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Volume 2, Number 2-n, 1996A RESPONSE W. Warren Wagar Copyright 1996 by W. Warren Wagar Let me begin by thanking everyone who commented on my ASA paper, "Toward a Praxis of World Integration," both those who were generally sympathetic to its thesis and those who were not. It is inconceivable to me that any two freethinking human beings living in our time could share the same preferred model of the good society. So of course I am not surprised that no one found every aspect of my vision appealing or that some found almost nothing to applaud. I would probably react to each of your utopias in much the same ways. Nonetheless, our species needs, perhaps more than anything else, to think together about where we want to go, and how, and why. Without telos, how can we speak of praxis? And without praxis, what use is analysis? The point is to change the world and change it for the better. When we utopianize, however, or at least when I utopianize, we engage in a form of creative play. We are not predicting, which is impossible anyway, and we are not legislating for all humanity. We are painting pictures, much like an artist; we are composing symphonies, much like a musician; we are writing stories, much like a novelist. Our visions are informed by the knowledge and theories in our heads, but this is also true, in a somewhat different sense, of the artist. So I do not claim that "Toward a Praxis for World Integration" contains a final blueprint for the future world order, any more than I would make such a claim for my book, A Short History of the Future. Neither text marks the path we must take. They are both simply experiments in utopography -- or should I say teleography? When some of my critics apply epithets to my work such as "fantasy utopianism" (Bergesen) or "political fantasy" (Schauffler), I can only reply, of course! This is precisely what I am about. Utopography is perhaps the best way to lure our hunches about humanity's telos into plain view. I identify at least four common threads in the critical discourse of the twelve papers commenting on my article. There is the issue of antisystemic movements versus the World Party, the issue of multiculturalism versus the Left Enlightenment, the issue of civil libertarianism versus the World State, and the issue of the World State itself versus the radical decentralization that I envision as a sequel to the World State. There are other issues, some of [Page 1] which I will touch on, but these have drawn the most attention, and I think rightly so. The formula for world integration delineated in my article and in my book is clearly at odds with most of what reactionaries in our time describe as "political correctness." With just a little strategic tinkering here and there, you might say, my formula could meet the needs of the Lords of Capital themselves. It might even be construed as a cleverly (or clumsily?) disguised variant of fascism. Both capitalism and fascism, after all, sport their own teleographies of world integration. So did the Positivism of that High Priest of Humanity, Auguste Comte. Well, I am not a capitalist or a fascist, nor even a Positivist, but I am also not a knee-jerk radical. I think, as I hope do most of us, that the common pieties of the Left need to be re-examined every so often, to make sure we still believe them, that we know what they mean, and that they are not incompatible with one another. On the subject, first, of the role of antisystemic movements versus the role of a World Party, Bond and Mayekiso challenge my skepticism about such movements by citing the heartening example of South Africa's liberation movement; Boswell finds support for world integration in movements for national self-determination and the cultural autonomy of nations; Goldfrank and Schauffler argue that the day of revolutionary parties has long passed; Moghadan sees the international women's movement and various other vital contemporary social movements as fundamentally antisystemic; and Teivainen pleads the case for a postmodernist acceptance of many perspectives and contributions. Paraphrasing The Communist Manifesto, Schwartzman endorses the World Party, but only as a kind of umbrella sheltering all other progressive parties and movements. For the most part, I agree with my critics, not with their reading of my article so much as with their insistence on the inestimable value of genuinely antisystemtic movements. I did not say that every so-called antisystemic movement fails to deserve the adjective, nor that the World Party should refuse to acknowledge or work with any that do. Late in the article I even speak approvingly of unnamed "sister movements." But I did contend, and still contend, that a movement or party opposed to one aspect of the world-system is not ipso facto opposed to all or most of the rest, or will always be opposed to all or most of the rest. Such movements and parties must be judged by their performance on a regular and continuing basis. Obviously any genuinely antisystemic movement or party merits the strongest support of the World Party. If I downplayed their significance in my article, it was only because I wished to highlight the need for something else that we do not presently have and need most [Page 2] desperately: the World Party itself. To be sure, I also denied that any movement speaking for any segment of humankind can be intrinsically antisystemic, which is to say, antisystemic by its very nature, as opposed to whatever its actual performance might be. For example, the international women's movement is intrinsically a movement to benefit women. Women, as women, have no more right to represent or speak for the whole human race than have men. The women's movement might become antisystemic in practice, because its leaders and members agree that women need global socialist democracy as much as men. But it could also turn in many other directions, such as cozying up to capitalism or to this or that sectarian religion or national cause, without ceasing to think of itself, quite legitimately, as feminist. Again, what matters is the praxis of the antisystemic group. Antisystemic is as antisystemic does. As for the argument that a World Party has been tried and failed miserably--the Second and more especially the Third Internationals (see Goldfrank and Schauffler)--I do not need "lessons" in history. A modern European historian for the past 40 years, I am well aware of the grotesque record of the Internationals, the complicity of the Second with bourgeois capitalism and of the Third with totalitarian state capitalism. In point of fact almost all revolutions and global political (and religious) movements have failed to achieve their goals or strayed from their original path or both. This is history, my friends. Many crimes, many follies. But just indulge in a bit of counterfactual history, and imagine what might have happened without the revolutions, without the global movements, without the utopias and the philosophical deconstruction of slavery and serfdom, of patriarchy, of aristocracy, and ultimately of capitalism by the Enlightenment. Should we give up on political parties or revolutionary programs or utopian visions just because they don't deliver all they promise, and sometimes even turn into nightmares? Certainly not. The real utopians (in the pejorative sense of the word) are the people who cannot bear anything but perfection. Another crucial and intimately related issue is my defense of the Left Enlightenment against multiculturalism. One of my critics (Sanderson) denounces the "folly" of multiculturalism, and I must confess to feeling a surge of adrenalin when I read this passage in his response. Yes, damn it, multiculturalism is a folly. Not the existence of many cultures in our pluralistic global society. That is a fact. Not the belief that all of these cultures have a right to exist, as long as they respect the rights of the others. That is the essence of Enlightenment liberalism. The folly lies in assuming that we can build a coherent democratic and socialist [Page 3] world civilization without certain shared core values that transcend multiculturalism. I will admit to one serious oversight. I failed to define what I meant by the Enlightenment and, more to the point, what I meant by the Left Enlightenment. Schauffler seems to think that I equate the two. I do not. The Enlightenment is the movement of ideas that swept through Western civilization and beyond in the 17th and 18th centuries upholding reason and science and free inquiry against traditional belief systems. As Kant said, it was the emancipation of the mind from the tutelage of authority. The political corollary of the Enlightenment was the primacy of liberty: liberty of thought and expression, of assembly, of religion, of enterprise. In the second half of the 18th century, the thinkers of the Enlightenment began to veer off in two directions. Some, starting with Rousseau, Morelly, and Babeuf, turned leftward. The rest, such as Adam Smith and the Physiocrats, turned rightward. Chiefly from the thinkers on the Left came two new cardinal principles, of the same rank as the principle of liberty: democracy and equality. For the thinkers on the right, the highest value remained liberty, and especially liberty of enterprise. In the first half of the 19th century, the Left Enlightenment culminated in the work of the utopian and scientific socialists. The Right Enlightenment culminated in classical political economy, Utilitarianism, and Positivism. During the second half of the 19th century, the Enlightenment disaggregated as a coherent movement of thought, but its political core values lived on, in various forms, in Europe, in the Americas, and throughout much of the world. The core values of the Left Enlightenment, I believe, retain their cogency in our postmodern era. There are just three. One is liberty, one is democracy, and one is equality. I do not wish to live in any society where this Trinity is not the supreme faith of the land. The trick, of course, is to make sure that none of the three (or no two of the three) overpowers the rest. No small trick! If, for example, liberty of enterprise is carried to its logical extreme, it sabotages democracy, eliminates equality, and in the end undermines liberty as well. By the same token, if equality is won at the expense of liberty and democracy, equality itself swiftly disappears.
[Page 4] Now it is simply an accident of history, inconvenient as it may be, that this trinity of core political values was generated by thinkers and activists and lawyers and politicians and voting citizens of the Left Enlightenment in modern Western civilization. Clearly, none of these values was entirely original with the modern West. Each has its antecedents reaching far back into the past, just as modern Western civilization itself can be understood only by reviewing the 10,000 years of pre-modern world history that made it possible. But in the forms they have come down to us in the late 20th century, the core values of liberty, democracy, and equality are the heritage of the Left Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries. If we wish to ignore history for the sake of political correctness or for practical reasons and forget about the origins of this modern trinity, well and good. We can just say that our core values are liberty, democracy, and equality, and let it go at that. All the same, I seriously doubt that any progressive freethinker in the world today would deny that these are his or her core political values. If multiculturalism means the demotion of these values to the same level as the values of, say, Arab nationalism or Christian theology or certain varieties of radical feminism, then I would have to view multiculturalism as a dangerous antagonist to the cause of democratic socialist world integration. Identity politics and the Left Enlightenment do not mix. You have to choose. And if the World Party ever comes along, I am sure of one thing. It will not subscribe to an ultimately nihilistic relativism or to a "church of your choice" eclecticism. It will have a powerful, undiluted faith in liberty, democracy, and equality. Under that banner, it will build Cosmopolis. A third issue taken up by my critics is the fear that [Page 5] Cosmopolis will turn out to be an all-devouring Leviathan, a cure worse than the disease for which I prescribe it. Babones asks, "Might not the potential for repression of a world-state pose an ever greater risk to humanity than our current 'doomed and polarized world-system of capitalism'?" Bergesen hears in my language about leaders who would be of "no use to us" the ominous clang of the guillotine. Sanderson finds my World Commonwealth too "coercive" and "overwhelming." Teivainen complains that political struggles in my Commonwealth "are suffocated by the enforced consensus supported by a rather totalitarian security apparatus of a world state." Such fears are not groundless. In the end, my Commonwealth does collapse because of its unwieldy bureaucracy and its sheer redundancy in a world of self-sufficient communities living in a whole and healthy biosphere. It could have collapsed for more serious reasons, if it had massively betrayed its own commitment to liberty, democracy, and equality. But the narrative in A Short History of the Future does not envisage such a betrayal. There are several other mass parties besides the World Party, there are plenty of political struggles, civil liberties are guaranteed (including freedom of enterprise in producers' co-operatives, although without the opportunity to profiteer), dissident faiths and ideologies are tolerated, a whole new branch of government (the "tribunate") is formed to protect citizens against wrongful use of state power, and a rough equality of incomes is maintained throughout the planet. When Sanderson says the Commonwealth "did not allow many of the liberties that prevail today in the capitalist democracies," he is simply wrong. When he says that free enterprise was prohibited, he is wrong. When he says that religious and other minorities "had no right of self-determination," he is right if he means that the Commonwealth proscribed theocracies, but wrong if he means there was no freedom of religious belief and practice. The conclusion of my alter ego, the narrator Peter Jensen, is that the Commonwealth did a better job of safeguarding civil liberties "than the bourgeois democracies [of [Page 6] the 20th century] at their best." (A Short History of the Future, p. 209) Now because I am a historian, and I know there are no perfect polities in history, I decided not to make my Commonwealth a perfect polity. Jensen freely admits over and over again that the Commonwealth sometimes did go too far in protecting democracy and equality at the expense of liberty. It made many serious mistakes. The liberties it guaranteed on paper were not always available in practice. I even invent the irascible figure of Khader Barrakat, a Palestinian sociologist of the early 22nd century, who--during the era of the Commonwealth, please notice--published a book denouncing its authoritarian tendencies. Jensen opines that Barrakat exaggerated, but Sanderson seems to take everything Barrakat wrote at face value. The point is that in criticizing my own utopia, in noting that the Commonwealth did not always live up to its lofty ideals, I am reaffirming those ideals. Peopling my book with fallible human beings does not mean that I endorse their failings. Just the opposite! Finally, some of my critics are dubious about my scenario for the transformation of the Commonwealth into a highly decentralized pluralistic global community of communities, which I call the House of Earth. Babones observes that these independent communities still have governments, and therefore do not fulfill the vision of Friedrich Engels in his Anti-Dühring of a transition from governance to public administration. Sanderson cannot understand how the Commonwealth could have given up the ghost so easily or how human beings could be so altruistic and peace-loving. He is also puzzled that an avowed foe of multiculturalism would resurrect multiculturalism at the end of his utopia. Teivainen laments the insularity of the communities in the House of Earth and their lack of interaction with one another.
[Page 7] Babones is right about Engels. The end of the world state is not the same thing as the withering away of all state power. However, some of the communities in the House of Earth would probably satisfy Engels, since they elected to carry on without governments of any kind. Most of the rest opted for direct, town-meeting democracy. I suppose my reluctance to give up on "governance" and "polities" altogether is my skepticism about Engels's categorical distinction, and that of Babones, between state power and public administration. As for Sanderson's objections, I do not agree that the Commonwealth gave up without a fight. Troops were dispatched to rebellious districts, passive resistance paralyzed cities, the Commonwealth outlawed the Small Party and proclaimed martial law, and the constitution was suspended, leading eventually to the assassination of the Commonwealth's strong man. I also disagree with Teivainen on the subject of the insularity of the communities in the House of Earth. They were self-supporting, but they did collaborate on various projects, as documented in chapter 12. Ten communities scattered across three continents worked together on the Samsara Project, three communities provided most of the personnel of the Darwin Project, and the consortium engaged in the terraforming of Mars enlisted people from 43 communities. None of this would have been possible if the communities of the House of Earth paid no attention to one another. Nor could Peter Jensen have written a history of their various doings. Sanderson, of course, objects that none of this is realistic. The House of Earth is unbelievable, because sociologists who appreciate Max Weber know that politics does not work "this way." All I can say in response is to look again at my section on "The Logic of Decentralization" in chapter 10. I anticipated the kind of criticism voiced by Sanderson. Peter Jensen comes up with four reasons why politics could indeed work "this way." Changes in the structure of society and in cultural [Page 8] norms are among them. But two other reasons are adduced, about which none of my critics has anything much to say. As social scientists, we naturally spend most of our days thinking about society and culture, but there is more to human life than society and culture. The other two explanations for the success of the House of Earth lie in the realm of technology and biotechnology, respectively. Technological change--change in information, energy, and cybernetics technology--has made it literally possible for communities to sustain themselves without the aid of a complex web of global services and facilities. Beyond this, biotechnological change has created a higher subspecies of humankind, far more intelligent and far more disposed to cooperative, altruistic, and empathetic behavior than the old Homo sapiens. I expected that most of my critics would pounce on these advances in automation and eugenics as examples either of my puerile weakness for science fiction or my barely covert racism or both. Instead, you pretty much ignore them. But social scientists ignore the society-wrenching capacities of science and technology at their peril. Science and technology are out there, and they are not going to stop throwing us for various loops in the centuries ahead. As Marx and Engels knew quite well, science and technology (and industrial reorganization) have made it possible for humankind to stand on the threshold of universal abundance. They can also, as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley knew quite well, enslave us all. But never underestimate their capacity to make a big difference. There are many other points I could address. For example, I agree wholeheartedly with Bergesen on the need for significant attention to the concerns of deep ecology. The World Party must be a thoroughly Green party. Chapters 3 and 7 of A Short History of the Future are all about the environment and its restoration under the Commonwealth. I have an article forthcoming in Review entitled "Socialism, Nationalism, and [Page 9] Ecocide," which will focus on the ecological tasks of the World Party. Of course I do not agree with Boswell on the question of the alleged benignity of nationalism, as opposed to imperialism and racism. As a historian, I cannot think of too many nationalisms that have not been imperialistic from time to time, both in seeking to extend their domains and to crush or homogenize the many variant micro-nationalities in the homeland. I conclude that nationalism is intrinsically imperialistic. I do enthusiastically agree, however, with Pozas on the urgent need to imagine how socialism can convert the global economy of capitalism into a socialist economy, and with Ross on global labor as the antithesis and mortal enemy of global capital--so long as we include under the heading of "labor" anyone who works for a living. Working people in a postindustrial society include the majority of managers, technicians, teachers, lawyers, doctors, artists, bureaucrats, legislators, computer programmers, and many other brain-workers, a veritable host of people who derive all or most of their income from their own toil. Thank you again, everyone, for hearing me out and for your comments. I have learned a lot from you, and I think I have also come to understand my own ideas better as a result of this interchange. Permit me one last unrepentant cheer. Long live the World Party!
[Page 10] Addendum: RESPONSE TO DAVID WILKINSON The comment by David Wilkinson on my article "Toward a Praxis of World Integration" is one of the most imaginative the article received, and I regret that I was unable to include it in my original response. What I liked best about his comment is his willingness to play my sort of game--in short, to futurize, and futurize copiously. He agrees that some kind of world party calling itself socialist is a likely outcome of the globalization process, and then proceeds to explore the challenges that a world socialist party might face from rival political formations in the next century. I do not doubt that the World Party would find itself so challenged. I would not be surprised to see the rise of alternative self-styled socialisms, perhaps along the lines sketched by Wilkinson. One may also expect attempts to form coalitions of stateless national groups, as well as brief marriages of convenience between otherwise hostile religious movements. But I am dubious about Wilkinson's third category, the "religious democrats." Decades ago, in a book ineptly titled "The City of Man," I looked hopefully at the idea of a fusion of the great positive religions, which would help inspire a movement for world government. In the perspective of the 1990s, this looks more and more like a pipedream. Liberal and syncretistic forces have faded in the various religious communities or merged with secular humanism (itself an endangered species), leaving the field to the zealots and fundamentalists in every creed who cling fiercely to their traditions and recognize no gods but their own. The only kind of globalization they understand, if any, is an evangelical passion to conquer the world, something I cannot believe they will ever do. Nevertheless, the World Party will not go unchallenged; if I fail to make this explicit in my article, please consult "A Short History of the Future," which sports a rich array of opposition parties. Eventually one of these--the Small Party--prevails. On capitalism as the dominant system of relations of production in the modern world-economy, I will concede to Wilkinson that pre-capitalist modes of land ownership and rent persist in the world-economy, but much of the large-scale dealing in land that goes on today simply reflects the commodification of land and its use as a form of capital in the global marketplace. One day a given chunk of capital is invested in land, the next day the land is swapped for industrial plant, and the day after that, presto, the industrial plant becomes a chain of banks. I fail to see the difference. One final note. Wilkinson describes my idea of culture as chiefly political and economic. He might well receive that impression from my article, but, again, my book makes abundantly clear that I view culture, including the possible global "monoculture," as a tissue of science, philosophy, religion, and art, as well as political and economic values and institutions. I do maintain that the ways we satisfy our material needs and our needs for a social order determine the kinds of intangible culture that will be possible in a given human community, but once the intangibles evolve from their material base, they achieve a life of their own and interact ceaselessly with the forces at play in the base.
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