Reflections

Dear Warren,

Thanks for your summary of the Fernand Braudel Center 25th Anniversary
Conference. Overall, my impressions of it were similar to yours.  However,
one of the hightlights of the conference for me was meeting and talking
with people like yourself whom I had previously only known by reputation.

Like you, I was dissapointed that there was not more said about the
environmental future. However, I don't agree with your implication that
world-system gatherings routinely belittle or ignore the topic. The PEWS
mini-conference at ASA this past August was titled "Globalization and the
Environment: Prospects and Perils." Immanuel Wallerstein, in "After
Liberalism," put the ecological crisis on his short list of phenomena that
portend the chaos and potentially disastrous trajectory of the world-system
over the next 50 years. And Peter Grimes and others have published papers
on environmental issues from a world-system perspective. 

But while I would have welcomed some discussion about the environment at
the 25th Anniversary Conference, I am not sure what I would expect to hear.
We already know there is a crisis, as your post summarized, and we know
that as long as the logic of capitalism dominates the world-system the
crisis will only get worse. It seems to me that what we need to talk about
is how we turn this situation around, a topic that would have implications
for not only the environment, but all facets of the world-system.

This brings me to what I would have liked to have seen more of at the
conference: a serious discussion of the FUTURE of the world-system,
including sessions about organizational forms and immediate objectives. I
agree with you that the concept of a World Party needs to be seriously
considered, along with other ideas about possible organizational forms. And
proposals such as Terry Boswell's and Chris Chase-Dunn's international
market socialism need to be hashed out. I would hope that in the
not-too-distant future there will be a conference dedicated to discussing
the future of the world-system from these angles. If it happens, I look
forward to seeing you there...

 
-Pat Loy