Just a few postscripts to Chris's comment of 30 July. I am not a
firm believer in the thesis that world wars occur during Kondratieff
downswings. In fact I am not enough of a sociologist to believe that
world wars must occur during any part of any cycle. The greatest world
war ever was brewed in the murky vat of the Great Depression, but its
baleful predecessor came during a time of general prosperity.
A further point. My argument that the next world war may occur in
2044 is not really an argument at all: it is a scenario, one among many
that I might have chosen. I do not believe that another world war is
inevitable, or that it has to come during a downswing, or that it could
not happen in the 2020s. There is enough instability and injustice in the
present world-system to allow it to erupt at almost any time, and there
are enough problems in the present world-economy to produce runaway
inflation, famine, and environmental collapse in a matter of a decade or
two. For example, as Lester Brown asks, who will feed China? China is
on a collision course with catastrophe and this matters profoundly to
everybody else on earth.
Of course I agree with Chris that the World Party must not wait
for the capitalist world-system to destroy itself. It would have to do
its best to prevent such a thing, because there is no way that the death
of one or two or five billion people can be justified. There is no way to
justify the death of anybody. But as Chris goes on to say, the World
Party might not be able to keep the system from suicide. Maybe a renewed
US hegemony will turn out to be the least of the various evils in store
for humankind. Better red, white, and blue than dead?
In any event, the one thing this discussion has not elicited, to
any great extent, is attention to praxis. The session at the ASA last
summer that started all this was supposed to be devoted to praxis. How do
we get from here to there? Even if we can't agree on what's happening
here and what's needed there--and that's par for the course in left
circles--couldn't we at least focus for once on appropriate means? If the
World Party is a pipedream, what would be better? If it's not a
pipedream, how should it be organized, how should it operate, what kind of
politics should it pursue? To echo Chris, how do we prepare strawberry
jello?
Warren
<wwagar@binghamton.edu>