Thanks to all who have contributed to the discussion of Warren Wagar’s
short essay about antisystemic movements. The discussion has been civil
and enlightening. If you want to go back to take a look at the exchanges
I recommend accessing the WSN mail archive at
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/wsn and sorting by the threads. The
relevant subject headings are: "anti-systemic movements", wagar on
antisystemic movements, "comrades", "world party" and " world
government." Alternatively you can sort by date and read most of the
posts since September 15.
I see two basic issues in the debates:
1. What are the appropriate values around which we could mobilize a
global movement to transform the capitalist world-system into a
collectively rational and democratic global commonwealth? and
2. Should we try to reform the existing system or should we concentrate
on radically transforming it?
On the values question my approach is mainly pragmatic. Choose and
believe those values that facilitate the mobilization of those people
who have the greatest motivation and the greatest opportunity to change
the system. I agree with Professor Wagar that the values of Left
Enlightenment are fine. It has not been the values promulgated by the
powers-that-be that are the source of the problem. Liberty, equality and
sorority are fine values. These values are found in many non-European
cultures as well. The problem is to construct social and political
structures that realize these values in practice, rather than merely
using them as legitimations for exploitation and domination.
On the second question, I say we need to do both. Reform _and_
revolution. I would constitutionally prefer revolution, but I see
reform as a necessary effort under the circumstances. Let me explain.
The capitalist world-economy in its globalizing phase will probably
cause either ecological catastrophe or thermonuclear holocaust, or both.
Seeing that this is true we cannot opportunistically wait to pick up the
pieces after said holocaust(s). In Wagar’s novel the World Party does
not get going until the 2030s. The nuclear war that kills off two-thirds
of the world’s population occurs in 2044. In my projection of
world-system cycles and trends (Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1995) the
window of vulnerability to a future war among core states occurs rather
in the 2020s. Seeing this now, in 1997, we must do all that we can to
prevent the two possible holocausts. This means trying to reform the
capitalist world-system in order to prevent these outcomes. At the same
time we need to recognize that our efforts may fail, and so we should
also be building the necessary organizational tools to survive and to
carry through a revolutionary transformation.
The combined strategies (reform and revolution) require mostly
overlapping and complementary tasks. We need to form an organization
that will debate, educate and strategize with the short-run and long-run
goals in mind. The word "party" seems to cause a lot of difficulty.
Maybe we should rather call it a "network." We need to do research on
the structural causes of warfare and ecological degradation in the past
and construct models of how these causes are likely to work in the
future. We need to understand the connections between popular movements
and the changing structures of globalized capitalism and the
institutions of the global capitalist class. We need to write articles
and books that explain the world-systems perspective to the broad
audiences who will need to understand how things work in order to change
them.
It is not too early to start.
chris