Re: World party

on constituency:
In my Global Formation (Blackwell 1989, Rowman and Littlefield 1998) I
critiqued both Workerism and Third Worldism as missing a key dynamic of
the way in which world-system transformations have worked in the past
(and will probably work in the future).  The main most powerful agents
of systemic transformation repeatedly come from the semiperiphery. The
all of the modern hegemons (Dutch, British and U.S.) were formerly
semiperipheral, and the most important revolutions of the 20th century
occured in semiperipheral locations (Russia, China, etc).  I expect that
there will be a new round of democratic socialist regimes that will come
to power in the semiperipheral countries in the next decades. these,
with allies in both the core and the periphery, will likely be the heavy
lifters if we are to construct a democratic and collectively rational
global commonwealth.

The semiperiphery now is Brazil, Mexico, India, China, Argentina, South
Africa,as well as the more developed smaller countries -- Korea, Taiwan,
etc.  These are countries with strong workers movements in which
socialist parties can come to power by electoral means.

Terry Boswell and I have presented an analysis of the spiraling
interaction between expanding capitalism and anti-systemic movements and
we have thought about how a global socialist society could feasibly be
organized in our forthcoming
_The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy_
 Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn, Lynne Rienner Publishers,
Boulder, Colorado, USA
http://www.rienner.com/viewbook.cfm?BOOKID=460&search=boswell


Chris Chase-Dunn