Constructing a World Fit for Marxism: Utopia and Utopistics of Professor Wallerstein

A bstract .   World system theory, founded and developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, continues Marx's original vision of modern economy as a zero-sum game based on exploitation. Ignoring convincing criticism of Marx's economics, Wallerstein broadens spatial confines of the applicability of Marxist economics to include the whole world. Imaginatively combining Marxist and postmodernist frames of reference, Wallerstein constructs a future economic and social system reminiscent of a classical Marxist utopia. This endeavor, which Wallerstein calls "utopistics," provides a logical conclusion to world system theory, as it finalizes a practice of defending Marxian analysis of the past and the present in terms of an imagined future.