Crisis of What: the end of capitalism or another systemic
cycle of capitalist accumulation?
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of California-Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
v. 6/7/13 8519 words
Paper to be presented at the Global Studies Association Conference on “Surviving the Future: Owning the World or Sharing
the Commons” June 7-9, 2013 at Marymount
College: Palos Verdes Campus (Los Angeles). This
is IROWS Working Paper #81 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows81/irows81.htm
Abstract: This paper discusses the nature of the
current global systemic crisis in order to evaluate the likelihood of several
possible futures in the next few decades. Employing a comparative world
historical and evolutionary world-systems perspective, I consider the ways in
which the contemporary crisis is similar to or different from earlier crisis
periods in the evolution of global capitalism and how the constellation of antisystemic movements and challenging regimes are similar
to, or different from, the challengers in earlier crisis periods. I designate
alternative possible models and discuss contending proposed visions of the
human future and use a structural analysis of social change to assign
probabilities to the different outcomes, while acknowledging that the future,
like the past, is somewhat open-ended and the somewhat unpredictable actions of
individuals and groups can shift the probabilities that we are trying to
estimate.
The comparative
evolutionary world-systems perspective uses comparisons between small
world-systems of foragers with expanding systems in the Bronze and Iron Ages as
well as an evolutionary perspective on the modern world-system since the 13th
century to comprehend the nature of the current world-historical period and the
probabilities of different sorts of reorganization that could occur within the
next several decades (Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2013). The focus is primarily on the
forest rather than the trees. And different kinds of forests are compared with
one another and ascertain how they have evolved over long periods of time. One of the big ideas that has emerged from this
comparative and evolutionary perspective is the notion of “semiperipheral
development” --
the idea that semiperipheral polities
often contribute to systemic social change by implementing organizational and
ideological forms that facilitate their own upward mobility and that sometimes
transform the logics of social reproduction and development. This paper
considers the question as to how contemporary semiperipheral
national regimes and alliances of these with one another, as well as with
transnational social movements -- might either mainly reproduce the existing
institutional structures and logic of the capitalist world-economy while
undergoing a shuffling of the predominant centers of accumulation or might
transform the global system into a qualitatively different, more egalitarian
world society in the next several decades. In order to intelligently comprehend
the possibilities for the next several decades we need to compare the current
world historical situation with earlier conjunctures that were somewhat
similar, but also importantly different. Sorting out the differences as well as
the similarities is a crucial task for these purposes.
The evolution of the modern
world-system has been composed of the expansion and deepening of commodified processes of production and accumulation, but
also of the evolution of the institutions of global governance. The structures
of authority have evolved from tributary empires to national states
increasingly controlled by capitalists, and an interstate system that
reproduces national sovereignty. Global governance in this system has mainly
been organized by a series of hegemonic core states – the Dutch in the 17th
century, the British in the 19th century and the U.S. in the 20th
century. And the increasing size of the hegemons has resulted in a cyclical trend
toward greater centralization of global governance. The decolonization of the
great colonial empires of the European core states extended the system of
theoretically sovereign nation-states to the non-core, creating an isomorphic
global polity of national states. But international political organizations and
super-national regional and global institutions have emerged over the tops of
the states composing the interstate system over the past 200 years. And
institutions of neo-colonialism such as foreign investment, aid regimes, and
covert political manipulation of non-core states by the Great Powers, have
reproduced the hierarchical nature of the global political economy.
The
political globalization evident in the trajectory of global governance evolved
because the powers that be were in heavy contention with one another for
geopolitical power and for economic resources, but also because resistance
emerged within the polities of the core and in the regions of the non-core. The
series of hegemonies, waves of colonial expansion and decolonization and the
emergence of a proto-world-state occurred as the global elites contended with
one another in a context in which they had to contain strong resistance from
below. We have already mentioned the waves of decolonization. Other important
forces of resistance were slave revolts, the labor movement, the extension of
citizenship to men of no property, the women’s movement, and other associated
rebellions and social movements.
These movements affected the
evolution of global governance in part because the rebellions often clustered
together in time, forming what have been called “world revolutions” (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein
1989).[1]
The Protestant Reformation in Europe was an early instance that played a huge
role in the rise of the Dutch hegemony.
The French Revolution of 1789 was linked in time with the American and
Haitian revolts. The 1848 rebellion in Europe was both synchronous with the
Taiping Rebellion in China and was linked with it by the diffusion of ideas, as
it was also linked with the emergent Christian Sects in the United States. 1917
was the year of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but also the Chinese Nationalist
revolt, the Mexican revolution, the Arab Revolt and the General Strike in
Seattle led by the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States. 1968
was a revolt of students in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Red Guards in
China. 1989 was mainly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but important
lessons about the value of civil rights beyond justification for capitalist
democracy were learned by an emergent global civil society. The current world revolution of 20xx
(Chase-Dunn and Niemeyer 2009) is an important context for the questions about semiperipheral development and future likely outcomes that
are the main topics of this article.
The big idea here is that the
evolution of capitalism and of global governance is importantly a response to resistance and rebellions
from below. This has been true in the past and is likely to continue to be
true in the future. Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) contend that capitalism and
socialism have dialectically interacted with one another in a positive feedback
loop similar to a spiral. Labor and socialist movements were obviously a
reaction to capitalist industrialization, but also the U.S. hegemony and the
post-World War II global institutions were importantly spurred on by the World
Revolution of 1917 and the waves of decolonization. An important idea that
comes out of this theoretical perspective is that transformational changes tend
to be brought about by the actions of individuals and organizations within
polities that are semiperipheral relative to the
other polities in the same system. This is known as the hypothesis of semiperipheral development.
The idea
of the “semiperiphery” is a relational concept. Semiperipheral polities are in the middle of a
core/periphery hierarchy, but what that means depends on the nature of existing
organizations and institutions and the forms of interaction that exist within a
particular world-system. Semiperipheral marcher
chiefdoms are necessarily somewhat different from semiperipheral
marcher states and semiperipheral modern
nation-states. The evolutionary
world-systems perspective points to the similarities as the basis for the claim
that studying whole world-systems is necessary in order to explain
socio-cultural evolution. But this does not tell us what semiperipherality
is in any particular world-system. For that we have to know the nature of those
institutions that regulate interactions in the particular system. And
successfully playing the game of upward mobility that involves challenging the
core powers, moving up in the system and sometimes transforming the very nature
of the whole system, is an even more complicated matter involving innovation
and the implementation of new technologies, ideologies and forms of
organization. It is important to mention that not all semiperipheral
polities are agents of transformation. Some act to reproduce the institutions
that are predominant. But a semiperipheral location
is fertile ground for those who want to implement organizational, ideological
or technological changes that are transformative.
Some
observers have claimed that the world is now flat because of globalization. But
studies of global inequalities do not find a strong trend toward a flatter
world. Even with the rapid economic growth of China and India in the past few
decades, the global stratification system has not become significantly more
equal (Bornschier 2010). The large international
differences in levels of development and income that emerged during the
industrial revolution in the 19th century continue to be an
important feature of the global stratification system. Others have claimed that
globalization and “the peripheralization of the core”
evident in the migration of industrial production to semiperipheral
countries has eliminated the core/periphery hierarchy. Deindustrialization of
the core and the process of financialization have had
important impacts on the structure of core/periphery relations, but it is
surely an exaggeration to contend that the core/periphery hierarchy has
disappeared. Certainly U.S. economic hegemony is in decline and there are newly
arising challengers from the semiperiphery. But
recent upward and downward mobility has not appreciably reduced the overall
magnitude of inequalities in the world-system.
The
proponents of a global stage of capitalism have often focused on an allegedly
recent emergence of a transnational capitalist class. William Carroll’s (2010)
research shows how transnational interlocking directorates and political
networks have changed over the past several decades to link wealthy and
powerful families in Europe with those in North America and Japan. Though a few
individuals from semiperipheral countries have
managed to join the club, it remains mainly a network of big property owners
from core countries. William Robinson (2008) has also focused attention on how
the conditions of workers and peasants have been transformed by capitalist
globalization, and he contends that a global class structure is emerging that
will have consequences for the future of class relations and world politics.
The
concepts of a transnational capitalist class and the further transnationalization of workers and peasants are important
ideas, and they may also be usefully employed to examine relations among elites
and masses in earlier centuries as well. There has always been a
world-system-wide class structure. Immanuel Wallerstein
(1974:86-87) analyzed the class structure of the Europe-centered world-system
of the long sixteenth century. Samir Amin (1980) explicitly studied the global
class structure before globalization became an important focus of study. In the centuries before the most recent wave
of globalization there have been several important efforts by both capitalists
and workers to coordinate their actions internationally. The global class
system remains importantly impacted by the global North/South stratification
system despite greater awareness of global interactions and the strengthening
of transnational social movements.
Semiperipheral
development has sometimes, but not always, led to the attaining of core status
and hegemony in a core/periphery hierarchy and at other times it has only
contributed to the development and spreading of new forms of interaction that
eventually led to systemic transformation. These successful semiperipheral marcher states that produced large empires
by means of conquest were often also implementers of new “techniques of power”
that made larger systems more sustainable. The semiperipheral
capitalist city-states that accumulated wealth by means of production and trade
diffused commodity production to wide regions, providing incentives for subsistence
producers to also produce a surplus, and inventing writing and accounting
systems and forms of property and organization that sometimes diffused to the
commercializing tributary empires to which they were semiperipheral.
Some semiperipheral polities innovate
new technologies, ideologies or forms of organization, but new ideas also come
from core areas where there are bigger information network nodes and sometimes
from the periphery. But semiperipheral polities are
more likely to take the risk of investing resources in new techniques, ideas or
organizational forms regardless of their origins. They implement new stuff, while older core
polities get stuck in the old ways. What will be the systemic consequences of the
actions and developments of contemporary semiperipheral
peoples?
With
the emergent predominance of capitalism the relationship between core/periphery
relations and class structure changed. Now core polities tended to have less
inequality because a large middle class developed, producing a diamond-shaped
class structure ♦. Non-core
polities tended to have more inequality because a small
elite dominates and exploits a large mass of poor peasants and poor urban
residents, producing a pyramid-shaped class structure ▲. This stabilizes the system to some extent
because now core powers have greater internal stability than non-core powers.
But semiperipheral development continued because
economic development was still uneven. The relationship between class structure
and the core/periphery hierarchy continues to be important. Now the
core/periphery hierarchy crosscuts the class structures within polities. In the
core a relative harmony of classes is based on having a larger middle class and
on the ability of core elites to reward subalterns with the returns to
imperialism. In the periphery class conflict is also undercut by the
core/periphery hierarchy to some extent, because some elites side with the
masses against colonialism and neo-colonialism. But in the modern semiperiphery class conflict is not suppressed by the
core/periphery hierarchy. On the contrary, class conflict is exacerbated
because some elites have both the opportunity and the motive to adopt policies
such as economic nationalism that are intended to move the national economy up
the food chain of the global economy, while other elite factions prefer the
status quo. Movements supported by workers and peasants can more often find
allies among the elites. This explains why antisystemic
movements were able to attain state power in semiperipheral
Russia and China in the 20th century (Chase-Dunn 1998, Chapter 11).
The
Contemporary Core/Periphery Hierarchy
The social science literature on measuring the
relative positions of national societies in the larger core/periphery hierarchy
continues to be contentious. Is there really a single dimension that captures
most of important distinctions between national societies with regard to
economic, political, military and cultural power, or is the core/periphery
hierarchy multidimensional, and if so what are the most important dimensions?[2]
Arrighi and Drangel (1986)
argued that the semiperiphery is a discrete economic
stratum that is separated by empirical gaps from core and peripheral
zones. They contend that GNP per capita
is by itself an adequate measure of position in the world-system, and they find
empirical gaps in the distribution of national GNP per capita that are said to
be the boundaries between the core and the semiperiphery
and the semiperiphery and the periphery. Salvatore Babones (2005) also found these gaps in the international
distribution of levels of economic development (GNP per capita).
But another way to look at the core/periphery
hierarchy is as a multidimensional set of power hierarchies, that includes
economic, political and military power forming a continuous hierarchy that is a
relatively stable stratification hierarchy in the sense that most of national
societies stay in the same position over time, but that also experiences
occasional instances of upward and downward mobility? From this perspective the
labels of core, periphery and semiperiphery are just
convenient signifiers of relative overall position in a continuous hierarchy
rather than truly discrete categories. Semiperipherality
is just a rough appellation for those that are rather more in the middle of a
continuous distribution of positions.
There are likely to be important different ways to be semiperipheral depending on where a national society is on
the different hierarchical dimensions. And these differences may be related to
how a national society, or the movements that are based in these national
societies, behave in world politics. I contend that the question of cutting
points between allegedly discrete core, peripheral and semiperipheral
zones is largely a matter of convenience in what is, in the long run, a
continuous set of distributions of different kinds of power. In order to
produce a map that shows where the semiperipheral
countries are it is necessary to adopt cutting points, but it is not necessary
to claim that there are empirically discrete positions within the global
hierarchy.
Jeffrey Kentor’s
(2000, 2008) quantitative measure of the position of national societies in the
world-system remains the best continuous
measure because it includes
GNP per capita, military capability, and economic dominance/dependence (Kentor
2008). One may trichotomize Kentor’s
continuous indicator of world-system position into core, periphery and semiperipheral
categories in order to do research and to produce the kind of map shown in
Figure 3 below. The core category is nearly equivalent to the World Bank’s
“high income” classification, and is what most people mean by the term “Global
North.” The “Global South” is divided into two categories: the semiperiphery
and the periphery. The contemporary semiperiphery
includes large countries (e.g. Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, India, China) and smaller countries with
middle levels of GNP per capita (e.g. Taiwan, South Korea, South Africa,
Israel, etc.). 
Figure 1: The contemporary global hierarchy of national societies: core, semiperiphery and periphery (Bond 2013).
Figure 1 depicts the contemporary global hierarchy of
national societies divided into the three world-system zones. The core
countries are in red, the peripheral countries are yellow, and the semiperipheral
countries in the middle of the global hierarchy are orange. Several terms have been used in recent
popular and social science literatures that are approximately equivalent to
what we mean by the semiperiphery: Newly Industrializing Countries (NICS),
“emerging markets,” and most recently BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa). In Figure 1 it is visually obvious that North America and Europe
are mostly core, Latin
America is mostly semiperipheral, Africa is mostly
peripheral and Asia is a mix of the three zones.
As we have said above, the evolutionary world-systems perspective contends that
semiperipheral
regions have been unusually fertile locations where social organizational forms
that transformed the scale and logic of world-systems have been implemented.
The hypothesis of semiperipheral development suggests
that close attention should be paid to events and developments within the semiperiphery,
especially the emergence of social movements and new kinds of national regimes.
The World
Social Forum (WSF) process is conceptually global in extent, but its entry upon
the world stage as an instrument of the New Global Left has come primarily from
semiperipheral
Brazil and India. The “Pink Tide” process in Latin America, led by Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, has been constituted by the emergence of both reformist
and antisystemic national regimes in fourteen out of
twenty-three Latin American countries since the Cuban Revolution (Chase-Dunn
and Morosin 2013). We want to pay special attention
to these kinds of phenomena and to their interaction with one another because
of the hypothesis of semiperipheral
development.
Wallerstein’s development of the concept of the semiperiphery has often implied that the main function of
having a stratum in the middle is to somewhat depolarize the larger system
analogously to a large middle class within a national society (e.g Wallerstein
1976). This functionalist tendency has
been elaborated in the notion of “subimperialism”
originally developed by Ruy Mauro Marini (1972) and
more recent discussed by Patrick Bond (2013) in his analysis of the BRICS. This approach focusses on the instances in
which semiperipheral polities have reinforced and
reproduced the existing global structures of power. Bond’s study of
post-apartheid South Africa’s “talk left, walk right” penchant is convincing.
But he may underestimate the extent to which the emergent BRICS coalition is
counter-hegemonic. The discussion of the need for an alternative to the U.S.
dollar in the global economy and the proposal for a new development bank for
the Global South have had unsettling effects on the powers-that-be in the core
states even if Bond makes little of these challenges. As we have said above, semiperipheral development is not carried out by all semiperipheral polities. It is undoubtedly the case that
the very existence of polities that are in between the extremes of the
core/periphery hierarchy tends to hide the polarization that is a fundamental
process in many world-systems. But the
fact that emerging powers are increasingly banding together and promulgating
policies that challenge the hegemony of the United States and the institutions
that have been produced by the European and Asian core powers indicates that semiperipheral challengers do not just reproduce the
existing global hierarchy. The question
for the New Global Left is how to encourage the potential for constructing a
more egalitarian world society. Bond is certainly right that the transnational
social movements need to push the BRICS to more effectively address the
fundamental problems of ecological crisis, global inequality and global
democracy.
The Challengers: Counter-hegemonic, reformist and antisystemic
There
are several different kinds of significant contemporary challengers to the
powers-that-be in the world-system. The question of reproduction vs.
transformation requires understanding the different kinds of challengers. Here we follow Jackie Smith and Dawn Weist (2012) in distinguishing between counter-hegemonic
movements, regimes and coalitions that opposed U.S. hegemony but are not
politically progressive (Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda and the subimperialist actions of some of the BRICS). [3]
Among regimes, movements and
coalitions that are progressive we distinguish between those that are
reformists and those that are antisystemic. Our study of Latin American regimes
(Chase-Dunn and Morosin 2013) makes a distinction
between reformist regimes that have adopted some socially progressive policies
or taken some anti-neoliberal international positions and antisystemic
regimes such as most of the members of ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. [4]
Smith and Weist (2012:10) define antisystemic as follows: ‘“Antisystemic
movements’ include a diverse ‘family of movements’ working to advance greater
democracy and equality (Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein 1989). According to Wallerstein,
‘to be antisystemic is to argue that neither liberty
nor equality is possible under the existing system and that both are possible
only in a transformed world’ (1990:36).”
Thus we have three categories for
organizing a discussion of challengers: counter-hegemonic, reformist and
anti-systemic. Some of the challengers
to global neoliberalism and the hegemony of the United States are not
progressive. Thus the New Global Left
must distinguish between its allies and those political actors that are deemed
to not be progressive. And among the
latter there may be some that can be worked with on a tactical basis or
convinced to pursue more progressive goals.
International geopolitics is a game
that state regimes need to play. The logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my
friend” is hard to escape when one is in charge of national defense. This is the main factor behind the phenomenon
of “strange bedfellows,” as when Hugo Chavez allied with Iran’s Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
Regarding the hypothesis of semiperipheral development and the Pink Tide phenomenon in
Latin America, we found that both semiperipheral and
peripheral countries were equally likely to have moved toward either reformist
or antisystemic regime forms in the last few decades.
But when we examine the timing of these moves we find that semiperipheral
countries were more likely than peripheral countries to have made these changes
earlier (Chase-Dunn and Morosin 2013: Tables
2-4). Latin America as a whole has had
more of these progressive challenging regimes because there has been a regional
propinquity effect, and because it Latin American the non-core “backyard” of
the global hegemon (the United States).
Also Latin America is has a larger proportion of semiperipheral
countries than do other world regions.
It should also be noted that the
spread of the trappings of electoral democracy (polyarchy)
to the non-core has provided opportunities for progressive movements to
peacefully attain power in local and national state organizations. Salvador
Allende’s election in Chile was an example that was followed by the more recent
electoral victories of populists of various kinds in Latin America. The
imposition of draconian structural adjustment programs in Latin America in the
1980s and the rise neoliberal politicians who attacked labor unions and subsidies
for the urban poor led to a reaction in many countries in which populist
politicians were able to mobilize support from the expanded informal sector
workers in the megacities, leading in many cases to the emergence of reformist
and antisystemic national regimes.
The
establishment of relatively institutionalized electoral processes in most Latin
American countries and the failure of most leftist efforts to effectively
employ armed struggle encouraged the leaders of the World Social Forum process
to proscribe individuals who represent political groups that advocate armed
struggle from attending the WSF meeting as representatives of those groups.[5]
But all this should not lead us to suppose that violence and military power are
no longer important in politics. The fate of Allende and of the presidencies of
Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti remind us that death squads, the military, and
foreign intervention are still powerful factors in Latin American politics as
well as elsewhere.
The relationship between the progressive
national regimes and the progressive transnational social movements has been
contentious. Despite strong support from the Brazilian Workers Party and the
Lula regime in Brazil, the charter of the World Social Forum does not allow
people to attend the meetings as formal representatives of states. When Chavez and Lula tried to make
appearances at WSF meetings large numbers of movement activists protested. The horizontalists, autonomists and anarchists see those who
hold state power as the enemy even if they claim to be progressives. Exceptions have been made, as when European
autonomists provided support for Evo Morales’s
presidency in Bolivia (e.g. López and Iglesias Turrión, 2006).
The World Social Forum (WSF) process
has itself been a complicated dance toward global party formation and the
construction of a new global United or Popular Front (Amin 2007; Chase-Dunn and
Reese 2007). Its charter prohibits the
WSF itself from adopting a program or policy stances. The WSF is supposed to be an arena for the
grass roots movements to use to organize themselves and make alliances with one
another. In practice this has led to
competition among the movements and NGOs for hegemony within a hoped for
emergent New Global Left.
As
discussed below, studies of attendees at global World Social Forum meetings in
Porto Alegre, Brazil and Nairobi, Kenya reveal a multicentric network of overlapping movements, in which
four or five most central movements connect all the rest with one another
(Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro (2009). Up until 2011 the World Social Forum process
had little participation from the Middle East.
The Arab Spring revolts got the attention of activists, and in March of
2013 the World Social Forum was held in Tunis. The connection of the Arab Spring
revolts and continuing political contestation in Egypt with global
neoliberalism and austerity has been obscured by the struggle for national
democracy within the Middle Eastern countries and the rise of Islamist parties.
The
Network of Movements in the New Global Left
Survey research conducted at the meetings of
the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, Brazil in 2005 and Nairobi, Kenya in 2007
revealed a network of alliances among eighteen movement types based on the fact
that many individuals are active in more than one movement type (Chase-Dunn and
Kaneshiro 2009). Comparison of the WSF05 and WSF07
network figures showed that the basic multicentric
structure of the movement of movements did not change. In both networks there
was a set of hub movements that strongly integrate all the other
movements. As was the case for the WSF05
network, the matrix of movement pairs for the WSF07 meeting has no zeros,
meaning that all of the 18 movements have at least one participant in all of
the other movements. Only one of the forty-three anarchists was also actively
engaged in the slow food movement, the socialists and the feminists. But
there were no zeros and so all the movements were connected to other movements
by the fact that some individuals were active both of them.
Three of the movements (anarchist, communist and queer rights) that were
disconnected by the high bar of connectedness in the WSF05 matrix were also
disconnected in WSF07, whereas National Liberation met the test in Nairobi, but
not in Porto Alegre, and Anti-corporate failed the
test in Nairobi but not in Porto Alegre.. One of the same movements appears near the center (Human
Rights/Anti-racism), but some that were rather central in 2005 had moved out
toward the edge in 2007 (Peace, Global Justice and Alternative Media). The
Environmentalists were still toward the center, but not as central as they had
been in Porto Alegre. Health/HIV was much more
central than it had been in Brazil, probably reflecting both an increase in
global concern and a much larger crisis in Africa. Regarding overall structural
differences between the two matrices, the 2007 network was more centered around
a single movement (Human Rights/Anti-racism), but there were also more direct
connections among some of the movements out on the edge (e.g. feminists and
socialists, socialists and labor, slow food and global justice.
Figure 2: The network of movement
linkages at the 2007 WSF in Nairobi (Chase-Dunn and Kaneshiro
2009)
Crisis of
What?
In earlier work Kirk Lawrence and I have
discussed three broad possible scenarios that depict in general terms what
might happen in the several decades (Chase-Dunn and Lawrence 2011; Lawrence
2012). We imagine the possibility of another round of U.S. hegemony in which the
United States reindustrializes based on its comparative advantages in new lead
high technology industries and provides global order that accommodates rising
powers and challenging social movements.
We concluded that this scenario was unlikely to come about because of
the continuing political stalemate within the U.S. and growing resistance to
U.S. unilateral use of military power. The illegal use of drones to murder
civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere confirms that the Obama administration has
continued the illegitimate unilateral use of military power begun by the Bush
administration. This kind of imperial over-reach is a strong sign that the U.S.
hegemony is continuing to decline, substituting supremacy for hegemonic
leadership. So one thing that is clearly in crisis is U.S.
hegemony. And it is rather unlikely that this could be turned around.
All earlier hegemonic declines led to periods of disorder and then to what Arrighi (1994) called new systemic cycles of capitalist
accumulation.
Kirk Lawrence and I also
contemplated the possible emergence of a democratic world government that would
coordinate collectively rational responses to population pressure, global
climate change and ecological degradation, global inequality and rivalries
among national states and transnational social movements. We see this as a
possible outcome that might be brought about if progressive transnational
social movements could form a powerful coalition and could work with
progressive national regimes in the Global South to democratize global
governance and to organize a legitimate authority with the capacity to help
resolve the great crises of the 21st century. This next phase could either take the form of
another systemic cycle of capitalist accumulation, perhaps based on a globalized
form of Keynesianism, or it might involve a qualitative transformation to a new
type of world society based on forms of socialism.
And
we also contemplated “collapse” in which continuing U.S. hegemonic decline,
rising challenges from the BRICS, a contentious multilateralism among
contenders for global predominance, conflictive action by both progressive and
regressive transnational social movements lead to high levels of conflict that
prevent coordinated responses to the emergent crises. This scenario could be
much like what happened in the first half of the 20th century, or it
could be worse because of the potential for huge destruction caused by more
lethal weapons and because of the more globalized extent of ecological
degradation. This is may be the most
likely scenario. But the other paths are not yet completely impossible for the
next few decades.
Giovanni
Arrighi (2007), in his last book, Adam Smith in Beijing, discussed the
possible emergence of another systemic cycle of capitalist accumulation that
would be less warlike and exploitative than the kind of capitalism that emerged
with the rise of the Europe-centered world-system. Arrighi
saw the rise of China as providing a model of “market society” in which the
power of finance capital is balanced by the strength of technocrats who are
able to implement development projects that are kinder to labor and less driven
by the military industrial complex. China is not large enough economically,
despite its immense number of people, to become the next hegemon. And, as Arrighi carefully explains, the current regime in Beijing
has made great efforts to avoid any discourse about hegemonic rise and global
leadership. He persuasively contends that the current Chinese leadership just
wants a level playing field upon which China can develop its economic
potential. These leaders are also quite sensitive and resentful of criticism
from the West about the nature of their political institutions. Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank
(1998) and many other academics in the West have accurately recognized the
pervasive nature of Eurocentrism. Our lack of
knowledge about East Asian history has facilitated negative images of East
Asian backwardness, including the Marxian notion of “the Asiatic Mode of
Production” and these have served well as justifications for colonialism and
intervention. And anti-communism has also served these purposes.
The
obvious need of Western political leaders for a bogeyman (now that Osama Bin
Laden has been dispatched) understandably makes the current Chinese leadership
nervous. The Chinese leaders are well aware that the racist imagery of the
Yellow Peril and China-bashing might again serve the agenda of Western
political leaders looking for a scapegoat for current or future catastrophes.
This
said, the New Global Left (Santos 2006) needs a good
analysis of the possible helpful, or not so helpful, roles that the Chinese
people and current and future Chinese governments might play in the coming
decades. Arrighi’s analysis implies that the
Chinese development path provides a useful example for the rest of the world,
and that the rise of China may help the rest of the world to reduce global
inequalities and to move toward a more sustainable and just form of political
economy.
Arrighi contends that contemporary China is
pursuing a model of market society that is similar in many ways to the
paternalistic commodifying “natural” path that Adam
Smith saw in earlier centuries. Arrighi’s contention
that China has not yet developed full-blown capitalism is largely based on
Samir Amin’s observation that the rural peasantry has not yet been dispossessed
of land and so full proletarianization has not
emerged. The continued existence of the household registration system that the
Chinese Communist Party uses to try to regulate rural to urban migration also
guarantees rural residents access to farmable land (means of production).
One
may wonder whether or not dispossession of land is still a requisite of
capitalism in the age of flexible accumulation and outsourcing. Mike Davis
(2005:97-100) tells the story of the Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand Company
(CP), a large-scale poultry producer who brought Tyson-style (American)
industrialized chicken production (the “Livestock Revolution”) first to
Thailand and then to China. Davis (2005:99) quotes Isabelle Delforge
as saying “With contract farming, large companies control the whole production
process: they lend money to farmers, they sell them chicks, feed and medicine, and they have the right to buy the whole
production. But usually the company is not committed to buy the chickens if the
demand is low. Contract farmers bear all the risks related to production and
become extremely dependent on demand from the world market. They become factory
workers in their own field.” Davis reports that, after starting in Shenzen, CP has built more than one hundred feed mills and
poultry-processing plants throughout China. This all sounds rather like
capitalism despite that farmers have not been dispossessed of their land.
Arrighi also implied that the current Chinese
regime is relatively environment-friendly. Others contend that this was indeed
the case in traditional China, but not of the Communist regime. The Chinese
Communist Party’s (CCP) embrace of the family-owned automobile for the masses
could have at least required California-style catalytic-converters fifteen
years ago, a proven technology for reducing auto emissions that would not have
added much to the cost of each car. Instead Chinese cities are choking on
automobile exhaust fumes. Decisions like that are both bad for the
environment and for the human population. Regarding greenhouse gas emissions,
Global South activists such as Walden Bello (2012) contends that China must be
included among the countries that should undertake rapid reduction in
emissions.
It
would seem logical that Arrighi’s depiction of
Chinese “market society” as a more sustainable and labor-friendly form of
society than that of the capitalist West implies that other nations should
emulate the Chinese model in order to deal with the issues of inequality and
environmental degradation that capitalist globalization has presented us with
in the 21st century. But Arrighi (personal
communication) denied that he was saying this. He pointed out that the
historical conditions that produced the institutional complexes and culture of
China today are impossible to replicate, and also that the world does not need
one model, but rather many approaches. And yet it is important to ask whether
or not the institutional elements that Arrighi found
in China are of use elsewhere in the efforts to construct more humane and
sustainable national societies and a democratic and egalitarian world society. [6]
The notion that China may be an exemplar of
contemporary egalitarianism in relations with the periphery would seem to be
contradicted by the situation in Tibet and by the reports of many observers of
Chinese projects in Africa. Progressive world citizens should not condone
China-bashing, and I agree with Arrighi
that China is, and is likely to continue to be, a somewhat more progressive
force in world politics than many other powerful actors. But what does the
Chinese model of market society imply for those who are looking for progressive
alternatives to global capitalism?
Arrighi’s (2007) effort to tease out the
combination of economic and political institutional forms that make the
difference between better and worse forms of modernity is a valuable start, but
needs to be further developed. The contemporary global justice movement that
perceives a “democratic deficit” in the existing institutions of global
governance and in many forms of representative democracy that exist within core
states is not likely to find much worth emulating in the paternalistic Confucianist state that the CCP regime seems to be
embracing. At the 2008 opening ceremony to the Beijing
Olympic Games Confucian harmony had erased all vestiges of the Chinese
Revolution except the red flag. Mao was gone. The class struggle was gone. The
heroic workers and peasants were gone. And so was the Red Detachment of Women.
The representation of modern China to the world was a vision of social harmony,
technological achievements of the traditional past, openness to the world, and
precise, large-scale drumming and tai chi. It was Confucian
harmony and the paternalism of the “grandfather state” devoid of any
alternative version of legitimate authority except national pride.
The
issue of democracy cannot be brushed aside as only a manifestation of
Eurocentric ignorance. It is unfortunate that the neoliberals and the
neoconservatives have used the discourse about representative democracy and
human rights to badger the Chinese regime, but this will not make the democracy
problem go away for the New Global Left.
And
the issue of institutional forms of property also badly needs to be addressed.
The CCP is promoting the rapid expansion of private property in the major means
of production and the reorganization of state-owned firms. But private and/or
state ownership of large firms are not the only options. Investment
decisions in large-scale undertakings could be shaped by market mechanisms,
thus allocating capital to firms that are productive and efficient, while
profits are distributed to all adult citizens (Roemer 1994). The role of the
state in this kind of market socialism is to redistribute shares to each
individual at the age of adulthood and to incentivize the protection of the
environment. In Eastern Europe most of the post-1989 experiments in
public ownership were carried out in the context of “shock therapy” in which
neoliberal economists engineered a transition from former state-led and
centrally planned economies to capitalism. Citizens were issued coupons, which
were then rapidly bought up by a new class of capitalists (usually former party
apparatchiks), thus proving that this kind of market socialism does not work.
But a country like China could carry out experiments with real market socialism
in which the whole public benefits from the profits of large firms while at the
same time using market mechanisms to allocate both capital and labor. That
would be a kind of market society worth emulating.
Both a new stage of capitalism and a
qualitative systemic transformation to some form of socialism are possible
within the next several decades, but a new systemic cycle of capitalism is
probably more likely. Capitalism has only been a predominant mode of production
for about five centuries. It is still young. The kinship and tributary modes
lasted much longer.
The
progressive evolution of global governance has occurred in the past when
enlightened conservatives implemented the demands of an earlier world
revolution in order to reduce strong pressures from below that were being
brought to bear in a current world revolution. The most likely outcome of the
current conjuncture may a global form of Keynesianism in which enlightened
conservatives in the global elite form a more legitimate, capable and
democratic set of global governance institutions to deal with the problems of
the 21st century.[7] If the trajectory of U.S. hegemonic decline
is slow and episodic, as it has been up to now, and if financial and ecological
crises are spread out in time and if conflicts within and between nation-states
are moderate and spread out in time, then the enlightened conservatives will
have a chance to produce a reformed world order that is still capitalist but
that meets the current challenges at least partially. But if the perfect storm
of global calamities should all come together in a short period of time (a
single decade), even though there would be a heavy price to pay and it would
fall mainly on the world’s poor, the progressive movements and the progressive
non-core regimes would then have a chance to radically change the mode of
accumulation to a form of democratic global socialism.
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