Journal of World-Systems Research

Treadmills of Production and Destruction in the Anthropocene

Chad L. Smith — 2020-08-20

Human activities in Latin American countries have resulted in past and ongoing deforestation located in the Amazon and the Andes. Demonstrative of this new Anthropocene Epoch, the illegal production of cocaine stands as a major driver of these environmental outcomes in these countries; however, in recent years the extraction of illegal gold has yielded larger export values than that of cocaine. The consequences of these practices have far-reaching environmental, economic, and social consequences. Using a critical realist perspective, we investigate and analyze how, when, and under what conditions the treadmills of production and destruction are absent, present, and thriving in Colombia and Peru. The implications of these relationships are grave as both the Amazon and the Andes are undergoing extensive transformations – damage that represents the Anthropocene Epoch in which human activities are driving ecological systems toward “tipping points”. We find that the two treadmills operate differently within each country and that treadmills are not ubiquitous but are, instead, contingent. We underscore the fact that when present, both types of treadmills have the ability to engage in social and environmental destructions, sometimes violently so.

Introduction to the Special Issue on World-Systems Analysis and the Anthropocene

Leslie Sklair — 2020-08-20

Across the social sciences and humanities, and in diverse forms of popular media around the world, discourse about the Anthropocene is proliferating. From the plastic particles found in deep sea trenches to the unfolding of Earth’s sixth mass extinction, among many other indicators—notably anthropogenic climate change—it is clear that human impacts may have irreversibly perturbed the planet. This special issue sets out to deepen and broaden the conversation from a world-systems perspective. Building upon a long tradition of scholarship deploying world-systems theory to understand global environmental change, we wish to explore the past, present, and future of the world-system with/in the Anthropocene. In this introduction we first offer prefatory remarks about the Anthropocene (by no means a universally accepted concept) that are meant to help orient readers to debates around the Anthropocene before turning to a summary of the contributions and the themes that emerge in this Special Issue.

Review Of: First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

Corey R Payne — 2020-08-19

Review Of: La guerre de Sept Ans

Matthew Hayes — 2020-08-19

Envisioning Indigenous Models for Social and Ecological Change in the Anthropocene

James Fenelon — 2020-08-19

Indigenous societies provide alternatives to hegemonic social institutions that global capitalism spread around the world, contributing to human caused environmental degradation called the Anthropocene, coterminous with the development of the modern world-system. In this work we describe Indigenous communities using ten social spheres, that balance human needs through ecological mindfulness, including spirituality, and then we model how these social spheres can be adapted to contemporary world-systems using a radical imaginary, building off Indigenous works by Fenelon (2015; 2016), social perspectives of Pellow (2017) and Norgaard (2019), and environmental geospatial sciences (Lui, Springer, and Wagner 2008; Jankowski 2009). We identify four social constructs from Indigenous peoples—(1) decision-making, (2) land tenure and resource management, (3) economic and (4) community—which we model for societies in world-systems through the ten imagined social spheres, to present foundations that empower communities to resist the coming climate change futures of the Anthropocene.

The World-System and the Earth System

Alf Hornborg — 2020-08-19

Efforts to conceptualize the role of asymmetric resource transfers in the capitalist world-system have been constrained by the emphasis on surplus value and the labor theory of value in Marxist thought. A coherent theory of ecologically unequal exchange must focus on asymmetric flows of biophysical resources such as embodied labor, land, energy, and materials. To conceptualize these flows in terms of “underpaid costs” or “surplus value” is to suggest that the metabolism of the world-system can be accounted for using a monetary metric. This paper rejects both labor and energy theories of value in favor of the observation that market pricing tends to lead to asymmetric resource flows. The Marxist labor theory of value is an economic argument, rather than a physical one. In acknowledging this we may transcend the recent debate within ecological Marxism about whether “nature” and “society” are valid categories. Nature and society are ontologically entwined, as in the undertheorized phenomenon of modern technology, but should be kept analytically distinct. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological progress has been contingent on the societal ratios by which biophysical resources are exchanged on the world market. The failure among Marxist and world-system theorists to properly account for this central aspect of capitalist accumulation can be traced to the pervasive assumption that market commodities have objective values that may exceed their price. Instead of arguing with mainstream economists about whether market assessments of value are justified, it is more analytically robust to observe that market valuation is destroying the biosphere.

Anthropocene Fiction and World-Systems Analysis

Andrew Milner — 2020-08-19

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein’s work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova’s La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply “distant reading” more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner’s model of the “global SF field” identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed “Anthropocene fictions” and Daniel Bloom “cli-fi”, which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.

Anthropocene, Emissions Budget, and the Structural Crisis of the Capitalist World-System

Minqi Li — 2020-08-19

This paper evaluates the implications of global emissions budget distribution between three large geographical areas (China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world) in the context of Anthropocene and the structural crisis of the capitalist world system. Two plausible emissions distribution principles are considered. Under neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle, can continuing economic growth be made compatible with requirements of climate stabilization in all three regions. This conclusion does not change significantly when plausible acceleration of emissions intensity reduction in the future is taken into account. To limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, at least two of the three large regions need to reorganize their economies to operate with zero or negative growth. Such a reorganization cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system given the inherent tendency of capitalism towards endless accumulation. Neither is it likely to be achieved under any conceivable economic system dominated by market relations.

Nuclear Weapons and the Treadmill of Destruction in the Making of the Anthropocene

Michael Lengefeld — 2020-08-19

This research analyzes the human dimensions of environmental degradation and injustice in the age of nuclear weapons. Human societies are fundamentally linked to global environmental systems and are transforming ecological conditions in dramatic ways, such that the current epoch has been termed the Anthropocene. This article highlights the human health consequences, ecological transformations, and threats to biodiversity imposed by military institutions in the Anthropocene; emphasizing how these outcomes can be traced to specific interrelated sets of processes and generative conditions. I advance the treadmill of destruction theory as one useful theoretical framework for examining these socio-ecological interrelationships. The investigation focuses on the institutional foundations of nuclear war strategy and preparations for nuclear war, and their interactions with ecosystems. I provide an analysis of the American nuclear weapons production process, revealing how a treadmill of destruction emerged after World War II. This analysis of how the developmental dynamics of nuclear weapons have changed over time brings greater clarity to the Anthropocene concept and the distinct role of military institutions in shaping the new era.

Refiguring the Plantationocene

Michael Warren Murphy — 2020-08-19

While sympathetic to debates about the utility, accuracy, and significance of the “Anthropocene,” in this brief essay, we are most interested in implicating racialization, colonization, and their ongoing place in the capitalist world-economy and global ecological change. To this end, we point to the potential of thinking with the “Plantationocene,” considering that to invoke the plantation is to simultaneously contend with the intermeshing organization of the colonialist/imperialist, racialist, and capitalist dimensions of the world-system as directly related to global environmental transformation since the 15th century.

The World Ecology of Desalination

Brian F O'Neill — 2020-08-19

World-systems scholars are increasingly engaged in issues at the intersection of ecological and economic concerns since the proliferation of debates on the Anthropocene. Recently, the alternative concept of Capitalocene—age of Capital—has emerged to draw attention to the world-ecological disruption of capitalism founded on cheap nature appropriation at ever-emerging extraction zones. This paper extends these discussions to the oceanic frontier, as the latest trend in the abstraction of value from the environment. Based on original archival research conducted in the context of a larger ethnographic project on the politics of industrial desalination—creating potable water from the sea—the article analyzes how this practice emerged in two phases. First, the Cold War opened the ocean as a commodity frontier during the pax Americana. Then, when this technopolitical agenda stagnated, financialization techniques were deployed to appropriate seawater, utilizing a mode of financial engineering—desalination via financialization reinstates the cultural hegemony of the Capitalocene that privileges infrastructure for water supply management solutions. As such, the article highlights the co-production of nature with financial capitalism.

Power and Politics in the World-System

Jamie M. Sommer — 2020-08-19

While various researchers and practitioners agree that it will be hard to restructure our current global and local systems to adapt to and mitigate climate change, there is unsurprisingly great disagreement in how and if this can be accomplished and on what level(s), or if this is even what needs to be accomplished. These conversations have continued with the introduction of the “Anthropocene.” The dominant interpretation of the concept poses several solutions, one being national government restructuring to support environmental efforts and encouraging behavioral change. To join conversations that critically evaluate the conceptualization and implications of the Anthropocene with the world-systems perspective, we consider how the effectiveness of national environmental governance in reducing CO₂ emissions varies by a country’s position in the global hierarchy. Using two-way fixed effects regression, this article tests how one aspect of this environmental governance, environmentally related taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue impacts CO₂ emissions for 75 countries from 2000 to 2011. Given inequities in the global division of labor, which reinforce the dominance of higher-income countries and the exploitation of lower-income countries, we expect the effectiveness of environmental governance to vary tremendously by global position. Our results support the idea that the impact of environmental governance on CO2 emissions varies across countries at different income levels in the world-system, and this is due to external constraints. Such external influence is unsurprisingly neglected in dominant interpretations of the Anthropocene. In line with previous critical research, we argue that these external constraints undermine climate change solutions because they fail to address mutually reinforcing global, political, economic, and environmental inequalities.

Introduction

Michael Warren Murphy — 2020-08-19

Work for reparations requires interventions by world historians to bear witness to the brutalities of the past as part of a process that seeks truth and reconciliation, along with some measure of accountability and restitution. Shifting our lens to encompass world history exposes the varied effects of slavery and the slave trade, and it allows us to interrogate national boundaries and hegemonic histories. It also makes visible the myriad forms of resistance to the capitalist world-system, nurturing the radical imagination of alternatives. We discuss work in the United Nations and other global political spaces to advance demands for reparations and introduce contributions to this symposium.

Editor’s Introduction

Jackie Smith — 2020-08-06

Editors introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 26, No. 2

Choices in Implementing Reparations

Patrick Manning — 2020-07-27

Reparations, Restitution, Transitional Justice

Joyce Hope Scott — 2020-07-27

Making Our Way Home

Prentiss A. Dantzler — 2020-07-27

Disasters are Everyday Like the Weather

Chaya Go — 2020-06-19

This essay offers an urgent intervention from the global South in contribution to this special issue on the Anthropocene. Drawing from Rob Nixon's work on slow violence, the author offers sobering reflections on the everyday realities of what she writes as the “Philippine Anthropocene”: not only is this defined by spectacular freak weather conditions, but also shaped by normalized and state-sanctioned forms of abandonment and terror. Written in the present political context of intensifying state attacks on civil society in the country, the author recasts the light on anthropogenic forces of violence which endanger lives at the front lines of daily disasters, more lethal than the strongest storm in recorded history.

Review of: Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the Transnational Capitalist Class

Zophia Edwards — 2020-03-10

Review of: Globalization, EU Democracy Assistance and the World Social Forum: Concepts and Practices of Democracy

Marek Mikuš — 2020-03-10

Remembering Immanuel Wallerstein

Christopher Chase-Dunn — 2020-03-10

Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the leading founders and promoters of world-systems analysis, died on August 31, 2019. Given the importance of his scholarship to the Journal of World-Systems Research, we plan to publish in future issues research articles based on conferences and symposia that are now being planned to honor Wallerstein’s work and legacy. In this essay, JWSR founding editor, Christopher Chase-Dunn, is joined by current editor Jackie Smith incoming editor Andrej Grubacic, and World Historical Information section editor Patrick Manning offering reflections on some of Wallerstein’s contributions to both scholarship and practice.

Editors' Introduction

Jackie Smith — 2020-03-10

Editors' Introduction to Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 26, Issue 1 (Winter/Spring 2020)

Fear of a Yellow Planet: The Gilets Jaunes and the End of the Modern World-System

Peter Wilkin — 2020-03-02

The emergence of the Gilet Jaunes has seen a section of the popular classes present a significant challenge to the elite-driven ideological frameworks that have dominated since the end of the cold war: neoliberalism and the Clash of Civilisations. What Immanuel Wallerstein calls ‘centrist liberalism’ has been the dominant ideological foundation of the modern world-system since the late nineteenth century. Its current form, neoliberalism, is in crisis across the core of the world-system, intensified following the Great Recession of 2008. This has invited new challenges from revived and reconstituted political formations of both right and left. Populist movements are a part of this process of ideological reconstitution, and the Gilets Jaunes are an important example of progressive populism calling for social and economic justice. What was triggered by a protest directed at increased fuel taxes rapidly escalated into a much broader protest movement whose influence has spread beyond French borders. Importantly, the Gilet Jaunes have brought a layer of the French working-classes into the public realm in dramatic fashion, raising issues such as equality, public welfare, and participatory and direct democracy that challenge neo-liberal norms. The agenda that has emerged from the Gilet Jaunes illustrates the way in which a working-class left is being reconstituted in opposition to forces of the political right. The article addresses three main questions: Why have the Gilet Jaunes emerged? Who makes up these protests? What do they mean?

Coppering the Industrial Revolution: History, Materiality and Culture in the Making of an Ecological Regime

Daniel Cunha — 2020-03-02

No copper, no Industrial Revolution. Although accountants listed it in the very last position in the table of “value added” per sector in 1831, the British copper industry was essential for the Industrial Revolution, the period of British hegemony over the world-economy. In this article, I use the figure-ground method proposed by Terence K. Hopkins to show that the copper industry played key roles in the ecological regime of the 1700-1840 period, due to its material properties and related historical contingencies and cultural valuations. By focusing in on particular production processes, historical contingencies, and cultural phenomena in which copper played an important and unique role, and then zooming out again to the world-economy as a whole, I show that an Industrial Revolution would not have happened without copper. From sugar production in the Caribbean to textile printing, from the slave trade to the Battle of Saintes, from the development of the steam engine to gin and rum production, from the telegraph to buckles and buttons, copper was conspicuous. This demonstrates the ecological regime of the period, in which the removal of a single commodity from the picture—i.e., copper—disrupts the whole constellation of relations. This study also shows that a “copper boom” immediately before and at the start of the Industrial Revolution (~1700-1800), instrumental in the British struggle against France for the hegemony over the world-economy, has been overlooked in the literature. Additionally, the article includes a reflection on method.

Opposing Observations and the Political-Economy of Malaria Vulnerability: A Community-Based Study in Bududa, Uganda

Kelly F. Austin — 2020-03-02

Malaria is a parasitic infection that remains a leading threat to health and development in many communities, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Bududa, Uganda, malaria represents a key threat to health and well-being. However, whether or not malaria rates are improving in the district over time represents a conundrum. By using principles of structural fieldwork and drawing on multiple data sources that include the more- and less- powerful, opposing observations emerge, where community members perceive marked increases in malaria rates over time, while official district-level data depict the opposite. World-systems analysis illuminates the reasons behind this discrepancy, along with the factors that community members use to explain the rise in malaria suffering, including environmental changes and decreased healthcare access. Overall, this research demonstrates how global economic policies and structures create unequal health impacts, placing those in Bududa at disproportionate and elevated vulnerability to malaria.

Review of: Using Gramsci: A New Approach

Gifawosen Markos Mitta — 2020-03-02

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has become a very important inspiration for the twentieth-century Marxist political thinkers around the world. ‘Using Gramsci A New Approach’ is one of the most recent additions to various works done around the Prison Notebooks of this Great Italian political theorist and cultural critics. Michele Filippini, a researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna has come up with ‘a new approach’ on Prison Notebooks and has touched some major concepts that are previously given little attention by Gramscian scholars. By extending Gramsci’s concepts beyond Marxist perspective, Filippini’s book provides expert guides to key features and themes in Gramsci’s writing in combination with the pressing political, social and cultural struggles of our time. The author does not show a clear connection between those topics discussed in the book, but his work remains a valuable addition to Gramscian thoughts in the twenty-first century.

Key Words: Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ideology, the individual, Society

Research Note on Captive Atlantic Flows: Estimating Missing Data by Slave-Voyage Routes

Patrick Manning — 2020-03-02

This essay provides new estimates of the number of captives carried in the Atlantic slave trade during each decade from the 1650s to the 1860s. It relies on two categories of known data—on the routes of voyages and the numbers of captives recorded on those voyages—as a basis for estimation of missing data and totals of captive flows. It uses techniques of Bayesian statistics to estimate missing data on routes and flows of captives. As a framework for the Bayesian estimates, it focuses on analysis of 40 distinct routes linking the African coast to the Americas and traces the captive flows—that is, the number of captives embarked on or disembarked from voyages along those routes. The dataset that provides the basis for this research note is available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6HLXO3.

The Land Question in China: Agrarian Capitalism, Industrious Revolution, and East Asian Development

Wenkai He — 2019-09-03

Migration and Agriculture: Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area

Susan E. Mannon — 2019-09-03

Dirty Gold: How Activism Transformed the Jewelry Industry

Tim Bartley — 2019-09-03

Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change

Jacob F. Northcutt — 2019-09-03

Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explanations

Thomas Reifer — 2019-09-03

Giants: The Global Power Elite

Hiroko Inoue — 2019-09-03

American Tianxia: Chinese Money, American Power, and the End of History

Marilyn Grell-Brisk — 2019-09-03

Erratum: Marion Werner. Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean

Jackie Smith — 2019-09-03

Volume 25(1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included a review by Jeb Sprague of Marion Werner’s Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean, DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.920. Because the book review editor decided it would be better suited for inclusion in a proposed review symposium, she removed the review from the website, with the idea that it would run in a future issue. This was done in error, since by the time the decision was made to reschedule the review, it had already been published in the first issue of volume 25. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site. The book review editor regrets the mistake and apologizes for the confusion.

The Political-Military Foundations of China’s Global Ascendency

Aaron Major — 2019-09-03

In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China’s rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations. This paper explores the structural relationship between China’s economic and political-military relationships with other states over the period 1993 to 2015. Drawing on a wide variety of data sources, we present a multi-dimensional analysis that measures the changing size of China’s economic and political-military networks, their shifting regional distribution, and the degree of coupling, or decoupling of economic ties from political-military ties. In describing these patterns, we conduct a similar analysis for the United States. This allows us to situate Chinese trends in the context of the structures of U.S. global power. Our analysis points to ways in which China’s global rise has been shaped through navigating U.S. global power. Our analysis also shows that China’s growing leadership in the global economy builds upon a set of existing political-military relationships that, while their scope and form are quite different from those that the United States built to support its hegemonic ascendency, are nevertheless critical for understanding the mechanisms by which Chinese power and influence has grown in the global political economy.

Anarchism in the Web of Transnational Social Movements

Christopher Chase-Dunn — 2019-09-03

Anarchists have played a visible and significant role in global civil society since the 19th century and in the New Global Left since it emerged in the 1990s. Horizontalism and social libertarianism have been central components of the contemporary World Revolution and were also important in the world revolutions of 1968 and 1989. Anarchists have participated in the Social Forum process at the global, national and local levels and, in various ways, have influenced the contemporary world revolution far beyond their numbers. We use surveys from Social Forums to examine how self-identified actively involved anarchists are similar or different from other attendees. We also conduct a formal network analysis to examine the links that the anarchists have with other social movement themes. Despite the small number of self-identified anarchists, our findings suggest that anarchist organizational approaches and political values are widely shared among the activists who have been involved in the Social Forum process.

Sugar, Slavery, and Creative Destruction: World-Magnates and “Coreification” in the Longue-Durée

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz — 2019-09-03

Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and periphery. Namely, we challenge the notion that these zones consist of geographical spaces that, since very early in the development of the world-economy, became permanently specialized in the production of raw materials (periphery) or more sophisticated manufactures (core); and that labor forces have been trans-historically relatively free/better-paid in core activities and coerced/poorly-paid in peripheral ones. We argue that, prior to the nineteenth century, the world-economy is not only characterized by the uneven and combined emergence of various forms of labor exploitation, as usually argued within a world-systems perspective, but also one in which core-like and peripheral activities (that is, those providing access to relatively greater or lesser wealth) were not yet as clearly bounded geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that a longue-durée analysis of sugar production by enslaved labor illustrates not merely processes of peripheralization, but of what we call coreification.

Saving the Sacred Sea: The Power of Civil Society in an Age of Authoritarianism and Globalization

Salvatore Babones — 2019-09-03

Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of ‘Green’ Capitalism

Md Belal Hossain — 2019-09-03

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Author Responses

Michael G. Hanchard — 2019-09-03

Routes of Atlantic Slave Voyages: Revised Framework and New Insights

Patrick Manning — 2019-09-03

This study explores data on the Atlantic slave trade through a revised framework, focusing not simply on voyages of individual slave ships but on aggregating them by route, linking an African region of departure with an American region of arrival. The result shows a total of 40 slave routes, for which documented voyages are aggregated by decade from the 1650s through the 1860s. Within this framework, analysis is conducted at the level of documented voyages (by route and by decade) and also at the level of documented captive flows (by route and by decade). This intermediate frame of analysis lies between analysis of individual voyages and aggregate figures for the whole slave trade. Results of this analysis show the variation among routes: ten out of the forty routes account for 85% of the voyages. For each route, it is shown that the average numbers of captives departing Africa remained roughly constant from the 1650s through the 1830s; the same is true for the numbers of captives arriving in the Americas. These and other characteristics of the routes, as seen through voyages and captive flows, allow for new insights into the character and the changes in the Atlantic slave trade over two centuries.

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Review of Hanchard's The Spectre of Race

William I. Robinson — 2019-09-03

Dialogue: Race in the Capitalist World-System, Review of Robinson’s Into the Tempest

Michael G. Hanchard — 2019-09-03

Forging a Diagonal Instrument for the Global Left: The Vessel

Rebecca Álvarez — 2019-09-03

This article takes up Samir Amin’s challenge to rethink the issue of global political organization by proposing the building of a diagonal political organization for the Global Left that would link local, national and world regional and global networks and prefigurational communities to coordinate contention for power in the world-system during the next few decades of the 21st century. The World Social Forum (WSF) process needs to be reinvented for the current period of rising neo-fascist and populist reactionary nationalism and to foster the emergence of a capable instrument that can confront and contend with the global power structure of world capitalism and aid local and national struggles. This will involve overcoming the fragmentation of progressive movements that have been an outcome of the rise of possessive individualism, the precariat, and social media. We propose a holistic approach to organizing a vessel for the global left based on struggles for climate justice, human rights, anti-racism, queer rights, feminism, sharing networks, peace alliances, taking back the city, progressive nationalism and confronting and defeating neo-fascism and new forms of conservative populism.

Needed: A New International for a Just Transition and Against Fascism

Francine Mestrum — 2019-09-03

Mestrum draws from her extensive experience in the World Social Forum process to outline some of the reasons for past failures of left struggles to come together around the kind of fifth Internationale Amin proposes. A new Internationale, she argues “will require some serious and honest self-criticism and a downright rejection of all romanticism and naive utopianism…. we have to look for solutions beyond the easy slogans and assumptions.” Mestrum identifies important structural and ideological rifts in the global left. She is also wary of localized movements such as those advocated by Sklair, fearing that they could detract from the left’s ability to coalesce around a strong structural critique of globalized capitalism. What she sees as essential is the construction of “alter-globalist” identities and solidarity across issues and borders. This will require moving beyond abstract “anti-capitalist” ideology to build inter-connected campaigns that tackle the complex inter-connections among movement struggles. While cautioning against slogans, she sees lasting wisdom in Enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity and modernity’s respect for universalism and diversity. These can help advance a politics of system change that is “emancipatory and transformative, geared towards the full realisation of individual and collective human rights for all.”

World Revolution or Socialism, Community by Community, in the Anthropocene?

Leslie Sklair — 2019-09-03

Like Robinson, Sklair is critical of Amin's state-centrism, and he sees the international system of hierarchical states: “The power of capitalist hegemony today is so overwhelming (allied as it is with the military and police powers of states) that the only viable strategy for change is by a process of negating, avoiding, and eventually consigning capitalism and the state to the dustbin of history.” He argues that, “Putting all our energies into world socialist revolution” (as Amin argues) “seems increasingly like a self-defeating strategy.” For Sklair, “[t]he only way out of this mess, the only chance of having a liveable planet for the generations to come …is to organise for small-scale socialist communities to create new forms of less destructive and hierarchical economy and society.” He envisions a project of locally-grounded “anarching,” where autonomous producer-consumer cooperatives (P-CCs) advance a “double strategy” that serves to “slow down capitalism” and to “bring into existence a new mode of production based on the different principles and [new] mentalities.” “[A] reconstructed political community could create more genuinely democratizing forms of economic, social, and political organization to encourage and facilitate networks of P-CCs [and…t]he transition from the present capitalist-statist hegemony to the new form of society.

Climate Justice and Sustained Transnational Mobilization

Paul Almeida — 2019-09-03

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. This essay provides evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements on the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change create an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization to confront neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models essential to building an enduring international organization representing subaltern groups.

Rethinking Samir Amin’s Legacy and the Case for a Political Organization of the Global Justice Movement

Bonn Juego — 2019-09-03

Juego argues that the new Internationale’s “primary organizational function should be the global coordination of actions of progressive grassroots movements from country to country.” He calls for a ‘learning organization,’ where the new Internationale supports “a continuous dialogue between bottom-up and top-down approaches to decision-making.” He sees it as “[a]kin to a global coordinating council” meaning that it works to integrate and synthesize the “varying initiatives, campaigns, and mass actions at all geographical levels of membership” while remaining mindful of the “dialectics between reform and revolution.” The new Internationale must, moreover, be “grounded on a pragmatic understanding of realpolitik especially in struggles at national and local scales,” and institutionalize a commitment to dialogue, research, and discussion.

The Twenty-First Century Revolutions and Internationalism: A World-Historical Perspective

Şahan Savaş Karataşli — 2019-09-03

In his essay, “It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples”, Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to “deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the [capitalist world] system”, we should seriously study “the experience of the worker Internationales [...], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to ‘choose’ a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions.” In this paper, I will follow Amin’s (2018) suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century and conditions that produced them with an eye to the present moment. By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations that are modeled after the International Workingmen’s Association and the Communist League. First one should serve as a horizontal “movement of movements” that would reflect the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized world communist party.