Five Linked Crises in the
Contemporary World-System
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside
v. 8-22-13 2417 words of text
IROWS Working Paper #83 https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows83/irows83.htm
To appear in the Journal of World-Systems Research Symposium on “Crisis of What?”
This essay uses
the evolutionary world-systems perspective to address questions about the current
crises in the world-system. This
approach analyzes the structure and changing institutional nature of the whole
world-system over the past 500 years, with attention to comparisons with
earlier regional world-systems (Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2013). The main idea is that the waves of global integration have been driven
by system-wide class and national struggles in which the elites of core states
contend with one another and the most successful are those that can effectively
deal with the resistance from below. This has produced a spiral of capitalism
and socialism that has been connected with the rise and fall of hegemons
(Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). The sequence of hegemonies (the Dutch in the 17th
century, the British in the 19th century, and the U.S. in the 20th
century) constitutes the most important structural feature of the evolution of
global governance and political globalization. This is most obviously seen in
the increasing sizes of each of the hegemons relative to the size of the system
as a whole. This rise and fall and cyclical upward sequence occurred in the
context of successive world revolutions (the Protestant Reformation, 1789,
1848, 1917, 1968, 1989, 2011) in which local rebellions have increasingly
clustered in time and become more and more linked with one another. Wallerstein’s (2004) discussion of world revolutions notes that
the demands put forth in a world revolution do not usually become
institutionalized until a consolidating revolt has occurred, or until the next
world revolution. So the revolutionaries appear to have lost in the failure of
their most radical demands, but enlightened conservatives who are trying to
manage hegemony end up incorporating the reforms that were earlier radical
demands into the current world order in order to cool out resistance from
below.
So this theoretical perspective
presumes that an important part of the current crisis is a crisis of U.S.
hegemony. The U.S. is a declining
hegemonic core power. Its economic hegemony
has been declining in stair-steps since the height of its global power in 1945
(Chase-Dunn, Kwon, Lawrence and Inoue 2011).
Most observers now admit that the U.S. hegemony is in decline. Now the
questions are about the rate of decline, and what kind of international system
will replace American hegemony. It also assumes the importance of successive
world revolutions for as a driving force of the evolution of the world-system.
The world revolution of 2011 is
proceeding apace. It is a messy affair, as all earlier world revolutions have
been. It began in 1994 with the Zapatista revolt, warmed up with the global
justice movement and the anti-war movement, and got really rolling with the
Arab Spring and the anti-austerity movements. It is both similar to and
different from earlier world revolutions.
And the constellation of social movements that constitute the New Global
Left need to be compared with earlier incarnations of the Global Left.
So there are five linked crises
occurring simultaneously in the contemporary world-system:
1. A crisis of
hegemony and global governance;
2. A crisis of
inequality and democracy;
3. A crisis in
the relationship between humans and the natural environment;
4. A crisis in
the global capitalist system; and
5. A crisis in
the New Global Left.
Global
Governance
I have already mentioned the decline
of U.S. hegemony. Hegemonic declines of the past have been followed by periods
of rivalry and world war amongst contenders for regional and global power. But
the U.S. economic size is so great, and its military power is so preponderant,
that a pre-World War I situation of contending militarized challengers is not
going to emerge very soon. This is a good thing. The long-term trend toward large-scale
political integration and centralization will eventually result in the
emergence of a world state, but this is an unlikely development for the next
few decades. More likely is a multipolar interstate system in which the U.S.
must share power with the existing core states and emerging powers from the semiperiphery (China, India, Brazil and Russia). This
geopolitical structure will also involve multiple and overlapping sovereignties
that include the United Nations, the International Financial Institutions (the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization) as
well as regional interstate entities and international NGOs. It is not clear
how well such a complicated world polity will be able resolve conflicts within
and between national societies peacefully, or to deal with global ecological
and economic challenges. This is why I speak of a crisis of global governance.
Inequality
and Democracy
Huge inequalities
between the Global North and the Global South emerged in the 19th
century and have not increased or been reduced much since then (Bornschier 2010). Some national societies have experienced
big increases in within-country inequality since the 1970s, including the U.S. As
the world is increasingly integrated by communications technology people in the
Global South have become aware of (and desirous of) the level of living
attained by people in the Global North. Also the contested idea of democracy
has spread to nearly all the peoples of the Earth. The result is a crisis of
development in a context in which the biosphere is already heavily depleted by
the huge consumption and pollution by the Global North. Peter Taylor (1996)
called this “Global Impasse.” If the
people of the Global South eat as many eggs and drive as many cars as the
people of the Global North the biosphere will fry. This is a problem.
Democracy is also a problem at
several levels. There is little democracy at the global level. The
commander-in-chief of the global military empire (782 U.S. military bases all
over the world) is elected by the voters of the United States. At the U.N. the
important decisions are made by the powers that won World War II (the Security
Council). The Director of the World Bank is always from the United States. The
Director of the International Monetary Fund is always from Europe. At the
national level the Global South has seen a wave of regimes that have been
elected by majorities of citizens. In some of these, especially in Latin
America, reformist and even anti-systemic leaders have managed to occupy the
national leadership. But in many of the countries of the Global South democracy
is just polyarchy in which elites manipulate
elections in order to maintain their class power (Robinson 1996). The same may be said of many democracies in
the core. The growing rule of money in politics in the U.S. has increasingly
made the electoral process a direct extension of the power of the rich. Low
quality democracy has provoked movements for direct democracy in which the
voices of average citizens can be heard (Graeber 2013).
The
Biosphere
Anthropogenic
global warming and pollution are obvious looming crises that are exacerbated by
the unwillingness of the powers that be make serious efforts at solutions.
Indiscriminant fracking in order to make money on
rising energy prices is making matters much worse. Nuclear power accidents have
led to a German declaration of a nuclear-free future, but in Japan the
political will behind this idea has declined. Green technology and clean energy
are emerging, but consumption remains very high and the human population is
still increasing. The historically high consumption, energy use, and pollution
by the Global North is an obstacle to reform in the Global South, especially
China and India where prodigious levels of greenhouse gas emissions have been
reached. This has produced a huge collective action problem with regard to
global environmental policies (Roberts and Parks 2007).
The
Global Capitalist System
In comparison with the earlier modes
of accumulation, capitalism is yet young. It has been around since the Bronze
Age in the form of semiperipheral capitalist
city-states that specialize in trade, but it has been predominate in a
world-system only since the rise of Europe in the 16th century CE. The
rise of tribute-taking based on institutionalized coercion occurred in the
Early Bronze Age about 5000 years ago. The
tributary mode of accumulation was the predominant mode until the rise of
capitalism in Europe. Thus capitalism as a fully-developed and predominant
logic of development has not been around very long. But the rate of social
change has speeded up. Capitalism itself speeds up social change because it provides
stronger incentives to revolutionizing technology. Rapid technological change
speeds up change in all institutions and in culture, and people become adjusted
to more rapid reconfigurations of culture and institutions. So it is plausible
that, even though capitalism is young, its contradictions could lead it to
reach its limits much faster than the kin-based and tributary modes did.
But
is it capitalism (a logic of social reproduction based on profit-making) that
is currently in crisis? Or is it the current developmental ideology that became
predominant in the 1970s – neoliberalism? Or is it the systemic cycle of
capitalist accumulation that was associated with the U.S. hegemony? Or is it
finance capitalism, which rose to predominance in the core along with
neoliberalism? Or is it all of the above?
Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) contends that capitalism itself is in crisis because it is reaching certain limits caused by its basic contradictions. The three long-term upward trends (which he calls asymptotes) that capitalism cannot manage are:
1. the long-term rise of real wages;
2. the long-term costs of material inputs; and
3. rising taxes.
All
three upward trends cause the average rate of profit to fall. Capitalists
devise strategies for combating these trends (automation, capital flight, job
blackmail, attacks on the welfare state and unions, financialization),
but they cannot really stop them in the long run. Deindustrialization in one
place leads to industrialization and the emergence of labor movements somewhere
else (Silver, 2003). The falling rate of profit means that capitalism as a
logic of accumulation will face an irreconcilable structural crisis during the
next 50 years, and some other system will emerge. Wallerstein calls the next five decades “The Age of
Transition.”
Giovanni Arrighi’s (1994, 2006) evolutionary account of “systemic cycles of accumulation” is explicitly evolutionary, but rather than positing “stages of capitalism” and looking for each country to go through them (as most of the older Marxists did), he posits somewhat overlapping global cycles of accumulation in which the logic of capitalism widens and deepens and finance capital and state power controlled by capital take on new forms and increasingly penetrate the whole system.
Arrighi (2006) analyzes both the similarities and
the differences between the current period of U.S. hegemonic decline and the
decades at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century
when British hegemony was declining. Taking a cue from Andre Gunder Frank (1998), Arrighi saw the rise of China as portending a new systemic
cycle of accumulation in which “market society” will eventually come to replace
rapacious finance capital as the leading institutional form in the next phase
of world history. Arrighi did
not discuss the end of capitalism and the emergence of another basic logic of
social reproduction and accumulation.
As Arrighi
has pointed out, the ascendance of finance capital is driven by the decline of
the profit rate in trade and production as those with centrality in the world
economy try to devise new ways to squeeze profit out of the system. The
financial crisis of 2008 was not really a total collapse, and the balloon of
financial “securities” has been reflated. Also the global capitalist class has
resisted calls for a green global new deal to save capitalism, and has
“doubled-down” on austerity, thereby increasing the pressures that lead to
rebellion. Neoliberalism may be in crisis but it proponents, and its
militarized version, neoconservatism, are still
kicking. The banks are trying to take over education in the North and the South
in order to expand profit-making opportunities in privatized schools and
student loans. At the global level Dick Cheney is still ascendant, and George
Soros and the green new deal are still in the wings.
Crisis
of the New Global Left
The
New Global Left is still in formation despite the intensification of the World
Revolution of 2011. Big divides remain between the old and new social movements
over goals, strategy and tactics. The horizontalists
are still in the ascendance, and normal electoral politics and taking state
power are proscribed by a broad majority of the underemployed educated
activists. A global united front that combines labor with horizontalists
is possible, but may not happen until global Robocop and 21st
century fascism get stronger (Mason 2013; Robinson 2013). These five crises are obviously linked to
one another as both causes and effects, and so those who see them as a single
inter-related bundle are not wrong.
Both a new stage of capitalism and a
qualitative systemic transformation are possible within the next three decades,
but a new stage of capitalism is more likely. This could take the form of “market
society,” as implied by Arrighi – a kinder, gentler
form of capitalism in which the rule of finance capital and the military
industrial complex are countered by technocrats and civil society, or a related
green global Keynesianism that takes responsibility for employing workers who
then have the means to purchase the commodities that capital produces. These
kindler gentler forms of capitalism are not rocket science, though they would
need to be scaled up to work at the global level. Symbolically this would be a
shift from Dick Cheney to George Soros, the enlightened conservative.
If U.S. hegemonic decline is slow, as it has been up to the present, and if financial and ecological crises are spread out in time and conflicts among ethnic groups and nations are also spread out in time and space, then the enlightened conservatives will have their chance to build a new world order that is still capitalist but meets the current challenges at least partially. Making this happen would still require a revolutionary shove from a united front of antisystemic movements and the progressive regimes of the Global South. But if the perfect storm of calamities should all come together in the same period the transnational social movements and progressive national regimes in the Global South may have the chance to radically change the mode of accumulation to a form of global socialism.
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