Where is World Capitalism Going?

Capitalism is now by no means a fashionable word. Its reality is more wide and complex than bourgeoisie-proletariat relations, wage-labour and surplus value (Marx), and evidently more hardy than Lenin’s ‘decaying imperialism’. To name our global world system capitalistic (instead of the neoliberal euphemism ‘free market economy’) is to emphasise the tremendous concentration of power and control over all kinds of world resources by ‘the Big Three’: modern transnational corporations (TNCs), main banking groups (with the New York – London – Tokyo axis), and governmental elites of the core states (G – 7).

This global oligarchy uses institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organization (WTO), North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and other US-controlled military unions as instruments of its ‘Realpolitik’. The deplorable destiny of opponent countries, (such as the USSR, Cuba, Panama, Serbia, North Korea and Iraq) and the financial difficulties (collapse?!) of non-instrumentalised international organisations (such as Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), UNESCO, the global ecological programs of the Rio Forum, and now the United Nations) indicate the real power of modern world capitalism rulers.

I wonder why futures studies mostly avoids the problem of the global political economy. Scholars rush into social and religious utopias, pink fantasies, environmentalism, postmodernism, epistemology, interpretism, and now neomythology, but miss the good old question ‘cui prodest’ (for whom is it profitable?). Any image of a global future will fail if it does not fit the interests of the world capitalist elites. We can take three main views on this point:

a) The neoliberal ‘mainstream’ position: free market economy and democracy are winning. They are becoming stronger and stronger and are really worthy of this victory and all further ones. It is nothing but ‘ideology’ (in a strict Napoleonic and Marxist sense) of the Big Three.

b) The Left’s expectations of the decline of world capitalism: it is a world disease (‘virus’) and is worthy of its forthcoming failure. My question is: what are the visible signs of any decline or crisis, which should be stronger than all those problems and crises that world capitalism successfully prevailed under in the past, for example, in 1810-15, 1848-49, 1914-18, 1930-32, 1939-45, 1960, 1968-69?

c) The appeals (both Left and Right) for struggle against strong and threatening world capitalism-imperialism. For example, the appeals of Maoists and Trotskyists in Latin America, Russian communists, ‘patriots’ in Russia, USA and France, and fundamentalists in Muslim countries. Also, the appeals of many Western university intellectuals – especially against TNCs and the IMF – belong to the same bunch.

Here also some doubts and questions appear. Historical facts tell us that in most cases the open ‘hot’ struggle against world capitalism did not succeed, but all the local national ‘successes (for example, in Russia since 1917, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Albania) led inevitably to mass social disasters, deep misery and poverty, and frequently mass terror.

On the contrary, most ‘soft’ and interior attempts to ameliorate national ‘capitalism’ were successful, or at least lacked social disasters – such as the Second International and Social-Democratic reforms in Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century, labourists in Great Britain, socialists in Sweden, and the promotion of social programs in USA, France and Germany.

My position can be summarised in the following statements: World Capitalism currently seems to be strengthening, not declining, and it seems it will survive the probable crises of first decades of the 21st Century. No scenarios, prospects or prognoses can miss its tremendous power and significance.

World Capitalism is not a monolith, it is not closed for reforms, at least it is in fact more open to reform than all non-capitalist social regimes! Many long-term trends of its transformation during the last 500 years should be morally appreciated, that is why further soft transformation of this mega-system is a realistic prospect.

The global purposes of humanistically-oriented reforms of modern Capitalist World Order are:

* to substitute the principle of oligarchy in international relations, world politics and world economy by the principle of law based on human rights for every human being on the Earth including future generations (not only for living citizens of core states);

* to decrease arms production and arms trade in favour of peacefully, ecologically and multiculturally oriented national and world economies (‘ecoculture’ and ‘sustainable development’ must become more profitable than arms trade for the world capitalist elites); and

* to decrease the terrible gap between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ peoples, especially in basic needs, education and real access to national and world resources (but not by means of violence).

These aims seem today to be rather utopian, and the idea of global reforms that we crucially need in the 21st Century must be supplied by global praxis strategy. This strategy should be based on results of national reforms analysis of the 18th to 20th Centuries, uncovering implicit possibilities, motivations and coalitions of modern world situations.

Let’s finish for now with words from Ilya Prigogine: ‘Time is construction, the future is open and depends on us’.

I would only like to add that no religion, science, philosophy, myth nor even study can release us from ethical and practical responsibility for our humanistic futures.

Nikolai Rozov
Professor of Philosophy at Novosibirsk State University, Russia.

Email: rozov@cnit.nsu.ru . Rozov is also coordinator of Philofhi, a philosophy of history and theoretical history network at http://darwin.clas.virginia.edu/~dew7e/anthronet/subscribe/philofhi.html.

Reproduced with permission from Futures Bulletin, Vol 23 No 1, April 1997

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