Global South objectively progressive forces — not on the basis of an analysis of their position in the world-system, which did not justify it, but on the basis of a geographic and anti-Western solidarity that contradicted the epistemological foundations of the theory he had helped to build. To get there he had to resort to arguments external to the Wallersteinian tradition — Third Worldist geopolitical arguments that substituted identity for analysis. The result was an internal contradiction in his own thought that the most attentive critics identified, and which Amin never managed to resolve coherently.
Amin’s drift illustrates three mechanisms that produce intellectual campism even in those who have the theoretical tools to avoid it. The first is partial selection of texts: the analyses of American hegemonic decline are incorporated without drawing their logical consequences — namely that this decline does not equate to the emergence of an antisystemic alternative. The second is an arrest of analysis at the point where its conclusions become uncomfortable: WST is used to diagnose the present up to the point where the diagnosis is comforting, then external categories are deployed to draw political conclusions the theory does not support. The third, and most insidious, is the use of WST as academic legitimation for a position already adopted for reasons that have nothing to do with it: the theory is cited in support of conclusions that precede the analysis instead of deriving from it, transforming from a critical tool into rhetorical ornamentation for a preformed political position. This third mechanism produces soft campism most effectively, because it often operates below the threshold of awareness: the person who says “I’m not with Putin, but…” is applying an interpretive frame internalised during decades of political formation in which bipolarity was the world’s dominant structure — a frame that the collapse of the USSR did not automatically cancel but simply deprived of its original object.
The Living Tradition and Its Implications
Jason Moore has expanded WST in the direction that perhaps makes it sharpest for the present, incorporating the ecological crisis not as a problem external to capitalism but as a structural dimension of its logic of accumulation. Capitalism does not suffer the climate crisis as an unwanted side effect of its expansion: it produces it, because its accumulation mechanism requires the continuous appropriation of natural resources at a cost tending towards zero. This integration of the ecological crisis into the WST framework makes even more evident the inconsistency of those who use that tradition while simultaneously attributing antisystemic function to powers like Russia, whose economic model is founded on fossil rent, or China, the world’s largest CO2 emitter: neither is an alternative to the system that produces the ecological crisis; both are constituent parts of it. Christopher Chase-Dunn, continuing the research programme inaugurated by Wallerstein and Hopkins, has developed the analysis of global governance in the moment of American hegemonic decline, showing how this decline does not automatically produce a progressive alternative but opens a space of intensified rivalry between powers seeking to reposition themselves within the system, with risks of instability that fall above all on the weakest subjects — the peoples inhabiting the friction zones between competing powers.
Incompatibility as Conclusion, Not as Political Choice
World-System Theory, in its entirety and continuity from Braudel to Wallerstein, from Gunder Frank to Arrighi, through to its contemporary continuators, leaves no theoretical space for campism in any of its forms. The incompatibility is not a political choice superimposed on the theory: it is a conclusion that emerges necessarily from its foundational premises — from the assumption that the capitalist world-system is a single totality within which no actor is antisystemic by structural definition.
Using WST to its full extent means accepting conclusions that prove uncomfortable for both explicit and soft campism alike: that no antisystemic geopolitical camps exist; that non-Western powers compete within the capitalist system and not against it; that American decline is not the door to a better world but one of the historical forks WST had already identified — an opening toward plural and undetermined outcomes in which the left is called to choose its own direction, not to wait for someone else to produce it. Those who stop short of these conclusions, however respectable the political reasons that hold them back, are not using WST as an analytical tool: they are using part of it to support conclusions the rest of the tradition directly contradicts. Stopping halfway is not an alternative interpretation. It is an abandonment that leaves the field open to exactly those errors the tradition was built to render impossible.
Marco Noris is a writer and activist based in Bergamo, Italy. He has a background in economics and writes on political theory, international relations, and the Italian left.
The Italian original of this article first appeared on the author’s blog, Area mancina. This English translation, by Adam Novak, first appeared on the website of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
More content from this blog
- Chapeye on “Abstract Pacifism”, by Adrian Ivakhiv – 3 August 2025
- America’s Multiracial Right: Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes interviewed by Eric Maroney – February 2025
- Chip Berlet (1949-2026), by Spencer Sunshine and Daryle Lamont Jenkins – 5 February 2026
- On the Use of the Word ‘Genocide’ in Relation to Gaza at the Present Time, by Vincent Présumey – 11 July 2025
- Gaza: An Extreme Militarization of the Class War in Israel-Palestine. Interview with Emilio Minassian – 30 October 2023
Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.