thanks to all who have contributed to the discussion of the world party
and the world state.
i agree with warren wagar, except for a few details. there needs to
be a world state to sort out the problems that capitalism and human
social evolution have created. a state is a monopoly of legitimate
violence. governance, commonwealth, federation, all these words will be
needed but fundamentally the problem is to create a monopoly of
legitimate violence. this because one of the main unsolved and cyclical
products of capitalism is warfare. and warfare under modern
technological conditions is species suicide.
in this regard things are somewhat worse than wagar imagines. because he
accepts the position that world wars occur during Kondratief downswings
he thinks the likely time for the next one is 2044. unfortunately
goldstein has shown that world wars are most likely to occur at the end
of k-wave upswings. that would be some time in the 2020s.
some see the possibility of global ecological disaster within a similar
time frame.
the second problem is this. the world party cannot simply wait for the
capitalist world-system to destroy itself and most of the people on
earth. it must act to prevent that from happening.
even though a world state is the best solution as an instrument for
creating a more just and sustainable world society (call it socialism,
call it democracy, call it a collectively rational and democratic global
commonwealth, call it strawberry jello) there is not likely to emerge
a world state strong enough to prevent a war among core states in the
next twenty five years even if we try very hard, which we should do.
given the high probability of nuclear annihilation, that means looking
hard at possible substitutes for the world state. one possibility, though
it may not be much more likely than a world state, is a renewed US
hegemony. yes folks. that is what i said. this is a hard conclusion
for someone who spent his youth opposing US imperialism. talk me out of
it.
chris
p.s. this line of reasoning is spelled out in more detail in Chase-Dunn
and Podobnik, "The next world war: world-system cycles and trends"
_Journal of World-Systems Research_ 1,6 1995.