The Piketty Challenge:
Global Inequality and World Revolutions*
Pachamama
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research
on World-Systems
University of
California, Riverside, Riverside, CA. 92521
www.irows.ucr.edu
10413 words, v. 1-21-16
Forthcoming in Lauren Langman and David A. Smith (eds.) Twenty-first Century Inequality: Marx, Piketty and Beyond., Brill
This is IROWS Working Paper #101 at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows101/irows101.htm
*
Thanks to Evan Heimlich and Hiroko Inoue for helpful comments on an earlier
draft.
Abstract: This chapter discusses
the inequality trends revealed by Thomas Piketty’s research as context for a
consideration of transnational social movements of the past and in the current
era. Social movements and world revolutions have restructured global governance
institutions over the past several centuries. The rebellions, protests and
counter-hegemonic regimes that have emerged since the 1990s need to be compared
with earlier world revolutions in order to assess the prospects for the future
emergence of a more coherent effort to transform the capitalist world-economy
into a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth.
Thomas Piketty’s (2014) research on
changes in the magnitude of wealth and income inequalities within several core
countries over the past 200 years is a major contribution to the study of
economic inequalities because he uses data from tax returns that are more
reliable than the usual household surveys on income and that allow the close
study of the wealth and incomes of the very rich. His results show a long-term
trend toward lesser and then greater inequality within core countries (the so-called
“great u-turn”) as well as important similarities and differences between them.
He shows that the returns to wealth and labor have changed greatly as a result
of the rise, and partial demise, of the welfare state. He also discusses the
issue of distributive justice within national societies, and he argues in favor of a global
progressive tax on wealth that would help redistribute income.
The
main lacuna in Piketty’s work that I will address in this chapter is the lack
of attention to the role that social movements played in the causation of the
inequality trends that he finds and the possibilities for social movements to
once again challenge the growing inequality trends of the past several decades.
Piketty’s analysis does not get at the
roots of the problems of global capitalism. The important political and
analytical task is to distinguish between those institutional and structural
aspects of the contemporary world-system that are congruent with a more
egalitarian and sustainable future global society and those that are not.
The
world-systems perspective
The world-systems perspective presents a
structural interpretation of the cycles and trends that have constituted the
expansion and evolution of global capitalism (Wallerstein 2011; Arrighi 1994; Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2014). This holistic structural approach allows us to see both the similarities
and the important differences between the current world historical period and
earlier periods that were similar in some ways but different in others. The
expansion and deepening of capitalism has occurred in the context of the rise
and fall of hegemonic core powers, waves of colonization in which European
powers subjugated and exploited most of Asia, the Americas and Africa, and the
waves of decolonization that extended the European system of formally sovereign
states to the non-core. The expansion and deepening of capitalist production
and the increasing size of the nation-states that played the role of hegemons
were driven and made possible by movements of resistance that were located both
within core polities and, importantly, in the non-core. Each of the hegemons
(the Dutch in the l7th century, the British in the 19th century and
the United States in the 20th century) were formerly semiperipheral states that rose to core status in struggles
with contending great powers. Their successes were partly based on their
abilities to deal with resistance from below more effectively than their
competitors (Wallerstein 1984).
It is important to accurately grasp both the structural similarities and differences between the current world historical period and earlier periods that were similar but also importantly dissimilar. The United States has been in decline in terms of hegemony in economic production since 1945 and this has been similar in many respects to the decline of British hegemony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Chase-Dunn et al 2011). Giovanni Arrighi (2006) noted that the period of British hegemonic decline (1870-1914) moved rather quickly toward conflictive interimperial rivalry because economic competitors such as Germany and Japan were able to develop powerful military capabilities that could be used to challenge the British. The U.S. hegemony has been different in that the United States ended up as the single superpower after the demise of the Soviet Union. Some economic challengers (Japan and Germany) cannot easily play the military card because they are stuck with the consequences of having lost the last World War. This, and the immense size of the U.S. economy, will probably slow the process of hegemonic decline down compared to the rate of the British decline.
The
post-World War II wave of trade globalization and financialization
faltered in 2008 but seems to have recovered since then. A future trough of
trade deglobalization similar to what happened in the
1930s could happen if a perfect storm of calamities and resistance to further
economic globalization should emerge. The declining economic and political
hegemony of the U.S. poses huge challenges for global governance. Newly
emergent national economies such as India and China need to be fitted in to the
global structure of power. The unilateral use of military force by the Bush
administration further delegitimated the institutions
of global governance and provoked resistance and challenges. A similar bout of
“imperial over-reach” in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries on the part of Britain (the Boer Wars) preceded and led to a period
of interimperial rivalry and world war. Such an outcome
is less likely now, but not impossible.
These developments parallel, to some extent, what happened a century ago, but the likelihood of another “Age of Extremes” or a Malthusian correction such what occurred in the first half of the 20th century could be exacerbated by some new twists. The number of people on Earth was only 1.65 billion when the 20th century began, whereas at the beginning of the 21st century there were 6 billion. Moreover, fossil fuels were becoming less expensive as oil was replacing coal as the major source of energy (Podobnik 2006). It was this use of inexpensive, but non-renewable, fossil energy that made the geometric expansion and industrialization of humanity possible.
Now we are facing global warming as a consequence of the spread and rapid expansion of industrial production and energy-intensive consumption. Energy prices have temporarily come down because of fracking and overproduction by countries that are dependent on oil exports, but the low hanging “ancient sunlight” in coal and oil has been picked. “Peak oil” is approaching. “Clean coal” and controllable nuclear fusion remain dreams. The cost of energy will probably go up no matter how much is invested in new kinds of energy production (Heinberg 2004). None of the existing alternative technologies offer low cost energy of the kind that made the huge expansion possible. Many believe that overshoot has already occurred in terms of how many humans are alive, and how much energy is being used by some of them, especially those in the core. Adjusting to rising energy costs and dealing with the environmental degradation caused by industrial society will be difficult, and the longer it takes the harder it will become. Ecological problems are not new, but this time they are on a global scale. Peak oil and rising costs of other resources are likely to cause more resource wars that exacerbate the problems of global governance. The war in Iraq was both an instance of imperial over-reach and a resource war because the U.S. neoconservatives thought that they could prolong U.S. hegemony by controlling the global oil supply. The Paris Agreement on greenhouse gas emissions reached in December of 2015 are good news, but compliance will be difficult, especially for non-core countries.
The first decade of the 21st century has seen a continuation of many large-scale processes that were under way in the last half of the 20th century. Urbanization of the Global South continued as the policies of neoliberalism gave powerful support to the “Live Stock Revolution” in which animal husbandry on the family ranch was replaced by large-scale production of eggs, milk and meat. This, and industrialized farming, were encouraged by the export expansion policies of the International Monetary Fund-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). One consequence was the ejection of millions of small farmers from the land. These rural residents had been producing a lot of their own food rather than buying it. A good part of the “increased income” that is counted as poverty reduction in the Global South is due to the monetization of what was formerly agrarian subsistence production. Money incomes and purchases went up but slum-dwellers are no longer able to produce as much of their own food as they did before they migrated to the city. This is one reason why counting monetized income and consumption alone is an imperfect way to study inequality.
For
most of these former rural residents migration to megacities meant moving to
huge slums and gaining a precarious living in the “informal sector” of services
and small-scale production. These huge slums lack adequate water or sewage
infrastructure. The budget cuts mandated by the SAPs, required by the
International Monetary Fund as a condition for further loans, have often
decimated public health systems. And so the slums have become breeding grounds
for new forms of communicable diseases, including new strains of avian flu,
that pose huge health risks to the peoples of both the core and the non-core.
These diseases are rapidly transmitted by intercontinental air travel. Many
public health experts believe that a flu pandemic similar in scope and
lethality to that of the infamous 1918 disaster is highly likely to occur in
the near future (Crosby 2007). Most of the national governments have failed to
adequately prepare for such an eventuality, and so a massive die-off could
easily occur. Like most disasters, the lethality would be much greater among
the poor, especially in the megacities of the Global South (Davis 2005).
In
addition to the lack of attention to the roles of past and future social
movements, there are other lacunae in Piketty’s analysis as well as his
prescriptions. Whereas he mentions global
inequality, his actual research is about trends within core societies. This
is because taxation data over long time
periods is not currently available for most of the non-core countries. But
there is a large and contentious research literature about inequality trends in
the global system as well as an important and consequential set of publically
held assumptions about these trends. Many, including Bill Gates, simply assume
that global inequality has decreased because of rapid economic growth in China
and India in the past several decades. Many critics of capitalist globalization
assume that global inequality must be going up over the past decades because of
Piketty’s findings and because problems of poverty and dispossession in the
Global South are well-known. The problem
is that both within-county and between-country trends need to be taken into
account in order to know the true trend in income distribution for the whole
population of the Earth. And there are difficult issues regarding the
conversion of national currencies into a single global metric (usually U.S.
dollars). A conservative estimate based
on the contentious quantitative literature on trends in global income
inequality is that global inequality increased greatly during the 19th
century industrial revolution and it has remained at about the same high level
or possibly decreased slightly since then (Bornschier
2010). Though the magnitude of global
income inequality expanded in the 19th century, there were already
important amounts of political inequality that had emerged between the core and
the periphery as a result of European colonialism. And these structures were
both outcomes of, and causes of, resistance and rebellions that occurred within
the European core and in the colonized regions.
World
Revolutions
The institutional changes
that have occurred with the rise and fall of the hegemonic core powers over the
past four centuries have constituted a sequence of forms of world order that
evolved to solve the political, economic and technical problems of successively
more global waves of capitalist accumulation. The expansion of global
production required accessing raw materials to feed the new industries, and
food to feed the expanding populations (Bunker and Ciccantell
2004). As in any hierarchy, coercion is a very inefficient means of domination,
and so the hegemons sought legitimacy by proclaiming leadership in advancing
civilization and democracy (the Gramscian side of
hegemony). But the terms of these claims were also employed by those below who
sought to protect themselves from exploitation and domination. And so the
evolution of hegemony was produced by elite groups competing with one another
in a context of successive powerful challenges from below. World orders were
contested and reconstructed in a series of world revolutions that began with
the Protestant Reformation (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000: 53-64; Linebaugh and Redicker 2000).
The
idea of world revolution is a broad notion that encompasses all kinds of acts
of resistance to hierarchy, regardless of whether or not they are coordinated
with one another, but that occur relatively close to one another in time.
Usually the idea of revolution is conceptualized on a national scale in which
new social forces come to state power and restructure social relations. When we
use the revolution concept at the world-system level a number of changes are
required. There is no global state (yet) to take over. But there is a global
polity, a world order, which has evolved as outlined above. It is that world
polity or world order that is the arena of contestation within which world
revolutions have occurred and that world revolutions have restructured.
Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) focused on those
constellations of local, regional, national and transnational rebellions and
revolutions that have had long-term consequences for changing world orders.
World orders are those normative and institutional features that are taken for
granted in large-scale cooperation, competition and conflict. Years that
symbolize the major world revolutions after the Protestant Reformation are
1789, 1848, 1917, 1968 and 1989. Arrighi, Hopkins and
Wallerstein (2011) analyzed the world revolutions of 1848, 1917, 1968 and 1989
(see also Beck 2011). They observed that the demands put forth in a world
revolution do not usually become institutionalized until a later consolidating
revolt has occurred. 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. It is important to tease out the similarities and the differences among
the world revolutions in order to be able to accurately assess the contemporary
situation and to learn from the past. The contexts and the actors have changed
from one world revolution to the next.
This view of the modern
world-system as constituting an arena of political struggle over the past
several centuries implies that global civil society (Kaldor
2003) has existed all along. Global civil society includes all the actors who
consciously participate in world politics. In the past it has consisted
primarily of statesmen, religious leaders, scientists, financiers, and the
owners and top managers of chartered companies such as the Dutch and British
East India Companies. This rather small group of people already saw the global
arena of political, economic, military and ideological struggle as their arena
of contestation (Chase-Dunn and Reese 2011). There has been a “global left” and
transnational social movements involving non-elite actors at least since the
world revolution of 1789.[1] While global civil society is still a
small minority of the total population of the earth, the falling costs of communication
and transportation have enabled more and more non-elites to become
transnational political actors.
Our discussion below focuses
on what Santos (2006) has called the New Global Left and compares it with
earlier incarnations of the global left. This is part, but not all of global
civil society. Other important actors are the forces organized around the World
Economic Forum, the new conservative and neo-fascist elements (Anderson, 2005)
the BRICs (Bond 2013) and the jihadists (Moghadam
2009).
We are in the midst of
another world revolution now. Chase-Dunn and Niemeyer (2009) have called it the
world revolution of 20xx (because it is not yet clear what the key symbolic
year should be). They claim that it began with the anti-International Monetary
Fund riots in the 1980s and the Zapatista revolt in Southern Mexico in 1994.[2]
World
revolutions are hard to study and difficult to compare with one another because
they are complex constellations of events. The time periods and places to
include (and exclude) are hard to judge.
They each have had different mixes of social movements, rebellions and
revolutions, including reactionary movements, and have occurred unevenly in
time and space. What have been the
actual and potential bases for cooperation and competition across the
progressive (antisystemic) movements? How did some of
the movements affect the others? And how
did they relate to the similar and different terrains of power and economic
structures in the world-system at the time that they emerged? And how have they
affected the struggles among elites in their efforts to maintain their
positions or gain new advantages?
The
World Revolution of 20xx
It
is difficult to pick a symbolic year that expresses the main characteristics of
the current world revolution because it is still in formation and it is not
clear which characteristics to pick. The
wave of protests that began with the Arab Spring in 2011 demonstrated some
coherence with regard to their local and global causations, and so some have
concluded that 2011 is a good choice. The Arab Spring was followed by an
anti-austerity summer in Greece and Spain and then the Occupy movement in the
Fall. But it is probably too soon to pick a symbolic year for the current world
revolution.
Some
claim that the anti-International Monetary Fund riots of the 1980s (Walton and
Seddon 1994) were the first skirmishes of the revolts and rebellions against
neoliberal corporate capitalism (Podobnik 2003. [3]
The Zapatista rebellion of 1994 was the first to name neoliberalism as
the enemy. The “Battle of Seattle” in
1999 brought the “antiglobalization movement” to the
attention of large numbers of people. The founding of the World Social Forum
(WSF) in 2001, a reaction to the exclusivity of the World Economic Forum held
in Davos, Switzerland since 1971, provoked the coming together of a movement of
movements focused on issues of global justice and sustainability. The social
forum process has spread to all the regions of the world despite, and because
of, the events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent military adventures carried
out by the neoconservative Bush regime in the United States.
Many of the participants in the contemporary movement of movements are unaware, or are only vaguely aware, of the historical sequence of world revolutions. But others are determined not to repeat what are perceived to have been the mistakes of the past. The charter of the World Social Forum does not permit participation by those who attend as representatives of organizations that are engaged in, or that advocate, armed struggle. Nor are governments or political parties supposed to send representatives to the WSF.[4] There is a great emphasis on diversity and on horizontal, as opposed to hierarchical, forms of organization. And the wide use of the Internet for communication and mobilization makes it possible for broad coalitions and loosely knit networks to engage in collective action projects. The movement of movements at the World Social Forum engaged in a manifesto/charter-writing frenzy as those who sought a more organized approach to confronting global capitalism and neoliberalism attempted to formulate consensual goals and to put workable coalitions together (Wallerstein 2007).
One continuing issue has been whether or not the World Social Forum itself should formulate a political program and take formal stances on issues. The Charter of the WSF explicitly forbids this and a significant group of participants strongly supports maintaining the WSF as an “open space” for debate and organizing. A survey of 625 attendees at the World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre in 2005 asked whether the WSF should remain an open space or should take political stances. Exactly half favored the open space idea (Chase-Dunn, Reese, Herkenrath, Alvarez, Gutierrez and Kim 2008). So trying to change the WSF Charter to allow for a formal political program would be very divisive.
But this is not necessary. The WSF Charter also encourages the formation of new political organizations. So those participants who want to form new coalitions and organizations are free to act, as long as they do not do so in the name of the WSF as a whole. In Social Forum meetings at the global and national levels the Assembly of Social Movements and other groups have issued calls for global action and political manifestoes. At the end of the 2005 meeting in Porto Alegre a group of nineteen notable intellectuals and activists issued a statement that was purported to be a consensus of the meeting as a whole. At the 2006 “polycentric” meeting in Bamako, Mali a somewhat overlapping group issued a manifesto entitled “the Bamako Appeal” at the beginning of the meeting. The Bamako Appeal was a call for a global united front against neoliberalism and United States neo-imperialism (see Sen et al 2006). And Samir Amin, the famous Egyptian Marxist economist and one of the founders of the world-systems perspective, wrote a short essay entitled “Toward a fifth international?” in which he briefly outlined the history of the first four internationals (Amin 2006). Peter Waterman (2006) proposed a “global labor charter” and a coalition of womens’ groups meeting at the World Social Forum have produced a feminist global manifesto that tries to overcome divisive North/South issues (Moghadam 2005, 2009).
There has been an impasse in the global justice movement between those who want
to move toward a global united front that could mobilize a strong coalition
against the powers that be, and those who prefer local prefigurative,
horizontalist actions that abjure formal
organizations and refuse to participate in “normal” political activities such
as elections and lobbying. Horizontalism abjures
hierarchical organization and prefers flexible networks without formal
organization (but see Freeman 1970).
Prefiguration is the idea that individuals and small groups can
willfully constitute more humane and egalitarian social relations in the
present. It has a long history as utopian socialism (Engels 1918) and communes, and was an
important component of the Occupy movement’s construction of face-to-face
participatory democracy (Graeber 2013) and has strong
support in the social forum process (Juris 2008, Pleyers
2010). Some of this horizontalism and prefiguration
was inherited from similar tendencies in the world revolution of 1968. Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein (2011: 37-8) pointed out
that the New Left of the sixties embraced direct democracy, attacked
bureaucratic organizations, and was itself resistant to the creation of new
formal organizations that might act as instruments of revolution. These
organizational predilections were seen as the important lessons learned from
earlier waves of class struggle and decolonization. As Arrighi,
Hopkins and Wallerstein (2011:64) pointed out:
… the class struggle “flows out” into a
competitive struggle for state power. As this occurs, the political elites that
provide social classes with leadership and organization (even if they sincerely
consider themselves “instruments” of the class struggle) usually find that they
have to play by the rules of that competition and therefore must attempt to
subordinate the class struggle to those rules in order to survive as
competitors for state power.
In
later years many 68ers joined prefigurative communes
or formed new Leninist organizations, some which have survived (e.g. the Revolutionary
Communist Party, 2010). The resistance to politics as usual, especially
competing for state power, has been very salient in the world revolution of
20xx. These proscriptions are based on the critique of the practices of earlier
world revolutions in which labor unions and political parties became bogged
down in short-term and self-interested struggles that then reinforced and
reproduced the global capitalist system and the interstate system. This
abjuration of formal organizations and participation in institutionalized
political competition is strongly reflected in the constitution of the World
Social Forum as discussed above. And the same elements were robustly present in
the Occupy movement as well as in the several popular revolts that have
constituted the Arab Spring and the other anti-austerity movements (Mason
2013).
Journalist Paul Mason (2013) spent
the last decade doing ethnographic immersion in the wave of protests that occurred
in the Middle East, Spain, Greece, Turkey and the Occupy movement. His
sympathetic analysis of the current world revolution contends that the social
structural basis for horizontalism and anti-formal
organization, beyond the reaction to the reformist outcomes of earlier efforts
of the Left, is due to the presence of a large number of middle-class students
in the protests that were building in the first decade of the 21st
century (see also Korotayev and Zinkin
2011; Milkman, Luce and Lewis 2013; Curran, Schwarz and Chase-Dunn 2014). Of
course, the world revolution of 1968 was also composed of an activist element
within the large stratum of college students who had emerged on the world stage
with the global expansion of higher education since World War II.[5]
Precariat
Fractions
Mason (2013) makes an interesting
comparison of the recent protest wave with the world revolution of 1848, in
which a large number of the activists were also educated, but underemployed,
students. He notes that the participants in the recent wave of protests
were heavily composed of highly educated
young people who were facing the strong likelihood that they will not be able
to find jobs that are commensurate with their skills and certification levels.
Many of these “graduates with no future” have gone into debt to finance their
education, and they are alienated from politics as usual and enraged by the
failure of global capitalism to continue the expansion of middle-class jobs.
Mason notes that the urban poor, especially in the Global South, and workers
whose livelihoods have been attacked by globalization, have also been important
constituencies in the protests. And he points to the significance of the
Internet, social media and cell phones for allowing disaffected digital youth to
organize large protests. He sees the netizens’ “freedom to tweet” as an
important element in a strong desire for individual freedom that is an
important driver of those middle class graduates who have enjoyed confronting
the powers-that-be. This embrace of individuality may be another reason why the
movements have been reticent to develop their own formal organizations and to
participate in traditional organized political activities.
Guy Standing (2011) has undertaken a
broad consideration of how the neoliberal globalization project has affected
global class relations and the nature of work. Standing does not focus on the
nature of the recent protest wave, but his observations and claims overlap
with, and in some ways diverge from, those of Paul Mason. Standing claims that
the reorganization of production that David Harvey (1989) calls flexible
accumulation has produced the recent rise of what he calls the precariat.
Standing sees the rise of precarious labor as constituting a new class, the
precariat, which is significantly different from the proletariat. Employment is
increasingly temporary and workers have
little identification with their jobs or the firms that pay them. The
increasing power of capital, deindustrialization of the core and attacks on labor
unions have produced a reorganization of the global class structure around
precarious work. Standing notes that there are important differences between
different sectors of the precariat. The
slum-dwellers in the informal sector in megacities of the Global South have
long been exposed to precarious labor, though this group has expanded as a
result of the neoliberal transformation of agriculture discussed above. The
over-educated, under-employed are young people from working class and middle
class backgrounds who also face a precarious livelihood, but with rather
different tastes and interests from the folk of the planet of slums. They are
individualistic and difficult to organize using the methods that worked fairly
well for the industrial proletariat.
Standing wants to forge political
alliances among these different groups in order to press for workers rights and
greater protections from states, but he recognizes that this effort faces very
difficult obstacles. Standing also has a very different attitude toward the
“freedom to tweet” than does Mason. He believes that the short attention span
produced by constant exposure to electronic communications makes it difficult
for the young to develop an understanding of the larger historical context in
which the precariat is emerging.
Tweeting makes you stupid, according to Standing. He is rather less
sympathetic with these aspects of the millennials than is Mason, but they both
agree that these are important characteristics that need to be taken into
account in projects that seek to build larger alliances in order to fight for
workers’ rights.
The Multicentric Network of Leftist Movements
Just
as world revolutions in the past have restructured world orders, the current
one might also do this. But in order for this to happen a significant number of
activists who participate in the New Global Left would need to agree on several
complicated matters:
·
the
nature of the most important contemporary problems,
·
a
vision of a desirable future and
·
judgments
about appropriate tactics and forms of movement organization.
The
Transnational Social Movements Research Working Group at the University of
California-Riverside performed a network analysis of movement ties based on the
responses to a survey of attendees that was conducted at the 2005 World Social
Forum meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil.[6] This
study examined the structure of overlapping links among movement themes by
asking attendees with which of 18 movement themes they were actively
involved. The choices of those attendees
who declared that they were actively involved in two or more movement themes
were used to indicate the overlaps among movements. The results show a multicentric network of movement links as illustrated in
Figure 1 (Chase-Dunn, Petit, Niemeyer, Hanneman,
Alvarez, Gutierrez and Reese 2006). 
Figure 1: The network of movement
links at the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre
All
the movements had some people who were actively involved in other movements.
The four isolates shown in the upper left-hand corner of Figure 1 resulted from
the necessity of dichotomizing the distribution of connections for the purposes
of formal network analysis.
The overall structure of the network of movement linkages reveals a multicentric network organized around five main movements
that served as bridges linking other movements to one another: peace,
anti-globalization, global justice, human rights and environmentalism. These
were also the largest movements in terms of the numbers of attendees who
professed to be actively involved. While no single movement was so central that
it linked all the others, neither was the network structure characterized by
separate cliques of movements that might be easily separated from one another.
Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro (2009) compared the movement network results found at the 2005 Porto Alegre meeting with the results of a very similar survey carried out at the World Social Forum meeting in Nairobi in 2007. Their findings show a few changes but the main network structure was very similar to that found in Porto Alegre. This suggests that the New Global Left contains a rather stable global network structure of movement interconnections that is largely independent of the location of the meetings. Rather similar network structures were also found at meetings of the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007 and in Detroit in 2009 (Chase-Dunn and Breckenridge-Jackson 2013) indicating that the network links among movements seem to be quite similar at the global and national levels, at least for the case of the United States.
This structure means that the transnational activists who participate in the World Social Forum process share many goals and support the global justice framework asserted in the World Social Forum Charter. It also means that the network of movements is relatively integrated and is not prone to splits. A global justice united front that is attentive to the nature of this network structure could mobilize a strong force for collective action in world politics. But there are some obvious problems that need attention.
Global North-South Challenges
Thomas Piketty’s empirical
contribution was to the study of changes in the magnitude of within-country
inequalities, but his prescriptions for solutions included considerations of
inequalities at the global level. The focus on global justice and north/south
inequalities and the critique of neoliberalism provide strong orienting frames
for the transnational activists of the New Global Left (Byrd 2005; Steger,
Goodman and Wilson 2013). But there are difficult obstacles to collective
action that are heavily structured by the huge global inequalities that exist
in the contemporary world-system (Roberts and Parks 2007) and these issues must
be directly confronted.
Our survey of the attendees of the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre found several important differences between activists from the core, the periphery and the semiperiphery (Chase-Dunn, Reese, Herkenrath, Alvarez, Gutierrez, Kim and Petit. 2008).
Those from the periphery were proportionately fewer, older, and more likely to be men. In addition, participants from the periphery were more likely to be associated with externally sponsored NGOs, rather than with self-funded Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) or unions. NGOs have greater access to travel funds and were able to bring more representatives from the peripheral countries. Survey respondents from the Global South (the periphery and the semiperiphery) were significantly more likely than those from the Global North (the core) to be skeptical about creating or reforming global-level political institutions and were more likely to favor the abolition of existing global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Chase-Dunn et al 2008).
This skepticism probably stems from the historical experience of peoples from the non-core with colonialism and global-level institutions that claim to be operating on universal principles of fairness, but whose actions have either not solved problems or have made them worse. These “new abolitionists” pose strong challenges to both existing global institutions and to efforts to reform or replace these institutions with more democratic and efficacious ones.
George Monbiot’s Manifesto for a New World Order (2003) is a reasoned and insightful call for radically democratizing the existing institutions of global governance and for establishing a global peoples’ parliament that would be directly elected by the whole population of the Earth.[7] Monbiot also advocated the establishment of a trade clearinghouse (first proposed by John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods) that would reward national economies with balanced trade, and that would use some of the surpluses generated by those with trade surpluses to invest in those with trade deficits.[8] And Monbiot proposed a radical reversal of the World Trade Organization regime, which imposes free trade on the non-core but allows core countries to engage in protectionism – a “fair trade organization” that would help to reduce global development inequalities. Monbiot also advocated abolition of the U.N. Security Council, and shifting its power over peacekeeping to a General Assembly in which representatives’ votes would be weighted by the population sizes of their countries.
Monbiot
also noted that the current level of indebtedness of non-core countries could
be used as formidable leverage over the world’s largest banks if all the
debtors acted in concert. This could provide the muscle behind a significant
wave of global democratization. But in order for this to happen the global
justice movement would have to organize a strong coalition of the non-core
countries that would overcome the splits that tend to occur between the
periphery and the semiperiphery. This is far
from being a utopian fantasy. It is a practical program for global
democracy.
The
multiple local, regional and largely disconnected human interaction networks of
the past have become strongly linked into a single global system. The treadmill
of population growth has been stopped in the core countries, and is slowing in
the non-core. The global human population is predicted to peak and to stabilize
in the decades surrounding 2075 at somewhere between nine and twelve billion.
Thus population pressure will continue to be a major challenge for at least
another century, increasing logistical loads on governance institutions. The
exit option is blocked off except for a small number of pioneers who may move
out to space stations or try to colonize Mars. Thus a condition of global
circumscription exists. Malthusian corrections may not be only a thing of the
past, as illustrated by continuing warfare and genocide. Famine has been
brought under control, but future shortages of clean water, good soil,
non-renewable energy sources, and food might bring that old horseman back.
As we have already noted above, huge global inequalities
complicate the collective action problem. First world peoples have come to feel
entitled, and non-core people want to have their own cars, large houses and
electronic gadgets. The ideas of human rights and democracy are still
contested, but they have become so widely accepted that existing institutions
of global governance are illegitimate even by their own standards. The demand
for global democracy and human rights can only be met by reforming or replacing
the existing institutions of global governance with institutions that have some
plausible claim to represent the will and interests of the majority of the
world’s people. That means democratic global state formation (Chase-Dunn and
Inoue 2012), although most of the contemporary protagonists of global democracy
do not like to say it that way.
Individualism in the World Revolution
The relationship between
individualism, sociocultural evolution and modernity is a long story, but Paul
Mason’s claim that a new level of individual freedom is an important element in
the recent global wave of protests brings this issue once again to the center
of the discussion about the nature of the New Global Left.[9]
It is also raised by David Graeber’s (2011) assertion
of the individual’s right to self-assess the question of social debt and by
Mary Kaldor’s (2003) defense of the individual’s
right to not participate in politics. Many would agree with the horizontalists and anarchists that the attack on
individualism that was waged by communists and some socialists in the world
revolution of 1917 and its aftermath was a mistake. Individualism is rightly
associated with capitalist modernity, but arguably it is one of the good things
that modernity has brought. The rise of a global human rights regime since
World War II (Brisk 2005; Meyer 2009) and the centrality of the human rights
movement theme within the network of movements found at the World Social Forum
also indicate the importance of the issue of individualism in contemporary
world politics.
Of course there are many kinds of individualism, and it has been emerging since the birth of the world religions, and before (Chase-Dunn and Lerro 2013). Norman Cohn’s (1970) study of European medieval millenarianism describes the Free Spirits, a movement of self-deification in which individual mystics became convinced that they had attained omniscience and omnipotence and were thus entitled to do whatever they wanted, irrespective of the consequences of their acts for others. Ethical egoism denies any obligation to act in the interests of others (e.g. Ayn Rand 1957). The freedom to express one’s unique self in artistic works and in consumer choices are the relatively mild forms of individualism that have become widely accepted by both those who have opportunities to express themselves and by most of those who wish that they could. Individualism that allows great choice, but that does not countenance harming or constraining the actions of others, is not a bad thing whether or not it is engrained in biological human nature, as the evolutionary psychologists believe (McKinnon 2005). The construction of more effective forms of collectivism need not attack the individualisms that serve as legitimations for capitalism, nor the forms of individualism that are supported by many of the activists in the emerging New Global Left.
David Graeber’s
(2011) individualism asserts the right of each person to decide regarding the
issue of social debt – what one owes others, society and nature.[10]
Graeber points out that socialists and communists
(and almost all other authorities) set up systems that justified policies of
distribution and power based on assumptions about debt. Graeber
rejects these, and many would agree with him. Beyond this assumption of
individual authority over the matter of debt, Graeber
presumes natural human tendencies toward sociability, sharing and friendship.
And he contends that the techniques of direct decision-making that constituted
the processes developed by the Occupy movement are good guarantees of
individual rights in collective decision-making (Graeber
2013). This is a sympathetic view of
human nature and an attractive version of individualism that acknowledges the
importance of social life, but leaves participation up to the person.
A Global United Front?
As mentioned above, Paul
Mason stressed the importance of unemployed, but educated, youth in the world
revolutions of 1848 and 20xx. Of course scholars of social movements have long
known that oppressed people are usually led by disaffected members of the
middle or upper classes who have some education and resources that can be
devoted to the tasks of movement leadership. But is there more than this to
Mason’s claim? He notes that many middle class radicals in earlier world
revolutions turned against the urban poor and workers when they posed a strong
and radical challenge. Mason attributes part of the defeat of the
revolutionaries in 1848 to the students betrayal of the radical workers in
European cities. Mason contends that one reason why the middle class radicals
in the current wave of global protest have mainly kept their radicalism is
because the urban poor and workers have been relatively quiescent, at least so
far.
We may also wonder how the
differences between now and 1968 will affect the politics of middle class
students. Perceptions of the
availability of future middle class jobs have changed greatly. Most of 68ers
were able to find middle class jobs if they wanted them, whereas the current
crop of highly educated youth are facing a much more constrained job market as
well as mountains of debt incurred in getting their degrees. Mason sees this as
a cause of activism, but others surmise that educational indebtedness may
undermine rebellious courage.
In 2013 Mason guessed that
the wave of protests would likely melt away if the global economy was
successfully reflated, which is what has happened to some extent (see below). Mason
also recounted the story of the 1930s, when the Global Left started off as a
squabbling bunch of ideological purists, but was driven to make broad alliances
in the popular front by the rise of fascism. Mason saw horizontalism
and prefiguration as going nowhere. But he suggested that the Left might be
driven to form a new united front by the emergence of new economic fiascos,
global environmental disasters and by the further rise of neofascism.
Mason (2013:295-6) said:
Up to now, in today’s
crisis, protest has been driven by narratives of hope and outrage, not of fear.
The horizontalists’ self-isolation, indeed self-obsession,
is not the result of a dictated party line, as in the 1930s, but of something
equally strong in today’s conditions; the inner zeitgeist…. As austerity pushes
parts of Europe towards social meltdown, as fascism revives there and as
democracy is eroded, maybe it is this that drives the worker’s movement beyond
the one-day strike and the social movements beyond the temporary occupation of
space, as well as goading the existing parties beyond the comfort zone dictated
by the global order.
At the World Social Forum a somewhat
less ideological approach could involve a greater willingness to collaborate
with progressive national regimes such as that in Bolivia. Mason called for the
radicals to engage in “physical politics,” by which he meant contention for
power within existing institutions. Arguably this is what the New Global Left
must do if it is to have an important impact on the human future. But this
could be done without completely abandoning some of concerns of the 68ers and
the current generation of activists. The new individualism and participatory
democracy could be embraced while also inventing or reinventing more humane and
sustainable forms of collectivism and new modes of participation in
institutional politics. The enhanced
ability to swarm, using social media and the Internet, is a tactic that appeals
to the millennials and that could be coordinated with more populist forms of
participation in electoral politics.
And with regard to
bureaucratization, the oligarchical tendencies of political parties and all
other formal organizations are well known to sociologists of organization. But we
should recall that it was Thomas Jefferson, an 89er, who said that a revolution is needed about
every 20 years. Voluntary associations have gotten much easier to start since
Jefferson’s time.[11]
Many global activists carry neonatal NGOs around with them in their
backpacks. So if the organization you
are currently working with seems to have gotten ossified, you can start a new
one. This is the part of horizontalism and network
organizing that solves the problem of ossified parties and unions. But it also
leads to the proliferation of specialized organizations at a time when the main
challenge is to weave different movements into a larger organizational instrument
with enough muscle to challenge the global powers that be – a party-network.
The wave of protests that built up
in the last few decades peaked in 2011 and has declined somewhat since then (Karatasli et al 2015; Carothers and Youngs 2015). The protest intensity measure assembled from
web sources by GDELT (Leetaru 2014) shows successive
waves of global protests from 1979 to 2014
(see Figure 2). The partial decline since 2011 is probably due, in part,
to reflation of the global economy since
the crash of 2008. But the decline probably also reflects the debacles that
have ensued since the Arab Spring, which have understandably reduced the
enthusiasm of idealistic democracy protestors in war zone countries. The Green
Revolution in Iran was suppressed. The tragic events in Egypt and Syria have
been especially disheartening. Horizontalism and
prefiguration seem to presume a Habermasian world of
legitimate and protected political discourse that does not exist in many
regions. Military coups and contending mass parties like the Muslim Brotherhood
leave little room for the protests of the precariat to influence political
discourse. All world revolutions have gone through cycles of activism and
quiescence.
Figure 2 – Intensity of protest activity worldwide 1979-April
2014 (black line is 12-month moving average) (Leetaru 2014)[12]
The protests
mounted by the global justice and anti-austerity movements have changed the
political discourse about inequality and
have helped set the stage for Thomas Piketty’s research to be widely read and
discussed. The current U.S. presidential election campaign has the Democrats
vying with one another over how much to crack down on Wall Street. Podemos, an
anti-austerity party in Spain led by former autonomist Pablo Iglesias Turrion, developed a wide following and gained important
representation in the Spanish election of December 2015. But the debacle of Syriza in Greece, concluding an austerity compromise
despite a popular mandate to stand up against global finance capital, presents
an object lesson for those who have preached the dangers of institutional
politics. The quote above from Arrighi, Hopkins and
Wallerstein (2011:64) seems particularly apt. A valuable opportunity was missed
in Greece to show that indeed there are progressive alternatives to neoliberal
capitalist globalization.
Will the current world revolution
eventually develop enough muscle to challenge neoliberal capitalism and to
provoke enlightened conservatives to usher in a new era of global Keynesianism
that is more sustainable and less polarizing than the capitalist globalization
project? Or will a perfect storm of environmental disaster, hegemonic decline, mass
immigrations, interimperial rivalry, ethnic violence,
and neo-fascism produce so much chaos that a United Front of the New Global
Left will have an opportunity within the next few decades to fundamentally
transform the capitalist world-system into a democratic and collectively
rational global commonwealth? Both of these options would require a United Front
that brings the progressive movements, parties and regimes together.
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