transnational social movements and
democratic socialist
parties in the semiperiphery
Christopher
Chase-Dunn
Institute
for Research on World-Systems
University
of California, Riverside
Riverside,
CA. 92521
Terry Boswell
Sociology
Emory University
Zapatista
banner in the Zocalo, Mexico City
To
be presented at a social movements
roundtable at the ASA meetings in Atlanta, 2003 draft (6987 words). An earlier
version is available at
http://www.irows.ucr.edu/papers/csa02/
Globalization backlash is promoting transnational social movements
that are seeking to reform and restructure both national societies and global
governance. Some of these movements are reactionary, while others are
progressive. We distinguish between:
·
antisystemic
movements that seek to
democratize global governance by means of globalization from below and
·
anti-globalization movements that
attack the powers that be in order to revitalize traditional non-democratic
civilizational values (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2002).
Ironically, the
anti-systemic movements are labeled "anti-globalization." As they constantly point out, this is a
misnomer. Their goal is to transform
globalization to make it more equal and more just. The real anti-globalization movements are not called by that
name. They are called terrorists.
The argument presented here is that the
progressive antisystemic movements will find their greatest support in the
semiperiphery. Democratic socialist parties and regimes that are coming to
power in the semiperipheral countries will be the forereachers that show how
the progressive transnational movements (feminism, environmentalism, labor,
indigenism) can work together to democratize global governance.
The
semiperipheral development idea is an important tool for understanding the real
possibilities for global social change because semiperipheral countries are the
weakest link in the global capitalist system – the zone where the most powerful
antisystemic movements have emerged in the past and where vital and
transformative developments are likely to occur in the future.
One
implication of the comparative world-systems perspective (Chase-Dunn and Hall
1997) is that all hierarchical and complex world-systems exhibit a “power
cycle” in which political/military power becomes more centralized followed by a
phase of decentralization. This is likely to be true of the future of the
world-system as well, though the form of the power cycle may change. Our species needs to invent political and
cultural institutions that allow adjustments in the global political and
economic structures to take place without resort to warfare. This is analogous to the problem of
succession within single states, and the solution is obvious – a global
government that represents the interests of the majority of the peoples of the
Earth and allows for political restructuring to occur by democratic processes.
Capitalist accumulation usually favors a
multicentric interstate system because this provides greater opportunities for
the maneuverability of capital than would exist in a world state. Big capitals
can play national states off against one another and can escape movements that
try to regulate investment or redistribute profits by abandoning the national
states in which such movements attain political power.
The modern world-system has experienced long waves
of economic and political integration over recent centuries. We use the term
“structural globalization” to denote intercontinental economic and political
integration. These waves of global integration are the contemporary incarnations
of the pulsations of widening and deepening of interaction networks that have
been important characteristics of all world-systems for millennia. But since
the nineteenth century these have occurred in a single global system. Figure 1
shows the waves of global trade integration in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000). The crucial comparison is
between the
late 19th century (1890-1914) and recent decades (1980- ). These are the periods when the cycle of
globalization makes a qualitative shift upwards. The shift is so steep that it changes the culture and people
become terribly aware of their global interdependence.
Figure 1:
International Trade relative to the Size of the Global Economy, 1830-1994 (from
Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000)
Capitalist Globalization
We
understand the historical development of the modern world-system in terms of
the evolution of institutions. These key institutions: commodity production,
technology and techniques of power, have been shaped by tremendous struggles.
These include conflict among contending powers and between the core and the
periphery over the past six centuries as Europe rose to hegemony and capitalist
globalization expanded in waves of commodification and integration.
The
story of how global orders have been restructured in order to facilitate
capitalist accumulation must be told in deep temporal perspective in order for
us to understand how the most recent wave of corporate globalization is similar
to, or different from, earlier waves of globalization. Of particular interest
here is the phenomenon of world revolutions and increasingly transnational
antisystemic movements. In order to comprehend the possibilities for the
emergence of global democracy we need to understand the history of popular
movements that have tried to democratize the world-system in the past.
The most
relevant for comprehending our own era is the story of the nineteenth century
and its tsunami (tidal wave)of capitalist globalization under the
auspices of British hegemony. Transnational antisystemic movements, especially
the trade union movement and the feminist movement, emerged to contend with
global capitalism. Workers and women consciously took the role of world
citizens, organizing international movements to contend with the increasingly
transnational organization of an emergent global capitalist class. Political and economic elites, especially
finance capitalists, had already been consciously operating on an
intercontinental scale for centuries, but the degree of international
integration of these elites reached a very high level in the late nineteenth
century.[1]
The British created the Concert
of Europe after defeating Napoleon. This was an alliance of conservative
dynasties and politicians who were dedicated to the prevention of any future
French revolutions. The British Royal Navy suppressed the slave trade and
encouraged decolonization of the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The English Anti-Corn
Law League’s advocacy of international free trade (carried abroad by
British diplomats and businessmen) was adopted by most European and American
states in the middle of the century.
The gold standard was an important support of a huge increase in international
trade and investment (Chase-Dunn, Kawano and Brewer 2000; O’Rourke and
Williamson 1999). The expanding
Atlantic economy, already firmly attached to the Indian Ocean, was accompanied
by an expanding Pacific economy as Japan and China were more completely and
directly brought into the trade and investment networks of Europe and North
America. American Ginseng was harvested in Pennsylvania as an important
commodity export that could be used in lieu of silver in the trade for Chinese
silk and “china.”
The nineteenth century wave of
capitalist globalization was massively contested in a great globalization
backlash. The decolonization of Latin America extended the formal aspects of
state sovereignty to a large chunk of the periphery. Slave revolts, abolitionism and the further incorporation of
Africa into the capitalist world-system eventually led to the abolition of
slavery almost everywhere. Within Europe socialist and democratic demands for
political and economic rights of the non-propertied classes strongly emerged in
the world revolution of 1848.
An
important aspect of our model of world-systems evolution is the idea of semiperipheral
development (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: Chapter 5). Institutional
development in premodern world-systems occurred because innovations and
implementations of new techniques and organizational forms have tended to occur
in societies that have semiperipheral positions within larger core/periphery
hierarchies. Semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms conquered adjacent core polities
to create larger paramount chiefdoms.
And semiperipheral marcher states conquered adjacent core states to
create larger and larger core-wide empires (e.g. Chin, Akkad, Assyrian,
Achaemenid Persians, Alexander, Rome, Abbasid Caliphate, etc.) And semiperipheral
capitalist city-states (Dilmun, Phoenician Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage; Venice,
Genoa, Malacca, etc.) expanded commercialized trade networks and encouraged
commodity production within and between the tributary empires and peripheral
regions, linking larger and larger regions together to eventually become the
single global economy of today.
The modern hegemons (the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth
century, the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and the
United States of America in the twentieth century) were all formerly
semiperipheral nation-states that rose to the position of hegemony by
transforming the institutional bases of economic and political/military power
in response to challenges from contenders for hegemony and challenges from
popular movements contesting the injustices of capitalism and modern colonial
imperialism. The modern world-system has experienced system-wide waves of
democracy rather than separate and disconnected sequences of democratization
within individual countries (Markoff 1996). These waves have tended to start in
semiperipheral countries and the institutional inventions that have diffused
from country to country have disproportionately been invented and implemented
in semiperipheral countries first (Markoff 1999). Both the Russian and Chinese
Communist challenges to capitalism emerged from the semiperiphery.
The
worker’s movement became increasingly organized on an international basis
during the nineteenth century. Mass
production made working conditions increasingly similar for industrial workers
around the world. Labor organizers were able to make good use of cheap and
rapid transportation as well as new modes of communication (the telegraph) in
order to link struggles in distant locations. And the huge migration of workers
from Europe to the New World spread the ideas and the strategies of the labor
movement. Socialists, anarchists and communists challenged the rule of capital
while they competed with each other for leadership of an increasingly global
antisystemic movement that sought to democratize the world-system.
The
decline of British hegemony, and the failure of efforts after World War I to
erect an effective structure of global governance, led to the collapse of
capitalist globalization during the depression of the 1930’s, culminating in
World War II. In our perspective capitalist globalization is a cycle as well as
a trend. The great wave of the nineteenth century was followed by a collapse in
the early twentieth century and then a reemergence in the period after World
War II. The global institutions of the post World War II order, now under the
sponsorship of the hegemonic United States, were intended to resolve the
problems that were perceived to have caused the military conflagrations and
economic disasters of the early twentieth century. The United Nations was a
stronger version of a global proto-state than the League of Nations had been,
though still a long way from the “monopoly of legitimate violence” that is the
effective center of a real state.
The Bretton Woods institutions
– the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund— were originally intended
to promote Keynesian national development rather than a globalized market of
investment flows. Free trade was encouraged, but important efforts were made to
track international investments and to encourage the efforts of national states
to use fiscal policy as a tool of national development. The architects of the Bretton Woods
institutions were chary (suspicious) about the effects of volatile waves of
international capital flows on economic development and political stability
because of what they perceived to have been the lessons of the 1920’s. The restarting of the world economy after
World War II under the aegis of the Bretton Woods institutions and U.S. support
for relatively autonomous capitalism in Europe and Japan succeeded
tremendously. But the growing power of unions within the core, and the
perceived constraints on U.S. fiscal and financial interests imposed by the
Bretton Woods currency regime, along with the oil crisis of the early 1970s,
led the U.S. to abandon Bretton Woods in favor of a free world market of
capital mobility. The “Washington Consensus” was basically
Reaganism-Thatcherism on a global scale – degregulation, privatization, and
reneging on the “social contract” with core labor unions and the welfare state.
The IMF was turned into a tool for imposing these policies on countries all
over the world.
This
U.S./British-led neo-liberal regime of global capitalism
(Reaganism-Thatcherism) was a reaction to the successes of the Third World and
the core labor movements, not in achieving true global democracy, but in
getting a somewhat larger share of the profits of global capitalism. The attack on the institutions of Keynesian
national development (labor unions and the welfare state), was also a delayed
response to the world revolution of 1968 in which students, women,
environmentalists, Third Worldists, indigenous peoples, democracy movements,
and radical parts of the labor movement had critiqued and resisted the
inadequacies of welfare capitalism and business unionism from the Left. The New Right appropriated some of the
ideology and many of the tactics of the 68ers, -- demonstrations, civil
disobedience, guerilla armies, drug financing, mobilization of subnations,
etc. These tactics have come back to
haunt the powers that be. In the recent wave of “blowback” organizations and
ideologies formerly supported by the U.S. CIA as instruments against the Soviet
Union (e.g. Al Qaeda) have turned against their former sponsors,
employing dirty tricks to besmirch symbols of global power and to murder
innocent bystanders in the heart of the core (Johnson 2000).
We
contend that the current historical moment is similar to the end of the
nineteenth century. Like British hegemony, U.S. hegemony is declining. Contenders for global economic power have
been emerging in German-led Europe and in Japan-led Asia. Popular movements and
institutions have been under attack, especially since the rise to ideological
hegemony of the neo-liberal “globalization project.” Anti-systemic movements are struggling to find new paths for
dealing with capitalist globalization. New communications technologies such as
the Internet provide possibilities for creating coordinated and integrated
movements in favor of global democracy. The liberating potential of decentered
and democratized communications is great. But cheap interactive and mass
communications also facilitate increasing differentiation and specialization of
political mobilization, which can undercut efforts to promote inter-movement
coordination. We hold that the Internet will be, on balance, a liberating
force, but the big gains in movement integration will probably come as a
response to the economic, political and ecological disasters that globalized
capitalism is likely to produce in the not too distant future (Chase-Dunn
2002b).
We
expect that the current resistance to global capitalism will, in large part,
take the form of local self-reliance, the revitalization of diverse cultural
forms and the rejection of the cultural and technological totems of corporate
capitalism. Thus the characterization of the recently emergent protest
movements (Seattle, Genoa, etc.) as “anti-globalization” movements is partially
correct, but it is misleading. Self-reliance may take forms that are
progressive or forms that promote divisions among the people based on
ethnicity, nation or race.
Self-reliance by itself is not an adequate strategy for transforming capitalism
into a more humane and sustainable social system. Rather the building of
self-reliant communities needs also to organize with a coordinated movement of
“globalization from below” that will seek to reform, or create de novo,
world institutions that will promote social justice and environmental
sustainability.
The
theorists who have delineated a recent stage of “global capitalism” contend
that the latest wave of integration has created a single integrated global
bourgeoisie that has overthrown the dynamics of the hegemonic sequence
(hegemonic rise and fall and interstate rivalry) (e.g. Sassen 1991, Robinson
1996, Robinson and Harris 2000). While most world-systems theorists hold that
the U.S. hegemony continues the decline that began in the 1970s, many other
observers interpret the demise of the Soviet Union and the relatively greater
U.S. economic growth in the 1990s as ushering in a renewal of U.S. hegemony.
While some interpret this U.S. upturn in the 1990s as the beginning of another
wave of U.S. “leadership” in the global economy based on comparative advantages
in information technology and biotechnology, Giovanni’s Arrighi sees the 1990s
as another wave of financialization comparable to the “belle epoque” or
“Edwardian Indian summer” that occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. Much of the economic expansion in the U.S. economy was due to huge
inflows of investment capital from Europe and East Asia during the 1990s. The
theorists of global capitalism contend that the U.S. state (and other core
states) are now instruments of the integrated global capitalist class rather
than of separate and competing groups of national capitalists.
We
agree with Walter Goldfrank (personal communication) that both models (global
capitalism and the hegemonic sequence) continue to operate simultaneously and
to interact with one another in complicated ways. Despite the rather high
degree of international integration among economic and political elites, there
is quite likely to be another round of rivalry among core states. Global elites
achieved a rather high degree of international integration during the late
nineteenth century wave of globalization, but this did not prevent the World
Wars of the twentieth century.
Admitting
to some aspects of the “global capitalism” thesis does not require buying the
whole cake. Some claim that information technology has changed everything and
that we have entered a new age of global history in which comparisons with what
happened before 1960 are completely inappropriate. The most important slice of
the cake is the part about global class formation, and this needs to be
analyzed for workers and farmers as well as for elites (Goldfrank 1977).
Research is currently under way to compare the nineteenth and twentieth century
global elites as to their degree of international integration, as well as
changes in the patterns of alliances and connections among the wealthiest and
most powerful people on Earth (Chase-Dunn and Reifer 2002).
The hegemonic sequence (the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers) is not usefully understood as a cycle that takes the same form each time around. Rather, as Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has so convincingly shown, each “systemic cycle of accumulation” involves a reorganization of the relationships among big capitals and states. And the evolutionary aspects of hegemony not only adapt to changes in scale, geography and technology, but they also must solve problems created by resistance from below (Arrighi and Silver 1999; Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). Workers and farmers in the world-system are not inert objects of exploitation and domination. Rather, they develop new organizational and institutional instruments of protection and resistance. So the interaction between the powerful and less powerful is a spiral of domination and resistance that is one of the most important driving forces of the developmental history of modern capitalism.
The
discourse produced by world-systems scholars about “the family of antisystemic
movements” has been an important contribution to our understanding of how
different social movements act vis a vis each other on the terrain of
the whole system (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989). It is unfortunate
that public discourse about globalization has characterized recent protest
movements in terms of
“antiglobalization.” This has occurred because, in the popular mind,
globalization has been associated primarily with what Phil McMichael (2000) has
termed the “globalization project” – the neoliberal policies of the “Washington
Consensus” and the hegemony of corporate capitalism. This is the political ideology of Reaganism-Thatcherism – market
magic, deregulation, privatization, and allegedly no alternative to submitting
to the “realities” of global capitalist competition.[2]
The terminology of “antiglobalization” is a disaster because it conflates two different meanings of “globalization” and it implies that the only sensible form of resistance to globalization involves the construction of local institutions to defend against the forces of global capitalism. Structural globalization means economic, political and cultural international and transnational integration. This should be analytically separated from the political ideology of the “globalization project” (Chase-Dunn 1999).
The “neoliberal globalization project” is what the
demonstrators are protesting, but the term “anti-globalization” also implies
that they are against international integration and global institutions. Our
usage of the term “antisystemic movements” needs to be carefully clarified so
that it does not contribute to this confusion.
Local protectionism will undoubtedly be an important
component of the emerging resistance to corporate globalization and neo-liberal
policies. But one lesson we can derive from earlier efforts to confront and
transform capitalism is that local resistance cannot, by itself, overcome the
strong forces of modern capitalism. What is needed is globalization from below.
Global politics has mainly been the politics of the powerful because they have
had the resources to establish long-distance connections and to structure
global institutions. But waves of elite transnational integration have been
accompanied by upsurges of transnational linkages, strategies and institutions
formed by workers, farmers and popular challenges to the logic of capitalist
accumulation. Globalization from below means the transnationalization of
antisystemic movements and the active participation of popular movements in
global politics and global citizenship.
An analysis of earlier waves of the spiral of domination
and resistance demonstrates that “socialism in one country” and other
strategies of local protection have not been capable of overcoming the negative
aspects of capitalist development in the past, and they are even less likely to
succeed in the more densely integrated global system of the future. Strategies
that mobilize people to organize themselves locally must be complimented and
coordinated with transnational strategies to democratize or replace existing global
institutions and to create new organizational structures that facilitate
collective rationality for all the peoples of the world.
The major transnational antisystemic movements are the
labor movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and the
indigenous movement. Of these, the environmental movement and the women’s
movement have had the most recent successes in forming transnational linkages
and confronting the difficult issues posed by regional, national and
core/periphery differences. But the labor and indigenous movements have made
important efforts to catch up. Cross-border organizing efforts and support for
demonstrations against corporate globalization show that the AFL-CIO is
interested in new directions. One important task for world-systems scholars is
to study these movements and to help devise initiatives that can produce
tactical and strategic transnational alliances.
Bruce Podobnik’s (2002) careful and systematic study of
globalization protests shows how these have emerged over the last decade in the
core and the non-core countries. There was an important wave of anti-IMF
struggles in the 1980s researched by John Walton and David Seddon (1994). Podobnik’s research shows that about between
1900 and June 2002 44% of the globalization protests occurred in core
(developed) countries and 56% occurred in non-core (less developed)
countries. The percentage of protestors
injured, arrested and killed was far higher in the non-core than in the core
countries. Podobnik also shows that these protests were temporarily dampened by
the events of September 11, 2001 but that they rebounded to in the months
following. Contrary to popular opinion, the globalization protests were not
stopped by the events of September 11.
Growing
Inequalities
Growing
inequalities (both within and among countries) were an important source of
globalization backlash in the late nineteenth century (O’Rourke and Williamson
1999) and are already shaping up to be an important driving force in the coming
world revolution. Mike Davis’s (2001)
analysis of late Victorian drought-famine disasters in Brazil, India and China
shows how these were partly caused by newly expanded market forces impinging
upon regions that were subject to international political/military coercion. He
also documents how starving peasants created millenarian movements that
promised to end the domination of the foreign devils or restore the rule of the
good king. Islamic fundamentalism is a
contemporary functional equivalent.
Huge and visible injustices provoke people to
resist, and in the absence of true histories and theories, they utilize
whatever ideological apparatus is at hand.
The world-systems perspective offers a useful systematic understanding of
history that cannot be found elsewhere.
The
phenomenon of semiperipheral develop suggests that social organizational
innovations that can transform the predominant logic of accumulation will
continue to emerge from the semiperiphery.
The Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century were
efforts to restructure capitalist institutions and developmental logic that
succeeded mainly in spurring the U.S. hegemony and the post World War II
expansion of capitalism. The Soviet and Chinese efforts were compromised from
the start by their inability to rely on participatory democracy. In order to
survive in a world still strongly dominated by capitalist states they were
forced to construct authoritarian socialism, a contradiction in terms.
We
can expect that democratic socialist regimes will come to state power in the
semiperiphery by electoral means, as already happened in Allende’s Chile. Brazil, Mexico, and Korea are strong
candidates, and India, Argentina, Indonesia and China are possibilities. Democratic socialism in the semiperiphery is
a good strategy for fending off many of the worst aspects of corporate
globalization. The transnational
antisystemic movements will want to support and be supported by these new
socialist democracies.
This has already begun to happen in Brazil, where the new labor party (PT) government supports the global social justice movement. President Lula’s current support for fiscal austerity in order to woo global finance capital is likely to fade once it becomes clear that not enough finance capital will flow in to make much difference. If Lula is not willing to confront global capital some other leader from his party or from a new party is likely to do it. The Brazilian working class does not need foreign capital to construct a national economy that can provide a good living for all Brazilians. And a Brazilian democratic socialism will support and be supported by friendly regimes in other Latin American countries. Friends of socialism in the United States may need to prevent the bond traders from mobilizing an intervention.
The
ability of capitalist core states to destabilize democratic socialist regimes
in the semiperiphery is great, and this is why support movements within the
core are so important. Information
technology can certainly be a great aid to transborder organizing. Issues such as sweatshop exploitation can
help to make students aware of core/periphery inequalities and to link them
with activists far away. The emergence
of democratically elected challengers to global corporate capitalism will strain
the ideologues of “polyarchy” and facilitate the contestation of narrow
definitions of democracy. The emergence
of a World Party to educate activists about the world historical dimensions of
capitalism and the lessons of earlier world revolutions will add the leaven
that may move the coming backlash against corporate globalization in a
progressive direction. A world
historical perspective will help political campaigns and organizing efforts
make tactical and strategic decisions and will provide a structurally informed
basis for the building of a democratic and collectively rational global
commonwealth. [3]
U.S. unilateralism and especially the use of
“pre-emptive” military force by the hawks of the George W. Bush presidency have
caused critical analysts to theorize anew about empire and a “new
imperialism.” The theorists of a global
stage of capitalism organized by an integrated global capitalist class have
elaborated their distinction between national and international capital in order
to deal with what seems to be a renewed round of inter-imperial rivalry among
the core states. Those who have been saying all along that neo-liberalism is
mainly an Anglo-American thing rather than the permanent emergence of a global
“new economy” based on finance capital seem to be vindicated. And the
assumption that military power has been permanently transcended by economic
power is also now debated.
Giovanni Arrighi (2003) contends that the U.S. superpower
is trying to morph its hegemony into a world state in which the U.S. balance of
payments surplus becomes tribute paid by foreigners in exchange for the
provision of global security. A version of this hypothesis was discussed after
the first Gulf War, ironically in terms of the U.S. serving the function of
Global 911 (an emergency phone number in the United States).
Critics of the world-systems perspective as well as
apologists for global capitalism have long downplayed the importance of the
core/periphery hierarchy. Some claimed that core/periphery inequality ended
with decolonization. Dependency theory was declared a dead letter by
“post-structuralists” just at the time that many Third World countries were
being subjected to the structural adjustment programs of the International
Monetary Fund. Others claimed that the categories of core and periphery, or
First World and Third World were no longer valid because countries in Africa,
Asia and Latin America have different histories. But no one ever claimed that
all peripheral countries were the same. Core and periphery are relational
concepts and the nature of the power-dependence relations changes over time,
but the core/periphery hierarchy has not evaporated. The industrialization of
some non-core countries and the nearly complete marginalization of many other
countries (in what some have called the Fourth World) did not eliminate the
core/periphery hierarchy. Neither did the formal decolonization of the Third
World eliminate neo-colonial forms of domination by which core countries and
international financial institutions came to exercise power over Third World
countries. Imperialism in the sense of
unequal power among countries has not been eliminated by the organizational
changes in the world division of labor that have taken place since World War II.
So the discovery of a “new imperialism” needs to be clear as to how what is
allegedly new differs from what went before.
David Harvey (2003) contends that U.S. unilateralism
constitutes a renewal of capitalist primitive accumulation based on military geopolitical
power. The world-systems perspective on
capitalism (Chase-Dunn 1998) has long argued that primitive accumulation was
not a stage in the creation of capitalist world economy, but has rather been a
constant and necessary feature of capitalism all along. Peripheral capitalism
has used political coercion in mobilizing labor since the expansion of slavery
in the New World and the development of “capitalist serfdom” in the
peripheralized economies of Eastern Europe. After the abolition of capitalist
slavery and serfdom Third World working conditions have continued to be
conditioned by political coercion in the form of state-organized and
core-supported suppression of labor unions and peasant movements. So primitive
accumulation has been an important component of the capitalist world economy
all along. The ideology of democracy and free markets was used as a smoke
screen to cover the political coercion of labor and subjection of the periphery
to politically organized domination. The fact that the IMF imposed structural
adjustment on Third World countries while ignoring the massive fiscal deficits
and balance of trade deficits of the United States is only one of the most
flagrant instances of core/periphery domination in recent decades.
The rediscovery of the importance of military power in
the structuring of the capitalist world economy is another instance in which
even the critics of global capitalism have been bamboozled by the rhetoric of
the free market. Military Keynesianism in which the U.S. federal government has
spent over half of its total discretionary budget on “defense” began in earnest
during the Korean War, and these huge expenditures have continued despite the
demise of the “Soviet threat” that was the main justification for this massive
use of public monies to pump up the U.S. economy. Where is the “lean state” that is the ideological darling of the
neo-conservatives? The U.S. has been a welfare state for the military-corporate
complex since the early 1950s.
But is there not something new in the willingness of the
Bush administration to ignore the will of French, German and Russian allies in
the conquest of Iraq? What is new and frightening is what appears to be the
beginning of a breach in the core-wide multilateral foreign policies of the
post-World War II period. Certainly the Bush administration has pursued a more open and pronounced unilateralism and disdain for multilateral
solutions than previous U.S. administrations. But why has the Bush regime doen this? We contend that this is similar in many
respects to the British use of its comparative advantage in military power
during its decline of economic comparative advantage. The U.S. has a massive advantage in military technology because
of the huge investments that military Keynesianism have provided. The development and production of military
technology is not an ideal industry from the point of view of profit-making in
the world market, because selling the technologies puts destructive weaponry in
the hands of potential future rivals and may fuel regional conflicts. But
direct conquest can provide important geopolitical returns, especially where
the control of significant scarce raw materials (oil) is concerned. So the declining hegemon plays one of the
only cards it has left – the military card. Dick Cheney says, “give war a
chance.”
The problem with this strategy is that it is likely to be
counter-productive, especially if it is over-used. Unilateral conquest provokes
opposition and resistance. It does little to overcome the more basic problems
of the loss of comparative advantage in new lead industries that can produce
significant profits by selling products to buyers abroad (or at home).
The
other U.S. advantage has been its centrality in global financial transactions
and the importance of the U.S. dollar in international financial and trade
transactions. The world market for oil is denominated in U.S. dollars. And the
U.S. trade imbalance has been counteracted by a huge inflow of foreign lending
for the last decade. Moneys from Europe and East Asia has flown into U.S. stock
and bond markets, making the United States extremely dependent on these inflows
of foreign moneys to finance its growing trade imbalance.
The
recent decline of the U.S. dollar relative to the Euro could foreshadow a new
kind of structural adjustment. Foreign investors believed in U.S. superiority
in information technology and biotechnology, but the dot.com collapse and the
Enron scandal have shaken the confidence of these foreign investors to some
extent. The very size of the U.S. market and its ability to generate prodigious
new forms of financial “security” (e.g. derivatives) mean that the alternatives
for receiving some return on the huge amounts of “fictitious capital” that are
now flowing in the world financial markets are few. At the new exchange rate the GDP of the European Union is now
larger than the U.S. GDP. But the E.U. does not have the capacity to absorb the
vast financial capital that is now invested in the U.S. What this means is that there will probably
not be a rapid exodus of finance capital from the U.S. unless the whole system
collapses. If crisis management continues to work for a few more years the air
will go out of the U.S. balloon slowly.
Imagining Global Democracy
What
might global democracy look like? And how could we get from here to there? A consideration of global democracy must
confront two main issues: huge and growing inequalities within and between
countries; and the grave problems of environmental sustainability that capitalist (and Communist) industrialization has
produced.
Rather
than drawing the blueprint of a global utopia and then arguing the fine points
it makes more sense to learn from the heritages of earlier efforts. Utopias may be useful for those who are unable
to imagine any possible improvement over existing institutions. But they also
function to delegitimize efforts to make social change because they often
appear to be unattainable. A more useful approach is to imagine an historically
apt next step, one that the relevant constituencies can agree is a significant
improvement and that is plausibly attainable.
Global
democracy means real economic, political and cultural rights and influence for
the majority of the world’s people over the local and global institutions that
affect their lives. Local and national
democracy is part of the problem, but not the whole problem. Global democracy
requires that local institutions and national states be democratic and
the building of democratic institutions of global governance.
We
support the proposals for radically reforming the United Nations and for
establishing an institutional framework for global finance proposed by
Camilleri, Malhotra and Tehranian (2000).[4]
Their principles and thoughtful step-by-step proposals for democratizing global
governance address most of the issues quite well. The principle of
subsidiarity, proposes the decentralization of control over all issues that
can be effectively resolved at that level (2000: 46). This principle is
similarly applied to the national and international regional levels, so that
global-level institutions deal with problems that can only find effective
solutions at the global level. We agree with this important principle.
Camilleri, Malhotra and
Tehranian (2000: 25) abjure the term “global government” and prefer terms such
as “interlocking institutions” and “international regimes” for describing
global governance. Albert Martinelli’s (2002) insightful discussion of
democratizing global governance also categorically rejects the notion of global
government. We understand the political sensitivities involved in this choice
of terms, and we agree that it is important to use language wisely. There is a
lot of resistance to the idea of an emerging world state because people understandably
fear that such an institution might become an instrument of repression or
exploitation. But we are concerned that careful rhetoric might obscure or paper
over issues that need to be confronted explicitly. The main reason that the
United Nations has been largely ineffective at stopping interstate warfare is
that it is not a state in the Weberian sense – a monopoly of legitimate
violence. International law is not truly law according to Weber because it
is not backed up by institutionalized sanctions.
Our position is that the human
species needs to establish a real global government that is legitimate,
effective and democratic. This does not require the centralization of
everything. As stated above, we agree with the principle of subsidiarity in which
everything that can effectively be left to local, national, and regional bodies
should be. But inequality, environmental problems, population pressure and
peace are all global problems that can only be effectively solved by a
democratic global government with the power to enforce the law.
Thus, reforming the United Nations must move in the
direction of the establishment of a democratic global government. This is in
the interest of all the people of the Earth, but especially the dispossessed.
The Westphalian interstate system has allowed powerful capitalists to
repeatedly escape the institutional controls that have emerged from
antisystemic movements that have sought to protect workers and communities from
exploitation. Only a democratic world state can produce institutions that can
guarantee social justice.
We also
support the establishment of new institutions to provide a framework for global
financial relations that can support local and national development, and
increased oversight of these by the United Nations (Patomaki, Teivainen and
Ronkko 2002). And we see a need to go beyond polyarchy at both the national and
the global levels.
Bill Robinson (1996) examines the struggle over
the concept of democracy. He redefines the meaning of the term “polyarchy”
which was coined by Robert Dahl to signify pluralism. In Robinson’s usage
polyarchy means a system in which a small
group actually rules and mass participation in decision-making is confined to
leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing elites. Institionalized polyarchy prevents the
emergence of more egalitarian popular democracy
that would threaten the rule of those
who hold power and property. The notion
of popular democracy stresses human equality, participatory forms of decision-making,
and a holistic integration of political, social and economic realms that are
artificially kept separate in the polyarchic definition of democracy.
We are
not satisfied with polyarchy (parliamentary democracy) at the national level.
We contend that real democracy must address the issue of wealth and property,
rather than defining these as beyond the bounds of political discourse. This
said, we can also learn much from those failed experiments with collective
property that were carried out in the socialist and Communist states in the
twentieth century. State ownership
works well for major infrastructure, such as utilities, health and education.
But for the production of most goods and services, even when the state is
itself truly democratic, state ownership creates grave economic problems
because of the problem of “soft budget constraints.” This is because
state-owned firms are usually bailed out by the state for their economic
mistakes, and they mainly respond to political exigencies rather than to
consumer demand. In order to achieve a
reasonable level of efficiency large firms need to compete with one another in
markets, and they should also compete for financing by showing that they can
make a profit.
We support John Roemer’s (1994)
advocacy of a kind of market socialism in which ownership shares of large firms
are distributed to all adult citizens, who then invest their shares in a stock
market that is the main source of capital for large firms. All citizens receive
a set number shares at the age of majority and when they die their shares
revert to the public weal. So there is no inheritance of corporate property,
though personal property can be inherited. Firms, large and small, produce for
markets and labor is rewarded in competitive labor markets. Small firms can be
privately owned. This kind of market
socialism equalizes income, though some inequalities due to skill differences
will still exist. The economy will still be a market economy, but the democratic
state will provide security, due process, and oversee the redistribution of
corporate shares across generations.
This
model of public market socialism incentivizes technological change and
efficiency without producing increasing inequalities. It will probably work
well, especially in the core countries for which Roemer has intended it. But
when we think about the global economy there are certain problems that are not
addressed in Roemer’s model. One of the
main problems in the global economy is the huge difference in productivity
between core and peripheral labor. This
is why labor standards in international economic agreements are anathema to
workers and unions in peripheral countries. A single worldwide minumum wage
standard sounds good, but it would tend to function as a protectionist
agreement for core workers, and undercut the ability of peripheral firms and
workers to sell their products in core markets. Wage and other standards have
to take into account local conditions, but their enforcement is the key to
preventing the race to the bottom pursued by many transnational corporations.
The real solution to this is to raise the level of productivity of peripheral
labor. So global democracy needs to create institutions that can do this.
Banning child labor worldwide while supporting the children’s families to speed
the demographic transition would be a giant first step in this direction.
This is
why we need effective institutions of global governance. Antisystemic movements
cannot simply dismantle such institutions as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. These must either be reformed (democratized and
empowered) or they must be replaced. Market socialism in the core will not be
enough. A movement for economic democracy in the core needs also to mobilize
for economic democracy at the global level.
Support
for both more democratic national regimes and global socialist institutions is
likely to come from the semiperiphery.
We expect that some of the most potent efforts to democratize global
capitalism will come out of movements and democratic socialist regimes that
emerge in semiperipheral countries. As in earlier epochs, semiperipheral
countries have the “advantages of backwardness” – they are not already heavily
invested in the existing organizational and political institutions and
technologies – and so they have both the maneuverability and the resources to
invest in new institutions.
Peripheral countries could also
do this, but they are more completely dependent on the core and they are not
able to mobilize sufficient resources to overcome this dependency. The large
semiperipheral countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, India, Indonesia
and China, have opportunities that neither core nor peripheral countries have.
If a democratic socialist regime is able to come to state power by legal means,
and if this regime has the political will to mobilize the popular sectors in
favor of democratic socialism, an experiment in Roemerian market socialism
could be carried out. We expect that regimes of this type will in fact emerge in
the near future as the options of kowtowing to the megacorps or demagoging the
popular sectors (Chavez in Venezuela) become more obviously bankrupt.
The smaller semiperipheral
countries (South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa, Israel) may also opt for democratic
socialism, but we expect that these will only be able to do so after earlier
efforts have been made in the large semiperipheral countries. Much also depends
on what happens in the contest for hegemony. Continued U.S. primacy will likely
strengthen the resistance to democratizing global governance, while the rise of
the European Union, which has stronger social democratic traditions, will
likely provide greater core support for democratizing global institutions and
for emerging democratic socialist movements in the semiperiphery.
The
semiperipheral democratic socialist regimes will be the strongest
organizational entities that can forge the links among the global antisystemic
movements and produce a network for bringing forth the institutions of global socialism.
Globalization from below and the formation of global socialist institutions
will need to be facilitated by an organized network of world citizens.
Stephen Gill (2000, 2002) has had the courage to
formulate the idea of a world party, a peoples’ international, which could help
to coordinate the several anti-systemic movements emerging in resistance to
global corporate capitalist and neo-liberal policies.
Gill invokes Gramci’s characterization of the Italian Communist Party
as the “modern prince,” a network of organic intellectuals and workers who
would challenge the hegemony of capital. Gill is careful to distance his idea
from the putative errors of the Left parties of old – hierarchy, dogmatism, etc.
He says, “…the multiple and diverse
political forces that form the postmodern Prince combine both defensive and
forward-looking strategies.” This is an
appropriate stance, especially in light of what happened to the New Left in the
1970s. A period of broad encompassing social movement activism morphed into a
bevy of small sectarian parties yelling slogans at potential organizees and at
each other. The sectarian model is
obviously not one to emulate and Gill is careful in this regard.
Warren Wagar (1996)
has also had the temerity to suggest that an organized group of political
actors making use of and further developing the world-systems perspective might
come together in what he calls the World Party (1999). The angle here would be
the use of a world historical and comparative perspective on the development of
capitalism to help the family of anti-systemic movements see the big picture
and to cooperate with one another on feasible projects. The risks of Napoleonic
hubris and accusations of Stalinism are probably worth taking because of the
strategic and tactical importance of theoretical perspective for constructing a
democratic and collectively ration global commonwealth.
We have
adopted the name given to such a confederation by Warren Wagar (1996) – the
World Party. But this is not a party in the old sense of the Third
International – a vanguard party of the world proletariat. Rather the World
Party we propose would be a network of individuals and representatives of
popular organizations from all over the world who agree to help create a
democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth. The World Party[5]
will actively recruit people of all nations and religions and will seek to
create the institutional bases for a culturally pluralistic, socially just and
ecologically sustainable world society.
This is what we mean by global democracy.
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