7/30/96, chris chase-dunn wrote:
>...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.
To ignore all the uniquely new realities of the modern world, and
depend on "k-wave upswings" for predictions, makes no more sense than
reading tea leaves. Allow me to re-iterate A Austin's comment in this
regard...
7/31/96, Andrew W. Austin wrote:
> ...I think much of what goes on this channel suffers from a
>very intellectually bounded view of the world, one where some very broad
>concepts and theories reduce the ability to think about the world to very
>narrow eschatologies. ...illegitimate teleologies with all
>the trappings of a Nostradamus.
chris chase-dunn continues:
>...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.
What's this about "renewed" US hegemony? The U.S has global
hegemony, has had it since 1945, and has it more totally now than ever
before. The hegemony has been so pervasive that use of the nuclear arsenal
hasn't even been necessary. But it's always there as a backup, in case any
real threat arises to American power.
As for a world state, that's exactly what we're getting, because
that's what the U.S. elite wants. Having achieved military hegemony in
1945, they had strategic options as to how to exploit that in the post-war
world. They could have opted for a classical U.S.-centric imperialist
system -- an enlarged British Empire, if you will. But they chose not to,
partly because (I imagine) it would have been difficult to manage PR-wise,
partly because it would have created the seeds of global rebellion, and
partly because such empires are problematic to manage and maintain.
But they weren't going to fritter away their advantage either.
They did decide to maintain U.S. military hegemony, manufacturing the
"Soviet threat" as an excuse for the necessary expenditures. But in the
economic realm, they had more subtle designs for their new world order than
an unwieldy U.S.-centric trading empire. What they chose instead was to
dismantle the trappings of classical European imperialism, create lots of
little fledgling "independent" nations, and thereby create a "level playing
field" for global capitalism.
To use a metaphor from American mythology, you might say capitalism
graduated from a Wild West stage of existence, and that the time had come
to urbanize the Western Frontier -- banks and marshalls instead of
shoot-em-up anarchy. What we see in the current globalist initiative (GATT
and all that) is the codification of what has been an ad-hoc set of
U.S.-sponsored arrangements for this new world order. This is the world
government we're heading for, and it has no trappings of democracy, and it
won't be needing core-power warfare -- k-waves or tea-leaves
notwithstanding.
The problem with cycle-based theories is that they can't
anticipate the impact of change-of-state paradigm shifts.
IMHO,
rkm