 |
|||||
|
| |||||
|
|||||
|
|
Volume 2, Number 2-e, 1996
PRAXIS, SHMAXIS: COMMENTARY ON WAGAR
Walter L. Goldfrank
Department of Sociology
UC Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA
wally@cats.ucsc.edu
Copyright 1996 by Walter L. Goldfrank.
v. 6/10/96
What are the controversies here? Wagar makes one
main point and several subsidiary ones. The main
point is that a world party will/should be the
principal organizational vehicle for the long-run
victory of democratic socialism in a global
commonwealth. The subsidiary points are (1) that
the array of (multi-) cultures will/should give
way to (or at least not preclude) agreement on the
basic values of the Western Enlightenment; (2) that
currently existing anti-systemic movements may be
opposed to this or that aspect of contemporary
[Page 1]
social organization but are not really very anti-
systemic, because they do not challenge the world-
economy or the interstate system; (3) that the world
will most probably pass through a prolonged and
chaotic time of troubles (possibly including such
horrors as environmental catastrophe, widespread
nuclear war, or global North-South war) before
the integrated, peaceful, egalitarian Utopia
arrives; and (4) that world-system theory implies
something like the world party as its complementary
praxis. The implication is that world-system adepts
should unburden themselves of illusory hopes in
today's motley semi-relevant movements and set about
the task of party formation. To me, not much of
this makes sense, representing rather an awkward
global analogy with what voluntarist Marxist political
doctrine was taken to mean at the national level.
Let me comment on Wagar's points from the bottom
of my list backwards. World party or movements?
Sometimes Wagar seems to be saying that overcoming
the multi-stateness of the world-system is the main
goal, sometimes a socialist world-system. It is
perfectly plausible that the elites of the capitalist
world-economy will themselves come very close to
achieving a single global polity in the interests of
effective economic regulation, and/or biospheric
preservation, and/or efficient repression (e.g.,
one way to control borders is to eliminate them).
In thus creating a global polity, elites would
nudge the world toward global social democracy if not
socialism, but in the face of multiple and critical
problems, it might well be a step that elites find
[Page 2]
worth taking.
As they say about old age, it's preferable to the
alternative. In any case, why should we do the
elites' work for them?
Is chaos/war necessary or likely? To some degree,Ô
envisioned by Wagar and agreed to in oral commentary by
Arrighi and Wallerstein, again I'm not so sure. "Two,
three, many Vietnams" was an anti-systemic slogan of
the 'sixties; the sages at the ASA seemed to be
predicting "two, three, many Somalias, Bosnias,
Iraqs, Rwandas, Chechnyas, etc.," replete with
deplorable miseries and potential spillovers and
throngs of refugees. Perhaps. But perhaps
not, at least perhaps not with dire consequences
except for the luckless victims. Brush fires can be
extinguished, and so can forest fires, especially if
they're in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones.
More menacing: if one reasons from previous cycles
of hegemony, one would predict that after U.S. hegemony
is utterly defunct (say, in fifteen to twenty-five
years) and the fabric of condominium the U.S. is weaving
frays, a period of intense rivalry and conflict would
ensue, leading to "core" wars similar to the Thirty
Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and World Wars I & II.
While this sort of cyclical repetition is surely
possible, so is its transcendance, its sublation into
modes of redividing the world less harmful to our
collective health (or our children's). I have
elaborated some of the reasons this more tepid
outcome might occur in a prior publication in this
forum (Goldfrank 1995). Clearly, one of the strongest
trends of the present moment is the thickening of
[Page 3]
international organization, IGO and NGO, official and
informal, corporate and professional. This trend, along
with the "no-winners" nature of nuclear war, makes
nation-state-based core wars a less likely feature of
future hegemonic cycles than of past ones. By no means
impossible, but not foreordained, either. As for
generalized North-South war, again, it is not impossible,
but let's not forget the discovery of the semi-periphery.
Is the "family of anti-systemic movements" really
anti-systemic? Probably not so much as Wallerstein
would like it to be, but probably more than Wagar
thinks. Let's be clear about this: we are in a period
in which the century-plus of Marxism as world movement
and set of world parties has ended, and the new
overarching vision has barely begun to be enunciated.
Earth-destroying, militaristic, patriarchal,
racially-inflected capitalism continues to generate
mind-numbing inequalities and dangers to human
livelihood. The movements that we have, mostly
local or national, mostly single-issue, keep alive
in important and often dramatic ways the rational
and egalitarian alternatives to this world-system
we are stuck with for at least the medium run.
It is out of their sometimes conflictful visions
that an oppositional ideology for the 21st century
will emerge. If that vision turns out to be moreÔ
to go to meetings three times a day?
What about Enlightenment versus multiculturalism?
Is there really so great an opposition as Wagar posits?
From Montaigne and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Unamuno,
"Caucasian males" have done their share to balance,
within Western culture, rationalist control-freakism
[Page 4]
with intuition, passion, localism, and respect for
difference. In other words, DWEM culture is not the
monolith it is often caricatured as being. Perhaps
more importantly for the political future of the
world, the principal bearers of that culture have proved
remarkably adept and flexible both at accomodating
cultural difference (why, at McDonald's in Maine
you can even get a McLobster!) and at instructing
non-Western elites in the mystical virtues of liberalism.
The current defensive/assertive postures of today's
fractionated communities are not etched in stone, and
we can reasonably expect more coalitions and more
cooperation among culturally distinctive subordinated
groups than we see today. In addition, we can reasonably
expect that as it becomes more global, "Western"
culture itself will incorporate subthemes drawn from
other civilizational traditions, as it has with
African music, Asian religion, and pagan sensuality.
Finally, do we need a world party to arrive at
global socialism? As claimed above, such a party does
not seem to be a necessary vehicle for overcoming the
multi-stateness of the capitalist world-economy: the
elites will manage this on their own, with a little
help from international civil society. Once that
has been accomplished, it's not clear to me that a
"revolutionary" party along the lines of past Socialist
or Communist parties would be worth the trouble. Perhaps
it will turn out to be better simply to demand more and
more justice and more and more equality without entering
formal political competition, all the while voting,
[Page 5]
lobbying, demonstrating, disrupting, in the interests of
equalization and livelihood protection. Do we really
want to be in the business of constructing counter-
bureaucracies when we might be able to get the existing
ones to do the right thing?
One of Wagar's contributions, then, is to have
formulated clearly the party path to world socialism.
(Maybe he's a party animal? I don't know him
personally.) I have argued that the party path
is probably not necessary for "worldness" and possibly
not useful for socialism. Since Wagar sets the date
for founding the World Party in 2035, neither of us is
likely to face a decision about joining it, and in the
meantime we should all get back to the business at hand.
REFERENCE
Goldfrank, Walter L. 1995. "Beyond cycles of hegemony:
Economic, social, and military factors." Journal of
World-Systems Research 1, 8. http://jwsr.ucr.edu/
[Page 6]
|
|
 Top |
Archive | Vol. 2 |