Re: spiral of capitalism and socialism (fwd)

Dear Richard,

        Thank you for re-posting your excellent summary of Chase-Dunn
and Boswell's remarkable book.  I forget what I may have said about that
book earlier, but let me say now that it supplies an ideal basis for
discussions of praxis on this list, far more practical than my A SHORT
HISTORY OF THE FUTURE, of which Chris generously led this list through two
rounds of discussion in previous years.  My scenario combines a dire
warning of what can happen if worse comes to worst with a last-ditch hope
for the survival and thriving of humankind in spite of such an apocalypse.
As such, it may provoke thought and controversy, but it cannot give us a
basis for action in the here and now.  Chase-Dunn and Boswell's SC&S does
give us such a basis.  If I had written A SHORT HISTORY as a non-fictional
world-systems treatise on theory and praxis, I hope I would have come to
arguments much the same as theirs in SC&S.  Indeed, the capitalists are
erecting a world state, or trying to, many elements of which a democratic
movement would necessarily incorporate;  indeed, the semiperiphery is
fertile ground for democratic initiatives;  indeed, market socialism
constitutes a plausible, and perhaps achievable, alternative to both 
market capitalism and state socialism.

        My instincts tell me that Chase-Dunn and Boswell are being too
optimistic and too rational, but a hopeful rationalism is a far better
basis for socialist praxis than my apocalypticism.  Put it this way:
maybe the only way that an Israel would have been possible was for a
Hitler to order and execute the Holocaust.  Historians would probably tend
to agree.  But should Zionists in, say, 1929 or 1939 have preached the
necessity of a Holocaust?  Clearly, not.  Hopeful rationalism in that
case would have dictated a policy of trying to persuade Great Britain to
grant Jews a state of their own in Palestine, and, I would add, a state
that would not have precluded the creation of an Arab Palestinian state as
well, with no expulsions and uncompensated confiscations.  History can be
incredibly cruel, but human beings must always try to surpass it.

        Cheers,

        Warren