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Volume 2, Number 2-g, 1996
WHAT WILL AN INTEGRATED SOCIALIST WORLD LOOK LIKE?
Brief comments on Warren Wagar's article: "Toward a Praxis
of a World Integration"
Maria A. Pozas
Sociology Department
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
Copyright 1996 by Maria A. Pozas.
v. 6/10/96
World integration under a single state is foreseen by
world-system theorists as the only means to save the world
from destruction and chaos. The exhaustion of capitalism
will lead, in their view, to the substitution of the current
system of competing sovereign states by a democratic,
liberal and socialist commonwealth. In his article Warren
Wagar discusses who will lead this transition, and
indirectly suggests that a world system party similar to
that of his novel A Short History of the Future (1992) may
be the most feasible way to guarantee the socialist
character of the new world state.
In A Short History of the Future the party was
[Page 1]
initiated in an American university, in other words it
originated in the academic realm, suggesting that world-system
thinkers could contribute in the building of the
world party. He defends the universality of the values of
the "Left Enlightenment" and considers that "whenever local
cultures diverge from its values...we must assert, and
persuade others to assert, the priority of democratic
socialism" (Wagar, 1995:5).
The object of politics, unlike that of the academy, is
a very practical one: to take state power, or, at least, to
accumulate enough power to modify the established order in
the desired direction. This goal can be reached by violent
means, using economic power, manipulation and corruption, or
via a democratic route. Wagar proposes to follow the
democratic way. The construction of a world party that
ensures the triumph of democracy, freedom and socialism
requires joining forces and mobilizing people's will around
a new project for society. If the party's program genuinely
reflects the peoples' interests, needs and concerns, the
party will have adherents and supporters.
I can imagine Marx and his colleagues, little more
than one hundred years back, infused by the same concern,
motivated by the same ideals and the same resistance to
accept that we live in the best of possible worlds. But,
unlike our modern academics, Marx was free of the
disenchantment of the last one hundred years: the unlimited
ability of capitalism to adapt and reproduce itself, the
increasing dismantling of the welfare state, the growing gap
between poor and rich countries and, over all, the failure
of the socialist experiment in Eastern Europe. In Marx's
time, it was still possible to believe that the logic of
society's evolution would naturally lead to a socialist
[Page 2]
world. I do not know what Marx would think if he could see
the real course of his political project, but I understand
that the world needs a new project of society, a political
project that gives direction to the actions of the majority,
who are overwhelmed by abuses and the concentration of
economic and political power.
In this sense, the concern that has motivated the
world-system group to transcend the narrow limits of the
academy and to start thinking in political terms seems very
positive. The formation of a world party, however, looks at
first sight premature, perhaps as premature as in its time
was the Socialist International. And it is not the
discrepant interests of the new social movements or cultural
differences that in my opinion make this project appear
unrealistic. After all, the capitalist ideology has proved
to have an extraordinary capacity to penetrate the most
divergent cultures and to unify the most disparate
interests. Even if it could be argued that capitalism
permeated all cultures by using force and military power,
the socialist states also had this resource and still
declined.
The problem is the lack of a feasible alternative
model of society, one that is able to solve the fundamental
contradictions that led to the failure of socialism in
Eastern Europe and to the drawing back of the welfare state
in Europe, Canada and the U.S.
In my view, the success of capitalism is, above all, a
product of its capacity to organize the world's economy.
Braudel distinguishes between capitalism and market economy;
even more, he considers capitalism as the antithesis of the
market economy because it works against market's laws
through its monopoly of economic and its control over
[Page 3]
political power (cf. Arrighi 1994:10). From world-system
theory we have also learned that capitalism emerges
precisely from the marriage of capital and the state
(Braudel 1982; Wallerstein 1991; Arrighi 1994). The states
that currently rule over the vast majority of the world are
therefore capitalist states. In other words, it does not
matter how democratic they can be or how egalitarian some of
them can look; as soon as these concessions to society put
at risk the utility margin of the "lords of money," they
will turn over "their states" to correct those deviations.
That is what neoliberal states have been doing during the
last two decades.
For these reasons, it is not possible to shift the
world from capitalism to socialism only by political means,
i.e., by taking state power. Chase-Dunn (1989) envisions the
emergence of the world state (or the world federation)
before the arrival of socialism. In other words a socialist
world party will have to take over a capitalist state. It is
necessary to solve first, theoretically at least, the
problem of how the world economy could function without
capitalist accumulation. Otherwise, the socialist world
party will be working in the best of cases to balance the
demands of capitalists, which is not at all bad, but it will
never be able to eliminate their power, nor even to control
it. This is the lesson that we learned from the socialist
governments of Spain and France.
What kind of institutions can substitute for the
capitalist financial and productive systems? The East
European socialist countries substituted bureaucrats for
capitalists but they were not able to invent an efficient
alternative to organize economic life. The socialist
experiment has yet to be seriously and coldly studied and
[Page 4]
analyzed. World-system theorists prefer to discard these
experiences by suppressing the term socialist and by
considering them capitalist. The problem was, in Wagar's
view, Stalin's proclamation of "socialism in one country." I
think it was more complex than that. The expansion of
socialism in Eastern Europe and Asia was large enough to
have allowed the emergence of an independent world system.
The reasons why this did not occur have yet to be explained.
But even if these states continue to be linked to the
capitalist world economy, internally they eliminated the
"capitalist top layer" of their societies, to use Braudel's
expression (1982), and created a highly inefficient
production system (Kornai 1986). Maybe some new relations of
production emerged in these countries but these were drowned
by bureaucracy or by the world-reigning capitalism.
Another problem is the agent of transformation. As
Wagar says, citing Wallerstein, "the building of an
egalitarian democratic world order demands a 'social praxis
socially arrived at'" (Wagar, 1995:11). Marx thought that
the working class was be the transforming agent. Maybe he
was wrong; maybe the rebellion of a single class is not
enough. Perhaps the kind of crisis that Wagar describes in
his novel is indeed necessary. But under current conditions
it is hard to imagine a group of academics leading the
process. Even if they were able to recruit enough adherents
worldwide to infiltrate the centers of power, as Wagar seems
to suggest, this will not change the logic of capitalistic
accumulation.
In my view, the main strength of the academy in the
first world is its legitimacy. It provides in my opinion the
best platform to construct the kind of "overarching
consciousness of the need to confront the capitalist world-system"
[Page 5]
whose lack, Wagar says, affects today's global
political culture. This is what Marx did one hundred years
ago. His ideas were present in most of the anti-systemic
social movements of the century. Today we need a new theory,
not only a theory that explains how capitalism works, as
world-system theory does, but one that based on the
knowledge accumulated during a century of studies and
economic and political experiments is able to imagine an
alternative form of organizing the world economy.
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