the soviet union, china and the world-system

Thu, 05 Oct 1995 08:20:14 -0400
chriscd@jhu.edu

Nikolai Rozov has raised the question of whether or not
China and the Soviet Union were parts of a larger world-system or
separate systems. This question was the focus of a huge debate in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the points of view are included in
a book I edited that was published in 1982, _Socialist States in the
World-System_ (Sage).
Albert Szymanski and Vicente Navarro, both marxists, argued the position
that these societies were largely separate systems.
Though no one predicted that the Soviet state would collapse in 1989 most of
the essays discussed the ways in which the Soviet Union was becoming more
and more reintegrated in to the capitalist world-economy. I argued that the
Soviet Union had experienced a communist revolution that was intended to
create a separate system but that never really escaped the capitalist
world-economy. The necessities of survival as a state required the
mobilization of military strength and negotiations with the "great powers."
So the Soviet Union never escaped the interstate system. The Communist state
did mobilize a great effort to protect economic development from world
market forces and in this is was partly successful, as Prof Rozov points
out. But this is not entirely different from what other upwardly mobile
semiperipheral states have done. Even the United States used tariff
protection in the nineteenth century to protect "infant industries." And
twentieth century "successes" have used state power to mobilize national
industrialization to an even greater degree. The Soviet Union and China
are distinctive mainly in the extent to which used socialist ideology to
mobilize national industrialization.
As predicted, both China and Russia have been increasingly reintegrated in
to business as usual in the capitalist world-economy.

My most recent contribution to this topic focusses on the spiralling
interaction between capitalist and socialist development over the last 200
years. "The spiral of capitalism and socialism" Pp. 1665-187 in Louis F.
Kriesberg (ed.) _Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change_ Volume
14, (Jai Press, 1992).
Here I contend that antisystemic movements such as workers' coops, granges,
agriculutral collectives, labor unions, socialist parties and communist states have pushed capitalism
to expand the scale of market integration and firm size as these socialist
organizational efforts have become reincorporated in to capitalism. And the
socialist movements also increased their scale and type of organization in
response to expanding capitalism. The point is that we are now in a period
in which global capitalism requires global socialism.

Terry Boswell and I are working on a book on this latter point. We are very
interested in Warren Wagar's idea of a world party to carry forth the
project of a global-level democratic socialism.

chris
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu