That said, I don't find Wallerstein's work to be particularly convincing. A good deal of his theoretical position is predicated upon Braudel's Annales school historical work and Andre Gunder Frank's dependency theory (a kind of warmed over Leninism applied to Latin America). As it turns out, dependency theory is more or less wrong on the facts — it was a plausible sounding theory, but didn't have much of an empirical basis.
Wallerstein's work is an expansion of Braudel's work on the Mediterranean-as-an-economic/geographical-system and on A.G. Frank's dependency theory. Wallerstein posits that the entire global economy grew out of the European/Mediterranean system, and that there's a dependent relationship between the core states (First World industrialized countries) and periphery states (Third World raw materials suppliers). This is basically an updating of Lenin's essay "Capitalism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism", buttressed with a great deal of historical narrative.
If you read Wallerstein's short introduction to WST, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, you'll get an idea of what a theoretical spaghetti his thought is when pressed to put it down simply and briefly on the page. And the last third of the book is devoted to a kind of 1960s-counter-culture burnt-out-hippie wishful-thinking about the potential of anti-globalization movements.
If you're really interested in Marxist International Political Economy, I would skip Wallerstein and try Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey instead. For the more historical stuff, Braudel, Abu-Lughod, and Frank are awesome.
I liked the World-Systems Analysis book - compared to most social science, it was at least readable and truly interesting in many parts. He's not so cagey, hedged, and recalcitrant a writer that one can't filter out his opinions, like the "burnt-out-hippie wishful thinking" parts. :)
Thanks again for the references. The future will be interesting.
Don't get me started on Thomas Friedman. As a TA, when I have to teach Friedman, I usually just instruct my students to go into it realizing that everything he says will be so wildly overstated, baselessly enthusiastic, or anecdotal that it will invariably be wrong. I really hate that people feel smarter when they read him.
That, I think, is why you see internal contradictions. You're pointing out that the best capitalists do stuff that harms the average capitalist; if Myspace is making money, there's always a Zuckerberg waiting to ruin things. But of course, there is no "Capitalism" that encompasses all of the goals of Myspace's owners and Facebook's.
That also takes care of the apparent contradiction of outsourcing. The capitalists who lose to outsourcing don't like it; the outsourcers do. There's less money made (since the outsourcers charge less), but the economy is more efficient. That's capitalism--the net result of lots of self-interested people, who often act against one another's interests. It's not the vision of capitalism in which the rich, as a group, make consensus decisions to advance their collective interests.
Thus, that version of capitalism is wrong.
Oh, and slavery and colonialism are much, much older than capitalism as we understand it today. In fact, one can make the case that slaves are the oldest form of property. Certainly, I've never heard of a civilization that advanced at all and never had slaves.
And of course the startups that became possible because Sun equipment was much cheaper than IBM's thought this was a pretty good thing too.
I don't disagree with your general arguments, but this bit is factually wrong. IBM's problems in the late 80's and early 90's were to do with the rise of the PC industry, not the Unix workstation. Yes, IBM had a dysfunctional Unix strategy during that period, and yes it lost sales (some to Sun) but it wasn't Sun that was killing it, it was the rise of client server computing. If Sun hadn't been there then Apollo (remember them?) or HP or maybe even SGI
Nah, the best way is to prey on vice. Weight loss pills, get rich quick schemes, porn, 0 interest ARM loans, etc.
Capitalism works because of increasing productivity and because it is a more efficient method of allocating resources than a planned economy.
The world's a really complex system, even limited to just the human-systems part of it, and the <50 miles from satellite orbits down to deep-sea drilling that concerns said humans. So in forecasting and speculating on the future, we can't help but project our own fears and hopes - in this case, Thiel is a capitalist/investor who makes a long case for going long on the world economy, with some Biblical quotes and economic history to make it interesting, if not quite convincing. Too many false dichotomies are given - I think it's a good bet the future will not run like a decision tree.
In particular, Thiel wrestles with the fairly old internal contradictions of capitalism that many other thinkers have, some much more in depth. To use one more Biblical reference, the Rapture for globalization is a totally "flat" world of complete freedom for labor and capital (and technology, but presumably not land). Global capitalism runs, shuffles, or stumbles towards that end, with much of its participants heedless of the journey, never mind its destination.
For example, since capitalism's purpose is to accumulate capital for its own sake, it cannot help but be global (early on, slave trade/colonialism), and it cannot help but work against itself in the long run (We'll up profit margins by outsourcing! But wait, then those outsourcers will get richer, and compete to squeeze our own profit margins. Yah, but then they'll outsource too! But wait, the planet is finite...). While it is a very resilient economic system, what might follow it as its contradictions come fully into play is far from clear.
As an aside, here's someone else who's view on the current globalization situation is, I've found, comprehensive and coherent:
http://www.iwallerstein.com/